The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Introduction: Freud and Preexisting Fault Lines

77 It is unquestionably difficult to break through the heavy wall of the Freudian theory of psychic events. More solid than the “protective shield” that it requires, it seems that this theory never admits anything from outside without filtering it through the endogenous processes of psychic life. Any conclusions drawn from the examination of neuropathological cases—with their total metamorphoses of identity, destruction of the primitive layers of the psyche, profound alteration of auto-affection, and irremediable annihilation—come up, once again, against the resistance of the Freudian concept of “psychic reality,” which is the place where events are welcomed, transformed, translated, and even constituted. I would now like to undertake a lengthy study of this resistance in order to test—and thus to reinforce and to renew—the validity of claims that cerebrality has an etiological function. Introduction: Freud and Preexisting Fault Lines All neurotics are malingerers; they simulate without knowing it, and this is their sickness. We have to keep in mind that there is a big difference between conscious refusal and unconscious refusal. The conscious and the unconscious are always conjoined in an individual, however, and if I confront a neurotic who claims and believes that he is organically ill with a statement that he is not, he will be offended, because it is partially true. — s i g m u n d f r e u d , cited by Kurt Eissler in Freud as an Expert Witness 78 The Neutralization of Cerebrality The Crystal and the Psyche In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud presents psychic disturbances as true ruptures that introduce real discontinuity into the life of the subject. But the emergence of these ruptures always occurs along preexisting fault lines. The psyche behaves exactly like a crystal: it never shatters haphazardly, but, within the disorder of its very shattering, always follows a secret fault line that prepares it to shatter in a specific manner. If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure [durch die Struktur des Kristalls vorher bestimmt war]. Mental patients are split and broken structures of this kind [Solche rissige and gesprungene Strukturen sind auch Geisteskranken].1 Freud thus discerns within illness a predictable relation between the hazard of shock and the necessary form of breakage, a form that obeys lines of fracture already inscribed within internal psychic life. The metaphor of the crystal thus makes it possible to understand that, for Freud, the event is always a synthesis between the unexpected accident and the endogenous processes that produce psychic events. It is precisely the originary possibility of such a synthesis that makes it possible to uphold sexuality as a privileged etiological principle. To underscore the point once again, the concept of “sexuality,” for Freud, names a specific regime of events. “Sexual life” designates both a natural development of the psyche and the body and a set of events that come from outside to impinge upon this unity of development. The events of sexuality solder together chance and necessity and, for this reason, become the very model, or the archetype, of every event. Sexuality derives its privileged causal character from a specific articulation—which constitutes its essence—of the relation between the two dimensions of “predisposition (Anlage)” and contingency . Psychic damage or disturbance can only happen to a psyche that, in a certain sense, is waiting for them. There are events that, because they have no link to the intimacy of the psyche, can cause radical transformations of the psyche that do not actualize its preexisting potentialities. But Freud’s work does not recognize the Introduction: Freud and Preexisting Fault Lines 79 destructive power of such events. Although Freud’s conception of the event was constantly evolving—from Studies on Hysteria or “Sexuality in the Etiology of the Neuroses” to late texts such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id, or Outline of Psychoanalysis—the one thing he never questioned was its character as a synthesis. From the theory of infantile trauma to the analysis of “disasters . . . involving a risk to life,”2 Freud always upholds the double articulation of the event. The wound by itself—the brain wound in particular—is unable to determine the event and is always subordinated to the...