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Barnaby B. Barratt
Senior Research Associate, Wits Institute for Social and Economic
Research, University of Witwatersrand; Training Analyst, South African
Psychoanalytic Association; The Heritage Stone House, 122 Virginia Ave-
nue, Parkmore, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa BBBarratt@Earth-
link.net
Even after the shift in his writing that occurred around 1914, Freud contin-
ued to assert consistently that the method of free-association is the sine qua
non of his discipline (191617, 1924, 1925, 1937). Yet the contemporary
world of psychoanalysis is quite divided as to the significance of this mode
of discourse. On the one hand, commentators such as Kris (1996), Bollas
(2002, 2008), Green (e.g., 2000, 2002, 2005), and Torsti-Hagman (2003)
1
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 49th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical
Association, Boston, July 2015.
What is repressed?
Freud was adamant that he had discovered a psychology of repression
(1901) and that the repressiveness of self-consciousness is the cornerstone
on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests (1914). It is clearly
Freuds opinion that this dynamic is the cardinal coordinate of the entire
scientific venture. Many contemporary practitioners would disagree with
this bold assertion, claiming that psychoanalysis has advanced beyond
Freuds discovery; for better or worse, the discipline has diversified. In this
paper, I suggest that the claim of advancement may be presumptuous and
Freuds assertion must be taken seriously; that is, the cardinal coordinate of
his discipline is this discovery (for that is what Freud insists it is) of the
repressiveness of self-consciousness (by which I mean the textual domain of
representational reflective awareness). It is possible to take repression as a
center, Freud adds in 1918, and bring all the elements of psychoanalytic
theory into relation with it. We might add that the dynamic of repression
is not a convincing notion unless one surrenders to free-associative praxis,
and that this method would be virtually irrelevant were it not for the repres-
siveness of self-consciousness.
Starting in the late 1890s, Freud found that this method discloses how
the functioning of self-consciousness renders some ideas or wishes unknown
or unknowable to itself (eigentliche Verdr angung, literal or so-called sec-
ondary repression). Following this disclosure, Freud later speculated that
some such dynamic (which, in 1915a, he names Urverdr angung or primal
repression) must be structurally implicated in the very origins of psychic
life. That is, such a dynamic must have a formative role in the originary dif-
ferentiation of representationality from the energies or drive forces (Triebe)
that animate it and that are related to, but not identical with, biological
mechanisms. As has been discussed, notably by Laplanche (199293, 2000
2006), the controversial notion of Urverdr angung (which might better have
been called something like disavowal, Verleugnung) pivots both on a distinc-
tion between psychic energy (Triebe) and biological mechanisms (called
Instinkte by Freud), and on the way the former lean on (anlehnung which
the Strachey volumes misleadingly translate as anaclisis) or follow from
the latter. In this paper, space does not permit a critical review of the debate
around the necessity of this distinction between representations and the
energy invested in them. Rather, I am going to assume the value of a theory
of Trieb as nonidentical either with the representations that it animates or
with the neurobiological phenomena from which we presume it to be derived
(cf, Barratt, 2015, 2016; Green, 1973, 1995; Laplanche, 1993, 20002006). I
make this assumption in part because it sharpens the crucial question: What is
the status of the repressed in the everyday processes of repression (that is, as
what sort of a meaningful entity, archive or trace, does it insistently persist)?
I must quickly make it clear that, in raising this question, I am not at least
primarily and directly addressing the issues of empty universes, where there
may have been a complete failure of presentation or representation. My con-
cern diverges, at least in the limitations of this paper, from that of recent writ-
ers who focus on the treatment of patients who are said to suffer from voids
in their experience that have to be addressed by techniques of clinical inter-
vention that go beyond those that have been classically described (e.g., Bion,
1970; Botella and Botella, 2005; Green, 1993; Levine et al., 2013; Rousssillon,
1999; Winnicott, 1971). Rather, my triple purpose is to challenge the assump-
tion that cure requires the sufficiency of representational insights or assimi-
lated interpretations, to (re)assert the special significance of erotically
embodied thing presentations in human functioning, and to suggest that
free-association permits these to be listened to, despite the fact that they
remain largely or insufficiently translatable into representational form.
As a starting-point, I invite consideration of Greens comment, in his
1999 interview with Kohon. He noted that . . . in the preconscious you
have words and thoughts, but in the unconscious you are not supposed to
have words and thoughts, you only have thing-presentations. This is some-
thing that for us is very important . . . (p. 46). The implication of this
standpoint is threefold.
The first point is critical. If an idea or wish, once it has been repressed, no
longer has the representational form that ideas and wishes have when we are
aware of them (or when they are archived such that we might potentially
become aware of them), then much of what is called the unconscious
much of that which is usefully brought to the surface in clinical discourse
and deemed to have been unconscious is actually not equivalent to the
unconscious qua repressed. To give just one example of how this opposes
rationalistic trends in contemporary theorizing, it challenges Levines asser-
tion that there is an organized, articulable subset of the unconscious that
we call the repressed, which he then contrasts with the perhaps infinite,
formless, not yet organized and not yet articulated or articulable subset of
pre- or proto-psychic elements that we might call the unstructured or
unformulated unconscious (2012, pp. 606607). The assumption here is
that, if the repressed impacts preconscious and conscious psychic life, which
Copyright 2016 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2017) 98
42 B. B. Barratt
navel points to erotic connections that are essential to, yet can never be
appropriated by, the subject. Like the belly button, this navel continues to
speak to us, even if seemingly mute, in a strange and untranslatable mean-
ingfulness, that comes from the mysteries of our own erotic embodiment. It
presents and absents itself as the sourcing of every humanly expressed or
enunciated text (note that one does not anticipate finding any such navel in
computer talk). Of particular significance is the way in which free-associa-
tion opens awareness to the enigmatic signification of the body. Vigorously
pursued (and avoiding the resistance of faux association), the process allows
the subject to become more aware of the voicing of our erotic embodiment;
I have discussed this in more detail in a recent publication (Barratt, 2013a,
2014). The navel of psychic life thus hints at the enigmatic moments in
which pure energy connects, as if arbitrarily, with the realm of signifiers or
representations (cf, Lacan, 1953, 195354, 195455, 1964). Such a sourcing
is perhaps less obscured in dream-life than in the everyday narratives by
which we make sense. Yet (and this is crucial) it is to the insistence and
persistence of the rhythms of this navel that free-association opens us.
Fifteen years after writing the Traumdeutung, Freud articulated what is, I
believe, the same issue in terms of his notion of thing-presentations. In my
reading, three points may be garnered from these 1915 essays. First, repres-
sion (at least in its eigentliche mode) is understood as a deconstituting or
decomposing. What might have been formed as representations, or word-
representations, is now repressed into the status of a thing-presentation.
Lived experience that is repressed is rendered, not as an archive, but as a
trace, like a pulse of psychic energy. Second, such repressed traces persist
and persistently insist on trying to find expression in consciousness and pre-
consciousness. They thus remain embodied indeed, erotically embodied
in their deconstituted or decomposed condition, and they exhibit a certain
sort of intentionality. Following Brentano quite deviously, this is the inten-
tionality of psychic energy or libidinality. Third, although the repressed dis-
rupts, and thus announces its presence, as an energetic impulse or trace
within the purview of self-consciousness, it is never to be fully translated or
understood in terms of representationality.
To this understanding of Freuds theorizing up to 1915, we must add a
reading of the essay written 5 years later. This is not the time to review
how the psychoanalytic world has been divided over the various interpreta-
tions of Todestrieb, nor to critique what I consider to be mistaken paths
not just Jones (1927) notion of aphanisis, picked up by Lacan (196480),
Federns ideas from the early 1930s about mortido (see his sons 1974 paper)
or Weisss destrudo (1935), but also, of course, the prevalent interpretation
of Todestrieb as an innate propensity of destructiveness by the Kleinian
school (e.g., Bell, 2008; Segal, 1997). Rather, I want to follow the sugges-
tion offered by Laplanche (1992, 20002006) in the latter part of his career;
namely that Lebenstrieb and Todestrieb are not really drives per se so
much as principles by which drive forces operate. Lebenstrieb names the
process of binding psychic energy to representations (coming from the
unknowable navel into the domain of the preconscious), and Todestrieb
names the process of unbinding. This argument is only compelling if you
Int J Psychoanal (2017) 98 Copyright 2016 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Listening to the otherwise 47
Concluding note
What needs to be appreciated here is that free-association is not a means to
an end; such as the goal of knowing about matters that are other than the
subjects initial state of self-consciousness. Rather, it is an inherently
changeful process; indeed, changeful in a way that interpretation is not, and
can never be. This is because its deconstructive mobilization accesses and,
in a sense, listens to the repressed, as a meaningfulness that animates our
being and is otherwise than textuality. By contrast, interpretation, however
creative and epistemologically justifiable it may be, closes our ability to lis-
ten to that which is beyond the knowability of conscious and preconscious
representation. Thus the praxis of free-association effects an ontic change
a transmutation in the being of the subject which is not going to be
explainable epistemologically. The method intimates, and listens to, the enig-
matic and erotic signification of forces within us that are not translatable
into the languages of making good sense.
In this context, psychoanalysis is hyperbolic (or, as Derrida suggests, it is
hyperanalytic) and there is no pure psychoanalysis. The radicality of a
commitment to the free-associative method is reflected in Freuds intermit-
tently characteristic commitment to Copernican (as opposed to Ptolemaic)
praxis (cf, Laplanche, 199293). That is, when he prioritizes the ongoing
movement of analysis or deconstructive inquiry, the free-associative pro-
cess of exposing and listening to the voicing of the repressed. Significantly,
with occasionally remarkable candor, Freud seems less than fully concerned
about the mental health of the patient more concerned with pursuing the
unsettling effects of psychoanalysis, than with the goals of settlement that
define therapy. In a 1918 letter to Oskar Pfister about the labors of synthe-
sis, Freud writes that the individual does that for himself better than we
can, and this injunction is followed by even sterner warnings against psy-
chosynthesis in his Lines of Advance essay a year later.
A hundred years after the period in which Freud made his great discov-
ery of this unique method (the period from the mid-1890s to about 1914 or
1915), the discipline he inaugurated is now at a crossroads (whether or not
this is generally acknowledged). If you forego free-association as the prime
method of psychoanalysis, then you can relinquish the controversial notion
of psychic energy or libidinality and/or the precept that the forces of drive
(Triebe) are never identical with the biological mechanisms (or Instinkte)
from which they are derived. You can also dispense with enigmatic notions
such as unfathomable navels, thing-presentations that point to traces of
lived experience that are erotically embodied (meaningfully inscribed in the
soft tissues, yet untranslatable into the languages of representationality).
You arrive at a cleaner, neater and more conventional psychology, a simpli-
fied version of the human condition one that has lost sight of the mean-
ingfulness of the libidinal body, but that is compatible with the empirical
investigation of behavior and much contemporary neuroscience. You also
arrive at a practice of therapy that is synthetic, integrative and convention-
ally creative, but politically circumscribed by pre-decided criteria of adapta-
tion and maturation. But is this psychoanalysis? I contend not. As facile as
such a practice may be at unearthing and gaining insight into the role of
preconscious, even deeply preconscious, ph/fantasies in the psyche, it conve-
niently bypasses the repressed, the untranslatable, and the libidinality of our
erotic embodiment. To listen to the voicing of the traces of lived experience
that animate our psychic life to open ourselves to the voicing of the other-
wise that is representationally untranslatable free-association is necessary.
Translations of summary
Den Diskurs fu r das anders Seiende o ffnen: Die Disziplin des Zuho rens und warum die freie
Assoziation fu r die psychoanalytische Praxis unabdingbar ist. Der Autor vertritt die These, dass
das Verdr angte nur durch die freie Assoziation in den Diskurs der Selbstbewusstheit (der dem reflexiven
Gewahrsein zug anglichen Reprasentationen) einbezogen und in Worte gefasst werden kann. Die Meth-
ode ist f
ur Freuds Neuerung zentral und bildet das Sine qua non eines genuin psychoanalytischen Pro-
zesses. Klinische Verfahren, die sich ihr nicht unverbr uchlich verpflichtet sehen (und stattdessen
entweder deutende Formulierungen, die die Bedeutung einer bestimmten gelebten Erfahrung ein f ur alle
Mal zu fixieren scheinen, als ausschlaggebend betonen oder aber die Schicksale der Ubertragung und
Gegen ubertragung im Hier und Jetzt der Behandlungssituation), beschneiden das Potential der Behand-
lung, die Macht des unbewussten Prozesses offenzulegen. Mit Laplanche gelesen, erleichtern die von
Freud 1920 beschriebenen Lebens- und Todeskrafte (die Bindung und Entbindung psychischer Energie
in Repr asentationen) ein Verstandnis der einzigartigen Signifikanz des frei-assoziativen Diskurses, der
die reprasentative Textualitat der Selbstbewusstheit f
ur die Auerung dessen o ffnet, was anders ist als
Reprasentationalit at und Vernunft. Dieses anders Seiende wird als wiederkehrende Kraft des
Verdrangten, als unergr undlicher Nabel der Sachvorstellungen, gef urchtet. Es wird erlebt und aus-
gedruckt im Text des Gewahrseins, ist aber nicht u bersetzbar in das Gesetz und die Ordnung seiner logi-
schen und rhetorischen Reflexionen. Daher wirkt der frei-assoziative Diskurs auf die Selbstbewusstsein
in einer Weise ein, die sich radikal von anderen kreativen (psychosynthetischen oder integrativ deuten-
den) Verfahren unterscheidet. Unter diesem Blickwinkel betrachtet, ist der Status der frei-assoziativen
Praxis als unabdingbare Voraussetzung eines genuin psychoanalytischen Prozesses gerechtfertigt.
Aprirsi a cio che e altro. La disciplina dellascolto e la necessita delle associazioni libere nella
pratica analitica. Lautore sostiene che solo il metodo delle associazioni libere consente di aprire il dis-
corso della coscienza di se (ossia dellinsieme delle rappresentazioni disponibili alla consapevolezza rif-
lessiva) allespressione del rimosso. Questo specifico metodo costituisce peraltro uno dei pilastri
a di Freud, ed e condizione necessaria di qualsiasi processo autenticamente psicoanalitico.
delloriginalit
Gli orientamenti clinici per i quali il metodo associativo non rappresenta una priorita da mantenere con
impegno saldo e costante (orientamenti che privilegiano di volta in volta le formulazioni interpretative
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