The Walking Dead: Neurology and the Limits of Psychoanalysis

In The New Wounded, Catherine Malabou seeks to reconcile advances in neurology and a material understanding of the brain with traditional psychoanalysis. In order to lay the groundwork for a potential revision of psychoanalysis, Malabou suggests that contemporary psychoanalytic subjects have emerged-"the new wounded"-who exhibit different behaviors than those in the traditional Freudian clinic. She explores the limits of historicity, narrative, meaning, and signification in the psychic lives of these new subjects. What new terms does the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic require in order to be effective? Malabou notes the explanatory power of contemporary neuroscience, and offers the reader a neologism: "cerebrality," a term she then uses to suggest a new etiology of psychic trauma that accords explanatory power to the events of the brain itself. Freud's concepts of sexual etiology, Malabou states, have in part been replaced by the brain and "cerebral events" as "the privileged site of the constitution of affects" (3). "In the same way that Freud upheld the distinction between 'sex' and 'sexuality,'" she states, "it has become necessary today to postulate a distinction between 'brain' and 'cerebrality'" (2). This is to say that just as Freud posited a sexual etiology of neuroses, we must also find ways to articulate a "specific historicity whereby the cerebral event coincides with the psychic event" (2). By defining the term "cerebrality" and applying it throughout her study, Malabou seeks to move beyond the stalemate between neurology and psychoanalysis.

Rather than focus on temporalizing events that the subject can stitch into a narrative of the past, Malabou notes that there are events that sever all connections to the subject's past and thereby lead to a disappearance of the self altogether. Malabou first cites examples of patients who have suffered brain lesions, degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, or violent head traumas, such as the classic case of Phineas Gage, a Vermont railroad worker who suffered an accident that forced an iron rod into his brain. The damage to Gage's prefrontal lobe fundamentally changed his personality. He became a different person, unfamiliar to friends and family. Malabou points out that such individuals may well exist outside the reach of psychoanalysis, but she nevertheless draws connections between them and the contemporary analysand. Like these subjects, who have lost their own historicity due to organic brain damage, the new wounded—such as victims of sexual assault, terrorist attacks, or modern warfare—also become emotionally cool and disaffected, and undergo the loss of their histories due to an aleatory traumatic encounter. Instead of relying on Freud's accounts of regression and his insistence on a return to originary traumas, Malabou dwells on these patients who instead irreversibly lose their narrative of self. She notes Freud's difficulty with fully articulating the death drive, and asks: "Isn't it precisely by accepting such events, which no longer fall under the jurisdiction of sexuality, that psychoanalysis can finally put itself in a position to flesh out the death drive, the beyond of the pleasure principle, and a new regime of events?" (210). Malabou argues that contemporary psychoanalysis must find tactics for dealing with those patients who have become fundamentally incapable of traditional transference and for whom their own psychic wounds do not have a clear narrative logic. The "subject supposed to know" does not carry the same weight if the analysand is cool, indifferent, and does not seek the love of the analyst: "A deserted, emotionally disaffected, indifferent psyche is not or is no longer capable of transference" (214). Rather than a loss of meaning, signification, or history, the new wounded have, in a sense, undergone a radical loss of self. Malabou examines traumatic events that cause neurological changes in the brain, events that are so intense and ultimately asignifying that they create a rupture with the subject's own past and undermine all temporal and narrative continuity. She examines such neurological damage in part through the lens of negative plasticity.

For Malabou, then, traditional Freudian psychoanalysis does not sufficiently account for the idea that an identity can...