CONCLUSIONES Y RECOMENDACIONES

It is possible to recognise the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts - a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their demonic character.^

As can be seen in Freud and Brener’s early Studies on Hysteria, the notion o f a repressed memory lurking behind conscious behaviour was thought to be the trigger for hysteria/' The patient is caught in the cycle of the repetition of a memory which has become an idée fixe^^di suggestion on auto-repeat, which has to be challenged or deleted in order to erase its position as inner puppet master of the patient, directing their every move.

Between 1890-1920, Freud conceived the psychic apparatus as a homeostatic system invested with quantities of energy, regulated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.^^ The organic system, he concluded, seeks to release the tension of accumulated excitations and promote an equilibrium of psychic energies, providing mental constancy and stability: balance.^ However, by 1920, Freud adopted a darker view.

^ Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey, London: Penguin Freud Library Vol. 14, 1990, p. 360.

Cf. Appendix 2.

The idea of the repetition of a fixed idea can be seen in other writings of this period such as M. Regnard, ‘Sleep and Somnambulism,’ Science 2:50, June 1881, p. 172, ‘The patient absolutely ignorant of all her surroundings, neither perceiving sound or light, begins to follow out a dream which has the peculiarity of being always the same and is the reproduction of some event, or series of events, belonging to her experience.’ Pierre Janet too, Freud’s perceived ‘rival’ stated in 1888, ‘The core of a hysterical attack, in whatever form it may appear is a memory, the hallucinatory reliving of a scene which is significant for the onset of the illness.’ Quoted in Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995 p. 193. A detailed and informative comparison of Freud and Janet on this theme is Campbell Perry and Jean-Roch Laurence, ‘Mental Processing Outside of Awareness: The Contributions of Freud and Janet,’ The Unconscious Reconsidered, (eds.) K. Bowers and D. Meichenbaum, New York: John Wiley, 1984, pp. 9-48.

“ Cf. Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey, London: Penguin Freud Library Vol. 11, 1981, p. 277, ‘Every psycho-physical motion rising above the threshold of consciousness is attended by pleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it approximates to complete stability, and is attended by unpleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it deviates from complete stability.’

^ Freud’s conception of a balance of energies can be seen in the context of late 19th and early 20th century mechanical theories in physics and instinct theories in biology. Cf. Salzman, Treatment o f the Obsessive Personality, p. 4, ‘All mental activity was to be comprehended in the language of physiology and energy mechanics. That Freud’s theories were couched in the language of energy (libido) and mechanics (cathexis, countercathexis, repression etc.), as well as in instinctual notions of human motivation is only natural.’ Cf. also Tatar, Spellbound, p. 43, ‘The terminology that Freud used to describe the operation of mental processes - ‘flows and ‘dams,’ ‘charges’ and discharges,’ ‘excitation’ and ‘cathexis,’ currents of energy,’ resistance,’ and ‘tension’ - similarly reflects an inclination to view mental energy as an electrical or hydraulic force, perhaps on more than a

conceiving the possibility of a paradoxical pleasure to be found in pain, a ‘deliberate’ unbalancing of energy and disturbance of equilibrium manifested as a compulsion to repeat.

The compulsion to repeat emerges, according to Freud, from a repressed instinct^^ in the unconscious realm. This instinct, although cut off from consciousness, can ‘struggle through, by roundabout paths,’ to reach a ‘substitutive satisfaction.’ What is repeated compulsively is precisely what cannot be directly remembered, so one repeats a distorted version o f what one cannot remember but at the same time what one cannot completely forget. But rather than an homeostatic balance of equilibrium between psychic forces then, there is more a constant underground battle going on between them because the unconscious insistently seeks to destroy the world built up by the ego. The unconscious ‘has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.’^ The unconscious is repressed by consciousness, and the compulsion to repeat is the result of the battle between the survival instinct of the organism and the darkness dwelling in the unconscious which seeks expression; this darkness is referred to by Freud as the ‘death drive.’

Where one might normally think of instincts as geared towards effective action, growth and development, Freud emphasises an aspect o f instinct which is geared towards the conservation of the previous state o f the living being, an instinct ‘inherent in organic life to restore to an earlier state of t h i n g s . T h i s may be in order to return to a time when life was ‘safer’ - for instance, a time prior to a traumatic event, or it may be a reaction to modem progressive life in general in which rapid change leads to an overload of incoming stimulus, which in order to be balanced out, demands an exaggerated need for inertia.^* In either case, for Freud, it is outside events or change that force the living being to alter its

metaphorical level.’ For a more general account of this era and its terminology Cf. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reconstruction o f European Social Thought, 1890-1930, New York: Vintage, 1961.

Cf. J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language o f Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith, London: Kamac Books, 1973, p. pp. 214-217, for an account of the problematic translation of Freud’s term for instinct into English. Freud’s use of Trieb does not relate directly to the English term instinct, but relates rather to ‘drive;’ a dynamic process, p. 214, ‘consisting in a pressure (charge of energy, motricity factor) which directs the organism towards an aim.’

^ Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ p. 289.

Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ pp. 308-9. Cf. also Freud, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,’ On Psychopathology, trans. James Strachey, London: The Penguin Freud Library Vol. 10,

1993, pp. 243-244.

^ A more materialistic way of looking at this de-animating activity is suggested by Max Horkheimer, quoted in Martin Jay, Dialectical Imagination, Toronto: Little, Brown, 1973, p. 115, ‘To adapt oneself means to make oneself like the world of objects for the sake of self-preservation.’

patterns, whereas if this were not the case, ‘if conditions remained the same, the organism would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life,’*^^ In this respect, there is no inherent ‘creative instinct,’ only an instinct to respond; change is demanded of one from outside, and is both painful and in some ways ‘unnatural,’ yet is necessary for those of us who don’t have the security o f womb, cocoon or vacuum/^

The instinct towards death, the innocent, emotionally static state emerges when its repression has failed, due to unbalanced psychic energies. While there is a balance of energies, the pendulum swings equally from side to side, remaining within a particular range, keeping its limits, but after a trauma or ffight^^ the pendulum, swung violently to one side, beyond its normal limits, must swing equally violently to the other side in order to remain swinging. Absolute chaos in one’s life and experience will be balanced out by absolute certainty - or rather, the desire to find it. The death instinct, far back in the organism, ‘the first instinct,’ becomes exposed and active; it is ‘remembered,’ though diluted by counter-energies, and becomes converted into a need to repeat, to ‘return.’’^

Using the terms developed so far in the thesis, it seems clear that the death and life instincts can be seen as analogous to the poles of habit. Habit provides the best means of modulation between externally imposed change, and deep instincts which demand repetition in order to maintain balance and security. Through habit one has a foot in both the extended world and the interior realm of the unconscious. However, we have also seen that habit must be distinguished tfom instinct. Even if the ‘Todestriels’ is conceived as a drive rather than an instinct, it still represents an essential force of some kind. However, perhaps the model of habit I have been working towards allows one to question the centrality of this notion. What

^ Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ p. 310.

As we have seen earlier, this is indeed what the obsessive compulsive aims to create for herself in her ritualistic routines. This too will come to have bearing on Chapter 4.

Freud singles out ‘fright’ from both fear and anxiety, as the latter are mechanisms which anticipate or prepare the organism for an encounter. Group fright occurred on the Tokyo underground.

This bleak view ultimately sees life as a more or less circuitous detour to death, an unconscious desire to return to the lifelessness from which one came. J. B. Pontalis ‘On Death-Work in Freud, in the Self, in Culture,’ Psychoanalysis, Creativity and Literature, (ed.) Alan Roland, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 86, points out that the theme of death is more basic to Freudian psychoanalysis than the more commonly cited theme of sexuality, ‘I even believe that the latter has been widely put forward so as to cover up the former.’ Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic theory in Lacan’s return to Freud, New York and London: Routledge, 1991, p. 6-9, describes the unpopular reception of Freud’s theory of the death drive in both medical, psychoanalytical, common sense and religious opinions, and the way in which discussions of Freud silence or side-step the concept, ‘Indeed, in many circles the theory of the death drive remains one of the great embarrassments of psychoanalysis,’ presumably because it hints at an instinct geared towards self-destruction - the opposite of what instincts are usually believed to be geared towards.

I have been trying to show in this chapter is that habit itself only exists in relation to its own breach. It itself is a response to anxiety, and always exists in relation to doubt. Could this aspect o f habit therefore explain the role of anxious repetition in mental life better than the possibility of an elemental death instinct?

Slavoj Zizek sees the compulsion to repeat following trauma not as a means of ‘escaping’ to an earlier, inanimate state, but rather, as a response to the traumatic rupture in belief. The ‘primal trauma’ is the trauma of an originary groundless of belief. There always was doubt, and life is merely the papering over of it with illusions of certainty. Thus, for Zizek, whatever type of i d e o l o g y w e commit to is not so much ‘an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself.’^'* ‘That is why we must avoid the simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked r e a l i t y . Ra t h e r than any particular illusion obscuring ‘reality’ as such, according to Zizek, it is the entire structure of our social reality and of social relations which are a constant source of illusion. Such fantasy is necessary in order for one to live and function without being continually disabled by doubt, but it also reflects a fundamental unconscious structure of belief behind belief, ‘we find reasons attesting our belief because we already believe; we do not believe because we have found sufficient good reasons to b e l i e v e . T h e desire to believe is stronger than the rationale one can find for believing, whatever ideology one latches onto. One doesn’t necessarily believe because something makes sense - rationality is a secondary condition one might apply to what one believes in a more or less erratic way - why else would superstitions, for example, have such a hold on some people, despite what the scientist proves to them? Without this fundamental desire to believe would something like religion or spiritual faith exist at all?^’ The need for Law, the need to believe requires one to submit oneself to ideological ritual, ‘act as i f you already believe, and the belief will come by itself. [...] By following a custom, the subject believes without knowing it, so that the final conversion is merely a formal act by means of which we recognise what we have already b e l i e v e d . T h i s is where habit and repetition come in, by repeating the belief we have opted to believe and by repeating it, in the same way as the obsessive, but perhaps not often so aggressively, one repeats to prove;

I am using the term ‘ideology’ here in accordance with the Marxist notion of an ‘illusion of reality.’ Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object o f Ideology, London: Verso, 1989, p. 33.

Zizek, Sublime Object, p. 28. Zizek, Sublime Object, p. 37.

Cf. Chapter 4 on religious obsession / ritual. Zizek, Sublime Object, p. 39-40.

the proof spurs on further repetition and grows stronger every time. I will return to this in Chapter 4.

In order to believe in something to the point where one submits to it, one has to make an initial leap of faith, thus exposing one’s vulnerability to the possibility of the belief being broken. This is a tense time because every habitual structure of thought and belief one takes on, however certain it seems, has behind it a fundamental vulnerability. The relation between belief and its groundlessness circumscribes the realm of the unconscious. Habit and repetition are its counterparts in the sense that they are the means by which a belief can be continually secured and reinforced. Habit allows one to feel certain, to forget that the very reason that one adopted a habit in the first place was to cover over an original, however deeply unconscious, lack of certainty. When the habit is broken the lack of certainty behind it is exposed and enters consciousness more vividly. The fatalist murmers to herself, T always knew it would happen.’ The doubt can only be eased by the adoption of a new habit or ritual and so it goes on over and over, the habits becoming more modest and refined - less dangerous and open to rupture. There is a circularity here, in fact it is a spiral: original doubt leads to habit as a means to belief, the habit when broken leads to doubt again, but now the area of certainty has excluded many previously certain things and has shrunk. The new habit which emerges can only safely be focused on fewer possibilities, and the circle gets smaller. Until in the end, if the spiral continues, one is trapped as though at the bottom of the well, turning round and round in circles in the dead-lock of obsessive compulsion. Behind the curtain of everything habitual, then, there lurks uncertainty and doubt.

We are subjects to the spirals of habitual repetition, from the smallest, tightest circles to the largest, and our visual perception in some part determines what we see and what we can subsequently control. The circle of the sun rolls across the sky (or not). The return of sinful self-consciousness to the state of grace at the end of history is a circle that unravels itself into spirals, but these can always be tilted off their axis by the hesitations and stutterings that keep the obsessive stuck in the doorway.

In Chapter 4 I will look at some very specific adoptions of habit and ritual in which the adoptive subjects attempt to use their habits to find autonomy and freedom from the dark hole o f doubt lurking behind life.