After defending the relevance to Civilization and Its Discontents of his discussions of guilt therein, Freud turns to talking about “the quite peculiar relationship—as yet completely unexplained—which the sense of guilt [Schuldgefühls] has to our consciousness [Bewußtsein].”33 (He already had been struggling to explain this for quite some time.) He says:
In the common case of remorse, which we regard as normal, this feeling makes itself clearly enough perceptible to consciousness. Indeed, we are accustomed to speak of a “consciousness of guilt” [Schuldbewußtsein] instead of a “sense of guilt” [Schuldgefühl]. Our study of the neuroses, to which, after all, we owe the most valuable pointers to an understanding of normal conditions, brings us up against some contradictions. In one of those affections, obsessional neurosis, the sense of guilt makes itself noisily heard in consciousness; it dominates the clinical picture and the patient’s life as well, and it hardly allows anything else to appear alongside of it. But in most other cases and forms of neurosis it remains completely unconscious, without on that account producing any less important effects. Our patients do not believe us when we attribute an “unconscious sense of guilt” [unbewußtes Schuldgefühl] to them. In order to make ourselves at all intelligible to them, we tell them of an unconscious need for punishment, in which the sense of guilt finds expression. But its connection with a particular form of neurosis must not be over-estimated. Even in obsessional neurosis there are types of patients who are not aware of their sense of guilt, or who only feel it as a tormenting uneasiness, a kind of anxiety, if they are prevented from carrying out certain actions. It ought to be possible eventually to understand these things; but as yet we cannot.34
Arguably, “remorse” refers to the intuitive, quotidian notion of guilt as a feeling of the negative affects associated with culpability while, simultaneously, being conscious of a cause or reason for feeling like this; in Freudian parlance, this would amount to conscious components of the ego knowingly being affected by conscious components of the superego. In many instances of obsessional neurosis, as Freud describes it, there are prominent conscious guilty feelings minus an awareness of an appropriate cause or reason for these feelings; in these cases, the conscious parts of the ego are affected by largely unconscious aspects and operations of the superego. (Freud uses obsessional neurosis, insofar as certain obsessional neurotics feel guilty without knowing why, to rule out the hypothesis “that a sense of guilt arising from remorse for an evil deed must [müßte] always be conscious, whereas a sense of guilt arising from an evil impulse may [könnte] remain unconscious”;35 such obsessional neurotics, instead of harboring an unconscious sense of guilt for their aggressive or libidinal inclinations, are acutely conscious of guilty feelings, feelings generated behind the scenes available to the inward gaze of the ego by the superego’s consciously inaudible condemnations of id-level “repressed impulses.”)36 What’s more, whereas in “The Economic Problem of Masochism” Freud indicates that his analysands’ inability to comprehend and accept the notion that they harbor an unconscious sense of guilt partially justifies theoretically abandoning this metapsychologically problematic notion and replacing it with the less troubling concept of a need for punishment, he here, in the passage quoted, alters his stance: talking to patients about a need for punishment is more a matter of practical clinical expediency (instead of theoretical and metapsychological accuracy), taking into consideration the unlikelihood that those on the couch could or would work with interpretations appealing to a feeling they don’t consciously feel per se. (This same alteration of stance is evident a few years later in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, where Freud once more contends that the consciously unrecognized need for punishment really is an unconscious sense of guilt and not, as indicated in 1924, vice versa.)37 Additionally, he specifies that not all obsessional neurotics consciously self-interpret their underlying guilt as guilt; some autoreflexively experience it instead as “a tormenting uneasiness, a kind of anxiety.” (This again lends support to the thesis that unconscious guilt is still felt, instead of being a paradoxical unfelt feeling; but this guilt is [mis]felt as anxiety rather than culpability strictly speaking.) Finally, Freud confesses to a sense of being in the dark immediately after once more broaching the topic of unconscious affect. (It will be argued in what follows that today’s neuroscience of the emotional brain can be of immense help here.)
Freud says further interesting things that elaborate this point in Civilization and Its Discontents. Continuing right where the previous quotation leaves off, he remarks:
Here perhaps we may be glad to have it pointed out that the sense of guilt is at bottom nothing else but a topographical variety of anxiety; in its later phases it coincides completely with fear of the super-ego [Angst vor dem Über-Ich]. And the relations of anxiety to consciousness exhibit the same extraordinary variations. Anxiety is always present somewhere or other behind every symptom; but at one time it takes noisy possession of the whole of consciousness, while at another it conceals itself so completely that we are obliged to speak of unconscious anxiety [unbewußter Angst] or, if we want to have a clearer psychological conscience, since anxiety is in the first instance simply a feeling, of possibilities of anxiety [Angstmöglichkeiten]. Consequently it is very conceivable that the sense of guilt [Schuldbewußtsein] produced by civilization is not perceived as such [nicht als solches erkannt wird] either, and remains to a large extent unconscious [großen Teil unbewußt bleibt], or appears as a sort of malaise [Unbehagen], a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations.38
It’s incorrect to claim that guilt is the only affect in relation to which Freud speculates about the possibility of unconscious affect, since Freud does connect guilt to anxiety and blurs the lines of demarcation between these closely related states. (In general, demarcating precise, black-and-white categorical borders between affects is rightly quite hard given the hazy, fluid nature of the phenomena in question.) Anxiety, another affect of enormous significance in psychoanalysis, turns out to be relevant to this issue too. Guilt itself is said to be “a topographical variety of anxiety” (i.e., in relation to the second topography of id, ego, and superego, an anxiety specific to the ego vis-à-vis the superego). Freud is “glad” to be able to link guilt to anxiety because it allows him to mobilize his extensively elaborated metapsychological accounts of anxiety as means for resolving the difficulties presented by invocations of an unconscious sense of guilt. Anxiety, Freud here maintains, is a common feature of all of the psychoneuroses (a few pages later in Civilization and Its Discontents, guilt is likewise claimed to be a factor in every neurosis).39 He proceeds to distinguish between felt and unfelt anxiety, only again to repudiate, in the name of “a clearer psychological conscience” for which anxiety, as a feeling, must be (consciously) felt,40 the latter category (i.e., unfelt anxiety). It’s as though he’s compelled to play a conflicted game of fort-da with the theoretical object called “unconscious affect.”
With yet another quick oscillation back in the other direction of speculation, Freud then goes on to distinguish between degrees of unconsciousness as regards guilt, a range including the possibility of it being a misfelt feeling not felt “as such,” but instead registered through distorting misperceptions as anxious unease (“malaise,” “dissatisfaction,” and so on.). Freud certainly doesn’t seem to feel comfortable with the topic of unconscious affect, apparently being able neither to accept this quasi concept nor simply to abandon it (as the cliché one-liner has it, he can’t live with it, can’t live without it). Another striking illustration of his conflicting (and conflicted) vacillations apropos this topic can be found in The Ego and the Id, wherein, at one point, he defines “the sense of guilt” (Schuldgefühl) as “the perception in the ego answering to” the criticisms voiced by the superego.41 (Since it is, by definition, perceived by the ego, guilt cannot be unconscious; yet, as has been shown, Freud repeatedly appeals to an unconscious sense of guilt elsewhere in The Ego and the Id,
even declaring therein that, “a great part of the sense of guilt must normally remain unconscious” [ein großes Stück des Schuldgefühls normalerweise unbewußt sein müsse].)42 In the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), his ambivalence emerges clearly when he laments, referring to the need for punishment, “If only the words went together better, we should be justified for all practical purposes in calling it an ‘unconscious sense of guilt’” (Würden die Worte nur besser zusammenpassen, so wäre es für alle praktischen Belange nur gerechtfertigt, es ‘unbewußtes Schuldgefühl’ zu heißen).43 Freud never manages to reach a point where he feels that these words can be understood in a sense by virtue of which they sit side by side in a metapsychologically coherent manner. This unresolved difficulty in Freud’s corpus, as with so many matters in psychoanalysis, can and should be put to work, in good dialectical fashion, as a productive impasse, as a lingering mystery calling for additional exploration. Such an exploration, which I will undertake now, promises to divulge a number of interesting insights and implications not only for psychoanalysis, but also for theoretical and practical philosophy.
10.
AFFECTS, EMOTIONS, AND FEELINGS
FREUD’S METAPSYCHOLOGIES OF AFFECTIVE LIFE
The Freudian metapsychology of affects (or, more accurately, metapsychologies of affects) is complex in the strict Freudian sense,1 namely, a dense, tangled knot of a plethora of axioms, concepts, theses, and so on that branch out in all directions and that are ramified from numerous angles in relation to the entire framework of psychoanalysis. In other words, Freud’s treatment of affects is far from being a “simple” account capable of being addressed as a self-sufficient whole independent of the rest of his evolving metapsychological apparatus. Insofar as Freud’s theories regarding affects are complex or nonsimple in this way, my handling of them cannot claim to be exhaustive. Similarly, due to limits of time and space, many of the points of overlap between Freud’s metapsychologies of affects and other facets of his wider metapsychological scaffolding must be left to the side here.
At least in the worlds of Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, the first and foremost feature of the Freudian doctrine of affects is the distinction between, as Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis put it in their influential psychoanalytic dictionary, “affect” (Affekt) and “idea” (Vorstellung).2 This distinction closely parallels the broader fundamental dichotomy between energy and structure, a dichotomy running through the entire span of Freud’s writings from start to finish, so starkly visible in the Project for a Scientific Psychology (which was composed in 1895, and which is a foundational text for everything that ensues in Freudian metapsychology) in the form of the difference between the structural system of neurons and the energetic quantities of excitation (Q) flowing through this same system.3 And, a roughly contemporaneous text, the essay “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense” (1894), explicitly articulates a conception of affect along these precise metapsychological lines. Therein, Freud states: “If someone with a disposition [to neurosis] lacks the aptitude for conversion, but if, nevertheless, in order to fend off an incompatible idea [Vorstellung], he sets about separating it from its affect [Affekt], then that affect is obliged to remain in the psychical sphere. The idea, now weakened, is still left in consciousness, separated from all association. But its affect, which has become free, attaches itself to other ideas which are not in themselves incompatible; and, thanks to this ‘false connection, ’ those ideas turn into obsessional ideas.”4
By “conversion,” Freud means a “sum of excitation being transformed into something somatic”5 (à la the conversion symptoms of somatizing hysterical subjects)—that is to say, a channeling of the quota of affective charge emanating from a defended-against Vorstellung (as a memory, idea, and so on) into the defiles of the body as a fleshly medium of expressive discharge.6 It is important to note that the affect thus converted is still felt, albeit (mis)felt, in hysteria’s conversion symptoms as unpleasant physical feelings, rather than as a particular affective feeling-state that is a specifically psychical phenomenon (the inseparability of feeling-states from corresponding, associated somatic sensations might explain what makes conversion in this sense a feasible possibility, facilitating the converting transfer). Whereas hysterics can and do employ the option of conversion, obsessionals handle (or, really, awkwardly mishandle) threatening affects by detaching them from their accompanying ideational representations, by removing feeling from these charged Vorstellungen. But, as Lacan, following this Freudian trajectory, later puts it, “The affect … goes off somewhere else, as best it can.”7 In obsessional neurosis, the withdrawn affect becomes the proverbial lump in the carpet woven of the psyche’s interconnected ideational threads (as concepts, symbols, words, and so on—namely, as thoughts). And, this lump is displaced along lines of association between Vorstellungen, remaining in the sphere of conscious cognizance by being (re)attached to thoughts distant from but still associated with (however loose this associative link might be) the, so to speak, deaffected thought(s) at issue. The original coupling of idea and affect subjected to the defense mechanisms of obsessional neurosis would be a “true connection,” whereas the obsessive trains of thought powered by quotas of defensively displaced negative affect are enabled partly by the free-associative logic of primary-process-style mentation, a logic resulting in what Freud identifies as “false connections” (the already-discussed vicissitudes of guilt in obsessional neurosis in particular provide many examples of “free” affect becoming entangled in such false connections).
A metapsychological ambiguity lurks in the background of this differential diagnosis from 1894 that bears upon the fate of affect in hysteria and obsessional neurosis. On the one hand, the contrast between hysterical conversions and obsessional ideas implies that affect becomes nonconscious in the former case while remaining conscious in the latter. On the other hand, insofar as hysterics with conversion symptoms are acutely conscious of their senses of pain and suffering (as somatically converted negative affect), they too, like obsessionals anxiously haunted by compulsively recurring insistent thoughts, remain conscious of being affected by something (i.e., by affect as that which affects). These hysterics still feel their feelings, although, again, not as the affective states that they are per se, but instead as physical sensations typically associated with these affective states minus what would be, in a typical “nonpathological” instance of (self-)consciously feeling these affects or feelings, the accompanying conceptual-linguistic mediating interpreters parsing them so as to make a given feeling feel like what it is as such. Invoking the notion of the misfeeling of feeling enables this metapsychological ambiguity to be resolved.
Also in the second section of “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense,” Freud extends the implications of his reflections on the affect-idea rapport to speculations regarding the nature of the unconscious in general. He rightly emphasizes that the highly charged neurotic symptoms he’s been describing in this essay testify to extremely subtle and intricate mental maneuvers transpiring in the service of managing unpleasant affects without the supervisory oversight of reflexive, self-aware consciousness: “The separation of the sexual idea from its affect and the attachment of the latter to another, suitable but not incompatible idea—these are processes which occur without consciousness. Their existence can only be presumed, but cannot be proved by any clinico-psychological analysis.… Perhaps it would be more correct to say that these processes are not of a psychical nature at all, that they are physical processes whose psychical consequences present themselves as if what is expressed by the terms ‘separation of the idea from its affect’ and ‘false connection’ of the latter had really taken place.”8 Apart from underscoring the crucial difference between the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious and the superficially similar pre- or nonpsychoanalytic versions of this notion—the former is much more than a rudimentary deep, dark reservoir of simple energetic urges of a primitive, animalistic sort—this passa
ge ventures the tentative hypothesis that physiological mechanisms may be responsible for (or, at least, involved in) the elaborate regulatory regime governing the psyche’s far-from-straightforward, hardly self-evident affective life. This is one of those occasions when Freud finds himself, as he openly acknowledges elsewhere,9 awaiting potential future confirmations and explanations of clinical analytic observations through the life sciences. As I will argue at length later (in the next two chapters), this Freudian future is now.
Whereas, in 1894, Freud seems to waver slightly apropos the question of whether or not affects can become unconscious in the process of being submitted to the manipulations of psychoneurotic defenses, in 1915 he appears to be unambiguously categorical: affects cannot be unconscious. Such is the standard reading of the third section of the metapsychological paper devoted to the topic of “The Unconscious.” However, although there is indeed some support in Freud’s text for this widely accepted reading, such an interpretation grossly oversimplifies matters, indefensibly neglecting various highly pertinent conceptual and terminological details contained within this piece of writing. So as not to miss these details and their upshots, close attention must be paid to what Freud actually says, namely, to the precise letter of his text.
At the end of the first paragraph of this section on “Unconscious Emotions,” Freud wonders, “We have said that there are conscious and unconscious ideas [bewußte und unbewußte Vorstellungen]; but are there also unconscious instinctual impulses, emotions and feelings [unbewußte Triebregungen, Gefühle, Empfindungen], or is it in this instance meaningless to form combinations of the kind?”10 In terms of the fundamental energy-structure dichotomy situated at the base of his entire metapsychology as a whole, Freud is asking himself whether energetic or qualitative aspects of psychical life (i.e., “unconscious instinctual impulses, emotions and feelings [unbewußte Triebregungen, Gefühle, Empfindungen]”) can be rendered unconscious, as happens with structured and structuring ideational representations (i.e., “conscious and unconscious ideas [bewußte und unbewußte Vorstellungen]”). The latter, according to the contemporaneous metapsychological paper on “Repression,” become unconscious by virtue of being submitted to the defensive action of repression (Verdrängung).11 In other words, repression acts upon mental contents such as mnemic traces and conceptual-linguistic formations, rendering these contents inaccessible to voluntary or spontaneous processes of consciousness. But, Freud inquires, can more “energetic” phenomena also lie below the threshold of explicit self-awareness in a repressed state?
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