Beyond the Pleasure Principle Reading Group - (Session I)

okay great we're recording all right so welcome everybody to our reading group on beyond the pleasure principle uh this is our first session we're very excited um we have a nice forum of people from around the world uh people from australia to europe to uh the states and beyond here's the agenda for today so um i'm gonna do most of the sort of talking but again my my preference is for folks to intervene at any point um as i am sort of summarizing the text and really what i'm going to do um at point number two after i say just a few brief things about the text is really just go through line by line i've just highlighted key things and i want to do a close reading and then once we're done with section 2 as you know it ends with the fort da game of freud's grandson and so this actually becomes um a kind of neglected philosophical origin point to the repetition compulsion and i say neglected because uh there's many other sort of primary scenes of philosophical imports from freud's discourse and obviously from lacans lacan had a lot to say on the fort da um because in in a certain sense um it became of of profound interest once lacan develops the object so i want to get into that i also um unfortunately have been doing some reading from philosophers on the fort daw including derrida and so i have some things to say about what he has to say about this game as well i don't know if you're aware that he commented on it um and actually for derrida it's like an extremely significant thing as it pertains to psychoanalysis writ large and then i want to end by um graphing a little bit of lecon's own reading of the game and then we'll just go through the questions we have about over 20 questions i thought it might be nice to do the questions at the end so i've listed everyone everyone sent emails not everyone but many sent email questions and thank you for doing so other people sent more um more like notes the vision or the sort of the idea there is um we want to create an archive when all is said and done for the benefit of other readers of beyond the pleasure principle so your notes your questions your interrogations your reflections etc we'll put into some kind of compendium maybe we'll create a website for them um and really also obviously like uh these these are meant for group discussion so if you raise a highly speculative question about i don't know set theory um maybe i can answer it maybe i can't so i will i will ask others to lend their expertise when appropriate so is everybody good on that agenda nice okay very good very good so yeah my name is daniel i think many of you probably met me from like twitter perhaps or something like that but it's really an honor to be with you all um i'm having green tea and it's very delicious um getting over a cold but it's like the last day of the cold so it's kind of that liberating feeling where you're sort of like i'm free until my children give me another one which is like in the next couple of days um okay so here we are so um i'm literally okay the the text that i wanted us to focus on um was a recently translated text by a couple of lacanian philosophers who i like quite a lot and i recommend that you buy it it's ten dollars for the the the adobe digital version however i really dislike the adobe digital thing because it's not flexible with like us hackers you know i mean it's not easy to use um and it's really hard to like copy paste to like it's not it's not a pdf that i'm used to so i am even though ernest jones the translator actually hated this book i think we should rely on his translation um that's my thought um and that's what i'm copying here and that's what i'm sort of using as our as our sort of measure uh in this presentation so is that okay i mean i hope that's okay i mean you can obviously still read the other one but i mean i i'm not really um of the mind that you know the choice of certain uh german words hold that much significance as it pertains to our interpretation of the text that i'm willing to claim that jones's translation is somehow uh inadequate or seriously flawed i'm i'm not convinced that it is but if anyone disagrees with that we can uh there can be a mutiny on that particular point uh if if you wish um okay no mutiny unfortunately although i'm definitely not a captain i'm reading uh moby dick this summer my god what a nightmare i didn't realize that like this this ahab figure was like um worse than donald trump himself really um okay um what else other housekeeping things am i neglecting to mention um oh yes uh we have a special guest so so the big trajectory here is we're gonna have three sessions on the text itself it's a short book really um we're gonna read things line by line um on our own i mean not in here we're gonna kind of look at passages and do a lot of extra sort of secondary reading which i put in a dropbox link but when we're done with those first three sessions a wonderful comrade and a psychoanalyst from brazil named gabriel tupanambas who has a sort of incredible book coming out on lacanian psychoanalysis he's going to give two talks largely on the theme of drive and the transference um which i think will really help us ground um a much more competent uh perspective on what freud is up to in the book a lot of people have asked about this business uh which you you see early on in the text of sort of world war one and the traumatic war neuroses actually um we can talk about that tonight and we will but uh tupanamba has actually like his first presentation is going to be about that so more on that later which i think is very exciting it's not only about that but it's kind of linked to that okay that covers housekeeping so um the text opens um and and and we might want to say just a couple of things about its sort of um placement in freud's work uh before we truly dive in i mean there's so much to say that much of the background will come as we proceed into the text i think you know many of the freudian disciples were very polarized by the publication of the book it's obviously an account of a of a fil of a speculative and philosophical level philosophers psychoanalysts and others have actually debated this precise point about its scientific efficacy which we're going to get into later for example ernest jones makes the argument that freud's theory of the death drive is his um sort of vulgar attempt to insert what he calls the father image into the origin story of his wider system right so there is there is definitely a tendency to look at the production of this text as a sort of radically biographical gesture and we'll see that as we get to the end of section two where uh of the three examples of repetition compulsion uh war neuroses dreams and the games of children freud uses the games of children from the example of his own family i mean of significant uh interest uh more generally a lot of the ideas that we have developed here prior to death drive which we're not even going to talk about tonight that's for session uh session two in session two next week will probably be our kind of meatiest uh uh philosophical speculative um the night will be as well but section our next meeting where we where we look at sections i think three through six is when we get into the heart of the contribution of uh of the of the book um so i won't get in too much into the genealogy of various concepts that are developed because i think we can kind of retroactively pick those apart although i will say one of our members in this group uh sent a wonderful kind of essay to us which i can share with everyone um about precisely that point right which is sort of what were the pre-concepts um that freud developed prior to beyond the pleasure principle that kind of sort of animated their development because if we see beyond the pleasure principle as the kind of refinement of of his statement of psychoanalysis as such um yeah i think it it is important for us to sort of at least get a grasp on some of the key points from which he was launching uh and then and then uh refined them in this text um so yeah so he begins let me see if there's anything else i wish to say about the text in general and other people can jump in if they have other thoughts on you know um the context in which beyond the pleasure principle was written i would be more than happy as i pull up my notes okay so one big thing i wish to say at the at the outset here in addition to what i've already said is that a lot of psychoanalysts were thinking that the kind of origin of freud's theory of mental life at large is located within his theory of narcissism and freud was interested and therefore as a theory of the ego and freud was interested as you'll see in this text to enter into a much um broader uh uh sort of rooting of his methodology beyond uh simply a theory of a narcissism and of the ego and so the pleasure principle as the laws will famously say later is actually never fully defined as a scientific it remains a kind of quasi principle a transcendental kind of kantian regulative idea according to delos which actually is its strength the fact that it is a regulative idea uh is precisely its elusive abyssal non-foundational strength as a concept so for philosophers uh what this text is is a great victory for them for their possibility of having dialogue with psychoanalysis right and somebody asked a beautiful question which is what did the ego analysis ego psychoanalysis community think of this text were they pro or were they against it and i would actually say in many senses they were against it right um in part because as we'll see freud is making a separation from the centrality of the ego in his theory by emphasizing a completely different origin point to consciousness and to life then again why would a psychoanalyst want to say from the perspective of psychoanalysis what consciousness is this is uh why did he think this is necessary right why did he think it's necessary to locate the origin of life in relationship to consciousness right these are the the nonetheless the kind of questions that animate the text um and there are certain um secondary commentators many many of whom are philosophers that i think have done and i think lacan does the best job um that have actually driven the insights that are developed in this text farther much farther than freud himself therefore i even think it's fair to say that we think the periodization of freud's ideas onto his own scholarly production right his own thought production but in reality la con was starting his investigations after the publication of this text you see so la khan took the truths that were developed here the highly speculative truths and i believe he formalized them farther than anyone else so that's actually why i'm very happy uh that in each of our sessions we'll be reading la khan super close uh because i believe that he remains the best reader of freud pure and simple um anyways there's more to be said here uh but i think i think i'll jump into the text are there any questions about anything that has been said thus far um i had a quick question about the use of regulative idea uh it's a slight technical question because sometimes i get the sense with a regulative idea that it's like an idea that never actualizes but just as like something that's uh in the distance is that the same way it's used for with to lose interpretation of death drive or is that not applicable yeah um well i think the big the big point that the lows will pick up upon is that freud's theory of repetition that he develops here is hinged upon a notion of death drive which is non-foundational is which is precisely abyssal and it is that abyssal uh status uh which which he then names or which yeah which he then puts onto a kantian framework right as a kind of unknowable point an unknowable point of origin let's say so um i was going to actually dedicate a whole section of this reading series on delos's reading of freud um but i've you know if the person that i wanted to speak about that wasn't available and i sort of decided against it in a certain way all of this is gathered in difference in repetition by the laws obviously though freud is a huge influence on on the los rata's uh career though but i would i would say that that is the answer right there that the lewis basically makes a claim that um ford's theory of death drive is this kind of um unaccounted for um not scientific origin point of of the very logic of his system right but instead of saying that this is a failure and it should be rejected and so on he says this is actually the strength of it right from a kantian kind of standpoint is how i would characterize that um does that make sense uh yes thank you okay okay okay so so let's let's hop in now again as we go through this i encourage you to bring the text up on like another screen or sort of if you have it printed out or if you have a physical copy sort of read along um so obviously freud begins the text with a kind of general notion that you know pleasure is um generally thought of in relationship to pain as a kind of economic relationship he says we have decided to consider pleasure and pain in relation to the quantity of excitation present in the psychic life and not confined in any way along such lines that pain corresponds with an increase in pleasure with a decrease in this quantity we do not thereby commit ourselves to a simple relationship between the strength of the feelings and the changes corresponding with them least of all judging from psychophysiological experiences so the main point here is that um we kind of think of uh uh purely as a kind of a biological substrate of excitations uh measured over a given period of time and he then points out that um several thinkers of the time including fechner thought that the kind of balance of this economic relation was one that was that the mental life was aiming towards a kind of stability so stability instability is the kind of wider logic by which pleasure operates within the body and the mental life right but freud rejects this view as you can see here it says if such a thing existed in the vast majority of our psychic processes would necessarily be accompanied by pleasure or would conduce to it while the most ordinary experience emphatically contradicts that conclusion one can only say that a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle exists in the psyche to which however certain other forces or conditions are opposed so that the ultimate issue cannot always be in accordance with the pleasure tendency so i think that's very clear enough um uh it would it would be a kind of naivete to to think that um on it purely on its own terms the economic theory doesn't hold um he then introduces on about page three of the text the notion of the reality principle and he he defines the reality principle in essence as a type of delayed gratification um he doesn't really go into examples of that but i think it's obviously quite intuitive to develop some examples he says quote under the influence of the instinct of the ego for self-preservation it is replaced by the reality principle which without giving up the intention of ultimately attaining pleasure yet demands and enforces the postponement of satisfaction the renunciation of manifold possibilities of it and the temporary endurance of pain on a long and circuitous road to pleasure um so it's related to reality principle but it's not necessarily in a dialectic with the reality principle and nor is the pleasure principle necessarily in a dialectic with pleasure pain so he's sort of bringing these up and then letting them go as then thirdly he goes on to say that it is uh has its kind of origin point in sex impulses um and they happen over and over again that whether acting through these impulses or operating in the ego itself uh the sex impulses tend to prevail over the reality principle okay so far so good um he then shifts gears and really makes a pivot which i think is super significant for our understanding of later concepts that he's giving us and that is that there is this relationship between internal and external and the notion that pleasure uh can only be symbolized that is it it's much more significant for us to think about the definition of the pleasure principle from the standpoint of perception representation of the perceptual order um and he says quote most of the pain we experience is of a perceptual order perception either of the urge of unsatisfied instincts or of something in the external world which may be painful in itself or may arouse painful anticipations in the psychic apparatus the reaction to these claims of impulse and the threats of danger in which the real activity of the psychic apparatus is manifested may be guided correctly by the pressure prince by the pleasure principle or by the reality principle which modifies this it seems thus necessary to recognize a still more far-reaching limitation of the pleasure principle okay and i've noted here it's important we understand perceptions of pain in external danger in order to grasp the structure of it so these are that's the end of section one um he's sort of laying down um some just very general points about how uh these things have been thought and what one gathers is that the scientific community from psychology but also from biology has a kind of under theorization of of this right um so i really found the first section a bit scant and a bit um like really the whole thing reads as a kind of essay whereby freud's not really being that generous in terms of telling us uh his thesis out front so it's sort of written in that classic mode where the thesis is developed as he sort of it's almost in in that sense like a meditation a meditation that links from one meditation to the other uh with no necessary relationship from a beginning point where he's sort of spilling the beans of what my argument is i feel like today we're forced to write that way and we sort of don't have people that write in this manner um not near as much i don't know if anyone would actually perceive this form of writing to be um generous or good i wonder what you think about that anyways um so section two is obviously uh much more meaty um and he he immediately uh enters into this notion of traumatic neuroses and this is where this sort of famous passage comes about he's he had written about this before okay um and in essence obviously everyone i think knows that freud um treated uh many of the veterans of the first world war and gained a sort of certain amount of sort of profound insight um especially in relationship to what he had gained from the hysteric subjects that first initiated the psychoanalytic method and that is uh what we see here so we can just sort of read through uh read through this after a severe shock of a mechanical nature sorry did somebody want to say something yes sorry um before jumping into section two i just had some thoughts on section one as well that i wanted to see if it spurred anyone yourself uh yes um i'm bradshaw uh um but i i wanted to ask about this metapsychology term that comes up because strategy tells you that this is the inauguration of like the last phase um and freud on the first page sort of suggests that uh this is what we now distinguish as the term metapsychological um there's something of a conflict there maybe in a way um or or a tendency to view freud as more complete on strategy's part than he really is um but but the question is what is metapsychology and freud tells you that it's a it's a combination um he says it's the combination of topographical and dynamic systems um but but finally what he'll be giving us now is an economic model and the economic model is is important but it's also rather peculiar or queer but before jumping to the economic ones uh i i won't give you that intellectual genealogy of these things but um in the papers on technique in remembering repetition and working through um freud freud talks about these two topographical and dynamic systems or dynamic modes of working um he says that descriptively speaking and this is how psychoanalysis would appear to to most people um psychoanalyst aims to a psychoanalyst aims to fill in gaps in memory but dynamically speaking he says and this is what's important for a psychoanalyst from the inside of psychoanalysis the goal is different the goal is to overcome resistances due to repression that's freud's answer and so now we have something else um there's a there's an economy which which is at work and one of the quotes that we that we read just a moment ago um it it goes on uh freud says that um pleasure and unpleasure not just a ratio or a simple relation of excitation um but but something ha something to do uh he says uh the factor that determines the feeling of pleasure is probably the amount of increase or diminution in the quantity of excitation in a given period of time um i i think this is a really crucial point and one which almost no one picks up um except de la's perhaps because um this is this is the concept of differentiation uh from calculus to take a difference with respect to time to to understand difference with respect to time this is uh this is what the libido is really about and this is the sense in which it's a transcendental or regulative concept it's an economy not of things or objects but of speeds um and and this is something which freud uh does definitely remain very tentative about um he laments that that scientists philosophers aren't able to give us any any clues about it um but but nevertheless he wants to to push forward um and i think that this question of uh the the differential uh differentiation is uh really of the essence in a way um because what freud is getting at here on on on page 11 of the standard edition uh sorry page nine um he says that this pleasure principle follows from the principle of constancy and that's a the question that he's getting at in this paragraph is if um if life is economic um why isn't it the case i mean the simplest economy is to run to zero um why why isn't everything simply dead um why is it the case that life achieves a certain constancy a homeostasis um an internal environment um which which can wreak havoc on the subject even as it's as as it's subject to an external environment um and how are these two things related in a way uh this is what the pleasure principle and its deviation through the reality principle get at um this principle of constancy um really it's it's a question of are there actually existing infinities in the in the finite world um in in a in a strange way um and this question of an actually existing infinity has to do with this uh organic homeostasis or constancy that freud is is puzzling over how how does an organism achieve it um what what does it bring to its mental functioning or uh how does this mental functioning reflux back to uh its organic stability um anyway thank you sorry oh excellent thank you for that um yeah no uh other thoughts are welcome other interventions are very much welcome there i mean i think uh please please hi um this sort of reminds me of uh what shizek says he points it out a couple times about the problem of life isn't uh like how does it uh so what do you say can you introduce yourself i'm jonas hi hello everyone so uh he says um yeah the problem of life isn't how an organism relates to its environment but how it draws the line of itself the um i guess the barrier of life i guess um i guess that was one of my questions is i i'm not really sure what the difference between homeostasis is and like maintaining a barrier and creating and having a definite barrier um but that does seem to be the problem here the constancy of of a barrier yeah um aaron um the issue the barrier will come up in later sections this is what defines the organism initially and this is a big part of brassiere's reading um which i'm not terribly familiar with but zupanchik talks about it a bit in her section on the drive and what sex as um regards the first point i mean the earlier point made about um uh differential rhythms at play i can't say that this is a really long-standing theme in freud or at least the only other instance of this comes to of this coming to mind this idea of almost a kind of tempo to psychic life is um you find traces of this in the early letters to fleece you know in the pre-psychoanalytic writing she talks about you know um the kind of rhythms of analysis the architecture of the symptom um jameson webster covers this really beautifully in her conversion disorder but i can't speak much more to it than that other than it's a very neglected topic in freuden if you're looking for you know the kind of initial traces of it you do find it in these um again like the letters to fleece and um i'm not sure if it really suffers surfaces in the project for scientific psychology but that's of course the other kind of gray eminence as it were for beyond the pleasure principle you find a lot of you know early articulations of these things and not to mention alongside the metapsychological inter psychological supplement to the interpretation of dreams a lot of the most um kind of rigorous formulations of uh ford's mass psychology particularly as it pertains to the pleasure principle reality principle as these are conjugated along the kind of divide between primary process and secondary process wonderful and aaron just want to give a plug um aaron wrote this like really nice little mini essay um which i'm happy to share which is what i was saying at the beginning about this kind of conceptual genealogy so if it's okay i would like to share that with everyone later yeah okay awesome so yeah so i'm really happy that we've had these interventions um i really didn't want this to be like this kind of presentation thing so it's so so thankful for those fabulous kind of interventions and um let me just say something real quick obviously also instinct or drive or treb is also mentioned at the end of section one and there is a certain sense in which i can just read where it is for reference this is literally like the page before or as section 1 ends [Music] okay of the old conflict which ended in repression a new breach has occurred in the pleasure principle at the very time when certain instincts tribes were endeavoring in accordance with the principle to obtain fresh pleasure the details of the process by which repression turns a possibility of pleasure into a source of unpleasure are not clearly understood and cannot be clearly represented okay however there is no doubt that all neurotic unpleasure is of that cl of that kind pleasure that cannot be felt as such so uh here we have like a really um kind of enigmatic point i love this point pleasure that cannot be felt as such it really reminds me of schuster's the trouble with pleasure which he very much links this statement to a much wider um argument around pleasure um but uh this is what is animating this text i would say in many many ways right which is how do we describe the elusive nature of the elusive principle of that drive propulsion right and for which the issue of time uh constancy internal external barrier all of these things need to be mapped and need to be kind of graphed i think and we will hopefully do that um in the future so excellent points i've tried to jot all of these all of these points down as you mentioned them are there other interventions before we move to section two i don't know if it's redundant i don't want bogged anything down i just had uh two brief notes on section one um uh issues freud raises there one is he talks about your name oh yes aaron sorry um that um let me pull this up um uh he notes um well for one these possible source of unpleasure arising from a splitting in the mental apparatus it is um these individual drives are then split off from that unity through the process of repression if they then succeed as can easily occur with repressed sexual drives um this may provide an occasion for that is felt by the ego as unpleasure etc etc um this is you can find um if you want know what this entails clinically on the paper that freud wrote just the year before a child is being beaten is an excellent demonstration of this that is where some component of the sexual instinct has he puts it becomes um makes itself uh quote prematurely independent and fixated and it gives rise to this um sadistic and then later masochistic uh erotic fantasy um that is of course a great source of unpleasure to everyone um who to all of its subjects um and then the other thing um daniel you just mentioned that um pleasure that cannot be felt his pleasure um i couldn't help but i i think the kind of pithiest summation of this um is probably in the ratman case where freud notes that his patient experiences um uh horror at the pleasure of which he himself was unaware yeah very nice and in the excerpt i gave you from la con on four fundamental concepts a child is being beaten his analysis of this famous uh case a dream um appears there although unfortunately i didn't include it in my excerpt i apologize uh but it's on the uh automaton uh section so i'm happy to actually share the whole text of the four fundamental concepts where that appears for those that wish to look at it um because it's very much um not only related to masochistic and sadistic um fantasies but a child is being beaten is also related to repetition compulsion right and i think that by the time of section two uh where freud is getting to is not yet death drive it's not yet invented it's not yet laid out on the table again he's kind of inventing this as he goes in some sense um but repetition compulsion is right and so the uh the three things the uh traumatic neuroses dreams and children's play all have a certain logic of repetition compulsion right that can be kind of formalized right and he says the best example is obviously children's play right um well uh la khan really homes in on this point around the notion of a child as being being around that the way in which the dream um functions as a cover it's a it's an incredibly rich reading i highly recommend i was just reading it this morning actually so thank you for those uh really nice points including the rap man example other uh interventions or thoughts what do you make of this notion of this the interest that freud has in perceptual order i know many commentators on um bpp have really mentioned that um and i think cope jack aaron you mentioned kopech really talks about this a lot in her reading which is um by the time before it develops death drive it is something thought it level of representation and perception right so this is this kind of movement and that you see why you see why i think right here why lecon wants to take freud into the field of structural linguistics right because if biology and science cannot give an account right um but it is grounded in the way in which perception makes a mental representation right that primary uh repression is felt through language first in that sense you see you see the linkage right so then you see why for lack on sassuor becomes such a significant interlocutor uh for freud and you also see why in some sense um freud would have been referencing sassuor in the beginning passages here if sasur was available to freud in that sense right daniel uh miguel here may just put one quick question uh i think uh there's a footnote if i remember correctly in which freud connects pleasure and displeasure to the ego because they are by definition conscious feelings some feelings that are perceived by the so what would be a pleasure that cannot be cannot be felt as pleasure like who is is it being enjoyed by someone at some level who is the subject who is enjoying uh this pleasure because for the ego it would be unpleasable right so uh i i think the the neurotic complaint is the uh classic example of pleasure which you don't experience is pleasure you enjoy complaining um it's a it's a pleasure which you have to access in this indirect manner yeah go ahead uh doesn't make freud make the distinction early on that consciousness only distinguishes um qualities and not quantities and so isn't it that like when we think about consciousness it's not actually getting at this economic um magnitude necessarily but it actually just registers like the pluses and minuses um i think that's like made of that's the distinction made pretty early on and maybe that's what's referenced here yeah um that's a very nice point and i think once we get to freud's theory of primal repression uh and the notion of the splitting of the subject the spalting the division of the subject i think we can see very clearly that you know in some sense it has to do with the yeah the the agency of of of the subject's relationship to the pleasure it's as such right and i think that there is a um a bigger claim being made exactly as you say in the division between the mental biological substrate of the soma of the body to consciousness and i fully agree with that distinction that you what was your name who just spoke oh sam hey oh cool um i fully agree with that distinction although do you know where that appears where he says this business on qualitative versus i think it's in the project i think he's an adverb yeah yeah i'm so uh grateful we have such heavy-hitting freud scholars on this uh reading group this is fabulous so uh so yeah miguel i think as we proceed that uh answer and obviously i would point your attention to robert fowler um because this is his whole notion of the of um uh his his recent book on pleasure and the problem of pleasure and i think that he's done probably the most next to maybe zizek on pointing out the lingering neurotic structures of this kind of disembodied pleasure right um obviously candle after is is one such example but i think these cute pop culture examples only go so far because at this level of what freud's giving us he's really talking i think about um a much more fundamental structure of subjectivity is what he's developing you know so um [Music] um yeah i think we will we will we will hopefully get a better grasp on that unless others want to jump in on miguel's nice question around this notion of what what are examples of um pleasure that cannot be felt or pleasure that's not in the possession of the subject this interesting point mean hysterical protest seems like a pretty good example you know dora's say complicity and everything she complains about in the world her supervalent protest yes where does pleasure come into play there though or not pleasure or where does pleasure not come into play there yeah um well i think that what happens is that when you work with patients you find people who fall into the same patterns in their lives and they can be very unpleasurable or unhappy for them but um pleasure and unpleasure aren't necessarily the right words for making this distinction lacan is correct that uh we need to speak about satisfaction um in addition to pleasure unpleasure um people can be satisfied with unpleasure and that's really what what freud is getting at here with this this question of neurotic unpleasure um and it's also why uh de luz will say that the pleasure unpleasure this complex has to be thought independently of pain it has nothing to do with pain hi everyone johnny here just a quick question how does this i think i mean to miguel's question i mean would something like just trying to formulate it within my own thoughts it would something like the the the current hysteria like the hysterical complaint that i believe i'm sorry i forgot your name but you made excellent points the hysterical complaint of like donald trump is going to do a coup isn't that like the pleasure like the unpleasurable the the pleasure that's found with an ultimate ultimate climax of some sort um not to bring left twitter into this but like the sort of like climactic like it's unpleasurable that donald trump would do a coup but nonetheless the invocation of that uh of an apocalypse of of isn't that in some form like a form of jewish jewish sons or is that is that totally something unrelated uh i think i think it and to a certain extent it can hold but i think that the the key point i would hone in on is um you know why is it in the fort dawg game that the child is choosing the direction of the activity of the game they've invented to be structured around mastering the unpleasurable repetition of the absence of the mother right um clearly this indicates that in the example of children's play it's not something which is dictated by the pleasure principle right um so but but that doesn't mean that it's reducible that all children's play is reducible to a kind of sunk masochism either right um it means that there's a sort of structural logic uh at play right which is going to be developed around um oh well around around how one handles repression right um so that's one way to get at it but i invite others to respond to that in the in the interest of getting examples on the table you know always important to do okay well johnny hopefully that like satisfies your question uh um no but i wonder what you mean by the trump thing can you say more about this kind of notion of of trump what did you what was your specific thinking in that i was thinking about pain from pleasure or pleasure from pain this like the figure of donald trump in the liberal mindset of he's such a gauche figure but at the same time he's necessary for like to repeat the constant like invocation of him as a as a figure that will cause a climactic like turnaround and like i think throughout these four years as we're entering 2020 there's this like notion that like there's a coming apocalypse there's a there's calming fascism and it's all gonna it's all gonna all the contradictions will be sort of leveled out at the i'm not making a whole bunch of sense but i i guess i i was trying to think of it in terms of the the pleasure that comes from no pleasure of of invocating something that continually brings you down or makes you the and i think the neurotic complaint and the hysterical protest are both probably excellent examples i was just trying to think of it in terms of politics no that's very helpful i mean i think that we lose track of the fact that we still i think in many regards have um very much a neurotic civilization right um that we're sort of not um that like psychic life still is sort of predominantly neurotic in in a certain sense and so i certainly agree and i think that a sort of general framework of of the neurotic subject is one for whom the proximity of otherness uh is always unresolvable or is always problematic right it's like one way that i always like to formulate that whereas for psychosis um you have a kind of foreclosure or a removal of of otherness right so in that sense um i'm almost more interested in the kind of uh becoming psychosis of the political american scene uh which liberals i think in many senses are incapable of actually becoming full psychotics right um so i don't know maybe it would do them some good in in a certain sense to um think to to escape the the fantasy that they can constantly control the other right um okay let's move to section two i think we've raised some really fabulous points um just sort of some getting our bearings straight kind of uh points um so freud opens this section discussing the traumatic neuroses and pointing out how since the dawn of psychoanalysis the hysteric subject the next subject that became of profound interest to him um were veterans from the first world war and he points out that this sort of fact that the the ones who were actually wounded at the body tended not to exhibit the same dramatic or intense war neuroses as those who witnessed an accident and the way that i frame this and please i invite others to sort of enter in here because we're thinking again of soma we're thinking of body in relationship to consciousness we're thinking of that fabulous distinction we're also thinking really of mediation right we're thinking the mediation of the of the scene of the accident and seems to me that um with the the very aperture of the talking cure uh it makes a great deal of sense why one who has access to the mediation of a physical wound would be able to process that event um more resolutely do people agree with that or sort of how do you how do you take this point such a it's such a there's so much to be said and freud does write about it elsewhere but i wonder if anybody wants to jump in on this uh something that's physical i mean that's that that jumps into my mind i just watched the lobster by jorge silanthamos uh the director eureka's lanthanum was last night and sort of the idea that blindness one and always the other sentences are hyeatons as a result of one's blindness um sort of the physic like the body sort of always necessarily like coming to a conclusion of sorts about um whereas psychic damage um isn't as easily foreclosed like like you were saying but i my friend the first example that comes to mind is blindness for me i mean maybe that's a cliche i've never been blind obviously and i yeah yeah aaron um other than um a compensation as it were i think that you might link this with other parts of the text um again i'm not that familiar with brassiere's reading only second hand but i know what he stresses is the idea um or a richness that you know a primitive organ organism has to um in order to you know prevent being overwhelmed by external stimuli it has to kill off a part of itself it has to mortify itself or at least some part of itself to form this impermeable um barrier and um i mean you could that would be like a very strong almost i dare i say kind of physicalist um reading of the war trauma though i think what you were touching on dino is interesting and it's kind of confounding i don't know what how to kind of make sense of it but the um notion of this proving kind of necessary symbolization as it were um maybe symbolization is too strong but symbolization as it relates to the body you um you had mentioned this um uh answering to certain clinical problems with neurotics i'm curious what you had in mind there well first of all i think that um thank you for reminding me that ray brazier is a really exceptionally good reader of this text and of freud in general um [Music] of lacan but really he's a reader of freud i would say um more so in certain in certain sense um no i was just trying to help johnny um with this understanding of a kind of general neurotic subject and for the nexus of freud's time the neurotic subject was paramount was the most common and i think that there's a certain sense in like post-lacanian circles that today we sort of experience you know a kind of um the borderline and that there's a kind of fracturing and that the three structures um are are all over the map right but i think actually there's a certain certain sense in which we still are very much a neurotic culture right is all i was trying to to say not not even thinking about certain case studies per se but um i agree though yes this business of body and uh overcoming trauma will return um and freud is sort of just um introducing this because he's wanting to talk about um traumatic neuroses right and he then shifts to the question of dreams because it is in dreamwork precisely where um the resolution occurs for for the uh war war neurotics right uh he says quote the study of dreams may be regarded as the most trustworthy approach to the exploration of deeper psychic processes in the traumatic neurosis the dream life has this peculiarity it continually makes the patient back takes the patient back to the situation of his disaster from which he awakens in a renewed terror so in this sense the dream um you can see why it's unresolved status would be its repetition compulsion would be more prominent for the one who was not physically wounded why because the fright of that event seems to almost cause an impossible mediation right where the sort of subject is constantly wanting its unconscious is constantly revisiting it seeking some mediation for which it never fully achieves this fact has caused less surprise than it merits the obtrusion on the patient over and again even in sleep of the impression made by the traumatic experiences taken as being merely a proof of its strength the patient has so to speak undergone a psychical fixation as to the trauma fixations of this kind on the experience which has brought about the malady have long been known to us in connection with hysteria we uh in 1893 uh argued that hysterics suffer from reminiscences so here and i love this point about reminiscence versus repetition as a sort of huge motif both obviously in philosophy um you have plato's theory of reminiscence uh which is very like the cornerstone of platonic uh theory of truth in some sense and then you have kierkegaard and the kind of great anti-philosophical tradition of repetition being primary right and uh and how freud intervenes in that philosophical debate uh uh is very interesting and we'll see that in section three uh even more so um so yes so the war neurosis indicates that the traumatic point the point of the wound whether physical or psychical uh is a point of repetition in this case in dreams um okay without the intention of making a comprehensive study of these phenomena i availed myself of an opportunity which offered uh wait are we already okay so we're already done yeah so this is how short this is so that's first he talks about um neuroses then he talks about dreams and now here we are already at the third example of children's games um so this is actually the bulk of what i wanted to talk about today i spent most of my time preparing for the fort da example um before i get into it is there any points that we need to make about everything we've talked about so all far this is oh sorry please go ahead yeah this is kade um and this is more just even like a passing thought kind of going off with johnny a little bit even but uh when it's brought about like the distinctions between apprehension fear and fright and how fright seems to be the only thing that brings out that the fight neurosis or the associated with the war trauma uh i'm thinking a little bit and it's simplified because i don't grasp it entirely of zupanitches what is sex somewhat where it seems like there's a correlation between sex and like the uninscribable or what isn't able to be made sense of uh has a certain quality of repetition to it and so thinking of like the hysteria at like an assumed catastrophic event like a trump coup or something like that i'm wondering if there's something sexual in that nature of anticipating like strangely anticipating a fight and and being drawn to it in a certain way yeah very interesting so you're saying is there a logic in which um the lingering notion of structure of fright creeps over into other kind of newly traumatic experiences as i understand what you said that's a very interesting point in other words is there something of the prior fright present in my future accidental fright moments i witness a horrific accident or something do i is that what you're saying in a certain sense is it sort of a a kind of um tapestry that has some connection in some sense like almost like an adrenaline junkie type thing where where you put your health in a situation where you're uh anticipating a fight somewhat or or that's what you read the situation as and drive some sort of enjoyment of that before the fact yeah i mean i think this is actually going to be present in the notion of games right and even in horror movie horror and the experience of horror it has to do with a a game of the fortification of the agency and the kind of the notion that the the the um [Music] the like the um the exit and the there right the the movement and then the i've established it like the excitation that comes with that in certain sense is a kind of leap right it is a leap of a discovery and this is why i was saying this business of the laws found so interesting the abyssal leap and here i do think that yes the pascali and kierkegaardian notion of leap is here present um um so so i think it's certainly uh uh there um i i want to say though hopefully that answers your question here but i do want to say that like this whole business of the fort dodge is super weird because did you notice that freud does not admit that it's his own child or like that it's his daughter's child and there is a reading from a pretty interesting american philosopher who really says that uh freud omitted that information for two reasons one he wanted to ground it in a kind of scientific authority right um like it could be any example it's more universal right and two apparently uh freud's daughter sophie had died i think that that was the case so there was a certain um a certain trauma that freud himself was experiencing it's sort of interesting that he chose uh that example on the side be remiss uh aaron here if i didn't mention on the subject of sophie freud's death it was actually just a lecture by jacqueline rose yesterday for the freud museum on beyond the pleasure principle yeah on the impact of sophie's death i haven't had the chance to listen through uh to it yet but um i like jack wayne very interesting very interesting so let me just say a couple of things here before i actually go into um the example this actually will preface uh a little bit from derrida's reading of the fort dawn um uh which is that um very dope spends a lot of time focusing here on how freud establishes to the reader to his public his own participation um in the example he's citing of the game of the child right um and and and what i wishes to point out here is that in fact freud was not just a passive observer of this example that he's illustrating but really was sort of an architect of it in a certain sense um uh so that's very significant for derrida because what that means is that the origin in a certain sense of of the beyond of the pleasure principle because here we're really getting the closest formalization of it that we've gotten thus far is an autobiographical origin right and it is still uh because there is this tacit denial of his own intricate role and the fact that it's from his own family um derrida then argues that this is a sign that freud is still undergoing a self-analysis i think for many for many of us we'll be very upset that he makes this claim um um and maybe maybe not i don't know so anyways so let's let's get into it okay i thought that was interesting um uh sorry uh bradshaw just before you go there i wanted to mention that this question of fright um it comes up with anxiety and fear which seem to be different states but fright designates a speed um a suddenness which which goes back to this question i mean it's a it's a point that freud brings up just at the beginning about uh quantity of excitation in a given period of time speed and it recurs in the very last last pages of beyond the pleasure principle as well um he says that he's been forced actually to to to countenance um this this kind of accelerated uh notion or the suddenness but um the fort dog game is important and what's what's happening here um in section two is that freud is explaining why uh the traumatic neuroses are a kind of challenge to psychoanalysis um in 1900 in the interpretation of dreams freud says that dreams are wish fulfillment and here he tells you anyone who thinks it's self-evident uh that you should be put back in in your dreams into states of fright um has not understood what what is a wish fulfilled um so the he's really kind of twisting himself um in a way to accommodate these dreams these neuroses um and and it's this always this element of speed or suddenness uh of differentiation uh which which seems to be at stake um and and yeah i'll let you there's something else i want to say but i'll let you talk about fort daw uh you might get it no no thank you so much um really excellent interventions um okay so i'm just gonna read from the text so without the intention of making a comprehensive study of these phenomena i availed myself of an opportunity which offered of elucidating the first game invented by himself of a boy 18 months old [Music] and this is after the mirror stage i think technically right just as an fyi it was more than a casual observation for i lived for some weeks under the same roof as a child and his parents and it was a considerable time before the meaning of his puzzling and continually repeated performance became clear to me the child was in no respect forward in his intellectual development at 18 months he spoke only a few intelligible words making besides sundry significant sounds which were understood by those about him but he made himself understood by his parents and the the maidservant and had a good reputation for behaving properly he did not disturb his parents at night he's fruitlessly obeyed orders about not touching various objects and not going into certain rooms and above all he never cried when his mother went out and left him for hours together although the tie to his mother was a very close one she had not only nourished him herself but had cared for him and brought him up without any outside help okay so a couple points here um [Music] uh freud links the the notion of the game to again the theme of economic compensation which we've already been introduced to because it's largely about the instantiation of presence and absence as we'll see uh occasionally however this well-behaved child evinced the troublesome habit of flinging into the corner of the room or under the bed all the little things he could lay his hands on so that to gather up his toys was often no light task he accompanied this by an expression of interest and gratification emitting a loud long drawn out ooh which in the judgment of the mother one that coincided with my own was not an interjection but meant go away so the ooh is the fort that is away i saw at last that this was a game and that the child used all his toys only to play being gone fourth sign with them one day i made an observation that confirmed my view the child had a wooden reel with a piece of string wound rounded it never occurred to him for example to drag this after him on the floor and so play horse and cart with it but he kept throwing it with considerable skill and every time he did he would say ooh and drew the real by the string out of the card again greeting it's reappearance with the joyful da there this was therefore the complete game disappearance in return the first act being the only one generally observed by the onlookers and the one untimely repeated by the child so you see it's kind of like a yo-yo string that you sort of attach objects to it goes out and back to you right okay so i've made these these points on the side there the analysis of a single case of this kind yields no sure conclusion on impartial consideration one gains the impression that it is from another motive that the child has turned this experience into a game he was in the first place passive was overtaken by the experience but now he brings himself in as playing an active part by repeating the experience as a game in spite of its unpleasing nature this effort might be ascribed to the impulse to obtain the mastery of a situation a power instinct which remains independent of any question of the recollection but another interpretation may be attempted the flinging away of the object so that it is gone might be the gratification of an impulse of revenge suppressed in real life yes you can go i don't want you i am sending you away myself the same child a year later than many observations used to throw on the floor a toy to say go to the war he had been told that his absent father was at the war so that's you can see the similar structure there um one is left in doubt whether the compulsion to work over in psychic life what has made a deep impression to make oneself fully master of it can express itself primarily and independently of the pleasure principle in the case discussed here however the child might have repeated a disagreeable impression in play only because with the repetition was bound up a pleasure gain of a different kind but more direct okay so uh very interesting points i think this last point is probably our best example of where the logic of repetition compulsion is is is is hinged on um we see that um on the one hand uh there is uh a beyond which is a kind of risky beyond a kind of wager that the child has created through and this is very important especially for lekkon the physical device lakhan will literally call that physical device of the child the objean right the apparatus right so that's very significant but from this example we are dealing with an opportunity to sort of formalize the theory of primal repression on the one hand um and we're also able to theorize uh the birth of signification for lechon so in the readings that i had us look at um lechon does just that so he really gleans quite a lot from this um but before we get into that i just wanted to make a couple uh sort of general points um so the first thing to note here is that and dairy dot picks up on this and others have as well is that it's actually unclear whether the absence or the presence which one is first in the in sequence right because in some sense the presence it's very interesting that the one of the presence the achievement the there of the ooh is secondary and not primary that's a very interesting dialectical point um the other point is that freud says that life disappears there right so at the point of the fort not being the da the fort is the da so being there before the emergence of life the repetitive movement of the drives is retraced to the one single self-identical origin the fort which was there and is there and will be there before during and after all is said and done so this has led some to say that the the fort the origin of this movement because again freud will develop a theory of both the origin of the fort being both on the side of consciousness but also of life and the kind of unique interconnectivity of the two it is a point where neither the living nor light can ever emerge from now it is also the point and ernest jones will say this later where freud interjects and this goes back to the self biographic biography piece autobiography piece where freud interjects the father image of himself into the fort right um for derrida it is in some sense uh the place where no trace can emerge and you you those who are appreciative of his philosophy understand the importance of trace and why why precisely there is so hostile of freud's fort daw is precisely the lack of it let me also make a point that this is for materialists like let's say zizek the the the fort da instantiates a notion of a materialist even a kleinman khan will say this uh in the the um four fundamental concepts that the fort dot uh it displays and if those of you are not familiar with the the notion of kleinemann from greek atomism uh the greek atomist had the notion that there is a kind of swerving atom which out of chaos produces a kind of accidental order right but it is um from a kind of void of interacting multiplicities a sort of swerving atom creates a kind of retroactive um so there's a what i'm trying to say to you is that the dialectical relationship between the fort and the daw uh brings such profound it's the origin point of everything that is speculative about this text um okay so that's my little crazy philosophical interlude and this is a picture of freud and his daughter with the boy okay let us move to lacron so um wait can we please can i ask a quick thing about why we didn't do like the active passive bit sure let me go back to that please well i'm going to get into it with the in a moment but go on okay no no no it's okay i just thought we would do it as part of it but if it will get back to it no no no what did you wish to say about it oh it was i just felt like it was like this weird aristotelian moment that doesn't necessarily get picked up on and like i just see all these i'm in i'm doing social work and it's like my like training right now so like i see a lot of this interpretation of like mastery right which freud is sort of saying it's not that this is not the sort of like drive to mastery in repetition there's in the repetition compulsion it's not mastery and so he pauses this alternative which has to do with the move from passive to active yeah so i guess that's what i'm kind of interested in exploring further both like what if people think that there's like a weird aristotelian notion or concept of it or if it's like how does it i mean how it gets put into lacon's sort of civilization yeah i think at this point we might have to move to the master himself um but you're right i think freud leaves open let's call it like a vulgar ego psychoanalytic reading here right by not saying oh yeah we can reduce this to the power instinct right or that it's all about the ego's agency right i think that's why this text probably frustrates a lot of people in the psychoanalytic community right who are very like egocentric in a certain not literally but you know in their theories right and as i say in the beginning why this text sort of becomes a problem for a lot of people but also why i would also add that there is a um aside from the materialist reading and the kind of daridian ernst jones biographical overdetermination reading we should also be honest that there is a mystical reading i mean i don't know if you guys read norman o'brown the great american freudian i mean he's for him this notion of fort dao is is is a kind of mystical origin point it's kind of the sort of van morrison um um beyond the vista's you know whatever kind of thing fully naturalized i mean he has no interest in talking about the material instantiation of language or anything like he doesn't read like on at all right um so there's a certain mystical direction even though jung is kind of not really in the picture in a certain sense you can kind of sort of reincorporate a mystical freudianism from beyond the pleasure principle i wish to suggest i don't know if anyone agrees with that um aaron here i just want to add one other potential reading at this moment i'm kind of engaged in a debate as it were with mikhail borjakobson um whose thesis in the freudian subject is one of a kind of essentially he takes his bearings from a gerardi in metapsychology which posits that i didn't desire is always um secondary to identification um that desire is always modeled and so forth and so that essentially the unconscious consists in just identification and no dreams are for instance lived out from the person themselves they always seem to be you know taking the guise of someone else um and he doesn't think this is just a compromise formation something to get around the dream center for instance but it is the very activity of the unconscious that this kind of primordial opacity consists in my identification with the other and hence his reading really stresses this kind of revenge aspect of the four da it's like oh you dispose of me well you i'm going to reenact what you do to me i'm going to take your place literally in my fantasy and dispose of you as you of myself and indeed for for jakobson this kind of fundamental identification explains uh the odd convergence of unpleasure with desire it's a well i i mean it's a fascinating argument i think it's terribly simplistic though especially once you just take in to account later developments um but at this stage i think it is one that's i don't know um bears uh warrants grappling with uh on this passive active question i wanted to point out that yes it is uh freud freud says you know no it's not this instinct for mastery but then he's not very persuasive about it is he um but he does say actually what it what it is instead um it's not an instinct to mastery that prevails here on the other hand it is obvious that all their play is influenced by a wish that dominates them the whole time the wish to be grown up and be able to do what grown-up people do um what he's saying there's that the uh the human organism doesn't come out sort of with these uh predetermined ends or goals it doesn't become a master of its own house the house has to be built by someone first who tells them what to do there have to be grown-ups um and and ultimately what uh matters is not the instinct master to master anything um which may or may not happen uh but but rather this wish uh this desire to be grown up or whatever a grown-up is who knows what a grown-up is um but but this mastery instinct versus the wish to master come comes to a point that i think is uh in on page 15 in the footnote um he makes a further observation which he says confirms his interpretation fully uh one day the child's mother had been away for several hours and on her return was met with the words baby ooh which was at first incomprehensible it soon turned out however that during this long period of solitude the child had found a mean a method of making himself disappear um so so in a mastery instinct what what prevails is the ego over everything else in this wish for mastery um and the wish to be the master uh it's not about the ego prevailing it's about the ego disappearing um there's a magic trick that happens and this is the puzzle of narcissism um it's why jean laplante for example uh says that everything that writes the freud writes after this narcissism essay is a disaster um le planche wants to totally erase everything after narcissism but um the puzzle of narcissism is either i only see myself i exclude the rest of the world um or on the other hand i see myself in everything i am the world uh narcissism cuts in both of these directions but it's not clear how or in what way and this question of mastery um it's it's implicit more or less it's latent i think here um but what freud is trying to get at is that there's a wish a desire um which which is important not the instinct or um the capacity to to be a master aaron here i just want to add one thing to the kind of laplacian reading of um narcissism i mean it's remarkably similar to borshi akibson's own claims you know uh either i debase myself entirely before the other i totally divest myself a personality or i just project myself outward and cop jack has an interesting answer to this and read my desire and not read my desire imagine there is no woman building on laplace's point that sublimation is actually what gives rise to primary narcissism as opposed to secondary narcissism which is more properly echoism and that is that you have to insert narcissism at the level of the drive that it instantiates to quote leo steinberg's line about jasper johns you can't tell the difference between what you bring to the object and it what it gives back excellent so um let's move to lacon's reading of the thought let me just say that lacon mentions this game quite a lot um in the accrete there are multiple reference points in the um the purloin letter um the function and field of speech um and elsewhere and you know uh not to mention in many seminars and i gave you uh excerpts from the seminar on fantasy and obviously from the four fundamental concepts where it's elaborated i think the most um the most significant point that lacon will will derive from this i believe is the idea that you have and although lacan does not want to use the term agency um it is something of the achievement of of a new subjective humanization of desire you could say agency if you like but um it is an achievement both of symbolization for the child but if we think about the fort dog game vis-a-vis the structure of the oedipus complex um which which i will we'll turn to in a moment that actually really helps us understand um a how the game performs something of an achievement for the child's relationship of autonomy if you like to their own desire right but also sets up the sort of preconditions for the child's relationship to the field of signification as such so a lot's going on with this game nonetheless um so the object the child makes appear and disappear is actually less important for lechon than the phonemic distinction of the ah it is the point of an insemination for a symbolic order that pre-exists the infantile subject and again pre-exists um why is it uh how do you pronounce the is it the from the greek aristotelian notion of the of the automaton is it am i pronouncing it correctly 2k did anybody know i tried to look it up but i couldn't find it because it's actually not a greek word um maybe no one else knows okay that's good i'm not the only idiot here then um but the notion that um the symbolic order in which the subject is being introduced has a pre-existent status goes back to this notion of the kind of speculative abyssal foundation of of what will be death drive right or of of freud's entire project which we talked about at the beginning um so this this excerpt here is from the accrete uh actually this is from the seminar on edgar allan poe um towards the end of it uh so you'll see that he says quote fort daw it is already when quite alone that the desire of the human child becomes the desire of another of an alter ego who dominates him and whose object of desires henceforth his own affliction should the child now address an imaginary or real partner he will see that this partner too obeys the negativity of his discourse and since his call has the effect of making the partners slip away he will seek to bring about the reversal that brings the partner back to his desire through a banishing summons thus the first er thus the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing and this death results in an endless perpetuation of the subject's desire so i think you can see what is what is it that's being killed first of all what is it that's being killed it is the traumatic event which would otherwise be a repetition compulsion of the absence of the mother a kind of enigmatic x right that is what's being brought up right and i think like the mother's already dead like and so who's talking sorry oh this is sam i was just thinking like isn't there that line where uh when when the child actually when the child's mother dies it's like he's you know uh the boy shows no grief i'm thinking that's kind of an interesting or where where does that appear um it's freud's note on i'm actually using the the richter translation but 59 of that one you want to read it please uh sure yeah when the child was five years and nine months old his mother died now that she was really in quotes gone um ooh the boy showed no grief over her indeed a second child had been born in the meantime and had awakened in him the strongest jealousy freud's note yeah that's right i don't think the mother the mother is not dead at the point of this example though right of the fort daw in its initial presentation right right no no yeah that's correct yeah okay okay okay so we've already established for lacon um that the the the issue of the game enacts the humanization of desire the introduction of symbolization uh which we'll get to in a moment and so uh however this this excerpt i wish to read aloud from the 2k and the automaton so this reel is not the mother reduced to a little ball and again the real is the the physical object that the child has used to put the string on to take the objects to create the effect to create the away effect it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his still retained this is the place to say in imitation of aristotle that man thinks with his object it is with his object that the child leaps the frontiers of his domain transformed into a well and begins the incantation it is true i love this quasi-theological stuff it is true that the signifier is the first mark of the subject how can we fail to recognize here from the very fact that this game is accompanied by one of the first oppositions to appear that it is in the object to which the opposition is applied and act to real not real but real like the device that we must designate the subject to this object we will later give the name it bears in the lithuanian algebra of the petit the activity as a whole symbolizes repetition but not at all that of some need that might demand the return of the mother and which would be expressed quite simply in a cry it is the repetition of the mother's departure as cause of a spalting in the subject which is a division in the subject overcome by the alternating game away there away there so you see the you see the duality right uh here or there um i kind of prefer away like i said and i think the lowest much prefers this notion of exit like yeah and whose aim in its alteration alternation is simply that of being the fort of a da the da of a fort it is aimed at what essentially is not there represented for it is the game itself that it is that that is the representance of the vorstalon what will become of the force along win once again this representance of the mother in her outline made up of the brush strokes and the the gouches of desire will be lacking so um very interesting we have a kind of dual level operation of representation that's taking place um i've noted here i think this is worth uh pointing out here that there's three significant points of fort da for la con first is the verbal communication of the fort daw by connecting the event with signifiers absence and reappearance second the fact that the the erasure of the thing is the precondition for symbolization what lacon calls making an effigy of the mother taking the enigmatic desire of the mother's absence and turning it into an efficacy or an effigy um is the second point third you also have the notion of substitution which is taking place so why is substitution important uh well in some sense and i could actually graph this i actually have i may be able to let me see if i can do this real quick if i go to sorry this may not work but it may work at the same time so if i stop share and then i go share screen and i go here and then i go share and then i have okay cool can you see that does that work yeah so you have a couple ways to graph this and this is i think helpful so you have a certain uh introduction of the spoken chain which is itself as you all know a metonymy so the s1 here being the the enigmatic origin point of the mother is converted into an s2 and but that s has a relationship which lechon graphs like this s2 over bard 1 1 x s2 and then u stands for unconscious and x stands for um the enigmatic origin point of the like pure pleasure of unification with the mother's desire right so in that sense what the s2 represents is precisely what lachon calls oh sorry hold on the necessary spalting or splitting of the subject right so the fort dog game is the achievement of this which what is your your name again who you you you articulated it so well uh my friend i forget your name you you were mentioning this uh a vision of how the presentation is not reducible to this notion of ego psychology of agency and so on and so forth but it's actually what's your name again sam yeah is actually about the uh development of the split subject and s2 is the split subject i apologize this doesn't read exactly wonderfully but this is my first time doing it so s2 is also following the logic of substitution substitution uh so all of that then would be uh primal repression is the necessary precondition for entering into a relationship to a signifier as such seems to be lakhan's point now i wish i could bring up my other slides here that summarize that a little bit but in essence the fort daw has to do with the necessary creation of a lack right so when the child says fort da the child disappears in being right and the child basically re-emerges as an effect of language right so here we're sort of um realizing that the 2k what like what lacon calls this residue of eras or the the the legacy of the aristotelian notion of repetition uh is best understood as these moments of symbolization whereby repetition hits or has an encounter with a real right and i like the fact that the real of the object of the game has a hama or sounds the same as real in some sense because it's not the same but it allows for uh a touch with the real if you like a touch with the x right um so that's how lekkon will actually uh graph it um [Music] but it looks incredibly uh ugly so i might actually stop the ship go ahead aaron uh yes i just had a question about the engendering and necessary lack could you say that this is engendering the very necessary lack in the ma if mother capital o other because i know that um reads for daw somewhat along these lines i mean he views it as a very inadequate initial means of symbolization on the part of the child but he i think he says in seminary five formations of the unconscious that this is a way of reaching the mother's quote beyond and way of beginning to escape subjects anxiety provoking subjectivization and so this is also equally a way of beginning to symbolize the mother's desire and to evade her desire because it's of course a huge source of anxiety for the child yeah i think for those of us that are less familiar with lacan's um general view of oedipus um what we also have at play here in addition to everything aaron just mentioned is also the achievement of the proper metaphorization right so for la khan entering into language this notion here of the what will say spoken chain or signifying chain um is a metanomic a metanamic relationship a subject represents a subject to another signifier so it's a sort of um de-personalized almost intrinsically alienating experience to enter into the spoken chain right but it is one which is necessary for the development of the child and the precondition of that entering into um requires the sort of um making a metaphor also of the phallus right and the question of the possession of the phallus between the mother and the father which is very important and so what's also at play here is the metaphorization of being as having right in the distinction of having uh uh like why is it uh as our friend sam mentioned that the exit of the child is one of uh moving away from being because being is uh not on the side of the signifier it's on the side of the kind of enigmatic desire of the mother right and so there is a sort of um movement and that movement is necessary also by the interdiction of the father's role in helping to metaphorize that desire right so there is a certain um paternal metaphor i think or even the name of the father that also could be mapped onto this as a necessary feature and obviously we need to talk about the notion of oedipus as a type of you know a conflict over possession of the phallus right and all of the kind of dangers and conflicts that come within families and within the life of a child around um this kind of turbulent notion of possession of phallus but i think it's clear to me that lacan is making the argument that split subjectivity is a necessary introduction to this uh well this field of language as such right but that then introduces a whole new terrain of alienation right it's like um the alienation is is redoubled and and layered right um but let me please the is the s1 um the paternal signifier or is it something akin to i i've heard the notion of a union aries signifier like a nonsensical like it's it's relative it's like i guess my question is is s1 here basically it could be whatever or it can be anything but it has to instantiate the idea of there or i guess yeah my question is what s one here is force or da i is and is it a paternal signifier yeah this is this is part of the ambiguity of the um uh the notion of presence and absence which one is primary it's not exactly clear or it's not exactly like this is certain fundamental ambiguity that i think many people have picked up on but i think in in general the s1 would be the non-alienated uh position of the child um before they have even endeavored to throw the through the the x to throw the object right that's how i would answer that but if i invite others to to to also jump in daniel would you uh care to compare this example of the child with the previous example of the traumatic dreams uh in terms of this theme of the spoken chain and and and repetition so uh are the dreams repeating themselves because uh the soldiers can find a metaphor for that traumatic event would that be the basic point if we look at it uh through this lacanian reading of freud yeah i think that's i think that's an interesting uh point which is to say that it is it is possible to resolve the repetition compulsion of a traumatic dream precisely through the work of the talking here of the analytic session and one of the things we're going to look at immediately in section three is the way in which in the transference which has not yet come up uh we find us an extremely uh further proof of the ambiguity of the origin of the primal repression precisely because the primal repression lies on the other side of the subject's unconscious desire the analyst almost seems to possess a more proximate position vis-a-vis their own interpretation of it right so they are like literally bringing it about within the analytics session and that itself that bringing it out actually creates a kind of proof of its existence even though it's not something is of conscious existence for the subject right so i think we'll actually get into the way in which the dream functions in analysis through transference in section three uh before we introduce death drive and so on which is where we can answer this question with more precision i believe let me actually share this other screen with you very quickly which is even better because i try to summarize lakon's key points so we have somewhat limited time let me just go through them the fourth thought has to do with absence and presence in creation of a lack when the child says for thou the child disappears in being it is nothing and emerges as subject namely as an effective language as we just tried to demonstrate so what this allows is the child can now mobilize his desire as a desire of a subject towards objects that substitute for the lost object that's the key thing the introduction into the chain of speech or in into the the chain of uh of metonymy of other signifiers uh you see helps to sort of um push down the the traumatic x right through substitution through metonymy and metonymy simply refers to a system of a kind of horizontal differentiation right um where you cannot say uh this is the one so in a a signifying chain that's governed by uh metonymy you you do not have pure signification it's not possible right so the game for lacon is about a certain mastery of the lost object as such which is the enigmatic x of the fusion of mother and child right and we should note here that uh melanie klein had a radically different view about the um notion of fusion of mother and child la khan held the view that it's necessary like a priori necessary to make a move away from this fusion right that a kind of you if you know anything about mirror stage in the construction of the imaginary you'll know that la khan's argument is that the child longs to be free from this hold of the enigmatic desire of the mother that the mother's desire is das ding right it's monstrous right so this is a kind of um uh a move that melanie klein moves away from which is i think worth noting because klein as i read luck on as i get older it's like very important for lacon melanie klein is she comes up a lot and she's a silent influence right um and then we haven't really got into this but the fact that all symbolization is premised on this kind of necessary erasure of the enigmatic x means that it is a precondition for uh all symbolization so therefore uh primal repression and then paternal metaphor um are very central to to the whole procedure um and so yeah so i think these are the the key points now um you'll notice that we have about two minutes left but we have about 20 questions also left yeah about about 25 questions so what we might want to do is kind of go through these very quickly unless there's any other sort of interventions on la con and i'll share all of these slides and everything uh real quick real quickly just because the the one line you had up there the thing which must be lost in order to be represented i'm going through the sixth seminar with people right now and in the hamlet section there's one part in particular where he talks about uh mourning as a converse of psychosis whereas in psychosis the there's a hole in the symbolic that then reappears in uh hallucinations and reality uh that for wakanda mourning is there being a hole in reality like like a lost other of sorts that then reappears in the symbolic and it seems to line up very much so with like the lost object being necessary to instill the chain of signification but explicitly as like a converse of psychosis i thought was at least an interesting part oh interesting oh because in psychosis the foreclosure of the lost object is is permitted uh where you yeah you have a a hole in the symbolic as helicon puts it which then rep returns in uh hallucinations in reality and then for morning there's a hole in reality of a lost object or a lost other that then reappears and the level is symbolic it seems to be like the entry point he uses the phallus as like the thing to be rejected to where you can get the object small a which introduces the symbol yeah yeah yeah yeah so i just i love this business yeah thank you for that intervention um but i think as you can see this is surprisingly of of rich philosophical interest and aaron you mentioned that lacon says it's an inadequate example of forta but i never encountered that it seems to me that he's very much in favor of it like as a kind of um i don't know like a really strong example for symbolization i don't know where did you read that or where did you encounter that i just get the impression that i mean it's in his three moments of oedipus in seven or five i'm not sure if he says it outright he just talks about fordham in connection with the metonymy of the mother and the anxiety provoking subjectivization it's a way of coping with it as it were but i get the impression that it's not ultimately um sufficient that the child needs some such i i think black hole's technical term is supplement um in the form of say like for little hans the horse i see what you mean yeah that's very helpful so let's just try to work through these real quick with what little time we have left so um i think we've kind of already addressed this business of ego psychology um i think i would invite others if they have kind of um are more well-read in ego psychology i think as a lacanian we have a tendency to sort of be sectarian and so we reject ego psychologists and we don't read them um but i think in general we've already addressed this their aversion to too many of the things many of the themes raised right um from where and for whom does freud write as a medical professional yeah that's a great question i mean i think he's writing from the position of the founder of psychoanalysis and trying to derive um some type of uh scientific legitimacy although he is very clear at the outset especially in section three as you'll see that what he is producing is speculative right so i don't i think he's really grounding his authority on a philosophical register right even with these references to nietzsche's eternal return and a number of philosophical references right so he's so so he's comfortable being speculative and and metapsychology is speculative as we've seen earlier um how does he conceive of them freud writes of incommensurable drives how does he conceive of them pre-death drive is eros an example um i think we've kind of touched on that as well um and in some sense we haven't really talked about this notion of instincts and the way in which once death drive is discovered something which kind of exceeds a biological logic alone um you know i think the whole theory of drives anything he said on it before is kind of scrapped from where does freud garner his notion that the child's wish is to be like adults on page 59. who could answer that i think it's right out of aristotle actually um i think it's a combination of his theory of like wish and also aristotle's theory of like telos uh when he relates it to organic material such as animals which like basically they have uh you know the formal and final drives or or not drives sorry causes uh the like the final cause of a baby zebra is to become an adult zebra and i think that that's how i read this is like that the baby child has somewhere within it actually some sort of and maybe it's kind of weirdly naturalistic um but i and i think obviously it gets it gets changed by you know signifiers and lacan but there's probably i think that's why there's that would be how i read freud reading it that there's something i don't know primary identification may also play a role i imagine i mean after all what's that like posthumous in for its posthumous notes it's like the first thing the child thinks says i am the breast yeah yeah i guess what what my question would be what would be the alternative like it's it's obvious that um the very notion of ego ideal uh is still operative here and so i think you know the the idea of um primary caretakers functioning as ego ideals is also very central um so therefore adulthood is a kind of necessary transition or initiation and so on uh okay so this might be a big question um but what is given or opera in the consonantology is it that castration is constitutive from the primal lack of void of being to the endless chain of signifiers the central trauma or wound of humanity want to know where their where the ground is before i start even walking with freud we'll read the introduction i see um as you know or may know that jacqueline miller asks la khan if he has an ontology and he was kind of waffled on this point um it's it's a it's a major question i think many post locations have gone further than lechon wind in this regard um but i think we've given some hints of it with this notion of kleinemann of this of this kind of um this notion of the um of the origin point as this type of kind of beyond biology like this kind of strange um i don't know like almost um materialist uh like even i would even say like the the den in in greek materialism the d-e-n that concept which if you read g-x less than nothing where he probably develops la consonantology the farthest even though most lacanians don't particularly like zizek i think he does the best job in this regard he really grounds it through that kind of like greek materialist lens um okay what is meant by the phrase the signifier is the mark of the subject i think we kind of got into this a moment ago with the relationship between s1 and s2 um that the the the spalt the splitting of the subject leaves a trace uh through primal repression right and that it's that mark uh that that hangs with it even as it enters into a relationship of autonomy with other signifiers temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on a long indirect road to pleasure what happens if reality imposes with such convincing convincing harshness that we can no longer believe that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice and we come to see that our mother will never return um that's a very nice comment um would lacon support the martin luther king thesis of the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice no nothing in the microcosm or macrocosm prepares us for happiness he's very fond of um quoting this point this line from uh civilization it's discontents and uh yeah making my way through seminar seven now so yeah well units there's not there is a um uh well this is actually a much uh bigger question we need to return to because it has to do with the unique uh logic of teleology in lacon and to what can we say of teleology and lecon it's a very big question it's actually not as i don't think we can dismiss it so easily um what is the distinction for this drawing between the effects of the phases of ego development and those of the reality principle on the operation of the pleasure principle okay so listen uh we've actually reached time by some and i think these questions i will post on our dropbox and i would like for folks to keep them coming and i would even say um if people wish to make notes in addition like we've had three or four people send notes as i mentioned aaron wrote kind of an essay i'll post all of that and maybe even if folks wanted to would it be cool to create a google doc where a a question is posted whether you name yourself or it can be anonymous and then people can kind of write their thoughts or answers because we have a large group i thought that might be a good thing to do my only caution here would be um i've done that before and sometimes people lose stamina with it so i kind of want to find a way where we don't lose stamina with it um but maybe like a thumbs up on that idea or thumbs down do you like that idea of that take the questions on the google doc because we have so many people on this uh meeting that are like very knowledgeable and so on and so forth what do you think good oh you put an emoji on very cool very cool i don't even know how to do that nice okay all right all right it's a fiat uh because there's some beautiful points here that are raised and i don't want to kind of go laboriously through each of them i'd rather kind of continue this this way we've been doing things um and yeah are there any other kind of things that we've missed or points to raising we've only discovered sections one and two um let me just say one thing i put uh an excerpt from a book by samuel webber who's a deridian uh called the legend of freud it's on dropbox and you know i think you should read it um i really i really thought it's good he summarizes really well uh the laws and territo on beyond the pleasure principle and i've also put a wonderful excerpt well a full essay actually of caterine malibu um [Music] and her reading of beyond the pleasure principle and i really gained a lot from it i'm gonna reference it next time we speak so malibu and weber um and and then if there are other readings you want to throw on there secondary readings and i'll bring some stuff from le con as well for next time we meet um but yeah voila i guess we are good it was a good first session thank you all very much uh let me stop sharing say hello oh hello ben how are you you with us hello everyone um okay well maybe we can do in intros next time since you all are so cool and interesting people some of you talked and we don't know who you are but you're like oh my god that was a profound point thank you so much who are you that kind of thing you know but at the same time i don't want to do too much so what do you think good like is this a good format or should we other thoughts email me email the general email and we can mix it up if need be it's a good format was that aaron thank you for your interventions aaron and thank you for your essay uh will that be on the drop will aaron's essay be on dropbox i would love to read it yeah awesome yeah absolutely also presentations be on dropbox sorry about that just last question oh yeah we're we're recording this you mean this this recording yeah oh i spent oh yeah sure yeah sure yeah yeah we have this uh friend gabriel tupanumba who's i think probably one of the best young lacanians in the world uh today uh he's also happens to be very good at website design so he can like create these fancy websites and like for our group on coach and karatani he is uh uh something else um also amazing at drawing his drawing very good at drawing very good at drawing yeah not that you were bad but i his drawings was uh no no no no no no it was bad and his were very good which i'm fine with um okay very good well uh i don't want to leave i want to stay we can have a drink now we can have a beer or something like that although what time is it for you ben i mean it's nearly midday so what's that almost works oh you're not in berlin anymore you're not in berlin i mean i'm in melbourne okay are you teaching right now no not this semester next year okay yeah okay well um wonderful i think we've covered everything i wanted to cover if there's anything else we can take it to i'll do a google doc so we can kind of do you like those uh what is that thing we tried once um [Music] uh where it's sort of um they have different variations of them but they're kind of like these these group where you used to file sharing you do chat black good or bad i'm kind of you like slack lauren yeah i haven't really tried it it's sort of interesting okay i'm down i mean it's up to you all if would that be easier you can do a lot more with it i mean in terms of um you know posing a question and then answering it it's actually much better than a google doc so maybe i should create a slack since we have a large group should i do that i'm interested to try okay okay cool where are you based danny melvin so many aussies my god brazil australia and america we have this weird affinity because of our founding of our of our countries there's like this weird like homologous relation and so it's very odd that we're all drawn to le khan too there has to be some bigger there's something there you know i wonder what it is i'm not sure and you had the fires now we have these fires your fires are done though yeah i'll start again soon will they yeah yeah god help us yeah why should i stop recording

Channel: Study Groups on Psychoanalysis and Politics

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Length: 129min 51sec (7791 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020