A neglected doorway to the garden labyrinth of Freud’s though is the strange and forgotten concept of Endopsychic Perception. If at times Freud refers to the instrument of the psyche as a telescope or microscope (1900, 1940)—that is, as an image emerging at an ideal point between glass lenses—then the perception that this apparatus allows us is precisely endopsychic; it is an obscure perception of the interior world reflected upon exterior phenomena. While in my view this concept/technique may add a certain amount of lucidity to the Freudian project, it has up to now received little attention—even Laplanche and Pontalis’ comprehensive encyclopedia of Freud’s thought, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, does not include this as a stand-alone entry. The following is an attempt to amend this error.

TLDR: Endospychic perception is the obscure recognition of what would otherwise be unconscious. A perception of psychical reality that finds its expression in projections cast upon the external world. From the beginning of Freud’s thought the reflection of certain features of the interior world may be discovered in the superstitions of religion and in mythologies, dreams, phantasy, paranoia and delusions.

Endopsychic perception arrives fully formed, as if it had been plucked from out of the thin air, in an amusing letter from Freud to Fliess, dated December 12, 1897. The passage reads as follows:

Can you imagine what “endopsychic myths” are? The latest product of my mental labor. The dim inner perception of one's own psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside and, characteristically, into the future and the beyond. Immortality, retribution, the entire beyond are all reflections of our psychic internal [world]. Meschugge? Psycho-mythology (1897, p. 286).

While perception is the key feature of this concept, Freud is consistent in qualifying such perception as “dim”, “dark”, or “obscure;” consciousness is no requirement for this perceptual feedback. If a certain amount of puzzlement or even a quasi-mystical language creeps into Freud’s use of this concept, it is little wonder for it amounts to the paradoxical notion of unconscious perception.

Freud does not fail to deploy his nascent science of the unconscious to make direct and devastating attacks upon the superstition world of the believer. The concept endopsychic perception is never far away from such critique for it is his principle tool by which metaphysics are transformed into metapsychology. From The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901):

A large part of the mythological view of the world…is nothing but psychology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition (the endopsychic perception, as it were) of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored…in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious… to transform metaphysics into metapsychology (p. 258-259).

Projection is closely related to endopsychic perception, being the means of its expression, while revealing its basic shape—it is as if the telescope had a mirror on one end: the innermost stuff of the psyche, its structure and processes, become by projection the mirroring representations of the world itself. Both projection and endopsychic perception are thus non-pathological, and rather more like facilities of mind, permanent features of Freud’s psychical apparatus, like memory, or judgment. “But projection was not created for the purpose of defence; it also occurs where there is no conflict. The projection outwards of internal perceptions is a primitive mechanism, to which, for instance, our sense perceptions are subject, and which therefore normally plays a very large part in determining the form taken by our external world” (Freud, 1913, p. 63). So we can see how the categories inside/outside are entangled with one another and, ultimately, indistuishable.

It fits well with the program of endopsychic perception that we can see this same circular structure in the nondual insights of certain Zen practitioners, for example, 13th century Zen master Dōgen: “I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars” (Dogen quoted in Loy, 2019, p. 13). Were we to apply Freud’s logic of endopsychic perception to this Zen insight we will find that it expresses, or allows us to perceive, certain peculiarities of the unconscious; that is, as Dogen realizes the nonduality between himself and the external world the perspicacious reader may perceive certain features of the unconscious: lack of contradiction, presumption of reality and so on.

If endopsychic perception recedes in Freud’s work from 1913 onward, the concept is not so much abandoned as integrated into the entire metapsychological project and, finally, makes a subtle return under the guise of its synonym, “obscure self-perception,” at the end of Freud’s life with his last note observing that “mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id” (1938, p. 300). The id is on the outside.

Freud had made a similar claim regarding mystical practices in what is arguably one of his more famous paragraphs in The New Introductory Lectures of 1933:

Certain mystical practices may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for instance, perception may be able to grasp happenings in the depths of the ego and in the id which were otherwise inaccessible to it… it may be admitted that the therapeutic efforts of psycho-analysis have chosen a similar line of approach (1933, p. 79ff).

References

Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 4:ix-627

Freud, S. (1901) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Forgetting, Slips of the Tongue, Bungled Actions, Superstitions and Errors (1901). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 6:vii-296

Freud, S. (1933) New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 22:1-182

Freud, S. (1938) Findings, Ideas, Problems. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 23:299-300

Freud, S. (1940) An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 21:27-84

Endopsychic Perception

Thinking with Demons

Freud’s Nirvana

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