Project and Freedom 筹划与自由

“我们都有点神经症“——用精神分析理论看《危险方法》

http://movie.douban.com/subject/4221515/

今天和同学一起看了这部我们期待已久的电影。我们几个都是哲学系学生，但是对于弗洛伊德、荣格、拉康等人的精神分析理论有很大兴趣。我这学期第一次系统读了点弗洛伊德和拉普朗虚（Laplanche，台译），所以看这部电影觉得像看侦探片一样，充满了值得琢磨的细节。虽然自己并不是专业的心理学学生，还是愿意把自己的一些想法抛砖出来，希望更多的精神分析学朋友可以指正和讨论。片中弗洛伊德与荣格的分歧越来越大的时候，荣格曾写信让弗洛伊德正视自己的神经症（neurosis）和对他人的控制欲，而弗洛伊德回信说：“我们每个人都有点神经症。“需要说明的是，在接下来的分析中，我讨论的更多是电影中的角色，以及电影中的故事所具有的典型意义，而不是历史中的人物。

（不知道有哪些敏感词，实在是发不出来，只好截屏做成图片发了……）

http://book.douban.com/subject/2556907/

　　In my reading Freud, I always feel the lack of the other, that is, the other people, who stand clearly different from my person, seem not having an irreducible role in my mental life. In this essay, I’ll examine the role of the other in Freud’s and Laplanche’s understanding of instincts, especially sexual instincts, and argue that while Freud gives primary role to auto-eroticism and thus cannot give a full account of the role of the others in sexual instinct, Laplanche’s theory of primary seduction and source-object can be seen as a way out. 
　　 
　　In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”, Freud defines the object of instincts as “the thing in regard to which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim.” (SE, XIV, 122) The object, as to an instinct, is not essentially connected to the latter, is prone to change however frequently, and is not necessary “something extraneous: it may equally well be part of the subject’s own body”. (SE, XIV, s122) The source of an instinct is strictly somatic, and the aim of an instinct is, in accordance, also somatic, “the attainment of ‘organ pleasure’”. (SE, XIV, 126) This implies that even when external object is needed or used, the source and the aim of instincts are still not external, independent from the other, and fundamentally belonging to the self. 
　　 
　　The self-referring tendency of instincts in Freud may be explained that his claim that the ego has went through an early developmental phase of “auto-erotic”, or “narcissism”. The distinction between self and the other, is therefore reduced to the relation between subject and object, active and passive, and is further reducible to that between the narcissistic subject and narcissistic object. Even in those passive forms of instincts (for example, masochism and exhibitionism) that by definition require another as the acting role (respectively, sadism and scopophilia), Freud claims that here the “narcissistic subject … through identification, replaced by another, extraneous ego”. (SE, XIV, 130) The primal narcissistic state cannot transform and develop if it were not for the primal dependent state of human, “during which his pressing needs are satisfied by an external agency and are thus prevented from becoming greater” (SE, XIV, 134, fn2) Though the others are on whom we depend, they constitute a part of the impenetrable and inaccessible external world for us, there is no way to distinguish them from other things; the arbitrariness of whether they decide to fulfill my needs might seem to me as impenetrable as the arbitrariness of weather. 
　　 
　　The “leaning-on”, as Laplanche would call it, of sexual instincts to ego-instincts seems to make the sexual instincts more self-referring. “To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to one of the functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not become independent of them until later.” (SE, VII, 181-2) To Freud, sexual instincts, like its earlier leaning on self-preservation, always seeks the repetition of the satisfaction that is enjoyed in the early age. While it requires the external world to provide this satisfaction, the satisfaction itself is ultimately my own. It is hard to detect when in Freud the other human agents are distinguished from the overarching notion of “external world”. Therefore, it leaves open where Laplanche can bring in his theory of instincts and his notion of source-objects. 
　　 
　　Laplanche considers it as a problem that in Freud’s biological notion of instincts (drives), “the contingency of the object is total”, and this theory treats both the outside world and the others as something to anchor the floating energy, without endowing them with a sense of necessity on their part. (EO, 124) For Laplanche, rather, the drive comes from two sources: apart from the endogenous, somatic source that Freud acknowledges, Laplanche points out that “an adult cultural world in which the child is totally immersed from the outset”, which should also be considered as an antecedence of drive. (EO, 126) This is the world, full of sexualized messages and significations, which no child or adult can escape being overwhelmed by, nor can anyone fully grasp. To Laplanche, what is lacking in Freud is the fact that infants and adults are at the same time existent, and are all in a cultural environment where unconscious sexualized messages are sent with any seemingly non-sexual gestures. Thus, the adults’ unconscious gestures to the infants constitute what Laplanche calls “the primal seduction”, which causes the bifurcation of sexual instinct and self-preservation instinct to happen. For Freud, it is because we are dependent on the others for our subsistence that we develop out of the narcissistic state, and the autoerotic narcissism is explained by the infants’ incapability of controlling the external world. For Laplanche, the seduction from the other is primary; the adults’ gestures, carrying unconscious sexualized messages with them, cause auto-erotic activity. “The obligatory vehicle of auto-eroticism … is the intrusion and then repression of the enigmatic signifiers supplied by the adult.” (EO, 129) The unconscious messages received but not decoded by the infant will remain as mental presentations of things, and will then constitute the id. And these “thing-presentations” are ultimately the “source-object” of the drive. The drive is neither fully mental nor fully biological; it is the impact from these repressed source-object to the ego. 
　　 
　　In Laplanche’s account of sexual drive, the role of the other human (rather than a mere “external world”) is clearer than that in Freud’s theory of instinct. As human beings also immersed in the whole of unconscious significance and communications, they make gestures and send messages to infants while they themselves can never fully understand, and this unknown communication has a central influence in the development of sexual drive. 
　　 
　　 
　　 
　　Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Standard Edition, Volume VII, 123-246. 
　　 
　　Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, Standard Edition,Volume XIV, 109-140. 
　　 
　　Laplanche, The Drive and its Source-Object, Essays on Otherness, 117-132.