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    Against Heredity PDF

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    kronstadt

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    CHAPTER 1 Against Heredity The Question of Causality in Psychoanalysis Samo Tomsié Restating the Problem Psychoanalysis begins with etiology asa science that investigates the causes of mental illness. Yet, unlike most of his contemporaries, Sigmund Freud sought these causes in the mental rather than the physiological realm. He thereby flouted normal medical science, which strived to root these illnesses {in a neurological hereditary facto. In this same move, from the hereditary (o the symbolic, Freud developed a general theory of the mental appara- tus, which broke radically from the regimes of knowledge still grounded in a centralized model of consciousness. What is striking in this inaugu- ral move is that Freud mobilized the notion of cause, the scientificity of ‘hich had been questioned throughout modernity and had almost become redundant in the sciences by the time psychoanalysis was invented. With the accomplishment of the modern scientific revolution, the sciences no Jonger aimed at determining the causality underlying natural phenomena, but instead aimed at mathematizing their laws. In Isaac Newton's Principia ‘Mathematica, the historical movement that grounded positive science upon the combination of formalization and experimentation was stabilized. New ton’s general theory seemed to have solved the majority of problems that Preoccupied physics following the downfall of the Aristotelian paradigm. Consequently, the notion of cause, which had been imported into science from Aristotelian metaphysics, appeared redundant, f not pseudoscientific 2 Chapter 1 “The theory of causality was indeed one of the last remainders of Aristote- lianism that needed to be removed from positive science. In philosophy, the development from David Hume’ skepticism to Immanuel Kant’ critique produced a similar result, with the difference being that it restricted causal: ity to the realm of human cognition and transformed it from an ontological to a purely epistemological concept. “The main problem was that causality still presupposed the central posi tion of human observation in the field of knowledge. This centralization ‘contradicted the main achievement of Galieanism, which postulated the autonomy and stificiency of the mathematical apparatus inthe exploration of the physical real. Mathematics isa science without a human observer It {does not rely upon a subject of cognition (consciousness), which implies that its tools and procedures do not describe the world of appearances but rather something that thinking experiences as impossible. In the regime of ‘knowledge, where its centralization around the fixed and immovable point of the human observer had been abolished—in other words, where scien- tific knowledge had been radically depsychologized—the notion of cause necessarily became a remainder of the old epistemic regime. Recall that, for Hume, the continuity and connectedness postulated by the linear causal relation inevitably mixes human habitus into science and makes know! ceige obtained through the technological-mathematical apparatus depend tupon the psychological observer: In opposition to the claims of classical metaphysics, natural laws contain no stable and invariable necessity, and the notorious awakening from the dogmatic slumber that Kant described in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics concerns precisely the downfall of etiology as an essential ingredient of episteme, an awakening of philo- sophical thinking from the closed world of the ancients into the infinite uni- ‘verse of the moderns.‘ Kant seems to suggest that precritical thinkers such 3s Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and René Descartes did not entirely integrate the revolutionary consequences of the modern scientific revolution into philosophical knowledge. An important pillar of Aristotelian epistemology ‘as still standing, and this is what the critique was supposed to challenge. ‘We know that the Kantian solution consisted in maintaining that sclence ‘can drop the concept of causality, but the notion nevertheless persists in the mental apparatus, Causality is the subjective conceptual reaction to the objective appearance of nature. Kant evidently shared Fume’ epistemolog- ical skepticism, but he transformed it into a weapon of critique, thereby indicating a possible transformation of the concept. However if, for Kant, ‘causality remains limited to human cognition, psychoanalysis will take the additional and surprising step of renewing lts ontological dimension, Against Heredity I Freud's intervention into the problematics of causality will consist in detach- {ng the causal relation from the context in which it designated a stable and seemingly unproblematic continuity and in linking it to a disturbance or rupture of regularity and automatic repetition. In the context of psychoanal- ysis, causality will describe dysfunction rather than function, Furthermore the ran hoy frum il inode rc change inthe (Wopo- logical and temporal) representation of causality by replacing linearity lea and temp ) representation of causality by replacing linearity with By reformulating the problem of causality, psychoanalysis will my phlnphy and poste sence my hve eco hay in te do Iota vn hse dong in lp ny ws le, sion of production, Freud situated production—notably, the production of jouissance—at the very heart of psychoanalysis, which showed language and sexuality in an entirely different light and, in both cases, repeated the same decentering gesture as the concept of the unconscious in relation to think. ing, Indeed, Freud did much more than propose an etiological explanation of neuroses. When reading his early writings on hysteria—as well as some of his mature works, including The Interpretation of Dreams and “Papers on. ‘Metapsychology’—it is difficult not to see that the interplay of contradic- tory forces or psychical conflict is central to etiology: Freud did not analyze ‘unproblematic causal relations; rather, he reinterpreted causality as an inher- ently conflictual nonrelation between the insatiable unconscious formation (desire or drive) and the mental labor needed for its satisfaction. The nonse- Ietional aspect of causality became evident once neurosis was acknowledged as being more than a simple illness or disorder. Recall that psychoanalysis was established asa talking cure (asthe frst patient, Bertha Pappenlheim, whom Freud and Josef Breuer identified by the pseudonym Anna O, describes it) a treatment in which the patient assumes the positon ofthe subject. But i it really the patient who speaks, that is, does the fact that he ar she speaks as ‘ conscious subject mean that he or she is a neutral observer? Freud drew a

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