Dr. Freeman

In The New Wounded (Les nouveaux blessés), Catherine Malabou proposes a radical reformulation of Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis. In essence, she argues that classical psychoanalysis can no longer think Trauma as such – where trauma (the central topic of psychoanalysis) is what Lacan called the impossible/Real – an unexpected /violent intrusion or shattering experience around which our language circulates but can never directly confront…. In presenting her thesis about what she calls the “post-traumatic subject” (the prevailing form of person-hood in the 21^st century), Malabou begins with the critical distinction between the Internal and External trauma.

For Freud and Lacan unexpected shocks and violent/shattering encounters from the External world draw their traumatic impact from the way they touch a persons pre-existing Internal psychic reality… When one undergoes a shattering experience the truly traumatic core of this shock is due to the way it arouses or disturbs some already preexisting internal wound…. In other words, all external intrusions owe their traumatic effect to the resonance they find in “internal” psychic life: sexuality, the death drive, unconscious guilt feeling, etc … Basically, then, for Freud and Lacan, the external event itself doesn’t really count… it must first find an echo in yr psychic reality – the Real of ones pre-existing inner trauma…

Now for Malabou this no longer holds today for we live in a socio-political life world that imposes multiple versions of external intrusions/traumas – meaningless brutal disruptions that destroy the symbolic texture of subject’s identity directly – i.e. in a way that leaves no therapeutic recourse to Freudian psychoanalytical regression. First, there are the multifarious forms of physical violence: terror attacks like 9/11, the US “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq, street violence, rapes, bashings, murders, etc. There are also natural catastrophes, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. Then, there is the “irrational” (meaningless) destruction of the material base of our inner reality (brain-tumors, Alzheimer’s disease, organic cerebral lesions, breast cancer, etc), which can utterly change, destroy even, the victim’s personality. And finally, there are the destructive effects of socio-symbolic violence (social exclusion, the invisible violence of power exercised systemically the established order, etc)

Malabou’s point is that independently of the cause of trauma (social, natural, biological, symbolic) in the face of such widespread socio-political interruptions the same form of person-hood or subjectivity is produced – the post-traumatic subject, a disengaged and neutral subject devoid of emotions and lacking any kind of engagement with other people in the world…

So from this perspective, Freud’s problem is that he succumbs to the interpretation of meaning – he is not ready to accept the direct destructive efficiency of external shocks that destroy the psyche of the victim without resonating in any pre-existing inner traumatic truth. Freud always looks for the “internal” childhood trauma – but it is obviously obscene to link traumatic encounters like the psychic devastation of the Muslim terrorist in Guantanimo Bay (for instance) to masochism, death drive, Oedipal dramas and guilt feelings – No, the terrorized Muslim is not devastated by his unconscious anxieties – he is brutalized by a meaningless external shock that can in no way be hermeneutically appropriated…. it is in no way related to a pre-existing internal trauma…

The problem for the post-traumatic subject is that the story that one tells oneself about ourself is erased in the face of these direct external interruptions and so there is no possibility of a regression to a pre-existing trauma… All that is left are subjects deprived of their symbolic substance… the shock is too strong, the destruction is direct… and so what we have are the living dead, totally devastated but still aware of the void that is now ones life…

As a brief aside there is a central paradox here: the post-traumatic subject is not shut up in their private ‘inner’ worlds while the rest of us are directly engaged with reality, rather they are directly exposed to the shattering experience of the traumatic/Real without any protective screen, while the rest of us (barely) function on a day to day level by investing in a series of social codes that provide a protective screen against the irruption of the traumatic/Real…

But back to the main theme: the problem with Freud is that he cannot see that the post-traumatic victim “survives its own death”, i.e. the trauma destroys your conventional personality but you still survive… However Malabou believes that in these troubled times a new subject is emerging that is characterized by lack of emotional engagement, indifference and detachment, a living death, a life deprived of erotic enjoyment (sexual, artistic, religious or sensual)….

So if the 20th century was the Freudian century, the century of libido, so that even the worst nightmares were read as (sado-masochist) vicissitudes of the libido (sex drive), for Malabou the 21^st century is to be the century of the post-traumatic / disengaged subject – the first emblematic figure being the Muslims in US concentration camps… a radically new subject whose entire past is erased… an emotionally blank existence that is the death drive embodied…. a subject that is now multiplying in the guise of refugees, terror victims, survivors of natural catastrophes, as well as masses of living dead on public transport and staring at computers in office buildings, the endless streams of mall zombies, the countless victims of family violence, and so on… The feature that runs through all these figures is that the cause of the trauma remains utterly meaningless and resists any interpretation…. for the subject has no substantive identity – no story to tell itself about itself – no inner psychic life to work with - and it is just this that psychoanalysis is unable to think…

But I tend to disagree with Malabou. As far as I can see, the experience of being deprived of ones identity – where all ones psychic substance is erased and rendered meaningless – this process is actually constitutive (definitive) of the subject itself - and the very goal of psychoanalysis… In this sense, the real lesson of psychoanalysis is that the conventional story we tell ourselves about ourselves is a survival-lie, a cheap bluff designed to radically reject any feelings of helplessness, weakness and vulnerability… and so we simply must be de-centered, disillusioned, unmasked, and left with nothing left to hold on to in order to realize our true condition… That is, we must come to accept the reality of loss, defeat and meaningless suffering to become an authentic and free-functioning person - and this is the goal of any successful psychotherapeutic practice…. So where the destructive efficiency of the many and varied external shocks/traumas in the 21st century do indeed destroy the psychic stability of the victims identity - even to the point where such intrusions they do not trigger any inner traumatic kernel of truth, when the vital-lie of one’s character (i.e. the story we tell ourselves about ourselves) is undone… instead of becoming one of the living dead we can instead: a) let go of the self-contraction, b) rest in the empty ground of awareness (Consciousness without an object)… c) rejoice in the contingency and ambiguity of those events that reside at the limits of human experience… d) refuse attachment to any single perspective… and e) playfully enact a world without the need for a “self-contained symbolic order as the ultimate guarantee of Meaning” (Zizek)…

In other words, the external trauma is not so much the death of the subject but the “condition of possibility” for the constitution of an authentic and integrated subject… where the authentic subject is one that no longer needs to find a “deeper meaning” for their suffering… but can say Yes to life in a joyful embrace of paradox, which is - of course - not so much a question to be answered but an enigma to live with…

I’ve posted below a clip of Nicole Kidman in The Invasion where she mentions my favorite philosopher Ken Wilber and discusses integral theory in general… Click here

In one of his earliest writings “Madness and Civilization” Foucault gave a fascinating portrait of Madness – what he also called Un-Reason. By the 19^th century Foucault observed that madness had been labeled a “mental illness” and therefore made an object for the science of psychology, which derided the mad and the non-rational under a hypocritical veil of morality and foreclosed on the original “experience of Un-Reason” through the confinement of the mad.

Now, beneath the modern psychology and psychiatry where madness is viewed as either a brain dysfunction or a moral failing lies its more essential truth. For Foucault, modern psychology cannot master the hidden truth of madness, for the voice of madness was closed off in the very constitution of modern psychology as a science. So for Foucault what we call mental illness (depression, bi-polar, schizophrenia) today is “alienated madness” – where the mad are made alien by our objectifying and dehumanizing sciences.

The brilliance of Foucault is that he wants to bring us face to face with madness in its original and un-alienated form, a form that is recognized in the modern world only in “lightening flashes” with names like Friedrich Nietzsche - as a kind of tragic split and radical freedom…

Foucault wants to let the truth of madness speak its own voice. In other words, rather than diagnosing and treating and the mentally ill with what amounts to little more than powerful anesthetics, Foucault wants to linger with madness for a while, to hear what it has to say…

So what do the mad know? Well, quite frankly It’s the sort of truth that would kill you… or drive you mad. The mad have been released from ordinary constraints and experienced a terrible truth…. They are extreme points of sensitivity to the human condition… And they are not Other than Us. The mad speak a truth for which we have neither the nerve nor the ear – they disturb us with the truth of who we are.

For Foucault, the mad offer a forceful testimony to the breakdown of Reason, Knowledge, Truth – they speak from a depth of experience in which both the reassuring structures of ordinary life and the reassuring comforts of scientific, philosophical or religious truth have collapsed. They experience the radical groundlessness of the world, the contingency of all its constructions, and they speak from a kind of irrepressible terror… and call to us from the abyss by which we are all inhabited. We are put into question by the mad, for they have set foot where the sane fear to tread…

In his typical transgressive style Foucault turns the tables and show how the world-view of science and reason is put into question by the mad, and specifically the madman as artist – the one who reveals the difficult truth of the human condition – we are inwardly divided, inhabited by an abyss, that we have to live within the tension between knowing and not-knowing, belief and skepticism, truth and the night of truth, the light of reason and the midnight hour when reason allows itself to be invaded by unreason…

Here Foucault rejects the idea of Truth with a capital T. The truth is that there is no truth, and we are better off making the humble confession that we don’t know who we are – our inner most truth is always already disturbed by untruth… and neither religion nor philosophy nor the human sciences can tell us who we are or what to do…

In the face of this radical not-knowing, for Foucault the most meaningful task is to refuse who we are, struggle against those who think they can positively identify who we are, liberate ourselves from the kind of individuality that the state and the social structure produces and open up new modes of self-invention… And in this sense, for Foucault freedom is fundamentally the capacity for being otherwise, a continual twisting loose from our the ways we have previously been constituted, a capacity for novelty and innovation refuses to be reduced to a fixed stereotype…

Madness is a disturbance and the disturbing thing about the mad is that they are attuned to some deep seated dissonance from which the rest of us seek to be protected… The mad disturb us because they are exposed to something the rest of us prefer to ignore… and so we are beset by an apprehensive-ness that our sane, healed, whole lives mask a deeper rupture… The Mad are a mirror of ourselves. They tell us who we are.

The whole problem of the mad person is that he/she cannot repress and deny the trauma of existence like ordinary people… And so when madness takes the form of schizophrenia it is only because the mad reflect the contradiction of a world in which humans can no longer recognize themselves… because the social world is itself marked by struggle, hostility, and foreignness…

And let’s not forget that the mad suffer from their attunement – from what they feel/experience/undergo. Their ruptured lives are the site of a wound. They live with terror, they wrestle with demons, they need healing… They lay claim to us, we who are whole, to help. We who are perhaps not so much whole and sane as just a little better skilled at repressing our madness… And so when we are called upon by the mad, we need not approach them as an object of information, but a subject in communication, and one to whom we turn with something to learn from.

The mad do not ask for scientific analysis by us but friendship, support, companionship… The healing gesture is not to explain away the abyss but simply to stand with the mad and affirm that they are not alone… that our common madness is a matter of degree, that we all inhabit the same night of truth…

And because of their terrible initiation into the “night of truth” the mad have a special kind of freedom, in spite of their painful symptoms. They can question in a more radical way than the rest of us, taking issue with things that most of us take for granted. The mad are in touch with fundamental truths about society, the “rational ego” is all in flux and fragmentation. The mad know that there is no such thing as a “whole person” and so simply stops trying to make sense, while celebrating “the numinous energies of existence in a joyous activity of free play.”

The message of the mad and the radical freedom that stems from the night of truth… is to let go and stop pretending not to be mad. Let yourself go and scream your own screams. In other words, take the plunge into Un-Reason and go against the grain of normalcy, the civilized madness of the average and mediocre. Such a person “produces himself as a free man, solitary, and joyous, a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatsoever. He had simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad. . . .” (Gilles Deleuze)

Reference John D. Caputo “More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not-Knowing Who We Are…”