Dora’s daimon
24 July 2024
[NOTE: This is the fourteenth in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]
The wellspring of psychoanalysis is the analysand’s sense of her own uniqueness and the passionate desire to have this uniqueness recognised by others. Before such recognition can happen, she must disclose her uniqueness, but this disclosure “can almost never be achieved as a wilful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this ‘who’” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p.179) in the same way that one describes oneself in, say, a job interview. The interview is a highly structured kind of dialogue, with a certain logical progression from beginning to end. In the early days of psychoanalysis, when Freud was first developing his ideas about treating hysteria, he tried to impose a similar narrative structure on the patient’s discourse by “starting with the symptoms” and then “clearing them up one after the other” (Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901], p.40–41; page references are to the Penguin edition). But Freud soon abandoned this approach and “let the patient himself choose the subject of the day’s work,” so that each session starts out “from whatever surface his unconscious happens to be prescribing to his notice at the moment” (op. cit., p.41). As Freud notes, although this less structured approach feels more chaotic and confusing, it is actually more appropriate for dealing with “the finer structure of the neurosis” (ibid):
…on this plan everything that has to do with the clearing up of a particular symptom emerges piecemeal, woven into various contexts, and distributed over widely separated periods of time. (ibid)
It is up to the analyst to take this apparently disorderly material and construct a narrative out of it. The analysand is the protagonist of this narrative, but she can only enact the story of her life; she cannot make it. If the analysand is like Achilles, acting out his story on the stage of history, the analyst is both the spectator who witnesses the speech and actions of the hero and the poet who turns the hero’s words and deeds into a coherent narrative. The fact that the analysand is the hero of her story does not mean that she need be heroic:
The hero the story discloses needs no heroic qualities; the word “hero” originally, that is, in Homer, was no more than a name given each free man who participated in the Trojan enterprise and about whom a story could be told. The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one’s own. And this courage is not necessarily or even primarily related to a willingness to suffer the consequences; courage and even boldness are already present in leaving one’s private hiding place and showing who one is, in disclosing and exposing one’s self. (Arendt, p.186).
And unlike Achilles, who “delivers into the narrator’s hands the full significance of his deed” by dying in the middle of “his one supreme act,” the analysand goes on living and must therefore disclose herself “piecemeal” (Arendt, p.194). In so doing, she forgoes the possibility of becoming “the indisputable master of [her] identity” (Arendt, p.193). She must accept that, although she is the hero of her story, the principle actor or agent, she is neither its author nor its maker. Nor is she even aware of what her actions reveal about her — her true identity, the unique essence of who she is.
This uniqueness is like a daimon who speaks from a position just behind her, always looking over her shoulder “and thus visible only to those [she] encounters (Arendt, p.180). The speech of the Other is implicit in everything she says and does, while her identity thereby “appears so clearly and unmistakably to others,” it remains hidden from the analysand/actor herself. Although she does not know who she is, her identity is disclosed to others in her speech and actions, as if her daimon was speaking through her. And if she wishes to know herself, she must be willing to say whatever comes into her mind when talking to the analyst — to let her daimon speak freely, uncensored — and thereby risk revealing the secrets she has been hiding from herself.
For unlike the evil demon of Descartes, Dora’s daimon does not lie. On the contrary, it speaks the truth about her desire — a truth of which she is not yet aware, and which constitutes her uniqueness. If Dora is unaware, when begins her analysis with Freud, of her passionate desire for recognition, Freud’s primary task is to foster the conditions for Dora to grasp it.
This grasping of one’s desire for recognition can manifest itself as something like assertiveness or even “self-esteem,” but the task of the analyst is not to facilitate the appearance of such phenomena. On the contrary, the analyst may often (and even unwittingly, as in the case of Freud’s treatment of Dora) foster the conditions for the analysand to grasp her desire for recognition precisely by failing or refusing to grant her this recognition. In this way, the analyst becomes the cause of the analysand’s passionate desire to show her self.
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This “urge towards self-disclosure” — even “at the expense of all other factors” (Arendt, p.194) — lay at the heart of Athenian politics. Unlike the Romans, the Athenians “did not count legislating among the political activities” (ibid):
In their opinion, the lawmaker was like the builder of the city wall, someone who had to do and finish his work before political activity could begin. He therefore was treated like any other craftsman or architect and could be called from abroad and commissioned without having to be a citizen, whereas the right to politeuesthai, to engage in the numerous activities which eventually went on in the polis, was entirely restricted to citizens. To them, the laws, like the wall around the city, were not results of action but products of making. Before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis and its structure the law; legislator and architect belonged in the same category. But these tangible entities themselves were not the content of politics (not Athens, but the Athenians, were the polis), and they did not command the same loyalty we know from the Roman type of patriotism. (Arendt, pp.194–5)
The analyst is both like the builder of the city wall who secures “a definite space” where speech and action can take place, and like the legislator who creates the law that provides the minimal structure for that speech and action. The space is that of the consulting room, which constitutes, as it were, a new kind of agora in which the polis assembles (for the polis is “not Athens, but the Athenians”); and the law is the rule of free association.
For the Athenians, the only properly political activities were speech and action, which fully realise their potential freedom in the political arena only because there they are free from all biological and financial interests, and aim solely at glory for its own sake. In aiming at glory, speech and action are not even in the world of means and ends any more, for when they achieve glory they do so not as the instruments for obtaining something else, and which can therefore be thrown away as soon as their object has been obtained, but as realising that glory in their very appearance, so that the speech and actions of the hero actualise in themselves their potential for glory and unite Being with appearance.
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This notion of actualisation is one of the most profound elements of Aristotelian thought. In book nine of his Metaphysics, Aristotle distinguishes between two types of process — motions and actualisations:
Now of these processes we should call the one type motions, and the other actualisations. Every motion is incomplete — the processes of thinning, learning, walking, building — these are motions, and incomplete at that. For it is not the same thing which at the same time is walking and has walked, or is building and has built, or is becoming and has become, or is being moved and has been moved, but two different things; and that which is causing motion is different from that which has caused motion. But the same thing at the same time is seeing and has seen, is thinking and has thought. The latter kind of process, then, is what I mean by actualisation, and the former what I mean by motion.
Aristotle argues that eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία) is an example of the latter kind of process (actualisation). And this is precisely why Arendt is so adamant that it is so misleading to render this term in English as happiness — which most translations of Aristotle do:
eudaimonia means neither happiness nor beatitude; it cannot be translated and perhaps cannot even be explained. It has the connotation of blessedness, but without any religious overtones, and it means literally something like the well-being of the daimon who accompanies each man throughout life, who is his distinct identity, but appears and is visible only to others. Unlike happiness, therefore, which is a passing mood, and unlike good fortune, which one may have at certain periods of life and lack in others, eudaimonia, like life itself, is a lasting state of being which is neither subject to change nor capable of effecting change. To be eudaimon and to have been eudaimon, according to Aristotle, are the same, just as to “live well” (eu zen) and to have “lived well” are the same as long as life lasts; they are not states or activities which change a person’s quality, such as learning and having learned, which indicate two altogether different attributes of the same person at different moments. (Arendt, pp.192–3)
Arendt’s interpretation of eudaimonia as the well-being of the daimon, and the daimon as the “distinct identity” of each person, is unconventional but utterly brilliant. She bases it in part on the famous lines towards the end of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (1186 ff.), especially the verses: Tis gar, tis aner pleon/tas eudaimonias pherei / tosouton hoson dokrin / kai doxant’ apoklinai (“For which, which man [can] bear more eudaimonia than he grasps from appearance and deflects in its appearance?”). These lines are sung by the chorus just after the awful truth about his parentage has been revealed to Oedipus. Although Oedipus himself is of course devastated by the revelation, the full extent of the tragedy is perceived only by the chorus. As Arendt notes, “these others see, they ‘have’ Oedipus’ daimon before their eyes as an example; the misery of the mortals is their blindness toward their own daimon” (Arendt, p.193: footnote).
It is the daimon, then, that discloses itself in the speech and actions of each actor, and which the analysand brings to the analyst:
This unchangeable identity of the person, though disclosing itself intangibly in act and speech, becomes tangible only in the story of the actor’s and speaker’s life; but as such it can be known, that is, grasped as a palpable entity only after it has come to its end. In other words, human essence — not human nature in general (which does not exist) nor the sum total of qualities and shortcomings in the individual, but the essence of who somebody is — can come into being only when life departs, leaving behind nothing but a story. [193]
Freud’s famous statement that psychoanalysis succeeds when it transforms “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Studies in Hysteria, emphasis added) is therefore incomplete; in addition to these passing feelings of the analysand, there is the extraordinary happiness of the daimon, which is permanent.
To interpret the daimon merely as “the sounds in Socrates’s head” is, by comparison with Arendt’s interpretation, utterly banal. The daimon is not just a collection of “sounds”; and it is not even “inside” the head at all. It exists outside, in the intersubjective space between the analyst and the analysand. And the daimon is happy to the extent that the analysand actualises her potential for glory (κλέος, kleos).
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Dora’s glory was actualised in her sessions with Freud, despite the brevity of her treatment, and narrated by Freud in his brilliant case study. And this is why her analysis, far from being a failure, was a dazzling success, and why she has rightly taken her place alongside Achilles and Oedipus in the ranks of the immortals.
