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Simon Gros se je rodil, ivi, in bo umrl.

Freud Lives! by Slavoj iek

As published in London Review of Books,Vol. 28 No. 10 25 May2006

In recent years, its often been said that psychoanalysis is dead. New
advances in the brain sciences have finally put it where it belongs,
alongside religious confessors and dream-readers in the lumber-room
of pre-scientific obscurantist searches for hidden meaning. As Todd
Dufresne put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more
wrong about all the fundamentals
with the exception of Marx, some
would add. TheBlack Book of Communism was followed last year by the
Black Book of Psychoanalysis, which listed all the theoretical mistakes and

instances of clinical fraud perpetrated by Freud and his followers. In this

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way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and psychoanalysis is

now there for all tosee.

A century ago, Freud included psychoanalysis as one of what he

described as the three narcissistic illnesses. First, Copernicus demon-
strated that the Earth moves around the Sun, thereby depriving humans
of their central place in the universe. Then Darwin demonstrated that
we are the product of evolution, thereby depriving us of our privileged
place among living beings. Finally, by making clear the predominant
role of the unconscious in psychic processes, Freud showed that the ego
is not master even in its own house. Today, scientific breakthroughs
seem to bring further humiliation: the mind is merely a machine for
data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy merely a users
illusion. In comparison, the conclusions of psychoanalysis seem rather
conservative.

Is psychoanalysis outdated? It certainly appears to be. It is outdated sci-

entifically, in that the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of the human
mind has superseded the Freudian model; it is outdated in the psychiat-
ric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is losing ground to drug
treatment and behavioural therapy; and it is outdated in society more
broadly, where the notion of social norms which repress the individuals
sexual drives doesnt hold up in the face of todays hedonism. But we
should not be too hasty. Perhaps we should instead insist that the time
of psychoanalysis has only just arrived.

One of the consistent themes of todays conservative cultural critique is

that, in our permissive era, children lack firm limits and prohibitions.
This frustrates them, driving them from one excess to another. Only
afirm boundary set up by some symbolic authority can guarantee sta-
bility and satisfaction the satisfaction that comes of violating the pro-
hibition. In order to make clear the way negation functions in the
unconscious, Freud cited the comment one of his patients made after

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recounting adream about an unknown woman: Whoever this woman in

my dream is, Iknow she is not my mother. Aclear proof, for Freud,
that the woman was his mother. What better way to characterise the
typical patient of today than to imagine his reaction to the same dream:
Whoever this woman in my dream is, Im sure she has something to do
with my mother!

Traditionally, psychoanalysis has been expected to enable the patient to

overcome the obstacles preventing his or her access to normal sexual
satisfaction: if you are not able to get it, visit an analyst and he will help
you to lose your inhibitions. Now that we are bombarded from all sides
by the injunction to Enjoy!, psychoanalysis should perhaps be regarded
differently, as the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy:
not not allowed to enjoy, but relieved of the pressure toenjoy.

Nowhere is this paradoxical change in the role of psychoanalytic inter-

pretation clearer than in the case of dreams. The conventional under-
standing of Freuds theory of dreams is that adream is the phantasmic
realisation of some censored unconscious desire, which is as arule of
asexual nature. At the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
provides adetailed interpretation of his own dream about Irmas injec-
tion. The interpretation is surprisingly reminiscent of an old Soviet
joke: Did Rabinovitch win anew car on the state lottery? In principle,
yes, he did. Only it was not acar but abicycle, it was not new but old,
and he did not win it, it was stolen from him! Is adream the manifest-
ation of the dreamers unconscious sexual desire? In principle, yes. Yet
in the dream Freud chose to demonstrate his theory of dreams, his
desire is neither sexual nor unconscious, and, moreover, its not
hisown.

The dream begins with aconversation between Freud and his patient
Irma about the failure of her treatment because of an infection caused
by an injection. In the course of the conversation, Freud approaches her

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and looks deep into her mouth. He is confronted with the unpleasant
sight of scabs and curly structures like nasal bones. At this point, the
horror suddenly changes to comedy. Three doctors, friends of Freud,
among them one called Otto, appear and begin to enumerate, in ridicu-
lous pseudo-professional jargon, possible (and mutually exclusive)
causes of Irmas infection. If anyone had been to blame, it transpires in
the dream, it is Otto, because he gave Irma the injection: Injections
ought not to be made so thoughtlessly, the doctors conclude, and
probably the syringe had not been clean. So, the latent thought artic-
ulated in the dream is neither sexual nor unconscious, but Freuds fully
conscious wish to absolve himself of responsibility for the failure of
Irmas treatment. How does this fit with the thesis that dreams mani-
fest unconscious sexual desires?

A crucial refinement is necessary here. The unconscious desire which

animates the dream is not merely the dreams latent thought, which is
translated into its explicit content, but another unconscious wish, which
inscribes itself in the dream through theTraumarbeit (dream-work),
the process whereby the latent thought is distorted into the dreams
explicit form. Here lies the paradox of the dream-work: we want to get
rid of apressing, disturbing thought of which we are fully conscious, so
we distort it, translating it into the hieroglyph of the dream. However, it
is through this distortion that another, much more fundamental desire
encodes itself in the dream, and this desire is unconscious and sexual.

What is the ultimate meaning of Freuds dream? In his own analysis,

Freud focuses on the dream-thought, on his superficial wish to be
blameless in his treatment of Irma. However, in the details of his inter-
pretation there are hints of deeper motivations. The dream-encounter
with Irma reminds Freud of several other women. The oral examination
recalls another patient, a governess, who had appeared a picture of
youthful beauty until he looked into her mouth. Irmas position by
awindow reminds him of ameeting with an intimate woman friend of

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Irmas of whom he had avery high opinion; thinking about her now,
Freud has every reason to suppose that this other lady, too, was ahys-
teric. The scabs and nasal bones remind him of his own use of cocaine
to reduce nasal swelling, and of a female patient who, following his
example, had developed an extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous
membrane. His consultation with one of the doctors brings to mind an
occasion on which Freuds treatment of awoman patient gave rise to a
severe toxic state, to which she subsequently succumbed; the patient
had the same name as his eldest daughter, Mathilde. The unconscious
desire of the dream is Freuds wish to be the primordial father who
possesses all the women Irma embodies in thedream.

However, the dream presents a further enigma: whose desire does it

manifest? Recent commentaries clearly establish that the true motiva-
tion behind the dream was Freuds desire to absolve Fliess, his close
friend and collaborator, of responsibility and guilt. It was Fliess who
botched Irmas nose operation, and the dreams desire is not to exculp-
ate Freud himself, but his friend, who was, at this point, Freuds sub-
ject supposed to know, the object of his transference. The dream dram-
atises his wish to show that Fliess wasnt responsible for the medical
failure, that he wasnt lacking in knowledge. The dream does manifest
Freuds desire but only insofar as his desire is already the Others
(Fliesss) desire.

Why do we dream? Freuds answer is deceptively simple: the ultimate

function of the dream is to enable the dreamer to stay asleep. This is
usually interpreted as bearing on the kinds of dream we have when
some external disturbance noise, for example threatens to wake us.
In such asituation, the sleeper immediately begins to imagine asitu-
ation which incorporates this external stimulus and thereby is able to
continue sleeping for a while longer; when the external stimulus
becomes too strong, he finally wakes up. Are things really so straight-
forward? In another famous example from The Interpretation of Dreams,

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an exhausted father, whose young son has just died, falls asleep and
dreams that the child is standing by his bed in flames, whispering the
horrifying reproach: Father, cant you see Im burning? Soon after-
wards, the father wakes to discover that afallen candle has set fire to
his dead sons shroud. He had smelled the smoke while asleep, and
incorporated the image of his burning son into his dream to prolong his
sleep. Had the father woken up because the external stimulus became
too strong to be contained within the dream-scenario? Or was it the
obverse, that the father constructed the dream in order to prolong his
sleep, but what he encountered in the dream was much more unbearable
even than external reality, so that he woke up to escape into that reality.

In both dreams, there is a traumatic encounter (the sight of Irmas

throat, the vision of the burning son); but in the second dream, the
dreamer wakes at this point, while in the first, the horror gives way to
the arrival of the doctors. The parallel offers us the key to understanding
Freuds theory of dreams. Just as the fathers awakening from the
second dream has the same function as the sudden change of tone in the
first, so our ordinary reality enables us to evade an encounter with true
trauma.

Adorno said that the Nazi motto Deutschland, erwache! actually meant
its opposite: if you responded to this call, you could continue to sleep
and dream (i.e. to avoid engagement with the real of social antagonism).
In the first stanza of Primo Levis poem Reveille the concentration
camp survivor recalls being in the camp, asleep, dreaming intense
dreams about returning home, eating, telling his relatives his story,
when, suddenly, he is woken up by the Polish kapos command Wst-
awac! (Get up!). In the second stanza, he is at home after the war, well
fed, having told his story to his family, when, suddenly, he imagines
hearing again the shout, Wstawac! The reversal of the relationship
between dream and reality from the first stanza to the second is crucial.
Their content is formally the same the pleasant domestic scene is

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interrupted by the injunction Get up! but in the first, the dream is
cruelly interrupted by the wake-up call, while in the second, reality is
interrupted by the imagined command. We might imagine the second
example from The Interpretation of Dreams as belonging to the Holocaust
survivor who, unable to save his son from the crematorium, is haunted
afterwards by his reproach: Vater, siehst du nicht dass ich verbrenne?

In our society of the spectacle, in which what we experience as every-

day reality more and more takes the form of the lie made real, Freuds
insights show their true value. Consider the interactive computer games
some of us play compulsively, games which enable aneurotic weakling
to adopt the screen persona of amacho aggressor, beating up other men
and violently enjoying women. Its all too easy to assume that this
weakling takes refuge in cyberspace in order to escape from a dull,
impotent reality. But perhaps the games are more telling than that.
What if, in playing them, Iarticulate the perverse core of my personality
which, because of ethico-social constraints, Iam not able to act out in
real life? Isnt my virtual persona in away more real than reality? Isnt
it precisely because Iam aware that this is just agame that in it Ican
do what Iwould never be able to in the real world? In this precise sense,
as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of afiction: what appears in
the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on
whose repression social reality itself is founded. Therein resides the
ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who
cannot sustain thedream.

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Author: Simon Gros

Simon Gros se je rodil, ivi, in bo umrl. View all posts by Simon Gros

Simon Gros / december 26, 2016 / English, iek

mariborchan.si /

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