Study Resource-5, Continental Philosophy

THE BODILY UNCONSCIOUS IN FREUD'S "THREE ESSAYS"
By John Russon
INTRODUCTION
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Childhood sexuality
Oedipus complex
Formative stages of psychosexual development
Russon's aim- "To interpret, defend and partially transform Freud's notion of 'the unconscious' as it is developed in this early work"
Structure of the chapter: Four stages
Concept of childhood and body: development of understanding of the self-transcending character of human experience
Human family reconceived as an experiential reality, rather than biological one
Experience of other persons on which the child's experience of the family depends (criticism of Freud and argument that the unconscious could be understood as inherently intersubjective)
Phenomenological philosophy "properly lives up to the demands of the method that are entailed by the Freudian conception of the unconscious"
PART 1- THE BODY AS PROTOTYPE FOR THE REAL
The "first great insight" that Freud brought to the forefront was the bodiality- the life of the body which begins when we are children and continues into one's childhood. The life of body is essentially marked by the responsiveness to one's surroundings. "The unconscious is the continued life of this child's perspective in us, which means it is the continued life of the body."
Russon posits two elements that mark the life of the body:
Innate bodily sensitivities
"Determinate stimulations and developments" through experience
"What comes to be 'the world' for us will be the result of the progressive interaction of the bodily sensitivities that are innate to us and the determinate stimulations and developments that these sensitivities undergo in the course of experience."- Even though we share the physical world, how it is experientially shaped into one's 'world' will be decided by the interaction between these two elements.
Experience of the child vs that of adult
Child-
The units of environment: The units of environment are received singularly without any conceptual counterpart of the physical differences.
The interaction with units: Determined on basis of their response to her/his bodily interests.
Non-conceptuality: the child does not have experience of 'milk' but of a flowing of tasty wetness, of a piece with experience of the kinesthetic sense of the contraction of lips and varying texture and shape of breast and nipple on which the mouth fixes itself.
Nature of experience: That which is conceptually distinguished by the adult (mentioned below) are roughly equal aspects of its own amorphous, singular, experiential reality. Being a child, as an act of experiencing, "is" this multifaceted assemblage.
Adult-
Units and interaction with environment: the units of environment are conceptually distinguished as 'milk', 'table', 'pen' and so on.
Presence of concepts- Experience is fused with concepts.
Nature of experience-
Coming together of subjective and objective- the subjective pleasure with the real object
Blending of different substances with one another and with their properties: breast+milk+tongue+lips+wet+firm and so on.
Coming together of one person with another: child+mother, self+other
Thus, there are series of coherent and self-identical realities which are distinguished from each other.

Freud's understanding of the child's experience
Pleasure principle- For a child, experience operates under pleasure principle. The world he encounters is a series of objects which allow him to realize or not realize his desires, primarily bodily.
Matrix of significance- It is within this matrix of significance (consisting of that which realizes desires and that which does not) that the child gradually develops sense of distinction between the self and the world- exploring the nature of these two realities.
One's bodily sensitivities are affected in different ways by these matrix of significance. For instance, my bodily sensitivity towards the bodily form which provides milk is shaped by the latter's treatment of me- which later is conceptually realized into the concept of mother and will shape my way of looking at the being of mother itself .
The "second great insight" that Freud puts forward is that our character is that of experiencing bodies which shapes the nature of the real.
New ontology of Freud:
Freud puts forwards a new theory of nature of reality.
It is the specific forms of desires operating in the bodily sensitivities of the child which creates possibility of subsequently developing a sense of 'reality' which is a world of distinct and self-identical objects encountered by cognitive and moral subject.
As a child, my body is sensitive towards diverse units of my environment. Thus, I am a series of bodily sensitivities in interaction with the world. How I associate my desires with each of these sensitivities and what form this association takes creates space for development of my sense of reality as a cognitive and moral subject.
Sexuality in childhood and adult life
There are three prime erotogenic zones in our body: mouth, anus and genitals. Each of these is involved in processes of eating, excretion and reproduction that sustain our lives and also which provide the greatest pleasure.
Freud states that children are consistently in pursuit of satisfaction of their sexual desires (broadly defined) such that by standards of adult life, their ways would be considered as those of 'polymorphous perverts'.
According to Freud, it is the development of these erotogenic zones that determines our personal and sexual maturation.
For our purpose, we will focus on the erotogenic character of oral and anal structures of the child's bodily sensitivities.
Stages in child's sexual development
Oral stage: child-as-mouth
Pleasure and forms of significance made available by mouth.
Biological processes-
First, by sucking on mother's breasts.
Later, through series of motions which involve use of mouth including thumb-sucking and eating.
Psychological counterpart-
Incorporation- The act of using the mouth is identified with the act of incorporating the world into oneself. That is, I am appropriating my object into myself in various forms. This is the original and fundamental way of "getting a hold on reality".
Adult life- The fundamental method of incorporation is carried into adult life where it becomes the basis for experiencing the world. The incorporation of the object is the prototype of all our latter identifications (i.e. appropriation of the identity of the other as one's own) and for every relation of love.
Anal stage: child-as-anus
Pleasure and forms of significance made available by anus.
Biological processes:
Anus is a sphincter- a controllable gateway which regulates the outward flow of one's feces.
Psychological counterpart:
Interpersonal control and submission/separation and alienation: The pleasure connected with anus is that of control and submission. Biologically, it is represented by the increased pleasure derived in excreting after withholding for a long period of time which leads to a forceful and substantial release. It is psychologically connected to the pleasure of disobeying where one can assert her/his autonomy in relation to others. One can control the separation of 'gift' from oneself and one's independence from others. This is the development of the child as an independent and autonomous agent.
Adult life: Anal logic becomes the prototype for experiencing oneself as both active (controlling) and passive (responsive) when dealing with interpersonal relationships. It decides the form of and is a prototype for power in these relations (sadism and masochism) and also for knowledge: "every sphere is a form of gaining mystery over an alien determinacy".
Infantile embodiments as the unconscious foundation of our mature experience
The original forms of bodily experience are thus prototypes which provide the fundamental schemes within which our mature experiences arise.
Reality principle- In our adult life, we tend to work on what has been called the reality principle- reality is considered independent of oneself such that its presence forces itself on us and compels us to shape ourselves to it.
Fundamental role of bodily prototypes- However, the original character of our infantile bodily experience is only hidden. Our developed experience inherently reflects our embodiment in the very pattern of meaning that we live through, though these bodily roots are hidden within the experience.
Body as prototype for the real
We are sensitive bodies. The nature of the sensitive body is to open up forms of experience which can develop beyond its initial form.
These forms of significance are in themselves capable of growth and this process of self-transcendence takes the form of response to pleasures of the body which is the basis for experience of the world as 'real'. Ironically, a life founded in bodily pleasure leads us to an experience of the world where the bodily foundation is concealed. The possibility of experiencing the world as real is opened up because of our experiencing bodies; however, this body is also concealed in the face of reality principle.
The body thus becomes the unconscious within experience- the continuing presence of our childhood in our adult lives.
PART 2- THE FAMILY AS A CATEGORY OF EXPERIENCE
For a child, the other is primarily reflected through its parents. Since the bodily reality of the child is insufficient to support himself, it always finds itself amidst the context of a family or community which is substituted as he matures.
The parents become agents who decide the way in which reality is delivered to the child and the extent to which the child is insulated from the world's demands. As the child's 'desiring' body develops, the parents determine the horizon within which he can or can not actualize these desires.
Oedipus complex: the notion of a child desiring his mother (the primary object of pleasure) accompanied by resentment towards the father (primary agent of the reality's resistance to child's desires) which can be resolved only in the identification of the child with same-sex parent.
The experience of the reality is the majorly that of parents and determines structures which will decide the nature of his adult relationships.
The child first develops into person- recognition of oneself within this family life. The child does not cognize the family as a working together of three fully formed human substances.
Our later forms of experiencing are conditioned and based on the prototypic forms which we encounter as original objects as infants.
The family life is the child's first encounter, thus, its entrance into the "rich world of significance". At a level, his parents become the face of humanity for him. This first encounter constitutes the relation he holds with his parents:
Mother
For the child, the identity of the mother is derived through the milk. However, by the reality principle one follows as an adult, the milk is said to be derived from the mother.
Father
We also tend to understand the family only as a relation of biological reproduction. However, 'family' is an experiential category for the child. The use of term 'family' is here designated for those who play the critical and integral role of initiating the child into humanity and into becoming a person. For this reason, there are 'father figures' as symbolic of authority and 'mother figure' as that of object of desire. These are formative experiences which shape the way child receives any later experiences. It is not that we are intimate with our parents but that one's way of being intimate gets defined by being with one's parents.
This is the "third great insight" in Freud's theory: the emergence of 'family' as an experiential category.
It is only in the realm of family that a child develops his being as a person. Such a being is not a given to the child when he is born. It is that which he develops in the matrix of human affairs. Moreover, it could not be the case that the child arrives as a person, for human realm as a realm of freedom can only arise in the matrix of human activities.
Thus, the family becomes an experiential category and unconscious becomes the continual presence of child's body within one's world.
PART 3- THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE DESIRE OF THE OTHER
What did we learn in the last sections? The human body has been shown as a self-transcending prototype of experience and the family has become the prototypical experiential process of initiation into familiarity with the human world. The unconscious is that through which the childhood body and one's family are continually experiences within all the structures of one's own mature experiences.
Content of this section- This section includes criticism of Freud's theory on the following two aspects:
Inadequate account for our experience of other people; and
Improper understanding of the nature of sexual sphere.
Russon goes on to refine his theory, than to discard it taking into account psychoanalysis as has been dealt in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology by those like Heidegger and Ponty.

SECTION 1- Inadequate account for our experience of other people
Inadequate account for experientiality of body and family: Freud has not been adequately able to account conceptually for human experience. Because of the character of human as a subject, Freud recognized the need for a unique method to gain access to the reality of this subject- through psychoanalysis. However, he does not explicate in what way the human being as an object is different from other sort of object- which creates requirement for a unique method. How is it that the child comes to experience other persons as persons at all? Even though he relies on the experience of one's desire for mother and fear of father, he does not see these experiences as being of a different kind. They are identified with tasting milk or passing of feces. They are not experientially inculcated in his theory. To experience an object as a person is to experience that object as another subject. The mother is not of the same form of object as the milk. One's human experience is primarily based on the recognition and experience of the other subject as a subject. However, Freud does not account for the problems which could arise in this realm- the problem of other mind, especially in his account of the emerging experiences of the child.
How the account becomes inadequate due to non-consideration of subjectivity? If the child did not recognize the other as a subject and only received passively the other as an object, he would not recognize any object as the 'outside'. In looking at the mother's eyes, he would not see a gaze (which is in the realm of subjectivity) but only blue and black concentric circles and so on. However, the child does experience the gaze of the other, most evident in the imitative behavior of the newborn infants. An infant recognizes the other like itself- as a subject, my 'other'. Such recognition is immediate within experience and from the beginning, the child lives in a subjective sympathy with the other subjects. His bodily life is immediately responsive to the subjective character of the other's body. To recognize the other as a subject could not be learnt objectively- it is a self-refuting idea: the experientiality of child, as a subject is constitutively of the structure that it recognizes the other as a subject (for that matter, even non-living things).
Relevance of this in Freud's theory: The development of the child's experience of the world begins with the original bodily sensitivities. However, such a development can only take place if it is constituted by the responsiveness to other subjects as subjects. The infantile body takes the form of unconscious in the adult life. This infantile body must be an intersubjective body. Thus, apart from unconscious being the presence of the following:
Infantile
Bodily
Familial
It must also be the presence of the other within us.
Intersubjectivity as presupposition in Freud's theory: Freud presupposes the intersubjectivity of child's being in his account of the child's bodily sensitivities:
Withholding of feces: for magnification of the strength of feeling of release or for being disobedient with accompanying sadistic pleasure- this requires that the child recognizes itself as interacting with another "cognitive, desiring, rule-engendering being".
Breast feeding: the child does not only derive pleasure exclusively from the taste and texture of the milk and creast as objects but is also taking pleasure in the experience of company of another person- the mother in this case.

SECTION 2- Improper understanding of the nature of sexual sphere
The sexual sphere as elaborated by Freud thus appears to be incomplete in a sense that the inclusion of experientiality also changes the nature of the sexuality itself.
Sexuality becomes the bodily sensitivity to others as others- bodily desire for another desiring body as such. It is also the experience of one's own body as site of contact with other persons where the one's own body is experienced as inter-subjective.
Autoeroticism: Satisfaction is acquired from subject's own body. Called autoeroticism, Freud gives example of thumb-sucking as autoerotic satisfaction from an erotogenic zone. According to Freud, sexual impulses are already present in the newborn child and continue to develop, until they are overtaken by a progressive process of suppression and diverted from sexual aims to cultural achievements, a process he termed sublimation.
Such an understanding of autoeroticism is transformed under the grasping of the experientiality of the bodily sensitivities. The experiences which have been called autoerotic become experiences of taking pleasure in the contact with other persons. The other persons are sexual objects for the child from the start- however, autoeroticism is not the primitive root of sexual experience but is in itself derived from the original sexual experience of the other.

SECTION 3- WHAT OF FREUD'S THEORY?
Meaning is disclosed within the realm of desire of the other
From the start, our experience is defined by a sympathy for or openness to other subjects as subjects. Thus, our desire is inherently a desire for others. Our nature is to desire others- desire other subjects, to desire other desiring bodies.
To desire other subjects as subjects, as desirers is to only desire that we be desired by them. This means that the other's desire has the power to satisfy or frustrate us- it has the power to shape the form our experience takes. It is the "desire of the other (in both the objective and the possessive senses of the genitive) that is the driving force shaping our bodily entry into meaning". For this reason, our original others- the family- has a profound effect on how we develop as persons.
Intersubjectivity of human experience
Even though Freud mentions the significance of the gaze of others for one's psyche in his notion of 'fear of the loss of love', he does not conceptually explicate it sufficiently. He only sees this phenomenon as a giving of pleasure and threat of punishment without taking into account the subjectivity involved- where there is the experience of other as a subject which defines one's experience of oneself as subjected to the other's desire.
PART 4- OBJECTIVITY AND METHOD
According to Freud, the pursuit of knowledge is based on the anal prototype since it is the attempt of the child to master.
What is knowledge, in the standpoint of the child? Knowledge is the attempt to master the given and determinate nature of the foreign things of our world. Freud recognizes that one discovers the reality principle- that there is a world of this nature when he encounters resistance from the world when he attempts to carry out his desires, especially the resistance arising from the parents.
While the following two conditions are necessary for the development of the project of knowing:
Resistance from the world in pursuit of fulfillment of desires;
Resistance from family, more specifically
These conditions are not sufficient to explain the experientiality of the child. "The pursuit of knowledge is governed by the value of objectivity." Such a value of objectivity is not grasped only through the resistance encountered.
Differential responses to the reality:
Understanding of reality on its own terms
Not to acknowledge it and to continue to act as if it were not there
Change one's direction in order to avoid confrontation with it
Fight with it and overpower it
To collapse in a sense of defeat: accounted by Freud in his study of psychopathy
Apart from a, all responses do not understand the reality in its own terms.
The following two strategies fail to objectively understand the reality:
Experience of resistance
Strategy of mastery
A parent who manipulates child into submissive behavior
Use of books to start a fire
In neither of the two above cases have the true nature of the 1object- child or books- been understood. There has only been masterly control over the possessions. How do we then account for objectivity? In what space can objectivity arise?
Objectivity:
Objectivity constituted the recognition of the other on the other's own terms accompanied response to the other on the basis of these determinants.
When we say- 'on the other's own terms'- we do not imply an essence or inherent nature which is isolated from the subjective sensitivities of the individual. Any characteristic of an organism is "irreducibly rooted in the prototypic nature of the subjective body".
However, if my psyche is determined completely by these prototypic forms of subjectivity, where does the space for answerability arise beyond these bodily perspectives?
Our bodily perspectives are constituted by answerability from the start. How? One's bodily perspectives are answerable to the desire of the other from the start. The desiring perspectives of others is the autonomous sites of resistance which we encounter in the experience. Because I desire to be recognized by the other and to be desires as well, I experience myself as being answerable to the resistance of the other. Objectivity only arises as universality within intersubjectivity. That is, the value of objectivity is the value of coordinating the terms of one's own experience with the terms of every one else's perspective in principle.
Thus, the pre-condition for there to be objectivity is the primal desire to be desired by the other which conditions one's experience of the world, opening the realm of intersubjectivity.
Effect on Freud's theory:
Even though Freud recognizes the integral role of bodily roots of all meaning, he depends on the causal explanations offered by the natural sciences and assumes a world-in-itself.
The natural sciences are projects of knowledge which are placed within the world of significance which arises in the infantile body and its sexual desires. The self-transcending body explains natural sciences and not the other way round.
Reality-in-itself does not demand that we pursue objectivity (keeping in mind differential responses to it). Belief in reality-in-itself is the strategy we use to cope with our sexual involvement with others. The description of our experience of sexuality explains the ideal of objectivity- objectivity does not tell describe the experience of sexuality.
Thus, psychoanalysis cannot claim to use a scientific method, as natural science does. The 'ultimate' method can only be the description of our intersubjective experience from the 'within' of our developed sexual experience.
The description of intersubjective experience as it is lived is phenomenology.
CONCLUSION
Unconscious as the continuing presence of the infantile and intersubjective body in our adult experience.
Human body as a determinate and self-transcending openness
Family as an experiential reality which initiates us into experience as human
Mature experience cannot outstrip forms of childhood life whose traces it bears
This bodily unconscious is the presence of the desire of the other in us and this leads to reinterpretation of the ideal of objectivity.
Phenomenological method is the "legitimate heir" to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious.


Continental Philosophy
Study Resource 5
11-March-2015