Freud's mourning manual

Music: Athlete: Tourist I regret that with new courses and one new seminar prep I am feeling the crunch for time; blogger energy is getting shunted into new places, and now that all that holiday time has been spent, entries are likely to dwindle. On tap this week, aside from teaching: two more job candidates to question, wine, and dine; editing a thesis (it's on the way Rog!); and new prepping for a manuscript I wanted to finish writing (the stuff on Agamben and War of the Worlds). In lieu of something new, I'll post a rehash, part of my lecture from yesterday that opened "Psychoanalysis and Rhetoric."

Freud said that his The Interpretation of Dreams was his most inspired and important work, comparing its writing to Jacob's tussle with an angel while confiding to a friend, admitting on some level that the angel may in fact have been the heavenly outlier. At the age of 44, Freud had met one professional failure after the next. He longed for recognition. He had delayed The Interpretation for a year so that it would be published in 1900, thinking that the book was going to make an impact--a turn-of-the-century kind of impact.

Although acclaim would eventually come during his lifetime, in the initial years after Freud published the study it went unnoticed. Freud took this seeming failure personally, for as Bateman and Holmes point out, Freud wrote the Interpretation of Dreams as he was mourning his father's dying, his father's death. Hence the landmark document of psychoanalysis is not so much about sex as it is death. The Interpretation is a manual for mourning. And if we will maintain Freud's dream book is a manual for mourning, then we are concerned with memory and forgetting. Insofar as psychoanalysis is dead, or insofar as its death always seems to be coming, and insofar we could argue that that rhetorical studies suffers from a kind of amnesia--a willful forgetting and repression of the Freudian idiom--then it is entirely fitting that we begin the course in mourning.

Let us begin at the ending of Freud's "dream book," and more specifically, with the dream of the burning child. Interestingly, Freud chooses to open his closing chapter with mourning dream (p. 547; Strachey trans.):

Among the dreams that have been reported to me by other people, there is one which has special claims upon our [this would be the "royal" our] attention at this point. It was told to me by a woman patient who herself heard it in a lecture on dreams: its actual source is unknown to me [here we should interject that Freud is speaking of adolescent omnipotence--to be born without parents; his father is dying]. Its content made an impression on the lady, however, and she proceeded to re-dream it, that is, to repeat some of the elements in a dream of her own, so that, by taking it over in this way, she might express her agreement with it on one particular point. The preliminaries to this model dream were as follows. A father had been watching beside his child's sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room which his child's body was laid out, with tall candles standing around it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours' sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm, and whispered to him reproachfully: 'Father, don't you see I'm burning?' He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child's dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.

Freud then moves on to say that such a dream is overdetermined and poses no difficulty of interpretation; it is a model example of how external sensation is incorporated into a reality of the interior. The dream also importantly marks Freud's transition from the "affect-trauma" model of the psyche--ambitiously described in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology" essay--to the so-called "primary topography," or Freud's transition from the influence of external reality to the increasing importance of fantasy.

Yet, given the mournful and touching tone of the dream, its placement in Freud's book of dreams should alert us to an obvious paternal dynamic here about one's origins: part of who you are, or who I am, concerns parental origin. "Father, don't you see I'm burning?" is the displaced plea for recognition (pure Kojeve), the very same recognition Freud longed for his dream book and for himself; that the subtextual unconscious here is Freud and his Status as Father and Child is made more obvious that most readers assume the burning child is, in fact, "the burning boy" (the original German is "child"). Most importantly, however, is that the burning child visits the father to reproach him. What the father-dreamer knows is that the child is in fact dead; the teaching of this dream is the source of Freud's own neurosis: the child does not know she is dead; all she knows is that she is burning, that we have a ghostly apparition of adolescent agressivity.

The dead subject who does not know that she is dead is a recurring theme in Freud's work, and perhaps no one has stressed this more than Lacan, who employs the figure to demonstrate the relationship of the subject to the signifier (we'll get to that in about six weeks). Turn with me if you will to another classic, Freud's "Formulations on Two Principles of Mental Functioning," where Freud reverses the role of father and son, stressing now the profound importance of phantasy to waking life (p. 305, number 8):

Suppose, for instance, that one is trying to solve a dream such as this. A man who had once nursed his father through a long and painful mortal illness told me that in the months following his father's death he had repeatedly dreamt that his father was alive once more and that he was talking to him in his usual way. But he felt it exceedingly painful that his father had really died, only without knowing it.

The dreamer feels guilty for wanting his father to die, muses Freud, as if to disown the death wish. The burning boy has become the burning father; in either case, the dreaming subject teaches us not so much how to mourn the death of love objects, but how to mourn our own deaths. The anxiety Freud's dream book raises is anxiety about death, and more to the point, the horrifying possibility that we are already dead.

Of course, this is a familiar cultural fantasy that is yoked, repeatedly, to fathers, sons, and monstrosity (and what follows will therefore be important to those of you who elect to take the companion seminar in the fall on haunting, which begins on the theme of "women left to themselves"). A good case is M. Night Shyamalan's film The Sixth Sense, which is about a boy, Cole Sear (pun intended, har har), who sees dead people. In the final scene of the film dubbed "Letting Go," Dr. Malcolm Crowe, not coincidentally a child psychologist, gradually begins to realize his own death [show clip].

The realization begins, of course, when he happens upon his wife sleeping. As with the original telling of the burning child dream, the roles only get reversed in the presence of woman, who is the source of truth (this is a metaphor well worn by Nietzsche and something we'll encounter again with Kristeva and Irigaray). In her sleep--that is, in the dream state--she questions the father in a reproachful tone: "Why Malcolm? Why did you leave me?" The ghost is called to account for himself, as if being interpellated by the living, but now we are in his dream. In the film, as with Freud's dream book, the primary identification is with the good doctor, but unlike Freud, this dreamer is revealed to be a ghost--he understand that he is fundamentally a void made meaningful by fantasy. "I see people. They don't know that they're dead," says the boy. When the doctor asks him when he sees dead people, the child responds, "All the time. They're everywhere. They only see what they want to see." So we should ask, in the Zizekian stylistic, "Isn't this Freud's fundamental teaching?" All of us are fundamentally empty, filled up with cultural scripts and narrative and meaning--with all those fantasies of waking life. And isn't the unfolding of the entire film akin to the dream work, the condensation and displacement of the painful and brutal truth that opens the film . . . a scene, incidentally, that the spectator conveniently and perfectly forgets until the end of the film, when the Dr. properly interprets all the pieces of this rebus? Let us not forget that the Dr. Crowes' death was at the hands of suicidal boy returned to punish the father for not seeing that he was burning up on the inside. Mourning always seems to entail a degree of guilt, and death, a punishment.

I have opened the class with a meditation on The Interpretation of Dreams as a manual for mourning, and with The Sixth Sense as an allegory for dream interpretation, in order to underscore a series of common themes that will run throughout the course. They reduce to three:

1. The subject is dead. That is to say, one of the many teachings of psychoanalysis is that there is no real or essential you, or rather, you are only the sum of your stories. Its ethic is consequently and fundamentally a mournful one.

2. Psychoanalysis has a father. This is why it is always being killed off. Freud even had a name for it: the allegory of the primal horde. As a corollary, mother is always the source of truth and the object of barter.

3. Interpretation is suspicious, or, rhetoric is not to be trusted. Although there are no accidents when we speak of the unconscious, nothing ever means what it seems. Rhetorical studies, in this respect, does not know that it is dead, invested as it is in the conscience of the manifest and the wholly conscious.