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Freud: Memory and the Metapsychological Witch

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Freud: Memory and the Metapsychological Witch Freud: Memory and the Metapsychological Witch Manuel Batsch Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University College London 2015 I, Manuel Batsch confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisors, Juliet Mitchell and Liz Allison for their excellent guidance and generous encouragement during this project. Thanks to their benevolent attention and intelligent advice, I was able to construct and structure my research question. Our supervision meetings were crucial steps in the writing of my thesis and they also remain in my memory as transformative existential moments. I was impressed by the accuracy with which they read and corrected my drafts, a process from which I learnt a great deal. Psychoanalysis and Feminism is an important book in my inner library and often, when I feel threatened by a kind of intellectual inertia, I just have to reread some of its passages to regain a pleasure for thoughts. The seminars and supervisions with Juliet Mitchell have always triggered the same pleasure and inspired in me a form of bravery in thinking. I have been working under the supervision of Liz Allison since my MSc dissertation and throughout these years she has given me the confidence to compose academic work in English. Amongst many other things, I owe to her my introduction to a completely new reading of Derrida. Our Bion reading group was also extremely helpful and had a significant impact on my understanding of metapsychology after Freud. I would like to thank Sophie Bennett for her amazing proofreading of my thesis and for her extraordinary kindness and efficiency as the PhD Programme Administrator. I am infinitely grateful to Mayah Kadish for our discussions and the time she spent reading and correcting my drafts. Finally, for their imaginative insights and sound recommendations, I wish to thank: Rob Adès, Anton Axelsson, Francesca Baglietto, Shaul Bar-Haim, Esther and Christophe Batsch, Samuel Bigiaoui, Benjamin Elwyn, Hatty Hodgson, Mei Maza, Aurélie Mazars, Leonardo Nascimento, Akshi Singh, Helen Tyson and Guillaume Zorgbibe. À Mayah 3 Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..6 Chapter 1 Construction of the Question………………………………………………………....7 1.1 The Seed and the Soil…………………………………………………………….7 1.2 “Remaining a Prisoner in Order to Escape!”……………………………………13 1.3 The Vanishing Points…………………………………………………………...24 Chapter 2 Study of a Controversy……………………………………………………………….28 2.1 “The Maidservant of Psychiatry”………………………………………………..28 2.2 The Hermeneutic Point of View: A Return to Phenomenology?..............................37 2.3 The Positivist Point of View: Lost in Translation?......................................................44 2.4 The Supporters of Metapsychology: “Psycho-Analysis farà da se”.............................51 Chapter 3 Project for a Scientific Psychology: The Impossibility of a Text……………………58 3.1 “A Kind of Madness”.......................................................................................................58 3.2 From Breuer to Fliess.......................................................................................................63 3.3 A Memory without Objects.............................................................................................67 3.4 I is an Other..........................................................................................................................73 3.5 The Ontological Lies.........................................................................................................76 3.6 Conclusion: The Witch.....................................................................................................80 Chapter 4 The Infantile Prophecy..............................................................................................................82 4.1 From the Hysterical Theatre to the Text of the Dream……………………….....82 4.2 The Emergence of a New Question…………………………………………….85 4.3 The Mainspring of the Psychical Mechanism……………………………………..95 4.4 The Hallucinatory Mode of Thinking………………………………………….103 4.5 Conclusion: “How One Becomes What One Is”……………………………………109 4 Chapter 5 A Hallucinatory Form of Writing…………………………………………………..111 5.1 Derrida’s Alliance……………………………………………………………...111 5.2 A Hallucinatory Writing………………………………………………………..117 5.3 An Aboriginal Population in the Mind………………………………………....125 5.4 To Verbalize is to Repress……………………………………………………..135 5.5 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….143 Chapter 6 A Metapsychological Formalism…………………………………………………...144 6.1 A Textual Empiricism……………………………………………………….....144 6.2 The Dichter Against the Metaphysician…………………………………….......150 6.3 A Metapsychological Writing…………………………………………………..168 6.4 Conclusion: A ‘Stracheyesque Freud’..….……………………………………....181 Chapter 7 From the Proton Pseudos to the Proton Algos……………………………………...190 7.1 Father and Daughter…………………………………………………………...190 7.2 Proton Algos……………………………………………………………….......202 7.3 Construction of a Trace………………………………………………………..219 7.4 Conclusion: ‘the time had not yet come’……………………………………….228 References…………………………………………………………………………...231 5 Abstract In this study, I explore the connections between Freud’s metapsychology and the practice of psychoanalysis. Until his very last papers, Freud continued to assert that the specificity of the genuine psychoanalytic cure was the research of infantile memory. In 1937 he wrote: “What we are in search of is a picture of the patient’s forgotten years that shall be alike trustworthy and in all essential respects complete” (Freud, 1937b, p.258). In order to perceive how this picture of a patient’s forgotten years is to be found not in the discovery of an archive-memory but through the construction of an infantile mode of thinking, it is necessary to go back to a theory of memory that Freud elaborated during the first twenty years of his metapsychological work. Reminiscences are not faithful representations of the past but the outcome of a conflict between conscious and unconscious ideas. In the same way, memory is not an apparatus that registers the past but a system that inscribes contingent scenes of existence within a psychical destiny. Freud researched this psychical destiny through the description of an unconscious mode of thinking and through the invention of a new form of writing: a metapsychological writing. I propose to read the construction of a metapsychology as a grid on which one can write unconscious ideas. My focus throughout this work is to understand the functioning of the metapsychological grid and to answer the question of what it reveals in the clinical encounter. I discovered that the answer to this question could be located in Freud’s clinical paper A Child is Being Beaten (1919) and it involved the construction of a masochistic phantasy. A Child is Being Beaten stands, therefore, outside the timescale of this thesis, as an icon that captures the discursive argument of the whole. 6 Chapter 1 Construction of the Question The Seed and the Soil In an appendix to Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis, James Strachey listed no less than sixteen of Freud’s papers that aim at giving a definition of psychoanalysis.1 As a starting point, I will use the longest definition that Freud proposed for psychoanalysis, which is to be found in Two Encyclopaedia Articles: Psycho-analysis is the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline. (Freud, 1923[1922], p.235) The assertions of this definition can be transformed and developed into three interrogations: 1. A hermeneutical interrogation: In the first point of the definition, Freud challenges the dogma of psychological knowledge, according to which what is mental is identical with what is conscious. Conversely, Freud proposes that what is in the mind does not coincide with what one is conscious of and, as a consequence, some mental processes are only accessible through interpretations. Hence the hermeneutical interrogation is: how to justify the validity of those interpretations? 2. A clinical interrogation: In the second point of the definition, Freud challenges the dogma of psychiatric practice according to which mental life can be clearly divided between the normal and the pathological. The psychoanalytic investigation establishes continuity between normality and pathology. The mental mechanisms behind a symptom are equivalent to those behind a dream, and can 1 In Freud, 1910a, p.56. 7 be explored in the same way. Moreover, because Freud proposes a model in which mental life operates beyond the principle of homeostasis, recovery from psychic disorders does not consist in a return to a state of balance. Hence the clinical interrogation is: is there an a-symptomatic mental life? 3. An epistemological interrogation: In the third point of the definition, Freud challenges the dogmas of positivism around the wide question of what constitutes a scientific method. Positivism used mathematical-physics as the model of all scientific discourses. The Freudian epistemological bet is that a science can exist whose object of study is human subjectivity.
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