"Denying Germany its status as a civilized nation rests on a claim that the persecution of Jews and other minorities, the camps and the Holocaust were aberrations from the values of Western civilization. Recent analyses, particularly Agamben’s work, present a systematic attempt to refute this exceptionalist perspective, casting Germany as a significant moment rather than a deviation of
Western civilization." Pp. 180
"The war generation internalized the fear of a take-over as a psychic structure, extending it even to include literature and language more generally. It hence began to become all-pervasive and to operate indiscriminately at a more subliminal level. In some of its aspects, the parental generation displaced this fear onto the generation of postwar children". Pp.182
"Most cultures share a tendency to silence traumatic histories. Traumatic amnesia seems to become inscribed as cultural practice. Yet, trauma can never be completely silenced since its effects continue to operate unconsciously. Suggesting that the silence intended to cover up a traumatic event or history only leads to its unconscious transmission, Abraham speaks of a haunting that spans
generations. He calls for a kind of psychoanalytic ‘cult of ancestors’ (as defined by Rand) that allows the dead to rest and the living to gain freedom from their ghostly hauntings." Pp.186
1- “Clad in Mourning: Violence, Subjugation and the Struggle of the Soul,”
“My considerations are rooted in my ethnographic work in Morocco, and in the insistent questions raised by my interlocutors to me, as well as in the
predicaments of their lives. I read Fanon side by side with a parallel reflection on destruction, trauma, and the possibility of ethical-political struggle in a contemporary Islamic tradition, in the context of a renewed problematization of the concept of jihad al-nafs, “the struggle of the soul” (but also struggle at such), in relation to the experience of oppression, violence, pain, melancholy, and what Fanon calls the “annihilation of being.” Pp.26
“Spiritual slaughter”, Sheikh Yassine explains, is caused by the injustice of
a tyranny that concentrates all wealth and power in the hands of the few, in a
situation in which it becomes both self-evident and justified that only some have
access to humanity. The slaughter, or tadbih, destroys the possibility of imagining
the future, as well as of relating to the past. It freezes time, and reduces life to a
flat surface without exits. The only “exits”, under the rule of “soul murder”, are
suicide and self-immolation, if one has the strength and courage to pursue them.
But these are flights, says Sheikh Yassine, and constitute a religious transgression,
a ma`siyya.” Pp.31
2- Observing the Other: Reflections on Anthropological Fieldwork:
“In this paper, I shall attempt to develop a psychoanalytic hypothesis concerning the psychological nature of fieldwork for the anthropologist who possesses, in the ethnographer EvansPritchard’s words (1962), the capacity “to abandon himself without reserve,” “to think and feel alternately as a savage and as a European” and for whom the native society is “in the anthropologist himself and not merely in his notebooks.” Pp.614
“Malinowski’s intense feelings for his mother while in the field-one manifestation of the regression induced by his isolation in a totally alien setting-are recorded regularly throughout the first section of the Diary: “Dream of settling permanently in the South Seas; how will all this strike me when I’m back in Poland? I think-of Mother. Self-reproach” (p. 22). Recurrently, Malinowski‘s romantic memories turn to his mother: “I still think about and am in love with T.-It is the magic of her body that fills me, and the poetry of her presence-all my associations lead in her direction. Moreover, I have moments of general dejection. . . At last I begin to feel a deep strong longing for Mother in my innermost being (pp.27-28). “Occasionally strong yearning for Mother-really if I could keep in communication with Mother I would not mind anything and my low spirits would have no foundation” (p. 41). Significantly, there is only one incidental mention of his father in the Diary and it is of more than passing interest that, subsequent to his fieldwork, Malinowski published a series of essays disputing the universality of the Oedipus complex.” Pp.618
"So—I will now name Latin America. What is Latin America today? I will explain in a moment why in my view it has to be named. But, first, does it in fact exist, and if so what is it? Is it the name of something so sufficient unto itself—i.e., as a continent—as to have identity? Is it the name of a concept?And what could this concept have to do with psychoanlysis" Pp.200
"These provisos notwithstanding, our original question remains essentially unanswered. Why is the International Psy
cho-Analytical Association, founded seventy years ago by Freud, unable to take up a position on certain kinds of vio
lence (which I hope to define more clearly in a moment) in any other terms than those of a pre-psychoanalytic and a
psychoanalytic juridical discourse, even then adopting only the vaguest and most impoverished forms of that traditional
legal idiom, forms deemed inadequate by modern human rights jurists and lobbyists themselves" Pp.213
"Another area—and another hemisphere—embraces all those places where psychoanalysis as an institution is firmly implanted (Western Europe, North America) and of which, though human rights are not universally respected (far from it, in fact, as witness Amnesty International's reports on European and North American countries, not to mention those kinds of violence which fall outside Amnesty's purview), at least it may be said that certain sorts of violence have not as yet, not in the period since World War II, been unleashed with the ferocity, whether state-supported or not, that is familiar at varying levels and in varying forms in so many Latin American countries"
Wilson's discussion of the topographical model versus the economic model of the unsconsious mind was new to me and very helpful in thinking through how I might discuss public space in my research. The idea of something being identifiable both through coordinates (place/topography) and through qualitative register (state/economy) makes sense to me when I approach the fuzzy unconscious as something that can be relayed or interpreted through two instruments at the same time. For example, I can weigh my cat, and I can look at my cat, but my scale and my eyes/brain will return different readings that have their own utilities and contexts of import. Here I am interested in two elements of this concept: simultaneity, and importance. Simultaneity seems to ignore linear or hierarchical order, while the other is dependent on it.
(1) The centrality of text and inscription as a method for interpreting dreams and other unconscious associations, And extending from that, the difference between meaning and "communicative finality" (a phrase I am struggling with: does it mean the "load-bearing point" is unclear? How can meaning have no meaning?). Perhaps these quotes, not written by Hewitson, but uttered by the actors in the drama of the unconscious being played out in conferences and other public spheres, could help illuminate the parchment of my thoughts:
“It is quite simply to be found in the fact that an inscription does not etch into the same side of the parchment when it comes from the printing-plate of truth and when it comes from that of knowledge.” (Lacan)
“The unconscious is a phenomenon of meaning, but without any communicative finality” (Laplanche, The Unconscious and the Id, p.103).
“the unconscious is not the message, not even the strange or coded message one strives to read on an old parchment: it is another text written underneath and which must be read by illuminating it from behind or with the help of a developer" (Leclaire)
(2) The analyst/mentor and student/analysand dynamic: What is it about psychoanalytic dialogue that sets off this chain of analysis and pedagogical relations? From last week's readings, I remember that the critiques come from former analysands. This week, I read about how Lacan felt slighted by Leclaire & Laplanche's critiques. What is it about the content of psychoanalytic dialogue that critiques feel like slights? Then I remember Felman's claim of how Lacan was Freud's "best student", because, or in spite of, the "mis-reading" of Freud. What is it about the culture of psychoanalytic dialogue (since this is a seminar about psychoanalysis and culture) that someone becomes someone's best student?
“what methodological difficulties lie in the path of an alliance between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis?”
-The difficulty of merging a theory that emphasizes so many unknowns and biases with a science that prefers precision
“looks for a mode of neuroscience-psychoanalysis mutuality that is strong because it is capable of tolerating, even enjoying and promoting, the process of being unbuttoned”
-Allowing for the cognitive dissonance that may result from such opposite fields, and instead focusing on what can be gleamed in such a space
“disarticulation is not a move against the articulate or the articulated, but rather an enquiry into the power of internal torque”
“This analysis… aims to explore the kinds of thinking, feeling, and doing made possible by an incommensurate encounter between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. To this end, the key interdisciplinary issue for a neuropsychoanalysis synthesis may not be content (e.g., is activity in the prefrontal cortex the biological mechanism for transference?) but methodology: do the neurosciences and psychoanalysis have, ought they have, could they formulate, the same kinds of epistemological politics?”
-exactly, one must first consider not how they align but what the two fields aligning may be able to tell us and ultimately if that information is useful enough for the focus on such a merge; finding the balance of what this new information may bring, while also acknowledging the limitations as a way to further understand the relationship between the two
“This also implies a core compatibility between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis, as if their separation has been ill-fated rather than necessary or fruitful; and so feeds the fantasy that their reunion ought be harmonious, collaborative, and reasonable”
-rather than acknowledging how their placement and relationship to one another may tell us more and further the conversation of knowledge of the person, rather than the combined methodology which may be incompatible and contradictory;
“It is a daydream of scientific progress that hopes to turn interdisciplinary differences into transdisciplinary accords.”
“When practiced carefully, an alliance between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis should understand the damage done to psychoanalysis by its sequestration from the natural sciences, the damage done to the neurosciences by their detachment from psychic dynamism, and the inadequacies of consilience as a solution to interdisciplinary differences”
-however, trying to combine the two or integrate them tends to lead to a muddling of this point
"This tendency to select parts of those scientific findings that one finds useful and put them together in an additive fashion results in cut-and-paste theory-building, which combines elements from different theories with very different-and often incompatible-basic assumptions”
“ways of thinking about the mutuality of neuroscience and psychoanalysis that are less integrative-mutualities that are unruly, aggressive, destabilizing, vertiginous, and strange.”
“I look to the unconscious, the affects, sexuality, and the body to find ways of deploying neuroscience and psychoanalysis together, yet not have everything mean the same thing.”
-exactly, use psychoanalysis for what it can tell you and use neuroscience for what it can say; present the two from an ecological lens and examine what the information presents together as well as separate.
“Freud gives the name "metapsychological" to any account of minded processes that can describe them in topographical, economic, and dynamic terms, although he notes straight away that "in the present state of our knowledge there are only a few points at which we shall succeed in this.”
-this all fits one category makes it difficult to sparse out the differences and makes it seem as if they are all at odds with one another: “if mind is suspended between spatial and economic parameters, if it is unclear, for example, whether an unconscious idea is in another place {topographically) or in another state (economically), then there can be no consilient psychoanalytic account of mind” – completely negates how they intersect and that impact; however, the discussion on psychic energy alludes to a more interconnected system, showing how they are at odds
“Ferenczi was interested in mutuality-mutuality between patient and analyst, between bodily organs, between phylogenetically distant time periods, between different epistemological systems.”
“Ferenczi supposed that biological events have the capacity for complex semiotic communication: they are overdetermined processes, rather than the products oflinear cause-effect sequences. 21 In this physiology-psychoanalysis synthesis, biology substance would no longer been seen as "flat:' but would be deemed to have its own depth-there would be a recognition of a biological unconscious in which archaic, conflicted motivations are native to human physiology.”
“Most neuropsychoanalytic researchers have settled for a more tepid un - derstanding of mutuality; a surprising amount of which is indebted to John Kihlstrom's idea of a "cognitive unconscious: This model draws its empirical and conceptual power not from a distinction between conscious and unconscious events but from a difference between different kinds of non - conscious mental events. Drawing on conventional psychological theories of memory, Kihlstrom differentiates between declarative knowledge {"the individual's fund of general and specific factual information;' which may or may not be conscious) and procedural knowledge ( the "repertoire of skills, rules, and strategies that operate on declarative knowledge in the course of perception, memory, thought, and action")”
“Procedural knowledges are not amenable to conscious reflection or introspection: "these mental processes, which can only be known indirectly through inference, may be described as unconscious in the strict sense of that term”
-this is different from Freud’s version of the unconscious: “Stripped of its depth {libido, motive, conflict, drives, body), the cognitive unconscious is technically much closer to what Freud called the preconscious: a system governed by the secondary processes, bound to word-presentations, and separated from the raging unconscious by a barrier of censorship”
“Material that is cognitively unconscious has not been repressed, in the classical Freudian sense. Indeed, the question of repression-which, for psychoanalysis, is the question of motivation-is either ignored or explicitly repudiated in a lot of neuropsychoanalytic work”
-then why combine them??
“By rendering the unconscious more cognitive than dynamic, these new neuro-psychoanalytic commentators drain much of the life out of their theories of mind”
The three empirical pillars of contemporary psychoanalysis-infant development research, affect regulation, and attachment theory-testify to this growing neglect of sexuality.
-intersting to think how such an integral part is often ignored; what does that say about our cultures relationship to sexuality though
“He offers the now routine pronouncement that "a behavioral trait such as sexual orientation almost certainly is not caused by a single gene, a single alteration in a hormone or in brain structure, or a single life experience;' yet he also trusts that neuroscientific methods "are at hand for establishing whether there are reliable anatomical differences between people with different sexual orientations" -as if such methods will eventually be able to straighten out questions of sexuality once and for all, as if sexuality will eventually give up its aleatory nature and become indistinguishable from flat genetic, neurological or hormonal action.”
-once again thinking they can narrow something down to a specific factor à what does that really tell us?
"Sex has undoubtedly become more complex since Freud's original descriptions, yet in another way it has changed little. It is still there as the primary motor ensuring the survival of our species, the perpetuation of our genetic material. For all mammals the process of reproduction is at the centre of their behavioural systems. For mammals with minds, this is unlikely to be different”
-how does this relate if one separates sexuality and reproduction, as suggested by feminist theorists
“Without question, we spend our lives elaborating the entanglements of fantasy, sexuality, biology; but these events draw on substrata that are already entangled each with the other”
“This account of James prevaricates on the crucial question of the relation between stimulus, body, and emotion: are they separate events {requiring associative linkages) or are they somehow already psychosomatically entangled?”
Sexuality, soma, and emotion form a complex network of under-theorized events in neuropsychoanalysis. As they have been understood in the critical humanities, each of these is a disarticulate, self-incommensurate process. It seems that their inclusion into these new consilience-oriented neuropsychoanalytic projects is at the expense of their vitality and unruliness. Indeed, the two cultures dilemmas that haunted both psychoanalysis and neuroscience in the twentieth century {dividing the unconscious from the neural network) are being resolved by generating monocultures that relentlessly grind all differences, all specificities, all vitality, into consilient dust.
<p>-"Sign, symptom, and symbol are sustained not only by the unconscious meaning to be discovered in them, but<br> also by the immediate meaning which they first seem to express" Pp.122</p><p>- However schematic these considerations may be, they have never-the less a direct echo in our day-to-day practice. In this connection, it would be particularly interesting to define the attitudes, the ways of listening that make up what each of us understands by "free-floating attention." In our view, one would find two very different types of listening, between which most individual cases would fall: we wouldbe prepared to compare them under the rubrics: "the attitude of simultaneous translation" and "the attitude of attention to lacunary phenomena" Pp.124</p><p>-</p><p>(a) The unconscious is not coextensive to the manifest as its<br> meaning: it must be interpolated in the lacunae of the manifest text.<br> (b) What is unconscious is in relation to the manifest not as a<br> meaning to a letter, but on the same level of reality. It is what allows<br> us to conceive of a dynamic relationship between the manifest text<br> and what is absent from and must be interpolated in it: it is a<br> fragment of discourse that must find its place in the discourse as a<br> whole." Pp.126</p>
one striking difference between Dimen and Frie is the vocabulary -- excess, ambiguity are concpets to think with for Dimen, not even in Frie. Not to mention Marx.
"Thus, it is particularly interesting to note Kardiner’s critique of Freud. Kardiner was well versed in Boas’s opposition to the cultural evolutionism that Freud endorsed. On a visit to Vienna, Kardiner shared his misgivings about Freud’s postulated theory of the origin of culture with his analyst. Freud reportedly replied: “Oh, don’t take that too seriously. That’s something I dreamed up on a rainy Sunday afternoon” (Kardiner, 1977, p. 75)." Always good to be reminded that Freud often knew, and said, that he was just spitballing. Nowhere is that better analyzed than in Derrida's analysis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Leaving us with the question: how serious is not too serious but just serious enough?