Ruminations

Psychoanalysis takes as its starting point the discourse of the subject, of the analysand in front of the analyst, regardless of the reality this discourse conjures up. One need only remember Freud’s embryonic first postulations following his revision of seduction theory to see that the only reality that mattered was the one independently lived by the subject. Indeed, one could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no reality insofar as reality is not-all (pas tout); the reality of psychoanalysis is a reality about which one can only utter half-truths, about which one can only babble too much or too little but never enough for the simple reason that the signifier is opaque, as Joan Copjec says. The signifier connects with another and another, forming a signifying chain that begins the process of how the world becomes meaningful for a subject, not in the sense in which the chain totally exhausts the possibility of reflecting the exteriority of the world, but quite the contrary—precisely insofar as the signifying chain is not enough. The process of signification as such, the way in which this sorry world becomes ours, how it gets mediated, carries with it its own failure. The way the signifier emerges as the matter that henceforth ferries our intentions is resistant to bearing us in our entirety. “The symbolic,” as Lacan says, “provides a form into which the subject is inserted at the level of his being.”¹ And yet, at the same time, “There is, in effect, something radically unassimilable to the signifier. It’s quite simply the subject’s singular existence.”² We have nothing but the signifier to represent reality, to make reality appear to us, which means that the capriciousness of the signifier must also contaminate the very nature of facticity since any fact at all can only be expressed in words. As Copjec writes, “Psychoanalysis, like the psychological fantasy, acknowledges that no fact is unequivocable.”³ This means, as Copjec reasons, that the facticity of human life, the very events that we must suffer, are always more than we register. “[T]he subject is affected by meanings it never lives, never experiences.”⁴ The argument depends on the incontrovertible assumption that we are only in the world by way of mediation and that this mediation is the signifier. 

None of this is to say that reality is unimportant nor that one should just disseminate all meaning of reality into an endless displacement or performativity to land at meaning’s impossibility or, worse, at ethical irresponsibility. Neither should one fall prey to the kind of contemporary political maneuvers as emerge in the airwaves of Moscow and bang the drums of war to the cynical beliefs that reality is not reality, that power is ignorance, and the future is in the past. What psychoanalysis says is at the level of the subject. There is a necessary fiction in reality because the symbolic is not-all, and the signifier is opaque, as much an obstacle as it is how we find our bearings in our world and what carries the surplus that makes life of life. 

Let’s consider a hypothetical, perhaps impossible, case: that of a scientist who, having stayed in an old hotel for one week, left frazzled and afraid because she experienced what we could for the moment call poltergeist activity: thumping in the walls where there shouldn’t be any (indeed, an element of horror is displacement, of something occurring where it ought not to be, an event perhaps itself not otherworldly but misplaced), and even the sight of a monstrous entity which she would describe to herself as a woman with a strange face. But she, of course, has not told anyone about it yet, because she is a scientist and lives by the empiricism of her profession. She understands that there is little she could do to convince those like her even though she is in no doubt that what she has experienced, she has experienced. 

Let us locate this rumination at this site, at the moment of her leaving the hotel in fear because she has encountered what is not explainable within the scientific symbolic. There were no “rational” explanations for what happened, and yet she knows what she heard and even felt because she put her hand on the wall as it thumped, thus adding a second sense to confirm what one already indicated. So how does she explain it, then, to someone? To the Other? How does she explain it to herself?

There is an experience here and a symbolic with a wound, for her fear is not the fear of a startled cat but precisely that of the encounter with the unfathomable. Perhaps there is something of anxiety there if we take Lacan’s definition of it as “the instant when the subject is suspended between a moment at which he no longer knows where he is, and a shift towards a moment when he will become something in which he will never be able to find himself again.”⁵ But how to talk about it? How can she, who has never believed in the supernatural, otherworldly, suprasensible, metaphysical, or extrasensory, suddenly utter the words, “I saw a ghost?” For this is what she would have to say. “I saw a that which I don’t believe one can ever see.”

If a person witnesses something of a supernatural kind, something that by all accounts isn’t comprehensible within the coordinates of the symbolic order, is this not a sign of trauma? Do we not say that a person couldn’t possibly have seen that and, instead, rush into the discourse of the pathological? Is this impulse not precisely how our contemporary empirical psychologizing has taught us to understand the supernatural as we see it manifest in the past or in the speech of certain native populations? The most poignant, if perhaps overused, example here is the epilepsies of people once-presumed to be demonically possessed but which today are readily classified as psychiatric pathologies. Even Freud is not free of this prejudice, for, as he says in his paper on narcissism,

In [primitive peoples], we find characteristics which, if they occurred singly, might be put down to megalomania: an overestimation of the power of their wishes and mental acts, the “omnipresence of thoughts,” a belief in the thaumaturgic force of words, and a technique for dealing with the external world—”magic”—which appears to be a logical application of these grandiose premises. In the children of today . . . we expect to find an exactly analogous attitude towards the external world.⁶ 

In Freud’s view, a belief in magic, in the “thaumaturgic” power of words to elicit real effects, is a sign of infantile narcissism, so that the realm of the impossible, of “magic” as such, is foreclosed, cast almost to the level of a stage one outgrows (though, as we well know, one can’t outgrow anything insofar as we’re condemned to the nachträglichkeit of the signifier). So long as Freud remains loyal to positivism, to empirical science—so long as he remains a child of the 19th century, of von Humboldt and Charcot, Freud takes such prejudices for granted, though, even as I say this, one can’t easily forget that one of his contemporaries, his once-best acolyte, Carl Jung, was in a hurry to mystify the unconscious by filling it with archetypes and images that could only come from the Other while at the same time denuding the subject of the very libido that characterizes the human as human. For Jung, when one plunges into the unconscious, one enters a vestibule of icons, archetypes, mandalas, and phantasms. One is only left to wonder how these things got here in the first place and whether, in the Jungian world, such a thing as a pure signifier, a signifier without a signified, exists. Indeed, as Lacan said, “contrary to what Jung believed, no deduction from experience can make us accede to the number 3.”⁷ In short, Freud was perhaps too scientistic if only because he foresaw the Jungian danger of turning the unconscious—by nature, what disturbs the security of scientific empiricity—into something that could house the supernatural. 

This question of reality was thus of supreme importance to Freud. In one of Freud’s most mystifying papers, “Negation,” Freud reminds us that it is one of the functions of judgment to “test” for reality, to decide “as to the existence of something of which there is a presentation (reality-testing).”⁸ Judgment seeks to determine whether something of which we have an impression, a presentation in our mind (in our “ego,” as Freud says), actually exists out there. Thus, if we find the object, this is so because this object has been found again. The implication here is that we are unconscious of that first experience which left the impression we now use in our search for the “re-found object.” Notice how this does not reset us to the position of Berkeleyan idealism. The goal is not to ask whether our thoughts make the world but rather whether we can adequately refer an internal representation that we derived from a primal experience to an external object. “What is unreal, merely a presentation and subjective, is only internal; what is real is also there outside.“⁹ Thus, Freud writes that this “reality-testing,” this ascription of existence to an object, is a type of decision of the function of judgment in which the notions of the ego, the object, and what the ego considers to be “good” for it (otherwise why would it care if something existed or not), are all united into a structure that gives us Freud’s blueprint for how he believes reality is constituted. 

But why do we care at all about these questions if not because what we’re talking about is the nature of reality? Is not a dry, positivistic conception of “reality” at the center of the scientist’s incapacity to utter what she needs to utter to communicate her experience? Furthermore, if we skirt off any notion that her having witnessed a ghost’s activity is the result of a psychotic state (so that we’re thus able to avoid having to talk of the ghost as being the signifier that appears in the real), shouldn’t we then consider the ghost rather naively as an object, perhaps a semi-unreal one, that demands our scientist to come to a judgment regarding its existence? Will the ghost not be one of the many objects that populate our reality insofar as what constitutes our world is the set of transitional objects upon which we stumble on our way to the “true” object, the re-found object? As Lacan says in Seminar IV, paraphrasing Donald Winnicott’s observations, “[the child] constitutes a world to the extent that in heading towards something he desires, he will come up against something that he bumps into, or which burns him.”¹⁰ The child builds up his world by following its desire along a route demarcated by other things to which it attaches in an incomplete, semi-real way, like clasping to “the corner of his blanket or a piece of his bib.” This is why Lacan calls these transitional objects “half-real, half-unreal.”¹⁰   

If the subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of the unconscious and of desire, if these are the axes on which the destiny of humankind is to play itself, then what is the object if not that which can be ensnared in the web of desire, want and lack? Is reality thus not populated by every single object that could present itself with the possibility of it being a landing pad for the vectors of our desire? 

That we don’t desire everything out there means that there is a law to my desire, a law whose workings are not at the level of a universal abstraction but of an extimate insistence. The world of reality is constituted by these objects that come to us as the echoes of this insistence, as re-found objects modeled along that primal object of our history with whose encounter in the Oedipal situation we entered into the world of intelligibility. 

So again, what does it mean for a scientist to be so disturbed by an experience that she would hesitate and stumble over a speech concerning a judgment: whether the ghost exists or not? 

The issue is not to ask whether the ghost is objectively real but rather how its possible existence can be accommodated within a symbolic structure that is assured not to admit the signifier of the ghost without necessarily making the scientist a psychotic.

Are we not here at the level of the Lacanian real? Is the ghost not real precisely because it is an intolerable experience, a trauma that defies the very coordinates of meaning? 

In the case of the scientist, the ghost is nothing other than an unspeakable thing, something that calls upon the subject to repress, to foreclose, to negate. These are all reactions that the scientist is all too likely to have. Any discourse that emerges from our scientist is emptied of any positivity. When she tells her friends about it, she must speak of her fear about something she knows wasn’t there. She takes a subjective position—one of fear, of anxiety—towards a gap, a je ne sais quoi that the most empirical of empiricists can never do without since they can never be assured, when they make an inferential statement, that the totality of all phenomena has been taken into account at the moment that the statement emerges. There could always be one more element, however minor, missing from what has been observed that dismisses the legitimacy of the inference. The scientist, in saying, “It couldn’t be a ghost; I was simply tired because of x reason,” all too evidently expresses the anxiety which shows how “couldn’t” represses “shouldn’t.” For, if there is one thing of which she is not sure, it is whether all the factors so far account for her seeing what she can’t allow herself to symbolize. Indeed, this remains as true here as when Hume first uttered it and Kant repeated it. Interestingly, this inferential spirit is also what dogs Freud in his speculations considering the peculiar coincidences of an analysis he describes in Lecture XXX of the New Introductory Lectures. Insofar as there are facts missing from his observation, “We are once again left with a non liquet.”¹¹

But let us now digress and look at another manifestation, another figure that even Freud wrote about in his New Introductory Letters, the “medium” or psychic, insofar as this figure has a different relation to reality and the otherworldly. 

Freud’s definition of the medium is apt and colorful: they are “individuals to whom peculiarly ‘sensitive’ faculties are ascribed, but who are by no means distinguished by outstanding qualities of intellect or character.”¹² For the medium or psychic, the supernatural exists. There is an entire discursivity that can more-or-less seamlessly run its course, meaning a discursivity that makes sense, that allows the subject to situate herself at a level of certainty in relation to the world. She grapples onto the world insofar as this world carries with it a supernatural which it is her profession to elucidate in nothing other than the signifiers of the tarot, the lines of the hand, tea leaves, coffee grounds, astrological charts, or really, any speech whatsoever that comes out of her that can circularly self-validate. (This is a self-positioning taken up by holy books like the Bible as well since their enunciation of truth is itself the content of that truth. These texts self-validate by closing the gap between the statement and the enunciation: by the text itself saying that its claim to authority is that it is itself the Word of God and not its derivation.) 

One can perhaps easily explain the appeal of the medium as being produced by the suggestibility caused by the necessity to see a medium. After all, the search for a medium comes either as a last resort, as an exhaustion of possibilities, after having tried everything else; or else, when it isn’t, it is the product of a conscience that now fully believes in the craft and who will take any discourse uttered over the crystal ball as nothing short of the truth. Freud realized that part of the reason people responded so positively to the medium’s predictions, even when proven absolutely incorrect, was that the medium was uttering prophecies that harped on the subject’s unconscious desires. Thus, the medium’s predictions are not valuable insofar as they bear on objective reality but rather as they create transferential moments where a subject’s repressed wishes find some satisfaction. The phenomena of the medium probably caught Freud’s attention not just because the issue produced an opportunity for Freud to brandish his positivistic bona fides by allowing him to diplomatically but rotundly take down occult performances but also because there is something of a resemblance, of commonality between the analytic procedure as it occurs in the clinic and the—shall we call it—prophetic procedure as it appears in the fortune-teller’s tent. 

Thus, for the medium, the ghost is but another phenomenon whose reality can easily be tolerated by the symbolic. For the medium, the ghost is not as real (in a Lacanian sense) as it is for the scientist. In this case, it is on the side of the medium that the ghost can enter into comprehensibility because it will find its home there where the signifiers of the supernatural are not falling into the void of the real. On the other hand, it is the poor scientist whose discursive apparatus can experience the ghost as neither here nor there, as something best left repressed or foreclosed, perhaps hauntologically, as Derrida would say.  

Furthermore, something that shouldn’t escape our notice about the medium, especially when we keep on talking about positivism, is the similarity of the form of some of their contemporary discourses with those of the scientist. If you watch a film like The Conjuring 2, which is about two Catholic exorcists struggling to tame a demon that holds a girl (and others) hostage, you’ll be struck by how the exorcists coordinate their strategy along the lines of cause and effect. To send the demon back to hell, for example, they need to utter its name. Actions produce effects. 

The very orderly nature of the solution, which is almost characteristic of the exorcism genre of horror films, is almost scientific. In other words, the effectiveness of the exorcists’ battle against the forces of hell is not because of a special mantic or emotional relationship with the spiritual—say, because of a particular sensitivity that gives them a privileged gaze (which, by the way, is actually an exorcist’s power)—but rather because of a particular understanding of the nature of the signifying organization at work in hell and its creatures. Indeed, what is seductive about the exorcists is their operation of a causal discourse that relies on their long experience for its authority, so that, in a way, they bridge the gap between the scientists, who cannot utter one thing about the supernatural, and the fortune-teller, who will say so much, you will find the fate of the world in her words. This is all to say that even hell has a symbolic order, that demons are tied to the linguistic by virtue of their names. You could even say, following the film, that the power one holds over demons by the simple act of uttering their name means that they feel the burden of the symbolic far more than we do, especially when we remember that a name is the signifier that demarcates our existence in the symbolic and, as such, forms part of the signifying discourses, unconscious or not, at the heart of the structures of neurosis and psychosis. 

On another level, a film like this is also fascinating because, despite the fact that it (re)presents certain Lacanian ideas, it does so in a context that totally betrays the degree to which the rationalism of the scientist has ideologically captured the mass-market film industry. One has to marvel at a movie in which the characters seek the solutions to spiritual problems not in God nor prayer but in the comforts of cause and effect. Furthermore, is this not the infantile solution? Is this saying-of-a-name not exactly the “thaumaturgic force of words” that Freud ascribed to the wishes of children in his paper on narcissism? The film essentially tells us that the lessons that came from the “language turn”—lessons that tried to teach us to have a closer look at language—have been all but forgotten. Language has been re-mystified. Perhaps the reason for this all is, as some Lacanians think, that we are in the midst of a performative presentism which believes that the subject, despite being a product of discursive power, is nevertheless anchored by a particularity, an irreducibility, a non-linguistic “graininess” that may derive simply from the body as something endowed with “bio-power” and which thus allows us in a performative, playful sense to side-step the dilemma of language to which a film like The Conjuring 2, in its naiveté, returns us through the echo of a demon’s wailing. 

Even Freud could not look away from the demonic. In “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis,” Freud unambiguously writes, “The states of possession correspond to our neuroses . . . In our eyes, the demons are bad and reprehensible wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and repressed.”¹³ Freud’s reading of demonic encounters is thus, like Charcot’s, filtered by his theory. For Freud, possessions or apparitions of the Devil were how neuroses manifested themselves in the 17th century, whereas in our time—which Freud calls “hypochondriacal”¹⁴—neuroses manifest by way of the symptom. And he produces a dazzling interpretation in which he concludes that the Devil that appears to Christoph Heizmann is the manifestation of his hostile sentiments towards his father, who had recently died and thus plunged the young man into a depression. To get himself out of it, Heizmann had to manifest a Devil that would force him to sign a contract in which he would “subscribe [himself] to this Lord as his bounden son,”¹⁵ even if this contract meant the forfeiture of his soul. Thus the whole neurosis qualified as a wish-fulfillment, as a way for the man to prolong his being a son. 

The most pertinent thing for us to consider is the difference in the treatment of the demoniacal that Freud offers in this paper versus what we see in the Conjuring film. For, despite Freud’s complete allegiance to the positivism that he thought defined his project, and which is evident there in his understanding of the demonic, and despite him treating the case in purely analytic terms—meaning that from the start, the running assumption is that there is a neurotic explanation of Heizmann’s case—Freud nevertheless doesn’t sink to the mundane empirical causalities of the exorcists in the film.¹⁶ Freud looks at the subject. He is enthralled by their speech. He listens for cues and does what these exorcists, for all their sagacity, cannot fathom: to attack not demons qua demons but demons qua desires. 

As I mentioned above, Freud was aware of the possibility that poor analysts and enthusiasts who took his discoveries too far would irreparably harm his theory, especially if, as Jung did, they took the unconscious as the first element of a new modern theosophy. But this did not mean that Freud never countered the problem head-on. On the contrary, he wrote many pieces against the idea that one could co-opt psychoanalysis for mystical or occult purposes. Freud believed, much like Marx did, that his theory belonged in the pantheon of scientific creativity. But for all of this, Freud was never so prejudiced to the occult—or rather to the discursivity of the occult—that he’d dismiss it all at once without having something to say. Instead, I leave this rumination with two sentences of his, which, as they go, also represent my position, and which I love because they show Freud’s consummate capacity to consider everything—all speech, all agony, all forms of angst, including perhaps the wailing of the netherworld, even if in this end science must prevail:

“Permit me now for the purpose of what I have to tell you, to omit the cautious little word ‘alleged’ and to proceed as though I believed in the objective reality of the phenomenon of telepathy. But bear firmly in mind that that is not the case and that I have committed myself to no conviction.”¹⁷

Notes

1 Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III (New York: Norton, 1997), 179.

2 ibid.

3 Joan Copjec. Read My Desire Lacan against the Historicists. (London: Verso, 2015), 66.

4 ibid. 68.

5 Jacques Lacan. The Object Relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV. (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2022), 218.

6 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. (London: Vintage, 2001), 75.

7 Lacan, The Object Relation, 230.

8 Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works. (London: Vintage, 2001), 237.

9 ibid.

10 Lacan, The Object Relation, 119.

11 Sigmund Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII (1932-1936): New Introductory Letters on Psychoanalysis and Other Works (London: Vintage, 2001), 54.

12 ibid., 35.

13 Sigmund Freud, “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works (London: Vintage, 2001), 72.

14 ibid. 87

15 ibid. 93

16 The exorcists are, by the way, a married couple that does nothing but enter into homes full of children where the father is either distant or absent, almost giving the impression that the first step in returning a house to normality is to open the doors to a healthy heterosexuality and the belief there is a sexual relation (seeing as how these movies tend to end with the exorcists somehow more in love with each other than at the start of the film).

17 Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 36.