Notes on Photography: The Uncanny Double and Photography

We should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope, or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a place inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. 

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 

Freud compares consciousness to photography several times. And in his essay on the uncanny, he famously analyses ‘The Sandman’, a tale by E. T. A. Hoffman named after a mythical figure who steals children’s eyes. In the story, the character who represents the Sandman has two identities: Coppola and Coppelius. In the former guise, he’s an optician, who also makes eyes for automata; in the latter, an alchemist. In Italian, coppo means ‘eye-socket’, while coppella means ‘assay-crucible’: a white-hot orifice, overflowing with molten light.

Self-knowledge is a prize I pursue through a labyrinth, towards its centre, where I wait for myself. I’m both Oedipus and the sphinx; Theseus and the minotaur. But who lays out the labyrinth? Who carries out the act of repression that banishes an idea to its underworld? In other words, who maps the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious? He’s a censor who controls access to consciousness. He’s an invisible homunculus who watches a screen inside my head at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. He’s my double, who, in the essay on the uncanny, troubles Freud in the form of mannequins and automata, and is initially identified as an avatar of the id: primordial narcissism, which seeks, in duplication, a defence against annihilation.

As is often the way with Freudian concepts, and the effect is especially appropriate here, the double also stands for its opposite (just as unheimlich may also mean heimlich): having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. In this guise, it doesn’t affirm my existence; it usurps my place. And is thereby revealed as an avatar of the superego, which performs the function of self-observation and self-criticism, and which In the pathological case of delusions of observation ... becomes isolated, split off from the ego, and discernible to the clinician.

The double is the child of both Coppelius and Coppola: alchemy and optics. He’s my shadow, and my reflection. That is to say, the double is the child of photography, which uses alchemy and optics to combine shadows and reflections. Photography is an attempt to conjure and bind this hidden double, the ghost in the machine. I force him to manifest inside the frame, like a genie released from a bottle. He escapes: not out of the image, but into the image. 

'Interpreting Dreams' by Sigmund Freud

Dreams feature prominently in Five Wounds, where they are prophetic messages, as they are in the Bible. 

I want to draw attention to the passage below on p. 300 of Freud's Interpreting Dreams (in the new translation by J. A. Underwood), referring to what Strachey had previously translated as 'overdetermination' in the dream-work, rendered by Underwood as 'multiple determination':

Each element of the dream-content turns out to be multiply determined - represented in the dream-thoughts several times. .... So I see what sort of relationship exists between dream-content and dream-thoughts: not only are the elements of the dream determined several times by dream-thoughts: individual dream-thoughts are also represented in the dream by several elements.

No doubt the same principle underlies all imaginative writing, as Freud states explicitly on p. 279:

Like every neurotic symptom, in fact (like dream itself, which is capable of repeated interpretation, at a deeper and deeper level - even requires it if the dream in question is to be understood), every genuine poetic creation will also have proceeded from more than one motive and more than one stimulus in the poet's mind and admit of more than one interpretation.

The principle of multiple determination is, however, particularly useful for interpreting internal relationships between textual and visual elements in a multi-modal text, such as Five Wounds, which also (perhaps not coincidentally) includes numerous accounts of dreams.

In fact, I didn't read Interpreting Dreams while composing Five Wounds. I should have - and I even bought a copy at the time, but it lay unread on my shelves while I was revising the novel. The role of dreaming in Five Wounds is therefore influenced more by early modern ideas on prophecy and divination. In fact, it was one of Freud's major insights that the meaning of dreams could be found in the dreamer's past rather than her future (p. 636):

For it is from the past that dream springs - in every sense. Granted, even the age-old belief that dreams show us the future is not wholly without truth-content. By showing us a wish as having been fulfilled, dream does in fact lead us into the future; however, the future that the dreamer takes as present is moulded by the indestructible wish into a mirror of that past.

As an additional point, I note that Interpreting Dreams uses a metaphor I thought I'd invented for the introduction to the 'The Art of Grief' (an autobiographical essay that provides several unattributed quotations in Five Wounds, and therefore relates to the novel as latent content relates to manifest content in a dream). On pp. 508-9 of Interpreting Dreams, Freud writes (in a variation of the archaeological metaphor for analysis of which he was so fond):

Like dreams, [daydreams] are wish-fulfilments; like dreams, they are largely based on the impressions of childhood experiences; like dreams, they enjoy a certain relaxation of censorship as regards their creations. Looking closely at how they are put together, one becomes aware of how the wish-motive that operates in their production, seizing the material of which they are constructed, has jumbled that material up, rearranged it and assembled it to form a fresh whole. To the childhood recollections to which they hark back, they stand in something like the same relationship as some of Rome's baroque palaces stand to the classical ruins whose columns and dressed stones provided the materials for their reconstruction in modern forms.

I would argue that in it, the unconscious is structured, not like a language (as Lacan famously insisted), or like an image (as Freud states explicitly within Interpreting Dreams), but rather, like a comic strip – or an illustrated novel.

Stream of Consciousness

Stream-of-consciousness is closely associated with literary modernism. Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, et al experimented with this technique under the influence of contemporary philosophical attempts to define the nature of consciousness – it was William James who first referred to it as a ‘stream’ - for example, in the fields of phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

I rediscovered stream-of-consciousness recently in the work of Jean Rhys, whose short novels of the 20s and 30s are all marked by their profound exploration of the narrator’s sensibility via this technique. Here is a sample from Good Morning, Midnight (1939):

Now the room springs out at me, laughing, triumphant. .... Here we are. Nothing to stop us. Four walls, a roof, a bed, a bidet, a spotlight that goes on first over the bidet and then over the bed – nothing to stop us. Anything you like; anything you like. ... No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us. ... A difficult moment when you are out of practice – a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary. 

Stream-of-consciousness has fallen out of favour recently, like many of the literary techniques associated with high modernism. It has largely been replaced by ‘limited third person narration’: that is, writing nominally from a third-person perspective, but in fact following the experiences and consciousness of a protagonist fairly closely. This technique allows writers the intimacy of a first-person perspective, while eliminating the dangerous idiosyncracies that come with direct immersion in the narrator's thoughts. Direct stream-of-consciousness is now used only to represent altered or damaged states of consciousness: that is, intoxication or madness. (Rhys’ protagonists are often on the verge of either intoxication or madness, or both.)

I am writing a novel about modernism and consciousness, but I never use stream-of-consciousness. It didn’t even occur to me until after I read Rhys. Why? Because Reciprocity Failure is more concerned with intersubjectivity, and so its key passages are either dramatic monologues (that is, written as if spoken aloud, as quasi-soliloquies) or dialogue exchanges: direct attempts at communication. In this context, stream-of-consciousness, as traditionally practiced, is a failure to communicate, a form of solipsism.

Psychology

S: You have often expressed contempt for psychology. Yet you keep talking about the mystery of personality in ways that sound psychological. What's the difference between what you want to understand and what the psychologist wants to understand? 

B: The psychologist discovers only what he can explain. I explain nothing. 

S: You are a person with no preconceptions. 

B: None at all. 

S: Whereas psychology is a closed system, whose premises dictate its method. Therefore, it discovers evidence in support of a preexisting theory of human behavior. 

B: If I succeed at all, I suppose some of what I show on the screen will be psychologically valid, even though I am not quite aware of it. But of course, I don't always succeed. In any case, I never want to explain anything. The trouble with most films is that they explain everything. 

....

S: What I am trying to explore with you is the emotional problem for the spectator [in Pickpocket]. 

B: I never think of the spectator. 

S: But you can see that your hero might appear unsympathetic. 

B: He is unsympathetic. Why not? 

S: I am also puzzled, in view of your uninterest in psychology, at the heavy psychological emphasis in this film. Let me explain. As we see the hero stealing, we don't know his motive, but toward the end of the film we find out that he previously stole from his mother. We then realize his psychological motivation; he stole from his mother, felt guilty about that, was ashamed to confess to her, and, therefore, commits crimes so as to be punished and fulfill his need for penitence. 

B: Perhaps, but only a psychiatrist would explain it like that. As Dostoyevsky frequently does, I present the effect before the cause. I think this is a good idea because it increases the mystery; to witness events without knowing why they are occurring makes you desire to find out the reason.

From this interview with Robert Bresson.

'The Uncanny' by Sigmund Freud

Eyes in The Terminator and Blade Runner:

'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson

I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.

The above quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, first published in 1886, is the epigraph for Pat Barker’s The Eye in the Door, a novel that features a protagonist experiencing fugue states. In The Eye in the Door, the theme of dissociation is strongly associated with that of surveillance: in other words, dissociation is a way to evade the surveillance of our own conscience, as indeed it is for Jekyll (see also: Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly).

Stevenson’s text is odder than its subsequent reworkings in popular culture might suggest. The first thing to note is that Hyde, who is described as both slighter and younger than Jekyll (the latter is common in dramatisations, but not the former), is rather unimpressive as an avatar of evil. He tramples a child underfoot in the opening chapter; and later he commits a murder without provocation; but otherwise his propensities are described in rather vague terms. Perhaps this was quite enough to create an overwhelming impression of evil in 1886, but it seems rather tame now. Of particular note – and again this distinguishes Stevenson’s tale from its later dramatisations – is the absence of any sexual element in Hyde's escapades. Indeed, there are almost no female characters at all, except in incidental roles (e.g. a servant who witnesses Hyde carrying out the murder from an attic window). This absence has lead some interpreters to see Hyde as an allegory of repressed homosexual desire (hence the lawyer Utterson’s suspicion that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll). As if in response to this, almost all subsequent dramatisations (including the very first stage production, in the 1880s) have added a heterosexual love interest for Jekyll, and in many cases, they also insist that Hyde’s evil nature expresses itself in sexual terms, usually by violence against female prostitutes (as in, for example, the 1990 television adaptation starring Michael Caine). This last point does take up an allusion in the original text, since Hyde rents a room in a squalid neighbourhood to facilitate unspecified depravities, an action that has no obvious explanation within the text (why would he need a separate room?), but makes immediate sense if one assumes his landlady is a madam.

Lending credence to both the homosexual and the violent heterosexual subtexts is the fact that all the important male characters in the story, including Jekyll, are middle-aged or elderly bachelors, who seem to spend most of their time in each other’s company (this circumstance is apparently not worthy of comment, either for Stevenson or his protagonists). The subsequent career of Jack the Ripper – who came to public attention in 1888, and has been associated with Hyde ever since – lent immediate credence to the second of these interpretations.

Both these sexual interpretations are of course characteristically psychoanalytic, in that they identify what the text does not say as its most revealing element. Stevenson himself rejected any sexual interpretation of Hyde’s proclivities.

'Studies in Hysteria' by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer; 'The Unconcious' by Sigmund Freud

The Studies in Hysteria contains several of Freud's earliest case histories, and would be worth reading for that alone (their tentative and evolving format can be contrasted with the later case histories collected in the Penguin volume named after The Wolfman). The Studies are also the earliest attempt to theorise the 'talking cure' that Freud developed in collaboration with Joseph Breuer. This book is therefore the foundational text of psychoanalysis, although many of its ideas were later abandoned (for example, Freud is still using hypnosis for the earlier cases, and also ... massage!)

The collection of essays on The Unconscious includes later elaborations of some of the ideas introduced in the Studies. These essays are more concise and focused than the Studies; but they are also more abstract.

Freudian theory is often presumed to validate the concept of a fugue state: that is a split consciousness, which was a common symptom of hysteria. In fact, Freud's work opposed the prevailing view that Hysteria is a form of mental disintegration characterized by the tendency to to a permanent and complete split of the personality (this formulation is from Pierre Janet, The Mental State of Hystericals, 1894).

Even so, in the Studies, Freud and Breuer do repeat the then-accepted dictum that hypnosis is artificial hysteria (SiH, p. 15); and that, during a hysterical attack, a hypnoid consciousness has taken hold of the subject’s entire existence (SiH, p. 18). The therapeutic value of hypnosis was therefore due to a principle of resemblance between illness and cure. With the patient under hypnosis, the psychologist could communicate directly with her illness.

After 1900, as Freud developed both his theory of the unconscious and the therapeutic method of free association, he grew increasingly sceptical, not only of hypnosis, but of the whole concept of a double conscience. What we have within us, he argued, is not a second consciousness, but psychic acts that are devoid of consciousness (TU, p. 54). Thus the known cases of ‘double conscience’ (split consciousness) can most accurately be described as cases of a splitting of psychic activity into two groups, with the same consciousness alternating between the two sites (TU, p. 54). Similarly, in 'A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis' (1912), Freud again asserted that:

If philosophers find difficulties in accepting the existence of unconscious ideas, the existence of an unconscious consciousness seems to me even more objectionable. The cases described as splitting of consciousness ... might better be described as shifting of consciousness, - that function – or whatever it be – oscillating between the two psychical complexes which become conscious and unconscious in alternation.

Even in the Studies, while Breuer is confident that hypnoid states are the cause and condition of many, indeed most, of the major and complex hysterias, Freud is reluctant to concede full agency (that is, a truly independent existence) to unconscious ideas, which do not, therefore, 'belong' to an independent consciousness, but rather are removed from consciousness, as in this account of the influence of such ideas on Fräulein Elisabeth von R. (p. 168):

the love for her brother-in-law was present as a kind of foreign body in her consciousness, which had not entered into any relation with the rest of her ideational life. What presented itself, as regards this inclination, was the peculiar state of at once knowing and not knowing, that is, the state of the detached psychical group. This is all that is meant when we assert that this inclination was not ‘clearly conscious’ to her; it is not meant to indicate an inferior quality or a lesser degree of consciousness, but rather a detachment from any free associative traffic of thought with the ideational content.

The question of fugue states remains important in medicine today because of multiple personality disorder, a diagnosis that dates back to the heyday of hysteria, but has increased greatly in frequency in recent years, especially in America. In the Studies, Freud was exploring the idea that hysteria derives from repressed memories of sexual abuse. This is now thought to be an essential precondition for multiple personality disorder too. The later Freud seems to have abandoned (or at least ceased to emphasise) this presumed connection between sexual abuse and dissociation.

My new novel Reciprocity Failure features several actions carried out in a fugue state, although in the novel, these states are chemically-induced: that is, they are blackouts caused by alcohol and / or Stilnox / Ambien (which is in fact classified as a ‘hypnotic’ drug). In a blackout, the affected person performs actions of which they later retain no memory. In cases of extreme intoxication, there also may be considerable impairment of motor functions and perception, and observable personality changes. Oddly, there is very little theoretical discussion of such chemical blackouts (even though they are a well-attested phenomenon). In particular, the available discussion rarely relates blackouts to psychoanalytic theory. Perhaps this is because blackouts are treated as examples of short-term memory loss rather than dissociation; or perhaps it is because they have an identifiable physiological cause, and are always temporary. They therefore require no theoretical explanation.

Interestingly, the foundational literary account of multiple personality disorder - that is, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (on which, more soon) - also attributes the protagonist's transformation to chemical manipulation rather than hysterical dissociation.

'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life' by Sigmund Freud

I have been reading a lot of Freud recently, in the new Penguin translations. The previous, so-called ‘standard edition’, created under the direction of James Strachey, was much concerned with the status of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline, and Strachey sought to promote this status by coining several technical neologisms, where Freud had preferred to adapt idiomatic German terms. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in (arguably) Freud’s most popular book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which, even on the title page, is making a far-reaching argument: that the insights gained from treating neurotic and hysteric patients could be applied to a general theory of mind. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is also famous for introducing us to the idea of the Freudian slip, for which Strachey coined the ugly word 'parapraxis'.

A parapraxis is a meaningful mistake, through which we reveal something unintentionally. In it, we carry out an unconscious intention, which manifests itself as [a] disturbance to other, intentional actions (p. 183); the consequence (in, for example, the variant of this process involving a memory lapse, which affects a neutral thought, but one that is linked symbolically to a repressed idea) is that my act of volition failed to find its target, and I unintentionally forgot one idea while I intentionally meant to forget the other (p. 8).

The word Freud coins in German for this double or divided action is Fehlleistung, which, as Paul Keegan points out in his introduction, simultaneously suggests achievement or accomplishment (Leistung) and failure, errance (fehl-) (p. xxxviii). Keegan goes on to quote Bruno Bettelheim on the semantic connotations of this compound word:

When we think of a mistake we feel that something has gone wrong, and when we refer to an accomplishment we approve of it. In Fehlleistung, the two responses become somehow merged: we both approve and disapprove. Fehlleistung is much more than an abstract concept: it’s a term that gives German readers an immediate, intuitive feeling of admiration for the cleverness and ingenuity of the unconscious processes, without the reader’s losing sight of the fact that the end result of those processes is a mistake. For example, when we make an error in talking we frequently feel that what is said is right, though we also somehow know it is wrong. When we forget an appointment, we know that forgetting it was an error, but also feel that somehow we probably wanted to avoid keeping the appointment. Perhaps the best rendering of Fehlleistung would be ‘faulty achievement’. [Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (London, 1983), pp. 85ff.]

Elsewhere, I have seen 'faulty achievement’ rendered as ‘mischievement’, which fortuitously suggests ‘mischief’ as well as ‘mistake’. The only problem in the new Penguin edition is that the translator, Andrea Bell, having excluded the option of using the word 'parapraxis', has made it difficult to determine when Freud is using Fehlleistung, and when he is using some other construction.

I am reading Freud as research for my novel, Reciprocity Failure, which is concerned (among other things) with two modernist theories of consciousness (I know, I know, it sounds like a bestseller already). The first  is that of phenomenology, which identifies the essential aspects of consciousness as ‘intentionality’ (consciousness is always directed towards something, and is therefore always ‘full of’ something) and ‘givenness’ (we should take seriously how things present themselves directly to consciousness: that is, we should take appearance seriously); the second is that of psychoanalysis, which, famously, posits the existence of an unconscious, to which we do not have direct access. Phenomenology is very much in the Cartesian tradition (as is existentialism, to which it is closely related); and for Descartes, consciousness is self-evidently transparent to itself, and is an independent realm of being. Freud offers us a radical critique of this model of the self, even if Freud’s theory of perception is oddly indebted to Descartes (for example, in the premise that perception happens in the mind).

Keegan’s excellent introductory essay to the Penguin edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is both a consummate exercise in epigrammatic style (e.g. The this-world of the parapraxis offers only fugitive scenarios of the possible, and Everyday Life is a host of walk-ons: here comes everybody [p. xxiii]) and an attempt to restore Freud’s text to its immediate historical context in turn of the century bourgeois Vienna (in the process implicitly denying the text’s claims to universality). Thus Keegan points out that the public settings of Freud’s anecdotes are train carriages, health spas, doctors’ waiting rooms, and parlours. However, since I am interested in Freud as a modernist, I take him at his own estimation, not as a product of a particular historical moment, but as the creator of a general model of consciousness.

Freud's is a modernist theory, but it is also, in a sense, the origin of the postmodern strategies of deconstruction, whose methods are certainly derived from those of psychoanalysis. For example, it was Freud who infamously determined that whenever a patient says one thing, this may be taken by the analyst to mean the exact opposite. So one obvious interpretive move for texts written by Freud is to hoist them on their own petard and deconstruct them.

With this in mind, I am particularly interested in the question of agency in Freud. Where is agency located in the split intention of a Freudian slip, or, to put this differently, how is it possible to make a mistake deliberately? On p. 139 of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud concludes that A structure of multiple stratified agencies can be seen as the architectonic principle of the mental apparatus [emphasis in the original], alluding to the unconscious, but this merely defers the need for an explanation. If there is a split between the conscious and unconscious, who mediates between the two, and determines what belongs to the territory of each? Someone must be doing it, and that someone must of necessity have access to both realms.

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the question of who commits the slip is obfuscated or answered with circumlocutions. For example, on p. 212, writing about substitutions when reading a text aloud, Freud observes that Co-operation on the part of the verbal material alone both facilitates and limits determination of the mistake: here, therefore, agency lies partly in the text that the slipper misreads or mispronounces, which thereby 'assists' his hidden intention. But, cooperation with who?

Elsewhere, Freud refers to a mysterious 'censor', who is not, I think, identical with either the unconscious or the superego. Who is the censor? Who is censoring? Freud's answer might be: The question is a category error. The censor is not a person - not a 'someone' who wields agency.

So Freud doesn’t dispose of agency; he displaces it, or perhaps misplaces it, as in the Freudian slip itself.