Redeploying the distinctions between emotions and various shades and sorts of feelings uncovered by recent affective neuroscience, one should perhaps retain the term affect precisely to designate the uniquely human desynchronizations between emotions and feelings as well as among feelings themselves, that is, the actual, palpable absences of in-synch harmonies afflicting the bodies, brains, and psyches of partially denaturalized subjects of signifiers. For such subjects, affective life must be lived under the permanent shadow of doubts about passions and sentiments as self-evident, self-transparent, and self-sufficient experiences. Reflexive self-consciousness, thanks to the reflexivity of feeling itself, never will seize upon solid guarantees vouching for the ultimate, final truths of why it feels, how it feels, or even what it feels. A lot can happen in the gaps between emotions, feelings, and the feelings of feelings. With the combined resources of Lacan’s Freudian foundations and the rapidly accumulating findings of the neurosciences, the time is ripe for Lacanian explorations in both psychoanalysis and neurobiology of this terrain that no longer justifiably can be neglected.
POSTFACE
THE PARADOXES OF THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSTANCY
I believe it possible to affirm more than ever that a confrontation between psychoanalysis, neurobiology, and Continental philosophy has not been attempted before. It is this confrontation that our work undertakes here, a work insisting on the importance of the new libidinal economy currently emerging at the intersection of these disciplines and revealing new definitions of affects.
The most striking affirmations of contemporary neurobiologists like Damasio or LeDoux concern the importance of the emotional brain. All the cognitive operations closely depend on it. Affects function initially at a primitive biological and cerebral level that does not involve consciousness. There therefore exists nonconscious affects, and the brain is their place of origin. This is why it is important, for the neurobiologists, to redefine the psyche according to this primordial emotionality. What challenges do such affirmations throw at psychoanalysis and philosophy?
Psychoanalysis: Are There Unconscious Feelings?
During the course of a meticulous and passionate investigation, Adrian Johnston explores, in Freud and Lacan, the fate of the feelings of guilt and anxiety first, and then those of shame and modesty. Why this exploration? Johnston recalls, with a great deal of pertinence, that the question of affects seems in many respects to have been neglected by psychoanalysis. For one thing, this is because, for Freud as for Lacan, emotions and feelings cannot but be conscious. This is why emotions and feelings can be displaced or inhibited, but never repressed. In other words, and paradoxically, the unconscious, where the pleasure principle is located, is little concerned with affects as such.
In his metapsychological writings, Freud declares, in 1915, that it is incoherent to assume the existence of unconscious affects. How could one feel something without being conscious of it? In response to this question appears Johnston’s very beautiful formulation: How can there be seen to be something like misfelt feelings? How can it be supposed that “one can feel without feeling that one feels, namely, that there can be, so to speak, unfelt (or, more accurately, misfelt) feelings?” Lacan will return to this Freudian position in affirming that feelings, if they merit their name, cannot but be experienced in consciousness and that neither unconscious nor, thus, “misfelt” feelings exist. As is well known, Lacan takes care to distinguish between, on the one hand, affects, which always are conscious, and, on the other hand, signifiers, which truly and totally constitute the register of the unconscious. An “affective” unconscious therefore is nonsense.
All the same, from 1907 on, Freud circles around the possibility of admitting the existence of “an unconscious feeling of guilt,” an idea picked back up in “The Unconscious” of 1915. We should remember that the third section of that metapsychological essay is entitled “Unconscious Emotions.” Nevertheless, after having envisaged this hypothesis, Freud pushes it aside. He employs some very interesting terms that he never takes the trouble to define and distinguish, such as affective structures (Affektbildungen), affects (Affekte), emotions (Gefühle), and feelings (Empfindungen).
In much later texts, like The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud speaks again of an “unconscious sense of guilt.” He seems at this point to recognize, in the second topography, a structural relationship of the unconscious with affects via the feeling of guilt. He already had opened the possibility of such a feeling in texts such as “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work” of 1916 (in the section entitled “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt”), where there appears a feeling of guilt certainly conscious but where that consciousness does not know what this guilt is about: an obscure guilt that is unaware of itself.
This unconscious feeling of guilt is able to manifest itself also in the form of a diffuse anxiety originating from the superego. Guilt even is assimilated to a “topographical variety of anxiety.” Freud thus considers that guilt perhaps can be a “misfelt feeling” which gives itself to be felt as an uneasiness, a dissatisfaction—once again, as an anxiety that is vague and without apparent object.
Lacan seems more radical still than the Freud of the first topography in terms of negating the existence of unconscious feelings or affects. In the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, he denounces the confused nature of the recourse to affects and the mixing together of representations and affects. The latter play only a secondary role in relation to the unconscious. It is not a question of confusing affects and the ideational representations they can merely accompany. There is no representational rapport between affect and signifier.
In reality, Lacan’s position is more nuanced. In the tenth seminar, Anxiety, he correctly states that anxiety is an affect, an affect that it really is necessary to call unconscious. And, perhaps it is possible to reconcile here what Lacan calls a senti-ment, playing with the two verbs sentir (to feel) and mentir (to lie), with what Johnston names a “misfelt feeling.” Anxiety does not know in the face of what it is anxious. For this reason, like guilt, it manifests itself as an uneasiness, as a dissatisfaction more than as an affect that is clear and perfectly certain of its object. Consequently, anxiety is well defined as “the central affect, the one around which everything is organized,” the “fundamental affect.”
If psychoanalysis ends with recognizing the importance of affects, can one now envision possible points of passage between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology? The problem is that psychoanalysis has never admitted the central importance of cerebral activity in psychical functioning.
Freud never contested the appropriateness of the metaphor of the brain as an “electrical center” developed by Breuer in the Studies on Hysteria. According to this metaphor, the brain is a pure and simple place where the transmission of energy occurs, a simple mechanism. Breuer declares:
We ought not to think of a cerebral path of conduction as resembling a telephone wire which is only excited electrically at the moment at which it has to function (that is, in the present context, when it has to transmit a signal). We ought to liken it to a telephone line through which there is a constant flow of galvanic current and which can no longer be excited if that current ceases. Or better, let us imagine a widely-ramified electrical system for lighting and the transmission of motor power; what is expected of this system is that simple establishment of a contact shall be able to set any lamp or machine in operation. To make this possible, so that everything shall be ready to work, there must be a certain tension present throughout the entire network of lines of conduction, and the dynamo engine must expend a given quantity of energy for this purpose. In just the same way there is a certain amount of excitation present in the conductive paths of the brain when it is at rest but awake and prepared to work.1
Now, there exists “an optimum for the height of the intracerebral tonic excitation.”2 When this is exceeded, it produces in the system the equivalent of a “short circuit”: “I shall venture once m
ore to recur to my comparison with an electrical lighting system. The tension in the network of lines of conduction in such a system has an optimum too. If this is exceeded its functioning may easily be impaired; for instance, the electric light filaments may be quickly burned through. I shall speak later of the damage done to the system itself through a break-down of its insulation or through ‘short-circuiting.’”3
The brain therefore has no other possibility for coping with energetic excess than malfunctioning. It is not equipped with any structure of fluidification via detour—that is to say, via differentiation (différenciation)—of energy. In other words, it does not enjoy any mechanism of representation. Lacan will affirm exactly the same thing: the brain, a purely biological and organic entity, is not endowed with representations.
Thus, for Freud as for Lacan, the drive (Trieb, pulsion) is never a cerebral given. The “thrust” (poussée) of the drive, despite the urgency of the pressure it exerts, does not effectively manifest itself, as Johnston recalls, except by representation or delegation. At its temporal origins, it splits itself into a commissioning power (mandateur) and its commissioned proxy (mandataire). The drive then sends representatives in order to say that it cannot wait. It is this representative structure that qualifies and characterizes the particular rapport between the somatic and the psychical which is at work in the drive’s structure.
Freud develops on this point two conceptions that are contradictory only in appearance. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, “Sometimes the instinct [la pulsion] itself is presented as ‘the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind.’ At other times the instinct becomes part of the process of somatic excitation, in which case it is represented in the psyche by ‘instinctual representatives’ [les représentants de la pulsion] which comprise two elements—the ideational representative [Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, représentant-représentation] and the quota of affect.”4
It should be noted that the drive representative itself is split, in an additional splitting, into a representation or group of representations and a quota of affect. The extreme pressure exercised by the drive on the nervous system therefore is not only quantitative but also qualitative: that which pushes is simultaneously the quantity of force and the division of instances put in relation in the force, namely, representative and quota. The cut or separation between the two, obtained by repression, is hence the sole possible solution to the excess of stressful endogenous urgings: division, procrastinating, and delaying permit deferring (différer) the pressure of the inside without provoking “short circuits.”
From the perspective of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, this separation provoked by repression certainly cannot be the result of a biological operation.5 In effect, for the cut to take place, it is necessary that psychical energy detach itself from neural (nerveuse) energy. The vicissitudes of the drives—“reversal into its opposite, turning round upon the subject’s own self, repression, sublimation”6—assume a place other than the cerebral topography. Psychical energy is, in a way, the rhetorical detour of neural energy. Unable to discharge itself in the nervous system, endogenous excitation makes detours comparable to the tropes or figures of discourse.
Because, for Freud, symbolic activity does not exist in the nervous system, psychical energy represents this very absence in a style that is foreign to the brain. This brain does not have any initiative in the treatment of an energy it can only transmit and maintain at a constant level to the extent that this is possible.7
“Psychical” energy therefore comes to reveal the absence of a representational and symbolic power in cerebral organization. The nervous system, of which the first task is to master excitations, does not represent the relation of representation that originally unites and divides the psyche and the body. It does not develop representations of the “sources of internal excitation of the organism.” Insofar as it cannot affect itself, it also is not a psyche.
In Freud’s thinking, as is known, sexuality does not designate primarily the sexual drives or sexual life, but actually a certain regime of events governed by a specific causality. Now, this causality finds its source in the possibility of the cut—this cut is at work in every drive, sexual or not (the drives are all similar qualitatively, writes Freud)—between representation and affect.
The sexual drive is, in a sense, reducible to an upsurge of energy that pushes and knocks at the door in demanding to be liquidated. But, this liquidation is never simple or immediate: the energy there undergoes circumnavigations, splittings, and divisions so as to transform itself into the coded message of a “representative.” Sexuality is the hermeneutic adventure of psychical energy. The exogenous event, when it happens, necessarily finds itself separated from its very exteriority in enlisting itself in the endogenous adventure of meaning (sens).
Thus, one will not be surprised that what “libido” (qua affect related initially to the sexual drive stricto sensu) ends up designating, in Freud, is the mobility or the “rhetoric” of the quota of affect in general. In the same manner that there exists an “enlarged” meaning of sexuality (as a type of causality and specific regime of events), there also exists, by way of consequence, an “enlarged” sense of the word libido. The mobile character of the libido, which renders it susceptible to detours, becomes the dominant trait of psychical energy as a whole. The treatment of the sexual drive becomes paradigmatic for every drive vicissitude.
Lacan shows that the libido, far from being only a dynamic manifestation of the sexual drive, designates, in fact, “an undifferentiated quantitative unit susceptible of entering into relations of equivalence.”8 Even if, as one will see later on here, it is far from being the only psychical energy at work in the psyche, the libido gives its name to every energetic transaction. “Hence one would talk,” Lacan continues, “of transformations, regressions, fixations, sublimations of the libido, a single term which is conceived of quantitatively.”9 The libido therefore truly has for its function the unification of a field (champ)—not simply that of different phases and structures of sexual development, but also, and precisely, that of the “field of psychoanalytic effects” (champ des effets psychanalytiques) in general, the energetic tropes or tropisms that go beyond the organization of the nervous system.10
Contemporary neurobiological discoveries put into question these analytic notions. The Freudian conception of a brain foreign to symbolic activity, a brain that is a purely material base without autonomy in the treatment of its own energetic urgings, is in the process of totally disappearing today. Contrary to what the psychoanalysts affirm, the “emotional brain” is apt to support endogenous excitations or drives. In light of this fact, the frontiers between, on the one side, the brain and the cerebral organization and, on the other side, the psychical apparatus and the unconscious find themselves reelaborated.
What is an emotion from a neurobiological point of view, what we are calling here affects? The word is old, thus seeming to drive us back well behind what is designated by the word drive. Emotion, according to its literal sense, designates a relational dynamic between brain and body, the very movement of the psychosomatic totality, comprises an individual body and a nervous system. It is this totality in movement that, as I have shown in my text, Damasio interprets in terms of conatus. Between the nervous system and the body a constant exchange of information takes place (which draws these “maps” of which we spoke much earlier). In fact, only one word is needed in order to designate the two entities: organism, which refers as much to cerebral organization as to bodily structure.
The dynamic of emotion has its origin precisely in this elementary activity of exchange of information and autoregulation of the organism. In the beginning, emotion does not designate this or that passion, but actually is a process at work in vital regulation. There is consequently a sort of pure emotion of vitality, without any object other than the “self,” namely, the cerebral “self,” which Damasio calls the “protoself.�
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Far from being a mechanical energetic process, comparable to the functioning of an electrical switchboard or telephone exchange, homeostasis, the self’s information about itself and the maintenance of life, is an affective and emotional economy—something psychoanalysis has never envisaged.
The maintenance of excitation at its lowest level, necessary for the survival and elementary activity of the system, is the producer of affects: the brain affects itself in regulating life. There is therefore no “principle of inertia”—this is the name Freud gives to the principle of constancy—without emotion, that is to say, without the autoaffection of the mechanism that produces the maintenance of the system. “Curiously enough,” writes Damasio, “emotions are part and parcel of the regulation we call homeostasis.”11 We thus arrive at this astonishing paradox: maintenance, constancy, inertia, and homeostasis are the products of an autoexcitation. The “emotional brain” must be understood precisely starting from this paradox.
The emotions organize and coordinate cerebral activity. Whether concerning primary emotions (sadness, joy, fear, surprise, disgust), secondary or “social” emotions (embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, pride), or even emotions said to be “in the background” (well-being, uneasiness, calm, despondency), the emotions are all elaborate ensuing continuations of affective processes at work in homeostatic regulation. Therefore, in the brain, there are no regulatory mechanisms of adaptation to the external world and the environment without emotional adaptation to the inside of the brain by the brain itself.
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