Jean Laplanche has written at length on the theory of the ego in Freud's work, its complexities and its contradictions. This includes his extensive analysis of its conceptual profile at the different stages of Freud's thought as laid out in the lengthy entry under ‘Ego’ in Laplanche and Pontalis (1967: 130–143), and his elaboration of the ego's relation to the vital order and to narcissism in the two chapters of Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. He argues against the assumption, as evidenced for example in the editorial note in the Standard Edition to Freud's 1914 paper on narcissism, that it was only with The Ego and the Id (1923) and the formulation of the second topography that a systematic theory of the ego as agency (Instanz) of the psychical apparatus was developed, whereas previous uses of the term referenced the self or individual as a whole.1 Laplanche demonstrates that, on the contrary, the existence of an agency called ‘the ego’ within the psychical apparatus is assigned the function of inhibition of the primary processes in the Project for Scientific Psychology of 1895 (Laplanche 1970: 48–65).
Laplanche also demonstrates the tension verging on contradiction in Freud's treatment of the ego, in the second topography, between a ‘realist’ conception of the ego as an organ of adaptation of the id to the demands of the external world, centred on the perception-consciousness system, as a representative of the ‘reality principle’, on the one hand, and on the other, the recognition of the unconscious dimensions of an ego that is conceived of as an internal libidinal object, made up synthetically of potentially conflicting identifications with other persons. It is to the latter perspective of a libidinal genealogy of the ego, its formation in relation to the drives and their transformations, that Laplanche's treatment of the ego in the framework of the general theory of seduction is affiliated. In particular, it is the theory of narcissism
proposed in Freud's 1914 paper ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ that Laplanche builds on, with its distinction between an autoerotism of the sexual drives in the moment of their first appearance as such, and a later primary narcissism of the ego. That distinction was unfortunately effaced by Freud's subsequent reformulation of primary narcissism as an undifferentiated, objectless primal state, ‘implying no split between subject and external world’, ‘which is epitomised by life in the womb’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967: 338), from which the little solipsistic monad would—somehow—awaken: a late Freudian conception against which Laplanche has consistently argued.
Freud postulated a ‘primary and normal narcissism’ that would be ‘the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation’ (Freud 1914c: 73–4). He then poses the question: ‘what is the relation of the narcissism of which we are now speaking to auto-erotism, which we have described as an early state of the libido?’ His reply is cryptic but pregnant, as he responds by invoking the theme of the ego and its origin:
I may point out that we are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed. The auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the first; so there must be something added to auto-erotism—a new psychical action—in order to bring about narcissism (Freud 1914c: 76–7).
For all the richness of his development of the problematic of narcissism in the essay, Freud never specifies what this ‘new psychical action’ might be. However, by twinning the development of the ego with the transformation of auto-erotism into narcissism, he implies that the one entails the other.
A few years earlier in the Schreber case, Freud had proposed narcissism as a ‘half-way phase between auto-erotism and object-love’ (Freud 1911c: 61). In this phase ‘by taking himself, his own body, as a love-object’, Freud argues, the individual ‘unifies his sexual instincts (which have hitherto been engaged in auto-erotic activities)’ (Freud 1911c: 60). Where in the Schreber case Freud's focus had been on the object-relation
here the unification of the hitherto independent and fragmented auto-erotic drives, dispersed around the different erotogenic zones of the body, coincides with the formation of an ego, a ‘unity’ that ‘cannot exist in the individual from the start’ (Freud 1914c: 77). By implication the narcissistic unification of the drives in a single libidinal object constitutes the ego as such. However, it is only in the later text, which delivers the second topography, The Ego and the Id, that the origin of the ego is explicitly located in the formation of a body schema, as ‘the mental projection of the surface of the body’: the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface' (Freud 1923b: 26). While a series of heterogeneous elements are identified across a number of Freud's texts—the autoerotic drives and their unification, the narcissistic investment of the body, the body-surface entity and its projection (to which one could add the mechanism of identification and the process of sublimation from the third chapter of The Ego and the Id)—the ‘new psychical action’, that would produce the unity of the narcissistically constituted ego as agency out of the primordial body-ego and its auto-erotic drives, is never explicitly elaborated as such.
Later psychoanalytic theories of the ego can be seen as attempts to take up Freud's unfulfilled promissory note and to specify the nature of that ‘new psychical action’. Lacan famously proposed the mirror phase, in which the infant, in a state of uncoordinated dependency, anticipates its future bodily coherence and mastery in an imaginary unity through an identification with the image of its specular counterpart in the mirror ‘[T]his gestalt … symbolizes the I's mental permanence, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination’ (Lacan, 1949: 76). Lacan attributed to this fictional self-representation the function of anticipatory misrecognition with regard to the infant's biologically premature state of non-coordination, and of resistance with regard to the unconscious and the drives, and he opposed it to the conception of the ego as ‘centred on the perception-consciousness system or as organized by the ‘reality principle’ (Lacan, 1949: 80).
However, it is Anzieu who develops Freud's notion of the ‘body-ego’ into a ‘skin-ego’ as both tactile surface and mental projection, at one and the same time a containing sack of inner contents, a protective barrier against external impacts, and a psycho-physiological receptor of
excitations and messages from the mother (where in Anzieu's words ‘the massage becomes a message’, an apt approximation to what Laplanche was later to call the enigmatic signifier [Anzieu, : 39]). Anzieu's skin-ego would be the necessary set of psycho-physiological preconditions for anything like Lacan's specular drama to take place. The skin-ego also plays a part in Laplanche's ambitious attempt, in the framework of the theory of primal seduction, to model the ‘new psychical action’ that would transform the auto-erotic drives, and the polymorphous perverse, libidinal body of the infant they infest, into the narcissistically constituted ego, the antagonist of the drives.
Laplanche points out that Freud's term Instanz has a juridical connotation in German as well as in French, such that the derivation of the ego as Instanz from the psychobiological individual implies both the formation of an agency and the notion of a delegation of powers to it from the larger whole from which it derives (Laplanche 1993c: 81–2). He situates the derivation of the ego as agency from the whole individual in Freud's thought within a double perspective: the derivation by contiguity (metonymy) and the derivation by similarity (metaphor).2 This is not simply the evident existence of two alternative or contradictory conceptions of the ego in Freud's thought, a metonymical ego as distinct from a metaphorical ego, but in reality, Laplanche argues, there is a double derivation of a single ego, which is not just a derivation of concepts but an actual derivation of a psychical entity along two paths of formation that intersect (Laplanche 1993: 83). The contradiction between ‘realist’ and ‘narcissistic’ concepts of the ego would then be the symptom of partial and alternative attempts to grasp the complexity of that actual combined derivation.
The relation between the ego-individual and the ego-as-agency in the first instance would be a metonymical one of contiguity: the ego is a specialised organ in which are localised certain functions performed on behalf of the whole, which—in Freud's ‘ego psychology’ and its later developments—operate under the rubric of adaptation to the external world. Its genesis is by way of a differentiation of the surface of an organism from the impact of external reality on its receptive apparatus,
the perception-consciousness system, which Freud called the nucleus of the ego (Freud 1923b: 23). The ego's development is in a metonymical relation of continuity with the whole organism (the psychobiological individual) of which it is a part. The differentiation thesis is a causal one (as in the model of the vesicle with its receptive surface and protective shield in Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Freud's description of this modification of the surface of the body-id into the ego under the impact of external forces leads him to his further claim that ‘the ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id’ (Freud 1923b: 25). However, the differentiation thesis doesn't entail or support the representation thesis that the ego ‘represents’ the demands of external reality, although Freud attempts to suture the two claims together with the succeeding proposition that ‘for the ego, perception plays the part which in the id falls to instinct’ (Freud 1923b: 25). This equivalence or substitution of the perception of external realities for the internal force of instinct or drive is a category mistake, and as Laplanche observes, ‘This means that in psychical conflict an intrinsic force is attributed to reality. It is not so much the ego that acts through its own energies … as the real itself which seems to play the role of a veritable agency’ (Laplanche : ). The ego's task of dominating and adapting the id and its drives to the demands of the external world is at this point entrusted to the force of perception itself (a profoundly un-psychoanalytic proposition), as if the supposed differentiating effect of external perception in the formation of the ego were the guarantee of its efficacy in mastering the drives.
The metaphorical derivation of the ego is by way of an image or representation of the whole organism which also emerges from the receptive surfaces of the perceptual apparatus, in the very passage I have been drawing on at the close of chapter 2 of The Ego and the Id where Freud derives the ego's status as the representative of the reality principle. Thus, in Freud's cryptic formulation, ‘The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection
of a surface'. This is elaborated briefly in a footnote to the English translation authorised by Freud, ‘the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body’ (Freud 1923b: 26). By allusion to the bodily apperception through which ‘a person's body attains its special position among other objects in the world of perception’ (Freud 1923b: 25), Freud passes from the body as agent of perception to the body as object of its own perception, the body-ego as simultaneously percipiens and perceptum. As the mental projection of the body surface and its sensations the ego is no longer, Laplanche argues, ‘conceived of as a prolongation of the living individual but a displacement of it, and of its image, to another site, and consequently as a kind of intrapsychical reality, an intrapsychical precipitate formed in the image of the individual’ (Laplanche 1970: 53). In other words the movement of Freud's thought has taken him from the metonymic conception of the ego as an outgrowth and dependency of the perceptual system, via the notion of bodily apperception, to what is a metaphoric conception of the ego as intrapsychic projection, representation, simulacrum of the body with its surfaces and boundaries, but one located, as Laplanche argues, in another site, in an interior topography, a psychical apparatus of the soul (Seelischer Apparat). From paragraph to paragraph Freud segues from the metonymic to the metaphoric conception by way of a conceptual slide from perception to apperception.
The ghost of the ‘new psychical action’ of 1914, the term ‘projection’ is used oddly here, as in its strict psychoanalytic usage it refers to a defensive expulsion of mental contents, their relocation in an external figure or object, while its neurological reference is to the internal transfer of sensations from periphery to the central cerebral cortex. Freud's projection of the body surface, while it operates from the surface to the interior (rather than from the interior to the exterior as in psychoanalytic projection), is not, however, neurophysiological but ‘mental’ or psychical. It is, furthermore, posited entirely in a perceptual register, as in the realist conception of the ego, with no reference to the libidinal dynamics that was the field of operation of ‘the new psychical action’. The realist ego was to master and adapt the drives by the sheer force of its perceptions of external reality that implausibly were to ‘play the part
which in the id falls to instinct' (Freud 1923b: 25). Freud doesn't elaborate on the nature or functions of this intra-psychical projection of the body surface, except to make a passing analogy with the cortical homunculus that maps the different areas and organs of the body onto the brain. Freud's projected body-ego or psychical homunculus, like its cortical twin, remains confined to the perceptual register and the central mapping of peripheral organs with their sensations and perceptions and the pathways they traverse (with the substitution of perception for drive as the supposed energy source of the ego).
It is not surprising that the body-ego disappears without trace when, resuming his argument in the following chapter, Freud proceeds to his account of the building up of the ego through identifications with external figures and the libidinal transformations that entails. Here the starting point of this identificatory process is said to be not the primitive body-ego but the individual's first identification with ‘the father of his personal prehistory’ (Freud 1923b: 30), leading to the formation of the ego ideal. Freud makes no attempt to articulate these different elements in a single system or model, although it is possible to see the intra-psychic projection of the surface body-ego, with its internal mapping of a preliminary boundary or containing envelope, as the interior site to which successive identifications might be delivered and on which they might perform their identificatory work of assimilation.
The heart of the metaphorical derivation as laid out by Laplanche lies in the ego as an intra-psychical ‘projection’ (or introjection) of the primitive body or skin ego, invested as a libidinal object. Freud's starting point in ‘On Narcissism’ in 1914 had been the transformation of the multiple, auto-erotic component drives into a unified libidinal organisation centred on a single object the ego, the first unified love-object. Thus narcissistically constituted, the ego becomes a permanent reservoir of libido from which investments are sent out to particular objects and withdrawn back from them into the ego in the form of secondary narcissism:
Thus we form the idea of there being an original cathexis of the ego from which some is later given off to objects but which fundamentally persists and is related to object-cathexes
Page 53much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out. (Freud 1914c: 75)
This gives an account of the ego in terms of libidinal dynamics, but what is missing is a way of relating its formation and functioning in the libidinal register of the drives to the parallel account of the ego in terms of the register of perception (where Freud had substituted external perception for the drive), whether metonymically, as the recipient of perceptions and representative of the external world, or metaphorically, as the simulacrum projected inwards of the apperceptive body surface.
Laplanche's account of the ‘new psychical action’ that forms narcissism and the ego works across these two registers. He draws on Lacan's model of the mirror-stage (which is formulated almost entirely in terms of the perceptual register, albeit concerned with self-perception) for his notion of an identification with a gestalt of the whole body as a total object. However, where Lacan poses this in terms of the formation of a unified body-image and its organisation of the subject's relation to his uncoordinated bodily functioning (and as a relation of alienation and misrecognition) with only a passing reference to the libidinal dimension, Laplanche sees this identification with a totalizing gestalt as a precipitation and binding of the auto-erotic drives, dispersed around the body's multiple erotogenic zones, into a libidinal, representational unity. Laplanche argues that there isn't a temporal priority of primary narcissism over the narcissistic object choice that in Freud's presentation comes afterwards, for ‘primary narcissism isn't anything other than narcissistic object choice’ (Laplanche 1993c: 94, my translation), i.e. the concentration of diverse auto-erotic drives anchored in specific zones in a unified object (here the body-image), formed in the image of the whole individual. The very formation of the ego as agency is the primal narcissistic object choice:
Narcissism, on this basis, is the love of the ego; the love of an ego itself precipitated by love, in the same moment as
Page 54the love for the form of its counterpart [semblable]; an ego precipitated in the same moment that the living being attaches itself to the image of its counterpart; a loved ego invested with libido, Freud tells us, and so becoming, he adds, ‘a great reservoir of libido’. On the other hand, the ego is ‘binding’; it binds, it is by definition totalising and acts so as to hold together, to assemble all the auto-erotic drives and at the same time to contain them; it acts to contain the auto-erotic by enclosing it, by totalising it, but also exercising over it, laterally, from the margins, an effect of moderation and control (Laplanche 1993: 94–5, my translation).
Here the role of perception is also central, but rather than a neutral reception of incidental sense data from any external reality, it is a libidinally driven identification with the containing form or outline of its specular counterpart, whether reflexively perceived in a literal mirror in Lacan's exemplary instance or in the mirror of the other (especially the other who addresses the infant with its nurturing but enigmatic messages). As Laplanche elaborates, ‘narcissism is a Gestaltung, a giving of form to auto-eroticism, entailing a profound mutation of sexuality, by the fact that the narcissistic action, the precipitation or narcissistic coagulation, binds that sexuality’ (Laplanche 1993: 99, my translation). The function of binding here is the other side of the movement of enclosure and totalising of the component drives into an organised, invested whole body image. The effect of this binding is of a moderation and control of drive movements, exercised laterally, from the margins.
Laplanche derives this function of binding from Freud's first systematic theory of the ego as an agency of inhibition, in the unpublished Project for a Scientific Psychology of 1895. In Laplanche's extensive commentary on the early model of the ego, he demonstrates its affinity with the later metaphoric derivation, rather than with the ‘realist’, metonymic derivation of the ego. While the latter is plugged directly into external reality through the perception-consciousness system, having a privileged or at least unproblematic relation to that reality, the ego of the
Project is established quite independently of the perception system (the φ system on the external periphery of the psychical apparatus). As Laplanche points out, the ego is only introduced into the model after the operation of perception, and the process of recognition of the reality or otherwise of revived perceptual traces, have both been established.
The problem that Freud addresses is that when the revived perceptual traces are intensely cathected they override the signals of correspondence with a real object (the ‘indications of reality’ in the ω consciousness system) and so take on the force of hallucination due to the intensity of the cathexis. The problem is not dealt with by granting the ego a special relation to reality or by elevating perception to the status of an internal force comparable to the drives, as Freud is later to do in The Ego and the Id. Rather Freud posits the ego as a bound form invested with drive energy from the unconscious ψ system—‘let us picture the ego as a network of cathected neurones well facilitated in relation to one another’—which ‘corresponds to the vehicle of the store required for the secondary process’ (Freud 1950a [1895]: 323). This operates an attractive field of force on adjacent neuronal pathways, inhibiting the passage of energy by drawing it to itself. So if the ego is threatened by the intensely cathected revival of a memory trace of a painful experience, or of an hallucinatory perceptual trace whose discharge would lead to an experience of dissatisfaction due to the absence of the corresponding object (e.g. a lost love-object), it can deploy the side-cathexis of adjoining neurones to capture the passage of drive energy for its own system. This inhibiting action of the ego is explained entirely in economic terms as the action of a gestalt on its surroundings by virtue of the difference in their energy levels. As Laplanche comments: ‘there would be a kind of induction in the surrounding field, similar to that exercised by an electrically or magnetically charged mass, the induced effect being a function of the energy difference between the inducing element and the environment’ (Laplanche 1970: 63).
The nucleus of the ego here is not at all the perception-consciousness system, but is rather the permanent stasis of energy in the bound but internally facilitated gestalt of the ego (i.e. energy flows evenly distributed between the elements or ‘neurones’ that constitute the nucleus and sustain it homeostatically at an optimum level for its functioning,
separate from its surroundings). It is the operation of this mass as a field of attractive force that lowers or abolishes the highly charged movements of hallucinatory memory traces, and so allows the separate perception and consciousness systems with their indications of reality to function. As Freud concludes, ‘It is accordingly inhibition by the ego that makes possible a criterion for distinguishing between perception and memory’ (Freud 1950a [1895]: 326). However this inhibition is not a function of the ego's privileged access to reality or of the formation of the ego around the perception system. On the contrary, the ego is an object formed within the unconscious ψ system by ‘the regularly repeated reception of endogenous Qn [energy or quantity] in certain neurones of the nucleus’ (Freud 1950a [1895]: 323).
This inhibition and capture of adjacent highly charged drive movements anticipates the idea formulated in the third chapter of The Ego and the Id that the ego's control of the drives takes place through the regression from object-choice to identification. Freud calls this, ‘a method by which the ego can obtain control over the id’:
When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id's loss by saying, “Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object”. (Freud 1923b: 30)
Here, in a further development, the ego as a libidinally charged form, both bound and binding, is established through identification with renounced love-objects and the recapture of the investments previously made in them. Freud generalises the process, first described in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ as a mechanism specific to melancholia, of an identificatory process that constitutes the ego through the introjection of a loved object, ‘it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-choices and that it contains the history of those object-choices’ (Freud 1923b: 29). The price for this, however, as Freud points out, is an ‘acquiescing to a large extent in the id's experiences’ (Freud 1923b: 30). An ambiguous form of control, then, that is scarcely distinguishable from acquiescence in the id and its drives.
It is a recognition of this paradoxical and equivocal status that informs Laplanche's conception of the ego in its metaphorical-libidinal derivation. Laplanche draws out the implications of this conception, starting from the Project, that the ego is not ‘essentially a subject’. ‘[I]t is neither the subject in the sense of classical philosophy, a subject of perception and consciousness (it is not ω), nor the subject of wishing and desire … but a specific formation within the mnemic systems, an internal object cathected with the energy of the apparatus’ (Laplanche 1970: 66). However, it is a paradoxical kind of object that acts and ‘enters into conflicts as a participant by virtue of its double function: an inhibitive function or a function of binding … and a defensive function’. An object that acts, a kind of proxy, a pseudo-subject: ‘the ego is indeed an object, but a kind of relay object, capable of passing itself off, in a more or less deceptive and usurpatory manner, as a desiring and wishing subject’ (Laplanche 1970: 66). As Freud recognizes in his famous metaphor of the rider and horse, a metaphor that starts off intending to exemplify control of the id but ends up in acquiescence, ‘Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own’ (Freud 1923b: 25 my italics). So the ego is an internal object, in Laplanche's striking formulation, passing itself off as a subject of wishing and desire.
However the question of perception is not entirely banished from the developed metaphorical-narcissistic conception of the ego. The relation of the ego to perception was at the heart of the realist conception and it intersects with the narcissistic conception at this very point. It is, however, a special and original perception at stake here, not just routine perceptions of the external world and its objects, but both apperception or self-perception, and the perception of the other, i.e. perception in the charged context of a formative inter-subjective relation. Freud had alluded to the role of self-perception in his transition from the metonymic to the metaphoric conception in the final pages of chapter 2 of The Ego and the Id:
A person's own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen like any other object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of sensations, one of which may be equivalent to an internal perception. Psychophysiology has fully discussed the manner in which a person's own body, attains its special position among other objects in the world of perception. (Freud 1923b: 25)
It is only in a much earlier recognition in the Project, later well forgotten, that Freud acknowledges the foundational force of the perception of the other:
Let us suppose that the object that furnishes the perception resembles the subject—a fellow human-being. If so, the theoretical interest [taken in it] is also explained by the fact that an object like this was simultaneously the [subject's] first satisfying object and further his first hostile object, as well as his sole helping power. For this reason it is in relation to a fellow human-being that a human-being learns to cognize (Freud, 1950a [1895]: 331).
The first object of perception-cognition is the semblable or counterpart, the ‘fellow human-being’, the one who is like me, so that this perception is implicitly an apperception. Furthermore, Freud attributes the interest in cognizing to the fact that this counterpart is also like the first satisfying and the first hostile object, as well as the ‘sole helping power’. The perceptual complex proceeding from the fellow human being, Freud tells us, ‘falls apart into two components, of which one makes an impression by its constant structure and stays together as a thing’ (Freud, 1950a [1895]: 321), while the second component is variable. While some aspects will be ‘new and non-comparable’, e.g. the facial features, others—e.g. the movements of the hands—will recall memories of the subject's own body and it experiences (Freud, 1950a [1895]: 321). In this account perception of the other is supported and made intelligible by apperceptive experience of the subject's own body. Indeed Freud proposes a wholesale analogy
between the structure of the ego and the structure of the object of perception and cognition; for the latter divided by judgement into the thing and its variable predicates, matches the distinction between the ‘nucleus of the ego’, internally charged with a constant level of energy, and ‘the changing cathexes in the pallium’—in Freud's neurological language, the neurones that receive excitations from the perceptual apparatus. (Freud, 1950a [1895]: 328). It's not clear, however, what the implications of this analogy are: whether the infant projects the structure of the ego onto the object as its structure or whether he receives this structure from the other—as a Vorbild or model for the nascent ego, ‘projected’ inward from the body surface to its internal site. Laplanche's theory of seduction would propose that it is the vector coming from the other that is prior and elicits or provokes both the subject's perceptual and libidinal responses to the other.
Freud locates the initiation of the perceptual apparatus, and the subsequent development of the faculties of judgement and remembering, in a metaphorical reference back to what Laplanche calls the situation of primal seduction, with its satisfying and hostile objects and the ‘sole helping power’, the nurturing and seductive adult other. In the context of the theory of primal seduction, that perceptual complex that comes from the other is not just a set of neutral ‘indices of perception’ (the Wahrnehmungszeichen or first elements given to perception in the letter to Fliess, 6th December, ) but ‘perceptual signs’, ‘originating in the sender of the message, they make a sign in a double, linked sense—they acquire the force of signs and this is because, isolated by the sender, they are addressed to the subject’ (Laplanche 1992: 74). The role of this enigmatic signification from the adult other in the provocation of the infant's primal translation-repression, with the consequent formation of the drives as its by-product, has been set out in Laplanche's New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (especially chapter 3) and his essay on the drives in Essays on Otherness (Laplanche 1999a). I have commented at length on it in my editorial introduction to the latter volume and in a recent essay on the Theory of Primal Seduction (Fletcher, 2007).
Freud's privileged primal perception or perceptual complex proceeding from the fellow human being (whether satisfying, hostile, supportive, or
all three), when set in the framework of Laplanche's seduction theory, takes on the force of an enigmatic signifier or sequence of signifiers that target and address the infant recipient. Facial expressions, gestures, intonational patterns, these pre-linguistic signifying elements are ‘embedded in the periphery of the ego … implanted in the periphery of the individual, and primarily in the points known as erotogenic zones’ (Laplanche 1987: 135). Laplanche is describing here what he calls the first stage of a primal repression that is, overall, correlative with the formation of the ego and has vital implications for its precipitation in a narcissistically invested form. The ‘ego’ that receives and registers these primary perceptual signs is Freud's body-ego, Anzieu's skin ego, coterminous with the whole individual as its receptive surface. What Anzieu says of the tactile skin surface perceptions—‘the massage is a message’ (Anzieu, : 39)—applies across the whole sensorium and, as Laplanche argues, the message is both a message of care, support, love but one that carries an enigmatic, repressed sexual dimension.
What is pertinent here is Laplanche's taking up and elaboration of the translation model of repression that Freud sketches out in the letter to Fliess cited above. There Freud proposes that psychic structure is formed through a process of stratification by which memory traces are laid down not once but several times over, through a series of rearrangements or retranscriptions that represent successive epochs or phases of development:
At the boundary between two such epochs a translation of the psychic material must take place. I explain the peculiarities of the psychoneuroses by supposing that this translation has not taken place in the case of some of the material … Every later transcript inhibits its predecessor and drains the excitatory process from it. If a later transcript is lacking … thus an anachronism persists … A failure of translation—this is what is known clinically as “repression.” (Masson 1985: 208)
In Laplanche's model of translation-repression, developing that of Freud, for every act of translation or carrying across of exciting material there is also a partial failure of translation. Something is not carried
across. The later transcript that ‘inhibits its predecessor and drains the excitatory process from it’ is the germ of the idea of sublimation (see Laplanche's development of this in his recent return to the concept of sublimation, Laplanche 1999b), while Freud explicitly identifies the failure of translation with repression. Both the concepts of repression and sublimation are re-positioned in relation to the translation model. In Laplanche's elaboration of the model of translation, it is the repressed, untranslated remainders of the enigmatic messages from the other that form the nucleus of the unconscious as a separate system. He calls these elements of the primal repressed ‘de-signified signifiers’ and ‘source-objects’, i.e. they are signifying elements that have lost their signifying function and original context in the other's discourse and expressiveness and become reified, reduced to a ‘thing-like’ status in the unconscious. As such, they press towards expression and discharge in the form of the drive. Rewriting Freud's terminology, Laplanche also calls them ‘source-objects’, signifying objects from the other that have been fragmented, remaindered and thereby come to function as the source of the drives.
In the second stage of primal repression, Laplanche writes, the ego-as-agency is formed, the ‘projection’ or translation inward of the excitable and receptive surfaces of the body-ego in a bounded self-representation. Where in the first stage the enigmatic signifier was external, ‘embedded in the periphery of the body-ego… primarily in the points known as erotogenic zones’, in the second stage:
The enigmatic signifier or, to be more precise, its repressed residue, the source-object, becomes internal; it is still external to the ego, or embedded in its periphery but, given the ego is more restricted than the whole individual … it is an internal-external element which, as far as the ego is concerned, acts from the outside. (Laplanche 1987: 135)
However, we have not considered the actual translation itself, the successful carrying across of the excitatory elements into a new phase of development, and the new ‘language’ that attenuates and binds them (as in the letter to Fliess on translation). Here we encounter once again from a different angle the question of Freud's ‘new psychical action’
and its synthesising of the auto-erotic drives into the narcissistic ego. This requires the articulation of its libidinal register with the projection of the body surface into the intrapsychic space of the ego-agency, and the recognition that that body-ego is infested with exciting implantations that map and zone its surface. This projection of the erogenized and auto-erotic surface into a narcissistically loved and boundaried body image also comes to perform a defensive function against what resists and so cannot be translated but which seeks to return; for the ego forms an internal periphery or protective barrier against the attack of the drives, the excitations of the internal foreign body (the object-become-a-source) of which Laplanche writes: ‘a kind of internal-external instance has been formed: a “thorn in the flesh” or, we might say, a veritable thorn in the protective wall of the ego’ (Laplanche 1970: 42, my re-translation of Laplanche's épine, where Mehlman has ‘spine in the flesh’).
Laplanche models the levels of the ego and the repeated moments of their precipitation as a series of envelopes—body surface, skin ego, introjected ego-agency—which enfold each other in parallel. Psychically actualised metaphors of the whole individual, they are not, however, just metaphors floating in inner space—for the successive envelopes coincide at certain points of tangency. In Laplanche's various diagrams they intersect tangentially, sutured or stapled together, as it were, by ‘the thorn-in-the-flesh’, that is, by the privileged traces and zonings of the erotically implanted body. The body and the ego, Laplanche argues, are articulated together at the point of impact of the drive, where those
‘later transcripts’, the sublimated counter-investments, inhibit and drain its excitations (Laplanche 1980: 228).
It is with this carrying across or translation of the ego as a centred form and its untranslated remainders or source-objects that we can see the ego's double and combined derivation:
The second stage of primal repression concerns the nascent ego-as-agency; the ego-agency is part of the apparatus, and it is made in the image of the whole. It is therefore a metaphor for the biological whole, but it is also an organ of the whole and it exists within a metonymic contiguity with the whole. (Laplanche, 1987: 134).
The moment of the ‘new psychical action’, with its unifying projection inwards, happens spontaneously in Freud's account, as the next stage of a developmental programme. In Lacan's mirror stage schema it appears also as a spontaneous development (at least in the classic 1949 paper), anticipating in the imaginary what is to come and thereby implementing the organising function of the body schema. The model of primal seduction, however, would require a more specific motivation for this than the general defensive function performed by the ego of an internal periphery against the drives. Laplanche's theory with its other-centred, ‘Copernican’ perspective prompts the question: what action of the other offers the infant a libidinally invested, bound form as a model or prototype for its ‘new psychical projection’?
An intimation is given in ‘On Narcissism’ where Freud's distinction between the different modes of object choice, the so called ‘anaclytic’ and the narcissistic, collapses, as the donation of narcissistic libido to all objects, however derived, whether chosen on the model of the ego or on that of the parental support, emerges as the general libidinal formula for all object choice. ‘Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably reveals its former nature' (Freud, 1914c: 91). The action of parental love, donating its revived narcissism to the infant, is detectable, Freud argues, in the idealisation and overvaluation of the infant in the parents' eyes, in their conscription (can one use Laplanche's term ‘seduction’?) of the infant to the parental fantasy Freud calls ‘His Majesty the Baby’:
Thus they are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child … to suspend in the child's favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves. The child shall have a better time than his parents … he shall not be subject to the necessities … Illness, death, renunciation … shall not touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall be abrogated in his favour. (Freud 1914c: 91)
Then in a rhetorical climax as theoretically pregnant as it is ironic—Freud concludes:
He shall once more be the centre and core of creation—‘His Majesty the Baby’, as we once fancied ourselves. (Freud 1914c: 91)
Like his vivid description of maternal seduction, ‘She strokes him [the baby], kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object’ (Freud 1905d: 223)—which points the way to Laplanche's account of primal seduction, Freud's wry insider's evocation of parental fantasy—‘he shall once more be the centre
and core of creation’—points the way to the ‘Ptolemaic’ movement of self-centring, with its closure of the psychical apparatus on itself, and its repetition ‘once more’ of parental self-centring. While Freud's descriptions of primal seduction and parental fantasy stop short of a proper theoretical elaboration of their action and effects, yet we can see that what is at stake here is a ‘narcissizing’ effect of parental fantasy that implants and implements, like a performative in speech act theory, a seductive libidinally charged ‘centre and core’ in the infant. The Standard Edition's helpful footnote refers Freud's ironic titling of parental fantasy to a well known Royal Academy painting in which two policemen suspend the stream of city traffic to allow a nursemaid to parade a pram and baby across a busy street (Freud 1914c: 91). They reference Freud's ironic reworking of the painting's title as a formula for authorial self-projection in daydreams and popular fiction: ‘His Majesty the Ego’ (Freud 1908e: 150). The ironic repetition of the honorific formula indicates Freud's awareness of the inter-connectedness of the two themes, the parental fantasy of ‘the Baby’—en majescule as it were—and ‘the Ego’. The parental fantasy of the baby, as a protected and defended ‘centre and core’, thereby centres the libidinally fragmented and dispersed infantile skin ego in the narcissistic unity of the loved simulacrum. The parental fantasy of His Majesty the Baby lays down for the infant, who is seduced and conscripted to it, a template or Vorbild that thereby models His Majesty the Ego.
Surprisingly there is very little in Laplanche's work that directly addresses the centripetal action of the adult other and its impact, which would provoke and support the synthesising processes of primary narcissism on the part of the infant. However, Laplanche's most recent work on gender identity (Laplanche 2007) has argued that the infant's acquisition of gender identity through identification with the parent of the same sex can only be explained by the prior identification of the child as belonging to one of two genders by the adult other and associated adult socius. The child is assigned to and identified as belonging to a gender and it is only this identification by the other that provokes and enables the child's identification with the other.
The same argument clearly obtains with the primary identification, which requires adult provocation and support for an identification with either the specular counterpart in the mirror or the form of the ‘fellow
human-being', an identification that internalises the delimiting form and outline of the primary self-representation. However any account framed purely in the perceptual, metonymic register is inadequate, as the libidinal dynamic that invests the form and that provides the ‘drive’ that impels the identification must also be accounted for. Along with the Laplanchean principle of the primacy of the other, this requirement of a libidinal dimension calls out for a further theoretical elaboration of the action of parental narcissism and its narcissizing fantasy within the framework of the theory of primal seduction.3
‘The movement of the concept repeats the movement of the object of the concept’, Hegel.
Laplanche sometimes summarizes thus an aspect of Hegel's thought that he finds congenial, as a way of dramatizing both Freud's repeated movement of ‘going-astray’ (fourvoiement, a term he raises to the level of a methodological concept) and his own way of interpreting Freud's going-astray. This is an oscillation in thought from an other-centred or ‘Copernican’ break from self-centring to a ‘Ptolemaic’ recentring. Indeed he parodies Freud's fondness for invoking Haeckel's Law (ontogenesis, the development of the individual, repeats phylogenesis, the development of the species), with ‘Laplanche's Law’, ‘Theoreticogenesis, which is to say the evolution of the theory with all its avatars, tends to reproduce ontogenesis, which is to say the fate of sexuality and the unconscious in the human being’ (Laplanche, 1993c: 188). The fate in question is a covering over, an elision, an absorption into something else, both at the level of theory and of individual psychic formation.
Laplanche traces such a movement from the first theory of the drives, turning on the relation of leaning-on and deviation between self-preservation with its instinctual functions and the sexual drives (in short, between Instinkt and Trieb), to the second theory of the drives, which posits a real opposition between the Life ‘Instincts’ or Eros and the Death ‘Instincts’. Here, despite Freud's massive recourse to the biological, in effect to Instinkt, he speaks of Lebenstriebe and Todestriebe. Laplanche argues that the sexual drive of the first theory is not to be
mapped onto the Life Instincts or Eros of the second theory, which would have left an incommensurate, indeed incoherent parallel between self-preservation and the Death Instincts. In fact Eros represents the collapse or conflation of the Trieb/Instinkt distinction in Freud's thought, what Laplanche calls the colonization of self-preservation by Eros and the consequent absorption of both it and the sexual drive into Eros:
I remain convinced that the shift from one dualism to the other in Freud is in no sense the substitution of one system for another less valuable system. It corresponds to something in the reality of the human being: the movement from one to the other corresponds to the birth of something, the transition between two states or positions … This would imply that the first dualism would pre-exist the second in the reality of human existence, indeed would constitute its very foundation (Laplanche, 1999b: 34–5).
Laplanche argues that beneath the incommensurate pairings of the two theories there is an underlying consistency which he represents in the form of what he calls a ‘strange chiasmus’:
Laplanche's diagram dramatizes both the apparent anomaly by which
sexuality moves from the pole of the primary process, free energy in the first theory to the pole of the secondary process, bound energy and the ego in the second theory, and the underlying consistency of the opposition of unbinding and binding that organizes these pairs of opposites. To these one can add further Freudian opposites, such as the pressure towards absolute discharge and homeostasis. I would argue that the cross-over point of Laplanche's ‘strange chiasmus’ that is unnamed on his diagram but sees the sexual drive cross over into its opposite, Eros, is in fact primary narcissism.
This is the moment of ‘the new psychical action’ which this paper has been so concerned with: the internalization from the other of the bound and binding form that coagulates the auto-erotic component-drives of infantile sexuality into the unified narcissistic libido. This constitutes the ego as the first totalized love object and as the libidinally invested representative of the self-preservative functions that, henceforth, it encloses. Laplanche draws a further implication from Freud's disinclination to propose a ‘destrudo’ as an independent energy source for the Death drive to match the ‘libido’ of the Life drive, ‘For the death drive does not possess its own energy. Its energy is libido. Or, better put, the death drive is the very soul, the constitutive principle, of libidinal circulation’ (Laplanche, 1970: 124). The death drive is then the return of the Trieb, the unbinding and unmaking pressure towards discharge, first elaborated in the Three Essays of 1905, the great ‘Book of the Drive’. It is, Laplanche argues, the alternative regime of the sexual, ‘Lucifer - Amor’ (Masson, 1985:421), re-affirmed in 1920 as an exigency of the Freudian field and its object, the ‘apparatus of the soul’, in the face of the massive elaboration of the principle of binding, of narcissism and all its works from 1914 onwards. It is the Life ‘Drive/Instinct’, the heir of that narcissistic cross-over and its ‘new psychical action’, Laplanche concludes, not the death drive (‘known of old and long familiar’ like Das Unheimliche, the Uncanny of ), that is Freud's new invention, the great surprise of 1920.
'[A]t first he used the term [“das Ich”] without any great precision, as we might speak of “the self”; but in his latest writings he gave it
a very much more definite and narrow meaning' (‘Editor's Note’, Freud 1914: 71).
This double perspective is reprised in contemporary structuralist thought from the principles of the association of ideas and the classical tradition of rhetoric. Laplanche sets it out systematically in relation to psychoanalysis in ‘Derivation of Psychoanalytic Entities’, reprinted as an appendix to the English translation of Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Laplanche, 1970).
The late Sylvia Bleichmar, a former student and colleague of Laplanche's, had begun such an elaboration (Bleichmar, 2000) with her concept of maternal narcissisme transvasant (self-emptying narcissism) that allows part of itself to become other in the infant's own body (le corps propre).