Since only a part of what happens in the nervous system is ever carried into consciousness (we do not feel our seeing, and recollection is, “speaking generally, devoid of quality”), Freud must assume a third set of neurons whose business it is to convert not quantity itself but the quantity of quantity, its frequency or period, into sense.
According to a modern mechanistic theory, consciousness is no more than an appendage added to physiologico-psychical processes, an appendage whose absence would make no difference to the course of psychical events. According to another theory consciousness is the subjective side of all psychical events and is thus inseparable from physiologico-mental processes. The theory which I have here propounded lies between these two. According to it consciousness is the subjective side of a part of the physical processes in the neuronic system—namely of the perceptual processes … and its absence would not leave psychical events unchanged …16
Energy approaching us has two characteristics, then: period and amount. We reject some possible stimuli altogether; we refuse the frequencies of others, and reduce the amount of energy of any we accept. A series of screens and filters protects us from being overwhelmed, and especially keeps our awareness clear for the performance of its basic function: the searching out of objects which will help us master our persistent internal drives. Our primary neurological aim is expressed in the reflex: by an action we remain the same. Our secondary neurological aim is the retention, spread, and maintenance of a minimal energy level throughout the system. The rejection, discharge, and storage of quantity does not imply a contradiction since all these activities serve the same end—constancy—as does the appearance of consciousness itself.
Of course in infancy consciousness is able to accomplish very little. Kicking and screaming are more successful than any sort of thoughtful perception. The fetus is automatically cared for by the body of its mother, and the newborn’s mewling helplessness speaks for an equally efficient food tube, tub, and swaddle. Cries are its eyes now, yet the baby’s awkward motor movements manipulate the world as well as a mechanic, balancing it better than a walker on a wire. They succeed, however, because they are addressed to another consciousness, a bonded and dutiful awareness. It is little wonder our tantrums try to return the immediate environment to this early state of blessed obedience, or that lambastabombulation is the deepest root and secret lure of leadership.
Few infants are born in a wilderness to be suckled by wolves. Far from being locked between the jaws of gentle nature, neither entrusted to the sea nor given up to a hillside, they find themselves in worser sort inside a family, and whether attention, love, or resentment are most called forth by howl-power, the responses which the baby’s behavior generally receives ensure that from its first squalling, purple moment forward, most of the connections between the child’s neurons will be social, and that social structures will sink into the psyche like stripped autos into river-silt.
So if hunger provokes wailing and wailing brings the breast; if the breast permits sucking and milk suggests its swallow; if swallowing issues in sleep and stomachy comfort, then need, ache, message, object, act, and satisfaction are soon associated like charms on a chain; shortly our wants begin to envision the things which will reduce them, and the organism is finally said to wish.
No neuron knows where its energy has been. If the sight of the breast elicits sucking, so may hunger’s memory of it, but which is sweet wish and which the sweeter flesh? Up to this point Freud has been able to distinguish instinct from object only in terms of the devices used to discharge their demands (with instinct, as already mentioned, flight fails), and because perceptual stimuli possess a periodicity which some neurons translate into quality, whereas wishes (the mix of memory and desire) do not.
There is in addition an ego, however, which is simply a mechanism for spreading neural excitement evenly throughout the system in order to inhibit neuronasms and retain energy for adaptive use. Actually, it is not so much a mechanism as a habit subject to modification whenever the cells which retain energy alter their relationships and number, just as on a beach the damp sand is rhythmically rewet or dries. Early experience determines how strong an ego is likely to be. Weak egos cannot postpone satisfaction. They suffer an enervating prematurity, while strong egos admit energy from more sources and by cunning dispersion retain greater quantities for later use in satisfying instinct. Therefore an ego can elevate its owner above insect or animal, since instinct ordinarily is unwilling to wait and meets each stimulus with that same pattern of automatic discharge we see in the spider who patiently repairs her torn web through the indifferent bell-ringing wind which rent it and will rend it again.
The ego, in saying “yes” to the id, as Freud eventually thought it did, is not altogether a friend, for its formation is socially inspired, and the so-called reality it recognizes is nothing less than the enduring cultural complex which shaped it in the first place.17 Relying on the ego to mediate between pleasure and reality is a lot like arbitrating a dispute between factory workers and their firm by calling in to settle the issue a still fat-cheeked former head of the company.
The “Project” was as full of conjectural leaps as a pond of frogs. Patient by patient, Freud’s own clinical and couch work was drawing him further from neurophysiology. The language of psychology was richer, looser, more supple and suggestive for him. Increasingly what he found he had to do was “read down” from consciousness rather than try to “read up” from the nerve ends and the brain. This method, moreover, did not seem to push him so persistently toward that pictureless chasm between current and color, impact and scream (so easy to cross and impossible to span) which he was expected to leap.
Therefore it was in every way necessary for Freud to translate neural discharges and energy paths into sensation, thought, and feeling, even if he were forced, as he immediately was, to construct a theory out of neologisms and catachresis, to speak of suppressed wishes and unfelt feeling, of ideas which had never clearly lit so much as a minute’s inch of the mind, of psychic conflicts which symptomatically expressed themselves in a war of muscle lengths and inner organs (bowel pitted against belly, blood rising like steam through the skin, the eye an ally of the thigh, the vagina an unviolated victim of the thumb). The appearance of new terminologies and structures, altered models and recharged metaphors, however, did not demand a wholly new design, or mean that Freud had abandoned his neural economics.
The “Project” was repressed only to turn each of Freud’s speculative dreams into a jackbox from which the hidden theory then popped with a not-too-startling wheeze. It haunts every line of his metapsychology; in the last chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams we hear its heavy tread, throughout Beyond the Pleasure Principle its clanking chains, again in the ultimate Outline of Psychoanalysis the whistle of its indestructible spirit. The fact is that through the whole of Freud’s work the same few ideas are in evasive flight like hares through their images, for beneath differences of poetry (whether of constancy, homeostasis, equilibrium, entropy, inertia … whether in the meters of hydraulics, geography, thermodynamics, chemistry, or electricity … in those verses which describe the body as an engine or a clutch of wires, or those in which the mind is a camera, a stacked set of cities like Troy, or a grayly waxen magical slate), the same sense lies as quiet as a crocodile with shuttered eyes, the doctrine itself a “system of layers of signs (Zeichen)—waiting to be trans-lated (Umsetzung: transformed, restructured, communicated at another level of communication) or simply read …”18
Psychology replaced physiology as early as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), but it was a psychology of signs and ciphers, codes and other kinds of communication, like the raps of a distant prisoner on the pipes of his plumbing. Even if neurons were made up, you could in principle see them; even if their paths were imaginary and their intercourse a fiction, what the “Project” had invented was perceivable. The new area of investigation, consciousness itself (that consequence of neuronic light), w
as private, and more out of reach than if it were covered by layers of bone. Except for his own dreams, his own follies and phobias, Freud could only analyze descriptions: the patient’s life in the patient’s language.
A difficult and possibly sad situation. Is it not scientifically sounder to deal in visible fictions than invisible facts? The construct, in any case, can always be called to account. Still, the more narrowly the patient’s life could be equated with language, the more closely the analyst could come to grasping it. He could listen and read. He could construe. Something inside us is saying something—but what? why? to whom? how? and with what slippery, thick, forked, or tangled tongue?
It is customary, now, for philosophers to distinguish between sentences and propositions by pointing out that the same propositions can be contained in many sentences, just as the fact that cows give milk can be expressed in various ways. Not only can these propositions be symbolized so that their structure is exposed, but operations of a richly regulative sort can be performed upon them, altering the relationships of terms, making the positives negative, substituting one value for another, switching voices, replacing variables with constants, transforming affirmations into queries, and so on.
The remarkable language model into which, by stages, Freud translated his neurophysiological one imagines that states of consciousness, physical symptoms, and patterns of behavior are sentences; that these sentences contain propositions of a limited and uniform sort, and that, symbolized, they can be expressed in terms of a function (some need like hunger) containing four places: (1) the ego, or owner of the wish, (2) an object (like an item of food) which is expected to satisfy it, (3) an organ or organ path (mouth to stomach in this case), and (4) the resulting disappearance of pain in the reduction of the drive, a reduction which is always a constant (pleasure).
Every complete proposition of the psyche is therefore of the following form: IT (the subject term of the function, and for every want accepted by the unconscious ego, “IT” is replaced by “I”) WANTS (the function, which varies in strength, a characteristic we indicate by increasing or decreasing the occurrence of its symbol, W, and which is either actively engaged in taking [→] or passively occupied by wishing and waiting for [←]) PLEASURE (the positive constant, + P, which can of course be some degree of pain, – P, as well) from an OBJECT in the world (Ob), by means of an ORGAN of the body (or erogenous zone, Or), thus:
WWW(I – +P → Ob, Or),
an expression which can be read as: I badly (the strength of the desire is indicated by the number of Ws) want to take pleasure from the world through my body. The same proposition in the passive voice looks like this:
WWW(I ← +P – Ob, Or),
and is read: I badly want to receive pleasure from the world through my body.19
The resulting departmental or bureaucratic scheme takes this form:
The unconscious ego revises any proposition offered it until an acceptable version can be found. The ego may alter itself by absorbing pleasure-giving things and persons (introjection) or by projecting upon the world its own pain. It may replace one term with another in the same formula so that “all cows give milk” becomes “all chessmen make threats.” Finally, it may employ any one or more of four psychological operations which rephrase meanings at the same time that they disguise desire.20
(1) Reflexivity changes the voice of the proposition so that if the instinct has been active, it is turned back against the self and the murderer becomes suicidal:
(Ref)WWW(I – +P → Ob, Or) WWW(I ← +P – Ob, Or).
The reflex of “I badly want to take pleasure from the world through my body” is equivalent to “I badly want to receive pleasure from the world through my body.”
(2) Reversal not only forces a flip-flop in the voice, it puts pain in the place of pleasure and pleasure in the place of pain. Active love turns into the wish to be disliked:
(Rev)WWWWW(I – +P → Ob, Or) WWWWW(I ← – P – Ob, Or).
The reverse of “I very badly want to take pleasure from the world through my body” is equivalent to “I very badly want to receive pain from the world through my body.”
(3) Sublimation is a substitute formation in which a neutral object appears instead of a sexualized one. This often requires a shift in erogenous zone as well. The desire to obtain sexual pleasure from one’s mother is disguised as an intellectual interest in nature:
(Sub)WW(I – +P → Mo, Or) WW(I – +P → N,Mi).
The sublimate of “I want to take pleasure from mother through my body” is equivalent to “I want to take pleasure from nature through my mind.”
(4) Repression rejects as ill-formed all sentences which try to express the rejected proposition, leaving the speaker with the urge to speak but not the symbolic means. This urgency may later appear as generalized anxiety, and we can conveniently think of the sigh, moan, and thrash of those gagged and bound by bandits, scruples, or guerrillas. If, however, there are many ways to express the objectionable idea, then the most devious, euphemistic, and remote may reach consciousness. I can’t say that I want my father’s penis, and I can’t say that I want what father has. I can’t say that I want to take my father’s place, and I can’t say that I wish my father would go away, but I can say (and, indeed, don’t I say?) that I want to be big and strong like my father when I grow up.
If I cannot say that I wish to be refused, I can try refusing you, but if I dare not refuse you, I can eventually settle on giving you an inappropriate gift. Sometimes a series of acts is so inept and foolish that we can infer the inward opposite of their publicly painted purpose (Nixon’s bumbling coverup, for instance). What we need to know, of course, is how to translate this behavior into its appropriate assertion, and, in addition, what operators ought to be applied to it, and in what order. Generally, only an analysis of the “speaker” will disclose the habitual psychological operators employed, as well as the reasons why these specific ones are chosen rather than some others.
Assuming that we know these things, Freud’s scheme allows us to proceed through a series of propositional transformations from an early assertion of infantile desire, for example, to a later, more general, belief about the self, somewhat in the following fashion:
If this last statement expresses an extended belief about the self, and therefore represents a set of sentences rather than simply a specific and momentary wish of the id, then we can profitably apply K. M. Colby’s programming suggestions to it, transforming at once the whole belief-group in any one (or more) of the following ways:21
By mid-career Freud was suggesting that there were two instincts, one concerned with the preservation of the person, the other with sexuality. These two instincts were soon so intertwined that they found themselves speaking the same sentences. If I want pleasure from your body, I shall need some power over it, and it is possible that soon my sexual pleasure will stem from the power itself.
Sexualized power is the root of sadism, and pain has very little to do with its subtler manifestations. Moreover, the sadist is so concerned to be secure he has no time for the blessings of peace, and instead seeks repeated proofs of his safety in the whip.
The economics of sexual pleasure can be worked out on this “marital” square of opposition:
Within the total pleasure of any bonded pair (two people who are serving as introjected objects for each other, food sources, so to speak, as near as each belly, or the ever-present breast, the tender fondle, the happy tweak), the income and outgo for each should be roughly equal over time, otherwise the economy of the country will surely falter, one ego will find itself in debt to the id of another. In such circumstances only power can prevent payment, and soon still another little repressive society will have been added to the world.
Freud’s first book was about speech problems (On Aphasia, 1891), and it might be argued that his work remained running in that starting place. Even in the silence of the id, there is the beginning of differentiation, of centering, of speech; for the u
nconscious cannot come forth by day any differently from the way it does by night. There must be fragments of language it can fasten to, images it can distort, concepts to hide under as though they were sheep whose woolly backs would soothe the suspicious hands of the Cyclops—come forth! come forth!—and with such sly chicanery, such a clever sleight to the pokered eye of the cyclops, emerge from the cave as a symbol … clean as a contest queen from a suburban housewife’s womb.
Does the id speak the truth? It always speaks the truth, because the id is a miraculous conjecture. There are no obstacles to myths. The Freud of the “Project” worried about the confirmation of the magnified eye and the knife, as do many of the philosophers in Wollheim’s volume, nor did he ever abandon the belief that one day a slide would show the eye a reason; but the Freud who told us the meaning of our slips, jokes, and dreams was a reader and interpreter of texts. How do we know, then, when a code’s been cracked?… when we are right?… when do we know if we have even received a message? Why, naturally, when, upon one set of substitutions, sense emerges like the outline under a rubbing; when a single tentative construal leads to several; when all the sullen letters of the code cry TEAM! after YEA! has been, by several hands, uncovered.
And if the Japanese don’t sail their ships where we have said their messages have sent them?… then the Japanese have simply not sent their ships where they said they would. Warriors, poets, persons change their minds; but codes are frozen in their formulas of dissimulation like those toothy tigers were in Russian ice.
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