Biology, Science and Analytic Truth
C Y So
In Lacan’s Borromean rings, the imaginary is interweaved with the symbolic and the real. This is the situation in the analytic session, which helps to undo the unconscious presentation of the subject. The twist also presupposes the Lacan’s notion of subject supposed to know. It is that particular knowledge situation or truthful position that make the twist possible. The core of the twist is paralogical, the enclosed logics of the psychical relations. What I meant by ‘paralogical” is that the working of the twist has to follow some kind of “associative process” through which the subject keeps verifying the truth value of the thought-idea until he comes to conviction he firmly believes. The process is not an operation of emotional rendering rather it is more like a kind of internal mediation for what is true and what is not true. The position of truthfulness is far more important than the cause of affect in this operation. While in the operation of affect, the subject will seek to break down into pieces his own psychical unity. In another words, affect drives the subject for intensive splitting of the subjectivity. However, in the operation of the twist, we see only further reinforcement of the subject as a gestalt. In the associative process, the subject invents the logically links between one event with another and at the end he will come up with a judgment which he thinks it is perfectly true. This operation is a process for truth, although we may not agree with the judgment that is made out of this “paralogism”. Nevertheless, in clinical session, there should not be any judgment or suspicious against anything being spoken by the subject as illogical. The subject may say something, which is intended to deceive; he may invent the fact in his personal history. However we find that the subject’s discourse is supported by some kind of logical reasoning, which is valid in itself. What I mean by valid is that the reasoning itself has a sequence that is constituent to the being of the subject. It is always useless to argue with a psychotic about the logical thinking of his discourse. If we are a careful listener who understands the reasoning behind the discourse, one will follow the specific “logics” involved. One recent example from a case history is about a perversion. The subject has a strong emotional urge to harm her partner if she thinks the partner does not love her. To show the man loves her, she asks if the man is willing to accept her request for eye transplant in case she loses her eyes. As the man does not show immediate approval, she erupts into strong anger and starts beating the man. In her description, she provides a reasoning pattern that is an example of paralogism in the patient. She invests on the loss of eyes with bodily pain (previous experience in painful abortion) and then move on to associate her loss of eyes to her personal loneliness (previous experience of loneliness and helplessness in US). Immediately this is also related to her financial insecurity (loss of job) and loss of pleasure and freedom (especially about freedom in material enjoyment). And she starts thinking the man will go with other woman and leaving her at home (suspicious about the man’s loyalty). It is obvious that the patient is over sensitive but the link from one notion to another notion is actualized within a very short time (slightly within one minute). She starts beating the man and complaining about all the deeds that the man causes to her. The psychical reasoning involved here is a self-constructed linkage, a structure, and a paralogism that has long been posited in her psychical system. The reasoning is a kind of paralogic thinking that it is perfectly valid in itself, at least the patient firmly believes the loss of eyes will associate with the subsequent notions (i.e. misfortune in life). As an analyst, we are not in a position to argue with the patient that the paralogism is not true. What we can do is to follow the logics of the linkage and analyze to her the structure of it. The twist itself is what relates the notions (unconscious presentations) into a sequence. It is also through the intervention of the analyst that we are able to undo what are being linked up and return it back to it original state. The Project in Scientific Psychology has long been a major point of polemics between Freudian and Lacanian. And this is also the major contribution that reflects Freud’s earliest attempt to build a scientific psychology based on the model of biology. Lacan has pointed out that the metaphor of energy has limited the whole ideas of dynamics in Freudian psychoanalysis, which constitutes the concepts of displacement, condensation, resistance and repression. And this also contributes to Freud’s major conceptualization of the theory of Id. The mechanism of energetics associated the ideas of energy flowing in and out of the psychic system and eventually under the suppression of the ego that the unconscious energy is stored in the reservoir. However, this energetic concept has also faced a lot of criticism. Some critics points out that the idea of energetic is an outmoded concept in mechanics in the time of Freud. Roy Grinker suggests that …..information theory is replacing libido theory and its energic concomitant….[S]ilently but definitely the dual drive theory, never fully accepted even by its originator, Freud, is being replaeed by a monolithic theory of motivation (Eros) not too different from the ancient ideas of life. Life is a process that is there and necessary. Any other consideration at this time becomes speculative, science, philosopher or religion. (Grinker, quoted from Boothby 49) Grinker’s idea is correct even today as neuroscience retains the vitality of psychoanalysis with advance research in brain scanning. The advance in neuropsychoanalysis has posed hope and vision for the “biological nature of consciousness” (Kandel 377) The neurologist has started to seek direction from philosophers and psychoanalysts about the biological status of mind. Some believe that the consciousness is separated from the brain and the working of the brain will have some direct connection with the conscious and unconscious process. The development of neurology is directly related to Freud’s vision in The Project of Scientific Psychology, especially about the notion of neurons. However, the modern neurology is still falling short in lack of finding about subjective emotion. As from philosopher like Thomas Negal, the neurology can help to find out particular “neural correlates of consciousness” for particular percept, such as looking at a red color. This biological and material concomitant of conscious perception is a big advance in neurology; however it is still difficult to identify the subjective experience of a person such as when a person looks at the red color and it remind him of his girl friend’s favorable color. The reason why Freud has withheld the development of the “scientific psychology” and turn to psychoanalysis could be his vision on the lack in developing a concept that can cater subjective experience. There is no point to have a universal concept of mind if the concept does not apply to individual and subjective experience. Modern Neurologist like Eric Kandel has worked hard to investigate and record the unconscious process by brain imaging studies. “[T]he discovery of a correlation between volunteers’ background anxiety and their unconscious neural processes validates biologically the Freudian ideas that unconscious mental processes are part of the brain’s system of information process.” (Kandel 388) The criticism against the biological research on mind focuses on the mechanist and automatism implied. Even though we are able to find the biological bases of unconscious process, one tends to believe every single conscious action (especially not those simple action as lifting a finger), there may have multiple reaction correlates in the brain. And it is even harder to identify the hidden process of the unconscious. What could be the biological status of a hidden process, if it is not expressed in the conscious mechanism as recorded in the brainwork? It is even harder if the neurologist ever tries to engage in the transference, regression and dream work, which are proven to be major tool for reprocessing the unconscious thinking. Criticism against Lacan’s return to Freud like those from Paul Ricoeur also points out that Lacan’s linguistic interpretation of Freud fails to encompass the “energetic-hermeneutic duality” of Freud. (Ricoeur 129-137) Lacan does not show a strong inclination toward the energetic metaphor nor does he ever try to work out a scientific model in the same direction as Freud does in The Project of Scientific Psychology. Lacan in his Seminar II provides one of the best description and clarification on Freud’s biologism. He has pulled the discussion backward to the very root of biology, which has never intended to be a science of life as we used to think it is. The founding spirit of modern biology has tried to retain a vague link with the notion of life or God. Life is a phenomenon of the spirit in contrary to death which is the lost of spirit. The difference between life and death if viewed from the perspectives of biology is the working or stoppage of the machine itself. The spirit or life phenomenon is never count. It is for this reason that Lacan does not think Freud’s biology is the modern biology. What Freud has borrowed from biology is the notion of a machine – the living machine. And this is eventually the root of energetic metaphor. The metaphor itself is not able biology but about mechanics. Freudian biology has nothing to do with biology. It is a matter of manipulating symbols with the aim of resolving energy questions, as the homeostatic reference indicates, thus enabling us to characterize as such not only the human being, but the functioning of its major apparatuses. Freud’s whole discussion revolves around that question, what, in terms of energy, is the psyche? This is where the originality of what in him is called biological thought resides. He wasn’t a biologist, any more than any of us are, but throughout his work he placed the accent on the energy function. (Lacan Seminar II 75) Energy, I had you observe last time, is a notion which can only emerge once there are machines. (Lacan Seminar II 75) Energy has never been a concept in the time of slavery. Slavery is not to be count on energy. Only with the machine as an apparatus that we start have the concept of energy, which supports the operation of the machine. Lacan is right to point out the notion of mechanics as the origin of the energetic. But to him the more important vision is about “the metaphor of the human body as a machine”. (Lacan Seminar II 76) This is Lacan’s major theoretical contribution in psychoanalysis about the work of the symbolic in the constitution of human subjectivity. The apparatus we call human body is the embodiment of human understanding of oneself as a unity. As in a machine, the coordination between the parts creates a notion of unity; this unity is the kind of subjectivity from which the subject constitutes the position of the “I”. The formulation of the I as a subject is Lacan’s most revolutionary position in psychoanalysis. In the article “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, Lacan initiates a metaphor of the constituent of human subjectivity which postulates the psychical scene of the subject in his infancy. The metaphor created an infant baby who in his sixth to eighteen month of age suddenly recognizes his own image as a unity in his mirror image. At the moment of this “situational apperception”, the subject experiences the pleasure of playing with the gestalt of the body. This imaginary recognition does not guarantee the material and bodily integrity of the subject. In another words, the baby is still unable to control his own bodily movement and needless to say about his ability as a living being that is able to live on his own effort. From a developmental perspective, this is the moment that a subject enters into the history of being a human although this “anticipation” is of an imaginary processing without a solid material foundation. This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively project the individual’s formation into history: the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation – and for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turn out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call the “orthopedic” form of its totality – and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with the rigid structure. (Lacan, Ecrits 78) The mirror stage is both a moment for initiation of a new stage as well as a constitutive point for bringing up a structure to a point of activation. It is both diachronic (genetic) as well as synchronic (structural). Although the subject himself has not yet completed a full extension of a gestalt being nor he has entered into the social dialectic of the symbolic world, we have seen there is clue to implement a preparation for handling the exchange in symbolic world, which is based on the operation of difference. Lacan’s notion of gestalt is a structure, which is formulated by the three realm of being: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. Comparing with Freud’s topology (Id, ego and superego), Lacan has tried to evade the emphasis on mechanist thinking in Freud. The energetic model at the background of the notion of Id is replaced by a structural concept of imaginary. The imaginary is the distance between nature and human subjectivity. It helps the subject leaping from “insufficiency to anticipation”. If there is no imaginary, the subject itself may not be able to achieve his premature gestalt in anticipation. The working of the symbolic is the work of the language, which in structural sense includes all the major exchange and transaction of signs and symbols. It encircles the law and order in human community and by means of the filtering function of language, the symbolic pins down the position of the subject onto the grid of the social order. Although it seems that ego provides the similar function as the symbolic, however, Lacan does not accept the position of the ego as what the ego psychology does in 1960s to 1980s America. For Lacan, the symbolic does not include the function of censoring of the internal drive. The symbolic process is more of socialization but it does not a strong conviction to eliminate the activities of the drive. Freud has proposed a closed system in which the internal drive from Id will be filter internally by the mechanism of the ego as a guard against unwanted feeling. The censoring process is internal while the socialization in Lacan’s model as explicated in the symbolic is an open system. The exchange between the subject with his otherness operates the dialectics which serves functions for building up knowledge, awareness, perception in the one hand and create the foundation for the satisfaction of desire or even the final fulfillment of his moral destiny. Lacan thinks ego is driven by misrecognition. This ego whose strength our theorists now define by its capacity to bear frustration, is frustration in its very essence. Not frustration of one of the subject’s desire, but frustration of an object in which desire is alienated; and the more developed this object becomes, the more profoundly the subject become alienated from his jouissance. (Lacan, Ecrits 208) The symbolic is opened up for the realm of desire. Through the exchange on the speech about desire, the subject is able to access his jouissance in the symbolic, rather than standing in the realm of imaginary which only facilitates fantasies. However the ego is working on a different position. Only with the function to eliminate the desire (if it is over the limit or it starts to disturb the psychic equilibrium), the ego will function to filter the desire. It is for this understanding that Lacan has criticized the expansion of the function of ego in some of the ego psychology schools, which has hindered the efficiency of psychoanalysis. It is not difficult to find out that the energetic model is what behind the scene of the Freud’s topology. However, it is also because of this metaphor that Freud’s notion cannot continue his radical attitude toward humanity. Equilibrium, as Freud stresses in his energetic model has made it impossible to liberate the subject from suppression and it does not help eliminate the repression and achieve the kind of freedom in spirit as promised in Freud’s psychoanalysis. Based on the analytic experience, I find that the energetic model is only good enough to understand the unconscious process on the surface level. The hidden motivation of the patient is mostly driven by the sexual inclination toward the parents. The unconscious thinking will be driven to reappear during the analytic session either through verbal recognition or from the transference love toward the analyst. The energy is always at the background to push the patient to uncover the hidden thinking. However, the energy itself does not have a clear direction of how the session is driving to. It becomes quite often that the analytic session will go sidetracked or repeating the same element on and on. In my experience, psychic energy is not reliable and it does not guide us for finding the truth if we do not already have a direction or directive in mind. Freud seems to advise us to uncover the agency of suppression (phobia for incest, aggressivity or moral reasoning). He has actually a notion of structure in mind, which has been expressed in his notion of psychic apparatus. The patient’s unconscious is structured in how energy is enclosed. The complexity of energy flow does not affect the structure itself. The patient can never escape the psychic structure, which has always already been framed into the familial structure – the triad relations between the father, mother and the son. In Lacan’s theory, the position of the Father as reflected in the actualization of the phallus is the major structural locale from where we see the flow of the energy. The position of the mother in the Oedipal relations is another locale, which links our imaginary with the subjectivity. One of my clients has never mentioned anything about her father. The empty speech as in the position of the Father has already pointed out her reluctant or resistance to “talk about” her love toward her father. It is so obvious that her love toward her father is unspeakable. In this case, there seems to be no psychic element related to her father. And actually she has brought forward very common episode about the father. It seems that the psychic energy related to her father is so low. Nevertheless, unspeakable relationship is always the most important part of one’s being. This case always reminds me of the revolution that Freud brought to us is about something hidden or unawared. If an analyst only counts on the issue, which carries powerful psychic energy, what is the whole idea of unconscious which does not necessarily issue strong energy. Lacan is right to stress on the notion of structure rather than the energy. The locales in the structure are best standpoints for us to understand how the patient’s psychic energy flow fort/da toward the structure. The analyst is the one whose gaze is on the structure rather than on the flow. Before I finish this chapter, I will discuss how psychoanalytic causes reframe the true knowledge (truthfulness) of psychoanalytic object (effect). If Freud thinks that biology can offer some material evidence to the working of the mental process, it is because he has in mind an energetic model, which may not be very useful in analytic experience. It is actually not useful for practitioner to understand the mental process as a machine. For a practical and useful end in psychoanalysis, one cannot eliminate the question about analytic truth as reflected in psychoanalytic experience. And this truth is not the empirical truth in natural science nor does it only rest upon a closed system. The analytic truth is dialectic toward materialism (not as materialist dialectics) as the return to material bases on ones being is why psychoanalysis is different from philosophy. It is not even a system, which may help us return to the knowledge about oneself or the knowledge-in-itself. We have discussed the four psychoanalytic causes earlier. They have provided us with the unique scope to reframe our analytic experience. The analytic truth is what the causes aiming at, the destination, the path or absolute knowledge. To start with this understanding, we shall go into our thinking about the psychoanalytic object which Lacan regarded as the Other and the object a. “The meaning of a return to Freud is a return to Freud’s meaning. And the meaning of what Freud said may be conveyed to anyone because, while addressed to everyone, it concerns each person. One word suffices to make this point: Freud’s discovery calls truth into question, and there is no one who is not personally concerned by truth.” (Lacan Ecrit 337) In our analytic experience, an analyst cannot escape the problem of truth. At the earlier stage of the analysis, most of the patient will assume the analyst will hold all the truth related to the patient. The analyst is situated at the position of “subject supposed to know” although he may not anticipate it. Freud’s discovery is about the hidden truth of human knowledge. The knowledge is about the subject himself but he may not be in the position to access it. Lacan’s idea about analytic truth is a mirage. “Psychoanalysis is the science of the mirages that arise within this field” (Lacan Ecrits 339)
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