Hello and welcome to the sixth session of the APNDC, instructed by Reza. Reza, please. Hello everyone, thank you. So, today we're going to continue the discussion and then i get to rank and frenzy as i said kind of combined and next session which is friday uh xenobia would you be able to email everyone uh or probably are not uh going to come uh in today's class that uh next session uh we are going to
actually cover uh what's that beyond pleasure principle the one on uh freud right uh instead of the grown bound one uh because i think that the continuity uh is better to be preserved also i want to do a little bit of a preparation for the grown bound one uh it's kind of because this week i'm kind of you know overcrowded the schedule is overcrowded and i think it's best to leave it's not for the conic friday but the next friday which will be the last session unless someone volunteers to do the recording for free and moderating not that we need moderation
we are immoderate people um and uh yes so with that and xenobio uh you can uh let's the attendees in as they join. Thank you so much. Before we start, any question gap that you want to be filled in from the last session? I actually have something as usual.
Sure. It is about your remark about the consciousness, its alleged existence. So I thought about the... when we describe the functioning of the mind, even in the psychoanalysis, we may say that we are processing information somehow. somehow. And this, even this phrase contains a problem regarding the word information.
Do you think the information as a given unit is a similar thing to the energy in the energetic systems? And do you think that it may be a problem to assume that we have this information as a given? uh not not sure about the information as a given uh but yeah i mean of course this is the whole idea that the information theory in the formal sense of information theory was developed out of thermodynamics right um that's basically called mogorov uh you know uh solomon of kolmogorov idea of information and uh to that extent yeah processing
i mean the way that philosophy of mine talks about uh information it's uh too broad to have any sort of real you know uh consequential assertion of any sort but if you want to go to the formal end of you know information sciences uh information complexity sciences yes that is essentially tied to energy and energetics and that's information is essentially the thermodynamic content of a system simple as that uh you know that a system is uh able to create an internal model of uh in a kind of like a when we are going to a little bit more in the realm of complexity
is going to create an internal model of the environment such that uh it can uh you know reliably reliably be able to predict future estates through you know basically parsing past and present states so it's a predictive processing essentially in that sense you know which obviously comes with the idea is about constraints of this internal model. So the model should have a sort of a balanced size, not too big, not too small,
because the size of the model has something to do with basically randomness, noise, and essentially order. uh so information and complexity is essentially about these constraints about the size of the predictive model that allow it to um to a large set of random data would be able to capture the relevant patterns for the predictive processing uh uh but i mean of course this has something this brings back uh you know the whole idea of you know uh information theoretic and computational side of you know cognitive processes uh but yes i mean
to a great extent when philosophy of mind uh i mean classical philosophy of mind talks about information as a as a unit it's just too broad to be any sort of you know what sort of information they most probably it's just like the way that they are talking about language right you know or communication they mix up communication with language and information with either concepts or sensory data or all these sorts of stuff of course these are fundamentally different but yeah information theoretically is absolutely connected with the you know the thermodynamic content with the energetic content that's essentially began this sort of line of inquiry began with gibbs
and baldsmart Thank you. Absolutely. Maria. Yeah, thank you. I was catching up on Freud's Phi-Sy Omega Theory and I found out that he eventually abandoned it in favor of something like pre-conscious and unconscious. Might it be because he was uh unsure about the physical and neurological foundations for his theory or why he did it yes uh he as i mentioned uh you know the whole point is that uh freud completely realized to you know criticisms that he received that uh this project is not terrible for psychoanalysis
the project the so-called project is not uh tenable uh so uh he created an analog model of that that analog model as i mentioned that uh supposedly is capable of capturing by uh by analogy uh analogy that is in Freud's own words informed by cases studies and clinical studies, the underlying physical biological processes. But of course then, as we are going to talk about today, it is not clear how far this analog actually
can be extended or can be useful as i'm going to talk about today uh at the end is that it seems that uh freud uh inevitably uh ends up in a solipsistic realm a certain sort of methodological solipsism with metaphysical baggage of solipsism you know kind of like uh cartesian solipsism but with a new twist i will talk about this and i would say that you know uh ultimately the way that he formulates uh theories of libido and death drive leads him in a way to
assume the position of an agnostic solipsism about the external world that that the others can never be identified whether the others are other persons or or the external world despite his early physicalism yeah i mean that's the the twist in freud that he become even though he never actually admits that and would be a heresy to him but yes he's he's fundamentally uh ends up in a uh you know a kind of of uh solipsistic realm in in the in a technical sense of solipsism
not denial but agnosticism about the reality of external world and this something coming back to this idea that you know uh for so many reasons there are so many reason for that but i mean uh first of all i mean we should understand that individual uh first of all subject doesn't exist for freud really in any sort of you know coherentist uh agentical sort of sense but also as we are going to talk about in the individual even doesn't exist for him really in that sort of sense that we are talking about individuals
There is a way that, you know, what I'm saying that, you know, solipsism, as I will talk about, methodological solipsism, which is an agnostic form of solipsism, is built usually on analogical reasoning, creation of analogs. Meaning that, for example, in classical methodological solipsism, we are not saying that, you know, like a metaphysical or epistemological solipsism, that, for example, you know, anything that we basically, that is out there, you know,
it's basically uh modeled on you know kind of like a uh new spherical uh private or internal new spherical uh horizon which is basically the mind of a of an individual rather methodological or agnostic solipsism attempts to resolve the issue of the you know of the possibility of an external world or the others in terms of of um analogical reasoning by saying that uh if it is the case uh that i am aware
uh that um you know such mental estates are originating from uh uh thus and so you know somatic or bodily or you know uh neurophysiological uh whatever uh you know uh processes uh then uh by virtue of analogy i would say that uh any thing outside of me any entity outside of me uh exhibiting the same sort of body or you know physiological configuration and the same sort of behaviors uh kind of is like me
you know. Hence, methodological agnosticism begins with the position of not saying that everything is based on, you know, this sort of private, modeled on private, you know, mental events uh but rather tries to resolve solipsism the threats of solipsism or hard idealism by way of uh addressing these issues under uh you know the criteria of pure uncertainty
uncertainty so that we cannot so essentially begins with this idea that it like like agnosticism about god we can neither refute solipsism nor we can defend it in a in a kind of the way that for example a metaphysical truth is nuts uh this metaphysical solipsism does so it tries to begin to resolve the problem of solipsism and and the consequences that arise from having such a problem through our logical reasoning logical reasoning for a methodological solipsist is a good instrument to deal with situation of
uncertainty of the external world and others but as i will talk about uh analogical reasoning uh use of analogical reasoning in methodological solipsism is bound to fail because it is already based itself on you know uh iranus highly dubious assumptions such as that i know what i think i know that i have these sort of feelings so any sort of other person who has these sort of feelings is like me right or or the reverse you see the whole idea that particularly freud doesn't allow for this sort of stuff because of
the intrusion of the unconscious into the conscious how can you say you know that i have access to my own feelings such that you can actually draw an analogy that say other people like me that that that there is an others out there other than myself that's a twist of of this agnostic solipsism that agnostic solipsism uh as uh critiques of descartes had it is actually the most what you might call to be the sharpest and the most poisonous form of solipsism because it creates the illusion that solipsism can be in fact resolved by
a logical reasoning but it can't it actually leads to other sorts of problems particularly in case of freud's uh in which the individual is already understood as essentially the bundle of unconscious drives this creates a massive sort of problem that the consciousness that sort of consciousness that you say that i am aware of my feelings and thus and so physical estates that are giving rise to these sorts of feelings or how i can trace to these make a correspondence between these sort of feelings and these sort of physical estates and then compare it that saying that okay other sorts of things and entities that exhibit the same sort of correlation of correspondences
between their feelings and physical states are like me and hence there is a world outside of me you know that is not just me other people also feeling the same having the same sort of stuff because of the intrusion of the unconscious to the consciousness that make the works against consciousness that sort of introspection or inner stare also being uh you know uh compromised becomes uh crippled that you can no longer make this analogy in the first place precisely because you don't even have an access a real conscious access to to the certainty of the self or your
emotional content so Freud I mean so for Descartes certainty one certainty is really uh you know kind of grounded uh and that's the certainty of the self right but for that the certainty of the self that gives you a gateway to make a correspondence between dozen so emotional feeling contents and the motivations behind them and the physical states are kind of correlated with them because of the drive because of the unconscious intrusion is already frail and precarious
it does not allow you to do that and that's as i said that's the whole idea that man is diseased it comes with neurosis and that neurosis is precisely this but but but precisely because of this universalization of neurosis as we are talking about in a very twisted a strange uh thing that freud uh to dismay of so many defenders of his uh become a solipsistic thinker rather than this sort of you know champion of materialism or rationalist materialism as he understood it
questions from last session anyone uh or any anything that you would like to bring before i start Aaron, Anna, I don't know anyone, Will. Maybe just a little clarification then on the argument you're making right now, because does seem like that yeah the idea that sort of psychoanalysis leads to a kind of um disbelief in other agents right i wouldn't call psychoanalysis i would say that
particularly uh uh, drive theory. Drive theory. And the sort of psychoanalysis that is based on drive theory. Yeah. I mean, I guess the question I was going to ask was something like, does, does skepticism about the reality of, of other agents and evidence, is that like, Is the argument that that's a slippery slope to solipsism about reality itself? Yes. Yeah, that's the argument overall. Yes. And your claim is that Freud sort of doesn't, yeah. Yes.
A way of blocking the regress to solipsism about reality from solipsism about other agents. Yes. You see, as we will look into it, I mean, the whole idea of not only the hydraulic hypothesis that we talked about, but also drive theory and this whole idea of libido, you know, creates a situation wherein wherein everything ultimately is driven by a retroactive final cause, which would be
the dissolution right and this dissolution is already not only is in the past antecedent but is also in the future and this dissolution shows itself quite manifestly in the methodology of uh freudian psychoanalysis to such an extent that uh uh that it's essentially flattens the idea of individual I mean dissolve or dilutes the idea of individual to such an extent that is only a shell that it doesn't have the where we thought to be distinguished
from the external world right and hence anything that this individual is going to talk about the external world is really you know the exercise of the final cause of the drive the the basically the the fact of eternal repose or dissolution yes entropy right yes uh uh equilibrium or equilibrium but then on this point are we we're talking more so about drive theory and the sort of freudian theoretical model of mind um or are we more specifically talking about the failure of
kind of like analytic crack like the analyst patient relationship or both no no i would say that more of on the theory side more on the theory side but then uh uh you know uh if if it is also on the theory side then uh we should also be rather uh suspicious about uh the practical side of it right and this is exactly one of the reasons that you know people like rank and frenzy fundamentally thought that the practice should be revised because the theory leads to an impasse
uh that you know that that would be quite uh that would make psychoanalysis ultimately redundant you know because for freud uh there is a letter to rank that uh freud actually completely talks about that you know when we are talking talking about uh psychotherapeutic procedures we are not talking about healing people we are not talking about regenerating them we are talking about an operation that simply allows them to be be conscious of the fact of trauma simple as that
and this operation is not supposed to have any sort of what you might call to be ultimately uh a a by itself sufficiently a cause of you know positivity it's just simply a kind of what you might call to be what's that it's a prolonging prolonging the fact of identity the solution of identity of ego no that's all idea of prolonging which is basically the fact of life and libido that's exactly what because it because in in prolonging this fact the fact of death the
fact of life as as a means to to dissolution uh you can uh also uh in the next step uh begin to think about uh uh you know kind of like a a healthier uh individual uh who is uh who is more in touch with the identity of its ego but it's quite actually very i i hadn't i had actually i hadn't read freud's letters to rank
uh and i don't know whether he's trying to appease rank because rank was supposedly a very disgruntled the student he was pestering uh after after he became kind of disenfranchised and disenchanted became quite um you know uh annoying to freud and it looks like that in these conversations that freud either as i said is either he's really trying to appease him and saying or uh that's is being honest i mean the fact that freud saying that look there is no such a thing as healing process in the process of psychoanalysis that's quite actually severe blow
simply psychoanalysis becomes reduction of anxiety in the technical sense of what they mean by anxiety. For Freud, anxiety is essentially a kind of concurrent symptom of pathogenic traumas whereas for rank anxiety is really the fact of existence of being born to life
reza so then do you think um to avoid this kind of solipsism that you talk about is like a better model than simply hegelian mutual recognition like is that um have more traction and also in the sense of like uh causality about this kind of eternal return of the past and the future being this trauma that you know man is a diseased animal just continually returns the hegelian you know kind of aristotelian uh final cause of of world spirit i do is that where you come back you do you think even like something like hegelian mutual recognition is a better therapeutic device than than this like or actually gets to gets away from um this sort of uh misplaced uh
concreteness yeah i mean uh well mutual recognition at least in the way that hegel talks about it but with mutual recognition you also get the sort of uh overtly liberal rationalism. You know, there is a liberal ethos to mutual recognition, you know, in the sense of liberalist sort of thing. And that's, as you know, Marxians have talked about, uh mutual recognition is not also uh what you might call to be bulletproof it's not i wouldn't
say that it is uh in a uh much better if it is it would be a slightly so better than freud's uh position it's just that uh there are there are essentially working on two different levels uh two different domains uh having uh by virtual of having different sorts of assumptions about what an individual is so let me go through the this whole uh thingy uh and try to give a certain sort of
rundown of um of sexual functions and development of sexual uh functions uh i remember that i read uh that's those passages uh from freud uh and i also met talked about that uh you know uh the idea of repression as as being you know uh key uh element to freud's entire thoughts um which Freud in Freud's own words the entire edifice of psychoanalysis is based
on one word repression um and essentially through the theory of uh repression uh Freud departed from, you know, kind of traditional theories of human nature and human society. In a sense that Freud, as I mentioned, understands repression not as a possibility, but as a fact. uh and as we see in his uh you know uh later um works uh the essence of society for example
becomes that of repression uh of the individual and the essence of the individual is repression of him or herself so freud's breakthrough uh was discovery of meaningfulness in a set of phenomena therefore regarded at least in scientific circles as meaningless first first the math symptoms of the mentally deranged second dreams and third the various phenomena gathered together under the title of psychopathology of everyday life you know like Freudian slips of
the tongue errors and random thoughts now you can ask yourself and this is you know the sort of path this idea of meaningfulness and meaninglessness that these stuff prior to Freud they were considered psychopath the psychopathology of everyday life these sort of uh occurrences were considered to be meaningless so it was freud uh that by embracing their full meaningfulness uh you know uh this establishment this uh spousal of this uh of this thesis led him to the theory of repression now you might ask in what sense uh does freud find meaningfulness in neurotic symptoms
dreams and errors of course he means that these phenomena are determined and can be given a causal explanation he's insisting on unequivocal allegiance to the principle of psychic determinism but he means much more than that for it where for if it were possible to explain these phenomena and behavioristic principles as a result of superficial association of ideas then they would have a cause but no meaning here meaningfulness means expression of a purpose or a motive right and as i mentioned motive here is a causal explanation
for something to be a causal explanation doesn't need to be understood in a physical sense of physical causes but as i mentioned for something to make a difference in the incidence of y x making a difference in the incidence of y so in that sense he thinks that these are meaningful precisely because there is a causal explanation behind them and these causal explanations are drive like
motivations reasons beliefs beliefs and emotions in a sense the crux of freud's discovery is that neurotic symptoms as well as the dreams and errors of everyday life do have meaning and that the meaning of meaning here has to be radically revised because they have meaning since the purport of the of these purposive expressions is generally unknown to the person whose purpose they express freud is then driven to embrace the paradox that there are in a human being purposes of which
he knows nothing or involuntary purposes or in a more technical freudian language unconscious ideas now from this point of view a new world of psychic reality is being opened up ignorant as we are of the reality of the external world and which our ordinary conscious observation tells us no more than our sense organs are able to report to us of the external world. Freud then defines psychoanalysis accordingly as nothing in his own words, as nothing more than the discovery of the unconscious in mental life.
and we are going to so we have kind of uh and this is kind of a tangent uh we we have uh so far we have talked about the unconscious and we have uncritically actually talked about the unconscious next session i'm going to actually uh bring some challenges on the idea of the unconscious ideas or the notion of the unconscious in general showing the sort of confusions uh that this uh that this word is always an already hard break
I'm just trying to read the chat stuff see if there is anything that I need. so i will talk about some of these hegel can't stuff later on so to continue the realm of the unconscious
according to Freud this is Freud's own words the realm of the unconscious is established in the in the individual when he refuses to admit into his conscious life a purpose a motive or desire which he has and in doing so establishes in he himself in himself a psychic force opposed to his own idea this rejection by the individual of a purpose or idea which nevertheless remains his is repression so let me read it again the realm of the unconscious is established in the individual when he refuses to admit into his own conscious life a purpose or desire or a motive
which he has and in doing so establishes in himself a psychic force opposed to his own idea this rejection by the individual of a purpose or idea in a sense of causal determination which nevertheless rain which nevertheless remains his is called repression and for it then continues the essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting or keeping something out of the consciousness what text is that in reza uh this is uh ego and the id
So, you see, there is a paradox here. as you have probably noticed this this particular sentence the essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting or keeping something out of consciousness but the thing is that we have already noticed that consciousness
in a deeper sense a freudian deeper sense is what you might call to be the facade of the unconscious right and the fact that this rejection as you have noticed so if this is the whole thing if the consciousness is also the facade of the unconscious and tries to reject the unconscious ideas giving them their proper essence then of course we can understand that the fact of this rejection the fact of this uh keeping something out of consciousness
is not actually conscious, but it is unconscious working against its own self in the guise of consciousness. Which means that a rejection here is purely, in a sense, the automatic drive of the unconscious dealing with its own self. this rejection is no longer voluntary then it is when unconsciousness inflect upon itself in the guise of consciousness
and hence the rejection can no longer be talked about in purely personalist or voluntaristic lexical anymore and in that sense it is what you might call to be the complete opposite of resistance if resistance is what makes an agent an agent rejection in this sense
shows the hollowness of the concept of agency of conscious agent Thoughts? Before I move forward? Sorry. I'm sure I can go first. Oh no, you go. I saw that you raised your hand on your SR. We can go first. Okay, thanks. I was just curious, what exactly is there to, when you say that things are kept outside of consciousness, how do you establish something?
No, no, no, it, it, it, it, essentially, no, I said, he says that, he says that the essence of reparation lies simply in the function of rejecting or keeping something out of consciousness. by what he mean by consciousness here is uh is rather different from what he has been talking about consciousness in in the project in earlier works at this point he mean consciousness in terms of uh uh what you might call to be uh uh sort of more than a perceptual but rather uh consciousness in this in the way that um in a more evolved sort of sense of awareness rather than mere perceptual
awareness it is the idea of that you know kind of like an inner consciousness you know the inner awareness it's more yeah that well like earlier you were saying how there's like an inward gaze right and that inward gaze maybe isn't identical with consciousness but what you're saying is that we're keeping things outside of that gaze right or or that or yes yes we essentially this is what what here he is talking about consciousness what you might call to be the outmost utter uh uppermost sorry uppermost uh layer of consciousness uh the sort of consciousness that we usually associate with consciousness in an ordinary vocabulary, right? I am conscious of my feelings. I am
conscious of what I am doing, right? That sort of consciousness, rather than the technical consciousness that he used to talk about simply as perceptual in terms of omega systems, right? As perceptuals. Okay. And then I guess my other question was, um if it would be incorrect or reductive to to to say that the unconscious is simply where we we store these ideas correct it's not really like a unconscious is not uh it's not a storage you see unconscious it's the the it's like what you might
called to be the the formative process right right or i'm thinking of it almost as like the very like the very shape of the conscious itself right like it kind of like yes it's yes absolutely it's what you might call to be yes uh the the shape the shape of it yeah in a kind of like a rhetorical way of putting it yes it's the very shape of it it's the very shape of it right okay I see that so then so then the when you say that okay yeah that makes sense to me because it kind of like okay yeah I don't know what exactly what I was going to say next but that okay that makes more
sense i guess and i guess also this idea that um you you mentioned earlier this phrase of like an unconscious idea or or or that um when he says unconscious idea idea here is simply what you might call to be a a cause right right right is uh when we are talking about idea they're not really ideas in a kantian sense or any sort of you know ideas meaning motivations uh sort of you know drive like motivations the things are we are not aware of and the thing is that they they drive certain sort of behaviors and mental uh events
uh and ideas in a more familiar sense but they are not really ideas in themselves they are dark uh what you might call to be uh yeah unconscious motivation unconscious drive like uh reasons reasons as causes here right right okay thank you not again reason it so we have i think we have already established that when freud is talking about this stuff reasons and causes and stuff he doesn't talk about reasons the way for example we are talking reasons in hegel or reasons it can't yeah he just he means it more colloquially almost right he's talking yes
no actually not even colloquially he has already established that all sorts of rational reason reasons are in fact at the bottom forms of rationalization right okay cool in the pathogenic sense of rationalizing right um okay cool that was that was all i was curious about thanks Great. Can I? Sure.
I just wanted to make sure that I'm getting it right. So you said that the unconscious, according to Freud, is it's basically the conscious is sort of like the facade of the unconscious. and it's the unconscious which is acting on these depressions. And so it is... Unconscious in the guise... Unconscious that is depressing. You see, essentially consciousness, in the sense, what Freud wants to say,
that uh um as you i've seen it in the whole id and ego and super ego and stuff you see it's not as if that consciousness and unconscious are separate categories right uh what you might call to be uh it's a dynamic system and these are dynamic processes and the way that they manifest these unconscious processes in taking certain sort of quality that's that's when you call it conscious so but but their nature uh freud wants to argue that is unconscious uh largely unconscious
uh and it's just a qualitative change uh that under certain certain circumstances happen but essentially it is the unconscious in the guise of qualitative guise of the consciousness that automatically or quasi-automatically rejects some ideas keeps them out parts of its own conscious self unconscious self so if so if we have such little control over what we repress because we're not consciously making those decisions right yes um then how how much control could we exercise over
um becoming aware of those depressions and sort of well that again that's coming back to the idea you know the aim of psychoanalysis as we're talking about the the well the the point is that you can't have control of it as we talked about that repression is the fact of being human but the thing is that this anxiety of repression is what what escalates the repression to the point of deterioration. So psychoanalysis, at least the practice of psychoanalysis,
the communication between the analyst and the analyst, supposed to mitigate control this anxiety by by bringing out what is being repressed and incorporating or synthesizing them in a new formation of ego aware at least interpersonally interpersonally of the fact that these are thus and so things that I unconsciously on the guise of my consciousness have rejected as I said so there is a transition here if you wanted to stretch it a little bit more
a transition from automatic rejection which appears to an individual as in fact a voluntary intentional and wholesome rejection matter of choice but it is not really as a matter of fact to an act of resistance resistance as i said here is a mark of a healthy ego so to speak right so again there are there are there is a certain degree or a certain spectrum
in yes like you can yeah yes it's not entirely conscious but not also entirely unconscious is somewhat in the middle yes yes that's like and and the thing is that uh as we talk about the course of the practice uh it is the key that how this transition from rejection becomes that of proactive resistance uh which is a sign of development of so-called healthy ego is a transference.
Now, but it looks like that as Frenzy points out, that it's essentially, it doesn't work precisely because you are also working with a kind of an analyst who has the same sort of unconscious problems, you know, repression. So that's why frenzy goes with a certain sort of that it tries to really recreate the dialectical nature of this sort of, you know, of this progression from moving from rejection to an active resistance or proactive resistance.
by not merely relying on the transference of the patient as a key to deciphering these repressive ideas, unconscious ideas, but by also complementing transference with counter-transference, meaning that the psychoanalyst should also put something into the fold. but then as we said this is where basically things become much more messier and that's why uh you know freud uh disowns frenzy ultimately okay okay thank you this is the difference between usually you call in uh you know uh one body two body three body or four body psychoanalysis
it's all coming back to the one body two body meaning psychoanalyst and the patient three body four body psychoanalysis these are all configurations of how uh this thing should actually unfold given the fact that the psychoanalyst also working on the same sort of more or less the same level of the unconscious ideas Right. So. So coming back to that, the essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting or keeping something out of consciousness. As stated in more general terms, the essence of repression lies in the refusal of the human being to recognize the realities of its human nature.
the fact that the repressed purposes nevertheless remain his is shown by dreams and neurotic symptoms which according to freud represent an eruption of the unconscious into consciousness producing not indeed a pure image of the unconscious but a compromise between the two conflicting systems and thus exhibiting the reality of the conflict therefore the notion of the unconscious remains an enigma without the theory of repression or as freud says we obtain our theory of the unconscious from the theory of repression
In other words, the unconscious, again in Freud's own words, the dynamically unconscious repressed. Repression is the key word in the whole system. The word is chosen to indicate a structure dynamically based on psychic conflict. Freud illustrates the nature of psychic repression by a series of metaphors and analogies drawn from the social phenomena war civil war policies actions later in his life from neurotic symptoms Freud says that dreams and errors to a general theory of human nature
may seem like a longest step granting that it is a long step um then uh sorry this is actually not from freud uh drum this is from uh um uh frenzy's uh uh protege uh i forgot his name i didn't write it here says that from neurotic symptoms dreams and errors to a general theory of human nature may seem like a longer step granting that it is not a longest step that it is a longest step freud could argue that he is entitled to explore the widest part application of a hypothesis derived from a narrow field he
could take the offensive and claim that traditional theories of human nature must be regarded as unsatisfactory because they have nothing to say about this preferral phenomena significant to say about dreams or insanity and our dreams and insanity really negligible factors on the periphery of human life so coming back to this Freud ultimately believes that to go from neurotic symptoms, dreams, and errors to a
new theory of human nature in general involves no further step at all than basically dealing with repression. through the course of psychoanalysis for the evidence on which the hypothesis of the repressed unconscious is based entails the conclusion that it is a phenomenon present in all human beings the psychopathological phenomena of everyday life even though it might appear trivial from a practical point of view are theoretically important because they show the intrusion of unconscious intentions into our everyday and supposedly normal behavior
so in a way the difference between neurotic and healthy if everyone has you know this sort of what you might call to be malady then the difference between neurotic and healthy is only that healthy have a socially usual form of neurosis. And Freud himself says that from the study of dreams,
we learn that neurosis makes use of a mechanism already inexistent as a normal part of our psychic structure, not of one that is newly created by some morbid disturbance or other. therefore freud's first paradox the existence of a repressed unconscious necessarily implies the second and even more significant paradox the universal neurosis of mankind here is the really the pinnacle of Freudian psychoanalysis. Neurosis is not an occasional aberration.
It is not just in other people. It is in us and in us all the time. It is the psychoanalyst. It is in the psychoanalyst as well. Freud discovered that Oedipus complex, which he regard you know as a root of all neurosis precisely because it comes naturally with the development of you know sexual functions uh uh that's uh all psychoanalysts through self-analysis uh can observe the fact of their own neurosis and this is again coming back to there is a uh you know that freud always uh
the reason that floyd always like had this sort of socratic attitude that before you going on and analyzing other people analyze thyself analyze thyself this is precisely because of that because to show that uh you know that that neurosis is not uh what you might call to be a local uh phenomena it's a universal and the more you understand about the extent of it how it spreads and how it depends the more you are capable of uh you know reclaiming the usual social function
of neurosis which is the mark of a healthy person uh let's have a uh i need to get some uh water for myself uh Let's have a five minutes break and then come back and then I will just talk a little bit about these and then I will go to frenzy and rank. Okay, five minutes.
Thank you. So getting back to the idea, and yes, Norman Brown, I suggested it last week. He's actually one of the, what you might call to do, used to be a no Freud philosopher and psychoanalyst.
And that book is actually quite good. but he he seems to and this is we are going to talk about uh particularly next session he and other no freudians uh and we should understand where they are coming from they are actually coming from uh post uh kind of post marxist reading of freud uh so there is uh we You should understand that, as I mentioned, that Freud wasn't considered to be a materialist thinker at all during his time. In a very specific sense, it could be called materialist, but he wasn't, in fact, famous or even hailed as a materialist.
This, at least in the realm of psychology, the myth of freud as a materialist became popular by uh james strachey uh in 1950s uh and then uh in 1960s and then it uh moved uh by way of uh you know marxist reading of freud and you can say that you know there's a whole lot of uh them in uh you know from frankfurter school onwards like like Herbert Marcuse and Brown was you know one of these but but emphasizing less on on
the Marxian aspect of Freud but rather reviving Freudian ideas in the light of you know the Marxist materialist reading of Freud and it's but but again as we are going to talk about hopefully next session that as we will see because of some of the stuff that are going to be covered this session it would be actually quite difficult to integrate
gives a historical uh theory uh of drive and repression uh with uh historical uh uh materialism of marks without overextending the metaphors as marcus does so coming back that's uh you might ask then what is uh what is the source of repression you know uh
in a sense that what is actually being repressed here what are these ideas that are being kept out ideas in the freudian sense of ideas Dr. Nadeem Goussousa Tisneriouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiouiou
in the prolonged development of sexual functions in child from the moment of infancy to you know kind of what you might call to be uh puberty and adulthood these are you know as I mentioned the the various phases of of the sexual functions Now, it is important to point out that the course of sexual development, at least for freud is being uh is being investigated uh under uh idea of uh identification and object choice
what does that mean let's begin with the initial stage of sexual function this is what you have we have been talking about in the last session in terms of uh autoeroticism uh this is where um what you might call to be the the infant cannot separate itself self uh from from the outside which in that case would be the mother right um
through the breath that's the whole idea of you know uh the kind of uh breastfeeding phase uh in so in that period sexual function in fact cannot even be formulated in terms of an individual or subject for that matter the subject doesn't exist you're talking about pre-edipal phase of development of sexual functions subjectivity in a Freudian sense arises uh you know uh post separation
of the infant from the mother that allows for the development of sexual functions within which uh uh the i within which self is being concretized right so the development of the self uh is what you might call to be a later uh you know development uh in the what you might call to be the progress of sexual functions. So if the infant doesn't have a subject, it cannot be understood as a subject, as an
individual uh this is what freud says that it would be like a a phase in technical freudian sense called uh you know pure narcissism uh pure narcissism in in a sense that not it's narcissistic in the sense that uh you know uh love of self but it's essentially um it has no identification self-identification and it only has object choice an object choice that it cannot differentiate from its own self object choice here would be you know the you know
attention the food that it receives this is kind of like what you might call to be uh uh an undifferentiated route the differentiation at this level uh uh doesn't exist the differentiation comes later and this differentiation that leads to identification of self as differentiated from the environment is a result of the prolonged what you might call to be prolonged development of sexual functions which for freud
uh is not uh purely biological driven by biological necessity uh but primarily for humans is a sociocultural uh sociocultural in nature and as i said so when we are saying that sociocultural in nature for freud then we are not merely talking about id but id in conjunction with super ego as that which is largely unconscious but operates under the guise of arts and art knots
that as we talked about that the greatest form of the unconscious in later freud uh that an individual a child or an adult individual works under is super ego super ego is the name of the ultimate form of the unconscious for freud given uh It's what you might call to be rational facade, which are, you know, which take the shape
of social cultural norms, parental social cultural norms. It also happens to be the most sinister form of the unconscious. it is sinister because it works concurrently on two different planes one that would be you know the unconscious that manifest in the interpersonal dynamics and the other would be the unconscious
that how this interpersonal again coming from personal unconsciousness and then becoming interpersonal, this interpersonal unconsciousness intrudes in the inner consciousness of an individual. So, it would be, and that's why, again, it is sinister, is precisely because it is hard to say if not impossible to pinpoint the origin of the sort of unconscious the unconscious of the super ego
is it coming from within or is it coming from without well actually both at the same time so this is again precisely because the nature of you know this sort of the unconscious that unfolds true parenting through the dynamic uh the interactive dynamic between uh the child uh and parents particularly mother uh we see that it has it exercises the most powerful expression of molding sexual functions
in terms of the behaviors the behaviors the patterns of behaviors of sexual functions and that's why again as i said that uh uh freud to a great extent uh thinks that uh you know that these are that repressions uh that are endemic to development of sexual functions uh have uh their major origin in essentially these sort of dynamics that's true uh you know super ego
I'm trying to see how much I can actually skip so I can get into rank and uh frenzy um so we talked about yeah so the way that freud studies uh you know as i mentioned the the uh
development of sexual functions is under the terms of identification and object choices. Now, the object choice is primary for an infant, and this is due to essentially the anaclitic character of object choices uh you know the idea that reliance uh on
that on external uh what you might call to be external assistance that forms these object choices for example the breastfeeding you know then movement from you know breast milk to the process of winning and you know other sorts of you know kind of assistances as child needs in order to you know to grow up and of course so in so far as these because of their anaclytic character object choices are always in connection with self-preservation
economic need you know and essentially dependencies it it is always about uh in one way or another about to possess something yeah to possess something so object choice uh is essentially an impulse to possess a desire to possess for freud and it is the disturbances in desire to possess that creates trauma for a child
now here we should understand that trauma here at this stage doesn't have any negative meaning in the in the sense of basically later on is being talked about in freud and other psychoanalysts trauma is simply the fact of something disturbing or perturbing or working against the desire to possess namely it you know kind of operating to the detriment of the anaclyctic character of
periodical sexual development. in a sense when i'm saying that it is both it is uh it is both negative and positive trauma is neutral meaning that it's both negative and positive positive precisely because it allows for growth right in fact this is floyd uses the metaphor of sieves mesh net that's uh without trauma there would be no growth without uh you know without this sort of uh
a perturbation a system wouldn't be able to create a protective device for itself to grow to complexify right so there's a positive connotation of trauma that trauma is really the trigger for growth for development of sexual functions without it there wouldn't be no absolutely no zero growth it would be pure um flattening of self-preservation of self-destruction now it's negative also precisely because trauma with it unfolds
the outside within the inside so from the outside perspective from the exogenesis trauma as an exogenous force they're coming from outside in it leads to the growth of sexual functions or the system but trauma once it is being transplanted or grafted in the inner development then it becomes a negative power it begins to affiliates the libidinal ego into what you might call to be
dead end roundabout paths on vegans dead end on vegans in this and there's a word for these dead ends on vegans these are called fixations and Freud and every fixation what you might call to be is traceable back to that which has been repressed inside of me And it is also a dead end because it has a, you know, a kind of...
a barrier to growth of sexual functions, or their complexification. And this is why Freud's talk about, so we have four or five phases of sexual development. With them, we have four or five categories of fixation, from oral to anal, genital, so on and so forth.
And all of them, each of these categories can respectively have their own classification of fixations under which they can be categorized. Now, so, in that sense, as I mentioned, so we were talking about trauma, that trauma leads to the growth of the system, but also negatively impacts through it. It's a positive and negative force at the same time. it's um uh then if that is the case so we have came with this idea that you know what is it that
humans do repress and what is the origin of uh where where is the report or of this repression you know where how they can where where can they be traced to um we say that well you know the freud's answer is as uh you know sexual development and the sexual development also can be traced back to a trauma a trauma that is both positive and negative and what is really then the origin of this trauma you might ask them if trauma in the most basic sense in this neutral sense is that which uh undergirds repression neurosis
then what is the nature of this trauma ultimately given that it's both positive and negative well rank and frenzy already and freud already have an answer for it but rank takes it to a different level and so has frenzy so it seems that the trauma itself is at the same time union with the external world and separation from it both union and separation can be understood negatively and positively
this is what rank calls the trauma of birth but trauma of birth here for rank as a deeper meaning it is actually trauma of existence like you can think about a horror movie uh that have you ever you know it's a sort of paradoxical question uh or riddle have you ever uh felt what it is what it means to be on board well this is a question
that rank actually wants to answer what does it mean to be on board given that this act this question can only be asked you know by a uh a person and from a person who is born who is existent this what you might call to be a split splitting fork between union with nature
separation from it which is the basically the uh if it taken to extreme leads to identification and the other one which is complete undifferentiation is what you might call to be the point of trauma for rank and also for frenzy for rank separation from womb
or womb like a space womb like a space creates an anxiety and this anxiety as I said is a source of all neurosis so it's not as if anxiety comes as a result of neurosis but rather it is the origin of neuroses themselves now frenzy takes this to a different level and that would be kind of like at the point of geotrauma
right he sees that Every time that you are, as an organism, separating from this womb-like space or structure, it creates a catastrophe, a critical point. in a renaissance sense of a critical point in the development the morphogenetic development of a system that allows for further complexification from that critical point on board so every
time that this separation happens we are talking about these critical points namely catastrophes which are in fact originary traumas both rank and frenzy use the word or or trauma the originary the pre-originary or originary originary trauma and these are these traumas that are essentially lead to anxieties that are being encoded either through through evolution of organisms or through basically socialization functions
being entrenched within the organism that lead to repetition of this sort of fixations and you know what you might call to be again desire to go back through these roundabout paths either fixations or other means to go back to this again wound like a structure from which we have separated so trauma here takes a very almost uh cosmological uh uh uh characteristic which i'm going to talk about now
first i want to say that uh i want to start with this key passage uh from uh philosophy a theory of genitality this is english title of frenzy's uh book uh which is which is actually is called catastrophes in development of genitality so what is actually talasa that's a sea goddess you know as a personification of this womb-like
space something within which you are one with the surroundings uh it's wet it's uh at this point uh spirit oedipal and uh you know Separating from it creates an anxiety. You know, a critical point, so to speak, that creates a catastrophe that creates an anxiety. So, friends, it says, all physical and physiological phenomena require a metaphysical, i.e. psychological, metaphysical, i.e. psychological explanation.
and all psychological phenomena a meta psychological one and theories of uh the frenzy put forward from thalassa uh onwards are in the realm of metaphysical to metapsychological. So,
it was i mean as a kind of like a brief introduction freud had already entertained some of these ideas with regard to, you know, that generally speaking, with regard to Hackel's idea of you know recapitulation
theory that ontogenic development recapitulates phylogenetic development in a sense that you know the so for example the development of sexual functions for an infant for a newborn to adulthood takes the analog shape or configuration or dynamics of the developments that have happened through from the dawn of especially from the dawn of life
and through speciation this of course has been you know the recapitulation theory has been uh you know uh criticized quite severely but freud was in fact was not really interested in recapitulation theory itself nor frenzy nor rank they were rather interested in something else they were interested in the lamarckian so lamarck was actually the one who influenced hackle's recapitulation theory we're interested in appropriation of lamarck's theory in the realm of psychology in the sense
that uh we are when we are talking about that ontogenic development recapitulation follows under genetic uh sorry phylogenetic uh development we are not really interested in the literal sense sense of biological evolution or uh biological uh development on the level of uh ontogenesis in comparison with the phylogenetic development but rather we are interested in codification of phylogenetic development
into symbolic developments of sexual functions think about the symbolic evolutions as what you might call to be dynamic archetypes or renaissance uh not not jungian archetypes i don't mean jungian archetypes think about renaissance uh morphodynamic forms but for psychic reality instead of biological reality these are essentially uh so what they are really mean is that you know sexual functions sexual
development development of sexual functions uh follows or imitates uh the development occurred at the phylogenetic level. Now, on the phylogenetic level and the development of sexual functions, when we are saying that, you know, imitate the phylogenetic development, we mean it that these sexual developments can be understood
in terms of morphological transformations between various symbolic sexual functions. and that was also red tom's idea that you know just as we can talk about you know the evolution of morphogenesis in the realm of biology uh we can also uh talk about uh morphodynamic forms in the socio-cultural and psychological realms right and freud and frenzy and rank uh i mean the whole inner circle uh was uh very interested
in this idea that uh we weren't really interested in the kind of like a really recapitulation theory uh per se but rather uh that the phylogenetic developments um is b are being imitated by uh symbolic morphological uh by symbolic morphological, basically patterns of sexual development. like for example you see that so in the in the course of the phylogenetic development you can
see that there is this uh what you might call to be this uh kind of of development from this aquatic soup to amphibian species right and from amphibian that sort of kind of old lamarckian stories then to kind of like a land navigator and bipedal and so on so forth and the psych basically the so freud uh thinks that these uh sexual functions can be understood as symbols
that are codifying uh these or referring to these sorts of you know developments and in in that sense that was quite we can see that how symbolically they are being correlated that's womb here mother's womb becomes the ocean you know uh what uh what basically fruit called oceanic feelings and uh frenzy called thalassa of course as we see so if that is the case you know that we are uh so the course of sexual
development uh captures uh the development of phylogenetic uh development uh so it it seems that freud already creates a certain sort of tension within his own theory and it shouldn't be so surprising to him that why rank and frenzy become such heretics to him precisely because in one sense basing or admitting the sort of psychological recapitulation theory means that psychology
unfolds from a pre-Oedipal space and a pre-Oedipal full-blown pre-Oedipal phase rather than an Oedipal one but Freud doesn't want to admit that Freud wants to say that psychology in earnest unfolds from the Oedipus complex and this is why freud i mean frenzy and rank uh separate from freud because they think that you can have both it just doesn't work and they put their uh you know emphasis on pre-edipal
face as the horizon through which psychoanalysis uh emerges the need the need for psychoanalysis emerges and in that sense what you might say that psychoanalysis then becomes an inquiry this is really that i would say that the most important thing that we shouldn't forget in that sense then psychoanalysis becomes an inquiry into the possibility of the human condition in the broadest sense and in multiple stages that even though psychoanalysis fails right as a project particularly the freudian one but
But nevertheless, the formulation of this inquiry, I think is quite important and something that needs to be taken seriously, an inquiry into the possibility of the human condition. Coming to be born, coming to exist by a series of catastrophes or traumas, so rank begins to work on uh after writing the double which is actually a very great book if
haven't read it doppelganger uh that's otto rank's uh book after writing this he writes uh trauma of birth now um um as famous as rank was extremely a sort of what you might be say a shy and uh kind of uh passive student of freud he was actually being ridiculed for never having anything to say
you know in in classes and uh but it seems that he uh became quite actually uh disgruntled with freudians ideas uh particularly uh the the fact that freud had put such a you know So disproportionate emphasis on the figure of father in psychoanalysis and also the whole idea of Oedipus complex. He started to pen, you know, trauma of birth and he published it. He sent a copy with a very good letter to Freud and Freud actually started to read it
and he corresponded with rank and he said that he likes it but call abraham who was another pupil of uh and jones of course uh was another pupil of freud completely hated rank they started to say that well no this is the most grandiose ideas ever invented in the history of psychoanalysis and completely uh convinced freud that he should actually confront with rank for such a you know substandard work and then yes so freud wrote a criticism of the book and rank initiated a few
letters uh that he has been misunderstanding him and uh you know what are the source of misunderstanding and so on so forth i will try to read some of the couple of passages from his letters but freud was true influence of abraham and jones was convinced that rank was completely uh you know, hopeless at this point. Frenzy, however, took side with Rank to an extent, but under pressure, he also gave up. But later on, Frenzy also took the same sort of slant as what Rank had taken, but with different results.
different results both ended up you know on Freud's blacklist so to speak in fact it is uh famous that rank became so disgruntled he sent a copy of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil to Freud without any sort of letter simply as a reminder that you have just plagiarized Nietzsche beyond pleasure principle beyond good and evil and Freud was absolutely furious about this
uh he worked against him uh uh publishing his uh responses ranks uh his responses to freud in you know respectable uh psychoanalytic journals with frenzy it was a different sort of a story with frenzy it was a recognition that um that Freud wasn't a good analyst to him uh and he always wanted to put his own unconscious motivations
and decode his transferences according to his own unconscious uh motivations and that's why Frenzy departed from Freud not on a theoretical ground initially, but from a practical ground. The failure of his analysis with Freud, which frenzy associated with over-reliance on transference and not actually opening up to the patient. um freud uh it's famous that uh frenzy uh in one letter uh uh after his separation from freud sent
to uh wrote this that uh i never actually understood it was complex until i began to reflect on uh how you treated me during the course of analysis so it is famous that freud didn't have actually a stern father but had a stern mother and freud saw that i mean frenzy saw that freud had became that that overbearing father to him that Freud didn't have. Essentially Freud had exercised
you know that sort of Oedipus complex on frenzy and that was extremely frenzy, kind of like a disheartening thing that uh as a he wasn't really a psychoanalyst uh a real you know open psychoanalyst to him as a patient but rather a father figure who confuses his uh you know kind of of paternal impulses with his psychoanalytic openness or psychoanalytic duties.
So this is just a shorter story about you know how Rang and Frenzy you know separated from Freud. So, coming at... That's... Let's start with a little bit about the idea of trauma and how it fits into this sort of cosmological tale that Rankin frenzy
are putting forward obviously As I mentioned earlier on, that the concept of trauma, at the end of the day, also happens to be a very energetic concept. though freud you know kind of uh abandoned uh the project of scientific psychology nevertheless the
shadow of energetics remained strong within the concept of trauma and you know uh given the the role of the concept of trauma in beyond pleasure and principle uh you know uh it seems that uh really you can't we can't actually read beyond pleasure principle without you know a kind of glance a critical glance at his earlier phase uh which was you know the project of energetics and psychophysics um
so beyond pleasure and principle in that sense might call to be is it it's like rebuilding the fallen wall uh of psychophysicalistic project where he was initially you know concerned with problem of force energy a stimuli or excitation which threaten you know the existence of organism uh this threat uh compels the organism to defend itself and therefore by reaction formation to grow
and freud in number of cases calls this defensive structure a screen a sieve crust shield envelope membrane uh and uh you know uh earlier in the in the 1920s uh basically receptive cortical layer or cerebral cortex so this uttermost layer of the psychic or mental apparatus is then for freud the limit and condition of all further development so the limit is being
the mark of trauma itself the limit which allows uh or constraints both negatively and positively enables and disables complexification and growth is really the mark of trauma itself of. So to repeat, this outermost layer of the psychic or mental apparatus, according to Freud, is the limit and the condition of all further development,
including consciousness. consciousness a consciousness is by definition is the result of trauma enabled by trauma in 1923 he says consciousness is the surface of the mental apparatus from both a functional and anatomical perspective. Speaking of living vesicles, Freud writes in Beyond Pleasure Principle, this little fragment
of living substance is suspended in the middle of the external world charged with the most powerful energies it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against a stimuli and he usually talks about uh uh flawed thing uh is it over how do you spell it uh uh over shaman is it flooding aaron yes what is it the german word for it for flooding flooding yeah let's see
yeah That would be how you would pronounce it. So with first items, I can put them on you? Yep. foundation or flooding is this a common word in german yes okay so yes so that's uh this is uh you know that uh essentially you know uh
without that organism will be flooded right so the protective shield which is the mark of trauma kind of at the same time wards off at least prolongs the inevitable flooding and hence enables uh you know growth and development and complexification but at the same time it essentially creates uh you know
uh a kind of uh you know uh a screen uh upon which uh you know the the intensity of the inundation can be registered in its most uh what you might call to be uh horrific sense, right? It's kind of like, you know, that the only way
to kind of encounter with the outside, with openness, is by way of closure. Right? A closure is what understands in the most palpable sense the meaning of outside and that's that's exactly you know that's that's and that closure is really you know registered as you know that's kind of uh inflection point that the the mark of trauma and it says then it continues uh it acquires the shield in this way its uttermost surface
ceases to have the structure proper to living matter uh becomes to some degree inorganic and dense forward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli so this is you know it's kind of like uh the bark uh of a tree uh or uh the crust uh of uh you know of something that has been uh blasted uh you know by the rays of the sun right uh that essentially it is exactly that is part of an organism
that mimics death and then uh yeah he says that by its death the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate now these powerful energies from the external world test and hence kind of indirectly help to reinforce the outermost layer of psychic crust but sometimes energy overwhelms or inundates the crust as a you know uh as an overwhelming of the organism flooding of the organism
in these cases the psychic apparatus is traumatized in the negative sense accordingly freud says then we thus describe as traumatic a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against a stimuli this is we should understand that this is a negative trauma because then as frenzy and rank point out that the real trauma is really the barrier itself
rather than the breach the barrier that allows for the existence of this vesicle or cell or entity now before moving forward uh I think we should again repeat this point that Freud distinguishes between two kinds of trauma right ones which originate in the external world and the ones uh which originate within the organism they have exogenous and endogenous uh you know
essentially uh traumas built as a defensive response to external stimuli the crust is not designed to shield itself from endogenous or internal stimuli as i mentioned endogenous and traumas are the ones who are uh who express what you might call to be negative connotation of trauma in psychoanalysis iona uh yes please go on um yeah i i have a question which is I don't know a bit inarticulate and might be a rambling um because while you're saying this I'm
I'm perhaps mistakenly thinking of the distinction between uh trauma and decay as perhaps posed by Moynihan whereas trauma is the outside becoming inside and decay is out no inside becoming outside and i was wondering if there is always this kind of like directionality in terms of freud where it is always the interior becoming exterior yes yes absolutely i mean as we have seen it interior becomes exterior exterior becomes interior and that we have seen it that this
only happens by way of you know a certain sort of condition of possibility of compartmentalization right and think about this uh you know uh rat mazes so think about the you can say that uh so there is no such a thing as a rat maze right it's just a space but then if you actually put it into um you know compartmentalize it into corridors that are connected to one another that creates a navigational path through which you know the rat
navigates and gets a sense of its environment right this sense of environment we can say that essentially there was this uh i think that earlier on the joke was that uh the name of the syllabus our session was that do you have a rat for a brain uh so brain the metaphor of brain and psychoanalytic mind is essentially this rat that it only is able to identify itself by way of this sort of rat-like navigation enabled by this compartmentalization which is like this of interior and exterior right that is only otherwise it wouldn't be able to claim
itself differentiate itself from the environment the differentiation namely the identification of the ego the differentiation of one's self or claiming of self in fact calling it a self i didn't accept which is only is possible by way of differentiation requires a certain sort of compartmentalization and with compartmentalization of this this undifferentiated space, right, this womb or the eternal ooze or whatever, comes directionality of outside to inside and inside to outside.
And that's why Freud calls it the unwigen, roundabout paths. And this is really about this whole thing, that the roundabout paths is essentially, is the result of compartmentalization of an undifferentiated space that enables differentiation from the undifferentiated, from that which refuses to differentiate itself. Thank you. So, how much, let's go for 10 minutes,
and then Zenobia, are you going to, is Zenobia there still? Yeah, yeah, I'm here. Do you know who is, are you going to moderate next session or Ikoro? We are still thinking about, maybe it's going to be me. Okay. Maybe next, I mean, Friday, we can go a little bit like 15 minutes over, if that's okay with you. Sure. because I need to actually go at 130. So yes, as I said, the cross is not designed to shield itself
from endogenous or internal stimuli, right? Or what is the same thing from instinctual energy? instinctual energy is rather conceived as a traitor operating covertly within the walled city of the mind so trauma in the most negative sense in the negative connotation of it is really can be captured really well by the metaphor of insider you know insider as a as a as a conspirator that shows within an inner circle, right? And inside the preside, and here, as we have seen it,
that this insider is really, ultimately, is libido. is libido. Libido that springs through, you know, the horizon of life, giving life thus and so characteristics which distinguish it from that of you know complete dissolution and undifferentiation what rather works always behind the back of what it has remained from the semblance of what we call life
so yes and uh freud again uh talking about freud uh freud uh proposes that psychic apparatus is forced to treat internal excitations in freud's own words as though they were acting not from the inside but from the outside a defensive strategy nonetheless better known by the term projection so it is really easy for the mental apparatus psychic apparatus to blame it on the enemies rather than its own very nature
this is like the the twist in the story of trauma so obviously you know from this sort of uh you know kind of configuration the extended exposure to a stimuli gives the psychic apparatus as we mentioned a cross-like hardened exterior a shell with which to protect the soft delicate interior which is the psyche since the presence of hostile
energy is nothing short of a continuous test of the mind's constitutional strengths and weaknesses energy is always in the most extreme formulation nothing but traumatic one must be pinched so to speak in order to stay awake and grow barring this one falls asleep and dreams to die, so to speak, as Freud had it. And this is why for Freud, sleep and dreams,
kind of like what you might call to be of meta-stable withdrawals from the external world and hence there are what you might call to be momentary victories of the death drive and the primary processes within the realm of life itself of of psychic life itself so again um having realized that the concept of trauma is actually energetic uh at its base
trauma can be said to be both necessary and good from a certain perspective from inside to the outside from inside out right from inside out seems to be great and Freud says in ego and the ego and the id the emergence of life would thus be the cause of the continuance of life and also at the same time this striving towards death and hence this
a striving towards death should be understood as what what does he mean is striving towards death it doesn't mean a kind of Schopenhauerian strife right uh that was actually quite um fashionable uh you know in the in the late 19th century actually freud believes in a series of incremental accumulations of a prior state of affairs right through the course of you know accumulations of prior states of affairs uh right through that unfolds through the development of
sexual functions and uh you know the activities uh or or the processes initiated by libido And this is also Freud as said that precisely this sort of incremental accumulations can be reflected in psychosexual development, specifically kind of like infants' innate narcissism uh he says uh um that the libido first stores itself in love of self narcissism this phase
is clearly visible in an infant his interests are confined to the acts and products of his own body he finds all his courses of pleasure in himself to be sure even an unwinged child has a love object the breast of his mother he can however do nothing but to interject this object into himself and treat it as a part of nothing but himself so it is famous that you know freud initially uh believed or thought of narcissism as a chronological phase you know in child's development but he eventually began uh through you know particularly through the works of uh abraham rank and frenzy uh to abstract uh that phase from the
time of life and sexuality all together and in a sense narcissism became fundamental uh uh you know to the reality of psychosexual development as i said i mentioned it earlier you know uh i think we are 126 i think that maybe we should uh okay let me just read this sentence from again uh freud and then uh call it a day and then i will
pick it up and then i will talk about the problem of solipsism and the problem of the unconscious next week. And also, yes, we will go a little bit more on frenzy, you know, on frenzy's ideas. But yeah, so Freud again talks about narcissism. The narcissistic libidinal cathexis of the ego is the original state of things, realized in earliest childhood, and is merely covered by the later extrusions of libido but in essentials persists behind them so it's a it's originally a state of affairs and fundamentally pre-edipal
now we are going to to uh so uh go to again go to uh freud uh and frenzy and i remember uh that the the reason that i actually mentioned asked you to read that that passage uh from uh clinical diaries uh the case of rn it's because of some stuff that i i would like to talk about um um next session first i want to actually give a very brief introduction like three minutes before saying goodbye uh the case of rn is actually you know considered to be the one of the most
uh famous cases in the history of early psychoanalysis it's famous that frenzies uh majority of friends is uh patients were americans uh and um detective work and uh also people's diaries have shown that you know we know who rn is uh uh it was a code name for elizabeth severed um and she was american i think she was coming from tennessee tennessee or i don't know Oh, or Wisconsin, can't remember. But yes, so they went through a very kind of tumultuous, long sort of therapy.
I mean, frenzy and Elizabeth Severn. And Freud was highly skeptical of this woman. he called Elizabeth Saverne Frenzy's evil genius in reference to Descartes' demon that seduces someone from the inside to give them the sense of self certainty, right? That we are on the path of self certainty. It was absolutely thought that she is making things up about her past traumas.
And there is actually a book by Elizabeth Sever. I've forgotten the title of it, but you can actually read it. It's actually quite good, so you can see her side of the story. But yes, probably I shouldn't actually talk too much about her. And some of the materials are quite a little bit triggery, I would say, even by my standards. Some stuff that we can't actually talk on record. But you can actually read about her, you know, stuff that happened to her. and i mean i all i can say that you know they were part of the you know slave uh owners uh families
and she was apparently abused from you know when she was an infant and all sorts of stuff just like outside of you know uh kind of canonical psychoanalytic cases because for psychoanalytic cases the majority of the people other than freud they were getting you know kind of highly you know manicured patients not real cases of serious child abuse and freud usually thought that majority of these cases that they were presenting themselves as cases of child abuse were making things up and frenzy actually thought that no they are not making things up and even if
they were making these stories up in fact in lying or fabricating these accounts it is actually we should understand them as different interpretations that they actually reveal sort of informations that candidness throughout the course of psychotherapy doesn't bring about that they are actually better they hold better keys to decipher you know uh the traumas that have taken place these fabrications rather than just a real account so my dear friend uh