MEMORY, MALADY, AND THERAPY

Psychoanalysis did not spring full-grown and armor-clad from the head of Freud. Each of its theoretical and practical features developed incessantly during a career that lasted half a century. Yet one of its earliest and most enduring traits was the significance of memory for it. During the first of his introductory lectures “On Psychoanalysis,” delivered at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1909, Freud italicized the following sentence: “Our hysterical patients are suffering from reminiscences.”³ He explained that whatever complaints hysterics might have, a facial tic, chronic nausea, numbness in the limbs, the complaints could be regarded—a purely physiological, “medical” cause having been excluded—as vestiges of remembrance. Freud called them Erinnerungssymbole, “symbols of rememberance.” Hysteric symptoms symbolize one or more traumatic events in the patient’s past life, often from early childhood, events of which the patient is perfectly unaware, that is to say, which he or she cannot remember. Freud compared these symptoms to monuments or memorials—like ancient herms, serving as both burial crypts and pathmarkers—that affect the patient in a mysteriously persistent and overpowering way. Freud had visited London a few days before his ship sailed for America and had gone to see “Charing Cross” and “The Monument.” The tourguide explained that “The Monument,” which had no more revealing name than that, was to remind Londoners of the devastating fire of 1666; “Charing Cross” was erected during the thirteenth century by one of the Plantagenet kings, for there the coffin of his dead queen had touched down during the funeral procession. Very moving, says the tourist. Yet what would the tourist think if a passerby were to pause at Charing Cross or The Monument and then suddenly collapse in paroxysms of grief, utterly unable to move from the spot and take up his or her daily routine? That is what happens to hysterics, Freud explained. Some monument of the past that has no remembered significance cripples them in the present.

In an anonymous article published in 1904 (“Die Freudsche Psycho-analytische Methode”)⁴ Freud notes that very early in his treatment of hysteria and compulsive neuroses he made an observation that was “determinative” for psychoanalysis. When patients tried to recount their case histories they were often stymied by insuperable barriers that prevented their recollecting when and where it all started. “There is no case history of neurosis,” Freud was led to conclude, “without amnesia of some sort.” Yet not the purely passive amnesia we might suffer after an accident: when he encouraged his patients to concentrate and apply themselves in order to recall these events that were forgotten or distorted beyond recognition, they resisted actively with every cunning art at their disposal. They assured him it was a matter of no consequence, changed the subject, “forgot” to show up for their next appointment. Freud speculated that the amnesias themselves resulted from a force that was still at work in the patients. He called it Widerstand, resistance, and attributed it to Unlustgefühle, feelings of displeasure (or as we usually translate it, unpleasure) that were instituting an enforced oblivion. Nietzsche had in the second treatise of On the Genealogy of Morals hypothesized an “active forgetfulness.” Freud called it Verdrängung, repression. Yet, paradoxically, he attributed neurotic symptoms to the incompleteness of the amnesia, the failure to achieve total forgetfulness, the ultimate futility of resistance. In one of his earliest cases, that of Miss Lucy R., Freud was driven to conclude that although “forgetting” was actually intended and wished, it was “always only apparently successful.”⁵ He was compelled to recognize, as he put it, eine unvermutete Treue des Gedächtnisses, a fidelity of memory far greater than anything one could have anticipated. That fidelity made people sick. Freud believed it might also cure.

In 1893 Freud and Breuer published their “preliminary report” on the “psychic mechanism of hysteric phenomena.” Two years later—the very year of Freud’s sketch toward a scientific psychology—their Studien über Hysterie incorporated the “preliminary report” as an introduction to five detailed case histories (one by Breuer, four by Freud), a theoretical discussion by Breuer, and concluding observations “toward the psychotherapy of hysteria” by Freud. The first and last sections of the book established memory as both the mainspring of the hysteric mechanism and the principal tool of the therapy. In their preliminary report Breuer and Freud attributed their interest in hypnosis to the fact that a normal interview with hysteric patients could not elicit information on the etiology of the symptoms. The etiology involved events they “really could not remember.” Hypnosis proved to be one way “to awaken the memories of that time” in which, after an incubation period, the symptoms first began to appear. To rouse such memories was not merely an academic exercise in recall; it implied nothing less than the disappearance of the symptoms that had somehow sprung from dormant “reminiscences.” The authors italicized the following passage, and Freud reprinted it in his concluding comments:

For we found—at first to our very great surprise—that the particular hysteric symptoms vanished without further ado, and without recurring, when we were able to awaken to full clarity remembrance of the occasioning event, when at the same time we were also able to call to wakefulness the accompanying affect, and when the patient portrayed the event in the greatest possible detail and put the affect into words. (SH, 9-10; 204)

Here Freud and Breuer emphasized four aspects of the therapy. First, the symptoms result from an Erlebnis, or from a series of traumatic experiences, which the “ego-consciousness” of the patient no longer remembers; if the analyst succeeds in restoring remembrance of these events in the patient, the symptoms will vanish like pacified ghosts. Second, such remembrance must come to pass as an intense affective or emotional experience, the traumatic events being recovered “in as lively a manner as possible,” virtually tugged into their statum nascendi, the state in which they ought to have been experienced the first time. Third, the pathogenic events must be portrayed in minute detail, the analyst aiding the patient in the process of microscopic remembrance by relentless interrogation. Fourth, the patient must give utterance to the affect, must speak it out.

However, in the same preliminary report the two therapists contend that memory is also responsible for the formation of the symptoms in the first place. They stress, to repeat, that “for the most part, hysteric patients are suffering from reminiscences,” that is to say, from unknown memories, as though memories do not have to be remembered in order to be, indeed as though the most potent memories are those we forget, those that (as Merleau-Ponty says) are guarded and preserved by oblivion, so that Being and Thinking are not at all coterminous. Such unremembered reminiscences do not erode with the passage of time; they retain their affective force, or such force retains them. Their force is accounted for by the fact that the patient cannot repulse or even react to (abreagieren) the original event in a way that might expend the emotional energy the event had summoned. If the emotional reaction is obstructed, the affect remains linked to the reminiscence, the reminiscence imprisoned in the affect, as it were. Such unremembered reminiscences, which the patient is unable to associate with the rest of his or her conscious life, Freud and (especially) Breuer ascribe to an abnormal state of consciousness, which they call “hypnoid.” These reminiscences are dissociated from consciousness in a way that more than parallels the way in which a patient’s ego-consciousness is dissociated during hypnosis. Here the very language betrays the interlacing of disease and cure: hypnosis is the therapy for hypnoid malady. Freud underscores the same interrelation of malady and therapy in his 1893 address to the Viennese Medical Association: “The effort to learn the occasioning factor of a symptom is simultaneously a therapeutic maneuver” (StA 6, 20).

When the affective charge of such dissociated or hypnoid reminiscences reaches a certain threshold, it produces more or less chronic hysteric symptoms by virtue of what Breuer and Freud call a “conversion into the somatic” (SH, 127). The essence of psychotherapy is the countermanding of somatological conversion: if unremembered reminiscences yield the somatic symptom, then reminiscences remembered dissolve it. Freud and Breuer conclude: “It is by now comprehensible how the method of psychotherapy here presented heals. It cancels the effects of the representation that was not originally ‘abreacted’ by enabling its pent-up affect to be released by means of talk and by bringing the representation to correction by means of association” (SH, 18). The spoken word—much more than a sign signifying a signified—reasserts its rights in the domain of the symbolic: symptoms or “symbols of remembrance” are disbanded and the reminiscences behind them reappropriated as memories proper. The latter, no longer dissociated, are brought home. They can now be corrected by means of a kind of dialogue with one another, in which each remembrance understands itself as a perspective, as one associated with others.

In the two to three years that intervened between the preliminary report by Breuer and Freud and the latter’s concluding remarks, “Toward the Psychotherapy of Hysteria,” Freud distanced himself from hypnosis and from the Breuerian “cathartic method” and achieved fundamental insights into the sexual etiology of neuroses. These shifts in point of view and new insights need not concern us here, but one point merits our attention. Freud describes his replacement of hypnosis with the method of “enforced concentration”: the analyst requests that the patient lie back, close his eyes, and concentrate, assuring him he will remember what must be remembered, and so “compels” the patient to remember. Such compulsion, Drängen, on the analyst’s part counteracts the patient’s tendency to repress, Verdrängen, the pathogenic representations. Once again, in Drängen and Verdrängen, we discern the interpenetration of malady and therapy.

Perhaps it is unnecessary to go into greater detail—although Freud’s descriptions of enforced concentration, the procedure of laying a hand on the patient’s forehead or temple in order to overcome resistance (the procedure itself mirroring the “conversion into the somatic”), the threefold layering of repressed material, the roots of a general theory of the unconscious, as well as of “transference” in the therapeutic situation, all make the concluding chapter of Studien über Hysterie one of the classics of psychoanalysis. Yet for the sake of my own theme let me now summarize. An event or series of events that are shocking and painful to an individual occur; he or she cannot, for one reason or another, react to them, move away from them, as it were. A powerful emotional charge adheres to a reminiscence or representation of the event and causes it to be unrememberable, inaccessible to consciousness, ostracized from the realm of the “I think,” but by no means powerless. At a certain critical point, enacting some mysterious symbolism, miming the event, the body “remembers.” With the conversion into the somatic we reach the heart of the interlacing of disease and cure. As symptoms, or bodily interpretations of the repressed event, these iconographic “symbols of remembrance” constitute the first stage of genuine recollection and recovery. True, without the tic, the nausea, the numbness in the extremities, the patient would not need a doctor; but now that he does, the doctor needs those symptoms as herms or signposts, else he or she has nowhere to go in search of help. Beginning with those engrammatological clues the analyst labors week after week to negotiate a reconciliation and repatriation. That can be achieved when the patient is able to recollect the repressed events in vivid detail and put those remembered events and the feelings attached to them into the words and gestures of dramatic speech.

Thus Freud’s famous “talking cure.” It rests on the confidence that there is something in the patient which, in spite of all resistance, wants to express itself and to know. In chapter 5 we shall say the same of spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Freud encourages the analyst to have faith in the ultimate fidelity—and also the benevolence—of memory: no matter how recalcitrant a particular remembered scene may be for a nascent analysis, no matter how absurd and contradictory, it will find its place when the analysis is complete, that is to say, when the symbols of remembrance have been recovered in genuine remembrance. However, is not such dramatic recollection and catharsis of emotion dangerous? Should not the sprite be kept in the bottle? In an address to his dubious medical colleagues in 1905 Freud assures them that the remembrance induced by analysis cannot cause more emotional and somatological damage than the amnesia. If the unremembered reminiscence is thanatos, remembrance is eros, and eros will prevail.

Why that is so, Freud is never able to explain to his own satisfaction. This is not the place to rehearse his various attempts at a solution. The secret of the talking cure runs deep. Just how deep Freud suggests in a late work, The Future of an Illusion, where in a fully positive sense he invokes the psychoanalyst’s “god,” unser Gott, Logos (StA 9, 187). The Future of an Illusion appears in 1927, the very year in which Heidegger’s Being and Time challenges the ontotheological interpretation of the being that “has logos.” We will not follow Freud’s Future, however, but will turn back now to the 1895 project toward a scientific psychology.

QUANTITY

The “Project” is not without abortive developments, inconsistencies, reversals, and contradictions; it is not without imperfection, this regressive monster. Again and again the text allows the imperfect tense to interrupt the narrative flow ofYou may never know in the preterite all perhaps that you would not believe that you ever even saw to be about to. Perhapsthe present, such interruption suggesting that sketches toward a scientific psychology are already relics of the past. Composed precipitately in the late summer and autumn of 1895, it shows three parts: the first (undated) provides a “general plan” of a neural theory of mental behavior based on a quantitative conception of excitation and discharge; the second (dated September 25) offers a “psycho-pathology” of hysteria, based (tenuously) on the general neural theory outlined in part one; the third (dated October 5) attempts to describe “normal psychic processes,” especially conscious thought, memory, and language behavior. The first part shows twentyone sections, the second six, the third only one, although it readily falls into four parts.

The overarching scheme of the “Project” emerges in a remark Freud makes to Fliess on May 25, 1895: “Two intentions torment me: namely, to see how a doctrine of psychic function takes shape when one introduces quantitative observation, a kind of economics of neural energy [eine Ökonomik der Nervenkraft]; and, secondly, to carve out of psychopathology the gain [Gewinn] for normal psychology” (129). The economics prove to be problematic, the gain meager, even though the 1895 “Project” will continue to inform the metapsychological treatises from 1915 to 1923. Preeminently occupied with “pathological defense” mechanisms, laboring over the psychotherapy of hysteria, and having scarcely begun the sketch, he writes to Fliess about it on August 16 as though it were a sin of the past: “It was a curious business, this (jnjjo). . . . To put it briefly, I’ve chucked in the whole alphabet, and I try to tell myself that it is of no interest to me whatsoever” (133). And a dozen lines later: “The psychology really has become a cross. . . . I wanted no more than to clarify defense, but explained something right out of nature [mitten aus der Natur heraus]. I had to work through the problem of quality, sleep, memory [Erinnerung], in short, all psychology. And now I’ll have no more of it.” Curious imperfection, this system finished before it is begun, this “cross.” The following discussion will overlook the repetitions in Freud’s text and will focus on its frustrations, especially as regards the specific topic of memory (Gedächtnis) and remembrance (Erinnerung).

The “intent” of Freud’s sketch is to provide a psychology for “natural science,” based on material parts (neurons) and their quantitatively determined states. Two fundamental states emerge, “activity” and “rest,” fresh from Plato’s Sophist; activity is distinguished from rest by “quantity,” that is, quantities of force subject to the laws of motion. Freud does not pause to ponder what one of those basic states (“rest”) can be in a universe of Galilean turbulence, but does concede that his efforts join those of many other researchers (he is thinking perhaps of Sigmund Exner’s 1894 system), and that “similar attempts are common these days” (379). Indeed, one of the sketch’s insuperable problems, a problem shared by all such systems, will be that quantity alone fails to account for several aspects of mental and emotional life that are of crucial importance to the budding psychopathologist (aspects such as repression, destined to be the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory), so that at a very early stage in the argument Freud will have to appeal beyond quantity to quality.

In the first section of Part One Freud elaborates “The Quantitative Conception” as his “First Principal Proposition.” In direct contradiction to what Josef Breuer will soon claim in their collaborative Studien über Hysterie, Freud asserts that the psychopathology of hysteria and compulsive neurosis, with its appeals to highly charged stimuli, substitutions, conversions, and discharges, implies a general conception of neural excitation in terms of “quantities in flux” (380). Thus it “seemed” “not unjustified” to try to generalize these findings. “Neural inertia” is the first such generalization. In their structure and development neurons betray this primal fact: they endeavor to void quantity (sich der Quantitat zu entledigen trachten). That there are fundamentally two neural systems, the sensible (afferent) and the motor (efferent), reflects the fundamental structure of reflex behavior, to wit, the intake and discharge of quantities of energy. Thus the neural systems are inheritances of our protoplasmic past, or as Freud will later suggest, are in macrocosmic relation to the microcosm of one-celled animal life, with the surface of the cells exposed to excitations from the external world. The primary function of the neural systems is to transfer sensible excitation to the motor apparatus in order to reduce excitation and dispel stimulus through flight. Such “flight stimulus” occurs along neural pathways that by virtue of some mysterious “secondary function” come to be “preferred and preserved” avenues of discharge (381).

This fairly straightforward account of quantity intake and discharge is soon disturbed by the phenomenon of indigenous, endogenous stimulation, that is, excitations occurring within the organism that are bound up with hunger, respiration, and sexual reproduction. The “exigency of life” (die Not des Lebens) cannot be resolved by mere flight but only by specific changes in particular conditions in the “outer world,” such changes necessitating the expenditure of considerable energy. The proper calamity of life, life’s destitution or needful condition (Not), is that it must quit the Nirvana of zero-excitation, abandon the paradise of inertia, and settle for the halfway house of Fechnerian “constancy.” The neural system

must come to accept a reserve [Vorrat] of quantity [Q = exogenous excitation], in order to satisfy the demands for specific action. However, in the way the system does this, the perdurance of the same tendency shows itself. For it is modified into a striving at least to maintain the quantity [Qἠ = endogenous excitation] at the lowest possible level and to defend itself against its increase; that is to say, to keep it constant.

Freud now applies the rubric “secondary function” to the modified striving to maintain a modicum of endogenous energy as a reserve for specific action designed to alleviate the exigency of life.

Freud’s “second principal proposition” (in fact the last such proposition, since he drops the term Hauptsatz from the title of subsequent sections) develops his “theory of neurons” (382). The nervous system consists of a series of distinct though similarly constructed neurons. The neurons come into contact with one another only indirectly through the mediation of “foreign mass,” absorbing a “quantity” of energy that flows along certain favored routes (Leitungsrichtungen) in the dendrites and discharging energy along the cylindrical axon. Freud notes the “abundant divergences” of the dendrites and their “various calibers,” that is to say, the difference in the thickness of these cell processes; such difference reflects morphologically a differentiating function soon to be described. Neurons can at one time be “occupied” or cathected by fixed quantities of endogenous energy, and at another time be “empty.” Neural inertia expresses itself in the “streaming” of quantity from dendrites to axon. “Thus the single neuron is the icon [Abbild] of the entire nervous system, with its duplex construction, the axon serving as its organ of discharge.”

Let us bypass this curious iconography of the nervous system and its neural components and proceed to Freud’s more detailed account of the secondary function. It requires that the flow of quantity be interrupted, that the homology of neuron and nervous system be somewhat restricted, or perhaps that the adherence of both microcosm and macrocosm to the principle of inertia be put into question. The storing of quantity, which the secondary function requires, compels us to suppose that the point of contact between the axon of one neuron and the dendrites of the next is in fact a barrier (Kontaktschranke). As Derrida recognizes (ED, 298—99), the hypothesis of contact barriers (influenced perhaps by Foster and Sherrington’s work two years earlier on the “synaptic gap”) is essential to Freud’s sketch. The first justification of such a supposition is that it allows him to conceive of the conduction of energy through highly differentiated rather than undifferentiated types of protoplasm: the capacity to conduct quantities of energy is differential, and it is to be accounted for by a “differentiation in protoplasm.” However, such differentiation in protoplasm itself accounts for “a better capacity for the advancingvia mala, hyber pass, heckhisway per alptrack: through landsvague and vain, after many mandelaysof further conductions” (383). We soon realize that one never bypasses iconography: the paradoxes of original and copy—also fresh from Plato’s Sophist—prevail even here in speculations on the neural structure and functionguide them through the labyrinth of their samilikes and the alteregoases of their pseudoselvesof this complex slab of quantity we call the human body. And where we find iconography we may be sure that typography and engrammatology will not be wanting. Freud now recounts the second justification of the theory of contact barriers, the one that clarifies the relevance of all this for memory and thus for the psyche as a whole.

A principal property of nerve tissue is memory [das Gedächtnis], that is, quite generally, the capacity to be changed for the duration [dauernd] by events that occur but once [einmalige Vorgänge]. This is in striking contrast to the behavior of matter that allows the motion of a wave to permeate it and then reverts to its former state. Any psychological theory worthy of the name must provide an explanation of “memory.” Now, every such theory comes up against the difficulty that on the one hand it must assume that after excitation the neurons are in a different state than before, while on the other it cannot deny that new excitations generally confront the identical conditions of reception that earlier excitations confronted. Hence the neurons should be both influenced and unchanged, without bias. An apparatus capable of this complicated achievement lies for the moment beyond our powers of invention; we rescue ourselves by ascribing the perdurant influence via excitation to one class of neurons, and contrariwise the immutability, that is, the freshness required for new excitations, to another. In this way the current practice of segregating “perception cells” from “remembrance cells” came to be; however, it is a practice that has been coordinated with nothing else and that cannot itself appeal to anything else.

The imperfect tense (So entstand. . .) suggests the imperfection of the ascription, which remains an anomaly (die sich aber sonst in nichts eingefügt hat), perhaps what Coleridge called a suffiction (und selbst sich auf nichts berufen kann). Nevertheless, the theory of duplex (and even tripartite) construction in the neurons is the mainstay of psychoanalytic theory (see chapter seven of The Interpretation of Dreams and the whole of Beyond the Pleasure Principle).⁶ And it forms the backbone of the 1895 sketch, as we shall now see, with Freud’s depiction of the ɸ, ψ and ω neurons.

The contact-barrier theory, having unearthed “this way out,” “this loophole” (diesen Ausweg), now asserts that there are two classes of neurons: the permeable, which allow endogenous quantity to pass through them “as though they possessed no contact barriers,” so that such neurons revert to their prior condition; and those neurons that are relatively impermeable, which bring their contact barriers to bear in such a way that energy flows only with difficulty, and only in part, through them (384). By suffering transformation to another state, such impermeable neurons grant us “a possibility of portraying memory.” Permeable neurons serve perception but are incapable of retention; impermeable neurons are the “bearers” of memory and of psychic processes in general. Freud designates the latter accordingly as the ty neurons, the former, more mysteriously, as the ɸ neurons. (Or perhaps the designation is more mysterious: Plato’s Cratylus, at 427a, aligns phi and psi, identifying both as windy consonants requiring “great expenditure of breath,” so that the stoppage of flow by “contact barriers” and the possibility of retention, the possibility of a psyche that will not expire, remain the aporias.) In any case, Freud does not for the moment take up the conundrum that perception is neither a psychic process in general nor an accomplishment that is inherently capable of retention, so that it is difficult to see how anything perceived is ever remembered. Nor does he comment on the further conundrum—to which he nevertheless explicitly draws our attention—that the ψ neurons, as they become better and better conductors across their contact barriers, become less and less impermeable and thus more and more similar to the neurons they were invented to supplement. The condition of the contact barriers is itself determined as a degree of “breaching” or “effraction” (Grad der Bahnung). “Memory is portrayed [dargestellt] by means of the breachings at hand among the ψ neurons.” Memory is thus a power of showing the way, eine wegweisende Macht, that “prefers” one path to another (Wegbevorzugung), ensuring that the resistance offered by the sundry contact barriers will be a differentiated resistance. One is reminded of the differentiation of the intervals and pores into which in Descartes’ suffiction the animal spirits tumble. “Memory would be portrayed by virtue of the differences [Unterschiede] in the breachings among the ψ neurons” (385). Breaching or effraction itself operates according to a twofold factor, to wit, “the magnitude of the impression,” die Grösse des Eindrucks, and “the frequency of the recurrence of the same impressions,” die Häufigkeit der Wiederholung. Here too, in this first explicit reference tocatastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past, type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundancetypography, to the Ein-druck that was sure to come, we find a further reminiscence of the Cartesian account: the robust and repeated punctilious action of the journeyman weavers assures the retention of differentiated memories in region B of the brain.

Freud again rehearses the fundamental trait of neural inertia. If the system strives to keep the amount of stimulus as low as possible; if it only reluctantly makes way for the secondary function by which the exigency of life requires and receives its reserve of quantity, the secondary function in turn requiring an increase in the number and variety of impermeable (ψ) neurons; then the breachings that facilitate the flow of quantity can readily be seen as “in service to the primary function.” Breaching must therefore be seen as a partial reversion to an earlier state, prior to the exigency of life. Derrida is therefore entirely rightAdd lightest knot into tiptitionto stress that “life is already menaced by the origin of the memory that constitutes it, and already menaced in the effraction [le frayage] it resists, the breaching that it can contain only by repeating it” (ED, 301/202); and he is also right in seeing the 1895 “Project” (as psychoanalysts such as Ernst Kris have also seen it) as the seedbed of Freud’s mature notion of the economy of life-death Ofoetal sleep! Ah, fatal slip!in the repetition compulsion of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. However, to return to the 1895 sketch, such breachings in any single neuron are multiple, and one can readily imagine that all the reserved energy flows in one specific direction rather than in another, thanks to differences in the “paving” of its various avenues. Freud here appears to abandon the microcosm/ macrocosm model according to which the axon or Abfuhrorgan of any given neuron is singular. As the network of contact barriers and breachings grows, the economyShop! Please shop! Shop ado please! O ado please shop. How hominous his house, haunt it? Yesses indeed it be!of life-death becomes supremely complex.

Granted such complexity, it is easy to see that Freud can hardly be expected to explain everything. “In what breaching otherwise consists is a question we shall not discuss.”⁷ And yet the entire theory (or fiction) stands (or falls) with the account of a differentiated typography that tends to erase the difference between the neural systems as such. One might suppose that the contact barriers themselves somehow absorb endogenous quantities of energy; yet Freud assures us that the quantity “left behind” by the breaching itself is expelled, discharged “precisely in consequence of the breaching, which of course makes [the neuron] more permeable.” In other words, breaching itself requires the perdurant presence of quantity, even though its sole function is to let quantity pass. Which is a way of saying that breaching and the preferential path appear to presuppose precisely what they are meant to account for—both to presuppose it and to make it utterly impossible. After posing the additional problem as to whether the magnitude and frequency of impressions need be equal, whether 3 Q = 1 Qἠ • 3 (he will later, at 395, reflect on the strength of the latter half of the equation, as periodicity, and then, at 405, assert the likelihood of the supremacy of the first half), Freud concludes by conceding: “All this must be held in reserve [vorbehalten bleiben] for later adaptations of the theory to psychic facts.” There is no end of psychic facts, however, hovering in the wings and awaiting their cue.

In the third section, “The Biological Standpoint” (387-90), Freud reasserts his confidence in the duplex theory of neurons to account for retention and fresh reception, even though he himself has shown how the putative differences in breachings tend to reduce the two systems to one and thus to destroy the theory’s explanatory power. That his hypothesis betrays something of “the gratuitousness of the constructio ad hoc” (387) heProspector projector and boomooster giant builder of all causeways woesoever, hopping offpoint and true terminus of straxstraightcuts and corkscrewn perambulaups, zeal whence to goal whither, wonderlustfreely concedes. Nothing in the histology of his times supports such a duplex morphology. (See note 8, below). Freud therefore pursues the question in general “biological” terms; that is to say, in terms of the genealogy of the duplex system, its possible morphogenesis or “development.”

“From the outset,” the nervous system exhibits two functions, as we have seen: it receives stimuli from the outside and endeavors to discharge the resulting endogenous excitation. The exigency of life (hunger, respiration, reproduction) intervenes in the discharge process, however, compelling the system “toward further biological development.” Let us pause a moment to ponder the curious intervention of die Not des Lebens. If the nervous system “from the outset” possesses two functions, then what becomes of the distinction between primary and secondary functions? We recall that the latter term shifted in its sense and application, from the general discharge of quantity in the motor system (the efferent system) to the general accretion of quantity as an endogenous reserve for exigent life. One might wonder, from a “biological” point of view, if there ever wasBut really now whenabouts? Expatiate then how much times we live in. Yes?at “the outset” a primary system without a secondary system, an outside without an inside, a neural inertia, quantity flow without a reserve; one might wonder therefore whether the secondary function is not every bit as original, “from the outset,” as the primary function, whether indeed that primary function taken by itself could have anything to do with life. What was lifeDon’t forget! The grand fooneral will now shortly occur. Rememberbefore it became need?

Freud now (388) hypothesizes that the (ɸ) neurons are to be found in the spinal gray matter, the ψ neurons in the gray matter of the cerebrum proper. The latter manifest no direct links with the periphery of the body, and thus no links with the outside world, but merely serve the sympathetic nervous system.⁸ Yet the hypothesis is so close to being a “sci-fi” hypothesis, so exposed to the charge of arbitrariness (Willkür), that Freud now pursues another “way out.” Because it is ultimately the (differential) quantity of excitation that produces the breachings, one may transfer the differentiating factor from the morphology of the neurons themselves to their topology. “A difference of essence is replaced by a difference in destiny and milieu” (389). The permeability or impermeability of neurons thus would depend on the quantity that reaches them in their environment. If the neurons have to do solely with the periphery of the somatic system, the neurons with the endogenous, visceral system, then one may assume that the peripheral system is exposed to the quantities that exceed the threshold of the contact barriers of the (ɸ) neurons there, and that the level of excitation in the endogenous system—whatever the vicissitudes of life—does not exceed the threshold, so that accretion of quantity can occur in the central (ψ) neurons. If we were able merely to change the locale and the network (Topik und Verbindung) of the two sets of nerves, their structural permeability or impermeability would correspondingly change.

The fact that the external world, the world of the organist’s fingers and the lacecuff punch, serves as “the origin of all large quantities of energy,” the fact that in the world of Galilean turbulence we are exposed to “mighty, powerfully moved masses that propagate their motion,” leads plausibly to this shift from a protoplasmic to a topicalTip. Take Tamotimo’s topical. Tipaccount. The very first exigency of life would be to neutralize typography by absorbing and discharging large quantities. On the periphery, the frontier between life and death, topography would master typography. All would be permeability—without permutation, without memory. The psyche, the system of ψ neurons, would be purely supplementary, nachträglich. Yet Freud quickly dashes this illusion. For the system of ψ neurons is in fact, as we anticipated, necessary from the outset. It receives quantities of energy from two sources, namely, from inner-corporeal excitation but also from the ɸ neurons themselves. Life, it seems, must be in the world. Freud is now concerned to show that these quantities of stimulus, though double in terms of their source, are actually smaller in magnitude than those in the ɸ system. The fact that the histology of nerve cells indicates a basically homologous structure in all such cells suggests that endogenous stimulation is of the order of magnitude of intercellular exchange generally—hence, presumably, weaker than in the case of the peripheral ɸ system.

Freud therefore returns to “The Problem of Quantity” (390), particularly with regard to the ɸ system. The fact that neurons are not directly exposed to the outside world, that they terminate in sundry cellular formations, implies that quantity (from the outside) is always (from the outset) dampened, tempered, or reduced. The nerve-end apparatus is thus a shield against quantity, a screen that allows only “quotients” or fractions of the original force to penetrate. (Such shielding apparatus would not be necessary in the endogenous sphere, inasmuch as excitation would already have been filtered down to the proper intercellular or intracellular level.) A general theory of the nervous structure would therefore have as its central concept Abwehr, defense; and Freudwiv his defences down during his wappin stillstandintroduces two further Ab- words to express this pervasive notion of apotropaism and aversion. “The structure of the nervous system may thus serve to withstand [Abhaltung], may serve to discharge [Abfuhr] endogenous quantity (Qἠ) from the neurons” (391). The several subsystems of the overarching nervous system may therefore be viewed as increasingly refined filters designed to hinder the passage of quantity. The secret of their efficacy is difficult to discern; the clear signal of their failure is the pathology of pain, der Schmerz. Freud will return to that pathology once again five sections later, with Das Schmerzerlebnis (404—5). And we too shall have to take up the theme of pain later in Part Two of the present volume, especially in chapters 6 and 7.

Yet pain has itsWhose dolour, O so mine!own mystery. For it is perfectly confluent with stimulation in general. Just as the principle of principles for neurology is neural inertia or “flight from stimulus,” Reizflucht, so the principle of neuropathology is “flight from pain,” Schmerzflucht. Except that here it is difficult to know how to translate Reizflucht and Schmerzflucht. Is it flight from stimulus and pain, or the flight and coarsing of these things? In other words, how does one distinguish between neurology and neuropathology when pathos, as typography, perforation, puncture, penetration, and effraction, is the very mechanism and the norm? Only by postulating a quantity in excess of the ɸ threshold, and thus a fortiori in excess of the ψ threshold, a quantity whose invasion in effect levels the ψ neurons to ɸ neurons, smashes all contact barriers, equalizes all differential thresholds, and institutes a stasisApproach not for ghost sake! It is dormition!more than reminiscent of death. Pain is “the most domineering of all processes,” as Freud will repeat in the 1914 “Narcissism” essay and the 1923 The Ego and the Id (StA 3, 49; 294), even though it consists of nothing more than an enhancement of quantity, nothing more than more. One is reminded of Aristotle’s arguments in On the Soul and On Sense (413b—414a; 421a; and 435a) that the sense of touch, whose metaxy is the flesh (hē sarx), is in fact the primary sense, since if stimulation of the sense of touch is enhanced to a critical point the organism dies. As though struck down by the Hobbesian mace. Pain strikes like lightning, writes Freud (392), leaving in its path a breach that may destroy the contact barrier altogether, so that future stimulation of ψ will flow without resistance, as though it were ɸ. And yet. Could lightning ever strike twice—would it ever have to strike twice—in the same place? The place, the impossible topos, of life-death? What is the quality of such lightning?

QUALITY

A breach opens in Freud’s own text with the introduction of “The Problem of Quality.” Why quality at all in a psychology dedicated to quantity? Whatever the reply, and whatever the precedents in the “School of Helmholtz,” we may suspect that, once it gapes, the breach of quality will not heal; Part Three of Freud’s sketch will peter out in the very course and flow of his account of quality—with questions of consciousness, hallucination, thought, speech, and memory. Let us therefore follow Freud’s text with particular care now (392.—93), even though we will soon have to move more quickly.

Up to now we have left undiscussed the fact that every psychological theory, in addition to its efforts on the side of natural science, must also fulfill another significant requirement. It should explain to us what we know in the most enigmatic way by virtue of our “consciousness”; and because our consciousness knows nothing of the suppositions we have employed throughout—quantities and neurons—a theory should also account for this ignorance of ours [dieses Nichtwissen],

We immediately become aware of the presupposition that has hitherto guided us. We have treated psychic processes as things that can do without this knowing undertaken by consciousness, as things that exist independently of such knowing. We are quite prepared not to find the particulars of our suppositions corroborated by consciousness. If we do not allow ourselves to be deceived in this regard, our being so prepared follows from the presupposition that consciousness provides neither complete nor reliable knowledge of neural processes; the latter are from the outset to be regarded in their full scope as unconscious, as though they are to be disclosed like any other item of nature [wie andere natürliche Dinge zu erschliessen].

Why does Freud bother with these platitudes? What rises to disturb him—which disturbs so few disciples of the Traite de I’Homme? Is it not as though a reversal in what Hegel will have called the “experience of consciousness” occurs here, a primal reversal; as though precisely at this breach something like a phenomenology of spirit were on the verge of instigating itself once again? The next paragraph of Freud’s text (393) informs us of the nature of the disturbance: if neurons function and quantities flow without our being conscious of them, if they can dispense with consciousness and dispose of it, then they must somehow have disposition over consciousness, both producing and exceeding it. Into which system then is consciousness to be mustered, integrated, ordered, or reduced (einzureihen)? Freud does not hesitate: “But then the content of consciousness [der Inhalt des Bewusstseins] is to be integrated into our quantitative ψ processes.” Why into the endogenous, psychic, mnemic system? And how, inasmuch as consciousness is introduced via quality, and not quantity? Freud will not always decide for the ψ system. In fact, containment of consciousness will soon call for a major revision in the binary structure of the theory. For there is a kind of difference in and about consciousness that resists both typography (contact barriers, effraction) and topography (difference in destiny, milieu).

“Consciousness gives us what we call qualities, sensations [Empfindungen]that in their vast multiplicity are otherwise [die in grosser Mannigfaltigkeitanders sind] and whose being otherwise [und deren Anders] is distinguished by relationships with the external world” (393). The reiterated Anders is odd both grammatically and lexically. Its oddness reflects something of importance for the differential theory Freud is trying to develop. “In this otherwise there are sequences, similarities, and such-like; there are, properly speaking, no quantities in it.” In the being otherwise of consciousness, in abundant and multifaceted relationships with the outer world, the theory of quantitative energy-flow proves to be all but irrelevant. Why the flagging confidence, when up to now Freud has been perfectly willing to speculate and soar, his text itself coarsingas highly charged with electrons as haphazards canlike quantity? Freud does not say, but poses other questions instead: “One might ask, how do qualities originate, and where do they originate?” He is not confident that answers will come easily: “These are questions that require the most solicitous investigation, questions we can here take up only in a rough-and-ready way.” He elaborates the topological question as follows:

Where? Where do qualities originate? Not in the external world. For according to our natural-scientific view, to which psychology too is here to be subjected [unterworfen werden soll], outside there are only masses in motion, nothing else. Perhaps they originate in the system? What inclines us in that direction is the fact that qualities are bound up with perception [Wahrnehmung]; yet this contradicts everything else that is to be rightly claimed for the seat of consciousness in the superior levels of the nervous system. Well, then, in the ψ system. An important objection rises against this, however: in perception the ɸ and ψ systems are both active, working with one another; there is, however, a psychic process that occurs exclusively in ψ, to wit, reproduction or remembrance, and this in general terms is without quality. Remembrance establishes de norma nothing of the special kind of perceptual quality. Thus one is encouraged to suppose that there may be a third system of neurons, perceptual neurons, as it were, that are coexcited whenever we perceive, though not whenever we reproduce [in memory]; the states of excitation undergone by the system of perceptual neurons produce the various qualities, which are conscious sensations. (393)

The place and function of this third neural system, the W system (= Wahrnehmung or perception, transliterated [presumably by Freud himself] misleadingly as the ω [omega] system), shift and oscillate, bedeviling Freud’s psychology over decades.⁹ Why, we must ask, is quality attributed to perception, and not to memory? Why is memory banished from quality, and thus from consciousness? Is it merely the Hobbesian, Humean notion of memory and imagination as faded, lackluster perception, perception devoid of “such a pitch of vivacity,” that induces Freud to associate quality solely with perception? At all events, and no matter what may have induced him, can a theory that divorces perception and memory satisfy?

Freud acknowledges that the demands of quantitative science impose themselves on the description of conscious qualities that he is now assaying to provide. Yet rather than being abashed by such an imposition, he endeavors to take advantage of the entanglement of method in the matter in order to produce a kind of deduction, a Regeldetri or “golden rule” that will find the unknown fourth where three are given. “For whereas science has posed for itself the task of leading our sensible qualities collectively back to external quantity, we can expect of the structure of the nervous system that it will consist of contrivances [Vorrichtungen] that transform external quantity into quality, whereby the original tendency toward the obstruction of quantity again appears to be victorious” (394). Freud depicts the nerve-end apparatus as a series of shields, umbrellas, or filters that gradually decrease the amount of penetrating quantity. Initially, he places the perceptual system—and hence consciousness—at the most interior level, as Diagram 1 (mine, not Freud’s) indicates. By the time endogenous quantity reaches the perceptual system it should be excluded as much as possible (möglichst ausgeschaltet); it should be transformed into pure quality. Yet the system as depicted confronts “an enormous difficulty,” a difficulty that arises at about the place where “memory” meets “consciousness and quality”: if permeability allows the influx of quantity, and if the system is already essentially or virtually impermeable, then it becomes difficult to see how the W system could account for the ephemeral stream of consciousness, the rapid alteration and flux of its content, and the seamless transition from one perceived quality to another contemporaneous quality. Only “full permeability” and “complete restitutio in integrum” will do for perception. Perceptual neurons, like the organs of perception, thus can have nothing to do with memory. Yet where could such full permeability and total effraction stem from, if not from quantity? The introduction of perceptual quality and conscious sensation entails a crisis of typography: if quantity is effectively filtered out by the ɸ system, what possible antitypia could connect perception with the external world?

DIAGRAM 1

No doubt it is this crisis that will instigate the change in Freud’s account which he reports to Fliess in letter 39, dated January 1, 1896. Put most simply, what Freud suggests here is that the W system be intercalated between the ɸ and ψ systems. Further, ɸ is now said to transmit its quality to W. The latter is now represented as transmitting neither quality nor quantity to ψ. Indeed, how could it do so when ψ neurons are defined as having the capacity for only the “most meager quantitative cathexis”? Mysteriously, the W system is said to “incite” (anregen) the ψ system, with no real transmission of quantity. (One recalls Descartes’ expression nihil reale transmigrare in the Regulae.) Freud doubtless senses the continuing crisis: “I don’t know whether you can understand this gobbledygook,” he writes to Fliess (153). The letter goes onI don’t understand. I fail to say. I dearsee you tooto discuss consciousness in general, as well as a “secondary, artificial consciousness” that advenes as a supplement to the ψ system, a consciousness that has to do with “linguistic association.” However, the third part of the “Project” will also take us there, and so we return to Freud’s Entwurf.

For the moment, Freud sees “only one way out,” and that is to revise thoroughly his basic assumptions about endogenous quantity flow. The revision here (395) takes the form of introducing a “temporal nature” into such quantity. It is not as painful an introduction as it might seem, if we remember that t is a factor in almost all laws of mechanics. However, it is not time as such that Freudnow and then, time on time again, as per periodicityintroduces, but periodicity. No doubt Fliess’s fixation on the functions of periods in the lives of both male and female human beings helps to breach Freud’s “way out.” Periodicity would account for a motion within and among neurons that no contact barrier could resist. Even though the W system would be incapable of taking up and passing on to even endogenous quantities, it would be subject to “periods of excitation.” Affection by periods, requiring a modicum of quantity, would constitute “the fundament of consciousness.”

Whether and how periodicity alters the fundamental conception of neural inertia remains a crucial question. Was not quantity from the outset conceived as periodic, that is, as occurring in relatively discrete and differential bursts of energy, reminiscent perhaps of those foraying parties of animal spirits? And what are we to make of an incitement or excitation (Anregung/Erregung) that would not function as a typographic impressing? Are we not, even with periodicity, still locked within a typographic system of the crudest sort? Freud only makes matters worse when he expands the notion of periodicity in order to embrace the ψ system as well, arguing that it is here merely “without quality” or “monotonous.” He broaches the urgent question, however, when he reverts to the issue of the origin of differences (Verschiedenheiten) among the periods. For the system has been differential from the start, whether the origin of differences was attributed to sundry nerve systems, varying thicknesses of the axons, contact barriers, breachings, quantities, destinies, or milieus.

Freud now shifts his theater of operations from the nerve-end apparatus to the various sense organs themselves; the action of these he depicts by means of an inversionand everthelest your umbrof the protective umbrella. Sense organs function rather as sieves. They allow only particular periods of stimulus to pass. They somehow communicate periodic difference (diese Verschiedenheit) to the neurons by way of “analogous” motion. (Recall Descartes’ eventual embrace of feathery analogy for cognition—also in the Regulae.) These “modifications” (presumably not structural alterations but periodic motions, a kind of neural Morse Code) pass through the ɸ system to the ψ system and on to the perceptual system. (Only later, as we have noted, will W be sandwiched between ɸ and ψ.) There, well-nigh free of quantity, these periodic motions “produce conscious sensations of qualities.” Now, even though the periodic motions pass through ψ, they leave no traces (keine Spuren), so that perception is not reproducible as such. Freud will return to this last quandary (e.g. at 419 and 444), which we have already had occasion to mention, the quandary that makes it impossible for us to conceive how anything perceived could ever be remembered. Although it is certainly difficult to depict periodicity as such, the sieves or filtersnow that I come to drink of it filtred, a gracecup fulled of bitternessthat are organs of sensation might be portrayed as in Diagram 2.

The breach in Freud’s “Project” expands with his account of “Consciousness,” closely tied to the sensation of qualities in perception. Here Freud seeks to demonstrate that consciousness is not a psychic process as such, that it occurs outside the system. Whether or not memory can ever be regained for consciousness, or consciousness for memory, remains the burning question. Surely, we can attain satisfaction only when memory, perception, and consciousness are fully integrated, though not conflated.¹⁰

Freud has by now (396-97) identified consciousness with the perceptual system, but he complicates that system by adducing to it the paramount qualities of pleasure and unpleasure. The latter, Unlust, at first seems to correspond to what was earlier identified as pain. Yet both intense pleasure and excruciating pain diminish the zone of potentially perceived qualities, which is always a “zone of indifference” with regard to Lust and Unlust. After providing a detailed resume of “the functioning of the apparatus” (397—400), Freud reasserts the inexplicable yet essential capacity of the nuclear neurons, that is, the central nervous system, to be both fully effracted, fully “paved,” and highly resistant—thus capable of retention. No distinction between quantity and periodicity, no account of “intermittence” and “summation,” no appeal to the “defenseless exposure” of the ψ system to quantity as the “trigger [Triebfeder] of the psychic mechanism” will dissolve the paradox. Nor will the introduction of two new terms destined to designate the source of power (Antrieb, Macht) for all psychic activity, terms for which the sketch has not adequately prepared the reader: “We know this power to be the will [der Wille], the descendant of the drives [Triebe]” (402). If philosophy is Freud’s initial goal, for which medicine is the detour, the regnant philosopher appears to be Schopenhauer. As we have always known (see Jenseits, StA 3, 259). Except that the words Wille and Trieb will survive Schopenhauer to dominate the entire tradition of Lebens-philosophie from Dilthey, Nietzsche, Driesch, and Scheler up to a very unwilling Heidegger.¹¹

DIAGRAM 2

Yet no such appeal to possible “influences” will aid us in following the giant steps Freud now takes in portraying “the experience of satisfaction” (402-4), not Lust but Befriedigung, “pacification,” in the face of calamitous life, a life of will, compulsion, and drive. Compulsion, Drang, seeks discharge in the motor system. If such discharge produces only “internal” changes such as shifts in mood, cries, or the innervation of blood vessels, the surge of the compulsion will not be checked. Cessation of the stimulus in ψ can occur only by virtue of an intervention in the outer world, instigation of a specific action that brings on nourishment or reaches the sexual object. To be sure, the infantile human organism is incapable of direct interventions to supply itself with nourishment; it relies on “an experienced individual” to provide “help from the outside [fremde Hilfe].” Thus the “internal” changes rejected above actually fulfill “the supremely important secondary function of making oneself understood [Verstandigung], and the primordial helplessness of the human being is the primal source [Urquelle] of all moral motives.” Freud allows us no time to catch our breaths but proceedsIf I lose my breath for a minute or two, don’t speak, remember!... It’s thinking of all. . . I’ll begin again in a jiffey. . . How well you’ll feel! For ever afterto an even more fateful deduction. The experience of satisfaction through foreign aid, as it were, the checking of compulsion through the specific actions of benevolent persons in the outside world, has the most telling consequences for the further development of the individual. Satisfaction, the achievement of inner peace, occurs by way of a cathexis (or “occupation,” Besetzung, a term introduced already in the second section of Part One)—not merely a discharge. Cathexis of an object perceived as essential to the discharge of unpleasure. Through the operation of association by contemporaneity a cathexis is established that proves to be every bit as important as the effraction that allows for the discharge of distressful quantity: a breaching is established “between two mnemic images,” that is, presumably, between the Erinnerungsbildern of the situations “before” and “after” the experience of satiation. Further, a breaching is established between this pair of images and the nuclear neuron to which the compulsion—given the exigency of life—will inevitably return. As the compulsion or wish (Wunsch) is activated, the already established breaching will lead to the image of the remembered object, das Objekterinnerungsbild. That image is of course an icon, the particular iconYou were dreamend, dearassociated with satiety, the cessation of hunger and the achievement of peace. At long last memory and perception are to be linked! Freud forges the link, enacts the primordial iconography of memory, as follows: “I do not doubt that this activation of the wish at first produces the same thing that the perception does [zunächst dasselbe ergibt wie die Wahrnehmung], namely, an hallucination.” Sonly all in your imagination, dim. Poor little brittle magic nation, dim of mind!Should the motor nervous system swing into action, should the infant head turn and the groping mouth begin to suck, suck air, “disappointment will not be wanting [so bleibt die Enttäuschung nicht aus].” Which makes it easy to see I said are you there here’s nobody here only me why a return to the “experience of pain” is necessary. When in Freud’s sketch toward a scientific psychology, typography becomes iconography, the result is delusion and torment, a wretchedness on the verge of outrage.

Once we have caught our breath, now realizing why it was vital for Freud to protect W from ψ, we do well to press Freud on these mnemic images that originate in perception and terminate in hallucination. Does mere quantity produce them, or quality, or some sort of periodic mixture of both? What precisely is the relation of Freudian iconography (if that word can be retained when it is purely a matter of phantastikē) to typography? And will there be no sign, no reading, no engrammatology, to rout the phantasms?

The mnemic image also comes to play a role in the experience of pain (404—5). Pain cannot be equated with unpleasure, yet the unpleasure sensed in W and the tendency to discharge (because of an overload in ψ) are doubtless associated through breaching with “a mnemic image of the object that excites pain.” It is the action of this image that calls forth quantity, not in order to discharge it via the motor system, but by way of detours (auf Umwegen) to key it into a power affect. This mechanism now captures Freud’s imagination. “Key neurons,” “Schlüsselneuronen,” instrumental to the release of pleasure and unpleasure in the efferent (motor) system, hence to sexuality, involve the cathexis of mnemic images. Freud does not pause to comment on this Besetzung von Erinnerungen (405, lines 1—2), a catachresis that wreaks havoc with his efforts to distinguish quality from quantity. Indeed, mnemic images themselves, connected not by effraction but by some subordinate “circuitry” (die ψ -Leitungen), will soon begin to behave like little quantities, even though as early as 1891 it was clear to Freud that “representations” could not be encapsulated in “cells” (see StA 3, 165-66). There also seems to be some confusion as to whether the image produces the affect, or the affect the image, even though it is here a matter of re-production and thus activation of cathected images as such. In an outrageous reversal, the icons themselves now function as typoi. The “key neurons,” stimulated by the excess of quantity in a quantity itself released by the cathexis of memories, mediate between “mnemic image” and “affect unpleasure.” Pain has opened a “superb breaching” to them. Pain will be the engrammatological power. Yet who is there to “read” pain?

Freud will soon introduce the ego (406—8), but only by way of further clarification of Affekt, “affects and wishful states,” Wunschzustände (405-6). Affects and wishful or desirous states complement the pair pain and satisfaction and constitute the four fundamental psychic Erlebnisse. Affect, produced by a sudden release of quantity in ψ, is, as we have seen, closely associated with pain; it will not surprise us (thanks to the art of Regeldetri) that satisfaction or pacification relates closely to wishful states produced by summation or the gradual accretion of small quantities in Affect and wish are of supreme importance for the psychic process, writes Freud; they supply the “motives” for that process as such. “Out of the wishful state there arises immediately an attraction toward the object wished for or its mnemic image; from the experiences of pain there results a repulsion, a revulsion against cathexis of the inimical mnemic image.” Freud’s prosopopoeia with regard to the psychic motives indicates the incipient unfolding of a primal drama, a primal scene: “These [motives] are primary desirous attraction [Wunschanziehung] and primary defense [Abwehr].”

In spite of the fact that the two prior discussions of pain ought to have made description of the defense mechanism less laborious than an account of desirous attraction, the latter will be dealt with quite readily, whereas the former will eventually destroy the entire project. Desirous attraction is consequent upon an excess in the cathexis of a “friendly memory.” Craving or desire (der Begierdezustand) involves an excess beyond what any mere perception of the object would produce. The excess in quantity in turn produces “an especially good breaching” in the ψ system between a nuclear and a “mantle” neuron nearer the periphery, in the pallium. Desire moves.

“It is more difficult to explain primary defense or repression,” emphasizes Freud, writing the crucial word Verdrängung here for the first time and adding, by way of apposition, “the fact that an inimical mnemic image will be abandoned by cathexis as soon as possible.” (Kris notes that Freud later, at 430, distinguishes between primary defence and repression, as he does much later, in the 1915 essay on “Repression,” between flight from pain and repression [StA 3, 108].) Perhaps the difficulty can be seen, however darkly, in the awkward phrase “will be abandoned by cathexis,” dass ein feindliches Erinnerungsbild so bald als möglich von der Besetzung verlassen wird.” What can it mean to abandon a memory? And how does cathexis come to don the mask of agency and the subject? What is cathexis? Heretofore it has meant the occupation of neurons by quantity; it entered into Freud’s account so long ago and so lubriciously that we have scarcely noted or noticed it. Yet if the fundamental tendency of the nervous system as a whole is discharge of quantity, we should perhaps puzzle over it even after Freud has introduced the fundamental revisions of quality and periodicity.

Periods were introduced as a process of energic induction, the appropriation of and filling with quality. Quality entered on the scene as that final sifting of quantity that gets through to the W system. Besetzung was first employed in a new sense beginning with the section on “Consciousness” (397), in the context of pleasure and unpleasure: “Pleasure and unpleasure would be the sensations of their own cathexis [wären die Empfindungen der eigenen Besetzung], of their own level in W [des eigenen Niveaus in W], whereby W and ɸ represent in a certain way containers that communicate with one another.” To what does the word eigen, “own,” refer in these phrases? Perhaps to sensation of the qualities pleasure and unpleasure as the original auto-affection? An auto-affection, we remember, that reduces the zone of perceptual qualities. Reduces them to the essential motives or Erlebnisse.

The economy of cathexis in the W neurons as developed in the final lines of the section on consciousness (397) is far from pellucid. It will be necessary to “introduce the ‘ego’ ” if we are to make any sense of cathexis as auto-affection. In the meantime, Freud can only appeal to the model of flight from pain, which is merely analogous to primary defense and even farther removed from the pressing issue of primary repression, whose very name suggests the auto-affection of unpleasure. Primary experiences of pain are brought to an end by defenses consisting of simple reflex actions. Yet Freud complicates such simple action by introducing a kind of semaphore, a kind of engrammatology. Inasmuch as signals and signs will become increasingly important in the 1895 sketch, we ought to let the drama unfold, even though the personifications employed now seem truly comic. “The emergence of another object in the place of the inimical one was the signal that the experience of pain was over.” Thus the hand stops hurting as soon as the object “water” emerges in place of “fire,” because, as Freud will now say, the hand is biologically instructed, biologisch belehrt. The system thus endeavors to “reproduce” the image of the state that signals cessation of pain. Freud argues that biological learning too can be traced back to mechanical principles and quantitative moments, forgetting for the nonce those revisions of the theory that have already forced themselves on him. “In the case at hand, it can readily be the increase in endogenous quantity always accompanying the cathexis of inimical memories that compels us toward an increase in discharge activity, and thus toward a flushing away of memories too [zum Abfluss auch von Erinnerungen drängt].” With the coupling of compelling memories and the root of repression, Drang and Verdrangung, Freud’s “Project” enters a new phase—

“THE INTRODUCTION OF THE ‘EGO’”

The ego is an “organization” in the ψ system, an organization of neurons in the nucleus or kernel (des Kernes) of that system. Such neurons are continuously cathected by endogenous quantity and thus constitute reserves (Vorrat) needed to effect changes in the outside world. Freud offers the following perfunctory account of the ego’s function (an account that remains nonetheless relevant for Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920] and The Ego and the Id [1923]): “While it remains necessary for the ego to strive to surrender its cathexes along the path of satisfaction [auf dem Wege der Befriedigung], this can happen in no other way than by influencing the repetition of painful experiences and affects [die Wiederholung von Schmerzerlebnissen und Affekten] in the manner now to be described, which can generally be designated as inhibition [Hemmung]” (407). The principal mechanism of inhibition—the influencing of repetitious, painful experiences—is “lateral cathexis,” Seitenbesetzung, a manner of “sidetracking” a quotient of quantity. Freud’s sketch in Diagram 3 illustrates this complex inhibitory influence.

DIAGRAM 3

Here the lower arrow actually indicates the normal path of a quantity of endogenous energy (that is, one that has already passed through the filter of the ɸ system) from neuron a to b. That normal path represents “psychic primary processes,” to which Freud will soon turn. The ego exists precisely in order to inhibit that process by diverting a quotient of quantity, and eventually perhaps all of it, from b to ɑ (alpha). It is intriguing that the sidetracking indicated here actually follows straight-line motion in the diagram, from a to ɑ, so that lateral cathexis is actually preferred to what is otherwise called primary. Inhibition, writes Freud, is “a decisive advantage for ψ” (408). That advantage becomes clear in the following narrative: “Let us suppose [Nehmen wir an] that a is an inimical memory [eine feindliche Erinnerung]. . . .” Never mind the question as to how tube-station a of the neural Metro can be said to be a memory: let us grant that a certain iconography has translated the mnemic image (Bild) into protoplasm, that a certain typography has become amalgamated with topography. Let us suppose further, writes Freud, that b is “a key-neuron for unpleasure.” The awakening (Erweckung) of a, that is, the activation of the inimical memory image leads directly (a→b) to the release or parturition (Entbindung) of unpleasure. Key-neuron b might well have remained quiescent had it not been for the awakening of a; its unpleasure would have had no goal, and, zwecklos, its full burden would not have fallen on the system. However, the lateral cathexis a-δ, which is nothing else than the ego-organization, comes to play a major inhibitory role now that the icon a has been stirred to wakeful life. The release of unpleasure will be “slight,” thanks to that rescue organization; the neural system will be “spared” (erspart) the “development and discharge of quantity.”

Yet how does a know—yes, know—when to step into the breach? How is the ego-organization alerted to the imminent awakening of a? Where does the switchman sit? Or the fontenier? Now that the lace cuff graces the hand of the ego—what Augustine called “the hand of my heart,” the hand that repulses unwanted memories—and now that the hand of the ego operates the sidetracking mechanism, a special sort of signaling system will have to be brought into service. For only if some signal makes the ego aware (aufmerksam) of the imminent reoccupation (die ankommende Neubesetzung) of a and b can the ego exert itself. The signaling system proves to be the crucial contribution of the ego in both the “primary process and secondary process in ψ” (409-II). Freud will return to it in the third and final section of his project, “Attempt to Portray the Normal Processes” (443).

Two outrages menace the psychic system. First, vulnerability (Hilflosigkeit) and the resultant damage (Schaden) enter on the scene when in desire (im Wunschzustande) the “object-memory” is recathected in a situation where “satisfaction must perforce remain in default—inasmuch as the object is not at hand in reality [nicht real vorhanden] but is only present in fantasy-representation [nur in Phantasie-Vorstellung vorhanden ist]” (409). The icon is prokheiros, at hand, as the vestige of Theodorus, “gift of god”; yet it may very well be snubnosed Theaetetus, or even Socrates, that I see. False judgment is possible. And in the primary process, where craving itself conjures the hallucination of pacification, all but inevitable, “ψ is initially incapable of making this distinction [between reale Vorhandenheit and fantastic representation, phantastikē], because it can only work according to the sequence of analogous states among its neurons.” The system therefore needs “from elsewhere a criterion for distinguishing between perception and representation [Wahrnehmung und Vorstellung].”¹²

The second outrage to befall the psychic system, the impending reoccupation of an inimical memory-image, can be averted only if the system is made aware of it. The system can prevent (vorbeugen) the release of unpleasure only if it inhibits the reoccupation sufficiently ahead of time (zeitig genug). Such inhibition, effected by the lateral occupation of the ego-organization, needs a sign, ein Zeichen, or what the “Two Principles” calls “a system of marks” (StA 3, 19). The iconography of memory images will require a revamped engrammatology, one that will avert and divert cathexis rather than simply restore (hallucinatory) presence. If such engrammatology fails, if the signal is not forthcoming, the result will be “staggering unpleasure and excessive primary defense.” (Freud’s mention of primary defense here must make us ask whether the process we are now discussing, that of signal and sidetracking, is primary or secondary; it seems likely that lateral cathexis is a secondary process, “primary process” being reserved for discharge of quantity; yet we will no doubt have cause to return to this theme more than once.)

In order to avoid “biological damage,” the psychic system must prevent both excessive “wish cathexis” and the occupation of “inimical memory images,” especially when the latter arise not from the external world but from associations within the system itself. In other words, hallucination is possible in cases of trauma as well as pleasure, and is in both cases harmful, inasmuch as it seduces (verlockt) the system into excessive discharge. The solution in both cases “is a matter of a sign [ein Zeichen] to distinguish perception [which for Freud is virtually always true perception, Wahr-nehmung] from remembrance (representation).” Freud is asking for a sign that will pass between ψ and W. Pass between them as readily as a period. In hoc signo Freud will emerge victorious with a scientific psychology securely in hand. Whence such a sign? “It is probably the perceptual neurons that yield this sign, the reality sign.” With every perception of the external world, a qualitative excitation occurs in the perceptual nervous system. “News” of that discharge of excitation reaches ѱ. (It appears that the diagrams of both the nerve-end apparatus and the sense organs are now placed on their heads, the umbrellas and sieves inverted once again, so that system W now stands at the top.) “News of the discharge of W (ω) is therefore the seal of quality, or reality sign, for ψ [das Qualitätsoder Realitätszeichen für ψ” (410).

We ought to pause in order to underscore the anomaly. The very first axiom of a scientific psychology is “the quantitative conception” (380-81); and now “reality,” that is, contact with the “external world,” a world which, scientifically considered, is nothing but quantity, proves to depend on the communication of quality, not quantity. Quality is more real than quantity. Yet the communication of quality itself depends on the quantity of excitation, whereby the decisive factor is the cathected ego-organization. The latter alone “makes possible a criterion for distinguishing between perception and remembrance” (410). Without following all the ins and outs of the mechanics of the qualitative signal, we may allow Freud to summarize as follows:

The cathexis of desire [Wunschbesetzung] to the point of hallucination [and] the full development of unpleasure [die volle Unlustentwicklung], which brings the full exertion of defense with it, we shall designate as psychic primary processes; by contrast, those processes that a sound cathexis of the ego makes possible and that represent a moderating influence on the above, we shall call psychic secondary processes. As we see, the condition of the latter is a correct application of the reality sign, an application that is possible only by means of the inhibiting action of the ego [bei Ichhemmung]. (411)

With the “sound cathexis of the ego,” we are not far from what the Traumdeutung will call the “probing labors of thought” (StA 2, 569). The next three sections of the 1895 psychology focus on “Cognitive [Erkennende] and Reproductive Thinking,” “Remembering and Judging,” and “Thought and Reality” (411—19). We shall limn their contents only in the broadest strokes, since Freud himself will bring us back to them in Part Three. Yet even these broad strokes will have to delineate the bizarre terrain between primary and secondary processes, the no-man’s-land of Regeldetri, neural syntax, identity, and the teat in our mutter nation of the breast, to which Freud now leads us.

Inhibition by the ego, that is, the sidetracking and binding of excessive quantity streaming from an excessively desired icon in ѱ, allows hallucination—which is the natural condition for man, man’s initial state of nature—to come to an end. Inhibition enables us to know or recognize (erkennen) that the craved object may well be unreal, nicht real, that is, not truly present at hand, ou prokheiros. Presuming that it is the hand that craves, although it is not. Freud projects three possible situations: (1) total coverage (the Husserlian notion of volle Deckung is perfectly apt here) between the memory image cathected by desire and a perception; (2) partial coverage, a far more “interesting” situation in that it calls forth genuine labors of thought, Denkarbeit; and (3) total dysymmetry, which leaves us with nothing to say or think or do. About the first we need only remark that while it served as the Limes of Husserl’s dreams, which were from start to finish dreams of voile Deckung, Freud finds it of no “biological interest.” It does provide an opportunity (taken by Ernst Kris) to present a passage from a much later text, “Die Verneinung” (1925; StA 3, 375-76), that provides a context for the entire discussion of the “reality probe” that is Denken.

The first and most proximate goal of the reality probe [Realitätsprüfung] is therefore not to find an object in real perception that corresponds to the one represented but to find it again, to convince oneself that it is still at hand. A further contribution to the estrangement [Entfremdung] between the subjective and the objective arises from another capacity of our thinking faculty. The reproduction of perception in representation is not always its faithful retrieval [Wiederholung]; it can be modified by omissions and transmogrified by the fusion of diverse elements. It is the task of the reality probe to oversee [kontrollieren] how far these distortions go. One realizes however that it is a condition for the institution of the reality probe that objects have gotten lost, objects that once provided real satisfaction.

It will thus always have been a matter of loss and alienation, of the primary outrage we saw impending some pages back. It will always be a matter of retrieval with distortion and after frustration. It will be, under the best of circumstances, a calculation of the damage done, an estimate of losses, a salvage operation, a “repetition of painful experience.” The vigor of the 1895 sketch and all its bravura flights of physiologic fancy cannot conceal the deprivation or annul the outrage.

What is it that gets “covered” when desire and perception only partly coalesce? “It is. . . time to remember,” writes Freud, “that perceptual cathexes are never cathexes of individual neurons, but always of complexes” (412). The meeting of desire and perception, through breaching, occurs complex to complex. If the cathected desire can also be represented as neuron a joined by effraction to neuron b, the cathected perception may be represented as neuron a joined by effraction to neuron c, as follows:

N (a) + N (b) = N (a) + N (c)

The problem is of course to establish the equality, validate the equal sign. However convincing Regedetri may be (recall that Freud employed it in “The Problem of Quality” in order to invert the umbrella of the nerve-end apparatus into the sieve of the sense-organ apparatus; that is to say, in order to take science’s project of reducing perceptual quality to measurable quantity as the inverse of the structure of the nervous system, which filtersdown the scales, the way they went up, under talls and threading tormentors, shunning the startraps and slipping in sliders, risking a runway, ruing revealsquantity in order to perceive quality), no apodictic or adequate equation seems possible. It is far more commonly the case that the “reality sign” corroborates only a partial dovetailing of complexes. Even that part is questionable, as we might imagine. How is the identical neuron a known to be involved in the cathexis of both desire and perception? Freud will fall back on the principle of identity (a = a), and yet nothing in the “sieve” diagram allows us to assume that a neuron can travel back and forth between systems ψ and W. To be sure, some sort of transport will be necessary in addition to the energetic effraction and circuitry discussed so far, some other sort of wandering, some passing of signs or engrams, a kind of news network. For the moment, Freud is content to assert that comparison (Vergleich) is possible within a whole range of perceptual complexes where neuron a prevails and then to analyze or dissect (zerlegen) the perceptual complex in which a remains stable as b “varies.” And he does not shy from an even more astonishingly unabashed use of Regeldetri:

Language [Die Sprache] will later propose the term judgment [Urteil] for this analysis [Zerlegung] and will uncover the similarity that actually exists [tatsächlich vorliegt] between the nucleus of the ego and the constant perceptual component, and between the transitory cathexes in the pallium and the inconstant component; language will call neuron a the thing and neuron b its activity or property, in short, its predicate. (412-13)

Iconograpy and engrammatology here perform their most dazzling classical maneuvers, and the clumsy typography of breachings appears to be effectively sidetracked. Neuron a now embraces (1) the constant component of an entire range of perceptual cathexes somewhere on the frontier between W and ψ; (2) the nucleus of the ego, the subject, both as the subject-pole of the thinking process and as the grammatical subject of sentences; and (3) the thing, das Ding, also as the subject of propositions. Neuron b is now declared to be a component of the W complex, its variable component, whereas earlier it was identified as a component of the Wunschbesetzung, the cathexis of desire, or even as a depot of unpleasure. Neuron b is already traveling, already shifting, far more than neuron a; it has established by ruse a kind of identity that surely will fail to withstand even the most charitable reality probe. And what happened to neuron c, which was supposed to be the variable constituent of W? Neuron c will return in a moment, for it too is shifting. Yet let us not be distracted by the wanderings of b and the temporary disappearance of c to the point where we lose sight of the audacious character of Freud’s thinking in the passages we are examining now. The thesis of Jacques Lacan, to the effect that the unconscious is structured as a language, seems quite tame in comparison with Freud’s: Freud is suggesting that the entire neural and psychical system is structured as a language, that there is a protoplasmic or neurotopological syntax, a grammar of flesh that will ensure, among other things, the identity of things themselves and of subject and object, and ultimately of thought and being.

Freud declares judging, Urteilen, to be a process in ψ. We must be astonished by that as well, inasmuch as everything about reality seemed to depend on W, the perceptual system. Yet perception will prove to be anything but pure. As the very title of this section, “The Thinking that Recognizes and Reproduces [Das erkennende und reproduzierende Denken],” suggests, we are here precisely at the limits of ψ and W, where the one system passes, must pass, into the other. For Freud, as for Hegel and Hölderlin before him, Urteil is Ur-Teilung, the primal diremption and ordeal of the psyche. Judgment is first made possible by the inhibition produced by the ego-organization, without which every idol would be an icon, every image an original, every phantasm a phenomenon, every tremulous being an instance of full presence. Now that judgment is possible, it is “called forth” by the dissimilarity (Unähnlichkeit) between the desirous cathexis of a particular memory image and a perceptual cathexis that is similar to it (ihr ähnlich). How the similarity and dissimilarity confront one another, or rather, how the one calls forth a judgment upon the other, is a question that might send us scurrying back to Theaetetus and Sophist. Unlike b, however, we shall not scurry but hold our ground and continue reading. For we do not yet know the proper object of Freud’s iconography. What is the object of desire? What constitutes the identity a = a?

One can analyze the process further: if neuron a coalesces [in the coverage of complexes], but neuron c is perceived instead of neuron b, the work of the ego [Icharbeit] pursues the connections of this neuron c and causes [lasst] new cathexes to emerge by force of the quantity streaming along these relays, until access to the missing neuron b is found. As a rule, a dynamic image [Bewegungsbild] results, coming into operation between neuron c and neuron b; with the reactivation of this image by means of an actually executed movement, the perception of neuron b, and thereby the sought identity, is produced. (413)

The next sentence of Freud’s text—and we shall read it, since nothing about the “movement” of “judgment” is clear as yet—begins with a Z.B., Zum Beispiel, “For example.” It will be Freud’s sole example of a cathected desire, dynamic image, judgment, and perception coalescing. “For example, the desired mnemic image is the imageLowly, longly, a wail went forth. Pure Yawn lay low. On the mead of the hillock lay, heartsoul dormant mid shadowed landshapeof the mother’s breast and itslashbetassled lids on the verge of closing time, whiles ouze of his sidewiseopen mouthnipple in full front viewlanguishing as the princeliest treble treacle or lichee chewchowand the first perception is a lateral view of the same object without the nipple.” The cathected memory image of desire and the initial or primary perception are related as full front view (remembered, not seen) to lateral, partial (perceived, not now remembered) view. “In the child’s memory [Erinnerung] an experience may be found, an experience it had accidentally whileYawn in a semiswoon lay awailing and (hooh!) what helpings of honeyful swoothead (phew!)sucking, that with a certain turn of the head the full front image is transformed into the lateral image.” The primal interiorization, quite contingent in its details yet absolutely essential as a scene, which is the scene of life’s exigency, die Not des Lebens, the scene of desperately needed reserves and incipient ego-organization, involves the metamorphosis of full moon to new moon, no moon, and back again, as we too now shall see. “The lateral image now in view leads to a movementOne seekingsof the head; a first attempt showsNot the lithe slender, not the broad roundish near the lithe slender, not the fairsized fullfeatured to the leeward of the broad roundish butthat its opposite must be executed, and the perceptionindeed and inneed, the curling, perfect-portioned, flowerfleckled, shapely highhued, delicate features swaying to the windward of the fairsized fullfeaturedof the full front view is achieved.”

Such seeking and finding presuppose a nascent yet already efficient ego-organization. No amount of differentiated breaching or circuitry can account for it. For it is teleological, dominated by an aim, einem Ziel. All perception is tendentious. Like Husserl’s Leermeinen, or empty intending, Freudian perception is preview and retrospect at once. “The aim is to return back to the missed neuron b and to trigger the sensation of identity, that is, the moment in which only neuron b is cathected—the moment when the itinerant cathexis steers home [einmündet] to neuron b” (414). Neuron b. Neuron breast. Neuron Benjy. Whereas neuron c allows only a fixed pattern of breachings (by association) to occur in and as primary process, neuron b permits of various constellations of cathexis in the secondary process of reproductive thinking (des reproduzierenden Denkens), guided always by pain and unpleasure along its via negativa until it homes in, homes in on and into the mouth, where b einmündet.

Although Freud does acknowledge the possibility of a “pure act of thought,” one that seeks pure identity without the ultimate goal of the return to neuron b, reproductive thinking in his view has an eminently “practical purpose” and “a biologically defined end.” The need to cognize is the need to restore, to find one’s way back. Again, Freud’s schematic remarks on interiorizing remembrance (erinnern), awakening of memories (wecken, wach-rufen), and judgment baffle, while his illustration strikes home. “Let us suppose that the object that provides the perception is similar to the object, a fellow human being” (415). We will not pause to note the remarkably speedy progress of the neophyte ego-organization, which has passed from a needy turn of the head to full-blown subjectivity and intersubjectivity. “The theoretical interest [in our fellow humans] can then be explained by way of the fact that such an object is simultaneously the first object that satisfied us [das erste Befriedigungsobjekt]; more, it is the first inimical object as well as the sole aiding power; it is therefore in our fellow human beings that man comes to know.” Am Nebenmenschen lernt darum der Mensch erkennen. Freud recounts the way in which the other’s gestures are read in my own body, the other’s cry by my own remembered cry. He declines to enter into further detail, summarizing “Remembering and Judging” as follows:

Let us be content to fasten onto the following point: it is the original interest in producing the situation of satisfaction that has produced reproductive reminiscence [das reproduzierende Nachdenken] on the one hand and judging [Beurteilen] on the other. The latter is a means to get from the real, given, perceived situation to the desired situation. Here the presupposition remains that the ψ processes are not uninhibited, but transpire in an active ego. The eminently practical direction of all thought-work would thereby be demonstrated. (416)

Finally, with “Thought and Reality,” we are brought to the final phase of Part One of the 1895 project, which brings Freud to the place where he will have to begin in earnest: the place where dreams are made and analyzed. Expanding on the earlier, empty sense of identity, a = a, Freud now declares the “end and aim” of all thought processes to be “the establishment of a condition of identity, the transposition of a cathected endogenous quantity originating from outside [sic] to a neuron cathected by the ego” (416—17). The attempted fusion, or confusion, of inside and outside gives us pause: the cathected quantity is identified as endogenous Qἠ, thus as a part of the ψ system; and yet Freud specifies that the quantity “originates from outside.” What has become of the peripheral system? What has become of quality, which relates the psyche to the outside world? Also dubious is Freud’s neat distinction between two fields of operation for thinking: “Cognitive or judgmental thinking searches for identity [of the quantity deriving from the outside world] with a corporeal cathexis [Körperbesetzung’]; reproductive thinking searches for the identity [of such quantity] with a psychic cathexis (one’s own lived experience)” (417). There is something uncanny about this division into bodily and psychic fields—when the psyche was to have been explained strictly in terms of quantity. Freud reinstates the traditional mind-body dualism in the very project that should have abolished that dualism forever. Yet there is no doubt that with lateral cathexis in system ψ and consequent ego-organization, something like subjectivity and an appropriate experience (Ereignis) that is irreducibly and properly one’s own (eigenes) will not be far behind.

Such a reinstatement is no doubt crucial for the kind of “reality” Freud has in mind—the reality of personal history, in particular a sexual history characterized by latency or retardation till puberty, a history that the dynamic image of our corporeal being does so much to influence. The capacity for the imitation of movements and even for compassion with another’s suffering points to a primitive or primary judgment based on pure association. Judgment in such cases is actually the primary process, and our later capacity for judgmental thought a modification (Ermässigung) of that process. We must recognize the later capacity as secondary, rooted in the earlier mimetic tendency. Freud now explicitly identifies the process of judgment as involving an integration of system ɸ and the “internal news” provided by ego cathexis. The discharge of quality invading from the outside leaves a certain residue, presumably in and for system W (perception), and Freud reverts to the things we perceive in the world in a sentence equal to any Wittgenstein ever penned: Was wir Dinge nennen, sind Reste, die sich der Beurteilung entzieben. “What we call things are residues that withdraw from judgment” (418). So much for the realism we confronted some pages earlier: the thing is no longer the stable neuron a beset by variable qualities; the thing itself, as Hegel would say, slips away. The reality sign is the mark of a certain withdrawal or pulling out, a remainder of quantity that cannot be either discharged or internally bound. The process of thought remains a cathexis in codetermined by lateral cathexis. And thought about things? Secondary process is a repetition (Wiederholung) of the original discharge in the ψ system “on a lower level, with lesser quantities.” The binding of excessive quantity in lateral cathexis, while crucial for that repetition, does not alone fulfill the iconographic function; that is, binding alone does not enable us to retrieve the residues that withdraw from discharge. Thinking must satisfy “another condition” (419). “It dare not alter in any essential way the effractions created by the primary processes, otherwise it falsifies the traces of reality [die Spuren der Realität].” What traces? We last saw them in Freud’s discussion of periodicity, where the sifting and filtering of quantity to perceptual quality in the sense organs was discussed. Or did we see Spuren there? Certainly the word appeared, but only in a negation: “The propagation of quality cannot be maintained [Haltbar ist diese Qualitäts-fortpflanzung nicht]; it leaves no traces [sie hinterlässt keine Spuren]; it is not reproducible” (395). Whence then the traces of reality that dare not be falsified? When did the things—these residues and remainders in withdrawal—ever march augustly through the soul in order to leave vestiges of their footfall? When we turn to Part Three of the “Project” it will be purely in order to search out the origin of these impossible traces. Freud already appears to be so sure of them—these traces of reality that his metapsychology never surrenders (see StA 3, 19, 134, 147, 210, 235, 289)—that he is prepared to entertain a secondary set of vestiges, those of the thought process itself. For it is indubitably the case, unzweifelhaft, as Descartes well knew, that the process of thought “leaves durable traces.” How else explain the fact that the second time we go over something in thought—for example, in what Descartes called enumeratio—we expend significantly less energy? Freud now elides the two thoughts: in order not to falsify reality we need “special traces,” “indicators” (Anzeichen) for our thought processes, indicators that constitute a “thought-memory” (Denkgedächtnis) And he makes a promise to which we shall hold him: “We will later hear by what means the traces of thought processes are distinguished from those of reality.”

The final trinity of sections in Part One, “Primary Processes—Sleep and Dreams,” “Dream Analysis,” and “Dream Consciousness,” conducts Freud to the very threshold of psychopathology. Here as well, only the broadest strokes. For our own engrammatological purposes, Part Three is, or at least promises to be, the decisive part.

Primary process in ψ occurs either as pain (penetration by exogenous quantity) or affect (endogenous quantity released by effraction); secondary process, modifying the primary, occurs by virtue of reproductive thought alone. Reproductive thinking, essentially a kind of memory, involves a transposition of endogenous quantity from the ego to a mainline cathexis by means of a “thought-interest” that is proportional to “affect-interest.” Whether or not there are primary processes in that do not require “attention” (Aufmerk-samkeit) is now the question. Even though Freud says that such a question is to “remain open” (420), there is no doubt that what will be called the “psychology of the unconscious” hinges on it. For the iconography that is now to be established in the “similarity” between the mechanisms of psychoneurosis and normal dream function, as Ernst Kris notes (420 n. 1), will be “rediscovered” in 1899 by Freud, with the Traumdeutung, as the via regia of psychoanalytic theory and practice.

What in the 1895 “Project” is the relation of dream-work to thought-work? Are ego-organization and the transposition of endogenous quantity in secondary process involved in the same way in both thinking and dreaming? In spite of our (wholly justified) desire to paint in broad strokes, we shall once again have to follow Freud’s text quite closely here. “It is an important fact that every day we have before us, during sleep, ψ primary processes that have gradually been biologically suppressed in ψ development.” Every word here will prove to be important: that we have alltäglich, every day, every twentyfour hours, with every cycle of waking and sleeping, vor uns, before us, where “us” may well not be the ego-organization in the sense of perceptual consciousness but where “we” will still have some sort of access to “it,” alltäglich während des Schlafes, during sleep, “it” or “them” being ψ-Primärvorgänge, processes involving the release of quantity as affect by way of breaching, processes wie sie in der ψ-Entwicklung biologisch allmählich unterdrückt worden sind. The “biological development” of ψ referred to here is presumably phylogenetic, not ontogenetic: the gradual suppression of certain processes over aeons of time, a suppression necessary for species development. So that something like Unterdrückung, oppression and suppression—not yet “repression,” Verdrängung—would be the primary nature of primary process: the primal mystery. “A second fact of equal significance [is] that the pathological mechanisms that are disclosed by the most minute analyses of psychoneuroses possess the greatest similarity to dream processes.” However significant this fact, its reminiscent cycle will not bring it back, its rhaidiōs will not fully revolve, until four years have passed in Freud’s life. As though the iconography of dream and neurosis will itself have to suffer Unterdrückung.

And sleep? The scene of primary process brought before us every night of every day? The child sleeps as soon as the exigency of life disdains to torture it further with hunger, wet, and chill; nods pacified at the breast, an der Brust. The adult post coenam et coitum. “Condition for sleep is thus the decrease of endogenous charge in the ψ nucleus, which makes the secondary function (reproductive thinking) superfluous. In sleep the individual enjoys the ideal state [Idealzustand] of inertia, disburdened of the reserve of endogenous quantity.” For pages and pages there has been no mention of inertia, Trägheit, pillar of the quantitative hypothesis. Sleep alone restores it to us. When we awaken, reserves agglomerate in the “ego,” and so “we may surmise that it is discharge of the ego [Ichtentladung] that conditions and characterizes sleep.” Thus it becomes “immediately clear” that here (with Ichentladung) we have “the condition for psychic primary processes.”

However, what is not immediately clear is the relation of vigilant Ichhemmung to the Ichentladung of sleep. We were careful to translate the former, not as inhibition of the ego, but inhibition by the ego. Ego-organization and lateral cathexis were introduced in order to sidetrack quantity that is bound for cathexis in a traumatic or excessively desired mnemic image, bound in either case for pain and unpleasure. If we now translate Ichentladung as anything else than discharge by the ego, if we let the ego sink into oblivion, how will we find peace and satiety? Or is it the case that once the ego has done its work of deflection it can—indeed must—be dispensed with? “Whether with adults in sleep the ego completely disburdens itself is uncertain.” The phrase sich vollständing entlastet suggests that the ego is the subject (if not the agent) and by no means simply the object of the disburdening. Once needed in order to prevent the most damaging excesses from occurring in the primary process, the ego-organization is perhaps now to be (temporarily) retired. And in this context, yet another sentence for Wittgenstein: “From the peculiarities of sleep many things are to be derived that do not suffer surmise” (421). Aus den Eigentümlichkeiten des Schlafes ist manches zu entnehmen, was sich nicht erraten lässt. Without going into these peculiarities, among which are “quantity signs” (not quality signs), which would conduct us to the sacred precincts of hypnosis and psychotherapy, let us state the paradox that Freud confronts: If sleep is initiated by closure of the sense organs and cessation of attention, if system calls a halt to “ɸ impressions” and interrupts the otherwise relentless typography of Eindrücke, the psychic system nevertheless remains fully occupied during sleep with the most chaotic play of images, an iconography beyond your wildest dreams, on call in the stillest of nights.

Freud isolates six points of “Dream Analysis” for discussion (422—24), then proceeds to the final topic of Part One, “Dream Consciousness” (424-26). After noting (1) that dreams dispense with motor discharge and (2) that their bizarre logic derives from association, he emphasizes (3) their hallucinatory character. Dreams are every bit as lively (lebhaft) as perceptions are; furthermore, they are possessed of a consciousness (as point six will reiterate) and they command belief. Freud here reminds us that the “primary remembrance” of a perception is itself hallucinatory until ego-inhibition “teaches us never to cathect W so that it can by regression be transposed to ɸ” (423). The only thing that seems to help prevent this regression, apart from the unidirectional streaming of quantity from ɸ to ψ, and not from ψ to ɸ, is language—the operation of signs. “One closes the eyes and hallucinates, opens them and thinks in words.” (4) The “purpose and meaning” of dreams is wish-fulfillment, even if hallucinatory, a supposition that further corroborates Freud’s conviction “that the primary wish-cathexis [Wunschbesetzung] was also hallucinatory in nature” (424). (5) Dreams tend to follow already breached patterns of quantity flow, so that they cause little pain or biological damage; that means that unlike other primary processes in ψ they are subject to “a bad memory,” das schlechte Gedächtnis, and are often quickly forgotten. Finally (6), consciousness provides quality (that is, the quality normally associated with sense-perception) for these hallucinations, this fact implying “that consciousness is not bound to the ego,” inasmuch as the ego is “disburdened” in sleep. Not a word here about the reality sign, for it too is missing from dream-life. Consciousness can be an ingredient of every ψ process, and Freud expicitly warns us not to equate primary processes with “unconscious” processes. While Freud’s reflections in chapter seven of Die Traumdeutung will doubtless differentiate much more sharply the senses of “consciousness” and “unconscious,” tipping the balance in the direction of the latter, the final remark of this section—“Two hints of inestimable importance for what follows!” (the only phrase in the entire text that appears in italic rather than spaced type)—will wear well throughout the career of psychoanalysis: “If one interrogates consciousness when a memory of the dream is preserved [bei erhaltenem Traumgedächtnis] about the content of that dream [Trauminhalt], the result is that the significance of dreams as wish-fulfillments is covered over by a series of processes—all of them found in neuroses—characterizing the content’s pathological nature.” “Dream consciousness” is above all discontinuous, and its “missing links” all turn out to have a “sexual chemistry,” as in the exemplary case (for Die Traumdeutung) of the dream of “Irma’s injection.” The (quite literal) sexual chemistry (propyltrimethylamin) does not enter consciousness, but is displaced. Yet what can such displacement mean, when consciousness itself is displaced from the ego? Is displacement only the substitution of one quantity for another? At the abrupt close of Part One of his “Project,” the end of the “General Plan” for a scientific psychology, Freud finds himself cast back onto the shoals of a problem by now quite familiar: “The psychic sequence in dreams thus occurs in accord with quantity (Q) [that is to say, exogenous quantity]; yet it is not quantity that decides whether or not the sequence becomes conscious” (426). The riddle of the missing links will be the enigma of primary repression; and no purely quantitative theory will be equal to it.

SIGNS

For the sake of my own inquiry into typography, iconography, and engrammatology, which has all but vanished in the technicalities of Part One of the 1895 psychology, let me discreetly circumvent Part Two, “Psychopathology” (427-38), even though the sexual character of neuroses has everything to do with quality, the nodal enigma of Part One. I shall also thereby circumvent the themes of the deferral or retardation (Nachträglichkeit) of puberty (essential to the import of periodicity for individual development), resistance, and repression—the very knot of the enigma (432). Further, these psychopatho-logical themes all revolve about the fact that in neurosis a certain memory (not a perception: 436) releases sexual energy, a certain memory trace fools the ego-organization and inflicts unpleasure on the system (438). In short, it is not discreet to overlook the role of memory in psychopathology, or of psychopathology in memory processes, inasmuch as the most irascible problems of Part One here come to a head. The entire arc described by psychoanalysis may be seen as having its springboard in these few pages of the Entwurf. Yet rather than dream of doing them justice here, let me proceed to Part Three, “An Attempt to Portray the Normal ψ Processes” (439—66). Even here I shall forego a thorough account, approaching the final segment of Freud’s “Project” with certain specific questions in mind:

(1) Does Freud compel the tradition of typography, iconography, and engrammatology to a critical point, at which the relation of writing and psychism (as memory) becomes radically undecidable?

(2) Does Freud successfully resolve the traditional typographic-engrammatological difficulty—that the “impermeable” memory neurons must be both “influenced” and “unchanged” at once, simultaneously breached and unbroken, visited and virginal in one?

(3) Once the notion of quality has been introduced, once it has forced its way into Freud’s account for essential reasons, can the quantitative project be rescued?

(4) Can periodicity (the foundation of consciousness) and/or lateral cathexis (the foundation of ego-organization) step into the breach, as it were, in order to unify perception and memory?

(5) Does Freud ever explain how the signaling system functions, the system of Zeichen by which, for example, the ego-organization interrupts and sidetracks the cathexis of an inimical memory image?

(6) Does the successful integration of ɸ, ψ, and W come about only with the dynamic image, an image that allows perception to guide behavior in such a way that the goal of desire—neuron b—is attained?

(7) However it may function dynamically, is it not the sign alone that has commerce with both ψ and W, so that engrammatology (understood as the reading of signs) is the only hope for an integration of memory and perception?

The bulk of these questions we shall no doubt let slip into oblivion. Yet there is a certain trajectory to them, culminating in the question posed several pages back: Whence the traces of reality, Realitätsspuren, whence the signs and signals of reality, Realitätszeichen, that thinking must respect? Of what type are these traces?

Part Three, “An Attempt to Portray the Normal ψ Processes,” sets out to fulfill Freud’s second global intention—to reap the rewards of psychopathology for a universal or general psychology, a psychology that would be a detour to philosophy. The text consists of four unnumbered and untitled sections. The first (439—51) poses the problem of the reality sign or quality sign in the two instances that are critical for the ψ system, primary defense against threatening unpleasure and the search for real (not hallucinatory) satisfaction. The second (451-54) is devoted to the relation of linguistic signs to the reality signs of thought, the third (455—61) to the relation of such linguistic signs to memory as such, and the fourth (461-66) to three varieties of possible error in thought processes.

In the first section of this final part of his project Freud attempts to sketch a theory of attention (Aufmerksamkeit) that will unite quality and quantity. Whatever vestiges of reality-testing remain in Freud’s later writings, these speculations on attention will not long survive. Die Traumdeutung will search in another direction, as will the 1911 “Two Principles.” (See also “The Unconscious,” StA 3, 151, including note 1). Yet, for the moment at least, “The attention mechanism is not to be circumvented” (450). For it is the decisive exertion of the so-called secondary processes, in which a constantly cathected mass of neurons (the ego-organization) exercises some sort of influence on more transitory cathexes.

If I have on the one hand the ego and on the other W (perceptions), that is, cathexes in by ɸ (from the external world), then I need a mechanism that causes the ego to follow the perceptions and to influence them. I find this mechanism in the fact that, according to what I have presupposed, a perception always excites a) [a perceptual neuron] and thus yields quantity signs [Quantitätszeichen abgibt]. (438)

Earlier it was sufficient to discuss breaching in terms of quantity flow; now (presuming we do not have here a slip of the pen) it is to be a matter of quantity (not quality) signs. Why? Presumably because perception from the outset required the supposition of quality rather than quantity. Quantitative psychology can enter the realm of perception only if it borrows from quality its signal character, only if it becomes a psychology of quantity signs. To be sure, whether and how the (quantity) sign can be read remains the difficulty. Freud continues: “More precisely, the perception excites consciousness in W (consciousness of a quality), and the discharge of perceptual excitation will deliver the news to ψ, this news being the selfsame quality sign. I proffer the supposition that it is these quality signs that cause ψ to be interested in the perception.” Such interest on the part of ψ, where alone memory is possible, is what Freud means by Aufmerksamkeit. “Attention” therefore should serve as the missing link between perception and memory. Yet he concedes from the start: “I find it difficult to explain its emergence mechanically (automatically).” He will try to understand it “biologically,” and that means in terms of the genesis and development of the entire system, the entire narrative of need, craving, expectation, frustration, and ephemeral fulfillment. The principal biological justification of secondary processes (such as thinking and remembering) is that they assist in restoring the real presence of the desired object—above and beyond its presence in hallucination. “Biological experience has taught us that this representation [of the desired object] dare not be so strongly cathected that it can be confused with a perception; it has taught us to defer the discharge until the quality signs emerge from the representation as proof that the representation is now real, is now a perceptual cathexis” (440). Freud is perfectly aware that such signs pose a challenge to the quantitative effort as a whole. Yet he cannot dispense with them. For it is a matter of knowing which perceptions are the “correct” ones (441), that is to say, the ones that can be brought into iconographic accord with particular cathexes of remembrance.

If quality (quantity?) signs arise from perception, who or what can actually bring them into accord with mnemic images? Freud now appeals to the excitation of certain motor neurons (443) as a way of communicating the news, die Nacbrichtung, to system ψ. (Such “news” may perhaps best be understood as a supplementary direction [Nach-richtung] of excitation; yet at the end of the line, Erwin Straus would remind us, one finds oneself appealing to an “attentive” gleaning of “the news.”) Past lessons in engrammatology should have prepared us for the particular area of motor activity that Freud will now summarily invoke:

Linguistic association fulfills this purpose. It consists in connecting ѱ neurons with [motor] neurons that serve representations of sounds [Klangvorstellungen] and that themselves have the most intimate association with linguistic motor images [motorischen Sprachbildern]. These associations possess two advantages over all the others: they are circumscribed (few in number) and they are exclusive. The excitation always proceeds from acoustic image [Klangbild] to word image [Wortbild], and from the latter to discharge. Hence if the memory images are of such a kind that a partial stream can pass from them to the acoustic images and motor word images, then cathexis of memory images is accompanied by news concerning discharge, such news being the quality signs, and thereby the consciousness signs, of memory. Now, if the ego has already cathected these word images, and if it has prior to that cathected the perceptual-discharge images, then it has fabricated the mechanism that steers the ψ cathexis toward the memories that emerge in the flow of quantity. This is conscious, observational thinking. (443—44)

A host of doubts and difficulties arises here. One would have to confront all these notions with the linguistics of Saussure—and indeed the linguistics of Plato’s Philebus (18b—c), which emphasizes the unlimited variety (apeiron) of sounds—not only in the case of the acoustic image as such but the closed or circumscribed order of such images, as well as their specificity and exclusivity.¹³ One would also have to think forward to Lacan’s “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient, ou la raison depuis Freud” (1957), which rests on the irresolvable ambiguity of “ultimately differential elements” composed by “laws of a closed order.”¹⁴ One would also have to come to terms with the fact that the famous “talking cure” of psychoanalysis—unser Gott, Logos—hinges on the kind of mechanism described here. Problematic of course is the identification of such a mechanism with conscious, even “observational” thought. Yet it is of supreme engrammatological importance that both memory and thought processes are seen to rely on breachings as tracings (Bahnungen als Spuren: 444) that are intimately bound up with language; and further, that such language, while at first identified as speech (“Innervation of speech is originally a valve-like effective discharge for ψ”), soon glides from Klangbild to Wortbild to Erinnerungsbild, bearing thither on traces of language the stamp and seal, the typos, of perceptual quality. Freud’s phonocentrism—like that of Hobbes and Locke—advances to the (r)uses of writing, a reliance upon writingIt stays in book of that which iseven sooner than Derrida supposes (ED, 297, 303/200, 204).

I shall not trace in any detail the account of speech innervation developed here by Freud (444—46), but only confirm that its trajectory, from the cry (Schreinachricht), through the phoneme (Laute), to the imitative tendency of onomatopoeia is classically phonocentric. And like all classic phonocentrisms, Freud’s speculations contain a hidden reference to something like writing. For the binding of quantity in the ego, the achievement of high cathexis with relatively little streaming, is itself a highly charged writing. A writing that marks the genesis and genealogy of the I—the laborious rise of the ego beingIn the ink of his sweat he will find it yetfor Freud the event that is “most obscure” (448).¹⁵

After reiterating his conception of the ego as a network of neurons at the core of the psychic system, a network cathected more or less stably, konstant, Freud now speculates on its genesis from the (precarious) experience of satisfaction. Satisfaction or pacification involves the association of “a perception (the desired image) and a dynamic index.” The apposition or equation of perception and desired image, Wahrnehmung and Wunschbild, of course begs the entire question of how the former could ever have become the latter—presuming that Wunschbild and Erinnerungsbild are at least sometimes synonymous. For perceptions cannot be retained. Or, at least, they leave no traces in ѱ apart from linguistic traces, hardly the traces of use to an infant in search of the moon. Not only is the communication between W and ty now being presupposed, but the ego-organization itself is being asked to organize its own transit authority and its own banking system. Freud writes:

In the repetitive state of craving, in expectation, the education and development of this nascent ego takes place. It first learns that it dare not occupy [besetzen] the dynamic images [Bewegungsbilder] in such a way that discharge follows, as long as certain conditions have not been fulfilled on the part of perception. Further, it learns that it dare not occupy the desired representation beyond a certain degree, because it would then deceive itself in hallucinations. Yet if it respects these two barriers and turns its attention to the new perceptions, it has some prospect of attaining the desired satisfaction. Thus it is clear that the barriers that prevent the ego from occupying the desired image and the dynamic image beyond a certain degree are the grounds for storing endogenous quantity in the ego; they require the ego, so to speak, to translate such quantity in certain amounts to the neurons it is able to reach.

It is of course the threatening unpleasure (Unlustdrohung) that does the real educating in this innercity school of hard knocks. The primary biological legacy is primary defense (die primäre Abwehr), its complement the law of biological attention: “Whenever a reality sign emerges, cathexis is to be extended to the cathected perception at hand and contemporary with it” (451). Reality signs are signs of quality. And signs of quality are the text to be attended to. Yet both the threatening and the promising signs are highly mysterious, and no perfunctory appeal to speech and to the dynamic image associated particularly with speech (see the 1891 aphasias monograph) will solve the riddle of their origin. That origin lies in their aboriginal repetition, Wiederholung, in a schooling that will always already have to have taken place. “How primary defense, nonoccupation thanks to the threat of unpleasure, can be portrayed mechanically, this I really cannot say” (450). Freud owes us this one: Ich gestatte mir von jetzt an. . . schuldig zu bleiben. Although it is said to be an account of the origin of quality signs in perception, this debt is nonetheless a debt of memory, of traces of Erinnerung in Gedächtnis. For quality signs can be kept only in a thesaurus.

Freud’s truncated speculations on linguistic quality signs and their relation to reality signs in thought—“the supreme, most secure form of cognitive thought process” (453),—do not bring us any closer to the origin of signs. Nor does the third section of Part Three do so; in fact, it makes the function of quality signs more perplexing than ever. Yet here Freud has more to say about Gedächtnis and Erinnerung, and again we will want to follow him closely. The fourth section, on the possibility of error (Irrtum) in thought, a possibility that would inevitably lead us back to Theaetetus, we shall forego in favor of this third section, drawing on the fourth only when it aids our final effort to understand signs, signals, seals, and traces in the 1895 Entwurf.

Although Freud celebrates theoretical thought as thinking in which “unpleasure plays no role” (464), so that such thought is possible only when memory processes are “bound” to the ego-organization; and although his description of critical or probative thought sounds like nothing less than a portrait of the analyst as a young man; there is no doubt but that practical thinking is for him the “origin” and “ultimate goal” of all thought processes, the process of which all the others are offshoots (461). Another word for practical, to be sure, is biological. Freud once again tries to clarify the path that leads from a particular perception (W) back to a desirous representation or Plus-Vorstellung (+ V). How is it that lateral cathexes do not consistently sidetrack and divert the pathway between perception and memory image? Surprisingly, Freud’s answer to this question (455) will take us back to Aristotle’s account of reminiscence. If neuron d is contiguous with + V; if (in Aristotle’s words) d is that penultimate point to which the proper arkhē kinēseōs, the dominant source or starting-point of self-showing, must guide us; if the final move to + V occurs at that point on its own; then how is it that the effraction or breached pathway from a to b to c need not necessarily be followed step-by-step? How is it possible to get directly from a to d?

Let us pause and marvel a moment at Freud’s Aristotelianism. Why does Freud not speak of a Bahnung that would take us (“we” for the moment being endogenous quantity) all the preferential way to + V? He has not hitherto shied from referring to mnemic images (Erinnerungsbilder) when, properly speaking, it is a question of neurons; so that it cannot be out of embarrassment in the face of these icons embedded in protoplasm. Why for that matter do both Aristotle and Freud trust in that “association,” that intimate Wahlverwandtschaft, between d and + V? In chapter I we puzzled over the sufficiency of movement to the penultimate goal of remembrance; perhaps Freud’s Aristotelianism is profound enough to solve that puzzle.

It is sufficient to move to the penultimate image in a sequence of reminiscences because the ultimate image and the origin of the series, the arkhē kinēseōs, are in fact selfsame. The movement in both the Aristotelian and Freudian cases is not linear but circular, not in the sense of a melancholic Teufelskreis but in the sense that the very choice of what Aristotle calls “the right starting-point” itself guarantees the success of the movement, if guarantees there are. The efficacy of that choice, in Aristotle’s account, is difficult to explain. In Freud’s, it is hard to see how lateral cathexis can be played off against effraction in this way. (Indeed, Freud confuses himself with Husserl yet again: modification of effraction or breaching, he says, liegt. . . im Belieben des Ich [455], as though the ego can, “whenever I like,” alter an established breaching.) The exertion required would neatly account for “difficulties in thinking,” Denkschwierigkeiten (456), but it would hardly explain successful association.

In this connection, Freud casts doubt on the role heretofore assigned to quality signs. He now says that they are “not indispensable” in processes of practical thought, even though they do “secure and fix” these processes. Later (464) quality signs will be reinstated, at least for cognizing and critical thinking, which “awaken” to such signs, or summon those signs themselves to vigilance (Wacbrufung aller Qualitätszeichen); but for the moment, in practical thinking, where W should pass “quickly” to the dynamic image that will get us closer to +V, who can take the time to call for seals of approval? “Wherever the sequence leading from a certain perception to particular goal-cathexes has already repeatedly occurred and is stereotyped by memory breachings [durch Gedächtnisbahnungen stereotypiert ist], there is seldom any occasion for awakening the quality sign” (456). The breachings of perception and memory (perception to memory) that we have been laboring to understand are now so thoroughly effracted that their typography is in stereo, solid state. Now the specific action called for by the dynamic image appears to negotiate perfectly well on the basis of the fixed breaching from W to + V and back again. Never mind the possibility that + V may be so excessively desiredI am highly sheshe sheriousthat W provesHe warto be more wanted and wished-for than w ahrgenommen. Never mindMy lips went livid from the joy of fearthe likelihood of outrage. “During the sequence, this dynamic image was cathected only in a bound way [that is to say, in full cooperation with the ego, the binding power], and the thought process took its departure from a perception (W) that was pursued purely as memory image [Erinnerungsbild]; because of these facts, the entire thought process can achieve its independence from expectation and reality; it can progress to identity with no alteration at all” (457). The thinking and the identity in question are, we must remember, practical, so that the new-found independence of the thought process must make us wonder. Have the old aporias really been solved while our backs were turned? So it would seem. Freud continues:

It is now time to qualify an assertion made earlier [at 444 in Freud’s text] to the effect that a memory of thought processes is made possible only by quality signs, because otherwise the traces [Spuren] of those processes could not be distinguished from the traces of perceptual breachings. What we must still insist on is the fact that our memory of reality [das Realgedächtnis] dare not properly speaking be modified by any thinking about it. On the other hand, it is undeniable that when we think about a particular theme we leave behind traces extraordinarily significant for later reflection, and it is extremely doubtful whether only the thinking that occurs with quality signs and consciousness does this.

I interrupt here to note the rather unexpected turn in Freud’s thought. It is not that quality signs are now to be dispensed with, and the only possible criteria for distinguishing hallucination and reality abandoned. It may rather be that the quality signs always were too close to cognitive thought, too close to “pure” thought and consciousness, to have served as such criteria. These seals of approval, these pathfinders and Wegweiser, are a dream that practical thinking does not, cannot, take time to dream. But to return to the passage: “Thus there must be thought breachings—and yet the original associative paths dare not be obliterated. Because there is only one kind of breaching, one might suppose, the two conclusions are incompatible.” We are thrust back upon the aporia that arose countless pages—and many centuries—ago. Effractions are einerlei, of a single kind. How is it possible for them to permit a retracing in practical thought that does not cover over the original breachings? And yet is it possible to conceive of such thought as leaving no traces of its own?

Freud’s reply, based on the level of excitation in the breachings, a level that is presumably higher in thought processes than in primary associations (—although, unless our memories betray us, Freud earlier [at 418] insisted that the level of excitation in thought processes was generally quite low, just as endogenous quantity is significantly lower than exogenous quantity), is hardly convincing, and he proffers it perhaps only halfheartedly. What remains indisputable is that “memory consists in the breachings [in den Bahnungen]” (458). Freud can only appeal to the level of excitation that occurs in them, or to the “threshold value” he has introduced into the contact barrier (454), as though Qἠ had not itself from the outset been differential in its “value,” and as though the entire system of breachings had not from the outset been radically dependent on quantity flow. However, just as in Part One Freud appealed to periodicity in order to account for differences in breaching, so now a certain temporal dimension reasserts itself in his text. It will once again be a matter of subsequent returns and augmentings, of retracings over time, of Nachträglichkeit. The account is hardly clear, but let us follow it closely. For we are now at the end. Last chance to collect on that debt.

In addition to cognitive and practical thinking there is “a reproductive, remembering thinking,” which is not entirely absorbed in practical thought (458). Such erinnerndes Denken in fact serves as an essential mediator between the practical thinking that follows the wiles and ways of primary process and the probing, critical thinking that analyzes with full consciousness. As mediator, erinnerndes Denken has the capacity to reverse directions: “It pursues a given thought process in the opposite direction, as it were, back to a perception, once again under [the condition of] goallessness, as distinct from practical thinking; and on its pursuit it takes advantage [bedient sich dabei] of a large range of quality signs.” Such mediation is of course aWell, we have frankly enjoyed more than anything these secret workings of naturesmiracle. Or a kind of magic. In a unidirectional system of quantity flow, where even the news flows only one way, whence in all the world this Rück-verfolgung? If the hypothesis of quantity flow plus lateral cathexes is unable to account for what Freud will soon call Riickstromung (460), what is this strange power of memorative thinking, a thinking that hovers somewhere between consciousness and the unconscious? Is it the prototype of what Freud in Die Traumdeutung will call the preconscious, das Vorbewusste? Whatever the case, this capacity to radiate stereophonically in both directions, to inside and outside at once, is crucial in Erinnerung; we shall see that capacity come to the fore once again—in Hegel’s philosophy, discussed in chapter 5, below.

In its regress to W, remembrance or reminiscence meets up with certain “mediative members,” Mittelglieder. They were introduced in the final section of Part One, “Dream Consciousness,” to explain how the sexual chemistry of “Irma’s injection” evaded detection. Sexual chemistry is the middle member (425). As the mediator between cathected desire and hallucination, the middle member is always “what remains to be disclosed.” It is something very much like a quality sign, a sign that is not read, yet not altogether identical to such signs. “In this pursuit back, the process stumbles across middle members that have up to now been unconscious, having left behind no quality signs; they are members whose quality signs emerge after deferral [sich nachträglich ergeben].” The Mittelglieder—reminiscent of the Mittelwesen of the ancients, such as daimons or hermaphrodites, who communicate between realms normally segregated from one another, or those intermediates that Socrates (again in Philebus (is looking for both in pleasure and in speech—are in fact traces (Spuren) that the thought sequence has left behind, vestiges that are not yet quality signs, not yet, but only nachträglich. Quality signs often serve as the indicators of commencement and termination, the start and finish (= arkhē kinēseōs?) of a particular stretch of the way, a stretch one would otherwise never disclose. Yet once launched on that stretch, thought encounters these strange middling creatures. Or encounters them at the end, in the form of results. “Whatever the case, the reproducibility of thought processes far exceeds their quality signs; the latter are made conscious by deferred action, although it is perhaps more often the result of the thought sequence that leaves traces rather than the stages of that sequence.”

Freud now cites one of the possible mishaps that may beset thought processes—that an instance of “practical thought with cathected goals” leads to the release of unpleasure—lest his account appear too elegiac. If a memory releases unpleasure it is apparently because the perception to which it is tied (let us not ask how) produced the same unpleasure or pain. Such perceptions summon a great deal of attention, less because of their quality signs than merely on account of the “reaction” they provoke; that is to say, they are associated with exertions or eψressions of affect and defense. The destiny of such memory images is that their repetition at first awakens affect and unpleasure quite intensely. Yet “with time” they lose this malignant capacity (459). At first such intense and lively images preserve their “sensuous qualities” but when they lose their effective power they become Hobbesian-Humean memory images. Such loss of affective strength eventuates when they become “bound,” tethered by and to the ego-organization. When a thought sequence crosses the path of an as yet unbound memory image, the latter’s quality signs, “often of a sensuous nature,” come to the fore, along with the consequent sensation of unpleasure and tendency to discharge. All this releases a certain affect—one that is liable to interrupt the thought sequence.

Yet what is time, asks Freud, that it should weaken the affective charges of images that are still too lively to be called Erinnerungsbilder proper? There is as yet no sign of Freud’s later conviction concerning the timelessness of the unconscious, and yet Freud himself is certainly aware of the anomaly of time’s action:

What is it that transpires with those reminiscences that are capable of affect [affektfähigen Erinnerungen] up to the point when they became bound [gebändigt werden]? It is not plausible that “time” debilitates the repetition of their affective capacity, inasmuch as this moment [i.e., time] otherwise contributes precisely to the strengthening of an association. It must be the case that something occurs in “time,” with the repetitions, that effects this subjugation; and this can be nothing else than the fact that a relation to the ego or to ego-cathexes assumes power over the reminiscence.

Because painful experiences leave traces of excessive ɸ quantity and produce a hypertrophied breaching in the direction of unpleasure, they require the ego’s robust and repeated exertions in binding, the “repetition of painful experiences,” until the path to unpleasure is effectively blocked. These traces of excessive ɸ quantity—as yet unbound—in fact account for the power of hallucination over the ψ system:

The fact that the reminiscence [die Erinnerung] exhibits an hallucinatory character for such a long time also demands its own explanation, one that will be significant for our conception of hallucination as such. Here it is plausible to suppose that this capacity for hallucination, along with the capacity for affect, are indications of the fact that the ego-cathexis has not yet exerted any influence on the reminiscence, that in this reminiscence the primary directions of discharge and the full process, or primary process, have the upper hand. (460)

Hallucination is in fact the dark side of that mysterious backflow of reproductive or reminiscent thinking, Ruckverfolgung, discussed a moment ago. Hallucination requires a regressive streaming of quantity, a Rückströmung, from ψ to ɸ and W. The backwash occurs because of excessive quantity cathected in particular memories formed by an unusually strong effraction, memories not yet sufficiently inhibited (or, as the Studien über Hysterie will say, not yet sufficiently associated) by the ego. Such inhibition or binding by the ego would seem to be the proper result of the mediative thought of reminiscence, and yet Freud—confusing himself now with Nietzsche—equates it with forgetting (Verges sen):

Now at long last it will be possible to occupy the painful reminiscence in such a way that it exerts no backward streaming and can give birth only to a modicum of unpleasure. Now it is bound, indeed by a thought-breaching [Denkbahnung] so strong that the latter exerts a lasting impact, exercising an inhibitory effect even in later repetitions of the reminiscence. Through desuetude, the path leading to the release of unpleasure will gradually augment its resistance. For breachings are subject to gradual ruination (oblivion) [Verfall (Vergessen)]. Only then is this reminiscence a bound reminiscence, a reminiscence like any other.

Properly speaking, what is “forgotten” is not the lively reminiscence but the effraction connecting it to unpleasure. Even though the breaching itself was never “remembered” as such, Freud now equates its waxing resistance with forgetting, oblivion. Even more ironically, such oblivion is what transforms a hallucination into a proper memory. It is also worth noting that Freud here identifies the reminiscence as a painful one, whereas earlier it was a wish-cathexis, an excessively desired icon, that spawned hallucination. The shift is important inasmuch as the inhibiting or binding of excessive wish-cathexis is what earlier called for signs of quality and reality.

Freud now (461) discusses the “signal” that primary thought-defense reads in order to evade unpleasure. Yet the sign of reality, the only sign that can prevent frustration and outrage, continues to elude him and us. Although Freud explicitly invokes both Realitätszeichen and Qualitätszeichen, their operations remain utterly mysterious. The debt is still outstanding.

WAX MAGIC

At the end of this long and tortuous path—an effraction with multiple contact barriers, lateral cathexes, regressive flows, and irruptions of unpleasure—Freud’s text can hardly satisfy us. It did not satisfy him. What began as crucifixion ended as a burlesque of delusion, eine Art Could you wheedle a staveling encore out of your imitationer’s jubalharp, hey, Mr Jinglejoys? Wahnwitz (Letter 36 to Fliess; 145). It doubtless fulfilled Freud’s need to integrate the flood of new materials and novel insights that were about to sweep him from neurology to the exotic shores of psychoanalysis. And there is no question but that completion of the task induced in him a distinct euphoria. Two weeks after composing Part Three, Freud to Fliess:

In one energetic night of the week now flown by, at that precise degree of inflicted pain [Schmerzbelastung] that in my case produces the optimal conditions for cerebral activity, the barriers [die Schranken] suddenly lifted, the blinders fell away, and one’s gaze encompassed everything from details on neurosis to the conditions of consciousness. Everything seemed to fit everything else, the gearwheels meshed, one got the impression that the thing was now actually a machine, that it would soon be running on its own steam. The three systems of neurons, the free and the bound states of quantity, the primary and secondary processes, the main tendency and the compromise tendency of the nervous system, the two biological rules of attention and defense, the quality signs, real[ity] signs, and thought signs, the state of the psychosexual cluster—the sexual condition of repression, ultimately the conditions of consciousness in its perceptual function—it all passed muster [alles stimmte] and it still does today! Of course, I can hardly contain my delight. . . .

All other sorts of neurotic corroborations [sic] come pouring in. The thing [die Sache] is really true and genuine. (Letter 32; 139-40; cf. ED, 306 n.1/329-30 n.8)

However, no amount of neurotischen Bestätigungen could sustain Freud’s mania or overcome the doubts that riddle the 1895 Psychologie. If only five weeks later the euphoria has succumbed to sarcasm concerning the odd systern he has “hatched,” this duckbilled platypus of a scientific psychology, the endeavor remains impressive, even awesome. It would no doubt be salutary to trace the progress of this hybrid—the progress of typography, iconography, and engrammatology, the progress ofFinny. Vary vary finny! philosophy—in a whole series of later works, beginning with letters 39 and 52 and proceeding to chapter seven of Die Traumdeutung, the 1911 “Formulations Concerning the Two Principles of Psychic Occurrence” (StA 3, 17—24), chapter four of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and all of The Ego and the Id (1923). Yet we shall follow the advice of Ernst Kris (185 n. 1) and the example of Jacques Derrida by turning exclusively to the brief 1925 text, Notiz über den “Wunderblock,” “Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ ” (StA 3, 365—69). Our purpose in doing so will be to see how the aporias of the 1895 “Project” culminate in the crisis of engrammatology—a crisis in which writing must serve as the metaphor for perception and memory but can no longer serve as a “known” providing a magic eψlanation for something “unknown.” That crisis will cause Derrida’s question to resonate once again: “What is a text, and what might the psychical be, such that it can be represented by a text?” (ED, 297/199).

“If I distrust my memory. . .” begins Freud, almost three decades after the 1895 “Project” (StA 3, 365). Such distrust aligns him with philosophers of almost all persuasions, even the Platonists, and most certainly the Cartesians. “If I distrust my memory—we know that the neurotic distrusts his to a conspicuous extent, but the normal person too has every reason to do so—I can supplement and secure [ergänzen und versichern] its function by making for myself a written note [eine schriftliche Aufzeichnung].” Freud wishes to focus on the plane or surface [Fläche] on which such jottings might be made, although it is the possible depth or interiority of such a res extensa that interests him—as it interested Hegel before him. Such a plane surface with depth-potential represents “a materialized piece of the apparatus of remembrance,” which is in fact “invisible within me.” The great advantage of such a plane surface is that it preserves inscriptions without distortion, so that they can be “reproduced” (the quotation marks are Freud’s, inasmuch as reproduction here is simply a reading) any time I like, nach Belieben.

Use of such technical apparatus (recommended, we recall, in Descartes’ Regulae) has in the past necessitated following one of two procedures. One could choose either a permanent writing surface, such as a sheet of paper, or a readily erasable surface, such as a blackboard. The advantage of the former was that when one covered a sheet of paper with notes jotted in ink the result was a “durable memory trace,” eine‘dauerhafte Erinnerungsspur.’ Of course, the concomitant disadvantage was that the receptivity of the surface was soon exhausted: once the sheet was fully inscribed one had to set it aside and take up another, thus running the risk of becoming what the Germans call verzettelt, bewildered among countless bits and scraps of paper, or the risk of being burdened with an archive of papers even when one is no longer interested in the theme recorded on them. The free and untrammeled spirit in us was disgruntled.

Freud’s complaint is not identical to Socrates’ (or King Thamus’) in Phaedrus, but it is surely related. Freud does not bemoan the exteriority of the indelible written trace as such; the exteriority of the durable and immutable trace is precisely its advantage. Yet the piling up of useless records is no doubt reminiscent of the ancient complaint that the written text gapes at us and refuses to engage in dialogue. Chalk and blackboard have the advantage of being “limitlessly receptive”; I can erase the board and fill it again with fresh traces—I do not need to replace the board with another. The obvious disadvantage is that here a permanent trace is not possible, or at least not likely. Once the board is full I must make a decision about what will have to go, a decision about what in the future will never interest me again. The archivist in us is struck with horror. Freud concludes: “Unlimited receptivity and maintenance of perdurant traces—these seem to exclude one another in the devices we substitute for our memory; either the receptive surface has to be renewed or the recorded note obliterated” (365—66). Unlike the technical apparatus that serves to augment our senses when they suffer some deficiency (apparatus such as eyeglasses, hearing aids, and telescopes), both writing-paper and chalkboard are insufficiently mimetic of the faculty they are meant to supplement. Although memory traces are not immutable, they certainly do perdure; and yet there always seems to be room for the reception of more traces. Can a new device, a novel aide-mémoire, be found?

Freud reminds his readers of his surmise in Die Traumdeutung that the dual function of memory in fact relies on a dual system—two distinct “organs of the psychic apparatus.” He does not mention the 1895 sketch, which began with abashed speculations on such a duality, or the even earlier reflections by Josef Breuer in this regard; nor does he pause over the bizarre juxtaposition of “psyche,” “organs,” and “apparatus,” the dual or multiple catachresis of traditional philosophical anthropology. The first such system, the perceptual-conscious system, in which we descry the evolution of systems ɸ and W from 1895, is capable of receiving perceptions but not of maintaining perdurant traces; the latter arise in “ ‘memory systems’ deposited behind” the perceptual-conscious system (kämen in dahinter gelegenen ‘Erinnerungsystemen’ zustande). He calls the “ineψlicable phenomenon” of consciousness, which originates in place of perdurant traces, an insight attained in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), although we know that the ground for it is prepared already in 1895 (Anfänge,392—97). Freud now introduces—“unveils” would be the wrong word—the recently marketed Wunderblock, the miraculous writing pad, as an aid to memory far better suited than either paper or chalkboard to emulate the structure and functions of both perception and memory. The mystic writing pad promises to be a more faithful icon of the psyche. True, Freud does not publish his Notiz über den “Wunderblock” on such a writing pad, no matter how miraculous, nor is it recorded that he prepared his text on it; he no doubt preferred the less renewable but far more durable method of publication in a printed journal and then in his typeset Gesammelte Werke. Nevertheless, Freud’s account of the icon is so finely wrought, so lucid and precise, that we may be confident that he at some point actually wielded such a pad, just as we may trust that Husserl had a tone-producing machine on his desk all the while he was composing his lectures on internal time-consciousness.

To be sure, the editors of the Standard Edition indicate that Freud’s account is flawed, and we ought to take a moment to clarify the defect. Derrida records the remark of Freud’s editors (ED, 330 n. 1/331 n. 28), appended to the following sentence in the Notiz: “If one wants to destroy the note one has jotted down, it is sufficient to lift the composite cover sheet by its unattached lower edge gently [mit leichtem Griff] from the wax pad.” The Studienausgabe of Freud’s works, which I have before me as I write and which contains the editorial material of the Standard Edition, contains the following editorial note: “The manner in which the cover sheet is lifted from the wax pad is somewhat different in today’s ‘mystic writing pads,’ but this alters nothing in the principle” (367 n. 1). The introductory note to which we are then referred (364) tells us that “today’s” mystic writing pads, sold under the brandname “ ‘Printator’-Dauerschreibblock,” achieve the separation of cover sheet and waxen matrix by means of a concealed lever or slide—one no longer lifts the composite cover sheet but moves the lever from left to right or right to left in order to efface the text. Derrida spurns the editors’ apologetics and writes: “We are tempted to think that Freud botches his technical description elsewhere as well for the sake of his analogy.” He declines to point out these places. Certainly there is nothing in today’s Printator that cancels Derrida’s own principal point: the machine still requires two hands for its operation.

Surely, we have a right to be a bit bemused by the editors’ intrusion and Derrida’s temptation. Surely, Freud cannot be held responsible for the fact that technical improvements have altered the implement itself, rendering his description in one or other respect obsolete. Who can control what is tossed onto the market? Who would want to halt technical progress? Progress—even if the greatest source of pleasure in the apparatus, the gentle grip of thumb and index lifting ever so slowly the shiny clear and the dull gray sheets from the sticky tablet, the crackling sound of text on the verge of obliteration, the line of text or illustration disappearing an instant before the separation seems to occur, vanishing like water once spilled on tabletop, like a stream flowing back to its source—even if all that pleasure is dashed. But enough of pleasure. Science.

There does seem to be one minor infidelity in Freud’s description, which neither the editors nor Derrida pinpoints, an infidelity that does not arise from technical progress but mars the description of even the original Wunderblock, and precisely in the region where science releases the greatest pleasure. Freud has by now described the resinous, waxy subsurface of the tablet, the matrix that will both provide the dark line of text and retain the impressions made by the stylus even after the text has been erased. He finds the dual cover sheet, consisting of a celluloid upper layer and a far more delicate “wax paper” beneath, “more interesting” (367). The infidelity occurs precisely with regard to the point in which Freud is most interested—Interesse being the word he used in 1895 to describe the mechanism of attention, Aufmerksamkeit, the mechanism that allows ψ to influence W and ɸ. “This sheet is the more interesting component of the little apparatus. The sheet itself consists of two layers, which, except at the two horizontal edges, can be separated from one another [die ausser an den beiden queren Rändern voneinander abgehoben werden können]” (367; my emphases). Now, in any mystic writing pad that has ever found its way into my hands, and they are legion (the pads, not my hands, which are two, and eminently capable of slips), I have never seen the two sheets attached to one another at both top and bottom. Rather, the laminating celluloid folio and the dull, delicate undersheet are joined together only at the top of the device, precisely where the two leavesLispn! No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leavesare attached as a unit to the pitchlike subsurface of the matrix. Freud’s infidelity will not affect the principal use of the pad as an analogy for perception and memory, but it will make one of his most precious discoveries impossible. However, let us follow Freud’s further description of the pad’s function—it will be impossible to capture the beauty of Freud’s proseBut there’s a great poet in you tooin any translation, so that such translations should themselves work mystically and quickly vanish:

One employs the mystic writing pad by carrying out the writing [Aufschreibung] on the celluloid laminate of the wax tablet’s coversheet. For such writing we require no pencil or piece of chalk: the writing does not consist in the delivery of material to the receptive surface. We have here a return to the way in which the ancients wrote on tablets of clay and wax. A pointed stylus notches the surface, whose depressions yield “script” [Ein spitzer Stilus ritzt die Oberfläche, deren Vertiefungen die “Schrift” ergeben]. (367)

The magic of the writing pad at first seems to consist in the fact that it too is a regressive monster, a throwback to the most primitive style and stylus of typography. Here script is produced as the profundation of a surface, whose relief effects the separation of light from darkness. And it is the darkness that is read, the darkness that articulates. We may therefore expect that the subsurface of pitch will come to play a role in the yielding of light to dark. Yet the magic of the writing pad is no mere regression:

With the mystic writing pad, the notching does not occur directly, but by mediation [Vermittlung] of the coversheet that lies over it. At the places where it touches down, the stylus presses the wax paper undersheet onto the wax tablet; furrows become visible on the otherwise smooth, pale gray surface of the celluloid With pale blake I write tintingface as darkling script.

At this point Freud describes the erase-function of the pad, and here the editors (and Derrida) make their interventions. Freud notes that once the composite coversheet is raised and the furrows and depressions eliminated (yet are they eliminated?) no restoration of the traces occurs when the upper sheets again come into contact with the pitch. “The mystic writing pad is now script-free and ready to receive new jottings.” Of course, the pad functions so far precisely as a blackboard does when covered with writing and then erased. Freud interrupts his description with this brief paragraph: “The minor imperfections of the device naturally hold no interest for us, inasmuch as we only wish to pursue its approximation to the structure of the psychical perceptual apparatus.” Never mind the optimistic juxtaposition of “psychical” and “perceptual,” des seelischen Wahrnehmungsapparats; although it would be good to know whether and how ψ and W are juxtaposed, particularly with regard to ɸ. Never mind that, because we now arrive atYou will tell me some time if I can believe its all. You know where I am bringing you? You remember?the consequences of that imperfection that is not the machine’s but Freud’s. An imperfection that impairs the second of the three “analogies” outlined by Derrida (ED, 331—32/224—25). Freud writes:

If one cautiously lifts the celluloid laminate [Zelluloidplatte] from the wax paper at a time when the pad is covered with writing one sees the script every bit as clearly on the surface of the wax paper itself; one might ask why the celluloid laminate of the coversheet is necessary at all. Experiment then shows that the thin paper would easily be creased or torn were one to write directly on it with the stylus. The celluloid laminate is thus a protective covering [eine schützende Hülle] for the wax paper, designed to withstand [abhalten] damaging influences from the outside [schädigende Einwirkungen von aussen]. The celluloid is a “shield against stimulus” [“Reizschütz”]; the layer that is properly receptive of stimulus is the paper. (367-68)

Freud can now reveal the legend or key to the analogy. He refers to chapter four of Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the source of his notion that “our psychical perceptual apparatus consists of two layers, an outer protection against stimulus, designed to reduce the magnitude of the oncoming excitations, and a surface behind it [Oberfläche dahinter] that is designed to receive stimulus, the system W-Bw [perception-consciousness].” Yet we could translate the entire structure of Beyond into the terms found already in Die Traumdeutung (StA 2, 512—17, 583—86 passim), where each system appears, one “behind” the other; and we could trace various aspects of that earlier system back to the 1895 “Project,” its ɸ, ψ, W, its umbrellas and sieves, contact barriers, cathexes, and breachings. We shall forego such translations in order to note the fact that Freud’s “experiment,” the one by which he would separate “cautiously” the two layers of the system perception-consciousness, cannot be executed. For he has sewn the two leaves at both horizontal rims of the pad, at both top and bottom, so that only the composite can “with a gentle grip” be removed from the pitch of memory.

A mere slip of the verge, no doubt. Scarcely affecting “the principle.” Yet it suggests that the relation of ɸ to W remains problematic. In letter 39 to Fliess (January 1, 1896; 153), we recall, Freud first intercalated ω between the ɸ and neurons, in such a way that ɸ would communicate its quality (but only a modicum of its quantity to ψ, while the latter communicated neither quantity nor quality to ψ but only “stimulated” or “incited” it by directing unbound psychic energies. (At this pointWhich route are they going? Why? Freud made his reference to Kauderwelsch, “gobbledygook.”) By attaching ɸ and W at both ends Freud now makes it impossible to see how excessive quantity can be filtered to the point where only refined qualities can arise (in consciousness); but that also means—although it would take many further steps to demonstrate these things—that it becomes impossible to isolate the primary process in ψ and even to envisage the calamity of life, impossible to identify inner need and outer reality, impossible to read the quality signs that might put an end to hallucination.

Let us see whether the third analogy—that involving memory proper, the waxen subsurface or substrate of the mystic writing pad—fares any better. For: “The analogy would not have much value if it did not lend itself to being pursued farther” (368). Freud returns to his description of the function of the magic writing tablet at the point where the composite cover sheet has been raised and the text effaced. “Yet it can be readily determined that the perdurant trace of what was written [die Dauerspur des Geschriebenen] on the wax tablet itself remains preserved, and that in suitable lighting it is legible [bei geeigneter Belichtung lesbar].” Freud’s tablet, the one he has now in front of him on his desk, must of course be new; otherwise the pitch would have been furrowed and carved to a dull, undecipherable, Hegelian gray on gray, like the pineal gland d’un hébété. Yet let us not spoil Freud’s pleasure so quickly:

Thus the pad provides not only an ever-renewable receptive surface, like a blackboard, but also perdurant traces of the written text, like the usual paper tablet. It solves the problem of how to unite the two accomplishments by distributing them to two separate conjoined [sic] components or systems. But that is very much the same way in which—according to my supposition, mentioned above—our psychic apparatus fulfills the perceptual function. The layer that receives stimulation—the system of perception and consciousness—forms no lasting traces; the groundwork of remembrance [Erinnerung] originates in other contiguous systems.

The two separate, conjoined systems are of course perception-consciousness and memory; we shall ignore the implication that perception-consciousness is also attached at both ends to the shield ɸ. Separate, conjoined. Conjoined when script actually appears, separate when script is erased. Yet does that mean that everything perceived is recorded in memory? When the systems are conjoined, laminated to one another, celluloid to wax paper, wax paper to wax tablet, wax to wax, are not all perceptions ipso facto memories? And when separation occurs, even with a gentle grip, does not perception, deprived of memory, cease to function? In 1895 the two systems were so effectively separated that it seemed as though nothing perceived could ever be remembered; in 1925 it becomes difficult to see how anything perceived could ever be forgotten. Granted propitious lighting.

What about the two systems in separation? What about the propitious lighting of pitchlike memory? Freud is about to raise with a careful grip the composite coversheet, in order to examine the illumination of memory traces. As he begins to raise it the reader senses that Freud’s Notiz is about to obliterate itself: “It need not disturb us that the perdurant traces of the jottings received by the mystic writing pad are not employed in any way [nicht verwertet werden]; it suffices that they are at hand [es genügt, dass sie vorhanden sind].” At issue is the presence at hand, prokheiros, Vorhandensein, of traces. Typography. To the question as to whether or not they can be read, whether or not typography will advance to engrammatology, Freud feigns indifference. Even though the only reason for preferring the advanced technology of the mystic writing pad over the stoneage method of slate and the modern paper pad is the fact that under suitable lighting the written trace in the pitchlike substratum of the Wunderblock can be read, lesbar ist. Freud raises the cover sheet even farther; one hears the dry crackling sound; it is almost a hiss:

Of course, the analogical relation of such an auxiliary apparatus to the paradigmatic organ has to come to an end somewhere. To be sure, the mystic writing pad cannot also “reproduce” the script from the inside [von innen her] once it has been eradicated; it really would be a mystic writing pad if it could achieve this in the way our memory [Gedächtnis] does.

Freud now restates the terms of the analogy, adjudges it “not entirely farfetched,” and seems to be on the verge of expunging the whole as a passing fancy, a caprice. We are no doubt disappointed. For the second time now. The traditional engrammatological problem is the inability to account for the reading of the incised letters in memory. If Freud should acquiesce in the failure of his analogy—or his machine—to “reproduce” the written text von innen her, then he is surely telling us no more than Phaedrus has taught us, and his career as a philosopher will have been exceedingly short-lived.

We shall take up this question of mnemic reproduction and interiority in later chapters; yet two comments from Derrida’s “Freud and the Scene of Writing” may be considered at this juncture. The first exhibits the essential continuity of Freud’s mystic writing pad with earlier typographic systems, while the second points to the abyss that underlies or undermines the depth or profondeur of all such systems. Derrida writes:

The multiplicity of layered surfaces in the apparatus abandoned to itself is a complexity that is dead and without depth. Life as profundity pertains solely to the wax of psychical memory. Freud thus continues to contrapose, as Plato does, hypomnemic writing to writing en tēi psykhēi, itself woven of traces, empirical reminiscences of a truth that is present outside of time. With that, separated from the psyche’s ability to respond, the mystic writing pad, as a representation abandoned to itself, reverts once again to Cartesian space and Cartesian mechanism: natural wax, the exteriority of the aide-mémoire. (ED, 336/227)

Yet what about those furrows inscribed in the substrate, the in-depth relief of the system “behind,” where suitable light penetrates in order to cast the shadowsSole shadow showsin the interior depth of the rune? What happens after Freud has raised the composite coversheet fully?

Let us observe that the profundity of the mystic writing pad is simultaneously a profundity without fundament [fond], an infinite referral [renvoi], and a perfectly superficial exteriority: a stratification of surfaces whose relation to self, to the inside, is only the implication of another equally exposed surface. It unites the two empirical certitudes that constitute us: that of infinite depth in the implication of meaning, the unlimited envelopment of the actual, and simultaneously that of the membranous essence of being, the absolute absence of underpinnings [l’absence absolue du dessous]. (ED, 331/224)

We shall not now pursue Derrida’s anatomical tracing of that membranous or pellicular essence, which expands the scene of writing beyond the apparatus of the dead machine to encompass society, the world, and history. For Freud does not erase the whole text—indeed, granted suitable lighting, he cannot do so.What has gone? How it ends? Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today’s truth, tomorrow’s trend. Forget, remember!The most daring of Freud’s analogies, the third and last, which we have been introducing for several pages now, is yet to come. It involves the illumination or limning of script, “the becoming visible of script and its disappearance with the incandescence [Aufleuchten] and passing away [Vergehen] of consciousness in perception” (368). We will want to follow this final analogy most closely, the analogy that should account for the liaison—the hyphen—within the system W-Bw, inasmuch as the introduction of consciousness cum perceptual quality into a putatively quantitative psychology proved both absolutely necessary and inevitably fatal to the 1895 system. “I confess that I am inclined to push the comparison even farther,” writes Freud at the outset of his third analogy.

With the mystic writing pad, the script vanishes each time the intimate [innige] contact between the paper that receives the stimulus and the wax tablet that preserves the impression is canceled [aufgehoben wird]. That coincides with the notion I developed long ago, but till now have kept to myself, concerning the mode of function in the psychical perceptual apparatus.

The editors of the Standard Edition interrupt (StA 3, 369 n. 1) in order to indicate that the secret Freud is about to reveal has actually slipped out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and that it appears “in germ” at the end of section 19 of the first part of the 1895 Entwurf, “Primary Processes—Sleep and Dreams” (see Anfänge, 421 and pages 137-40, above). The secret will involve the troublesome notion of “attention,” Aufmerksamkeit, as a quantity from that goes to meet (in the neurons of the pallium) the invading sensations in ɸ. Sleep (but also hypnosis) would be the counterstate to such wakeful perception. The question we posed earlier involved the possibility of a primary process in that would not require Aufmerksamkeit, the possibility for example of dream-work, and thus the very possibility of a path for psychoanalysis beyond mere ego-psychology.

Freud now elaborates his third analogy in the Notiz (369): “I adopted the supposition that cathectic innervations are dispatched into and withdrawn from the fully permeable system W-Bw [perception-consciousness], and that this occurs in rapid periodic thrusts [in raschen periodischen Stössen] from within [aus dem Inneren].” These periodic thrusts will not surprise us: periodicity was introduced early on in the “Project” as one of the first devices to account for the perception of qualities and thus the origins of consciousness (Anfänge, 395; pages 122—23, above). As the inversion of umbrella to sieve, periodicity was to be the fundamental mode of communication between ɸ and accounting for our perception rather than merely our pain; yet even the inversion did not succeed in allowing thoroughgoing communication, did not allow perception to leave traces that are reproducible in memory. The juxtaposition of cathexis and full permeability retains its mystery to the end.

Although the thrusts of periodicity do not surprise us now, something else surely must: the thrusts emerge aus dem Inneren, “from within.” Yet once the shields have been inverted and become filters, is not all quantity flow endogenous, is not all “within”? Freud’s topical-tropical vagueness is disturbing, to say the least. It is true, as Derrida remarks, that an important temporal dimension is being opened here for writing and for the psyche—perhaps the dimension in which the two can no longer be readily distinguished. “Freud, reconstructing an operation, cannot reduce either time [as Descartes does when he demands to know the truth of the wax] or the multiplicity of its sensible layers” (ED, 332/225). Yet by this time we may rightly insist on more specificity with regard to these psychic innards. Who or what releases these periodic thrusts? And whence? Freud continues: “As long as the system [W-Bw] is cathected in this way, it receives the perceptions that are accompanied by consciousness and relays [weiterleitet] the excitation further to the unconscious memory systems; as soon as the cathexis is withdrawn, consciousness is extinguished and the system’s efforts come to a standstill [ist sistiert].” Why the plural, unconscious memory systems? What sort of relay is it that connects ɸ and ψ, W? What is the meaning of that Anregung Freud introduced in his letter to Fliess in order to distinguish W from ψ, that is, in order to prevent a general theory of quantitative excitation (Erregung) from conflating the permeable and impermeable systems? And precisely how is cathexis withdrawn? Has the mystery surrounding Ichentladung been dissolved? What is the relation of such cathexis-withdrawal to inhibition by the ego, the sidetracking of quantity in and by the ego-organization? Is it the ego that is responsible for the periodic thrusts, or is it consciousness? Or are both ego and consciousness themselves outcomes of periodicity?

None of these questions, even after thirty years of intense psychoanalytic practice, has been resolved by the time of the Notiz. Although later in 1925, in the article on “Negation” (StA 3, 376), Freud will attribute periodic thrust to the probative action of the ego (an attribution in conformity with the tendency of the 1895 “Project,” in which the introduction of the ego is of central importance), here in the Notiz he attributes typographic thrust to the pitchlike substratum of the psyche, to memory and the unconscious. “It is as though the unconscious were to stretch out feelers into the external world by means of the W-Bw system, feelers that are quickly retracted after they have gotten a taste [verkostet haben] of its [i.e., the external world’s] excitations.” The pseudo-podic unconscious is that single-celled microcosm of the nervous structure as a whole that we entertained many pages ago. The “inner,” das Innere, of the structure is here neither consciousness nor the ego but the unconscious, the unconscious as memory: a cavern, pit, or shaft darker than any script. “I would have the interruptions that occur from the outside in the case of the mystic writing pad [i.e., the gentle grip raising the composite coversheet from the waxen subsurface] come about [in W-Bw] by means of the discontinuity in the stream of innervation; instead of an actual [wirklichen] cancellation of contact, my supposition would call for the periodically recurring impassivity [Unerreg-barkeit] of the perceptual system.”

Two cycles of periods mesh here, the cycle of feeling-thrusts by the unconscious, employing W-Bw as a means, and the cycle of periods of nonexcitability in general, presumably in sleep. A general period of (possible) activation of W-Bw would be further punctuated by (actual) activation of perceptual feelers, feelers that as means belong to W-Bw but whose origin and end (arkhē kinēseōs) is the unconscious. And in the meshing of these two cycles, time: “I further surmised that this discontinuous modus operandi of the system W-Bw underlies the genesis of the representation of time.” According to Derrida, such temporality as spacing (espacement) would mean far more than the horizonal discontinuityWhere are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space?in any chain of signs; it would mean “writing as interruption and reestablishment of contact among the diverse depths of psychic layers, the exceedingly heterogeneous temporal stuff of psychic work [travail psychique] itself” (ED, 333/225). The genesis of temporality in turn would produce “the differentiated duration and depth of a scene” (ED, 333/225). That scene encompasses the performance by multiple personae of a miraculous writing. Freud’s concluding sentence:

If one conceives of it in this way—that while one hand covers the superficies of the mystic writing pad with writing [während eine Hand die Oberfläche. . . be-schreibt] another hand [eine andere] periodically raises the coversheet of the pad from its wax tablet—that would be a pictorialization [Versinnlichung] of the way in which I would want to represent to myself [mir vorstellen wollte] the functioning of our psychical perceptual apparatus.

Derrida’s preoccupation with the two (or more) hands that operate the apparatus is no mere whimsy. Eine Hand clearly belongs to us. Us, who? Let us say, us the ego-organization, although even this steady hand, the writing hand, relies on the periodic thrust of feelers extended by the unconscious for whatever will become script. More troublesome is eine andere. We can insert the word Hand because of the feminine gender: eine andere is not the bizarre adverbial anders that emerged earlier with the problem of quality (Anfänge,393; see page 119, above). The word that causes the difficulty is the indefinite article eine. Another. An other? Hand? Does Freud refrain from writing die andere because there is yet a third hand at play? Thus a second person? A Nebenmensch? How many hands would W-Bw take, if we remember that its substratum is a totally different system, separate, though conjoined?

A hand across the top to hold the pad firmly in place.

A hand to guide the red wooden stylus across the celluloid shield.

And while that hand is trying to write, trying to preserve the intimate contact between perception and memory, a third hand to introduce discontinuity—not merely the discontinuity of blancs in the line of writing but a discontinuity of depth; a profound temporal interruption, the instauration of time and alterity as such. The scene of the tablet’s functioning, the scene of wax magic, will have to become rather more complicated.

Cette machine ne marche pasare you spraken sea Djoytsch?toute seule. Its maintenance, its main-taining by hand and holding by presence, the presence of the “now,” maintenant, its presence at hand, prokheiros, in the “now” is inordinately complex (ED, 334/226). Indeed, “the ideal virginity of the now [du maintenant] is constituted by the work of memory.” The implication is that it will not be possible to isolate W-Bw from the unconscious, or even to distinguish clearly between the functions of perception-consciousness and memory or the states of consciousness and unconsciousness, as The Ego and the Id freely concedes. Derrida writes:

Thus traces produce the space of their inscription only by giving themselves the period of their effacement. From the origin, in the “present” of their first impression, they are constituted by the double force of repetition and effacement, legibility and illegibility. A machine for two hands. . . .

A machine for two hands, eine Hand and eine andere. Perhaps we should think of hands as human beings, such as farmhands or sailors at sea, all hands on deck, where the demands are so excessiveSea, sea! Here, weir, reach, island, bridge. Where you meet I. The day. Remember!that one never has enough hands on hand to get the job done.

A machine for two hands, a multiplicity of instances or of origins—is this not the originary relation to the other [le rapport à l’autre] and the originary temporality of writing, its “primary” complication: originary spacing, differance, and effacement of the simple origin; the moment we cross the threshold [dès le seuil], a polemos of what one stubbornly insists on calling “perception”?. . . One must be many in order to write and even in order to “perceive.”

The closure of pure perception—and perhaps perception became impure forever with Merleau-Ponty—is the closure of typography. The multiplication of hands, as of cycles and periods, makes the presence at hand of all the icons of iconography a presence riddled by multiple absences. Engrammatology, executed on a magic writing pad, is no longer incision, storage, and retrieval of perceptions. The magic writing pad itself becomes one of the layersI’m getting mixedthat effect the magic: “The subject of writing is a system of relations among the layers: of the mystic writing pad, of the psychical, of society, of the world” (ED, 335/227). Both less and more than a system, a holding togetherHow small it’s all!that is from the outset discontinuous. Freud’s mystic writing pad is in fact (part of) the primal scene: “At the heart of this scene, the punctual simplicity of the classical subjectLoonely in me lonenesscannot be found” (ED, 335/227). The punctuation that punches, stamps, and coins the subject, the violent inscription of breaching or effraction, the “metonymy boundlessly at work on the same metaphor” in Freud’s work, serves as a silent and concealed exergue for the whole of “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” which culminatesWhen we come in the presencein a series of questions concerning genitality and the repression of writing. Without following these questions concerning prohibition, censorship, interdiction, and primary repression in both the Freudian and Derridean texts, we ought at the end to rememberSo. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff!the outrage that in the 1895 Entwurf organizes the scene of desire, unpleasure, and tenuous satisfaction.

With Freud it is never a matter of gloriously efficient breachings, perfectly punctual effractions, and guaranteed tracings. Both the “Project” and the “Note,” and all the systems to which they are responding, are markedly vulnerable. Menace is the sceneFor our netherworld’s bosomfoes are working tooth and nail overtime: in earthveins, toadcavities, chessganglions, salt-klesters, underfed: nagging firenibblers knockling aterman up out of his hin-derclutchof life, exigency its daily fare. If restitution and restoration are everywhere sought mememormee! it is only because loss is everywhere found.