Report from Freud Reading Group (1)
"what animals dream of I do not know"
The very first footnote in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) immediately locates the text within the intellectual domain of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Weimar sexologists whom the Nazis attempted to erase from history – from queer history. Freud cites Magnus Hirschfeld, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and so on in detail, recording their experimental thought in his (by comparison much more widely disseminated) corpus, which fortunately escaped archival destruction, and in so doing contributed to the material preservation of at least one strain of queer thought. I note this here just as something I want to keep in mind over the next months as Freud reading group tackles this text.
rats, wolves, horses, mackerel
In this post I want to make some notes about the rhetoric of the animal example in Freud (future instances of the Report from Freud Reading Group will likely develop completely different threads). Psychoanalytic scholars have already talked about this at length, partly because several of Freud’s most famous case studies are named after animals. This bestial eponymy is something that the patients introduced into Freud’s discourse. Psychoanalysis was forced to speak with animals from the beginning for theoretical reasons, but one of its new literary creations – the case study that reconstructs a series of free associations – had the form of the animal imposed on it by what people in Vienna happened to be dreaming about. Psychoanalysis in part was named by these dreams that were Freud’s to encounter.
The first sentence of the Three Essays begins: “The fact of the existence of sexual needs in human beings and animals is expressed in biology by the assumption of a ‘sexual instinct,’ on the analogy of the instinct of nutrition” (45 in the Penguin Freud Library edition, my emphasis). Freud goes on to describe his methodology, which will be to critique the ‘popular opinion’ about this instinct, its nature and formation. By the third paragraph he introduces a person-focused terminology, distinguishing among subjects, objects, and aims and so on. The first few sections of the text introduce the idea of an original bisexuality, posing the existence of both homosexual and heterosexual subjects as problems to be accounted for. But I think it’s interesting that he begins without worrying too much about whether he’s talking about humans or non-humans. This openness (to the biological and the phylogenetic) will recur at important moments, and Freud will sometimes introduce an example involving an animal at some profound moment in his exposition. This happens throughout his texts, and I’ll list two examples.
The birth trauma, which is the kernel of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) has to be recognised as something that humanity shares with all mammals. The operant difference for Freud (in studying the genesis of anxiety) is that the neonatal human has an ‘object’ to hand which resolves the tension aroused by the birth trauma, and for the rest of their life they check for this ‘object;’ its possible absence is anxiety. Mammalia are (mostly) untroubled by this neotenous object-relation, and we project at our own risk onto the briefly mournful cries for food of the magpie evicted by adolescence.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, for a second example, Freud writes
What animals dream of I do not know. There is a proverb, mentioned to me by one of my students, which claims to know, for it asks the question: What does a goose dream of? and answers: Corn. The entire theory that the dream is a wish-fulfilment is contained in these two sentences. (105, Oxford edition trans. Joyce Crick)
He doesn’t dwell on it, although a reader of the Traumdeutung has probably had it occur to them that if they have ever seen a sleeping dog or cat they may well have seen them twitch, growl and pedal while unconscious. This is really only slightly less evidence for the existence of animal dreams than the amount of evidence we have for the existence of human dreams. Despite the aphoristic reduction of the proverb, which confirms the straightforward intuition most people have about what their dog is dreaming of – chasing something delicious –, Freud’s comment is effectively that animal dreams and human dreams are created equal. If I am allowed to translate die Tiere wünschen as ‘animals wish,’ am I allowed also to translate it as ‘animals desire’?
various species of mammals
Content warning: I am now going to quote an example from the Three Essays concerning some experimental zoological surgery that actually makes me a bit queasy, so feel free to tap out. I am going to power through because I think it is an important moment, however, and particularly charged rhetorically.
During the last few years work carried out by biologists, notably by Steinach, has thrown a strong light on the organic determinants of homo-erotism and of sexual characters in general. By carrying out experimental castration and subsequently grafting the sex-glands of the opposite sex, it was possible in the case of various species of mammals to transform a male into a female and vice versa. The transformation affected more or less completely both the somatic sexual characters and the psychosexual attitude (that is, both subject and object erotism). It appeared that the vehicle of the force which thus acted as a sex-determinant was not the part of the sex-gland which forms the sex-cells but what is known as its interstitial tissue (the ‘puberty-gland’). (58, footnote added 1920)
Freud goes on to discuss what appears to be a successful testicular transplant in a human that took place about a hundred years ago. What’s straightforwardly entailed in this footnote of course is just that biological sex is thoroughly mutable, and it is a potent, practical cashing out of his earlier comment that, “in every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex” (52). Even if I don’t fully understand the bioscientific weight of the distinction between the sex-gland and the puberty-gland – I interpret it generally as a deprioritisation of a supposedly fixed function of the reproductive organs in favour of the flexible and ongoing somatic production of sex (cf. the ‘production of gender’) in and through the responsive hormonal ‘interstices’ – it is enough to note Freud’s ongoing interest across his body of work in the contingent (but knowable) causes of sexualities and sexes of all kinds.
To get to this realisation, however, Freud first has to invoke the endlessly pliable flesh of the animal – various species, in fact, and it doesn’t really matter which. Like so many of his animal examples, the rhetoric here raises us up into the realm of superior scientific investigators while simultaneously lowering us to the friends of beasts. Firstly, in Freud, the human/animal distinction stops mapping so easily onto the mind/body distinction. It doesn’t seem right to say that an animal is a body without a psyche, even though, to be clear, Freud understands that animals don’t have a psychic topology of anywhere near human complexity. But, secondly, if I I have learned anything from reading Freud it is that I am not a body with a psyche, but rather that my body is a psychic geography. I think in virtue of my flesh; I desire in virtue of my interstices. My body is laid out according to a blueprint I can recognise everywhere, and this is what the psychoanalytic animal example allows me to think.
As always, this is not the whole story, but what I would like to note here is just some of those points at which Freud’s exposition achieves its radical edge by reaching out to the non-psychoanalytic discourses of animal science. Freud charges his rhetoric with the intimate experience of alien physiologies at these moments. The story of the mammal whose sex is changed slides into the story of a patient whose hormonal distress is successfully aided by an experimental body modification, and Freud tells those two stories together for a reason. The supposedly most private, personal, and psychically charged landmarks on the map of our body correspond exactly to the life forms of the rat or the eel – and here our bodies seem almost like Virgil’s grafted fruit trees, the dream of corn, the flesh wound of civilisation.