Fabian Fajnwaks – Impression – Trace – Signifier –

Letter
pipol9.eu/2019/01/15/fabian-fajnwaks-impression-trace-signifier-letter/

January 15, 2019

That the unconscious has nothing in common with the brain is not self-evident for our
neuroscientist colleagues who have for many years been searching for the biological
markers of all the phenomena that take place in Consciousness and the Unconscious; such
as they conceive of it. In his text, In Search of Memory, the Emergence of a New Science of
Mind, published in 2006 in conjunction with the author receiving the Nobel Prize for
Medicine, Eric Kandel had already pleaded for the “development of a biological approach to
psychotherapy”, which would encompass the “phenomena of Consciousness, the
unconscious and subjectivity as a whole “(1). Kandel, whom as a young man having met
Ernest Kris in the USA at the time of Kandel’s emigrating there, had thought of becoming a
psychoanalyst, presents – with a call he makes in this book to collect psychoanalytic data
based on empirical research, supported essentially on brain imaging – how one might
integrate psychoanalysis into the new science of the mind which is currently being
developed.

Kandel wishes to point out that psychoanalysis was merely a digression that developed
between the development of neurology and its rallying around the research of Ramon y
Cajal in the twenties, and the new impetus that neurology has gained since the 1980s via
new brain imaging techniques such as MRI, as well as the newer scanners. A desire for a
renewal of neurology is thus clearly affirmed by this leading author of the Neurosciences.
Psychopharmacology and Cognitive Behavioral Therapies would reinforce this new science
of the mind […] and psychoanalysis as well, if it deigned to conform to this biological
model. This is what Kandel indicated during his visit to Paris last September, when in a
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discussion with colleagues from other schools he proposed that psychoanalysis could
submit to parameters of “scientific” evaluation, that is to say, observable parameters.
Impossible? Not for these guys. If the whole problem for neuroscientists is to find
biological markers of conscious or unconscious phenomena, then they have begun to do
so. In fact, the basal nucleus of the amygdala, a cerebral region that is only beginning to be
explored, would be color-highlighted, for example, in the case of CT scan, as the area
reacting to the stimuli that elicits for the subject “the unconscious perception of fear” (2).
Fear and anxiety are of course not of the same order, but for our colleagues a reduction is
effectuated in this direction.

The same reduction is evident with regard to neuronal plasticity: for many years, our
colleagues have been able to explain the evolution of the nervous system over time, thus
seeking to go beyond the innate/acquired debate and escape from the fixity of neuronal
determinism. New synapses would be established every day thus modifying the structure
of the nervous system; where lived experiences of the individual – trauma, learning, etc., in
short, any contingency, would involve a manner of cerebral inscription. Two years ago,
Céline Alvarez authored a book based on the work of Stanislas Dehaene who caused
controversy in the field of education, by explaining how a stimulus offered by an increased
interest of teaching staff in underprivileged suburban Parisian classrooms – where the
interventions were staged – facilitated the development of new neural connections, thus
improving the academic results of these students.

If indeed there are synaptic connections developing, this should not be confused here as
Eric Laurent pointed out at the Neurosciences and Psychoanalysis Colloquium held at the
Collège de France in 2008, with the difference between the written trace, the effaced trace
that founds the signifier and the writing that constitutes the remainder of this operation. If
our colleagues in Neuroscience are so interested in the Freud of the “Project”, it is because
they read the impressive routes that he delineates as a metaphor for writing, a perspective
already foreseen by Lacan in Lituraterre. Whereas, to become a letter each impression must
first pass through the signifier, that is to say, through the spoken word; that which the
written language model that neural plasticity supposes is an impression in short-circuit
with speech and the signifier.

In this return to the organicist neuronal materialism, today refreshed as Kandel would have
it, with brain imaging as proof, there is a complete foreclosure of the speech of the subject.
A perspective which it is undoubtedly necessary to put into opposition with the moteralism
that psychoanalysis practices: causality in language in so far as it fails to name the thing.

Translation by Raphael Montague

Reviewed by Caroline Heanue

(1) Kandel, E., In Search of Memory […].W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 2006, p. 370.

(2) Kandel, E., op. cit. p. 388.

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