José Martinho - Parte 1 - Freud e lacan - Pensamento inconsciente e sonho

For this first session we invited professor José Martinho, who is simultaneously, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst. I suppose everyone read the small curriculum we divulged; I'm not going to repeat what's in the curriculum, I'll only thank the fact that he has accepted the invitation, and mention the pleasure we have in having him here. The title of the communication, of the conference, as you have seen, refers to the Unconscious, and the theme of the Unconscious is, precisely, a part of the matter we have been addressing in classes, the best we know, obviously, but today we will be able to learn a little more. I don't even know if it was the correct way of approaching the theme, the one we chose: we centred on three of Freud's texts on the subject: the article from 1915, The Unconscious, a chapter of the essay The ego and the Id, and the 31st lesson of the New Conferences on Psychoanalysis, in which appears a famous phrase that those who know German are aware of the difficulty of translating, Wo es war soll ich werden, which I translate savagely as: "Where It was, must the I be". There are other possibilities besides this one. I would give the word to our guest, right away. José Martinho A very good afternoon to all, I thank you very much for you presence. I would like to begin by telling you how I understood the invitation that was addressed to me. I didn't get to talk in person with Dr. Morujão, we just exchanged a few rather synthetic e-mails - that was it, we didn't get to talk? -, but I understood -- well, it appears normal to me, to the lovers of Philosophy -- that there was an interest in what it is, to think. It seems normal that the friends of wisdom, the philosophers, think, and that we question ourselves, for example with Heidegger, about "what does it mean to think?" I don't know if you are familiar with this text in which Heidegger says surprising things, for example that Science does not think. But independently of this interrogation about what it signifies to think, it also seemed to me that there was a doubt, or not, about if the thought has to be forcefully conscious, that is, if there aren't unconscious thoughts. In any case, this doubt presents itself, even in Philosophy, as a resistance -- I could cite several names -, as philosophers have a tendency to resist, not only to the concept of the Unconscious, but even more, to that unconscious thoughts may exist. Well then, departing from these two problems: what is it to think and if there are or there aren't unconscious thoughts, and if there are, what novelty does that bring, I decided to begin by reminding you how the question of the thought is placed to the Moderns -- by convention, the "Modern Times" refer to: not to what is happening today, here and now, but to something that began in the seventeenth century -- more precisely, how is the question of the thought placed after Descartes. Descartes has radically distinguished, thinking from what is thought, cogitare, to cogitate, from what is cogitated, cogitatum. The problem is, that he also believed there was a subject behind the thought, an ego or an I, that thinks, the denominated ego cogito, the thinking subject. This supposition in particular has made him cut in half the old unique Substance of Aristotle. He divided this Substance into a thinking substance, res cogitans, and into an extensive or material substance, res extensa. I'm seeing a blackboard here as I haven't seen in centuries, with chalk and everything. Is there any light above? I can see there isn't. To simplify the cartesian dualism, I'll write down the list of cartesian bipolarities: The subject and the object, mostly on the level of what is the theory of knowledge, the subject that knows and the object he knows. This little philosophical playing -- well, I don't want to get into detail, but arriving to this wasn't easy it was a really radical turn in the history of Philosophy But what is then programmed, are these oppositions that are, somehow, going to organize a lot of what we say and think henceforward. The debate with Descartes, on his thought, the work of Descartes, is a current debate which is far from being finished. Even the so called "Postmoderns", who dreamt of having surpassed the Cartesian Modernity, have already retracted -- now they are no longer called "Postmoderns", but many other things -, they didn't exit this problematic. This debate exists not only in Philosophy, which interests you in particular, it also exists in Psychology, I don't know if we have a psychologist here, it also exists in the Cognitive Sciences, of which I think you have already spoken of, and it exists today, with special importance, I'd say, in Neurobiology, in what is called the "Neurobiology of the mind". A lot of what the thought was, of what Psychology was, is today being subsumed by the Neurobiology of the mind, a science full of promises, with great future, at least that's what I wish it. For example, in the area of Psychology, where I teach, the psychologists that up until a recent date had a formation inspired on experimental and scientific Psychology, the so called Cognitive-Behavioural Psychology, are all moving to Neuropsychology. The areas connected to neuropsychology appear to be the future of Psychology. In spite of this fact, I don't want to simply talk about the past. Psychoanalysis is not dead; it's alive and kicking. Dualism? There is a postulate today, and two theses follow this postulate and inform the Neurobiology of the mind. This postulate has already been part of a song, I will say it in English, because when said in English we can immediately see where it comes from: no brain, never mind. Is it necessary to translate? No? Everyone speaks English. If there is no brain, there is no mind. Well, I am here at Universidade Católica(Catholic University), I don't know my audience, but, evidently, if we believe in God, in the immortality of the soul, this appears to be a fantasy. Believing in God suffices to believe in the immortality of the soul, that there are souls about. This is not a scientific problem; in any case science hasn't yet took account of this kind of problems. I'll leave aside all of those that still believe, not all of those, but the arguments of those who believe in the immortality of the soul, in the existence of some ether or some divine breeze, of something ethereal. I will restrict to, what is called these days, the Neurobiology of the soul, let's put it this way. So, departing from Descartes, and from the current postulate, there are two major theses: one that says, all right, no brain, never mind, but, "brain is not mind", the brain is not the mind. We must distinguish it. I usually say to my Psychology students: "you have an interest in defending this thesis, because if you say that the mind, the psychism, is cerebral then leave Psychology and go practice Neurobiology, as there is no point in being interested in something that doesn't exist." But in the Neurobiology of the mind there are also those who defend that, for you knowledge, that the brain and the mind are not the same thing. These are the Cartesians. These are those who defend the dualism of the body and of the soul, or of mind and matter, the neural matter. I could give you several names; the most renowned is a certain Fodor - funny name - who entitles himself as "neo-Cartesian". There is no doubt that he defends that idea, even if in a more current vocabulary, that the brain is sort of a machine, of hardware, and the psychism would just be the software, that's the metaphor of the computer-brain. So we have the cartesians in the domain of Neurobiology and of the influence it has on philosophical reflection and others. And then we have the anti-Cartesians. Descartes continues to be crucial. The anti-cartesians are not dualists, but monists, they believe in an unique substance, again. What does this mean? That, effectively to them, mind is brain, meaning that there is nothing about the mental activities, including those who are connected to the most elevated stages of conscience as the social and moral conscience, that can't be explained, today or tomorrow, by neurobiology, and, therefore there's no need to distinguish the body from the soul, hardware and software, it's the same Substance. The most famous example of this thesis is the one of António Damásio, our compatriot. That's what he swears on joined feet(on his life). He became world famous, at least outside his laboratories, by publishing a book entitled Descartes' Error. Descartes is still a hinge in this discussion. Well, this is the thought as it was placed to the Moderns departing from Descartes, and just how he, in the present, still agitates contemporary debates. How are we going to place Freud, the name who baptises Psychoanalysis, on this debate? And Lacan? I don't know if you have already heard of, since it's rare in Portugal to have an interest in this gentleman who is already dead, and perhaps it will take another hundred years to speak about him. I don't know if you know, but he is a psychoanalyst of first importance in the History of Psychoanalysis, that has cut that history in half, to the point that psychoanalysts are either Lacanian or non-Lacanian, there's nothing else. It's something of this order. The reading Lacan did of Freud is crucial to enter this debate. You can't have this discussion with other psychoanalysts. Those who aren't Lacanian are not interested in this. So, to tell you how I introduce Freud into this debate, I will refer, not to those texts Dr. Morujão has cited and that you seem to have worked on, but only to two indications of Freud, given even before the date of birth of Psychoanalysis, that we may situate around 1900, which is the date he chooses to the publication of the Interpretation of Dreams, a book he had written a little earlier, but he then asks the editor to publish it on that date that marks the beginning of the century. Freud thinks that Psychoanalysis was to be born with the sex ("sexo" -- slip), with the century ("século"), and that it would last, dominate throughout the twentieth century. The first indication of Freud is from 1890, ten years before the Interpretation of Dreams, and appears on an article called The Psychical Treatment or Soul Treatment, in which Freud begins by saying that "words are the main instrument of psychic treatment". In the full panoply of instruments, in all the methodologies that can be used to that so-called "psychic treatment", the word is predominant. And five years later, in 1895, the moment in which he distances himself definitely from what he was, from the point of view of his academic studies -- and what was he? A medical doctor and a scientist - he distances himself because he will never practice medicine again, he will never conduct research in Neurophisiologic laboratories again, but he also moves away from what the different "psychotherapies" are, they didn't exist at the time, therapies of the soul he practised until then: hypnosis, suggestion, catharsis; he steps back because he was able to read, to recognise the value of something that was said by a patient, who wasn't even his, but that of a colleague with whom he worked, the designated "Anna O.", clinical name, who explained him and his colleague Breuer, that what they were doing and the results they obtained, came from what she called, in English, a talking cure, a cure through the means of the talk. It wasn't immediate, but some time after -- Breuer pulled away for several reasons -- that Freud took the due conclusions, and henceforward Psychoanalysis became a talking cure. He installed himself as a psychoanalyst, that is, someone who made people talk, who was there to listen, and all the previous therapeutic methods were cast aside. He changed his laboratory; he installed the new laboratory in his consultation room. I could develop this much further for you to understand it better, but I would simply say that these two indications, that words are the main instrument of the psychical treatment and that the practice of Psychoanalysis is a talking cure, are sufficient to understand that Freud introduces, in the previously reffered dualism, a third term which is the word. The word has predominance over the soul and the body. We have the psychism, either on the level of the psychic apparatus or on the level of mental functioning. And we have the body, which is a complex thing because, for instance, the body is not the organism. Psychoanalysis does not operate, does not befall on the organism. Freud speaks of a "spiritual organism" therefore there would be a physical plus a psychical organism. Let's maintain this difference to emphasize that what Freud tells us is that in Psychoanalysis, if we want to have an effect upon the soul and upon the body, we have to start from the word: Freud doesn't quote, but he could have quoted Aristotle when he says that the specific difference of the human gender is precisely language, Logos, even if it has a wider definition. What characterizes Man is being an animal, surely, but an animal that goes against nature, exquisite, bizarre, because it speaks, it's the only one that speaks and is spoken by others. And that's why he gets organized politically, and is capable of doing Medicine, Philosophy, etc, etc. Freud doesn't put things this way, that language is the constituent factor of being itself or human existence, not of the animal, the animal constitutes itself in another manner, but as stated by Phenomenology, there is a difference between life and existence. To live and to be are two different things. Life is a common phenomenon to every living creature. To be, or to exist, is something else. In a certain way, only man exists or is. What Freud tells us, is that the human being, the human nature depends precisely on the word. He counts on the word not only to approach human nature, which is a cultural, historical nature, etc -- he counts on the word in his psychical apparatus theory -- besides, in his first approach of the questions of the psychism, which is related to aphasias, which are language disturbances, he uses the expression "language apparatus", and not psychic apparatus -, but he counts on the word at this time for what he calls the cure -- it's not him that names it, but the refered patient who started to feel relieved, getting better -, all in all to transform the representations that affect the patients, the human beings, to their utmost intimacy, to that which, in a certain way, remains more occult. That most intimate is what Freud will call the Unconscious. And what does he say about the unconscious, namely on the book about the dreams? He says they are thoughts. They aren't the cartesian thoughts, they are thoughts that unroll, using a Fechner's expression, in "another scene" of the psychism other than the conscience, they are thoughts that escape conscience, will, intentionality. They are unconscious thoughts. It's through these unconscious thoughts, that unroll what he calls the "unconscious formations"; that's what he presents in a first moment through the dreams, the lapses, and the slips of the tongue. This aspect is illustrated by three essential texts, The Interpretation of Dreams, which has presently an excellent Portuguese translation, which has even won a translation prize last year, from Relógio d'Água (there was a previous one which was rather poor); Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which is also translated in Portuguese, a rare thing; the third book is not translated to Portuguese, we may call it O Dito de espírito (The Said of wit), or the Chiste (Joke), as the brazilians say, the thing that makes us laugh, but in it's relations with the Unconscious. Those who said before that laughter was proper of Man hadn't thought about this. This kind of formations are the things that make us commit an error, that make us dream, which Freud analyses precisely on this side. And on the other side, on the body level, the word has also an importance, because the incidences of the word on the physical and psychical organism, are the ones who will in a certain way redesign, not only the anatomy, but also certain body functions, and produce something never seen before which he names the "drive" and it's "vicissitudes" (there's a translated text in Portuguese with this title): Therefore we have, the formations of the unconscious and the vicissitudes of the drive. He discovers for instance that the hysterical anatomy isn't the same that the anatomopathology's anatomy. It's a different anatomy, governed by other designs, the drawings imprinted by the word not only on the thought but also on the body. Henceforward we see -- and that's what I want to emphasize, in a certain way -- that, would there be a model that Freud could provide, it would be a non cartesian model, but it wouldn't also be anti-cartesian, in the sense of the monism; it's not a dualist model, it's not a monist model, it's a trinitarian model, a model that comprehends a third element, that escapes that problematic, or, when it doesn't escape, as it happens sometimes in the Neurobiology of the mind, language appears as an object of Neurobiology, and from that moment on all is lost. There's a deviance in the apprehension of what language is. Here, language functions as in Aristotle; it's a principle, a principle that we could almost say metaphysical, a principle for what we think and for how we are going to behave in function of what we have in our head. For instance, if I believe in God, I will attend the mess. But if I don't believe in God, I won't do it. That's how I'll behave. Our attitudes, behaviours, our relations depend greatly on what is in our head, and because of that, our body transports what we are, over here or over there, which is, finally, what we think. So, here we have a trinitarian model, in addiction to the dualist or monist model. But I would say, that's not enough. This is one of the things Lacan brought to psychoanalysis, without straying away from Freud, but as he says, returning to Freud. Not to be stopped on Freud, but to re-depart from there, because, psychoanalysts at that time were no longer reading Freud, or didn't read much Freud. Lacan says there is a remainder. The word interferes with the soul and the body, but something surpluses, a remainder, which Freud names the symptom. If we take on account the dimension of the symptom properly said, we are now on the level of a quadripartite structure, not only ternary, but quadripartite; there's a fourth element that is somewhat heterogeneous of what is happening here, the symptom, that which brings people to analysis. People have symptoms. But it's not enough to have a symptom to seek a psychoanalyst. We often limit ourselves to complain about our symptoms, to go see the doctor, the psychologist, eventually the astrologist. Other times we stay alone with our symptoms. We leave the others, but what happens as well, generally, is that our symptoms get in the way, they complicate our life, and we don't know how to deal with them. They get in the way, more or less, but there are symptoms that complicate our lives a lot, for instance, which may provoke suicide and things of that kind; there are others, for instance, that make us wash our hands every five minutes; some others don't allow us to go outside because there's an animal we are afraid of. There are countless symptoms that get in our way. Sometimes it's as if something has meddled with the logic of our conscious thoughts, rational ones, just like the phobia of an animal that doesn't hurt a soul. Some psychologists even say: - do you want to see how harmless it is? Come here, close to the puppy... Pet him... He won't byte. In fact the animal doesn't hurt a soul, in its objectivity, but there is something, on the thought's level that causes anguish, panic, escape, that keeps the subject away from that animal. I intended to return to the initial problem, but as I already mentioned Lacan, I would say the following to simplify things: in the beginning of the 50's, when he commences his true teaching, I mean, his true teaching as a psychoanalyst -- he was a psychiatrist before -- and someone who knew, was related and had an interested on artists, namely the surrealistic ones, but also on philosophers; he knew Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc. In the beginning of the 50's, after having read Levi-Strauss, the founder of modern, structural, Anthropology, he says that, to understand the human phenomenon, but also to understand anything about psychoanalysis, it convened that we could relate each object, each event with three dimensions he calls: the Imaginary (I), the Symbolic (S) and the Real (R): The symptom appears in the final part of his teaching; many years later he will write it using the Greek letter Sigma, S: I won't have the time to talk about this, it's just to give you an idea. So, in the 50's, we can see what it's about: the dimension of the Imaginary, that's where Lacan places the thought, the soul and the body: Monism and dualism, they operate on the Imaginary level. What is the Imaginary? We can say it's the relationship that each one of us, the human being has with images. With images that already exist, with images that are formed, the real images, the virtual images, etc. There's a whole optic that explains these things. The image as such is the constituent of human reality and psychic reality. Besides, why do we have these debates to know if it's bad for children to watch too much TV, or to play a lot of computer games? There's that idea that images influence the children's minds, and not only those minds. Lacan's thought is of the Imaginary order. If we introduce a notion of knowledge, which is even more imaginary; this year we are working on one of Lacan's Seminars in our group, in which he speaks of the "metaphor of knowledge"