Beyond the Limit

While researching Erwin Schrödinger for a short essay on his famous cat, I read about his obsession with Hinduism and in particular the concept of Brahman is Atman—that notion by which the universe is in the human and the human is in the universe, a kind cosmic extimacy—to borrow Lacan’s term—and what Aldous Huxley would describe as one of the principle axioms of the perennial philosophy, found in Meister Eckhart no less than Buddhist philosophy, or the Kabbalah, or the zonked wave function of early quantum physics for that matter.

Anyways after reading all that I went to bed and had a long anxious theory dream in which Freud’s notion of the Primary Process was the structural solution to all metaphysics and all metapsychology. I woke up with my head buzzing with revelation and oceanic wave structures collapsing into little particles of ego consciousness. But the revelatory power soon diminished into a confused disappointment; the nighttime profundity could not hold up to daylight. In the dream it felt like I had discovered the primary process, when in fact Freud had already laid it all out in chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, in the year of our lord, 1900.

My anxious theory dream is born from an impulse (no doubt naïve) to reduce psychoanalytic theory down to its most basic feature; an attempt to find a structure that is common to the psyche (or at least most psyches) and from this derive a theory that refuses diagnosis and avoids making unnecessary decisions about the patient, or probably any decisions at all (It would also be nice to invalidate the needle-in-a-haystack style of most psychoanalytic papers). If, as my school maintains (the so-called modern school) that “the analyst is a receptor and not an explainer” (Bernstein), then none but the most basic theory is needed. Per my dream, we will say that the most basic feature of Freudian metapsychology is the primary/secondary processes; in short, a theory of the limit.

But what is the primary process? In the strict terms of Freud’s dynamic system we can describe the primary process as the free flow of psychical energy. It is the logic of the unconscious (which seems like no logic to us), indifferent to negation, space, time, reality and death; a wicked admixture of perception and memory where the limit between inside/outside falls apart. For Freud, the primary process is primitive, the mental functioning of an infant, propelled by pure libido—i.e. the pleasure principle—but that lives on, repressed, in the adult psyche.

So it has little meaning without its counterpart, the secondary process, that defensive and regulatory program by which waves of unconscious force are filtered, reduced and organized into conscious experience according to the dictates of the reality principle. The secondary process is the logic of the ego, our everyday logic; a logic meant precisely to limit or bind the free flow of psychical energy. It is important to note that the “reality” of the realitätsprinzip, as it is known by the secondary process, is consensual reality, the constructed reality of the appearances; reality as it “appears” to the ego and to the world (so you can see how easy it is to come to wildly different views of “reality” if you spend too much time on the internet).

One common reading of Freud (that even Freud himself succumbs to in the popular essays of late life) is that the well-functioning ego is supposed to limit and govern the more wicked impulses of the “primitive” infantile primary process, analyzing it down to a nicety, placing it under glandular control, binding it within a well-functioning society. Freud’s late notion of civilization falls under this view at times; that the purpose of civilization is to quell our more barbaric impulses—if only he read the newspaper today.

The theory of the limit as foretold by my dream (acknowledging that regulation by the ego is useful for personal hygiene) would reverse the confines of the unconscious. The primary process, emptied of its primitive contents and given a much greater scale, becomes the ultimate sea-chasm against which the ego attempt to make ground—ground that will always be an illusion (some illusions are better than others). The secondary process is reduced to its basic structure: a limit, a defensive perimeter—the ego, that ich—that strives in vain to deflect the oceanic forces that churn within and without; forces that will in time bring the self to its final conclusion: death—mors immortalis. The primary process becomes the ocean upon which your little boat the ego plies the wave; the limits of the boat are the hallucinated limits of the world. Past this limit is the Real; but the Real has no limit (and so remains foreclosed to thought). Children, schizophrenics, mystics, and victims of trauma each have privileged access to the Real. Again, it is helpful to note that the Real is not a place, nor an appearance, but rather an interface—perhaps even a practice.

Of course it is the tendency of the well-functioning ego to deny all of this. The interface of the Real is what the ego chooses not to face. The greatest trick the world ever pulled is to convince itself that the ocean does not exist (and so no wonder the biosphere is collapsing).

Nevertheless, we are all born there, beyond the limit.

Feminine Wave, 1845, Katsushika Hokusai