ANY BODY ANYBODY: THE MATTER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
Body Language
Isabelle ALFANDARY
It is generally assumed that the body of the hysteric speaks and its language can be interpreted through explicable causes and enunciable statements. I’d like to question the validity and pertinence of the conception and related metaphor of the speaking body in Freud’s works. Although the symptoms of hysterics were duly interpreted by Freud as early as his Studies on Hysteria (1895/2010), he never seemed to consider them as fully comprehensible. While some somatic yet inorganic manifestations led him to discover the unconscious by revealing their traumatic origin, it would be an overstatement to assert that Freud ever acknowledged them as thoroughly translatable. Remarkably, Freud seems to feel more at ease and at home with the language of obsessional neuroses. In his Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909/2010), when analyzing the Rat Man, he asserts that the language of obsessional neurosis “does not involve the leap from a mental process to a somatic innervation— hysterical conversion—which can never be fully comprehensible to us” (p.2128). In his later Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis delivered in 1916, Freud contrasts obsessional neurosis with hysteria: “obsessional neurosis, in which the puzzling leap from the mental to the physical plays no part, has… become more perspicuous and familiar to us than hysteria, and we have learnt that it displays certain extreme characteristics of the nature of neurosis far more glaringly” (1916/2010, p.3339). This brings us back to the process of hysterical conversion, prompting us to interrogate Freud’s side comment and elucidate the meaning of what he calls the “leap from the mental to the physical” (1916/2010, p.3339). If the language of obsessional neurosis is deemed to be “a dialect in which we ought to be able to find our way about more easily, since it is more nearly related to the forms of expression adopted by our conscious thought than is the language of hysteria” (1909/2010. p.2128), the reason why the process of somatic innervation is “never …fully comprehensible to us” (p.2128) remains to be seen. Freud seems to consider bodily manifestations as symptoms that pose some theoretical difficulty. Why should the body language of the hysteric be construed as specific and partly incomprehensible? In order to address this question, let us first go back to Freud’s conversion theory. The term conversion was first used in order to describe the case of Emmy von N. and defined as “the transformation of psychical excitation into chronic somatic symptoms” (1895/2010, p.79).
If we take a closer look at the cause of Emmy’s uncontrolled movements of the tongue, it is worth noticing that Freud explains them in terms of “the putting into effect of antithetic ideas” (p.83). The motor manifestation results from a psychical conflict whereby an idea puts itself into effect and takes the shape of a bodily expression; the body speaks in so far as an idea literally takes over. According to Freud’s incipient conception of the symptom, the body speaks insofar as the subject is unable to do so. While pondering on the case of Miss Lucy R., Freud generalizes that conversion results from an intentional repression. The somatic innervation stems from an excitation, amounting to a defense mechanism. The somatic experience is further described in anthropomorphic terms according to which “[t]he repressed idea takes its revenge …by becoming pathogenic” (1895/2010, p.102). Freud accounts for conversion symptoms where an excitation is converted into a somatic innervation in terms of economic gain: “the advantage of this is that the incompatible idea is repressed from the ego’s consciousness” (p.108). He further interprets them as an escape from the field of consciousness, resulting from what he calls a lack of “moral courage” (p.108). When characterizing conversion symptoms after Freud, Laplanche and Pontalis insist on their value of expression: “they express through the body repressed representations” (Laplanche, 1967/2010, p.104). In Freud’s early conception of the hysteric’s symptom, the somatic manifestation results from a conflict, but is not meaningful in or of itself. In discussing Dora’s throat symptoms (1905/2010), Freud further remarked on the “difficulty” of such a symptom production and asserted that a single symptom can correspond to several meanings simultaneously. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud defines the symptom as “a sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance; it is the consequence of the process of repression” (1926/2010, p.4252), but immediately admits that the enigma of the leap still remained to be elucidated. In the theoretical conclusions drawn from Studies on Hysteria, Breuer discusses in the third chapter the ideogenic nature of hysterical phenomena, in which he and Freud differ from Moebius, who considers all pathological phenomena as having been caused by ideas to be hysterical. What this ideogenic debate entails is the question of the somatic translatability of the unconscious; whether the body is ideally affected in the symptom and whether it is affected 22
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FALL 2017
by an ideal, abstract cause. Although limited in scope, Freud’s ideogenic conception of hysterical symptoms foregrounds the idealistic nature of unconscious mechanisms and of the unconscious itself. Freud’s unconscious is by no means organically based or localizable. The famous 1915 article titled “The Unconscious” clearly states that the justification of the concept that can only be phenomenally inferred cannot rely on any anatomical or neurological evidence. Having moved away from the theory and practice of neurological anatomy to the field of psychoanalysis, Freud is reluctant to acknowledge the possibility of any kind of organic location for the unconscious. The validity of his hypothesis cannot depend on any form of somatic evidence. The word that Freud uses to describe and perform this operation is hiatus, a word that echoes the “leap” to name the disjunction between the mental process and its somatic translation in the case of conversion symptoms. Freud’s psychical topography clearly serves to fill the lack of reference to anatomy. The “regions of the mental apparatus” (1905/2010, p.1493) are construed as practically without reference to the body. In his 1915 article, Freud goes so far as to conceive of the mental apparatus as belonging to a body without organs—to take up a Deleuzian concept, “regions in the mental apparatus, wherever they may be situated in the body” (1915/2010, p.2998)—as he sees them belong to a body whose anatomy is no longer organ-based, refashioning the clinically admitted image of the body. It may be argued that what Freud objects to is not so much the body as such, the soma per se, but its clinical and organ-based representation. However, knowing who Freud was, intellectually and clinically, his deliberately nonorganic conception not only of the unfathomable unconscious but of the mental apparatus at large gives us a sense of what it must have taken him to wrench himself free of his medical past in order to strip psychoanalysis from an organic, histological, if not bodily basis. What Freud denies is not the existence of a neurological functionality, but the possibility to derive mental processes, conscious or unconscious, from an organic functionality, to translate histological and chemical neurological connections to mental phenomena. In Freud’s view, the mental apparatus does not coincide with the brain, however powerful the brain can prove to be. The unconscious is without a site. The difficulty to account for the leap or hiatus between the psychic and somatic lies