7The Thinking Fetus

Cecilia Sjöholm

Rethinking the Unconscious in Cartesian Writings

René Descartes’s extraordinary autobiographic writings on his dreams, states between wakefulness and sleep, associations, desires, and needs have inspired and enticed psychoanalysis ever since Sigmund Freud.¹ After the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalytic readings of Descartes’s philosophy have primarily focused on a split cogito—the question of how “it” thinks in subjectivity.² But instincts, drives, object relations, and the mystery of infantile life, so relevant to psychoanalysis, is still largely uncharted territory in Cartesian studies. And yet, Descartes spends quite some effort to explain that the infant has a psychic life that will form the emotions, thoughts, memories, and fantasies of the adult. Sensations, passions, and appetites are with us already from birth, even from a fetal state of maternal symbiosis. How do the ideas on infantile life—developed in letters, anatomical writings, and images and The Passions of the Soul (1649)—connect to psychoanalytic theories of instinct, fantasy, and incorporation and Descartes’s ideas of infancy indicate the presence of drives and unconscious motivations? Not only do his theories of the infant pave the way for psychoanalysis, they offer a new way of thinking about the unconscious in the Cartesian notion of subjectivity, beyond the structure of the cogito.

The fact that Descartes gives attention to infantile life has been interpreted as an expression of personal trauma—as an infant Descartes lost his mother. Given the strong biographical feature of his writings in general, such interpretations may seem compelling: when Descartes speaks of the infant’s love and hatred, he seems to conduct a form of autoanalysis.³ Older schools of psychoanalysis saw no problem in seeing philosophers as patients. Most would abstain from writing reductive psychobiographies today. But it is unquestionable that in an early modern universe of humors and fluids, Descartes’s natural philosophy and anthropology stands out for the way in which it rethinks the attachments of the infant. This is not only relevant for the reassessment of Cartesian dualism, which has been attempted by many in philosophy and the history of ideas. The more pressing question is how the speculation on the life of the infant and its attachment to the maternal body opens new avenues for thinking about the relation between Descartes and psychoanalysis, and perhaps new perspectives in the thinking of Cartesian subjectivity at large.

Two distinct lines of questioning open studies in this direction. Both are concerned with the “thinking fetus”: a concept designating the Cartesian infant. The “thinking fetus” is immediately linked to “confused thought,” a concept often evoked in Descartes’s writings that points to the blurring of the line between body and mind. The first line of questioning concerns Descartes’s idea that affects are rooted in infantile life. Can we trace a theory of object relations like that formulated by Freud and Melanie Klein? If so, how is it articulated? Is it conjoined to fantasy and drives? This can be examined in textual material that distinctly holds up the specific relation between mother and child to scrutiny—both before and after birth. The second line of questioning follows up on the first: Is there a prepsychoanalytic theory of repression in Descartes’s writings? What does that do with our view of what Descartes meant by the notion of confused thought?

The Thinking Fetus and Confused Thoughts

Descartes’s idea of the thinking fetus is in part contained within a theological and philosophical proposal. But just as importantly: in early writings such as Treatise on Man and Description of the Human Body, Descartes demonstrates the biological rootedness of the human subject. Here, he returns not just to childhood but to the very origins of the fetus in the maternal womb. Treatise on Man also goes by the name “The Formation of the Fetus” in the edition published by Claude Clerselier (published posthumously in 1664), although the title was meant to encompass only the final part of the treatise on human anatomy (in the following, I will use the title “The Formation of the Fetus” for the final part of Description of the Human Body).⁴ Through the method of dissection, Descartes targets the invisible secrets of how internal organs help produce affects and perceptions. The actual, physical dissections were likely performed on a sheep. But they were used to demonstrate the beginning of life in the maternal womb, to throw light on what is most distinctly human—the capacity to think and feel.

In early modern thought, the human body was often considered to draw its life from the soul, as in the model of Latin philosopher Galen. But Descartes points out that the inner organs are not influenced by what we want or what we think. We cannot control reflexes sparked by hunger or pain through sheer willpower. This is to some extent a reason for dualism and for inferring the existence of a decisive split between anatomy and mind. The introduction to Description of the Human Body argues that there is a distinct difference between thought and the mere mechanics of the body that does not involve reflection. When we are children, we are not aware of this: we think that we can master our bodies.⁵ But there is a split between the mind and the body of reflexes—which is quite a different thing from the body of the senses. But as Descartes traces thought to the formation of the fetus, the distinction between the body’s “inside” and the senses blurs.

Figure 7.1. De l’Homine Figuris 1662, Leyden, Royal Library Stockholm.

“Formation of the Fetus” tells the story of how humans are formed from conception to birth, invisible traces joining mind and body. These traces, which could be interpreted as a form of impression that distinctly cross the mind-body divide, may pass from mother to child. The body of a fetus, as well as that of a young child, is more permeable than that of an adult body. In utero, infant and maternal body are in symbiosis through “the external surface of the skin called the ‘after-birth,’ which envelops the child before it is born.”⁶ This may even take physical form as external marks on the body. But such traces may also transcend the divide between the physical and the psychological: a mother’s perceptions can become imprinted on the limbs of the fetus as they form in the womb, something like a tattoo.⁷ This idea also occurs in Optics: what the mother perceives when pregnant can imprint on the body of the child in the form of a birthmark. Even her fantasies may have the same effect.⁸ In this way, Descartes posits a symbiotic relation between mother and child. The thoughts, imaginations, and perceptions of the mother will mark the mind and body of the fetus and remain in the life of the adult. The psychic life of the infant, then, is not determined by either body or mind but by a symbiosis that cuts across such a divide. What is challenged with such a conception is not just body-mind dualism but also the notion of the infantile subject as a “little cogito.”

Descartes brings this up himself. “Formation of the Fetus” is not simply an anatomical treatise—it has a distinct bearing on metaphysical discussions on the cogito in Meditations, which recurs throughout when infantile life is brought up. In a famous letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, Descartes describes three different faculties of knowledge: the first pertains to the pure, metaphysical understanding that uses concepts; the second joins intellect and imagination; and the third apprehends a kind of union between body and soul, producing a kind of bodily awareness in everyday life without us reflecting on it in our mind.⁹ In everyday life, we do not usually think that we are thinking or reflect on the relation between body and mind. We simply go about our business. This is Descartes overcoming his own dualism from an anthropological point of view. But it does not solve any metaphysical problems—the fact that we experience our mind and body as one does not entail that there is ontological unity.

In an exchange between the theologian Antoine Arnauld and Descartes (whose responses were mediated by Mersenne) this problem is brought up. To Arnauld, the logic of the cogito infers that the subject cannot conceive of itself as not thinking. This, however, is an absurd assumption. The infant in the mother’s womb has a mind, Arnauld argues, but it does not reflect over it. It is not conscious of itself.¹⁰ But Descartes objects to the idea that the infant, or even the fetus, would be an unconscious form of mind: “I don’t doubt that the mind begins to think as soon as it is implanted in the body of an infant, and that it is immediately aware of its thoughts, even though it does not remember this afterward because the impressions of these thoughts do not remain in the memory.”¹¹ In other words, the fetus is thinking. But it is not thinking as a cogito able to retain its reflections. The next question to conceive of, then, is what the thoughts of the fetus are really like. And this is where Descartes enters into unknown territories.

The idea of a thinking fetus different from the cogito developed in exchanges with Pierre Gassendi. Here it was taken more distinctly beyond metaphysical or theological argumentation, and it was brought to light that thought does not look the same in an infant and an adult.¹² Gassendi’s contention was that the moment in which the mind is infused in the body is undecidable. Do we think “while still in the womb. Or at birth?” The reflective powers of the mind of an infant in the womb must be meager, virtually nonexistent, he insists.¹³ We are not always thinking, not as we are asleep and not as we are small children.

To this, Descartes responds that the mind, even in the mother’s womb, “is always thinking.”¹⁴ And yet Descartes agrees with Gassendi that the moment in which “thought” begins—before or after birth—is undecidable, since we simply cannot recall our own birth. Sometimes the fetus is thinking in the womb; sometimes the mind appears to be “newly united” to the body at birth.¹⁵ This undecidability follows Descartes in his writings throughout—when he talks about the infant, it is not always certain if he is talking about the unborn child or the young child. This fluid nature of the “infant” stresses its belonging in a maternal sphere.

If the fetus is thinking, what is it thinking? Of course, a fetus cannot, Descartes says, not without humor, “meditate[s] on metaphysics in its mother’s womb, not at all.”¹⁶ This is because it is so invested in its own body that it cannot be detached from it. Sensations, affects, emotions, and instincts are with us already from birth, even from a fetal state of maternal symbiosis. The infant may not reflect on the extension of being or the difference between being and extension. But it thinks precisely because it is a mind connected to a body, even in the womb. Thus, our first thoughts come in the form of primary needs and physical afflictions: “a mind newly united to an infant’s body is wholly occupied in conceiving in a confused way or feeling the ideas of pain, pleasure, heat, cold and other such ideas which arise from its union and, as it were, intermingling with the body.”¹⁷ In this passage, taken from the famous so-called letter to Hyperaspistes, which can be read as a response to Gassendi, we encounter the notion of confused thoughts—when the mind is impinged on by the body. Descartes said in the beginning of Treatise on Man: children cannot distinguish between will and corporeal reflexes. The mind of the child conceives of its needs, and this is infantile “thought.” As explained in the conversations with Burman: “the mind is so swamped inside the body that the only thoughts it has are those which result from the way in which the body is affected.”¹⁸ Responding to its needs, the body “has an obstructive effect on the soul” and is “a hindrance to the mind in its thinking.”¹⁹ In early childhood, the mind is so closely tied to the body that the only thoughts that reach it are those of corporeal sensory awareness.²⁰ These are not connected to the comprehension of outside objects. Instead, what is felt is pleasure or pain, associated with things that are either harmful or enjoyable to the body in a direct manner.

It is not only the child that has confused thoughts—the body impinges also on the mind of adults.²¹ In infancy, and in a state of half sleep, affects and needs impinge on the mind. But they are not produced by the mind.²² The thoughts of the infant are close to that of someone who is half-asleep, or sick—the mind is wrapped in an acute corporeal and sensory awareness that pertains to the fixation on a single sensation. Not only the child but also the sleeping and sick individual is simply too much body. Confused thoughts are typical for, but by no means restricted to, the infant. This is also a metaphysical problem—which is how it has been reflected in the literature on Descartes in general. Gassendi asks, Is the child’s mind less perfect than that of an adult? To this Descartes responds no.

Philosophers, in general, cannot distinguish between mind and body either. Our “earliest childhood judgments” reflect the conflation between body and soul in philosophy at large.²³ It may well be the case that the mind of the infant “does not work so well.” But that is not because the body impedes the mind. It is because the mind, to a certain extent, depends on the body.²⁴ Descartes gives a double definition of the relation between mind and body; they are both joined, and not. It depends on how you can conceive of “thought,” as free and distinct from the body, or as a wider range of perceptions, which in itself is a metaphysical problem.²⁵ One may take the notion of confused thought to point to the need for a new metaphysics—and the cogito as a solution to that. But these reflections on the infant also point to the fact that “thought” in Descartes must be seen as a much more generous concept than we tend to believe. It pertains to cognition, but also to emotions, and their relation.²⁶ In the following, we will see how this open notion of thought pertains to the passions—which is a word that refers both to emotions and affects, both internal modes of feelings and more physical affectations. A distinction will not be made in this context. Ultimately, it pertains also to the unconscious and to the drives.

The Maternal Body

Many have commented on Descartes’s own attempt to overcome the dualism between mind and body in Passions of the Soul.²⁷ It has been read as a treatise that tries to solve the problem of dualism raised in Meditations and Discourse on Method, which is indeed one of the ambitions mentioned by Descartes himself.²⁸ It has often been read as a Stoic treatise, occupied with the deliberate “therapy” of emotions and affects.²⁹ Only few have commented on the fact that it is also an archaeology of emotions, with distinct threads of thought pointing toward contemporary psychoanalysis. To the exceptions belongs John Cottingham, who has seen the poignancy of the Cartesian notion of emotions and affects and early life. Drawing a comparison to Freud regarding the way in which the drive is present in the formation of affects in Descartes, Cottingham’s philosophical lens, however, points to the “therapy” of emotions and affects rather than going further into the analysis of the drives and the unconscious.³⁰

So in what way may the Cartesian notion of emotions touch the unconscious? Freud, in his first model of the ego, Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Entwurf einer Psychologie (1895), describes the self as the result of a development from instincts in infantile life, produced in relation to excitations from inside and outside. The ego develops as a kind of protection against strong corporeal experiences of pleasure and displeasure. Unsatisfied corporeal needs such as hunger cause tension and displeasure. Enjoyment, in turn, is explained as a discharge of tension. The original mode of this is breastfeeding: an infant seeks the breast for satisfaction. When it fails, a fantasy of the breast is produced in hallucinations or dreams. This is an early form of reality testing; the ego is construed as a shield, countering forceful stimuli through fantasies. The infant might be invaded by hallucinatory fantasies to the extent that it may threaten the development of the ego.³¹ What is crucial with this account, regarding the model of the self, is the immediate connection it makes between fantasy and the capacity to construe a self. It proposes a radical cut between corporeal needs and the fantasmatic inner formations of gratification that are construed in the face of unredeeming harsh realities where the self is nothing but a vulnerable and fragile construct. It is in a similar cut, where the child is a fragile and vulnerable being of confused thought, that Descartes situates the origin of a subject that eventually will reach its capacity of thinking like a cogito proper.

Emotions, to Descartes, are “thoughts”—although perhaps confused thoughts. We might speak about them as emotions, affects, moods, humors, moral forms of sensibility, and sometimes sheer physical sensation. They are “internal sensations” and physical phenomena, broadly speaking, “all sorts of cases of perception or knowledge to be found in us.”³² What connects these “thoughts” is the way in which they simply seem to hit us, beyond our willpower. In Principles of Philosophy (1644), he deployed the word affectus to designate the function of emotions and affects that have certain qualitative differences but are close in their way of existing. Emotions and affects “affect” us. They come to us, regardless of our will. We cannot make emotions.

In treating emotions and affects as a “physician” or natural philosopher, Descartes is also demonstrating the somatic nature of emotions—they are literally in our bodies.³³ Like Freud, Descartes finds their root in early experiences of pleasure and satisfaction, relying on the gastric and nutritional systems. Bodies cannot use reason, only produce sensations and affects.³⁴ They are a bundle of unpredictable emotional experiences. Affects are perceptions in the most general sense—they are imposed on us.³⁵ What is of concern to Descartes is not just the relation between body and mind, or the way in which we may treat emotions. It is the source of emotions and affects, unavailable to reason.³⁶ Searching for that source, Descartes’s inquiries move into the same territories as Freud.

Small children have a supersensitivity that stands in contrast to the free rationality of the adult; their minds are “swamped by affects.”³⁷ But this is not because their minds are less developed. The affective inundation derives from the conditions of infantile life. Certain affects, Descartes explains, are with us “before birth.”³⁸ Others, however, develop with primary needs—and this is where we may begin to search for a pre-psychoanalytical genealogy of object attachment. The infantile body, to Descartes, is dominated by needs that only the maternal body can respond to. Therefore, love is the most original emotion.

Descartes discusses the archaic roots of emotions in a famous exchange with Pierre Chanut, who was the French ambassador to Sweden. This exchange responds to a question indirectly posed to Descartes by Queen Christina: Which affect is “worse if immoderate and abused, love or hatred?”³⁹ The so-called letter of love is often evoked by philosophers and theologians for the way in which it distinguishes intellectual love and confused thoughts: the impingement on the mind of corporeal and instinctual love.⁴⁰ But not enough attention has been offered to the physical child and the “thinking fetus,” which are to be found at the origins of the explanations of love in the letter. The original affect is fetal enjoyment, receiving its nourishment through the maternal body and then developing as maternal love.⁴¹ It is in the nature of love to arise as confused thought, since love is “aroused by some motion of the nerves,” which goes back to the moment of birth: “in love a mysterious heat is felt around the heart, and a great abundance of blood in the lungs, which makes us open our arms as if to embrace something, and this inclines the soul to join to itself willingly the object presented to it.”⁴² Descartes traces the origin of emotions and affects to distinct scenes of infantile life: as we come into this world—and even before we are born—and to a distinct affect: we experience immediate enjoyment, which derives from immediate nourishment; “it is scarcely likely that the body would have been in a good condition unless there were nearby some matter suitable for food.”⁴³ Love is then the first emotion that the soul feels, and if there is no “food,” sadness or hatred. This could, of course, be read as metaphysical or allegorical “food,” but in a letter to Elisabeth this is clearly not the case: “For some people the first thing that upset them as babies was not getting enough food, while for others it was getting food that was bad for them.” This experience of deprivation will forever be connected to “the passion of sadness.”⁴⁴ This is an extraordinary observation, explaining the way in which love, or deprivation of love, is intimately connected to breastfeeding.

In Passions, also, this is how Descartes explains the origin of emotions and affects that are regarded as fundamental and as the source of all others: love, joy, hate, and sadness. The experience of pleasure, or enjoyment (“joy”), goes back to the time when we were newborns, or precedes birth, through veins nourishing and maintaining “the heat of the heart,” which is enjoyment.⁴⁵ Passions also posits a distinct origin of the emotions in the symbiotic relation to the maternal body. But these recurring explanations of the passions do not figure prepsychoanalytic theories of attachment primarily for the way in which they depict love and enjoyment but rather for the way in which they conceive of deprivation at the roots of human psychic life. The maternal breast is not only an object of satisfaction. When the child is deprived of enjoyment, sadness follows—and then hate. These archaic emotions—with us already before birth—result from shifts between satisfaction and deprivation.⁴⁶ To Descartes, these emotions can only appear in the guise of corporeal instincts, or as confused thoughts. As long as the body depends on basic needs, no other emotions can develop. It means that in childhood, these emotions do not derive from judgments that deem objects to be good or bad—which adults are capable of.⁴⁷ Love follows enjoyment; hate and melancholy are the result of deprivation.

Early psychoanalytic theories of object relations offer similar genealogies. Object relations theory takes its cue in Freud. In Three Essays on Sexuality, the most archaic experience of pleasure comes with the suckling of the maternal breast: “no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation.” To Melanie Klein, also, love is the most complex human emotion. It originates in the “mental life of the baby”—for whom the mother is the first object of love.⁴⁸ To Klein, like Descartes, psychic life is present already from the time of delivery. The maternal breast establishes the first relation of love.⁴⁹ The other side of infantile dependency is aggression, directed toward the body of the life-giving mother. When the breast is not there, Klein notes, the child feels as if it is lost forever. This is also where the contact with the breast extends to the mother—“the feelings of having lost the breast lead to the fear of having lost the loved mother entirely.”⁵⁰ It is at this point that psychic life becomes ridden with a fear, sadness, and aggression that may turn to depression. Depression, however, is not devastation—what appears to be a simple thwarting of nourishment is the origin of a psychic life. The Kleinian description of infantile life shows that affects derive from an archaic model of attachments. Just like Descartes, Klein finds love to be fundamental; but Klein also finds deprivation to cause a conversion to hatred and depression, which shows the attachment to the breast to be the beginning of psychic life.

But this is not so because affects are free-floating between bodies; it is because they are attached to objects that may differ in forms of substance and representation. To Freud, breastfeeding is the origin of fantasy. An infant seeks the breast for satisfaction. When it fails, a fantasy of the breast is produced in hallucinations or dreams. To Klein, this early form of fantasmatic life is ridden with a fragility that may threaten the development of the ego.⁵¹ There is no causal link between deprivation and fantasy; it is rather the case that the production of fantasms is the archaic life of the subject—it lives in the universe of persecutory or sadistic objects, mixing maternal breasts and paternal penises. The child is frustrated and sad at the loss of the breast. But it is aggression that is “of highest value” to the child’s mental development.⁵² Love is already from the start “disturbed by destructive impulses,” struggling with hate in a way that will persist through life and become “a source of danger in human relationships.”⁵³ Melancholy, in turn, is a product of splits and dissociations, where the separation between self and other is disavowed and aggression turned toward the internalized object, and consequently the self. Fearing the loss of the object as other, as well as loss of the self, the psychic universe of the melancholic is dominated by a constant fear of annihilation.⁵⁴ A depressive position may follow: “at that stage the child progressively integrates his feelings of love and hatred, synthesizes the good and the bad aspects of the mother, and goes through states of mourning bound up with feelings of guilt.”⁵⁵

What differentiates Descartes from both Freud and Klein is the immediate somatic nature, and subsequent effect, of the object. Objects, to Descartes, may be substances, but they are also “thoughts.” Love, in the life of the Cartesian as well as the Freudian subject, is aroused not just by physical encounters but also by the “object of love” presenting itself to the mind (i.e., as a representation to consciousness).⁵⁶ Objects of this kind are neither the origin of fantasy nor the development of inner life. They have direct physical effects that are conceived as thoughts. Simply representing a loved object is enough to stimulate that flow of “alimentary juice” that is experienced as enjoyment. In this way, love is a self-enhancing circuit where enjoyment will lead the mind to dwell on that object—it becomes a thought. This dwelling is immediately rooted in an infantile form of incorporation. A representation of the breast might suffice for the flow of enjoyment: “a single thought of joy or love or the like is sufficient to send the animal spirits through the nerves into all the muscles needed to cause the different movements of the blood which, as I said, accompany the passions.”⁵⁷ Love inscribes an original dynamic of blood flows and causes a sense of well-being, “the same bodily conditions . . . have ever since naturally accompanied the corresponding thoughts.”⁵⁸ Hate, in turn, is the instinct of discarding an object that may or not be real, or appear as thought. It is the immediate denegation of an object at a corporeal level.⁵⁹

Dominated by affective impulses, then, the “thinking fetus” is determined by attachments and refusals in a rhythmic flow that intertwines the somatic and the psychic. Love is more original than hate, but the Cartesian infant of “confused thought” is always wavering between love and hate. This Cartesian notion of a thought that at the same time is an object with a physical quality turns the relation between world and body inside out—the body acts on the fantasy of the breast as if it is “real.” This suggests mind and body are interrelated. There is no longer a meaningful distinction to be made between inside and outside. Psychic representations have been placed in the body, and the maternal body incorporated in experiences wavering between pleasure and displeasure. We are brought beyond the everydayness of embodiment, to a body of instincts where primary objects are incorporated and the relation mind and body turned inside out.

Like Freud and Klein, what Descartes describes is not only an infant attached to the maternal body through its needs but also the development of psychic life in and through the object. In fact, there is no basic passion defined by Descartes that is not fundamentally directed toward an object, or which does not have its origin in an archaic relation to the maternal body. Like Klein, Descartes describes a relation to the world defined in a pre-Oedipal phase, where the breasts are a fountain of milk, “coveted as organs of receptivity and bounty from the time when the libidinal position is purely oral.”⁶⁰ This is an extraordinary fact in itself. But it also shows a subject that may be altogether dominated by objects in a way more distinctly physical than either Freud or Klein accounted for.

The Animal Spirits of the Drive

In “The Formation of the Fetus,” infants are shaped by an original fetal enclosure. This symbiotic relation to the maternal body gives a floating status to the beginning of life, childhood being a continuation of the fetal state, dominated by the search for enjoyment. Freud thought that breastfeeding awakens autoerogenous zones: “No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.”⁶¹ Freud, like Descartes, speaks about the child as a body of supersensitivity; it is essentially autoerotic and finds its objects in its own body: “Its individual component instincts are upon the whole disconnected and independent of one another in their search for pleasure.”⁶² This polymorphous perversity makes the whole body of the child into a pleasure-seeking erogenous zone; what Lacan has called a montage of partial drives, originating in the polymorph-perverse body.⁶³

To Descartes, also, children seek a pleasure that hinges on sexuality: when the lips of a sleeping child are tickled by a feather, he says, the ticklish enjoyment is direct—a scene bringing Freud’s recounting of the dream of da Vinci’s childhood to mind—da Vinci opening his mouth to a bird’s tail. To Freud, this is a fantasy of suckling, embracing, and kissing the mother.⁶⁴ To Descartes, enjoyment entangled with love excites the instinct to “open our arms as if to embrace something.”⁶⁵ There is a difference between desire as a “concupiscent love” or lust and love as what Descartes calls benevolent, a form of transferential love. But the transferential love of the child is never without lust. In the “confused sensations of our childhood,” the dignified nature of love becomes intermingled with joy, sadness, desire, fear, and hate.⁶⁶

In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud affirms the all-encompassing domination of the pleasure principle of the psyche in what will become a first theory of the drive proper; an “instinct” is “a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychic representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body.”⁶⁷ Pleasure, in this logic, is associated with the preservation of the ego, so that archaic impulses of love propel the satisfaction of needs. But Freud, also, offers a theory of conversion: it is the fate of instincts to be reversed, so that love becomes hate.

Descartes, like Freud, affirms the instinctual nature of love. But he does so with a model that even more distinctly holds on to the somatic nature of instincts, or what we may call drives. If the problem of Descartes is the nature of confused thought and its origination in the life of the infants, with the “thinking fetus” swamped in emotions at the roots of the Cartesian genealogy of affects, then he needs to find not just mental images for the zone in-between subject and object, body and mind, but also more distinctly somatic zones. In Descartes, the autoerotic infantile body—which seeks the heat and flows of enjoyment—works through the introjection and expulsion of objects through the corporeal mechanisms of pleasure and displeasure where the somatic goes all the way back to the fetal state.

In “Formation of the Fetus,” the womb connecting mother and child is an organ not only of blood but also of spirits. The last organ of the fetus to be formed, by semen, is the navel. Blood flows through it and forms the heart, which is the original site of the passions.⁶⁸ The navel is a line of connection for the “spirits,” which forms emotions in the fetal joining of body and blood.⁶⁹ The stronger the emotion, the more movement: “love depends upon an abundance of spirits.”⁷⁰

As we come out into the world, some “juice” enters the veins of the heart and gives it the flow of life. The soul, Descartes argues further, loves this. It joins itself to the body de volonté, a term that does not designate conscious will. It derives as much from the body as it derives from the mind. The instinct to join another soul “in volition” can be read against the background of early modern theology. “It is the nature of love to make one consider oneself and the loved one as a single whole of which one is a part; and to transfer the care one previously took of oneself to the preservation of this whole.”⁷¹ This is by no means a mere spiritual experience; the soul learns to join this nourishment to itself from the body “in volition, that is, to love it.”⁷² The spirits flow from the brain to the muscles, shaking the body so that the heart is fueled, “to make them send it more.”⁷³ We love to feel the inside flow, which has its origin in the archaic maternal interconnection.

The concept de volonté, in volition, designates an instinctual move toward a split, not between body and mind but between the subject of separation and the object of love. The subject experiences an excitation, which impels it to join itself in volition to objects of pleasure.⁷⁴ I am not using the phrase de volonté to talk about desire, Descartes explains; it refers to the instinct to join with the objects we love.⁷⁵ At this point, the drive becomes sexual. Finding its origin in an archaic object, it is transposed into adult sexuality—the warmth of blood raising desires in the most energetic, strongest, and finest organs (apart from the brain), the “vessels destined for reproduction.”⁷⁶ A prepsychoanalytic notion of the drive—that has a distinct sexual character—is propelled by the “animal spirits,” a flow internal to the body that connects juices, moods, and ideas.⁷⁷ The body becomes a hypersensitive organ of desires.

Repression

The thought of the infant is not just an activity of the res cogitans, the subject conceiving of itself thinking. In the letter to Hyperaspistes and in the conversations with Burman, we see that the question of thought pertains also to the development of the child. Its mind is no less perfect than that of the adult, and yet the body impinges on it—it is a bundle of confused thought. This is so because the mind is set in motion “when the mind joined to a body thinks of a corporeal thing.”⁷⁸ Such things can be affects, emotions, objects, or names with corporeal implications. These things create traces in the mind that remain in the life of the adult.⁷⁹

So how does consciousness operate regarding these confused thoughts? Here, Descartes introduces the idea of childhood amnesia. We are, as children, marked by needs that we tend to forget as adults; our bodies are enveloped by pain and pleasure. As adults, we have difficulties remembering this exposure: “no traces of these thoughts have been imprinted on the brain” we hear in the conversation with Burman.⁸⁰ But in the letter to Hyperaspistes, mind and body are joined in such a way that “when the mind joined to a body thinks of a corporeal thing, certain particles in the brain are set in motion.” This may be produced by the sense organs and outside objects, but also by the so-called animal spirits and by our own thoughts: “the motion of these brain particles leaves behind the traces on which memory depends.”⁸¹

In other words, the fetus carries the seed of the cogito. But the corporeal needs of the fetus will also remain in the life of an adult. The traces and memories of infant life will remain unconscious, in the sense that they will cement “the impossibility of self-knowledge,” which, in the words of John Sutton, characterized both the Cartesian and the Freudian project.⁸² The most archaic emotions will always mark the life of the subject. But the body of an adult will carry them, unknowingly.

In Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality, for the breastfeeding child, the oral sensations of suckling form the “prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.”⁸³ Freud identifies the separation between the enjoyment of lactation and sexual stimulation as a split preceding child amnesia and repression.⁸⁴ Although childhood is a period in life of extraordinary sensual and emotive force, people tend to have no memories of it. This childhood amnesia, Freud explains, is because the strong affects become associated with the sexual impulses of childhood, which have been repressed.⁸⁵

To Descartes, like Freud, the sexual instinct is rooted in traces that are lost to memory. Descartes traces the origins of the passions to the unborn child.⁸⁶ This unborn, bestowed with the capacity to love, is the “thinking fetus.” An archaic symbiosis plays a pivotal role in the formation of passions. But the love that envelops the “thinking fetus” and the infant, as well as its ticklishness, its readiness for pleasures and satisfactions, its hate and anger—“do not remain in the memory,”⁸⁷ Descartes explains to Arnauld. “Infantile life remains unobtainable to consciousness.”⁸⁸ Childhood amnesia—from “Formation of the Fetus” to Passions—plays an important role in the Cartesian conception of subjectivity. In treating the passions “as a physician” or natural philosopher, Descartes is also interested in their unconscious origins. Considered as forms of perception that create physicopsychological imprints on mind and body, they are identified as “traces” or “folds” that form a link to representations. In this way, Descartes formulates a theory of repression. It is as if memories hide in the body, its connections, tubes, and flows, only to erupt in the mind at a given signal.

Love goes back to the moment when infants are newborn. Descartes writes of this in the letter to Elisabeth that is usually quoted as establishing a connection between body and mind, thus overcoming dualism.⁸⁹ But another purpose, less explored by scholars, is to describe the way in which archaic needs influence adult life. Descartes speaks about these needs as thoughts. The thoughts, he argues, “that have accompanied some movements of our body since our life began still accompany them today.”⁹⁰ These reactions, or thoughts, stay with us and are actualized by external causes that may “arouse the same thoughts,” whereas thoughts arouse the same movements. Emotional memories are incorporated since childhood; and as we have seen, we cannot tell where emotions come from—they hit us without us knowing why.

Confused thoughts are a bundle of ideas and corporeal impulses that cannot be dissociated. Intellectual love cannot be disconnected from sensual desires and appetites. The confusion, however, does not only pertain to the fact that we cannot dissociate body and mind. It pertains also to the fact that we cannot use our will to love, or control our desire. We feel desire toward objects against our wishes, and we are unable to love objects we would like to love. The object, at the origins of desire, remains lost. Descartes, like Freud, notes that affective memories are associated with representation. In Passions, Descartes describes how the brain, as we are affected by something, acts on traces that have already been set before.⁹¹ The brain creates folds as it is struck by the nerves stimulated by the senses—these folds have a tendency to be stimulated by the same objects.⁹² Emotions always attach to archaic traces, not made in our minds but received “from things represented by them.”⁹³ Traces of a childhood prehistory may then become reactivated.

In this way, Descartes identifies inscriptions in the mind that pave the way for other perceptions.⁹⁴ Dreams, fantasies, memories, and emotions are all part of this circuit. The cause of emotions lies not in the external world but within us, in the traces producing a flow between mind and body.⁹⁵ The associative stream of dreams, fantasies, and memories are linked to such traces. These in turn are associated with emotions and affects, just like the dynamic of mnemonic traces that Freud inscribes in the final chapter of the Interpretation of Dreams. The similarity stretches also to this: Freud explains the paths of association through traces marked by affects. The mnemonic traces can be remnants of images or language, but also of emotions.⁹⁶ In the psychic apparatus, they are associated, displaced, and condensed. Descartes argues in a similar manner: once a corporeal affect is established in connection with a representation, they will always be connected, but “the same actions are not always joined to the same thoughts.”⁹⁷ In other words, the relation between traces of perceptions and emotions are continuously deferred, so that representations and emotions will shift.

Cartesian traces of the mind are to be understood in the literal sense, as neurological markers. Not only will the child react on traces from its own experiences but also the mother’s experience. A mother’s emotions and affective states will pass on directly to her child, although they will remain repressed. But strong affects suffered by a mother will be transposed to the child in the womb: “what is adverse to the one is harmful to the other.” The experience will remain “imprinted in his brain to the end of his life.”⁹⁸ The idea that the relation between mother and child is permeable is in many ways medieval—but in this context, it has another meaning. It is an example of how bodies, in Cartesian speculation, can be incorporated as traces, as memories. What distinguishes the Cartesian conception from contemporary neuroscience and approaches it to psychoanalysis is the temporal character of the flow between traces—their retroactive capacities and their distinct relation to desires and aberrations.

The Return of the Object

Through the unconscious imprints of affects and traces, objects dominate the life of the subject. Why does one love one particular person rather than another?⁹⁹ This seemingly rather precious question was posed by the French ambassador to Sweden, Chanut, in an exchange with Queen Christina. And so, the question was posed to Descartes himself, who gave a surprising response to Chanut: love is not provoked by beauty, it may just as well be provoked by a defect. Such was the case of Descartes’s first love. When I was a child, I loved a girl of my own age who had slightly crossed eyes, he writes. This aroused the passion of love in me in every other instance that I saw a similar squint, “yet I had no idea myself that this was why it was.” The affect remained with the object—“when we are inclined to love someone without knowing the reason, we may believe that this is because they have some similarity to something in an earlier object of love, though we may not be able to identify it.”¹⁰⁰ Their memory remains as physical traces. For a long time, Descartes would feel tenderness at the sight of crossed eyes.

In Passions, he returns to this feeling of fixation on a unique feature in a person. The inclination or desire that arises in this way from attraction is commonly called “love” . . . “it is this inclination or desire that provides poets and writers of romances with their principal subject matter.”¹⁰¹ Here Descartes explains love in terms that are more neurological than theological. The attraction directed toward a lost object consists in the disposition of the parts of our brain.

Our desire is refound: directed as it is toward a trace or shadow of an object. Klein put it in a similar way: infantile dependency will later transfer love to other objects—“replacing the first loved person by other objects and things.”¹⁰² Freud, in a famous passage from the second of Three Essays on Sexuality, spoke of sexualization of the object forming après-coup: “At a time when the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking of nourishment . . . the sexual instinct has a sexual object outside the infant’s own body in the shape of his mother’s breast.” This is then transferred onto the mother. But “not until the period of latency has been passed is the original relation restored. There are thus good reasons why a child suckling at his mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is thus in fact a re-finding of it.”¹⁰³

To Descartes, also, the basis of our sentiments is a form of repetition, a recurrence of affects that will always be connected to infantile nourishment, and the movements and functions that go with them. It is this secret imprint on our system that will haunt all emotions that come after and continue to withdraw from intellectual elaboration. It bestows emotions and affects with a “confused nature,” which makes them difficult to understand. The nature of love, also, escapes from conscious understanding since it remains caught in the confused sensations of our childhood.¹⁰⁴ There is, then, in Descartes, no disruption of what Freud calls the latency period, or any distinction between the polymorphous-perverse body of the child and the sexual love of the adult. And there is not even any clear distinction between the love of benevolence and that of lust. This is precisely what haunts Descartes’s writings on the infant: the question of confused thought is concerned with much more than the cogito or the relation between body and mind. It has to do with the fundamental imprints on body and mind that derive from childhood life. Descartes forms a theory of the unconscious that stresses the corporeal imprints on the mind and remains with the polymorphous body of the infant as a vestige of the thinking fetus in the life of the adult; a childhood amnesia still leaves imprints in the body that will remain in the form of confused thoughts and reactivate with the object: of love, hate, melancholia, and so on.

These prepsychoanalytic observations and speculations of the psychic life of the infant, and its repercussions in adult life, may also impact the way we read works such as Meditations. Remainders of the objectal notion of the unconscious will also appear in the metaphysics, where Descartes sees the free flight of the mind as fundamental to the adult cogito. Only in relation to an object will the cogito sense the opacity of its own origin. As Descartes demonstrates in Meditations: thought begins with a thing between body and mind, self and other, inside and outside. In this way, it also searches for what psychoanalysis has pointed to as a vestige of the cogito, an “it” that thinks, impelled through an unknown and untraceable origin.¹⁰⁵

The Voice

The “it” that thinks, impelled through an unknown and untraceable origin, points to a remainder that has extension, but is still excessive to the cogito. Jean-Luc Marion has identified this remainder in Cartesian metaphysics as voice: in Meditations, we find the trace of an original alterity, posited before the cogito. That which thinks in me is an originary interlocution; “the ego, first being, has its existence from the call of another, whoever that may be, even if anonymous.”¹⁰⁶ Here we sense the impact of that body to another, at the crossing between need and desire, the object of instinct, which comes close to a Lacanian objet petit a. The presence of an originary alterity in the “thinking fetus,” the traces of which will remain in the cogito, is the voice: an object that is not an object but the remnant or excess of or an alterity that harks back to the individual prehistory of the dependency of the maternal body. In seminar 11, Lacan defines the objet petit a as the junction between desire and demand: it stands for the lack in the other with which the subject comes to identify and ultimately for a signifier that will define the subject beyond its own knowledge.¹⁰⁷ The voice, in Cartesian metaphysics, is a call that is more than metaphysics; it is also a signifier of desire, responding to the inscription of the split that is inherent in Cartesian subjectivity. The voice is that which calls, which allows for desire to be awakened, in the form of love, sadness, or wonder.

Descartes points to the premodern mystical notion of the voice as a foundation of the subject. The cogito and the method of doubt have mystical roots, for instance, in readings of Teresa d’Avila.¹⁰⁸ But Descartes’s construction of the cogito also points to the subject as divided and as prone to decenteredness. There are a lot of references to voice in Descartes: inner voices, the voices of deceit, the voice of the self. For instance, Descartes advises Princess Elisabeth to follow the example of Socrates and listen to “the inner voice.”¹⁰⁹ This anecdotal reference to the “inner voice” can be looked at as a trace of that excess of the voice that haunts the Cartesian meditations on the ego. I am able to grasp my limbs and my body both through sense perception and my body, Descartes writes in the second meditation, but I can use neither my sense perception nor my imagination to grasp myself: “it is surely surprising that I should have a more distinct grasp of things which I realize are doubtful, unknown and foreign to me, than I have of that which is true and known—my own self.”¹¹⁰

It is at this point that the voice is introduced in the reading of Marion. Thoughts give evidence of there being something that thinks, but thoughts are in themselves not proof of there being a subject that is the origin of these thoughts. This is also how the problem of subjectivity is conceived in psychoanalysis. To Marion, the cogito in Descartes carries with it the problem of alterity, an anotherness of the ego, a “yawning chasm,” Marion says, quoting Husserl.¹¹¹ This is the voice of an originary interlocution; “the ego, first being, has its existence from the call of another, whoever that may be, even if anonymous.”¹¹² The second meditation anticipates a subject that is split and a subject that is not congruent with the production of its thought. This is more than a problem of self-deception, or ideology or the possibility of reason. It is about an originary alterity inherent in the very possibility of the cogito, which psychoanalysis has identified. What Descartes points to is that it is not language that is the primary means of thought; it is the voice beyond language, which may also be a silent voice. This voice is the objet petit a, raised in me as a desire that I cannot respond to, only sense as a call.

In her diary, Hannah Arendt writes of Descartes, “Die Ent-zweiung ist der Zweifel” (“dubitare”—zwischen zwei Seiten hin- und herschwanken).¹¹³ The chasm is the doubt; to doubt means to go back and forth between two sides, with no given direction. “The doubt of reality is the outstanding experience of thinking,” she writes. The voice as objet petit a is caught in a chasm—between a stern sense of the real and its denial. The voice, however, cannot be the object of radical doubt. It cannot doubt itself. It is rather the trace of a physical object, a remnant of the confused thought of infantile life, a subject coming into being attempting to get hold of itself. If the thinking fetus is capable of grasping itself, it is precisely through the voice, through the presence of a thought that is embodied, rather than a reflection on existence. The voice does not belong to the body of extension, but it is not fully congruent with the cogito as sheer existence either. In this way, there is a trace of regression present also in Meditations, as it envelops a corporeal thought that is not yet thinking and not yet memorizing. The first sound of the voice in the life of a subject belongs to that of need: a calling to be nourished, to be soothed. It is that sound that remains in the life of the cogito, which makes of thought a chasm, something that can never be wholly detached from the remnants of a physical presence of maternal proximity.