PLATONIC IDEAS
AND THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS

SZPIRKO Jean


How does one comprehend that a man of such "good reputation", inventor of a scientific system using pigmentation to make nerve endings visible, and above all a man who, in collaboration with Carl Koller, contributed to the discovery of the anaesthetic properties of cocaine, thus opening new perspectives in scientific research and surgery - how does one comprehend that this man, anxious to make a name for himself in the anti-Semitic society of his time, came to write books dedicated to subjects of such trivial importance as dreams, parapraxis, slips of the tongue and wit derived from Jewish folklore?
Moreover, how does one comprehend his continual resort to unconscious - therefore inaccessible - "repressed" infantile sexual theories, in order to explain not only the unexplainable, but also the logic of philosophers who seek - as scientists do today - a way to establish "world systems"?

An important term that I wish to highlight in the introduction of this text is the verb "to comprehend". This verb is a leitmotiv that is used extensively, each time a person speaks, addressing a more or less unbiased listener and from whom one expects, at the very least, an echo, a sort of approval, albeit silent: "You understand what I mean, don't you? In this article, I shall endeavour, with this verb as a basis, to formulate a brief argument to illustrate how the current "malaise in civilisation" is supported by a neo-platonic conception of the world, which is radically the opposite of the Freudian interpretation as reviewed by Lacan.
Without this opposition, neo-platonic philosophy could pass as obvious fact, and thus would not be questioned. It seems to me that it is precisely in the constraint produced by this questioning, which introduces a shift of certainties, that the defences against psychoanalysis are reinforced, to the point that the word "unconscious" is employed today in domains other than psychoanalysis, such as in neurobiology, with a completely different meaning. In Freud's sexualised unconscious, what is occasionally considered scandalous is not the exclusive reference to sex, but the consequences linked to the status of "ideas" which are never free from subjective concerns.
Comprehension is essentially related to logic and "scientific" knowledge, which offer ways of linking suggestions, differences, hierarchies, qualitative and quantitative values and rules of combination. Everyone knows that although knowledge may be transmissible, experience itself is not: every person has to rediscover for himself the taste of his first kiss however much literature he may have previously consulted on the subject.

There exists a relative incompatibility between the registers of reason and those of belief. The latter are illusorily shared by all in a sort of unspoken, implicit, fashion that passes for the obvious. When these "obvious facts" are found to be defective, one can count - among various possible remedies - on the appeal offered by ceremonies, preachings, debates that galvanise the emotions or mental constructions in which the disciplines that aspire to the status of "science" excel. In the domain of religious belief and of faith in general, reasoning has, however, unavoidable limits and can only offer Pascal's wager as a last resort.

Everyone has his own conceptions of the world, in the guise of more or less reputable or shared religions from which science and psychoanalysis are not excluded.
If Freud affirms that psychoanalysis is not a conception of the world, despite the position of many who pretend to have a sound knowledge of this discipline, Lacan, who emphasised the functions of language, can help us to uphold why. These "reasons" will shed light on a certain modern resistance to psychoanalysis. For Freud, as for Lacan, humanisation, access to language and sexual development accompany each other in a specific history, in which the relationships to truth and to knowledge never cease to pose problems and query the "good reputations" that take refuge in a society's "politically-correct".

In the sciences, where the term "to observe" holds a privileged position, observation is only made possible when the acquired references are constantly called upon: the designation without which nothing could be seen. A discovery only becomes "observable" through a naming process within the framework of a specific discipline that offers it a place to be recorded and transmitted, while waiting for complements, nuances and critiques.
A concept only exists in the framework of language or of writing: without words to explain their combinations, equations and formulas would be indecipherable.

According to Plato, shadows represent an allegory of language. By applying to the "myth of the cave" the inverted perception that Levi-Strauss proposes to apply to other myths, we can grasp how an idea can be born of an idea, starting with man's inability to say exactly what he would like to say, without abandoning, however, the hope that he will be able one day to do so. The perspective lines of speech converge towards infinity. At this arbitrary point, both symbolic and imaginary, two terms become one: the Idea and the Being, to which no one has access. In other words, the Idea has no existence prior to its wording, it is the result of the inability of language to fully encompass or to master it in the movement of speech. The Idea is, like language, born of an endless quest for the Holy Grail, which no one abandons without difficulty.
Thus it becomes possible to express how the access to language, without which knowledge cannot exist, establishes within the same movement a relationship to a lack: that lack which structures desire in relation to its elusive object. This perspective may explain the way "science" is revered like a fetish. This form of modern idolatry is evoked or questioned in works of art or literature, in particular in films, the privileged realm of the cult of images, where it becomes possible to gain access to the subjective world of another person ( Tron, The Matrix, Existence, The Sixth Sense...).
We therefore witness the re-emergence of neo-platonic concepts (1): the notion that ideas are accessible and understood by all, by virtue of a grace, a higher power or through technological means. The latter offers a sort of virtual universe that could be explored by many, from the same perspective, each being able both to "comprehend" and to share an experience with others. As a result of these techniques, the verb "to comprehend" and the noun "communication" become the new forms of communion, celebrated in many secular masses within institutions and companies.

Considering psychoanalysis to be an obsolete discipline preserves the ignorance of the perpetual refutation it opposes to the promoters of new religions - New Age, Scientism, Liberalism and Communism - that is to the "good sentiments" that ignore the ambiguity of ideals in the way racism acts in the name of a pretence of tolerance advocating a "right to difference".
Promoting the belief in "ideas" doubtless means the illusion can be maintained that it is possible to resolve the problems connected to the radical difference that separates "beings" by means of current or future technical solutions. This avoids questioning language, without which these ideas would not have been born. The belief in ideas also makes it possible to disregard a contradictory aspiration: wanting to be both different from others and to be like everyone else. The concept of "subject" that permanently escapes the "fantasy of mastery", which differs in each case in its radical singularity, offers a non-normative response to this contradiction.
If psychoanalysis is not a conception of the world, it is because its theories are inseparable from a practice that interrogates the linguistic forms which both express and conceal, depending on the case, the difficulty to verbalise suffering, the body, the truth, the Being or the Idea, without proposing an illusory resolution. To renounce this illusion implies that one accepts a certain relationship to the lack by which desire is construed as an idea that the works of psychoanalysts try to define, sometimes without taking proprieties into account.

In this identification of an ideology in our civilisation that refers to neo-platonic concepts, psychoanalysis offers the opportunity of another perspective. That scientists - without naming them and probably unknowingly - call on Plato to resist Freud, it is an uncomfortable operation that reinforces the keenness of one's perspective on current affairs.

 

(1) For Plato Ideas, remain inaccessible.

Traduction Myrtil Boukris et Alison Crossley