The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Six: The “Libido Theory” and the Otherness of the Sexual to Itself: Traumatic Neurosis and War Neurosis in Question

101 It is not easy to have done with the etiological primacy of sexuality. As the preceding analyses have shown, and as Freud indicates through his many warnings not to reduce psychoanalysis to “pansexualism,” establishing the causal character of sexuality requires a complex elaboration.1 Even though sexuality is nomothetic within its order—it posits the law of its own field—it remains differentiated in its structure. The concept of sexuality functions to highlight the series of divisions and articulations of which it is constituted. For the moment, I have only taken into account the dual character of the psychic event, its “soldering,” whose organization, in spite of the theoretical displacements that it undergoes, is always constituted as a diptych or a fracture: on one hand, the conjunction of Ereignis and Erlebnis and, on the other, the fantasmatic accident and its interpretive reception. s i x The “Libido Theory” and the Otherness of the Sexual to Itself: Traumatic Neurosis and War Neurosis in Question The psychoanalytic view of the traumatic neurosis [is not] identical with shock theory in its crudest form. The latter regards the essence of shock as being the direct damage to the molecular structure or even the histological structure of the elements of the nervous system; whereas what we seek to understand are the effects produced on the organ of the mind by the breach in the shield against stimuli and by the problems that follow in its train. — s i g m u n d f r e u d , Beyond the Pleasure Principle The concept of narcissism made it possible to obtain an analytic understanding of the traumatic neuroses and of many of the affections bordering on the psychoses, as well as of the latter themselves. — s i g m u n d f r e u d , Civilization and Its Discontents 102 The Neutralization of Cerebrality But another dualism, equally fundamental, underlies the binary constitution of sexuality: what Freud calls the dualism of the drive—in other words, the “libido theory.” It is this dualism that reveals the full complexity of sexual etiology and that underscores yet again the difficulties that stand in the way of according cerebrality its own autonomy and its own evental power. An exhaustive examination of these difficulties requires that I elaborate the theory of the dualism of the drive from the perspective of the Freudian conception of trauma, showing once again that the armature of “sexual” eventality, which Freud reinforces from text to text, can apparently be shaken by the destructive occurrence of an unforeseen catastrophe. Sexuality as the Otherness of the Sexual to Itself the dualism of the drive against the monism of energy Contrary to what one might tend to think, sexuality, for Freud, never functions as a monological cause but designates a difference, a couple, a bifid conceptual structure. In this sense, however one decides to approach it, sexuality always reveals the otherness of the sexual to itself; and the theory of the dualism of the drive, which is inseparable from what Freud calls the “libido theory,” manifestly validates this observation. Throughout his work, Freud presents the theory of the drive as a dualism . If every neurosis, in the last instance, can be derived from sexual causes, this does not mean that the sexual drive is not internally differentiated. Within the drive, the sexual and the other of the sexual are always at work together. The “sexual” is always one half of a couple. What does this mean? Throughout his work, Freud theorizes the drive as a dualism. In “Drives and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud presents the first version of his libido theory, which divides the drive into “ego drives” and “sexual drives.” The former impel the individual to preserve himself; the latter, on the contrary, push him to go beyond his own limits and to reproduce himself: “On the one hand, the individual is the principal thing . . . while, on the other, the individual is a temporary and transient appendage to the immortal germ-plasm, which is entrusted to him by the process of generation.” Accordingly, sexual aims, contrary to the aims of the ego, “go beyond the individual and have as their function the production of new individuals—that is, the preservation of the species.”2 Traumatic Neurosis and War Neurosis in Question 103 In 1917, in “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” Freud comments on this distinction: [I...