“Where id was, ego shall now be,” Sigmund Freud proclaims, recalling the cosmogenetic gesture of Genesis. The self-knowledge to be gained in the course of psychoanalytic therapy is meant to separate consciousness from the realm of affects and instincts. Although this process brings light to the psychic apparatus, Freud’s mature subject nevertheless continues to carry a piece of night within: the unconscious psychic materials, whose discovery brings with it such serious injury to narcissism. Under ordinary conditions, the subject considers himself to be master of his psychic household; he believes that the critic he has created at its kernel to monitor his drives will provide him with complete and reliable information about his affects and fantasies. Neurotic disorders, however, force the ego to confront the limits of his power over his soul, which is conceived as a psychic home. Freud states in “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis” that:
thoughts emerge suddenly without one’s knowing where they come from, nor can one do anything to drive them away. These alien guests even seem to be more powerful than those which are at the ego’s command. They resist all the well-proved measures of enforced use by the will, remain unmoved by logical refutation, and are unaffected by the contradictory assertions of reality. Or else impulses which seem like those of a stranger, so that the ego disowns them; yet it has to fear them and take precautions against them. (141–142)
This invasion of allegedly dangerous alien thoughts reveals to the ego a nocturnal side of consciousness. These unbidden guests not only emerge from a place unknown to the subject, but also introduce a chaotic obscurity into the ordered light of the psychic apparatus, given that their interests and intent elude the conscious mind. Indeed, although normally able to protect the ego from the onslaught of dangerous impressions, the conscious mind can hardly defend itself against these strange visitations, because they are part of the psychic life that has withdrawn from the knowledge and dominion of the will. Freud’s cosmogenetic interpretation of the emergence of psychic disorders is based on the following claim: Because the conscious ego has not taken into consideration the concerns of psychic impulses that run counter to its own interests, these have “risen up and gone their dark way in order to distance themselves from repression, creating their rights in a way that can no longer be perceived as right” (10). Comparable to Milton’s Lucifer after his fall from heaven, these forces have withdrawn into that part of the psychic apparatus that is not illuminated by the light of reason, from where they seek to undertake their return to consciousness.
Two things are decisive about the way Freud conceives the return of the repressed. These alien forces might be conceived as nocturnal because the conscious ego, not having experienced their actual formation, can only reconstruct them belatedly. They enter consciousness only in the form of the traces they leave behind, in the symptoms they cause the subject to suffer. Although their origin remains inaccessible to the conscious ego, the unfathomable obscurity of their origin determines the fact that they are perceived as foreign bodies. One might fruitfully call them nocturnal aspects of the psyche, not only because their origin remains unknown, but also because they successfully resist both logical will and the law of reality, implementing thoughts impenetrable by and thus foreign to the conscious mind. These alienating powers compel the ego to recognize that it is not master of the psychic apparatus, thereby incessantly bringing to the fore the fact that more is happening in the psychic life of the subject than is consciously known. Although in contrast to Hegel, Freud does not explicitly think of the unconscious as a night, he nevertheless also has recourse to the figure of thought already discussed for other philosophical cosmogonies. He compares the passage to self-knowledge to a journey into a nocturnal domain, which will help the subject rid himself of those illusions and self-deceptions that screen out true knowledge. “Go inside yourself, to the depths, and get to know yourself,” he counsels his readers, “then you will understand why you were bound to fall ill; and perhaps, you will avoid falling ill in [the] future” (143).
His assumption that psychic processes are themselves unconscious, accessible to the ego only as mitigated and thus incomplete and unreliable perceptions, leads him to conjecture that “the ego is not master in its own house.” The point of this chapter is to show how night implicitly assumes a plethora of positions in the cosmogenetic narrative Freud devises for the emergence of the psychic apparatus, first and foremost because it contains the unconscious, conceived as an internal dark site impenetrable to conscious insight. Although this chapter explores the purpose nocturnality, as the counterpart to diurnal consciousness, plays in Freud’s charting of the vicissitude of drives, desire, and fantasy work, I will postpone an exploration of his work directly relating to the work of dreams, and thus to the key role played by night in his thinking until
chapter 6. I speak of a nocturnal side to the psyche, because at issue is the way Freud relates its emergence and development to a dark point of origin. As in the other cosmogenetic narratives discussed, this primordial state is never fully jettisoned, but rather it spills over into the fabric of everyday psychic activities. Indeed, it is the aim of psychoanalysis to explore this “dark continent” because Freud intuits it as a highly creative “other scene”: the point of departure not only for neurotic symptoms, but also for all dreamwork and fantasy formation, as well as the death drive, which compels the subject to move beyond earthly life and return to his inorganic origins.
Like Hegel’s ‘“night of the world,” Freud’s nocturnal side of consciousness contains manifold psychic representations whose intensities are highly mobile. As such, it emerges as a site whose impenetrability to the waking mind both safeguards and encourages a play of diverse phantasmagoria. In his essay “The Unconscious,” he conceives it as a highly dynamic site, in which “no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty” (186) are to be found because these distinctions are created only once consciousness has separated from the unconscious. This is comparable to the division of light from darkness. In the unconscious Freud also calls the “other site,” psychic processes have no relationship to time, nor do they know any consideration of diurnal reality, given that they exist beyond all rules and regulations of the ordinary everyday. Their fate merely depends on whether they maintain the balance between dissatisfaction and pleasure, which Freud considers to be the ruling principle of the psychic apparatus. Although the consciousness cannot directly discern them, unconscious drives and representations are animate; they are capable of development and transformation. Their psychic energy is preserved primarily owing to the survival of these descendents, who, in the form of fantasy formations, are able to penetrate into the preconscious. Like Karl Phillip Moritz in his rewriting of classical mythology, Freud makes use of nocturnal progeny so as to designate the seminal threshold between the two domains of psychic processes. Fantasies, he explains, emerge from the unknowable realm of the unconsciousness, moving “close to consciousness, remaining undisturbed as long as they do not have an acute cathexis but discarded as soon as that cathexis exceeds a certain level” (190). For this reason, Freud compares fantasies to
Mischlinge, whose ancestry shapes their destiny, implicitly speaking to the dual legacy of human subject formation. Each subject is a child of the day and the night, more or less adapted to the rational imperatives of diurnal rational law. The flaring up of unpleasant desires, however, reveals the nocturnal side of the psyche, namely, fantasies and affects that are incessantly repressed into the unconscious, where they remain until they have taken on a shape compatible enough with the expectations of normality that they can press forward again into consciousness.
So as to underscore this dynamic aspect of unconscious fantasy formations, Freud offers a scenic representation of their vicissitudes, in which the psychic apparatus is conceived as a stage set. In his lecture on “Resistance and Repression,” he equates the unconscious with a large entrance hall “in which all the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals” (295). This anteroom connects to “a second, narrower room, a kind of drawing-room—in which consciousness too resides.” On the threshold between these two rooms, however, a watchman keeps guard “who examines the different mental impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the drawing-room if they displease him” (295). The spatial conception of the unconscious supports Freud’s nomenclature. “The impulses in the entrance hall of the unconscious are out of sight of the conscious, which is in the other room; to begin with they must remain unconscious,” he explains. “If they have already pushed their way forward to the threshold and been turned back by the watchman, then they are inadmissible to consciousness; we speak of them as
repressed. But even the impulses which the watchman has allowed to cross the threshold are not on that account necessarily conscious as well; they can only become so if they succeed in catching the eye of consciousness” (295–296). Only the presence of the watchman produces a distinction between instinctual perceptions deemed permissible and those that, because they are deemed malignant, come to be repressed from conscious view. In so doing, the watchman also initiates the process that will transform these repressed instincts into desires, dreams, and symptoms. In their new guise they will be able to pass the threshold of censorship after all, and enter the antechamber of the preconscious, albeit as disfigured traces of the repressed material.
Mapped onto the cosmogenetic narrative of classical antiquity, Freud’s unconscious takes on the same position as Nyx, who manifests herself primarily through her children, and thus through the effects her nocturnal power has in the terrestrial world. What this conceptual correspondence renders visible is that in his mapping of the psychic apparatus, Freud also has recourse to a fantasy figure, given that the nomenclature at issue in his project is itself marked by the fact that it emerges from the nocturnal side of the soul. Following upon his philosophical predecessors, he devises the emergence of the psychic apparatus as a cosmogony that can only be surmised in retrospect. Given that the work of the unconscious can only be discovered belatedly through the effects it has on diurnal psychic processes, most notably through symptoms and fantasy work, this piece of night that each subject carries within can only be grasped in the language of consciousness, even if, as I have been arguing, it is in the language of figuration. Only as a metaphor can one designate the unconscious (qua other site) as the nocturnal side of the psyche. Equally decisive for Freud’s spatial mapping of the soul is the fact that the forbidden drives, affects and desires, which render visible the unconscious as an obscure depository for repressed psychic materials, may not be compatible with the censorship of the conscious. Nevertheless, they are already part of the process of psychic formations and not the formless particles of a primordial chaos. As such, their repression does not signify an originary defense mechanism, but merely the repetition of a gesture of separation that, according to Freud, has effected the formation of the psychic apparatus.
“We therefore have reason to assume there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representation of instincts being denied entry into consciousness,” Freud explains in his essay “Repression.” This process, he adds, “is accompanied by a fixation: the representation in question persists unaltered from then onwards and remains attached to it” (148). This initial separation between those perceptions that see the light of diurnal conscious and those denied such access provides a matrix for all subsequent psychic formations. In fact, the act of primal repression creates the ground for precisely the dynamic counter-pressure exerted by rejected wish representation, which regulates the subject’s psychic life under the auspices of the pleasure principle. “The second stage of repression, the actual repression,” Freud continues, “affects mental derivatives of the repressed representation.” He notes further that: “On account of this association, these ideas experience the same fate as what was primally repressed. Repression proper, therefore, is actually a return-pressure (Nachdrängen)” (148). The attraction the primal repression exerts proves to be as important as its repulsion, because repression can be effectual only if something already previously repressed exists, willing to absorb all the material repressed by the censor of consciousness.
In Freud’s cosmogenetic interpretation of the process of repression, the separation between conscious and unconscious, as predicated on an inaugurating primal repression is, furthermore, subject to a belief in the immortality of all wish representations. Figurations of desire, he proposes, cannot die, they can only undergo transformations. Repression does not hinder a particular impulse “from continuing to exist in the unconscious, from organizing itself further, putting out derivatives and establishing relationships. Repression in fact interferes only with the relation of the instinctual representative to
one psychical system, namely to that of the consciousness” (149). If the unconscious thus emerges as a keenly productive site, in which fantasy formations are constantly being developed, and their return routes to consciousness are incessantly explored, it is most fruitfully thought of as a threshold between two modes of repression. On one side there is primary repression, which, like the primordial night of classical cosmogony, is unfathomable, and on the other side, all aspects of secondary repression along with the after-pressure it affords, predicated as this is on an initial and initiating division between unconscious and conscious processes. The descendants or derivatives of primal repression always recall the founding act of the psychic apparatus, even while drawing attention to the watchman at the threshold of consciousness, whose sustained censorship protects the diurnal ego from all malign desires.
The unconscious proves to be a far more productive arena of the soul than conscious reason. In what I have called the dark side of the psychic apparatus, forbidden wish representations can develop “less disturbed and more fully, once they have been withdrawn from conscious influence. They proliferate so to speak in the dark, and find extreme forms of expression.” To the subject, who encounters them in the disfigured shape in which they finally pass by the watchman’s vigilant eye, they “are not only bound to seem alien,” Freud continues. Rather, they “frighten him by giving him the picture of an extraordinary and dangerous strength of instinct. This deceptive strength of instinct is the result of an uninhibited development in fantasy and of the damming-up consequent on frustrated satisfaction” (149). Thus, on Freud’s map of the psychic apparatus, the unconscious does not correspond to primal repression, but rather to the dark arena of psychic processes. Reformulated as a cosmogenetic narrative, one could say: Functioning along the lines of a primordial night, primal repression produces the unconscious as the nocturnal side of the psychic apparatus. This other site, divided from but welded to ordinary consciousness, functions as the arena in which primal repression continues to have its aftereffects, regulating secondary repression. It is in this dark place that desires and affects can develop in absolute freedom, because the unconscious contains everything forbidden by everyday consciousness. Comparable to Hegel’s “night of the world,” Freud’s unconscious emerges as a site whose darkness both protects and encourages a play of manifold phantasmagoria. The tremendous force, which an unbridled work of fantasy puts on display, is what renders this productivity terrifying.
There is, however, another reason why it is fruitful to think about Freud’s unconscious as corresponding with Nyx’s abode at the edge of the known world and thus as the threshold to the unknowable. Although the unconscious prevents the derivatives of primal repression from entering into consciousness, it also offers a stage for the production of precisely those disfigurations, which, once they have developed “far enough away from the repressed representation,” will allow forbidden wishes to find entry into consciousness. The unconscious emerges as the site from which the after-pressure emerges, which incessantly reminds consciousness of its nocturnal side, even while it is also the site at which an irrevocable distance to primal repression is installed. It is at this location in the psychic apparatus that the decision is made whether the descendents of repressed material will finally disappear in darkness, or whether, with the help of a transformation of their appearance, they will be allowed once again to seek access to the light of consciousness previously denied them. According to Freud, every instinctual representation has its particular destiny: “a little more or a little less distortion alters the whole outcome” (150). Conceived as a dynamic interface between primal repression and a successful return of its descendents, the unconscious not only functions as the site at which the manifold affects, desires, and self-conceptions of the subject are contained. The “little more or less” of distortion that is determined there also decides the fate of these wish representations. Both ideals and horrific fantasies may emerge out of the same perceptions and experiences. Decisive is merely the transformation they come to experience in the unconscious, a distortion that will allow them to disguise their common descent from primal repression.
The unconscious is conceived by Freud as a highly dynamic site, because under normal circumstances, the force of repression is only temporarily removed. Repression, he admonishes, should not be conceived as “an event which takes place once, the results of which are permanent.” Instead, it
demands a persistent expenditure of force, and if this were to cease, the success of the repression would be jeopardized, so that a fresh act of repression would be necessary. We may suppose that the repressed exercises a continuous pressure in the direction of the conscious, so that this pressure must be balanced by an unceasing counter-pressure. Thus the maintenance of a repression involves an uninterrupted expenditure of force. (151)
Comparable to the alternation of light and darkness in classical cosmogony, pressure and counter-pressure are mutually dependent; their alternation ensures the survival of the psychic apparatus. In conflict, on the one hand, with the watchman of consciousness and, on the other, with the resistance of rejected wish representations (resiliently seeking to return to consciousness from their exile into the unconscious) repression is incessantly generated and renewed, and along with it, the life of fantasy. Decisive for the vicissitude of repressed psychic material is merely the degree to which consciousness can endure the traces of primal repression that make up its legacy. In his discussion, Freud once more has recourse to a scenic depiction, arguing that it “amounts to much the same thing as the difference between my ordering an undesirable guest out of my drawing-room (or out of my front hall), and my refusing, after recognizing him, to let him cross my threshold at all” (152). One might, however, add that the site to which those who are refused entrance return is one he has unequivocally designated as being firmly in the dark.
Coming back one last time to the dynamic principle subtending Freud’s map of psychic processes, it is important to foreground that the restoration of repression is also not a singular event. In the same manner that an unwelcome guest cannot be removed from the drawing room (or front hall) permanently, the distortion cannot disguise his true aspect forever. Instead, what remains constant in the psychic apparatus Freud designs is a state of sustained and thus balanced pressure. In response to the return of descendents of primal repression, once they have deceived the watchman into letting them pass, consciousness exerts a counter-pressure, which, should it succeed, engenders a new resistance to repression. This is comparable to Hegel’s discussion of the way light only appears in front of the backdrop of darkness; whereas the latter also requires a degree of illumination so as to be perceived, the house which the ego seeks to be master of (namely, the psychic apparatus), comes into existence only as the interaction between diurnal consciousness and its nocturnal side; as the symptoms and fantasy formations that trace the incessant process of repression and counter-pressure. In Freud’s proposition of a primal repression at the beginning of psychic formation, one can thus locate not only the conceptual survival of Hegel’s notion of radical negativity. Freud also inherits from the romantic philosopher the conception of a dynamic interplay between unconscious wish representations and their return to consciousness, compelling him to locate the psychic apparatus between what one might call the nothing of pure primal repression and the light of pure consciousness. What the cross-mapping of Freud and Hegel’s cosmogenetic narratives about the development of the mind/spirit renders visible is that the “night of the I” and its recasting as the other site of the unconscious both emerge as the site in which this struggle, conceived as mutual afterpressure, is incessantly sustained.
THE UNCANNINESS OF THE NIGHT
Even if, as a clinician, Freud was primarily concerned with exploring the origin and vicissitudes of neurotic symptoms, he found in a particular aesthetic expression, namely, the uncanny, his most tangible example for the unbidden return of the descendents of primal repression. By forcing their way back into consciousness, repressed materials signal to the ego that he is not master of his own house. Exploring what produces a sense of the uncanny in literary texts, Freud makes the assumption that it involves a feeling of terror that reinvokes something long familiar, comparable to that portion of the night the subject carries within its depths, and from whence it can be awakened. His exploration of the uncanny is again guided by a cosmogenetic interest, given that he is particularly interested in discovering the circumstances that cause the familiar to “become uncanny or frightening” (220). In German the word unheimlich is the opposite of heimlich meaning both “domestic” as well as “clandestine.” However, from the onset Freud is convinced that it would be too simple to assume that something comes to be experienced as terrifying simply because it is unknown or unfamiliar. Something, he explains, “has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny” (221).
Further exploration of the usage of the term produces the following explanation: “
heimlich is a word, the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence until it finally coincides with its opposite,
unheimlich.
Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of
heimlich” (226). Starting from the basic psychoanalytical premise that repression transforms every affect into fear, Freud discovers in the uncanny a particularly vivid example for the cosmogenetic gestures of his own thinking. Literary depictions of uncanny events and situations neatly render visible how the terror they evoke in the reader is an articulation of the return of the repressed. It does not matter “whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some
other affect.” The transformation of the appearance of censored desires that repression produced further explains why the canny (
heimlich) comes to bleed into its semantic opposite, “for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (241). It ought to have remained hidden in the unconscious, but instead emerged out of this darkness. What had originally been familiar now appears strange, and yet this terrifying manifestation must represent some form of increase in pleasure for the ego. Otherwise, it would not have been allowed to pass the strict censorship of the watchman guarding the threshold to consciousness. The disfiguration of something originally familiar into something frightening thus also emerges as a form of disguise.
Freud never actually designates the night as the stage for uncanny experiences, because, in contrast to dreams, these manifestations of fantasy ultimately always involve a waking, albeit daydreaming state. Instead, he locates an articulation of the uncanny in literary themes corresponding to nocturnal psychic states. One can most prominently speak of a return of the repressed in situations that call forth intellectual uncertainty regarding the question whether something is animate or inanimate. Such inability to draw a clear distinction between the living and the dead reveals death to be the
heimlich kernel of life, much as night emerges as the
heimlich interiority of the day. Freud reminds his readers that a blurring of the distinction between life and death in fact recalls a more primordial way of perceiving the world: “We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects” (233). Only the mature subject seeks to clearly separate these two areas. The source of an experience of the uncanny is not to be sought in childhood anxieties. Rather it gives voice to a perception of the world not yet committed to the fundamental distinctions that are the mark of maturity, namely, the difference between life and death, day and night, reality and imagination, matter and spirit. Indeed, Freud discovers a reawakening of the child’s belief in the omnipotence of its fantasy life in the way the uncanny seems to repeal clear distinctions between opposites. The force of childhood imagination, having come to be repressed in the process of maturation, is brought back to consciousness with the help of an aesthetic experience, as though returning from a night of oblivion.
In the figure of the double, Freud discovers a further example for the way repression transforms familiar conceptions into something terrible, so as to allow these forbidden fantasies once more to have access to consciousness. In the “psyche’s primal stage,” surmounted in the process of the subject’s maturation, the double bore a benign meaning. Initially it was conceived as a figure protecting the subject from destruction, safeguarding its survival. In the same manner that the conception of a demonic night is predicated on its repression from the day—a point already presented in my reading of The Magic Flute—the emergence of the double as a figure of terror is predicated on the repression of death from life. In the realm of the aesthetic (which, as Goya’s Los Caprichos abundantly illustrates, privileges the monstrous figurations brought forth by the sleep of reason) the double returns as a nocturnal harbinger of death. This reversion into the uncanny can also be deciphered as an expression of the regression to a prior psychic state, namely, one in which “the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and other people” (236). A return to the belief that the self might double itself with the demise of its singularity assuring its survival, however, stands under a different sign. Decisive is the introduction of a clear distinction between the singularity of life and the more primordial domain of death, conceived by mythopoetics as a never-ending night. The desire for an existence beyond the limitations of the singular body, which is to say the desire for a division, an exchange, or replacement of the singular self, although quite familiar to the imagination, now appears strange. This alteration, turning what was initially benign into a figure of terror, corresponds to the fact that a doubling of the self is not compatible with the reality principle, insisting as it does on the survival of the subject in its individuality.
In the experience of aesthetic horror, the subject comes once more to enjoy the omnipotence of thought, which it must forbid itself in its ordinary life. Now, however, these thoughts no longer appear to be something he himself produced, but rather externally imposed, and as such doubly unfamiliar. The transference of what was initially a benign figure into a malign one renders the familiar strange. Yet because, owing to repression, this psychic representation does not seem to have been internally produced, the subject is allowed to indulge with impunity in the fantasy figure of the double, for which he is not responsible, because it is no longer perceived as being part of himself. The unintentional repetition of the same emerges as a quintessential source of uncanny feelings, and this sensation also can be attributed to the realm of the night. Because the repetition compulsion imposes the “idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’” (237), what was harmless is seen as something horrific. We might, however, also fruitfully recall that according to Hesiod, destiny is one of Nyx’s children; thus, a compulsion to repeat is aligned with a nocturnal side of psychic self-expression. Significantly, the uncanny sense of having been compelled to repeat an action allows the person in fantasy to divest himself of all responsibility for his desires. After all, one is powerless when confronted with fate, and therefore may in good conscience abandon oneself to its seductive power.
In that Freud ultimately seeks to trace all manifestations of the uncanny back to an allegedly more primary belief in the omnipotence of thought, he conceptually tracks an anti-cosmogenetic trajectory. He blurs the conceptual distinctions that determine the diurnal world ruled by the laws of reason, ascribing to the aesthetic domain an ability to reforge to a certain degree a less differentiated unity. The uncanny emerges as a cipher for undoing the separation between individual and collective, but also between a contemporary present and the belated fantasy of a psychic prehistory. Freud ascribes the force of such fantasy formations to a system of thinking that is not regulated by the laws of reason and the curtailments of the reality principle; this is a mode of reflecting the world most obviously found in the imaginary activity of children. But Freud also finds correlations to uncanny thinking in the “ancient worldview of animism,” which was characterized by the way it came to populate the world with human spirits and magical practices. Intuiting that traces of pagan superstition, which have come to be repressed by civilized thinking, find a vibrant cultural survival in the fantasy life of children, Freud conjectures: “It seems each of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of touching on those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression” (240–241).
For Freud, decisive in such privileging of psychic reality over the ordinary, which allows something we previously thought to be fantasy to confront us as real, is the following detail. The blurring of the boundary between fantasy and reality comes to be experienced as uncanny because we were once convinced of the authenticity of these occurrences: “Nowadays we no longer believe in them, having surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us, ready to seize upon any confirmation” (247). The uncanny can thus be seen as an expression of the nocturnal side of psychic formations, because it returns back to consciousness a prior belief in the omnipotence of thought as well as an intellectual uncertainty about the boundary between life and death, both modes of conceiving the world that are normally repressed by diurnal thinking. The uncanny is also a nocturnal articulation because it reverts back to the magical thinking that the reality principle sought to overcome. It retrieves a prior, repressed magical attitude toward the world from the darkness of the past, be it the past individual childhood or the past history of our ancestors. The uncanny allows for the emergence of a conceptual space in which previous times can be merged with the present, much as individual fantasy and collective imagination can be enmeshed.
Two further expressions of the uncanny refer more explicitly to the nocturnal deity, who, in mythopoetic thinking, straddles the familiar and the strange because she stands at the beginning of life, separating the origin of the world from its non-being even while her body unites these two opposites. Freud suggests many people experience the feeling of the uncanny “in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts” (241). The correspondence I am proposing between the Nyx of antiquity and Freud’s interest in death (her son) is that, as the source and goal of all terrestrial existence, Thanatos embodies a prior condition that is both familiar to the living subject and something strange, because it is the very opposite of being alive. Furthermore, death is inevitably associated with the image of the subject’s first corporeal home, which, according to Freud, our cultural image repertoire condenses into a trope par excellence for the uncanny: “whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,’ we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body. In this case, too, the
unheimlich is what was once
heimisch, familiar; the prefix
un- [-un] is the token of repression” (245). Nyx’s home on the periphery of the world finds a particularly resilient cultural survival in Freud’s re-encoding of the maternal genitals. Her place on the cosmogenetic map of classical antiquity also straddles the familiar night with the radically unfamiliar chaos, death as the origin and aim of all earthly existence.
BEYOND THE PRINCIPLE OF DAY
In his late work, Civilization and its Discontents, Freud reconceptualizes the dynamic return of a prior psychic attitude that strives toward the more originary inanimate state of human existence as a mythic struggle between two drives. As such he implicitly recalls the struggle in Paradise Lost between the light and the nocturnal side of God’s law. Like Milton, similarly interested in explaining the origin of human suffering, Freud begins his discussion by contesting that life is too difficult for us to bear, containing too much pain, disappointment, and irresolvable problems. Even though human beings strive for happiness, the possibilities of finding satisfaction are radically limited. Straddling his claim to happiness with ordinary suffering, the mature subject finds itself under attack on various fronts. As Freud puts it, there is first and foremost overpowering nature, whose relentless, destructive forces rage against him. Then there is civilization, which forbids the unbridled enjoyment of personal fantasies and imposes a restraint on pleasure so as to regulate the communal relationships between human beings. Finally, Freud locates a third attack on the individual in its own inherent tendency toward aggression, a seminal part of his psychic makeup. The mature subject differs from the child in that he has not only learned to accept cultural restrictions to his unbridled desire, but also to defend himself against his aggressive drives. However, both of these descendents of primal repression have withdrawn into the nocturnal domain of the psychic apparatus, from which they incessantly press back toward consciousness in search of renewed satisfaction.
Decisive for Freud’s late writings is the way he undertakes to distinguish these two drives further. In his first cosmogenetic mapping of psychic development, he was still working on the assumption that under the pressure exerted on it by reality, the pleasure principle would sustain the dynamic process of repression. By producing a balance between individual striving for pleasure and its curtailment, the stability of the psychic apparatus would be guaranteed. When, in his later writings, Freud returned to this initial model, he speculated that a drive existed that was more primal than the psychic compromise he had originally discussed as an avoidance of displeasure based on a re-figuration and modification of fantasies in accordance with cultural forbiddances. This drive, he found, acted independently from the pleasure principle. The discovery of a demonic trait in repetition-compulsion led him to revise his conception of the origin of the psychic apparatus and the vicissitudes of the drives. In
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he now claims: Even if drives maintain a “deceptive impression of energies striving to change and progress,” they are articulations of the conservative nature of life. They actually seek to attain a more primal goal, choosing old and new paths to achieve the restitution of an earlier condition that the individual was compelled to relinquish. Freud is only too willing to admit that a residue of mythopoetic thinking adheres to this claim:
it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that without exception everything living dies . . . [and] becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones.” (38)
The phenomena of psychic life can be explained based on the way the life and death drives interact and oppose each other. One of the psychic apparatus’s tendencies is to preserve living substance, producing ever larger entities. The other tendency is to dissolve these units and return all substance to its primordial state before life set in. Life thus proves to be a detour on the path toward death, to what might be called the nocturnal origin of inanimate matter, the formless chaos, the shapeless mass from which all animate life emerges. Fully aware of the speculative nature of his claim, Freud once more has recourse to his dynamic conceptual model of the mutual pressure regulating repression. Regarding the interaction of the life and the death drive, he argues: “One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey” (40–41). Freud’s conception of a death drive thus entails the desire for an earlier state of unity, free of all tension, pitted against the bustling urge to create ever new formations of life demanded by the life drive. Equally significant is the way in which Freud refigures the two dichotomies he takes from classical Greek thought. The fundamental struggle he posits between Eros and Thanatos can be seen as reconceiving the tension that binds Eros and Neikos (love and war) in conjunction with the equally seminal opposition between Bios and Thanatos (life and death).
Although the death drive seeks to recreate the lifelessness of an earlier inorganic condition, the erotic drive seeks to sustain all life by uniting two people, deferring death through procreation. If we recall, however, that the Orphic cosmogony conceives of both Eros and Thanatos as being the children of Nyx, one might also say that Freud implicitly derives all instinctual life from the night, even if he ascribes an earlier and thus more privileged rank to the death drive. He continues to deploy the incessant interplay between pressure and counter-pressure as the guiding principle, which already characterized the after-pressure of the descendants of primal repression in unconscious psychic processes. The erotic life drive is conceived as constantly changing and developing, whereas the death drive seeks only to return to an earlier state of shapeless matter. Both, however, are subjected to the night at the beginning and end of life, that inanimate condition that cannot be avoided or averted but simply deferred. The ubiquity of nonerotic destruction, which Freud overlooked in his first mapping of the psychic apparatus, now takes on a seminal role. He suggests thinking of the subject’s tendency toward aggression together with the demonic force he had come to align with articulations of the uncanny. A satisfaction of the death drive, he suggests, is “accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence” (121).
The revision of his cosmogenetic narrative brings with it a further claim: “the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species” (122). The tendency toward aggression, a particularly forceful representative of the death drive from which it is derived, is seen as a more primary, independent agent in the psychic apparatus, before the individuated life of the mature subject. Mythopoetic narratives had already conceptualized this aggression—as Nyx’s offspring strife, sorrow, and fear—but also in the figure of Milton’s Lucifer, the embodiment of evil par excellence. In yet another sense, then, the tendency toward aggression recalls a more primary mindset, namely, the magical thinking that enlightenment’s reason sought to repress.
Yet if Freud describes the development of culture and its discontent as a struggle between the giants Eros and Thanatos, he also offers a decisive addition to the formula; one that extends the death drive to all those domains against which the subject must defend himself. Because culture prohibits an unbridled enjoyment of aggression, this tendency comes to be internalized, and thus sent back to the dark realm of the psychic apparatus from which it originally came. Aggression comes to be pitted against the ego itself. Freud’s description of the origin of conscience reads like a re-figuration of what occurred in Milton’s Garden of Eden. Having returned to its site of origin, aggression is
taken over by a portion of the ego that sets itself over the rest of the ego as super-ego and which now, in the form of “conscience,” is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh superego and the ego that is subjected to it is called by us a sense of guilt. It expresses itself as a need for punishment. (123)
Analogous to the manner in which Milton’s God discloses punishment as the nocturnal aspect of his divine law in
Paradise Lost, the superego proves to be the nocturnal side of consciousness. Indeed, one might take the reading a step further and argue that like Milton’s God, the superego, so as to reinforce its punitive power, imagines human transgressions even before any temptation by any demonic force has taken place. Mapping Freud onto Milton’s cosmogenetic texts allows one to recognize how the superego feeds the ego with fantasy images of transgression that are as nocturnal as those repressed fantasies that press back into consciousness.
By insisting on a fundamental distinction between good and evil, Freud also follows the cosmogenetic gesture of Genesis. In many cases, he explains, “what is bad is not at all what is injurious or dangerous to the ego; on the contrary, it may be something that is desirous and enjoyable to the ego” (127). Like all psychic material belonging to the arena of the uncanny, these fantasies become threatening only as a result of their repression. Initially, it is those affects or fantasies involving parents inflicting punishment by threatening to withhold their loving affection that are considered to be evil. Only after the individual has come to internalize this punitive authority with the help of the erection of the superego does guilt come into play and with it the notion of a guilty conscience. It is at this moment that the difference between wanting to do evil and actually committing an evil act becomes moot. Like Adam and Eve vis-à-vis Milton’s God, the ego cannot hide anything from the superego. The latter tortures the ego with anxieties about punishment simply because the subject is capable of transgressing cultural laws, regardless of whether he actually commits crimes or remains virtuous. Freud thus comes to stipulate a double origin for the emergence of conscience. Initially it involves an anxiety regarding the external authority that compels the subject to curtail the unbridled satisfaction of its drives. What follows is the self-created internal authority. One is willing to relinquish a particular wish because one has listened to one’s conscience. Decisive, however, is the fact that all renunciation serves to produce a new articulation of guilty conscience, which in turn becomes increasingly harsh and intolerant, comparable to the way in which repression transforms familiar fantasies into figures of horror.
As in all other exchanges that take place within the psychic apparatus, there is no energy lost when the superego takes over. Each expression of aggression that is left unsatisfied is absorbed by the superego and enhanced as a forbiddance pitted against the ego. The death drive inhabits the domain of self-imposed forbiddances in the same manner as it is inscribed in the desire to promote possibilities of pleasure over and against the demands posed on the subject by reality. The interplay of pressure and counter-pressure regulating the process of repression emerges as an incessant struggle between a pursuit of happiness and an increase in guilt, which punishes the subject for all fantasies that threaten to transgress cultural laws and codes, be it an unrestrained desire for love or an unbridled inclination toward aggression. Because the ego is as besieged by its drives as it is by its self-created forbiddances, the piece of night it carries within finds articulation in various parts of the psychic apparatus: In the neurotic disorders and their symptoms, as in the visions which the work of dreams affords. Yet this piece of the night also finds articulation in the stirrings of conscience that restrict the subject’s Eros, as it does in the more prior tendency toward destruction, whose goal is ultimately death as the dissolution of all tension. Finally, one might also read the piece of night that each subject carries within as a residue of the primordial, inorganic state, as the point of departure and teleology of everything that comes into being as the ego emerges where the id originally had been.
Night thus assumes a plethora of positions in the cosmogenetic narrative Freud devises for the development of the psychic apparatus. It implicitly refers to death, the inanimate point of origin of all life to which one must ultimately return. All survival is contingent on somehow holding the force of the death drive at bay, which Freud eventually regarded as more primal than the pleasure principle. On the chart Freud devises for the psychic apparatus, night can also be aligned with primal repression, which finds articulation in the drives derived from it; most notably Eros and Thanatos. Their vibrant effects on the fantasy work of the subject offer resistance to the law of diurnal reason, even while they have assured their aesthetic survival in the domain of the uncanny. Finally, within Freud’s thinking of psychic processes, night is also located on the side of consciousness, particularly regarding the superego, which—not unlike Schikaneder’s Sarastro—produces punitive phantasmagoria, allegedly so as to protect the diurnal law of culture. However, it is precisely the severe superego that, together with the pleasure principle and all fantasy work of the subject, comes to introduce nocturnal traces into the realm of the day. In fact it works under the auspices of a black sun; the dark inversion of reason’s clarity nevertheless has its effects in the day.
