Introduction

Charles William Johns

The Neurotic Turn lays claim to a turn not dissimilar from those other turns with which we have become familiar — the linguistic turn and, more recently, the speculative turn. However, in this instance, the neurotic turn may not have come about intentionally, but rather as a symptom that, once repressed through the aegis of clinical psychiatry, the social sciences, materialist philosophy, etc., has come gushing forth, expecting its patients to be answerable to the phenomenon. This book started as some kind of pandemic, receiving an influx of passionate, polemical proposals (over twice the amount compiled here) from “victims” throughout the world (spanning from Iran, Finland, France and America, to England, Egypt and China). It seems that there was no shortage of reasons why neurosis, and intellectuals working on neurosis, proliferated and disseminated itself upon that mutable map we call Western culture.

There comes to my mind three immediate reasons why this would be the case. One is concerning psychology, the other is concerning philosophy, and the last is concerning capitalism (if I may use such a broad term).¹

It should come as no surprise, then, that this book has been organised into corresponding sub-headings: Psychology, Philosophy and Capitalism (as well as a highly enjoyable section on Linguistics).

Concerning psychology then, we need only point to the polemics of our very own contributors. Petteri Pietikainen convincingly shows us that the category of neurosis was never discarded because of its apparent obsoleteness (as the DSM confidently expresses) but instead was politically sidelined due to its obscurity; the ever-growing technological era of the twentieth century could not calculate nor locate what appeared as an increasingly “useless” nervous condition. The prevailing widespread manufacturing and use of pharmaceutical drugs did not seem to get rid of the problem, and the growing idealization at the time of man as a healthy, working cog in the capitalist machine seemed to be at odds with not only the ambiguity of neurosis but also its neurotic patients, who showed no signs of gleeful participation with the modes of production and cultural values at the time.

John O’Donoghue gives us another great insight. It is not, like for Pietikainen, that neurosis was deemed too obscure for an overly positivistic society, but that it was too pertinent. O’Donoghue reminds us of those initial constructions of neurosis in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. We soon realize that Freud’s theory of “inhibition” and “excitation”, the unique balance between anal retention/defence mechanism/deferral (Death/Thanatos) and the excess of libidinal forces and wish fulfilment (Love/Eros) that makes us particularly human, is thoroughly consistent with both biological, cultural and empirical data and is found everywhere within present society, even consummated into products (the intricate gauging of the limits of alcohol, prostitution, the anal retention of organized work-time and leisure, etc.).

Dany Nobus cites Ivan Pavlov’s contribution to animal psychology, stating that Pavlov not only paved the way for a non-anthropocentric, a-social characterization of neurosis, but also showed that the sources of stress and pain that caused neurosis in animals could also be seen as relatively independent from the socio-cultural milieu that instantiated the definition. What appears interesting, in retrospect, is that the non-organic (some might say semiotic) associations between stimulus and response (the ringing of a bell associated with food for example) found in Pavlov’s dogs, and the “associationism” found in traditional human psychology, are of the same kind.

Our final essay in this section, by Sean McGrath, beautifully foreshadows the following section on philosophy. McGrath speculates what a Schellingian psychotherapy would have looked like if it would have prevailed. The results are fascinatingly contemporary. For McGrath, dissociation is not described as a negative relation between the living subject and archetypal, unconscious or collective experience, nor some traumatic personal instance, but rather the phenomenological — almost surface — differences of consciousness itself.²

Neurosis has had a long, dark history with the discipline of philosophy; it even precedes and spurs on those neurotic dialogues we have come to call philosophy. The neurotic vector within philosophy (and its philosophers) has been repressed and re-named rigour, discipline, duty, etc. It is only relatively recently in the history of philosophy that philosophers have thrown their hands up and given neurosis its due. Psychology was named “queen of the sciences” by Nietzsche and “the path to the fundamental problems”. Nietzsche’s perspectivism is precisely the disclosing of a neuroses of various perspectives, various inclinations, fighting over one another for their rite of place within history (or within the publication circuit). Nietzsche’s desire for “all joys to return eternally”, as well as the eternal return of the world that supplies such joy, can be seen as a naturalization of that repetition compulsion researched in Freud; of the “remembering, repeating and working through” of lived life. Gilles Deleuze (a great admirer of Nietzsche) went so far as to ontologize the processes of repetition (and the difference that ensued) that made up lived experience. In short, neurosis paved the way for thinking conditions of constitution, relative autonomy of thought, and the possibility and prescience of memory, all without recourse to transcendental forms (Plato), transcendental conditions (Kant), and all without tearing ourselves away from experience (contra scientific instrumentalism/scientific realism). Equally, within political philosophy, it too wouldn’t take long for the thinker to equate thought’s auto-production with the processes of repetition found in society and its culture; technology, entertainment (film, the repetition of advertising images, the repetition of trends in fashion, etc.), means of production, etc. My contribution to this book is nothing short of an all-out attempt at describing every process — whether of mind or of putative matter — as neurotic. This is not without an ethical tone, however; we should be wary of those attempts at neurotic capture within our culture (the conformism of humans and their thoughts by humans and their thoughts), we should be wary of our own prejudices, values, and where they originally come from. Deep research into the history of ideas, their associations, and the mechanisms of seduction found in capitalism (but also our language) must ensue.

Graham Freestone’s contribution is refreshingly philosophical. What I mean by that is that it is not unaware of the perennial problems of Western philosophy, and it is not afraid of upholding both the skeptical position in terms of critiquing the apparent legitimacy of a physical reality nor is it afraid to think through the possibility of the unique autonomy of thought (seen in thinkers such as Descartes). Both these positions have become “antiquated” through the advent of phenomenology, materialism and modern science. Freestone discusses the irreducibility of thought to a physical site (a “regional processor”, as he calls it) and asks whether this irreducibility (and the agnostic disjunction that epistemologically ensues) does not uphold the notion that concepts have their own competing autonomous agencies that “plug themselves into” various minds qua social interaction or qua some bizarre paranormal realm. Freestone empathizes with my own philosophical project and admits that this competing agency of concepts may be aptly termed neurosis. He also admits that the tradition of Western philosophy has been neurotic and makes this a positive claim by substantiating “neurotic doubt” (the “either/or” of a philosophical discourse) as an ontological necessity for thought’s expansive range and proliferation.

John Russon’s text is nothing short of a comprehensive account of a neurotic theory of embodiment. We are led effortlessly through the fundamental stages of walking, eating, sleeping, relationships and more, with a convincing commentary on how such activities are stages of attempted integration within our neurotic society (an attempt at self-actualization within the putative determinations of domestic society). Russon’s magnum opus is a beautiful exercise in showing neurosis threefold. Firstly, by showing how the site of the historical/memorial determines lived experience (how the collective unconscious, or the collectively repressed, moulds an oppressive domesticated life). Secondly, how such determinations are neurotic in reflex and behaviour (working through modes of conditioning, behaviour and repetition not dissimilar from Pavlov’s research into dog semantics). Thirdly, by showing how the psychological/ mental category of neurosis is never simply an affair of the solipsistic cogito but rather seeps into and folds back into our very “being-in-the-world”.

Christopher Ketcham concentrates on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and describes his musings on “the Other” as a kind of ethical precursor to neurosis. Levinas’ demand to treat the “infinite Other” with “infinite responsibility” is self-evidently ambiguous and raises the existential question of how such a relation can be achieved (and not without anxiety). Neurosis is now refreshingly poised as the behaviour of this existential relationship to infinity and alterity and how one responds to the responsibilities of this relationship. It is important to note that this position hasn’t been neglected by psychology; the desire of “sameness” to totalize “otherness” seen in the oedipal complex, the compulsion to repeat and hence make “same” the trace of the other in post-traumatic stress disorder, and the articulation of such a relationship described in the “face of the other” not dissimilar from Lacan’s famous mirrorstage theory. The power of Ketcham’s research is that such an ethically fuelled neurotic relationship acts not only as a heuristic method but is also empirically and behaviourally qualified through direct observations of face-to-face interactions.

The third part of this collection concerns neurosis and its relation to capitalism. It is arguably the case that neurosis is found in its most explicit form through those disciplines studying the mechanics of capitalism — media and technology studies. Technology is the main apparatus in which values of capitalism are made manifest. Mediation is the study of how such technology influences our cognition/navigation of the world.

As early as 1903, Georg Simmel expressed concern with the over-determination of “man” qua “socialtechnological mechanism”. Simmel’s account of metropolitan life describes a process whereby man’s “habitual regularity” (that is his natural patterns of repetition) are manipulated and reflected un-naturally by the external stimuli of the metropolitan environment. The implications of this are twofold; firstly, the metropolis has used the very foundational impulse to repeat (found in man), has de-naturalized it, and has now made such repetition into a dissociated excess concurrently forming neurosis. Secondly, not only is the very construction of metropolitan life neurotic, it also causes symptoms of neurosis within the human; all the everyday anxieties Freud has discussed, such as sensitivity to various social circumstances and relations, the various wishfulfillments desired through the construct of celebrities and fame, worries of being late to various leisure — as well as work — activities, let alone the constant access to various visual stimuli that can at any time concoct itself into a Freudian soup of subconscious objects.

A whole legacy of thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Stiegler and Burgin have all attempted to disclose the inter-subjective dynamics between processes of repetition that “capture” us (as if externally) and processes of repetition that inform us (such as Stiegler’s concept of technics). Katerina Kolozova continues this line of thought in many ways by stressing that the ideological projection of the capitalist subject is always already constructed in a way that bars the encountering of him or herself as carnal, palpable material. This is not dissimilar from the repetitive mass-production of objects that represent commodities as opposed to any defining material basis. The inter-subjective dynamics between the “material” proletariat and the clothing of symbols draped over us (and placed within us) by the ideology of capitalism is one characterized by Kolozova as anorexia nervosa; capitalism’s neurosis with safeguarding us from the sublime, horrific and speculatively liberating encounters with our own “materiality”. We are forced not to eat the full meal of “materiality”, instead being fed smaller and smaller portions or “cuts” of the real until we are neurotically conditioned to flinch at the site of “real food”. It is in this sense that we can never ourselves become what Meillassoux calls “a good meal”, i.e. a target for the radical openness of the “outside”, or in Kolozova’s sense, the radicality of the material. Kolozova also makes the analogy between the neurotic interplay of capital’s delimiting power upon the subject and the ostensibly delimiting neurosis of the enlightenment subject itself.

Patricia Reed continues to liberate neurosis from its traditionally mental, libidinal and a-social genealogy and alternatively inquires into the conditions of a reality which such “neurotic” responses correlate. This inquiry immediately relates neurosis to the organization of “reality” in the collective sphere; politics, technology, economics, etc. The “reality” we encounter through Reed is a highly complex topology of computations existing everywhere within the human habitat. Using Benjamin Bratton’s work on contemporary computation theory, Reed illuminates an awareness of the world we live in (in fact, the world we use) which goes beyond our firstperson experiences. In this context, neurosis in the subject may be an expression of “not wanting to adapt” to such a reality — at odds with our antiquated, naturalistic concepts of human agency and truth. Alternatively, neurosis — as a symptom — may come about through the acknowledgement that our contemporary unconscious and subconscious may be riddled with the “planetary-scaled computation” processes that Bratton and Reed describe.

Mohammad-Ali Rahebi ends our section on capitalism by describing, in Deleuzio-Landian fashion, rates of acceleration and intensification within our current epoch of “cybernetic capitalism”. In predictable accelerationist fashion, Rahebi sees the human subject as a buffering-point within the “smooth” operational space of capitalism, allocating as neurotic exactly this space of stimulation and response. Using a plethora of “posthuman” contemporary philosophy to argue his case for the general flattening of human consciousness and agency into machinic operation, we are simultaneously led into both sublime speculative expanses of cybernetic potential, whilst at the same time realising that perhaps it is our own worry/neurosis — ironically — that may be the last testament to our once self-reflexive, contemplative nature.

Our final section, concerned with linguistics, is opened by Benjamin Noys, who uses the work of Melanie Klein, Jacques Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari to establish a neurosis of writing and the text. Whether it be the libidinal flows and rhythms of text described in Deleuze and Guattari as a truly schizoanalytic practice (stemming from the ontological freedom that a Body Without Organs provides), or the Derridean “trace” of writing appearing as a repressed residue, contradiction or context within the finished text, or the role of writing in the libidinal development of a child (Klein), Noys analyses these positions critically through the notion of their relationship to fantasy. Noys successfully shows us that within these radically different thinkers lies a similar relation; the relationship between the compulsive repetition of words and the fantasy of revival, essence and power.

Patricia Friedrich provides us with a much-needed text, evaluating those figures in mainstream culture that have given us access to the more disciplinarian characteristics of psychological neurosis, while equally showing us their “positive” traits within the domain of creativity and entertainment. The relatability of neurosis to our own cultural disposition is also identified in Friedrich, and the text also discerns that one possibility for the general acceptance of neurosis within popular culture (and not, for example, obsessive-compulsive disorder or amnesia) is that it has a kind of fugitive charm; being thrown out of the psychiatric domain by the power of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it was adopted by philosophers, writers, filmmakers and even comedy. The question, for Friedrich, is how the twentieth-century cultural representation of the neurotic is transforming in the twenty-first; from a controlled measuring of the neurotic as friendly Other represented in the last century, to a present culture already embedded with dissociation and narcissism (tweeting, selfies, etc.), i.e. already as neurotic as the neurotic characters they depicted.

Graham Harman’s essay provides a lucid description of the crucial differences between the godfather of psychology, Sigmund Freud, and the godfathers of schizoanalysis, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari critique Freud’s psychoanalysis, suggesting that there is an apparent disregard for the bare facts, with frequent recourse to displacement and condensation, which always alludes to some underlying “reductive” libidinal factor. Harman shows us how Deleuze and Guattari’s polemical criticisms of Freud’s psychoanalysis also express deeper philosophical differences between the two; Freud’s allegiance to a form of realism found in “the reality principle” which accounts for a difference between the “wish fulfillments” of the subject and the external world, the unification of the id, ego and superego, as opposed to the pluralization of these features, and Freud’s directed attention towards neurosis over psychosis. Harman then goes on to describe the similarities between Freud’s psychology and his own Object-Oriented philosophy. At first the similarities seem obvious; the shared refusal to accept that conscious perception is identical with unconscious and subconscious mental processes or some diaphanous external “reality”. For Harman, like Freud, the causal relation tout court is never totalizable but always indirect, even in some senses metaphorical. Harman’s essay also shines light on a more “acceptable” Freudian psychoanalysis, whereby the scientific goal is not to provide a complete systematical rationalization of the subject but to take into consideration the very real transformations that Freudian analysis recognizes; the awareness that, within every extraction of information from “reality”, such extraction can never leave its reality (or putative substrate) without being transformed into or implicated within something else (even if this is simply the transformation into a representation or symbol). This is also in-keeping with Harman’s philosophy (Harman’s Occasionalism and Vicarious Causation) and, through an ingenious ironic reversal, perhaps agreeable in Deleuzian philosophy too.

Before you engage in these essays, it is perhaps important to state that The Neurotic Turn is not simply making an analogy; that contemporary life is neurotic (if at times it may suggest this, it will be qualified on some level). This analogy has indirectly been presented before, as we have mentioned, from Georg Simmel through to Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm and — soon succeeding — Franco Berardi and Mark Fisher. The contents of this book simultaneously offer something much more specific than such an analogy; it wishes to survey the uprise of neurosis initiated by William Cullen, and later Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as analogous to the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and the uprise in advanced capitalism and its information technologies, enquiring into their possible logical and historical relation. It also wishes to analyse the “failure” of the use-term “neurosis” (the term being made officially redundant in 1980 by the DSM) as a direct effect of its conflation and rise within non-psychological discourses such as philosophy, sociology, media studies, literature and cultural studies. The Neurotic Turn adopts the curious notion that the diagnostic failure to define neurosis showcases the success of its irreducible, autopoietic and hyperstitional nature. The aforementioned historical relation is not without a sense of tragic irony also; the implementation and gradual integration of utilitarian technology (this includes the entertainment industry) has enhanced our conscious spectrum of sights, sounds and potential narratives to the extent of excess/maladaptation. The very equipment that was meant to make us better and more functional has made us sick and neurotic. In this sense, the over-technologization of mental health simply adds fuel to the fire. The removal of neurosis as a scientific category may well symbolise, like the actions of Dr. Frankenstein, the failure of technology to fully understand the human ills that it has created and marks the event of technologies gradual neglect of them.

Charles William Johns
20/2/17

Notes

1  Before I elaborate, in no way do I think the rise of neurosis is restricted to these three disciplines. In fact, the power of neurosis comes from its irreducibility to any such discipline.

2  This brings to mind the anti-essentialist notion of contamination within the sign (Saussure and Derrida) and hence their classification of reality; the notion that differentiation exists and positively motivates consciousness and its disposition without recourse to meta-physical or meta-psychological categories such as the subconscious.