It is worth making some observations in passing concerning psychoanalytic theory, since in its own way it is profoundly a theory of semiosis, even though my aim here cannot be a full exploration of this idea.
Nevertheless the convergence of some of my terminology, particularly introjectivity and projectivity, with that of psychoanalysis is not to be avoided nor its significance denied.
Many (or perhaps all) of the associative mechanisms explained in psychoanalysis are indexical in nature, such as ‗displacement‘ and ‗condensation‘. And in many schools of psychoanalytic therapy (especially the ‗Hungarian school‘ of Ferenczi, Abraham, Torok and Rand) the possibility of symbolisation, described as introjection, is equated with a process of inaugurated mourning that is healing in its nature.11 This is by no means external to my meaning. As Yassa (2002, p. 90) summarises:
The central idea running through the body of the Abraham and Torok work is that of the prerequisites for the emergence of subjectivity. The question of how a unique individual comes into being is only superficially simple. They approach this question at several different levels of the experience of subjectivity, and with the help of their specific concept of introjection – seen as the key to every aspect of psychic life.
The process of the development of subjectivity through the mediation of the symbolic order is precisely what I intend in my own use of the term introjectivity. With regard to the meaning of this term in Abraham and Torok there is little discrepancy between their usage and what I propose.12
The position regarding projection in psychoanalysis is slightly more complicated.
Abraham and Torok do not appear to have employed this term to nearly the same extent as introjection, and they did not propagate the formal symmetry in the opposition between
11 Cf. Freud on ‗Mourning and melancholia‘ (1987, pp. 245-268, originally 1917).
12 However this cannot be said of all schools of psychoanalysis, in some of which (occasionally including Freud himself), this term is not used with anything like the same degree of precision or consistency. .See especially Abraham and Torok‘s critique of Melanie Klein and others (1994, pp. 125-138, originally 1972). Notice how this implies a critique of Freud‘s own inconsistent usage, for example in ‗Instincts and their vicissitudes‘
(1987, p. 133, originally 1915).
Beyond Signification: The Co-Evolution of Subject and Semiosis 51 introjection and projection that one sometimes finds in Freud (e.g. 1987, p. 133) or in Kleinian psychoanalysts such as Hinshelwood (1995).13 In any event, the common psychoanalytical understanding of projection as a splitting off of a part of the ego which is then transferred to and discovered in another, e.g. the analyst, can be easily incorporated into the notion of projectivity as understood here, albeit as part of a broader meaning.
One other interesting point needs to be highlighted regarding the symbolic order from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory, one which is highly illustrative of the role of the indexical within it. Rand and Torok (1993) point out a certain inconsistency in Freud‘s approach to the symbolic, whereby he fails to distinguish consistently between ―personal meanings‖ and ―the use of universal symbolism‖ (1993, p. 570), sometimes even altering the emphasis on one of these relative to the other in successive editions of the same text, such as The Interpretation of Dreams. The authors make their preference clear: ―The method of permanent symbolic keys is no match for deciphering the verbal and affective distortions of a dream‘s unique, individual meaning‖ (1993, p. 578).
The matter at issue here is that of the status of personal meanings or personal associations. Associations of this kind are indexical in an individually subjective sense. So, for example, for the analyst to tell the dreamer that a severed tree invariably symbolises castration may turn out to be quite baseless and misleading when in the individual case it might really mean that a branch of the genealogical family tree has been cut off and lost. This is clearly a very important point, and yet when Rand and Torok (1993, p. 578) quote Freud on this question, we must surely wonder with him about his own ambivalence towards it:
We may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man‘s archaic heritage, of what is physically innate in him. Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we could have imagined possible; so that psycho-analysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race.
The author of this passage from the fifth edition of The Interpretation of Dreams is the same Freud that the authors quote (1993, p. 573) from the fourth edition as saying:
Indeed dreams are so closely related to linguistic expression that Ferenczi (1910) has truly remarked that every tongue has its own dream-language. It is impossible as a rule to translate a dream into a foreign language.
Is it not possible to argue, contra Rand and Torok, that these positions are not necessarily incompatible? I am not in a position to settle this question here, but let us consider what it might mean to accept both positions as Freud might have liked to do. Clearly the latter quotation reflects the view that Rand and Torok would like to uphold, in which it is the case that certain images, objects or words have obtained their significance for the individual as a result of strong associations in his or her experience, almost as if in a ‗private language‘. The former quotation, by contrast, puts the matter in a more universal and evolutionary perspective.
13 This alleged symmetry was similarly rejected by Lacan, on the grounds that projection is an imaginary mechanism, while introjection is a symbolic process. See Encyclopedia of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, accessed at http://nosubject.com/Projection on 3 February 2010.
Tahir Wood 52
Could it not be the case that in the process of hominisation certain (archetypal) symbols of a universal significance have been retained by the species, analogous to the instinctive indices of the animal? Such a notion, which is commonly although not necessarily associated with the name of Jung, is not inherently implausible or ‗mystical‘. Mills (2000), for example, in describing how the ego emerges from the unconscious, argues that it cannot do so ex nihilo and that what is at stake is really a separation within the unconscious itself, which culminates in a division between an innate preconception on the one hand and a realisation that takes place in experience on the other. Citing passages such as the following, he draws attention to a notion of the unconscious found in Hegel‘s anthropological work, an ‗underworld of spirit‘
or ‗nocturnal abyss‘, that predates the discoveries of psychoanalysis:
To grasp intelligence as this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and representations, yet without being in consciousness, is from the one point of view the universal postulate which bids us treat the notion as concrete, in the way we treat, for example, the germ as affirmatively containing, in virtual possibility, all the qualities that come into existence in the subsequent development of the tree. (Hegel Philosophy of Mind, § 453) If we were to accept a set of archetypal indices, we would be postulating an archaic semiotic realm that is specific to the human species, deriving no doubt from its earliest semi-animal stage of development, but which is overlaid by a later semiotic layer, as it were, another indexical realm that is not instinctual in nature, but rather motivated by experience.
Once this is admitted, however, we notice that both of these possibilities are in fact already in place in the animal kingdom, albeit to a limited extent and in a different balance for each species. A great many species have some ability to acquire knowledge of indexical relationships on the basis of experience in addition to those indices that are clearly instinctual, albeit without the emergence of an ego capable of conscious reflection on such experience.14
By retaining these two notions in tension with each other, relating as they do to the universal and the particular, we may gain a better notion of the animal in man and a better idea of how it is that subjectivity emerges from this through semiosis.
And, just as Abraham (1987) shows how ‗phantoms‘ are created and passed on in family history, as much through the unsaid as through the said, we must surely imagine that through the operation of taboos this happens within broader cultures as well, in civil society. So, in human cognition, we may find here again a triadic rather than dyadic division in the derivation of these ‗symbols‘ – really indices within the symbolic order, since they are all motivated by concrete associations – between those of the species, the culture and the individual. None of this is meant to detract from the importance accorded by Rand and Torok to ―the willingness of psychoanalysis to welcome people into their own personal creations‖
(1993, p. 577), and one may add, the value of helping them to verbalise these personal creations in the work of enriching subjectivity through introjection.
In our aspiration to rise above the indexical within the symbolic order this cannot entail a leaving behind of the indexical but rather consists in making the indexical, whether the sum total of mental associations or any part thereof, our own object of reflective thought. And this might include the heritage derived from both our species being and our culture. After all
‗personal creation‘ is not necessarily the work of the individual all-alone.
14 ―By the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas had concluded that animals make use of signs, both natural and those founded on second nature, or custom‖ (Sebeok, 1999, p. 93).
Beyond Signification: The Co-Evolution of Subject and Semiosis 53 In psychological terms one might say that the dialectic of introjection and projection brings about a synthesis in reflection, i.e. a conscious awareness, via symbolic means, of what has previously been achieved or created in subjectivity, also through symbolic means.
Reflection is, at each moment that it appears, a further fulfillment of the symbolic, in that one achieves a certain freedom precisely in each new awareness of what is determinate in one‘s development. We might then say with Hegel:
As consciousness has for its object the stage which preceded it, viz. the natural soul (§
413), so mind has or rather makes consciousness its object: i.e. whereas consciousness is only the virtual identity of the ego with its other (§ 415), the mind realizes that identity as the concrete unity which it and it only knows. Its productions are governed by the principle of all reason that the contents are at once potentially existent, and are the mind's own, in freedom.
(Philosophy of Mind, § 443)
In the spirit of the above, and in the spirit also of psychoanalytical reflection, let us consider the possibility that the further potential of the symbolic order lies in the achievement of greater freedom through reflecting back on the shapes that subjectivity has hitherto assumed.