Edda Hevers

Picturing the Unimaginable. Freud & the Visual Unconscious

What is psychoanalysis? What is the analyst doing with his patient? On this question Sigmund Freud answered in a fictive dialogue: „There is nothing else going on between them than talking”. At a certain hour the patient comes. He talks, the analyst “listens, talks to him [...]” (Freud 1926e, 279). The medium of psychoanalysis - the talking cure as it was called by one of his first patients - is the spoken word. For the time of the analytic hour vision remains suspended. The patient on the couch can not see the analyst sitting behind (Fig.1). Except at the very beginning and at the end their eyes will not meet. To practice psychoanalysis Freud, so it seems, had to sacrifice the Visual. Setting up a medical practice, he not only had to give up anatomical research in the laboratory of Ernst Brücke, a work superequipped by optical devices

(Fig. 2).

In order to employ free association in a truly psychoanalytic setting he also had to abandon the psychiatric-diagnostical gaze and hypnotic techniques (Fig. 3).

But as much as his physiological research survived in his therapeutic work insofar as Freud continued doing analyses (only psycho-analyses), so did the optical instruments. In his major text „The interpretation of dreams“, published 1900, Freud suggests to „picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus”. This way psychical locality corresponds to a place [einem Ort] “inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being“ (Freud 1900a, 536). Throughout his work and through all modifications of his theory Freud pictured the psyche as an optical instrument. Freud‘s mental apparatus is not, as mostly seen today, just an instrument for the transformation of stimuli and energies. It is also a complex image processing system composed of agencies or systems that stand in a „regular spatial relation to one another“ just as „the various systems of lenses in a telescope are arranged behind one another“ (Freud 1900a, 537).

Stimuli are not only passed on in the system though, they are also stored. To quote Freud again: „A trace is left in our psychical apparatus of the perceptions which impinge upon it. This we may describe as a ‘memory-trace’“ (Freud 1900a, 537). But as already Breuer had pointed out to him, the mirror of a reflecting telescope not function at the same time as a photographic plate (Freud 1900, 538). The perceptive layer can only carry out its task of receiving images indiscriminately when the longterm imprinting is performed in the layers beyond. In Freud’s words:

„We shall suppose that a system in the very front of the apparatus receives the perceptual stimuli but retains no trace of them and thus has no memory [...] behind it [...]lies a second system which transforms the momentary excitations of the first system into permanent traces“ (Freud 1900a, 538)

Already Freud’s teacher Theodor Meynert had devoted most of his research to the problem of memorising, and already Meynert had pointed out the importance of differentiating between the level of the retina as a perceptive system and the cortex as the level of storing memories. In one of his textbook-passages you can read, that the eye has often been compared with a Camera obscura and the retina with a projection screen (Fig. 4). Meynert now suggests to think of a traveller who moves with his camera from one site to the next and to imagine the ever changing images of his projection board imprinted in shallow drawings in his album. This is how we would have to imagine the difference between the retina as the perception layer and the cortex as the area of storage (Breidbach 1997, 207). It had been such a portable Camera obscura (Fig. 5) - invented by Robert Hooke already at the end of the 17^th century (Hammond 1981, 22) – that William Fox Talbot used during a journey through Italy in 1833, when he had the idea that led to the invention of the photographic negative-positive process. Being tired of clumsily drawing the images projected into his Camera obscura, he tried to find a way to let them imprint themselves. He exposed specifically prepared paper in a Camera obscura (Fig. 6), on which, when looked at by light, suddenly a sort of spontaneous (self-) developing drawing appeared. Further developing this process Talbot found, as he called it, the latent image. It became one of the founding principles of modern photography, which in Freud’s time though had changed already from a medium to make authentic records of the visible to something that could prove the existence of things hitherto unseen.

We can find Talbot’s latent images all over Freud’s work: in his differentiating latent dream thoughts from the manifest dream, in his calling psychoneuroses „the negative of perversions“ (Freud 1905d,166; Freud 1905e, 50), or in passages like the one taken from „A note on the unconscious“ from 1912, where Freud wrote (on this occasion in English):

„A rough but not inadequate analogy to this supposed relation of conscious to unconscious activity might be drawn from the field of ordinary photography. The first stage of the photograph is the ‘negative’; every photographic picture has to pass through the ‘negative process’, and some of these negatives [...] are admitted to the ‘positive process’ ending in the picture“ (Freud 1912g, 264).

But in dreaming as well as on the couch we are not dealing with outer vision. Having shut out the external world we are looking at inner images. Freud’s apparatus is less Camera obscura than Laterna magica (a projection device just like the one used by Salomon Stricker in his medical lectures in the University in Vienna in the 1880 (Fig. 7). What Freud tried to look at were not the imprints of the outer world but pictorial derivations of inner processes: trains of thought that become observable when our eyes are shut and motor pathways are down, when we dream or lie relaxed on the couch, as though we were “a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside” (Freud 1913c, 135). When the outer world is shut out, the image-processing within moves in a backward direction. Instead of outer stimuli getting imprinted in the psychic system, in the dream-state mnemic traces are transformed first into the latent dream thought and from there into visually experienced sensory images and finally into words. An ideational content, a latent thought - as a rule a thought of something that is wished for - is transformed into a sensory image, to which belief is attached and which can be experienced as in waking life (Freud 1900a, 534/35). And this transformation process was understood less and less in terms of light passing through lenses with a different refractive index but as an interactive, conflictual process between membranes: attraction and repulsion, making visible or making hidden. 

Thought in photochemical terms[1], inner images or thoughts are formed in a sort of developing process on the interface between the systems unconscious and preconscious-conscious. Already in the „Interpretation of Dreams“ Freud partly substituted the term system, introduced 1895 in his „Project for a scientific Psychology“, by the term agency [Instanz], carrying a more dynamic meaning. Dream formation is explained as the result of the working of psychical agencies, one of which submits the activity of the other to a criticism that involves its exclusion from consciousness. In some passages this critical agency is described as a screen [Schirm] situated between the unconscious and consciousness (Freud 1900a, 540). On this screen unconscious ideas or memory traces are being recast or clothed into sensory images. What Freud in some passages calls regard for representability [Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit] is also described as a kind of selective attraction exercised by the “visually recollected scenes touched upon by the dream-thoughts“ (Freud 1900a, 548). Ideas or images are

 „pushed from the one side (by the censorship of the Cs.) and pulled from the other with resistance opposing the progress of a thought into consciousness [...] and of a simultaneous attraction exercised upon the thought by the presence of  memories possessing great sensory force“ (Freud 1900a, 547)

 

But the German term for attraction Anziehung - with a slight connotation of clothing oneself - leads to yet another metaphor: the dream fabric. And here the point of view subtly changes. The optical model implies a distance between the subject and the object of investigation. With the metaphor of dream-clothing we suddenly become aware of the author behind the theory. Lets not forget: the „The Interpretation of Dreams“ is a very personal book. Most of the dreams with which Freud fascinates us throughout hundreds of pages were his own. When he describes them in a small passage as „in general less rich in sensory elements than I am led to suppose is the case in other people“ (Freud 1900a, 546), we wonder why Freud can’t allow them to be rich. We sense the underlying exhibitionist tendency and realise the extend of self-exposure connected with it and the scandal this book aroused in its time. And this might explain a little the rather unscientific concept of censorship [Zensur], a term going back to Freud’s correspondence with his friend Wilhelm Fliess. There he wrote in December 1897 in order to account for the apparently absurd character of certain delusions: „Have you ever seen a foreign newspaper which has passed the Russian censorship at the frontier? Words, whole clauses and sentences are blacked out so that what is left becomes unintelligible” (Masson 1985). This sentence then is repeated in „The Interpretation of Dreams“, where the idea of censorship as a prohibiting, blackening or erasing force becomes central.

Around 1900 Freud seemed to think of censorship mostly as a censoring barrier or screen (Fig. 8) that keeps images and ideas from becoming conscious resp. too visible, thus protecting us from unbearable psychic contents. It took Freud another five years to develop his instinct or drive theory in which voyeurism, the sexualised drive to see (Fig. 9), and exhibitionism, the urge to show, play a prominent part. In the course of elaborating the vicissitudes of the scopophilic drive [die Triebschicksale der Schaulust] Freud’s concept of censorship changed from an abstract mechanism to a personalised force prefiguring his concept of the super-ego as it was fully developed in 1923 (Freud 1923b). In 1910, in a small text on „the psychogenic disturbance of vision“ Freud writes:

„Let us suppose that the [...]instinct which makes use of looking [...] has drawn upon itself defensive action [...] as though a punishing voice was speaking from within the subject, and saying: ‘Because you sought to misuse your organ of sight for evil sensual pleasures, it is fitting that you should not see anything at all any more’“ (Freud 1910i, 216f.)

This passage prefigures an expression in the „Introduction to narcissism“ where Freud introduces the ego-ideal [Idealich] (Fig. 10) as an inner-psychic power „watching, discovering and criticising all our intentions“ (Freud 1914c, 95). Later Freud called this agency the ego-censor, a term going back to his text on „narcissism“ as well, where he also introduces the dream-censor. Both passages were written in Rome at a time, when Freud daily visited Michelangelo’s “Moses” (Fig. 11).

II.

Practising psychoanalysis meant for Freud turning from dead scientific material to living beings. This led him to an understanding of science which undermined the subject/object division that has been connected with the Visual since Descartes. Alfred Lorenzer saw Freud’s „Moses of Michelangelo“ as an example for a psychoanalytic hermeneutics that does not separate the object of investigation from its subject. The further psychoanalysis evolved, the more it developed into an object relations theory, a conflict-theory. And conflicting relations culminate in scenes and those can no longer be observed from a comfortable distance (like sitting in a theatre-box): You are on stage yourself, you take part in the play (Lorenzer 1983, 112).

In the „Moses of Michelangelo“ Freud, in order to understand the statue and the power it had over him, pictured himself as part of the scene. He included himself (his position and fantasies) in the interpretation:

„For no piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this. How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero’s glance! Sometimes I have crept cautiously out of the half-gloom of the interior as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned - the mob which can hold fast no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience, and which rejoices when it has regained its illusory idols“ (Freud 1914b, 213).

Michelangelo’s „Moses“ preoccupied Freud’s phantasy for years. Visiting Rome in 1912 he wrote to his wife that he daily visited the statue. He brought a small plaster cast back home with him and asked Jones (when the latter visited Rome) to supply him with photos and drawings. On his next visit in September 1913 Freud - as he remembered later - visited the statue every day for almost three weeks: measured it, drew it until finally writing down his interpretation at the end of the year 1913.

In the text - after a few initial remarks on the power of images - Freud first describes what one sees: „The Moses of Michelangelo is represented as seated; his body faces forward, his head with its mighty beard looks to the left“ and so on (Freud 1914b, 214). But what first appears as a precise description of an objective perception is being questioned already a few sentences later. The carefully assembled art historic interpretations of the statue seem curiously inept. Everyone seems to see a different Moses. The various interpretative attempts with their divergence of views on the hero’s gestures and facial expressions, show, as Freud points out a couple of times, that everyone sees with other eyes. To some, the statue does not seem to express anything, others complain of the brutality of the figure. The tables rest against his side or are about to fall down momentarily. Moses agitatedly grasps his beard or just nervously plays with it. And the divergence of views not only concerns his gestures but also his facial expressions. They are perceived as showing either a complex mixture of wrath, pain and contempt or as looking beneficient and prophetic not to mention the also observed proud simplicity and inspired dignity .

In the end, Freud offers his own view, draws his own conclusions - although first publishing it anonymously. It is the observation of a detail, the gesture of Moses’ right hand, that opens for him the way to a new approach, a different view on the figure:

„What we see before us is not the inception of a violent action but the remains of a movement that has already taken place. In his first transport of fury, Moses desired to act, to spring up and take vengeance and forget the Tables; but he has overcome the temptation, and he will now remain seated [He will not ...] throw away the Tables so that they will break on the stones, for it is on their special account that he has controlled his anger; [...] that he kept his passion in check“ (Freud 1914b, 229f.).

Freud describes Moses as inhibited in his movement, as being in the process of restraining himself. He was, as he admits, inspired to this view by observations of the two art historians Carl Justi and Ludwig Knapp. They did not stop short at the general effect of the figure but concentrated on separate features, features we „usually fail to notice, being overcome by the total impression of the statue”, being paralysed by it (Freud 1914b, 219). Feeling overwhelmed by the general impression of the figure, the example of Justi and Knapp helped Freud to take a long and detailed look at the figure. While in the beginning of the text Freud pictures Moses as a frightening patriarch one does not dare to approach, in the course of the argument the statue changes into a benevolent father-figure Freud can even identify with[2]. Concentrating on minor but significant details Freud finally draws his own Moses, and this is „not the Moses of the Bible“ (Freud 1914b, 230). Just as in his words Michelangelo „has modified the theme of the broken Tables“, altered and transformed Moses’ character  (Freud 1914b, 233) Freud as well carved out his Moses, making himself independent of the Bible or former interpreters.

Jack Spector saw Freud coming „to grips with important questions about his perceptions and motivations through analysing his aesthetic responses, hence his interest in analyzing art“ (Spector 1972, 80). For Ernest Jones Freud used the Moses-figure as a screen on which he projected some of his wishes and anxieties thereby transforming the figure into a picture that actualised a scene in which a haunting inner image could surface, and he asked who is Moses in this scene and who is Freud when looking at him (Jones 1953-57, II). Yosef Yerushalmi saw in some passages Freud as Moses, but when Freud imagines himself to be one of the mob, “who, other than his father Jacob, could have been Moses in this moment” (Yerushalmi 1991). Peter Fuller finally interpreted Freud’s chosen method (a methodology based on anatomy, measurement, and objective observation) as a disguised identification with Brücke (Fuller 1980, 51f.). And as much as the identifications vary, the scene also changes, and not only the scene. Depending on Freud’s mode of seeing Moses’ expression changes as well: from an annihilating gaze, a frightening look under which one hardly dares to look back or to be seen at all, to a partially inhibited sight (where Freud focuses with sharp eyes on parts and details) to a distant, rather benevolent overall picture in which Freud finally consciously seems to change sides.

Already in January 1914, right after having finished his text on the “Moses of Michelangelo”, Freud gave Jones, as the latter tells us, an outline of his ideas on what was to become “Mourning and Melancholia”. Almost a year later a first draft was presented to the Mittwochsgesellschaft. The final text was published in 1917 (Freud 1917e). Since Freud’s first speculations on the functioning of the psychic apparatus in his „Project of a scientific psychology“, he had been interested in the problems of object loss and memory. Already in a letter to Fliess dated December 6, 1896 Freud talked of:

„successive registrations represent[ing] the psychic achievement of successive epochs of life. At the boundary between two such epochs a translation of the psychic material must take place. [...] Every later transcript inhibits its predecessor and drains the excitatory process from it. If a later transcript is lacking [...] an anachronism persists: in a particular province fueros [Geister, Wiedergänger] are still in force; we are in the presence of „survivals““ (Masson 1985, 208).

The concept was elaborated in „The Interpretation of Dreams“, assimilating the idea of an ordered succession of registrations in the different mnemic systems to his idea of two main systems or agencies: the Unconscious whose mnemic traces are principally not able to emerge into consciousness and the system Preconscious-Conscious whose memories can be actualised. But the connection of memory with mourning and loss in both cases, in the letter to Fliess as well as in the „Interpretation of Dreams“, is only hinted at. It took Freud almost fifteen years to explicitly deal with object loss. So what had enabled Freud to reopen the subject in “Mourning and Melancholia”? The editors of the „Standard Edition“ tell us that this was of course the introduction of the concepts of narcissism and the ego-ideal. As much as Freud had in his text on narcissism described “the workings of the ‘critical agency’ in cases of paranoia, so this one sees the same agency in operation in melancholia“ (Freud 1953-74, 13, 240). In mourning the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Memories and expectations in which psychic energy, the libido, is bound to the object are in the process of mourning first hypercathected [überbesetzt] and then resolved. But in melancholia, in the end the libido is not displaced on to another object but it is „withdrawn into the ego [...] where it serve[s] to establish an identification [...] with the abandoned object [leading to a ...] cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification“ (Freud 1917e, 249).

In the text on „narcissism“ Freud describes the ego-ideal as a critical agency, an innerpsychic power „watching, discovering and criticising all our intentions“ (Freud 1914c, 95). A similar phrase can be found in „Mourning and Melancholia“, and it returns in Freud’s text on „The Uncanny“, with a significant addition: „In the pathological case of delusions of being watched, this mental agency becomes isolated, dissociated“ (Freud 1919h, 235).

III.

Donald Meltzer speculated that it must have cost Freud a considerable internal struggle to free himself from the neurophysiological preconceptions of the Fliess period and become a

“phenomenological psychologist who could acknowledge that the past was present in the structure of the personality and not merely buried as „recollections“ in the repressed unconscious“ (Meltzer 1984, 17).

The main theme of „The Uncanny“ is Freud’s interpretation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novel „The Sand-Man“. The story is about the tragic fate of Nathaniel, a young man who cannot banish the memories associated with the mysterious death of his father. “On certain evenings his mother used to send the children to bed early, warning them that ‘the Sand-Man was coming’” (Freud 1919h, 227). And maybe because he was never able to catch even a glimpse of him, Nathaniel finally decided to find out what the uncanny visitor looked like. One evening he hid in his father’s study, recognised the lawyer Coppelius who seizes him and threatens to drop hot coal into his eyes. The father can beg him off though and the boy falls into a deep swoon. A year later, in the course of another visit, the father is killed by an explosion.

Years later Nathaniel, now a student, suddenly believes to recognise Coppelius in the optician Coppola. He buys a small telescope from him through which he spies randomly into a window across the street. There he sees Olimpia, an automaton, with whom he violently falls in love. But soon her inventors quarrel over her. Coppola tries to tear out her eyes, and this leads to another attack of madness in Nathaniel. Again he can recover, so it seems. One day, on a walk with his bride Clara, she suggests that they climb the Town Hall tower. And, in Freud’s words:

„From the top, Clara’s attention is drawn to a curious object moving along the street. Nathaniel looks at this thing through Coppola’s spy-glass, which he finds in his pocket, and falls into a new attack of madness. [...] he tries to throw the girl into the gulf below. [...] Among the people who begin to gather below there comes forward the figure of the lawyer Coppelius, who has suddenly returned. We may suppose that it was his approach, seen through the spy-glass, which threw Nathaniel into his fit of madness“ (Freud 1919h, 229)

In a letter to Ferenczi 1919 Freud called his text on „The Uncanny“ an old text. It seems to have been an unfinished manuscript which the editors of the Studienausgabe date back at least to „Totem and Tabu“, to the years 1912/13 (those two years in which Freud twice visited Rome and there daily visited Michelangelo’s Moses). Freud describes Nathaniel as someone who cannot banish his memories, who stays bound/fixed to a frightful inner image, a horrorful sight. But not only Nathaniel seems bound to the sight of Coppelius/Coppola, the devilish half of the two opposites into which the ambivalently experienced father-imago is split. Also Freud has eyes only for the Sand-Man. All elements of the story are related to this figure, up to a significant Freudian slip. As pointed out by Sam Weber (Weber 1973) for Freud it was Coppolas’ “approach, seen through the spy-glass, which threw Nathaniel into his fit of madness” (Freud 1919h, 229). But in Hoffmann’s narrative, it was not the sight of Coppola which drove Nathaniel mad, but his failure to see something in his telescope: “Look at that strange small grey bush which seems to be coming right towards us, said Clara. Nathanael mechanically reached into his side-pocket; he found Coppola’s glass, he looked to the side - Clara stood in front of the lens”.[3] But if Clara stood in front of the glass, Nathaniel could hardly have seen anything in it.

To see nothing is not that easy though, as most of the interpreters of Freud’s text show us. Following Sam Weber, Friedrich Kittler, Francoise Meltzer or Sarah Kofman all mention Freud’s Freudian slip, but they likewise see something in the telescope. For Kittler Nathaniel tries to look at Coppola through the glass but sees only Clara’s rolling eyes in it. (Kittler 1977, 141). Francoise Meltzer asks „why does Nathanael go mad once again upon staring at Klara’s eyes through the telescope?“ (Meltzer 1982, 234). And in Sarah Kofman’s text finally we read: „Through the spy-glass, it is the face of Clara [...] which appears terrifying to him, a veritable Medusa’s head, as he imagined her in his poem“ (Kofman 1991, 133). In the „Sand-Man“ Freud seems mostly interested in Nathaniel’s childhood fears and here mostly about his anxieties about losing or damaging his eyes. He interprets Nathaniel’s fear of going blind as a displacement of infantile castration anxiety (with the eye as a substitute for the male organ). But in the course of his argument Freud’s perspective slightly changes. Dealing with the Uncanny Freud seems to have run up again and again against the image of the child being alone in the dark. And it seems to have been this darkness, that finally led to a reformulation of his concept of anxiety: seeing the castration complex just as a special form of a diversity of anxieties which Freud eventually traces back to separation-anxiety (Freud 1926d). Already in „The Uncanny“ Freud describes castration anxiety as a „peculiarly violent and obscure emotion [ein dunkles Gefühl]“ (Freud 1919h, 231). The same term is used again at the end of the text, in a passage on silence, solitude and darkness as “elements in the production of infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free“ (Freud 1919h, 252). A little earlier Freud had already evoked the picture of being caught in a mist, where „one has lost one’s way in a mountain forest, every attempt to find the marked or familiar path may bring one back again and again to one and the same spot“. And a few passages later he talks about wandering „in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and collide time after time with the same piece of furniture“ (Freud 1919h, 237).

Already in the „Interpretation of dreams“ Freud hat described the “endeavour to penetrate into the mental process involved in dreaming” as an adventure in which eventually “every path will end in darkness“ (Freud 1900a, 511).

„There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; [...] This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot [...] have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium“ (Freud 1900a, 525)

Not to see, seems to lead to seeing the same, again and again, so forcefully that one has the feeling of colliding. Where we perceive something as uncanny we have to see something at all cost where actually there is nothing. And this at a place where there should be something - the absence of which we can’t bear to realise. So exactly on this spot we often find something, that complements as well as denies the dark spot, that either stands out or insists by its repetition (like the mushroom that sticks out of its mycelium).

In the „Interpretation of Dreams“ Freud defines as the primary task for the mental apparatus to keep itself free of stimuli. The most primitive way to do this is

„a discharge in movement [...]. A hungry baby screams or kicks helplessly. [...But] A change can only come about if in some way or other ([...] through outside help) an ‘experience of satisfaction’ can be achieved which puts an end to the internal stimulus. [And Freud writes:] An essential component of this experience of satisfaction is a particular perception [...] the mnemic image of which remains associated thenceforward with the memory trace of the excitation produced by the need. As a result of the link that has thus been established, next time this need arises a psychical impulse will at once emerge which will seek to re-cathect the menmic image of the perception and to re-evoke the perception itself, that is to say, to re-establish the situation of the original satisfaction. An impulse of this kind is what we call a wish [...] Thus the aim of this first psychichal activity was to produce a ‘perceptual identity’ [Wahrnehmungsidentität] - a repetition of the perception which was linked with the satisfaction of the need.“ (Freud 1900a, 565).

In this view images, pictures, dreams are compromise-formations, comforters, replacements for the perception of the absent mother as the primary object of desire: evanescent, lost and found, and „never completely reached by signs that render it distant at the same time as they point it out“ (Pontalis 1981, 28). But already in the „Interpretation of Dreams“ Freud differentiated between a replacement that represents the missing object and its hallucinatory revival. Only in the first case can the image be recognised as such, is there a difference between phantasy and reality, is it possible to retain, as Freud put it later, some degree of aloofness, which enables us “to recognize that what appears to be reality is in fact only a reflection of a forgotten past” (Freud 1920g, 19). It is a difference, whether the symbol is just representing the symbolised or whether it pretends to be the thing itself. And - coming finally back to “The Uncanny” - it was exactly this differentiation that Freud dealt with during his so called turn of the twenties, differentiating between a functioning of the psychic apparatus according to wish-fulfillment respectively the pleasure principle and a functioning beyond the pleasure principle.

The psyche can only function according to the pleasure principle when it’s binding function is basically established and stays unimpaired. Dealing with trauma Freud was able to perceive this binding capacity at the very moment when it was threatened, when there was a breach. As Laplanche/Pontalis pointed out „’Trauma’ is a term that has long been used in medicine and surgery. It comes from [a greek word] meaning wound, which in turn derives from a word meaning to pierce. It generally means any injury where the skin is broken as a consequence of external violence“ (Laplanche/ Pontalis 1973, 465).The traumatic neuroses as well as phenomena of repetition compulsion had showed Freud that the capacity to dream, to phantasise is a psychic accomplishment that cannot be taken for granted. For the late Freud delusion was like „a patch over the place where originally a rent [ein Riss] had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world“ (Freud 1924b, 151). You could say, for Freud delusion is a kind of disturbance of the image-function. It is the patch that denies the dark spot that a traumatic object loss has torn in our world picture.... that is dependent on a kind of „psychic system“ that is capable of binding an influx of energy, that enables to imagine in the face of darkness[4].

Both texts „The Uncanny“ and „Beyond the Pleasure Principle“ deal with the preconditions of the psychic functioning according to the pleasure principle, the precursory conditions for wish-fulfillment literally to take place. Binding can only perform its function after a kind of pre-binding has been established, a kind of framework which Pontalis - taking up Bertram Lewins theory of the „dream screen“ (Lewin 1946) – called a protective screen, a shield or a specific inner space, where the presentation can take place, “not unrelated to what painting attempts to delimit, to a painting [...] what makes things visible, what gives its visible place to déja vu, which had become invisible“ (Pontalis 1981, 29).

 

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Vision, S.E. XI, 211

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-         Freud, Sigmund (1920g): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E. XVIII, 7

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