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Abstract
Noise and silence are seldom remarked upon as the necessary dynamic elements in psychoanalytic talk. Classics of linguistic and communication theory serve to demonstrate this dynamic with reference to primary, secondary, and tertiary transferences and countertransferences. The general problem of analytic work of all kinds is discussed with particular reference to Stephen Hawking's idea of singularity and astrophysical time. What is unusual for psychoanalysis among other analytic sciences is that it must, in session, deal with the tensions between interior and exterior noises for which the concept of imaginary time is important. Freud's concepts of traumatic neurosis and infantile morbid anxiety are considered in respect to the uncanny as the singularity in which noise and silence operate and are, from time to time, resolved in the unconscious culture of the dynamic relations between patients and analysts.
Notes
1 For a primary instance of the scientific study of neurological differences in male and female orgasm, see Portner (Citation2016). Also, see Portner (2008) on empirically based speculation that male ejaculation is an evolutionary adaptation to the necessities of species reproduction.
2 Hereafter a word is marked by italics (hence: cow) and the <thing itself> is marked by angle brackets, otherwise known as the less-than/more-than signs (thus: <cow>).
3 The one exception is onomatopoeia in which the spoken sound sounds like the real thing. Cows <moo>, cats <meow>, birds <tweet>.
4 Here and throughout gendered pronouns are managed by assuming that the analyst is feminine and the patient is masculine—thus to avoid over cumbersome “he or she” constructions.
5 A <personage> is a real thing to be distinguished from a <person>, also a real-world thing. Strictly speaking a personage is a real person to whom a degree of celebrity is granted. As such, personage applies to a <person> who, in situ, is treated with respect, if not awe, due to her elevated status in relation to others. A secondary reference of <personage> is to drama, as in a character in a performance. The applicability to the psychoanalytic relation hardly needs comment. Even when the transference is negative, the analyst plays the role of a <personage> to the patient's <person>.
6 Being a good hetero boy myself, I can only speculate whether female patients suffer the comparable infantilizing effect of wanting to be good girls. After decades of close observation, I tend to think not. But then, when in the 1950s I first started seriously acting out my good boy character, good American girls were thought of as those who would not fuck in the back seat of our used Fords. We who were then earnestly good boys did not force the issue. We settled for a hand under a bra and an occasional hand job.
7 See Grosz (Citation2013); cf. Lemert (Citation2014).
8 It is strange that the infinitive phrase <to analyze> can have, as here, many the same qualities as a gerund—a noun composed from a verb. Thus, in a discussion of an analytic process the word is the thing itself.
9 From the Greek: ἀνάλυσις (analysis, “a breaking up,” from ana- (“up, throughout”) and lysis (“a loosening”).
10 For more technical discussions or related aspects of singularity, see: Good, (Citation1965) and Andréasson, Kunze, and Rein (Citation2007). For philosophical discussions, see Chalmers (Citation2010) and Steinhart (Citation2012). And for the future prospects of a coming singularity, see Kurzweil, Citation2005; cf. Madrigal, (Citation2013).
11 See, for one example: Parsons, Citation1951).
12 Referring to the British physicist Roger Penrose's succinct description of a black hole, Hawking describes the singularity state this way: “Using the way light cones behave in general relativity, together with the fact that gravity is always attractive, [Penrose] showed that a star collapsing under its own gravity is trapped in a region whose surface eventually shrinks to zero size. And, since the surface of the region shrinks to zero, so too must its volume. All the matter in the star will be compressed into a region of zero volume, so the density of matter and the curvature of space-time become infinite. In other words, one has a singularity contained within a region of space-time known as a black hole.” See Hawking (Citation1988, ch. 3).
13 Lacan is the foremost proponent of the imaginary in psychoanalysis—a concept that pervades his work; see Lacan, Citation2006a, Citation2006b, Citation2006c). For a more social theoretical discussion, see Castoriadis (Citation1997).
14 Speaking of Lacan, his short (or variable-length) session would not seem to violate the conditions of imaginary time. In fact, he seemed to consider this practice a way of preserving and heightening the patient's experience of the finite time of a particular session.
15 Most famously, John Maynard Keynes, who more than anyone shaped 20th-century economic policy. Keynes resigned as a delegate to the Versailles Peace conference because he foresaw the economic disaster it would incite (as indeed it did). See Keynes (Citation1920).
16 On the effects of World War I on Freud's thinking in and around 1920 see Gay (Citation1988, pp. 342–357), for example, Gay's strong claim (p. 357): “What the Great War had done, Freud concluded, has been to make these unpalatable truths highly visible by exposing cultivated evasiveness for what it is. The war has ‘stripped us of our later cultural superimpositions, and has let the primeval man within us into the light.’” The internal quote is apparently from Freud's 1915 paper “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.”
17 But see also, Gay (Citation1988, p. 389) where he notes that 1921 was also when Freud began to consider cutting back his analytic patient hours.
18 One of the curiosities of the early 1920s for Freud was that, though the announcement of dual drive theory startled many in his inner circle, Freud himself was perfectly able to relegate the idea to the background in subsequent writings—none more notable that the weak attempt to define group psychology, perhaps his first sociological writing, where the drives appear as a passing note: (Freud, Citation1921/1940, p. 34, n1). On the other hand, the dual drive theory, so deeply embedded in the later writings, were at best hinted at but ill-formed in early writings, notably “Component Instincts and Erotogenic Zones,” in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud, Citation1905/1962 pp. 33–35), By contrast, in Freud's last, if incomplete, synthetic essay, drive theory takes pride of place as the lead topic presented as chapter 2, just after the outline of the psychical apparatus, “The Theory of Instincts,” coming right after the introduction to An Outline of Psycho-analysis (Freud, Citation1940/1949).
19 Freud, of course, had already developed by 1919, at least, a strong theory of morbid anxiety in The Uncanny. But the emphasis on the child's morbid anxiety has wider and telling effects on his emerging interest force of death in emotional life.
20 What follows includes a paraphrase and occasional quotes from Freud's presentation of ‘fort’ [‘gone’] /’da’ [“’there’] game in Freud (Citation1920/1955, pp.14–15).
21 The only ones that come close are Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848), Max Weber's “Science as a Vocation” (1917), and W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1897), possibly also Georg Simmel's “Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). All of these are classic and original essays, filled with fresh ideas, but even these do not approach the intellectual density of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
22 The familiar problems with trieb and Strachey's English drive derive from its relation to instinkt (or the English instinct), which stipulates the drives as from the unconscious interior. Yet, far better than drive or pulsion, as some have recommended, are the dictionary cognates impulse, urge, or desire—all of which are somewhat closer to the idea of an active force.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Charles Lemert
Charles Lemert is senior research scholar in sociology at Yale University.
He is a member of the psychoanalysis and culture faculty in the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. Lemert is author of many books, including Globalization: An Introduction to the End of the Known World (2015), and The Structural Lie (2011). His Silence and Society will be published in 2018.