Uncanny Belonging: Schelling, Freud and the Vertigo of Freedom

Uncanny Belonging: Schelling, Freud and the Vertigo of Freedom Author: Teresa Fenichel Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104819 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2016 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Philosophy Uncanny Belonging Schelling, Freud and the Vertigo of Freedom a dissertation by Teresa Fenichel submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2015 1 © copyright by TERESA FENICHEL 2015 2 Uncanny Belonging Schelling, Freud and the Vertigo of Freedom Teresa Fenichel Dissertation Director: Professor Vanessa Rumble Abstract: The aims of my dissertation are 1) to explicate what I take to be the philosophical foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis with the aid of Schelling’s contributions to the development of the unconscious and the nature of human freedom and 2) to make use of certain fundamental discoveries of psychoanalysis in order to reinterpret Schelling’s dynamic and developmental vision of reality. My claim is that Schelling’s philosophy not only offers an important historical moment in the development of the psychoanalytic account of the unconscious, but also gives us a vision of human development—and indeed the development of Being as such—that is grounded in the unconscious and the activity of the drives. Where Freud is often viewed as a determinist, through a closer examination of the connections Schelling makes between the unconscious ground of existence and human freedom we can begin to open up the space for a more complex Freudian subjectivity. Furthermore, the advances Freud makes in terms of the structure of the unconscious, his work on the altered temporality (most notably Nachträglichkeit, or “afterwards-ness”) of trauma and repression, also serve to bring some of Schelling’s most abstract and speculative work to both a more practical and philosophically relevant level. In the work of both Schelling and Freud, the relationship between the human subject and the reality such a subject “confronts” is radically transformed. In Schelling, we find that the developmental phases of Being, of 3 the Absolute and of Nature are also manifested in the structure of human becoming; that is, the catastrophic divide between subjective experience and objective reality is bridged by reinterpreting both as dynamic processes. Although Freud himself often has recourse to a more static view of “objective” reality, his work also speaks to a deep and disturbing revision of such a view. Indeed, Freud’s continued questioning of the boundaries between fantasy and reality, between the internal and the external, suggest that the irreducible otherness of the unconscious extends beyond the individual. 4 5 Introduction The Unconscious is in fact the real psychical, as unknown to us in terms of its inner nature as the reality of the outside world and as incompletely rendered to us by the data of consciousness as the outside world is rendered by the information supplied the sense organs—Freud, Interpretation of Dreams Man must be granted an essence outside and above the world; for how could he alone, of all creatures, retrace the long path of developments from the present back into the deepest night of the past, how could he alone rise up to the beginning of things unless there were in him an essence from the beginning of times? Drawn from the source of things and akin to it, what is eternal of the soul has a co-science/con-sciousness [Mitt-Wissenschaft] of creation—Schelling, Die Weltalter, 1813 I received my first real introduction to psychoanalysis and philosophy at the New School for Social Research. I became interested in these subjects both independently and at their intersection, because I see them as offering possibilities for self-questioning—languages that could do justice to a textured reality, to an objectivity that can encompass desire, fantasy, freedom and the unconscious. Freud’s therapeutic methods and their ethical implications, namely that psychic health requires an empathetic engagement with the most radical alterity, suggested to me a way to think the kind of grounding instability that would anchor such a metaphysics of freedom.1 With the guidance and generosity of Alan Bass, author of book-length studies of Freud, Heidegger and Deconstruction, I completed 1 From very early on in his development of psychoanalysis, Freud insists that the “normal” is in no way qualitatively different from the “neurotic,” the “psychotic” or the “perverse.” Part of his project entails using his treatment of the pathological both to illustrate its encroachment into the normal and to show that psychic “health” can only be an interpretive recognition of unconscious desires and fears. Paraphrasing one of the theses of a late work, Civilization and its Discontents, insofar as we are civilized so too are we neurotic. And, as he writes in “The Uncanny” (1914), the work of psychoanalysis is akin to telepathic communication: “Indeed, I should not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that reason. In one case, after I succeeded—though none too rapidly—in effecting a cure in a girl who had been an invalid for many years, I myself heard this view expressed by the patient’s mother after her long recovery” (SE Vol. XVII, p. 243). 6 an MA thesis focusing on the psychoanalytic contributions of Hans Loewald—an analyst and former student of Heidegger’s.2 I found in Loewald a critique of key Freudian assertions, clinical and metapsychological, that came from a genuine, philosophical appreciation.3 Concerned that psychoanalysis can be naïvely understood as relying upon a form of “objectivity” which would be exposed as a fantasy in the therapeutic situation, Loewald argued that Freud, at times, suffered from a “neurotic” sense of reality. In other words, Freud often retreated into a fundamentally antagonistic ontology—a distorted perspective he diagnosed in his neurotic patients—rather than following through with the much more radical and nuanced alternatives that psychoanalytic treatment depends upon: On three levels, then, the biological, the psychological and the cultural, psychoanalysis has taken for granted the neurotically distorted experience of reality. It has taken for granted the concept of a reality as it is experienced in a predominantly defensive integration of it. Stimulus, external world, and culture, all three on different levels of scientific approach, representative of what is called reality, have been understood unquestioningly as they are thought, felt, experienced within the framework of a hostile-defensive ego-reality integration. It is a concept of reality as it is most typically encountered in the obsessive character neurosis, a neurosis so common in our culture it has been called the normal neurosis (“Defense and Reality”, p. 30).4 Freud could not see that the (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) assumption of a hostile relationship between the psyche on one side, and the pre-given world on the other, was a neurotic construction of his own making.5 Like Loewald, I was dissatisfied with Freud’s strained insistence on the “scientific” status of psychoanalysis; I wanted to articulate a more radical worldview that 2 Alan Bass, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 3 Teresa Fenichel, “Neurotic Being and Erotic Time: Philosophic Reflections on Hans Loewald’s Contributions to Psychoanalysis”. American Imago. Vol. 70 No. 4, Winter 2013, pp. 663-698. 4 Hans Loewald, The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Monographs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Hereafter, TEL. 5 “Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love” (“Drives and their Fates,” SE Vol. XIV, p. 137). 7 psychoanalysis seems to demand, but that also seems to threaten the very foundations of the system. For my part, I considered Freud’s reading of the uncanny and telepathy as focal points for such a questioning, and thus situated myself in the same territory that so attracted Jacques Derrida.6 If Loewald offered insight into the therapeutic consequences of a more philosophically robust theory, Derrida helped me work toward a philosophical formulation of the therapeutic situation. It was not until I began studying Schelling and German Idealism at Boston College, however, that I became interested in the metaphysical thinking that laid the groundwork for Freud’s therapeutic project. As Professors Bloechl, Kearney, Lawrence, Rumble and Sallis helped bring to my attention, these post-Kantian philosophers, situated at the interstices of science and subjectivity, were in fact the very well-spring of the intellectual tradition from which, and within which, Freud was able to formulate his own project.7 In a sort of shock of recognition, I recalled that in the short paper at the center of my thesis work—“The Uncanny”—Freud had already pointed the way: it is Schelling’s definition of the uncanny that he uses.8 And there were broader similarities: Schelling, like Freud, has been dismissed from mainstream, academic philosophy for his false claims to rigorous, scientific thinking; and this, in no small part, is due to the role of the unconscious in his system. Indeed, it was partly in response to the shadow of Schelling’s 6 See in particular: “Telepathy” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other Vol. 1, pp. 226-261. Eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. 7 See in particular: John Sallis’s essay, “The Logic and Illogic of the Dream-Work,” pp. 1-16 in John Mills, Rereading Freud: Psychoanalysis Through Philosophy, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004) and The Gathering of Reason: 2nd Edition, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

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