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. 

Five Wounds: Cuckoo and Lacan's Mirror Phase

When I read the Icon Books title Introducing Lacan, I was struck by the description of Lacan's theory of the 'mirror phase', an elaboration of Freud's ideas on ego formation in the infant. The description corresponds exactly to (it mirrors?) the characterisation of Cuckoo in Five Wounds. Cuckoo is a man with no face, or rather a face made of wax, which he reshapes constantly in imitation of those whose identity he wishes to steal. He is also obsessed with his reflection, with which he can never fully identify.

Now here are some passages from Introducing Lacan (pp. 21-23):

The child identifies with an image outside himself, be it an actual mirror image or simply the image of another child. The apparent completeness of this image gives [him] a new mastery over the body. .... 'But all this at a price [says a picture of a child standing before a mirror in the Icon book]. If I am in the place of another child, when he's struck, I will cry. If he wants something, I'll want it too, because I am trapped in his place. I am trapped in an image fundamentally alien to me, outside me'. .... Lacan shows how this alienation in the image corresponds with the ego: the ego is constituted by an alienating identification, based on an initial lack of completeness in the body and nervous system.

There is a broader point here about how symbolism works: I mean symbolism in a general sense, rather than Lacan's more technical definition of what he calls the 'symbolic register', which for him complements the 'imaginary register' ('imaginary' from 'image'). For Lacan, language is the essential element that distinguishes the symbolic from the imaginary, so that in the symbolic register, the relation to the image will be structured by language (Introducing Lacan, p. 47). Cuckoo, by contrast, remains in the pre-linguistic, imaginary register, where the reflected image of his face cannot be described (in words or otherwise).

What I mean by 'symbolic' is rather the way in which Lacan's theory of the mirror phase describes an ongoing process (of ego formation) via an abstraction. It uses a single, signifying idea - the child looking at its own reflection - to stand for that broader process. The fictional character of Cuckoo then reverses that operation. I mean that Cuckoo's predicament takes Lacan's symbolic abstraction, and makes it both literal and definitive, so that it actually excludes other possible ways of understanding the nature of ego formation.

N.B. I am a big fan of the Icon Introducing series, which I am interested in for theoretical as well as pragmatic reasons: i.e. I am interested in how these unique attempts to present abstract ideas through a comic strip format work, beyond the information actually conveyed in any specific title. In this, they are natural successors to seventeenth-century emblem books. More on this in a future post perhaps ....

'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.

Five Wounds: A Fairy Tale

I'm reposting below and in several subsequent posts a cache of material on my first novel, Five Wounds, which I am about to re-publish in a revised second edition. It's a dark fantasy told in the mode of a fable or folk tale.

Traditional fairy tales have a kind of casual viciousness entirely alien to modern sensibilities, which distinguishes them not only from comic books (with which they otherwise have much in common), but also from the lavish gore of modern crime fiction. In fairy tales, there is never any attempt to ‘explain’ cruelty in psychological terms. It is not motivated by trauma and it does not result in trauma. It is simply there, an accepted part of the fictional world, just as starvation, premature death and casual violence were an accepted part of the lives of those who first listened to such tales in pre-modern Europe.

The violence in fairy tales is described in a matter-of-fact tone or (even more scandalously) is relished for its comic possibilities. Its cruelty is thus doubled. The narrative not only subjects the characters to all manner of ghastly events, but it refuses to acknowledge their right to be psychologically damaged, or to grieve.

This use of violence underlines the fact that fairy tales are not 'realistic,', by which I don't just mean that they feature magical plot devices. In general, their events do not occur as a result of modern, scientific relations between cause and effect; their characters are not explicable according to modern, post-Freudian notions of personhood; and the context in which their narratives occur is often composed only of a few isolated and impressionistic details. To put this last point in terms familiar to consumers of modern science-fiction and fantasy novels, fairy tales are not at all interested in 'worldbuilding.' Connections - between successive events, characters or apparently separate contextual details - are often made according to the same principle that links the two terms in a metaphor: i.e. by means of a violent imaginative leap.

Style is not just a matter of how you write. It is also a matter of what you miss out: what you do not feel it necessary to explain. Fairy tales take this principle to an absurd extreme. The wild imaginative leaps they make, and the gaping holes in their narrative logic, are another kind of cheerful violence that matches on a formal level all the amputations and violent transformations and deaths that occur in the content of their stories. These absences, taken together, constitute their distinctive voice, but that voice, judged according to the more familiar terms of a realist narrative, sounds like that of an affectless sociopath with a tenuous grip on reality.

Five Wounds takes the disturbing contradiction between fairy tales and realist narrative as its starting point. The five protagonists begin the story as irredeemably traumatised, and this trauma manifests itself physically, as deformity, but this is their natural condition, which they take for granted, and which in turn defines the world they live in and the limits of their choices. Those choices do not change their natures, but rather reveal them. Everything is simultaneously overly literal and overly symbolic. Everything is fixed in advance and everything is subject to arbitrary reversal.

This should not be taken to imply that Five Wounds is cold or detached. On the contrary, it is a boiling pot with the lid pressed down tight.

'The Uncanny' by Sigmund Freud

Eyes in The Terminator and Blade Runner:

'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.

Podcast on the Design of Five Wounds

The podcast of my talk on the design of Five Wounds, originally delivered to the Centre for the Book at Monash University on 20 Oct., is now available to download if anyone wants to listen to it at home. Alternatively, I have also uploaded and embedded the audio below.

The original talk was of course accompanied by illustrations. I have posted the most important of these below. The numerical headings are time cues, which refer to the point in the audio file at which I discuss the image in question. Anyone who wants to get a sense of what the book looks like before listening to the talk can check out these short videos, in which I flip through a copy and explain the various elements.

4:55: Freud Caricature

6:40 : Synaesthetic Paradise Diptych [I can't get this double image to work in the audio, and I waste a couple of minutes fiddling about with it]:

10:55: Plate 6: Cuckoo's reflection.

12:00: Alternative Representation of Cuckoo's Face

13:50: Gabriella's Shield

13:57: Magpie's Shield

15:00: Heraldry Sketches

15:15: Heraldry Grid

15:40: Sample Page Layout [see also 18:30 for discussion of the illustration included within this sample page]

17:00: Running Head [N.B. The pages above and below are two sides of the same layout, and thus the running head below serves as a title card for the illustration on the page above.]

24:55: Geneva Bible Page Layout (1560)

25:00: King James Bible Page Layout (1611)

25:30: Modern Bible Page Layout

40:00: Plate 15: Cut me

[All illustrations except the Freud caricature, the heraldry sketches and the page layouts are by Dan Hallett.]