JEAN-MARC LEMELIN
(with the linguistic collaboration of Danielle Lemelin)
DARWIN AND FREUD :
Sociobiology or Metabiology?
Panel discussion :
FREUDIAN THEORY : SCIENCE OR QUACKERY?
Departement of French and Spanish Seminar Series
Memorial University
February 28th, 2003
1) WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYSIS?
Psychoanalysis is both a theory and a therapy.
For the purpose of this discussion, I will adopt the
theoretical point of view, rather than the clinical
approach, and I will deal with science from there.
As a theory, Psychoanalysis has a triple point of
view : economic, dynamic, and topographical; it is a
Metapsychology, meaning that it is different from
Psychology and from Metaphysics, something deeper than
Psychology and beyond Metaphysics. Psychoanalysis is the
theory of the Unconscious : Freud did not invent the
Unconscious; he discovered or rediscovered it : in
dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, parapraxis, acting
out, literature, art, myths, politics, war, sexuality,
and madness. The Unconscious is present or manifest in
everyday life -- in our anxiety, our pain, and our
suffering.
2) WHO ARE THE MAIN PSYCHOANALYSTS?
Like every discipline, field or subject -- if you
except maybe Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, which
use numbers and formulas instead of letters and sentences
- Psychoanalysis struggles with languages : there is in
the field a language struggle between German, English,
French and, to a lesser extent, Spanish, Portuguese and
Italian theorists. Based on that, in my opinion, from a
theoretical point of view, the main psychoanalysts are :
Freud, Ferenczi, Reik, Roheim, Abraham, Jones, Klein,
Bion, Winnicott, Lacan, Leclaire, Perrier, and Legendre.
I would exclude Adler, Jung, and most of the
psychoanalysts of the International Psychoanalysis
Association [IPA] after the death of Freud in 1939,
especially after the exclusion of Lacan in 1953 (in fact)
or 1963 (officially).
3) WHAT IS THE ONTEGENETIC THEORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS?
Last year, one of my students said to me that she
was not interested in reading Psychoanalysis because
Freud was sexually obsessed. There is no doubt, for
Freud, that the Unconscious is directly related to
sexuality and language, to affect and representation, but
Psychoanalysis is not Sexology. Based on therapy, Freud
was able to see the relations between dreams and
sexuality, dreams and libido, dreams and desire, and
between the sexuality of the adult and that of the child,
also known as infantile sexuality. Everybody has heard of
the symbolism of dreams and of the mechanics (or
energetics) of the four stages (or phases) of infantile
sexuality : oral (or cannibal), anal (or sadistic),
phallic and genital; every stage or phase is libidinal,
but sometimes it is ego-libido - the subject's drive to
be and sometimes it is object-libido - the subject's
drive to have.
The Unconscious is also a matter of primary
processes, like condensation and displacement, metaphor
and metonymy, investment and identification, introjection
and projection, phantasies and drives, etc. The dynamics
between the primary processes and secondary processes -
such as fixation, inhibition, formation of the
Unconscious (compromise formation, reaction-formation,
substitutive formation) - is the foundation for Freud's
first topics; these concepts are based upon the
difference between the Conscious, the Preconscious and
the Unconscious, as well as the difference between thing-representation and word-representation. It is, however,
the introduction of the economy of the two principles -
the reality principle and the pleasure/displeasure
principle - with the theories of drive, narcissism and
masochism, which form the road to the second topics of
the Id, the Ego and the super-Ego in 1923.
Besides its insistence upon infantile sexuality
and on bisexuality, the main concept of Psychoanalysis -
and the one provoking the most opposition from religious
and political ideologies or scientific ideologies, and
the social or natural sciences - is the concept of a
castration complex. This complex differs sexually : with
a boy, it is known as castration anxiety; with a girl,
it is known as penis envy : possessing a penis
representing to her the ability to make a child for her
mother, receiving a penis representing the ability to
make a child for her father. For both, it is a matter of
ambivalence between love and hate, a generation struggle
where the parent - mainly the father for the son, also
the mother for the daughter - is a role model and a
rival for the child. This generation struggle is
certainly quantitatively different from one social class
to another, but generation struggles and class struggles
are part of what I call the struggle of the fathers. This
is where the social difference is a way to deal with or
displace the sexual difference...
[I would have liked, here, to speak about
neurosis and psychosis, but I don't have the time and, as
I already have said, it is not within the parameters of
this discusssion. For those who read French, I would
refer than to my last book, Le sujet, p. 56-70].
4) WHAT IS THE PHYLOGENETIC THEORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS?
Like Haeckel, Freud believed that ontogenesis
(individual development) recapitulates phylogenesis
(species development); but, at the same time, he wrote
that what is innate to the species has to be acquired in
the individual; in fact, ontogenesis does not
recapitulate phylogenesis, it invents it. That is why,
for Roheim, there is an ontogenetic theory of culture and
civilization, based on the primal scene and primal
phantasies of murder and incest; that is why there is
also no gap between individual psychology and collective
psychology. The Oedipus complex, or the castration
complex, is nothing else, from a collective point of
view, than the prohibition of incest, the main
prohibition being between mother and son, and the
prohibition of murder.
From Totem and Taboo to Moses, passing
by a
number of texts, there is what some call a "small short
story"; like others, I call it a "great narrative" : it
is the murder of the father of the primitive horde, by
the gang of brothers for the troop of sisters. This
historical or mythical event is the foundation of
paternity based on a presumption (a deduction, an
induction or an abduction) : this is the foundation of
fatherhood and of exogamy, by the way of the totemic
feast. This foundation is a genealogical invention and
not a genetic discovery. The historical or mythical
murder has been repeated in religion (Moses, Jesus
Christ), in mythology (Oedipus, Dionysus and other gods),
art (see the sculpture of Moses by Michelangelo
interpreted by Freud himself), literature (tragedy :
Oedipus, Hamlet; or most novels), bullfighting, etc. -
It is repeated in every murder!
For Popper however, a great narrative is not a
science - we will answer to that in question number 7.
5) WHAT IS SOCIOBIOLOGY?
Psychoanalysis is not incompatible with Biology,
nor Freud with Darwin. Despite Bickerton and Pinker,
Chomsky is probably incompatible with Darwin, but
Linguistics is not incompatible with Psychoanalysis; they
are all great narratives. It is not a question of choice
between Lamarck and Darwin : language, as speech and
discourse, is the transmission of the acquired
characters. Like Freud, Darwin was Lamarckian and, in The
Descent of Man, he was already talking about the
primitive horde; but, with Mendel and molecular Genetics,
Biology had to propose a "New Synthesis" [Simpson, Mayr]
: the Neo-Darwinism.
With Wilson and Sociobiology, we have a new "New
Synthesis". Based on Ethology, Sociobiology is not
distinguished here from Evolutionary Psychology. It is a
discipline which imposes genetic determinism of human
society and culture : genes - and not individuals or
species - reproduce themselves. The organism is reduced
to the genome, metabolism being ignored or marginalized.
The struggle for life is at the end a sperm war. Natural
selection is overturned by sexual selection in human
society because men and women don't have the same
strategies of reproduction : for Sociobiology,
reproduction is more expansive for women than for men;
their strategy must be qualitative and more selective. As
well, many psychological or socio-historical behaviors
have a genetic basis : autism, nepotism, altruism,
opportunism, jealousy, donjuanism, anorexia nervosa,
prohibition of incest, morality, and religion.
Sociobiology is the inversion of cultural, social or
structural Anthropology : for Lévi-Strauss, nature is
universal and culture is individual; for Tooby, nature is
universal and individual, culture is natural and
spiritual.
Usually, Sociobiology is rejected for political
or ideological reasons : it has been associated with
eugenism, racism, sexism, liberal economy (Malthus,
Smith), and the reactionary right. At the end of the
second millenium, however, Sociobiology was adopted or
claimed by Marxism and Feminism : by Chris Knight,
probably a marxist of the trotskyst tradition, Camilla
Power and Ian Watts; all are inspired by Turke and Dunbar
on one hand and by Engels and Lévi-Strauss on the other
hand. The class struggle is replaced by a sex struggle
and by another "great narrative" like this one :
In the beginning, humans - who were not already
humans - were dominated by men, who abused women and
children; that struggle was suicidal. This is why there
was a "symbolic revolution" of the "proletariat" of women
against the "management" of men : the sex strike, the
strike of the sisters, using synchronisation of
menstruations around the New Moon to be fertile around
the Full Moon, when the hunters came back with meat;
there was then an exchange of sex for meat, prostitution
being an exchange of persons, mainly women, for goods.
The new historical or mythical event was not the murder
of the father by the brothers; the new myth is the sex
strike by the sisters, which is the origin of the
evolution of culture and mind.
In one word, for Sociobiology, sexuality is
reproduction and paternity or fatherhood had been known
forever, even by animals other than humans - information
genetically and not genealogically passed on.
6) WHAT IS METABIOLOGY?
With Knight, Power and Watts, the speed or mood
of Sociobiology is hysterical or manic, feminist or
optimist; this is the hysterical speed or mood of a
maternal theory of evolution or nature : this is the
great narrative of the Mother. The speed or mood of
Metapsychology is obsessional or paranoiac, macho or
pessimist; this is the obsessional speed or mood of a
paternal theory of punctuation or culture : this is the
great narrative of the Father. For Sociobiology, the goal
of sexuality is reproduction of genes; that is its
teleology. For Metapsychology, reproduction is the effect
of sexuality and not its cause, but there is something
that both great narratives share : the taboo and/or
language of blood, blood as menstrual and maternal and
blood as criminal and paternal - the blood of periods
and the blood of meat. This taboo is the prohibition of
infest, which leads to the prohibition of incest - you
cannot share the blood of your mother - and to the
prohibition of murder - you cannot spill the blood of an
animal, especially if he is human, without paying the
price! Sexual predation or sexual hunting, the
reproduction by sexuality, leads to exogamy and dual
relations or structures of kinship; food predation or
food hunting, the production of food, leads to totemism
and sexual division of labor. Totemism is a pre-law, a
pre-religion and a pre-art at the origin of culture.
Sexuality, or sexual difference, is the origin of work,
tools, the domestication of fire, agriculture, craft,
etc.
That is the metapsychological part of
Psychoanalysis; the metabiological one deals with the
theory of the drive. While Sociobiology insists on the
multiplicity of instincts, like William James,
Metabiology makes a distinction between the life drives
and the death drive. With this last drive, come the
original or primal phantasies, which are related to
murder and incest, ambivalence, anxiety, repetition
compulsion and sense of guilt. Because of the most sexual
of drives, the death drive - which is not only a return
to the mineral or vegetal reign, but a detour by the
animal one itself - human life, in its anorganic
essence, is metapsychological and metabiological. Like
the essence of technics is not technical [Heidegger], the
essence of human life is not biological, meaning genetic,
but genealogical!
7) IS PSYCHOANALYSIS A SCIENCE?
For Popper and his criterion of falsifiability,
Psychoanalysis and History are not sciences. On the
contrary, Psychoanalysis questions epistemology and
science itself, as Heidegger did in Metaphysics and as
Derrida does in Philosophy and Literature. Science is not
thinking and knowledge is irreductible to learning as
truth is to knowledge. For Foucault, Psychoanalysis,
Linguistics and Political Economy are what he calls
counter-sciences; I prefer to consider Psychoanalysis as
an ab-science, because that which is excluded by the
discourse of science is the main topic of Psychoanalysis
- the subject, which is not the same thing as the
individual, ego or self. Psychoanalysis is still a
scandal for science, because consciousness is the essence
of science. Science has to reduce sense to meaning,
language to brain and subjectivity to error and illusion;
science has to ignore libido, desire, drives, phantasies,
but scientists cannot ignore these, because they speak.
This is particularily so when speaking their mother
tongue, which implies not only mind and brain, but the
whole body including the soul (as conduit of the senses),
flesh and heart.
The history of Life Sciences is full of
scientific ideologies, as Canguilhem showed in several of
his books, including Ideology and Rationality in the
History of the Life Sciences [1977 in French, translated
in English in 1988]. Despite the fact that Freud and
Lacan didn't have the same conception of science, the
former was trying to be in agreement with the Biology and
Anthropology of his time, while the latter did the same
thing with Linguistics and Mathematics. As "ab-science",
Psychoanalysis is "l'absente de tout bouquet"...
8) WHAT IS THE INSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM OF PSYCHOANALYSIS?
The International Psychoanalysis Association
was
founded in 1910 by Freud and Ferenczi; it has been
followed by dissensions, exclusions, expulsions, and
excommunications. In the beginning, this was probably in
great part because of the figure and presence of Freud
himself as a father to idolize and to hate, every
disciple waiting to overcome the master. After Freud's
death, at the time of World War II, Psychoanalysis was
taken in charge or taken over by Medecine and Psychiatry
in Great Britain and the United States of America. It
became taboo because of Germany and the Holocaust : on
the one hand, Psychoanalysis was associated with German
language and Germany; on the other hand, it was related
to Jewish people, psychoanalysts or not.
The Standard Edition of the complete works of
Freud, translated in English by Strachey, from 1953 to
1974 (in 24 volumes), was the beginning of the
anglicisation and medicalisation of Psychoanalysis. It is
an aspect of the language struggle in science, between
German and English and between English and French; the
Société psychanalytique de Paris (founded in 1926) and
the Association psychanalytique de France (founded in
1964) didn't accept the anglophone abbreviation IPA...
To finish, let's talk about Psychoanalysis and
the universities in North America and Europe. With the
exception of Paris VIII, in Saint-Denis close to Paris,
I don't know of an established and autonomous department
of Psychoanalysis (outside of Psychiatry and Medecine).
This may be because there is no more space, as it is
already occupied by Psychology, Behaviorial or Animal
Behaviorial Science, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience,
Biotechnology, Molecular Biology and Genetics. This is
why, like Semiotics, Psychoanalysis has to perform
between disciplines : Literary Studies, Comparative
Literature, Linguistics, Philosophy and Law. The main
institutional problem, however, is that the analytic
discourse is the negation of the academic discourse, as
the hysterical discourse is the negation of the master
discourse. The analytic discourse questions Power,
Religion, Science, Art and their boundaries; it is not a
scientific ideology or a political one. In the end, the
struggle of the mothers might overpower and overcome the
struggle of the fathers, as we see sex struggles,
Feminism against Phallogocentrism, and language struggles
replacing the generation struggle and the class struggle
in the Alma Mater of the Western World.
- If human cloning is not a crime against humanity and
if there is a struggle for life and a future for
Psychoanalysis, it might be in the therapy of clones!...