C. Part
Three
Psychical Issues and Psychical Processes
An
Important Distinction to Make:
The first
forty years of the history of psychoanalysis, and a few more years after the
publication of The Ego and the Id, were spent by Freud and the pioneer analysts
in discovering new aspects of psychopathology. They generated and formulated a vocabulary
for their findings. They chose words
that described or explained the dynamics of the observed processes behind
psychopathologies, even the untreatable ones. They gradually became ambitious
and tried to turn their theory of psychopathology into a comprehensive theory
of the human subject. Freud’s book of the Ego and the Id (1923)
was the first identifiable attempt at transforming the discoveries of
psychopathology into a psychoanalytic theory of the subject. The ‘title’ of the
book, when translated into English, created a subtle but a lasting distortion
in the sought-after theory of psychoanalysis of the subject.
The theory
remained up till now an illusive prospect because of the kind of distortion created
by translating Ich (German) into Ego instead of I
(the pronoun of the first person subjective). Ego (Greek for I),
turns the subject into an object (I can say I am happy
but cannot not say ego or my ego is happy, although a Greek could say Egho happy). The inclination to
turning whatever is subjective into a psychical object or entity was and stayed
the dominant trend in the translation of the ‘Standard Edition’. This
trend-in my opinion- was expressing the translator’s ‘wish’ to turn
psychoanalysis into a theory of human entities and psychical things instead of
a theory of the subject himself[i], thus
giving the impression that psychoanalysis-like physical sciences- deals with
issues. There is a basic and fundamental difference between an analyst saying I
interpret my patient’s dreams and another saying that he interprets the
patient’s dreaming as one of the psychical processes that he deals with in
analysis. The first makes the dream a psychical entity, and the second uses dreaming
as a process that turns something subjective (wish) into a psychical signifier
of the subject’s ways of fulfilling his wishes. The wish is not material for
psychoanalysis, wishing and its nature in a state of dreaming, fantasies,
enactments, etc. is material for psychoanalysis.
Freud and
the early practitioners initiated a genuine and powerful movement of
discovering new aspects of the subject that were unnoticeable before
psychoanalysis. They used the common
vocabulary of everyday life to define their novel findings. There was nothing
particular about their findings that could have engendered new vocabulary. There
was nothing unusual in what they identified that required ‘inventing’ new
meanings for the used vocabulary. However, what was unusual about the psychoanalytic
discoveries is the richness and details of the meanings implicit in the spoken
language. For instance, repression as an analytic term meant the usual
disappearance of an unacceptable issue from consciousness. But it also signified
that the ‘repressed’ is predisposed to taking disguised forms of itself to still
remain out of consciousness but still could be deduced from its repressed form.
Psychoanalysis
did not create a new vocabulary for its discoveries, like the theories of the
physical world usually do; it created theory regarding certain new aspects of
the human subject, used the common vocabulary in more meticulous and particular
ways, revealing its hidden connotations. The necessity to use regular
vocabulary to express psychoanalytic discoveries was basically the outcome of
something that we do not pay attention to: the vocabulary of the current psychoanalytic
literature is not of entities or things psychological. It is a
vocabulary that denotes processes that pertain to the person as a human
subject. Repression would mean nothing or very little if we do not know the
psychodynamics of the process of repressing. Repression is removing a psychical
issue from the field of attention but transforming it into another that could
just hints to its original meaning. Another way of putting it: the
vocabulary of psychoanalysis is not about psychical issues, events, entities,
things: it is the vocabulary of psychical processes, i.e., the vocabulary of
psychodynamics. If and when this quality is neglected or ignored psychoanalysis
will become a practice of correcting faults in a person or psychotherapy (a
‘lower’ level of practice).
Anxiety and Narcissism:
The trend to
translate the S.E. in the way Strachey did was a simplistic and crude attempt
at making psychoanalysis sound as if it is a theory of ‘things- human’ (thus
could eventually qualify to be a science of psychopathology). The things- human
could be turned into a subject-matter for theories[1]. The pervasive tendency to do that (see: Inhibitions,
Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926) has distorted psychoanalysis and flawed the
meaning of its vocabulary. That distortion gave the impression that a theory of
psychoanalysis is a theory of psychodynamics (A theory of faith is not a theory
of religion). Anxiety, which was considered before caused by ‘frustrated’
libido, became a cause symptom formation. A new issue emerged: castration
and its anxiety. Castrations was one of the central notions in understanding
the Oedipus Complex[ii] It is now (after more
than two decades) the instigator of anxiety. The details of hose concepts
(vocabulary), confusing as they happened to become in the S.D., put the
main issue of anxiety within the duality of the I and the ME. It
clear that the vocabulary of psychoanalysis without a theory could if not is
confusing one has to be well versed in their source before using them as
theoretical concepts.
What is even
more distorting of the theoretical situation in psychoanalysis was not making
the distinction between language and vocabulary: vocabulary does not make a
language but a language gives vocabulary its communicative functions. Thus, the
vocabulary of psychoanalysis has no meaning or expressive connotation outside a
clear comprehensive theory of psychoanalysis itself. For instance: does identification
denotes a psychodynamic process which renders the subject and the object become
alike, or the case where both subject and object are alike should just call it
identification. This simple and subtle distorted beginning of psychoanalysis
invited the new generation of psychoanalyst to complicate matters further.
The third
generation of analysts, leaned to understanding the psychodynamics of the
discoveries based on what the vocabulary linguistically suggests. By doing that
they the shifted the emphasis from looking for the subject matter of
psychoanalysis and gave the causal relationships between the pathological
symptom and its psychodynamic a central place in the concept of psychoanalysis.
Analysts used the terminology of describing psychical findings as
explanations (causations) of the psychopathological phenomena (the patient
introjected the mother’s passive aggressive trends). This way, psychoanalysis
became a verbal medium of common terminology use with a different meaning.
A
preliminary step toward a subject-matter of a theory of psychoanalysis is looking
closely at the subject that psychoanalysis tries to study and define, and
ultimately be useful to. I will mention just two attributes of the human
subject (not his manifestations) that qualifies him as the subject-matter
of psychoanalysis. This banal distinction between the subject and his
attributes is the key to defining the subject-matter of psychoanalysis and the
essential step in knowing why psychoanalysis is the theory of the human
subject, not the reverse. The human subject’s is the only life-entity
that has a psychological life. Some animals display effective reactions similar
to those human display. We are able to bestow on them some verbal connotations.
However, the are reactions but do not qualify as messages. ( the only living organism that does not
respond the internal or external stimuli without turning them first into a
subjective issue, and responds only to the subjective issue he created. The
human subject does not feel hunger and eats; he feels a desire for certain
foods and tries to get what he specifically desires. Moreover, the human
subject could feel hunger for other things that have nothing to do with eating
like love, fame, wealth, etc.
The human subject is not just a higher-ranking
mammal; he is the only mammal who developed language which translated his vital
needs into psychological demands. The psychological demands become his real
source of stimulation. The psychology of the human subject is caught in the
process of turning a need into a psychological demand. The subject matter of
psychoanalysis is that particularly human attribute.
1.In a
meeting in Los Angeles 2019, Mark Solms, who is supervising the new edition of
the Standard Edition, confirmed that those kinds of distortions will be
corrected in the new edition, and the translation will adhere to the intended
content and style of the original German text.
. 2.. At the beginning, Freud and the
pioneers of psychoanalysis considered anxiety the result of transforming the
frustrating libido into anxiety. Then, came the notion of castration in the
dynamics of the Oedipus complex and anxiety was associate with castration. We
know now that castration anxiety relates more to that concept of narcissism
which a better concept to explain anxiety as the result of concerns about the
person’s identity. But we still have to find our way to know if the anxiety
relates to affecting the I the Me.
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