Nonintegration, the Unintegrated State: the Silence of Falling Trees

One of the impressive features of Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" is the emphasis that he places on the disjuncture between individual morality and the morality of the community, a disjuncture that is also at play in his account of the ambivalence of civilization and barbarism. The difference in the matter has to do with the role and the function of instinctual renunciaton, which both "creates" civilization (per Freud), but also (per Adorno) only creates civilization (i.e. leads to the appropriation of individual interests for the sake of "humanity"). In his effort to describe the primitive attitude towards death, from which he thinks we stand to learn something, Freud digresses about the function of the artwork in representing death:

"It is an inevitable result of all this that we should seek in the world of fiction, of general literature and of the theatre compensation for the impoverishment of life. There we still find people who know how to die, indeed, who are even capable of killing someone else. There alone too we can enjoy the condition which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death—namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we preserve our existence intact. For it is indeed too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, when one false move may lose us the game, but with the difference that we can have no second game, no return-match. In the realm of fiction we discover that plurality of lives for which we crave. We die in the person of a given hero, yet we survive him, and are ready to die again with the next hero just as safely."

As he describes elsewhere (primarily in "Creative Writers and Daydreaming") through the concept of forepleasure, Freud here again attempts to account for that "extra" work that the artwork does; the so-called "incentive bonus" of the artwork, which elicits--also through identification--catharsis for an observing audience. But the suggestion that "compensation for the impoverishment of life" is provided by artworks links aesthetic "forepleasure" more explicitly with the performance of instinctual renunciation, with the renounced "death wish" that there is to experience (so his narrative of the primitive attitude of death goes) that is there in the observation of the deaths of others. The secret of forepleasure, then, is that it can provide us with the experience of the "plurality of lives," and this somehow provides the "compensation" for the feeling that life is impoverished. This is a feeling that Freud finds characteristic of the modern attitude towards death and one that he is optimistic that war (via aggression) could also work against, that is, counter-intuitively, that war could enrichen the experience of life.

Winnicott's similar interpretation of a patient that "All sorts of things happen and they wither. This is the myriad deaths you have dies. But if someone is there, someone who can give you back what has happened, then the details dealt with in this way become part of you, and do not die" (Playing and Reality 82) contributes to the development of the link between forepleasure and death. In the footnote to this interpretation, he comments: "This is, the sense of self comes on the basis of an unintegrated state which, however, by definition is not observed and remembered by the individual, and which is lost unless observed and mirrored back by someone who is trusted and who justifies the trust and meets the dependence." Here, and in other essays on the maturation of infants, he writes about the "unintegrated" state which precedes the important phase of "integration" in child development. This "unintegrated state," which he describes as also existing in older children and adults as a "non-purposive state" (74) is "the opposite of integration" (86).

The value of making a distinction between the pre-integration state (which is also not disintegration) and integration lies is Winnicott's desire to say something about "what life can be about for healthy children and adults" and thus to creativity and culture (there are also things to say, he notes, about the unintegrated state in relation to infant life and schizoid disorders). In "The Concept of a Healthy Individual," he writes, "In adult life, integration is enjoyed along with the ever-extending meaning of the term right up to and including integrity. Disintegration, in resting and in relaxation and in dreaming, can be allowed by the healthy person, and the pain associated with it accepted, especially because relaxation is associated with creativity, so that it is out of the unintegrated state that the creative impulse appears and reappears. Organized defence against disintegration robs the individual of the precondition for the creative impulse and therefore prevents creative living" (Home is Where We Start From 29). In his footnote, he also gestures towards forepleasure: "It is thought by some, as in Balint's paper (in Problems of Human Pleasure and Behavior, 1952) discussing Khan, that much of the pleasure in the experience of art in one form or another arises from the nearness to unintegration to which the artist's creation may safely lead the audience or viewer. So where the artist's achievement is potentially great, failure near the point of achievement may cause great pain to the audience by bringing them close to disintegration or the memory of disintegration, and leaving them there. The appreciation of art thus keeps people on a knife-edge, because achievement is so close to painful failure. This experience must be reckoned part of health." As Winnicott suggests, like Freud, the value of art, as described, is its ability to create conditions for the experience of nonintegration, a state that is lost unless observed and reflected back by someone (or in the case of the artwork, something). Much like the question of whether a tree can be heard if it falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, the enigma lies in imagining the parameters of a state that hinges on, but does not necessarily lead to integration (to being heard). The silence of the tree that falls without being heard is nonintegration.

As suggested by Winnicott, and by Bernard Golse's definition of "integration" in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, nonintegration is significant because it implies the trust to "yield to this regressive movement"; such a negative state occurs like depression between integration and disintegration, civilization and barbarism, and guilt and aggression to indicate the work of alternative forms of rearrangement that enhance our understanding of agency and activity--political, emotional, and otherwise.

photo: Philli Workman
Disclaimer: Above thoughts and associations might only be confused at this point...

Der andere Schauplatz

I'm trying to synthesize a few things with this post, perhaps more wildly disparate than will merge in the space of writing this (both temporal and raeumlich), and all of them associatively linked to the convergence of some factors experientially and conceptually. The first is Balibar's notion of "the other scene," which occurred to me as a formulation that could be useful for thinking about alternative functions of the poetic work (alternative to the "task" of political lyric, or the task of lyric to sublimate aggression or combat barbarism). Turning to Balibar, I noted that "the other scene" is a reference taken from Freud (primarily in The Interpretation of Dreams), and further, that Freud develops his ideas about it from the luminous G.T. Fechner, whose Principles of Psycho-Physics is also a primary referent of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This all only means something to me because in attempting to think about "forepleasure [Vorlust]" as a means for thinking alternatively about the function of tension release in relation to pleasure and displeasure, Freud's references also lead to Fechner, who develops this notion in The Primer of Aesthetics, and here it is the idea of the mutual non-contradiction of factors that allows him to account for otherwise inexplicable effects, such as the feelings of identification and transfer of emotions that occur in experiencing works of art and aesthetic events.

In Politics and the Other Scene, Balibar uses the term to refer to the "differentiation of change," or a "change within change," rather than the "changing of conditions." The idea seems to provide Balibar with a way of conceptualizing the "locality" of such factors, or the coherence of a pattern that is, as he says, one "inverted" from Marx's turning away from the "apparent scene" of politics to reveal the "real scene" of economic processes. Balibar writes, "I have a certain tendency to invert this pattern--not to return to the idea that 'ideas drive history', but to emphasize the fact that 'material' processes are themselves (over- and under-) determined by the processes of the imaginary which have their own very effective materiality and need to be unveiled" (xiii). Balibar qualifies this distinction with the idea that it's not exactly that the political other scene is the scene of the imaginary collective processes and their unconscious determinants, and this qualification perhaps points to the significance of this being originally Fechner's notion. It's been a little while since I've looked more closely at his work, but the Fechner/Freud distinction (which is elaborated by Mai Wegener in "DAS PSYCHOPHYSISCHE UNBEWUSSTE: GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNER UND DER MOND" (Psychoanalytische Perspectiven 23 (2005) 2, 261-282)) often seems to consist of Fechner's greater emphasis upon the preconscious aspects of the unconscious, rather than the unconscious itself. The structure is interesting, however, and resonates with Balibar's above because Fechner's elaboration of the indistinction seems to require the rather more forceful distinction of cs/ucs, as Balibar's inversion seeks also to recombine and relocate the place, or perhaps "moment," of their interaction. This is the point at which, I think, the associative connection with "the other scene" shifts into a conceptualization of "civility" and for a "politics of civility." In the preface, the connection is drawn, although not explicit: "A politics of violence, or a politics of civility (the same thing obversely formulated), is not something that can be pursued solely on the stage of globalization, where processes, motivations and interests are supposed to be visible and manageable" (xii). Balibar explains that it's in order to account for the heterogeneity of the processes of globalization that Freud's concept is so useful, and it's this that Freud attempts to describe as the "essential heterogeneity of psychic processes" (xii). It's possible, therefore, to think about how this notion of the Schauplatz provides a scene for civility, for what is neither, according to Balibar, "transformation" or "emancipation."

Briefly, civility is, for Balibar, "a politics which regulates the conflict of identifications between the impossible (and yet, in a sense, very real) limits of a total and floating identification, 'civility'. Civility in this sense is certainly not a politics which suppresses all violence; but it excludes extremes of violence, so as to create a (public, private) space for politics (emancipation, transformation), and enable violence itself to be historicized. What interests me, here, is not to codify that civility, but to attempt, in conclusion to outline some of its problems" (29-30). "Civility" is not then a model for a politics, but a way of thinking about the problems that are necessarily involved in thinking what precedes political actions, or politics, or what takes place behind the scenes of globalization. And in this sense, "civility" refers to the processes of identification and misidentification (processes involved in the master-slave dynamic and in the notion that fascism is the desire that "desires its own repression") and the destructiveness (tending toward death drivenness) of these processes. These ideas are elaborated in "Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Anthropology" (differences 20 (2009)), and here above I've done little more than outline the argument and ideas, but the link that I'm attempting to draw out between "the other scene" and "civility" relates to the distinction between sleeping and waking.

It's not just that "the other scene" refers to this distinction, and in fact becomes a concept that allows for the theorization of the distinction, but it remains very much the case, in Balibar's writings, that this also underlies the parallel (and gain) of the essential heterogeneity of the psychical and the essential heterogeneity of the political.

In her essay, Wegener describes the difference between Freud's and Fechner's notions of "the other scene [anderen Schauplatz] by talking about how Freud fixes the concept as a "synonym of the unconscious itself." (271, translations mine). In contrast, Wegener argues that Fechner's conceptualization of the unconscious is "physical," which is surprising, she notes, for the founder of psychophysics: "Dies ist nicht der Fall [die Zuordnung des Unbewussten zwischen dem Koerperlichen und dem Psychischen], Fechners Unbewusstsein ist unzweitdeutig ein physisches. Die psychophysisiche Taetigkeit wird, wie oben erwaehnt, von ihm als koerperliche gekennzeichnet, sie ist der koerperliche Traeger des Psychischen. Ihre negativen Werte, also das Unbewusste, entsprechen schlicht dem Schlaf [This is not the case [the placement of the unconscious between the bodily and the psychical]; Fechner's unconscious is unambivalently physical. The psychophysical activity becomes, as mentioned above, designated as bodily; it is the bodily carrier of the physical. Its negative value, the unconscious, corresponds simply in sleep]." As Wegener describes, "the other scene" is the expression of a negativity, rather than the expression of an ambivalence between psychical and physical life, as the distinction between waking and sleeping often seems to entail. Fechner articulates this: "Sollte der Schauplatz der psychophysischen Thaetigkeit waehrend des Schlafes und des Wachens derselbe sein, so koennte der Traum meines Erachtens blos eine, auf einem niedern Grade der Intensistaet sich haltende, Forsetzung des wachen Vorstellungsleben sein, und muesste uebrigens dessen Stoff und dessen Form theilen. Aber es verhaelt sich ganz anders [If the scene of psychophysical activity is supposed to be the same during sleep and waking, then the dream, in my opinion, can be merely a continuation, which maintains a lower degree of intensity, of the waking imaginative life and would therefore share this material and form. But it behaves quite differently]." His articulation of this difference between waking and sleeping makes use of the notion of the "threshold [die Schwelle]," which preoccupies the Elements. From this threshold, he derives the notion of negativity that Wegener takes up above: "...die zunehmende Vertiefung des Schlafes unter die Schwelle eben so mit wachsenden negativen Werthen zu bezeichnen, womit sich unsere fruehere Auffassung negativer Bewusstseinswerthe als unbewusster Werthe von der Empfindung auf das Gesammtbewusstsein uebertraegt, und eine Verallgemeinerung und Verstaerkung der frueheren Auffassung zugleich erwaechst [the growing deepening of sleep beneath the threshold indicates the growing negative value, with which our earlier ideas about the negative consciousness value were translated as the unconscious value of the sensation on the entire consciousness and a generalization and strengthening of the earlier ideas simultaneously increase] (441)." This rather figural notion of the negativity and positivity in relation to the threshold thus serves as Fechner's conceptualization of the oscillation that is constitutive of conscious and unconscious value. It's all about the threshold, for Fechner, and how or what its overcoming can be conceived of as. In this conception, "the other scene" is not the unconscious, per se, but the registration of a threshold which can be passed over and under, according to the gradations in the state of sleep.

Note: These associations/convergences latently manifested walking in Boston, with a recounted dream of EB (with Rei Terada and Travis Tanner).

aectivity

Of the several panels and talks that I attended last weekend as part of the University of Minnesota`s graduate student conference in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Aesthetics/Class/Worlds, many explicitly addressed the question of aesthetics, perhaps even explicitly formulated in this way: as the question of aesthetics, and much of what I heard seemed to be invested in insisting on aesthetics, as if it was in some danger of being lost, or revoked, or done away with. Such projects are perhaps easy to understand, if we consider, for example, that it is perhaps not so much a matter of aesthetics disappearing, but the problem of reconciling the political and aesthetic, which is perhaps a rough way of phrasing the problem of Marxist literary and cultural theory. It is not really surprising then that aesthetics would seem to be the object that might be lost, since insistence upon the priority of the political almost always takes the place of further examinations about how exactly these things are related, except that they are.

In the panel, ``Marxism Today,`` my observation about the occurrence of the above coincided with the pointed tendency of each paper to discuss through its own theoretical apparatus, the problem of conceptualizing (much less inhabiting, if this was a part of it) the point of resistance. It seems to me that this resistance is an aesthetic matter. But I may need to be more descriptive about what this aesthetics is, because my thinking about aesthetics derives from Freud`s observations about the principle of fore-pleasure, and ideas about the relative indeterminency, or the ambivalence of activity and passivity that pertains to thinking about how the role of the observer or spectator can be acted out. There is a moment--or at times, a series of moments--when these roles of activity and inactivity become articulated with one another and the ability to identify with fictional entities, or the ability to see oneself in this position of another--and to mistake one`s movements for another`s--becomes possible. This is the gist of what Freud writes about in also writing about seduction in ``Creative Writers and Day-dreaming,`` but his observations about the function of this principle also extend to the function of the economics of movement that govern his later writing on pain and pleasure and the dynamics of these principles. In this regard, aesthetics is more fundamentally about the politics of identification, and this conceptualization of two interdependent but antagonistic spheres has as much to do with taste as beauty, qualifying such notions about the qualities by which we judge aesthetic work with the fact of our own perception of that work. Pleasure, as much about fore-pleasure, and the non-teleological, non-normative implications of the concept. Taste, I think works on beauty in much a similar way, always undermining its seeming obduracy or self-evidence.

picture: Franklin Bridge, Minneapolis

complacency

In his quirky little essay, ``Discussion of War Aims, `` D.W. Winnicott regards the problem of opposing morality in times of war (in which friend and enemy lines are drawn with a thick black Sharpie market) as a matter of complacency. Complicity, which is often regarded as a condition of guilt, is here only a kind of psychic fact, something like a condition for existing in such times:

At the present time we [Englanders] are in the apparently fortunate position of having an enemy who says, ‘I am bad; I intend to be bad’, which enables us to feel, ‘We are good’. If our behavior can be said to be good, it is by no means clear that we can thereby slip out of our responsibility for the German attitude and the German utilization of Hitler’s peculiar qualities. In fact, there would be actual and immediate danger in such complacency, since the enemy’s declaration is honest just where ours is dishonest. (211-212)

Complicity is the very movement of identifying and dis-identifying that comes to define the status of individual ambivalence in relation to group or collective identification. In most writing about guilt in the context not only of Holocaust studies but also, and potentially more problematically, in the context of contemporary Human Rights discourse and problems of ethics, complicity, however, remains the defining paradigm for thinking about the relationship between guilt and responsibility. Adorno`s statement on Auschwitz is often interpreted as one that identifies the inevitable complicity of art (and poetry), as for example Nouri Gana`s (nonetheless beautiful and compelling) essays on post-elegaic, post-Nabka, post-catastrophic film and poetry. Still others have attempted to shift the discussion away from such issues of guilt by turning to the theoretical notion of shame. For these individuals, including Ruth Leys and Timothy Bewes, shame is preferable because it provides a way of talking about conditions of vulnerability as ontological states, in contrast to the ethics that guilt seems to proscribe.

It is however, particularly difficult to want to talk about Adorno without talking about guilt, since the notion of guilt is so central to his conceptualization of both the artwork and individual experience after Auschwitz. Guilt--the ``guilt of the artwork,`` the ``encompassing context of guilt [umfassende Schuldzusammenhang], the ``guilt of society``--is pervasive. Winnicott`s idea that complacency figures into guilt highlights something which is also there is Adorno`s writings on the society of the artwork in postwar culture. One does not, in fact, have to look far. In his revision of his (by now tired) Auschwitz statement, Adorno noted that he was speaking about culture particularly (this is evident when one reads ``Cultural Criticism and Society``) , but about the ``resurrected [auferstanden]`` culture of postwar Europe ( Metaphysics: Concept and Problems 112).

The idea complacency [Wohlbehagen] is also resonant with Freud`s discussion of the sense of guilt, which he suggests is ultimately the same as (or maybe a ``close up`` of) the discontents [Unbehagen] of civilization [Kultur].

any-spaces-whatever

“Consequently it is very conceivable that the sense of guilt produced by civilization is not perceived as such either, and remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort of malaise [Unbehagen], a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations.” (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents 99).

In his introduction to Cinema 2, Deleuze famously describes a shift from pre- to post-war cinema (from movement-image to time-image) as the crisis of the “cinema of action.” Throughout, Deleuze persists in attributing the cause of this crisis to the figure of the broken “sensory-motor link,” which, if un-broken, signals the correspondence of incoming sensation and action, in short, the ability to register and react to stimulus. Commenting on his choice of the war’s end as a point of demarcation between these two periods, he says that “in fact” the postwar consists of an increase in “spaces which we no longer know how to describe.” It’s not clear whether the post-war as described is cinematic or real; for Deleuze this ambiguity is constitutive of becoming. Such is the ambiguity that inheres in the “I,” the lyric speaker, of postwar poetry. The problem of this speaker is not just one of speaking or representation, but one of being seen, of being observed. The crisis is typically assumed to be traumatic, but as Deleuze’s construction shows us, the crisis of the subject is one of description, not experience.

Deleuze’s own descriptive discourses of these “any-spaces-whatevers” highlight questions for action in general. Such “empty or disconnected” (272) spaces—“deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, wasteground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction (xi)—are alternately referred to as situations: the “rise of situations to which one can no longer react” (272). The disturbance of reception and reaction marks the breakdown of the “sensory-motor” relationship in indescribable spaces and situations which foreground the impossibility of reaction. This crisis of describing and reacting involves exchanging action for perception, hence the breakdown of the “sensory-motor” apparatus. This breakdown and exchange occurs at the level of the character, but as we will come to see in Deleuze and elsewhere, the postwar is qualified by the difficulty and confusion of identifying and differentiating oneself from this omniscient character.

For Deleuze, the war marks a break in filmic modes—not by staging the dictum of writing after Auschwitz, but by reading these broken, postwar “spaces” as the positive introduction of a new subject, a “mutant” character who “does not act without seeing himself acting” (6). In these “any-spaces-whatever,” he states, “a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers” (xi). A similarly eerie perceptiveness is present in Civilization and its Discontents. But this perceptiveness—the coincidence of observing and being observed—is not ascribed to characters and spaces, but first to the meta-critical faculty of the super-ego. Freud notes that the super-ego, conscience, and the “sense of guilt” are different aspects of the same thing: “the perception which the ego has of being watched over in this way” (100). Freud orders them topographically, or primordially, describing how the super-ego comes before conscience, and the sense of guilt before the super-ego, such that the sense of guilt is primary. Perhaps Freud later becomes more occupied with how the conscience and super-ego function and how they exercise their critical powers, but for now his most astonishing connection is between the “sense of guilt” is misrecognized, that it appears as “a sort of malaise [Unbehagen].”

the state of sleep

I feel that what is perhaps Philomena’s first night of sleep (8 hours!!!) deserves a blog entry, coincident with my desire to read Jacqueline Rose’s essay, “’On Not Being Able to Sleep’,” and to think about the beginnings of things. Anyhow, I think Philomena slept through the night last night. The reason that there is uncertainty about this is that it is entirely possible (and not unlikely), that I got up with her at some point and that I just do not remember it. However, to the best of my recollection, she did not get up, which means that this is a major event. It could be an anomaly. That’s fine, too. I think it’s just a matter of it being able to happen. I mean, now I’ve seen that it’s possible.

I found it ironic, in a certain way, that in Winnicott’s book, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World, there is no mention in either the index or the table of contents of sleep. Of course I have found this to be the most difficult thing about having a child, seven months in. So maybe my response is a little overdetermined. On the other hand, the hundreds of books on sleep, sleep training, sleep techniques, and etc,.. attest to this problem, at least in contemporary society.

In Jacqueline Rose’s essay, she explores the question of what sleep is, for Freud. She writes, “Although Freud will crucially identify all the features of the dreamwork, not only in symptom formation, but also in jokes and slips, the dream—through sleep—at least partly escapes the mantle of these forms. It breaks the line which Freud—in a gesture which might be seen as the founding gesture of psychoanalysis—runs from the neurotic to the everyday (the ‘approximately normal person’ as he famously describes himself in the preamble to the specimen dream). Sleep changes everything” (106). In this passage, Rose addresses the primary task of psychoanalysis, arguably, the distinctions it makes between the normal, neurotic, and psychotic states of the individual. If sleep breaks the line between or beneath the normal and the neurotic, it is, as she describes, because it is psychotic. The question of how psychotic states of mind intervene in the normal/neurotic continuum is one that is often understated in literature on madness and psychoanalysis, because, I think, it is often assumed that it interrupts or is a rupture in this manner. Perhaps because it seems to follow from the way that psychosis itself is figured as a break, or a rupture with reality. I’ve begun to consider psychosis as less radical and more regressive, perhaps as a reaction to the drama involved in pseudo-psychotic moments.

Regression also turns up in Rose’s essay (also in my above notes that it’s okay if the night of sleep was an anomaly, as if to forestall already the disappointment of regression), several pages later. Rose writes, “Could it be then that the greatest fear for the analyst is not the fear of not knowing, one loss of omnipotence, but another, more tangible, more physical, the fear of slipping backwards (regression is of course also central to this chapter), of turning—with awesome, hallucinogenic vividness—into a frightened child?” (110). For Rose, the idea of the “infantile wish,” which contains the ambiguity of this as a wish that was had as a child or a wish to be a child. Of course regression involves the idea of being “taken back” to something. This is a very abstract and general formula for regression, but it can also therefore include a number of experiences, ones that I would like to think together—certain forms of tradition that are authenticated by being able to be “taken back,” Winnicott’s desire to return to a time when metaphors mean something, recovery from the past or the present, historical reference or citation to an earlier version of an event or idea, the two steps forward one step back theory of progress…

for the love of

transference-love. Reading Freud's essay, "Observations on Transference-love" made me wonder if there is love other than transference love, or if, in fact, all love is transference love (and, what would this would mean!?). This distinction in the essay is so strained--rescinded and then reinvoked again--that the insistence is notable. In order to deal with the clinical problem of transference love, he must also detail what it is that "real" love is. One of the things it seems that Freud would like to say is that we should be able to rid ourselves of at least most of our childhood inclinations towards love, that the definition of love as transference-love depends upon the degree to which the love feelings can be adequately attributed to the present object of desire rather than than they would remain fixated in the past. Certainly this is how the relationship comes to stand for transference, but it also seems that one of the implicit consequences of this lies in the distinction between infantile and mature sexuality, or between sexual perversion and sexual satisfaction. This distinction is one that Freud also describes in terms of the type of pleasure that can be attained. Forepleasure, in Freud's discussion of infantile sexuality, is contrasted to the end-pleasure of mature sexuality, which relates pleasure to the release of tension. It seems, though, that to draw out the consequences for forepleasure, that the release of tension would not be the measure of pleasure, since the possibility of release is here something difference. Forepleasure is something that, for Freud, is always "dependent" (like passive forces) upon the pleasure of tension release. Forepleasure, in other words, seems to count only insofar as it augments the pleasure of the end--this is Freud's description in all his uses of forepleasure--in jokes, in art, in psychopathic characters on stage, in sex. But as I am thinking about in other contexts, especially for poetry, this "dependence" seems to rely on a pathos-oriented, dramatic, identificatory model of art in relation to reality.

The question of transference-love brings the issue of resistence to bear on this "dependence." It seems that the issue of transference allows us to talk about resistances as things that are meant to be overcome, unconditionally, almost, as similarly, passive forces could also be seen (like suffering) to be something only to get over. And the unquestionable "good" of this is always there for us to read in the cure, in the love. And the question of what this priority on overcoming means for transference (as the relationship between the analyst and analysand) and for love is probed far less often. Freud writes: “But above all, one gets an impression that the resistance is acting as an agent provocateur; it heightens the patient’s state of being in love and exaggerates her readiness for sexual surrender in order to justify the workings of repression all the more emphatically, by pointing to the dangers of such licentiousness.” And thus the logic of "dependent" passions, guided by the priority of overcoming or of love, runs: resistance, as agent provacateur, is only greater resistance; this goes for forepleasure as well: pleasure, as incentive bonus, is only pleasure. As resistance, the transference-love must be registered without being renounced, but must nonetheless not be acted upon. The course of action for the analyst involves making a distinction between real love and unreal love: "He must keep firm hold of the transference-love, but treat it as something unreal, as a situation which has to be gone through in the treatment and traced back to its unconscious origins...." The status of the "unreal" nature of this love is put on hold briefly as Freud discusses an exceptional case, "women of elemental passionateness who tolerate no surrogates." He writes, "They are children of nature who refuse to accept the psychical in place of the material, who, in the poet's words, are accessible only to 'the logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments'." The transference-love in this case refuses to be unreal, and this presents an impossibility for the analytic scene: "With such people one has the choice between returning their love or else bringing down upon oneself the full enmity of a woman scorned. In neither case can one safeguard the interests of the treatment. One has to withdraw, unsucessful; and all one can do is to turn the problem over in one's mind of how it is that a capacity for neurosis is joined with such an intractable need for love." The extreme ambivalence here between love and resistance for the loving subject and the loved object (if we can say this) is worth noting, for it is this that presents the "danger" and the seeming impossibility of working-through.

I don't know exactly what to make of Freud's dismissal, or the case of the woman scorned (but he did abandon fantasy), but it leads him to attributing the quality of submissiveness to real love: "Genuine love, we say, would make her docile and intensify her readiness to solve the problems of her case, simply because the man she was in love with expected it of her." Real love should, as it would, contain no resistance, a distinction that Freud dismantles in the next step: "can we truly say that the state of being in love which becomes manifest in analytic treatment is not a real one?" The nature of love, Freud continues, is one that is characterized by its departures from the norm; each of the differences he had tried to outline he now retracts, which is explained "by the fact that being in love in ordinary life, outside analysis, is also more similar to abnormal than to normal mental phenomena." Case closed, perhaps, was my sneaking suspicion--love is transference-love, which necessarily implies that it is also not, in its "real" (i.e. requited) form, only this. And this logic, if it is coming through at all, presents the dependence of passive forces. The problem provoked by this logic is perhaps revealed when we are forced to think about the object common to resistance and love. In Freud's essay, the object of resistance is never fully articulated--it is to treatment, generally, as can be assumed also by the dynamic of transference, but this has a more explicit description as Freud makes clear when he attempts to speak more directly to the analyst (and with an awareness of a public weary of psychoanalysis). The issue of transference-love compels a dynamic within analysis that the analyst is forced to fight against; this analysand is the scorned woman, those "who first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them...." Here, the initial resistance seems to be to the idea of "overvaluation of sexual life," but the resistance of transference-love seems to be of a different sort, and not easily assimilable within the logic of passive forces, since it takes the form itself of this overvaluation. At this point, the resistance-as-love-as-transference-love phenomena seems to overtake the transvaluation of infantile sexuality as mature sexuality.

image: Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Finch, midwest perfume action (2006)

Mistranslated Kites: une Chose without a Cause

“Ernst Jones, in his biography of Freud, has called the mistranslation

‘a singular lapse in Freud’s knowledge of natural history.
Kites were as common in Italy as vultures in Egypt.’”
—Alan Bass, “On the History of a Mistranslation in the Psychoanalytic Movement”

James Wagner’s “Auralgraph 6” reads like a joke; in fact, commentary on Wagner’s contemporary “homophonic translation” or “ear writing,” treats it as a joke, as a language game, an aesthetic exercise that surprisingly yields a little more than nonsense, but a nonsense that, for some, sounds like every other homophonic translation.[1] “Auralgraph 6,” a translation of a poem by the German poet Paul Celan, is one of fifteen auralgraphs published in Wagner’s 2003 collection, the false sun recordings. The auralgraph presents a case in which the correspondence between the original and the “translation” resembles hieroglyphic inscription, a correspondence of sound that also registers a certain sameness in content.[2] But what is this certain sameness? Here is Celan’s English version:

“The eternities struck / at his face and / past it, / slowly a conflagration extinguished / all candled things, / a green, not of this place, / with down covered the chin / of the rock which the orphans / buried and / buried again.”

Like other translations of Celan, Hamberger’s negotiates the paradoxes of the original, its preservation and transformation. Wagner’s auralgraph presents (or perhaps exposes) the problem of the original (i.e. in the generic way that Celan’s German is not German) as the paradox of “original” language. Wagner’s choice of “original” (Vallejo and Reverdy, in addition to Celan) reveals his interest in the internal difference of language, one that might begin in dialect, or with an accent. The auralgraph, even if we don’t take it seriously, presents the problem of a version that is simply more interesting than either the original or the translation. I will read the German, now, if you would follow along with Wagner’s English translation.

[Die Ewigkeiten]
Paul Celan

Die Ewigkeiten fuhren
Ihm ins Gesicht und druber
Hinaus,

langsam loschte ein Brand
alles Gekertzte,

ein Grun, nicht von hier,
umflaumte das Kinn
des Steins, den die Waisen
begruben und wieder
begruben.

Auralgraph 6
After Paul Celan’s [Die Ewigkeiten]

The highway kite in foreign
Hymen gets sick and drew bare
In house

long song locks brandy
all is get hurt

A groan, nicked veneer,
O, flower dump that can
Destine eyes, then the wayside
by grubbing and wider
grubbing.

“Auralgraph 6” interprets the erotic content of Celan’s original, and in so doing, we lose sight of if that erotic content was there in the first place. The erotic content of Wagner’s poem is superficial—better: it is the surface translated—“him in,” “ihm in,” as “hymen, or as in another of the auralgraphs, “I hear,” “Ich hore,” as “Each whore. The auralgraph is a poem presented as dream, one that ironically defies interpretation based on the wish-fulfillment.

The erotic content of the poem is apparent in the “foreign Hymen,” and, as we know, once we open the door to reading innuendos, it is difficult to shut, and this, perhaps is the impossibility that translation affords. It is the process not of reading either what is or is not there, but the uncertainty of reading both at the same time that replaces the original paradox of translation. I would like to suggest that the case of the auralgraph allows us to think about translation as being not only proper, as in the transporting of meaning from one site to another, but as a particular mode of exchange that is not only not based on the transference of content, but that positively values another mode of transference, a method of dream interpretation that is not based on wish-fulfillment.[3] The auralgraph presents a limit for thinking about psychoanalytic translation as the movement from the unconscious to consciousness.[4] In this sense the parallel between the movement from the unconscious to consciousness can be seen as a model of translation in which priority is placed upon moving from unknown to known, of bringing dark to light, something that transference, in a sense, is all about. But the problem of keeping things in the dark in transference is another altogether different problem.[5] What is the practice of psychoanalytic translation, or transference, that takes seriously the case of the auralgraph’s defiance of wish-fulfillment as a means of interpretation?

According to Alan Bass (translator of Derrida and psychoanalyst), psychoanalysis, and more precisely transference, is a mistranslating machine. In his article, “On the History of a Mistranslation in the Psychoanalytic Movement,” mistranslation is a fetish, similar to translation that if not good, is bad. The problem of being so good that you are bad follows a logic of the fetish that Bass describes in terms of a mistranslation that is, for one reason or another, too “precious” to give up.[6] Bass gets here by pointing to a logic in which the fetish, or mistranslation, is a fantasy, a childhood memory, and notably, one that “may become unconscious” (118).[7] His topic is Freud’s mistranslation (and the many subsequent mistaken translations) of the Italian nibio (kite) as the German Geier (vulture) in his study of Leonardo’s notebooks.[8] Freud not only translates nibio as “vulture,” the bird of prey, but uses this to discuss the role of the vulture as mother in Egyptian hieroglyphic in relation to the fantasy of the maternal phallus. Bass writes, “the vulture, then, is a mistranslation as precious as the “precious object” for which the fetishist searches so passionately.” Bass’ threadlike question: “What is a mistaken translation in psychoanalysis?” results in the end in the positive content of mistranslation, the confusion of “transference-translation,” something pointing to transformation as the nature of transference.

One of the ways that I want to think differently about transference and the “impossibility” of translation is by questioning the common and somewhat homophonic practice of translating “translation” [übersetzen] as “transference” [übertragen]. Bass’ articulation of the fetishistic, substitutive logic that combines translation and transference puts the “impossibility” of translation to work; he shows that the latent content resides in transference, and describes the process of translation as a code that transforms “baffling inscriptions” into “everyday language” (103). Derrida’s presentation of translation in “Des Tours de Babel” as “necessary and impossible” looks for the limits posed to theories of translation by the paradoxical nature of the necessary impossibility.[9] He considers more radical the complexity introduced by needing to translate more than one language within one language—thus to translate the internal difference of language.

The mistranslated poem, “Auralgraph 6,” repudiates but also registers the difference within language. My reading here, of its ironic and erotic tension hopes to disturb the double fantasy of Benjaminian “pure language,” on the one hand (the fantasy of “essential” language), and on the other hand the fantasy of coming as “close as possible” to the original, something like the unity of form and content (the fantasy of the completeness of expressive voice).[10] Both of these logics, I think, are based upon a homophonic model of language, one that holds that learning to speak (and thus to translate, and to interpret) consists of identifying a given originary language in which expression is total.[11] In this model, expression and activity are modes in which obscurity and passivity signal the inhibition of the wish-fulfillment, and thus represent stages to be worked through in order to attain the clarity of expression or the decisiveness of action. The logic is one of a “homophonic method” of translation, noted by V.W. Quine in Word and Object, which involves the idea that sound—and perhaps best to say not only “sound,” but the correspondence of sounds, “creates” meaning.

Quine’s discussion in this section is on “Translating Logical Connectives” and the example he follows in his discussion of the “normal” homophonic method has to do with negation: “That fair translation preserves logical laws is implicit in practice even where, to speak paradoxically, no foreign language is involved. Thus when to our querying of an English sense an English speaker answers ‘Yes and no’, we assume that the queried sentence is meant differently in the affirmation and negation; this rather than that he would be so silly as to affirm and deny the same thing” (59). The homophonic model defends against both nonsense and difference within the same language, against what Quine calls “the hidden differences of language” (59). Here Quine wants to think about examples that would suspend the homophonic method, instances in which “the hidden differences of language” even in the same language create a problem for translation. For him, the hidden differences can account for bad translation, “or in the domestic case, linguistic divergence,” and this is interesting, since he says that “beyond a certain point” bad translation is more likely to account for these differences than “the interlocutor’s silliness.” What happens to the “hidden differences” in the case of an interlocutor’s silliness that is also a bad translation?[12]

The mistranslated auralgraph presents the impossibility as something we can feel differently about and pushes us to think about situations in which “becoming unconscious” is more compelling, or “too precious,” in other words, in situations in which our interest in the other is simply more compelling.[13] The interest in one that Freud identifies as erotic—in the form of liking, love, and lust; this erotic content, or the mere possibility of it, presents the difference between thinking of the other as an ethical bind and thinking of the other as one liked. The difference in such a case involves the occurrence of unavoidable feeling for the other in a situation, such as transference or interpretation, where one is best instructed to keep feelings, especially those of the erotic interpreter’s, out of it. The erotic interpreter (could he be someone like Balibar’s “vanishing mediator”?) is there on both sides, to obscure and make ambiguous, to keep some things in the dark. I have articulated this problem of the “impossibility” of translation differently because I saw the metaphysical problem of individuality presented by the necessary impossibility of translation to be the same as the ontological failure of the subject to find its origin. Although the ironic transposition of erotic content in “Auralgraph 6” exposes the fantasy of complete translation, the hope or wish for complete transference might be more difficult to dislodge. These problems, in particular that of equating the moment of the self’s failure with the recognition of the other, are ones that seemed to me to need another logic that is not the interpretive logic of wish-fulfillment, of making conscious, or of translation as transference proper.[14]

Ironically, the erotic interpreter does not deal with the erotic content of wishes, but with the model of the joking unconscious. I would like to turn to the case of the joke as a way of situating the work that the auralgraph does and the work that it frees us from. The auralgraph, unlike other translations, takes the job of mistranslation seriously.[15] It is, perhaps surprisingly, jokes and the logic that Freud develops for them that can tell us most about this process of “reverse censorship,” in which the obscurity of the form is preserved by the sense that it has meaning. Unlike the process of censorship that uses the form to obscure the content of a potentially damaging or dangerous transmission, Freud writes that jokes cause pleasure by the “alternation between ‘thinking it senseless’ and ‘recognizing it as sensible.” He continues, “The psychogenesis of jokes has taught us that the pleasure in a joke is derived from play with words or from the liberation of nonsense, and that the meaning of the joke is merely intended to protect that pleasure from being done away with by criticism” (131). Freud calls this process of “reading” “reducing”; he writes, “It will be recalled that when we had succeeded in reducing a joke (that is, in replacing its form of expression by another one, while carefully preserving its sense) it had lost not only its character as a joke but also its power to make us laugh—our enjoyment of the joke” (112). Throughout these sections on both purposeful and innocent jokes, Freud continuously makes the point that the source of pleasure in joking is related to what we don’t know; he writes: “Thus, strictly speaking, we do not know what we are laughing at” (121).

In the case of innocent jokes, like the wordplay of “Auralgraph 6,” pleasure seems to be something aesthetic, something derived merely from the form. Freud seems to suggest here a sense of the aesthetic that might not be in his other writings on art and literature. Here, the pleasure is not something that is merely aesthetic, rather, the aesthetic is that which seeks “to derive pleasure form its own activity.” Freud’s emphasis on the idea that the “from its own activity” counts as a form of pleasure refers us again to his main point (as he winds about a variety of possible causes for the pleasure) that the pleasure of jokes relies on the obscurity of cause. He here presents cases in which the pleasure principle, which functions to assure the equivalence of exchange or translation, is suspended in some way so that a qualitatively greater pleasure can be attained. It is important to note that the logic of this “suspension,” like the “precious mistranslation,” is not an exception but is all too caught up in pleasure. The suspension is a descriptive difference that amounts to a reason for keeping things in the dark. Freud writes, “What we have before us here is in fact no simple effect of force but a more complicated situation of release” (134). The shift “to release” instead of “force” serves to introduce the complex situation in which factors of pleasure (and in other cases, pain) become quantitatively indistinguishable. Freud writes here, “we have said above (p. 94) that a good joke makes, as it were, a total impression of enjoyment on us, without our being able to decide at once what share of the pleasure arises from its joking form and what share from its apt thought-content. We are constantly making mistakes in this apportionment” (italics mine).[16] The “mistake in apportionment” is the characteristic unconscious of jokes; it is not that jokes allow for greater pleasure, but that the joke relies on what is unknown as its source of pleasure. In so doing, it creates situations of complex release, and therefore it also creates new forms of satisfaction, new forms, I might say that come “from its own activity.” This ambivalence of activity is something I will return to in a moment.

I would like to note that I have moved through this discussion of joking without being clear that the questions posed by the translation of jokes differs from the “mistaken” translation of Freud’s “kite,” his vulture, since the translation is situated within one language. And this returns us to the case of the auralgraph, which refers the impossibility not to the sameness of content between languages but to the representation of difference via the sameness of sound. The joke’s unconscious is a pervasive, unknown code. The ambiguity that arises in the situation is most interestingly related to the joke’s capacity not to increase the force of expression of the first person (and who is the first person? The analyst? The patient? Celan? The auralgraph?), but to complicate the situation of release by introducing a third person. The complication seems to result from the fact that the first person speaks as the patient. The relationship is not just one in which the analyst is the translator who is making conscious the unconscious of the analysand, but that in doing so, he creates a third position, similar to the case of innocent jokes, in which the second person becomes the third person. Freud writes: “But this second person in the case of jokes does not correspond to the person who is the object, but to the third person, the “other” person.” As I have been suggesting, the third person is the erotic interpreter, one who brings, and “always with some irony,” the transference of the individual consciousness through the common possibility of mistranslation, of mistaken apportionment. [17] Jokes present an alternative to wish-fulfillment, to expression as a gesture or outcome of satisfaction and most importantly and obscurely, they offer a theory of a passivity that is itself a form of activity. I have wanted to think about passions and passivity that do not inhibit the possibility for activity and thus to think about the types of situations in which holding off expression of something would result in an increased capacity for action. Here, even “holding out for action” seems that it would detract from the ability to care for the actions or activity that you take in receiving the impressions of others, the passions, and in dealing with your own passivity as something that is itself a form of activity.

The auralgraph interrupts the desire to even know the meaning of the original, to get to pleasure, and taking seriously this interruption, or suspension, in turn recalibrates the relationship between desire and pleasure. The “total impression” of the auralgraph allows the mistaken apportionment to become the substance of the unconscious, hidden “differences,” not hidden content. It is not so much the “unknown” or the “impossible” as such, but rather that the movements between what we know and don’t know take place not in the realm of consciousness, but in the realm of the unconscious. The antagonism—the “convergence without mutual contradiction”—of what we know and don’t know is the unconscious content.[18] The erotic content of “Auralgraph 6” is ironic; Wagner’s kite, like Freud’s absent kite, tells us only more of what we don’t already know.

Image above (Not a Kite): Egyptian Shrew, Cleveland Museum of Art

[1] In a journal publication of several of the auralgraphs, Wagner writes: “Maybe the term “auralgraphs” (or ear writings) is new, but that’s about it. I believe my initial interest came via writing experiments mentioned by Bernadette Mayer on the web somewhere. Charles Bernstein’s interests in these things, and a phonetic translation of a Henri Michaux poem in Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, were also components.”
[2] See Derek White and Jessica Fanzo’s brief commentary on Wagner’s 2005 translation of Caesar Vallejo’s Trilce. From “Terrestrial Visitation to the Contemporary Zapotec Underworld” (http://www.sleepingfish.net/5cense/Maya_3.htm) “I picked up a copy of Cesar Vallejo's Trilce in Spanish on my last day. Reading it now on the plane. My Spanish is not good enough to fully comprehend, at least the poeticness of it, but in a sense this makes it more interesting, reading into it. I can appreciate James Wagner’s obsession with his parasitic and “homophonic” translation of Trilce (some of which are going to be in the forthcoming SleepingFish). You can read it for the sound or pure language of it, more than for the content, and from the sounds alone create something entirely new of your own invention. It's like viewing Mayan hieroglyphics without a codice, without fully understanding the original intent. Appreciating it just for the superficial look or sound. Or like appreciating mole without knowing what goes into making it. The meaning surfaces on its own and hits the sense organs directly without any cerebral processing from the brain.” (July 17, 2005). For a full on discussion of hieroglyphic interpretation, see Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing” in Writing and Difference. See also Freud (cited in Bass 103) in The Interpretation of Dreams (V): “The productions of the dream-work, which, it must be understood, present no greater difficulties to their translators than do the ancient hieroglyphic scripts to those who seek to read them.”
[3] For an account of the significance of improper transation, see Dina Al-Kassim, “The Faded Bond: Calligraphesis and Kinship in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano” in Public Culture 12:1 (2001), in which she describes the practice of “transgraphing” which “shifts the emphasis from a concern with semantic meanings toward a search for new terms and new forms of writing that might materialize the social transformations of kinship that are evident in the modern postcolonial state.” In Des Tours de Babel, Jacques Derrida cites Jacobson’s definition of a “proper” translation in One Tranlsation (1959) as being (in contrast to interlingual (rewording) and intersemiotic (transmutation)) interlingual, transferring content from one language to another.
[4] As such, psychoanalysis seems to consistently offer a compelling analysis of how the transference from individual to collective organization is made.
[5] Bass’ book, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford 2000), describes resistance to interpretation in the psychoanalytic setting as a problem of the concrete patient, a term that he provides a psychoanalytic genealogy of, surrounding Edith Jacobson’s description of such patients as those who “treat their psychic strivings as if they were concrete objects.” (cited in Difference and Disavowal 14-15. Cf. Jacobson, “Denial and Repression” (1957)).
[6] See also Freud’s essay on “Fetishism” (1927) in which he writes: “In the last few years I have had an opportunity to study analytically a number of men whose object-choice was dominated by a fetish…. For obvious reasons the details of these cases must be withheld from publication; I cannot therefore show in what way accidental circumstances have contributed to the choice of fetish. The most extraordinary case seemed to me to be one in which a young man had exalted a certain sort of “shine on the nose” into a fetishistic precondition. The surprising explanation of this was that the patient had been brought up in an English nursery but had later come to Germany, where he forgot his mother-tongue almost completely. The fetish, which originated from his earliest childhood, had to be understood in English, not German. The “shine on the nose” (in German, Glanz auf der Nase) was in reality a “glance at the nose” [Blick auf die Nase, Blick = glance: Glanz]. The nose was thus the fetish, which, incidentally, he endowed at will with the luminous shine which was not perceptible to others.”
[7] See Bass page 119, cf. Freud in “Leonardo” page 85. emphasis in this quotation Bass’.
[8] Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), in SE XI.
[9] For a related notion of the effect of co-constitution, see Fechner’s principle of aesthetic assistance: “If determinants of pleasure that in themselves produce little effect converge without mutual contradiction, there results a greater, and often a much greater, outcome of pleasure than corresponds to the pleasure value of the separate determinants—a greater pleasure than could be explained as the sum of the separate effects.” (Vorschule der Ästhetik 1: chpt V), see Freud’s reference in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious 135.
[10] Adorno has a similar account of poetic language in “Lyric Poetry and Society.” He writes: “The moment of unself-consciousness in which the subject submerges itself in language is not a sacrifice of the subject to Being. It is a moment not of violence, nor of violence against the subject, but reconciliation: language itself speaks only when it speaks not as something alien to the subject but as the subject’s own voice.” (in Notes to Literature page 45).
[11] Quine, in Word and Object, refers to the “homophonic method” “so fundamental to the very acquisition of language.”
[12] The logic that I am interested in is that which is not “rhymes,” as Derrida notes in his foreward to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word. Taking “tieret,” the magic word of the wolf man, Derrida writes: “tieret, on the other hand, tieret alone produces no speech at all. The pleasure it gives rise to is only that of a living tableau. But tieret is not contrasted with this tableau-fetish in the way that the thing itself is traditionally opposed to its fetish. This thing is not the thing-in-itself philosophers speak of. It is a mark or cipher, a piece of a cipher that can only be translated into a vast interminable sentence or into the scene of a tableau with more than one object, more than one entrance or exit. A trace with no present in its wake, a Thing, ein Ding, une Chose without a cause, “Cause” to be designified in the crypts of anasemia” (xlv).
[13] I’m thinking here of both David Berman (“the feelings about the feeling…”) and Rei Terada’s comments on the importance of the matter being how you feel about the feeling (the demand, in this case, of impossibility).
[14] See Daniel Tiffany’s reiteration of the “impossibility” that defines translation in Radio Corpse: “What distinguishes translation historically—and what makes deconstructive theorists so enamored of it—is its nihilism: its repeated admission that extreme literalism—the very principles that condition translation itself—is impossible. In other words, translation discourse proclaims with self-destructive candor what is often forgotten or submerged in the history of aesthetic philosophy and literary criticism: a realistic image is no more possible than an exact translation” (200).
[15] I see the implications of this as being three-fold, and all are related to what Etienne Balibar describes as “problematic individuality,” and what I understand as the problem of coincidence of self-ownership and the “desire” for a community. The first is in terms of transference and the work of psychoanalysis as the “mistranslating machine”; the second is in terms of non-literary translation and the political stakes of the mistranslation of essential “inessential” information; and the third is in terms of literary translation and a practice of textual interpretation retains the registration of difference (i.e. in paradox).
[16] In German, the passage reads: “Wir täuschen uns beständig über diese Aufteilung.”
[17] The logic of the traumatic dream is similar, since Freud acknowledges it as a situation in which wish-fulfillment is interrupted. Freud writes, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “We may assume, rather, that dreams are here helping to carry out another task, which must be accomplished before the dominance of the pleasure principle can even begin. These dreams are endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.” See further: “If there is a ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ it is only consistent to grant that there was also a time before the purpose of dreams was the fulfillment of wishes. This would imply no denial of their later function. But if once this general rule has been broken, a further question arises. May not dreams which, with a view to the psychical binding of traumatic impressions, obey the compulsion to repeat—may not such dreams occur outside analysis as well?” (page 38)
[18] This phrase is taken from Gustav Fechner, one of Freud’s strong influences on the matter of psychophysical phenomenon. The effect of “convergence without mutual contradiction” is based on a ‘principle of aesthetic assistance or intensification,’ which Fechner describes in Vorschule der Ästhetik as the Vorlustprinzip (the “forepleasure” principle”).