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59 3 On Deep History and Psychoanalysis: Phylogenetic Time in Lacanian Theory§1 Traversing the Phylogenetic Fantasy: Revisiting the Archaic in Psychoanalysis Starting with Freud, the topic of phylogeny has remained a vexed, troubling matter for psychoanalysis. Freud’s ambivalence with respect to this issue is rather evident. On the one hand, especially in his later works, he repeatedly appeals to a phylogenetic “archaic heritage” both as a subject of metapsychological speculation and as an explanatory device at the level of clinical practice.1 Freud not infrequently goes so far as to echo the theory of recapitulation à la Ernst Haeckel’s famous statement asserting that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”2 (Before proceeding further, it must be noted that “phylogeny” and “ontogeny” are employed throughout what follows primarily in their Freudian analytic senses, as opposed to their contemporary scientific meanings; as Daniel Lord Smail clarifies, “natural selection allows organisms infinite room for variation—but the variation is infinite within a set of phylogenetic constraints that evolved upstream . . . There’s a subtle but crucial distinction . . . between a phylogenetic constraint and what Freud called ‘archaic heritage.’ The former determines what you can’t be; the latter determines part of what you are.”)3 On the other hand, Freud’s reservations regarding phylogenetic hypotheses are testified to not only by textual evidence—the fact that he refrains from publishing his metapsychological paper focused on such hypotheses (entitled “Overview of the Transference Neuroses”)4 bears witness to his hesitancy (a copy of this lost paper was discovered by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis in 1983 amongst Sándor Ferenczi’s belongings, with Ferenczi himself having avidly indulged in musings about phylogeny). In a brief letter to Ferenczi (dated July 28, 1915) accompanying this draft manuscript, Freud tells him, “You can throw it away or keep it.”5 If Ferenczi had not kept it, this text would have been lost forever. In print, the negative side of Freud’s ambivalence vis-à-vis phylog- 60 J A C Q U E S L A C A N eny comes through on a couple of occasions. The case study of the Wolf Man, although containing an instance of recourse to the claim that a reservoir of ancient, collective human experiences provides stock material for “primal phantasies” springing into operation when the individual ’s ontogenetic life history fails to furnish the psyche with such material,6 harbors a moment of wavering with implications for his phylogenetic theories. Therein, Freud expresses this skepticism in a footnote: I admit that this is the most delicate question in the whole domain of psycho-analysis. I did not require the contributions of Adler or Jung to induce me to consider the matter with a critical eye, and to bear in mind the possibility that what analysis puts forward as being forgotten experiences of childhood (and of an improbably early childhood) may on the contrary be based upon phantasies created on occasions occurring late in life. According to this view, wherever we seemed in analyses to see traces of the after-effects of an infantile impression of the kind in question, we should rather have to assume that we were faced by the manifestation of some constitutional factor or of some disposition that had been phylogenetically maintained. On the contrary, no doubt has troubled me more; no other uncertainty has been more decisive in holding me back from publishing my conclusions. I was the first— a point to which none of my opponents have referred—to recognize both the part played by phantasies in symptom-formation and also the “retrospective phantasying” of late impressions into childhood and their sexualization after the event . . . If, in spite of this, I have held to the more difficult and more improbable view, it has been as a result of arguments such as are forced upon the investigator by the case described in these pages or by any other infantile neurosis—arguments which I once again lay before my readers for their decision.7 Later, in The Ego and the Id (1923), he very quickly performs a sort of intellectual fort-da game with phylogeny, remarking: With the mention of phylogenesis, however, fresh problems arise, from which one is tempted to draw cautiously back. But there is no help for it, the attempt must be made—in spite of the fear that it will lay bare the inadequacy of our whole effort.8 Of course, in the longer of these two passages from 1918’s “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis...

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