I only just received my copy of ‘To the Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf in the mail today, and so I have not yet had the opportunity to fully complete my readings for the week. Consequently, I decided I would make a post about an observation made while reading Stijn Vanheule’s book, “The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective” (2014).
Vanheule’s book is divided into two parts, inspired by the strong distinction between Lacan’s early work, and his later work. I have just entered the ‘Second Era: The Age of the Signifier’, where Vanheule goes into greater depth on Lacan’s idea of how language works, which Lacan developed after his doctoral dissertation. This newer work departed from a number of earlier theories, now establishing the body of work for which he is best known. In this later work, Lacan takes paradigm of the signified, signifier, and signification from the linguist de Saussure. Lacan comes to the conclusion that the unconscious follows the logic of the signifier, which is one part of the ‘liguistic sign’. (Vanheule, 2014, 35) It is the analyst’s job to detect these signifiers in a patient’s speech; but unlike Freud, Lacan does not believe that we should determine the underlying cause of speech patterns (therefore psychosis) based off of what we (the analyst) learns from psychotic speech.
The signifier is a identifiable entity in language because it is delimited by the very fact of its existing within the context of a signified chain of speech. As can be surmised by this definition, the signified has an implied connection to a signifier through the verbalization of some idea. Thus, “grammar and syntax have a fundamental effect on the creation of meaning.” (36) Vanheule writes: “speech hooks the signifier to the signified or creates ‘button ties’ in discourse. Their effect is that the sliding of the signified under the signifier comes to a halt.” (37) Language grounds signification of what is in the unconscious; this is the result of the relationship between these two entities.
Much more detail could be gone into regarding the nature of these entities and how they function with regard to a greater social spectrum and to the individual psyche; however, I will refrain from doing so because I wish to address a particular passage of Vanheule’s, where he discusses a case study that interested Lacan – namely, Freud’s Mr. E, who “had an ‘anxiety attack at the age of ten when he tried to catch a black beetle’.” Further:
“During a session Mr. E, when speaking about his anxiety attack, connected the idea of the beetle (Kaefer in German) to the word ladybug (Marienkaefer in German). Before making this connection Mr. E had been talking about his mother, who was called Marie. In other words, the topic of his mother constituted the basis upon which further associations were made. In the path of associations the word ‘Marie’ led to the word Marienkaefer. Furthermore, when talking about his mother Mr. E mentioned that as a child he had heard a conversation between his grandmother and aunt. Freud states that this was about the marriage of his mother, where ‘it emerged that she had not been able to make up her mind for quite some time. As a child Mr. E grew up with a French-speaking nurse, and therefore learned to speak French before German. Regarding the following session with Mr. E, Freud states that just prior to the session ‘the meaning of the beetle [Kaefer] had occurred to him; namely: que faire? – being unable to make up one’s mind…'” (Vanheule, 2014, 38)
Vanheule relates Lacan’s conclusion, which is just that the “acoustic image” relates to two different conceptions. 1) about the bug, and 2) about the mother’s hesitation. The bug is the symbol that represents the mother’s hesitation. The subjective truth of the matter is repressed by Mr. E. (Vanheule, 2014, 38)
This whole idea reminds me of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), and so I went back to read the story on Project Gutenberg (E-book released 2005). From the very first lines of the story, we can detect a metaphor for the concept of a phonetic chain consisting of signifiers. “He lay on his armor-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections.” (Kafka, 2005) We notice too that Kafka displays an interest in surfaces and the ambiguous resonations those walls produce. By resonations, I mean the symbolism implied by the plain and seemingly unassuming insertion of phrases such as “His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls.” In fact, this particular syntactical construction anthropomorphizes Gregor’s room, pointing out the fact that it is composed of pieces and is not a singular whole. This idea coincides clearly with Lacan’s ideas, if we conceive of part of his issue as arising from the failure to express his feelings of degradation in the job he works. But if we make a connection between Gregor’s story and Freud’s Mr. E, we might turn again to Freud for his model of consciousness in light of his (subsequent, but more important to our reading) model of trauma. Indeed, though Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” was not published until 1920, the corollaries to Kafka’s story are almost uncanny.
First of all, as Susan Bernofsky (2014) points out, Kafka did not want Insekt on the cover of the story, preferring instead the title we know well. Further, the word Ungezeifer, which stems from the Middle High German, ungezibere, is the word Kafka first uses to introduce Gregor’s state. Ungezibere is supposedly a negation of zebar, meaning “sacrifice” or “sacrificial animal”. Ungeziefer describes the class of insect-creature. The word in German suggests primarily six-legged insects, though it otherwise resembles the English word “vermin”. Ungeziefer is also an informal equivalent of “bug,” though the connotation is “dirty, nasty bug”. Thus, Bernofsky (2014) concludes, the word used to introduce Gregor’s newfound condition is highly ambiguous.
Cvetkovich (2003) writes, Freud invites his reader to “picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation.” (53) The model organism is thus abstract, a “little fragment of living substance”, “suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies” (Freud’s words). (Cvetkovich, 2003) External energies are dangerous for this fragile entity, which is cause for fear of penetration. Thus the creature acquires a shield in order to defend against external penetration; and whatever (and whenever) penetration is experienced, it is deemed traumatic. The shield is formed out of what Cvetkovich calls “the death of its [the organism’s] outer layers” which is submitted so that the rest of the organism may live. It is my contention that Gregor represents an individual who has undergone trauma in his attempts to keep his family financially afloat; it has caused his mental condition, which, Kafka implies, also has every kind of effect on the human body. Gregor’s inability to command regular use of his limbs, such as the fact that his new body does not allow him to sleep on his right side, could represent the fact that, while his outer crust protects him, it separates him in some way from his family, who (at least in his eyes) still ‘alive’. In the unconscious’ attempt to protect the body, the individual is also alienated from the world. He has metaphorically represented mental inhibition and trauma and the (Freudian) reaction of the ego to that trauma.
This idea of Freud’s interests me in particular, and I hope to use it in analyzing future readings for my independent study. It would also be interesting to look at the dialogue of female characters in literature using the Lacanian conception of signification in relation to this concept of creating a protective shield.
Sources:
Franz Kafka (2005). The Metamorphosis. D. Wylie, Trans. (Original work published 1915). Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5200/5200-h/5200-h.htm.
Stijn Vanheule (2014). The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Susan Bernofsky (2014, January 14). On Translating Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, Retrieved from: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-translating-kafkas-the-metamorphosis.
