Reflections on Time and Politics

12. The Genesis of the Surface I: The Theory of Drives

12 The Genesis of the Surface I: The Theory of Drives freud often laments that the understanding of instincts remains obscure , insufficiently established, and lagging in development compared to the rest of psychoanalytic theory (Freud 1953, 168n2; 1957a, 50; 1957b, 117–18; 1957c, 78; 1959, 56–57; 1965, 95; 1994, 45). Yet perhaps this is due primarily to the organization of component instincts into an oppositional schema that is extraneous and without basis. Freud defines instinct1 as ‘‘an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation . . . lying on the frontier between the mental and the physical’’ (1953, 168, see also 1957b, 121–22). He contrasts it to ‘‘a ‘stimulus,’ which is set up by single excitations coming from without’’ (1953, 168) and to which the instincts respond (1959, 57). Instincts are only loosely related to particular objects (1953, 148) and their relations are further complicated by the ambivalence of desire, which amounts to a complex set of negative relations towards an object—the desire to possess, to destroy, to negate oneself and be possessed as an object, etc. (see Freud 1960, 29–30, 62, 157; 1961a, 41–42; 1994, 58–59). The largely unconscious resolution of these ambivalences through instinctual repression establishes both the precarious stability of the conscious self—‘‘the inclusive unity of the ego’’ (1957a, 11)—and the processes of condensation, displacement, transference, and projection, which characterize unconscious life. Instinct in general amounts to ‘‘a kind of elasticity of living things’’ (Freud 1959, 57) and the play of instincts, bringing together divergent do1 . The vagaries of translation have meant that Freud’s use of the German trieb has been consistently translated as ‘‘instinct,’’ whereas Nietzsche translators have used both ‘‘instinct’’ and ‘‘drive.’’ For the sake of consistency with the translations being quoted, I will continue to use the term ‘‘instinct’’ with respect to Freud, noting here Lacan’s persuasive argument that the translation is poor. 122 Reflections on Time and Politics mains and giving them meaning and direction, forms a surface of sense.2 There is no necessary conceptual limit to the number of instincts—‘‘in no region of psychology were we groping more in the dark. Everyone assumed the existence of as many instincts or ‘basic instincts’ as he chose’’ (Freud 1957a, 51)—yet Freud consistently restricts the component instincts to two—‘‘our views have from the very first been dualistic’’ (53; see also 1994, 46). He does so, moreover, on an entirely speculative basis, from the speculations of ego-instincts operating against libido instincts (1957c, 75–81)3 to the biological speculations of a death instinct beyond the pleasure principle (1957a).4 Ultimately, Freud admits that the entire theory ‘‘is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness ’’ (1965, 95). Yet these binary schemes underpin the early and later models of the psyche, account for the ego’s mechanisms of repression, which establish psychic life and its relation to the outside world, and remain useful hypotheses for explaining transference neuroses (1957b, 124) and, later, the compulsion to repeat witnessed in traumatic neuroses. It would seem, therefore, that a simplified and unconvincing understanding of the instincts is necessary for the kind of psychoanalytic theory Freud desires. The great threat to multiplicity, for Freud, is not dualism but a collapse into monism, Jungian or otherwise (Freud 1957a, 52–53; see also 1966, 413).5 The advantage of dualism is, purportedly, that the irreconcilability 2. Compare with Freud’s definition of the sense of a psychical process: ‘‘We mean nothing other by it than the intention it serves and its position in a psychical continuity. In most of our researches we can replace ‘sense’ by ‘intention’ or ‘purpose’’’ (1966, 40). Also: ‘‘By ‘sense’ we understand ‘meaning,’ ‘intention,’ ‘purpose’ and ‘position in a continuous psychical context’’’ (61). 3. Indeed, the very existence of the ego and its instincts is displayed only indirectly through the failure and repression of libido instincts: ‘‘we are far less well acquainted with the development of the ego than of the libido, since it is only the study of the narcissistic neuroses that promises to give us an insight into the structure of the ego’’ (Freud 1966, 351). Also: ‘‘the analysis of the transference neuroses forced upon our notice the opposition between the ‘sexual instincts’ . . . and certain other instincts, with which we were very insufficiently acquainted and which we described provisionally as the ‘ego instincts’’’ (1957a, 50–51). Freud is even more speculative when conceiving the...