Psychoanalysis: What Is It?

I'm afraid my understanding of this whole next section is going to be compromised by my lack of knowledge about psychoanalysis.  As far as I can tell, all of this long section (pgs. 96-117) is written in the shadow of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle.   That's the book where Freud introduces his famous and mysterious idea of the "death instinct".  It seems this then led directly to his developing the three-part division of the mind in The Ego and the Id  and had a big influence on some later psychoanalysts, notably Jacques Lacan.  I went and read Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which is interesting in its own right, and helps a lot with understanding this section.  Depending on how long the quarantine is maybe I'll get to The Ego and the Id, which sounds like it would also be helpful here.  Both of these are really just long essays, and Freud is generally a fairly clear writer.  However, there's no way I'm going to dig into Lacan, who I know nothing about and who has a reputation for impenetrability.  That's just asking too much from your friend and humble narrator.  We'll just have to muddle through.

In broad brushstrokes, this section repeats the three syntheses we already discussed in the first part of the chapter and applies them to the constitution of human psychic life.  In some sense, it is the combination of the synthesis of habit, the synthesis of memory, and the disjunctive synthesis of the eternal return that create us as biopsychical organisms.  Though this is a very peculiar us that is not just limited to our consciousness, but actually defines our whole passive and unconscious being, with our consciousness featuring as nothing more than the thinnest sliver at the edge of this being.

It is these three syntheses which must be understood as constitutive of the unconscious.

The basic idea seems to be that we can bootstrap a peculiar form of identity out of a field of pure difference interacting with itself, so to speak. This identity is secondary, an effect rather than a cause, but also an effect in the sense of a "special effect" like in the movies.  But this is all much too abstract to make much sense.  We'll dig into the details next time.

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