No More Learning

The hystericizing of women circa 1800,after all, consisted in teaching them to read in such a way that poetic content was translated, through enjoyment and hallucination, into signifieds. What was brought to light on the couch may thus have been only a historical sediment," at the moment when it became dysfunc- tional, in order to teach another kind of reading, the literal, of everyday experience. Psychoanalysis would have stood at the spot of a "bifurca- tion" that from 1900on divided high and popular cultures according to the "phrase, book or picture; there is no third choice. "" Women, chil- dren, and the insane, instead of continuing to dream images in books, discovered the unconscious of the movie house; the science of psycho-
? REBUS 277
analysis, by contrast, discovered in women, children, and the insane, in order to inscribe it into them, an elite unconscious of secret scriptural codes. '6At the end of her cure, one of Freud's famous hysterics dreamed that even she was reading calmly in a "big book. "''
Immediately after the initial showing of the first German art film, Otto Rank began to psychoanalyze it. One of his assumptions was "that repre- sentation in the movies, which is suggestive of dream technique in more than one respect, expresses in clear and sensual picture language certain psychological conditions and connections that the Poet cannot always grasp with words. "'" Instead of pursuing such associations, Rank trans- posed the film sequences of The Student of Prague serially into the lexi- con of literary doppelganger motifs and this lexicon in turn into the ana- lytic theory of narcissism. Professional readers overlook the fact that the doppelganger motif films the act of filming itself. The movies are only the "actual psychic surface," the "arbitrary and banal starting point for broaching extensive psychological problems. "" Rank is thus quite con- vinced of the manifest-latent distinction-not only for the psychic appa- ratus, but for the connection between the technical and literary.
And Freud? In 1883, directly continuing the work of Muybridge, Albert Londe built an electrical "short-exposure series" camera, and two years later Charcot used it to film his hysteric patients in the SalpOtriire. The young neurologist Freud was watching. zoBut for him, as well, film recordings-that is, the cutting up of the great hysterical curve-were only an arbitrary and banal starting point. His approach to hysterics broached the completely different problem of exhausting the flood of im- ages. Movies aren't mentioned in The Interpretation of Dreams. Uwe Gaube's fine study Film and Dreams fills this gap by citing American psychologists, who read the manifest dream-content cinematographi- cally. " Philologically and historically speaking, however, it remains a fact that Freud did not even ignore the Other of his decoding. The filmlike, presentative symbolism of the dream images vanished in the rhetorical- scriptural domain instituted by psychoanalysis. Whatever "visual forms of the flight of ideas" haunted unfolding dreams were excluded. zzAs with Saussure, whose linguistics could begin only after the mythical separation of firmament and ~ a t e r , ~of' thoughts and sound, of anything halluci- natory and undifferentiated, the movie pleasures of viewers like Ronne and Pinthus remained a limit concept on the system'sedge. 'The unity of this world appears to me to be something obvious, unworthy of empha- sis. What interests me is the dissection and division of something that would otherwise be lost in the primal SOU^. "^'
The soup is thus not denied, but circumvented. That was the profes- sional path, by contrast to mystical and philosophical contemporaries.
? 278 1900
Rudolf Steiner made into a secret doctrine Benedict's discovery that those saved from death had seen their lives pass before them as in a time-lapse film. " Henri Bergson denounced, in favor of his Creative Evolution, the "cinematographic mechanism of consciousness," which was unable to process the continuous flow of the durke and was limited to discrete im- ages. z6The philosophy of life thus became a kind of movie that would have sacrificed its working principle, the cutting of images, to what was only a cunningly produced illusion in the viewer. Freud, however, per- sisted, like the researcher on the tachistoscope, in investigating a mechan- ics of dreamwork that was accomplished not by an illusory consciousness but by the unconscious itself.
The fact that psychoanalysis, given the options of cinematic dream and the tachistoscope, chose the symbolic method is indicative of its place in the system of sciences in 1900. This place had nothing to do with a "scientific self-misunderstanding" and for that reason also had little to d o with the human sciences. " In his admirable uncertainty about whether the return of language circa 1900represented the last moraine of transcen- dental knowledge or a new beginning, Foucault placed psychoanalysis, ethnology, and structural linguistics in a position where the human sci- ences' inner perspective on Man was transversed by language as an ex- terior element. The uncertainty arose because Foucault conceived dis- cursive rules as comprehensible and therefore overlooked technologies. But innovations in the technology of information are what produced the specificity of the discourse network of 1900,separating it from transcen- dental knowledge and thus separating psychoanalysis from all human sciences.
Freud's early work O n Aphasia was a brilliant, immediately acclaimed critique of brain physiology and its relation to language. Without doing any original experiments or dissections, the neurologist demonstrated to his colleagues that their all too localized language centers did not take into account the primacy of function. The critic maintained his allegiance to all the assumptions of that theory of language; he drew conclusions from deficiencies and isolated discursive functions, although not pri- marily in an anatomical sense. His Project for a Scientific Psychology consequently. contains a topical model of isolated functions (conscious- ness and the unconscious), whose positions remain strictly functional. The Project provided the very model of contemporary models; the soul became a black box. One need only compare the hypothetical pathways, discharges, cathexes, and (of course discrete) neurones of Freud's text with statements about the material of brain physiology, which, since Sigmund Exner, had described the brain as a "street system" with more or less
? REBUS 279
deeply engraved "driving tracks,"*8or as a network of telegraphic "relay stations" with more or less prompt connection^. ^^ Freud's mental appa- ratus, which has recently been interpreted as protostructuralist, merely conformstothescientificstandardsof itsday. " Thesoledifference,though one fraught with consequences, between it and neurophysiology is its lack of anatomical localization. Psychoanalysis, not content with looking forward to "filling in this gap" in a distant future," undertook another kind of localization.
Freud's study of aphasia inherited all the material on speech deficits and defects that doctors had obtained by distinguishing and localizing in- dividual aphasias. " 'Quill pen' instead of 'pencil,' 'butter' [Butter] for 'mother' [Mutter],'Fother' for 'father' and 'mother'" 'I are only selected examples, and their oddly Freudian quality is not just an effect of the con- text they appear in. The Psychopathology of Everyduy Life thankfully made use of the parapraxes in speaking, reading, and writing that the In- dogermanic linguist Rudolf Meringer and the psychiatrist Karl Mayer had gathered from colleagues and patients, in their attempt to demon- strate, first, that parapraxes were not a matter of free ''subjectivity"3' and, second, that they could be localized in an anatomically conceived system of language rules. Freud thus had an immense store of nonsense at his disposal, material that had been statistically ordered by doctors and linguists so as to provide inferences from the known deficiencies to brain functions and from those to language as a system. But anyone who attacks localization breaks the only thread holding together the statistics and lists. The collection of nonsense became a mere aggregate. That was reason enough to reverse the sorting procedure. Instead of ordering the data of countless speakers in columns until the rules of language emerged, psychoanalysis assembled the linguistic errors of one speaker into a text in which the rules of his individual speech came to light.
There were sound psychophysical premises for such a methodological shift. The psychoanalytic distinctions of condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy, on the one hand, and the structural linguistic distinction of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic on the other, are only transpositions of the fundamental principle of associationist psychology. Ziehen established that all associations play only on similarity or con- tiguity, on the paradigmatic or syntagmatic axes. "
Scientific discretion led Meringer and Mayer to indicate only paren- thetically and with abbreviations which colleagues or patients committed particular solecisms; they recorded the fine specimen "Freuer-Breudian method"" under the rubric initial-consonant-syllabic confusion, or ac- cording to rules of similarity. Freud had only to leaf through the con- tiguity of their pages to find the same speaker committing another distor-
? 280 1900
tion of Freud-and the Breuer-Freudian method could suppose, quite unlinguistically, that the particular academic "was a colleague and not particularly delighted with this method. " I6 Nothing could be easier. The experimental or statistical jumble of syllables is given another location on paper. Rather than placing fother, the word combined from father and mother, under the heading of general paraphrase, as would have been done in the early days of neurology, the analyst Freud reads it, in the con- text of all the others provided by the same patient, as part of a single rebus. Of course, father-and-mother is this context.
The same shift in method also brought Jung to psychoanalysis. His first efforts in psychiatry carried on the statistical experiments in associa- tion and flight of ideas of investigators like Emil Kraepelin, Ziehen, and Stransky, although his subjects were limited to the patients in Eugen Bleuler's institute in Burgholzli. From report to report the statistics di- minished and the space devoted to particular cases increased. Just two associations of a hysteric woman, read together, "demonstrate beau- tifully" that "the conscious ego is merely a marionette that dances on the stage of a hidden automatic mechanism. "" Thus one day Jung reversed the sorting procedure and worked exhaustively with a single schizo- phrenic patient. All the patient's neologisms were recorded and spoken back to her, until "all associations" of each "stimulus word" were pro- duced and could in turn be used to produce associations, and so on, to the point where even hieroglyphs provided material for psychoanalytic decoding. '" But Jung was unable to hear that he had himself become a telephonic instrument of torture. "Her suffering had no rhyme or reason for her, it was a 'hieroglyphic' illness. The fact that she had been locked up for fourteen years, so that 'not even [her] breath could escape,' seemed to be nothing more than an exaggerated declaration of her forced institu- tionalization. The suffering through 'mouthpieces that are held in from the outside,' seems to refer to the 'telephone,' or voices. ""
Psychoanalysis does not cut across the human sciences from an outside called language; it traverses the field of psychophysics, working with the latter's premises and material. The shift of focus from language as system to speech does not imply that individuality has become the object of in- vestigations. "No one makes an arbitrary error in speech"-this already- established fact in anatomical and linguistic systems is brought to bear on the singular system of the unconscious. 'O The individual falls in the crossfire between psychophysics and psychoanalysis; in its place is an empty point of intersection constituted by statistical generality and un- conscious singularity. As an instance of initial-consonant-syllabic confu- sion and of Freud repression, a particular colleague is fully classified.
Whereas individuals consisted of matured and unified speech and writ-
? REBUS 281
ing, individual cases are specified by the scattered debris of their language use. Uniqueness in the discourse network of 1900is always a result of the decomposition of anonymous, mass-produced products. According to Rilke, two "completely similar" knives bought by two schoolboys on the same day are only "remotely similar'' a week later? ' To use therefore means to wear down: out of industrially guaranteed similarity come broken, but singular things. Because these things, only a little the worse for wear, gather together whole case histories at once, the detectives Holmes and Freud carry the day. Dr. Watson doesn't have a chance when heattemptstofoilhismasterwiththefollowingchallenge:"'I haveheard you say that it is difficult for a man to have any object in daily use without leaving the impress of his individuality upon it in such a way that a trained observer might read it. Now, 1 have here a watch which has re- cently come into my possession . . . "'*' The scratches on the watch pro- vide the cocaine user Holmes with the welcome opportunity to turn page after page in the secret family history of his constant companion. As Bleuler recognized, the sciences of gathering evidence "certainly have a future. " From handwriting, from "its style, indeed from the wear of a pair of shoes," it is possible to deduce the whole person? ' Bleuler's as- sistant, Jung, investigated the psychotic wear and tear on the finished product of language.
The cocaine user Freud, however, in his great small-mindedness, would begin an analysis by considering a neurotic misuse of the finished product that is the alphabet. A twenty-four-year-old patient on the couch in the Berggasse told "the following story from the fifth year of his childhood": "He is sitting in the garden of a summer villa, on a small chair beside his aunt, who is teaching him the letters of the alphabet. He is in difficulties over the difference between m and n,and he asks his aunt to tell him how to know one from the other. His aunt points out to him that the m has a whole piece more than the n-the third stroke. "" The patient sees this as a romantic childhood scene, one that brings back summer and the histori- cal happiness of being alphabetized by the Mother's Mouth. The analyst does not dispute the reliability of the memory, but does question its imaginary significance. Had he done the former, Freud would have been like the physiologists of reading, who never encountered any confusion between m and n (only confusion between n and r, and m and w ) . Be- cause he was concerned more with the differences between letters than with letters, and more with letters than with significance, Freud trans- posed the intervals in a language to the intervals in speech. At the very place where Stephani's mothers' mouths slid lustfully and continuously from m to n,Freud confirms a harsh binary opposition. The opposition between m and n stands in as a "symbolic representation" for another
? 282 1900
opposition that can and must be written as the patient's rebus. "For just as at that time he wanted to know the difference between m and n,so later he was anxious to find out the difference between boys and girls, and would have been very willing for this particular aunt to be the one to teach him. He also discovered then that the difference was a similar one- that the boy, too, has a whole piece more than the girl. ""
An inscription as meaningless as it is unforgettable can thus be de- coded. The triumph of the Freudian transposition of media is to have made it possible to solve singular problems of differentiation with an in- dividual experimental subject. Psychophysicists had certainly recognized that small letters at x-height "are most often subject to confusion";H but no one had asked why individual subjects (themselves as well) produced one kind of mistake and no other. Ebbinghaus was only surprised that nonsense exhibited "very significant and nearly incomprehensible dif- ferences" in what people retained (as the twenty-four-year-old demon- strated). Gutzmann was led only as far as "the discovery of certain sus- pected trains of thought" by the "phonographic tests" he conducted, in that experimental subjects automatically and suspiciously heard or wrote nonsense as meaningful words? ' But any aspects of test material that could not be evaluated physiologically or typographically were discarded. The discarded material was so copious and so literal that no one, includ- ing the twenty-four-year-old, could approach it save as a novice. This is the reason for psychoanalysis. Material discarded by psychophysics can be resorted and then decoded. Freud's discourse was a response not to individual miseries but to a discourse network that exhaustively records nonsense, its purpose being to inscribe people with the network's logic of the signifier.
Psychoanalysis made into something significant-indeed, into the sig- nifier itself-the nonsensical attribution of nonsense to the fact that someone confused precisely the letters m and n. An opposition of letters yields the minimal signifier of a sexualized body. From this point on, the patient knows that alphabetization was only a screen for his sexuality and that sexuality is only a metaphor for the elementary opposition. What is scandalous in Freud is not pansexuality, but the return to a lucid and tan- gible play of letters of an eroticism that, as Spirit and Nature, had per- vaded the so-called world circa 1800. The phallus is as nonsensical and block-letter-like as the small mark that the m has and the n does not have. No handwriting of a continuous individual can get around the latter difference, nor can any illusion in the war between the sexes survive the former difference. What the boy's aunt began as pedagogical educa- tion ends in a system of notation that abolishes pedagogy and the soul.
? What must be said, with Aristotle, is that it is not the soul that speaks, but man who speaks by means of his soul-as long as we take into account that he has received this language, and that in order to sustain it he throws in much more than his soul: even his instincts, whose ground resonates in the depths only to send back the echo of the signifier. It is such that when the echo returns the speaker is delighted and responds with the praise of an eternal romanticism. "When the soul speaks, then" . . . the soul does speak, that is, . . . "oh! it is no longer the soul that speaks. " You can hear it; the illusion will not last long. 4a
All of Freud's case histories demonstrate that the romanticism of the soul has yielded to a materialism of written signs. When a patient "deco- rates his writing and notes with an S," it is only because S is "the first letter of his mother's name" (and not, say, an abbreviation of author- ship). " When the Wolf-Man, recounting a dream, says Espe rather than the hallucinated Wespe ["wasp"], the amputation of the initial letter rep- resents a castration complex that is typographic, and the rebus word Espe is the abbreviation S. P. , or the proper name of the Wolf-Man. '" Precisely because they do not occur in nature, letters are the keys to the uncon- scious. They cancel out conscious intention and hermeneutic understand- ing in order to expose people to their subjection to language. But meth- odologically this means that Freud (to use a pervasive metaphor of 1900) was a proofreader. Instead of reading over mistakes because of his com- pletealphabetization,heseeksoutmistakes. " Inlinewithsuchprofession- alism,intheBerggassemistakessuchas(W)Espeareneitherproducednor recorded in writing. The patients speak; as a good interview psychologist, the doctor avoids taking notes during the session. Otherwise he would only disturb the flow of speech, make "a detrimental," that is, meaningful, "selection" and distract his free-floating attention with bureaucratic tasks. 'LPsychoanalysis provides the singular example of a discourse net- work that has writing as its object but writing's complete opposite as method. Even this rebus can be solved.
Just as the patient must relate everythingthat his self-observationcan detect, and keep back all the logical and affectiveobjectionsthat seek to induce him to make a selection from among them, so the doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation . . . without substituting a censorship of his own for the selection t h a t the patient has forgone. To put it in a formula, he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Justasthereceiverconvertsbackintosound-wavestheelectricoscillationsin the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the doctor's unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconsciousness which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient's free associations. ''
REBUS 283
? 284 1900
The paradox of writing without script can only be solved with tech- nological media. Freud, determined to sacrifice his knowing subjectivity, produces a transposition of media onto himself: his ears become a tele- phone receiver. As it is written, men have ears only in order not to hear (and to transform everything into sense). Only the connection between electroacoustical transducers guarantees the reception of a full spectrum of noise, one that is informative to the degree that it is white. Once more, the word is "Listen to the Sacred Vibrations. " All conscious "commu- nicating" between the two counts only as a keyed rebus transmitted from one unconscious to the other. Its manifest sense is nonsense; Freud the telephone receiver picks out the parapraxes that would be mere debris under a postulate of sense.
In order to be able to fish m/nor U P . as telltale, interspersed signifiers out of a flowof speech that is merely the intimidation and resistance, the se- duction and distortion, of a consciousness, the doctor must have recorded them in advance. Freud's telephone analogy does not go far enough. Al- though it avoids the traditional recording device of writing, psycho- analysis works like a phonograph that in its developed form couples electroacoustical transducers with memory. Only sound recorders can register spoken typographic errors (an oxymoronic concept in itself).
Benjamin synchronized psychoanalysis and film with the argument that the former "isolated and made analyzable things which had hereto- fore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception," whereas the other "for the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception . . . has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. "" That doesn't quite do justice to the facts. Technologies and sciences of media transposition do not simply extend human capacities; they deter- mine recording thresholds. In the physiology of the senses these thresh- olds cannot be determined too exactly. Freud's treatment of dream and memory images is not the first or only instance of his exclusion of the whole optical realm. The fact that the doctor and hysteric patient are not allowed to look at one another means that the couch (in the best Nietzschean manner) is a pure realm of hearing. Both people are in the same room, so that eye and other forms of contact would be expected. But because mouths and ears have become electroacoustical transducers, the session remains a simulated long-distance call between two psychic apparatuses (in Freud's fine phrase). Psychoanalysis has no vague paral- lels to film; it has much more precisely learned the lesson of technological sound recorders. Its phonography of unconscious sound waves fishes, not in the wide stream of perception, but only among acoustical data.
The catch is restricted to discrete elements. Not only the imaginary sig- nificance, but also the real aspects of discourse are excluded. Freud had
? as little to d o with the physiology of speech (precisely, that studied by his teacher, E. W. Briicke) as he did with escaping to the images in the movies. Female hysterics, those born starlets, could run through, instead of the single "oh," the many real pleasures and pains of speech on the couch-from spastic halting to stuttering, clicking the tongue, gasping, or muteness-but the supposedly filterless receiver filtered them all out. Freud's inimitably forthright justification: he "could not," unlike any boy on the street, "imitate" these real aspects of speech. " The one who once diagnosed his own "motoric aphasia" recorded, in a complete reversal of Berliner'sgramophone,thelettersofsound-everything thatwasalready written, but only that, in the flow of speech. '6
Movies and the gramophone remain the unconscious of the uncon- scious. Psychoanalysis, the science born with them, confronts sequences of images with a primal repression and sequences of sound with their dis- tortion into chains of signifies Only the day when psychoanalysis be- comes psychochemistry-Freud's dream and the nightmare of others-si might wimess the repression of this repression as well.
A transposition of media that transposes images and sounds into letters does not stop there. By the force of its own logic it finally trans- ferred the letters into books. This is the relation between analytic practice and theory. What would have disturbed free-floating attention during the session later occurs after all: Freud reaches for his pen.
As Walter Muschg recognized early on, Freud belonged "to the modem movement of Ger- man letters. " "
Writing circa 1900means being without voice and writing with the alphabet. Fundamentally, psychoanalysts must know when to remain si- lent vis-&vis their word-jumble generators. Not only for "persons with hysterical mutism" did writing become a "vicarious" means of expres- sion; s' the motoric aphasic behind the couch did not suffer from agraphia, either. Written case histories made a "talking cure" into-literature. The expression itself shows how this happened. Freud had no such striking expression for his invention; his first patient, Anna 0. (alias Bertha von Pappenheim), gave her "new type of treatment the name 'talking cure' [in English]. "" The writer in Freud had only to put the foreign words on paper and honor them by his definition.
But this relationship between speech and writing, prompter and au- thor, so fundamental between Freud and his hysteric patients, does not make him a Schlegel or Anselmus, or Pappenheim a Dorothea or Serpen- tina. The simple fact that Anna 0. "during this period of her illness re- markably spoke and understood only English,""' separated her from a Mother's Mouth that could whisper even Sanskrit texts in High German.
REBUS 285
? 286 1900
The discourse network of 1900determined that Freud would not once put the expression "talking cure" into German. Psychoanalysis is not a translating universalization that makes the speech of many women into the originary language of One Woman. In practice as in theory, in listen- ing as in recording, psychoanalysis remained the feedback of data that circumscribed an individual case. "If" Freud's famous hysteric patient should "by chance" come to read the Fragment of her analysis, she would read nothing that she and only she did not "already know. " But because or in spite of this, an "embarrassment" awaits her:6zthe parts of her speech that have found their way into print are not the expressions of a na'ive lay philosophy of the sort that Schlegel ascribed to women, but of the organs and functions of her sexuality.
The meticulous Freud calls his activity the "written record" and "ac- cordingly not absolutely-phonographically-faithful. " But in this ex- plicit competition it has such a "high degree of dependability" that Wildenbruch would for once be made nervous by literature:' Every me- dium that brings the hidden to the light of day and forces the past to speak contributes, by gathering evidence, to the death of Man. This dis- tinguishes psychoanalytic case-study novels from the classical-romantic epic form. When Goethe put together his heroines from the different indi- vidual features of different women, inviting all feminine readers to iden- tify themselves with the Woman, the models, although they may have seen themselves robbed of eyes, hair, or mouths, hardly had the fear or pleasure of being publicly recognized. The discourse network of 1800 had no need of formal, legal guidelines about authorial discretion, be- cause it voluntarily, or philosophically, saw the individual as genus. Not until the current century did popular literature begin by disclaiming any similarity between fictional heroes and living models. One popular novel- ist, Thomas Mann, was drawn into an exemplary trial in 1905and had to defend Buddenbrooks against the charge of being a roman a clef by stressing the transposition of media as his artistic achievement. w In the same year, another novel "Fragment" began: "I am aware that-in this city, at least-there are many physicians who (revolting though it may seem) choose to read a case history of this kind not as a contribution to the psychopathology of neuroses, but as a roman B clef designed for their private delectation. I can assure readers of this species that every case his- tory that I have occasion to publish in the future will be secured against
their perspicacity by similar guarantees of secrecy, even though this reso- lution is bound to put quite extraordinary restrictions upon my choice of material. " 65
The novelist Freud thus does not rule out the novelistic reading of his case histories. He simply disapproves. It is possible, but distasteful, to de-
? code psychoanalytic decodings of individual cases. Such are the intimida- tion tactics of one who turned the subject index in Mayringer-Merer, excuse me, Meringer-Mayer, into a secret-person index. Such is the pro- tection of data records, which are exhaustive only because he, the discreet doctor, in a move of fine symmetry, forbade his patients to have any dis- cretion. Freud broke off the analysis of "a high official who was bound by his oath of office not to communicate certain things because they were state secrets. "" The shift from bureaucratic ethos to psychophysics, from an oath of office to the exhausting of material, could hardly occur more drastically. Writing circa 1900necessarily conflicted with rules of discre- tion-simply because it was no longer the imagination that dictated. Freud would sooner renounce writing books than subject signifiers to the kind of distortions that once translated recognizable, bourgeois Veronicas into the pure signified of a Serpentina.
If the distortions are slight, they fail in their object of protecting the patient from indiscreet curiosity; while if they go beyond this they require too great a sacrifice, for they destroy the intelligbility of the material, which depends for its coherence precisely upon the small details of real life. And from this latter circumstance fol- lows the paradoxical truth that it is far easier to divulge the patient's most inti- mate secret3 than the most innocent and trivial facts ahout him; for, whereas the former would not throw any light on his identity, the latter, by which he is gener- ally recognized, would make it obvious to everyone. 6-
What distinguishes case histories from Poetry is the fact that the depths of the soul do not betray the identities of the persons described to readers addicted to decoding. That Freud did not advance as far as the phono- graph, which with particulars like the voice or breath would have be- trayed persons' identities to even the most naive media consumers, is the very structure of writing. Only small, factual details remain as indices, which as people's symbolic aspect inscribe them in public networks of discourse. Certainly Freud's novels leave "no name standing which could put a lay reader onto the right track. ""* But because psychoanalysis is concerned with gathering evidence of the letter, names remain essential. Without the play of signifiers, whose differences are as incomprehensible as they are important, unconscious connections would be destroyed.
Under the hesitantly established heading, "The Presentation of Man" in Freud, Muschg writes of the "remarkably anonymous characters that occupy his writings. "6YIt is indeed a strange anonymity that consists of indices and names. Obsessional neurotics appear as the Rat-Man or Wolf-Man,'" hysterics as Anna O. , Frau Emmy v. N. , Dora, Fraulein Elizabeth v. R. For these figures the texts develop neither imaginative im- ages nor novels of Bildung-none of the representations of man in the Spirit of 1800,in other words. Only a mass of spoken material is pre-
REBUS 287
? 288 1900
sented, through which unconscious inscriptions run their jagged, telltale course. The rebus is written down as rebus. Because Freud's own texts will be scrutinized by distasteful colleagues, the texts encode each rebus a second time according to the rules of media transposition. Thus wherever a rebus appears to be solved, another one begins (along with yet another book on Freud). Anyone who can decipher the initials of the Wolf-Man in the castrated word (W)Espe,just as the formidable Sherlock Holmes discovered the place name Ballarat in the ordinary word rat,-'has still not fixed upon a referent, to say nothing of a man behind the words. Simmel's objective interpretation allows for solutions quite other than those of the author; Freud permitted and practices "Constructions in Analysis,"-2 which beyond psychoanalytic practice determined the constructions of his writing as well. The surname of the Wolf-Man has only recently been revealed. For seventy years it was anyone's guess as to whether the initials S. P. corresponded to the Wolf-Man's passport or whether they were the discreet fiction of a writer who had encoded a solved rebus a second time.
Small facts like initials or abbreviated names are thus quite literally the contact surface on which two discourses oppose and touch one another: on one side the speech of the patients, on the other side the writing voca- tion of their doctor. It is finally impossible to determine which of the two one might be reading at any given moment, simply because inscriptions on one side trace through to the reverse side. The contact surface-as is only proper in a discourse network that does justice to the material as- pects of media-consists simply of paper. Whether in Freud's sense or not, his paper is and remains the place where the discourse network of 1900comes into contact with people. Either the patients really spoke as if speech were a masquerade for the rebus, or psychoanalysis selected from the flow of the voice only what it could transpose into signifiers and then transpose a second time to foil roman a clef readers. In any case, psycho- analysis occupies the systemic position taken by Poetry in the discourse network of 1800. The position consists in the place of initiation. If voices and dream images are to be grounded in the logic of the signifier, they must first cross the threshold of psychoanalysis; if, in return, any rituals of the sign or psychophysics are to be inscribed on individual bodies, they must first cross the threshold of psychoanalysis. The discourse network of 1900 places all discourse against the background of white noise; the pri- mal soup itself appears in psychoanalysis, but only to be articulated and thus sublimated via writing proper. "
There is nothing further to say about the wider effects of such a strat- egy. The only nontrivial problem is one of method. If Freud's technique consists in transposing optical and acoustical streams of data into words
? and words into the signifier script of his own texts, then his universal sci- ence confronts only one superfluity or impossibility: data that have al- ready assumed written form. Wherever articulation has already occurred, "the dissection and division of something that would otherwise be lost in the primal soup" is unnecessary. Thus Freud granted texts, regardless of who their authors were, a special status. Whether or not the texts were distinguished by literary honors was secondary to a certain testimonial function . -4
The pact between Freud and the people who believed that dreams could be read, despite the objections of all philosophers, would have had no discursive support if the spoken dream stories of patients had not been media-transposed by literary dream texts and confirmed by the ordinary documentary means of pen and paper. The mere written existence of Jensen's Gradiva, a novella about mania and dreams, was sufficient to de- fend Freud against attack. That it is not of particularly enduring value, that its author "refused his co-operation"-' when approached and thus would not personally authorize its transposition into the medium of psy- choanalysis, is insignificant. Objective interpretation can do without au- thorial assent. Freud thus reached the following conclusion on the rela- tionship between writers and analysts: "We probably draw from the same source and work upon the same object, each of us by another method. And the agreement of our results seems to guarantee that we have both worked correctly. Our procedure consists in the conscious ob- servation of abnormal mental processes in other people so as to be able to elicit and announce their laws. The author no doubt proceeds differently. He directs his attention to the unconscious in his own mind, he listens to its possible developments and lends them artistic expression instead of suppressing them by conscious criticism. Thus he experiences from him- self what we learn from others-the laws which the activities of this un- conscious must obey. But he need not state these laws, nor even be clearly aware of them; as a result of the tolerance of his intelligence, they are incorporated within his creations. "'"
The same source, the same object, the same result-writers and psycho- analysts moved into a proximity equal to that which joined the Thinkers and Poets of I 800. Yet the reverse conclusion is equally possible and logi- cal: namely, that writers end up on the side of the patients. If Freud's pa- tients and the hero of the novella share the same dreams, paranoid struc- tures, and hysterias, then these must belong to the writer's unconscious as well. There is one small difference, however: hysteria speaks, but Jensen publishes. Mania and Dreams can no longer be attributed to an individ- ual case. The material already present in the medium that supports the psychoanalyst has achieved "artistic expression. " Rather than proceeding
REBUS 289
? 290 1900
according to the rules of hermeneutics and assuming that fictional heroes naturally dream the dreams of their authors, Freud finds in Gradiva writ- ten dreams "that have never been dreamt at all, that were invented by a writer and attributed to fictional characters in the context of a story. "- Therefore, there is no need to pomon out statistically distributed non- sense to individual cases. Jensen, no different in this from Freud, is sepa- rated by a thin but impermeable piece of paper from its reverse side, from mania and dreams, and is above the suspicion of being their referent. His relation to the primal soup is not one of participation, but simulation. For invented individuals he invents dreams that in spite of this squared fiction "contain in embodied form" all the "laws" of the unconscious. Laws, let us note, and not, say (asone often prefers to read) contents. With its cen- tral metaphor, the burial of Pompeii under lava and ash, Jensen's novella does not symbolize this or that repressed content, but rather provides a "parable" of the metapsychological process of repression itself. "There really is no better analogy. "'R
In distinction from the doctor (Freud once more leaves out the mystery of his self-analysis), the writer does not extrapolate the laws of the un- conscious from others' mouths, which are unable to say why their sense becomes nonsense and their nonsense sense. A strange listening in on his own mental processes gives him not only their repressed contents but be- yond that their signifying logic. Once again, then, the writer seeks out a nom-like authority, which administers the rules of all writing. but be- cause they are rules, it remains unnecessary and impossible to "pro- nounce" the unconscious laws that have been discovered. It is enough that they have been given a material location: paper, on which discursive rules such as repression are "embodied. "
In written material, therefore, the localization that defines psycho- analysis in the discourse network of 1900is left out-because it has al- ready occurred. If the diverse local centers of the brain-physiological localization doctrine are linked together in the typewriter, psychoanaly- sis-m ysteriously true to its neurophysiological beginnings-reverses the founding relationship. Its textual theory replaces that body with a type- writerly corpus.
The text as embodied psychoanalysis does not distinguish the literary or even the classical. It is simply the effect of a medium that governs the analyst himself, First when he reads the flow of the voice as a rebus, and second when he writes. In order to achieve this effect, it is sufficient for a mania, rather than flood Freud's senses with hysterical visuality and the spoken faqade of dreams, to have been written down. If and because a work called Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is present in the form of a
? REBUS 291
book, psychoanalysis treats it very differently than it would a mentally ill person on the couch.
Freud's "Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia" seems at first to be a compromise solution arrived at in an attempt to extend his practice to cases who, in contrast to neurotics, cannot wander around freely and so (if they have not lost language alto- gether) can only send out messages in bottles. Paranoiacs cannot be ana- lyzed; they "cannot be compelled to overcome their internal resistances, and . . . in any case they only say what they choose to say. " Such, how- ever,eversincePilate's6yiypa& yiypa& ("WhatIhavewritten Ihave written"; John 19:22),is the very definition of a text. Which is why "pre- cisely" in the case of a paranoiac "a written report or a printed case his- tory can take the place of personal acquaintance with the patient" (read:
. his spoken story). "
So much for the introduction to and justification for the analytic act.
By the end everything reads much differently. Schreber's book, instead of simply replacing the flow of the hysteric's voice, attains all the honors of theory, in that the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness also contains what is indeed memorable: the embodied laws of the unconscious. As with Jensen, the writer Freud greets as a colleague, albeit one who was at the time a patient in the Sonnenstein asylum in Pima.
Since I neither fear the criticism of others nor shrink from criticizing myself, 1 have no motive for avoiding the mention of a similarity which may possibly dam- age our libido theory in the estimation of many of my readers. Schreber's "rays of God," which are made up of a condensation of the sun's rays, of nerve-fibres, and of spermatazoa, are in reality nothing else than a concrete representation and pro- jection outwards of libidinal cathexes; and they thus lend his delusions a striking conformity with our theory. . . . these and many other details of Schreber's delu- sional structure sound almost like endopsychic perceptions of the processes whose existence I have assumed in these pages as the basis of our explanation of paranoia. I can nevertheless call a friend and fellow-specialist to wimess that I had developed my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the con- tents of Schreber's book. It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than 1should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber's delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe. *"
After seventy-five pages of interpretation, Freud proclaims that inter- pretation has hardly been necessary. He finds the basic assumptions of his libido theory in Schreber also. There could be no clearer literary testi- mony from one author to another. Here psychoanalysis runs into legal difficulties quite different from those encountered in writing case histo- ries: in case histories, the analyst must protect the identities of those de- scribed, but here the author must protect his copyright. In Schreber'scase
? 292 1900
"the object of the analysis is not actually a person, but rather a book produced by that person," and so "the problem of professional discretion does not enter in. "" Yet a more serious problem raises its head. In order to present Schreber as a mere witness and not cede him the psvchoana- lytic copyright, Freud has to call another wimess to the stand. A psychia- trist friend will swear to the fact that the patient and his analyst (in the terms customary for fictional disclaimers) arrived independently at the same results.
Psychoanalytic discourse itself must be at stake if its founder moves to head off charges of plagiarism. In fact, Schreber'smania archives as body and text the libido theory that psychoanalysis reached only through the long detours of interpretation. Schreber's relation to the theory is that of all writers. Jensen, according to Freud, could register and write down processes occurring "in his own mind"; Schreber, according to Freud, does this with "endopsychic perceptions. " The Memoirs depicts a nerve- diseased body as the theater for whole theomachies, where divine nerve rays invade and retreat, destroy organs and extract brain fiber, lay down lines of communication and transmit information-a psychic informa- tion system that Freud takes at its word rather than as mania. Freud is not so believing at other points, as, for example, when the paranoiac accuses his psychiatrist, Flechsig, of persecutorial intent; behind this image of his colleague Freud senses only the patient's father. In describing the mind as information system, however, the psychotic text, which describes the sys- tem throughout its four hundred pages, is said to be the unmetaphoric truth.
There are grounds for this methodological distinction. The Oedipus complex is the nucleus of the neuroses, but the mental apparatus is co- extensive with psychoanalysis itself. Only by "assuming the existence of a spatially extended, advantageously constructed apparatus developed in meeting the exigencies of life," can Freud build his science "on a basis similar to that of other natural sciences. " But these bases are not available for experimental verification. One can only infer them with the help of "artificial aids," because "'reality' will always remain 'unknowable. ""' Accordingly, "reality" would be a necessary and impossible limit concept on the edge of the system, were it not for Schreber's endopsychic per- ceptions, which without doubt describe a body, his own, as a spatially extended mental apparatus. The corpus of the psychotic text provides psychoanalysis with its indispensable but undiscoverable basis: a body. A body is the piece of evidence without which psychoanalysis, by con- temporary standards, would have remained empty speculation.
From the first, aphasia studies had made brain localization into a methodological space; psychoanalysis becomes the destination of the
? long route that traverses this space. Schreber's mania guarantees that there is "not more mania contained" in analytic theory than its inventor would "wish. " Processes that allow endopsychic perceptions in an expe- rimental subject, however delirious, cannot not exist from a psycho- physical standpoint. Schreber's body is the verso of the pages Freud filled with writing.
The Doctor of Law Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-I~II)s,on of the widely known inventor of the Schreber garden, which is still cultivated on the edge of German cities, entered the Leipzig University Nerve Clinic of Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig in 1884 as a failed candidate for the Reichstag, was released in 1885, was appointed in 1893 to the second highest judi- cial position in the Kingdom of Saxony, the Presidency of the Senate of the Supreme Court, immediately thereafter entered Flechsig's clinic once more, was transferred several times, was released in 1902, and in 1907 was finally institutionalized until his death. The Memoirs appeared in a private edition in 1903 with the declared intention of allowing "expert examination of my body and observation of my personal fate during my lifetime. " "'
Freud's "Psycho-analytic Notes" thus appeared just at the moment to filloutandcashthisblankcheck. *'In 1911,whoevergavehisbodyover to science would get a response posthaste. Not only is the mental appa- ratus, as described by the psychotic and psychoanalytic corpus, a single, highly complex information system; the two corpora in tandem consti- tute this system a second time. Tidings of the impossible reality reach the symbolic, via media transposition. Freud receives what Schreber sends; Schreber sends what Freud receives. All that remains unsaid is why the whole discourse network worked so promptly and precisely around one individual body. Freud was much too concerned with the testimonial value of the received messages to investigate the logic of the channels. What Schreber writes, what writers write-everything became for Freud an anticipation of psychoanalysis. And he is not alone in this. Schreber too grants poets like Wagner occasional anticipations of his neuro- theology. " In the competition for corporeal knowledge, then, the ques- tion about which channels of knowledge constitute the body is left out. The discourse network of 1900 withholds its proper name.
The Memoirs constitutes an ''exhaustion''a6of Schreber's body while he was still alive. The transposition of a body into a corpus was just as necessary-namely, as necessary for survival-as was the fictional com- poser Lindner's transposition of letter to note values. After Schreber has published his book (against the wishes of his family and the medical es- tablishment), the natural sciences of the mind have only to open it-and
REBUS 293
? Schreber's person is "offer[ed]. . . as an object of scientific observation for the judgment of experts. " Otherwise, "at some future time" the ex- perts could only confirm "such peculiarities of my nervous system . . . by dissection of my body,'' for "1 am informed that it is extremely difficult to make such observations on the living body. ''87
Schreber as writer or Schreber as anatomical preparation-these are the only alternatives in the discourse network of 1900. Like all writers of the epoch, he plays the role of the "victim of his own writing,"nnin order to be able, in place of his autopsy, to prepare refuse, a bodily substitute, a text. Only thus can his case remain "soul murder"*9and not descend to the postmortem examination of those peculiarities that make people with nervous diseases so attractive to their psychiatrists. The patient dissects his own organs and notes their modifications while he is still alive, with a positivism that honors psychophysics and comes close to correcting fac- tually Kraepelin's Psychiatry (on the subject of hallucinations). Schreber thus practiced, as if to realize Nietzsche's assertion "for there is no soul," preventative soul murder.
But "soul murder"-in Schreber's divine "primary-" or "nerve-lan- guage" an autonym for the neurophysiological relationship between him and God-is also a chapter title in Ellen Key's The Century of the Child. Schreber could once more confront his blind exegetes and their multiple associations on the phrase, with the extent of his reading of contempo- rary works, which aside from Kraepelin, Du Prel, and Haeckel, also in- cluded her.