Constructing the Three Universals of Analysis:
Part III – Winter Semester 2015
Instructor: Groome
Place: Santa Monica, CA (San Francisco dates to be announced)
Time: 11:00am
Date: Saturday, Jan. 31, 2015 (every last Saturday until the end of May 2015).
0. Preliminaries: The Three Universals of Analysis
The
Oedipus Complex,
Sex, and the
Unconscious are three
Universals of psychoanalysis that any analyst worthy of a name must come to terms with. Yet, these concepts are so often left in such obscurity that the student of analysis either rejects them as being the outmoded thought of Freud or becomes resigned to miscomprehension and laughter. We have, however, in Part I&II introduced a guide: we proposed not only to construct the
universal in a topology and logic, but made room for an argued presentation in an
agora. With the Fall 2015 semester, we were left with doubts, corrections, and questions, but this itself sets up the conditions of our task for the Winter-Spring semester. We must ask, what arrives if a
universal does not simply fall like fruit from the trees, but only is achieved through a harvest: in a sustained, if not tensional work with others. We will begin, therefore, by opening up the floor to questions, critiques, and comments, from those who attended the first semester. The task before the seminar is to construct a
universal that does not fall into the monoliths of a religion, politics, or science, but is singular to the discovery of psychoanalysis as such. At the clinical level, we show that the discontents of modern civilization and the suffering of the individual lie in the lack of an adequate construction of such a
universal. Indeed, instead of being encouraged to actually participate in the construction of an analysis and its
universals with others, psychoanalytic schools and institutes begin oppositely: they domesticate the student by asking him or her to simply hand the construction of the theory over to the experts who are supposed to know and teach; thereby reducing the truth and
universals of the student's practice to consensus and the relativity of expert opinion.
We begin otherwise: at each step it will be important that the teaching be accomplished from the place of the participant. This position is nothing other than that first achieved by Freud: far from what is habitually supposed, Freud was taught by his 'patients' and not the contrary. To achieve this clinical foundation, it is necessary to present a psychoanalytic construction in a precise enough way such that its presentation can be corrected and reworked by those participating. At this fundamental level, just as the psychoanalytic clinic has never been a static place for the application of a psychoanalytic theory onto others, a psychoanalytic school has never been the education of pupils by professors. On the contrary, the clinic emerges in the very transmission of an analytic knowledge and a practice of analysis itself with others.
To assume the material of the seminar, the participant is encouraged to work in analysis with a colleague and join a cartel where the questions, critiques, and doubts can be focused on with more time and detail. Any questions on the seminar, enrollment, or preparation may be addressed to the secretary at: PLACE@topoi.net.
1. The Problem of the Universal
Our convictions are restated in the refinement of our first proposition:
1– The Oedipus Complex is not Universal, but the Universal is the Oedipus Complex.
Part of our work consists in not only getting clear on what a
Universal is and how to work with it, but extending this proposition to include both
Sex and the
Unconscious. From his first work on particular dreams, sexuality, and his early theory of the Masculine Oedipus, to his conjecture of a more Absolute definition of the Unconscious, Sex, and Oedipus in his post-1920 writings, Freud discovered the phallus, feminine sexuality, and castration. These odd terms can be constructed and argued without being intimidated or seduced by their dramatic imagery, on the condition that one adopts the position of an experimental minimum. Following Lacan, we call this a topology of the subject and logic of the signifier.
The Fall 2015 semester ended by showing how there is both a logical and topological problem posed in Freud's theory of Perception:
• the problem of the fetish and the phobia are manners of confirming universals and refuting particulars (Anti-Popperian);
• while the instruments used in mathematical and experimental optics have yet to rigorously explain how sight takes place. Instead, there is a series of displacements of the problem from optics to physiology to phenomenology that ends with
Bergson's Paradox: if what is seen is the image on the retina inside my eye, why do I see the world outside and not inside? The response to this question of the place of sight has not received a response in the scientific literature.
Attention has also been drawn to another paradox of Freud's
Oedipus Complex – the
St. Christopher Paradox of Identification:
• If a description of the
Oedipus Complex begins by stating that a child chooses as an object the opposite sexed parent and identifies negatively with same sex parent, then the Oedipus Complex is over the moment it begins since the identity of the sex of the child was already assumed from the beginning and has no need to develop (in the same way if St. Christopher holds Christ on his shoulders who carries on his shoulder the world, where is St. Christopher to stand?).
What we show in Part III is that these two paradoxes are in fact the same
blindspot: the
Oedipus Complex is also a theory of
Perception, or more generally, tragedy is an
anti-aesthetics, that finds its reason in Freud's theory of
Narcissism. Since Lacan, Freud's
Narcissism has been given an experimental basis in an optical model that only becomes rigorous in the construction of a topology. At least this is what we aim to show.
2. The Experimental Basis
We will, therefore, proceed to extend the
Oedipus Complex to this experimental apparatus of optics and topology in borrowing two further indications from Lacan:
2) The Oedipus Complex is the Mirror.
3) The Oedipus Complex is the 4th term of the Generalized Borromean Lock.
To date, at least in the English language and only with rarity in French, these propositions have yet to find a reasoned argument or construction. Our seminar presents this argument, finally, in a manner that is open to those working in the clinic with no previous mathematical or logical background. We show how and why the three
universals of psychoanalysis –
Sex, Unconscious, and the
Oedipus – are not naturally conceivable in ordinary speech and a communication of ideas anymore than the atom of the physicist can be isolated without an instrument. The construction of a universal of analysis only passes to speech on the condition it obtains a constraint and materiality: a minimal writing and reading. We seek to respond to how an analytic speech comes from this experimental writing – and not simply in the use of writing as a convention to code and decode speech and ideas.
We left off in December by showing Freud's movement to the universal situates three lacks in his previous theory of Sexuality, the Dream (as 'royal road to the unconscious'), and the Oedipus, that we only schematize here as:
Universal Singular (lacks)
| Oedipus |
Primitive Father (Totem&Taboo) |
Parricide / Castration |
| Sex |
Phallus |
Primitive Scene (trauma) |
| Dream |
Absolute Dream |
Umbilic of the Dream |
It will become important to reconstruct these arguments to the point that the term 'lack' and universal are no longer metaphors, but actual topological operations in a theory of Narcissism. We will begin, therefore, by revisiting Lacan's descriptive models in optics (see seminar Figure 1), then founding their conditions on a topology.
4. Writings and Readings for the Seminar
To be current with the seminar it is important to maintain a minimum of reading. For the first Winter course 2015 on Saturday, January 31st, you are responsible only for a reading of:
FREUD
1)
On Narcisssism, Freud, Standard Edition, 1914.
This much said, the presentation of Narcissism in terms of Optical Models throughout the seminar will refer to the work of Lacan. One should, therefore, begin reading:
LACAN
1)
On Narcissism IX & The Two Narcissisms X, Seminar I, 1953–54.
The seminar will introduce the topological constructions of the optic models as it proceeds. References to the work of Lacan will be cited at that time.
4.1 Previous Readings
Previous Readings have been centered on a logical cut at approximately the year 1920. Here, we discover Freud's early relative theories being critiqued by the author and separated from his later universal theory of the
Unconscious (Dream),
Sex, and
Oedipus. The following Table identifies the reading crucial for following the argument of the seminar. Though not all of these texts are necessary to follow the seminar, it will be helpful to begin reading them all and work out the problems being posed.
Early Freud Late Freud or Post-1920
| Relative DreamThe previous semester readings included Freud's Irma Dream (Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Lacan's Re-interpretation (Seminar II).Read also Freud's Gradiva (1907), esp. the analysis of Repression in Felix's Ropps painting of St. Anthony. |
Absolute DreamThe footnotes and nine revisions of the Interpretation of Dreams are crucial. Then read Freud's Meta-psychological To The Theory of Dreams (1917). (Ask yourself what is a universal of a painting: the painting of painting? a painting that paints its own painting. Call this the gaze, then repaint Ropp's painting in the manner of Picasso!) |
| Relative Sex (Sexual relations, sexuality, sexual differences, gender)Previous semesters read Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality (1906) |
Absolute Sex (Absolute Difference, phallus, castration)Read Freud's 8 revisions of the Three Essays, especially A Child Is Being Beaten (1919) and The Genital Organization of the Child (1923). |
| Relative Oedipus ComplexPrevious semesters read Freud's early works on the 'positive' or Masculine Oedipus: A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men (1910)**New participants should ask the secretary for a copy of the collected writings of Freud on the Oedipus Complex. The complete works of Freud in both English and German are available upon request. |
Absolute Oedipus Complex Freud extends his theory to include the negative or Feminine Oedipus; read The Ego and the Id(1923) and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), esp. Chpt. 7 on Identification. |
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