A patchwork reflection on psychoanalysis and politics, by Amador Fernández-Savater, published in Lobo Suelto (17/09/2022).
Reading Freud is an experience of great intensity. Not only because of what he brings to light, against everything and everyone (he, a bourgeois from Vienna, as if today we were saying, in the words of my friend Beñat, “a man from San Sebastián”).
It is also intense as a reading experience. Unlike Lacan, he does not think that to be suggestive you have to be hermetic. It is very clear and at the same time inexhaustible. And all the time he indicates failure in his own words: “I do not have the answer, I have not been able to advance further, etc.” Two things come to my mind, among a thousand others.
First, have we not regressed a great deal in our understanding of the psyche? The Freudian impact was slow, but inexorable. It affected all planes of reality. Literature, philosophy, cinema, popular humour, all registered its effects: the certainty that what we see is not what happens, that what is said is not what is said, that reality is double and the subject is divided.
Today, however, subjects parade themselves everywhere without any blemish or flaw, subjects that neither know nor suspect their division. The culture of the self and the will prevails: I know what I want and if I don’t get it, it’s my fault (or that of others). The techniques of access to the unconscious are conspicuous by their absence. And what proliferate are the palliatives of a malaise that we do not know how to question or elaborate.
Second, at what point has it been possible to separate the intimate and the collective (or historical-social)? Freud certainly leaves no room for doubt: psychoanalysis serves to think about the world (how else to read his Mass Psychology, Totem and Taboo, Civilisation and Its Discontents?).
And yet, in politics the reference to the unconscious disappears (objectivism and voluntarism are everywhere). And in the clinic, the reference to the social-collective disappears and there is no thought about what the collective dimension could be – the revolutionary included – of psychoanalysis.
But Freud’s discovery is that there is no difference between the normal and the pathological and that is why the psyche can be investigated through the jokes or the slips that anyone makes; and that the reality principle itself (culture-civilisation) is neurosis inducing and highly problematic as it is established.
The couch clichés
We said: psychoanalytic culture has receded in the world. Clichés proliferate and the resistance to psychoanalysis (to think radically) uses them as a pretext. These are some, which were mine until yesterday:
“If you have good friends, you do not need psychoanalysis”. Let’s see: the objective of analysis is none other than to think (of ourselves, but not only and nor alone) and it is to think with friends. Analysis has a family resemblance to me because I have experienced moments of thought in conversation with friends.
But there are differences: the friend listens to what you say, believes you, argues, but takes you seriously. The psychoanalyst listens to something other than what you say (“what is put together behind what you say”, in the words of Franco Ingrassia). And many times s/he neither believes you nor takes you seriously! Cuts are made, things are shed, through questions or humour, so as to step out of the infinite repetition that we are, so that we can hear ourselves.
“Psychoanalysis is an intellectual process”. How many times have I heard well-meaning friends tell me “more words, Amador? Take peyote or dance zumba”! And there is nothing wrong with peyote and other things, but in analysis it becomes very clear that words are bodily. What produces healing effects is not to “apprehend” anything, but a word that affects and moves us; a word of affection, a word as affect. And that is why Lacan can think of transference in reading Plato’s Symposium: teaching and analysis both belong to the realm of Eros.
“The psychoanalyst is a priest who confesses you: he listens to your sins and administers penance”. In reality, it is quite the opposite: psychoanalysis teaches us to be worse, that is, to not give in to our desire, against everything and everyone. Because we are still too good, we immediately sacrifice what is most proper to us. There is no “evil” in analysis, except that of not listening and not following one’s desire. There is no penance to apply, just a little company to listen to each other better and turn discomfort into strength. In our “sins” (or symptoms) is our salvation.
I speak, of course, from my own experience; of my truth, if it can be of any help to someone.
To carry death within
Spinoza affirms that all things seek to persevere in their being (conatus). Through a science of affections we can learn to choose the encounters that make us happy (increase our power) and discard those that make us sad (weaken). The free being thinks of everything except death, because it is not of its own essence. Or, as Sartre beautifully puts it, “death always comes from outside.”
The criticism directed at Spinoza (and the Spinozists) is recurrent: how then is evil to be explained? Is it really just an effect of ignorance?
The last Freud affirms: the drives are two, Eros and Thanatos. We are also inhabited by aggressiveness and self-aggressiveness; we carry death inside, within us. The science of affections gets mixed up: we feel the greatest of loves and the greatest of hatreds for the same person. The overlaps between Eros and Thanatos are extremely complex (sadism, masochism). And it cannot be ruled out that the death drive actually works in favour of Eros: we want to eliminate all the obstacles that prevent our return to the placidity and shelter of the womb. The other name for death is Nirvana.
Lyotard, in Libidinal Economy, tries the most difficult thing yet: a single principle, a breath or vital breath that animates everything that exists, the libido. But this last works at two speeds, with two temperatures. Eros composes: it unites, gathers together. Death decomposes: it separates, it dislocates. But an effect (good, bad) cannot be assigned to each operating principle: love can suffocate, asphyxiate; there is, as we know from Rosalía, “malquerer” [dis-liking]. And Thanatos can liberate: the escape from a home that crushes us and oppresses our heart.
No science, Lyotard concludes, can know everything in advance. Love kills and death gives life. We are that labyrinth. Each case must be listened to.
We could also carry it over to politics: a revolt, by what impulses is it inhabited? Does it seek to liberate life or to assault another that prevents us from returning in our imagination to the placidity of this or that identity? Or both…?
Listening to what is singular is the rarest and most precious art, the most difficult of arts.
Hesitant love
Neurosis is expressed according to Freud as permanent doubt and insecurity: the inability to make decisions, postponement and constant rumination.
That doubt, Freud concludes in his essay on the “Rat Man,” is fundamentally insecurity about love. Such basic insecurity extends to all other areas of life (including the past: regrets, etc.).
“A man who doubts his own love may, or rather, must doubt every lesser thing.” For Freud, the doubt about love has a great deal to do with the repression of sensuality required by the reality principle.
The neurotic defends himself through obsessive behaviours: placating doubt, compensating for discomfort, rectifying the state of suffering, for example, compulsively praying with a rosary.
Would it be possible to consider that what changes today, with respect to Freud’s time, is above all the type of obsessive compensation? Instead of religion or superstition, the compulsion to consume (all kinds of objects, substances and experiences), to work, to communicate and to mirror pleasures.
Doubt, indecision and permanent self-reproach are appeased through different types of “highs” (something very different from the rosary). The type of “addiction” is altered.
But neurotic protection, Freud explains, is penetrated by what it leaves out. For example, someone praying for his parents hears an inner voice asking God to please take them away as soon as possible.
In the same way today, what we like to do the most, as a protection mechanism, is also imbued with discomfort: reading, thinking, flirting or being in politics compulsively (in social network mode). Accordingly, what is burdensome – because of the acceleration and the number of things to do – is added to the first anxiety.
To disconnect, to blackout, doesn’t work either; it is just a momentary relief. Every year is marked by our repeated regret for the fact that after August, the stress of September always starts again. We all have to work, of course, but no one is forced to constantly look at Facebook. We voluntarily jump on the hamster wheel.
And then? It is necessary to return, necessarily, to meditate on the first insecurity; to think about the contemporary conditions of hesitant in love.
Therapy is war
Culture implies the renunciation of instincts. Freud brilliantly explains it in his text on the conquest of fire: it was necessary for some human to give up the pleasure of pissing on the fire and thus put it out for there to be culture.
But that renunciation has a price: it constitutes us from that moment on as neurotic subjects, always lacking, always dissatisfied, always restless. We are all neurotics: the “healthy” person only has a socially accepted neurosis.
But not all Freudians were going to accept this “original sin”. Marxist Freudians assign to the revolution the task of lifting the repressive curse. Among them perhaps the maddest and most brilliant was Norman O. Brown, who inspired movements of the 1960s.
The child leaves childhood defeated, explains Brown in his work Life Against Death: punishments, severity, authoritarianism, cruel entry into the reality principle. The revolutionary project therefore cannot be other than realising the potential of childhood: inscribing it in reality.
Realising childhood would mean organising society on the basis of free and pleasurable activities: life and work as play and experiment. At what point did work become this torment we suffer? Today, at the height of alienation, we pray for any job.
Achieving childhood would mean freeing the libido. But the infantile libido is not “genital” sexuality, but the perverse and polymorphous body, all of it an erogenous zone, which finds pleasure with elbows, knees, language itself considered as just another piece of skin. Reich’s mistake is to want to liberate a (genital) sexuality that has already been repressively limited.
Realizing childhood is getting out of countable time, time that passes, that slips through our fingers and anguishes us. Eternity is the way of being of unrepressed bodies, of childhood, of play, of love. Here and now, forever.
If culture is neurosis inducing, if it only offers substitute satisfactions, then therapy is war. One has to choose sides in the conflict between the libido and the (repressive) reality principle. One has to transform in the culture the aggressive-guilty energy of neurosis into energy for change, in the place of accepting the individual way out in a neurotic world.
What produces our anguish is the horror of living in what Rilke described as the unlived lines of our bodies. The resurrection of bodies, that is, the revolutionary realisation of childhood, would reconcile us with life… and with death.
Why we rest when we sleep?
It is not just a physical process that replenishes energy, but a psychic reencounter with childhood. It is what I learn reading León Rozitchner.
In the dream, the logical laws of the reality principle (successive time, non-contradiction) are suspended and the primary, archaic process, the pleasure principle, re-emerges. We talk to the dead, we are this and that.
This reencounter regenerates desire, every night. We wake up renewed, eager, the energies less connected and more plastic, also with surprise, because at that first moment we are still between two worlds…
We can forget and erase the traces of the dream as soon as possible to better adapt to reality, immediately focusing on some object, for example. Or try to prolong that state, retelling our dreams, writing them down, playing at interpreting them…
There is no “bad dream”. The bad dream is the non-dream, the triumph, without a trace, of the secondary process, without strangeness, without gaps and burrows that communicate with the unconscious.
Is this why, as Jonathan Crary demonstrates in his book 24/7, capital tries to reduce sleep, to disturb it, even to kill it? Research is already underway on how humans can regain strength without sleeping, that is, without having to reactivate childhood, without going through the unconscious. That is the real nightmare of the non-dream society …
Amador Fernández-Savater: Notes on the unconscious and politics (summer 2022)
A patchwork reflection on psychoanalysis and politics, by Amador Fernández-Savater, published in Lobo Suelto (17/09/2022).
Reading Freud is an experience of great intensity. Not only because of what he brings to light, against everything and everyone (he, a bourgeois from Vienna, as if today we were saying, in the words of my friend Beñat, “a man from San Sebastián”).
It is also intense as a reading experience. Unlike Lacan, he does not think that to be suggestive you have to be hermetic. It is very clear and at the same time inexhaustible. And all the time he indicates failure in his own words: “I do not have the answer, I have not been able to advance further, etc.” Two things come to my mind, among a thousand others.
First, have we not regressed a great deal in our understanding of the psyche? The Freudian impact was slow, but inexorable. It affected all planes of reality. Literature, philosophy, cinema, popular humour, all registered its effects: the certainty that what we see is not what happens, that what is said is not what is said, that reality is double and the subject is divided.
Today, however, subjects parade themselves everywhere without any blemish or flaw, subjects that neither know nor suspect their division. The culture of the self and the will prevails: I know what I want and if I don’t get it, it’s my fault (or that of others). The techniques of access to the unconscious are conspicuous by their absence. And what proliferate are the palliatives of a malaise that we do not know how to question or elaborate.
Second, at what point has it been possible to separate the intimate and the collective (or historical-social)? Freud certainly leaves no room for doubt: psychoanalysis serves to think about the world (how else to read his Mass Psychology, Totem and Taboo, Civilisation and Its Discontents?).
And yet, in politics the reference to the unconscious disappears (objectivism and voluntarism are everywhere). And in the clinic, the reference to the social-collective disappears and there is no thought about what the collective dimension could be – the revolutionary included – of psychoanalysis.
But Freud’s discovery is that there is no difference between the normal and the pathological and that is why the psyche can be investigated through the jokes or the slips that anyone makes; and that the reality principle itself (culture-civilisation) is neurosis inducing and highly problematic as it is established.
The couch clichés
We said: psychoanalytic culture has receded in the world. Clichés proliferate and the resistance to psychoanalysis (to think radically) uses them as a pretext. These are some, which were mine until yesterday:
“If you have good friends, you do not need psychoanalysis”. Let’s see: the objective of analysis is none other than to think (of ourselves, but not only and nor alone) and it is to think with friends. Analysis has a family resemblance to me because I have experienced moments of thought in conversation with friends.
But there are differences: the friend listens to what you say, believes you, argues, but takes you seriously. The psychoanalyst listens to something other than what you say (“what is put together behind what you say”, in the words of Franco Ingrassia). And many times s/he neither believes you nor takes you seriously! Cuts are made, things are shed, through questions or humour, so as to step out of the infinite repetition that we are, so that we can hear ourselves.
“Psychoanalysis is an intellectual process”. How many times have I heard well-meaning friends tell me “more words, Amador? Take peyote or dance zumba”! And there is nothing wrong with peyote and other things, but in analysis it becomes very clear that words are bodily. What produces healing effects is not to “apprehend” anything, but a word that affects and moves us; a word of affection, a word as affect. And that is why Lacan can think of transference in reading Plato’s Symposium: teaching and analysis both belong to the realm of Eros.
“The psychoanalyst is a priest who confesses you: he listens to your sins and administers penance”. In reality, it is quite the opposite: psychoanalysis teaches us to be worse, that is, to not give in to our desire, against everything and everyone. Because we are still too good, we immediately sacrifice what is most proper to us. There is no “evil” in analysis, except that of not listening and not following one’s desire. There is no penance to apply, just a little company to listen to each other better and turn discomfort into strength. In our “sins” (or symptoms) is our salvation.
I speak, of course, from my own experience; of my truth, if it can be of any help to someone.
To carry death within
Spinoza affirms that all things seek to persevere in their being (conatus). Through a science of affections we can learn to choose the encounters that make us happy (increase our power) and discard those that make us sad (weaken). The free being thinks of everything except death, because it is not of its own essence. Or, as Sartre beautifully puts it, “death always comes from outside.”
The criticism directed at Spinoza (and the Spinozists) is recurrent: how then is evil to be explained? Is it really just an effect of ignorance?
The last Freud affirms: the drives are two, Eros and Thanatos. We are also inhabited by aggressiveness and self-aggressiveness; we carry death inside, within us. The science of affections gets mixed up: we feel the greatest of loves and the greatest of hatreds for the same person. The overlaps between Eros and Thanatos are extremely complex (sadism, masochism). And it cannot be ruled out that the death drive actually works in favour of Eros: we want to eliminate all the obstacles that prevent our return to the placidity and shelter of the womb. The other name for death is Nirvana.
Lyotard, in Libidinal Economy, tries the most difficult thing yet: a single principle, a breath or vital breath that animates everything that exists, the libido. But this last works at two speeds, with two temperatures. Eros composes: it unites, gathers together. Death decomposes: it separates, it dislocates. But an effect (good, bad) cannot be assigned to each operating principle: love can suffocate, asphyxiate; there is, as we know from Rosalía, “malquerer” [dis-liking]. And Thanatos can liberate: the escape from a home that crushes us and oppresses our heart.
No science, Lyotard concludes, can know everything in advance. Love kills and death gives life. We are that labyrinth. Each case must be listened to.
We could also carry it over to politics: a revolt, by what impulses is it inhabited? Does it seek to liberate life or to assault another that prevents us from returning in our imagination to the placidity of this or that identity? Or both…?
Listening to what is singular is the rarest and most precious art, the most difficult of arts.
Hesitant love
Neurosis is expressed according to Freud as permanent doubt and insecurity: the inability to make decisions, postponement and constant rumination.
That doubt, Freud concludes in his essay on the “Rat Man,” is fundamentally insecurity about love. Such basic insecurity extends to all other areas of life (including the past: regrets, etc.).
“A man who doubts his own love may, or rather, must doubt every lesser thing.” For Freud, the doubt about love has a great deal to do with the repression of sensuality required by the reality principle.
The neurotic defends himself through obsessive behaviours: placating doubt, compensating for discomfort, rectifying the state of suffering, for example, compulsively praying with a rosary.
Would it be possible to consider that what changes today, with respect to Freud’s time, is above all the type of obsessive compensation? Instead of religion or superstition, the compulsion to consume (all kinds of objects, substances and experiences), to work, to communicate and to mirror pleasures.
Doubt, indecision and permanent self-reproach are appeased through different types of “highs” (something very different from the rosary). The type of “addiction” is altered.
But neurotic protection, Freud explains, is penetrated by what it leaves out. For example, someone praying for his parents hears an inner voice asking God to please take them away as soon as possible.
In the same way today, what we like to do the most, as a protection mechanism, is also imbued with discomfort: reading, thinking, flirting or being in politics compulsively (in social network mode). Accordingly, what is burdensome – because of the acceleration and the number of things to do – is added to the first anxiety.
To disconnect, to blackout, doesn’t work either; it is just a momentary relief. Every year is marked by our repeated regret for the fact that after August, the stress of September always starts again. We all have to work, of course, but no one is forced to constantly look at Facebook. We voluntarily jump on the hamster wheel.
And then? It is necessary to return, necessarily, to meditate on the first insecurity; to think about the contemporary conditions of hesitant in love.
Therapy is war
Culture implies the renunciation of instincts. Freud brilliantly explains it in his text on the conquest of fire: it was necessary for some human to give up the pleasure of pissing on the fire and thus put it out for there to be culture.
But that renunciation has a price: it constitutes us from that moment on as neurotic subjects, always lacking, always dissatisfied, always restless. We are all neurotics: the “healthy” person only has a socially accepted neurosis.
But not all Freudians were going to accept this “original sin”. Marxist Freudians assign to the revolution the task of lifting the repressive curse. Among them perhaps the maddest and most brilliant was Norman O. Brown, who inspired movements of the 1960s.
The child leaves childhood defeated, explains Brown in his work Life Against Death: punishments, severity, authoritarianism, cruel entry into the reality principle. The revolutionary project therefore cannot be other than realising the potential of childhood: inscribing it in reality.
Realising childhood would mean organising society on the basis of free and pleasurable activities: life and work as play and experiment. At what point did work become this torment we suffer? Today, at the height of alienation, we pray for any job.
Achieving childhood would mean freeing the libido. But the infantile libido is not “genital” sexuality, but the perverse and polymorphous body, all of it an erogenous zone, which finds pleasure with elbows, knees, language itself considered as just another piece of skin. Reich’s mistake is to want to liberate a (genital) sexuality that has already been repressively limited.
Realizing childhood is getting out of countable time, time that passes, that slips through our fingers and anguishes us. Eternity is the way of being of unrepressed bodies, of childhood, of play, of love. Here and now, forever.
If culture is neurosis inducing, if it only offers substitute satisfactions, then therapy is war. One has to choose sides in the conflict between the libido and the (repressive) reality principle. One has to transform in the culture the aggressive-guilty energy of neurosis into energy for change, in the place of accepting the individual way out in a neurotic world.
What produces our anguish is the horror of living in what Rilke described as the unlived lines of our bodies. The resurrection of bodies, that is, the revolutionary realisation of childhood, would reconcile us with life… and with death.
Why we rest when we sleep?
It is not just a physical process that replenishes energy, but a psychic reencounter with childhood. It is what I learn reading León Rozitchner.
In the dream, the logical laws of the reality principle (successive time, non-contradiction) are suspended and the primary, archaic process, the pleasure principle, re-emerges. We talk to the dead, we are this and that.
This reencounter regenerates desire, every night. We wake up renewed, eager, the energies less connected and more plastic, also with surprise, because at that first moment we are still between two worlds…
We can forget and erase the traces of the dream as soon as possible to better adapt to reality, immediately focusing on some object, for example. Or try to prolong that state, retelling our dreams, writing them down, playing at interpreting them…
There is no “bad dream”. The bad dream is the non-dream, the triumph, without a trace, of the secondary process, without strangeness, without gaps and burrows that communicate with the unconscious.
Is this why, as Jonathan Crary demonstrates in his book 24/7, capital tries to reduce sleep, to disturb it, even to kill it? Research is already underway on how humans can regain strength without sleeping, that is, without having to reactivate childhood, without going through the unconscious. That is the real nightmare of the non-dream society …
___
Further reading
Reading war and anarchy with Sigmund Freud