The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Introduction: The “New Maps” of Causality

23 Two Causalities: System and Alea In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant shows that there can be no causality without a “character.” And “character” is defined as the “law of a causality without which it would not be a cause at all”; that is, as the definite and specific relation between a cause and its effects.1 A cause cannot be a cause unless it presides over a precise order of events. Accordingly, if sexuality and cerebrality are each “efficient causes,” they each must “have a character” and intervene within a specific field as instances that regulate events, that have the capacity to condition relations between phenomena. The confrontation that I would like to establish between these two etiological characters, therefore, seeks to cut short any fruitless attempt to establish “bridges” between “neuronal states” and “psychological states.” To borrow a clarifying formulation from Daniel Widlöcher, such a connection Introduction: The “New Maps” of Causality The field of psychotherapy has always been a site of ideological confrontation. — d a n i e l w i d l ö c h e r , Les nouvelles cartes de la psychanalyse 24 The Neurological Subordination of Sexuality between phenomena that pertain to different causal regimes always lead to the aporia of an “impossible parallelism.” Rather than extract snapshots from the flux of causal series in order to compare them, I will put these series themselves into perspective. I will be concerned with “events” rather than “states.” The Struggle for Etiological Dominance The event, it would seem, raises the same question for both the psychoanalyst and for the neurologist. Does the disturbance or lesion derive from an internal disorganization of a system, from an endogenous disorder? Or must we admit on the contrary that this disorganization has been introduced by external events? It is in the nature of any causal “character” to synthesize the systematicity of the system and the happening of the accident. As Marc Jeannerod quite rightly asserts, the psychoanalyst and the neurologist must both construct functional systems.2 The psychical apparatus, in Freud, is composed of instances forming an internal organization that determines the meaning of the event. Neuronal architecture is itself composed of different systems that are constantly interacting with one another. Nonetheless, it is just as impossible for the psychoanalyst as for the neurologist to adhere to a strictly functionalist explanation of psychic disturbances that would take into account only the systematic level, ignoring external events and thus “reducing exogenous causes to nothing but factors that reveal vulnerability.”3 According to Jeannerod, the necessary collaboration between psychiatry and neuroscience today must be based upon their shared understanding of the way in which exogenous causes impact intrapsychic mechanisms.4 In La causalité psychique, André Green also distinguishes between a “closed system” and an “open system”: a system of functions is at once an “autoorganization ” or an “autopoesis” and a structure open to an “event.”5 This is perhaps a translation of what Freud formulates in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory from His Childhood as one of the fundamental principles of psychoanalysis : “Our aim remains that of demonstrating the connection along the path of libidinal activity (über den Weg der Triebtätigung) between external events (aüsseren Erlebnissen) and a person’s reactions (Reaktionen der Person).”6 Introduction: The “New Maps” of Causality 25 Psychoanalysis and neurology thus share the task of thinking the psyche as something that entails both the autoregulation of the system and the intrusion of the alea, both economic necessity and the irreducible margin of indetermination. This shared task, however, immediately appears as a point of rupture. The psychoanalytic and neurological conceptions of the relation between system and accident, along with their conceptions of the event itself, are radically opposed to one another. It would even be possible to claim that the conflicts between these sciences result precisely from their incompatible approaches to psychic eventality. This incompatibility might explain, in large part, the long process of mutual neutralization that has structured both psychoanalysis and neurology since their respective beginnings. Sexuality and cerebrality have always waged a fratricidal war for etiological dominance. Today, the etiological value of sexuality has been subordinated to that of cerebrality, thereby reversing the old hierarchy that, until quite recently, privileged psychoanalysis. “Subordination of sexuality” should be understood to mean, first, the effacement of the specificity of the sexual within the affects governed by...