Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 2 (V)

We have been examining Lear’s account of the “cathartic method” in Freud’s early thinking and, in particular, its problematic interrelation with the metaphor of “discharge.” In fact the medical backgrounds of Freud and Breuer would have disposed them to just this idiom. They “speak of the memory of trauma as a “foreign body” that continues to have a toxic effect on the patient, and it was the function of traditional medical catharsis to expel foreign bodies” (34).

But here Lear observes that, even if one accepts the image of a “foreign body” as a legitimate way to represent a repressed memory and its (strangulated) affect, a different metaphorical resolution — not discharge — would seem more logical. After all, on any cogent description, the repressed memory and unsung emotion are “foreign” only to consciousness, which has defensively refused to acknowledge them as authentic parts of itself. A cathartic method that rectified this situation, or which induced consciousness to avow the disavowed, can hardly be conceived as that entity’s “expulsion.” For this would amount only to confirming its “foreign-ness,” its status as something “other” to consciousness, and so compounding the original defensive distortion.

Lear now volunteers a metaphor that more accurately reflects the fundamentals of the cathartic procedure, and in particular one that captures the desideratum of acknowledgment:

“But if a memory’s remaining without citizenship in the land of consciousness is the basis for considering it a “foreign body,” then the metaphor of “foreign body” should not suggest discharge, but an opening up of the borders. For it is only by welcoming the foreign body into consciousness, by granting it citizenship, that its toxic effects are overcome” (34)

Nonetheless, discharge will stubbornly suggest itself as an appropriate model for emotional expression, not only to doctors of Freud’s era, but to everyone. “One reason for conceiving catharsis as a discharge is that it is natural for humans so to conceive of the expression of the emotions” (34-35). This universal “fantasy,” says Lear, will indirectly shape the theory constructed to grasp observed experience.

As it happens, it was a patient, Anna O., who instituted this metaphor in the course of her self-reflections. What was for her a natural, albeit imprecise way of speaking about her catharsis was taken at face value. That is, the “fantasy” of catharsis-as-discharge contoured all subsequent analytic thinking about it:

“Although Breuer reported that Anna O. “aptly described” his therapeutic procedure as a “talking cure” and only “jokingly” referred to it as “chimney-sweeping,” this “joke” worked is way into the theoretical formulation of catharsis…Catharsis was experienced by Anna O., at some level of her experience, as a discharge. But even if that is, for her, what happened, why should one assume that is what happened to her?” (35)

Or again, the Freudian “theory of catharsis was not describing a real emotional process so much as a fantasied conception of that process” (35). Ultimately, Freud and Breuer “rendered the fantasy of emotional discharge, which we all tend to share, into a conscious theory” (36).

This “fantasy” subsequently inflects Freud’s exposition of later psychoanalytic innovations, such as his theories of phobias and “transference.” There are traces of the discharge metaphor — indeed, more than traces — in the notion that, say, a certain quantum of “loving” ideas, wishes, and feelings, which properly belong to some childhood constellation as an unrealized potential, is in the therapeutic setting “transferred,” inappropriately, onto the analyst. And it is there, as well, in the proposal that a fear belonging originally to an unacceptable, then repressed idea, can subsequently attach itself through association to a tenuously-related object, such as spiders. For Freud, these neurotic strategies “redirect” the repressed quantum, rather than securing its needed “discharge” (42). And this is to say: the entire evolution of Freud’s “drive theory” is entangled with this fateful metaphor of discharge.

We now have before us the meaning of catharsis-as-discharge, as well as some of the reasons that have recommended this “fantasy.” Let us now ask: what exactly makes “discharge” insufficient as a metaphor for grasping catharsis — apart, that is, from its exclusion of “acknowledgement” from its semantic orbit, as well as its air of “misplaced concreteness” more generally? For surely metaphorical language is unsurpassable for psychoanalysis in its attempts to describe the mind: there simply does not seem to be any way of grasping metal phenomena without appealing to the non-mental sphere. Hence this metaphorical status cannot itself count against “discharge,” since it will hold equally of whichever alternative metaphor — “fantasy” — Lear proposes in its stead. (To anticipate, Lear’s eventual alternative formula for catharsis, “a conscious unification of thought and feeling” (33), is plainly as “metaphorical” an idea as any.)

What, then, are the the limitations of the discharge metaphor, specifically? Lear emphasizes two problems, in addition to the one we’ve already cited. First of all, discharge presupposes a sort of separation between the mental and bodily realms that Freud’s own discoveries invalidate. Understood correctly, “archaic mental functioning” reveals that bodily processes are “minded” all the way down. Precisely physiological “happenings” that seem least of all expressive of mind are, upon scrutiny, its most fundamental efforts at self-expression and self-knowledge. In the neurotic, these are “symptoms” that symbolize, communicate, and so on. But for just this reason, the discharge model — which supposes a mental quantum that may or may not be “converted” into bodily form, is unfeasible:

“Freud..was not yet in a position to see that it is a mistake to try to explain the conversion of the mental into the physical. For he did not yet understand that the physical symptom was itself a manifestation of archaic mental functioning. The task, then, is not to explain the conversion of a mental process into a physical symptom, but rather to explain the lack of development of a primitive mode of mental functioning into a conscious, more recognizably mental, expression” (43-44)

The question, in other words, is not whether a repressed constellation of thoughts, feelings, and wishes will express itself — invariably it does. Rather we should ask: how, in what form, and at how distant a remove from conscious recognition, does this constellation express itself?

On the other hand, and second: Freud attempts to “literalize" the discharge metaphor by insisting, at least in principle, on the dischargeable item’s quantifiability. This raises another, serious difficulty, once again in light of Freud’s own observations. As Lear puts it: “Why don’t hysterical symptoms naturally tend to die out?” (44). Even if we accept a version of the premise we have just rejected, and there is in neurotics some convertible quantum of repressed psychic energy that can be expressed physically or not — on those very terms the endurance of neurotic symptoms becomes imponderable. After all, a quantum of any substance is per definition finite. Freud’s insistence on its quantifiability entails as much. So whether it is “discharged” all at once in a single emotional outpouring designated cathartic, or — by contrast — “seeps out” over longer stretches of time, perhaps years, as it is converted into physical symptoms, this finite quantum will eventually be depleted. We will expect its expressions to diminish, even in the absence of any cathartic reckoning, simply from the “economics” involved. “[A] finite quantity of energy…should eventually be discharged in the course of producing and maintaining a somatic symptom” (44). (Lear indicates that the later, dynamic, “structural” model — featuring the id as “a reservoir of psychic energy” (44) partly responds to this conceptual difficulty.)

But of course no such diminishment is necessarily to be found in the neurotic. On the contrary, the very symptoms famously interpreted as epistemically distorted expressions, “conversions,” of the repressed quanta are, if anything, greater and more intense than their potential cathartic “discharge” would be. Phenomena like transference and phobias, which ostensibly involve projecting the quanta onto inappropriate objects, rather than their originally intended recipients, e.g. a loved or feared parent — on the evidence, these phenomena carry an immense discharge. Yet no matter the degree of intensity, or the frequency of repetition, these phenomena do not naturally come any closer to being fully “expended,” nor — what is perhaps the same thing — do the emotions felt offer their bearers relief.

Yet if we accept these criticisms of the “discharge” image, while nonetheless recognizing some version of “cathartic experience,” the question arises: how are we best to conceptualize the latter? Are there perhaps better, less objectionable metaphors?

We will take up these questions in the next entry.