Ways of getting at the mind: from the conscious to the unconscious1
Grahame Lock
The above title is meant to refer, equivocally, on the one hand to two historical
moments—the philosophical ‘invention of consciousness’ and the subsequent ‘discovery
of the unconscious’—and on the other hand to some proposed procedures for ‘getting at
the mind’. Introspection is one such method, well known to philosophers of mind. A quite
different approach is, notoriously, the Freudian method for gaining access to the
unconscious.
Whereas Anglo-American philosophers of mind have written and still write
extensively on consciousness, the (Freudian) unconscious is a topic frequently and
variously exploited in French as well as other ‘European’ philosophical writing of the last
half-century.2
The present paper addresses itself to a few aspects of the philosophical debate on
these matters of consciousness and the unconscious, as well as on some related themes,
like those of the self, self-identity, personal identity, the ego, the subject, the ‘I’ and the
‘me’ and so on. I don’t attempt to address a single problem, or to propose original
theories, but rather to present a brief survey of these themes as they have been treated by a
few Anglophone and non-Anglophone (European) thinkers, hoping thereby to stimulate
thought on various related matters. The paper consists of two rather different parts, the
first being concerned with consciousness and self-identity, the second with the
unconscious and the ego.
***
Let us begin with the above-mentioned question of the invention of consciousness. You
might think that this is an odd formulation: why did consciousness need to be invented?
The answer is presumably: because its concept wasn’t always available.
In a recent translation of and commentary on a section of John Locke’s Essay
concerning Human Understanding, Etienne Balibar makes the claim that this invention of
1
This is an abstract of a paper first read to the Forum for European Philosophy, Senate
House, University of London, 16 March 2001.
2 Not so frequently in the Anglophone world, concern there being generally restricted to a
relatively small number of thinkers who happen to have taken a personal interest in
Freudian theory: for instance the two John Wisdoms (of Cambridge and London), Morris
Lazerowitz, Richard Wollheim, James Hopkins, Sebastian Gardner and a few others.
Some of these authors also build on certain of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Freud. There are
of course other notions of the unconscious than the Freudian: for a survey, see Henri F.
Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, New York: Basic Books, 1970.
2
consciousness is to be attributed to Locke.3 ‘Locke,’ he writes, ‘in making consciousness
the criterion of personal identity, was led to revolutionize the very conception of
subjectivity, as compared both with the Aristotelian conception of the individual soul and
with the Cartesian account of the existent and thinking “I”’. This theoretical revolution,
he adds, ‘is the decisive moment in the invention of consciousness as a philosophical
concept’. At the same time, it may be suggested (anticipating the second part of this
paper), Locke’s achievement prepares the conceptual space within which subsequent
critiques of self-consciousness could be developed, for example those of Hume, of Kant
and of Hegel.4 Locke’s revolution, on this view, is a product of the conjoining of two
questions, that of personal identity and that of the mind’s knowledge of its own
operations. Recall that Locke writes in his Essay, Book II, ch. 27: that (§9) personal
identity consists in a thinking, intelligent being considering ‘it self as it self’, as the same
thinking thing in different times and places—which it does, he tells us, ‘only by that
consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking’. When we perceive or meditate or will
anything, he argues, we know that we do so. ‘And by this every one is to himself, that
which he calls self.’ It is consciousness ‘that makes every one to be, what he calls self’;
and in this alone consists personal identity. So (§16) ‘consciousness makes the same
person’; or (§17) ‘self depends on consciousness’, for ‘self is that conscious thinking
thing’ which is ‘concerned for it self, as far as ... consciousness extends’.
But if Locke is indeed the inventor of consciousness (or of philosophical
consciousness, or of modern consciousness, or of European consciousness), then what,
one might ask, of his predecessor Descartes? Balibar admits: ‘we used to think that
Descartes was the first of the great philosophers of consciousness’. This is indeed a
widespread view, reflected in many discussions of the theme.5 But if Descartes isn’t the
3 See John Locke, Identité et différence, présenté, traduit et commenté par Etienne
Balibar, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998.
4 Balibar in Locke, op. cit., 11.
5 Thus for instance the entry on ‘consciousness’ in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) notes: ‘For Descartes, all thinking is conscious;
conscious thought is the essence of mind; humans have privileged and incorrigible access
to their own conscious states’; and it notes the ‘Cartesian view that consciousness is as
consciousness seems’. The new Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in its entry on the
same topic, draws a line between pre-Cartesian philosophy, which is said rarely to
emphasize the term ‘conscious’ or ‘consciousness’, and Descartes’ own writings, which
are claimed to ‘mark a major shift in philosophical preoccupation with consciousness’,
adding that ‘Descartes typically speaks of being “conscious” to refer to an allegedly
intimate source of knowledge about one’s own mental occurrences’ and so on. To take
one more, recent example: Dermot Moran, in his Introduction to Phenomenology
(London: Routledge, 2000, 5), speaks explicitly of ‘the Cartesian discovery of
consciousness’. But Paul Edward’s older Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York:
Macmillan, 1967) opens its account of consciousness with a reference not to Descartes
but to Locke.
3
inventor of consciousness, as so many historians of philosophy have believed, why isn’t
he? The reason is surely linked to the fact that Descartes’ problematic is a different one
from that of Locke.
It is also noteworthy, at the linguistic level, that Descartes hardly ever makes use
of the term ‘consciousness’ (French ‘conscience’) or of the corresponding adjective, nor
of the Latin ‘conscientia’ or ‘conscius’. These terms are not typically part of Descartes’
terminology, though some of his disciples adopt them.6 But even the latter do not pick up
on the principal point at stake here, namely the role played by the concept of
consciousness in the unification and thus the constitution of an autonomous self.
Perhaps the quickest and easiest way of grasping what this stake amount to, is to
quote a few words from Louis Althusser, writing as it happens on the question of the
Freudian unconscious. Althusser argues that ‘Freud showed that manifestations of the
unconscious can occur solely in human subjects, thus in subjects endowed with
consciousness’. In his theory of the unconscious, he adds, ‘Freud in fact touched on an
extraordinarily sensitive point of philosophical, psychological, and moral ideology,
calling into question, through the discovery of the unconscious and its effects, a certain
“natural” and “spontaneous” idea of “man” as a “subject” whose unity is ensured or
crowned by “consciousness”.’
The idea is, then, that a philosophical notion can serve an ideological function, in
this case in respect to ‘the philosophical form of bourgeois ideology that has dominated
history for five centuries’.7 Further, ‘the philosophical category of the self-conscious
subject finds its natural embodiment in the bourgeois conception of morality and
psychology’. The reason is that this morality ‘needs a self-conscious subject, one
responsible for its deeds, so that it can be obliged “in conscience” to obey norms which it
is more “economical” not to impose on it through violence’, as also in the case of its
complement, the subject of law. Althusser even speaks of an ‘ideological conspiracy’
forged around the notion of the self-conscious subject, a notion which ‘represents
[individuals] as endowed with the unity and the consciousness’ they are ‘supposed’ to
possess.
On such a view, this was the concept of consciousness which modern (bourgeois)
society ‘required’. Descartes did not and could not provide such a concept. His
problematic, as you know, was one which circled around the epistemic questions of truth
and certainty. This does mean, to be sure, that he needed to try and get hold of the
principle of subjectivity (in its relation to objectivity). In this respect he is an obvious
precursor of Kant. But it is only possible to claim Descartes as the first of the great
6 See Balibar, op. cit., 24: the disciples in question are especially Louis de la Forge and
Pierre-Sylvain Régis.
7 Louis Althusser, ‘The Discovery of Dr Freud’, in Writings on Psychoanalysis, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 85, 114 (translation below slightly modified).
Althusser’s remark dates the emergence of the concept of consciousness at somewhere
around 1500, which is curious: it is not clear which thinkers or philosophical schools he
is thinking of in this connexion.
4
philosophers of consciousness if consciousness if identified with the subjectivity located
in the cogito—which is exactly the identity that Kant insists on, in the Critique of Pure
Reason, when he writes that the problems of self-consciousness are the problems of the ‘I
think’ or cogito.8
But couldn’t the cogito still be another name for consciousness? Balibar asks. The
answer is no. Even when Descartes unusually makes use of the term conscientia (in the
Principia Philosophiae) it is in a context in which consciousness is only one part of the
cogito, one cogitatio among others. For that reason it can’t fulfil the unifying function
played by Locke’s concept of consciousness and which underlies the latter’s
revolutionary character.
Locke’s consciousness gets hold of itself—more specifically, of its own
operations—by a kind of introspection, in which the mind is discovered to be identical
with itself—and this through a process which requires, so to speak, the provisional
division of the mind into the introspecting and introspected parts or aspects. The result of
the subsequent reunification of these parts or aspects is what is called consciousness or
thought. Thought knows what it thinks. What it knows, it comes to know via ideas of
sensation and reflection, the latter being precisely the perception of the operations of the
mind. This perception may be regarded as passive, but it is a perception of something
active, of an activity which is also mind, just as perception is mind. In any case, being
transparent to itself, consciousness not only guarantees the unity of the self; it also, just
on account of its transparency, ensures that there is no room for anything like a structural
misunderstanding of ourselves, or of a consciousness which is ‘non-subjective’.9
Balibar also speaks of ‘national traditions’ of consciousness. The French tradition,
according to the arguments sketched out above, is not really represented by Descartes—
but at best by his disciples, or by a fictional Descartes, on the basis of a misreading or a
misrepresentation of his ideas. But it does have Nicolas Malebranche (whose dates, 16381715, are quite close to those of Locke). Malebranche indeed works with a concept of
consciousness. Yet Malebranche’s consciousness is, unlike Locke’s, he himself insists, an
essentially imperfect mode of thought, or more exactly, of acquaintance with the soul; it
is confused and illusory. There is of course a theological background to this position. We
see things, Malebranche held, ‘in God’, in the sense that the ideas which we immediately
perceive are the ideas of objects in the mind of God. But the soul or self is not known by
8 See Balibar, op. cit., 32fn. But see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, I (Transcendental
Doctrine of Elements), Second Part, Second Division, Book II, ch. I, ‘The proposition, “I
think”, is ... here taken only problematically, not in so far as it may contain perception of
an existent (the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum), but in respect of its mere possibility, in order
to see what properties applicable to its subject (be that subject actually existent or not)
may follow from so simple a proposition.’ (Trans. Norman Kemp-Smith, Immanuel
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, London: Macmillan, 1982 (1929), 332.)
9 This is a theme which was taken up in twentieth-century Anglo-American analytic
philosophy.
5
the way of ideas: we have no more than ‘consciousness’—but ‘without ideas’—of our
own mind.10 All this is a consequence or a reflection of our sinfulness: we don’t have a
clear and distinct idea of mind. But we do have such an idea of the body, or of bodies
generally.11
***
Freudians tend to claim that Freud’s theoretical innovations have little or nothing to do
with the philosophical theories that preceded his work, either with philosophical theories
of consciousness or indeed with philosophical theories of the unconscious. He is said to
have discovered an object which prior to him had resisted scientific comprehension. Let
me quote Althusser once again, from the same source, on the matter: ‘the Freudian
unconscious’, he says, ‘clearly has nothing to do with the unconscious of the
philosophical tradition [which] is always an accident or a modality of consciousness’.12
This is perhaps how we should have liked things to be: Freud, the revolutionary, who
makes a ‘clean (theoretical) break’ with all his predecessors. David Archard, in his
Consciousness and the Unconscious, however notes that psychoanalysis and philosophy
have been set in false opposition on the question of the unconscious.13 He remarks
moreover, I think correctly, on a relative lack of interest, among those who are fascinated
by the (Freudian) unconscious, in a close study of philosophical accounts of
consciousness. The members of this group tend to believe that philosophers generally
subscribe to a so-called Cartesian identification of the mental on the one hand and
consciousness on the other. Such a ‘Cartesian’ philosophy, depicting the human mind as a
‘self-aware consciousness’, capable of a rational and full comprehension of itself,
seems—on Archard’s view—to be fairly obviously wrong. Nevertheless, he comments,
‘it would be an error to conclude that the respects in which, and reasons why, it is wrong
are precisely those respects in which, and reasons why, Freud and Descartes were not the
respective authors of mutually exclusive or jointly exhaustive philosophies of mind’.14
10 See Malebranche, Recherche de la vérité (1674).
11 See Balibar, op. cit., 54; Malebranche, Eclaircissements à la recherche de la vérité
(1678).
12 Althusser, op. cit., 122. Compare by the way Althusser’s 1964 article ‘Freud and
Lacan’: ‘Lacan’s first word is … to say that, in principle, Freud founded a science, a new
science that is the science of a new object: the unconscious’ (op. cit., 17) with his 1976
paper ‘The Discovery of Dr Freud’: ‘Lacan … believed that Freud had discovered the
scientific theory of the unconscious without knowing it’ (op. cit., 93).
13 London: Hutchinson, 1984, 15.
14 Cf. Michel Plon & Elisabeth Roudinesco, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, Paris:
Fayard, 2000, 195-96, on consciousness (‘conscience’): ‘The term consciousness,
associated with that of the subject, is hardly to be distinguished in the history of western
societies, from the time of René Descartes ... and Immanuel Kant ... up to that of Edmund
6
Lancelot Whyte, in his study of The Unconscious Before Freud, oddly suggests15 that it
was Descartes who inspired thinkers to look into the possibility of unconscious mentality
and so prepared the ground for Freud’s own work. But this seems to be a peculiarly
misleading formulation—as, by the way, does Jacques Lacan’s suggestion, in his Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, that ‘Freud’s method is Cartesian’.16 The
question of the background meaning of Lacan’s exegesis is however another story.17
One might be tempted to believe that, in the matter of the relation between
philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Malebranche stands closer to Freud than does
either Descartes or Locke. After all, as we saw, Malebranche rejects the notion that the
mind is transparent to itself—a fact which might seem to align him with Freud; instead,
he argues that the body—what Merleau-Ponty calls, in his commentary on Malebranche,18
the ‘side of affectivity and of the “flesh”’—is of essential importance in determining
(though symbolically rather than causally) the above-mentioned confused, inadequate and
often illusory content of the conscious mind’s reflections on itself. But as Balibar
remarks, if there is a fundamental difference between Malebranche and Locke, there is an
equally fundamental difference between Malebranche and the (various) theories of the
unconscious. Not only is Malebranche no proto-Freudian; he is not a theorist of the
unconscious at all. On his view, self-misunderstanding represents rather the alienated
form of the soul which, though created in the image of God, has in its sinfulness turned
away from Him.
What is probably more interesting than a comparison, at the philosophical level of
course, between the concept of consciousness as found in Locke or Malebranche on the
Husserl ... with philosophy itself, in so far as the latter presupposes a universality and a
singularity of human subjectivity, that is, a subject of consciousness, whether this
consciousness is empirical, transcendental, phenomenal or divided into a reflective
consciousness and an automatism-like subconscious…. In this respect, the term
consciousness is not part of the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, even if the Freudian theory
of the unconscious is linked to the history of the philosophy of consciousness, of which it
is the critical heir.’
15 As cited by Archard, op. cit., 15.
16 Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979, 35.
17 Cf. Sebastian Gardner, Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 205: ‘Psychoanalytic theory is not a
philosophical theory of the self—nor does it contain the germs of one—and that to think,
as does Lacan, that Freud somehow “undoes” the cogito, is a confusion: psychoanalytic
theory on its own cannot falsify a philosophical theory of the self, any more than it can
provide one.’
18 Merleau-Ponty, L’Union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Paris: Vrin, 1978.
7
one hand and Freud’s account of the dialectic of consciousness and unconsciousness on
the other, is an examination of Freud’s account, judged on its own merits.
We know how Freud proposed to ‘get at the mind’: by means of the talking cure.
The details can be found in his many books, essays and articles. A certain kind of
introspection on the part of the analysand is required in the analytical cure, but one which
is neither theoretically directed (by the analysand) nor itself normally capable of
producing results which the analysand himself or herself could ever interpret unaided.19
Freud himself wrote a paper on the topic of consciousness, which is however
missing from the collection of papers on metapsychology (published in 1915). So we can
only try to reconstruct his view. This seems to have been that consciousness was to be
likened to a sense-organ capable of perceiving internal mental events—a fairly classical
philosophical conception—and of distinguishing such perceptions from perceptions of the
external world and of its objects.20 Unconscious contents could of course be teased back
into consciousness, in particular in the process of an analytic cure, and on condition that
such contents were ‘brought into connexion’ with a linguistic or verbal image.21
19 Cf. R.K. Shope, ‘The significance of Freud for modern philosophy of mind’, in (ed.)
G. Fløistad, Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, vol. 4, Dordrecht: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1983: ‘The ideas that Freud describes as unconscious [in connexion with his
early experiments] are said to be “inaccessible” to the subject, but this means that one’s
trying to become conscious of them by turning one’s attention toward them under some
description (e.g., “what I experienced during the trance” or “what is leading me to do
this’) is not sufficient for one to become conscious of them.’ Shope contrasts this
procedure with Freud’s ‘free association’ by the patient.
20 See Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972, 23-24.
21 Freud writes that ‘it is probable that thinking was originally unconscious … and that it
did not acquire further qualities, perceptible to consciousness, until it became connected
with verbal residues’ (‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’, in
The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XII, London: The Hogarth Press,
1958, 219). Compare Freud, Totem and Taboo: ‘It was not until the sensory residues of
verbal presentations had been linked to the internal [thought] processes, that the latter
gradually became capable of being perceived’ (in The Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, XIII, London: The Hogarth Press, 1958, 64). Cf. Sebastian Gardner, op.
cit, 212: ‘Freud was aware of the philosophical perplexities surrounding consciousness….
The theory of word-presentations … makes an important connection between
consciousness and dispositions to overt linguistic behaviour…. Because psychoanalytic
theory’s interest in consciousness is circumscribed by the goal of explaining functions
such as avowal, defence, and working-through, there is no pressure for the class of
determinants of consciousness which it postulates to have a unified, non-disjunctive
form…. There will be no strict conceptual connection between consciousness as [the
system] Cs., and consciousness as a special kind of unity or source of the cogito…’
8
Note in parenthesis that Merleau-Ponty—criticized by Althusser for his
phenomenological interpretation of the significance of the Freudian revolution—argues in
the Phenomenology of Perception, implicitly at least against Freud, that ‘we enjoy direct
access to what [the word consciousness] designates’. So his account of the role of
language is also different: it is ‘in the silence of primary consciousness’ that can be ‘seen
appearing not only what words mean, but also what things mean…. [So] seeking the
essence of consciousness ... will not consist in developing the Wortbedeutung [the wordmeaning] of consciousness; ... it will consist in rediscovering my actual presence to
myself.’ Merleau-Ponty adds that ‘whatever the theoretical declarations of Freud may
have been, psychoanalytical research in fact led to an explanation of man, not in terms of
his sexual substructure, but to a discovery of sexuality in relations and attitudes which
had previously been held to reside in consciousness...’22 Althusser’s critique of MerleauPonty includes the point that the latter’s ‘theory of the unconscious as a “montage” of
behavioral patterns does not call into question what is … at the heart of psychological
ideology: the unity of the subject…’.23
Charles Rycroft meanwhile underlines the fact that ‘consciousness has an
integrative function’—presumably in respect to the process of the constitution of the ego.
The ego-psychology tendency in psychoanalysis was to make much of this function, thus
infuriating those Freudians who insisted, on the contrary, on an essential division of the
ego.24 On Lacan’s view, for instance,25 ‘the ego, as Freud suggested, is ... from the
moment of its inception a bodily ego, at least in the sense that it is a product not of
introspection but of the perception—from the “outside”—of the body, via the speculary
image; the body is given “in exteriority”, says Lacan. But the identity thus constituted, he
adds, is just for that reason “alienating”. The ego’s unity is created—a familiar point by
now—only at the cost of (indeed by way of the operation of) a division: between self and
image, between “inside” and “outside”, between, if you like, “mind” and “body” (which
sounds like quite an old-fashioned philosophical formulation). Yet the process of
recognition is indeed at the same time a process of misrecognition; for it produces an
“illusion of autonomy”, the illusion proper to the ego.’ The ego-psychologists are
considered to have been duped by this very illusion.
***
22 London: Routledge, 1962, xv, 158.
23 Althusser, op. cit., 123.
24 But the matter is quite complicated in the details: Heinz Hartmann, for instance, a
leading ego-psychologist, himself introduced a distinction between the ego and the self
(see his Essays on Ego Psychology, New York: International Universities Press, 1964).
25 In my own summary: Grahame Lock, ‘Uror amore mei: individual and social identity
in psychoanalytic theory’, in Lieve Spaas (ed.), Echoes of Narcissus, New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000, 47.
9
In order to understand more about the Freudian conception of the ego, we can usefully
turn to another kind of self-identity, one which doesn’t at all resemble the variety to be
found in Locke: namely the self-identity expressed in the self-love of narcissism.26
With Freud’s introduction of the notion of narcissism, emphasis is shifted away
from the opposition between conscious and unconscious, and the way is cleared for the
introduction of a revised notion of the ego, together with a concept of the superego—
which first makes its appearance, in somewhat different form, as the ego-ideal. Thus the
ground is prepared for the so-called second theory of the psychical apparatus, turning
around the ego/id/superego topography.27
So Freud needed to produce an adequate account of the ego. In his early writings
(from before 1900) he had stressed a sense in which the ego is more or less identified
with the conscious mind; he even spoke about ‘ego-consciousness’.28 The ego, on this
early view, is for each of us something like his own ‘conscious self’. Octave Mannoni
points out that Freud’s account of narcissism required and resulted in a new concept of
the ego: ‘Now the ego became an “object”, an image, a vestige of past identifications; the
ego of narcissism could not coincide with the ego of the inhibition of drives and of the
control of mobility.’29
In the auto-erotic phase of individual human development, the ego has yet to be
formed. The latter is first constituted as a ‘pleasure ego’, and is subsequently transformed
into a ‘reality ego’. Note that the ego is at the earlier stage the ego-subject. In narcissism
it becomes the ego-object. That is to say, the subject takes ‘itself’ as object: it splits. A
split ego is—in this radical sense—a new idea for Freud. Mannoni notes, as we saw, that
with the theory of narcissism the ego had to become an object. The question then is: what
kind of object? And how can such an object—the ego—be an object of desire for a
subject—the ego itself—understood by Freud as ‘the agency which opposes itself to
desire’?30 Well, as long as the ego is conceived of as subject, it is, so to speak, just the
principle of self-preservation. That is why the ego ‘opposes itself to desire’: for it resists
the blind satisfaction of libidinal impulses; it prefers a sober adaptation to reality.
26 In what follows I make use of modified sections of text drawn from my abovementioned study of narcissism in psychoanalytic theory in (ed.) Spaas, op. cit.
27 It is true that Freud later allowed the concept of narcissism to drop out of sight. (It was
resurrected, long after his death, by a new generation of psychoanalysts: especially by
Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg in the United States, by Béla Grunberger, by André
Green in France and of course by Jacques Lacan.)
28 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, in The Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, II, London: The Hogarth Press, 1955, 290-91.
29 Octave Mannoni, Freud: The Theory of the Unconscious, London: NLB, 1971, 134.
30 See J. Laplanche & J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, London: The
Hogarth Press, 1973, 136.
10
But there is of course a prior condition of the ego’s successful functioning:
namely, that it should exist, that is to say, that it should have come into existence as a
unity. And ‘a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start’.31
But doesn’t the requirement of unity imply a process of unification? And if so, what are
the elements that get unified?
Well, what takes the ego as an object is the ego itself—now unified as a subject,
but split from itself as object. Thus the ego comes into existence only ‘on condition of’ its
own division. Its very unity is indeed a function of this division. What does this division
amount to? 32 In a discussion of Freud’s conception of the ego, Richard Wollheim argues
that the origins of the ego lie in a misrepresentation of the ego by the ego, which
represents itself to itself as something corporeal, as a ‘bodily ego’. Or rather, it falsely
represents its own mental states to itself as corporeal states.33 Is such misrepresentation a
condition of the desire of the ego for itself? What in fact does the ego desire when it
desires itself? At least two answers suggest themselves in the light of Wollheim’s
comment. The first is that the ego desires something presented in the mode of an ‘external
object’: a body, though of course ‘its own’ body. The second is that it desires ‘itself’, but
in a misrepresented or illusory, corporeal form; it takes itself to be body. Which of these
two interpretations, if either, is correct, must depend on our understanding of what
happens when the unified ego emerges. Freud says that in secondary narcissism the libido
that has been withdrawn from the external world has been redirected to the ego. What in
primary narcissism is associated with the magical attitude of the ‘omnipotence of
thoughts’ is in secondary narcissism expressed as megalomania. Of course, these two
narcissisms have the same roots. But in the case of the child there is in Freudian jargon an
‘original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to objects’,
rather than, as in secondary narcissism, a redirection of libido to the ego.34
The ego, which in narcissism is the libidinal object, is a unity—but an imaginary
unity. That is to say, it is a unity produced by way of the production of an imaginary
31 Freud, ‘On Narcissism: an Introduction’, in The Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, XIV, London: The Hogarth Press, 1957, 77.
32 This division—or another one. Lacan for his part distinguishes between the ego (moi)
and ‘I’ (je) or subject: see for example his well-known paper ‘Le stade du miroir comme
formateur de la fonction du Je’, in Ecrits, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966. The ego (moi)
he takes to be the product of an imaginary identification, whereas the I is what becomes a
subject by becoming an object for others and, in consequence, for itself. The emergence
of the ego is thus said to be a necessary condition of the precipitation of the I. On Lacan’s
account it is, strictly speaking, the I or subject which is split or alienated. See Lock, op.
cit., 47, 52fn.
33 Wollheim, ‘The Bodily Ego’, in Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins (eds.),
Philosophical Essays on Freud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982: 124-138.
34 Freud, op. cit., 76.
11
scene, a phantasy. For phantasy is itself a product of desire: and the ego originally desires
itself. It might be said that it puts itself in the place of desire via a process of
incorporative phantasy.35 From the developmental point of view, narcissistic
identification is a normal ‘preliminary stage of object-choice’: it is ‘the first way ... in
which the ego picks out an object’. For ‘the ego wants to incorporate this object into
itself’.36 Thus narcissism is indeed linked, via identification, to incorporative phantasy.
***
To summarize: in Freud, the unification function which, in a ‘Lockean’ ideology of the
kind to which Althusser refers, is played by the concept of self-consciousness, is
substituted by a theory of the unification of the ego. But Freud’s ego possesses only an
‘imaginary unity’, continually constituted and reconstituted by each human individual in
the mode of phantasy, more precisely of an incorporative phantasy of its own body or
bodily parts.37 This is form of narcissistic self-identification or self-unification.
Narcissism may be understood as a kind of desire for perfect self-sufficiency,
implying among other things a perfect knowledge of or acquaintance with ‘self’—perfect
because perfectly transparent, and perfectly transparent because of the speculary or
mirror-like relation which defines it. Narcissism, one might tentatively suggest, could
thus be considered as something like the ‘truth of’ a ‘pure theory of consciousness’;
which would mean, of a theory that explicitly and radically rejects (see above) any
possibility of the above-mentioned non-subjective consciousness or, more specifically, of
an unconscious with its affects and effects.
Might narcissism even be regarded as the ‘truth of’ Locke’s—or a Lockean—
theory of consciousness? This would be too neat a conclusion. It is perhaps still possible
to work with a hypothesis like that of Althusser, to the effect that consciousness is the
function, delegated to the individual by the ‘nature of man’, of the unification of the
diversity of his practices, producing an ‘illusory unity’ whose popular form is what he
35 See Wollheim, op. cit., 131, 133: ‘The two [occurrent and dispositional] phantasies
essential to introjection represent themselves corporeally.... The subject [then
experiences] the dispositional phantasy as a corporeal process of containing the
[incorporated] figure in the very place where [that figure] is phantasized as being: that is,
inside the subject’s body.’ Mental acts thus come to represent themselves as bodily
phenomena, and to represent the ego—phenomenologically, the organized system of such
mental acts—as a corporeal reality. Of course, since it is an imaginary corporeal reality, it
suffers from none of the flaws of non-imaginary reality. Produced by the ‘omnipotence of
thought’, it is itself immune from destruction: deathless.
36 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, XIV, London: The Hogarth Press, 1957, 249.
37 Pierre Legendre for instance writes that ‘in its translation by representation the body
loses its status as a biological object and becomes something fictional’. Narcissism is the
first stage in a process in which the body is ‘reconstructed’—in a situation of subjection
to law (Legendre, Law and the Unconscious, London: Macmillan, 1997, 51).
12
calls bourgeois ideology; to which we might add that narcissism might then look like the
limiting case of that ideology, and narcissistic society the limiting case—if not perhaps
the fate—of bourgeois society.
But even if this hypothesis turned out to be worthy of examination, we shouldn’t
try to read any such narcissistic inclination back into Locke’s theory. He was far too
realistic or pragmatic a thinker, or if you like, too much of a go-ahead, outward-looking,
optimistic thinker of an earlier, genuinely progressive epoch, to entertain such an idea.
Lockeans proper are no Freudians, but generally they are no narcissists either.
grahame.lock@queens.ox.ac.uk