Psychoanalytic Myths of Life after Life
Yehuda Israely
Introduction
At the occasion of a conference held at Tel-Aviv, to celebrate the publication in Hebrew of my recent book: "The Craft of the Lacanian Treatment", I prepared a lecture. There was no point repeating what was already in the book but still, I thought it would be better if it would be related, so I took off from the point at which the book ends.
I chose two excerpts. One to recap the essence of the book, from the middle, and one from the end, as a mainspring for what I wanted to say about "Psychoanalytic Myths of Life after Life." By this title I mean, what are some fantasies, stories and constructions made by Freud and Lacan about the afterlife, life after death or even life beyond or before life. What devices did they use to convey ideas about this topic?
The first excerpts deals with the short session or the cut session, one of the more prominent features of the Lacanian treatment:
"The cutting of the session expresses the ethical commitment of the analyst to the analysand's desire. If in other theoretical frameworks, after predetermined forty-five or fifty minutes, the therapist gathers the unconscious of the patient before sending him or her out to the world, in the Lacanian treatment the analyst needs to be alert at all times to find the accurate point of cutting. The normative-obsessive structure of predetermined fifty minutes can tempt the analyst to relinquish the responsibility to take a stand in relation to the desire present in the analysand's speech, and instead, strengthen the analysand's belief in normality. In a similar was, the analysand may take decisions in his or her life on the basis of arbitrary or normative-adaptive considerations.
If not the norm guides the end of the session, what does? The same basis we would like to be the guide to any decision, namely – the desire of the analysand. The stand that the analyst takes buy cutting the session is vis-a-vis the desire of the analysand's subject of the unconscious. If at an end of a topic the analysand says "that's it!" the analyst cuts as if he or she is saying: "By saying 'that's it!' you express your desire to end the session and my loyalty is to your desire"."
The second excerpt is from the end of the book and deals with the question that will be asked at the end of life, brought from the end of Lacan's seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" – "Have you lived according to the desire that is in you?"
"It is true that today the pharmaceutical and cognitive-behavioral approaches take a central role at alleviating mental suffering in the western world; but psychoanalysis still exists, on its practices, institutions, and it is irreplaceable in combining curing the symptom with living a meaningful and desirous life, and not under the auspice of religion or other prescribed norms.
The grace Freud brought to humanity with the discovery of the unconscious still exists. There still exists a place where words have the power to alleviate pain in the body as if by magic, to ignite passion were there was depression, or remove anguish and replace it with longing. There is still a belief in something that is grander than us, the unconscious that stems from us and we can assume responsibility for it without guilt, but with humility, that is a cure in itself. There are still those who ask the question: 'are you living in accordance with your desire?' and wait patiently until the response will be yes!"
This logical point at the end of life needs a context that extends beyond life itself. Without such a vision this moment in time is meaningless. Meaning, as portrayed in the basic cell of the graph of desire, in the après-coup construction, is a point of junction between the temporal, diachronic chain of signifiers of speech, and the a-temporal, synchronic chain of language. Meaning is produced in the clash between past and future; it is an effect of past cause as well as cause for future effect. Meaning is "because of" something in the past as well as "for" something in the future. Myths of the afterlife can give a context that provides authority to the moment of death to give meaning to the life that was lived. The fantasy of being questioned at the stairway to heaven about the life that was lived is essential in order to pass the test of living a meaningful life. I want to demonstrate how the founders of psychoanalysis, Freud and Lacan, provided us with such myths that they weaved themselves.
Mythical thinking
The structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described what a myth is. He took as an example the myth of the aborigines of Vancouver: The fishermen could not go out to sea because the vicious Wind of the south blew harshly and relentlessly. The fishermen came to the Skate-Fish and asked him to speak with the Wind of the South on their behalf. The Skate and the Wind of the South agreed that the wind will blow every other day so that the fishermen could go out fishing every other day as well.
Levi-Strauss explains the function of the myth. It is a way of organizing knowledge in an illiterate society, where spoken stories are the main instrument for storing and transferring knowledge. Because knowledge must fit the format of speech, it must be organized linearly, as the words are arranged in a temporal line. It is impossible to speak more than one word at a time. This is the diachronic line. Knowledge that is structured as a diagram, formula, or hyperlinked text, is structured synchronically. The Skate is a fish whose upper side is dark and lower side is light. It is a "black and white" animal. If we conduct a synchronic reading of the diachronic myth, the outcome would be something like this: The wind of the South blows according to the binary function.
Psychoanalytic myths
I will review three Freudian and one Lacanian myths. The Freudian myths are "Oedipus", the father of the primal horde in "Totem and Taboo", and the death drive in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle". The Lacanian myth is the Lamella in "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis."
Oedipus
Freud borrows Oedipus from Sophocles. According to Feud, this myth demonstrates the way in which the unconscious is structured in each of us. The father's prohibition against remaining attached to the body of the mother, the threat of castration, is the limit that is the cause of desire, or chronic dissatisfaction that is the human condition. This being for a good reason for excessive jouissance can be fatal. Without limits children can become savages.
For Lacan, not only is Oedipus a metaphor for any father, any father is only a metaphor for something else, and so is the mother. What is responsible for the chronic dissatisfaction that enables a life of desire and not suicidality of excessive jouissance is language. The act of speaking is what kills the Real thing. The very representation of the Real thing in signifiers reduces the jouissance that is derived from it. Speaking is responsible for the reduction in jouissance but it is also the instrument of pursuing it.
A joke exemplifies it: A four year old child who never spoke a word said to his mother: "Can you please pass me the salt?" his astonished mother said to him "How come you never said a word?" – "It had enough salt". The signifier comes at the place of the missing thing.
The Primal Father
The myth of the father of the primal horde was invented by Freud himself. It is a fable whose function is to exemplify the transition from apes to humans, from nature to culture. There once was a horde of ape-people who lived according to the rule of the jungle. The ruler who had sexual access to all females and fought with all jealous males was the alpha male. The transition from ape to man was the discovery of coalition. While a weak ape cannot topple the alpha male, a coalition of weak apes can. So all his male offsprings killed him and the strongest of them took his place. He was killed in turn and the next one in line, as well as all the others, realized that the coalition system was not functional enough.
If in the rule of the jungle no one could curb the excessive jouissance of the primal father, now there was no one who could curb the excessive jouissance of the coalition. In order to continue the existence of the horde, they needed a leader who is not alive, therefore cannot b killed. He will not be human and will not evoke rivalry. This is the totem. It is a mythological animal like the jaguar or armadillo that is referred to as the ancestor of the horde. In letters between Einstein and Freud, when Einstein asked Freud for ideas how to promote world peace, Freud returns to the idea of a coalition of nations against a primal dictator as the key. Today the Totem is reincarnated in concepts such as constitution, God, or the institution of government and presidency. The real leader is super-human while the human leader is only the representative; the pope is a stand-in for Jesus.
If we juxtapose the Oedipal and the Totemic myths we will see the following idea: The father who limits the jouissance of the son creates desire, the principle of coalition that limits the jouissance of the father creates community. In both instances language and culture replace jouissance of the body and law of the jungle.
Death Drive
In his essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Freud ponders the riddle of shell-shock – post traumatic stress disorder. Why would a person choose, even unconsciously, to return to the traumatic event, in his or her nightmares, night after night for years?! Here is where Freud considers the source of masochism in the experience of excessive excitation, even when it is painful. This direction directly opposes the natural animalistic inclination for balance, homeostasis or reduction of tension; and what is the source of the animalistic striving toward reduced tension?
For this purpose Freud invents the myth of the death drive. The origin of the living is from the inanimate. The living cell is built from atoms that are inanimate. The same myth appears in the biblical aphorism "From dust you came to dust you shell return." But Freud adds to it the yearning to go back to the state of dust. This is one form of the death drive, the myth of the longing of the living to its original state of no movement, no tension, stillness. Freud animate the physical principle of entropy. Homeostasis is the pleasure principle while the opposite tension-seeking-drive is beyond the pleasure principle. In this respect, masochism is the opposition to the death drive, but heightened tension leads to ecstasy, obliteration of the subject and eventually another form of death drive.
If we juxtapose the three myth one on top of the other like transparent sheets we will get a picture in which excess jouissance, in the direction of still-life or in the direction of ecstasy, are both is opposition to the principle of family and society, be it uninhibited violence and disregard for law on one side or suicidal attraction to the inanimate on the other side. Culture is the refusal to the extremes of the death drive. Unlike the extreme condition, a certain amount of dissatisfaction enables desire, participation in language and making use of speech, living social and communal life, and a handling a certain degree of tension. Only in language presence and absence are interchangeable. A dog can only have food or be lacking it. In human language the paradox of "having hunger" or "having the lack" can exist. Only in language lack gets a status of existence.It is language that makes appear presence and absence simultaneously, and enables a refusal of the extreme conditions of all or none of the death drive.
Lacan's Lamella
Sex and death came together to the world. A single-cell organism such as an amoeba does not die a natural death. It just keeps on dividing indefinitely and always remaining the same one. The appearance of sexuality in the world brought death with it. The creature that temporarily keeps on living is the offspring carrying the genes of its parents but soon enough it has to die too. Lacan uses this biological story as a myth for the idea he tried to convey while teaching the subject of the drive.
The Lamella is an Amoeba-like creature that is the stuff of our nightmares. It spreads like a black stain and devours anything in its path. Like the "Nothing" in "The Never Ending Story." It is the lethal jouissance of addiction, of unrestrained drive; At the same time, it is a single cell organism that represents the wholeness that preceded the sexual division and the death sentence. The Lamella is the object of yearning, the object that because of its being lost we were condemned to a life of sex and death. This is in line with Freud's view of the drive as essentially a drive for unity and death. If for Freud, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" the longing-terror is directed toward the inanimate as death, for Lacan the experience of longing-terror is in relation to the a-sexual eternal state.
There is a bargain in each of these myths. In Oedipus, at the price of losing the battle to the father the child gains the family, a sense of belonging, and eventually identification with the father, achieving manhood and the ability to become a father himself. For the girl it’s a similar course – identification with the father in order to separate from the mother and achieve subjectivity, but an extra detour returns her to the mother for gender identification. The afterlife is in the continuity of the family institution from one generation to the next. Sophocles demonstrates this eventually with Oedipus's offspring, Antigona, when she was ready to sacrifice her own life in order to bring her brother to proper burial and keep the sanctity of the family institution.
In Totem and Taboo, the unrestrained jouissance of the living body, the control of the dictator, is bartered for brotherhood, law, constitution, and identification with the Totem that is imbued with eternal qualities like God. The animal as a symbol for the Totem convey the idea that eternity also takes the form of identifying with nature.
In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", language enables the replacement of the thing with the presence of the name that represents it. The serenity of the inanimate and the ecstasy of the trauma are exchanged for living a symbolic life of desire.
In the myth of the Lamella Lacan includes the previous myths of Freud and takes them a step further. In exchange for the eternal life of the single-celled organism, the multi-cellular human organism receives the symbol, speech and language. The eternal life that was lost with the inauguration of sexuality returns with the advent of the signifier. The Lamella is both, the lost eternal single-cell and its return as signifier, like the Totem, a primal animal refusing to succumb to the limitation of biological time. The word allows humans a window to the beyond of his or her organic time on Earth. That is why significance is possible in commemoration, creation and a vast array of Totems.
In the seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" 1960, Lacan said that what was created at the first death survives the second death. What was created at the first death is the word at the death of the thing, death of the raw jouissance. What survives the second death is the signifier that transcends the organic death of the individual. The myth of the Skate fish allows the fishermen to believe that tomorrow the wind will subside and they will be able to go out to sea. The myths of psychoanalysis make it possible to believe that life has meaning beyond the pleasure of living it. Life, like the myth, can be read diachronically, as a narrative, temporally from beginning to end, but it can also be read synchronically, simultaneously, in a dimension that is beyond time and its limits.
