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Psychoanalysis between sense and nonsense — On the infantile and the traumatic (and the grotesque)
As hermeneutic practice and theory, psychoanalysis is focused on the discovery or attribution of meaning or sense. However, in doing so psychoanalysis pays special attention to nonsense, to the bizarre and the banal. Moreover, nonsense is promoted to the carrier par excellence of hidden sense, as is illustrated by Freud's dream interpretation. To enable the nonsense to appear, psychoanalysis must curb its hermeneutic urge and be open to what shows itself automatically, non-intentionally, disconnected from any narrative context. This area on the edge of language and in the margins of the representational appears, so this article argues, mostly in infantilism and traumatism. In both, symbolization and thinking are overshadowed by a motor, psychologically impoverished automatism. Infantile and traumatic loss of sense therefore is an important entrance gate to a psychoanalytic anthropology. This article examines how precisely free association unites in itself the two traces of hermeneutism and automatism and — if carried through to the absurd — promotes contact with «true nonsense».