Hello and welcome to the seven session of the APNDC, instructed by Reza Negarastani. Please, Reza, take it away. Thank you everyone. I hope you are doing well. to know and feel free to let the attendees join you know as they are coming so today i'm going to you know just there were some loose threads left from the previous session on Tuesday i'm going to tie them together and then i will start to you know kind of
continue the theme from the previous session towards the most important idea of Freud, which is the unconscious, and showing that we are different thinkers, and particularly my references are three philosophers and psychologists. One, I highly recommend David Archer. The other one, Jacques Bouveres. And the last one, Todd Dufain.
These three I will synthesize them to give a of the idea of the unconscious and how the idea seems to be i then does not warrant you know this sort of uh the heavy weight and the heavy emphasis that freud attributes to it or it is is a confused idea which then undercuts the project of psychoanalysis, particularly in
the Freudian vein, as a scientific project. In either case, it would be a damning kind of element for Freud's theory. So with that said, let's hear the presentations. Who is it starting?
No one's just starting. Can you guys hear me? Yes, so this is going on with presentation. Is someone's, are people supposed to do some presentation or not today? I mean, where is the Novo?
Yeah, I'm here. Yeah, from the spreadsheet, there are like six, two groups, six people, but some told that they are like skipped to the next session or they are doing next week or something like that. But I mean, the... Okay. So, okay. So what about the other three? What about the other three? Yeah. Yeah, they are here online. Is it John, Akshat, and Johanna?
Or I don't know which group decided to do next week. And the Groombound group, because Reza said we'll do Groombound last session. so it just makes more sense for us to do it in the last session yeah sure sure yeah i also thought that we were we were bumped over to two session eights okay so you uh so yeah uh people want to do the ground bomb uh uh hold it until next what uh what about uh any other person wants uh to do a a presentation give a presentation for a what we have talked so far freud and rank and frenzy
no one i mean i don't have any problem with no presentation okay let's assume that there is no one uh so um just just a uh a reminder that our next session will be at 2pm yes yes yes okay yes and let's see actually how uh next session uh I don't know if we have some stuff that are important left off, then I will ask for a volunteer to kind of an informal makeup session for an hour, an hour and a half, and we go
over what is left off. Oh, OK. So stuff in the folder. And yes, what is this folder, by the way, the mysterious folder that all presentations finally disappeared to? I just got an email. I was told because I had to work in our last session. Our last session was sort of arbitrarily on a Tuesday and I couldn't make it. So I was told an email I needed to do my presentation remotely and upload it to a folder. And I will paste it in if it's okay.
Sure, sure. That would be great. Yes. Because I don't have it. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me just bookmark this. Let me see if I can find it really quick. I also upload my presentation on the folder. so i'm in the group of gregory too i see i see okay yes i can see that there's a rank one yes um uh do you want to actually uh gregory do you want to present it today i mean you can you can do that I took a whole day. I can we can watch it.
Yeah, you can watch it. Okay. Yeah, why don't we do that? Yeah, no, we will watch it. We will watch it and then come up with feedback, you know, next session. Okay, okay. okay okay so uh please uh those of you who have not presented upload uh your presentation into that folder okay so one second i there is some sort of uh connection problem i need to put something under my laptop so the sound doesn't glitch
So, before I start, any question, I know that we'll actually talk about the solipsistic side of Freud's theory and Freud thinking in general, which I'm going to talk about today. But other than that, any question that you might have from last session? Yes. Yes, I have one question concerning ranks, theory of ranks.
I was wondering to what extent it underpins or at least contributes into anti-natalism. Namely, in anti-natalism of early days of this movement, I mean Peter Wesselsapff's essay the last messiah and uh teneson's uh article happiness is for pigs psychology or philosophy versus psychiatry is there is any connection between this idea of trauma of birth and these two works and further antenatalism for example uh ligotes uh conspiracy against human race
and so on. Since, for example, stuff puts it like the ways the human is running, humans are running away from their idea of their mortality through the repression and sublimation. So it's very close to uh the stuff that is told by the good then uh and which you have also mentioned on your previous seminar humanism is this content that the human is only species which ever is aware of its deaths uh so um the trauma of birth is like uh when you have been talking on about it on the previous
session it's to my mind it has some connections to the essay of um software and uh to some further internationalism discourse is there is such a connection oh uh good good question i mean uh uh well Well, I don't think, I mean, rank and frenzy obviously are not anti-natalist in any modern sense, right? I mean, at least on the surface, in fact, invoking something like a trauma of birth
or trauma of separation as the or trauma is actually to move away from, the kind of this highly oppressive weight of death drive theory, particularly as pertaining to a child number one and two child's uh psyche uh to that of father right so essentially they want to to to begin psychoanalysis with uh with two things child
and mother and see the progression uh you know of the of sexual functions precisely through this diode of mother child which definitely uh childbearing and natalism then becomes uh you know a kind of something that they are actually interested they they think this is like the ultimate key but then from a kind of speculative dimension right uh rather than the psychoanalytic dimension from a speculative philosophical dimension yes i would say that it has that sort of i wouldn't call it anti-natalism
but yes a variation of it a very cosmological variations of it that to be born uh is is essentially a recipe for disaster right yes like in david benatar's better never to have been this formulation yes yes so in that sense yes they do but uh not anti-natalism in in the sense that you know some of the modern commentators pro-antinatalism yes going going against uh basically not having a child or child bearing and this sort of stuff they don't have that at all and uh but yes from from you know this whole idea
of uh ontogenetic uh recapitulation of phylogenetic uh development uh this and the whole idea that birth itself is a trauma that can be understood both positively and negatively yes there is a underlying uh philosophical thesis rather than a socio-psychological thesis about you know uh that can can can strike us as a form of anti-natalism thank you yes have you noticed that i have a bad connection okay let me one second we actually see if maybe i
need to be closer the mode okay OK. So any more questions? Sorry, Reza? Yes. If you want, I can present my part of Autorangs presentation if you want. Sure. It's only five minutes, so it's like an introduction. Please go on. Cool. Wait a minute.
Okay. Okay, can you see the presentation? One sec, I was... Yes, yes. Yes? Yes. Not my notes, yes, my presentation. No. Yes, yes. Yeah, cool. Okay, this is the presentation I prepared with Gregory and Anchala,
and this is the introductory part. So to begin with, I would like to give a general background the figure of Autorank, one of so-called Freud's favorite songs. A psychoanalyst whom Freud himself described as an enthusiastic and trustworthy person in 1914 in his book The History of the Psychoanalysis Movement. However, that opinion will change 10 years later when the issues of affect, lust, and maternal distress come to the forefront of the psychoanalysis movement. This was because when a theoretical conflict emerged, it was necessarily accompanied by
personal conflict or pride. This provoked a permanent rupture with Rank. From humble origins, Ron had problems with his egocentric and alcoholic father and an aversion to sex and physical contact that tormented him as he explained in his diary. My introduction to erotic experience at the age of seven was with the one of my friends who wish I still curse him today. I remember Bebelby that the foundation stone of my latter suffering was lightened. It was, at the same time, the tombstone of my bliss. Upon meeting Freud, Rank devoted himself to him and his work with unbridly passion and energy,
in addition to devoting himself entirely to an incipient psychoanalysis movement. He became the right hand of the father of the psychoanalysis with very submissive and servile manners and he becomes the secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalysis Society. After his stint in the Austrian army in 1915, where he served as editor of the Kraschow newspaper, Rank come back changed. He was no longer a shy boy, much less a submissive one. He even married some time after returning from the army, a sign that his aversion to physical contact was a thing of the past.
His marriage and his daughter's beard significantly influenced the development of rank theories, especially in his book, The Trauma of Beard. Here's a quotation that seems essential to introduce the main ideas of this text. The child wants to deny the existence of the female genitalia because he wants to avoid the memory of terrible contact with those organs. The central thesis of the Bird of Drama, published in 1914, held that the life in the womb was the prototype of pleasure and security. and the separation from the mother after childbirth constitutes the essential motive of distress and anxiety.
Moreover, Rank asserts that many later neurotic conflicts and symptoms correspond to this trauma. Rank considered the relationship with the mother to be more critical and emotional, more intense than with the father. Separation from the mother after birth was the leading cause of distress and anxiety. So the Oedipus complex and the castration anxiety were secondary in his theory, a derivative of the first cause. Thus the importance of the father was this downplayed, and the treatment focused on the maternal role of the analyst.
So Ranks' anguish arose from the concrete fact, the birth of trauma, and was not a consequence of childhoods or sexual anxiety. Ranks considered the relationship... Oh, sorry. With this idea condensed in this book, Ranks earned the contempt of Freud. This lead to his sub-consumption expulsion from the Vienna Psychoanalistic Circle. Later, however, Rahn's concept becomes part of Freud's theory in a modified form. This is clear in the text Inhibition, Symptoms and Distress, published in 1926,
Immediately after the break between Freud and Rank, where he present the idea of his disciplines as if they were his own, especially the importance of the separation of the mother and child. This is a quote of the Freud letter work. Here, language creates the repression and not, as I believed before, the repression to the anguish. As far as we can cover them today, most phobia can be traced back to the anguish of the ego, such as the one indicate in the face of the men of libido. In them, the anguish attitude of the ego is always primary
and is the impetus of repression. The anguish never comes from the repressed libido. Yes, that's all. Excellent. Thank you very much. Yes, it's actually quite interesting. I mean, well, first of all, I'm kind of curious what was his first sexual encounter that he was so traumatized. Not that I am actually interested to know, but just for the sake of curiosity. Reza, may I interrupt? Yes, I mean, yes.
Yes, absolutely. Before you comment, I just actually wanted to make a remark. So Alberto and Gregory and I worked on this presentation together, and I wanted to just bring to notice slide number seven, Alberto, if you could share that. I mean, I'm not going to go through my part of the presentation, but I just wanted to talk about just one particular thing. Is that okay? Sure, sure, absolutely. um alberto could you share slide number seven slide seven okay also uh i think that some people
having a connection problems i do have connection problems maybe that's just zoom i don't know uh but yes i have a kind of like a after a while uh sounds become a little bit glitchy so my apologies go on okay um one second one second so yeah that's okay so in the second um in the second chapter of um the trauma of birth um rank is he's talking about infantile anxiety and um cases of infantile anxiety um so which is sorry the one with the animals actually that one uh the next one
uh the one after this yeah so yeah so um so what drank says is oh actually the one after this the next one sorry yeah so he says that um in children when they're very young um the size of the animal has something to do with um inducing fear in in infants um and so size in both cases like whether the animal is very large or if the animal is very small um and it i found it very interesting because since I was a child like one of the first memories I have of myself
was this irrational fear of spiders and I remember thinking that the spider will go inside my ear and make a web for some reason and that's why I've always always been afraid of spiders and so when I read what Rang said, it just, it struck me because what he says is, the feeling of weirdness or uncanniness in the presence of these small creeping animals can be traced to their peculiar ability completely to disappear into small holes in the earth. They therefore exhibit the wish to return into the maternal hiding place as completely accomplished. Yeah, so I mean, I don't know if
I mean I'm pretty sure I didn't know about rank when I was three years old but um it's it's funny how um yeah it's funny how like the only reason I've been scared of spiders is because I once had this thought that it would go inside me um yeah sure that's what I wanted to point out I see. Before coming back to all of this, let me actually move, go inside. It seems that the connection here is kind of safe to connection gets better inside. One second.
Let's see if it's better here. Sorry. For some reason, I mean. So, yeah, the problem I have with, you know, the sorts of ranks and frenzies idea, particularly with rank, I think it seems to be, yes. So, you know, we all have this sort of stuff that, you know, bugs and things are kind of, we are kind of afraid, particularly we, you know, kind of in sheer disgust, almost like an automatic sort of reaction, even for a child who doesn't know what a bug is. Going to orifices
like ear, nose, just like it creates a kind of a really strong reaction. But then it is completely unclear, which you can say that is a cause of fear, right? But then to trace this cause of fear that we have to an archaic cause at the dawn of evolution, that I would say that it remained fundamentally speculative, right? There is no way that it can be experimented, it's obviously from a scientific point of view, nor can it be explained again by this
archaic cause. Unless it is within a theory that speculatively holds a causal connection between, you know, the sort of earlier archaic causes and the secondary causes like an instantaneous, a strong reaction to the size of creatures, particularly when they are too small. But yes, otherwise it would be, I would say that, you know, to many people, including Freud, in fact, but
Of course, Freud also has so many of these speculative frameworks already in place, so it doesn't need to be so negative about Rank's theories. But even to Freud, some of this stuff that Rank is talking about sound rather far-fetched. But again, Freud is absolutely in the same vein, but in different sort of contexts. sticks to this sort of archaism of causes that are at the roots of secondary causes of fear and anxiety, which we are going to talk about. But yes, I mean,
someone look like to me and we can assign had a word for it particularly with regard to Freud it looks as if some of these you know are kind of aesthetic judgments rather than any sort of scientific judgments, bringing back, you know, archaic causes is not by itself, you know, faulty, but as I said, it requires a certain sort of scientific explanatory connection to be made.
And that I cannot in any way see that psychoanalysis can make such a thing without actually already placing a theory that presumes such connections to exist and then explaining the causal connections between the archived cause and secondary contemporaneous causes to be holding. Thoughts from other people? Yes, Arvan.
Yes, thank you. I have a really maybe idiotic question. I want to understand the difference between the idea of anguish and happiness. Does it matter if anxiety has a quality or does it have a, I think you talked about this, or does it have a quantity if it's only quantity where the quality comes from? And if the quantity and quality are just transformation or translation of quantity into language, then would something like absolute death become the absolute happiness or the
absolute non-anxiety? Yes, that's the principle, right? So I wouldn't say that happiness plays a role here. Yeah, but it becomes, if we talk about it in terms of, you know, essentially that what you might call to be when this becomes the beyond pleasure principle, which means also it's beyond unpleasure, right? It is at the state of repose where basically the complete discharge happens. So in that sense, yes, I mean, that quality, you know, we can't talk about anxiety as a particular quality that we often associate with it, right?
it becomes when it's being in that way understood the absolute absence of anxiety doesn't mean really the opposite of anxiety at this point doesn't mean really happiness or the state of comfort it means a state of repose you know dissolution, dissolution, complete dissolution but there is actually, but even not talking about, you know, the whole idea of death and the state of repose, when we are talking, you know, psychoanalysts, Freudian psychoanalysts talk about anxiety. Anxiety, they don't mean it in a sense that it always registers as a discomfort,
at least to the patient, meaning that it doesn't manifest always psychosomatically as being of its own particular quality. Sometimes it takes the form of other source of quality, such as happiness. And that happiness might in fact be a way of discharging that anxiety. Thank you very, very good. And this is the whole point that, you know, That is actually quite highly running
motif that in Freud's were basically qualities that exhibits integrity and wholesomeness are usually taken to be the sinister manifestations of deterioration. For example, laughter, you know, certain sorts of, you know, a state of happiness and fulfillment. And, you know, this is particularly also comes in frenzy, people who have gone through other parts of clinical diary, but also, if I'm not mistaken, in final contributions to psychoanalysis.
So there are three-volume books. It's called The First Contribution to Psychoanalysis, then Further Contribution to Psychoanalysis, and there's a Final Contribution to Psychoanalysis. In the final one, he talks about this idea that, you know, he always uses a kind of a geological metaphor for a traumatized person, particularly as main a study before, you know, the case of R.N. Elizabeth Severn was cases of child abuse, right? And this is the thing that he talks about a traumatized adult who resembles a wholesome earth, right? That it has created
what you might call to be a terra firma for itself. Terra firma is what you might call to be the uttermost layer of the identity of ego. On the surface, everything looks fine. plants are growing, you know, there are roses, manifestations of usually greenies. But there are also kind of, if you look at it with a microscope, put a magnifier on it, you see that there are holes in it, where ants are coming and they are carrying corpses to these nests and other sorts of, you know, kind of like the beginning of David Lynch movie, Blue Velvet.
Exactly. Can I interrupt you mid-metaphor, sorry, just to ask a follow-up question and then shut up. Would you say that your idea of unconscious, maybe not Freud's idea, but what I understand from your idea and what we read in the essay that you put up in Discord yesterday, Would you say that the idea of scale really is the idea of unconsciousness? Maybe we hold some macro scale. We don't even see the unconsciousness. Only in the microstates are the states that we can call unconscious because they follow regulation, natural regulation,
organismic regulation that doesn't have a conscious or a semantic part in our minds and be made up that semantic part to somehow, I don't know, discharge the anxiety or go to an equilibrium state. If we go down to the microstate level, we see what Freud calls unconscious. If we go up on the microstate, then we don't see anything. If then that's the case in the after state for this yeah i will i will i will talk about this yes it can be it can be put into that uh sort of way essentially uh you know this sort of you know kind of uh what you might call the reductionist approach to the unconscious uh is actually can be possible right but then
that wouldn't be freudian it wouldn't have freudian consequences and essentially freud doesn't want that sort of unconscious the reductionist approach to the unconscious right he actually wants unconscious in a dynamic sort of way that basically can be uh understood as i will talk about as a preventive factor for the consciousness but also ultimately uh having the properties of consciousness, ultimately, primary. But that I will talk about is that Freud's account, how he wants the cake and eating it too, with regard to the unconscious, doesn't pan out.
But if it were this sort of pure reductionist approach, yes, it could be. But then it wouldn't have this sort of, you know, kind of, you know, hair raising tales about it. I will talk about this. Yes, coming back to frenzy, you know, the whole idea of the earth one. So this comes back to the idea of uh auto plasticity right so auto plasticity is a regressive in a psychological way is a regressive trait we talked about it that rank and frenzy uh saw a child uh you know at the
onset of infancy or being in the womb being completely auto plastic right uh it doesn't have any sort of subjectivity, and the only way that it can differentiate itself is through a space, right, as a projection. Otherwise there is no, what you might call to be, any idea of individuality here. And with cases of trauma in adults, Freud thinks that the first form of defense in under the pulverizing effect or atomizing what he calls atomization or fragmentation
under the pulverizing effect of trauma, the ego starts to shatter, to gets atomized. And he compares this with the ashes and lavas ashes and lavas that are erupting from an active volcano, right, as geological again, occurrence, that these, this is, it says that this fragmentation should also be understood as a positive, at least temporarily, as a positive defense mechanism, precisely because fragmentation allow for refragmentation, meaning that things can become coalesced once again,
integrated together, even though in a fragile manner, just like how lavas cool down and they create a crust, which is kind of brittle. and then this crust again becomes a new uh what you might call to be a shield for ego but now the shield protects uh a mishmash uh of liquid molten psychic infrastructures just like planet earth right at the at the beneath all these surfaces there is a rumbling core of molten iron
okay uh thoughts or question before i start Yes, John. And so even though in rank, the archaic ends up having this quasi mystical element, still names a really difficult question of capturing the impact of time in history in between the species level and the individual level.
and so it comes up all the time and like contemporary as just so stories and evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology rather and it's the kind of thing that psychologists now want to primarily get at through genetics or epigenetics but even if rank kind of fumbles it it's it seems to me it's pointing towards a really difficult and serious problem of to go arm on scale and temporality yes uh yes no i mean uh that is unfortunately uh happens all the time in evolutionary psychology but the thing is i would say that with freud and uh um rank it comes from two different directions actually as i mentioned it's not coming it's not coming from
the side of darwin because in darwin there is actually a way that to kind of you know put this together, although not with the same sort of results. It actually comes from Lamarck and another person whose name is now forgotten, but Freud was highly influenced by and used the word archaic as a direct reference to this person, Carl Abel. ABEL, who had worked on archaic words or archaic phrases. And there is, I need to think about this and how,
what exactly this sort of archaism represents. I haven't really thought about it, But there is actually a good, in my idea, there is a good criticism of it, at least in that sense of Abel and Lamarck with regard to Freud, in David Archer's Consciousness and the Unconscious book. Actually, I have it here. you can't find a pdf of it unfortunately and i don't i have a hard copy uh but i just was lazy to you know search some of the stuff um i borrowed it from archive org you can borrow it if you
open an account you can borrow it on archive org and it's uh let me see i think it's this is is okay it's on page so on page 28 of dave david uh archard uh book uh called consciousness and the unconscious which is absolutely one of the best books ever written on Freud. I mean, anything you can read by David Archer is absolutely majestic, is considered to be one of the greatest philosophers who have dealt
with psychoanalysis legacy. But yes, John, I need to think about this, something that, I'm aware of these kind of problems, but I just still haven't thought about what is exactly, make it palpable, at least for myself, what is really the source of problem, other than its vagueness, which we all know what it is. um okay so this is sort of with um oh uh you know uh
Oh, the thing, I forgot about that one. The, what was it? The, the, um find my notes the the the solipsism uh part part sorry notes are i can't even mark my notes and what it was that's not it can't do this one
today my apologies So before I find my notes, the problem of, you know, we talked about this idea that's ultimately for Freud, um no there is a um there seems to be a uh kind of a problem uh this you know the energetic the energetic paradigm even though uh in psychophysic physicalistic uh sense was abundant since projects of scientific psychology, but nevertheless it endures in what you might call to be
the concepts, key concepts of psychoanalysis such as repression, regression, Oedipus complex, libido, and trauma, theory of trauma. In a sense, it became the kind of the silent core of the project of psychoanalysis, but without, you the kind of naturalistic, psychophysicalistic details of its past.
Life, in fact, which is always being continued to be used in Freud's work is also being understood fundamentally in terms of you know energetics you know and life and why i'm saying that life is purely understood in terms of energetics i mean in in terms of life is being equated at some fundamental level with sexual energy, with libido.
Now, let me cite this. So, yeah, before actually citing this passage from Freud, I want to say so that ultimately I want to argue that the concept of existence, which also rank fundamentally goes toward the concept of existence, existence, both existence of individual, subjective individual, and the existence of external world, then being distorted under the energetic model.
And I will show, I will argue how and why. And then once we see that the existence, the meaning of this existence being somehow undermined or at least reinvented in Freudian psychoanalysis, then Freud's theory takes the shape of a very twisted methodological solipsism or agnostic solipsism.
that at the same time somehow escaped Cartesian solipsism, but in other way, again, comes back and takes the shape of a form, of a specific form of Cartesian solipsism. So Freud says in findings, ideas, and problems in 1938, he says, space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. no other derivation possible instead of Kant's a priori determinants of our
psychical apparatus psyche is extended knows nothing about it where is that quote from again could you could you yes findings ideas and problems that's it and now that was freud yes no so then it appears that freud in a sense at the same time allowed and didn't allow a place for external world in his theory you can say that on the one hand you know the cycle Lamarckian the so-called you know
recapitulation theory that antigenetic antigenesis follows phylogenesis at the level of symbolic or mental events. When I'm saying the recapitulation theory, those of you who weren't here last session, I mentioned that there is a difference between Freud and Frenzies and Rank's adoption of recapitulation theory and Hacol, you know,
recapitulation theory, which is a stays in a fundamentally evolutionary dynamics. rather recapitulation theory for Freud is that ontogenesis at the level of mental symbolic structure of the mental recaptures the phylogenetic progression or development. So on the one hand, he accepted the psycho-Lamarckian idea that our direct experience of the external world shapes our subsequent physical and psychical evolution, right?
I would say the physical left far less than psychical physical in a in a sense that not really it's not Heckelian anymore it's more of a Lamarckian which is rather innocent at least to his theory. On the other hand, he also rejected all social and, of course, socialists, because as I mentioned, Freud did not have politics. He was purely either agnostic or liberal agnostic.
You know, he didn't want anything to do with this sort of stuff. So on the other hand, he also rejected all social and socialist explanations for the onset of basically neurosis. He claimed that sickness was individually or biologically determined. these two aspects of Freud for his approach might be actually less a contradiction than a paradox I would say first of all it's not just that the course of life
is affected by the external world since existence is the accumulation and repetition of historic encounters with the external world, one can't be legitimately separate the psychical response, the mental growth from the external stimulus in Freud's theory. Rather, the inner world, as I have talked about, of affect is also always a reflection of the outer world of effect. in this regard, we shouldn't forget the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It's just that
an inheritance, meaning inheritance meaning that a psychobiological encoding of distant past. how many of you have watched the movie memoria yeah so if you haven't you should definitely check it it is kind of like around the same sort of, you know, theme or topic. That inheritance in that sense becomes a distant
translation of what you might call to be primordial morphogenetic processes. which leave their trace uh uh what you might call to be in the in uh in basically the uh in the biological memory not the memory in the sense but in the biological memory And these traits can take the shape of a crypt, you know, that can be navigated or erupt at, you know, under certain sort of conditions.
So Freud makes of the external world the biological stuff of our ancestry, which is to say that ontogenesis repeats or follows phylogenesis. So to an extent, this is a kind of an, what you might call to be, ironic conclusion. Since the phylogenetic past, which all humans do share, evokes the image of Jung's collective unconscious. Even so, for Freud, this inheritance is still somehow mediated on the individual level, which is to say it is idiosynchronic.
as a single nighttime noise or basically clamor is always subject to a particular response among different dreamers. In other words, although the external world can and will affect psychic reality, one can never say what form that affect will assume. Correspondence, in this sense, as every Freudian scholar knows, is always impressionistic and never realistic.
Right? so it is actually now interesting now that that external world in that sense and i'm going to expand on this external world in freud's theory does not being understood as a reality out there right there is no reality of the external world in that sense. It is a reality only in so far that it has a capacity to stimulate, right? I am like, instead of Descartes, I think, therefore I am, I am being stimulated, therefore I am.
But the stuff that is stimulated are precisely a stuff. It is not a reality, it's just a stuff, because it can be anything that stimulates you know the fact of a stimulation doesn't tell you about the specificity of the constraints other than in quantitative manners of mass of a stuff stimulating right and so that's one that external world is being reduced to stuff and second on the second more important level the registration the how reality external world external not reality external world affects the psychic apparatus is being registered on impressionistic
level just like noise that creates different impressions on night dreamers right a specific noise uh so john you want you raise your hand you want to say something I was going to ask, one of the solutions to both the apolitical character of Freud and the solipsism is to treat the family as a social institution and then historicize the family. So it takes the family out of the realm of biology and introduces both contingency and a kind of semantic legibility. Do you think this... That would be what Marx and Engels trying to do.
Yeah, or like Deleuze and Guattari. Yes. So I think this helps some actually for the apolitical character of Freudian analysis. Do you think it helps at all for addressing the question of solipsism that you've posed? To an extent, yes. But as I'm going to, again, continue with this, precisely because solipsism comes on two different levels, John. One is what you might call to be the external world, the problem of others that are just basically being mashed together in terms of stuff that stimulates, right? As what you might call to be the warrant for sense certainty
and two, as I'm going to talk about, the individual, the model of individual in Freud is not really also the model of individual in any sort of coherent sense that we usually say an individual. So solid socialism comes from, again, two directions. One, the sort of, you know, kind of essentially compromising the idea of external world. And the other one is kind of not dissolving, but yes, diluting the idea of the individual.
either of these, each of these by themselves can lead to a solipsism. And that's actually quite interesting that both of them here are taken, you know, as parts, as key parts of the theory. And yes, solipsism comes, but this solipsism comes from two different directions. Of course, the reason that he needs both of them is that one is already comes naturally with the other in Freud's theory precisely because of the death drive and the whole energetic thesis that is at the bottom of how these things are being formulated, the external world and the individual.
wrong. Arman, a quick question. Go on. A quick question. Would you say that the organism that becomes like the idea for the cart of a benevolent God that can rectify the doubt? Sorry, sorry, your first part. What exactly? What was we should be able to repeat the whole thing. Yes, yes, yes, sure. I'm saying that there is a metaphor between the Cartesian solipsism, Cartesian solipsism, and the solipsism of Freud that you also talked about in a very funny manner that I have, I'm impressed, I get impression, I'm stimulated, therefore I am. And then I say that
there is a benevolent god in cartesian story that ratifies the doubt and uh the inability the inability of the quote unquote individual to do things if there wasn't that god and there was a devil um that was uh some um how do you put it was uh anyway you know the story of uh the card Right, right. I mean, yes. This is why I said that Freud is an agnostic solipsist, right? So precisely because he doesn't have the source of self-certainty that is being warranted by God, because it has been literally pulverized by the death drive.
Freud comes up with a certain sort of this is what the definition of agnostic or methodological solipsism is. It is a thesis that can neither be refuted nor can it be essentially embraced. It's a pure sinister form of solipsism. Agnosticism. That's exactly my question. My question is, do you think that his idea of organism, of an organism, not a benevolent organism, but somehow a learned organism, actually replaces the idea and personalizes the idea of benevolent God.
That is, an organism that is orthogonal and hierarchical, upper than the consciousness, but for some reason can identificate the act of consciousness or the conscious mental state. And that idea of organism become the idea of some idea of a benevolent God. That is, as you put it, the self-certainty. But there is no self-certainty. There is only a natural certainty that this is what it must be or something like that. Yes, and yes, and no. I mean, again, as I will talk about this, essentially, this comes back to a very sordid idea that completely annihilates the idea of the unconscious in a Freudian sense.
And what is that? That Freud really, the problem with Freud, it has a very naive understanding of consciousness. you see uh so at the same time he wants to enrich it by the idea of the unconscious which as i say is a completely a mythological sort of stuff it just doesn't pan out in any sort of way that freud's try to use they use it as a preventive factor uh but also so he wants to enrich it the idea of consciousness but that consciousness is not really consciousness, that consciousness that there is a certain sort of what you might call to be not certainty, but a certain sort of what you might call to be direct knowledge,
that doesn't exist to begin with, right? And hence it makes the idea of the unconscious as a noun redundant. That one and second one, there is actually, as I said, an overlap with Cartesian form of solipsism, precisely because ultimately the psychoanalysis for Freud has as its aim quest for self. The certainty of self, even though this certainty
can never be, you know, substantiated, but it's a quest for the discovery of self. A self that is already what you might call to be mired in a very naive sort of consciousness, just like Descartes. So let me, okay, let's have a 10 minutes break and I will continue with the solipsism, move to unconsciousness. Let's cap the questions for now so I can actually get to the unconscious because then we will have problems. 10 minutes.
How many more minutes before 10 minutes? How many minutes left? I think like five minutes. Okay, good. Arman, you weren't actually last session when I actually talked about Nietzsche's influence just a little bit.
Yes, I mean, this is, I mentioned this funny story that, you know, when Rank finally gave up kind of persuading Freud about his misunderstanding of his work, he sent without any sort of comment or any letter, a copy of Beyond Good and Evil to Freud. Yeah, that's a joke. Beyond Pleasure Prince or Beyond, because of the influence that he had played and Freud never actually mentioned it. Yes, Gregory.
yeah well i was reading auto rank i was wondering if anybody else had read peter slaughter dyke's spheres trilogy have you read it i said uh the the bubbles right yeah he i have only read the first one uh not not the other two there's always this sense that maybe i'm reading into it but i don't think so i think slaughter dyke read auto wrong very carefully I see. There are places where his ideas cohere with wrongs perfectly. So I don't know. No, I can, I can, yes, I can, I can, I can say that how the idea of bubbles can go with Rankin ideas. Yes. And particularly given Slaughter Dykes
is not merely a philosopher, he's a very good actually historian of ideas. And yes, I suspect that he's actually putting his dirty paws all over other ranks and stuff. Just talking about Petas Lothardyke's work, he kind of offers another history of psychoanalysis,
beginning with mesmerism. Yes, of course. Mesmerism absolutely was essentially all of these sort of stuff that you see in terms of, you know, what you might call to be post-wakefulness, not post-woke, post-wakefulness theories of consciousness. It means that after certain sort of states, either trans, hypnosis, going to anesthesia, you wake up and suddenly some stuff erupts. These are all coming back from Mesmer, really.
There is actually a very good book on this. I've forgotten. I have it somewhere. I will find it and put it on Discord. So then with regard to what I said, that external world become then impressionistic and correspondence then becomes impressionistic rather than realistic. if that is so then psychic reality remains somewhat deaf to the external world it's because the outer world of impersonal force is a necessary but not sufficient cause of its development
And this particular formulation, you know, has important kind of generally unrecognized consequences for its theory of physical growth and mental development. Which is in this respect is, you know, kind of Aristotelian, you know, the Aristotelian famous example of an acorn that becomes essentially an oak tree being explained through a series of basically propling causes, efficient and final causes.
And Freud having reduced the external world to a group of mechanistic forces, literally like Aristotle's natural elements like wind, rain, sun, so on and so forth, Freud then conceived of the psychic apparatus as his own words, Freud's own words, unfolding of latent potentialities. As he says in Beyond Pleasure and Beyond Pleasure Principle, he says,
almost all energy with which the psychic apparatus is filled arises from its innate instinctual impulses. Impulses here are not only projected secondarily onto the external world. Therefore, at its deepest level, life or libidinal life unfolds in a direction given in advance. Or as Aristotel would have put it, life is a teleological phenomenon passing through material, formal, efficient, and final causes.
So final causes is really what makes the causal propeling Aristotelian, right? As opposed to, you know, any other sorts of framework. And again, coming back to the acorn that becomes an oak tree, the organism's growth then is in part caused by external world functioning as an efficient or propling cause. As Freud puts it, again in Beyond Pleasure Principle, in the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organism
must be the history of earth we live in and of its relation to the sun. Now you see that this sort of seemingly innocent kind of conjecture creates a whole slew of post-structural libidinal materialists who go with this sort of model but without actually understanding its repercussions this is solipsistic repercussions which i'm going to talk about
and i kind of briefly mentioned and by post-structural is you our pre-post structure is from, I mean, from, you can see it from Bataille and Duluth to Lyotard to land and so on and so forth. Yes, John. So I promise this will be my last question. So you talk about pre-personal forces, but aren't forces already personalized by the fact that the original encounters are within the context of the family in relationship to the mother and father? One could argue back at you that you're reading a section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle that's specifically couched as a metapsychological exploration of neurology.
Yes. But that for Freud isn't the decisive level of description. The decisive level for description is the interpersonal and familial. So if forces are always already personalized through the father and the mother, they haven't been personalized. They have taken a personal manifestation, two different things. You see, as I said, so that the familial and interpersonal things that comes by way of superego. So it comes actually, that is not actually correct. that is only merely coming from familial. And particularly with frenzy and rank, this is shown to be not really the case to an extent,
precisely because they are also coming from within, you know, the whole transcoding of phylogenetic into the ontogenetic ones. And this phylogenetic to the ontogenic encoding holds true for the entire species of Homo sapiens, right? And it is only when this text moves into the realm of sociality, and then it is not sociality anymore, as I said, Freud actually rejects that notion of sociality, family as a part, as a unit of sociality,
but rather family for him is not, or sociality is not sociality in the sense that we are talking about in an ordinary sort of way, but sociality itself being a different mass of these forces right, that have been entrenched in the structure of sociality, right? So essentially, the largely unconscious forces of super-ego that are being transferred by way of, you know, family and interpersonality are themselves, are being manifestations of this sort of, what you might call to be primordial forces, like the relation between sun and the earth, right?
And this is, as I mentioned that last session, that famous thing that Frenzy had talked about it, and Freud was in agreement with, that all physical phenomena should be studied by metaphysical, namely psychological phenomena. And all psychological phenomena should be studied under metapsychological criteria. that the these primordial forces have already again
not only diluted external world to a mass of stuff, but they have also diluted the concept of others as interpersonal others, right? The concept that is at the core of sociality. So we have in a sense that this theory, Freud's theory of the unconscious and drive-like behaviors has as its consequence severe dilution of external world, individual, and the social. Merely the idea of the social is no longer in any sense intersubjective in any form of Kantian or
Hegelian sense or interpersonal, because the person is already causally determined, according to this theory, from within and from without by these forces that are at the stake at different levels of operation though, you know, at the level of what you might call to be biology, at the level of symbols, like language, and so on and so forth. And Freud is really interested at the level of symbols. That is like his more mature sort of project. The recapturing of Lamarck's
and Haeckel's theory of recapitulation at the level of symbolic representation of mental events. you know what you're saying makes sense and to some extent it's a debate over which level of freud to read as primary and to give the most weight to but i do think you're right and it really comes out in the question of what's at stake in transference and why transference is the central point where the therapeutic and the meta-psychological come together Because the hope of transference is the patient reproduces this entire history through the repetition compulsion, but through some type of relationship with the analyst develops an awareness of the reality of their connection that goes beyond the repetition compulsion.
And in some ways, it's the ambiguity of the actual mechanism or Freud's failure to clarify the actual mechanism of how overcoming transference allows an escape for the repetition compulsion that means he doesn't escape solipsism. Yes, yes, a good point, very good point. Yes, yes, definitely so. Okay, so continuing now it becomes, of course, somehow confusing that's
according to Freud, the most latent of all potential developments, the deepest of all psychic wills, as Freud puts it, is death itself. Right? Death is both the purposeful and in the sense of final cause and meaningful beginning of existence. Right? Then Freud's metapsychology is for this reason circular ultimately.
As such, the purpose and meaning of existence which are basically the same has nothing to do with the external world. Meaning is an intangible quality that is simply beyond materialism. And interestingly enough, beyond also psychoanalysis. And death in that sense, being the final cause of Freud's dynamics, not only the energetic dynamics, but also projects of psychoanalysis is always
metapsychological because of its intangibility. The secondary, you know, status Freud gives to the external world is similarly reflected, you know, is in his approach to culture as a whole. Like the natural world and culture by here by culture, I mean, social culture, socios and culture, right? And kind of interpersonal, intersubjective dimension. Like the natural world, the social world is always mediated and therefore distorted by the
individual psyche which itself is under the spell of this sort of metapsychological forces and death ultimately others of society the concept of social others right others in terms of other people others others of societies already an epistemological difficulty, a conundrum, so to speak, about the existence of the external world in general. So it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that Freud's idea,
to say that Freud actually, Freud's idea gives a proof for the existence of the external world with his idea that a quantity of a stimulus threatens the psychic apparatus from some position outside its borders. And merely this becomes the vindication, this already quite, precarious idea simply becomes the vindication that then there is something out there becomes the proof of the outside world
of an external world right so as i said that just like Descartes grounded the first principle of subjectivity I think therefore I am on his own subjectivity sense of self-certainty psychophysicalistic Freud, which has never been vanquished from the project of scientific psychoanalysis
to the maturation, but rather been pushed under the carpet, the psychophysicalistic Freud dispenses with cogitation and more simply concludes that I am in this sense, I am stimulated, therefore I am. I am also here, which is, you know, the mark of existence, I am in so far as I defend, I grow, right? I defend and grow here simply means in a technical sense of defense and sexual and growth of sexual functions in Freud's, which have, you know, basically
neurotic foundations, right? So for Freud, consciousness then is a late byproduct of an elaborate, what you might call to be mechanical defensive process. And, you know, this mechanistic description of growth is in fact only another way of saying that the very fact of a stimulus or energy plays the role of the other or others in Freud's metapsychology. To these others,
you know, Freud can give all sorts of impersonal names impersonal names, right? Eros, life, libido, sexuality, and make them propeling causes of existence. The organism which is given as a material cause is only made aware of the outside world because some force acts on it, acts on its outermost border as an efficient cause of its
growth and its becoming conscious. But this, at the root of this efficient cause, which is the And in the stimulation lies the final cause, the beginning and end, which is death. Equilibrium, the law of constancy. so as we see that
well there is this passage i would like to read for you uh you know coming back to the idea of you know, that some people think that that line that I read that John was also talking about, the history of the earth we live in, and, you know, that ultimately the whole life is determined by the history of the earth we live in, and of its relation to the sun, some
people, Freudians thought that it's an aberration, but as we are seeing, that it's not really aberration. This is actually, you know, the groundwork, the foundational groundwork for the project, for studying psychology, you know, psychological events. In relation to that, Freud again says something, you know, in an unpublished essay during his life, He says, the hitherto predominantly friendly outside world, which bestows every satisfaction, transforming itself into a mass of threatening perils.
This hard school of the glacial period, he calls it. to frenzy in his letter to frenzy. And, you know, not only created disposition to anxiety that in a Lamarckian fashion has been passed from generation to generation, but created society in general, right? Including the full spectrum of intellectual activities and cultural activities, which are themselves elaborate attempts to defend one's self from
a hostile environment, which has been compared to the harsh glacial environment of cruel times of the Ice Age. Go on, Maria. I wanted to ask you a question about death and whether it is an external principle like Hegel's absolute or is it always mine like in Heidegger and Postkantian thought in Freud because this is important. It's not Heideggerian at all, actually. In Heidegger, death is always being deferred,
right, by the fact of dying, right? In a sense that, and that's the whole idea of the Dasein, that turns into a flawed that protracts. That is completely, Ray actually talks about this fundamentally with regard to Freud, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. Nietzsche is far closer to Freud with regard to the idea of death, but actually there is a canonical difference is that for Freud death can never be experienced because the fact
of something to be experienced means that its nature ought to be conscious. Right? So death is that which is always at the beginning, antecedently, and at the end, remains outside of experience. It marks the severance of the experiential subject and that's i remember that is actually the last chapter of rays freud and the truth of extinction
and since it is outside experience we cannot say that freud is not a solipsis because he said that death is ubiquitous is a principle external to human To say that death is ubiquitous is one thing, but to say that death is the final cause of life, you see, there is two different sorts of, and Freud actually sneakily moves around One, death being severance from life, a state that comes before and after life, right?
That is one thing. Completely, it's just actually an ordinary banal observation. but the other one saying that death drives life as a final cause of as a final cause that is a different sort of thesis you see that death is the final cause of growth and the psychic development final cause in a purely Aristotelian sense, final causal. That it precedes, not only precedes and succeeds material cause of the organism,
but that the material cause of organism is itself substantiated and is driven by the cause. by a final cause. And everything that the organism hands, and that is just the description of Aristotelian thesis, it becomes Aristotelian precisely because of the consequence of this observation. That if that is the case, this is the final cause, the final cause explains the growth. It has an explanatory valence. That explanatory valence is something that
is the hallmark of our stilium. You know, the idea of death has been very, has been always, you know, come to essentially haunt Freud and Freud's legacy. I have this thing I have extracted, let me find it for you, from Wilhelm Reich.
I need an assistant someone actually sorted my notes where is it was it there yeah but if that is news like uh it is uh Freud is not on not a solipsist after all Is this solipsis precisely because it's death becomes an explanatory cause in what you might call to be not only sexual, the growth of the organism, but also psychocognitive growth of the organism.
that essentially the entire psychocognitive edifice of human is no longer about, you know, it's not about knowledge anymore of the external world, right? It's not about also the knowledge because it's already been diluted. So as I said, it's a very strange sort of solipsism. It's not a solipsism in a typical sense of solipsism that we, but precisely because that this explanatory element, death being the explanatory, fundamental explanatory element, dissolves or dilutes both individual, the social, and the external world to an extent that it becomes all a certain sort of semblance of,
you know, a kind of like a basket case, counterpart of Cartesian, Cartesian solidism. I would say basket case in the original sense of, you know, when in World War I, people calling basket case people who have been, having lost all the limbs. That was called, the origin of the word basket case. So it's like a basket case counterpart of Cartesian solipsism, whereas Cartesian solipsism had as its point of origin that I'm at least certain of my own subjectivity and self. This one, solipsism originates because of the lack, complete lack of this certainty,
because all of it has been diluted now. The external world has become a mass of stimulants from beyond. And people always, actually, this is the whole thing, that this concept of beyond has been fundamentally challenged on different levels what he means by beyond here. When he says beyond pleasure principle. A good book, two good books actually on this.
Yeah, again, David Archer and also Todd DeFayne's uh tales uh tales from freudian crypt i think it's first or second chapter of it so yeah coming back to death no death derived you know as people have suggested i do actually believe it uh although probably it's way too harsh that it's just a repository into which anything that
Freud see that doesn't fit, he dumps it into this repository in the course of psychoanalysis, right? It's a kind of a rhetorical strategy where Wittgenstein had said it, and Jeanette also talked about it, it's kind of a makeshift, makeshift explanatory garbage bag where anything that you can't actually truly explain by your theory of psychoanalysis, just dump it into that garbage bag and just let it will take care of itself. Why it's death always takes care of itself at very least. And this is this is what Reich, Willem Reich talks about it. It says such formulations have
made any further thinking unnecessary, meaning death drive being the cause and final. If one was not able to cure, the death instinct could be blamed. When people committed murder, it was in order to go to prison. When children were told, it was obtained relief from a conscience that troubled them. I marvel today at the energy that was expended at that time on discussion of such stupid opinions. Let me get some water for myself and I will come.
For example, you know, again, think about the clinical... Maria, are you there? yes uh for example also think uh you know about the clinical viability of death drive theory uh i mean as people have uh mentioned uh you know the most uh controversial if not a scandalous instance
being that of negative theriopathic reaction. This is a phrase by Freud, negative theriopathic reaction. According to this, a patient, or rather a part of the patient's ego, may be under the impress of an overly severe superego, which is the purveyor of the death drive, And therefore, maybe under the impress of an overly severe superego, the purveyor of death drive, and therefore be singularly responsible for the failure of the entire therapy. right so if the therapy fails just blame it on that on that death drive on the part of the death
drive which is uh which is the which is part of the super ego and under which and hold complete sway of the patient just blame it on the stupid goddamn patients acting under the sway of death right and call it negative stereopathic reaction. And, you know, Freud actually talks about this, that, you know, know that in theory, Freud was famous at, you know, saying that, you know, when things fail,
it's always that failure is on the shoulder of both the analyst and the analyzant, the patient, right but in practice Freud always used to bitch about people who are called bad patients right bad patient what is a bad patient aren't you talking already about that you know that are these sort of resistances but he was insistent on this idea that bad patients are the ones that basically they are under the sway of the death drive and that we cannot do anything about this through the idea of super ego and so on and so forth in ratman he called the bad patient a
pedophile who didn't want to come again after he scolded him that was perhaps a bad patient indeed but i don't know about the death drive you know when i said at the beginning of the seminar that i have mild animosity towards freud it was in relation to these kind of um yes i remember i said i i yes i said that this course probably doesn't change your idea it's just giving you a more in depth i mean his ideas are very good But sometimes, I don't know why he had to be such a bad physician or clinician.
I mean, yes. I mean, well, of course, you see, he was primarily a physician-academicist, right? And that I got a part of it. Oh, it is a. In the. Draw. And. For. Arts, this idea that, you know, he has to shine away certain sources and that has, you know, this has become completely clear, not only with his patient, but also with his own pupils and students, that he disowns them quite really fast.
Well, at the level of professionalism, of ethical conduct, at the very least, I'm not saying that this ethical conduct hasn't been, you know, muddied by his dogmatism, but at the very basic level of ethical conduct, he was famous for it. And I don't think that Freud really compromised that side of it. Whereas Frenzy and Frank and so many other people in the inner circle did compromise the ethical protocol. I was just saying, he could have been a bit more integrative of even these like
dissentuous dissenting voices or let's say the absolutely patients which sometimes he should have tried to see as part of his research in a way like as bringing some sort of nuance or a glitch that could resolve a bit better than than blaming them for being bad yes yes absolutely yes I mean also Freud has famous for having double standards in terms of his practice so I remember that there is this letter that he talks so ranks says that you know
essentially I think that the practice of psychoanalysis like sessions shortened drastically uh uh precisely in a completely you know haphazard way uh the the suffering of the patient and it should be understood as a kind of like a tactical operation messy but but short uh uh where freud then he says that no this is just like you completely betray the psychoanalytic practice. But then a few years later, Frenzy talks
about this with the case of Elizabeth Severn, RN, that he has been prolonging sessions to get really into the depth of the tribulations. And Freud castigates him that why are you actually prolonging sessions so he has this always you know so long as he doesn't really care about what what amount of duration what is the duration of each session therapy session what he is actually really irks him for some strange reason is that both frenzy and both rank decrease or increase the duration of therapy based on their theoretical
findings. So there is a theoretical core or justification to their approach to the practice. And it seems that Freud is actually more interested precisely because their theoretical findings are different or contradict his theoretical findings. Hence, any sort of practice, regardless of its quality, that arises from those theoretical findings can be at his whim, be either castigated or encouraged. It really doesn't, Freud, it seems that, and Frenzy and Melanie Klein particularly talks about this, that Freud wasn't really interested in practice of psychotherapy.
He was more interested in a very crude way to substantiate his theoretical, his so-called allegedly theoretical discoveries by these episodes of psychotherapist sessions, there is absolutely no such a thing as an experiment that we can't even talk about psychological experiment. There is no such a thing as a psychological experiment
in the way that we talk about scientific experiments, in a way that scientific experiments validate or invalidate a theoretical framework. As Wittgenstein astutely understood and pointed out, psychological experiments are not matter of scientific experiments, and hence they don't essentially deal with hypotheses, because hypotheses need to be experimentally validated or not. or psychological experiments or alleged experiments have the nature of agreements,
aesthetic judgments, aesthetic observations, rather than experiments in the scientific sense that Freud is interested in. And we get into this a little bit further. So what was I? No, that is not the phone.
So as I said that for it not only, you know, kind of dilutes the idea of external world reduces to the mass of a stimulants or flows in flux of inundations of stimulations that is only precisely because there is a cross there is a border
that they can be vindicated as coming from outside. But also he does the same thing with the idea of other social others, right? In that sense, it creates a kind of twisted solipsistic rejection of others as a meaningful part of the individual's existence, right? Is then the essential, this kind of rejection of the others and meaningful part of the individual existence,
is then an essential characteristics of Freud's metapsychology, metapsychological worldview, which as Ferenzi has pointed out, is the proper way to study psychology, right? And this, there is a great quote again, from Beyond Pleasure Principle, that he talks about this, you know, kind of rejection of, you know, others as meaningful part of individuality. He tries to explain this or describes this by resorting to a certain sort of, you know, biologism.
And people who have read beyond pleasure and principle, Freud apparently had read American Lorraine Woodruff theory of basically chemical mechanical signals, cell signals, transmissions. He says, so this passage essentially deals with, you know, this is potentially, you know, baffling review of the biological literature on cellular reproduction and decay, which is, you know, the topic of chapter six of Beyond Pleasure Principle.
In there, Freud assures us that existence is not primarily dependent on any other, other here, external, other in the social, or any other sort of thing, any other whatsoever. And to this end, minimizes the role of coalescence, or more loosely put, reproduction in the life processes. He says, how is that the coalescence of two only a slightly different cells can bring about a renewal of life? The experiment which replaces the conjugation of protozoa by the application of chemical
or even mechanical stimuli enables us to give what is no doubt a conclusive reply to this question. The result, i.e. the renewal of life, is brought about by the influx of fresh amounts of stimulus this is point of emphasis is so the results namely the renewal of life is brought about by the influx of fresh amounts of a stimulus you know that this is one of those antique biological theses you know just like you know it's just a renewal of life it's just a matter of shake it and bake it you
put some stuff in it, shake it and bake it and that's it. There is nothing else to it. This tallies well with the hypothesis that the life process of the individual leads for internal reasons to an abolition of chemical tensions, that is to say to death, Whereas union with the living substance of a different individual increases those tensions, introducing what may be described as fresh vital differences, which must be lived off. He then, you know, referencing Woodruff, he says the recuperative effects of conjugation
can be replaced by certain stimulating agents, by altercations in the composition of the fluid which provides their nourishment by raising their temperature or by shaking. that shake it and bake it. So, you know, therefore, although conjugation is no doubt the forerunner of sexual reproduction of higher creatures, the most basic driving force of life is fresh stimulus of a chemical or mechanical nature, a shake and bake theory of existence, so to speak. Right?
And there is another place, he talks about this idea of, you know, coalitions that assist life, but only because it is an efficient cause like any other, like Ice Age, the thing that I mentioned earlier on. In the same chapter, when he's talking about Woodruff, he kind of makes a very surprising hint about the mysterious mechanics of death drive, you know, that qualifies, you know,
that basically, that for now has been, you know, silent at the background. Now, Freud writes, Woodruff is able to prove or was able to prove conclusively that it was only the products of its own metabolisms, you know, which had the fatal results for the particular are kind of an immaculate. For the same animacule, right, animacula, which inevitably perished if they were crowded together in their own nutrient fluid, flourished in a solution which was
oversaturated with the waste products of a distantly related species. An infusarian, and therefore, if it is left to itself, dies a natural death, owing to its incomplete avoidance of the products of its own metabolism. It may be that the same incapacity is the ultimate cause of the death of all higher animals as well. So he doesn't actually merely talks about primitive organism, but the entire organic species. So in a different way, you can say that Freud invokes a beyond of conjugation and orgasm leading to life in the more fundamental truth of isolation
and expulsion, leading that ultimately the problem, expulsion which leads to death, The problem of solipsism, in the sense that I have already mentioned it, it wouldn't be too ridiculous to say for Freud, it is a problem of waste management. In reference to just what I read to you with regard how he reads Woodruff, the organism that chokes, you know, its own nutrients. that in a sense that organism
dies on its own waste while it prospers on the waste of others. We all kind of... Yes, Kirsten, please. Hi, Ressa and everyone. Thank you. So I have nothing to say much to this. I agree with you very much, and I think that's not the first time I'm reading or listening about these criticisms. I just one that you wrote in your text for the introduction for the class therefore we instead seek to find
out not only whether the findings of the Freudian theory of the unconscious and drive can be validated on the screen but also whether such findings tell us something more than what natural and special science already tell us so i wonder about this point and which part of this project should be readopted which should be fleshed out and which should be discarded so i wonder about this findings which tell us something more and the readoption of the product or which parts of are you referring to in the readoption maybe you're coming to this next week but yes this is part that i think that uh i mean i try to kind of get at least close to that or um cover it next week uh
I generally agree with that Freud was a genius precisely because he uncovered a different class of psychic phenomena or mental events, right? A completely different class. But the way that he goes on and tries to formulate these mental events in terms of the unconscious, It seems that derails him from more modest and actually ultimately more interesting
potentials of his project. And as I said, this has something to do quite specifically with the fact that Freud really tries really too hard to give psychoanalysis a position akin to that of natural sciences. Yes, so that, you know, the discovery, I would say that that discovery of a class of mental events that was hitherto, you know, kind of unknown, or I wouldn't call it hidden,
because hidden right now might have the baggage of, you know, Freudian unconscious, unknown to psychologists, that I think that it's one of his phenomenal, you know, discoveries that really does put it at a certain sort of level that I would say that at the same level of natural sciences I mean in terms of its significance rather than in terms of its structure in terms of its significance but then I am not settled my mind on the fact that whether that such mental events can be addressed
by psychoanalysis or there are exclusive themes of psychoanalysis, right, as Freud claims them to be. That is something that probably I can never answer as a philosopher. At least I will try to explore it. But I'm not sure that in something, again, I will talk about it. I am not sure that neuroscience doesn't have or won't ever have the capacity to cover this kind of what Althusser called the new continent of psychic events.
But for me, generally, Freud's, what he actually does, other than this, you know, the discovery of this new class of mental events. As I said last session, you were here, that the whole project of psychoanalysis, even with all of its flaws, in a Freudian sense, I take it to be a very highly admirable philosophical, and that is to the dismay of Freud, because Freud really didn't want this project to be philosophical. A philosophical inquiry into the possibility
of human condition. But then as we have seen it, this inquiry starts to fray. usually people who have been, you know, taking this idea of, you know, inquiry to the possibility of human condition seriously as, you know, achievement of Freud, they have had materialist bends. You know, they put Freud and Marx on the same status, right, as an inquiry into the possibility of human condition. but as we have seen it that Freud materialism doesn't really hold together in any sort of
coherent materialist thesis and if it does it fundamentally contradicts some of his own main theories and positions with regard to you know the role of psychoanalysis interpersonality of the psychoanalytical practice so on and so forth. So now you you put me in a very bad position precisely because now that I started to actually go through the materials um conveying them to you it seems that I'm actually maybe I shouldn't have actually included that last bit that you read from from the introduction to the class.
Can it be recuperated? Does it actually say, I think that, or can it say something that national sciences don't tell us? I don't want to say no, but the more we have witnessed, There are not enough materials for us to work with. And the materials that were supposed to be, you know, the building blocks of reconfiguring the theory seem to be in their essence quite loose and fragile.
Thank you, Kirsten, for pointing out to my bad introduction. I actually, this is something that I thought that, I actually thought that maybe I shouldn't include that, whether it can actually say something that, but then I said, well, you know, this class needs to sell, so better actually to include it. Yeah, see, that's why I signed up for the class, exactly. Because I was like, is there something more to know about Freud, what I might already know? Is there some secret you know I don't know about, you know, so the curiosity?
Yes. I mean, from a philosophical perspective, I actually think that from a strictly philosophical perspective, I think that Freud's theory is an astonishing, you know, speculative conjecture. that if we really take history of philosophy after Schopenhauer and Nietzsche seriously, Freud is giving them the much sharp needed results and consequences,
ultimately brings it to its ultimate resting place, those earlier theses. But then, which is the death drive and, you know, the whole, what you might call it, the theories of the unconscious drive-like behaviors. but then we see that even though they have a magnificent philosophical import and potentiality they become detrimental
to the psychoanalytic project that Freud's try to hold together that is actually the curse of the the concept of the unconscious as we are going to uh talk about that while it is philosophically interesting in a in a certain way um it becomes quite problematic actually uh for the project of psychoanalysis yeah i mean i agree with you i mean it's not to uh contradict you or anything
oh uh i think we are running out of time so what are we supposed to do okay let's we need i know that xenobia we are not going to uh yes there is i will take the questions but first let's uh figure out how we should actually move forward so next session i definitely have to go through the unconscious and then gurunbaum and we don't probably need to say too much on because it's a specific chapter of Gurun Baan's book, which can be kind of condensed. So we need probably not only next session, but an hour, an hour and a half after that.
I don't want to put pressure on Zenobia because Zenobia does this for free, and he might not be available. But is there any person who might be available having access and capacity to record it for the new center? I can do it myself. I don't mind. Are you sure? Yeah. Really, I mean... Yeah. Okay. So then if that is the case, then let's talk to Rafael and see if so next session would be at two see if we can actually do the makeup session the last last session the real last session again at two next friday not this coming friday but
the friday after that is that good for all of you wait are we going to have So next session, which is supposed to be our real, our last session is going to be next Friday, but we'll be at two. So I'm asking that. So it seems that we will still be left off with some materials. So an hour to an hour and a half, another Friday after that, next Friday after the coming Friday, again at two. Does that work? It works for me. Yeah, it does. Okay. And those people who can't come, they can just look at the recording.
So, yes, Dennis, you want to say something? Yeah, I think it's a very short question, and I think it relates to the last conversation on the flaws on Freud, as in what would you think, like I'm talking in front of it, like I see that in a lot of kind of contemporary political theory, like it seemed to me that it's like the theorization of contemporary political theory, it seems to me heavily influenced by Freud's theories. And why would you consider it? At least post Marcuse, at least post Adorno Marcuse, I would say.
Yeah, what would you think are like the biggest, like I'm thinking of like, you know, these new sort of conceptions of like emotional capitalism or like effective capitalism and biopolitics and, and it's there seem to me some like that there is this maybe like kind of like attempts of like theorizing contemporary, I don't know, conditions or labor through a more like this, like fluid, the understanding of labor and capital. And it seems to me a bit dangerous, but I don't know. What would you say? No, I think that some of these, for example, emotional capitalism or cognitive capitalism,
I think that there are good ways to actually formulate these avenues of research. But then if we are going to formulate, and I think that there are absolutely, there are some good stuff, good research in those sort of, you know, avenues. But then we can't entirely rely on Freud. We have to be rather kind of, be a little bit choosy. selective so to speak and selective selective then means that infidelity to Freud right because as we showed that because it looks as if at least that you know in its entirety
Freud's theory of neurosis, trauma, and libido can't be exported without conceptual philosophical flaws, right? But I think that kind of a more Dionysian approach can be quite fruitful. But yet again, you know, again, it comes back to the idea that not only some of the concepts in Freud have been so entrenched in the philosophical and the sort of sociopolitical context
that they have already carried, you know, basically their connections with the orthodox Freudianism. And that would be kind of hard, like, you know, the idea of, again, the unconscious and drive and this sort of stuff, that would be hard to, you know, kind of graft them onto these sort of new avenues of research without also bringing the baggage, the baggage that they carry from the inner circle. So yeah, there are all these sorts of dangers, but so be it. I mean, that's what philosophers usually do, or either political philosophers or
social political philosophers or philosophers who are more interested in the history of philosophy. Who would you consider is like a good kind of cheater? Not cheater, like someone that we could cheat Freud with, like a political theorist, contemporary. I don't think that any of the political theories that I have seen go on and about openly say that, well, you know, we are kind of Freudians in a sort of way. No one
actually wants to say that anymore uh but you can see the influences i mean no it seems that actually when you really think about it it looks like all of the ones that you know they have something worthwhile to say and they're active in that sort of commentaries and and analyses are actually filtering Freud by way of Lacan and other sorts of people. So you really, it's hard to see any sort of political philosopher who directly brings
Freud on the table. In philosophy, yeah, people do, like, you know, recent Reyes papers, you know, it tries to bring Freud and Marx into the fold. But otherwise I'm not really aware of anyone. Does anyone know that if there are these sorts of political analysts or philosophers who were specifically put a, you know, accentuate Freud, put an emphasis on Freud?
Kirsten, do you know anyone? We're talking about contemporary theorists? Yes. And Lacan doesn't count, right? No, as I said, it would be actually easy because Freud going through Lacanian filter wouldn't be Freud, really, in the way that we have talked about it. It's like you're saying Hegelian, but you have ran Hegel through the filter of either
Kojia or Brandon. That doesn't really make you Hegelian. Right. Yeah, thanks. Sorry, go for it. I know, I just want to say, I was going to say thanks, but you can continue to answer me. I was just going to say, it probably is just a lot of, no one really wants to be called the Freudian these days, like you said. Yes. I mean, it is quite actually interesting that a majority of the, what you might call to be political philosophy that have this sort of deal specifically with, you know, psychological
phenomena or psychology, you know, social psychology, emotional psychology, you know, capitalism, and so on and so forth, it seems that their psychological dimension is not actually coming from psychology itself, but rather coming from neuroscience glossed by various strains of Marxism. For example, you can think about it, Jacques Camat, real subsumption thesis, actually being a kind of, you know, a scaffolding
for constructing a thesis about neurocognitive capitalism. That's actually quite a stretch that neurocognitive capitalism doesn't come from, for example, thesis about psychological subsumption in the realm of sociality, but rather it comes from Marxist thesis about sociality in the Camatian sense, you know, real subsumption thesis, that sort of stuff. Yes, Georgiana. Yeah, I wanted to return to a letter you spoke about earlier, like an hour ago perhaps,
about the hard school of the glacial period and how it's from a letter addressed to Pharynx, right? Yes. I can actually find the page number for you. that it's page 66. right yeah you can you can find the uh all the three i think it's three volumes yeah i I think it's three volumes of Freud Frenzy correspondence.
So I found it, have you read Dark Forest by Liu Shixin, the second part of the three body problem or like the part of the three- No, I've only read the first one. No, and I actually just this morning, Someone was saying, a friend was saying that, you know, he still needs to read the first one, and other people were saying that the other two are better. No, please go on. Enlighten us. So, basically, the content of their letter is about how the cruel times of the Ice Age create kind of these defenses that can even trigger like civilizational or technological
defenses we might call which are like infrastructural defense yes and i was thinking so or like just the ideas that human beings are forever drenched in traumatic externality and right now i'm uh reading a lot on a lot as much as i can um neanderthals for example And I was thinking about their, let's say, the traumatic specificities of their age, which has been, let's say, they are the prime climate change survivors. They survived quite dramatic climate change context.
And the material artifacts they left behind are sometimes very endearing because you can see that they have, let's say, they had a sensible mind. mind sometimes you if you look at the the way they arrange stalactites and caves or these like very delicate um almost magpie genuine um let's say enchantment with the world what we call aesthetics or whatever i was thinking in the case of Freud, is he kind of hinting at the fact that a set of traumatic experiences
create a worldview? Yes, trauma by itself. I mean, that is something that Freud, you know, theory of trauma is actually an earlier phase of Freud. But nevertheless, yes, trauma is, in fact, trauma is what makes experience per se possible. Without trauma, you wouldn't have experience. So that's the ur-ur trauma, right? The originary trauma. right but then after that yes there are these uh traumas uh which you might call it um
critical points but they don't they are not they don't essentially have negative connotation as such uh they can actually are kind of rather you can think about this as catastrophes in a renaissance dynamic sense of catastrophe or critical points of inflection, that yes, that they enable or scaffold certain sort of transitions and complexification in dynamic of behaviors, entrenchment and complexification of behaviors. And to an extent, this theory
has been widely accepted that that you can actually see this sort of what you might call to be accumulation of critical points lead to essentially a point where where coincides with the rise of technical objects. That's Andre Leroy Gorhan's thesis, right? The archaeologist and paleontologist Gorhan's thesis. They believe that, yes, the accumulation of critical points ultimately leads to the catastrophe of technical objects.
in the, again, in the Renathomian sense, like catastrophe in a sort of negative sense, catastrophe, catastrophe theory terminology. But then in reading this, how do we read trauma as trauma when for, like how do you have access? As I said, this is, Freud at the very least is quite careful when he's talking about trauma and in a very neutral sense, you know, as these critical points and traumatic events, traumatic events within the psychosexual development, right? Again,
even though that he's trying to separate this sort of what you might call to be ur trauma or traumata from these episodes, traumatic episodes, he nevertheless still believes that even in traumatic episodes, like for example, you know, aggressions against a child or this sort of stuff, they lead to critical points that at one level, it plays a positive role, and at another level, it creates a dynasty of negative effects.
And the point of neurosis is that the two sides of this traumatic scale are being imbalanced. The negative sides way more, the negative impacts way more than the positive ones. or the negative or the positive impacts in a strange twist become the expression of negative impacts just like the one that I said that you know that frenzy has this great idea that metaphor of someone who has gone through a massive sort of traumatic episode
and then he compares it with someone who has climbed Mount Everest and now with that you know his lungs feeling kind of like empty his adrenaline rushes the pressure is like makes his head light and he thinks that he's now a god right but that sense of fulfillment that positivity is really the expression of a fundamental deterioration that doesn't last long because it originates from an imbalance. Yeah, when I first read Nietzsche as a teenager,
I didn't read the... like these overstatements about himself, himself. Yes. Oh, it would be quite actually interesting to see how Freud is going to analyze Nietzsche, particularly the Nietzsche of, you know, that's a fake Zarathustra, when he says that I will come, I will return, you know, with this snake, with this ego, with this staff in my hand. But then can trauma, either this, let's say, cosmological trauma or individual set of tragedies,
give birth to a sort of poetics of expression? And instead of reading these symptoms in terms of a pathology, like... Yes, I mean, this is essentially what, something that Freud talks about, and it's initially proposed by Janet, right? that, of course, you know, the whole idea of automatism and the sort of stuff that, yeah, Freud talks about the work of art and in kind of briefing passages about poetry and Janet
followers of Janice talk about it, for example, surrealism, painting, people have, you know, kind of pointed out. It can also bring back the whole idea of the nefarious or the nebulous idea of sublime into the work of art and poetry, which is a point of contention to me, that leads to romanticization. That is, as we have seen it, is quite prevalent these days over romanticization. Whitewashes so many other things that is interesting actually about
art and poetry. Okay, my dear friends, poor Zenobio has to go, I have to go, and I know that you all have works. So next session, two o'clock. Love you, and take care of yourself, and have a great weekend. Thanks, Reza. You too. Have a good one. Bye. Thank you. Great weekend. Bye.