Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions Aarhus University Press 2008.
Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He ‘discovered’ sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning.
Three Essay on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) remains a major text in this respect. If one needed to sum up its argument in a single sentence, the following would come close enough to the mark: (human) sexuality is a paradox-ridden deviation from a norm that does not exist.
Freud starts with the discussion of ‘sexual aberrations’ … homosexuality, sodomy, paedophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, sadism, masochism, and so on. In discussing these ‘perversions’ and the mechanisms involved in them (basically the deviations in respect of the sexual object, which is supposed to be an adult person of the opposite sex, and deviations in respect of the sexual aim – supposedly reproduction) Freud’s argument simultaneously moves in two directions.
On the one hand, he extensively demonstrates how the ‘aberrant’ mechanisms involved in these practices are very much present in what is considered to be ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ sexual behaviour. Insofar as they well integrated in what is considered to be ‘normal’ sexuality, they are not viewed as perversions.
They are only considered as perverse aberrations if they become altogether independent of the ‘appropriate’ sexual object and of the supposed sexual aim, if they become autonomous in their fragmented, partial aims that serve no meaningful purpose.
Freud would object, however, to the word ‘become’ – and this constitutes the second, crucial line of his argument. Drives are fragmented, partial, aimless and independent of their object to start with. They do not become such due to some ulterior deviation.
The deviation of drives is a constitutive deviation. Freud writes that “the sexual drive is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be dues to its object’s attractions.”
This is why “from the point of view of psychoanalysis, the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature.”
… the central point of Freud’s discovery was precisely that there is no ‘natural’ or pre-established place of human sexuality, that the latter is constitutively out-of-its-place, fragmented and dispersed, that it only exists in deviations from ‘itself’ or its supposed natural object, and that sexuality is nothing other than this ‘out-of-placeness’ of its constitutive satisfaction.
In other words, Freud’s fundamental move was to de-substantialise sexuality: the sexual is not a substance to be properly described and circumscribed; it is the very impossibility of its own circumscription or delimitation. It can neither be completely separated from biological, organic needs and functions (since it originates within their realm, it starts off by inhabiting them), nor can it be simple reduced to them. Sexual is not a separate domain of human activity or life, and this why it can inhabit all the domains of human life. 10-11
Psychoanalysis does, of course, start out from the vicissitudes of human beings, on which it focuses its investigations. What keeps it from becoming a kind of ‘psychologised’ human-interest philosophy, however, is precisely its discovery of, and insistence on the sexual as a factor of radical disorientation, a factor that keeps bringing into question all our representations of the entity called ‘human being.’
In Freudian theory, the sexual … is the operator of the inhuman, the operator of de-humanisation or ‘de-anthropomorphisation.’ This is what sweeps the ground for a possible theory of the subject as something other than simply another name for an individual or a ‘person,’ which is to say, for a universal theory of the subject that is not a neutral abstraction from all the particularities of the human but singular, concretely-universal point of their inherent contradiction.
In other words, it is precisely the sexual as the operator of the inhuman that opens the path of the universal, which psychoanalysis is often accused of missing because of its insistence on the sexual. What Freud calls the sexual is thus not that which makes us human in any received meaning of this term, it is rather that which makes us subjects, or perhaps more precisely, it is coextensive with the emerging of the subject. 12
Freedom and cause
When speaking about the philosophical and, more generally, social implications of psychoanalysis and of psychoanalytical theory, we cannot avoid the always rather tricky question of how the latter stands in relation to the notion of freedom. 21
Is freedom a relevant issue at all for Lacanian psychoanalysis? On the face of it, one would not say so. Psychoanalysis seems to have little use for this notion; moreover it posits, at the very heart of its theory – at the point that concerns the constitution of the subject – the theory of the “forced choice,” which constitutes itself as a peculiar anamorphosis* of freedom.
* a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. A distorted projection or drawing that appears normal when viewed from a particular point or with a suitable mirror or lens.
The choice, which is by definition supposed to imply a certain freedom, is precisely that through which the subject emerges as subjected to the symbolic order and determined by it. 21
Furthermore, the structure of this forced choice (illustrated by Lacan with the famous “Your money or your life!” does not only imply that there is no choice, and that we can in fact only choose one of the two things or lose both, but involves yet another turn of the screw. Even that which we forcibly choose emerges from this choice as necessarily curtailed (‘life without money’ or, as the terms of this choice are posited by Lacan through the alternative ‘being or meaning’:
the meaning of the subject in the symbolic field of the Other, deprived of what would link this meaning to the subject’s being).
The Lacanian theory of forced choice – also when further turned, as illustrated by the revolutionary slogan “Freedom or death”, where the only way to choose freedom is to choose death and thus show that you have freedom of choice – certainly offers many crucial elements that one can use in the critique of the ideological slogans of freedom and of free choice, which play such a significant role in the economic and political hegemony of late capitalism. 22
What interests us here, however, is a different question: does psychoanalysis allow for the possibility of a concept of freedom that would not only be irreducible to this logic of ‘non-repressive’ (yet all the more effective) mechanisms of constraints, but would even be able to counter the latter, or disarm them?
In spite of all the attested – and one should perhaps add – ‘healthy’ pessimism of Freud and Lacan concerning a ‘final solution’ of individual and social conflicts and antagonisms, the fact remains that inscribed in both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis is the possibility of a real qualitative shift.
That is to say, of a shift that is not simple as exchange of one pathology for another (more acceptable), nor simple an understanding/awareness of the mechanisms that determine us, but one that involves a tectonic shift in the very functioning of these mechanisms.
And the possibility of this shift is not at all unrelated to the dimension of forced choice, it is not simply its other, but emerges only against its background [of the forced choice]. 22
The idea, however, is not simply that of a ‘free subject,’ it is not about the notion of the subject that has freedom as one of its essential attributes, and can act ‘freely,’ Lacan never gets tired of repeating that subject is the effect of the structure, and in this sense it is anything but free. Yet the structure itself is far from being simply non-problematic, clear, or smooth-running. 22
And perhaps the shortest definition of the subject in this theory would be that ‘subject’ is the conceptual name for that point of regularity, of substance, or of structure, in which the latter breaks down, or displays an inner difficulty, contradiction, negativity, contingency, interruption, or a lack of its own foundation. Subject is the place where discontinuity, a gap, a disturbance, a stain becomes inscribed into a given causal chain. 22
Hence – on the level of everyday life – things like slips of the tongue, dreams, as well as jokes (surprisingly produced ‘sense in nonsense’) are the locus of the subject in the symbolic structure.
They are also the locus where psychoanalysis introduces the notion of the cause.
Jacques-Alain Miller has argued at some length that in psychoanalysis the question of the cause rises precisely when something interrupts the smooth continuity of events :
again, the examples range from most ‘innocent’ slips of the tongue to all kinds of ways in which different symptoms betray points of significant discontinuity.
This puts the psychoanalytic use of the notion of cause outside its usual connection to lawfulness and regularity, and – perhaps – closer to the notion of freedom.
The question of the cause appears precisely when a (‘causal’) chain breaks up, which is to say that what is crucial for the concept of cause in psychoanalysis is the element of discontinuity. 23
From this perspective, it could be argues that for psychoanalysis the issue of freedom is closely connected to that of the cause: not with the absence of cause (as this relationship is often posited), but precisely with its presence or incidence.
We could thus say that freedom only really appears when something has a cause (perhaps in both meanings that the word ‘cause’ has in many languages). 23
between the two levels that psychoanalysis deals with (say the ‘manifest’ and the ‘latent.’ To use the Freudian terms) there is no smooth, immediate passage, just as there is no fixed key that could provide the translation of one level into the other. As Mladen Dolar has put this:
The reconstruction of the latent text behind the strata of distortion is far from presenting us with the unconscious in persona. On the contrary, we are on the track of the unconscious only in the space between the two, in the irreducible interval between the manifest and the latent, in the surplus of distortion over the ‘true’ content, in the dream-work that produced the distortion.
In other words: in principle, the distortion (as a form of discontinuity can be explained, related to its causes, yet besides the unconscious causes of distortion, there is also something else at work here, something that we can call the unconscious as the cause of the distortion, as the surplus of the distortion over ‘true’ content, as a cause motivated by itself.
Yet, as such, as causa sui, this cause only exists in the very relationship between the two levels (the manifest and the latent), and not independently of them.
In short, we are dealing with a cause that is linked to the existence of the two levels and to the constitutive gap between them, yet which is not directly determined by, irreducible to, either of them. It only exists as the articulation of their non-relationship. 24