SLUMBERING KISSES, SHAMELESS ENTANGLEMENTS: “la découverte de freud”

Abstract

This essay focuses on the profound relationship between psychoanalysis and deconstruction. It reads Jacques Derrida's suggestion that an “effect of deferral” both drives and disrupts the entire Freudian corpus. It suggests, in turn, that Freud's engagements with this “effect of deferral” are, like the navel of the dream, knots in the Freudian text, entanglements which speak of what will nevertheless remain unspeakable. My reading goes via the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” to Freud's letters to Fliess, letters where Freud reads the notion of Nachträglichkeit (or deferred action) in the shameless entanglements of a novella by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• deconstruction
• Freud
• Derrida
• Meyer
• Nachträglichkeit

Notes

I would like to thank the readers and reviewers of this essay's earlier manifestations; their advice was both welcome and hugely beneficial.

Jacques Derrida, “Let us not Forget – Psychoanalysis,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Oxford Literary Review 12.1–2 (1990): 3–7 (4).

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

This essay is indebted to the work of Samuel Weber, whose readings of Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly in The Legend of Freud [1982] (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), ask whether “psychoanalytic thinking” can “itself escape the effects of what it endeavors to think?” (xiv). In this text Weber argues that “if psychoanalytic thinking participates in what it describes, the writings of Freud comprise a privileged, if by no means unique, scenario of that participation” (xiv). Weber's point of departure, then, is the suggestion that

it is only in remarking the differences between a Freud who has grown all too familiar and another, less comforting, figure that his legend can regain the uncanny force we have “known” all the time, but of which we think less and less. (xv)

This essay aims to affirm that particularly uncanny “Freud,” a name which takes in both an individual and a corpus. Such a reading also attempts to counter that staid, phallogocentric idea of psychoanalysis which

today as in Freud's lifetime, seeks to establish itself in stable institutions, to ground itself in a practice and a theory that rarely question the established conceptions of truth and the criteria of value that prevail in the societies in which it is situated. (20)

If there is a difference in the approach of this essay and The Legend of Freud, it is merely my attempt to make explicit the profound relationship between psychoanalysis and deconstruction which is nonetheless implicit in Weber's text.

Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002) 246–91 (255). The original text can be found in “Freud et la scène de l'écriture” in L'Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967) 293–340 (303):

Notons-le au passage: les concepts de Nachträglichkeit et de Verspätung, concepts directeurs de toute la pensée freudienne, concepts déterminatifs de tous les autres concepts, sont déjà présents et appelés par leur nom dans l'Esquisse. L'irréductibilité du “à-retardement”, telle est sans doute la découverte de Freud.

I will follow Alan Bass's translation of “à-retardement” as “effect of deferral” at this point. By using “à-retardement” in proximity to Nachträglichkeit and Verspätung, Derrida may be seen to be preserving a less partisan description of the “effect of deferral” alongside its more Freudian reductions, whilst also being reluctant to reduce it in the French to “après-coup,” the Lacanian suggestion for the French translation of Nachträglichkeit.

In an introduction to the translation of Nicholas Abraham's essay “The Shell and Kernel,” Derrida discusses the possibility of psychoanalysis having an ego, and suggests that “the I [Moi] of psychoanalysis is perhaps not a bad introduction to the Ego [le Moi] of which psychoanalysis speaks” (see Jacques Derrida, “Me-Psychoanalysis,” trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 9.1 (1979): 3–12 (8)). Not unrelated to the reading I'm making here, but beyond the scope of this essay, Derrida asks “what must an Ego be if something like psychoanalysis can say ‘Me’?” (8). Derrida is here reapplying [repli] Abraham's notion of “anasemic” translation to that which might call “itself” psychoanalysis: that which takes seriously, or “introduces,” a radically unpresentable, unspeakable, unconscious “kernel” as its condition for thinking. Derrida is suggesting that, if psychoanalysis is something which might have an Ego, it would make precarious every foundation upon which that concept or principle of the Ego might be built (notions of presence or being, for example). Thus the psychoanalytic “Ego” would be something radically other than the “ego” of which a phenomenology might speak, as well as the “me” of everyday language – even though they might all have a certain homonymic relation.

Derrida has written in great detail upon the question of invention, in relation to Paul De Man and allegory for example, and as an aside it might be interesting to ask whether Freud's “discovery” could figure ironically as allegory, or be read as an allegory of irony: Nachträglichkeit being the injunction to remain on, or come back to (as many fabulous characters tend to wander), the path of a sequential and linear narrative. If this should be the case, must it also be a demand to stray, or to pause and reflect, defer and delay, to retrace ones steps or to take more than one path simultaneously? Obviously we have stumbled across the immensely complex histories of “discovery” and “invention,” and, in particular, the relation of such terms to literary production. For one of Derrida's forays into these histories see “Psyché. Invention de l'autre” in Psyché. Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987) 11–61. Translated by Catherine Porter: “Psyche: Invention of the Other” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007) 1–47.

Again the reader is referred to the theory of “anasemia” or anasemic translation as posited by Nicholas Abraham, in which both a phenomenological and an “everyday” concept of revelation or discovery would not account for the way these notions might be complicated by a certain psychoanalytic reading. As Derrida describes in terms of an anasemic notion of “Pleasure,” to “pass from the word pleasure in ordinary language to ‘pleasure’ in phenomenological discourse, then to Pleasure in psychoanalytic theory, is to proceed to translate in the strangest way” (“Me-Psychoanalysis” 7). In these terms, Pleasure might also be experienced in terms of pain (as Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Such an “anasemic” translation, then, which a certain reading of psychoanalysis puts to work, and in which what we call revelation might also be experienced in terms of discovery, would be one from which we would have to “draw the rigorous consequences that follow from an affirmation so scandalously [or shamelessly?] untenable in terms of classical logic, philosophy, common sense, as well as phenomenology” (“Me-Psychoanalysis” 7).

“la découverte” also has several different and interesting connotations in French, not least that the phrase can introduce a theatrical register which, although not overtly intended in Derrida's usage of it in the opening citation, does have a certain correspondence to “la scène [stage] de l'écriture.” For example, Le Petit Robert (2009) gives: “Élément de décor (scénique, cinématographique) placé derrière une ouverture et simulant l'arrière-plan,” whilst the Trésor de la langue française has: “Espace entre deux décors qui laisse voir les coulisses; perspective ouverte dans un décor par une porte, une baie, une fenêtre; [and in a metonymic form:] fond de décor.” Both citations are referring to a technical definition from the late nineteenth century, one now mostly outdated due to the more modern trend to film on location. The definition from Le Robert suggests an element of constructed scenery – en trompe-l'œil – which simulates the background to the set; the illusory beyond of an already fictional scene. The second, slightly older citation suggests – as well as an image similar to Le Robert (the illusory image placed behind any openings in the set) – a further definition: the space between two sets which allows one to see “les coulisses” (here, metonymically: “the wings”; but more specifically, any space which should be kept secret or hidden to the public by les décors; “la coulisse” may also refer to the groove or slot along which the scenes may slide – therefore giving us both the secret and the pre-programmed conditions for its disguise. See also the figures of speech: “Faire des yeux en coulisse” and “Un regard en coulisse,” referring to secret and/or sideways glances).

Strachey's interpolation.

Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology” [1895] in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, 1886–1899 (London: Vintage, 2001) 281–391 (353). The German text: “Entwurf einer Psychologie” in Gesammelte Werke: Nachtragsband Texte aus den Jahren 1885–1938 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999) 375–486 (445).

As Strachey notes in the text, this statement is obviously problematic with regards to the association of puberty and sexuality, and to Freud's later work on infantile sexuality. For a discussion of this see Andrew Benjamin, “Translating Origins: Psychoanalysis and Philosophy” in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 1992) 18–41 (29).

I use the terms “earlier” and “later” with due hesitation.

Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology” 356/447.

Ibid. 356/448.

With this in mind, Freud's later theoretical move, the introduction of infantile sexuality, might seem a similar theoretical eradication of the treacherous delays signalled by puberty. For a reading which re-introduces deferred action and sexuality at the very origin of the psyche, see the work of Jean Laplanche, notably: New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

Strachey's interpolation.

Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology” 353/445.

Ibid. 355/447.

For an intriguing and detailed reading of the latter in relation to Freud's metapsychological project, see Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud, Part 1, “Psychoanalysis Set Apart,” particularly 35–98.

Sigmund Freud, “March 15, 1898” in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (London: Belknap, 1985) 303.

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, “Gustav Adolf's Page” [1882], trans. David B. Dickens, in The Complete Narrative Prose of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, vol. 2, 1881–91 (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1976) 31–63 (57).

Benjamin, “Translating Origins” 33.

Sigmund Freud, “June 9, 1898” in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 316.

Meyer, “Gustav Adolf's Page” 57.

Ibid. 43.

Freud, “June 9, 1898” in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 316.

Ibid.

Ibid. 315.

See Masson's footnote to the letter of “June 9, 1898” on 316.

Sigmund Freud, “November 14, 1897” in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 279–80.

Meyer, “Gustav Adolf's Page” 41.

Ibid. 44. It should be noted that the ending of “Augusta” is actually only one letter away from Gustav, lending even greater strength to the association.

This is perhaps an understandable move if we consider the confusion that the names continue to engender: e.g., in Andrew Benjamin's – admittedly brief – reading of the text, he confuses Gustel with Christel: “[…] Christel, the page, was in fact a girl in boy's clothing” (“Translating Origins” 33). It seems here that the novella has again disseminated its dizzying effects through into theory.