Beyond the Pleasure Principle published in 1920, is famous as the work where Freud first supposed the existence of a “death drive”, which would be a recurrent theme in his writings from then on. But a reader who comes to Beyond in search of the famous death drive may be surprised to find that the first mention of it, and indeed the first relevant use of the word “death”, does not occur until more than half way through the entire text. Before reaching that point, in sections 1-3, Freud has discussed a “repetition compulsion”, suggested by the dreams of traumatised individuals, who repeat their past trauma in sleep, by the behaviour of a young child, who repeats the going away of its mother in play, and by the behaviour of people undergoing psychoanalysis, who repeat painful experiences of early childhood (the forced abandonment of Oedipal positions) in the course of their treatment and through their relationship with the analyst.
Repetition is not the only thing that Freud discusses in Beyond before he gets to the death drive. In an abrupt departure from the initial theme of repetition, section 4 of the work offers a remarkable account of the phenomenon of consciousness. For several pages the reader is bemused by the direction which Freud's essay has taken. When Freud finally makes the connection between consciousness and his initial theme of repetition, it is by a strange pirouette.
First, discussing the contrast between consciousness and memory, he sketches the idea (taken straight from the Project for a Scientific Psychology, which he had drafted 25 years earlier, in 1895, and left unpublished), that memories are laid down in the nervous system (or “mental apparatus”)1 by “excitations” arriving from the outside world, apparently (my comparison) in much the same way as vehicles leave tyre-marks on a mud track:
It may be supposed that, in passing from one element to another, an excitation has to overcome a resistance, and that the diminution
Page 45of resistance thus effected is what lays down a permanent trace of the excitation, that is, a facilitation.
The part of the mental apparatus, which is the seat of consciousness, is originally no different in nature from the part where memories (“facilitations”) are laid down. It also consists of elements separated by resistances, which incoming excitations have to overcome. However, consciousness occurs on the surface of the system, where incoming excitation makes its first contact with the resistances between elements. So the excitation is as yet undiminished by the effort, which it will have to expend in order to overcome ever more resistance on its journey into the system, and, as a result, the resistances between elements in the surface layer are entirely swept away instead of only being “tyre-marked” like those further in. Why, it may well be asked, should this destruction of resistance produce consciousness? All that Freud has to say is that “the elements of the system Cs. [the consciousness system] would carry no bound energy but only energy capable of free discharge” (1920g: 26-27). Because there are no resistances, excitation flows freely, and this free flow is consciousness.
Freud then suddenly advances the idea that trauma occurs precisely when the whole of the mental apparatus is flooded by an inrush of excitation from the outside world, which has broken through a “protective shield” around it (more of this shield in a minute) and which the apparatus is unable to “bind” i.e., when there is uncontrolled free flow of excitation in the apparatus. He suggests that the phenomena of repetition, which he had discussed in sections 1-3, are just the efforts of the apparatus to bind that free flow (1920g: 30).
Three things in Freud's whistle-stop tour of what appear initially to be disparate ideas are striking. First, the idea of consciousness as free flow has poetic appeal, but it is unclear what to make of it as a scientific, psychological theory of consciousness. Second, Freud pirouettes from a discussion of consciousness to his proposal regarding the nature of trauma via the concept of excitation that is in free flow (that is “unbound”). Both consciousness and trauma are generated by unbound excitation.
Is he then implying some close relationship or even identity between consciousness and trauma? Third, Freud's proposal that repetition is a matter of binding free flow of excitation leaves an explanatory gap. On the one hand he gives a mechanical explanation of the nature of binding:
We infer that a system which is itself highly cathected is capable of taking up an additional stream of fresh inflowing energy and of converting it into quiescent cathexis, that is of binding it psychically. The higher the system's own quiescent cathexis, the greater seems to be its binding force; conversely, therefore, the lower its cathexis, the less capacity will it have for taking up inflowing energy.
Trauma occurs when the system's “own quiescent cathexis” is insufficient to cope with unusually large inflows of excitation. But, we may well ask, how does repetition – for example (Freud's own example), the repetition of a traumatic experience in dreams – help to establish this missing quiescent cathexis?
As already seen, Freud emphasises, in his account of consciousness, that no part of the mental apparatus is exposed directly to the external world. Certainly, the outer layer of the apparatus is exposed to quantities of excitation greater than those which penetrate to inner layers (hence the obliteration of resistances between elements of the outer layer, enabling the free flow which generates consciousness). But, Freud says, the evolution of life forms since earliest times has created a “protective shield” around the apparatus as a whole (including the consciousness layer) that ensures its insulation from the “enormous energies at work in the external world”, by which the apparatus would otherwise “be killed” (1920g: 27). The sense organs can safely take small “samples” of the external world”, which are conveyed through the shield by the nerves, but actual breach of the shield causes trauma.
By contrast, the mental apparatus receives excitation from the inside the body directly, without any shield, and this is possible without
damage to the mental apparatus because the intensity of internal excitation is much lower than that of the excitations in the external world. The implication, based on everything Freud says, is that the intensity of internal excitation is roughly equal to that of external excitation, which has been filtered through the protective shield by the sense organs. However, he then says, at the start of section 5 of Beyond, that internal excitation can, nevertheless, “occasion economic disturbances comparable with traumatic neuroses”. He adds that “the most abundant sources of this internal excitation are what are described as the organism's ‘drives’ – the representatives of all the forces originating in the interior of the body and transmitted to the mental apparatus”.2 It quickly becomes clear that Freud takes the drives to be traumatic as such, regardless of their intensity. He writes, for example, that “it would be the task of the higher strata of the mental apparatus to bind the drive excitation” (1920g: 34).
This is puzzling. If the intensity of drive excitation is no greater than that of external excitation, which has been filtered and damped down to manageable levels by its conveyance to the mental apparatus via the sense organs, why does drive excitation need to be bound? The correct answer to this, I would suggest, is that, in Freud's system (despite some appearances to the contrary), the reason why excitation is traumatic is not its intensity. Excitation is traumatic simply because it is in free flow, which, as he makes clear, is the common feature of the drives and of “breakthrough” excitation from the outside world. The task, therefore, is to define exactly what Freud means by free flow and what he means by binding of that free flow. It is also to be noted that, if free flow is traumatic by nature, then the closeness (or identity?) between trauma and consciousness, which Freud also defines as free flow, is confirmed. This is really very surprising, in view of the peaceful and contemplative connotations, which the concept of consciousness often has in our understanding (something like gazing at a picture).
Having introduced the drives, at the start of section 5, Freud embarks on a fascinating equivocation. He returns to the examples of repetition that he discussed at the start of the essay – a child repeating the mother's
departure in play and a patient in psychoanalysis repeating Oedipal disappointments – and says that these “manifestations of a compulsion to repeat … exhibit to a high degree a drive [‘Triebhaft‘] character” (1920g: 35). At the same time he makes it clear that the repetitions in question – particularly the child's repetition of the mother's departure – are precisely the means of binding the traumatic, “freely mobile” excitation of the drives, i.e., what he had already said in section 4, and which I flagged as requiring explanation, about repetition as somehow establishing sufficient “quiescent cathexis” to bind a breakthrough of excitation from outside, but here applied to excitation from within, i.e., to drives. Now, if the compulsion to repeat exhibits “to a high degree a drive character” and it binds drives, we have a drive that binds a drive. Are we to understand that the drive binds itself?
Leaving the question open and advancing with Freud, we finally come to the death drive. Having evoked once more the repetition by the human individual of early experiences (first partings from the mother, Oedipal disappointments), Freud waxes lyrical and, admitting that what he is about to say may “give an impression of mysticism or sham profundity” (1920g: 37), makes the extraordinary leap from these very early experiences in the ontogenesis of the individual to something much, much earlier – to a period before the appearance of any life on Earth, and to the claim that the repetition compulsion is nothing less than an urge to return to the inorganic state. This is the death drive. Freud writes:
The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first drive came into being: the drive to return to the inanimate state.
Freud's bizarre idea is that the urge to repeat is, fundamentally, the urge not to add anything more to whatever “attributes of life” have already appeared, i.e. not to further embellish them, and so to remain as close as possible to the original inorganic state, which was upset by the appearance of life. I take this whole idea to be metaphorical. But two things in what Freud says are highly suggestive in the light of what has been discussed so far. First, his formula, according to which the drive endeavours to “cancel itself out”, sounds like an explicit statement of the paradox that he had already implied a couple of pages earlier, of the drive binding itself in the repetition compulsion. Second, what is to be made of the reference to the origin of consciousness? If it is right that the cosmic themes, which begin here and run to the end of Beyond, are metaphorical and not literal, Freud's comment can be shifted to the level of the human individual – from the origin of all life to the origin of each human subject. As shown above, consciousness and trauma are both described by Freud as free flow of excitation, and just free flow (rather than any quantitative criteria) seems to be what is definitive of trauma, suggesting a close relationship or even identity between Freud's concepts of consciousness and trauma. Seen in this light, Freud's train of thought in the three sentences can be deciphered. The meaning would be: “Free flow of excitation, which is both traumatic and is also definitive of consciousness, is evoked in the individual by the action of some force, and the trauma is managed when the free flow is bound by somehow being turned on itself.”
What is the “force” that evokes the free flow, how is the flow turned on itself and why do trauma and consciousness have a common nature? For answers to those questions, I propose going back 25 years in the Freud corpus, from Beyond to the Project for a Scientific Psychology of 1895
One striking coincidence between Beyond and the Project is Freud's resurrection of the concept of “facilitation” (“Bahnung”), which he had left alone for quarter of a century.3 As already seen, Freud explains in Beyond that facilitation is the making of a pathway between two “elements” through the complete or partial elimination of a resistance (something like a wall) between them by the action of mobile excitation. Facilitation which demolishes the resistance only partially is equated with
memory. I already likened the idea to a vehicle leaving grooves on a dirt track by its passage. The inadequacies of such an account of memory are numerous. (The brain is not clay, so what could these imprints, each somehow resembling the force that made it, possibly be?). In the Project, Freud had offered something more plausible, saying that “memory is represented by the differences in the facilitations” (Freud, 1950: 300), i.e., by the resistances between the elements of the system (individual neurones) being facilitated to different degrees. But this still makes very little sense, because we have to assume that the resistances in the “virgin” state are everywhere equal (otherwise our memories would be inbuilt or innate) and, that being the case, there is no reason why a travelling excitation should facilitate the resistances to different degrees by choosing one path through the system rather than another.
Ambiguity in terms of reference – nervous system or mental apparatus – is as much a feature of the Project as of Beyond. So, at the start of the Project, the “elements” between which facilitation occurs are neurones, but a few pages later Freud starts to write, without any explanation, about facilitations between mental images in a description of what he calls the “experience of satisfaction” and this description comes with an account of memory, which is completely at odds with that given earlier in terms of facilitation difference. Freud considers the infant sucking on its mother's breast and says that the experience leaves behind two memories, one of the satisfying external object and another of the reflex movement made by the infant (sucking on the breast), which brought the satisfaction. The latter memory is originally “information of discharge”, which Freud defines thus:
The information of the reflex discharge comes about because every movement, through its subsidiary results, becomes the occasion for fresh sensory excitations, (from the skin and muscles) which give rise to a motor [kinaesthetic] image.
Freud then writes that:
as a result of the experience of satisfaction, a facilitation comes about between two mnemic images and the nuclear neurones which are cathected in the state of urgency.
The two “mnemic images” are of the reflex movement (the “motor image” in the last-but-one quote) and of the satisfying object (the breast). The third item in the facilitation, the nuclear neurones, is the part of the nervous system, which receives stimulus from the interior of the body; in this case, the hunger/thirst that was assuaged at the breast. The facilitation which is created between the two images and the nuclear neurones has a particular purpose. When, subsequently, an object is discovered in perception which coincides with the mnemic image of the original satisfying object, the facilitation is there ready to enable flow of quantity to the motor image, “firing” the action represented by that image (sucking on the breast), obtaining satisfaction and dissipating the stimulus.
So, instead of facilitations as such somehow representing memory, we suddenly have memories (mnemic images) linked by facilitations with one another and, most fancifully, with neurones. Freud specifies that the three-way facilitation arising from the experience of satisfaction comes about in a special way. He explains:
there is a basic law of association by simultaneity … which is the basis of all connections between ψ neurones. We find that consciousness – that is, the quantitative cathexis of a ψ neurone, α – passes over to another, β, if α and β have at some time been simultaneously cathected from φ (or elsewhere).
By this mechanism the nuclear neurones, the image of the object and the motor image are linked together by facilitation just because they were “simultaneously cathected” in the experience of satisfaction. The ψ-neurones are the core of the nervous system (or mental apparatus or
system of elements – take your pick), including the nuclear neurones, while the φ-neurones are the fringe of the system, which receives excitation from the external world. The definition, which Freud gives here of consciousness, clearly presages his definition in Beyond because, as in the later text, it is in terms of free-flowing quantity (flowing from α to β). Moreover, quantity in free flow arriving from the interior of the body, which is Freud's theme at this point in the Project, is precisely what, in Beyond, he defines as drives. These two points suggest that Freud's thinking at this juncture in the Project will yield important clues about the relationship, which came into view in Beyond, between trauma (as the free flow that characterises the drive) and consciousness.
The surprise, though, is that the definition of consciousness, which Freud gives when he introduces association by simultaneity, is a blatant error in terms of the Project's official mechanisms. As James Strachey writes in a footnote to the lines just quoted: “It is surprising to find consciousness thus defined, apparently without reference to ω”.
Indeed, consciousness, for Freud everywhere else in the Project, is not free flow of quantity, but depends on a third type of neurones – not ψ or φ, but ω (the last letter in the Greek alphabet and nearly the last I will need to introduce here) – which, he says, are sensitive to a certain “period”, found only in quantities coming from the outside world. Freud gives the ω neurones an extraordinary role in the Project system – they provide what he calls “indications of reality”. This works as follows: excitation of the ω neurones by the special period produces consciousness and “the ω excitation leads to ω discharge and information of this as of every discharge, reaches ψ” (1950: 325). The information of discharge from ω serves as an “indication of reality” for ψ because, as I just said, only quantities coming from the outside world have the period that stimulates ω.
We should be struck by the fact that the “information of discharge” or “indication of reality” is exactly the same kind of thing as a motor image, since Freud says that “the discharge [from ω] will, like all others, go in the direction of motility” (1950: 311), and a motor image is the invariable result of a discharge to motility. This equation between the information
of discharge from ω and a motor image is, I believe, crucial. I will try to show why.
Ask first: what is the purpose of the indications of reality? Mechanistically, their principal role is to signal that quantity can be allowed to flow into the motor image in the three-way facilitation (between the nuclear neurones, object image and motor image), which was left over from the original satisfying experience. The arrival of the indication of reality proves that this is expedient because it proves that the object is, once again, really there, so activation of the motor image (sucking on the breast) will bring real satisfaction (1950: 325).
Pause now and wonder: what was Freud thinking of when he invented this weird, Heath-Robinson ω mechanism? Consider again Freud's “rogue” definition of consciousness as the passage of quantity between two neurones that were once simultaneously cathected. Judged by the (weird, but nevertheless) “official”, ω-neurone account of consciousness, it is a slip. Psychoanalysis seeks meaning in slips. So what does Freud's slip mean? In the official account, ω excitation and hence the indication of reality are provoked by the perception of an object, and if the object is one which has been previously perceived and a memory of which is included in the three-way facilitation, quantity is then allowed to flow to the facilitated motor image. Now, Freud has it that the perceptual image and the memory image somehow share the same neurones (or perhaps are the same neurones – here again we have the neurology/psychology nonchalance). He says, for example, that what is brought into the three-way facilitation as a memory, when the facilitation is set up, is “the cathexis of one (or several) of the neurones which correspond to the perception of an object” (1950: 318). Effectively, perceptual image and memory image are one and the same, but the first is with and the second without the special “period” that marks an origin in the outside world. Consider this in the light of what I pointed out two paragraphs back, that the information of discharge from the ω system – the “indication of reality” – is a motor image. The implication is as follows: when there is a new perception of the same satisfying object, which was experienced earlier, the object image, in its role as perception, arouses a motor image
(information of discharge from the ω system, excited by the period that comes with the object image as perception), as a result of which… the object image, in its role as memory, arouses a motor image (excitation is allowed to flow from the image to the memory of the movement made to obtain satisfaction)! The same thing happens twice over, namely uninhibited transfer of excitation from one item to another (object image to motor image), which is precisely how consciousness was characterised in Freud's “slip” and how he would characterise it years later in Beyond. So the ω mechanism is just a Heath-Robinson version (going round an extra lap for no apparent reason) of the free-flow account of consciousness, which, therefore, contrary to appearances, is to be taken as Freud's authentic version of consciousness in the
Then comes the most interesting question: is the extra circuit of the ω-mechanism really there for no reason? Why did Freud choose such a contrived disguise for his account of consciousness as free flow from one element to another? It is striking that the extra lap is really a repetition, i.e., precisely that which, in Beyond, is supposed to bind free flowing (traumatic) excitation. I do not think that this is a coincidence.
Consider now the purpose of the indication of reality (information of discharge from ω). As explained, its purpose is to signal that quantity can be allowed to flow into the motor image in the three-way facilitation, because the satisfying object is, once again, present in reality. But what receives and acts on the signal? And (essentially the same question) what prevents the flow of quantity into the motor image from occurring until such an indication arrives, since, after all, the facilitation is ready-and-waiting and quantity from inside the body is pressing towards discharge before the indication arrives? What binds the free flow of quantity?
This is the job of what Freud calls “inhibition”, which is a special device for preventing the free flow of excitation. Inhibition works by means of what Freud calls “side-cathexes”. So, if a quantity flows into a neurone, then,
If an adjoining neurone is simultaneously cathected, this acts like a temporary facilitation of the contact barrier lying between the two,
Page 55and modifies the course [of the current], which would otherwise have been directed towards the one facilitated contact-barrier. A side-cathexis thus acts as an inhibition of the course of Qη.
(“Qη” is the abbreviation that Freud uses for “quantity in the mental apparatus”.) It is clear from a moment's thought that inhibition (binding) by side-cathexis is really the exact same thing as the “association by simultaneity”, which Freud had described a few pages earlier in the Project and equated with consciousness in his “slip”, since it relies on the mutual attraction between quantities (“cathexes”) based on their simultaneous presence in several neurones. The fact that free flow between elements and its exact opposite – the inhibition (binding) of free flow between elements – depend on one and the same mechanism is very striking, because such free flow (arriving from inside the body) is precisely what Freud would describe in Beyond as the drive (“Trieb”) and the question, on which I left Beyond, was what to make of Freud's paradoxical suggestion that the repetition compulsion (aka the death drive) is a drive whose function is… to bind the drive. So, in the Project and in Beyond, what is definitive of free flow (association by simultaneity in the former and the drive in the latter) is just what binds the free flow.
I already wondered whether the reason why Freud, in the Project, conjures up the ω-system as a mask for the simple free-flow definition of consciousness might be the repetition, which the detour via ω entails (the passage from object image to motor image is travelled twice). Can it be shown that, in the Project, the repetition implicit in the ω mechanism is identical with inhibition (binding)? If it can, we may have answers to the two principal questions, which I posed earlier: why does Freud take both consciousness and trauma to be a matter of free flow, and how is repetition supposed to bind free flow?
Consider in more detail what Freud does with association by simultaneity. In order for the mechanism to be used as the tool of inhibition, making quantities remain separate and stand still (the objective of inhibition) instead of making them flow into each other (as when
the mechanism is first introduced, along with the “rogue” definition of consciousness), there would have to be, not two, but at least three cathexes in play. Thus, in Freud's example in the last quote above, there is a quantity drawn towards a facilitated contact-barrier by a second quantity on the other side, but held back by a third quantity acting from another direction (two magnets with opposite poles will fly together, but a judiciously positioned third magnet could hold the second immobile between itself and the first). Freud actually draws a diagram to show this necessity of three positions (1950: 324), and how this result could be achieved is what concerns him, when, towards the end of the Project, he addresses what he calls “the most obscure problem: the origin of the ‘ego’ – that is, of a complex of neurones which hold fast to their cathexis”, i.e., which achieve the objective of what, in Beyond, he calls “quiescent cathexis”. Here is what he says:
The ego consists originally of the nuclear neurones, which receive endogenous Qή through paths of conduction […]. The experience of satisfaction has brought about an association between this nucleus and a perceptual image (the wishful image) and information of a movement … The education and development of this original ego takes place in a repetitive state of craving, in expectation. It [the ego] learns first that it must not cathect the motor images, so that discharge results, until certain conditions have been fulfilled from the direction of the perception. It learns further that it must not cathect the wishful idea beyond a certain amount since otherwise it would deceive itself in a hallucinatory manner.
So the ego is initially the nuclear neurones, i.e., one of the items in the three-way facilitation created by the experience of satisfaction. The risk, described here, that it will deceive itself “in a hallucinatory manner” depends on a bizarre exception, specified earlier in the text, to the ω mechanism, namely: “if the wished-for object is abundantly cathected […] the same indication of discharge or of reality follows too
as in the case of external perception“ (1950: 325). The idea seems to be that over-cathexis of the wishful image produces the ”period“ that stimulates ω, i.e. produces consciousness, and information of the ω discharge makes the ego believe that it is dealing with a perception and not a memory. But what Freud says at the end of this last passage looks like nonsense. What could it mean for the ego (apparently intentionally) to not over-cathect the image for fear of ”deceiving itself“? After all, if it knows not to over-cathect the image for that reason, it must already know that the image is not a perception! More generally, what does Freud think he has said in these five sentences that could explain how vessels filled with quantity (the nuclear neurones) become what sounds like a little man inside man, who gets ”educated“ and ”learns“ things?
Freud himself writes, a few paragraphs after the last passage: “How primary defence, non-cathexis owing to a threat of unpleasure, is to be represented mechanically – this, I confess, I am unable to say (1950: 370). Frank Sulloway concluded that Freud in the Project, failed ”to provide a mechanical explanation for defense against unpleasure without having to assume the existence of an ‘observing’ ego“ (Sulloway, 1979: 125).
I think, though, that Freud does offer an explanation of “non-cathexis owing to a threat of unpleasure” – aka binding, inhibition or primary defence – in these sentences, only it is not a mechanical explanation and Freud's ego is not the psychological ego (the “little man inside man”) which Sulloway clearly takes it to be.
To see this, consider the word “education” (in the sentence that begins, “The education and development of this original ego”). Strachey inserts a footnote after the word, where he tells the reader that the manuscript “quite clearly” has “Entzieh(un)g”4 (“withdrawal”), but that he follows the German editors who “very plausibly” emended this to “Erziehung” (“education”). The editors were presumably moved to do this by the occurrence of the verb “lernen” (“learn”) in the next two sentences, which made them take “Entziehung” to be a slip by Freud. It is, however, unlikely that Freud made such a slip, since a connection between the concepts of “education” and “withdrawal” is hard to imagine. Moreover, “withdrawal” has much relevance to what he is discussing here.
This can be seen by referring back to what I said above: Freud's association by simultaneity means that two quantities cannot remain separate, but instantly flow together or coalesce, and inhibition (binding) is the art of using this self-same device of association by simultaneity to achieve the opposite result – to keep quantities apart by drawing them away from each other. I explained that inhibition would necessarily involve at least three positions, while coalescence occurs between two positions. So, if you have association by simultaneity with just two positions and no more, what has to be done is, precisely, to withdraw quantity from these two positions in order to create a third, which can keep the first two apart by the judicious use of its force of attraction. It is, however, extremely hard to see how this can be done, since, far from allowing the withdrawal of quantity from their association in order to make a third position, the two quantities will, due to association by simultaneity, tend to immediately coalesce into unity.5
If withdrawal really is the mechanism that can explain the “origin of the ego” as “a complex of neurones which hold fast to their cathexis”, what exactly is the withdrawal from? When, earlier in the Project, Freud resumes discussion of the experience of satisfaction a few pages after first introducing it, he refers again to the object image in the three-way facilitation and says: “the time has come to remember that perceptual cathexes” (such as the object image) “are never cathexes of single neurones but always of complexes”. He has not mentioned this idea in the Project before this point and offers no clue where it comes from. The origin is, in fact, traceable and confirms the line of thought I am pursuing here, but I cannot go into that now. Then, a few lines further on, he writes:
The perceptual complex, if it is compared with other perceptual complexes, can be dissected into a component portion, neurone a, which on the whole remains the same, and a second component portion, neurone b, which for the most part varies. Language will later apply the term judgement to this dissection and will discover the resemblance which in fact exists between the nucleus of the ego and the constant perceptual component [on the one hand] and
Page 59between the changing cathexes in the pallium and the inconstant component [on the other]; it [language] will call neurone a the thing and neurone b its activity or attribute – in short, its predicate.
Again, I cannot follow all the ramifications of this here, but what matters for present purposes is that Freud has made both the ego and the object image (“perceptual complex”) consist of two parts, supposed a “resemblance” between the ego and the object image, and taken the two parts of the object image to be a “thing”, on the one hand, and “activity”, “attribute” or “predicate” on the other.
This is at first bewildering. The experience of satisfaction left a facilitation between three items. Now Freud tells us that two of these items (object image and ego) each consist of two parts. Does that make a total of five facilitated items? Not at all. What Freud means to do, I believe, by these extra complications is to illustrate the tension I just described between three, two and one item, which is implicit in association by simultaneity and inhibition. The two components of the object image, which Freud specifies, are: on the one hand, the “thing”, which, if Freud had not suddenly introduced this new complication, we would naturally take to be the whole of the image; and, on the other hand, what he calls an “activity”. Now, an “activity” (German “Tätigkeit”) sounds remarkably like a motor image. What Freud has actually done, I believe, is to fold away what were two out of the three items in the three-way facilitation from the experience of satisfaction (object image and motor image) into one of the items (object image). If that is right, what becomes of the third item in the facilitation – the nuclear neurones, which Freud calls the “original ego”?
To answer that, consider the “resemblance”, which Freud posits here between the object image (the perceptual cathexis) and the ego. There is nothing anywhere else in the Project to indicate a resemblance between the ego and the object image or what such a resemblance could possibly consist in. The only resemblance is just the dual structure, posited here, of constant and changing components, which ego and object image
are supposed to share. I think that what Freud would like to say (I will consider in a moment why he cannot in fact say it) is that the ego and the object image are one and the same.
If it is correct that the ego and the object image are one and the same and if the motor image folds away into the object image, then there are not, or at least not originally, three items in the facilitation left behind by the experience of satisfaction, but only one. We can call it the object image or the ego, as we please, but it is just this strange essence, poised between unity (object image or ego) and duality (thing + activity, for the object image; or nucleus + changing cathexes, for the ego).
As I have said, the indeterminacy between unity and duality is part and parcel of association by simultaneity, by which any two items tend immediately to telescope into one. Whether or not he was the first to notice it, Jacques Lacan was certainly the first to delve deeply into what Freud's concept of association by simultaneity may have to do with the same concept as used in the structural theory of language.6 Something that may occur to anyone on first acquaintance with the theory of structural linguistics inaugurated by Saussure and developed by Jakobson and others is that, if the elements of language are purely differential (defined by “distinctive features”), they are not thinkable as separate, because each exists only by virtue of all the others. So the language system has a built-in capacity to coalesce into unity. Could this be what Freud means by the tendency of his elements, linked by “association by simultaneity”, to coalesce? This may seem far-fetched to anyone who is not sold on the Lacanian reading of Freud. But it is, perhaps, just as far-fetched to think that Freud, in a text as tightly organised as the Project, could have wandered (as I showed him doing above) between “mental image” and “neurone” to describe these same elements, unless he was feeling for a concept to describe them which was different from both.7
Think now again of how the ω arrangement does two laps or goes around twice, causing the activation of first one motor image (the information of discharge from ω, which Freud expressly likens to a motor image) and then of another (the motor image from the experience
of satisfaction) in what is effectively a repetition. As Freud presents it, at the superficial, “mechanistic” level of his exegesis, the information of discharge from ω lets the ego know that it can now safely release quantity to the motor image from the experience of satisfaction because the satisfying object is again present. But, as I pointed out, the explanation looks hopeless because, firstly, Freud seems to give himself this ego as a little man inside man, with no explanation of where it came from, and, secondly, he absurdly has the ego refraining from over-cathexis of the object image in order to prevent self-deception (but if it refrains, it is already “in the know”, so the deception is a fiction).
The solution to these riddles is, I think, like a psychoanalytic interpretation, surprising. The point is that the ego is created by the repetition based on ω. This repetition of two items separately from each other – motor image followed by motor image – is the holding apart of two signifiers (the time has come to use the word) and precisely this “holding apart” is inhibition or binding (prevention of coalescence).8 It is also the repression of one of the signifiers, which will now stand for the “thing” or the “nucleus of the ego”. The arrangement left behind by the experience of satisfaction is not what Freud pretends it to be, a means of experiencing the same satisfaction again, but a means of repressing that satisfaction (this could be demonstrated, if there was space, by showing that the “experience of pain”, which Freud describes next in the Project, is really the exact same thing as the experience of satisfaction, and that the consequences of the experiences are identical).
I am painfully aware that these last explanations are (space dictates) much too concise. As a sort of coda, let me add something that could give an intuitive glimpse of the key point. Lacan asserts that, if we read Freud carefully in many of his works, particularly the “Wolf Man” case history, it can be deduced that the determinant of psychosis is the failure of repression. Lacan takes an interest, at several points in his work, in a renowned philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom he judges, from reading his texts, to have been psychotic (Lacan, 2007 [1991]: 59-64). Lacan comments only on Wittgenstein's early work, the Tractatus, but if he is right about the philosopher's psychosis, we may well expect to find
relevant clues in the later work too, and my point is most easily made by reference to well-known passages in the Philosophical Investigations. In these passages Wittgenstein seems to put in question the very possibility of a distinction between the knowing subject and the contents of its experience. What I find most striking about the experiential contents, which he describes, is that they all seem to be unitary – there is, so to speak, “only one thing about them”, as can be seen most clearly from his discussion of the famous sensation S (Wittgenstein, 1958: 92-95). Any sensation, from a tickle to a sharp pain, would serve his purpose equally well, and the unitary nature of such a sensation seems obvious, since there is nothing else to it but how it feels.
Now, it seems perfectly feasible to have such a sensation once, remember it, and be able to identify a future sensation as the same as the first, but Wittgenstein challenges the possibility of doing this. There is much disagreement about what he means, but I think that his point is as follows: if a new sensation occurs and I recognise it as another S, there must be an initial moment when I am aware of the new sensation before I recognise it as another S. My “inner eye” must first settle on the new experiential content and only in the next moment do I judge it to be the same as a previous content. Without this division into two moments, the phenomenon of recognition does not occur and each new sensation would appear to be unique of its kind. A continuity that is essential to subjectivity – nothing less than the faculty of memory – is then lost: the experiencing subject is reduced to a series of mirrors attached to the series of contents and may as well be dispensed with altogether.9 Wittgenstein, I think, really does believe that this problem applies. He believes it because he is sure that every new experiential content is, as I said above, “unitary”, that “there is only one thing about it” and, that being the case, the two distinct moments, which are necessary in order for recognition to occur, are unobtainable – to become aware of a content is already to become aware of everything about it (because there is only one thing about it).
So Wittgenstein lacks a firm grasp on the separation between self and everything other than self just because he cannot accept Freud's
insistence that experiential contents are never unitary – that “perceptual cathexes are never cathexes of single neurones but always of complexes”. Every experience had by someone, in whom repression has occurred, is underpinned by a repressed signifier, which is just the self (the ego) that seems to stand separate from that experience.
What does all of this say about the death drive? I noted that, if consciousness and trauma proved to be the same thing (both consisting of unbound excitation), it would be a most surprising result in view of the calm and contemplative connotations of consciousness. But what is traumatic is the hallucinatory consciousness of psychosis, when the ego is not felt as separate from the content of its experience. When the “Trieb” (free flow of excitation, the tendency of the signifier system to coalesce) has been bound by its own repetition, aka the death drive, this separation is established and the trauma is tamed. Hurrah then for the death drive, the guardian of sanity.
It is often unclear in Beyond whether Freud is theorising in the domain of neurology or of psychology. Mainly he is in the latter, and I will use his preferred term, “mental apparatus”.
Here and everywhere I will use “drive” to translate Freud's “Trieb” instead of “instinct”, used in the Standard Edition, including substitution in quotes from the Standard Edition. The emendation is now generally accepted.
As established by a search of Freud's entire published psychoanalytical works (in the Standard Edition translation) in one PDF file, one of many invaluable resources freely available in Patrick Valas' treasure trove of Freud and Lacan texts at .
The two letters “un” are bracketed because Freud uses a shorthand in the Project, leaving out letters in words if a German reader could supply the missing letters him/herself.
A short but irresistible remark: viewed in this way Freud's problem matches that presented by Lacan in his sophism of 1945, Logical Time (Lacan, 2006: 161-175), where a third position, a “moment of concluding”, has to be extracted from
a “time for comprehending” that has a binary structure and tends to collapse into a unitary “instant of the glance”. The match, I think, is no coincidence, since Freud, at this juncture in the Project, is stating how he understands primary defence – what he would later call “primal repression” – and Lacan's sophism is to be understood as illustrating his (I think) correct understanding of Freudian repression. The Project and Logical Time are the first steps in the theoretical elaborations of the originator of psychoanalysis and of his French follower, steps taken exactly half a century apart.
His favourite reference is Letter 52 to Fliess, where Freud makes association by simultaneity the first “layer” of memory registration (Freud, Fliess, 1985: 207-215).
This stirs the question, where on earth could Freud have come across the ideas of structural linguistics before that science was invented? Such was the first question put to Lacan in Radiophonie (Lacan, 2001: 403-407). I think there is a more concrete answer than the one he gives there. I will try to present it in a future article.
In Lacanian terms it is the progress from “alienation” to “separation” (Lacan, 1977: 218).
This can be connected with the mirroring theory in the Tractatus.