The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

One: Cerebral Auto-Affection

29 o n e Cerebral Auto-Affection What Freud quite awkwardly calls psychic energy . . . — j e a n p i e r r e c h a n g e u x , Neuronal Man From Nervous Energy to Psychic Energy: Freud, or the Brain Diverted the problem of endogenous excitation Let us be clear: Freud never said that neurons are limited to “stimuli from outside.” Very much to the contrary, from Project for a Scientific Psychology onward, he insists upon the existence of endogenous excitation, internal to the nervous system, an excitation from inside. He will never reconsider this point. However, he will soon go on to show that the nervous system, paradoxically, cannot respond to such excitation—which is to say that it is not in a position to regulate its own stimuli. Freud will eventually identify this internal pressure with the drive, whose exercise, regulation, and channeling demands a specific space that, in a sense, obviates the nervous system and diverts a share of its excess energy. 30 The Neurological Subordination of Sexuality This space is that of the psychic apparatus. Accordingly, the problem of the endogenous excitation of the nervous system is not fundamentally a neurological problem. This is the point of greatest concern in contemporary debates. There are not, for Freud, two types of psychic energy: nervous energy and psychic energy. Instead, there is a relay, a differentiation, an economic complexification of the first type of energy by the second. Let us recall the famous statement from the metapsychological papers according to which “the stimulus of the drive does not arise from the external world but from within the organism itself.”1 Or further: The drive “impinges not from without but from within the organism.”2 These affirmations echo analogous statements from Project for a Scientific Psychology: With an increasing complexity of the interior [of the organism], the nervous system receives stimuli from the somatic element itself—endogenous stimuli— which have equally to be discharged. . . . From these the organism cannot withdraw as it does from external stimuli; it cannot employ their Q for flight from stimulus.3 As we know, Freud distinguishes between phi neurons, which manage external stimuli, and psi neurons, whose task is to liquidate endogenous excitation .4 In every case, however, Freud recognizes the existence of an “attack” that arises from inside the nervous system. At no moment does he seek to discover an energy that would be foreign to nervous energy, that would come from outside to manage the inside of the system. How, then, does properly “psychic” energy—not to be confused with nervous energy—come upon the scene? It is invoked at the precise moment when Freud confronts the nervous system’s inability to master its own stimuli, to satisfy the demands of these stimuli, precisely because they are internal. Freud will quickly abandon the hypothesis of the existence of two different types of neurons—permeable and impermeable—as a means of understanding and resolving the specific problem of endogenous excitation. In Freud’s metapsychological theory, the drive appears as a force that decidedly threatens the contact barriers, the facilitations, and the different “neuronal” systems for protecting against excessive quantities of excitation. The difficulty lies in the fact that this force is not exterior to the nervous Cerebral Auto-Affection 31 system itself. On the contrary, it is the very manifestation of its inside. The drive appears as a force from inside that the inside of the system cannot manage. Freud declares: We see then how greatly the simple pattern of the physiological reflex is complicated by the introduction of the drive. External stimuli impose only the single task of withdrawing from them; this is accomplished by muscular movements, one of which eventually achieves that aim. . . . Stimuli coming from the drive, which originate from within the organism, cannot be dealt with by this mechanism. Thus they make far higher demands on the nervous system and cause it to undertake involved and interconnected activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford satisfaction to the internal source of stimulation.5 These “interconnected activities” reveal that the nervous system does not know how to manage itself; does not know how to manage itself as soon as it finds itself confronted with another dynamic than the primary logic of the reflex—that is, as soon as it finds itself...