🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I am attempting to bring you the “honey” of my reflections on what—oh, my God!—I have been doing for a number of years now, years that are starting to count, yet, with time, they end up not being so disproportionate to the time you yourselves spend. If, of course, this effort at communication sometimes presents certain difficulties, think—just to understand—about the experience of honey. Honey is either very hard or very fluid:

• If it’s hard, it cuts poorly; there’s no natural cleavage.
• If it’s very fluid, I believe you’ve all had the experience of trying to eat honey in bed at breakfast time: soon, it’s everywhere.

Hence the issue of the jars! The issue of the honey jar reminds me of the mustard jar, which I addressed in the past, holding exactly the same significance since we no longer imagine that the hexagons in which we tend to gather our harvest have any natural connection to the structure of the world. Thus, in sum—as you will see—the question we are asking ourselves, and which ultimately is always the same, concerns the scope of speech.

More specifically, it is about realizing that the moral or ethical problem of our praxis is closely tied to something we’ve been able to glimpse for some time: that the profound dissatisfaction left by all psychology, including the one we’ve already established through analysis, may stem precisely from the fact—yes, this fact—that it is merely a mask, sometimes an alibi, for this attempt to penetrate the problem of our own action, which is the essence and very foundation of all ethical reflection.

In other words, the question is whether we have managed to go beyond the tiniest step outside ethics—whether, like other psychologies, ours is merely another path within ethical reflection, within this search for a guide, a way forward in something that ultimately boils down to this: what must we do to act rightly, given our position, our condition as human beings?

This reminder seems difficult to dispute when our daily actions suggest that we are not very far from it. Of course, things present themselves differently for us in how we introduce, present, or justify this action. Of course, too, we can say that its inception presents characteristics of demand, of urgent appeal, bearing a meaning of service that brings us closer to the ground in terms of the sense of ethical articulation.

But this does not change the fact that, ultimately, and at any time, so to speak, we can find it again in its integral position—the one that has always been the sense and purpose of those who have reflected on morality, who have written, who have tried to articulate ethics.

Last time, when outlining the program I wish to cover this year—a program that extends from the recognition of the omnipresence of the moral imperative infiltrating all our experience to something at the other end, paradoxically, the pleasure we may ultimately derive from it, on a secondary level, namely moral masochism—I pointed out along the way something that I believe will constitute the unexpected, the original, the very paradox of a perspective I intend to open here in reference to the fundamental categories I use to orient you in our experience: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real.

I indicated to you that, paradoxically, my thesis—and without doubt here, do not be surprised that it first appears in a somewhat confused manner, for it is, of course, the development of our discourse that will give it its weight—my thesis is that the moral law, the moral commandment, the presence of the moral instance, what imposes this instance upon us, represents that through which the Real, as such, is made present in our activity—activity structured by the Symbolic—the Real, the weight of the Real.

This thesis might simultaneously appear as a trivial truth and as a paradox. We can sense in this thesis that the moral law asserts itself, if you will, against pleasure. We can also sense that speaking of the Real in relation to the moral law seems to question the value of a term we typically subsume under the concept of the Ideal. For now, however, I am not seeking in any way to sharpen further the edge of what I am presenting here, since everything that might give weight and significance to this approach is precisely the meaning to be assigned, within the order of the categories I present to you here—I present to you, I repeat, always in the function of our praxis as analysts—the meaning to be given to this term Real.

You will see that it is not immediately accessible, although already, some of you have likely begun reflecting on the ultimate scope I might give it.

And of course, you must be asking yourselves—or at least beginning to sense—that the meaning of this term Real must have some connection with the trajectory that runs through all of Freud’s thought. This trajectory begins with an initial opposition between the reality principle and the pleasure principle and, through a series of vacillations, oscillations, and imperceptible shifts in references, leads ultimately to the culmination of his doctrinal formulation, to the proposition of something “beyond the pleasure principle.” What, we may ask, is the nature of this something in relation to that original opposition?

For when, beyond the pleasure principle, we encounter that opaque and obscure aspect—which to some has appeared as the very antinomy of all thought, not merely biological thought but even of all properly scientific thought—it is called the death instinct.

What is this last term—this sort of law beyond all laws, which can only be posited as belonging to some ultimate structure, a vanishing point of all possible reality? What is it, if not something akin to a revelation or rediscovery, set in opposition to the coupling of the pleasure principle and the reality principle? Within this coupling, the reality principle might be considered a kind of dependence, an extension, an application of the pleasure principle. Yet, precisely insofar as this reality principle assumes, in Freud’s perspective, a subordinate and reduced position, it makes something emerge beyond it, something that governs the entirety of our relation to the world in the broadest sense.

In this process, in this progression, what first remains, persists, and comes into view for us is undoubtedly the problematic character of what Freud posits under the term “reality”:

• Is it about everyday, immediate, social reality?
• Is it conformity to established categories and accepted customs?
• Is it something else? And if so, what is it?
• Is it the reality discovered by science, or one not yet discovered?
• Is it psychic reality?

What, after all, is this “reality”? And we, of course, as analysts, are certainly engaged in its pursuit. This pursuit takes us far beyond anything that can be expressed in a general category. It brings us into a specific field—that of a psychic reality, which, for us, presents itself with the problematic character of an order never before equaled.

If the moral law is to be posited in this reference, you can already see that what I will first address is an attempt to probe the function played by this term “reality” in the thought of the inventor of psychoanalysis and, consequently, in our own thought, as we are engaged in his pathways and his field.

Conversely, I point out—so that you do not forget it or believe that I am engaging in this exploration in a manner that consists solely of probing, objectifying, or referencing what, in moral experience, is the imperative instance as such, in whatever form it appears—that moral action itself presents challenges for us, and specifically in this regard: analysis may prepare us for it, but ultimately, it leaves us at its threshold.

Moral action, precisely insofar as it enters the Real, cannot be conceived other than as our action in the moment when it introduces something new into the Real, creating a wake in it—something that, in essence, marks the point of our presence there. The question is this: in what way does analysis prepare us for it—if it does indeed prepare us? In what way does analysis bring us, so to speak, to the very threshold of this work? And why does it bring us there in this way? Why, too, does it stop at this threshold?

This is the other axis around which I hope to articulate what I present here, specifying in this inquiry what I indicated last time as the limits of what we articulate and the extent to which we can articulate an ethics. The notion of the ethical limits of analysis coincides with the limits of its praxis, considered as a prelude to moral action as such, the said action being that through which we enter the Real.

Among those who have analyzed an ethics before us, Aristotle—let us take him as an example—ranks among the most exemplary and undoubtedly the most valuable. Reading him, as I have pointed out to you, is a fascinating experience, and I cannot recommend highly enough, as an exercise, that you undertake it. You will not find it tedious for a moment, I assure you. Read the Nicomachean Ethics, which specialists seem to consider the most reliable of his treatises and certainly the most readable. Admittedly, it presents some challenges and issues in the text, in its twists, and in the order of its discussions.

Nonetheless, move past the sections that seem too obscure or complicated, or use an edition with good notes that reference the essentials of Aristotle’s logic when necessary to understand the issues he raises. But in any case, don’t burden yourself too much with grasping everything, paragraph by paragraph. Try reading it straight through first, and you’ll surely be rewarded.

One thing, at any rate, will emerge: something Aristotle shares, to a certain degree, with all other ethics. As an ethical framework, it tends to refer to an order, an order that first presents itself as a science, episteme (ἐπιστήμη). However, this science presumes that something within the subject can be established—namely, this “science of what must be done,” this specifically ethical order, the order that defines the norm of a certain ethos (ἦθος), along with the specifically ethical state, which, at this stage, concerns the subject. Here arises the problem of how this order—postulated and undoubtedly discovered—might not be contested.

How, within the subject, can there be obtained—on the one hand—an adequacy that will allow the subject to fit into and submit to this order?

• The establishment of ethos (ἔθος), that which Aristotle posits as differentiating the living being from the inanimate or inert. As he notes: as long as you throw a stone into the air, it will not acquire the habit of following that trajectory. Humans, however, do form habits; this is ethos (ἔθος).
• And this ethos (ἔθος) must be aligned with ethos (ἦθος), with that which defines ethos (ἦθος), something relating to its conformity to an order or a Good that must ultimately be unified in the logical perspective of Aristotle into a final term:
• A “Sovereign Good,” which serves as the point of insertion, attachment, and convergence—a unifying principle where this specific order is integrated into a more universal understanding, where ethics transitions into politics.
• Beyond this politics lies an imitation of a cosmic order; here, the macrocosm and microcosm are assumed as the foundation of all Aristotelian meditation. This involves an orientation, a conforming to something in the Real, which is not contested as presupposing the pathways of this order.

The problem, continually revisited and posed within Aristotelian ethics, is as follows: The one possessing this science—clearly, Aristotle’s addressee, the student or disciple, is assumed to participate in this discourse of science merely by listening to it—is the intended recipient of the discourse. The discourse has already been introduced—the orthos logos (ὀρθός λόγος), the straight discourse, the proper discourse—into the problem simply by the fact that the ethical question has been posed.

The problem, then, is this, undoubtedly carried forward from where Socrates left it, albeit with an optimism whose excess could not escape the notice of his immediate successors:

How is it that, if the rule of action resides in this orthos logos (ὀρθός λόγος), if there can be no “good action” except one conforming to this orthos logos (ὀρθός λόγος), how is it that what Aristotle articulates as “intemperance” still persists? How is it that, within the subject, inclinations diverge elsewhere? How is this even explainable?

This necessity, this demand for explanation—no matter how superficial it might seem to us, who believe we know much more—nevertheless constitutes much of the substance of Aristotelian reflection in the Ethics. I will return to this shortly, particularly in relation to what we can make of Freud’s reflections in the same domain.

Undoubtedly, for Aristotle, the problem must appear circumscribed by the conditions of a certain human ideal, which I have already briefly pointed out to you as being that of the master’s ideal. The entire problem for him is to elucidate the relationship between this acholasia (ἀχολασία), this intemperance, and something he calls a deficiency, a manifested flaw concerning what constitutes the essential virtue of his addressee—namely, the master. I previously noted that this ancient master is not quite the brutish hero portrayed in Hegelian dialectics, which serves as its axis and turning point. I will not elaborate here on the representation of the ancient master. Let it suffice for you to know that it is this representation that allows us both to appreciate the true value of Aristotelian ethics and to recognize that this appreciation has a double significance.

On the one hand, of course, this limits and historicizes it, as we might say from our perspective, but it would be wrong to think that this is the only conclusion to draw from this observation. First, because this historicization raises all kinds of questions about what exactly this ancient master represents within the Aristotelian perspective: it is undoubtedly a function, a presence, a human condition that is far less critically tied to the slave than the Hegelian perspective articulates or allows us to perceive. The problem posed here is precisely the one left unresolved within the Hegelian perspective: the problem of a society of masters.

On the other hand, there are also many interesting points to consider that further limit the scope of Aristotelian ethics. Notably, this master—like the god at the center of the Aristotelian world, governed by nous (νοῦς)—is an ideal whose primary aim seems to be to withdraw as much as possible from the demands of labor. By this, I mean delegating the management of slaves to a steward in order to move toward that ideal of contemplation without which Aristotle’s Ethics cannot be fully understood.

This, then, illustrates the degree of idealization inherent in Aristotelian ethics. If this ethical framework is so localized—almost to a specific social type, a privileged exemplar of leisure (for even the term scholastichos [σχολαστχός] evokes this leisure)—it is all the more striking to see how much of what is articulated within this special condition remains rich in resonance and teachings for us. In the end, it provides schemas that, once recomposed and transposed, are far from useless, schemas that do not simply reappear in the same old wineskins into which we pour our new honey.

They are not perfectly recognizable at the level where we now see the first axiom and relationship emerge for us through Freud’s experience. At first glance, one might say this perspective is ours. This search for a path, for truth, is not absent from our experience. What else, after all, do we seek in analysis but a liberating truth?

But here, let us take care. It is precisely necessary not to trust words and their labels. For the truth we seek—certainly, in its being, in what we pursue through a concrete experience—is not that of a higher law, a law of truth. If the truth we seek is liberating, it is a truth we search for at a concealed point within the subject, a truth that is far more specific.

Even though we may find it—always fresh in its articulation in each individual, yet fundamentally the same in others—it nonetheless presents itself uniquely in its intimate specificity for each person, carrying the imperative character of a Wunsch (desire) to which nothing external can oppose itself, a desire that, in a sense, resists judgment from the outside. The best quality we can ascribe to it, once we have activated it, is that it represents the true Wunsch underlying a misguided or atypical behavior.

Yet it is in its irreducible nature, its ultimate modification, a modification presupposing no other normativity than that of an experience of pleasure or pain—a final experience from which it emerges and in which it persists, irreducibly, in the depths of the subject—that we find its essence. This discovery is far from presenting itself as a universal law. On the contrary, it is the most particular of laws, even if it is universal that such particularity exists in every human being. This, under the guise of what we have described as a regressive, infantile, unrealistic phase, characterized by a thought surrendered to desire—a desire mistaken for reality—is how we encounter it.

This, assuredly, constitutes the substance of our experience. But is this, if I may ask, the entirety of our discovery? Is this the whole of our ethics: the uncovering, the revelation of this thought of desire, this truth of thought? Do we expect that merely revealing it will clear the way for a different thought?

In a certain sense, this is true. It is, in some ways, that simple. But in another sense, to state it so plainly obscures everything. For this thought, if its discovery alone were to define the novelty and benefit of the analytic experience, would be no more than something that predates psychoanalysis. It would go no further than an idea that has existed for quite some time in history: the notion that “the child is the father of the man,” a formula Freud himself cited with respect, originating from Wordsworth, the English Romantic poet.

And it is no coincidence that we encounter it there, at the beginning of something new, unsettling, even suffocating, that emerged at the dawn of the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution in England, the nation most advanced in its effects. English Romanticism took on a distinctive character, emphasizing childhood memories, the world of childhood, and the ideals and wishes of the child. The poets of this era rooted not only their inspiration but also the exploitation of their central themes in this focus.

This approach sets them apart radically from the poets who preceded them, particularly the remarkable poetry of the 17th and early 18th centuries, often inexplicably referred to as metaphysical poetry.

This reference to childhood, this idea of the child within the man, this idea that something in man demands that he be something other than a child, and yet that the demands of the child within him are continually felt, is an idea that can be situated historically within the realm of psychology. A man of the same era, living in the first half of the 19th century, an early Victorian historian named Macaulay, remarked that at that time, while one might not accuse someone of being dishonest or completely foolish, a highly effective reproach was to accuse them of failing to achieve a fully adult mind, of retaining traits of childish mentality.

This type of argument, so historically specific that you find no trace of it elsewhere in history prior to this period, reveals something that marks a rupture in historical evolution. In Pascal’s time, if one spoke of childhood, it was to say that a child is not a man. If one spoke of the thoughts of an adult, it was never to find traces of childish thought within them.

The question, if I may put it this way, was not posed in these terms. I would argue, to some extent, that the fact that we constantly frame the question in these terms—justified as it may be by experience, by the contents and text of our relationship with the neurotic, by the reference of this experience to individual genesis—also obscures, in some way, what lies behind it.

For ultimately, as true as this may be, there is another stance, another tension between the thought we engage with in the unconscious and what we, for reasons unknown, call “adult thought.” What we demonstrate, what we see, what we continually touch upon, is that “adult thought” is rather lagging compared to this so-called “child’s thought,” which we use as a point of reference, not as a mere foil but as a perspective from which to assess the adult’s shortcomings, or even their deteriorations, which seem to converge and culminate at this point. There is, in fact, a continual contradiction in how we use this reference.

Before coming here, I was reading Jones, where he exclaims about the sublime virtues of social pressure, without which our contemporaries, our “fellow men,” would appear vain, selfish, sordid, sterile, etc. Yet one is tempted to annotate in the margins: “But what else are they?” And when we speak of the adult being, to what reference are we pointing? Where is this model of the adult?

This invites us to reexamine the sharp edge, the hard edge, of Freud’s thought, which undoubtedly led to this entire body of experience and material, structured in terms of ideal development. Yet in its essence, its origin, in the opposition—let us finally name it—between primary and secondary processes, between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, Freud finds his terms, his tension, his fundamental opposition within an entirely different system of reference, an entirely different order, than what development or genesis provides. As I hope I have suggested, even though I must address it here cursorily, I believe I have made it sufficiently apparent that this offers only an inconsistent support.

When Freud was conducting his self-analysis, he wrote in a brief letter, Letter 73 (Letter 144, October 31, 1897):

“Meine Analyse geht weiter. My analysis continues; it remains my main interest. Though still obscure, certain problems call out. Yet, there is something comforting about it. It feels,” he says, “as though one could reach into a storeroom and pull out whatever is needed at the right time. The unpleasant thing,” he says, “is die Stimmungen.”

[“Meine Analyse geht weiter, bleibt mein Hauptinteresse, alles noch dunkel, selbst die Probleme, aber ein behagliches Gefühl dabei, man brauchte nur in seine Vorratsräume zu greifen, um seinerzeit herauszuholen, was man braucht. Das Unangenehmste sind die Stimmungen, die einem die Wirklichkeit oft ganz verdecken.”]

That is, the states—understood in the broadest sense of the term, which has a particular resonance in German—the states of mood. Specifically, the feelings or affective states, which by their very nature obscure or conceal—what?—die Wirklichkeit, reality. Freud interrogates what presents itself to him as Stimmung in terms of this Wirklichkeit, this reality.

And Stimmung, by its nature, is what reveals to him what he is searching for in his self-analysis: what he interrogates, what he senses as being stored in a dark room, this storeroom, containing everything he needs, always held in reserve, but whose Wirklichkeit is fundamentally hidden from him. He is not guided toward this by his Stimmungen. This is the meaning of his statement: “The most unpleasant thing is the Stimmungen” (das Unangenehmste), which obstruct the reality he seeks.

It is through the search for a reality that lies somewhere within himself that the Freudian experience arises and explains, and allows us to sense, the originality of its beginnings.

He further adds in the same line:

“Even sexual excitement, for someone like me, is something unusable in this endeavor. Even in this, I do not trust it to reveal where the ultimate realities lie. I maintain my good humor throughout this entire affair. Before reaching a result, we must still know how to maintain a moment of patience.”
[“Auch die sexuelle Erregung ist für eine wie ich nicht mehr zu brauchen. Ich bin aber noch immer freudig dabei. An Resultaten ist jetzt gerade wieder Stille eingetreten.”]

I point out, in passing, that on this occasion, in a recent small book—which I cannot exactly recommend as reading, since it is a very peculiarly discordant, almost insidious, and borderline defamatory work by Erich Fromm, titled Sigmund Freud’s Mission—certain insinuating questions are posed. These questions, though not entirely devoid of interest, concern the specificity and peculiar traits of Freud’s personality in a manner that is obviously diminishing and devaluing. It is suggested that, like others, Sigmund Freud, in this pursuit of reality, did not find reliable guidance in “his sexual background.” Fromm extracts this phrase from Freud’s writings to suggest that, by the age of forty, Freud was already impotent.

This leads us to interrogate and articulate Freud’s reflections in 1895, particularly because circumstances have brought to us the text concerning his fundamental conception of psychic structure—the Entwurf (Project for a Scientific Psychology), which Freud initially considered titling A Psychology for Neurologists. Since he never published it, the draft remained appended to the bundle of Fliess letters, and we now have access to these texts thanks to the recovery of these collections.

Thus, it is not only legitimate but necessary that we begin here to investigate what Freud’s reflection on the opposition between the reality principle and the pleasure principle signifies. We must determine whether this presents something fundamentally different and distinct in the trajectory of his thought, and simultaneously, in the directions of our own experience. It is from here, I believe, that we must search for the deeper edge of this opposition.

Certainly, this opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle is revisited and rearticulated throughout Freud’s work:

• In 1895, with the Entwurf.
• In 1900, in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, where for the first time publicly, the so-called primary and secondary processes are articulated as such, governed respectively by the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
• Again in 1911, with the article from which, last year, I extracted the dream I emphasized so greatly—the “dream of the dead father” and the phrase, “he did not know it”—in the work titled Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. This could be translated as “on psychic structure.”
• And later, in Civilization and Its Discontents, which we will reach, as I promised, by the end of our exploration.

The same reference to the reality principle cannot be understood unless we attempt to see, starting from this origin, all the contours it involves and constitutes.

Before Freud, others had spoken of pleasure as a guiding function. Aristotle, for instance, could not but place it not only within consideration but at the very center of his ethical direction. What is happiness, after all, if it does not include this flowering of pleasure? A significant portion of the discussion in Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to correctly situating the true function of pleasure—a discussion that curiously enough does not treat it merely as a passive state. In Aristotle, pleasure is an activity compared to the flower that emerges from the vitality of youth. It is, in some sense, its radiance. Furthermore, it is also the sign of the flourishing of an action, properly understood as energeia (ἐνέργεια)—a term in which Aristotle articulates true praxis as containing its own end within itself.

Here, the pleasure that, without a doubt—something I pointed out to you last time—has found many other modulations as a sign, a mark, or a benefit, or as the substance of psychic experience across the ages, must be examined in its ultimate association with the pleasure principle in Freud’s thought.

The first striking feature of Freud’s pleasure principle is that, ultimately, it is a principle of inertia. The pleasure principle presents itself as something that regulates, through a kind of automatism, everything that both converges toward and results from a process. Freud, in his initial formulation, tends to present this as the outcome of a preformed apparatus—the neuronal apparatus as such.

This principle is narrowly tied to the neuronal apparatus, where its functioning is articulated as regulating the pathways it retains after undergoing their effects. It essentially concerns everything resulting from the effects of a fundamental tendency toward discharge, a sort of activity governed solely by Bahnung (facilitation), where a quantity is destined to flow. This is the perspective in which the effectiveness of the pleasure principle is initially presented to us. Suffice it to say, this particular attempt at hypothetical formulation comes with a unique character among Freud’s writings.

It is important to remember that Freud grew dissatisfied with it, rejected it, and decided against publishing it.

Certainly, he approached it as something representing his need for coherence with himself, before himself, but it lacks any evident reference—at least in appearance—to clinical effects, which undoubtedly constituted the primary demands he grappled with. Here, Freud was speaking to himself, or to Fliess—which, in this instance, amounts to nearly the same thing. What he was attempting was a probable, coherent representation, a working hypothesis to address something where the concrete, experimental core is masked or eluded.

It is therefore even more critical to observe that, in order to explain something toward which this project points—namely, the attempt to explain, as Freud puts it, the normal functioning of the mind—he starts from the apparatus’s data that are farthest removed from any conclusion aiming for adequacy or balance.

To a system that inherently tends toward illusion, error, or something marked by the fact that the organism seems entirely constructed not to satisfy need but to hallucinate it, there must oppose another apparatus. And here, I am not exaggerating: Freud himself recognized the need for a distinction between apparatuses, though he admitted finding no trace of them in the anatomical structures available.

One must posit another apparatus entering the scene to enact a principle, an instance of reality, which is essentially a principle of correction, a return to order. The reality principle—meaning everything upon which the neuronal apparatus ultimately bases its effectiveness—presents itself as an apparatus that goes far beyond mere control. It involves rectification and, indeed, every operation undertaken under its sway is but a precautionary detour, an adjustment, a form of restraint. This is the essential mode in which this principle functions.

The principle of restraint fundamentally opposes and compensates for the fundamental tendency of the psychic apparatus. Never before had anyone, or any conceivable system for reconstructing human action, gone so far in introducing a fundamentally conflictual nature at the very foundation of what normally characterizes an organism seemingly destined—after all—to live. No previous system had pushed further into the presuppositions required to explain such an organism in terms of radical inadequacy, assuming from the outset that a division of systems operates as a countermeasure to the inherent inadequacy of one of them.

Freud articulates this conflict throughout his work, almost as if it were a challenge. The opposition between the “ϕ system” and the “ψ system”—what justifies it, if not the very thing that, for us, maximally justifies it: the experience of uncontrollable quantities Freud encountered in his exploration of neurosis? This neurosis—the foundation of his entire system—demanded the foregrounding of quantity as such.

What gives weight and justification to this focus on quantity? Here, we sense it most directly: it is far more than a desire to align or not align with the mechanistic ideals of Helmholtz or Brücke. Rather, it corresponds to Freud’s most immediate lived experience, specifically the inertia he felt in the symptoms he observed—symptoms whose irreversibility he grasped. This experience designates Freud’s first foray into the obscurity surrounding Wirklichkeit (reality), the central question driving his inquiry. It is here that the force, relief, and movement of this entire construction lie, no matter how arid it may appear.

Here too, I ask you to reread this material, not with the mindset of the annotators, commentators, and critics who published it—whether it aligns more or less closely with purely psychological or physiological thought, or whether it relates to Herbart, Fechner, or others—but to realize that beneath this cold, abstract, scholastic, and complicated form lies an experience. This experience, at its core and in its nature, is fundamentally a moral one.

And I would even go so far as to say—since history has been written on this matter, as though Freud could be explained by influences or by the greater or lesser homonymy of his formulas with those of earlier thinkers in different contexts—that this effort has limited value. Why not engage in such an exercise myself, since it seems to be a common endeavor? I would argue that, at certain moments, Freud essentially does this himself, explaining to us how this activity of return and restraint operates. How does the apparatus supporting secondary processes work to mitigate the catastrophes that inevitably arise, through either too much or too little of something, when the pleasure apparatus is left to its own devices?

If it is released too early, it will result in movement, and since this movement will be triggered merely by a Wunschgedanke (wishful thought), it will inevitably be painful, leading to displeasure. On the other hand, if the apparatus intervenes too late—if it does not produce that small discharge in time to allow for a trial or an attempt through which an initial adequate solution can be provided in action—then it will instead result in a regressive discharge, namely hallucination, which itself is also a source of displeasure.

This functioning of the apparatus, insofar as it supports the reality principle, might appear strikingly close to what Aristotle addresses when he questions how someone who knows can act intemperately. Aristotle provides several solutions to this question. I will pass over the initial ones, which involve elements of the syllogism and dialectics that are ultimately somewhat removed from our present interest.

However, at one point, Aristotle proposes a solution that is not dialectical but rather somewhat physical in nature. Even so, he presents it in the form of a certain syllogism of the desirable, specifically as a certain application of a universal notion. For instance, in Nicomachean Ethics Book VII, Chapter 3, where he discusses pleasure, Aristotle states:

To the universal proposition, “One should taste everything sweet,” a concrete minor premise might be added: “This is sweet.”

The principle of erroneous action, he suggests, lies in the error contained within the particular judgment of this minor premise. Why? In what way? Precisely because desire, as it underlies and is evoked by the universal proposition, “One should taste everything sweet,” generates an erroneous judgment concerning the actuality of the “sweet”—the supposedly “sweet”—toward which action is directed.

Undoubtedly, we cannot help but think that Freud—who attended Brentano’s lectures on Aristotle in 1887—found something here, albeit in a purely formal sense, with a completely different emphasis. Freud transposed this articulation of the ethical problem into the perspective of his hypothetical mechanics, which, let us be clear, is no more a psychology than any of the other systems concocted in the same era.

Make no mistake: in psychology, nothing has surpassed Freud’s Entwurf to this day. Everything hypothesized about psychological functioning—inasmuch as the nervous apparatus might explain what we concretely recognize as the domain of psychological action—remains speculative to the same degree.

In Freud, we encounter a re-articulation of logical and syllogistic constructions that are none other than the same ones ethicists have always applied within this domain, yet Freud gives them an entirely different significance. If we think of this correctly, its true content becomes evident: this is what I am teaching you. The orthos logos (ὀρθός λόγος) relevant to us is not universal propositions.

The orthos logos we address is how I teach you to articulate what transpires in the unconscious. It is the discourse situated at the level of the pleasure principle. And it is in relation to this “orthos”—ironically, in quotation marks—that the reality principle must guide the subject toward achievable action. In Freud’s framework, the reality principle emerges as fundamentally precarious.

No philosophy before Freud pushed this perspective so far—not by questioning reality as such (certainly not in the manner of the idealists, who questioned it philosophically). Compared to Freud, the philosophical idealists are trifling, because ultimately, they do not challenge reality seriously; they domesticate it. They claim that reality is what we measure and that there is no need to look beyond it. The so-called “idealist” position is one of comfort. Freud’s position—as indeed that of any sensible person—is quite different: reality is precarious. And precisely because its access is so precarious, the imperatives charting its course are tyrannical.

Feelings, as guides to reality, are misleading. The intuition underlying all of Freud’s self-analytic research does not express itself otherwise with regard to the approach demanded of man toward reality. This very process can only begin through primary defense. The profound ambiguity of this approach is initially inscribed in terms of defense—defense that exists even before the conditions of repression are formulated as such.

To emphasize what I am calling here “the paradox of the relationship to reality” in Freud, I would like to illustrate this for you.

1- Subject
Pleasure Principle (Unconscious – ICS) ⇆ Reality Principle (Conscious – Cs)

2- Process
Thoughts ⇆ Perception-Consciousness

3- Object
Unknown ⇆ Known

Since you have been accustomed to these two terms, things may seem to fall naturally into place. And indeed, broadly speaking, as you are undoubtedly aware, it is on one side the unconscious, and on the other the conscious, that I have at least outlined here as the poles under which the opposition of this apparatus manifests itself at the level of knowledge. However, I urge you to pause here and pay attention to the points I will now highlight for you.

What, then, are we led to articulate about the apparatus of perception as such?
To reality, of course! Yet, what is the very novelty introduced by Freud that allows us to formulate something different, at the very least, if we follow his hypothesis?

It is that, if there is anything governed by the pleasure principle—this is Freud’s innovation—it is precisely this perception. The primary process, Freud tells us in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, tends to operate toward a “perceptual identity.” Whether real or hallucinatory, it will always strive to establish itself. If it does not coincide with reality, it will become hallucinatory. And this is precisely the danger when the primary process takes the upper hand.

On the other hand, what does the secondary process aim for? This, too, is discussed in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, though it is already articulated in the Entwurf. Freud tells us it strives for a “thought identity.” What does this mean?

It means that the entire internal functioning of the psychic apparatus—something we will diagram next time—is exercised through a process of trial, corrective testing, whereby the subject, guided by discharges occurring along pre-formed pathways (Bahnungen), engages in a series of trials and detours that gradually lead to the crossing point, the testing of the surrounding system in the experience of various present objects. This unfolds against the background of experience, which consists of what could be described as the erection of a particular system of Wunsch (desire) or Erwartung (expectation)—pleasure defined as anticipated pleasure, tending toward its realization within its own autonomous field, expecting nothing external for its occurrence, and thus striving directly toward the realization most contrary to what might be triggered.

Thought, then, should initially appear to us as something aligned with the reality principle, something we could classify under the same column. Yet this is not the case. According to Freud, this process, by its very nature, is unconscious. Unlike what reaches the subject through perceptual orders coming from the external world, nothing from these trials and attempts—where approximations take place in the psyche, creating pathways that enable the subject’s adaptation—appears perceptible as such.

All thought, by its nature, operates through unconscious pathways. Undoubtedly, it is not governed by the pleasure principle, but it occurs within a field that initially seems to belong to the unconscious, governed by the pleasure principle. As for what happens within internal processes—including thought processes—the subject’s consciousness receives no signals other than signs of pleasure or pain, Freud tells us. As with all other unconscious processes, nothing else reaches consciousness but these signals of pleasure or pain.

So how, then, do we gain any apprehension of these thought processes?

Here again, Freud offers a fully articulated answer: only insofar as words are produced. What is commonly interpreted—and naturally with the ease typical of all reflection, which remains, despite itself, marred by a tendency toward parallelism—is that Freud means to say that words characterize the transition into the preconscious. But a transition of what exactly? Of movements insofar as they belong to the unconscious.

Freud states that we know thought processes only through words. The knowable aspect of the unconscious comes to us through words. This is articulated with great precision and force in the Entwurf, where Freud, for example, states that we would only have the vaguest notion of a disagreeable object—an object, as such, would never detach itself from the context in which it functions as an unsaid point, pulling the entire contextual fabric along with it.

The object as such, Freud tells us, only signals itself to consciousness insofar as pain elicits a cry from the subject. The existence of the feindliche Objekt (hostile object), as such, is marked by the subject’s cry. This is articulated in the Entwurf and illustrates its function as a process of discharge and as a bridge through which something occurring in the subject’s psyche can enter their consciousness.

It is insofar as the consciousness of the subject captures something at the level of the discharge of a cry that something can be identified—this lived experience of the feindliche Objekt (hostile object)—which, like all other objects, would remain obscure and unconscious if the cry did not provide it with a signal that, for consciousness, gives it its weight, its presence, and its structure. At the same time, this development is reinforced by the fact that the major objects that concern the human subject are speaking objects, which allow the subject to see revealed, through the discourse of others, the processes that truly inhabit their unconscious.

If the unconscious is revealed to us, it is only insofar as we apprehend it through its explanation, ultimately articulated in what occurs through speech. From this, we are justified—and even more so as the course of events and the progression of Freud’s discoveries demonstrate—to recognize that the unconscious itself, in the final analysis, has no other structure than that of language.

This is what gives both the importance and the value to atomistic theories. Atomistic theories have no actual relevance and fail to account for what they claim to explain, namely, the supposed existence of discrete “atoms” of the neuronal apparatus or individual elements within the nervous framework. However, the entire theory of contiguity and continuity relationships admirably illustrates the signifying structure as such, insofar as it plays a role in every operation of language. What, then, do we see presented with this diagram:

1 – Subject
Pleasure Principle (ICS) ⇄ Reality Principle (Cs)

2 – Process
Thoughts ⇄ Perception-Consciousness

3 – Object
Unknown ⇄ Known

Namely, with this dual intercrossing of the respective efforts of the reality principle and the pleasure principle acting upon each other? The reality principle, governing what occurs at the level of thought, operates only insofar as something from thought reappears, articulated in words within interhuman experience. It is through this articulation that thought can emerge into the subject’s awareness and consciousness.

Conversely, the unconscious operates insofar as it engages elements—logical composites that belong to the realm of logos. These are articulated in the form of an orthos logos (ὀρθός λόγος), or if you prefer, a hidden logos at the heart of the locus where, for the subject, these passages and transfers occur. These are motivated by the attraction, necessity, and inertia of pleasure, which cause one sign to substitute for another or transfer to itself the affective charge tied to a previous experience.

Thus, at three levels, we see the necessity to organize three distinct orders:

1. Substance: The subject’s experience, or the substance of experience, corresponds to the opposition between the reality principle and the pleasure principle.
2. Process: The psychic experience divides into two distinct modes:

• 2a. Perception, linked to hallucinatory activity and governed by the pleasure principle. This is what Freud calls psychic reality, meaning a process that is, in essence, a process of fiction.
• 2b. Thought processes, through which the subject engages in tendential activity—the appetitive process. This appetitive process, as Freud later explained, involves searching, recognizing, and rediscovering the object. This constitutes the other face of psychic reality: a process that, while unconscious, is one of appetite.

1. Objectification: At the level of the object, we encounter the known and the unknown. It is because the known can only be apprehended through words that the unknown presents itself as having a linguistic structure.

This analysis allows us to revisit the question of what occurs at the level of the subject. Just as the oppositions between fiction and appetite or knowable and unknowable divide what transpires at the levels of process (2: fiction-appetite) and object (3: knowable-unknowable), we must ask what constitutes, in the final analysis, the subject’s apprehension of reality between these two principles.

I propose the following qualification: what presents itself as substance to the subject at the level of the pleasure principle is “the good” of the subject, insofar as pleasure governs subjective activity. It is the good—it is the idea of the good—that sustains it. For this reason, ethicists have always been compelled to attempt to identify these two terms—”pleasure” and “good”—even though they are fundamentally so antinomic.

From this point, can we not place, on the level of the substrate of reality in the subjective operation, something that is a question mark? What is this new figure introduced to us by Freud in the opposition between the reality principle and the pleasure principle?

Undoubtedly, it is a problematic figure. Freud does not, for a single moment, consider identifying adequacy to reality with any notion of “good.” In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud tells us: “Certainly, civilization and culture demand too much from the subject.” If there is something called “his well-being and happiness,” there is nothing to be expected from either the microcosm—that is, from himself—or the macrocosm. And it is on this question mark that I will conclude for today.