vienna 1911. during a meeting of the vienna psychoanalytic society alfred adler points to what appears to be a contradiction in the psychoanalytic theory of repression if you ask where repression comes from you're told from civilization but if you go on to ask where civilization comes from you're told from repression adler's perplexity frames the problem and the supposed answer to that problem that we'll look at in this video primal repression but what kind of problem is this adler soon to split from freud intended his remarks as an attack on psychoanalysis and its founder but freud's comeback was sharp what adler was describing were in fact two different repressions or more precisely two different moments of repression the first a repression by former generations of the origins of civilization the second a repression by each subsequent generation which maintains these first repressions repression is not the chicken or egg type problem adler presented it to be it's not some kind of logical contradiction to say that an egg comes from a chicken but a chicken comes from an egg they're simply two facts around the same time as his spat with adler we find freud making the first references to primal repression and soon afterwards we get a lot of other primal phenomena start to crop up in his work primal fantasies primal scenes the primal father so why do we need the idea of a primal anything and to what question is primal repression the answer this is the last in the series of videos on the concept of repression in psychoanalysis check out the rest and videos on other topics on this channel and hit subscribe and the bell icon to get notified when new ones are released for more exploring psychoanalysis through the work of jacques black on check out my site at lacononline.com let's go back in time to before freud to where the models of the mind that are at the basis of how we think about many aspects of psychology even today originated imagine someone lights a candle far away from you so far away that you don't see it it's brought a little closer you still don't see it closer still and now you see it at some point a threshold is passed and you're able to see the candle for the german psychophysicists who greatly influenced freud like fechner and his predecessor herbert experiments like these were ways to study the psychology of perception they showed that being able to consciously perceive something is a kind of liminal phenomenon at some point there's a threshold that's passed a threshold that marks the point between not seeing and seeing the question they were interested in was how much quantitative energy from the light do you need before you have the qualitative experience of being conscious of it in the same way they thought there must be an intensity threshold between conscious and unconscious experiences the outside world is brimming with stimuli but we haven't evolved to become conscious of all of it so imagine you're walking through a jungle and you hear a rustling in the trees here too we have a quantitative phenomenon which is qualitatively experienced but registered unconsciously it's not until that stimulus becomes sufficiently powerful the lion jumps out of the trees that it passes a certain intensity threshold and we turn our conscious attention towards it so in the scientific world that freud is about to enter we already have a model of the mind in which there is an energy an unconscious a conscious and a threshold it's a model that explains how we get from quantitative energy on one side to qualitative experience on the other freud's immediate predecessors helmholtz herring and herring's lab partner one joseph breuer all thought about the mind on this model fast forward to 1900 and freud has just published his breakthrough work the interpretation of dreams in it freud had taken this very model and made one crucial alteration the threshold for him was not just a stimulus threshold it was a defensive threshold freud thought the psyche strives to maintain a state of homeostasis of constancy or stability against a state of excitation psychical defenses were necessary to protect against a quota of energy which was capable of investing thoughts and ideas separating the conscious and the unconscious was a defensive barrier it guarded consciousness or pre-consciousness the stuff that's capable of becoming conscious from the intrusion of unconscious material and continuing with the military metaphors the term he chose to describe this investment was besetsum occupation in english this is often rendered by the strange term cathexis but we'll use investment here because it's easier in making this alteration what was new about freud's view of the mind was that it was a mind capable of regulating itself his was a model that synthesized the work of his predecessors it was both a materialist newtonian mind on the one hand but on the other it left a space for human subjectivity agency and intent over the course of the next 15 years freud developed a view of the psyche around this model one that he could describe in dynamic topographical and economic terms when we talk about thoughts and ideas being invested with a quota of energy we're talking about this economic aspect besides the dynamic and topographical points of view of the psyche freud wrote we have adopted the economic one this endeavors to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their magnitude levels of investment could be attributed to unconscious and conscious systems so that i propose that when we succeeded in describing a psychical process in its dynamic topographical and economic aspects we should speak of it as a metapsychological presentation so repression on this model might work like this there is an idea in the pre-conscious system a thought that is capable of becoming conscious it receives a level of investment from that system repression would entail a withdrawal of that pre-conscious investment the idea then either remains disinvested receives investment from the unconscious system or retains unconscious investment that it already had but for a couple of reasons this doesn't quite make sense for one what keeps the repressed unconscious if an idea receives an investment from the unconscious or if it already had it why doesn't it just push back into consciousness and if it did surely this whole process would have to start over and just continue endlessly we would have a constant yo-yo effect by which unconscious material pushes to consciousness on the one hand but then gets repressed again on the other but nothing would ever really be repressed secondly how does something become repressed in the first place in other words if the unconscious is the sum of the repressed how is the unconscious actually established we need a process that can explain how repression is both maintained and established not just how it works but how it gets started to begin with freud solved this problem in the same way that he responded to adler's attack we began with we have to think of two kinds of repression a day-to-day form of repression which floyd calls after pressure and a primal repression primal repression was primal in the sense that it created the distinction between the pre-conscious and the unconscious systems to begin with primal repression was therefore really important because it was a logical consequence of freud's theory of the unconscious so important was it in fact that by 1926 freud would write that most of the repressions with which we have to deal in our therapeutic work are cases of after pressure they presuppose the operation of earlier primal repressions which exert an attraction on the more recent situation so let's look a bit deeper into the two moments of repression firstly freud suggests there must be a counter investment in anti-cathexes by means of which the system pre-conscious protects itself from the pressure upon it of an unconscious idea it's this which represents the permanent expenditure of a primal repression and which also guarantees the permanence of that repression anti-cathexis is the sole mechanism of primal repression in the case of repression proper after pressure there is in addition withdrawal of the pre-conscious cathexis anti-cathexis counter-investment is not the same thing as primal repression but it is how the primal repressed stays repressed so that this doesn't get too theoretical let's give a clinical example of this counterinvestment at work the case of phobia the first phase of phobia is often overlooked it's the appearance of anxiety without an object you don't know what you're afraid of yet what's happening here according to freud is that the pre-conscious is recoiling from granting an investment to something from the unconscious that's pushing towards consciousness so to get a grip on this anxiety the pre-conscious invests a substitute idea an idea connected in some way with the rejected one a substitute by displacement for it says this is what a counter investment or anti-cathexis is it's in effect a rationalization of anxiety by the ego nonetheless we're afraid of it it's our phobic object but often this isn't a very effective response and when this can't be controlled the whole of the surrounding environment of the substitutive idea gets invested we have displacement heaped upon displacement and you become sensitive to anything which evokes the counter-invested idea so you stay away from those things too because what your ego is doing is trying to isolate the substitute idea to stop it developing further but the problem is not really with the substitute idea out there it's what's going on in here that's why certain treatments for phobia that only focus on the phobic object like exposure therapy graded desensitization missed the point the greater the level of investment of the idea from the unconscious the further outwards the defensive boundaries have to extend to protect against it and this is why phobia comes to overtake a person's world the irony of phobia is that the price of managing anxiety by investing a substitute out there to protect against something in here is that the world out there gets smaller and smaller so how does primal repression come about we can start by saying that the origins of primal repression are contemporaneous with some kind of trauma but what do we mean by trauma freud first thought there must have been some early infantile sexual experience and at the start of his work he even thought that this might be a kind of sexual assault perpetrated by the adult or caregiver on the child this he called his seduction theory but it was always quite an unlikely idea and he soon gave it up guessing that the real picture was much more complicated understanding primal repression helps us to see how complicated to really understand how primal repression works we have to understand a bit about what the drives are for freud we'll come back to this in more depth later but for now let's just say a drive is not a thing it's a dynamic process and this process has four components a source in the body a pressure a charge of energy an aim to eliminate tension to restore a state of homeostasis or constancy and an object the means by which this aim is achieved we never know drives directly because they're only expressed when they're linked to a representative and that representative might be a thought or an idea this is why freud says the drives themselves are silent to start with primal repression is a process that involves an initial fixation whereby the drive becomes fixed to a certain representation fixation is in fact a very apt term think for example of the way an early memory becomes fixed in place like you fix a photo in a photograph album but also think of the way we become stuck on something fixated on an idea we might say then two things have to happen to keep this fixation in place firstly as we saw there needs to be a counterinvestment of a substitute idea at the level of the pre-conscious system it requires not just a push but a counter a counter investment of another thought or idea secondly what is primarily repressed lack on says draws towards itself all the other repressions there's a kind of strange attraction exercised by the primarily repressed on later material that's subject to repression it's a mistake to emphasize only the repulsion which operates from the direction of the conscious upon what is to be repressed freud writes quite as important is the attraction exercised by what was primarily repressed upon everything with which it can establish a connection these two forces work together as one dynamic for a thought probably the trend towards repression would fail in its purpose if these two forces did not cooperate if they were not something previously repressed ready to receive what is repelled by the conscious so if we were to sketch a kind of developmental picture of primal repression it would go something like this we start with need the needs of the infant to be fed to be soothed to be kept warm primal repression starts when a gap opens up between the expression of need and the satisfaction of need let's imagine a newborn baby crying it feels hungry it feels cold it feels discomfort at a very simple bodily level in response it gets a breast a bottle a cuddle the child may cry for some other reason that it's hungry but it gets fed all the same so from the outset the expression of need and the way it's satisfied never totally coincide this is what kick-starts primal repression lack on thought that this expression of need is from the start contaminated by the demand for love for something more than the object of satisfaction this entails that the experience of satisfaction will always leave a residue beyond it that cannot be expressed a margin which lachon calls desire what is alienated in need lachanze says in the akri constitutes a primal repression as it cannot hypothetically be articulated in demand it nevertheless appears in an offshoot that presents itself in man as desire lachon's one-time student john laplanche himself one of the greatest readers of freud of his age elaborates what's going on here thinking of the infant's early life primal repression happens when there appears certain representations which are underlined delimited offered up implanted one might say by the adult world take for instance the breast he notes that freud talks about sexual pre-sexual objects a fantastic description that captures the fact that the breast both nourishes a need and is a representation that carries with it sexual overtones connotations of which the child is not yet aware nor which the mother may intend to relay but which is simply underlined transmitted enigmatically messaged to the child the fact that the breast is both a source of excitation for satisfying need and a source of excitation linked to a representation of something sexual if only for the caregiver create the conditions for primal repression laplace isolates two phases to primal repression the first phase is one of implanting it has the same weird temporality as we see in trauma and afterwardsness which always needs two moments the impact of the first only realized with the occurrence of the second laplante writes in accordance with the freudian theory of afterwardsness i take primal repression to have at least two phases the first passive phase is so to speak the implanting the first inscription of the enigmatic signifiers without these as yet being repressed they have a sort of dormant status which is both internal external or as for it also has it elsewhere sexual pre-sexual these enigmatic signifiers are implanted dormant which is different to being repressed to adapt a metaphor used by jacqueline miller we can think of language as a parasite or a virus it's implanted within us dormant in the sense that we incubate it we harbor the virus we might be infectious but we do not yet suffer from its effects the second phase of primal repression is one of binding laplace continues the second phase is bound to a reactualization and reactivation of these signifiers which are henceforth attacking internal ones in the same way that a virus attacks the immune system from the inside we might say which the infant must endeavor to bind it is this endeavor to bind to symbolize dangerous and traumatic signifiers that culminates in what freud calls the infant's theorization the infantile sexual theories and in the partial failure of such symbolization or theorization and by that token in the repression of an unmasterable uncircumscribable remainder in fact these remainders are even described in viable parasitic terms by freud and breuer who at the start of the studies on hysteria refer to the remnants of trauma behaving like internal foreign bodies laplace calls these isolated elements which are outside of communication or signification and which the infant will fail to bind symbolize or master in some way lacon was very interested in the role they played in his seminar on the logic of fantasy in 1966 he gave the following definition of primal repression primal repression is the following what a signifier represents for another signifier it does not bite on anything it constitutes absolutely nothing it accommodates itself to an absolute absence of design to illustrate this he drew a comparison to egyptian hieroglyphics for around 16 centuries at least the egyptian hieroglyphs remained as solitary as they were uncomprehended in the desert sands it's clear and it always has been clear for everyone that this meant that each of the signifiers cut into the stone at least represented a subject for the other signifiers if this were not the way things were no one would ever even have taken that to be a writing it's not at all necessary that the writing should mean something for anyone whatsoever in order for it to be a writing and in order that as such it manifests that each sign represents a subject for the one which follows it this is a tricky passage so let's go through it lacon is saying that like the signifiers of primal repression the hieroglyphs lay isolated dormant for centuries the people who had written them were long gone and so is anyone who could read them when they were finally discovered no one understood what they meant but we didn't have to in order to understand that they were a writing all we had to understand was that first and foremost they represented a subject a person for other signifiers and this is what told us they were writing we didn't have to know what the hieroglyphs meant to know they meant something to someone but first of all they represented a subject to other signifiers before they represented anything else to us because signifiers signify only to each other the subject no longer has to be there in person for it to be present in the gap between signifiers as an implication as a consequence and influence in the same way primal repression doesn't rely on there being someone around to primarily repress something the absence of design of being there that lacon was going on about earlier can be understood as the absence of the person being there or the absence of the thing being there but from a signifier's point of view this doesn't matter anyway and to us if nothing else a signifier a hieroglyph only needs to signify that there was an inscription at some point like the mother who carries the enigmatic message which is transmitted to and implanted in the child neither she nor the child need to intentionally communicate what it means nor understand what it means in order for it to have an effect and the remnant of the attempt to give it a meaning to imbue it with a signification this failure of translation as freud called it at one point is what we know as repression in seminar 11 lacon gives us a way to fit these pieces together let's sketch out how he does this starting on the left hand side the primal repressed is a signifier he says and we can always regard what's built on this as constituting the symptom as a scaffolding of signifiers repressed and symptom are homogeneous and reduceable to the functions of signifiers although their structure is built up step by step like any edifice it's nevertheless in the end inscribable in synchronic terms on the other side he puts interpretation which he says is equivalent to desire desire in fact is interpretation itself in between the two we have the realm of sexuality but sexuality in the form of what he calls the partial drives what lacon is emphasizing here following freud is that the drive is not some kind of neutral psychical energy in the way that jung had thought of it the drives are partial in two senses firstly because they are partial with regards to the biological finality of sexuality in other words we're not talking about a reproductive drive in the way that we talk about a reproductive instinct and there's no such thing as a sex drive a single drive for sex secondly because they partially represent a function a bodily function drives are always related to the body but related how like a montage lachon says a montage that is pieced together on what he calls the apparatus of the body similar to the scaffolding of signifiers on the left the drive is precisely that montage by which sexuality participates in the psychical life in a way that must conform to the gap-like structure that is the structure of the unconscious and he offers a fantastic image of this we should picture the drive as like a montage in a surrealist painting if we bring together the paradoxes of the drive i think that the resulting image would show the working of a dynamo connected up to a gas tap a peacock's feather emerges and tickles the belly of a pretty woman who is just lying there looking beautiful whatever contorted shape the drives take they are formed by being linked to parts of the body that have a special role in the interplay with our early caregivers these are privileged zones on the body what laplace calls exchange zones between the child and its caregiver the oral zone cited at the mouth is one such exchange zone the point where it meets the partial object like the breast which as we saw earlier is infused with a sexual signification at the same time as it nourishes the child's hunger it's this which gives the contorted character to satisfaction which colours what the child later experiences as its sexuality these early experiences are accompanied by enigmatic messages or designified signifiers transmitted from the caregiver to the child such as the mother's caress it's never clear what these mean to the child they are what freud called varney monsign perceptual indices or signs if as freud first thought repression is the result of a failure of translation this is the infant's inability to translate or metabolize these signifiers what they all have in common is that they are experienced as being addressed to the infant itself something which will become important later in the subject's life in its experience of its own sexuality so if the primary repressed is a signifier what kind of signifier is it and how do we know it when we see it la con gives a very simple answer it's a nonsense a breaking down of sense turning to the right hand side of the diagram this is exactly what he believes psychoanalytic interpretation should do interpretation should have the effect of bringing out an irreducible signifier irreducible nonsensical composed of non-meanings signifying elements but this doesn't mean that anything goes as if one interpretation is as good as any other the fact that i have said that the effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel a kern to use for its own term of nonsense does not mean that interpretation is in itself nonsense interpretation should sit between citation and enigma as he says elsewhere what is essential as lacon put it in seminar 11 is that he the analyst and should see beyond this any signification to what signifier to what irreducible traumatic non-meaning he is as subject subjected let's wrap this up with a clinical example to illustrate this which lachon gives from the wolfman case the sudden appearance of the white wolves sitting in the walnut tree that the young sergei panchi have seized through the window in his nightmare what horrifies the wolf man is the gaze of the wolves as they sit in the tree silently staring at him freud's idea is that this gaze is in fact the gaze of the young sergey himself silently watching something going on when he was an infant a primal scene for it calls it which gets repeated and which starts to structure and determine what will later become sergey's sexual fantasies at each stage in the life of the subject like on says something always arrived to reshape the value of the determining index represented by this original signifier we see how the wolfman's life his sexual life but also his desire in its wider lacanian sense is shaped around chance events but events which are important to him because lakon says they indicate something about the desire of the other and this is the important thing if you know the case remember the adventure of the father the sister the mother and the servant woman grusha lachan says so many different stages that enrich the unconscious desire of the subject with something that is to be put as signification constituted in the relation to the desire of the other in the numerator it represents a point of fixation lakon says because the young sergey cannot substitute anything for it as such since this would require the representation of one signifier for another whereas here there is only one the first and what then happens as a result lakon says is that we see the collapse of signification sergey can't make sense of it it doesn't seem or shouldn't be important but it is it has a weight but it doesn't have a meaning insofar as the primary signifier is pure nonsense it becomes the bearer of all the infinitization of the value of the subject not open to all meanings but abolishing them all which is different what in effect grounds in the meaning and radical non-meaning of the subject the function of freedom is strictly speaking this signifier that kills all meaning the primary repressed signifier he goes on to say is like what can't called negative quantities now it would be tempting to think that there must be something underlying primal repression something deeper darker or even more primal and fundamental but there isn't one of the great points made by la planche in his re-reading of freud is that the drive is not some kind of independent or abstract force that would fulfill this role for me the drive is a force of the representatives themselves and not behind them which go back to some abstract force which doesn't exist for me laplace thinks this should entail a revision of freud's economic model for him the drive isn't some kind of energy that goes into this or goes into that apportioned as if a debit in one area of life can be credited to another let's take the example of sublimation to see the implications of this when we think about sublimation of the drive people tend to picture an artist or some kind of creative who redirects sexual drive energy from to art as if to rebalance their drive account to a more productive but equally satisfying purpose but instead artistic creation in laplace's view means the creation of new energy lachan himself has some really interesting things to say about this and we can connect it to the original lack of meaning that he saw in primal repression his idea is that artistic creation comes ex-nilo from nothing the example he gives is the potter on a wheel the artist creates something out of nothing by creating a vas or a pot around a central hole avoid a lack or more precisely the artist creates something of nothing because the void or lack constituted by the hole in the center of the vas wasn't there to begin with it's the vas that has made it a void as such in the canyon terms the artist has made lack their object artistic creation is the creation of something new from this lack from an enigma something that evades or eludes representation something that will remain as a question or problem with which art in all its forms is a creative attempt to grapple as james baldwin brilliantly put it the purpose of art is to lay bear the questions that have been hidden by the answers this helps us understand the best definition of the drive the one freud gives it the drive is a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body art works like psychoanalysis in this respect we elaborate we metabolize we translate we circumscribe re-describe and reinvent and this strangely enough produces therapeutic effects of change for more videos like this hit subscribe and the bell icon to get notified as they're released all this and more exploring psychoanalysis through the work of jack lachon is available on my site laconline.com