The general nature of this question risks simply leading us back to aporias, namely:
Which Freud exactly?
And what philosophy?
Which Freud? We shall, of course, refrain from putting Freud ‘on the couch’, as they say… But there does perhaps exist an intermediate level, which I will further try to define as that of the exigency. An uncontrollable exigency which makes up the originality of an otherwise unpredictable intellectual trajectory. This Freud of the exigency is not purely subjective. It is found—and can be demonstrated—in the written work and its equilibrium.
What Freud says and what he does vis-à-vis philosophy can only leave us perplexed.
Here, Paul-Laurent Assoun's little work Freud, la philosophie et les philosophes (1976) provides the necessary reference points. In it, we find the double-handed language and the double attitude which Freud displays in relation to philosophy—what Assoun calls Freud's ‘double speech’. Out of a dozen examples, two quotations will suffice: ‘I most secretly nourish the hope of arriving, via these same paths, at my initial goal of philosophy’ (Freud 1887–1904: 1/01/1896); but many years later (in 1925): ‘I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper. This avoidance has been greatly facilitated by constitutional incapacity’ (Freud 1925: 59).
All of this, at least as far as explicit statements are concerned, forms part of an intellectual autobiography that Freud elaborated and modified ceaselessly. But what does he say from a more thoroughly argued point of view? The standpoint on philosophy is clearly set out in the chapter on ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ in the New Introductory Lectures (1933). Here the uniform and universal point of view characteristic of all world systems is rejected, and both its internal connection to narcissism
and the aim of comforting those who live by those systems are explicitly brought forward as decisive arguments. But the principal critique is in fact reserved for the religious view of the world; the philosophical view remains relatively inoffensive, of interest only to a restricted elite, and therefore having little influence on the course of the world.
While claiming repeatedly that he is ‘not properly competent to judge [the different systems]’ (Freud 1933: 175), Freud does not refrain from offering opinions on Marxism and its active branch, Bolshevism. But—and this is no less interesting for us—he also breaks a few lances against the intellectual ‘nihilism’ of those he calls ‘anarchists’, those who claim that ‘we find only what we need and see only what we want to see’ (175–6): ‘the relativity theory of modern physics seems to have gone to their head’ (175). Without taking Freud as an authority here, let us simply note that he already arraigns, after his own fashion, what is nowadays called ‘postmodernism’. This is a postmodernism which continues to thrive, maintaining that ‘anything goes’, and which, in order to attack psychoanalysis from the rear, does not fail to assert that if all hermeneutic keys are valid then psychoanalysis now has no privilege above any other ‘narrative schema’, that it is only one narrative among others.
To return to ‘world views’, let us clearly observe that Freud will not reject them all but will subscribe explicitly to what he calls the ‘scientific Weltanschauung’, to which he allies psychoanalysis. It too is characterised by its uniform ambition, but—and this is an essential difference—this aim is not only conceived as a programme whose accomplishment is to be found displaced unceasingly towards the future. Without wishing to develop the characteristics of science here, let us note its absolutist aspects, which Freud in no way rejects: ‘truth cannot be tolerant […] it admits of no compromises or limitations’; it ‘proce[e]d[s] with rejections and dismissals’ (Freud 1933: 160). This last view would return us directly to Popper's notion of falsification; a Popper whose epistemology—beyond his uninformed critique of what he claimed to be psychoanalysis, which actually boiled down to a somewhat simplistic Adlerianism—shows many points of contact with Freud's.
Freud compares this vision of science, with which he fully concurs, to that of philosophy which, he says, is ‘not opposed to science’. Philosophy
‘works in part by the same methods’ (Freud 1933: 160), but it goes wrong in seeking, by means of positive assertions, to fill the gaps in the unity at which aims, whereas for science such a unity always remains a regulative and programmatic principle.
We would not wish to leave Freud's reflection at this point, pointing at the absolutist and systematic character of philosophical world systems: for on the one hand, on the side of philosophy, the uniform, totalising aim represents just one aspect of things, best illustrated by Hegelianism, which Freud detests so much as to fail to recognise its dialectical moving force. It will suffice to mention Kierkegaard, without counting the great number of modern philosophers for whom the ‘Weltanschauung’ is of little concern.
But on the other hand, on the side of Freud himself, another term will be advanced and will be ceaselessly repeated by him: namely ‘speculation’, to which he willingly admits dedicating himself, even if he does so without abandoning ‘patient observation’. I will simply mention some of the great texts which contain a speculative dimension—Totem and Taboo, Civilisation and its Discontents and many others—in order to pause for a few moments over the text which is paradigmatic among them: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where speculation is defined as ‘an attempt to follow out an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will lead’ (Freud 1919: 25). Here one could see precisely Popper's procedure of ‘conjecture’, where the imagination can be given free reign, to be followed by refutation or falsification of the conjecture based on one or another of its results. But this speculation—which in the case of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is metacosmological—does not for the most part lead to refutations or solidly grounded findings. It will lead, a few years later, to a formulation which sounds like an absolute, beyond all proof: ‘To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views that I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way’ (Freud 1930: 119).
Exigency. This is the term which I now propose to describe that which pushes Freud in a single direction, which is constantly at work in him throughout all his ‘goings-astray’. In the case of Beyond the Pleasure Principle it is the exigency of the ‘death drive’—a notion which will, to be sure, undergo further elaboration. But primarily it is the exigency of the unconscious, encountered in the practice of analysis.
To speak of the Freudian discovery is not to speak of analysis as merely the updating of a procedure to access in a new way phenomena which are already recognised but just poorly understood—in a word, a psychology supplied with revitalised instruments. Psychoanalysis is the simultaneous inauguration of a new procedure and a new domain of being.
Psychoanalysis, Freud will say—and I am barely glossing his words—is a specific procedure which allows access to hitherto unknown beings, unconscious beings. It is thus comprised at once of a new method and a new object. At the same time, the exigency of which I speak is not an exigency belonging to the researcher: it is the very pressure exerted by his object.
Such is the meaning of the realism of the unconscious—as opposed to all hermeneutic conceptions—which the following very particular characteristics denote:
Alien-ness [étrangereté], as also designated by the well-known formula ‘internal foreign body’ [corps étranger interne].
Atemporality, and, more exactly, the exclusion of temporalisation.
The absence of coordination.
The absence of negation.
And, of course, the sexual character of the unconscious, to be understood here in the sense of polymorphous infantile sexuality.
In support of his theory of the unconscious Freud is sometimes led to refer to philosophers, in a genealogy which is not entirely free of confusions. The reference to Kant is rudimentary at best. The reference to Schopenhauer reintroduces the idea of a primal unconscious, an ‘unconscious will’, as the bedrock of our conscious life. We cannot deny that Freud himself states on several occasions that ‘everything which is conscious has first been unconscious’ and that ‘the primary precedes the secondary’. These are all propositions which it is important we oppose.
I am well aware that by issuing such reservations I am pleading on behalf of one Freud against another: the Freud of the experience and the exigency of alterity, against the Freud of a Ptolemaic, ipso-centrist re-centring which re-emerges ceaselessly and boils down to a formula of the following kind: in the depths and at the origin of man, flush out the instinctual id: ‘Nothing has entered into you from without; it is only a part of yourself which you do not recognise’.2 Such would be the formula I reject.
Two further remarks to finish up:
It is not for nothing that the exigency of the death drive should impose itself towards the end of the Freudian oeuvre. I recall Freud's own terms: ‘I can no longer think in any other way’. However, this exigency is not a pure lived experience, a subjective constraint. It is a constraint which is at once legible in the very structure of the Freudian oeuvre and in its evolution. Since Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, I have tried to pose the question, ‘Why the death drive?’ (Laplanche 1970: 103–124). Now, the explanation can be found in the drift taken by Freud's work during the years around 1915, a drift which tends to make one forget the uncontrollable, irreconcilable aspect of the sexual drive, which Freud names ‘Lucifer Amor’ in the letters to Fliess (Freud 1887–1904: 10/7/1900). It is a drift which, among other things, is consolidated by the place accorded to a sexuality unified under the aegis of ‘the Eros of the divine Plato’—a term which is very difficult to reconcile with the ‘polymorphous sexuality’ situated at the origin of our being and of our symptoms. As such, the death drive may be deciphered as a reaffirmation of the heterogeneity of the sexual within us, the infantile sexuality which is unbound and in need of binding.
Nor is it without significance that the discovery of the unconscious, in the earliest years, should be accompanied by a clinical and theoretical attempt to detect the source of that alterity in the enigmatic message of the adult other, a message infiltrated by the sexual unconscious of the adult. I am referring here to the ‘theory of seduction’, which is inseparable from the exigency of the unconscious as other within us. Heir to the sexual dissymmetry of the adult-infans relation—a dissymmetry which is characteristic of what may be referred to as the ‘fundamental anthropological situation’—the unconscious forever reminds us that we do not gravitate around ourselves nor even around an instinct-based id that is genetic in nature.
From the beginning we gravitate around the enigmatic other, the sexual adult other of our childhood, that other who is, moreover, enigmatic to himself.
For this reason, psychoanalysis—which is itself but a tiny part of our forever unfinished knowledge of the cosmos—is a body of knowledge which we might describe as ‘wounded’, opened up from the first by the enigma of the experience of the unconscious.
This in no way implies that psychoanalysis has to renounce the rationalist option. A ‘wounded rationalism’: this would be one of the possible formulas for referring to Freud's philosophy, in the knowledge that that very wound is a stimulating element.
Introductory remarks to a discussion organised by the “France Culture” radio station, February 25, 2006, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published in Sexual: la sexualité élargie au sens freudien 2000–2006 Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ). Translated from the French by Jonathan House and Nicholas Ray.