It is undeniable that this doctrine of Freud . . . is of great interest. . . . Nonetheless, can we say that the principle which seems to constitute his central theme, but which, in reality is more theory than practice, I am referring here to his pansexualism, would be sufficiently evident to lead to a conviction? It is permissible to doubt it. There is something a bit outrageous to want to bring by stone or by force, certain tendencies to the sexual instinct that somehow seem more primitive, like the revolt of a son against his father, often due to the simple survival instinct. . . . There are no parts in the psychic life that does not nourish some link with the whole of the personality. But to reduce this entire complex to a single fundamental tendency is to expose ourselves to insurmountable difficulties. (Jean Piaget, 1920, Psychoanalysis and Child Psychology, p. 34; translated by Marcel Duclos)
Observation teaches us that individual human beings realize the general picture of humanity in an almost infinite variety of ways. If we yield to the legitimate needs to distinguish particular types in this multiplicity, we shall first have to choose what characteristics and what points of view we shall take as the bases of our differentiation. For that purpose, physical qualities will no doubt serve as well as mental ones: the most valuable distinctions will be those which promise to present a regular combination of physical and mental characteristics. (Freud, 1931, Libidinal Types, p. 361; emphasis added)
The individual is a temporary and transient appendage to the quasi-immortal germplasma, which is entrusted to him by the process of generation. (Freud, 1915b, Metapsychology, p. 125)
Freud’s libido is a force that organizes all of the dynamics of the organism and pushes it to maximize its pleasure in general and sexual pleasure in particular. Although it plays a central role in his theoretical proposition, it is managed with reserve. He believes in it, but at the same time he reduced it to an innate hormonal construction selected by the mechanisms of biological evolution. He explains everything with it, but at the same time, its force is like that of the water in a brook, which must go around the boulders that slow down its flow. Without this water, the region it irrigates would become a desert. There is altogether a Viennese reserve in this theory of vital energy, which masks a conviction that is so strong that no one can influence it.1 When Jung—inspired by the vitalism of Henri Bergson—associated the libido to creative and spiritual energy, Freud so abruptly applied the brakes that Jung was expelled from the psychoanalytic movement. When Reich wanted to transform this brook into a political sexual tide, Freud reacted the same way. When Reich finally transformed the libido into an ocean of pleasure, Freud was deceased, but most of the orthodox psychoanalysts turned their backs on him. To his dying days, Reich was convinced that he was defending the most profound parts of Freud’s thought.
The term libido appeared very early in Freud’s psychoanalytic writings. Right from the start, it is powerful but contained, central but not invasive. Everything that deviated the course of the libido was a source of illness, but not necessarily evil. This conviction is one of the inexplicable drives of Freud’s personality that none of his students ever understood.
The complexity of Freud’s libido is close enough to what humans come to think about their sexuality: omnipresent and distant, source of pleasure and anxiety, and most of all elusive and incomprehensible. To this day, there is no instructive vision of sexuality, and the traps that sexual politics tend to fall into are unbelievably varied. Its influence does not let itself be cornered by words and theories, but it nonetheless has an unceasing effect in us. Freud especially defended this elusive aspect of sexuality. He therefore distrusted every individual who pretended to understand, situate, and master sexuality. He was not always sufficiently suspicious of the traps in which his way of handling the notion of libido caused him to stumble. This critique is done with great empathy for someone who at least dared to make explicit and undeniable the fact that questioning sexuality is a central preoccupation of every person who wants to understand human nature.
For an external frustration to become pathogenic, an internal frustration must be added to it. In that case, of course, the external and the internal frustration relate to different paths and objects.2 The external frustration removes one possibility of satisfaction and the internal frustration seeks to exclude another possibility, about which the conflict then breaks out. (Freud, 1916, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, III. 22, p. 395)
If I take up the System of the Dimensions of the Organism that serve as the reference point for this volume, it is possible to distinguish in Freud’s analysis (a) physical symptoms, (b) mental symptoms, (c) behavioral symptoms, and (d) a link between these domains. This “link” is the domain of the affects and the vegetative functioning of the organism, which was still not well known at the start of the twentieth century. For Freud, the central regulator of this affective domain is sexuality. He thinks that a person who is without a sexual problem cannot be neurotic. He calls the physiological aspect of sexuality, which activates the libido, a sexual appetite.3 This appetite would be linked to forms of physiological mobilizations distinct from those associated to hunger and thirst. At the time of his First Topography, Freud thinks that psychopathology appears when conscious thought is incapable of integrating the exigencies that sexuality would like to impose. To integrate these demands does not imply accepting them but to remain in dialogue with them.
We can only venture to say so much: that pleasure is in some way connected with the diminution, reduction or extinction of the amounts of stimulus prevailing in the mental apparatus, and that similarly un-pleasure is connected with their increase. An examination of the most intense pleasure which is accessible to human beings, the pleasure of accomplishing the sexual act, leaves little doubt on this point. Since in such processes related to pleasure is a question of what happens to quantities of mental excitation or energy, we call considerations of this kind economic. It will be noticed that we can describe the tasks and achievements of the mental apparatus in another and more general way than by stressing the acquisition of pleasure. We can say that the mental apparatus serves the purpose of mastering and disposing of the amounts of stimulus and the sums of excitation that impinge on it from the outside and inside. It is immediately obvious that the sexual instincts, from the beginning to end of their development, work towards obtaining pleasure; they retain their original function unaltered. (Freud, 1916, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. III, 22, p. 402)
The idea that there exist propensities with sexual goals, and that they play a fundamental role in the dynamics of the organism and of the mind, is ancient.4 Freud’s innovation lies in his analysis of what happens when a propensity does not attain its objectives. This was new for at least two reasons:
Freud’s idea is that a propensity mobilizes resources to achieve a goal. As long as this goal is not reached, the person experiences a disagreeable tension.5 When the goal is attained, the mechanisms of mobilization diminish and create an impression of pleasure and relaxation.6 If the goal is not reached, the organism engenders impressions like frustration and anxiety.7 A libido stasis then forms in the organism and impedes it from having the necessary resources to accomplish other tasks.
A few isolated sexual frustrations reabsorb with time. But if they are repeated, there will be an accumulation of retained metabolic waste products, feelings of frustration, and an excessive recourse to compensatory modes of satisfaction. An individual will feel anguished and will experience cravings, headaches, and so on. In brief, an entire series of behavioral, physiological, and mental mechanisms continue to deregulate until the organism has found a way of surviving more or less adequately in its environment.
This analysis leads to a central point in Freud’s theory: the organism cannot comfortably survive if consciousness does not fulfill its role of coordinator in an instinctive propensity. In the case of a dysfunction, the organism’s nonconscious mechanisms of regulation cause a splitting of the mind, which will maintain some desires in the unconscious and create the displacements of some propensities. These displacements are dangerous because the sexual desire can be replaced by an excessive activation of other propensities like hunger, aggression, hallucinations, and so on.8 In this organismic context, consciousness is unable to adequately achieve its role. The notion that the instinct needs to recruit the support of consciousness to be able to fulfill its functions is well summarized in the Three Essays on Sexuality:
The simplest and likeliest assumption as to the nature of instincts would seem to be that in itself an instinct is without quality, and, so far as mental life is concerned, is only to be regarded as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work. What distinguishes the instincts from one another and endows them with specific qualities is their relation to their somatic sources and to their aims. (Freud, 1905, p. 83)
As the libido is predominantly allocated to the provinces of the mental apparatus, we can distinguish three main libidinal types. To give names to these types is not particularly easy: following the lines of our depth-psychology, I should like to call them the erotic, the narcissistic and the obsessional types. (Freud, 1931, Libidinal Types, p. 362)9
LOVE TO HAVE PLEASURE OR LOVE TO PERPETUATE AND TRANSFORM A FAMILY TRADITION?
At the start, Freud’s insistence to associate anxiety disorders to the inhibition of the libido was perhaps accidental: that is, linked (a) to the particularities of certain patients, and (b) to his own personal inclinations. But when, as early as 1900,10 he began to train colleagues, he tried to shore up this association, because some of his students were particularly critical of this aspect of his theory.11 The argument that Freud forged in his discussions with Jung12 is that the central role of sexuality is comprehensible if we consider that it is the only innate instinct that exercises a pressure on the totality of the organism to satisfy the needs of the species instead of those of the organism.13 Let us take up the elements of this argument:
Sexuality is a drive that has at least two dimensions:
As in Darwin’s proposal, there is not just one instinct that motivates humans to become sexually active for the propagation of descendants.14 The human sexual instinct gathers distinct instinctual mechanisms that have heterogeneous goals. As I have explained in the sections dedicated to Wallace and Darwin, there is no need for coherence in nature’s choices. As it happens, there was no selection of organisms that have both the pleasure in copulating and the desire to have offspring. Practice shows us that these two tendencies coexist in the species, but not always in an individual. There are people who want to have children and like making love but are unable to have children; there are others who like to have intercourse without wanting any children; some who have child after child without caring for them; others who have pleasure only in making love with someone of the same sex and would like to have children; and others who do not enjoy making love but want to have children, and so on. This variety can be seen every day.15 There would be two types of frustration linked to the libido:
For Freud, the libido is then the regulator of the organism that promotes the linking of the attachment to the group to oneself. Sexuality would then be “the” instinctual propensity that plays a central role as organizer of the connection of body, mind, behavior, and society.
The Judeo-Christian thought has great difficulty entertaining the right to masturbate, to occupy oneself with one’s own comfort. This embarrassment is seen in the table manners of “educated” people who forbid every manifestation of postural comfort like resting one’s arms on the dinner table. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the style of novels is seen as quasi-masturbatory and reprehensible. Freud defended the right to masturbate and auto-regulation all his life, but he chose terms and metaphors that rendered the integration of auto-regulation problematic. Thus, he referred to the necessity to self-regulate as narcissism, conferring to this need an imagery of reprehensible self-admiration; yet he recognized that the organism can only survive if it appreciates the activities that allow it to self-regulate.16 Later, Freud (1915f, p. 222) associated a restorative auto-regulation that allows for sleep to a regressive and egotistic state that permits the organism to find a nearly fetal state. In short, the parasympathetic activity of the organism cannot truly be considered mature. Fundamentally, Freud is in agreement with those who defend the importance of auto-regulation, but the form that psychoanalysts still often use to speak of this primordial organismic activity remains problematic because the terminology and the metaphors can easily be experienced as negative. That is why I prefer to speak of auto-regulation rather than narcissism. This choice is found in a large part of the body psychotherapy literature.
FROM HOMEOSTASIS TO SOCIABILITY
Like Descartes and Hume, the psychoanalyst’s patient sits in his thoughts to observe what is going on. From the point of view of his consciousness, he analyzes his way of thinking and the rapport between thoughts and the rest of the organism. But in psychoanalysis, this practice is carried out in tandem with someone in a relationship; it has as its goal the co-construction of what is perceived by one person. This frame values the fact that the relationship with the other is finally as powerful as the relationship with the self. This strategy makes it possible for the patient to perceive aspects of his internal world he would not have been able to perceive and, above all, explain without his therapist. There is evidently an entire series of mechanisms, in addition to sexuality, that requires a connection to another to function well. Libido is thus only one of the social instincts17 that compel an organism to interact with other members of his species.
In the theory of transference originally proposed by Freud, interaction was a secondary variable.18 As the experience of the psychoanalysts trained by Freud gradually developed, they became aware that shared experiences play a central role in the development of a human being. Here are a few examples:
These studies show that some important relational problems from the earliest infancy also damage the development of the mechanisms of auto-regulation of the organism. The first article entirely dedicated to countertransference was written by Sándor Ferenczi in 1909. Freud did not publish The Dynamics of Transference until 1912. Freud discusses countertransference in only two publications.20 It is therefore evident that Freud’s colleagues added an intersubjective dimension to his intra-organismic view. Psychoanalysis thus rejoins other theories that believe that psychological dynamics are necessarily interpersonal.21 Besides the body psychotherapists who use a psychodynamic theory as the frame of reference, the notion of transferential dynamics is not always used in body psychotherapy. Others, for example, will use family therapy as a reference to coordinate their work on the dynamics of the organism and relational dynamics.
Freud sets about to distinguish two types of characters:
An individual centered on his auto-regulation cannot benefit from a psychoanalytical treatment unless he admits that the object-oriented libido is more important than the narcissistic libido. Freud nonetheless admits that the narcissistic personalities have trump cards that make them useful for the whole of society. For example, that is the case for a creative artist like Beethoven. Narcissistic personalities “are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or to damage the established state of affairs” (Freud, 1931, p. 363). The psychodynamics arguments that he gives to support this analysis of the narcissistic type are the following:
There is no tension between ego and super-ego (indeed on the strength of this type one would scarcely have arrived at the hypothesis of a super-ego), and there is no preponderance of sexual needs. The subject’s main interest is directed to self-preservation. The ego has a large amount of aggressiveness at its disposal, which also manifests itself in readiness for activity. In his erotic life, loving is preferred above being loved. People belonging to this type impress others as being “personalities.” (Freud, 1931, p. 362f.)
Having a healthy narcissistic libidinal activity and a healthy object libido is evidently advantageous. However it is rare that both develop well in an individual. The practitioner generally knows how to evaluate this equilibrium in an individual. Those that the psys currently qualify as narcissistic personalities’22 are individuals who have a narcissistic problem, a deficiency in the narcissistic dynamics that they try to compensate for in different ways. Otto Kernberg (1975) thus speaks of “pathological narcissism.” Individuals who suffer from a deficit of narcissism desperately try to function close to the libidinal type, but they are only partially successful. They often are afraid to cause harm and be rejected by others. These feelings become a form of central obsession that drains all of their energy and deprives them of sufficient resources to be able to help others, understand points of view other than their own, and coordinate their actions with others constructively. It is to poorly understand the theory of narcissism to believe that an individual can suffer from too much narcissism.
Narcissism was initially introduced by Freud to integrate within a psychoanalytic frame Jung’s theory on psychosis, once Jung had left the psychoanalytical association. That may explain why Freud uses a myth to describe a notion. As he called the pathological deviation of object oriented libido “narcissism,” he created an enduring semantic confusion between healthy and pathological narcissism. To be precise, Freud distinguishes between narcissistic (healthy) libido and (pathological) narcissism. I prefer to follow Wilhelm Reich’s proposition and refer to healthy narcissistic libido as the pleasure of auto-regulation. Today, many psychiatrists prefer to use a set of precise descriptive symptoms as suggested by the DSM-V and avoid using the term narcissistic as a psychiatric diagnosis.23
In a period when he was still flirting with the spiritualist thoughts of the schools of hypnosis, Freud (1895a) for a moment imagined that the libido was an energy that circulated in the body through particular pathways. He played with the idea of a libido that, as in the circulations described by Taoist alchemists, followed this route:
Freud uses this schema to explain that in individuals who suffer from “melancholy,” the mental libido pushes the physiological libido toward the base of the pelvis. They are afraid of a sexual charge greater than one for which they have the impression of being able to integrate without creating insurmountable conscious conflicts. A way of dealing with this, according to Freud, is to masturbate so that the somatic sexual tension would never be able to acquire the sufficient force to activate an intense mental desire. According to this model, melancholy would be the sadness of having repressed not only the libido but also the desire. In the 1970s, Paul Boyesen proposed almost exactly a same model, which he called the psycho-organic circle.24 Freud’s reflections on this subject interest me for two reasons:
In 1905, Freud took up certain ideas contained in the first model and proposed a theory of the psychosexual stages that shows that the libido gradually structures itself by associating different erogenous zones of the body to different psychological and interpersonal functions.
Sexual life includes the functions of obtaining pleasure from zones of the body. (Freud, 1938, Outline of Psychoanalysis, III, p. 152)
The Freudian psychosexual stages were still commonly used and taught in the 1970s. Since then, for reasons that I have not understood, this theory is rarely mentioned. Some authors still use it to identify a problem linked to a zone of the body, like when psychoanalysts use the term orality27 in a discussion on eating disorders or poor eating habits (Goldsztub and Levy, 2006).
In 1905, Freud proposed that sexuality develops around the erogenous zones of the body that corresponds to a child’s central phases of development. He describes five periods:28
These are approximate ages, indicative of an average that varies in each case. This rough sketch of a genetic model of the drives contains several important points:
A delicate point of this theory concerns its relationship with the notion of the Oedipal complex, which plays a central role in Freud’s thought. The Oedipal complex, as discussed by the majority of psychoanalysts, comes about around the age of three. Many psychoanalysts affirm that the male child entertains a genital love for his mother.31 Freud’s model is more refined. Around three years old, the boy has a sensual and erotic behavior toward his mother without a genital design. He wants to marry her, sleep with her, smell her skin, and sometimes play with her genitals if he is aware of them, but that is where things stop.32 At puberty, the genital sexuality enters into a resonance with the ancient sensuality associated with the mother and transforms the ancient drive into a genital drive. There then arises a genital Oedipal conflict. The sensual rapport toward the mother that was established at the age of three is reactivated in the adolescent by its association to manifest genital sexual drives. The conflict that develops in the unconscious of the young man can only be resolved if he learns to detach “his libidinal wishes from his mother and employ them for the choice of a real outside love-object” (Freud, 1916, III.21, p. 380). That is the only way he could really reconcile with his father.
Almost all narcissists and children in particular, are voyeurs. More than others, they are attracted to ambiguous events. They want to see for the same reason that they want to be seen. There is in this an interesting complex in the consequences it has in art or even in metaphysical intuitionism. (Jean Piaget, 1920, Psychoanalysis and Child Psychology, p. 32)
The sadistic relation can only be sustained in so far as the other is on the verge of still remaining a subject. If he is no longer anything more that reacting flesh, a kind of mollusk whose edges one titillates and which palpitates, the sadistic relation no longer exists. (Jacques Lacan, 1954, The Seminar, XVII.3, p. 215)
At first, the oral, anal, and phallic drives are identified as pregenital instinctual “components”33 that will be coordinated under the primacy of the genital zone:34 “What we call genitality is a summation of instinct components, so called, and of excitations of the erotogenous zones” (Ferenczi, 1929). Subsequently, Freud’s theory of the drives became fuzzier for many reasons. It seems to me that the following are the most interesting ones for the development of body psychotherapy.
Karl Abraham often associated, in direct fashion as in phrenology, the erogenous behaviors of a particular zone of the body to a specific psychological problem. Thus, one of his patients handled light with difficulty because his eyes were central symbolic components of different drives:37
From a theoretical point of view, a bizarre mixture begins with Karl Abraham. On the one hand, we have a systemic model “á la Freud” that supposed a great flexibility of the libidinal coordination between the body and the spirit; on the other hand, we find ourselves more and more often left with a rigid, linear link between a mental and a behavioral trait. This mixture is probably what created a manifest hostility toward a Psychoanalysis that reduces the wealth of thoughts to not only simplistic schemata but also poorly supported ones or only supported by few cases.
Sándor Ferenczi, another of Freud’s close collaborators, developed similar themes. He proposed a urethral stage between the anal and the phallic stages that is linked to the pleasure in urination. He associated a panoply of mental problems to the functioning of the bladder, like enuresis, premature ejaculation, the pleasure of urinating to fight against anxiety, a sexuality based on morning erections, pissing contests between children, and so on.
More recently, psychoanalyst Gerard Bonnet, influenced by Freud, Sartre,38 and Lacan,39 took up Abraham’s work on a person’s gaze and avoided most of the mistakes of the Berlin model. His 1981 publication, titled Voir et être vu [To see and to be seen], is a good example of a certain French psychoanalysis that is centered on what they call the “subject.”40 In concentrating on the perceptions of the subject, Bonnet skillfully avoids the necessity to directly relate to the mind, the perceptions, the libidinal stages, and the parts of the body. He details his analysis of the gaze with numerous clinical cases that show how to see and be seen forms a polarity that creates a resonance between the unconscious of a family, or of a group of people, in a certain way. The central issue pointed out by Sartre, which inspired Bonnet, is that seen from the outside, humans perceive each other as objects, but as objects that have a self. Person A cannot perceive the self of person B, but A knows that B is reacting as a subject to A, that B is evaluating A:
As a temporal-spatial object in the world, as an essential structure of a temporal-spatial situation in the world, I offer myself to the Other’s appraisal. This also I apprehend by the pure exercise of the cogito. To be looked at is to apprehend oneself as the unknown object of unknowable appraisals—in particular, of value judgments. (Sartre, 1943, III.I.IV, p. 358)
The analysis leans toward a way to integrate and to envision that which we have chosen to see and show. To quickly summarize some of Bonnet’s point of view on voyeurism, I evoke the ostrich who believes the enemy has disappeared by sticking its head in the sand. Of course, I am taking a shortcut here because this work speaks mostly of voyeurism and exhibitionism:
The body is inevitably present in most of Bonnet’s clinical examples, but his interventions remain strictly verbal. Gerard Bonnet insists on the fact that the voyeur is always visible, one way or another; even if he is not seen by the one he looks at.
The beauty of Bonnet’s approach is his exploration with the patients of what certain ways of seeing and exhibiting (or hiding) signify to the psyche of the subject while admitting that the libido of viewing and exposing inscribes itself necessarily in a complex and polysemous intra- and interpsychic channel. What is felt by each one enters into a Lacanian frame of an interplay between virtual thoughts that activate, without the subject knowing how, the behaviors and feelings that take place in the consciousness of each implicated individual. None of them can understand or even grasp the stakes of what is being perceived. Here, in summary, is an example from Bonnet:
Vignette on an exhibitionist. During the first 14 years of his life, the patient slept in the same room with his parents. Even if the patient does not mention it, Bonnet concludes that when it looked as if the boy seemed to be asleep, his parents secretly made love, trying not to wake up their child. In fact, it is possible that his parents no longer made love, or did so elsewhere, in other moments than nighttime. But Bonnet imagines that his patient has often witnessed what the psychoanalysts call the “primitive scene” There would have been a child who sees his parents have intercourse while they were convinced that they were not seen. They did things that they did not have the right to do in the presence of their child. We have, in these few words, a sample of what Bonnet called seeing and being seen. In these first years, the child does not know what is afoot; he does not know what it is to make love. He probably feels that his parents are having an intense encounter, touching and caressing each other while wanting to exclude him. He realizes very well that by feigning not seeing, he is able to observe. If the parents sensed that he was not asleep, their intimate ballet was interrupted. The child would have witnessed events that were not spoken about, that were not possible to talk about. Evidently, if this is how things happened, the pleasure of the parents and the curiosity of the witness was enveloped in shame and with forbidden feelings.
Bonnet is manifestly a specialist in the dynamics of the partial drives41 that transform themselves in every which way. Once an adult, the patient becomes an exhibitionist. He stands in front of a woman who is parking her car in the dark of the evening. He is easily visible under the street lights. He opens his overcoat and exposes his genitals. “To the desire to see, to spy what he experienced all of his childhood without ever being able to make sense of it, the desire to expose himself again and again in order to exorcise the vision that obsesses him abruptly succeeds, according to a reversal that is very characteristic in this matter” (Bonnet, 1981, 2.3.3, p. 79; translated by Marcel Duclos).
Bonnet’s explanation does not stop there, because he needs to understand his role as the therapist in the transferential dynamic that is constructed between him and his patient. He then begins to reflect on the fact that this exhibitionist pursues his prey, who are always adults and always in populated areas, until such time as he is arrested by the police and convicted. At the occasion of one of these episodes, the patient is referred to Gerard Bonnet by the justice system for a psychiatric evaluation and treatment. Given his status of voyeur, which he established with his parents at the occasion of their love-making, the patient does not know how to exist. The subject that he is has no status, has no permission, no right to exist. In transforming his voyeurism into exhibitionism to the point of attracting the attention of the police, what was traumatizing in the bedroom acquires a status, attracts attention, is discussed and judged. In therapy, the patient is able to speak, express himself, and especially to be heard. It is not only his words that are heard; he is listened to as a subject who is trying to understand himself and exist in the eyes of another. It would therefore be much more the search of a judgment than the need to expose oneself that motivates the behavior of this patient.
Bonnet’s analysis is even more interesting than I have been able to express in these few sentences. I encourage you to read what he has to say concerning this case, because it is equally instructive from the point of view of the formation of a psychotherapist. It consists in understanding the frame that the dynamics of the transference builds around what, in the first instance, is felt as an empathie exchange of information between two selves. To speak and be heard is a way to replay the problem of voyeurism.
The idea of the drive is connected, at the same time, to a vegetative and hydraulic metaphor. A drive pushes toward a goal like a tree that grows its branches, leaves, and fruits toward the sun. This drive also pushes like water held back by a dam and like water that carves a river bed to finally reach the ocean. The activity of a drive is first an organic propensity that recruits mental and behavioral energy in function of its needs.42
Andre Haynal (1992) reminds his readers that the term repression only partially translates the metaphor carried by the term Verdranung used by Freud. A defense, according to Freud, is like a boat that splits the waters of a river and displaces it on either side. This water no longer goes where it wanted to go; it forms waves in the water. Once a thought or a drive has been displaced, it no longer manifests in its original form, but the ripples it creates are sometimes perceived by consciousness without knowing what created them. These aquatic displacements put pressure on the river banks (the nonconscious mechanisms). If the displacement of fluids occurs in a cask, the fluids put “pressure on the walls. The repression would be a board that leans on the water, increases the pressure . . . sometimes to the point that the water squirts through the slits” (Haynal, 1992, p. 15; translated by Marcel Duclos).
A riddle is lurking in the region of affects. (Sigmund Freud in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, November 7, 1899, in Freud, 1904)
And then World War I broke out; everything around Freud had changed. He was at the head of a movement that unceasingly asked him to provide guidance on how to practice Psychoanalysis and the recommendations relative to a particular cure. His colleagues were, at the same time, intelligent, dynamic, and often unstable in the sphere of their personal identity. They were on a search; they believed that Freud could give them a frame which, all at the same time, could orient them, support them, and allow them to express everything that they feel and think. Psychoanalysis became a career path, a source of income. Twice already, the psychoanalytic movement split because it was unable to reconcile so many demands. Adler and Jung had supported the creation of the psychoanalytic movement and admired Freud; both wanted him to accept their ideas. But it was not possible. Freud accepted only the formulations that he could understand and integrate. Therefore, they each founded their own psychoanalytic movement. Freud’s psychoanalysis nonetheless remained the trunk, the reference point in the field of psychotherapy. A trunk that has branches becomes a tree.
There was suffering and anguish but also satisfaction in all of these adventures. Freudian psychoanalysis became visible in the academic and psychiatric world from the Urals to the Rocky Mountains. Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi were invited by Clark University in the United States to present their thoughts.43 There, they met the first psychoanalysts who were established in the region and William James of Harvard University. The psychoanalysts had a journal. In entering the marketplace of official theories, psychoanalysis must accept a harsh competition that is sometimes led by powerful personalities. Some of these reactions were ferociously opposed to Freud’s formulations. The psychoanalysts developed their own arsenal to confront this opposition.
Then there was war: a horrible, idiotic, and nasty war.44 Friends and colleagues fought each other in the trenches. He worried about his sons, who were fighting in the Austrian army. There was also less money, fewer patients. Editors had difficulty finding enough paper to publish the writings of the psychoanalysts. Colleagues no longer dared travel. Freud had time on his hands. He reflected. He wrote. He undertook an overall revision of all the models that he had set forth.45 In editing what was supposed to be a kind of synthesis of his work, he began to nail down the flaws in his theory more explicitly. He vaguely sensed that psychoanalysis must change gear.
He wrote Metapsychology to define the questions that he had to answer. He defined and then modified the five models that seem to him to have the greatest need of review and correction: the instincts and their vicissitudes, the notion of repression in the defense system, the unconscious, and his theory of dreams. He also incorporated his understanding of depression into all of this. Depression is not a neurosis, but he was thinking about it already in his correspondence with Fliess. He deeply sensed that Psychoanalysis must address pathologies other than just neurosis if it wanted to become a general theory of psychotherapy. Jung had already discussed this with him by showing that Freud’s understanding did not allow an approach to the treatment of those suffering from psychoses. Freud summarized the benefits of this discussion in refining his reflections on narcissism. He must also assimilate all of the discussions on transference and countertransference that his colleagues were about to place at the center of psychoanalytic preoccupations, while he remains mostly interested in an intra-organismic psychology.
Like many practitioners who were establishing themselves, Freud had long hoped to find a solid academic research position that would permit him to practice psychotherapy as a secondary career. He held on to the ambition that one day he would be able to synthesize the neurology, psychology, and philosophy that he had studied in medical school. His First Topography contained many formulations that could easily be used in academic discussions. For example, we have already seen that his psy system included a theory of thought close to that of Descartes. His writings on the relationship between the dynamics of the libido and the mind attempted to be compatible with a certain view of the nervous system.46
At almost 60 years old, Freud grieved these ambitions, and resigned himself to the idea that it would be future generations who will fulfill this dream.47 The researchers who will relate neurology and psychoanalysis will require resources to which the practitioners in Freud’s day did not have access.48 On the other hand, if a practitioner furnishes a precise clinical description, associated to a model that makes explicit the reasoning of the practitioner, he may inspire the researchers of tomorrow and help them know on what to concentrate to relate clinical and experimental research. In other words, Freud continued to want to create explicit and detailed models and to further explicate, as much as possible, the procedures used in Psychoanalysis. From then on, he focused on practical and technical issues that could improve the efficiency of psychotherapy. He had to tinker with models that support a clinical exploration in those areas which scientists have no means to study:
We know two kinds of things about what we call our psyche (or mental life): firstly its bodily organ and scene of action, the brain (or nervous system) and, on the other hand, our acts of consciousness, which are immediate data and cannot be further explained by any sort of description. Everything that lies in between is unknown to us, and the data do not include any direct relation between these two terminal points of our knowledge.49 (Freud, 1938, I, p. 144)
Consequently, the regions the psychoanalysts explore are situated in a waste ground, still poorly explored, between consciousness and the brain. It was not possible at the time to propose a coherent theory of the mind. In trying to resolve the contradictions that remain in his theory, Freud initiated a great reformulation of psychoanalytic theory by proposing his Second Topography. This reformulation provides the means for certain psychoanalysts to explore different ways to integrate somatic and behavioral approaches to psychoanalysis. That said, the Second Topography resolves certain problems and creates others. Consequently, the coherence of psychoanalytic theory was not reinforced in the end.
I am in fact of the opinion that the antithesis of conscious and unconscious is not applicable to instincts. (Freud, 1915a, Metapsychology, III, p. 177)
The psy system of the 1890s describes the circulation of mental representations. This is the model that was presented to the general public in Freud’s first works and that has so pleased personalities like Jung and Ferenczi. But everyone senses that this model poorly coordinated the dynamics of the drives and the dynamics of the thoughts. Jung leaned toward a global psychophysiological interaction, but he had to admit such generalities were of no help to psychotherapists. He ended up thinking that between the brain and the psy system there was a special interface that produced phenomena like archetypes. The interface between the unconscious and the brain is then perceived from the point of view of consciousness,50 as the mouth of a volcano, like something that is not a complete whole but an aspect of the global organization. Freud thought instead of a sort of necessity on the part of the instincts to recruit a regiment of thoughts that play a particularly useful function in a propensity’s army. This is a bit like what Cannon envisioned, in the same period, when he constructed his homeostatic model. For Freud, this axis organizes itself necessarily around pleasure: a biological pleasure and a mental pleasure, the organic pleasure to eat or to make love, and the mental pleasure of eating or of making love. There is also, on the side of the preconscious, another interface that connects the mental pleasure and the organic pleasure of moving, doing things, playing the violin, baking a good bread, hugging one’s partner. Seen from this angle, the only biologically constructed pleasure that links physiology, representations, and actions built with another is the sexual interaction. That is the center around which all the other pleasures are built. Freud insisted in distinguishing organic pleasure and mental pleasure because they manifestly function differently. The pleasure of eating that turns into a tendency toward bulimia is a prime example. A more complicated example is the one of a union between individuals who like each other but who do not have chemical systems that would promote an active sexual life. It is sad that only rarely does all of the apparatus of the soma and the psyche need the same person and that it be reciprocal.
Since 1905, when Freud defended his model of the libido, he created a kind of dichotomy in psychoanalytical thought. The desire coordinates the physiological dimension and the psychological dimension of a drive. When Freud spoke of the psy system, he clearly distinguished physiology and representations, but this differentiation takes on water as soon as he speaks of libido. The anal libido is attached to a part of the body, a physiological function, affective needs (to be miserly), ways of thinking (to be very rational), behavior patterns (to be very organized), and relationship styles (sadomasochistic relationships). It becomes evident that not only the thought of anger is repressed but so is a particular outburst of anger. The body psychotherapists, right from the Reichian Vegetotherapy, went to the outer limits of the idea that the entire organism is harnessed to repress the composites of anger. Freud did not go as far, but he did take a first step in this direction. Henceforth, he admitted that in repressing the thought of being angry, the propensity and its need to recruit the help of the psyche is disturbed. The defense system acts on the mental dimension and more indirectly, for Freud, in the physiological dimension of the drive. The First Topography does not achieve a description of this double psychological and physiological activity. Add to that the transferential dynamics described by Ferenczi, which give a greater importance than before to the interface between the mind and motor activity. The First Topography made it possible to impose the idea that the mind must also be treated by mental methods. But this beautiful theory, this clarity, does not take the fuzzier dynamics of the organism into account. Another approach had to be adopted.
This change is not just induced by the internal inconsistencies of the Freudian model. Psychoanalysts, even Freud, encounter a key problem in their practice that is linked to the inconsistencies I have just summarized. They had several cases in which the patient recovered memories of situations repressed in the unconscious without being relieved of the symptoms that motivated coming to psychotherapy. The psychoanalysts of the day explained this by telling themselves that these patients had recovered the cognitive memory of the repressed situation but not the memory of its affective content. The defense system therefore has the capacity to render an analysis ineffective by activating only half the memory: either its affective content deprived of the associated images, or only the images. The challenge for the practitioner is to find techniques that will help resolve this problem. Evidently, asking the patient to free associate and analyze the mental lapses and dreams does not always suffice. The solution that Freud envisioned is to propose a system of interpretation of the material brought forth by the associations of the patient that centers more on the coordination between representations and affects. We will see that for others, like Ferenczi and Reich, the problem could only be resolved by adopting more active methods that solicit the motor system more directly.
The clinical questions that Freud took up in this period imply that a thought links three dimensions: the representations, the affects, and the physiologic activity. This transition phase of psychoanalytical thinking is built around the model of the primary and secondary processes, a distinction that Freud thought about from 1895 up to the time of his death.51
In a psychotherapy practice, it is relatively easy to inventory the needs a patient manifests, the way a patient represents what is going on inside, and his relational experiences. It is therefore possible to list how these three types of phenomena inter-relate for an individual, even if the practitioner does not know the underlying mechanisms that organize this type of coordination.
We see that in this, Psychoanalysis increasingly becomes a collective endeavor because Freud broached notions that he probably would not have been able to discover alone. He would not have dared to move forward in a direction that rendered psychoanalysis irreplaceable and at the same time conceptually difficult to grasp. Spontaneously, and up to the end of his life, Freud liked having ideas as clear as possible.
As I have already remarked,54 the traumatizing events of World War I had an enormous impact on the development of the treatment for soldiers. In participating in this collective effort, psychoanalysts showed everyone that they could propose useful forms of therapeutic interventions. At the same time, they were placed in direct competition with other approaches like those of Goldstein and Cannon. These initiatives could only propose forms of intervention that were still works in progress. The psychoanalysts had to work with a new clientele that could not be treated in the comfortable and warm-hearted intimacy of an individual private practice. Hospitals became their principal workplace. It was no longer a question of asking the patients to have a session of psychotherapy each workday of the week for at least one hour. The psychoanalysts were obliged to adapt their theory to their practice. This allowed Freud, with the help of his collaborators, to calibrate the changes that he was about to put in place. Here are a few salient traits that characterize this mutation:
This turn of events permitted a creative proliferation in the area of techniques that encourage an increasing number of psychoanalysts to question themselves about the utility of relating the psychoanalytic approach to body and behavior therapy approaches.
Finally, around 1923, Freud learned that a cancer was growing in his jaw and threatens one of his dearest pleasures: smoking a cigar. He preferred to die rather than stop smoking. This cancer was often brought up as a cause of his growing pessimism, but it could also have obliged him to integrate the notion of corporality more explicitly into his theoretical elaboration.
It is in this context that Freud proposed his Second Topography with the hope that it would allow for a better management of the drives. This theme became a central preoccupation. He was aware that the second model was less precise on certain points, but more flexible and more relevant for the needs of a psychotherapist. The distinction between representation and drive became somewhat blurred but also more complex. It is the same for the distinction between mental energy and physiological energy. This Second Topography of the psyche distinguishes between the id, the ego, and the super-ego:56
The ego has voluntary movement at its command. It has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events, it performs the task by becoming aware of a stimuli, by storing up experiences about them (in the memory), by avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight), by dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation) and finally by learning to bring about expedient changes in the external world to its own advantage (through activity). As regards to internal events, in relation to the Id, it performs that task by gaining control over the demands of the instincts, by deciding whether they are to be allowed satisfaction, by postponing that satisfaction to times and circumstances favorable in the external world or by suppression their excitation entirely. (Freud, 1938, I, p. 145f).
The ego, above all, manages the organism’s relations with what is going on in the present.59 The psyche’s defense system is mostly controlled by the ego, which is able to link affects, representations, and relations.
Notice that there are some common points between Freud’s two topographies. Consequently, the id—as the unconscious—is mostly linked to the physiological mobilizations and the sensory data processed by the brain. The ego—like the preconscious—interacts with the memory and mechanisms that regulate movement. On the other hand, unconscious, preconscious, and conscious are now distributed into all of the systems of the Second Topography. The unconscious is, however, preponderant in the id, whereas the super-ego often has a conscious activity.61
Each level of the Second Topography generates certain forms of pathology. To be cut off from one’s id destabilizes the equilibrium between psyche and organism, while the intrusions of the id can bring about various forms of overinvestment that the psyche is not able to integrate. An ego can be too rigid (it imprisons) or too weak (it does not contain enough).62 The super-ego is sometimes overdeveloped in individuals with a weak ego, incapable of containing the demands of the drives’ dynamics. We then witness the formation of a continual battle between rigorous willfulness and chaotic drives.
In the supervision sessions that I took with him in the 1980s, Willy Pasini distinguished three function of the ego:
For these three functions to become operational, an individual must have a sufficiently structured ego to tolerate a strong dose of frustration without self-destructing (while maintaining a secondary functioning). The repressed unconscious material continues to exist outside of the ego. This implies that it is not submitted to the correction of experience. It remains unchanged while the rest of the personality evolves.63 The link between the drives and experience allows the ego to build itself up while tolerating a certain amount of frustration. The First Topography was especially relevant for the treatment of neuroses. The Second Topography adjusts itself to the fact that a growing number of clients suffer from other problems. With neurotics, the patients have a secondary process that is relatively well structured and that, above all, needs to be revised. On the other hand, individuals with a weak ego also have a lot of free energy. Individuals who nowadays we refer to as narcissistic and borderline personalities require active psychotherapeutic strategies that reinforce the ego and allow the libido to connect to forms of thought and constructive relations. In these cases, to permit the unconscious to become conscious does not suffice, for several reasons:
In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,64 Freud attempts to clarify the rapport between psyche and motor activity. He considers consciousness as not having a direct access to the drive. On the other hand, when a drive mobilizes the organism to construct an action that allows it to find a form of satisfaction, the motor system solicits the intervention of consciousness to calibrate the gestures, to accommodate them to the surrounding reality. Consciousness takes notice of an instinct by sensing its impact on motor activity. This regulation of the motor activity imposes on the thoughts the necessity to be able to distinguish between what is inside and what is outside, between a need and what this need is able obtain (the reality principle). In The Ego and the Id,65 Freud situates the ego in the space that links motor activity and consciousness as the container and regulator of the relation between thoughts, motor activity, and drives. This placement is so clear for Freud that he asserts (a) that one part of the functioning of the ego is out of the reach of consciousness; and (b) that “the Ego is, first and foremost a bodily ego” (Freud, 1923a, II, p. 26)!
A fact that is rarely commented on is the rapidity with which some individuals close to Freud seized on these formulations to develop different ways to increase the importance of the body in the reflections of psychoanalysts. In the next chapter, I describe this exploration of the rapport between psyche, body, behavior, and organism carried out by the psychoanalysts during the years between the World Wars.
The individuals traumatized by war responded only moderately well to psychoanalytical treatment. The psychoanalysts had an especially difficult time understanding why some horrible nightmares regularly haunted the soldiers after the war once the organism was no longer menaced. They had the impression that their patients latched on to these images that intruded into their psyche, not only at night but sometimes during the day. To answer this clinical question, Freud asked himself if it were possible to explain everything with a deviation of the pleasure principle. This same pleasure principle is also incapable of explaining the horrible drives that were expressed in by the masses during World War I, with no one capable of understanding their usefulness. Because of these observations, as well as others of a similar kind, Freud felt forced to postulate the existence of a destructive instinct (Thanatos) of self and others that is at least as powerful as the need to create pleasurable experiences (Eros).66 Thanatos creates a compulsion to repeat painful situations.
Before 1914, Freud refused to accept the criticisms of Jung, Adler, and Bleuer, who could not see how one could construct a psychiatric theory by affirming that everything organized itself around the pleasure principle. The destructive human tendencies are evident in psychiatry or as soon as one studies the history of humanity. Jung and Bleuer preferred to adopt a traditional position of vitalism. They believed that all the dimensions of the organism are animated by a basic energy. This energy is then used by a variety of propensions such as the sexual need, domination, aggression, and so on. Jung’s vital force contained as much shadow as it did light, as much destructive as constructive creativity. Because they refused to accept the primacy of the libido, Freud engineered their expulsion from the Psychoanalytic Association before World War I.67
Behold, in The Ego and the Id (1923a), Freud rejoins his old protagonists, at least partially, when he writes that the energy that animates the affects and thoughts is neutral and takes on erotic or destructive aspects. But he refuses to recognize that this reformulation was influenced by his discussions with Jung. In 1912, Sabina Spielrein consulted with Freud with regard to her private and therapeutic relations with Jung. Freud encouraged her to publish, in a psychoanalytic journal, an article on the death impulse. There was probably a thread of thoughts that go from Jung to Spielrein and from readers of Spielrein to Freud’s Thanatos. In 1926, in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, he distinguishes the mechanisms of the repression of the libido on the one hand and the repression of anxiety on the other.68 This analysis was taken up by Melanie Klein (1955) to explore the destructive human tendencies in “normal” individuals, without any discernible psychopathology, that seem to be already in place in the very young child.
It is useful to clearly distinguish the Second Topography from the vantage point of the Thanatos hypothesis. These two models were developed during the same period but in parallel. Wilhelm Reich adopts the first model and rejects the second, whereas Melanie Klein blends them together. Others, like Otto Fenichel, differentiate them, all the while using them in parallel fashion. In the psychoanalytic literature of the start of the twenty-first century, I still find many discussions based on revised versions of Freud’s Second Topography and very few that evoke the innate instinct to destroy. Having said this, the pleasure principle is also less omnipresent. Fenichel (1934) already insisted more on a defense system that protects from the pain of anxiety than on a psyche ready to risk everything to satisfy a desire to maximize the experience of pleasure. Psychoanalysis today, which long ago left the enclosure of neurosis, attempts to integrate the complexity of the violence of abuse, perversion, and dependence without having recourse to simplistic metaphors.69