Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  Before going back into the restaurant, the young star of East of Eden (and the forthcoming Rebel Without a Cause ) wanted to show Guinness a shiny parcel in the parking lot: a new silver Porsche Spyder 550 he had just received from the mechanic who customized it. It was wrapped in cellophane, with flowers and a bow on the hood. “It’s just been delivered,” he announced full of pride. “I haven’t even driven it yet.” Dean, a car collector and racer when he wasn’t acting, had nicknamed the car “Little Bastard.”

  “The sports car looked sinister to me, although it had a large bunch of red carnations resting on its bonnet,” Guinness wrote. “How fast is it?”

  “She’ll do a hundred and fifty,” Dean answered.

  At that moment, a grave expression passed over Guinness’s face, and he warned his new friend, in a voice he says he could hardly recognize as his own: “Please, never get in it.” He looked at his watch. “It is now ten o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.”

  Dean just laughed at his warning: “Oh, shucks! Don’t be so mean!” 2

  Guinness apologized for his strange utterance, explaining that it was due to hunger and lack of sleep. He and Moss then joined Dean and his entourage for a lovely dinner, at which no further mention was made of Dean’s new car or Guinness’s distressing premonition. Yet Guinness recalled that, despite the gaiety of the evening, he felt uneasy through the whole meal. And indeed, a week later, at 4:00 PM on Friday, September 30, Dean’s neck was broken when he slammed into another car while speeding through an intersection near Paso Robles, California, going twice the speed limit.

  Skeptics will whip out their “law of large numbers” and “selection bias” arguments to debunk Guinness’s story, of course. Guinness no doubt knew or could guess of his young dinner companion’s reckless lifestyle, shared by many young celebrities. One might guess that many of Dean’s friends and acquaintances uttered similar warnings to Dean all the time, sort of the way we imagine young celebrities constantly getting concerned warnings about their drug abuse and other self-destructive behavior. In a certain small percentage of cases, the warnings come true soon thereafter, and these are the ones remembered after the fact and retold as part of the survivor’s life story. This one instance, because it happened to nearly coincide with Dean’s (perhaps likely or even inevitable) death in an automobile, could have taken on a numinous quality for Guinness in hindsight, as he rehearsed and retold the event to himself and others over the subsequent years.

  But such a just-so story is subverted (if not undercut) by its repressed ghost. There is a coincidence in Guinness’s story that most readers, both skeptical and credulous, will miss simply because it is so obvious: The fact that the premonition was not about some random death, or the death of just any famous celebrity, or of just any acquaintance of Guinness. It was the death of a person Guinness had just met and formed a bond with. While this fact can be used to support the “law of large numbers” argument, it also lends itself to the opposite argument on the quite rational consistency of premonitions as centering on personally meaningful events and relationships. We will see later in this chapter that, on at least one other occasion in the early 1950s, Guinness had another premonition about the death of an artist with whom he had recently formed a kind of connection.

  Even if Guinness claimed he couldn’t recognize the oracular voice that came from his mouth when warning Dean of his imminent death, most moviegoers can imagine that voice readily, for it uttered a similarly grave pronouncement aboard the Millennium Falcon en route to Princess Leia’s home planet Alderaan in Star Wars . “I felt a great disturbance in the force,” Obi Wan Kenobi famously says, clutching his chest just after (the audience knows) Alderaan has fallen victim to the Death Star, “as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something gravely terrible has happened.” Afterward he sits clutching his head with a pained expression.

  The fact that audiences can so readily understand this scene, and relate to a “force” that connects people across time and space during a crisis, attests to the lasting power of Frederic Myers’ telepathy theory, which had dominated people’s thinking about psychic phenomena for nearly a century by the time Star Wars was released. Indeed, other than the role played by an automobile that could travel 150 miles per hour, practically hyperspace to a Victorian, Guinness’s premonition about James Dean would not have been out of place in Phantasms of the Living , the compendious 1886 volume Myers wrote with psychologist Edmund Gurney and skeptical writer Frank Podmore. Because ostensibly telepathic phenomena so often center on death, sickness, or other crises, Myers argued that it is strong emotion that overcomes the distances that usually separate people from their friends and loved ones, both in time and space. Trauma is the energy that powers telepathic broadcasts. 3

  The notion of a person in crisis as a telepathic broadcast tower has given way to newer metaphors for anomalous experiences that seem to involve some remote connection, such as entanglement—even though quantum mechanics as we currently understand it does not even allow entanglements between two people’s brains on the basis of shared genes, let alone a shared dinner. But the link to powerful, especially negative emotions remains an overriding theme in accounts of ESP phenomena. Precognitive experiences frequently take the form of apparent “warnings” of death or disaster, as we’ve seen, even though as often as not it is in trying to evade foreseen outcomes that people end up fulfilling them. It raises interesting questions about how precognition may work as an orienting function, especially if, as I have argued, its adaptive purpose is fundamentally to orient us toward rewards.

  We can get some clues to a possible answer by considering Freud’s writings on trauma, as well as subsequent psychoanalytic thinking about the paradoxical motivating power of emotions that lie, as Freud famously put it, “beyond the pleasure principle.”

  Psychological trauma was a new concept at the time Freud was constructing his theory of the unconscious in the late 1800s. The industrial age and its railways had created a widespread phenomenon that until then only soldiers had been confronted with: grievous injuries, mutilation, and close calls such as the witnessing of horrific accidents befalling others. When the insurance companies were forced to assess claims related to psychological injuries that seemed to set in after a person’s physical injuries, if any, had healed, psychiatry was forced to confront a new class of illnesses, what one later writer called “pension hysterias.” 4 Trauma, which originally meant a physical wound, came in Freud’s writings to refer to events that, because of their suddenness or horror, left some kind of lasting scar on the psyche.

  Freud’s innovation in the medicalization of trauma was twofold. First, he extended the conception of trauma to the sexual domain—namely, child sexual abuse. In the 1890s, because of repeated stories from his patients that seemed to point to sexually traumatic events in their childhoods, he formulated his famous “seduction theory.” Child abuse and pre-pubertal sexual experiences were, it seemed to him, much more pervasive than anyone had yet recognized and were the driver of adult hysterias and neuroses. However, when he “discovered”—many would say invented —what he later called the Oedipus complex, or lingering incestuous wishes from childhood, he abandoned his seduction theory in favor of a much more far-reaching idea: that many of these traumatic, neurosis-inducing “memories” were actually fictions woven from the threads of real, poorly understood experiences and a much larger component of fantasy, all abetted by childhood confusions about sexuality. The trauma, in many cases, was not some actual molestation that had occurred, but a nexus of ideas and fantasies inarticulately preserved in memory. Psychoanalysis came to mean enabling the patient to put into words those hitherto inarticulate ideas and fantasies, not simply recovering some buried memory (which is the simplistic idea still found in pop-culture parodies of the Freudian couch). 5

  Long after Freud’s death, Freud’
s abandonment of the seduction theory was seen by many feminists and other critics as a betrayal of his patients who may really have been abused by their fathers. The reassessment of memory and trauma that ensued led to an epidemic of “recovered abuse memories” in the 1980s and early 1990s. These “memories” were often the product of highly questionable therapeutic methods like hypnosis. 6 Thanks to the important research by Elizabeth Loftus and others into the fallibility of memory and the ease with which false memories can be created in therapeutic settings, the pendulum swung back in the late 1990s, away from assuming traumatic childhood memories are accurate. But Freud’s cultural reputation, even in the humanities, has never really recovered from this “scandal.”

  Nevertheless, and whatever the extent to which Freud’s reduction of trauma to sex should be bracketed, his second key innovation in this domain remains one of his most enduring and significant ideas: that trauma consists not in what happens to us, but in how we think about what happens to us. Crucially, these thoughts are displaced in time or deferred from the event as such. As the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche put it, “we try to track down the trauma, but the traumatic memory was only secondarily traumatic: we never manage to fix the traumatic event historically. This fact might be illustrated by the image of a Heisenberg-like ‘relation of indeterminacy’.” 7 The philosopher Jacques Derrida erected a whole philosophy on the notion of what he called différance (combining the sense of defer and differ ), with its central assumption that traumas are always secondary, always “supplements”: “One wishes to go back from the supplement to the source : one must recognize that there is a supplement at the source .” 8 Put simply, in this school of thought, memory is an infinite regress into the past, following chains of associations among memory traces, yet may never hit the bedrock of anything traumatic “back there.”

  Could the inability to ever localize the origin of a trauma in the past, and the psychoanalyst’s need to assemble some chain of “traumatic thoughts,” signal that the search for origins has always looked in the wrong direction, for the wrong trauma, or both?

  Playing Gone

  Even decades after he had formulated his theory of Nachträglichkeit —“afterwardsness” (or as John Forrester puts it, “the deferred action specific to neurotic causality” 9 )—Freud continued to be perplexed by traumatized patients behaving in compulsive and seemingly very unpleasurable ways, almost as if they wanted to relive the event that had traumatized them rather than forget it. On the one hand, conflicts between our conscious aims and our unconscious desires could go some of the way toward explaining this. People’s reactions to traumatic events may be much more complex than we like to imagine, for one thing—we harbor unconscious death wishes for those close to us, as a result of sibling rivalries and the like. But ambivalence could not be the whole story. Why do war veterans obsessively relive objectively horrifying combat situations in their dreams? Why do neurotics find it so hard to “let go” of real or imagined traumas and end up staging situations that essentially repeat and reinforce them, almost as though they are trying to (re)create those traumas instead of move on? For a doctor whose whole theory of human motivation rested on the individual’s pursuit of his or her wishes in dreams and of pleasure in daily life, this compulsive returning to past traumas was a conundrum.

  In 1919, Freud wrote his most controversial and arguably most interesting essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , in which he attempted to formulate a solution. He said that the main clue to his answer came from watching his toddler grandson Ernst repeatedly throwing a spool over the side of his crib and exclaiming “fort ” (gone), then pulling it back and enjoying its return, “da ” (there); and then, when he was slightly older, doing the same thing with his own reflection in a mirror. The fort-da game is one of the most memorable images in Freud’s writings, and those who knew Freud assumed Freud had written this after the death of his daughter Sophie, Ernst’s mother, in 1920. But he hastened to correct them that he wrote it months before her death 10 (making it another possible candidate for precognition).

  Staging the loss and recovery of objects and the self, Freud argued, is the child’s way of beginning to think about and master (via play) the traumatic absences of the mother. By bringing loss under its own symbolic control, the child builds a capacity to endure it. Thus, it is in dealing with trauma that the child first learns to use symbols to represent things that are absent. For later writers in the Object-Relations school, such play with what D. W. Winnicott called “transitional objects” is the very roots of cultural experience, the very beginnings of symbol use. 11 But what was most interesting to Freud was the compulsive, repetitive quality of these childhood games, as well as the fact that the emphasis seems to be on the “gone” (fort ) half of the fort-da game. Children, in their play, like to play gone. Freud suggested that there is in an organism’s own destruction also a kind of reward, annihilation being the ultimate release of psychic tension, whose dissipation is felt as pleasure. 12 He proposed that, apart from and even surpassing the rule that we are governed in our actions by pleasure, there is a parallel urge to dispel life energy and thus tension—and that this drive can be found at the root of war neuroses and the neurotic’s compulsion to repeat unpleasant situations. Specifically, he called this a “death drive,” or thanatos . Thus, beyond pleasure lay the even more extreme reward of oblivion. 13

  Although intriguing, Freud’s idea of an instinctive urge toward negation or annihilation seemed paradoxical, and never really caught on … except as it was reformulated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the late 1950s. Lacan’s French had an advantage that Freud’s German lacked, specifically the word jouissance , meaning painful pleasure or pleasurable pain—literally something “beyond pleasure” that takes over and drives a neurotic or someone who has been traumatized. The simplistic examples commonly given of jouissance include an orgasm so extreme that it causes agony, or the erotic pleasures of sadomasochistic acts. But a better analogy would be addiction, the compulsion to repeat an act (taking a drug, for instance) that cannot be resisted yet no longer gives much pleasure because it is more about the temporary dissipation or release of unpleasure. 14 There is no equivalent word in English either. In reference to Lacan, jouissance is usually translated as “enjoyment,” but it needs to be understood that there may be something deeply ambivalent or even repellent about this particular kind of enjoyment. It is an enjoyment we do not want , a weird mix of excitement and pain, reward and regret. The concept of jouissance , as the underlying energy driving human compulsions, including pathological compulsions and obsessions treated in psychotherapy, became so central for Lacan that late in his career he made the provocative statement that jouissance is the “only substance” psychoanalysis deals with. 15

  Lacan might better have said “force” and not substance. Later Lacanian thinkers have likened jouissance to the warping of space in a gravitational field. The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious reward bends our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessional behavior, and on some level all behavior. One’s “enjoyment” in this French sense of the word is what “turns one’s crank” (recall here also the “twisting, turning” sense of the Anglo-Saxon wyrd ). What may to an outsider appear to be a miserable or dreary compulsion (an addiction, a pattern of dating the wrong kind of person, obsessively collecting Hollywood memorabilia, whatever) conceals and also preserves or protects a vital and enlivening unconscious dimension, which it is the aim of psychoanalysis to help unbury. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, this circular, orbital pattern is one’s symptom .

  The push-pull of jouissance around signs of self-destruction represented a significant advance over Freud’s thinking about why traumatized people behave the way they do. Whereas Freud understood the traumatized person’s “compulsion to repeat” as a way of metabolizing or exorcising the pain of traumatic events and thoughts, Lacan sa
w that repetitive symptoms are really an adaptation to a new regime of enjoyment, how a person reorganizes his or her life in such a way as to continue to derive enjoyment from something that, on a conscious level, may be despised and even (in its most extreme and pathological forms) possibly does harm.

  Lacan was no more interested in literal precognition or prophecy than Freud was, but his revision of the Freudian theory of symptoms and their relation to trauma is highly suggestive for an understanding of precognitive phenomena, and the ways trauma may sometimes become “displaced in time.” For instance, in many cases where disasters and deaths are precognized, even including deaths of loved ones or near-fatal perils in one’s own future, there is an implicit reward, if only in the very primitive—and hard-to-acknowledge—sense of “but I survived.” This can be a very repellant kind of reward, something appealing to a very base, “lizard-brain,” survival-oriented part of us that may be at odds with our conscious, moral, social desires and sense of self.

  The paradoxical connection between survival and death, which sparked Freud’s thinking but which he could never resolve successfully, in some sense boils down to a matter of semiotics : the fact that the one value (survival) takes on its meaning or value as a signal only contrastively, when paired with its opposite (death/destruction). According to structural linguistics, which was hugely influential on Lacan, all signifiers ultimately derive their meaning from their opposition to other signifiers. In life’s semiotic (or “sign language”), death or disaster befalling others is the foremost signifier of our own being-there, our da-sein . If you find yourself “traumatized” by witnessing something terrible, you have by definition survived. Dreams seem to give people dramatic and often distorted previews of those situations lurking in the foggy waters ahead. So do premonitions like Alec Guinness’s vision of James Dean’s death. One can imagine that Guinness would have read of the death of his fellow actor, whom he had just met a week earlier, with a mix of horror and regret, but also grim affirmation: It wasn’t me . I didn’t have the reckless need to go racing through a little California town in a flashy sports car.