What’s Missing?
Subject/Reflection, Issue 01: Interrogating Negativity
Elementary Questions
Why is it so difficult to answer the question “Who am I?” It’s such a silly question; it’s both banal and also a deeply unnerving question because its primary concern is who I am, the locus of my experience. And when we try to answer this question, we say things such as “I’m a student, a father, a psychologist, an accountant, a human being, an… animal…” and we run out of identifiers. And yet, the question is still left unanswered. We could use the entire dictionary to describe who we are and still come up without a good, satisfactory answer.
To put it in terms of the issue of Subject/Reflection, we’ve encountered a point of negativity, of lack, at the center of identity. And how do we resolve this point of negativity? The point of negativity in this question is precisely that of identity itself, something Lacan called attention to early on in his writing and teaching. He criticized ego psychology, as is well known, for substantiating the ego — i.e., identity. The ego, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, is, on the contrary, indicative of a lack itself, a covering up of an essential negativity — i.e., a symptom.
So if the ego, the locus of our “experience,” is itself a signifier covering up a lack, does not the question of who I am also become meaningless? What does it mean to speak of a me since Freud?
We will use Lacan’s essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Conscious; Or, Reason Since Freud” to read Freud’s two metapsychological essays, “Repression” and “The Unconscious” to knock at the door of this question; namely: what is missing from subjectivity, and why? Because at the center of this problematic, the case of the missing self, is repression.
Structural Discourses
The ego is not substantial, but rather an effect. An effect of what? It is an effect of the process of the signifying chain and the position of the subject of the unconscious within it. Another word for the signifying chain, which Lacan borrowed from structural linguistics, is discourse.
To begin with, we must get clear on what discourse means from the point of view of structural linguistics. Because to understand how repression works, we need to understand how exactly the unconscious is “the discourse of the Other.”
Discourse is, in short, the structure of signification. This may be articulated in various ways, from the ‘chain of signifiers’ to ‘the symbolic order’ to ‘culture.’ The structure of discourse can be broken down into smaller bits: signs. Signifiers and signifieds, when considered in conjunction, make up a sign. And the signifying chain is comprised of a series of signs. So what’s a sign?
In Saussure’s 1916 Course in General Linguistics, he offers the following formula for the sign: [include figure of tree, or S/s] “A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern.” The sound pattern is not the physical sound, but rather the internal impression we have of the sound (i.e., the signifier/signal). The concept we have of the sound pattern is called the signified/signification.
Sound pattern = internal impression of concept = signifier
Concept = of the internal impression of the concept = signified
And the first thing that Saussure wants us to know about the connection of the two elements is that they are “arbitrary”: that there is no inherent connection between the idea ‘sister’ and the string of letters, s-i-s-t-e-r. This becomes obvious when we think in other languages. The concept of ‘sister’ (i.e., female sibling) is also found in Spanish, but with a different signifier: h-e-r-m-a-n-a. So there is nothing necessary in the relationship between signifier and signified.
The second thing he wants us to know is that signifiers operate within a temporal and linear dimension: they form a chain.
Saussure, according to Lacan, is on to something essential that he wants to take and apply to Freud’s theory of the unconscious. However, there is something which Lacan reworks in his essay “Instance of the Letter.”
The diagram that Saussure uses to illustrate the relationship between the word and the concept is this:
What’s wrong with this image? It indicates the signifier “tree” in relation to the concept we have of tree (the image, the thing itself). Lacan claims that this isn’t actually staying true to Saussure’s insight. He uses another diagram. What’s different about this?
Calum Matheson helps illustrate the differences in his commentary on the paper. First, the oval surrounding Saussure’s diagram is left out. “This suggests that the sign is not a discrete, self-contained unit but an element in a much more fluid chain” (138). This should be aligned with Saussure’s first principle of the signifier: that it is arbitrary. Second, the signifier is prioritized, “elevated”, over the signified, and it is capitalized. Third, the bar is read as a ‘resistance to signification’ rather than a porous field separating as well as linking the two elements. And what does this do for Lacan?
“…We will fail to sustain this question [of the importance of the letter to the unconscious] as long as we have not jettisoned the illusion that the signifier serves the function of representing the signified, or better, that the signifier has to justify its existence in terms of any signification whatsoever” (Ecrits, 416).
The basic project of this essay is to show, as Lacan puts it, how the signifier enters into the signified; how language informs subjectivity, and subjective experience. This draws him to open up Saussure’s signifying chain as a system which is based on pure difference, not identity. In this model of the signifier, one can only search for meaning — i.e., interpret — by looking at the connective tissues between signifiers, not by looking for the thing to which the signifier corresponds. But, as his classic style goes, he was not the first to come to this conclusion: “This revelation came to Freud, and he called his discovery the unconscious” (424).
Basically, this new image shows the fundamental ambiguity of language: that there is a slippage that occurs in how words relate to things, and how language in fact helps constitute those things.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to us modern readers, who have now experience with separation of gender from sex, of the author from the text, and other such procedures. However, Lacan’s rewriting should make us look closer. What this means, for Lacan, is that the only thing which determines the meaning of any given signifier is another signifier, within what Saussure called the chain. Within the conversation on gender, then, we are forced to push even further: if the signifier is arbitrary, then there is absolutely no relation of gender to sex; and if the signifier is temporal and linear, then all genders only refer to each other in a slippage of difference, and no one identity is more solid than another — in fact, gender identity itself would be predicated on non-identity (i.e., on difference).
Samuel Weber traces out the fundamental difference of Lacan and Saussure in his Return to Freud (1991, Ch. 4) throughout 20th century linguistics. While we will not cover his history here, an important quote should be allowed in full:
‘Truth’ is therefore no longer determined as the adequation of a thought to its object, or that of an expression to its thought, but rather has to do with a relation between signifiers.
Whereas Saussure maintains a binary structure of discourse by allowing the signified to ground the signifier, Lacan allows the signifier to “fall into” the signified. What is left is the logic of difference itself in determining the meaning of any given moment in the chain. What, then, do we make of repression? Is there a concrete event or moment which was repressed, and which the symptom and other metaphors may ‘point to’, i.e., signify? Or do these symptoms and metaphors only point to other symptoms and metaphors in the chain, always circling but never getting at the trauma? Basically, the question that Lacan can help us pose in Freud’s essays are: Is there a primary repression? Another way to ask this is: What are these “associations” in Freud’s writings?
Freud on Repression
The first thing that strikes us about Freud’s description of repression in his meta-psychological essay on the topic is that it is not affect that is repressed, but rather ideas which are. I think this is a common misconception about repression tied into statements we often hear such as “I’ve repressed my anger for ten years” or “Her love for her father was repressed.” Strictly speaking, affect cannot be repressed, because it is not an idea, not a signifier (and we equate the two to mean basically the same thing; signifier coming only later, in Lacan, in the structuralist vocabulary of which Freud did not utilize). As Bruce Fink tells us, “Feelings undergo displacement, suppression, and other kinds of transformations, but they never become unconscious;”[1] and again Freud: “there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas [or signifiers].”[2]
This is our first clue into the unique structure and mechanism of repression: something (presumably, at one point, conscious) becoming unconscious. What is this process like? How does a thing become unconscious?
A splitting is presumed to take place before something becomes unconscious. Freud tells us this in his “Repression”, and it is the core of psychoanalytic theory: the subject is split. Split how? Of course, between the conscious and the unconscious. Or, in different terms, between ideas and non-ideas. I do not mean this in the sense that everything which we do not know is unconscious; a kind of pan-psychism (“That my soul is interconnected with every other soul and enlightenment means a becoming-consciousness-of this fact”). I mean this in the very biographically situated life of each subject.
For a thing to become something, there must be a particular structure or mechanism which allows it do so. In the case of repression, the structure of the signifier articulated by Lacan in the “Instance” is just that structure which opens up the possibility of Freudian repression.
Lacan (and Saussure) is convinced that there is no inherent tie between a word and an idea; that the connections are, at best, capricious; and that, without this tie, things are libel to move around. This is the basic structure of the letter: it is defined only by its relationship and proximity to other letters. What Freud does, however, next in his paper is left unaddressed by Lacan in his essay.
For Freud, there are two levels of repression: primal/primary/primordial and secondary/after-pressure. Primal is the original moment of something which is not allowed entrance into consciousness, i.e., it is barred from the signifying chain that we have access to as speaking, thinking subjects. But because every idea is situated in a context of every other idea, and this is necessarily the structure of every idea, the primal repression “affects mental derivatives of the repressed representation … [which have] come into associative connection with it” (198). This original idea which is unacceptable gets linked up with other ideas by association. Freud’s case studies are illustrations of this.
Primal repression is “not directed upon the instinct as such but against its signs or ‘representatives,’ which are denied entrance to the conscious and to which the instinct remains fixed” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 393). This is, psychodynamically speaking, the birth of the unconscious. The ideational content/signifiers of which are then later repressed are repressed because either “they originate [from the original repressed idea] or because they become connected with it fortuitously” (ibid.). The center, the original repressed idea, can be thought of as the unconscious nucleus, which forms a bit of a black hole bending a grid of associations around it. For there to be an ‘original repression,’ we have to presuppose a structure that existed before that moment for it to be repressed.
To return to our question at the beginning of this essay: in our search for who we are, at our core, we will not find the magnificent answer we’ve always been waiting for — this is not how psychoanalysis works. In looking for the ‘core’ or trauma of our subjective structure, we miss the associations which are manifested in verbal and relational bridges in the speech of the subject.
But Freud, in his essay, doesn’t seem to be saying quite this much. He indicates a sense of a primary repression, something which is at the heart of the unconscious, an original moment of negativity (of what Adam Phillips would call the “unconverted”) and trauma. He seems to be closer to Saussure’s closed system of signification. If there is an original moment of repression that can be finally articulated, the chain of signifiers is closed; it is only up to the analysand to articulate this original trauma so that the rest of the structure will ‘click into place.’ So we have a dilemma:
1. Either there is an original trauma which repressed, constituting the primary repression. This idea which is primarily repressed is the foundation upon which the rest of the unconscious is built, brick by brick, association by association.
2. There is no original moment of repression; or, at least, it cannot be articulated and is left always open. Each association, then, is tenuously and only momentarily connected with the inherent lack of connection to any concrete signifier.
So what to make of this issue? It seems that, at a certain level, Lacan at the time of “The Instance” cannot account for the primary repression — trauma — that Freud identifies in his metapsychological papers of 1915.
This is a problematic which we will not attempt to answer here, but for a lack of space, will leave open for interrogation in another essay.
Conclusion: The Missing Signifier or the Signifier Which is Missed?
We’ve come to find that Freud’s duality of the unconscious — primary and secondary repression — seems to account for something Lacan, in “The Instance”, cannot. Namely, if the unconscious is nothing but signifiers and the associations linking them together in a chain, we cannot account for anything “before” the unconscious which places a cut into the chain. Put differently, in a system of thought which totalizes the psyche, trauma itself is difficult to conceive, because it seems exist somewhere else.
Because of the separation between the signifier and the signified — and the insistence on the autonomy of the former — it is difficult to conceive of an event which shifts the entire structure of signifiers. What could allow this kind of interaction, if we, following Lacan, have rejected the very idea that that things in the world can have any impact on our chain of signifiers? I’d like to leave this open there.
[1] A Clinical Introduction to Freud
[2] SE XIV p. 178
References
B. Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Freud (2013).
J. Lacan, “Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud” (1966).
C. L. Matheson, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud” in Reading Lacan’s Ecrits, from ‘The Freudian Thing’ to Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation (2020).
F. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916).
S. Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan and the Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (1991).
