Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Chapter 2 Freud and the Transcendental Relation

2 Freud and the Transcendental Relation Introductory Remarks: Psychopathology and the Unconscious 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. Mental patients are split and broken structures of the same kind . . . and can reveal a number of things to us that would otherwise be inaccessible to us.1 In his daily practice, Freud saw an extraordinary contamination: fantasy mixed with reality, discrepancies, conflicts, excessive certainties and uncertainties, symptomatic gaps, slips, blindness, resistances, denials, selfdeceptions , and so on, making it impossible to draw a distinct line between delusion and truth or, for that matter, between pathological and nonpathological states.2 Unsurprisingly, he concludes that the certainty we feel concerning the autonomy, unity, and integrity of our own ego, or subjectivity, is deceptive.3 Not only is the ego ‘‘continued inwards, without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the id and for which it serves as a kind of façade,’’ but it is subject to a further differentiation in the form of an internal superego to which we may attribute, among other things, delusions of observation that seem alien to the subject.4 Further, concerning all unconscious mental activity (which extends beyond the id to parts of the ego’s own activity —for example, unconscious repression—and parts of superego activity 46 too), Freud notes, ‘‘we have the same relation to it as we have to a psychical process in another person, except that it is in fact our own.’’5 I should immediately add that Freud’s notion of the unconscious undergoes a complex series of rearticulations (moving from an early conception of it as a repository to a later conception of it as a matter of active processing), which I shall not detail here, suffice it to insist only that on its basis he contests the presupposition that we are endowed from the start with a unified cognitive faculty.6 Moreover, although we tend to assume a clear demarcation between ourselves and the outside world, he finds this boundary to be unstable, uncertain, or inaccurately drawn. In his words: ‘‘There are cases in which parts of a person’s own body, even portions of his own mental life—his perceptions, thoughts, and feelings—appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it.’’7 Freud’s therapeutic experience leads him, like Nietzsche, to reject a philosophical tendency to presuppose in principle a fundamental coherence in intentional life. He projects from the start a phenomenal reality in which psychopathology, extending from extreme disorders to the minor neuroses of everyday life, remains ineradicable. He finds himself obliged, therefore, to ask the transcendental question concerning the a priori conditions that underpin the persistence, despite the best of human efforts, of errance and anomaly in the genesis of a phenomenal reality. Notably, however, he does not go so far as to deny the necessity and force of coherent experience. Rather, he insists on the theoretical obligation to account for not only the coherent world constituted through productive imagination or internal time, but also the persistence of its moments of errance or anomaly. In his attempt to fulfill this obligation, he proposes a split in synthetic processing on the subjective side of the transcendental relation, but not, with Husserl, between a primary, passive genesis, neutral in affect and meaning, and a subsequent or secondary active meaning-giving genesis. Rather, with Heidegger, he takes the genesis of a phenomenal reality to be actively, albeit unconsciously, infused with meaning and affect from the start. The split he proposes, then, occurs between primary, primitive, archaic, atemporal, alogical, ahistorical, associative, hallucinatory, and therefore idiosyncratic or singular processing (beholden to the demands of the pleasure principle) and secondary, temporal, logical, successive, coherent , ordered, linguistic processing (guided by the reality principle). As Freud sees it, it is through secondary processing in intentional life that we Freud and the Transcendental Relation 47 indeed build up, much as Husserl suggests, a robust phenomenal reality (although it would no longer be a perfectly coherent system if we were honest in our reality...