Hello and welcome to our fifth session today, the fragmented legacy of Freud at the dawn of psychoanalysis with Professor Rezanagalistani. I will pass the mic to Professor Rezanagal. Thank you everyone. Hello. And so this is the fifth session. As I was mentioning, we are, as ever behind the schedule and so today I will you know point out some of the criticisms about the energetic model and then move to kind of you know more kind of like
the stuff that freud is uh kind of like a vulgar way is uh famous for and that would be sexual functions and uh you know the developmental phase of uh you know sexual energies and sexual functions in children and how they lead uh essentially this sort of elaboration leads to freud's theory of neurosis and repression which is central uh to freud's work uh so uh with that said uh Oh, and by the way, I think that precisely because we are behind, I would say that next
session, we combine rank and Sando frenzy together. And then the I think that we have to even with that we have to essentially skip the last session unless and until one of our moderators volunteers to do like a one and a half hour makeup at some point makeup session after our last session. Otherwise we have to skip the last session and just focus on rank and frenzy next session. Then the other two sessions would be know beyond pleasure principle and trauma and death and the other one would be uh i forgot uh
which one is that uh if someone can remind me but yes so so three sessions left and uh today energetics critic criticism of energetic model um as you know mapped out by freud and delving a little bit into the development of sexual functions and theory of repression. So who is going to present today? Luya, Duahada, and...
And please five minutes. Okay. Yep. So we start with presentations. Yes. Yes, first I'll try to share screen and if not, can, if it doesn't work, can I send my presentations to you and maybe you can set it. If you can send it to Ikoro because I think that he has.
Sorry, I said it doesn't work. I'm going to send it to Icaro now. If someone else wishes to start. Yeah, I can start then. I'll try to share my screen. um can you see my screen yes yes okay uh so for my presentation i decided to uh focus on one of the entries in francis
diary thinking with the body equals hysteria as an investigation into the relationship between the body and psyche and how to account for hysterical conversion so a substitution of a somatic symptom for a repressed idea where the psychological is part of the body as a kind of organic or inorganic form hysteria being as a regression of eroticism into organs that otherwise only serve ego functions so as a intellectualization of ego organs or non-erotic organs his approach is a materialist approach based on energetics and mechanics so where the mechanic accounts for the quantity external pressures which provoke changes and in terms of energy
the psychic is governed by motives and the main motive is the maintenance of the state of equilibrium and needs to eliminate any disturbance. So the psychic energy as motivation is intellectual energy and any perception of unpleasure leads to emergence of power to seize the unpleasure. And if a kind of pressure is powerful enough, there is a qualitative change in the substances So they recover a kind of primordial psychic quality. So these are primal psychic powers of the organism as a whole, where this kind of psychic
quality in regards to thinking about the relationship, how Freud and Breuer were talking about hysteria, where there's this kind of rerouting of the repressed to the physical. there's this psychic quality to the physical organism as a whole as organism begins to think. Important in regards to the energy and matter is the quality of substances which in a natural state are divided. So physically dormant substance is rigid, nervous and mental systems possess fluid adaptability where the hysterically reacting body is a semi-fluid the substance whose previous
rigidity and uniformity have been partially redissolved again into a psychic state capable of adapting so there's a process of regression and transformation in the quality of substance the transfer of energy of intellectual energy to the other substance or same substance In regards to the whole kind of text, he kind of builds this quite a unitary image of a body whose equilibrium and natural state is based on substances varying in quality, which determines their functions and abilities. So functions change in correspondence to outside pressure or quantity of pressure, where the dormant substance, the unconscious, being awake by
force is given intellectual power and finally with enough force destroying this separation completely falling back into itself towards death so here a kind of drive towards the universal uh state of equilibrium generally i got the feeling that Ferenczi kind of psychologizes psychic and physical functions in terms of motivation he has a quite poetical lyrical style of interpretation almost kind of having a plot as is with another entry that Eduardo will be talking about, case of schizophrenia progressiva. Eduardo, do you want me to continue the presentation or will you open your own? Yeah, yeah, I would ask, can you pass it? Thank you. Oh yeah, sure.
I will tell you when you can pass the slide. So I'll be focusing on two texts, the last entries, which are case of schizophrenia progressiva and suggestion, intimidation and imposition of an alien will. because I feel these two texts are complementary and they comment on trauma and ego mechanisms and defenses. The incident of early trauma creates a double life, a split in the self of the person. Ferenczi starts this entry listening to the different moments that traumatic and similar events happen to this patient, named as RN, as we know, Reza Negaristani. In the beginning of the text, Ferenczi names ARFA as they're organizing life instincts,
which allow insanity to occur instead of death. So when you have like sort of traumatic event, instead of simply giving in to death or something like that, it's like the body has this mechanism of bringing about this sort of split. This happens during the traumatic event and has a fragmentation effect on this patient's After a brief description of the second instance of abuse, he lists down the parts of the personality so far. One, the one that goes through suffering in the depths of the unconscious, only available in sleep or during hysterical crisis. Two, a guardian angel, which he calls the Orpha, which is responsible for the preservation of life. This part creates fantasies and other coping mechanisms for the patient.
It is this part that was squeezed out from the body during the second traumatic event. Three, the body, the site of where trauma takes place, which is what is from a distance point of view. Throughout the years, after the abandonment of this patient's father, this orphan temporarily doesn't know how to handle the situation and then encourages a sort of suicidal behavior. but eventually stability comes about through this sort of splittings. At the end of the traumatic events, the patient arrives at four personality divisions. A a functional human, B the suicidal desire, C the remains of early suffering, and D the suffering itself apart from the rest of the
personality which is entirely in the unconscious. You can pass. So in the next text, Franks is going to test some drugs with RN, like anesthesia, to see how it will be her reaction. Now I'd like to remind us that the first text is regarding the insensibility of the analyst. In the book's introduction, we are told that this text is a a direct reflection of Ferenczi's own experience with Freud. What we find in common through these 19 pages is Ferenczi actively struggling with some things which he disagrees with Freud. For instance, he's bewired by the fact that Freud is much more worried about building an intellectual slash scientific system
than with the actual therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis. Before this text, there are two others which are on the idea of mutual analysis. a technique that Ferenczi employs with some patients which allow them to analyze him and break up the rigid figure of the analyst. While Ferenczi is careful about the effectiveness of this method and points out that this works better with patients which were already cured or close to reaching cure, it's interesting to see this group of texts in two senses. The first one being a disavow of Ferenczi's own practice from Freud's influence and approach and two a sort of non-systematic, very body-informed approach that wants to derive concepts from the experiences during the sessions. So RN underwent mutual analysis with Ferenczi, which brings this new
perceptional and openness to the idea of the split personality. And Ferenczi starts the text noting that RN was drug. It makes some parallels between the state of anesthesia, how it is forced even when someone consents to it because the person tends to struggle for their own body's control. He delineates how the will can be splitted from the agency of a person and transferred to something that appears to be a tendency of reality. You can pass. So there's this long quote, but I think it makes like a really good description of what he's doing on this text, which is to the anesthetized is thus to be temporarily split off from one's own body. The operation
is not carried out on me, but on a body to which I used to belong. Here one might include one woman's description of the terrifying inability to answer questions she experienced while she was being anesthetized. She heard the voice of the questioner as it from a tremendous distance, many miles away. In the course of the narcosis, which lasted two minutes, she saw an immense succession of dream images. Among these, she saw the completed operation, and so she had the comforting feeling that she had survived the operation, while in fact it was not over yet. All the same, sinking into nothingness was for her a terrifying sensation. When she recovered consciousness, her first remark was, I dreamed so much, so much. And then finally, my last slide. So arriving in conclusions, Franks notes how the sensibility of someone is heightened during these states of being anesthetized.
As I reviewed in the previous test of the diary, the effect of shock creates the sensation of distance from one's own body. Every traumatic experience then leads to the sort of splitting. The ego then carries features from this traumatic experience. On a short passage named on mimicry, Ferenczi talks about the relation of whiteness to the polar bears and the case of the whiteness of the environment. And Carl, this is a sort of imprinting of an individual collectivism, dialogue between individuals and places and sites where they dwell in. Ferenczi's very last paragraph was for me somewhat ambiguous. It seems that the functioning of the person has been affected by trauma, but the ego remains in a certain way untouched.
In a certain sense, looking to recover, this feeds the ego an idea of being bigger and clever than brute force. And then he has this very good phrase which the mentally ill person has a keen eye for the insanity of mankind, which is how he ends this text. Thank you so much, Edward. I'm gonna then share Georgiana's. Did you send me three minutes, Georgiana? Just a second. Oh, yes. The song of the beards from you, Reza?
So hello, everyone. My presentation will begin or will focus on providing some background to the diary, namely correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi that have prompted the latter to have a continuous attempt to disengage from his master's, let's say, method. And basically the exchange between Ferenczi and Freud, I tried to look at it as a kind of an example of missed communication eduarda can you move to the next slide
yep thank you and now even to the next yes so uh basically this exchange testifies to an asymmetrical or even latent hostility between the too um uh you can sense a trapped energy of frustration with one another um and i try to look at their communication as a great deal of expenditure of physical and emotional energy from pharynx's part um and indeed how failed experiments and um disappointments and lack of encouragements or reinforcements from his former mentor
might have costed him mental stability. So in a way, how they're using the Ferencz's terms, in his case, the internal rearrangement that occurred with this mutual analysis, if you want, between the two, might have provoked in both of them and say different outcomes. So this lack of reciprocity, mixed messages, no nesting, no holding might have led to a re-traumatization because I think he once identifies
in Freud, his dictatorial mother figure. And this asymmetrical communication is also visible when Freud alludes to the fact that Ferenczi might be going through a third puberty. So one of the two is unwilling to channel the message, the information received from the other, and the other one refracts this as inconsiderate and kind of like a particular case of abuse. Can you move to the next slide, Eduarda? um so in eduarda's presentation um when he uh when they mentioned insensitivity um
i i wanted to provide this background because i think um the debut of the diary is in response to that to this misfired communications between between the two um can you move to the next one and now i want to introduce um one of the dissenting thesis um he says that the analyst spends too much time protecting oneself from the patient and their traumatic accounts um and basically that they spent too much uh providing comfort or or sorry um they spend too much time protecting protecting
oneself from the patient rather than providing comfort for the patient or focusing on their job as healers as physicians um then he stresses out the importance of um or how chemical or physical health of the body or lack of is part of the emotional damage that done to the mind by the traumatic event um hence the healing power of the whole body has to be involved in the therapeutic process. So basically the body apparatus is what or what pharynx equals the organic hysterical basis for the analysis should focus on pathogenesis rather than fantasy formation
as his former master insisted. um and i um so in in this mechanics of trauma uh there is a part of you that orfa that tries to maintain you to and that activates itself um and in this activation a series of permutations occur. All psychic functions are converted into physical or metabolic functions. And one of the resulting permutations, especially when nearing the healing moment, is insensitivity from the part of the victim as a way of achieving revenge.
it's a way of silencing the event or the power or the violence of the abuser so blocking basically the force done upon the victim some temporal boundaries are reassured and And that's what, or all these permutations are akin to what pharynx calls growing another limb. And yeah, I think that's where I want to end. Thank you. Thank you so much. Excellent, excellent presentation.
Thank you very much. uh so i i will cover some of my comments on all three presentations uh throughout the course uh today and next session but uh yes uh with regard the first one uh it seems that um Now, the idea that whether, I mean, this is probably not Freud when you know that that is Syria is kind of like a regression to those vital functions that serve the ego. I would say that Freud actually go to a different depth level, saying that these are actually
the vital functions a regression uh to the vital functions that serve the id uh or at least the id part of the ego um um there is you know of course later on uh when he talks about uh you know development of sexual functions uh you know that's uh and of course this whole regression should be understood in in in one way or another in terms of dissolution to the external world uh but this time with regard to the sexual functions and sexual energy this dissolution manifests uh in dissolution in becoming one with the parents right uh and this is so for
for a child uh for an infant you know the uh the sexual progression sexual development begins uh from from that moment uh of kind of like uh you know nullity uh of the identity of ego uh understood as a fusion uh with the mother right uh like as if they are one uh and then it starts to you know through all those uh phases uh which i will elaborate later it starts to develop as a kind of differentiation and off growth that gets its own uh supposed sovereignty
under uh you know the principles of the ego um but throughout the regression um it's uh freud proposes that uh in fact within all sorts of regression there is this tendency to become one with the external world for which uh the mother particularly parents particularly the mother are a manifestation so again uh that within i mean so that there is this uh sort of and uh kind of dissolution uh to a register of the unconscious
which is represented by the mother or the mother figure, and also the father to an extent. And this, what you might call to be dissolution, this kind of regression Freud wants to emphasize is not actually exclusive to hysterical cases of hysteria, but rather it is the very principle of ego.
that's the famous thesis of Freud that there is no difference between the healthy and the neurotic or the hysteric. We all have it. It's just that there are different levels that, you know, at which point this becomes pathologically manifest. But as I said, that the idea between the normal and the perverse, healthy and the abnormal, doesn't exist precisely because Freud thinks that this tendency toward dissolution, which is the underlying dynamics of regression, is constitutive of the entire human culture.
and the tendency, at least at the socio-cultural level, manifests itself in superego, right? Because superego, as I mentioned, so reason and rationality, moral odds, particularly moral odds, uh you know you know associated uh with super ego but with a twist however the twist is that super ego these moral odds these reason and rationality are constitutive of uh social cultural uh build on of the uh of of ego of an individual
are largely unconscious in their nature so that is actually quite interesting that for reason rationality and moral odds and this source of the stuff are largely unconscious precisely because uh within them there is a dynamic of dissolution to the parental estate to the parental estate wherein there is no distinction between me and my mother we are one right becoming one with the world and particularly here the social world that precedes uh an
individual and and within every sort of this sort of tendency toward dissolution which is you know the the kind of uh as i said the undergirding principle of of regression uh comes a certain sorts of what you might call to be uh odds and ought nots what i should do or what i should not do so in a sense uh as i said uh freud sees uh regression uh as this expression of self dissolution into the external world or union with the mother or the the parents or the social ancestors,
not only in cases of hysteria and neurosis, but generally and normally in the realm of, essentially, cultural development. That's a reference to the last works of Freud on civilization and religion, that they have this sort of traits. Because with Frenzy, I reserve my comments for next session, which would be on Tuesday.
And I don't know, I think I forgot a couple of things that came to my mind during presentation. let's hear from you if anyone has a question or want to say something about the presentations. I wanted to ask Eduard what is the relationship between a dream and a nightmare because what exactly did happen? So she saw an operation in a dream.
And when she woke up, did she realize what she saw? She forgot. Did you mean the long quote on the presentation? No, not long quote. Just the quote that I think I dreamed so much. Oh, yes. It was because a patient received anesthesia and was like for two minutes in the state. And she sort of had these dream images based on what was happening around her. But she had like this sort of third POV. Like she saw her body from the distance and witnessed everything as it was in a dream. She sort of dreamed of seeing herself very distanced as another person.
so I think he's trying to to show this comparison of what is the sensation of being split off it's maybe like being anesthetized if you receive it, I haven't received anesthesia many times but I believe you have the sensation of I don't know a strong sort of experience alienation or the sort of division between yourself and your body when you can feel certain parts of your your body because you're anesthetized i think it's a similar uh thing that he's going for uh thank you so much i i yes this is one of just a minor comment i had i forgot one of the things i forgot um old times anesthesia was actually uh was not modern anesthesia so it had narcotics in
it high dose of narcotic particularly uh morphine or laudanum and this sort of stuff you know uh opium tinctures uh the thing is that uh precisely because of the nature of them the the reactions were quite severe just good old days and uh the thing is that this case actually precisely because he he uses a word frenzy in the case of rn a strange word actually uh called a tele-esthetics. So tele-esthetics is essentially when you can actually think or sense almost that your extremities, the sensory extremities have been extended at great range and you can actually
touch feel the heat of for example a pot on the stove while i am here in the backyard right that's a kind of like a tele-esthetic thing you can see it in Cronenberg early movies that some of particularly in the movie brood where the doctor you know shows this that's Oliver Reed shows this book called the face of rage where basically people turn their rage into these kind of outgrout almost tumors coming from their body right as if they are developing different organs merely by their state of mind right and this is actually today being categorized particularly by
thomas metzinger and co as deviant phenomenal self models deviant phenomenal self models it's not as if the self is being dissolved but essentially the relation between self namely the computational simulations of the self being a computational simulation and the body the integrity of the body is being compromised we're basically because under normal circumstances self is usually has a one-to-one mapping uh with your bodily integration right as a whole but when this one-to-one mapping uh you know uh bijective mapping is being compromised
it leads uh to the sense that to kind of like two different trajectories self the perception of self being distorted and the perception of body that supports the integrity of the body that supports the perception of self is being compromised also with regard to the dream and nightmare this is something that i i need to read more about it but uh this whole idea that i i think that freud also has this and frenzy also mentions at some point dreaming too much dreaming so much is a nightmare is the state of constant hallucination
right i mean people who have too much dream uh usually having fundamental sleep disturbances right and the the basically the medicine for that when it becomes terminal is ketamine yes this makes sense because i on the contrary had a very great dream recently insightful dream and when I woke up in the waking thought I replayed or the insight or made up at that moment and then the first thing that I thought to myself oh I didn't have dreams at all today
yes no I mean insomnia I mean acute insomnia I've had it acute insomnia is usually a good sign of it of chronic insomnia is dreaming and the architecture of dreaming fundamentally changes to the point that the only register of you having slept is through either remembering dream or essentially having a gap in your memory of what you were thinking just three seconds ago. which is quite actually a strange that's why chronic insomniac claim that they haven't slept
but they usually asleep it's just that the the architecture is so uh you know damaged uh that's uh you know the the difference between dreaming and wakefulness fundamentally blares thoughts question for the presenters people who have been silent yes let's love i have a question about the francis note in a diary which is called thinking with the body equals hysteria i will read i haven't read
that uh would you be able to uh post this the title and everything so i can the rest of us can find it uh i would read the passage uh maybe yes yes but also the the reference that where this is coming from that would be magnificent okay uh so uh frenzy rice man is an organism equipped with specific organs for the performance of essential psychic functions such as nervous intellectual activities in the moments of great need when the psychic system proves to be incapable of an adequate adequate response or when these specific organs or functions nervous and psychic have been violently destroyed, then the primordial psychic powers are aroused and
it will be these forces that will seek to overcome the disruption. In such moments, when the psychic system fails, the organism begins to think. I wanted to ask the presenter. Yes, it was a questionable thing for me. I forgot. This is another one that I forgot. The organism begins to think uh think at what level uh i have thought firstly about the interconnection about uh deep time and the trauma which you mentioned in the first seminar and then i thought that uh may we think that in this case forensic equals uh mind's eye to epiphenomenon um so that thinking precedes uh the conscious uh the eye consciousness the ego yes yes that's a
good point is this from a first pages of uh clinical diary uh yes this uh you can't remember from the page four to the page uh the page eight second for some reason i can't remember it uh yes i mean any any thought about this uh the the the one that uh my slav uh brought up it's i thought it's actually an interesting rather strange though sort of assertion. But also, I think he's referring this self-thinking organs or body as the Orpha,
and he speaks about the Orpha in May, May 1st. No, the Orpha is the next recording in his diary. This is prior to Orpha. i see is this orfee power appears uh impulse of living not just living when he describes uh what happened to this girl in in his childhood with the abuse something like the body starts to breathe to not pay attention to the suffering and this is the Orpha. I think it's kind of related. Maybe. I need to read the whole thing again, that part.
Is it also the part where he compares where he mentioned autoplastic versus alloplastic. I think it's around that page. And I think it's somewhat connected with what Miteslav was asking. Because autoplasticity uh essentially is the opposite side of thinking right um alloplasticity uh to an extent requires thinking because it's an interactive uh you know mode of adaptation
but it's still the word thinking uh here is kind of odd to me I think he also he gives specific qualities like this language of organs on page seven he says would then have the extraordinarily or wonderfully pleasing quality of being both mind body and mind simultaneously that is of expressing wishes sensations of pleasure on pleasure or even complicated thoughts through changes in their structure and function and then by the end he also kind of ties it to he says on page eight where the the entry is finished the often quoted incidents of clairvoyance yes yeah okay claire i remember
that yes that's a that's a good passage yes no i there was uh i think leica said that yeah i mean organism for freud is mostly like being defined simply as as a kind of in in as as energies or instincts uh you know i still need to read this uh another thing that's oh in your presentation um i think that uh frenzy actually uh uh as opposed i mean kind of no no i'm not as opposed actually following freud and this actually creates as we are going to talk about uh next friday on adolf grunbaum's uh critique of freud they seem that they don't actually quite grasp the idea of cause
and they think that cause simply means uh you know cause is something that just belongs to natural sciences and kind of in a deterministic fashion you know scientific explanatory causes but they are not and there is a reason for it precisely because if they say that you know this sort of psychoanalysis that they are talking about is prone to the discourse of causes then that would deprive psychoanalysis and psychology that they are trying to promote of its sovereign independent status with regard to natural
sciences right even though they want psychoanalysis to be a sort of you know offshoot of natural sciences but they want to maintain its independence the the way that they have to do it is to a stave of uh the strict uh you know uh reference to causes in so far as as i mentioned they think they assume uh the lexicon of uh causality uh gives it a kind of hard scientific, you know, vibe. So they instead choose to go for, you
know, the language of motives, reasons and beliefs. But as Grunbaum has actually mentioned, Your idea of cause as being this sort of deterministic, not even deterministic, this sort of hard scientific vocabulary is fundamentally naive. and for a cause to be counted as a cause, it simply means that it has to, for an X to be counted as a cause for Y, it means that the occurrence of X ought to make a difference in the occurrence of Y,
simple as that. And to that extent, motifs, beliefs, and reasons are actually causes and nothing else. thoughts if not let's have a page nine yes i'm sorry it's just that you said that the group bound presentation was the next session but i think it's like the it's in friday friday uh right so we have a we have a makeup session tuesday oh oh oh sure sure i forgot about that so that would be the friday uh and then the last one would be not coming friday uh but uh the other friday july 1st
uh yes okay let's have a break i we are kind of behind i need to wrap it up uh with the criticism of energetics i try to just go through some basic stuff and if i can't go through all of it then that would be fine and then get into the sexual functions and you know theory of repression okay uh five to ten minutes uh break and we reconvene
anything? I think variance is different from Freud, but I'm not exactly how. very in very even in methodology you see uh it is very quite actually hilarious that freud uh with everyone as i mentioned uh starts with on a good uh you know uh footing you know my dear friend this and that i love you this and then uh particularly you know in terms of pupils and stuff
and then as they grow and then they diverge, this piece of shit has written this. And the same thing happens with frenzy too. And Freud again, kind of, you know, starts to castigate them for crudility and, you know, rawness of thoughts and naivete and these sorts of things. But I think that Freud extremely was against this whole idea of counter-transference, that frenzy was used, integrated in his methodology.
And while he was highly famously, thought that transference is the curse of psychotherapy, but he noticed that, no, this is actually the pillar upon which psychotherapy should be erected. But to him, counterference creates the unnecessary imbalance, and most importantly, it endangers the position of psychotherapist. That was really the most, as a kind of like a professional thing, but also on a methodological level it was uh extremely uh you know uh a bad move on the side
of frenzy uh for at least for freud uh yes but also with regard i will talk about it with regard to the idea of trauma they are completely different because uh to a very great extent uh frenzy doesn't believe in uh that drive as the universal principle for the explanation of trauma or does he maybe he uh dismisses the physics part the energetics part you see this is i'm going to start with this uh that frenzy uh so there is there is a good uh historical i mean book uh
very very great actually book uh both as a criticism of freud and you know kind of you know introducing the back story behind some of freud's moves and stuff and the diversions from Rank, Frenzy, Jones, and so on and so forth. It's a book by Ola Anderson, Anderson with double S. It's called Studies in Pre-Psychoanalysis. Studies in Pre-Psychoanalysis, I think. it's hard to find i have i have a copy of it uh but it's very hard to find nowadays for some reason
will you send it somewhere sorry you have uh no unfortunately no no no unfortunately it's a hard copy no there is There is no PDF of it, unfortunately. So in that book, he mentions this fact that Freud, throughout his career was almost excessively encouraged and hailed as a materialist thinker, to the extent that Freud himself believed he's actually a materialist thinker and is like the champion of materialism right but as
anderson talks about that he's really not materialist because if he's really materialist then either he's a really bad materialist thinker or he's conflicting contradictory in so many aspects. And the thing is that it's actually quite interesting that the inner circle starts to fragment because they do not want to see psychoanalysis in materialistic terms anymore. And that's frenzy. And of course, that also means that, you know, kind of to an extent putting aside the energetic thesis
as a materialist core of early Freud that continues forward. So as I mentioned, this is Freud's uh seems to be a kind of cursed figure um uh in a sense that uh you know he he completely wants to prioritize uh a scent a kind of uh uh personalist and voluntarist view view of the psyche, you know, personally in the sense that, you know, in a very almost
Kantian sense of what constitutes as a person, right? But also at the same time he wants to, you know, adopt quite heavily the materialistic or materialist lexicon and vocabularies and kind of hard deterministic side of things. And as people have pointed out, this is, you know, leads to a number of serious flaws in Freud's work. And of course, it's reception by other philosophers, historians, and psychoanalysts.
First of all, I need to say that the understanding of Freud as materialist thinker, even though, as I mentioned, it's Freud, he believes he is, but it wasn't actually during the time of Freud. it wasn't even brought up because Freud was really emphasizing on the personal side of things in psychoanalysis. This became a big deal to the point that now in philosophy, and I don't want to name names, but you know I'm talking about, people actually think that Freud is a materialist thinker. The person who was initially responsible for this
you know introduction of Freud as a materialist was James Estrace, sorry James Estrace, he was a british psychoanalyst during late 40s and early 50s he you know he kind of you know introduced freud as the hero of materialism in the realm of psyche but before then freud was not on the same level of materialism or if any at all to the eyes of philosophers and other thinkers on the same level of Marx, for example. So putting him on the same level of materialism as Marx
is completely historically inaccurate. This is a very, you know, after the fact introduction and reception of Freud. And Freud would have, even though, as I mentioned, he thought that he takes the materialist side of things seriously, but that was an absolutely a priority for him. So, yeah, and obviously, as we see as he moves from the scientific projects of scientific psychology, namely the project toward later works, we see that the person oriented methodology
unfolds and that's you know through the whole idea of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy the methodology deviates from you know this kind of uh in the vein of uh speculative biology and uh uh psychophysics uh toward you know kind of empirical personalist uh you know methodologies and operations
This is also due to a fact that, as I mentioned in previous sessions, the psychophysical dimension, the psychophysical project, and the sort of methodology that it requires could not be uh substantiated uh in in the project of psychoanalysis and the reason for that again as i mentioned uh is really the problem of measurement measurement of quantities right measurements of energies quantities of energies and quantities of excitation
and again this has to do and of course this leads to the idea that you know at least for freud and early inner circle that okay so if the idea of measurement of quantities cannot be substantiated we should not only postpone it indefinitely but also replace it with the project of psychoanalysis as a sovereign you know offshoot of natural sciences within which we can still you know
Ritain the scientific status of psychoanalysis, but as people again have pointed out. Ritain D' For Freud Freud. Ritain D' doesn't really get the idea that for for something to be science. Ritain D' You don't need measurement of quantities. Dr. Nadeem G. Right. Dr. Nadeem G. There are so many empirical sciences that are not based solely or, if any at all, on measurement of quantities as a basic principle of the scientific method. So scientific method is an empirical method. An empirical method is not.
Dr. Nadeem G. bottomed out in measurement of quantities. But for some reason that's, you know, we, in so far as Freud conflates, or kind of elides the distinction between the quantitative and the empirical, he thinks that lack of, you know, quantitative or measuring quantitative factors kind of makes it, makes, you know,
any enterprise of investigation of the psyche unscientific, and hence either we have to postpone it, or rather we need to find a kind of what you might call to be a counterpart for that sort of quantification or measurement within the pure lexicon vocabularies of psychoanalysis itself but always uh with this implicit assumption that what we are talking about in the pure vocabulary of psychoanalysis
is implicitly mapped onto you know the quantitative side of things this gives a sort of picture of freud as a kind of a brain mind dualist that he he thinks that uh ultimately uh mind can be explained by the brain or psychic activities psychic events can be you know explained in terms of uh brain
activities not brain regions uh if not brain regions but brain activities uh you know the sort of stuff that happened in brain um but again this also again creates a kind of uh con conflicting uh scenario within freud's work to the extent that his emphasis on the personalist side the the interactive intersubjective uh you know dimensions of the mind uh can't really be mapped into brain activities ultimately precisely because there is no
bridge between these two and this bridge probably will never be discovered because any sort of way that you are going to talk about brain is being modeled on the inter personal personal side of things and this is actually the curse of neuroscience today as we have seen it that every time that someone's trying that oh i have discovered consciousness or this sort of this that sort of that they are essentially relaying some empirical facts of neuroscience channeling them through you know the the lexicon of the mind which fundamentally distorts uh
either positively or negatively those sorts of stuff and that's the the the neuroscientific nor physical side of things and that's really this so in a sense that within freud's work the contradiction you know carries the germ cell of you know later on sort of you know complications problems and difficulties that emerged within philosophy of neuroscience and they are endemic precisely to this sort of project mind brain dualism
Another point that needs to be talked about before going on and kind of elaborating on some of the weak points and shoddy moves of Freud's energetics is that Freud throughout his life was responsible for presenting a view of a theory of sexuality or libido or
you know, energies of eros and erotic energies as a kind of, you know, universal explanatory factor. Even though Freud himself, every time that this came up, that people were accusing him that, you know, he's a pansexualist, Freud himself was you know saying that no I am not you know he was saying that pansexualism simply means that you know it's a certain sort of reductionism that kind of like a dogma where basically either you know everything in nature is either or in organic nature is
either sexual or caused by sexual energies right freud even though he was responsible uh for this sort of pansexualism he always defended himself against it and in fact one time he joked that his theories were kind of mythology like theories of modern physics so he was more interested in the mythological side of this pansexualism but of course these these lines of defenses and jokes that freud made you know to kind of distance himself from this kind of vulgar pansexualism
were mere reactionary defenses. Insofar as a good chunk of his work shows that he does, in fact, promote what you might call to be a sexuality as a pancrestan. you know what a pancreston is, is a kind of, you know, is a certain sort of materialist pancreston, certain sort of universal explanatory platform that is supposed to explain a phenomenon
and all of its contingencies, right? A phenomenon and all of its contingencies. And, but of course, we know that from lessons in philosophy that, you know, various forms of pancreasal or universal explanatory causes end up to be over simplistic precisely because they want to cover all the contingencies of a phenomenon. And that creates a reductionist aura, atmosphere. I don't want to say that Marx ideas also count as pancrestans,
but certainly the way that sometimes Marx as a materialist thinker has been hailed and received received also you know smells like a pancrestin and definitely this is something that comes quite a lot with these you know materialist thinkers particularly with freud now of course freud wants to kind of uh you know brush it uh aside by simply saying that well you know this is a useful hypothesis and mythology has a useful hypothesis this uh pansexualism
but that would be then stretching the whole work too much then if it is so then at which points do you decide that it is no longer useful and it becomes a dogma considering the fact that for example theories of repression and fixation particularly He goes on to this lengthy details of counting and categorizing, classifying all sorts of fixations, namely contingencies of repressive neurosis. All trying to explain them away by the principle of this, by this pancrestal principle of sexuality.
thoughts before I move forward. Could you say a little bit more about the dualism and Freud and its relationship to the crisis of modern neuroscience. I think I followed that, but that was quite condensed. Yes, I mean, you see, I mean, the first actually came from, you know, I mean, it was Helmholtz's school, again,
that kind of put this idea forward that brain is, is in Latin, you know, the two phrases I have forgotten is that it's something that we do not know and we shall never know, right? right um and uh but nevertheless learning the mechanisms uh help us uh to understand the behaviors uh and we can trace some of the behaviors uh to these uh almost uh you know a good
portion of them these behaviors and these uh you know psychic events to uh you know kind of brain activities so on so forth however the tracing the tracing of mental events and psychic processes back to the nervous system uh can only be modeled or be relayed through as i mentioned you know the vocabularies of mind and not the vocabularies of neuroscience per se the reason for that is
precisely because the vocabularies of neuroscience or the nervous system these empirical facts can only be you know relayed in relation to the mind again by way of the vocabularies of mind so it creates a certain sort of what you might call to be double bind a double bind that you at the same time say that well you know these can be traced back to uh their physical sort of configurations and this such and such you know neurophysical configurations can be responsible for
thus and so range of you know kind of mental activities and stuff but but these transitions back and forth are all being you know uh relayed uh and transmitted through you know kind of intersubjective interpersonalist models which are constituted by mind right this combined with the fact that actually not combined with the fact this leads to this idea at least for you know some of the early problems of neurophysics and neuroscience to this idea that uh brain
is something that we are we will always be in the constant state of ignorance with regard to and also we shall never know what it is because all all the information ultimately being channeled through those sort of models not those of pure empirical facts of neuroscience and then you can see it i mean good example of this is like you know uh we see it in today's philosophy of neuroscience i mean majority of this stuff we should actually talk about this that nor science hardly talk about consciousness and this sort of stuff they are merely modestly working within the ambit of empirical sciences when you become to an uh intermediary uh dimension
of philosophy of neuroscience and some neuroscientists do actually also have the same don't do philosophy of neuroscience in philosophy of neuroscience things become much more murky uh to the extent that even like today some of the most brilliant ones like sanisla dohan metzinger i don't know uh hans father uh you can see they have to in order to give a kind of credence to these empirical findings they have to come back to the philosophical vocabularies of mind and the models uh to kind of either you know integrate these empirical findings into a body of insights uh or actually i don't know for other sort of reasons uh funding and
stuff to show a kind of what you might call to be a sense of progression in discoveries that's actually quite dangerous uh from a perspective you know of scientific uh methods uh this constant need in philosophy of neuroscience to always say that well you know this is uh this we have found the root of consciousness what the is consciousness you know uh you can see it in the terms of today as well uh with that guy who's saying that uh you know um the google engineer you know i have uh uh oh my god uh the ai is not sentient and there was this twitter meme that uh the google engineer asked uh said uh uh you know uh
i was wondering whether you are sentient or not and the ai said that i am sentient and the google engineer says holy you are sentient you know that sort of stuff happens here but in a in a far more complex way through these models uh that are specific to the philosophical canon of the philosophy of mind that freud is quite actually take them seriously and he doesn't want to depart from them because that would endanger the status of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy par excellence but also
at the same time to the extent that he wants to be a materialist or working in the vein of natural sciences this creates a contradiction and i will talk about that you know this comes back to this idea that he his model of energetics which is the materialist model ends up to be nothing more than a very uh bloated speculative uh interesting very interesting but a bloated speculative hypothesis
that cannot actually be tested because it cannot be tested through this sort of mind mind brain uh complication and how they fit together the vocabulary is I mean the empirical lexicon of brain and interpersonal you know kind of mental conscious you know inferential you know side of philosophy of mind May I ask a follow-up? Sure. So that makes sense to me and it reminds me of, do you know Anderson's book, After Phenology,
where he argues that basic neuroscience research is imprisoned by the way that a bad cognitive psychology vocabulary has been localized in the mind? It's a sort of similar kind of argument, but that line of thinking leaves open the possibility that a more modular, precise vocabulary of consciousness would give us an operational language that could be tested and turned in terms of neural. Yes, absolutely so. But it sounds like you're rejecting that in principle. you see in principle i mean you see i would say that in principle actually should be uh possible but when we say in principle we leave off a lot of other sort of details right it's
like when we are saying that in principle it's possible and yes that actually brings this idea i had this debate with this guy from brazil uh uh which you know talks about consciousness i forgot his name and this relativist guy and you know i attacked because i'm kind of frankly i'm quite uh you know sick of this whole idea of you know uh philosophers of mind talking about neuroscience and neuroscience talking about philosophy of mind particularly with regard to the idea of consciousness as if there was any sort of uh you know something that we could actually say well this is consciousness well maybe the fact is that your concept is so wide range
or long range clunky that it should be actually be modulated right in a kind of carnappian thesis i have been always been promoting explicated conceptual engineering explicated to more nuanced classified mappable you know uh and tractable sort of concepts that might not actually be representing what you under umbrella term calling consciousness but to them that was a heresy to the philosophy of mind but so be it uh esan you had a question um uh one of the things that i really liked in neuroscience before you just say which is
no but you you you were right you were right uh the thing that they use uh like um using fmri while presenting a picture or a certain idea to follow the imaging of brain parts. But you say that unless we have it like on the consciousness, on the like the parts that you uh undress and not the brain activity itself unless we understand that this is pointless right no no no not exactly that no in the sense that you see when we are talking about brain activities
and you know uh the sorts of measurements and imagings and uh sort of stuff we are not in fact talking about uh you know uh ideas like consciousness and this sort of stuff we are having a kind of a different approach methodologically and operationally to the data that we are gathering right that's a different sort of stuff it's when we are trying to gather and integrate such a data under the lexicon that are specific to mental activities and mind mindedness vocabularies of consciousness so on and so forth that complicates the story distorts uh
you know uh basically the the the what you might call to be the the framework of neuroscience and and its discoveries uh precisely because the the uh the bridge the two-way bridge between brain and mind you know psychophysical and mental uh is not a it's not really a kind of like a a a smooth you know two-way road a highway it's actually more like a kind of uh maze like things that uh things actually get lost in translation
So, you know, coming back to the project of uh uh uh was it uh a project uh project of scientific psychology um and the idea of uh quantity quantitative conception freud says uh something to that extent
it's called first principle theorem the quantitative conception where it says Because quantitative conception is derived from pathological clinical observation, especially where excessively intense ideas were concerned. Excessively intense ideas are emphasized, were concerned. In hysteria and obsessions in which the quantitative characteristic emerges more plainly than in normal. than in normal processes such as a stimulus substitution conversion and discharge directly suggest suggested the conception of neural excitation as a quantity in a state of flow
it seemed legitimate to attempt to generalize what was recognized there starting from this consideration it was possible to lay down a basic principle of neural activity in relation to q quantity or q eta which promised to be highly enlightening since it appeared to compromise to comprise the entire function this is the principle of neural inertia that neurons tend to divest themselves of q quantity eta you see however you know and this as i mentioned in previous sessions this idea of the you know uh the principle of neural inertia is at the bottom
of uh later theories of you know uh excitation discharge pleasure on pleasure uh repression and regression, so on and so forth. Within this passage that I cited from Freud, there are a few problems that need to be accounted for. First of all, transforming gross quantitative characteristics of pathological excitement into neural excitations is nothing more than another method of brain mythology,
essentially anthropologizing and psychologizing brain structures of functions by ascribing to them psychological processes constructed by psychologists to explain psychological phenomena. So what Freud does here do precisely because of the mind-brain dualism that I mentioned, that sort of scenario, he ends up, I mean, inevitably, to use the explanandum as its own explainants
psychological processes which are to be which are to be explained namely explananda are being explained by psychological phenomena which are we are supposed to be you know so so basically the explaining explainants so so it begs the question that you know how does this work so generally within that passage there are four issues that needs to be accounted for One is that, you know, what you might call to be, you know, neural undergirding of strong
feelings or emotive states in health and disease. Two is what you can call the fact that here where neural excitation is being equated with hypothetical, you know, quantity of energy in a state of flow. And the third one, which is a problem of neural inertia, as I mentioned, has that kind of its roots in law of motion.
And the fourth one is the dual neural psychical phenomenology of a stimulus substitution conversion and discharge. With regard to number one, which was kind of, you know, the neural undergirding of strong feelings, we can talk about Brewer. we have seen that Brewer translates psychopathologically heightened emotionality or emotive states or excessively intense ideas in Freud's terms into neurological terms.
and in the end he admits the existence of something called idogenic affect so idogenic affects are remember in terms of phi psi omega systems that's so ideas are qualitative but they being you know constructed or you know configured at their base by quantitative phi and psi systems
Now, as I said, ideas can escalate, aggravate, or subdue other ideas of the same kind or within a specific category or other categories. This is what is usually called in early psychoanalysis by Freud and Brewer, ideogenic affects. So ideogenic affects are ideas that creates imbalances in what you might call to be psychological
states and of course later on freud becomes suspicious of this idea of ideogenic affects precisely because sometimes in hysteria we can see that the relation between ideas these kinds of adverse ideas or escalatory ideas or intense ideas and somatic you know exhibitions somatic you know functions is being far more intricate than simply we reduce cases of hysteria or you know kind of neurosis to you know ideas
that have become intense in so far as other ideas have impinged on them and kind of aggravated them or subdued them so so as i said at the end admits the existence of ideogenic affect without ever hypothesizing a quantity q but the quantity q as i mentioned uh neither freud nor brower would could be able to uh kind of you know uh localize it localize this function in the brain of systems for responsible for quantity q
number two issue which was neural excitation equated with a hypothetical quantity of energy in a state of flow you know generally freud wishes to generalize q as the universal property of neurons however it seems that such a quantity even though it kind of feels intuitively right uh uh there are metabolic processes in cells uh and which kind of are similar but not exactly are kind of representative of this kind of quantity
q but but nevertheless this quantity q uh has not been demonstrated by any precise Dr. Nelani M.D.: physiological method, nor the assumed tendency of neurons to divest themselves of you know. Dr. Nelani M.D.: Of such quantity has been you know validated by any sort of physiological method. obviously it's true that the nervous system main goal is to rid up the organism of painful stimulation however this does not entail uh the neurons uh like pipes filling up with or being emptied of a fluid-like energy cube
flowing in them this sort of hydraulic hypothesis then is neither supported by the histological structure of nerve cells, their tissues and fibers, nor by their electrical or chemical functioning as arresting action or injury potentials, nor by the events in the synops, nor by the transducing processes in sensory receptors. So this idea of filling up with and being emptied of a fluid, namely the hydraulic hypothesis of neural discharge
as a part of, you know, the whole idea of pleasure on pressure principle Paul seems to be completely blind to even the existing theories of neural functioning. anderson actually calls this the pipe dream of the brain or pipe a new neural pipe dream of freud
you know because this is not like a hydraulic brain doesn't has this sort of hydraulic model in it nervous system Then. The third one. But of course, you see this idea of when, so if that is the case, you know, this sort
of hydraulic hypothesis is also, you know, kind of, it seems that the hydraulic, one of the things, I mean, not just the hydraulic hypothesis, but the entire energetic model seems in Freud. to account for the physical side, the physics side in the term biophysics or psychophysics. and as people have pointed out it seems that freud could never actually manage to
talk about an energetic model within the biological organism all such allegedly the biological models that Freud and brewers provide seem to be more in tandem with physics proper and in that sense critics of Freud have pointed out that Freud kind of a strict reliance and this sort of uh physical hypothesis rather than biological hypotheses give his energetic model uh the aura the shade of him doing a speculative methodology
this is what they call it a speculative methodology and this was supposed to be a a humiliating term for what Freud is trying to do. The hydraulic metaphor, you know, then again come in later works in a different guise in
connection with another hypothetical sort of energy, the energy of sexual drives, libido, so to speak. The central focus, which is the central focus of three essays on the theory of sexuality. Here, one can see how the actual, for example, ejaculation, discharge of gametes, sexual products in the male orgasm readily fits the image contained in the metaphor of filling up and discharging accumulated quantities of libido. Right? So it is actually quite strange that Freud really
takes this so seriously that the amount of semen discharge actually is representative of a quality of energy as libido. How, where, where did that come from? It only works if we take the idea of hydraulic hypothesis very seriously and expand it to sexual products, right? to sexual uh rather merely uh retaining it within the ambit of sexual energy so
and the metaphor of course also seems because of this you know the way that is being laid out the hydraulic model seems to hold good for representing the idea of tension and the escalation of tension model of drives the accumulation of sexual tension and its release in orgasm reflex in both the male and female, even though there is no emptying, according to Freud, of sexual products in the latter. Number three would be, you know,
the famous hypothesis of neural inertia that I mentioned in previous sessions. And this is where James S. Rache thinks that Freud being represented as a true materialist thinker. And it is, as I mentioned, it's a mechanistic universal principle or the principle of constancy which kind of foreshadows freud's later works on you know death drive and and principle of nirvana the inertia theory presents some contradictions though
Freud portrays quantity Q as flowing into the nervous system from exogenous, which is perceptual, and endogenous sources. The latter having their origin, according to Freud, in the cells of the body and give rise to the major needs, hunger, respiration, sexuality. But also Freud in the same work becomes conscious of an ineradicable contradiction.
He says from these the organism cannot withdraw as it does from external stimuli. He only sees subject to particular conditions which must be realized in the external world, i.e. by means of an action which deserves to be called a specific. In consequence, the nervous system is obliged to abandon its original trend to inertia. so he seems as I mentioned he wants to have a specificity but he wants to have generalized claim here and that's as I mentioned that's the the pancreastonic
form of materialism that is at the base of Freud's energetic and and sexuality uh that he wants to account for these contingencies uh by uh by you know by not by changing the principle or modulating it uh as john was talking about with regard to the brain not by modulating or or explicating it or compartmentalizing it, but by overextending the principle. It's just like that you have the metaphor
of carpet runners. So there are 10 people that need to be accounted for, right, as sitting on a rug. Well, you can't account 10 people on a small rock. So then you have to overextend the rock that is beneath their feet, right? To account for them being on the rock. That's exactly what Freud is trying to do. Essentially, he's overgeneralizing the materialistic substrate in order to account for the contingencies, which is the pancrastonic idea of materialism,
rather than going to different route and do the platonic work of cutting at the joints, attributing to each contingency or a specificity its own compartment of nature. what is this sorry again you know it seems that also uh uh again the the principle of another thing that is wrong with
the principle of neural inertia as the core of this whole idea of anxiety depression and so on and so forth is that it is really not has nothing to do with the biological side of psychophysics or biophysics which freud used to purport psychoanalysis is being erected on but rather it is more in a more kind of straightforward way has everything to do with physics physical systems proper physical systems proper now being overextended in their capacity as being a model the realm of biology
and by extension psychology thoughts before i move to number four if that is so how do you explain your claim that psychoanalysis was invented on the continuum between biology and physics. That was the, at least, what was the portrayal that we were getting on paper. But now that we are actually looking at the paper, it seems that, hmm, on paper it sounds good,
but at least in ways being theorized, it doesn't pan out. Right? As I said, to me, still, just like the one that I mentioned, in principle, it should be done. But when we say in principle, most probably it requires a lot of tweaking in models and other sorts of stuff. When we say in principle, we are essentially trying to kind of weasel away and saying that we are postponing it indefinitely. we are we are fine with this thesis as a hypothesis in the scope of sciences and yes psychoanalysis is a scientific method at least in freudian sense
and if it is it should be in the gradient of the entire you know scientific models and scientific methodologies of exact science natural science and so on so forth uh but in principle uh that's the case we don't have uh you know models to actually uh substantiate concretely the claim and theorize about it and that's i think that is even though these are the flaws of freud I think that nevertheless the fact that he's going to that extent. And creating this sort of speculative hypotheses.
To create this kind of continuum is quite actually commendable. But then the more you look at it, maybe. the fact that it is commendable is also a curse that it doesn't actually allow us to think about the question very differently we kind of get ensnared by the appeal of it and stop really asking questions that were its blind spots, you know, what is actually
missing here and do we really need to have a speculative hypothesis of such degrees, the metobiologies to create, account for psychology as a scientific discipline. So number four, which is no less speculative than the physiology of quantity or Q, is Freud's systems of neurons or basically neuroanatomy that Freud designated by the Greek letter phi psi and omega or collectively phi psi omega systems
where as I mentioned psi roughly refers to psyche or processes of thoughts and retention of thoughts while phi and omega refer to transient processes of sensation and perception. The psi cells were thought to be impermeable and the others permeable to passage of energy. Freud at this point says about this conjecture, However, we should not have invented the two classes, phi and psi, we should have found them already in existence. It still remains to identify them with something known to us. In fact, we know from anatomy a system of neurons, the gray matter of the spinal cord, which is alone in contact with the external world, and a superimposed system, the gray matter of the brain,
has no peripheral connections, but to which the development of the nervous system and the physical functions are attached. Here is the first possibility of testing our theory upon factual material. Of course, the last sentence is quite, if not wrong, at least very imprecise. The gray matter of the brain is, in fact, connected to the outside world through the synoptic relays from the periphery to the center. So in a sense, Freud, what you might call to be physiological or physical, biological psychology
comes in two shapes. One is grounded in the traditional neurophysiology of the day, as we talked about in third session, and two, is own a speculative system, which is detailed in the project, the project of scientific psychology. Now the problem with Phi Psi Omega, even in the sense of, you know, neuro, neuroanatomical
and neurophysiological findings of his time, it bears little to no resemblance to neurophysiological models, again, of his time. Freud, in a sense, really kind of mixes fictitious speculative neural systems and psychological processes to kind of you know fulfill the promise of a psychology as a natural science ultimately in this course of events in this kind of adventure he ends up in a mechanistic
contradiction or a mechanistic construction that is loaded with contradictions that at the same time you know tries to be dynamic yet is undergirded on certain sort of static you know architecture it wants to be personalist and voluntaristic but also being you know causally deterministic in a hard sense and so on so forth another things that needs to be also talked about about that precisely because I mentioned it in, you know, in length last session is a
question of memory and its relation is sort of, you know, hydraulic model and Phi Psi Omega systems. It should be said that during Freud's time, neuroscientists in general had a considerable understanding of neural basis of visual and auditory perception. neural basis of memory uh was you know kind of in the uh in the dark and it still is in the dark uh
to a great you know extent his hypothesis uh what he actually offers in this sort of uh psychophysical biological hypothesis is that he offers a physiological hypothesis to account for perceptual cells which act as receptors for kind of successive ways of you know So essentially, estimulations and how basically these estimulations or their traces are being
deleted. And then there are memory cells, which according to Freud can remain permanently altered since their job is to restore memories you know according uh lee uh his theory requires that perception should be mediated by preamble fine neurons that allow for quick passage of intercellular energy quanta that's at q eta while memory is mediated by impermeable side neurons in freud's words loaded with resistance and holding back q at a quantities quantas being vehicles of memory and so probably of
psychical processes in general now of course freud becomes extremely uh disturbed by even this sort of formulation about memory and this sort of hypothesis within which uh you know memories uh are being you know uh approached their deletion their traces their alteration so on and so forth um it seems uh that agrees that The Phi Psi Omega system can only offer an ad hoc explanation of neural basis of memories.
But for some reason is convinced that is, you know, something worthwhile, you know, to work with. given the lack of evidence. But as we have seen, as I discussed particularly last session, given the importance of concept of memory and its neural basis, the model of its neural basis, in Freud's later work with regard to particularly as we are going to talk about development of sexual functions. Talk of saying that well this model is good because we lack other sorts of evidences is not convincing anymore.
it just gives that gives the impression that as if freud uh is making a house of cards uh where we're wearing uh you know as i have always my my favorite metaphor is that the house of cards is not something that is shaky actually as usually in common sense being perceived a house of cards is that you introduce certain sort of axioms into a system and then just like cards at the base of the house of cards when you stack a tower of cards precisely because of friction principles the entanglement principles these cards that are at the foundation the axioms of the system create a certain sort of foundation that the more you put on things on top of the foundations
things look more robust more strong rather than shaky but it's not supposed to be and this is exactly with freud that it seems that he kind of like forgets about the shakiness of his axioms until it is too late that he takes the the top of the tower as completely solid. So,
yeah i mean uh and again the idea that he other than problem of quantity and you know this whole idea of hydraulic model and and five to psi omega system. And there is also the problem of quality in Freud's model. And the problem of quality, as we said, that the problem of quality is closely tied to the problem of consciousness. And Freud famously stated that the core problem
uh is like this that every psychological theory from the point of view of national science must fulfill yet another requirement it should explain what we are available in the most puzzling fashion through our consciousness since this consciousness knows nothing of what we have so far been assuming namely quantities and neurons this is actually a good one uh but then it brings back to that idea that you know uh that's that's essentially by psychology or psychoanalysis having its own mental vocabularies, even though
there are supposed to be counterparts or distant synonyms or translations of neural or physiobiological uh sort of lexicons uh it seems that in so far as we are merely working through those sort of uh mental counterparts uh um we can never know for sure as i said we can never for sure but by the virtue of his station we shall never know the how brain actually is being bridged to you know conscious mental activities because everything that we are going to do
at least in the realm of psychoanalysis at least i'm not going to for now expand into other the soul and stuff at least in the realm of psychoanalysis it seems that consciousness is another word for being unconscious of the brain as the constitutive element of the psychology of mind or consciousness as if it couldn't be twisted enough So.
And of course, you know. So it seems that Freud, again, to a good extent, he thinks that qualities can only originate in perception. He doesn't actually think that precisely
He thinks that perception and memories are two different things. He actually totally separates them from one another. He thinks that qualities cannot actually originate from memories. Qualities originate essentially in perception. reproducing and remembering is without quality according to Freud. Remembering brings out normally nothing that has the peculiar quality of perceptual quality. Now this is of course quite false. As a distinct function memory is not perception but it can most certainly range over
over remembrances which are dim to most vivid, you know, give them a certain sort of quality, fuzzy quality, which is specific to the qualities of perception, you know, how, you know, kind of Kantian sense, you know, things being produced and reproduced and resynthesized. And this is the thing is that the distinction between the source of quantity and quality in Freud, another thing which is part of his materialist model, even though it tries to
say that it is not, but it's quite black and white, particularly when it comes to qualities that something is either quality or not quality but we have do such things in fact as freud himself shows in you know episodes of uh you know uh regression and uh through the course of psychotherapy there are such a thing as fuzzy qualities that are neither here fully perceptual nor fully quantitative they are nearly and they are always nearly and closely almost you have to describe it in terms of adverbs nearly closely because of their fuzzy nature
precisely because they are not coming from perception uh as such uh they're not originating from perception as such but rather uh how perception and memory are being entangled uh so that is the criticism on um some of at least some of the criticisms on uh the thing is uh the energetic model now let's talk about a little bit about sexual uh functions and then we have to pick it up next session uh you know um i want to say that the best introduction i'm going to read it
through freud's own words just parts of it uh so as i mentioned sexual functions and libido they are qualitative right but also endogenous for it says that the sexual function as i found is in existence from the very beginning of the individual's life. Though at first it is attached to the other vital functions and does not become independent of them until later, it has to pass through a long and complicated process of development before it becomes what we are familiar with as the normal sexual life of the adult.
It begins by manifesting itself in the activity of a whole number of component instincts, These are dependent upon erotogenic zones in the body. Some of them make their appearance in the pairs of opposite impulses such as sadism and masochism, where the impulse is to look and be looked at, or for example, swallowing and vomiting, excretion and absorption, so on and so forth. Now, It is really important here that why sexual function, theory of sexual development and sexual functioning,
is important for it. Precisely because it plugs the energetic model into the interpersonalist developmental dimensions of the psyche. Developmental in two sense. One, the natural evolution of human, right, from the moment of birth to adulthood, and also developmental in the sense of more expansive social and parental development. and to him this is where basically feels his theory being vindicated fulfilled because this
is also the moment where psychoanalysis actually becomes irrelevant right that you can create a theory of development and then see pathologies as regressive trajectories within this development or post-development right this is you see he said that the the is actually quite interesting that he says that that it's a long and complicated process. And then there is another part where, again,
in this introduction, he uses the same word that he has been using it for the beyond pleasure principle, the umwegen, is it called the circuitous paths, the maze of organic life through this very complicated process. ultimately shatters, you know, at the edge of the Nirvana principle. The same thing, he actually describes the same word, he uses it, Sir Christian's Paths, to describe development of sexual functions and sexual identity. Why is that?
because as i mentioned development here even though in the parental sense represent unity with the world unity with the world is at the core of dissolution of the self and ego so regardless of things unfolding toward you know sexual energy eros or sexual energies degrading into death we are talking always about circuitous paths
and processes he then continues yeah they operate so those erogenic zone erotogenic zones they operate independently of one another in search of search for pleasure and they find their object for the most part in the subject's own body thus at first the sexual function is non-centralized and predominantly autoerotic later syntheses begin to appear in it the first stage of organization is reached under the dominance of the oral components and anal sadistic stage follows and it is only after the third stage
has at last been reached that the primacy of the genitals is established and that the sexual functions begin to serve the ends of reproduction and of course there is a fourth latency stage that i will talk about next session in the course of this process of development a number of elements of the various component instincts turn out to be unserviceable for the last end and are therefore left on one side or turned to other uses while others are diverted from their aims and carried over into genital organization i gave the name of libido to the energy of sexual instincts and to that form of energy alone as opposed to jung and other people i i was next
driven to suppose that libido does not always pass through its prescribed course of development smoothly that's actually an important observation as a result either of the successive strength of certain of certain of the components or of experiences involving premature satisfaction namely fixations of the libido may occur at various points in the course of its development If subsequently a repression takes place, the libido flows back to these points, a process described as regression, and it is from them that the energy breaks through in the form of a symptom.
Later on, it further became clear that the localization of the point of fixation is what determines the choice of neurosis, those contingencies that we were talking about. about and hence the classification of various forms of fixations which basically the only uh classificatory uh factor for them are the developmental stage of sexual functions oral anal latent genital and so on so forth so forth the process of uh yes he says that the process of arriving at an object which plays such an important part in
mental life takes place alongside of the organization of libido after the stage of autoerotism the first love object in the case of both sexes is the mother and it seems probable that to begin with a child does not distinguish its mother's organs of nutrition from its own body later but still in the first years of infancy the relation known as the oedipus complex becomes established boys concentrate their sexual wishes upon their mother and develop hostile impulses against their father as being a rival while girls adopt an analogous attitude all of the different variations and consequences of the oedipus complex are important
and the innately bisexual constitution of human beings makes itself felt and increases the number of simultaneously active tendencies children do not become clear for quite a long time about the differences between the sexes and during this period of sexual researches they produce typical sexual theories which being circumscribed by the incompleteness of their author's own physical development as a mixture of truth and error and fail to resolve the problem of sexual life the riddle of the sphinx that is the question of where babies come from
so So essentially, what is the source of repression and neurosis and Oedipus complex? It is the incompleteness of the map by way of which ego can construct its sexual identity. Because of the incompleteness nature, incomplete nature of this map, it can, you know,
It can assume different sorts of constructions, all being escalated, encouraged, and fortified by disturbances in intense feelings or the weakening of feelings to kind of like, kind of what Freud calls pathologies
of sexual, adult sexuality. So they're all coming back to this idea that precisely because the map is not complete, the identity is not a given sexual identity, but it's something that is being constructed in tandem with the fact that there are, during this developmental phase, certain feelings can be insufficient or certain feelings and attentions can be overpowering. it creates, inevitably, it creates a kind of, the incomplete map becomes a distorted map.
And the distorted map is the history of mankind, of all human beings. The fact that Freud, as I mentioned, had this idea that man by that man i mean human beings uh human beings have been born with a disease that disease is noroxys and edipus complex this is inevitable uh that was a main separation from a kind of point of separation from Carl Abrams, who was the best pupil of Freud,
because Abrams believed that, no, that there is a distinction between ill and non-ill person when it comes to these sorts of, you know, territories. But Freud believed that man, human being, is diseased in this specific sense, that that psychoanalysis begins with the point the of the inevitability of the disease so okay 10 minutes poor uh ikoro has to go 10 minutes questions or thoughts anything
yes if anyone doesn't have a question more specific to what you're talking about uh i should have asked this we're not talking about forensic like but sure go on just thought like if you think that that there's a maybe there is an interesting link between like his drive theory and niche and you know wheel of power and that sort of stuff yes of course i I mean, as I mentioned early on that, yes, absolutely,
will and representings are tightly associated with drives. And it's not actually the source of it. You don't even need to go as far as Nietzsche. But as I said, early on in natural philosophy culminating in certain vitalist, anti-vitalist, pessimist philosophies of Schopenhauer and Eduardo von Hartmann and so on and so forth. Yes, will and representing, yes. This is why I highly suggest, I can't suggest it
sufficiently i haven't uh the the chapter on will in philosophy of the unconscious there is another book i have forgotten about it it's about nietzsche and the unconscious i've forgotten that i i tried to find it that's also a good one that talks about these another book that i can actually suggest is uh um what is that uh title uh god uh let me check
life against death by norman brown Reza, I've got something I've just been thinking about. Sure. This is super incendiary, and I'd be curious to hear like a Freudian response to it. But I'm interested in your view then, like people like the Slovene School or someone like Adrian Johnston, um they smuggle in this uh uh confusing the explicandum for an explanation and like
there's this way of um hamstringing hegel to freud or lacan where it's just it just continues this endless postponement of explain like it it mechanizes explanations the formulation i came to like you're actually mechanizing explanation by not um having any sort of methodological purpose on purchase on this relation between the mind and the brain um i would say that this is a great uh deal it comes from lacan but then plugging hegel to local by way of brood absolutely that's that's a very great phrase i might actually steal it of course i will cite it
mechanization of explanation by way of by way of indefinite deferral yes absolutely yes uh to the point that it almost becomes a certain sort of uh as i said a pre-creston uh as a progression appeal uh precisely because you don't need anything more that already explains everything no i mean adrian i know that he's fundamentally uh slovenian lacanian kind of uh so that's so that's i've been completely ex acceptable or expected it from adrian on these sorts of you
you know, approaches to Freud. But I wouldn't say that, of course, a kind of a staunch Freudian, and there are so many good ones, would be completely think that this is just ridiculous to, you know, inject back Lacan to Freud. Particularly now that is, you know, being loaded with good amount of Hegelianism. Arman, you want to do this? Yes, sure. A question about the incompleteness of that that you talked about.
Do you think that the epliqueness or the inevitability of neurosis has something to do with the cliche idea of taboo? Yes, of course. So if so, then what we are really talking about is a double movement. I know it's maybe again some sort of a cliche, but we first produced the idea of something to be played, for example, an animal relation that doesn't have a culture, so doesn't have the idea of mother and doesn't need the taboo of, for example, incest, ancestral taboo.
in human relations these these manifest themselves because there exists a pre-established social or cult taboo and that taboo is something is something to do with the negating of the of the animal nature that is that that is the unconscious that is the unconscious that register itself in the guise of superego, which is the greatest form of the unconscious. Sure, exactly. But my point is, or my question is, somehow, I think it's what Will just said, that you think there is, in this respect, a relation between a completeness of an animal and incompleteness
of a woman, and then the idea of the inner ribidic neurosis, and this relation, this idea of the taboo, do you think it still holds as it did back when, for example, I don't know, formally talked about or structurally talked about it? Yeah, probably so. I mean, but of course, you know, as I mean, I actually, yes, I mean, I think that they can still be, you know, hold partially, but not with that sort of, you know, explanatory valence that they had. But nevertheless, I think that they do actually. And as I said,
said, this is quite actually interesting that the development of sexual functions or sexual stages, whatever you want to call them, in Freud are two separate, sometimes asynchronic and sometimes synchronic processes development one uh what you might call to be uh has something to do with the process of neoteny right uh which is highly specific to uh at that sort of you know uh intensity is only
highly specific to homo sapiens um and the other one would be the developmental side which is what you might call to be the developmental side of sociocultural parental dimension in general. The only thing is that during this phase that Freud is explaining theory of sexuality is actually more interested in conjunction of the neotonic development and you know development in the sense
of a sociocultural parental context but as the time passes he seems that he's more becoming more interested in the socio-cultural parental development side of things and that you can see that that his work on moses and uh civilization and uh its discontents uh arise where basically the idea of totem becomes uh extremely you know uh important then but yes i i just generally don't know i have forgotten how much the emphasis and in what capacity a structuralists were putting on the idea of totems and taboos and this sort of stuff
and how much you know So it's actually can be matched onto Freud's idea about these sorts of topics. But yes, absolutely. I think that the idea of taboo is absolutely fundamental to Freud's theory of sexuality. yes I do think that uh it can a good part of it not a good part of it but yeah a good part of it still holds but we should also be uh you know uh cognizant of the fact that uh taboos require actually a certain sort of uh
uh minimal uh semblance of ego so there are a good years of this development of sexual uh you know functions which are not actually being covered uh by ego they are uh proto-ego you know For example, a few months, months, year old to like a year old, two years old. At that point, still, we are not really talking about ego because for ego, and a more advanced sexual stage of sexual development, taboos become a big deal.
But before that phase of development of ego, taboos are not actually a big deal, because you are still in that sort of kind of union with the external world. you know the ego hasn't is in the lower world stage they cannot see taboos as as kind of switches between for example uh you know arts and art knots they're quite automatic mechanical even in the earliest stages freud actually does uh talk about you know for example in terms of breastfeeding and stuff,
we are not talking about taboos anymore. We are talking about weaknesses or overpowering of satisfactions. And later on, these weakenings or overpowering or over strengthening of this satisfaction and needs, they take the shape of taboos. They usually come in terms of rewards and punishments, disproportionate, in fact, rewards and punishments. Let's go.
I think that, guys, unfortunately, we have to wrap it up. Yes. Please keep your questions for the next session. So next session, we are going to do, I'm going to go through this sort of sexual functions and stuff, Oedipus complex particularly, and in that sense, also the stories of child abuse by way of frenzy and Rank's idea of trauma of birth. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day and have a great weekend. Thank you. Bye bye.