Figures of the Unconscious Series

A Non-Oedipal Psychoanalysis?

by Philippe Van Haute and Tomas Geyskens

Published 3 May 2012

The different psychopathologic syndromes show in an exaggerated and caricatural manner the basic structures of human existence. These structures not only characterize psychopathology, but they also determine the highest forms of culture. This is the credo of Freud's anthropology. This anthropology implies that humans are beings of the in-between. The human being is essentially tied up between pathology and culture, and there is no ‘normal position' that can be defined in a theoretically convincing manner. The authors of this book call this Freudian anthropology a patho-analysis of existence or a clinical anthropology. This anthropology gives a new meaning to the Nietzschean dictum that the human being is a ‘sick animal'. Freud, and later Lacan, first developed this anthropological insight in relation to hysteria (in its relation to literature). This patho-analytic perspective progressively disappears in Freud's texts after 1905. This book reveals the crucial moments of that development. In doing so, it becomes clear not only that Freud introduced the Oedipus complex much later than is usually assumed, but also that the theory of the Oedipus complex is irreconcilable with the project of a clinical anthropology. The authors not only examine the philosophical meaning of this thesis in the work of Freud. They also examine its avatars in the texts of Jacques Lacan and show how this project of a patho-analysis of existence inevitably obliges us to formulate a non-oedipal psychoanalytic anthropology.

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Our Original Scenes

by Tomas Geyskens

Published 20 September 2005

Freud's ideas on infantile sexuality can only be understood as constructions that are necessary to understand the psychopathological formations of adults. These constructions of infantile sexuality, therefore, must not be considered to be speculations about infant behaviour as such, because in infancy sexuality is obviously a rather marginal problem, and because, consequently, only their nachträglich effects reveal the significance of our infantile sexual experiences. In the psychoanalytic cure, these infantile experiences are never remembered as such. The idea that what is repressed in adults can be observed in infants does not take into account this notion of Nachträglichkeit, while Freud's theory cannot be understood without it. The relation between the pathological and the infantile bridges the gap between pathology and normality because pathology is caused by universally human problems or 'weak points': infantile sexuality and, following our interpretation of the death instinct, the infant's radical Hilflosigkeit. In psychoanalysis, therefore, the analysis of the different pathologies has inevitably an anthropological claim. To understand what it means to be human, says Freud, we must analyse the extreme, paradigmatic answers to this problem that we all are ourselves. The analysis of different pathologies will highlight the different aspects of our infantile experience and its nachträglich effects. In this perspective, the difference between normality and pathology can only be a quantitative, not a qualitative difference. In this way, Freud transformed the study of psychopathology into a clinical anthropology, i.e. a clarification of the specifically human in human nature by analysing its pathological manifestations.