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…

Brilliant poet W.H. Auden, on his conviction that Jesus is Lord: ‘I believe because He fulfills none of my dreams, because He is in every respect the opposite of what He would be if I could have made Him in my own image.’ But why not one of the other great teachers, like Buddha or Mohammed? Because, Auden wrote, chillingly, ‘none of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry “Crucify Him”.’”

Two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theatre, where they become thoroughly bored with the play. One feels a pressing need to urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet. “I think I saw one down the corridor outside,” says his friend. The man wanders down the corridor, but finds no WC. Wandering further, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it, he returns to his seat. His friend says, “What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just came on the stage and pissed in that plant pot.”

Click here for For Part 1

“The excitement of transcendental experience is found only at the edge of language… and the only way to find that excitement is to test those edges and those limits.” John Dominic Crossan The Dark Interval (1980)

My own approach to post-metaphysics (see the Source Code blog on this site) calls us to live with paradox - the creative tension between opposing perspectives. And since paradoxes are un-objectifiable (i.e. structurally open to Not-Knowing) and since they have no “fixed center of meaning” they refuse to be pinned down by the rational accounting of metaphysics (including an Integral Post-Metaphysics) which is still deeply conditioned by the traditional assumptions that underpin the rational-scientific demand for evidence and the quest for cognitive certainty. In other words, the paradoxical nature of reality frustrates our desire to possess or “get a handle” on the Mystery, for truth be told the mystery of God simply does not depend on what we think about it…

Historically, the foremost example of paradox being utilized as a skillful means for facilitating God-realization is found in the parabolic discourse of Jesus of Nazareth who consistently disrupted conventional wisdom (the myth of the given) by celebrating the ambiguity of those truth-events that show up at the very limits of human experience…

To draw out the key difference between Ken Wilber’s IPM and Jesus’ paradoxes we can briefly refer to the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss who famously argued that “in every system of myth we will find a persistent sequence of binary discriminations as inside/outside, up/down, one/many, followed by a ‘mediation’ of the paired categories thus distinguished.”

This description of myth is a perfect description of what Integral theory claims to do. That is, the basic contours of Integral theory perform the same specific task of reconciling or mediating opposites. The conviction that ultimate reconciliation is possible is the heart of all mythic religion, so much so that more important than the proposed solution itself (religious or philosophical) is the belief in the possibility of a solution…

Now, the opposite of myth (i.e. a story that reconciles opposites) is paradox which creates contradiction and dissonance where previously there was seamless certainty, bringing not peace but a sword. Jesus’ paradoxes are hidden in stories like the Prodigal Son and the Friend at Midnight, stories that shatter the deep structure of the commonly accepted world (which can only paste over the cracks through which the Kingdom irrupts) and thereby render clear and evident to us the relativity and historical contingency of the conventional world…

Jesus’ paradoxes they do not furnish us with easy assurance of myth but challenge us with an explosive reversal of meaning that they removes our defences and makes us vulnerable to God… In this manner Jesus’ parables show us the seams and edges of “the Myth of the Given” (traditional metaphysics) by shattering expectations and creating contradiction within a situation of complacent security…

So rather than providing a pre-packaged program of rules and procedures for admission into the Kingdom of God, the paradoxical strategy of Jesus disrupts the quest for cognitive certainty and thereby sets up the necessary conditions for the decision of faith with an ‘aporetic anxiety’ that invites and challenges one to follow to this singular teacher’s own realization of the Kingdom of God. By interrupting commonplace metaphysical assumptions with an outrageous abrogation of our fundamental laws of logic, the post-metaphysical heart of Jesus’ teachings consistently refuse to give us straightforward answers in response to our quest for what is Real, as his paradoxes call for a free movements of faith that is made in the face of an impossible situation, involving risk, uncertainty and an openness to the unexpected that is grounded in a confession of ultimate not-knowing (which is itself the very occasion of Satori or Enlightenment!)…

In contrast to the logical calculus and pin point clarity of an IPM, in view of the post-metaphysical paradoxes of Jesus an authentic faith commitment is structurally blind and takes root only when the road seems obscure and when the storm clouds of life buffet us, when we are overwhelmed, when we stumble, and fall, and yet still move forward in spite of all evidence to the contrary… For just as Kierkegaard wrote, the “infinite passion of inwardness” (i.e. Christian faith) that has nothing to do with objective explanation at all, and as such the real journey only begins when forgo all metaphysical anchors and confess that we don’t see directly where we are going…

So in my view, Christian paradox is Integral grown self-aware and self-critical… Paradox (e.g. security comes from accepting insecurity as our mortal lot) enhances our knowledge of ignorance, which is the beginning of philosophy and the heart of mystical experience… So where Mythic consolations (e.g. the AQAL co-ordinates of an Integral Post-Metaphysics) establish a world, Paradox subverts this world with a story deliberately calculated to show the limitations of myth, and shatters its presupposed categories so that its relativity becomes apparent…

And by keeping us humble through the dark night of truth, where the idolatry of metaphysics in its demand for cognitive certainty is exposed for the vital-lie that it is, we are precisely therein and thereby broken open to an encounter with transcendence…

In all in Jesus’ teachings, the Kingdom eventuates when ones world is overturned and challenged in its depths… The powerful distinction in Integral theory between exoteric (bad) and esoteric (good) religion can therefore be defined thus: exoteric religion gives one the final word about “reality” and thereby excludes the authentic experience of Mystery, and esoteric religion (paradoxical) continually and deliberately subverts final words about “reality” and thereby introduces the possibility of transcendence.

So Jesus’ paradoxes ask us why things might not be just as well some other way rather than the way we expected and presumed – they tell us that the reverse side also has a reverse side… and remind us that God, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, does not play the game by our rules…

We can conclude this key distinction between the logical clarity IPM and the enigmatic vision and challenge of Jesus with Heidegger who wrote that “in the openness of authentic disclosure (the meaning of Being) we admit the possibility of something unknown, even contradictory, to our world; for we put into question our own faculties rather than blindly measuring and evaluating what is real on the basis of these.”

And as Kierkegaard reminds us, “Everyone shall be remembered, but each became great in proportion to his expectation. One became great by expecting the possible; another by expecting the eternal, but he who expected the impossible became greater than all…”