rebirth through incest

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Notes

Christian Kerslake Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy Middlesex University White Hart Lane Tottenham London N17 8HR UK E‐mail: [email protected]

The French title of the whole volume is Présentation de Sacher Masoch; the English title is simply Masochism (New York: Zone, 1991).

In the bibliography to L'Île déserte (Paris: Minuit, 2002), which forms the “official” bibliography of Deleuze's early writings, it is listed as “reprinted” in Coldness and Cruelty. This bibliography, however, is based on Timothy Murphy's bibliography, printed in P. Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), where the same text is rather listed as “reprinted in revised form” in Coldness and Cruelty.

It is worth mentioning that another central figure in the so‐called “anti‐psychiatric” movement of the 1970s alongside Deleuze and Guattari, namely R.D. Laing, was also bewitched for a time by this book, seeing in it anticipations of his idea that a psychotic breakdown could sometimes be the harbinger of a “breakthrough.” Cf. the chapter on “Transcendental Experience” in The Politics of Experience (London: Penguin, 1967), and p. 137, where Jung is mentioned by name. In his biography of Laing, John Clay reports that Laing was reading Jung's Transformations and Symbols of Libido while writing this book (R.D. Laing: A Divided Self (London: Hodder, 1996) 151).

All of Deleuze's work on masochism seems to apply primarily to male masochism. I must leave aside for a future discussion the issue of the status of female masochism within Deleuze's theory.

Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia UP, 1995) 6.

Being written in 1961, the piece does not form a part of the pre‐1953 texts that Deleuze repudiated en masse, so it cannot be dismissed as juvenilia. In fact, it is roughly contemporaneous with Nietzsche and Philosophy (trans. H. Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983)) and may even have been written after, as parts of the latter were published as “Sens et valeurs” in 1959 in Arguments (where the 1961 Masoch piece was also published), with the note that the material was forthcoming, although the book itself did not appear until 1962. Nietzsche and Philosophy makes use of two clearly Jungian concepts: the anima (cf. 20) and the concept of typology, recalling Jung's approach in Psychological Types (cf. 115), although Deleuze does not mention Jung by name (indeed, he gives to Otto Rank the honour of being the psychoanalyst closest in spirit to Nietzsche; 211, n. 5).

The normative status of the paternal function is upheld most vigorously by Lacanian psychoanalysis. According to Lacan, psychoanalysis makes “the Oedipus complex something universal, namely something that exists not only in neurotics but also in normals … for the good reason that if it fails in neurosis, it fails in function of the fact that it is essential as a normalising function” (Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre V: Les Formations de l'inconscient (Paris: Seuil, 1998) 162. Unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher, 15 Jan. 1958, 2. Cf. also Lacan, “Intervention on the Transference,” in J. Mitchell and J. Rose (ed.), Feminine Sexuality (London: Macmillan, 1982) 69). There are two levels to Lacan's claim for the normativity of the paternal function in the Oedipus complex, which in an important passage he alludes to in terms borrowed from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. On the one hand, there is a level “for us,” a transcendental end‐point from which we the theorists reconstruct the conditions for entrance into the symbolic order. Lacan writes: “For us, the father, ‘is’, he is real. But let us not forget that, for us, he is only real because the institutions confer on him, I will not say his role and his function as father, it is not a sociological question, but confer on him his ‘name’ as father” (Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre V: Les Formations de l'inconscient 180. Gallagher translation, 22 Jan. 1958, 2). On the other hand, in order for the paternal function to be truly normative, it must also be binding for the child. The child must be able to “take on” the Law. Lacan's “dialectic of desire” is intended to show how the child is led from an initial immersion in the world of the mother towards the point where it accepts the Name of the Father as a condition for entry into the symbolic order. So he writes: “The first relationships to reality take shape between the mother and the child. It is there that the child will experience the first realities of his contact with the living milieu … For the child, the father has not yet made his entry” (ibid.). The problem for Lacan is that the more he tries to generate for the child the acceptance of the paternal function as passage into the symbolic order, the more the conditions of the symbolic creep back into the child's relation to the mother. For instance, in Seminar V, perhaps Lacan's most detailed exposition of the dialectic of desire, Lacan ascribes the constitutive function of Freud's “fort‐da” game to a “primordial symbolisation between the child and the mother” (ibid. 180). The gap between need and demand opens up a “subjectivation at a first primitive level … [which] consists simply in posing her [the mother] as the primordial being who can be there or not be there” (181). Reformulating Freud's fort‐da game, Lacan posits a primordial symbolisation of this mother who “comes and goes.” “She is called for when she is not there, and she is pushed away when she is there, so that she can be called back” (181–82). That is, her absence provokes the call for her presence, while her presence provokes the thought of her absence. The primordial relation to the mother inaugurates a minimal dialectic, in which presence and absence each collapse into each other, like being and nothingness in the first dialectical movement of Hegel's Logic. This primary opposition, therefore, seems to take place before, that is, independently of, the law of the father.

Seminar XIV, The Logic of Phantasy, 19 Apr. 1967 (unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher, chapter 17, 5). Lacan nevertheless slyly comments that “I took care to have it confirmed to me by the author himself … that he has no experience of psychoanalysis” (6).

Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty 137.

Lacanians tend to use “Jungian” as a term of abuse. For an example, see Joan Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason” in Read my Desire (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994), where Copjec's characterisation of Judith Butler as a “neo‐Jungian” (210) is most likely intended as a low blow. Slavoj Žižek has also sometimes singled out Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term “rhizome,” which Jung also used, as an indication of the suspect nature of Deleuzeanism.

The governing emphasis on the role of the image of the mother remains, and there are scattered clues to a Jungian background; to take one instance, the citation of Hermann Hesse's 1919 novel Demian (Coldness and Cruelty 96), which is perhaps the great Jungian novel, written by Hesse after analysis with a Jungian in 1916.

In “How Do We Recognise Structuralism,” trans. M. McMahon, in C. Stivale, The Two‐Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Guilford, 1998), taking the side of structuralism, Deleuze refers to “the hostility of structuralism towards the methods of the imaginary,” citing “Lacan's critique of Jung”: “The imaginary duplicates and reflects, it projects and identifies, it loses itself in a play of mirrors, but the distinctions that it makes, like the assimilations it carries out, are surface effects that hide the otherwise subtle differential mechanisms of symbolic thought” (269–70). In Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), Deleuze criticises “the Jungian discovery of archetypes” for presupposing that the contents of the past are fixed and self‐identical (104). In Anti‐Oedipus (London: Athlone, 1984), Deleuze and Guattari criticise Jung for taking mythology as a model in the investigation of the unconscious (57).

Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido was originally translated by Beatrice Hinkle in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious. In 1952 Jung revised the book substantially and reissued it as Symbole der Wandlung; this was first translated in 1956 as Symbols of Transformation, 2nd ed., trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967). Unless stated otherwise, I refer here to the reprinted translation of the first edition (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991), which makes up Appendix B to the Collected Works of Jung. However, in order to preserve the sense of the original German title, I refer to it in the main text as Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, but in the footnotes it is referred to by its English title, Psychology of the Unconscious.

Jung, The Psychopathology of Dementia Praecox 4, in Jung, The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, Collected Works, vol. 3. Hereafter I will use “CW” followed by the volume number to refer to The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, eds. Sir Herbert Read et al., trans R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series 20 (New York and Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953–83) 21 vols.

A term used by Theodore Flournoy in his 1899 From India to the Planet Mars to explain how mediums and spiritualists could apparently recall in detail ancient mythological and religious motifs to which they had had no access. The process of cryptomnesia occurs when “certain forgotten memories reappear in the subject to see in them something new” (quoted in Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 128).

Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Foreword to the 4th (Swiss) ed., CW 5: xxiii.

In “A Woman Called Frank” (Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture 50 (1990)), Sonu Shamdasani shows that Jung's claim that Miller's fantasies were a case of “pro‐dromal schizophrenia” was dubious, and that Miller turned out to be incorrectly and unjustly diagnosed by her psychiatrists. Moreover, Jung later admitted that Miller was a stand‐in for himself, and his analyses of her fantasies were really explorations of his own hypnagogic fantasies and dreams.

• The process of regression is beautifully illustrated in an image used by Freud. The libido can be compared with a river which, when it meets with an obstruction, gets dammed up and causes an inundation. If this river has previously, in its upper reaches, dug out other channels, these channels will be filled up again by reason of the damming below … The river has not permanently flowed back into the old channels, but only for as long as the obstruction lasts in the main stream … [These channels] were once stages or stations in development of the main river‐bed, passing possibilities, traces of which still exist and can therefore be used again in times of flood. (Jung, Theory of Psychoanalysis, in Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW 4: 163)

Freud, “Formulations of the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho‐Analysis, 1958) vol. 12, 222. The Standard Edition of Freud is hereafter abbreviated to “SE.”

Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” SE 12: 60–61.

Ibid. 71, 70, 72.

Ibid. 77.

Ibid. 74. Cited in Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 126–27.

Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 128.

In the Schreber case history itself, Freud leaves the alternative open, although re‐emphasises his commitment to seeking sexual aetiology by suggesting that because the paranoiac still “perceives the external world and takes into account any alterations that may happen in it,” it is more probable that psychosis can be explained by a loss of libidinal interest (75). But who would deny that the psychotic has the capacity for perception or registration of change in the external world? The function of reality must involve something more than that. Moreover, Freud himself appeared to accept at the beginning of the argument that psychosis involved a loss of “reality.” Clearly this point only problematises further what is required by a psychoanalytic account of the relation to the external world or to reality.

Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 136.

Ibid. 23.

Ibid. 25.

In his later texts, Jung claims that archetypes are images that appear in the mind as correlates of distinct kinds of brain functioning. They “are the ever‐present and biologically necessary regulators of the instinctual sphere.” Just as the instinct of the leaf‐cutting ant depends for its actualisation on the presence of an inborn image, or the instinct of a bird to fly is triggered by the presence of an image of a particular arrangement of plumage, “the same is true also of man: he has in him these apriori instinct‐types which provide the occasion and pattern for his activities, insofar as he functions instinctively” (Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche” in Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8: 201). In “Instinct and the Unconscious,” Jung writes more obscurely that “the primordial image might suitably be described as the instinct's perception of itself” (ibid. 136). See n. 65 below on Deleuze's own flirtation with the biological formulation of archetypes. The biological approach is perhaps the simplest way to conceive of the correspondence at issue, but it is not the only way, as we will see.

Freud developed his account of the emergence of reality in two main directions. The first trajectory lends itself readily to the kind of elaboration produced by Ferenczi in his “Stages of the Development of the Sense of Reality,” in which the “sense of reality” is gradually built up through the mechanisms of introjection of libidinally invested objects into the psyche, and projection of such objects outside the ego if they are productive of unpleasure. (Sándor Ferenczi, “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality” in First Contributions to Psycho‐Analysis, trans. E. Jones (London: Karnac, 1994) 226f.; and “Introjection and Transference,” ibid. 47f.) In his 1925 paper “Negation,” for instance, Freud writes: “What is bad, what is alien to the ego, and what is external are, to begin with, identical.” The second trajectory is taken up by Lacan, who insists that we first of all must remember that the human child is “born prematurely,” and so any lack of satisfaction is always already understood as a lack of care, related to the enigmatic desire of the other who has duty of care. There is no self‐enclosed state of “primary narcissism”; rather, narcissism concerns the identification with the image of another that one would like to be. If “reality” means anything in this context, it must refer less to some putatively “external world” than to “other people,” that is, to the coherence of the symbolic order, as ideally underwritten by an intersubjective pact of mutual recognition.

See Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 129f. and Theory of Psychoanalysis 102–10 for a fuller account.

Jung, Theory of Psychoanalysis 111 (on p. 125 he identifies libido more simply with “desire”). Cf. Psychology of the Unconscious 123. See n. 80 below.

Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 130. “In nature,” he asserts, “this artificial distinction [between nutritive and sexual phases] does not exist.”

Ibid. 132.

Sometimes it can seem that Jung genuinely understands this primal, self‐differentiating libido to be an objective, biological process. However, Jung also adopts Kantian, Schopenhauerian and Bergsonian positions on the nature of this primal libido. So, in Kantian mode he will call the libido “a complete X, a pure hypothesis, a model or counter, [which] is no more concretely conceivable than the energy known to the world of modern physics” (Theory of Psychoanalysis 124). But then he will allow himself a quasi‐Schopenhauerian conception of a “continuous life‐urge, a will to live” (Theory of Psychoanalysis 123), according to which we are permitted to think the thing‐in‐itself in general through an analogy with our own non‐phenomenal aspect, the will. Jung admits that this conception of libido is “a bit of psychological ‘voluntarism,’” “a throwing of psychological perceptions into material reality” (Psychology of the Unconscious 130). When Jung appeals to Bergson's élan vital, it can only drown these distinctions altogether in a vitalistic confusion. For a detailed survey of the influences on Jung's speculative endeavours, chapter 3 of Sonu Shamdasani's Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology is indispensable.

For instance, the transition from the sexual to the desexualised stage is explained in these terms:

• part of the energy required in the production of eggs and sperma has been transposed into the creation of mechanisms for allurement and protection of the young … The differentiated libido is henceforth desexualised … This now presupposes a very different and very complicated relation to reality, a true function of reality, which, functionally inseparable, is bound up with the needs of procreation. (Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 129, 133)

Jacques Lacan, Seminar 1: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953–54 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) 115. Lacan proceeds to criticise this conception for “illuminat[ing] nothing in the way of mechanisms.” His criticism on this point is unjust, as we will see. He overlooks the mechanism that is really at the heart of Jung's essential insight in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, and which is the “transformation” that reveals the true interest of Jung's genetic conception as a whole: the case of the third phase of the libido, that of “desexualisation.”

Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 151. We will see below why Jung states that initially there is only a “quasi” desexualisation.

“On Psychic Energy” in Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8: 20. While the “mechanistic” standpoint on physical events treats “unchanging substances [which] change their relations to one another according to fixed laws,” the “energic” standpoint assumes that “some kind of energy underlies the changes in phenomena … [and] maintains itself as a constant throughout these changes and finally leads to entropy … The concept [of energy] is founded not on the substances themselves but on their relations” (ibid. 4).

Ibid. 41–42.

Ibid. 9, 20.

Cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 237.

Jung, “On Psychic Energy” 20.

Cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 245–47.

Jung, “On Psychic Energy” 46.

Ibid. 48.

Ibid. 46.

Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE 13: 83–84.

Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 137.

Ibid. 147–49; the example is given again in “On Psychic Energy” 42–43.

In his central chapter on “The Transformation of the Libido,” Jung foregrounds the example of fire, inviting the conclusion that in the last instance reality as such, transcendence pure and simple, is constituted as the accidental by‐product of an illicit, displaced act of masturbation.

Psychology of the Unconscious 18–20. This distinction is made in “On the Two Kinds of Thinking,” the opening chapter of the book. Directed thinking “creates innovations, adaptations, imitates reality and seeks to act upon it,” while phantasy thinking, on the contrary, turns away from this tendency, “sets free subjective wishes, and is, in regard to adaptation, wholly unproductive.” Jung adds that whereas the material of the first kind of thinking comes from movements presently occurring in the actual world, “the material of these thoughts [in the second kind of thinking] which turn away from reality, can naturally be only the past with its thousand memory‐images” (ibid.). The schema recalls Bergson's dualism between perception and memory in Matter and Memory.

Ibid. 20, 18. The de‐animation of reality would thus correspond to a tendency to complete desexualisation at the level of directed thinking (and not just the “quasi” desexualisation of animistic reality). See n. 38 above.

• Letter 315J, Jung to Freud, 17 May 1912, The Freud/Jung Letters, trans R. Manheim and R.F.C. Hull (London: Hogarth, 1974) 505. This is exactly Deleuze and Guattari's argument in Anti‐Oedipus:

  • The law tells us: You shall not marry your mother, and you shall not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so that's what I wanted! … One acts as if it were possible to conclude directly from psychic repression the nature of the repressed, and from the prohibition the nature of what is prohibited. (114)

• In Transformations, Jung expresses his conclusion as follows:

  • Incest probably never possessed particularly great significance as such, because cohabitation with an old woman for all possible motives could hardly be preferred to mating with a young woman. It seems that the mother acquired incestuous significance only retrospectively … Incest prohibition can be understood, therefore, as a result of regression and as the result of a libidinal anxiety, which regressively attacks the mother. Naturally it is difficult or impossible to say from whence this anxiety may have come. (Psychology of the Unconscious 396–97)

Jung, Theory of Psychoanalysis 161–62. In these lectures from 1912, Jung addressed himself once again to a sensitive point in Freud's theory, on which he wanted to force Freud into a corner. In his early work, Freud had stated that actual historical traumas were causally productive of neuroses. Freud publicly retracted that view only in 1906, when he stated that neurotic patients do not suffer from actual memories, but that “the patient's phantasies (or imaginary memories) were mostly produced in puberty,” using “memories of the subject's own sexual activity (infantile masturbation).” (“My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses,” SE 7: 274). If early memories were operative at all, then their reactivation depended essentially on the presence of a trigger in later life. Supposed traumas are given significance only retrospectively in the light of present failures in the psychic economy.

On this reading, Freud's insistence on sexual aetiology finds its application in patients who experience sexual problems in their current life, because they cannot help but interpret their past in terms of their sexual frustrations. In other words, Freud's method tallies first of all with the “neuroses of the young,” who are indeed both obsessed with sex and subject to restrictions on their access to it.

Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Macey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) 118. As we will see in the last section, however, this verdict on the absence of Nachträglichkeit in Jung can be questioned and qualified.

Jung, “On Psychic Energy” 47.

Although further forays into metaphysics are essayed: “Naturally it is difficult or impossible to say from whence this anxiety may have come. I merely venture to suggest that it may have been a question of a primitive separation of the pairs of opposites which are hidden in the will of life: the will for life and for death” (Psychology of the Unconscious 397). We have suggested already that Jung's melange of Kant, Schopenhauer and Bergson is too inconsistent to provide any real theoretical help.

Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 218.

Jung, Symbols of Transformation, CW 5: 419.

For Deleuze's comments on Bachofen in Coldness and Cruelty, see 52–53. Deleuze also continues to refer to Gordon's book right up to A Thousand Plateaus.

On symbolic death, cf. Lacan, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992) 243–56.

Lacan, Séminaire V, 202; Gallagher translation, 29 Jan. 1958, 5. Cf. the account of the praying mantis in Seminar VIII: Transference, 22 Mar. 1961 (unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher, 1–8).

• The mother is more properly an “imago,” that is, an image which has a “living independence in the psychical hierarchy”; it has a certain “autonomy” as a psychical object for the subject (Psychology of the Unconscious 48, n. 6). In “From Sacher‐Masoch to Masochism,” Deleuze writes that

  • it was not left to [Freud] to grasp the role of original Images [that task being left to Jung]; these are not explained by anything apart from themselves, on the contrary, they are at once the terminus of each regression, the determining principle of instincts, and the principle of interpretation of events themselves. Symbols do not allow themselves to be reduced or composed … The irreducible datum of the unconscious is the symbol itself, and not an ultimate symbolised. In truth, all is symbol in the unconscious, sexuality, death no less than everything else.

• In this early paper, Deleuze appears to follow Jung's tendency to explain regressive images as reactualisations of the actual biological past of the species (see n. 29 above); Deleuze writes darkly of a “deeper unconscious which encircles us in a tie of blood [un lien de sang].” This can be compared with another early passage, this time from Deleuze's 1956 essay “Bergson's Concept of Difference.” “If difference itself is biological, consciousness of difference is historical … Consciousness already existed, within and in difference itself. Duration by itself is consciousness, life by itself is consciousness, but it is so by right … [H]istory is what reanimates consciousness, or rather is the place in which it reanimates itself and posits itself in fact” (in J. Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999) 51–52). This “reanimation” in historical consciousness of ancient biological paths of differentiation is entirely consonant with the biological tendency in Jung. In Deleuze's later work, his approach to images becomes clearly distinct from this approach. Inspired by Bergson and Kant, Deleuze will develop a new account of the cognitive synthesis of memory‐images in Difference and Repetition which demands that images of the past always be seen in terms of a developing cognitive whole, with the present as the tip of the “cone,” as it were. Given Jung's own statement that “Kant is my philosopher” (see Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology 168), and his attraction to Bergsonian notions of the past, it is possible that a Bergsonian–Kantian account of the past in Jung could be isolated and detached altogether from the biophilosophical explanation, and that Deleuze is in part effecting such a transformation in Difference and Repetition. My interpretation here is conducted in the light of this later work.

Lacan, Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu in Autres Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001) 30–36.

Ibid. 34.

Ibid. 35, 36.

Ibid. 35. Shuli Barzilai overlooks the Jungian background in her fine study of the enduring importance of Lacan's account of the mother in The Family Complexes, instead focusing on the relation to Rank. See Lacan and the Matter of Origins (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 23–35. Regarding the possible influence of Jung on the early Lacan, Sonu Shamdasani reports that Jung's library included a dedicated copy of Lacan's doctoral thesis on paranoia (private conversation).

Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 213.

Ibid. 283–84.

Ibid. 283.

In Difference and Repetition, basing himself on an opposition that originates with Kierkegaard, Deleuze opposes reminiscence to repetition, the former being a kind of memory that has great analogies with the Jungian emphasis on the role of the past as such. Deleuze writes that “every reminiscence … is erotic. It is always Eros, the noumenon, who allows us to penetrate this pure past in itself” (85). Deleuze wants to claim, however, that the overcoming of reminiscence by repetition is by no means a mere phenomenon of the accession to paternal law. The notion of rebirth as it appears in masochism serves, in effect, as an early model for the concept of repetition.

In his Psychological Types, Jung contends that symbols can be interpreted in two ways: a “semiotic” way and a properly “symbolic” way. “Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogue or an abbreviated designation for a known thing is semiotic.” Freud's notion of the symptom is semiotic in so far as he believes symptoms to be “signs of a definite and generally known underlying process,” in which they are “reduced” down, for instance, to specific repressed sexual content. A symbol taken symbolically, however, “always presupposes that the chosen expression is the best possible description or formulation of a relatively unknown fact, which is nonetheless known to exist, or postulated as existing” (Psychological Types, CW 6: 474, 479, 474; my emphasis). The symbol expresses something, to which existence has been ascertained at some point, but which is indeterminate. Its meaning cannot be determined by retracing the path of substitutions or displacements, finally arriving at the possibility of reduction. Rather, the symbol must instead be approached “synthetically.” (On the synthetic interpretation of symbols, see Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7: 80–89.) This distinction between Freudian sign and Jungian symbol brings us closer to the difference between the Freudian and Jungian unconscious. The difference perhaps turns on the respective priority they give the processes of condensation and displacement in the unconscious. Freud interprets the symptomatic expressions of the unconscious as signs referring legibly back to earlier events. The analyst uncovers the chain of associations that govern a displacement, analysing and decomposing them into their personal origins. Jung argues, on the contrary, that it is more likely that the unconscious operates by condensing material suppressed from consciousness into an enigmatic symbol that “synthetically” expresses each of the sides at work in the conflict, and anticipates solutions in the future, rather than isolating causes in the past. The symbolic synthesis thus essentially involves the projection of possible futures; it engineers alterations in the horizon of the future.

However, a return to the early Lacan of The Family Complexes once more complicates this picture. There, Lacan describes how the castration complex itself relies on a “myth” (Les Complexes familiaux 48). He suggests that Freud was misled by patriarchal tradition into thinking that the fantasy of castration fundamentally signifies “the terror inspired in a male by a male.” Rather, the “prototype of oedipal suppression” lies further back. In a key Jungian passage, Lacan writes that “the phantasy of castration is as a matter of fact preceded by a whole series of phantasies of the fragmentation of the body that go, in regressive order, from dislocation and dismemberment through gelding and disembowelling to devoration and burial” (ibid. 52) He continues that “this series can be understood as a form of penetration, in both a destructive and investigative sense, and is directed at the secret of the maternal womb.” The anxiety produced by the Oedipus complex, therefore, “is caused less by the eruption of genital desire in the subject than by the object it reactualises, namely the mother” (ibid. 53). We can see that these suggestions follow the regressive path opened by the symbol of castration further back into the nutritive phase (ending in devoration and burial). At the socio‐political level, Lacan even suggests that “the universally present traces and widespread survival of a matriarchal family structure … make clear that the foundations of the human family are not dependent on the power of the male” (49). His bibliography cites Bachofen's Mother Right, thus creating another point of passage with Deleuze's argument.

Cf. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty 23.

One might turn to contemporary art for evidence that this fantasy is alive and well in our age. Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002), with its Queen of Chain (Cremaster 5) and its male figures with indeterminate genitals (for instance the Apprentice in Cremaster 3 and the Giant in Cremaster 5), has all the trappings of a masochistic fantasy in Deleuze's sense.

On Deleuze's dialectic of problems or “Ideas,” see Difference and Repetition 107f. (on “problems” in psychoanalysis), and 244–45 (for a general formulation of Deleuze's project on this point), as well as chapter 4 passim.

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 107.

It should be pointed out that the only reference in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition to the term “desire,” which will become so important in Anti‐Oedipus, occurs in the context of a positive discussion of Jung: “Was not one of the most important points of Jung's theory” to be found in the priority given by Jung to “the force of ‘questioning’ in the unconscious, the conception of the unconscious as an unconscious of ‘problems’ and ‘tasks’? … Should it not be asked whether desire is only an oppositional force [as Freud often suggests] rather than a force completely founded in the power of the question?” (317, n. 17). An example of Jung's thought about “problems” in the unconscious can be found in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology 178–87.

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christian kerslake

Christian Kerslake Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy Middlesex University White Hart Lane Tottenham London N17 8HR UK E‐mail: [email protected]