Reading Freud’s “Some Elementary Lessons in Psychoanalysis” (1940)
The first few paragraphs of this interesting text seem to deal with questions of teaching, or, more particularly, teaching psychoanalysis. He proposes two methods or techniques. Hence, he opens the essay with the following statement: “An author who sets out to introduce some branch of knowledge — or, to put it more modestly, some branch of research — to an uninstructed public must clearly make his choice between two methods or techniques.”
Let us begin with the first. The first presumes that one is situated within discourse, that is, within the dominant social bond, in one way or another, and that, by working with the materials of this common language one can reveal the latent content. In this mode of teaching, the point is to move from knowledge, in the position of agent, toward that of another reading, or, to put it in more Lacanian terms, from S2 toward $. Hence, the goal of this teaching is to bring knowledge to bear upon its production. I shall quote at length the second paragraph:
It is possible to start off from what every reader knows (or thinks he knows) and regards as self-evident, without in the first instance contradicting him. An opportunity will soon occur for drawing his attention to facts in the same field, which, though they are known to him, he has so far neglected or insufficiently appreciated. Beginning from these, one can introduce further facts to him of which he has no knowledge and so prepare him for the necessity of going beyond his earlier judgements, of seeking new points of view and of taking new hypotheses into consideration. In this way one can get him to take a part in building up a new theory about the subject and one can deal with his objections to it during the actual course of the joint work. A method of this kind might well be called genetic. It follows the path along which the investigator himself has travelled earlier.
However, this technique comes with the following disadvantage: it is a slow and close or attentive reading or demonstration of the other reading. It is possible that the “learner” will not be impressed. Thus, Freud writes the following: “it has the defect of not making a sufficiently striking effect upon the learner. He will not be nearly so much impressed by something which he has watched coming into existence and passing through a slow and difficult period of growth as he would be by something that is presented to him ready-made as an apparently self-contained whole.”
Hence, there is a second technique, which Freud refers to as the dogmatic one. This approach “begins straight away with its conclusion,” without the slow and difficult period of guidance that would bring the learner on the path of what I previously referred to as S2->$. The problem with this approach is that it asks too much from the learner: it asks them for belief, in my reading, which means that it demands from them a belief that your conclusions are supported. I would add that Lacan seemed to have taken both the genetic and the dogmatic approach. At times, he would return to Freud and demonstrate the basis for his conclusions, and at other times he, like Jacques-Alain Miller, simply asks the readers to trust in his conclusion and to go and seek validation for it on their own readings if they must. In any case, the dogmatic approach can lead one to the following claim: “All this sounds most peculiar: where does the fellow get it from?” The dogmatic approach therefore seems to present itself as an S1, without the support of an S2.
Hence, the genetic approach motions from S1 toward $ but always with the risk of boredom or disinterest on the part of the learner. The dogmatic moves across another track, one which I cannot yet schematize, but which comes with the risk that one will simply dismiss the conclusions as baseless, though perhaps as provocative. It means that the second approach is outside of the common discourse and that, as a consequence, it must force its way into S2.
Freud adds a third approach to the genetic and dogmatic pair, one which oscillates between the two. If the genetic approach is characterized by a teaching within common discourse, then the dogmatic approach seems to be characterized by a teaching from experience itself. Thus, in my reading, he attempts to oscillate between discourse and experience. I conclude, therefore, that Freud’s approach to teaching navigates experience as well as discourse.
Freud concludes this section therefore with some remarks about the popularity, which I take to mean commonality, of psychoanalysis (e.g., he claims that it will never be popular or liked) and the experience (e.g., he claims that it will offend people’s feelings and its postulates and hypotheses will seems strange, which means dogmatic, to most people).
It is clear that this section (“the nature of the psychical”) begins again with the difficulty of sharing the experience of psychoanalysis. Freud claims that “there is no common quality that is possessed” by psychical processes that would reveal to us their human nature. Hence, psychoanalysis foregoes the essentialist concept or theory of a common human nature.
Freud next proceeds to remind his reader, against the common view that psychology is about what is ‘mental,’ that experience demonstrates a somatic dimension: the body. Psychical processes have a most powerful influence and dependence upon the body. This is where Freud positions an “impasse,” which means, in Lacanian language, it is the site of the impossible or real. There is a real or impasse that occurs in thinking about mind and body, or, rather, in the equation of psychical processes and bodily disturbances. Freud proceeds to claim that philosophy has not solved this problem but has attempted to discuss it, integrating it into its discourse. Freud boldly claims that psychoanalysis has avoided integrating this impasse, that is, the $, of the common philosophical discourse by refusing to overcome it: acceptance or interaction with $. For psychoanalysis this impasse, this $ of the discourse, is presupposed from the beginning: the mind and the body, or psychical processes and the body, are to not to be regarded as equated with one another.
At this point, at the point of $, Freud points toward unconscious ideas. There are ideas which remain dormant and then suddenly come to consciousness, “without one’s being aware of the steps that led up to them.” Those steps must have occurred within the unconscious. It is as if there was a logic in the unconscious, I would say, operating independent of consciousness, “withdrawn from consciousness.” Another example of the unconscious was when the President of a public body opened a meeting with the following slip: “I take notice that a full quorum of members is present and herewith declare the sitting closed.” Freud reasoned that this alternative reading, found in the logic of the unconscious declared a wish for the “disagreeably stormy” meetings of prior sessions to come to an end. “I would much rather be closing than opening it!”
Freud concludes that a single instance of such an act would not be enough to teach something of the unconscious: “A single instance can scarcely enable us to decide […] but what if every other instance of a slip of the tongue could be explained in the same way […] what if in all those instances … it was possible to demonstrate the presence of a psychical act which would account for the apparent mistake and which was unconscious at the moment which it became effective?” Here, it is clear that Freud is attempting to teach something about the experience of a logic of the unconscious, precisely to account for its dogmatic effects independent of its common reading.
The person who recognizes instances of the unconscious in this way might become “embarrassed and ashamed.” But he also requires an Other, since: “he cannot as a rule find the explanation of it himself without outside help; and he often refuses to accept the solution when it is put before him.” Thus, psychoanalysis is a space where he might confront the unconscious as a logic.
A third example that teaches something of the unconscious is hypnosis. We can witness the suggestion and then the effects of that suggestion on the behaviors of the patient who is at a later time no longer conscious of those impressions which have determined him. He might then feel embarrassed for his behavoir and offer not a logic but a meaning for them, in the register of knowledge.
Freud then states something quite interesting: consciousness is only a quality of what is pshchical, since the driving force is unconscious logic. Yet, consciousness appears as disaparent, not continuous, precisely because the logic of the unconscious is disjointed or repressed: “consciousness can only offer us an incomplete and broken chain of phenomena.” Here, it is clear that consciousness is taken by Freud as an element of delusion: consciousness is consistent for those who do not see it as disjointed, but psychoanalysis, that is, the teaching of psychoanalysis, reveals consciousness as broken by the interruptions of unconscious psychical processes.
At the beginning of the short essay Freud states that he, on the contrary, offers no delusions. Hence, consciousness is a part of the common discourse, it is on the side of S1, S2, and $, which are the four discourses, against which, through the limitations of what is common, through the discontinuity of consciousness, $, one confronts the experience of the logic of the unconscious.
Freud opposes discourses which nontheless are forced to confront the unconscious: philosophy/literature, which has “toyed with it,” and science, “which could find no use for it.”
Psychoanalysis begins with it, as the agent of the discourse, objet petit a (“psychoanalysis has seized upon the unconscious, has taken it seriously and has given it a fresh content.”)
