An Ethics not a Psychology how Reality is Constituted a Topology of Subjectivity
I have up till now taken account of a number of points in Freud’s work. And last time you saw how I was led in particular to refer to that curiously situated work, the Entwurf.
You are aware of the reservations that one might have relative to the correspondence with Fliess. It is not a work as such; the text we have isn’t complete. But it is certainly extremely valuable, and especially its supplementary material, among which the Entwurf has a special place.
The Entwurf is very revealing of a kind of substructure of Freud’s thought. Its obvious relationship to all the formulations of his experience that Freud was led to offer subsequently makes it especially precious.
What I had to say about it last time expressed well enough the way in which it will appear in my commentary this year. Contrary to received opinion, I believe that the opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle or between the primary process and the secondary process concerns not so much the sphere of psychology as that of ethics properly speaking.
There was in Freud the perception of the proper dimension in which human action unfolds. And in the appearance of an ideal of mechanistic reduction acknowledged in the Entwurf, one should simply see a compensatory movement or the other face of Freud’s discovery of the fact of neurosis, which is from the beginning seen in that ethical dimension where it is, in effect, situated. The proof of this is in the fact that conflict is in the foreground, and that from the outset this conflict concerns the moral order in what we might call a massive way.
That’s not such a novelty. Every builder of an ethics has had to face the same problem. It is, in fact, in this connection that it is interesting to write a history, or a genealogy, of morals. Not in Nietzsche’s sense, but as a series of ethical systems, i.e., of theoretical reflection on moral experience. That way one understands the central significance of problems that have been posed since the beginning and that have been pursued with a notable constancy.
After all, why is it necessary that thinkers in the field of ethics always return to the ethical problem of the relation of pleasure to the final good, whenever the guidance of human action from a moral point of view is concerned? Why do they always return to this same theme of pleasure? How does one explain that internal demand which constrains the ethical philosopher to try to reduce the antimonies associated with this theme? – from the fact that pleasure appears in many cases to be the end which is in opposition to moral effort, but that the latter has nevertheless to locate its ultimate point of reference there, a point of reference to which the good that is supposed to orient human action is finally reduced. That’s an example, and by no means the only one, of the kind of knot which one comes upon in solutions to the problem. It is instructive for us to see the constancy with which the problem of conflict is posed within every discussion of morals.
Freud in this respect appears as no more than a descendent. Yet he contributes something unmatched in significance, something that has changed the problems of the ethical perspective for us to a degree that we are not yet aware of. That is why we need reference points, and I have already alluded to some of those that we will need to take account of this year.
One has to choose, since I don’t intend to highlight all those writers who have discussed morals. I have discussed Aristotle because I believe that the Nicomachean Ethics is properly speaking the first book to be organized around the problem of an ethics. As you know, there are plenty of others around, before, after, and in Aristotle’s work itself, who focus primarily on the problemn of pleasure. I will not be referring to Epictetus or Seneca here, but I will be discussing utilitarian theory insofar as it is significant for the new direction which culminated in Freud.
I will indicate today the interest of the analysis I will be giving of certain works in the same terms that Freud used in the Entwurf, when he designated something which, to my mind at least, is close to the language that I have taught you over the years to pay attention to in the functioning of the primary process, namely, Bahnung or facilitation.
As far as the statement of the problem of ethics is concerned, Freud’s discourse facilitates something that allows us to go further than anyone has gone before in a domain that is essential to the problems of morality. That will be the inspiration for our discussion this year; it is around the term reality in the true meaning of the word – a term we always use in such a careless way – that the power of Freud’s conception is situated. And it is a power that one can measure through the persistence of Freud’s name in the development of our analytical activity.
It is obvious that it is not the poor little contribution to a physiology of fantasy involved, which explains the passionate interest we might take in reading the Entwurf.
You will no doubt be told that this text is difficult, but it is also exciting. Not so much in French as in German, for the French translation is extraordinarily awkward. It is wanting in precision, emphasis, and resonance throughout. In brief, I am obliged to evoke or to provoke at this point the sense of regret some of you may have that you don’t know German. In German it is a brilliant, pure text; it suggests a virgin source and is altogether remarkable. The outlines of the French translation obliterate that and make it grey. Make the effort to read it and you will realize how true my comment is that one finds there something very different from a work constructed of hypotheses. It is Freud’s first skirmish with that hyperbole of reality he had to deal with in his patients. There we have it; around forty years old he discovers the true dimensions, the profoundly meaningful life, of that reality.
It is not out of a vain concern to refer you to a text that I draw your attention to the Entwurf. Yet why not, after all? You all know that on occasion I know how to take liberties with Freud’s texts and affirm my distance. If for example I have taught you the doctrine of the dominance of a signifier in a subject’s unconscious chain, it is so as to emphasize certain characteristics of our experience. By virtue of a distinction that I don’t fully agree with, a distinction that does nevertheless express something, the paper we heard last night called the above “the experience of the content.” And it affirmed in opposition to it the scaffolding of concepts. Well now, this year I am proposing not simply to be faithful to the text of Freud and to be its exegete, as if it were the source of an unchanging truth that was the model, mold and dress code to be imposed on all our experience.
What are we going to do? We are going to look for the phylum and the development of the concepts in Freud – in the Entwurf in Chapter VII of the Traumdeutung – where he publishes for the first time the opposition between the primary and the secondary processes, and his conception of the relationship between the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious – in the introduction of narcissism into this economy; then in what is called the second topic, with its emphasis on the reciprocal functioning of the ego, the superego and the outside world, which gives a complete expression to things that we may have glimpsed as new shoots in the Entwurf; and finally in the later texts that are still centered around the same theme, “How is reality constituted for man?”, namely, in the 1925 article on Verneinung, which we will look at again together, and in Civilization and Its Discontents, the discontents of man’s situation in the world. The German term is Kultur, and we will perhaps have to try to define its exact meaning in Freud’s writings. He never takes over concepts in a neutral, conventional sense; a concept has always for him a fully assumed significance.
It turns out then that if we are following so closely the development of Freud’s metapsychology this year, it is in order to uncover the traces of a theory that reflects an ethical thought. The latter is, in fact, at the center of our work as analysts, however difficult it may be to realize it fully, and it is also the latter which holds together all those who constitute the analytic community – that dispersion, which often gives the impression of being a mere scattering, of a fundamental intuition that is taken up by each one of us from one perspective or another.
If we always return to Freud, it is because he started out with an initial, central intuition, which is ethical in kind. I believe it essential to emphasize that, if we are to understand our experience and animate it, and if we are not to lose our way and allow it to be degraded. That’s the reason why I am tackling this subject this year.
Last time I was pleased to hear an echo, a kind of response.
Two of you who for other reasons are involved in rereading the Entwurf – because they are working on a lexicon and perhaps for personal reasons – came to tell me after my seminar how happy they were with the way in which I had discussed Freud’s text; it helped justify the interest of their own rereading.
I, therefore, had no difficulty remembering – it is something of which I am painfully aware – that this seminar is a seminar, and that it would be a good idea if it were not simply the signifier “seminar” alone that maintained its right to such a denomination. That is why I asked one of the two people to come and tell us the thoughts inspired in him by the way in which I related the subject of this seminar to the Entwurf You will hear Jean-Bertrand Lefèvre-Pontalis, but his colleague, Jean Laplanche, and he are currently equally on top of the Entwurf a work that, as Valabrega noted just now, you really have to have fresh in your memory, if you are to say anything valid about it. Is that really true? I don’t know, for one ends up realizing that it’s not as complicated as all that.
Mr. Lefèvre-Pontalis: “There is a slight misunderstanding that I would like to clear up. I am by no means a specialist of the Entwurf and I haven’t reread it — I am in the process of reading it. Dr. Lacan asked me to go over a number of points made in his seminar last week, including especially the question of the relation to reality, that he described as particularly problematic, if not downright paradoxical, in this early text of Freud.” (Mr. Lefèvre-Pontalis’s presentation followed.)
I would like to thank you for what you have done today. It will perhaps enable us to introduce this year a way of dividing up the seminar that will allow me to stop now and then, to take a rest, and at the same time have another use.
It seems to me that you presented with remarkable elegance the vital armature of a problem where one risks getting lost in details that are, I must say, extraordinarily tempting. I did occasionally regret that you didn’t enter into the detail of the position of the Bahnung, on the one hand, and the Befriedigungserlebnis, on the other. I also regretted that you didn’t remind us of the topology that the system φ, ψ, ω, presupposes. All that might perhaps have illuminated things. But it is clear that one could spend a whole term, indeed a year, simply in the attempt to rectify the distortions of certain of the Entwurf’s original intuitions, distortions caused by the English translation.
I notice an example of this more or less at random. Bahnung is translated into English by “facilitation.” It is obvious that the word has an exactly opposite meaning. Bahnung suggests the creation of a continuous way, a chain, and I even have the feeling that it can be related to the signifying chain insofar as Freud says that the development of the ψ apparatus replaces simple quantity by quantity plus Bahnung, that is to say its articulation. The English translation, “facilitation,” slides over the thing.
The French translation was modeled on the English text. As a result, all its mistakes have been multiplied, and there are even cases where its text is absolutely unintelligible compared to a simple German text.
Nevertheless, I do believe that you emphasized the points that our following discussions will take up, discussions that will lead us back to the relationship between the reality principle and the pleasure principle. You showed the paradox involved by indicating that the pleasure principle cannot be inscribed in a biological system. Yet, my goodness, the mystery isn’t so great if we see that this state of affairs is supported in the following way, namely, that the subject’s experience of satisfaction is entirely dependent on the other, on the one whom Freud designates in a beautiful expression that you didn’t emphasize, I am sorry to say, the Nebenmensch. I will have the opportunity to proffer a few quotations so as to show that it is through the intermediary of the Nebenmensch as speaking subject that everything that has to do with the thought processes is able to take shape in the subjectivity of the subject.
I ask you to refer to the double column table that I drew for you last time. This diagram will be of use to us until the end of our presentation and will enable us to conceive of the pleasure function and the reality function in a relationship that we will have to bind together more and more closely. If you approach them in another way, you end up with the paradox that you perhaps overemphasized today, namely, that there is no plausible reason why reality should be heard and should end up prevailing. Experience proves it to be overbundant for the human species, which for the time being is not in danger of extinction. The prospect is exactly the opposite. Pleasure in the human economy is only ever articulated in a certain relationship to this point, which is no doubt always left empty, enigmatic, but which presents a certain relationship to what man takes to be reality. And it is through this that we manage to approach ever more closely that intuition, that apperception of reality which animates the whole development of Freud’s thought.
Freud posits that the ψ system must always contain a certain level of Qἠ quantity, which will play to the end an essential role. The discharge cannot, in effect, be complete, reach a zero level, after which the psychic apparatus achieves a final state of rest. The latter is certainly not the plausible goal or end of the functioning of the pleasure principle. Freud wonders, therefore – and this is something that the translation misses – how one can justify that it is at such a level that the quantity which regulates everything is maintained.
You perhaps skipped a little quickly over the reference to the ψ system and the φ system. If the one is related to exogenous stimulations, it isn’t enough to say that the other is related to endogenous stimulations. An important part of the ψ system is, in fact, constituted of raw Q quantities from the outside which are transformed into quantities that are by no means comparable to those that characterize the ψ system, among which the latter system organizes whatever reaches it from the outside, and does so in a way that is clearly expressed by Freud as apparently being similar to Fechner’s theory – it is a matter of the transformation of what is pure and simple quantity into “complication.” Freud uses the same Latin term, complicationes.
Thus we have the following scheme. On the one hand is the φ system. On the other is the ψ system, which is a highly complex network capable of shrinkage and of Aufbau, that is to say of extension. At this point of the theory, there occurs between the two a crossing over, which is indicated in Freud’s little diagram. Once a certain limit is passed, that which arrives as quantity is completely transformed as far as its structure is concerned. This notion of structure, of Aufbau, is represented by Freud as essential. He distinguishes in the ψ apparatus between its Aufbau, to retain quantity, and its function, which is to discharge it, die Funktion der Abfuhr. The function isn’t simply to circulate and discharge; it appears at this level as split.
One must realize that this apparatus is presented to us as isolated in a living being. It is the nervous system that is being studied and the totality of the organism. The latter is an extremely important point whose significance is to my mind obvious. It affirms and sustains itself in a very different way from the hypotheses that Freud evokes nicely when he says that if one has a taste for them, one should only take them seriously once their arbitrary nature has been attenuated – die Willkürlichkeit der Constructio ad hoc. It seems obvious to me that this apparatus is a topology of subjectivity, of subjectivity insofar as it arises and is constructed on the surface of an organism.
There is also in the ψ system an important portion that Freud distinguishes from the part called the nucleus, namely, the Spinalneuronen, which are open to endogenous stimulation, a stimulation on the side where there is no apparatus transforming the quantities.
One finds there a wealth of material that, given your wholly legitimate purpose to simplify, you failed to mention. By way of linking up with what I will have to say next time, I will do so.
There is, for example, the notion of Schlüsselneuronen, which have a certain function in relation to that part of the ψ system which is turned toward endogeny and which receives its quantities. The Schlüsselneuronen are a particular form of discharge that occurs within the ψ system. Yet paradoxically that discharge has as its function to increase the pressure. He also calls these Schlüsselneuronen, motorische Neuronen and I don’t think it is a mistake. They provoke stimulations that occur within the ψ system, a series of movements which increase the tension still further and which as a result are at the origin of current neuroses. And this is a problem which has been particularly neglected, but that is for us of great interest.
We will not go into that now, however. The important point is that every-thing that happens here offers the paradox of being in the same place as that in which the principle of articulation by the Bahnung reigns, the same place, too, in which the whole hallucinatory phenomenon of perception occurs, of that false reality to which, in brief, the human organism is predestined. It is again in this same place that the processes oriented and dominated by reality are unconsciously formed, insofar at least as it is a question of the subject finding the path to satisfaction. In this instance satisfaction should not be confused with the pleasure principle – this is a topic that emerges, oddly enough, at the end of the third part of the text. You could not, of course, lead us right through such a rich text. When Freud sketches out what the normal functioning of the apparatus might represent, he speaks not of specific reaction but of specific action as corresponding to satisfaction. There is a big system behind that spezifische Aktion, for it can only correspond, in fact, to the refound object. We find here the foundation of the principle of repetition in Freud, and it is something we will have to come back to. That specific action will always be missing something. It is not distinguishable from what takes place when a motor reaction occurs, for it is, in effect, a reaction, a pure act, the discharge of an action.
There is a very long passage that I will have occasion to come back to and to distill for you. There is no more vibrant commentary on the gap that is inherent in human experience, on the distance that is manifested in man between the articulation of a wish and what occurs when his desire sets out on the path of its realization. Freud expresses there the reason why there is always something that is far from finding satisfaction and which doesn’t include the characteristics sought in a specific action. And he concludes with the words – I seem to remember that they are the last words of his paper – “monotonous quality.” Compared with anything the subject seeks out, that which occurs in the domain of motor discharge always has a diminished character.
We cannot avoid giving that remark the approbation of the most profound moral experience.
By way of concluding these thoughts today, I will draw your attention to the analogy that exists between, on the one hand, that search for an archaic – one might almost say a regressive – quality of indefinable pleasure which animates unconscious instinct as a whole and, on the other, that which is realized and satisfying in the fullest of senses, in the moral sense as such.
That is far more than an analogy; it reaches a level of profundity which has perhaps never previously been articulated as such.
December 2, 1959