freud & narrative

Freud: Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex

In "Author's Preface to Third Edition" of his Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Freud emphasizes the empirical foundation of his essays, as well as the focus on considerations of therapeutic practice and purpose:

The dependence of this work on the psychoanalytic experiences which have determined the writing of it, shows itself not only in the selection but also in the arrangement of the material. A certain succession of stages was observed, the occasional factors are rendered prominent, the constitutional ones are left in the background, and the ontogenetic development receives greater consideration than the phylogenetic. For the occasional factors play the principal role in analysis, and are almost completely worked up in it, while the constitutional factors only become evident from behind as elements which have been made functional through experience, and a discussion of these would lead far beyond the working sphere of psychoanalysis.

Not only this, in terms of focus and causality, Freud looks at "constitution" as the "precipitate of a former experience of the species to which the newer experience of the individual being is added as the sum of the occasional factors." That the essence of group behavior and group consciousness is observable is implicit here; that the nature of the individual consciousness and behavior is additive to or variation of an essential or historical "story" of sexuality is also implicit. From these statements, the reader can expect Freud's essays to focus on the individual as extrapolated from observable group behavior over time and representative of variation with a clearly defined field and/or changes in the observable structure of sexuality over time. The empirical nature of his theory is thus clear; the absolute of the conglomerate whole of observed behavior implicitly so.

In the subsequent introduction to the first essay in the actual text, entitled "The Sexual Aberrations", Freud describes the biological view of "sexual impulse" and then what he attributes to popular beliefs about the same.

The fact of sexual need in man and animal is expressed in biology by the assumption of a "sexual impulse." This impulse is made analogous to the impulse of taking nourishment, and to hunger. The sexual expression corresponding to hunger not being found colloquilly [sic], science uses the expression "libido."

Popular conception makes definite assumptions concerning the nature and qualities of this sexual impulse. It is supposed to be absent during childhood and to commence about the time of and in connection with the maturing process of puberty; it is supposed that it manifests itself in irresistible attractions exerted by one sex upon the other, and that its aim is sexual union or at least such actions as would lead to union. (I:Introduction)

This is implicitly compared to the focus described in the aforementioned preface. Rather than an assumption of a biological impulse as explicitly imperative as the need to eat or the assumption of an idealized impulse that is a part of divine mythical union, Freud finds his explanation of the sexual impulse in the empirically observed behavior of the species over time and in the observed behavior or testimony of the individual.

What has become clear in these passages is not only his focus on empirical date and observed behavior but also the reliance on narrative mode as an indispensable part of the structure of psychotherapy, specifically the means of finding the causal story of the individual psyche and/or the story of subject's behavior (also object of study) in his setting.

Described in terms of narrative function, Freud clearly declares his independence from the "story" of biology or myth and chooses instead the "story" of the patient's behavior or psyche (ontogenetic view) as it relates to the story of the behavior of the group or category (phylogenetic view) as his point of departure:

The characteristics of the inversion in any individual may date back as far as his memory goes, or they may become manifest to him at a definite period before or after puberty.

and:

(a) It must be considered that inversion was a frequent manifestation among the ancient nations at the height of their culture. It was an institution endowed with important functions. (b) It is found to be unusually prevalent among savages and primitive races, whereas the term degeneration is generally limited to higher civilization (I. Bloch). Even among the most civilized nations of Europe, climate and race have a most powerful influence on the distribution of, and attitude toward, inversion. (I:1A. Inversion)

The causal, descriptive narrative of the psychotherapist is a reasoned unity: that the condition of inversion is congenital must be questioned, for example, due to the variety of its forms and the variety of the histories in their particulars of path and manifestation of traits or behavior at certain points of development or in conjunction with certain influences. Thus, congenital influence is taken out of the narrative scope.

The story of inversion, the narrative of the inverted individual is a multiple storyline, a host of variations, that, taken together, reveal an essence of sexuality that is biological, cultural and somehow graspable as an absolute set of variations.

The manifestation of homosexuality is therefore in no way connected to the narrative of sexuality as a free enterprise or to a penchant of consciousness to exist in a narrative mode of possibility, in which the self may be projected into a character, a setting and a storyline, on the basis of the basic functions of consciousness: the perception of self as something that is self-actualized on the basis of freedom that is narrative in structure.

How narrative may be a part of consciousness, how the story of one's sexuality might be one a trajectory of possibility within the individual consciousness, a possibility revealed through the narrative event itself, would never be the focus of a theory arising from the practice of psychotherapy, geared as it is toward an externally observable data.

jumping off deleuze

This post speculates on a few Deleuzian concepts and how they might relate to an exploration of narrative-being (meant in the sense that Heidegger talked about "work-being" with regard to the essence of the work of art).

In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel Delanda describes Gilles Deleuze's "flat topography," in which the individual is not a copy of an ideal (Platonic) essence but a unique actualization of a virtual multiplicity or process.

While...[essence] implies a unified and timeless identity...[multiplicity] implies an identity which is not given all at once, but is defined progressively; and while essences ear to their instantiations the same relation which a model has to its copies, that is, a relation of greater or lesser resemblance, multiplicities imply divergent realizations which bear no similarity to them. (28)

In this view, "the reality of the virtual is structure" which underlies the actualization. The virtual structures or multiplicities are recognized in both their actualizations and their potential, that is, a spectrum of possible actualizations that may never be realized.

In terms of narrative theory, the conceptual scheme is potentially useful in finding a connection between the "fictitious" and the "real," the possible worlds inherent in the fictional, and in the exploration of the narrative mode in general.

Back to Delanda on Deleuze:

Just as the extrinsic (actualized, measurable) biological phenomenon of the body grows out of the intrinsic (virtual) process of cell division, which rather than by a mathematically reducible formula occurs on the basis of cell properties and attractions in the organic, the individual emerges or is territorialized from the virtual into a unique being. The being is more than the sum of its accidents.

...mere resemblances and identities must be treated as mere results of deeper physical processes and not as fundamental categories on which to base an ontology. (42)

According the Deleuze, the generalization that arises from a comparison or analysis of attributes of similar objects/beings, is not an essence (agreeing here with Husserl that accidents cannot lead to essence) but a different individual.

...while an ontology based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera), an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique singular individuals different in spatiotemporal scale but not in ontological status. (47)

From this perspective, the generalization, human being, for example, is a new, unique individual, as distinguishable from the individuals from which it has been conceptually derived. Further, it is a result of its own multiplicities or virtual component, thus allowing the individual actualizations to which it conceptually relates their own identities. This non-hierarchical topography is a basis for plotting the individual consciousness on a larger plane where consciousness as such is examined; it is the topography that allows a single fundamental religious belief to exist as unique from the individual, "religious beliefs," thereby allowing the discovery of the dynamic processes underlying religious belief as such without having to contort the various specific actualizations (Christian belief or Islamic belief or Hindu belief, etc.) to a set of extrinsic qualities that may be used to characterize religious belief as such.

I believe that this topography is useful in exploring the narrative mode as a fundamental structure within what Merleau-Ponty describes as the lived-body consciousness and that this mode is one that recognizes the possibility of Deleuze's plane of immanence. This narrative-being is at home with the dynamic of identity and meaning that arises from being born of this plane. From this standpoint, the narrative product (whether written or merely imagined) is a trace of being, a unique actualization, which in the reading is re-actualized into a new trace, each time it is read.

The single reading or the writing gives rise to a picture of the world or, if we include the concept of identification, of ourselves in the world as a single actualization of a virtual process. This picture is synchronic in the sense of Saussure's snapshot of a language system that shows a coherent spectrum of meaning in the world and the elements that make up that system in coherent relation to each other...at that moment. Complementing the concept of Saussure's diachronic view of language, a single narrative trace is territorialized and deterritorialized over time, (e.g., by interpretations or critical analyses) as are the multiple readings of a text by a single reader. The stability of the text, as the stability of our identity, is in the virtual, the underlying dynamic, in the connection to the plane of immanence and to undiscovered potential actualizations.

This kind of view does not determine the human psyche as something that, as psychologist Ernst Becker describes it in Denial of Death, desperately reaches for stable symbolic meaning in order to escape the suicide that would result from the recognition of its own mortality. It is not one that despairs at the continual territorialization or deterritorialization of meaning in language, as seems to be the attitude within poststructuralism. The attitude of consciousness expressed by narrative potentiality is one at home with the dynamic of meaning and the multiple actualizations or visions of truth.

jumping off sartre

Sartre's statements about the empirical focus of the psychological theories of the emotions at the time of his text and Husserl's premise on the impossibility of getting from accidents to essences could also apply to traditional narrative theories, which are overwhelmingly empirical. From the standpoint of cultural studies, the narrative is viewed as oral tradition, the handing down of culturally significant information, with the purpose of providing a common worldview, regulating behavior, teaching or legitimizing common attitudes or beliefs, maintaining hierarchies of information access, etc. (e.g., Eric Michaels.) From the standpoint of the disciplines of sociology or history, (grand) narrative may be viewed as a means of communication or self-representation within the public sphere, a means of organizing and representing microcultures or political views, or the expression of cultural and political identity. (e.g., Habermas) Even the denials of historical metanarratives by poststructuralists or post modernists (e.g., Lyotard) are viewed by others as merely another metanarrative and still include the idea of local narratives. In linguistics, the narrative discourse theory would seem to come close to a look at process or mode rather than product, and yet this theory too remains at the level of functional communication and observable (cause and effect) interaction. From the standpoint of literary theory, the narrative is discussed in its Dinghaftigkeit, its attributes of observable form. While theories about multiple narrators, the uncanny or focalization begin to get at a psychological or philosophical aspect that conjoins with the problem of language and meaning as such (Husserl, Heidegger, by way of Saussure through Derrida and others), there is still little discussion of narrative-being in that builds on Heidegger's idea of the origin of the work of art, the setting-up of an object as a tension of world and earth or connects the narrative to Merleau-Ponty's directed consciousness, or like Sartre's emotions, a view of narrative as an indispensable structure of consciousness.

I believe that investigation of narrative-being will lead to the discovery of a fundamental comfortable relationship between the structure of consciousness and potentiality, also revealing the assumption of a need for the absolute, the verifiable and the unequivocal meaning—certainly prejudices of Western culture in terms of psychology (e.g., Becker), beliefs and communication norms—as alien to consciousness. This understanding that we do not seek absolute and stable meaning but are conditioned to want it would have relevance for addressing problems of tension, anxiety and intolerance in and between fundamentalist cultures, as well as for further exploring the uncanny or the fear of unstable meaning.

sketch for a theory of emotions (2)

Unfortunately, when Sartre turns from critiquing the psychological theories of James and Janet and begins describing what a phenomenological theory of emotions might entail, he reveals himself as more prejudiced toward rationalism than his introduction implies. Moreover, replaces the unsatisfactory and mysterious realm of the "unconscious" with the rather deflating category of the "magical."

According to the chapter Outline of a Phenomenological Theory, one of the most significant characteristics of the emotional mode are that it is nonreflective. "Fear does not begin as consciousness of being afraid," (34) but begins with the relationship to a object, with a relationship to the world. Sartre uses the example that one is afraid "of" something; however, we can easily see that we are also angry "at" or in love "with" or charmed "by" something. He calls this the synthesis of the subject and the object in the emotion.

This synthesis partially explains another important point about the emotional mode and that is its immediacy. Unlike the implicitly more distant reflective or rational apprehension of the world, with its "organized complex of utilizable things" that enable us to arrive at a given predetermined end by choosing a series of appropriate tools, the emotional world appears to us as a "nonutilizable whole."

In that case, the categories of the world act immediately upon the consciousness, they are present at no distance (for example, the face that frightens us through the window acts upon us without any means; there is no need for the window to open, for a man to leap into the room or to walk across the floor). And conversely, the consciousness tries to combat these dangers or to modify these objects at no distance and without means, by some absolute, massive modification of the world. This aspect of the world is an entirely coherent one; this is the magical world." (60)

At first glance, these observations follow the promise of the introduction in giving the emotional apprehension of the world its own coherence and its own autonomy. However, when Sartre begins describing the shift from the rational to the emotional mode, he suddenly talks about the "debasing" or "degrading" of consciousness and, in doing so, implicitly ascribes emotions to a more inferior realm of consciousness than the rational, rather than giving it a complementary role. This seems to follow the cultural prejudice in favor of rationalism and with a disregard to the emotional, placing emotionality as a recourse where rationality fails or courage, patience or fortitude are lacking. This is underscored by the ultimately vague nature of the "magical" nature of the emotional world.

sketch for a theory of emotions (1)

Psychology has moved on since Sartre wrote this in 1939. Nevertheless, it seems to we (U.S. culture) are still stuck in a rather primitive psychological view of human behavior and that individuals from our culture, even those who locate identity in the spiritual, may be likely to see feelings and emotional behavior in terms of the human sciences. While very few people would probably ascribe to the peripheric theory that physiological disturbances precede emotional responses, that trembling leads to fear or tears to melancholy, I bet many still follow what Sartre describes as the intellectualist theory that a mental state leads to emotional response or that emotionality is an inferior response that sets in when the superior, rational response fails.

The most profound aspect of Sartre's introduction for me is that the emotions are neither antecedent nor subsequent to rationality, that they are a part of consciousness and an autonomously structured means of apprehending reality.

For me, Sartre's view frees me from having to see myself as a candidate for therapy, from having to see emotional responses in terms of reason. It releases me from the obligation to make emotions fit into a pre-conceived psychic structure as facts and allows me to explore the emotional field and discover the semantics of emotive expression or emotional being as I would explore the physical experience of being in a room, distinguishing hearing from listening, visual impression from seeing, etc. and creating a sense of sense.

Emotional response is being, directing itself toward the world. Moments of emotive interaction differentiating themselves from a background of emotional potential. How is this emotional being organized? What creates perceptions of clash, touch, crossing over, return?

The word "drive" is a pejorative view of energy. Driven. The phenomenological term "directed" frees us from the breath of Original Sin still attached to the "driven," driven to disobey God, driven out of our emotional household.