Self and Emotional Life

by Adrian Johnston

  Soon after comparing beauty and shame as parallel defensive “functions”—both serve in protective capacities relative to painful facts40—Lacan asks, “Do the fantasm of the phallus and the beauty of the human image find their legitimate place at the same level?”41 Arguably, this is a rhetorical question, the answer to which is “Yes.” Why? For Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, sex and death are mutually entangled in multiple manners. In connection with this, the aesthetics of phallic sexuality require repressing from view, through the artful manipulation of veils of various sorts, an underbelly of time-ravaged, putrescent flesh spitting out spluttering trickles of smelly discharges. Even when two sexual partners face each other in their apparent nakedness, a nakedness which really isn’t so naked thanks to the interplay of fantasmatic projections between them,42 each must unknowingly coat both bodies there in layers of fantasies making possible the effect or affect of sexiness. The masquerades of such fantasy-supported sexuality wrap titillating films of spectral images and meanings around a repulsively rotten core of senseless filth, of idiotic, pointless enjoyment driven along by the raw facticity of a sexuality coupled with mortality.43 In later seminars, Lacan indeed speaks of pudeur vis-à-vis the anxieties and horrors of the faceless Real of death-tinged sexuality.44

  If Lacanian pudeur (over and above honte qua Empfindung, the felt feeling of shame as embarrassment, humiliation, and so on) is qualified as something affective, then the truly subtle dimensions of Lacan’s underdeveloped, largely tacit metapsychology of affect present a much more intricate picture than is commonly assumed by the majority of his readers. In other words, this would mean that Lacan doesn’t simply and flatly deny categorically the existence of anything affective at unconscious levels; in this hypothetical instance, he wouldn’t reduce affective phenomena to the status of residual, epiphenomenal conscious by-products of unconscious formations solely comprising nonaffective structures of pure signifiers. Again, if pudeur is affective, then the Lacanian unconscious is not without affect. But, this remains quite vague insofar as it raises a series of yet-to-be-answered questions, questions Lacan himself doesn’t explicitly address: Is the distinction between honte and pudeur to be lined up in a way that corresponds to the distinction between actual and potential affects, respectively? Can honte or pudeur be misfelt, that is, consciously registered and reflexively interpreted as affective hues other than themselves? Similarly but differently, can honte or pudeur be enlisted in intra-affective defensive maneuvers in which one consciously feels ashamed or modest so as to avoid feeling other possible feelings instead, in which case these defended-against other (potential) feelings would be, in a certain sense, unconscious? The most effective and productive way to handle these difficulties bequeathed to contemporary thought by Freud and Lacan is to interface their metapsychologies with the neurosciences.

  Some of Žižek’s recent work constructs a very useful and unconventional bridge between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and neuroscientific accounts of emotional life and affective selfhood or subjectivity. Interestingly, there is evidence that Žižek admits the existence of unconscious affects, a controversial admission in psychoanalysis generally and Lacanianism especially. On at least one occasion, he speaks of guilt, in faithful Freudian fashion, as “ultimately unconscious.”45 In this context, he even indicates two modes in which guilt can be unconscious: (1) “the subject is unaware of his or her guilt” (i.e., an unfelt feeling), and (2) “he or she, while experiencing the pressure of guilt, is unaware of what he or she is guilty of” (i.e., an enigmatic, free-floating feeling).46 The latter mode arguably also could be (or morph into) a misfelt feeling: in the absence of an explicit cognizance of culpability apropos a misdeed relative to a certain rule, the feeling that might otherwise be self-interpretively felt as guilt is consciously registered as some other affective tonality (such as anxiety, nervousness, vague discomfort, or even physical illness).

  Žižek’s book The Parallax View (published in 2006) contains detailed engagements with the sciences of the brain. Among other figures in this set of disciplines, he turns his attention to Damasio in particular, specifically the latter’s neuroscience-based theories of emotional matters elaborated primarily in the book The Feeling of What Happens (published in 1999). Before turning to what Žižek has to say regarding Damasio, a few introductory remarks obviously should be made about the ideas and positions of the latter. To begin with, Damasio is generally sympathetic to psychoanalysis and particularly sympathetic to the neuro-psychoanalytic movement in Anglo-American clinical analytic circles; for instance, he sits on the Neuroscience Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Neuro-Psychoanalysis, of which Solms is one of the founding editors.47 Damasio (and, in fact, neuroscience as a whole) fundamentally accepts an unconscious along the lines of that described by analytic metapsychology.48 What’s more, whereas the notion of unconscious affect remains controversial in certain sectors of psychoanalysis—for many Lacanians, the phrase “unconscious affect” is oxymoronic—Damasio (and, as will be seen, many of his fellow researchers investigating the emotional brain) posits the reality of affective phenomena below the threshold of self-awareness.49 Like Freud, he even acknowledges the ostensibly unavoidable awkwardness of proposing that there are feelings that aren’t felt as such: “Someone may suggest that perhaps we should have another word for ‘feelings that are not conscious,’ but there isn’t one.”50

  In the three shadows cast by Freud, Lacan, and Žižek, the current discussion, with its selective focus, will be limited to touching upon Damasio’s fashion of distinguishing between “emotions” and “feelings” (as well as between nonconscious and conscious feelings). Properly understanding this Damasian distinction requires initially noting that Damasio insists, as I’ve done here too, on the essentially mediated nature of human beings’ affective lives, on the ineliminable modulation (even constitution) of passions and sentiments by intellectual, linguistic, and representational configurations.51 To put it in the language of the neuroscience trinity of cognition, emotion, and motivation, the emotional brain cannot be separated from the cognitive brain52 (not to mention the motivational brain, whose facets also are of great importance to psychoanalysis, with its reliance on a theory of drives).

  For Damasio, emotions are, by his definition, nonconscious phenomena, rather than, as in quotidian parlance, felt feelings. To be more precise, Damasian emotions are physiological processes visible to third-party observers; feelings, by contrast, are private, first-person phenomena.53 He thus aligns emotions with the publicly accessible body and feelings with the publicly inaccessible mind.54 However, Damasio is far from resting content with an indefensibly simplistic opposition between a nonconscious body of physiological emotions and a conscious mind of psychological feelings. This becomes clear in Damasio’s delineation of a three-stage diachronic sequence running from nonconscious emotions to potential and actual conscious feelings (with emotions having temporal priority over feelings):55 “I separate three stages of processing along a continuum: a state of emotion, which can be triggered and executed nonconsciously; a state of feeling, which can be represented nonconsciously; and a state of feeling made conscious, i.e., known to the organism having both emotion and feeling.”56

  The second of these three stages is where Damasio is perhaps at his most psychoanalytic. On his account, the human brain is a compulsive, reflexive self-modeler, constantly generating map-like depictions of the states of the subject’s body, its world of objects, and the ongoing interactions between these two enmeshed poles (with consciousness being an outgrowth of these self-mapping dynamics).57 The conceptions and pictures thus formed can be, in Damasio’s view, either conscious or nonconscious.58 He’s entirely open about his reliance on the (originally Freudian) assertion according to which the large domain of mental life that isn’t conscious contains not only motivational energies and impulses (as per the pseudo-Freudian notion of the unconscious as the dark depths of a writhing, primordial animal id), but also cognitive images
and representations (something Lacan adamantly insists upon again and again in his “return to Freud”): “Images may be conscious or unconscious. It should be noted, however, that not all the images the brain constructs are made conscious. There are simply too many images being generated and too much competition for the relatively small window of mind in which images can be made conscious—the window, that is, in which images are accompanied by a sense that we are apprehending them and that, as a consequence, are properly attended. In other words, metaphorically speaking, there is indeed a subterranean underneath the conscious mind and there are many levels to that subterranean.”59 With the preceding details in mind, a better appreciation of the nuances and potentials of Damasio’s fine-grained distinctions concerning affective life is now possible. Damasio states: “This perspective on emotion, feeling, and knowing is unorthodox. First, I am suggesting that there is no central feeling state before the respective emotion occurs, that expression (emotion) precedes feeling. Second, I am suggesting that ‘having a feeling’ is not the same as ‘knowing a feeling,’ that reflection on feeling is yet another step up. Overall, this curious situation reminds me of E. M. Forster’s words: ‘How can I know what I think before I say it?’”60

  Emotions are “expressions” in the sense of physiological processes manifested by the body (everything from heart rates and adrenalin releases to blushing and sweating). These bodily states then are cognitively mapped, translated into images and representations. Such maps of emotions, constructed by the spontaneous self-modeling activities of a brain that “is truly the body’s captive audience,”61 would be feelings in Damasio’s parlance. However, he crucially stipulates that feelings thus defined are not automatically and necessarily conscious (i.e., consciously felt feelings, Freudian Empfindungen). As Damasio postulates, one can “have a feeling” (as a nonconscious or unconscious image or representation of an emotion qua physiological condition) without knowing it.62 (Jean-Pierre Changeux, another neuroscientist, likewise observes that “the direct experience of feeling is readily distinguished from the knowledge that one has a feeling.”)63 And, perhaps there are two modes in which this gap between having and knowing can exist: on the one hand, the feeling is unattended to by first-person consciousness (i.e., it’s an unfelt feeling), or, on the other hand, the feeling is interpreted by first-person consciousness (i.e., it’s a misfelt feeling, examples of which might include the conscious registration of varieties of affective excitation as anxiety or of guilt as physical distress). At this point, it’s tempting to establish one-to-one correspondences between the affective trinities of Freud and Damasio: Affekt (affect) is emotion (for psychoanalysis, this emotionally expressive body is already itself saturated by the denaturalizing influences of intertwined cognitive-ideational and motivational-libidinal dimensions); Gefühl (emotion) is feeling-had (which can be unconscious, as in unconscious guilt à la Freud [unbewußte Schuldgefühl]); and Empfindung (feeling) is feeling-known (which would be “feeling” in the everyday, nontechnical sense of the word).

  Damasio’s work on affective life should be of great interest for psychoanalysis, including even Lacanian theory. (Žižek once more, as in other respects too, is an admirable and rare exception, being one of the all-too-few Lacanians to address seriously the advances achieved by Damasio and the neurosciences as a whole; by contrast, Anglo-American neuro-psychoanalysis indeed has enthusiastically embraced affective neuroscience.) From a Freudian-Lacanian perspective, several features of the approach to parsing the affective phenomena selectively summarized immediately strike the eye. As in Freudian metapsychology, Damasio’s intermediary realm of feelings-had, situated in a mediating capacity between nonconscious emotions and conscious feelings-known, consists of Triebrepräsentanzen (drive representatives), namely, the psychical inscriptions both structurally articulated and energetically charged that form the coordinates of the drives’ aims (Ziele) and objects (Objekte). Along related Lacanian lines, one cannot help but think of jouis-sens, of the hybrid juxtapositions and unstable syntheses of (in Freud’s terms) soma and psyche, of something neither strictly corporeal-libidinal nor subjective-meaningful.64 Additionally, the line from Forster quoted by Damasio also elegantly encapsulates Lacan’s take on an aspect of free association in the analytic process, a take in which the analysand, as a parlêtre voicing his/her thoughts and desires, comes to figure out what he/she really thinks and wants through the verbal labor of associational expression itself (rather than a take in which free association merely helps to reveal what already was present beforehand fully formed in the repressed recesses of the speaking subject’s psyche).65

  Before turning to Žižek’s critical comments on Damasio, a quick examination of the latter’s book Looking for Spinoza, published in 2003, promises to be helpful and relevant (in part because it further clarifies arguments and concepts first delineated in The Feeling of What Happens). Damasio’s Spinozism is expressed via the assertion, taken straight from part 2 of the Ethics (especially propositions 13 and 23), that “the human mind is the idea of the human body.”66 For Damasio, an obvious extension of this, in connection with his distinction between emotions and feelings, is the proposition that “feelings … are mostly shadows of the external manner of emotions.”67 Again, emotions are “external” insofar as they are corporeal expressions made manifest as physiological phenomena potentially if not actually observable by third parties. Moreover, as indicated, they are, in and of themselves, nonconscious; they can be translated into consciously registered experiences in the guise of feelings, but they aren’t automatically and necessarily thus registered. In this vein, Damasio observes—this observation obviously dovetails with assertions central to Freudian psychoanalysis—that pleasure and pain (as emotion-level bodily events) don’t need the mediation of conscious experience to generate and guide behaviors.68 He goes on to indicate that this independence relative to consciousness is enjoyed by emotions generally.69

  Damasio, in line with the thesis that the mind consists of ideational reflections of the body, defines feelings (as mental, distinct from physical, emotions) as representations of body-states (i.e., the body’s changing conditions and its ongoing interactions with entities and circumstances affecting it).70 He proceeds to elaborate: “Feelings are perceptions, and I propose that the most necessary support for their perception occurs in the brain’s body maps. These maps refer to parts of the body and states of the body. Some variation of pleasure or pain is a consistent content of the perception we call feeling.”71 He continues:

  Alongside the perception of the body there is the perception of thoughts with themes consonant with the emotion, and a perception of a certain mode of thinking, a style of mental processing. How does this perception come about? It results from constructing metarepresentations of our own mental process, a high-level operation in which a part of the mind represents another part of the mind. This allows us to register the fact that our thoughts slow down or speed up as more or less attention is devoted to them; or the fact that thoughts depict objects and events at close range or at a distance. My hypothesis, then, presented in the form of a provisional definition, is that a feeling is the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes. Feelings emerge when the sheer accumulation of mapped details reaches a certain stage.72

  As Damasio summarizes all of this a few pages later, “A feeling of emotion is an idea of the body when it is perturbed by the emoting process.”73 From a psychoanalytic angle, a number of details in these passages warrant commentary. As I suggested earlier, the pleasure-and-pain-infused “body maps,” themselves not necessarily conscious but capable of becoming so in the trappings of the ideational-representational material of feelings, can be associated with Freudian drive representatives (composing configurations of libidinal aims and objects) and Lacanian jouis-sens (itself written in the fluid “language” of lalangue). These Damasian maps, continually drafted and updated by the
perpetual self-modeling activity of the brain, are necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for the experience of somatic emotions as psychical felt feelings: “an entity capable of feeling must be an organism that not only has a body but also a means to represent that body inside itself.”74 What’s more, this mapping process is the first step of a two-step translation process at the end of which emerge feelings-known (Empfindungen), affective phenomena consciously experienced. In addition to the initial step from emotions to maps as (proto)affective formations (a step in which representations of body parts and relations with exogenous objects must be integrated), a subsequent step from such maps to “metarepresentations” (in which cognitive styles and contents must be linked and synthesized) is requisite for the genesis of a consciously felt feeling.75 Although Damasio repeatedly acknowledges that something like the psychoanalytic unconscious plays a role in the vicissitudes of affective life,76 his discussions of the trajectories of translation leading from emotions through feelings-had to feelings-known tend to pass over quickly and quietly features of this multistep movement with respect to which a Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology of affect has a lot to say.

  The Lacanian rendition of the Freudian unconscious as a “superficial” (non)being at play in twists, turns, and gaps inscribed within the very surface of consciousness is worth recalling at this juncture. (As is well known, Lacan is adamantly opposed to the vulgar depiction of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic depth psychology, an exploration of hidden pockets of profound meaning.)77 To be more precise, the psychoanalytic unconscious (and not the vague nonanalytic notion of the nonconscious) exists, in part, as events of interventions intervening between different components and operations along the line running from one end of Damasio’s affective spectrum to the other, from nonconscious emotions to conscious feelings. In other words, the unconscious isn’t itself a deep, obfuscated component or operation of the complex ensemble of affective machinery, but instead is something slipping into the intervals of spacing distinguishing emotions, feelings-had, and feelings-known. It even can and does affect the linkings internal to both feelings-had and feelings-known, that is, the linkings of body parts, states, and surrounding circumstances in Damasian feelings-had (i.e., first-order representations in the form of body maps mapping the far-from-elementary complexes that are emotions) as well as the linkings of cognitive modes and themes in Damasian feelings-known (i.e., second-order “metarepresentations” as reflective appreciations of affective experiences).