Post on 01-Mar-2023
“His Majesty the Ego”: From Freud to Laplanche (and
back)
John Fletcher
Jean Laplanche has written at length on the
theory of the ego in Freud’s work, on its
complexities and its contradictions. This includes
his extensive analysis of its conceptual profile at
the different stages of Freud’s thought as laid out
in the lengthy entry under ‘Ego’ in Laplanche and
Pontalis (1967, pp. 130-143). There is also his
elaboration of the ego’s relation to the vital
order and to narcissism in the first two chapters
of Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970). Finally there
is his long meditation on primary narcissism and
the ego in the as yet untranslated final volume of
lectures delivered at the Sorbonne in the
Problématiques series: Le fourvoiement biologisant de la sexualité
chez Freud (1993). Laplanche argues against the
assumption that it was only with The Ego and the Id
(1923) and the formulation of the second topography
that a systematic theory of the ego as agency
1
(Instanz) of the psychical apparatus was developed,
whereas previous uses of the term referenced the
self or individual as a whole1; as evidenced for
example in the editorial note in the Standard Edition
to Freud’s 1914 paper on narcissism. Laplanche
demonstrates that, on the contrary, the existence
of an agency called ‘the ego’ within the psychical
apparatus is assigned the function of inhibition of
the primary processes in the Project for a Scientific
Psychology of 1895 (Laplanche 1970, pp. 48-65). This
argument of Freud’s is central to Laplanche’s
conception of the ego.
1. The Ego and its Double Derivation
Laplanche also demonstrates the tension verging
on contradiction in Freud’s treatment of the ego,
in the second topography, between what I will call
a ‘realist’ conception of the ego as an organ of
adaptation of the id to the demands of the external
world, centred on the perception-consciousness
system, and so a representative of the ‘reality
principle’, on the one hand, and on the other, an
1 ‘[A]t first he used the term [“das Ich”] without any great precision, as we might speakof “the self”; but in his latest writings he gave it a very much more definite and narrowmeaning’ (‘Editor’s Note’, Freud 1914: 71).
2
ego conceived of as an internal libidinal object,
made up synthetically of potentially conflicting
identifications with other persons. It is to this
latter perspective of a ‘libidinal genealogy’ of
the ego, of its formation in relation to the drives
and their transformations, that Laplanche’s
treatment of the ego in the framework of the
general theory of seduction is affiliated. In
particular, it is the theory of narcissism proposed
in Freud’s 1914 paper “On Narcissism: An
Introduction” that Laplanche builds on, with its
distinction between an auto-erotism of the sexual
drives [Triebe and not instincts] in the moment of
their first appearance as such, and a later primary
narcissism of the ego. That distinction was
unfortunately effaced by Freud’s subsequent
reformulation of primary narcissism as an
undifferentiated, objectless primal state,
‘implying no split between subject and external
world’, ‘which is epitomised by life in the womb’
(Laplanche and Pontalis, p. 338), from which state
the little solipsistic monad would - somehow –
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awaken: a late Freudian conception against which
Laplanche has consistently argued.
In 1914, however, Freud had postulated a
‘primary and normal narcissism’ that would be ‘the
libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct
of self-preservation’ (Freud 1914c, pp. 73-4). He
then poses the question: ‘what is the relation of
the narcissism of which we are now speaking to
auto-erotism, which we have described as an early
state of the libido?’ His reply is cryptic but
pregnant, as he responds by invoking the theme of
the ego and its origin:
I may point out that we are bound to
suppose that a unity comparable to the ego
cannot exist in the individual from the
start; the ego has to be developed. The
auto-erotic instincts [Triebe – drives],
however, are there from the first; so there
must be something added to auto-erotism – a
new psychical action - in order to bring
about narcissism (Freud 1914, pp. 76-7).
For all the richness of his development of the
problematic of narcissism in the essay, Freud never
4
specifies what this ‘new psychical action’ might
be. However, by twinning the development of the ego
with the transformation of auto-erotism into
narcissism, he strongly implies that the one
entails the other.
A few years earlier in the Schreber case, Freud
had proposed narcissism as a ‘half-way phase
between auto-erotism and object-love’ (Freud 1911c,
p. 61). In this phase ‘by taking himself, his own
body, as a love-object’, Freud argues, the
individual ‘unifies his sexual drives [Triebe]
(which have hitherto been engaged in auto-erotic
activities)’ (ibid., 60). In the Schreber case
Freud’s focus had been on the object-relation. Here
in 1914 the unification of the hitherto independent
and fragmented auto-erotic drives, dispersed around
the different erotogenic zones of the body,
coincides with the formation of an ego, a ‘unity’
that, as he has said, ‘cannot exist in the
individual from the start’ (Freud 1914c, p. 77). By
implication the narcissistic unification of the
drives in a single libidinal object constitutes the
ego as such. However, it is only in the later text,
5
which delivers the second topography, The Ego and the
Id, that the origin of the ego is explicitly
located in the formation of a body schema, as ‘the
mental projection of the surface of the body’: the
ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not
merely a surface entity, but is itself the
projection of a surface’ (Freud 1923b, p. 26). So
while a series of heterogeneous elements are
assembled across a number of Freud’s texts - the
auto-erotic drives and their unification, the
narcissistic investment of the body, the body-
surface entity and its projection (to which one
could add the mechanism of identification and the
process of sublimation from the third chapter of
The Ego and the Id) – nevertheless, the ‘new psychical
action’, that would produce the unity of the
narcissistically constituted ego as agency from out
of the primordial body-ego and its auto-erotic
drives, is never explicitly elaborated as such.
A number of later psychoanalytic theories of
the ego can be seen as attempts to take up Freud’s
unfulfilled promissory note and to specify the
nature of that ‘new psychical action’. Lacan
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famously proposed the mirror phase, in which the
infant, in a state of uncoordinated nursling
dependency, anticipates its future bodily coherence
and mastery in an imaginary unity through an
identification with the image of its specular
counterpart in the mirror ‘ [T]his gestalt ...
symbolizes the I’s mental permanence, at the same
time as it prefigures its alienating destination’
(Lacan, 1949, p. 76). Lacan attributed to this
fictional self-representation the function of
anticipatory misrecognition with regard to the
infant’s biologically premature state of non-
coordination, and also of resistance with regard to
the unconscious and the drives. He opposed it to
any conception of the ego as ‘centred on the
perception-consciousness system or as organized by the
‘reality principle’ (ibid., p. 80).
However, it is Didier Anzieu who develops
Freud’s notion of the ‘body-ego’ into a ‘skin-ego’
as both tactile surface and mental projection, at
one and the same time a containing sack of inner
contents, a protective barrier against external
impacts, and a psycho-physiological receptor of
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excitations and messages from the mother. Here in
Anzieu’s words ‘the massage becomes a message’
[Anzieu, 1985, p. 39], an apt approximation to what
Laplanche was later to call the pre-verbal
enigmatic signifier, itself both massage and
message. Anzieu’s skin-ego thus constitutes the
necessary set of psycho-physiological preconditions
for anything like Lacan’s specular drama with the
mirror image to take place. The skin-ego also plays
a part in Laplanche’s ambitious attempt, in the
framework of the theory of primal seduction, to
model the ‘new psychical action’ that would
transform the auto-erotic drives, and the
polymorphous perverse, libidinal body of the infant
they infest, into the narcissistically constituted
ego, the antagonist of those very drives.
Laplanche points out that Freud’s term Instanz
has a juridical connotation in German as well as in
French, such that the derivation of the ego as
Instanz from the psychobiological individual implies
both the formation of an agency and the notion of a
delegation of powers to that agency from the larger
whole from which it derives (Laplanche 1993c: 81-
8
2). He situates the derivation of the ego as agency
from the whole individual in Freud’s thought within
a double perspective: the derivation by contiguity
(as in the trope of metonymy) and the derivation by
similarity (as in the trope of metaphor).2 So a
double derivation of the ego, at once metonymic and
metaphoric. This double derivation is not simply
the evident existence of two alternative or
contradictory conceptions of the ego in Freud’s
thought, a metonymical ego as distinct from a
metaphorical ego; rather, Laplanche argues, there
is a double derivation of a single ego, which is
not just a derivation of concepts but an actual
lived derivation of a psychical entity along two
paths of formation that intersect (Laplanche 1993,
p. 83). The contradiction between ‘realist’ and
‘narcissistic’ concepts of the ego would then be
the theoretical symptom of partial and successive
attempts to grasp the complexity of that combined
and lived derivation.
2 This double perspective is reprised in contemporary structuralist thought from theprinciples of the association of ideas and the classical tradition of rhetoric. Laplanchesets it out systematically in relation to psychoanalysis in ‘Derivation of PsychoanalyticEntities’, reprinted as an appendix to the English translation of Life and Death inPsychoanalysis (Laplanche, 1970).
9
2. The ego as metonym
The relation between the ego-individual and the
ego-as-agency in the first instance would be a
metonymical one of contiguity: the ego is a
specialised organ in which are localised certain
functions performed on behalf of the whole. In
Freud’s ‘ego psychology’ and its later developments
these operate under the rubric of adaptation to the
external world. Its genesis Freud argues, is by way
of a differentiation of the surface of an organism
due to the impact of external reality on its
receptive apparatus, the perception-consciousness
system, which in 1923 Freud called the nucleus of
the ego (Freud 1923b: 23). The ego’s development is
in a metonymical relation of contiguity with the
whole organism (the psychobiological individual) of
which it is a part. This differentiation thesis is
a causal one (as in the model of the vesicle with
its receptive surface and protective shield in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Freud’s description of
this modification of the surface of the body-id
10
into the ego under the impact of external forces
leads him to his further claim that ‘the ego seeks
to bring the influence of the external world to
bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours
to substitute the reality principle for the
pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in
the id’ (Freud 1923b, p. 25). However, this
differentiation thesis doesn’t entail or support
the accompanying representation thesis that the ego
‘represents’ the demands of external reality,
although Freud attempts to suture the two claims
together with the succeeding proposition that ‘for
the ego, perception plays the part which in the id
falls to drive [Trieb]’ (ibid, p. 25). This
equivalence or substitution of the perception of
external realities for the internal force of
instinct or drive is a category mistake, and as
Laplanche observes, ‘This would mean that in
psychical conflict an intrinsic force is attributed to
reality. It is not so much the ego that acts
through its own energies ... as the real itself
which seems to play the role of a veritable agency’
(Laplanche 1970, p. 53). The ego’s task of
11
dominating and adapting the id and its drives to
the demands of the external world is at this point
entrusted by Freud to the force of perception
itself (a profoundly un-psychoanalytic
proposition). It is as if the supposed
differentiating effect of external perception in
the formation of the ego were the guarantee of its
sufficiency or efficacy in mastering the drives.
3. The ego as metaphor
The metaphorical derivation of the ego is by way
of an image or representation of the whole
organism. Strikingly this also emerges from the
receptive surfaces of the perceptual apparatus, in
the very same passage I have been drawing on at the
close of chapter 2 of The Ego and the Id where Freud
derives the ego’s status as the representative of
the reality principle. Thus, in Freud’s cryptic
formulation, ‘The ego is first and foremost a
bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but
12
is itself the projection of a surface’. This is
elaborated briefly in a footnote to the English
translation authorised by Freud, ‘the ego is
ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly
those springing from the surface of the body. It
may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the
surface of the body’ (Freud 1923b, p. 26). So by
allusion to the bodily apperception through which
“a person’s body attains its special position among
other objects in the world of perception” (Freud
1923b, p. 25), Freud passes from the body as agent
of perception to the body as object of its own
perception, that is, to the body-ego as
simultaneously percipiens and perceptum. As the mental
projection of the body surface and its sensations
the ego is no longer, Laplanche argues, ‘conceived
of as a prolongation of the living individual but a
displacement of it, and of its image, to another site,
and consequently as a kind of intrapsychical
reality, an intrapsychical precipitate formed in
the image of the individual’ (Laplanche 1970, p.
53). In other words the movement of Freud’s thought
has taken him from the metonymic conception of the
13
ego as an outgrowth and dependency of the
perceptual system, via the notion of bodily
apperception, to what is a metaphoric conception of
the ego as intrapsychic projection. This projection
is a representation, a simulacrum of the body with
its surfaces and boundaries, but one located, as
Laplanche argues, in another site, in an interior
topography, a psychical ‘apparatus of the soul’ (in
Freud’s formulation a Seelischer Apparat). From
paragraph to paragraph Freud segues from the
metonymic to the metaphoric conception by way of a
conceptual slide from perception to apperception.
The ghost of the ‘new psychical action’ of
1914, the term ‘projection’ is used oddly here. In
its strict psychoanalytic usage it refers to a
defensive expulsion of mental contents, their
relocation in an external figure or object, while its
neurological usage refers to the internal transfer of
sensations from peripheral nerve endings to the
spinal chord. (In the neurological sections of his
1893 paper on organic paralyses, Freud
differentiates between the relations of
‘projection’ that obtain between the periphery and
14
the spinal chord and the relations of
‘representation’ that obtain between the spinal
chord and the cerebral cortex). However the
projection of the body surface Freud is here
talking about operates from the body surface to the
interior unlike psychoanalytic projection. It is,
nevertheless, not neurological but rather ‘mental’
or psychical. It is, furthermore, posited entirely
in a perceptual register, as in the realist
conception of the ego, and with no reference to the
libidinal dynamics that constituted the field of
operation of ‘the new psychical action’ of 1914.
The realist ego was to master and adapt the drives
by the sheer force of its perceptions of external
reality that somewhat implausibly were to ‘play the
part which in the id falls to drive [Trieb] (Freud
1923b, p. 25). Freud doesn’t elaborate on the
nature or functions of this intra-psychical
projection of the body surface, except to make a
passing analogy with the cortical homunculus that
maps the different areas and organs of the body
onto the brain. Freud’s projected body-ego or
psychical homunculus, like its cortical twin, remains
15
confined to the perceptual register and the central
mapping of peripheral organs with their sensations
and perceptions and the pathways they traverse (and
with the substitution of perception for drive as
the supposed energy source of the ego).
It is not surprising that the body-ego
disappears without trace when, resuming his
argument in the following chapter 3 of The Ego and the
Id, Freud proceeds to his account of the building
up of the ego through identifications with external
figures and the libidinal transformations which
that entails. Here in chapter 3 of The Ego and the Id
the starting point of this identificatory process
is said to be, not the primitive body-ego, but the
individual’s first identification with ‘the father
of his personal prehistory’ (ibid: 30), leading to
the formation of the ego ideal. Freud makes no
attempt to articulate these different elements in a
single system or model, although it is possible to
see the intra-psychic projection of the surface
body-ego, with its internal mapping of a
preliminary boundary or containing envelope, as
that interior site to which successive
16
identifications might be delivered and on which
they might perform their identificatory work of
assimilation.
The heart of the metaphorical derivation as
laid out by Laplanche lies in the ego as an intra-
psychical ‘projection’ of the primitive body or
skin ego, invested as a libidinal object. Freud’s
starting point in ‘On Narcissism’ in 1914 had been
the transformation of the multiple, auto-erotic
component drives into a unified libidinal
organisation centred on a single object the ego,
the first unified love-object. Thus
narcissistically constituted, the ego becomes a
permanent reservoir of libido from which
investments are sent out to particular objects and
withdrawn back from them into the ego in the form
of secondary narcissism:
Thus we form the idea of there being an
original cathexis of the ego from which some
is later given off to objects but which
fundamentally persists and is related to
object-cathexes much as the body of an
17
amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which
it puts out. (Freud 1914c, p. 75)
This gives an account of the ego in terms of
libidinal dynamics, but what is missing is a way of
relating its formation and functioning in the
libidinal register of the drives to the parallel
account of the ego in terms of the register of
perception (where Freud had substituted external
perception for the drive); whether metonymically,
as the recipient of perceptions and representative
of the external world, or metaphorically, as the
simulacrum projected inwards of the apperceptive
body surface.
4. The Ego as love-object
Laplanche’s account of the ‘new psychical
action’ that forms narcissism and the ego works
across both these two registers. He draws on
Lacan’s model of the mirror-stage (which is
formulated almost entirely in terms of the
perceptual register, albeit concerned with self-
18
perception) and he reworks this for his own notion
of an identification with a gestalt of the whole
body as a total object. Lacan’s classic paper of
1949 poses this in terms of the formation of a
unified body-image and its organisation of the
subject’s relation to his uncoordinated bodily
functioning (and as a relation of alienation and
misrecognition) with only a passing reference to
the libidinal dimension. Laplanche sees this
identification with a totalizing gestalt as a
precipitation and binding of the auto-erotic
drives, dispersed around the body’s multiple
erotogenic zones, into a new libidinal and
representational unity. He argues that there isn’t
a temporal priority of primary narcissism over the
narcissistic object choice which in Freud’s order
of presentation comes afterwards: “primary
narcissism isn’t anything other than narcissistic
object choice” (Laplanche 1993c, p. 94, my
translation), i.e. primary narcissism is the
concentration of diverse auto-erotic drives,
hitherto anchored in specific zones, in a unified
object (here the body-image), formed in the image
19
of the whole individual. The very formation of the
ego as agency is the primal narcissistic object
choice:
Narcissism, on this basis, is the love of
the ego; the love of an ego itself
precipitated by love, in the same moment as
the love for the form of its counterpart
[semblable]; an ego precipitated in the same
moment that the living being attaches itself
to the image of its counterpart; a loved ego
invested with libido, Freud tells us, and so
becoming, he adds, ‘a great reservoir of
libido’. On the other hand, the ego is
‘binding’; it binds, it is by definition
totalising and acts so as to hold together,
to assemble all the auto-erotic drives and
at the same time to contain them; it acts to
contain the auto-erotic by enclosing it, by
totalising it, but also exercising over it,
laterally, from the margins, an effect of
moderation and control (Laplanche 1993, pp.
94-5, my translation).
20
As with the metonymic conception, here the role of
perception is also central, but rather than a
neutral reception of incidental sense data from any
old external reality, the perception involves a
libidinally driven identification with the
containing form or outline of its specular
counterpart. This may be either reflexively
perceived in a literal mirror as in Lacan’s
exemplary instance or in the mirror of the other
(especially the other who addresses the infant with
its nurturing but enigmatic messages). As Laplanche
elaborates, ‘narcissism is a Gestaltung, a giving of
form to auto-eroticism, entailing a profound
mutation of sexuality, by the fact that the
narcissistic action, the precipitation or
narcissistic coagulation, binds that sexuality’
(ibid., p. 99, my translation). The function of
binding here is the other side of the movement of
enclosure and totalising of the component drives
into an organised, invested whole body image. The
effect of this binding is of a moderation and
control of drive movements, exercised laterally,
from the margins.
21
5. The Ego of the Project
Laplanche derives this function of binding from
Freud’s first systematic theory of the ego as an
agency of inhibition, in the unpublished Project for a
Scientific Psychology of 1895. In Laplanche’s extensive
commentary on the early model of the ego, he
demonstrates its affinity with the later metaphoric
derivation, rather than with the ‘realist’,
metonymic derivation of the ego. While the
‘realist’ ego is plugged directly into external
reality through the perception-consciousness
system, having a privileged or at least
unproblematic relation to that reality in The Ego and
the Id, by contrast the ego of the Project is
established quite independently of the perception
system (the system on the external periphery of
the psychical apparatus). As Laplanche points out,
the ego is only introduced into the model after the
operation of perception has been established, along
with the process of recognition of the reality or
non-reality of revived perceptual traces.
22
The problem that Freud addresses in this
section of the Project is that when the revived
perceptual traces are intensely cathected they
override the signals of correspondence with a real
object (the ‘indications of reality’ in the
consciousness system), and so they take on the
force of hallucination due to the intensity of the
cathexis. However the problem is not dealt with in
1895 by granting the ego a special relation to
reality, or by elevating perception to the status
of an internal force comparable to the drives, as
Freud is later to do in 1923. Rather Freud posits
the ego as a bound form invested with drive energy
from the unconscious system: ‘let us picture the
ego as a network of cathected neurones well
facilitated in relation to one another’ which
‘corresponds to the vehicle of the store required for the
secondary process’ (Freud 1950a [1895]: 323). This
operates an attractive field of force on adjacent
neuronal pathways, inhibiting the passage of drive
energy by drawing it into itself. So if the ego is
threatened by the intensely cathected revival of a
memory trace of a painful experience, or of an
23
hallucinatory perceptual trace whose discharge
would lead to an experience of dissatisfaction due
to the absence of the corresponding object (e.g. a
lost love-object), it can deploy the side-cathexis
of adjoining neurones to capture the passage of
drive energy for its own system. This inhibiting
action of the ego is explained by Freud entirely in
economic terms as the action of a gestalt on its
surroundings by virtue of the difference in their
energy levels. As Laplanche comments: “There would
be a kind of induction in the surrounding field,
similar to that exercised by an electrically or
magnetically charged mass, the induced effect being
a function of the energy difference between the
inducing element and the environment’ (Laplanche
1970, p. 63).
The nucleus of the ego here in this early
account is not at all the perception-consciousness
system, but is rather the permanent stasis of
energy in the bound but internally facilitated
gestalt of the ego. (By “internally facilitated”
Freud means that energy flows are evenly
distributed between the elements or ‘neurones’ that
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constitute the nucleus of the ego and they sustain
it homeostatically at an optimum level for its
functioning, separate from its surroundings). It is
the operation of this mass as a field of attractive
force that lowers or even abolishes the highly
charged movements of hallucinatory memory traces,
and so allows the quite separate perception and
consciousness systems with their indications of
reality to function. As Freud concludes, “It is
accordingly inhibition by the ego that makes
possible a criterion for distinguishing between
perception and memory” (Freud 1950a [1895], p.
326). However this inhibition is not a function of
the ego’s privileged access to reality or of the
formation of the ego around the perception system.
On the contrary, the ego is an object formed within
the unconscious system by “the regularly repeated
reception of endogenous Qn [energy or quantity] in
certain neurones of the nucleus” (ibid, p. 323).
This inhibition and capture of adjacent highly
charged drive movements anticipates the idea
formulated in the third chapter of The Ego and the Id,
that the ego’s control of the drives takes place
25
through the regression from object-choice to
identification. Freud calls this, “a method by
which the ego can obtain control over the id”:
When the ego assumes the features of the
object, it is forcing itself, so to speak,
upon the id as a love-object and is trying
to make good the id’s loss by saying, “Look,
you can love me too – I am so like the
object”. (Freud 1923b, p. 30)
Here, in a further development, the ego as a
libidinally charged form, both bound and binding,
is established through identification with renounced
love-objects and the recapture of the investments
previously made in them. Freud generalises the
process, first described in ‘Mourning and
Melancholia’ (1917) as a mechanism specific to
melancholia: we have an identificatory process that
constitutes the ego through the introjection of a
lost or renounced loved object: “it makes it
possible to suppose that the character of the ego
is a precipitate of abandoned object-choices and
that it contains the history of those object-
choices” (ibid., p. 29). The price for this,
26
however, as Freud points out, is an ‘acquiescing to
a large
extent in the id’s experiences’ (ibid., p. 30). An
ambiguous form of control, then, that is scarcely
distinguishable from capitulation to the id and its
drives.
It is a recognition of this paradoxical and
equivocal status that informs Laplanche’s
conception of the ego in its metaphorical-libidinal
derivation. Laplanche draws out the implications of
this conception, starting from the Project, that the
ego is not “essentially a subject”. “[I]t is
neither the subject in the sense of classical
philosophy, a subject of perception and
consciousness (it is not ), nor the subject of
wishing and desire ... but a specific formation
within the mnemic systems, an internal object
cathected with the energy of the apparatus”
(Laplanche 1970, p. 66). However, the ego is a
paradoxical kind of object that acts and ‘enters
into conflicts as a participant by virtue of its
double function: an inhibitive function or a
function of binding ... and a defensive function”.
27
An object that acts, a kind of proxy, a pseudo-
subject: “the ego is indeed an object, but a kind
of relay object, capable of passing itself off, in
a more or less deceptive and usurpatory manner, as
a desiring and wishing subject” (ibid., p. 66). As
Freud recognizes in his famous metaphor of the
rider and the horse, a metaphor that starts off
intending to exemplify control of the id but ends
up in acquiescence: “Often a rider, if he is not to
be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it
where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is
in the habit of transforming the id’s will into
action as if it were its own” (Freud 1923b, p. 25 my
italics). So the ego is an internal object, in
Laplanche’s striking formulation, passing itself
off as a subject of wishing and desire.
6. The Ego between perception and drive
However the question of perception is not
entirely banished from the developed metaphorical-
narcissistic conception of the ego. The relation of
the ego to perception was at the heart of the
28
realist conception and it intersects with the
narcissistic conception at this very point. It is,
however, a special and original perception at stake
here, not just routine perceptions of the external
world and its objects, but both apperception or self-
perception, and the perception of the other, i.e.
perception in the charged context of a formative
inter-subjective relation. Freud had alluded to the
role of self-perception in his transition from the
metonymic to the metaphoric conception in the final
pages of chapter 2 of The Ego and the Id:
A person’s own body, and above all its
surface, is a place from which both external
and internal perceptions may spring. It is
seen like any other object, but to the touch
it yields two kinds of sensations, one of
which may be equivalent to an internal
perception. Psychophysiology has fully
discussed the manner in which a person’s own
body, attains its special position among
other objects in the world of perception.
(Freud 1923b, p. 25)
29
It is only in a much earlier recognition in the
Project, but later well forgotten, that Freud
acknowledges the foundational force of the
perception of the other:
Let us suppose that the object that
furnishes the perception resembles the
subject – a fellow human-being. If so, the
theoretical interest [taken in it] is also
explained by the fact that an object like this
was simultaneously the [subject’s] first
satisfying object and further his first
hostile object, as well as his sole helping
power. For this reason it is in relation to
a fellow human-being that a human-being
learns to cognize (Freud, 1950a [1895], p.
331).
The first object of perception-cognition is the
semblable or counterpart, the “fellow human-being”, the
one who is like me, so that this perception is
implicitly an apperception. Furthermore, Freud
attributes the interest in cognizing to the fact
that this counterpart is also like the first
satisfying and the first hostile object, as well as
30
the “sole helping power”. The perceptual complex
proceeding from the fellow human being, Freud tells
us, “falls apart into two components, of which one
makes an impression by its constant structure and
stays together as a thing” (ibid., p. 321), while
the second component is variable. While some
aspects will be “new and non-comparable”, e.g. the
facial features, others – e.g. the movements of the
hands - will recall memories of the subject’s own
body and it experiences (ibid: 321). In this
account perception of the other is supported and
made intelligible by apperceptive experience of the
subject’s own body. Indeed Freud proposes a
wholesale analogy between the structure of the ego
and the structure of the object of perception and
cognition. The perceived object is divided by
judgement into the constant thing and its variable
predicates, which matches the distinction between the
“nucleus of the ego”, internally charged with a
constant level of energy, and “the changing
cathexes in the pallium” – the word “pallium” in
Freud’s neurological language refers to the
neurones that receive excitations from the
31
perceptual apparatus. (ibid, p. 328). It’s not
clear, however, what the implications of this
analogy are: whether the infant projects the
structure of the ego onto the object as its
structure or whether he receives this structure
from the other - as a Vorbild or model for the
nascent ego, ‘projected’ inward from the body
surface to its internal site. Laplanche’s theory of
seduction would propose that it is the vector
coming from the other that is prior and this
elicits or provokes both the subject’s perceptual
and libidinal responses to the other.
My argument is that Freud locates the very
initiation of the perceptual apparatus, and the
subsequent development of the faculties of
judgement and remembering, in a metaphorical
reference back to what Laplanche calls the
situation of primal seduction, with its satisfying
and hostile objects and its “sole helping power”,
that is, the nurturing and seductive adult other.
In the context of the theory of primal seduction,
that perceptual complex that comes from the other
is not just a set of neutral “indices of
32
perception” (the Wahrnehmungszeichen or first
elements given to perception that Freud talks about
in the letter to Fliess, 6th December, 1896); rather
the initiating perceptual complex constitutes what
Laplanche calls “perceptual signs”, “originating in
the sender of the message, they make a sign in a
double, linked sense – they acquire the force of
signs and this is because, isolated by the sender,
they are addressed to the subject” (Laplanche 1992,
p. 74). The role of this enigmatic signification
from the adult other in the provocation of the
infant’s primal translation-repression, with the
consequent formation of the drives as its by-
product, has been set out at length in Laplanche’s
New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (especially chapter 3)
and various essays in Essays on Otherness (Laplanche
1999a) and his last volume of essays, Sexual, to be
published in English later this year. I have
commented at length on it in my editorial
introduction to Essays on Otherness and in a recent
essay on the Theory of Primal Seduction in
Psychoanalytic Quarterly (Fletcher, 2007).
33
7. Primal repression and the formation of the Ego
Freud’s privileged primal perception or
perceptual complex proceeding from the fellow human
being (whether satisfying, hostile, supportive, or
all three), when set in the framework of
Laplanche’s seduction theory, takes on the force of
an enigmatic signifier or sequence of signifiers that
target and address the infant recipient. Facial
expressions, gestures, intonational patterns, these
pre-linguistic signifying elements are Laplanche
argues “embedded in the periphery of the ego ...
implanted in the periphery of the individual, and
primarily in the points known as erotogenic zones’
(Laplanche 1987: 135). Laplanche is describing here
what he calls the first stage of a primal repression
that is, overall, correlative with the formation of
the ego and has vital implications for its
precipitation in a narcissistically invested form.
The ‘ego’ that receives and registers these primary
perceptual signs is Freud’s body-ego, Anzieu’s skin
ego, co-terminous with the whole individual as its
receptive surface. What Anzieu says of the tactile
34
skin surface perceptions – ‘the massage is a
message’ (Anzieu, 1985, p. 39) - applies across the
whole sensorium and, as Laplanche argues, the
message is both a message of care, support, love
but one that carries an enigmatic, repressed,
inchoate sexual dimension on the part of the adult.
What is pertinent here is Laplanche’s taking up
and elaboration of the translation model of
repression that Freud sketches out in the letter to
Fliess that I cited previously. There Freud
proposes that psychic structure is formed through a
process of stratification by which memory traces
are laid down not once but several times over,
through a series of rearrangements or
retranscriptions that represent successive epochs
or phases of development. Freud wrote to Fliess on
6th December, 1896:
At the boundary between two such epochs a
translation of the psychic material must
take place. I explain the peculiarities of
the psychoneuroses by supposing that this
translation has not taken place in the case
of some of the material ... Every later
35
transcript inhibits its predecessor and
drains the excitatory process from it. If a
later transcript is lacking ... thus an
anachronism persists ... A failure of
translation – this is what is known
clinically as “repression.” (Masson 1985, p.
208)
In Laplanche’s model of translation-repression,
developing that of Freud, for every act of
translation or carrying across and binding of
exciting material, there is also a partial failure
of translation. Something is not carried across and
remains unbound. The later transcript that
“inhibits its predecessor and drains the excitatory
process from it” is the germ of the idea of
sublimation (Laplanche develops this in his recent
return to the concept of sublimation, Laplanche
1999b), while Freud explicitly identifies the failure
of translation with repression. Both the concepts
of repression and sublimation are re-positioned by
Laplanche in relation to the translation model. In
Laplanche’s elaboration of the model of
translation, it is the repressed, untranslated
36
remainders of the enigmatic messages from the other
that form the nucleus of the unconscious as a
separate system. He calls these elements of the
primal repressed ‘de-signified signifiers’ and
‘source-objects’, i.e. they are signifying elements
that have lost their signifying function and
original context in the other’s discourse and
expressiveness and have become reified, reduced to
a ‘thing-like’ status in the unconscious. As such,
they press towards expression and discharge in the
form of the drive. Rewriting Freud’s terminology,
Laplanche also calls them ‘source-objects’,
signifying objects from the other that have been
fragmented, remaindered, repressed and thereby have
come to function as the source of the drives.
In the second stage of primal repression,
Laplanche writes, the ego-as-agency is formed, the
‘projection’ or transferral inwards of the
excitable and receptive surfaces of the body-ego in
a bounded self-representation. Where in the first stage
the enigmatic signifier was external, ‘embedded in
the periphery of the body-ego... primarily in the
37
points known as erotogenic zones’, in the second
stage:
The enigmatic signifier or, to be more
precise, its repressed residue, the source-
object, becomes internal; it is still
external to the ego, or embedded in its
periphery but, given the ego is more
restricted than the whole individual ... it
is an internal-external element which, as
far as the ego is concerned, acts from the
outside. (Laplanche 1987, p. 135)
(ES=enigmatic signifier, SO=source-object
Figure 3.3, Laplanche 1987, p. 135)
However, we have not considered the actual
translation process itself, the successful carrying
across of the excitatory elements into a new phase
of development, and the new ‘language’ that
attenuates and binds them (as in the letter to
38
Fliess on translation). Here we encounter once
again from a different angle the question of
Freud’s ‘new psychical action’ and its synthesising
of the auto-erotic drives into the narcissistic
ego. As I have argued, this requires the
articulation of its libidinal register with the
projection of the body surface into intrapsychic
space as the ego-agency, and the recognition that
that body-ego is infested with exciting
implantations that map and zone its surface. This
projection of the erogenized and auto-erotic
surface into a narcissistically loved and
boundaried body image also comes to perform a
defensive function against what resists translation
and binding, what cannot be translated, but which
seeks to return; for the ego forms an internal
periphery or protective barrier against the attack
of the drives, the excitations of the internal
foreign body (the object-become-a-source) of which
Laplanche writes: ‘a kind of internal-external instance
has been formed: a “thorn in the flesh” or, we
might say, a veritable thorn in the protective wall of
the ego’ (Laplanche 1970, p. 42, my retranslation of
39
Laplanche’s word épine, where Mehlman has ‘spine in
the flesh’). It reminds me of Lacan’s suggestive
neologism for an interiorised exteriority: extimité,
not the intimate but the extimate.
Laplanche models the different levels of the
ego and the repeated moments of their precipitation
as a series of envelopes - body surface, skin ego,
introjected ego-agency. These enfold each other in
parallel. Psychically actualised metaphors of the
whole individual, they are not, however, just
metaphors floating in inner space, for the
successive envelopes coincide at certain points of
tangency. In Laplanche’s various diagrams they
intersect tangentially, sutured or stapled
together, as it were, by ‘the thorn-in-the-flesh’,
that is, by the privileged traces and zonings of
the erotically implanted body. The body and the
ego, Laplanche argues, are articulated together at
the point of impact of the drive, where those
‘later transcripts’, the sublimated counter-
investments, inhibit and drain its excitations
(Laplanche 1980a, p. 228).
40
(Figure 3.2, Laplanche 1987, p. 134)
It is with this carrying across or translation
of the ego as a centred form with its untranslated
remainders or source-objects that we can see the
ego’s double and combined derivation:
The second stage of primal repression concerns
the
nascent ego-as-agency; the ego-agency is part of
the
apparatus, and it is made in the image of the
whole.
It is therefore a metaphor for the biological
whole, but
it is also an organ of the whole and it exists
within a
metonymic contiguity with the whole.
(Laplanche, 1987: 134).
8. Narcissism and the other
41
The moment of the ‘new psychical action’, with
its unifying projection inwards, happens
spontaneously in Freud’s account, as if it were the
next stage of a developmental programme. In Lacan’s
mirror stage schema it appears also as a
spontaneous development (at least in the classic
1949 paper), anticipating in the imaginary
dimension what is to come and thereby implementing
the organising function of the body schema.
Laplanche’s model of primal seduction, however,
would require a more specific motivation for this
development than the general defensive function
performed by the ego of an internal periphery
against the drives. Laplanche’s theory with its
other-centred, ‘Copernican’ perspective prompts the
question: what action of the other offers the
infant a libidinally invested, bound form as a
model or prototype for its ‘new psychical
projection’?
An intimation is given in ‘On Narcissism’. Here
Freud’s distinction between the different modes of
object choice, the so called ‘anaclytic’ and the
narcissistic object-choices, collapses. The
42
distinction collapses because the donation of
narcissistic libido to all objects, however derived,
whether chosen on the model of the ego or on that
of the parental support, emerges as the general
libidinal formula for all object choice. “Parental
love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish,
is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again,
which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably
reveals its former nature” (Freud, 1914c: 91). The
action of parental love, donating its revived
narcissism to the infant, is detectable, Freud
argues, in the idealisation and overvaluation of
the infant in the parents’ eyes, in their
conscription (can one use Laplanche’s term
‘seduction’?) of the infant to the parental fantasy
that Freud calls ‘His Majesty the Baby’:
Thus they are under a compulsion to ascribe
every perfection to the child ... to suspend
in the child’s favour the operation of all
the cultural acquisitions which their own
narcissism has been forced to respect, and
to renew on his behalf the claims to
privileges which were long ago given up by
43
themselves. The child shall have a better
time than his parents ... he shall not be
subject to the necessities ... Illness,
death, renunciation ... shall not touch him;
the laws of nature and of society shall be
abrogated in his favour. (Freud 1914c: 91)
Then in a rhetorical climax as theoretically
pregnant as it is ironic - Freud concludes:
He shall once more be the centre and core
of creation – “His Majesty the Baby”, as we
once fancied ourselves. (Freud 1914c: 91)
Freud’s wry insider’s evocation of parental fantasy
– “he shall once more be the centre and core of
creation” - points the way to the ‘Ptolemaic’
movement of self-centring, with its closure of the
infant’s psychical apparatus on itself, and its
repetition “once more” of parental self-centring.
While Freud’s description of parental fantasy stops
short of a proper theoretical elaboration of its action
and effects, nevertheless, we can see that what is
at stake here is a ‘narcissizing’ effect of
parental fantasy, whose action thereby - almost like
a performative in speech act theory - implants and
44
implements a seductive, libidinally charged ‘centre
and core’ in the infant. The Standard Edition’s helpful
footnote refers Freud’s ironic titling of parental
fantasy to a well known Royal Academy painting of
“His Majesty the Baby” in which two policemen
suspend the stream of city traffic to allow a
nursemaid to parade a pram and baby across a busy
street (Freud 1914c: 91). The Standard Edition
editors reference Freud’s later reworking of the
painting’s title as a formula for authorial self-
projection in daydreams and popular fiction: ‘His
Majesty the Ego’ (Freud 1908e, p. 150). Freud’s
ironic repetition of the honorific royal formula
indicates his awareness of the inter-connectedness
of the two themes, the parental fantasy of ‘the
Baby’ - en majescule as it were – and ‘the Ego.’ The
parental fantasy of the baby, as a protected and
defended ‘centre and core’, thereby centres the
libidinally fragmented and dispersed infantile skin
ego in the narcissistic unity of the loved
simulacrum. The parental fantasy of ‘His Majesty
the Baby’ lays down for the infant, who is seduced
and conscripted to it, a template or Vorbild that
45
thereby models the later accession and coming to
power - the crowning and enthronement - of ‘His
Majesty the Ego’.
Surprisingly there is very little in
Laplanche’s work that directly addresses the
specific centripetal action of the adult other and
its narcissizing impact, which would provoke and
support the synthesising processes of primary
narcissism on the part of the infant. However,
Laplanche’s most recent work on gender identity
(Laplanche 2007) has argued that the infant’s
acquisition of gender identity through
identification with the parent can only be explained
by the prior identification by the parent of the
infant as belonging to one of two genders. The
infant is assigned to and identified as belonging
to a gender and it is only this identification by
the other that provokes and enables the child’s
identification with the other.
The same argument clearly obtains with the
primary identification with the adult other that
Freud invokes in The Project. The adult fantasy
addressed to the infant both provokes and supports
46
an identification with either the specular
counterpart in the mirror or the form of the
“fellow human-being”, an identification that
internalises the delimiting form and outline of the
primary self-representation. However any account
framed purely in the perceptual, metonymic register
is inadequate, because the libidinal dynamic that
invests that form and that provides the ‘drive’
that impels the identification must also be
accounted for. Along with the Laplanchean principle
of the primacy of the other, this requirement of a
libidinal dimension calls out for a further
theoretical elaboration of the action of parental
narcissism and its narcissizing fantasy of ‘His
Majesty the Baby-Ego’ within the framework of the
theory of primal seduction.3
Postscript on Narcissism and Freud’s Two Theories of the Drives
‘The movement of the concept repeats the movement
of the object of the concept’, Hegel3 The late Sylvia Bleichmar, a former student and colleague of Laplanche’s, had begun suchan elaboration (Bleichmar, 2000) with her concept of maternal narcissisme transvasant (self-emptying narcissism) that allows part of itself to become other in the infant’s own body(le corps propre).
47
Laplanche sometimes summarizes thus an aspect
of Hegel’s thought that he finds congenial, as a
way of dramatizing both Freud’s repeated movement
of ‘going-astray’ (fourvoiement, a term he raises to
the level of a methodological concept) and his own
way of interpreting Freud’s going-astray. This is
an oscillation in thought from an other-centred or
‘Copernican’ break from self-centring to a
‘Ptolemaic’ recentring. Indeed he parodies Freud’s
fondness for invoking Haeckel’s Law (ontogenesis,
the development of the individual, repeats
phylogenesis, the development of the species), with
‘Laplanche’s Law’, ‘Theoreticogenesis, which is to
say the evolution of the theory with all its
avatars, tends to reproduce ontogenesis, which is
to say the fate of sexuality and the unconscious in
the human being’ (Laplanche, 1993c: 188). The fate
in question is a covering over, an elision, an
absorption into something else, both at the level
of theory and of individual psychic formation.
Laplanche traces such a movement from the first
theory of the drives, turning on the relation of
leaning-on and deviation between self-preservation
48
with its instinctual functions and the sexual
drives (in short, between Instinkt and Trieb), to the
second theory of the drives, which posits a real
opposition between the Life ‘Instincts’ or Eros and
the Death ‘Instincts’. Here, despite Freud’s
massive recourse to the biological, in effect to
Instinkt, he speaks of Lebenstriebe and Todestriebe.
Laplanche argues that the sexual drive of the first
theory is not to be mapped onto the ‘Life
Instincts’ or Eros of the second theory, which
would have left an incommensurate, indeed
incoherent parallel between self-preservation and
the ‘Death Instincts’. In fact Eros represents the
collapse or conflation of the Trieb/Instinkt
distinction in Freud’s thought, what Laplanche
calls the colonization of self-preservation by Eros
and the consequent absorption of both it and the
sexual drive into Eros:
I remain convinced that the shift from one
dualism to the other in Freud is in no sense
the substitution of one system for another
less valuable system. It corresponds to
something in the reality of the human being:
49
the movement from one to the other
corresponds to the birth of something, the
transition between two states or positions .
. . This would imply that the first dualism
would pre-exist the second in the reality of
human existence, indeed would constitute its
very foundation (Laplanche, 1999b, pp. 34-
5).
Laplanche argues that beneath the incommensurate
pairings of the two theories there is an underlying
consistency, which he represents in the form of
what he calls a “strange chiasmus”:
50
(Laplanche, 1970, p.124)
Laplanche’s diagram dramatizes both the apparent
anomaly by which sexuality moves from the pole of
the primary process, free energy in the first
theory to the pole of the secondary process, bound
energy and the ego in the second theory, and the
underlying consistency of the opposition of unbinding
and binding that organizes these pairs of
opposites. To these one can add further Freudian
opposites, such as the pressure towards absolute
discharge and homeostasis. I would argue that the
cross-over point of Laplanche’s strange chiasmus
that is unnamed on his diagram, where the sexual
drive cross over into its opposite, Eros, is in
fact primary narcissism.
This is the moment of ‘the new psychical
action’, which this paper has been so concerned
with: the internalization from the other of the
bound and binding form that coagulates the auto-
erotic component-drives of infantile sexuality into
51
the unified narcissistic libido. This constitutes
the ego as the first totalized love object and as
the libidinally invested representative of the
self-preservative functions that, henceforth, it
encloses. Laplanche draws a further implication
from Freud’s disinclination to propose a ‘destrudo’
as an independent energy source for the Death drive
to match the ‘libido’ of the Life drive, ‘For the
death drive does not possess its own energy. Its
energy is libido. Or, better put, the death drive
is the very soul, the constitutive principle, of
libidinal circulation’ (Laplanche, 1970, p. 124).
The death drive is then the return of the Trieb, the
unbinding and unmaking pressure towards discharge,
first elaborated in the Three Essays of 1905, the
great ‘Book of the Drive’. It is, Laplanche argues,
this alternative regime of the sexual, ‘Lucifer -
Amor’ (Masson, 1985, p.421), which is re-affirmed
in 1920 as an exigency of the Freudian field and
its object, the ‘apparatus of the soul’, in the
face of the massive elaboration of the principle of
binding, of narcissism and all its works from 1914
onwards. It is, however, the Life ‘Instinct/Drive’,
52
the heir of that narcissistic cross-over and its
‘new psychical action’, Laplanche concludes, not the
death drive (‘known of old and long familiar’ like Das
Unheimliche, the Uncanny of 1919), that is Freud’s
new invention, the great surprise of 1920.
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