The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Four: Psychoanalytic Objection: Can There Be Destruction Without a Drive of Destruction?

67 Before continuing to examine psychic destruction and its creative plasticity, we must hasten to address the virulent critique that Freud would not have failed to mount against the preceding developments: Is it really possible to take into account a destruction of the psyche caused only by exterior events? Must we not always relate this destruction, in one way or another, to an internal power of annihilation that is immanent to the psyche itself? Isn’t the way in which the psyche reacts to accidents conditioned by the selfdestructive tendency at work within each individual? Isn’t there an internal negativity that always doubles any fortuitous encounter with negativity? In a word, can one really think destruction without a specific drive of destruction? It would appear necessary, at this point in our analysis, to test the hypothesis of a plastic formation through destruction against the Freudian hypothesis of the death drive. If cerebrality characterizes the relation of the psyche to emergent accidents and to death, it cannot, for this very reason, merely f o u r Psychoanalytic Objection: Can There Be Destruction Without a Drive of Destruction? Indeed, it may, as we know, be doubted whether any psychical structure can be the victim of total destruction. — s i g m u n d f r e u d , Constructions in Analysis 68 The Neurological Subordination of Sexuality designate a regime of external events that threaten to interrupt cerebral auto-affection without the latter’s taking part in this interruption. How does one think destruction without admitting that it works—much like a vicissitude , the vicissitude of a drive—within the psyche itself? Indeed, it does not suffice to insist upon the finitude and fragility of the cerebral core; it is also necessary to consider the possibility that there is a process of death within the brain. Positing that the unconscious knows neither time nor death, Freud strangely shows that the psyche has a relation to destruction that is more radical than the biological knowledge of mortality. The Persistence of the Trace A first objection takes issue with the hypothesis of destructive plasticity and threatens to undermine its validity. Such plasticity, I have argued, has the power to form identity through destruction—thus making possible the emergence of a psyche that has vacated itself, its past, and its “precedents.” In this sense, such plasticity has the power of creation ex nihilo, since it begins with the annihilation of an initial identity. Such an analysis necessarily presupposes a fundamental distinction between the “normal brain”—with its positive plasticity of neuronal modulation , the economy of its affects, and the regulative activity of its autoaffection —and the damaged brain, with its negative plasticity, which causes an absolute metamorphosis of the subject through sheer accident. There seems to be no link between these two brains. However—herein lies the heart of the objection—can one seriously postulate such an absence of linkage or relation between the nonpathological functioning of the brain and its dysfunction? Within the ordinary processes of cerebral auto-affection, isn’t there a secret propaedeutic that anticipates the metamorphosis of damaged identity? This objection has three parts. First of all, how can one deny, even in cases of very serious damage, that something like a psychic structure or profile remains intact? How can one deny that a style of being endures despite the alterations and disturbances that it undergoes? Even if a subject no longer recognizes us, don’t we always recognize him within his very metamorphosis? Is there really such a thing as an unrecognizable psyche? And, consequently, is there really a clinic of the unrecognizable? Doesn’t every Psychoanalytic Objection 69 therapy, in one manner or other, start with the vestiges or the ruins of identity rather than with the metamorphic effects of its deracination? It would be possible to provide ample testimony that even a very diminished person remains fundamentally who they always were. There is much proof of this ontological persistence of identity. Let us take the case that Oliver Sacks calls “The Lost Mariner.” Jimmie suffers from Korsakov’s syndrome , which entails a profound and irreversible loss of memory. This pathology is sometimes also called “transient global amnesia” (TGA). Jimmie, Sacks writes, “both was and wasn’t aware of this deep, tragic loss in himself, loss of himself.”1 He had the very strong feeling of “something missing” but did not know...