Arkady Plotnitsky
Introduced by Sigmund Freud at the intersection of science and (indirectly but importantly) literature and art, psychoanalysis has had a long history of complex and often stormy relationships with both science and literature, and with other arts. The relationships between psychoanalysis and science have been particularly acrimonious because the scientific claims of psychoanalysis have been seen as controversial and often dismissed altogether. I shall here adopt a contrasting position and, while recognizing the complexity of these relationships, focus on their productive nature, more in accord with the history of the relationships between psychoanalysis and literature, although these relationships have not been free from controversy either.
The topic is vast, and even sketching it poses difficulties and forces one to make decisions unfortunately limiting the argument. First, I shall restrict myself to psychoanalytic theory and bypass psychoanalytic practice, although psychoanalytic theory is grounded in this practice. It is, however, psychoanalytic theory that is of primary interest and significance for my subject, since my discussion is concerned with psychoanalysis in relation to science and literature, and thus also with the relationships between literature and science. The applications of psychoanalytic techniques in the study of science and, especially, literature (e.g., in biographical and historical studies of science and, most extensively, in considering literary authors, characters, and texts) are important, and these approaches have a long and well-known history. Nevertheless, as I write this, conceptual affinities and interactions among psychoanalysis, literature, and science appear to be particularly significant and implicative.
My second decision is largely to focus on the concept of the unconscious. By this I mean a new and specific concept of the unconscious, that is, the concept whose conceptual architecture is shaped by other key psychoanalytic concepts, such as repression, anxiety, pleasure and reality principles, the death drive, and so forth. This psychoanalytic grounding of the “unconscious” must be kept in mind, although only some of these other concepts, most particularly “consciousness,” will be addressed here. The concept of the unconscious is, however, the greatest conceptual discovery of psychoanalysis, and focusing on it will be the most effective way to explore the relationships among psychoanalysis, literature, and science.
My third decision is to center my discussion on two founding thinkers, Freud himself and Jacques Lacan. The body of major psychoanalytic work, even as concerns the connections of psychoanalysis to literature and science, cannot of course be limited to Freud and Lacan, and it is not my intention to diminish the contributions of other figures. Nevertheless, first, Freud and Lacan have exerted the greatest conceptual influence on psychoanalytic thinking. Second, I would contend that the relationships between psychoanalysis and science (including mathematics), and among psychoanalysis, science, and literature, found their most dramatic and poignant manifestations in Freud and Lacan.
It is tempting to formulate my grounding thesis in one simply stated sentence: Freud is a “scientist” and Lacan is a “mathematician” of psychoanalysis. Freud, a neuroscientist and a medical doctor by training, thinks like a natural scientist, say, a biologist. The genealogy of psychoanalysis, from the work of Freud’s key precursors to his early Project for Scientific Psychology (1895), is primarily scientific, and in developing psychoanalysis Freud had a scientific project in mind. By contrast, Lacan thinks as a mathematician: a certain mathematical or mathematical-like thinking shapes Lacan’s psychoanalytic theorizing, as against that of Freud, for whom the biological sciences appear to have been the primary models. Lacan thinks as a scientist, too, but, in contrast to Freud, more like a twentieth-century mathematical physicist, especially a quantum physicist, say, Werner Heisenberg or P.A.M. Dirac, whose thinking is of course more rigorously mathematical. Indeed, as I shall explain, this may be a better parallel, especially given that both Lacan’s thought and quantum theory are shaped by an analogous radical epistemology, which Freud was hesitant to adopt, even though he might have realized it to be possible. In particular, Lacan understands what he calls “the Real” in the same way that quantum theory understands quantum objects and processes (the quantum “Real”). While inferred through their indirect effects upon phenomena that can be observed, they are not only beyond observation but also beyond any description, or even conception (see Plotnitsky 2002a). Correlatively, in both theories, chance acquires a central role; and quantum-mechanical predictions are essentially probabilistic in character.
It would not be possible to trace the history of the ideas and ways of thinking leading to Freud’s and then Lacan’s conceptuality and epistemology. This history reaches as far back as the pre-Socratics. Kant’s work, however, appears unavoidable:
We have … no elements for the cognition of things except insofar as an intuition can be given corresponding to these concepts, consequently … we have cognition of no object as a thing in itself [noumenon], but only insofar as it is an object of sensible intuition, i.e. as an appearance [phenomenon]; from which follows the limitation of all even possible speculative cognition of reason [Vernunft] to mere objects of experience. Yet … even if we cannot cognize [kennen] these same objects as things in themselves, we at least must be able to think [denken] [about] them as things in themselves. To cognize an object, it is required that I be able to prove its possibility (whether by the testimony of experience from its actuality or a priori through reason). But I can think whatever I like, as long as I do not contradict myself, i.e., as long as my concept is a possible thought, even if I cannot give any assurance whether or not there is a corresponding object somewhere within the sum total of all possibilities. But in order to ascribe objective validity to such a concept … something more is required. This “more,” however, need not be sought in theoretical sources of cognition; it may also lie in practical ones.
(Kant 1997: 115)
This passage captures the essential grounds not only of modern philosophical but also of modern (post-Galilean) scientific thought. Psychoanalysis, too, defines itself in relation to Kant’s epistemology, including as concerns its connections to modern science and, in more complex ways, literature or philosophy. Indeed, the modern history of the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science is shaped by this epistemology as well.
A science, such as physics or biology, or a theory in another domain, may deal with either phenomena or noumena, or with both types of entities and the relationships between them, as most of modern sciences and philosophy do. A theory of this type would, at least in principle or by way of idealization, determine all of its objects as directly or indirectly knowable or, on the model of Kant’s things in themselves, at least as thinkable. Accordingly, there might be reasons, theoretical (or experimental) or practical, to accept this thinking – for example, that material bodies ultimately have an atomic constitution – as correct, or at least as sufficiently correct. Classical physics may be seen as the main paradigmatic model of such a theory for both science and often, as in Kant, philosophy. Physics deals only with idealized and, specifically, mathematized models of nature, either more directly, like in classical mechanics or astronomy, or indirectly, as in the (classical) molecular physics or molecular biology. Such theories may also be termed epistemologically classical.
However, it is also possible to have theories that are, by contrast, defined by the fact that they place the ultimate objects they consider to be not only beyond their own reach or the reach of all knowledge, but also beyond any possible conception. These objects are literally un-thinkable, along the lines of the Lacanian Real. Quantum theory is a theory of this type, at least in some interpretations, such as the one adopted here, following Bohr and Heisenberg. One might call such theories epistemologically non-classical. Certain forms of modern biology, including, beginning with Darwin, evolutionary theory, pursue non-classical theorizing as well. Philosophical examples (there are not many) include Nietzsche’s philosophy and, following Nietzsche, that of Bataille and Derrida, both of whom were significantly influenced by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is positioned between classical and non-classical epistemology, with Lacan expressly moving it into the non-classical register. Psychoanalysis’s relationships with literature have played an important role in the non-classical (re) positioning of psychoanalysis, again, especially in Lacan. Literature provides important instances of non-classical thinking, and sometimes, beginning at least with the Romantics, such as Kleist, Percy Shelley, and Keats, it defines itself accordingly. Beginning with Plato, literature has been defined as something that can partake in or capture something of the divine or the sublime, say, by way of the divine madness (a proto-psychoanalytic concept already by virtue of implying a certain unconscious) in Plato’s Ion. (In his later works, Plato denies literature this capacity and instead claims it for philosophy.) In modern literature this possibility is radically rethought, along with the very existence of such a transcendent realm, divine or other.
It is crucial for understanding the nature of non-classical thought that, rather than merely postulated or imagined, unthinkable entities are rigorously defined by means of a given non-classical theory. The existence of such unthinkable objects and the fact that they are unthinkable are essential to what the theory can do in terms of knowledge, explanation, or prediction. The unthinkable is placed inside and is made a constitutive part of the theory, rather than positioned outside this theory. Thus, unobservable and (in their nature and behavior) undescribable and ultimately inconceivable quantum entities, such as electrons and photons, are introduced by quantum theory in order to account for their observable effects manifest in our experimental technology, such as cloud chambers. These are traces, literally, in Derrida’s sense of the trace, insofar as their ultimate origin is never traceable or definable (Plotnitsky 2002a: 231–33). Similarly, the unconscious [das Unbewusste] in Freud (sometimes against his own grain) and the Real in Lacan are introduced as a necessary but inaccessible efficacity of certain manifest mental effects or traces.
The mental nature of these effects is important. While we may more readily think of things in themselves as material objects, for Kant the concept equally refers to mental objects as distinguished from phenomena. Kant’s argument has major implications for our understanding of the nature of thought, and Freud expressly appeals to it in defining the unconscious:
In psychoanalysis there is no choice for us but to declare mental processes to be in themselves unconscious, and to compare the perception of them by consciousness with the perception of the outside world through the sense-organs; we even hope to extract some fresh knowledge from the comparison. The psychoanalytic assumption of unconscious mental activity appears to us, on the one hand, a further development of that primitive animism which caused our own consciousness to be reflected in all around us, and, on the other hand, it seems to be an extension of the correction begun by Kant in regard to our views of external perception. Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perception is subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with the phenomena perceived but never really discerned, so psychoanalysis bids us not to set conscious perception in the place of the unconscious mental process which is its object. The mental, like the physical, is not necessarily in reality just what it appears to us to be. It is, however, satisfactory to find that the correction of the inner perception does not present difficulties so great as that of outer perception – that the inner object is less hard to discern truly than is the outside world.
(Freud 1963: 121)
It follows that all evidence concerning these unconscious dynamics is irreducibly indirect. It is not accidental that Freud is a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes (the most famous fictional practitioner of the scientific method in detective work), or that Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories are so important for Lacan. Both Freud and Lacan realized that dealing with indirect and even irreducibly indirect evidence does not prevent the possibility of rigorously scientific psychoanalytic research, although the scientific claims of psychoanalysis have often been questioned because psychoanalytic evidence is of this recondite nature. However, rather than being a problem for psychoanalysis, this criticism reveals an uncritical understanding of the nature of science itself. This misunderstanding persists even in the face of a massive effective critique of it in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science, pursued for about half a century by now, in particular along the so-called constructivist lines. Science often uses indirect evidence, even in classical physics or biology, evolutionary theory, and so forth; and conversely, psychoanalytic evidence and explanations are debated in the psychoanalytic community, just as scientific evidence and cases are debated in scientific communities. In other words, we find the same type of complexity – experimental, theoretical, and institutional – in psychoanalysis as in the natural sciences or mathematics.
In quantum physics, in a non-classical understanding, all evidence concerning quantum objects themselves is irreducibly, unavoidably indirect, which circumstance defines, arguably, as the greatest point of convergence, indeed a mutually illuminating convergence, of psychoanalysis and science. It should be stressed that, in the words of Bohr, who often reflected on the relationship between quantum epistemology and modern psychology, “we are not dealing here with more or less vague analogies, but with an investigation of the conditions for the proper use of our conceptual means of expression” (Bohr 1987, v. 2: 2). The difference between classical and quantum physics may be seen as follows. Classical physics, specifically classical mechanics, was born with Galileo as a representational geometrical theory, in which every physical process considered is, in principle, visualizable or picturable and is geometrically mathematized accordingly. By contrast, quantum theory may be seen as an algebraic theory, which is non-representational and is thus purely formal or symbolic: its mathematics does not relate to any geometrical representation of quantum processes. Indeed, such a representation appears to be impossible. Geometrical or topological concepts may be used by the theory, but, again, as part of the ultimately predictive mathematical machinery, since such objects never describe the ultimate (quantum) objects and processes considered. The mathematics of quantum theory only serves to predict the outcomes of certain specifiable experiments on the basis of the previously performed experiments. In sum, classical physics predicts because it describes, while quantum physics predicts without being able to describe, and moreover, quantum-physical predictions are only statistical. Indeed, it may be shown that the non-classical nature of quantum theory is correlative to the irreducible role of chance and probability there (Plotnitsky 2002a: 74–87).
Both philosophy and science have been reluctant to accept the correlative lack of realism and causality as reflecting how nature ultimately works. As Stephen J. Gould noted, however, literature appears to be more open to this possibility in nature, life, or human affairs alike (Gould 2002: 1340–43). One could hardly be surprised at this difference, given powerful philosophical, ideological, ethical, and political imperatives that have defined both philosophy and science throughout their history, paradigmatically encapsulated by Einstein’s famous refusal to accept that God would play dice with the universe. Non-classical thinking in science does find nearly equally illustrious advocates, such as Bohr and Heisenberg, or Darwin, but only a few. While the same classical imperatives are at work in literature, the latter, often wayward and even deviant, is philosophically less constrained by them than science and, perhaps especially, philosophy, which appears to be more hostile to non-classical alternatives than even science is.
This intellectual conflict is reflected in psychoanalysis as well. It may be noted first that the correlativeness of non-classicality and chance appears to extend to the psychoanalytic field. In the domain of psychoanalytic theory, such predictions are even more subject to chance and are often literally more hazardous (the French hazard also means chance more generally). The point is not missed by Lacan: perhaps following quantum theory, his conception of the Real is defined, correlatively, by its non-classical inaccessibility and by the effects of chance it generates (Lacan 1991: 53–64). Lacan’s use of both algebra and topology may be best understood along these lines of, at most, only partial mappings and indirect relations to the ultimate efficacity (the Real) of psychoanalytic events or effects (Plotnitsky 2002a: 109–56). This efficacity is ultimately inaccessible, but relating to it, including the use of mathematical metaphorical models, is essential.
The non-classical approach – factoring in the role of chance and making use of mathematical metaphorical models – is more characteristic of Lacan than of Freud. Indeed, it is remarkable that, as he says in the passage cited above, Freud thought that the unconscious “does not present difficulties so great as that of outer perception – that the inner object is less hard to discern truly than is the outside world” (Freud 1963: 121). He thought that he could give the unconscious a kind of mechanics, which is largely causal, in particular an Oedipal mechanics, whose model, it is worth noting, derives from literature, read classically in the present sense. Freud’s later models of this “mechanics,” as in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, are primarily biological. Freud thus appears to stop short even of seeing the unconscious character of thinking as placing the ultimate nature of thought beyond knowledge – as being open, at most, only to thinking about, rather than knowing – let alone of making it unavailable even to thinking itself. In the latter (non-classical) case, the suspension of causality at the ultimate level is an automatic consequence. If the nature of a process is unthinkable, it cannot be thought of as causal.
I stress “thinking” because it is the unconscious that does most of thinking itself, which is one of Freud’s greatest scientific insights (Freud 1963: 117), the implications of which for neuroscience took a while to realize, although this happened in part in view of recent remarkable breakthroughs in neurological research, especially molecular biology. Here, too, literature (from Sophocles to Proust and beyond) has been more perceptive and, one might even say, more scientific. While Freud took (deserved) credit for developing a scientific way to study the unconscious, he acknowledged that the unconscious, specifically as thinking, was discovered by poets and philosophers before him. I would argue that consciousness has primarily to do with the presence of phenomena, including of itself as a phenomenon (the phenomenon of self-consciousness), and little to do with thinking, at least as logic, understanding, reason, and so forth.
Nearly, but not altogether! This type of unconditional separation, without mutual interaction and inhibition, may not be possible, as Freud tells us. One cannot uncritically reverse the customary hierarchy of philosophy that, from Plato to Husserl and beyond, has grounded thought in consciousness. Proceeding uncritically in either direction (one often finds this problem in the currently prominent although still emerging discipline of consciousness studies) will not help us to understand the nature of either the unconscious or consciousness, and the latter, as Freud acknowledged, remains enigmatic, perhaps more so than the unconscious. The unconscious should not be thought of as merely some exterior self-present reservoir of ideas that are outside consciousness and that may or may not become available to the latter, although this type of traffic between both domains is at work. The unconscious is better seen as referring to the non-classical dynamics that continuously involves the reciprocal and mutually inhibiting interactions with consciousness upon which this dynamics produces certain effects, similarly to the way quantum objects interact with the classical macro world in the non-classical view of quantum physics. Nevertheless, it may be maintained that consciousness encompasses only a small part of thinking vis-à-vis unconscious thought processes.
This view extends and, again, via Lacan, non-classically radicalizes Freud. As Lacan says, crediting Freud with “truly unprecedented boldness”:
When Freud realized that it was in the field of the dream that he had to find confirmation of what he had learned from his experience of the hysteric, he began to move forward with truly unprecedented boldness. What does he tell us now about the unconscious? He declares that it is constituted essentially, not by what consciousness may evoke, extend, locate, bring out of the subliminal, but by that which is, essentially, refused. And how does Freud call this? He calls it by the same term by which Descartes designates what I just called his point of application – Gedanken, thought. There are thoughts in this field of the beyond of consciousness, and it is impossible to represent these thoughts other than in the same homology of determination in which the subject of the I think finds himself in relation to the articulation of the I doubt.
(Lacan 1991: 43–44)
Thus, the unconscious, as theoretically defined in the field of psychoanalysis, is primarily thinking – Gedanken – and, conversely, thinking is primarily unconscious. Thus understood, the unconscious may need to be theorized non-classically, as something that is ultimately beyond our ability to think about it, except for its actually or potentially manifest effects, from which we infer this unthinkability. It is a major contribution of Lacan that he extends this non-classical epistemology, beyond the unconscious, to his concept of the Real. In this view, inaccessible, on the one hand, and productive of effects, on the other, as it may be, the unconscious is defined as the field of the effects of the Real, as an even more remote efficacity, which may also have conscious effects. We deal here with the difference between two different forms of the unthinkable, although both are equally unthinkable.
In Lacan, effects of the Real may be manifest either in the Imaginary or in the Symbolic register. The Imaginary is, roughly, an illusionary and essentially narcissistic interior image production, through which the human subject constructs its image of itself and its objects of desire. The Symbolic is, roughly, an organization of subjectivity, governed by the laws of exteriority, the law of the Other, which is essentially linguistic in nature, and which re-channels the Imaginary, primarily along Oedipal lines. Both of these registers have more hidden but still more classically defined strata, as well as inaccessible, non-classically defined strata. It is possible, Lacan suggests, that in the neo-natal state we have a closer access to the Real, but these pre-early traces of the Real, if they still exist, would no longer enable us to image or even think the nature of the Real. In other words, whether they are found in memory or new experiences, traces of the Lacanian Real, just as they are in quantum theory, are traces in Derrida’s (in turn, non-classical) sense.
Although the character and role of this thinking could be interpreted along more classical lines (see, e.g., essays assembled in Ragland and Milovanovic 2004), I would place Lacan’s mathematical-like thinking in relation to this epistemology. I would argue that at the very least his psychoanalytic “algebra”–in part modeled in complex and imaginary numbers, such as the square root of minus 1 (Lacan 2004: 281–312) – and at least some his “topology” obeys the non-classical epistemological paradigm, with the Real placed in the position of the irreducibly inaccessible. There is no object, physical or phenomenal, that such mathematical entities represent, made apparent to consciousness, although there could be rules that can link them to representable objects (Plotnitsky 2002a: 141–54). Lacan sees the dynamics of the unconscious in terms of the effects of the irreducibly inaccessible, ultimately arising from the Real, rather than in terms of a causal dynamics responsible only for certain manifest effects, such as those associated with neurosis.
In Freud, too, the ultimate nature of consciousness and of the unconscious effects is hidden in the physical material abyss, which is unknowable and perhaps unconceivable. However, the unconscious is still mapped by an Oedipalized mechanics of neuroses. Freud’s view of the entities defining this mechanics (such as the phallus or castration) in terms of signifieds, rather than in terms of signifiers, as in Lacan, is itself part of this mechanics, while a certain primacy of signifiers in Lacan is correlative to his non-classical quasi-mathematization of psychoanalytic theory. In both cases, certain psychoanalytic effects of the unconscious are describable and are described by the theory. By analogy with quantum mechanics, however, the Oedipal, as the Lacanian unconscious, is treated only in terms of effects, describable or hidden, and a certain mathe-matical-like formal machinery, defined by the signifiers, a kind of calculus, relating to these effects. The Real, as I said, provides a still more remote stratum of this unthinkable efficacity, thus doubling it. Depending on the situation or case, effects may be found in the (under-Oedipalized) Imaginary register or the (properly Oedipalized) Symbolic register. And, like in quantum theory, the role of chance, arguably the most powerful and fundamental effect of the Real, remains irreducible.
From this perspective, the human brain may be seen as an organic technology suited for interactions with both classical and non-classical domains, but this technology interacts with each domain differently. This machinery enables both our unconscious thinking and our consciousness. For one biological-evolutionary reason or another, our bodies appear to enable us to “see,” to consciously experience, only a classical world, and both classical physics and our picture of consciousness itself (more) naturally arise in this field of intuitive experience. This is why we must begin with consciousness. There is no other place to begin, including in the case of psychoanalysis or quantum physics, whose data, too, are ultimately given only to our consciousness. However, we also arrive, now by means of theoretical thinking, at the idea of quantum objects and processes in physics and at the idea of the unconscious in psychoanalysis, while the workings of both the quantum and the unconscious, or the Real, are conceived as unthinkable in their ultimate constitution.
To think how our brains or our bodies enable our minds to conceive the unthinkable as the ground of thought is a formidable task. The interactions among different fields, such as those found in science, philosophy, and art, may not only be helpful but also necessary to approach this task. Psychoanalysis deeply connects to the cognitive sciences, on the one hand, and philosophy and literature, on the other. Possible connections to cognitive sciences, consciousness studies, and neuroscience have been a subject of considerable interest in both philosophy and literary studies in recent years, although mostly along classical epistemological lines and, correlatively, bypassing psychoanalysis, especially in its aspects here considered. I would like to take a different, non-classical, view of the problematic of thought and of the interactions between different fields dealing with this problematic, and to place psychoanalysis in relation to science, art, and philosophy in accordance with this view.
This view extends G. Deleuze and F. Guattari’s argument, according to which it may be necessary to rethink the very nature of thought by considering it as arising from science, philosophy, and art, viewed as primordial forms of the workings of the brain itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 201–18). Deleuze and Guattari see thought as a product of a confrontation between the brain and chaos, and according to them, “The brain is the junction – and not the unity – of the three planes” through which art, science, and philosophy, each in its own way, cut through chaos: “Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes the subject, Thought-brain. They are the three planes, the rafts on which the brain plunges into and confronts the chaos” (208–10). I would argue that the conception of chaos that is necessary here inevitably involves the irreducibly unthinkable of non-classical thought, and in this respect the present argument complements their conjecture. The conjecture, it follows, relates art, science, and philosophy to certain specific forms of neural functioning of the brain itself. Art, science, and philosophy are now seen as more primordial forms of thinking rather than its more mediated products. Or, rather, they arise from something that neurologically defines each as a particular form of the confrontation between thought and chaos, for it would be more accurate to see art, science, and philosophy as manifesting certain specific capacities of the brain: these neurological capacities have to be socially mediated to become art, science, or philosophy.
It is difficult to assess this extraordinary conjecture, as concerns its significance for the future of the sciences of the brain. Deleuze and Guattari offer a philosophical concept of thought and of the brain. I would argue, however, that the conjecture is well worth taking seriously, and indeed the extraordinary developments of neuroscience during the last two decades (since the book’s appearance in 1991), which have redefined the future of the field, suggest that this argument has become even more inviting to consider. Psychoanalysis, specifically Freud’s work, which has enjoyed a new recognition in neuroscience, has much to contribute to this type of project, in particular as concerns its non-classical dimensions. For, arguably more so than any other psychological or neurological field, it has always been engaged with art, science, philosophy, and their intersections; and it will make its further contributions to our understanding of the brain by continuing this engagement, and thus bringing itself closer to the workings of the brain, which was indeed Freud’s great dream.
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——(2004), Ecrits, trans. B. Fink, New York: W.W. Norton.
Plotnitsky, A. (2002a) The Knowable and the Unknowable: modern science, nonclassical thought and the “two cultures”, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Ragland, E. and Milovanovic, D. (eds) (2004) Lacan: topologically speaking, New York: Other Press.