FREUD: THE OPENING OF THOUGHT AND THE SHADOW OF REASON

Freud’s investigation into the unconscious sphere of the human psyche and its complex processes did not merely provide a heuristic tool for the interpretation and understanding of psychic manifestations; above all, it demythologized anthropocentric narcissism and the philosophical–metaphysical conviction that the self-conscious subject of modernity is governed by self-sufficiency and transparency and, consequently, is responsible for and in control of its thoughts, desires, and actions through autonomous will. The Freudian discovery of the unconscious overturns the Cartesian notion of subjectivity; it questions the Cartesian equation subject = ego = consciousness. This “Copernican” displacement of the center of consciousness from the subjective ego to the unconscious structure of the psyche intimates the abyssal darkness of Being and the chaotic texture of the Cosmos, which cannot be incorporated into symbolic discourse, even though it traverses it and perpetually escapes it.

Thus, it problematizes—without transcending them—fetish concepts such as truth, reality, authenticity, propriety, appropriation, and belonging, and demonstrates that there exists no foundational knowledge nor any ultimate certainty, since all symbolic-cognitive systems, including science itself—of which Freud remained a restrained yet stubborn defender—constitute rationalizations in relation to the real, abstractions in relation to the concrete, generalizations in relation to the singular. Rationalized elements become idealized and are transformed into ideas, ideals, and principles referring to a metaphysical beyond, a transcendence of meaning. Freud reveals that symbolic institutions are idealizations—though he overlooks their deeper significance—and that imaginary identities and identifications are radical illusions.

Although he struggled to illuminate and exorcise the ancient shadows of irrationalism and belief in the supernatural, the undertaking fulfilled itself precisely through its failure. We say this because psychoanalysis—and this is due to Freud himself and not merely the Freudians—constitutes an “anti-theological” theology, an “anti-religious” meta-religion, whose metaphysical core possesses all the structural characteristics of both classical mythology and modern mythology, namely technology. Freud himself, to some extent, recognized this.

Freud’s entire project moves between what he himself calls instinctual mythology and the hope for a future pharmacodynamic and technical intervention. “The theory of instincts is, so to speak, our mythology, ” he writes in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. “The future may teach us, let us hope, to act directly, through certain chemical substances, upon the quantities of energy and their distribution within the psychic apparatus, ” he says in An Outline of Psychoanalysis.

At this point, it is necessary to clarify the structural characteristics of mythology. The first is universality: a mythology constitutes a complete image of “humanity within the world.” Every mythology also possesses an origin—a decisive moment of revelation or diagnostic insight from which the entire system derives—and certain developmental stages linked through the logic of causality. Another element indicative of the mythological universe is the development of a particular language, emblematic images, metaphors, and dramatic scenarios. This language generates its own system of myths; it depicts the world through a series of foundational rituals, gestures, and symbols.

The great mythologies constructed in the West during the nineteenth century were not merely attempts to fill the void left by the erosion of organized religion and systematic theology under the pressure of techno-scientific rationality—above all, the decline of Christian theology and dogma. They themselves became a kind of substitute theology, organized according to rules, as symbolic images of the meaning of humanity and “reality.” These were systems of belief and argumentation marked by intense anti-religiosity. They posited as metaphysical principle a world without a metaphysical principle (God), and denied life after death. Yet their structure, ambitions, and demands upon believers remained profoundly metaphysical and religious, both strategically and in terms of their effects.

Freudian psychology, despite its metaphysical and metaphorical dimensions and its quasi-religious aspect, represents an exaltation of the organizing power of rational thought, which decisively contributed to the unveiling and exploration of the non-rational dimension of existence. Above all, it continued the process of dismantling anthropocentric narcissism, the egocentrism of the modern individual, the individualism and autism of the contemporary subject. Of course, Copernicus, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Einstein, and others had preceded him. Freud continues the long therapeutic process against anthropocentric arrogance and hubris—a process that must continue and expand in the Space Age through the recognition that humanity participates in, belongs to, and communicates with the biosphere and the Universe as a whole, which exists not for colonization and conquest but for dwelling and hospitality.

The question that arises is this: Did Freudian mythology—and the other mythologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—succeed in filling the existential void created by the disintegration of religion? Was the longing of soul and spirit for Truth satisfied? Was the nostalgia and thirst for the Absolute and the transcendent weakened? Did the impulse toward mystery subside?

The belief held by the intellectuals of humanistic nihilistic Enlightenment—that the rise of the sciences (mathematics, physics, social sciences, applied sciences) would satisfy humanity’s need for order, beauty, and moral integrity in a way surpassing revealed religion, thereby filling the vacuum created by religion’s collapse—a collapse for which science itself is causally and logically co-responsible—was not confirmed. The dominance of techno-scientific rationalism and abstract conceptual schemas, producing a truth that is abstract, neutral, and impersonal, despite its productive contributions and despite the catastrophes it caused, fulfilled only partially the expectations it had cultivated.

The sense of failure prevailing in a West that is planetary in scope yet declining, the anxiety, dissatisfaction, unease, and fear dominating the soul and spirit of humanity, the subtle feeling that nothing is truly under control, strengthen the irrational and absurd element of existence. This irrationality overcompensates for the loss of meaning through nostalgia for the Absolute, the transcendent, Truth, Innocence, and Harmony, reviving beliefs, myths, and dogmas of the past.

At this point, several ontological observations of major historical and meta-historical significance become necessary. After twenty-five centuries of metaphysical thought, during which the Being of beings was considered the transcendent source of Meaning, Truth, Cause, and Purpose, there emerged the ontological nihilism of humanistic anthropology in various forms, denying the metaphysical foundation of Being and beings. Ontological nihilism denied the objectivity of Meaning, Truth, Cause, and Purpose and argued instead for the subjective perspective in shaping the world of experience.

If in earlier epochs Nature or God was the Cause, the Logos, the Truth, the Meaning generating causes, reasons, truths, and meanings for beings and phenomena, in the age of Subjectivity and Humanistic Humanism, human conscious rationality itself assigns causes, truths, meanings, and reasons. The “anti-metaphysical” metaphysics of Subjectivity and the humanistic spirit merely reversed the signs of classical Greek and Christian metaphysics. Yet it preserved its idealistic character insofar as it granted primacy to the Idea of Man and Human Reason over the Idea of Nature and the divine character of Logos (Greek tradition), and over the Idea of God and the divine nature of Logos (Christian tradition).

Thus, transformed, it continued the metaphysical tradition distinguishing the empirical from the transcendental (metaphysical or ontological). Yet this distinction leaves the World itself unthought—the unified, double, and multiple relation between World and Human Being. When we speak of World, we do not refer to the anthropocentric empirical world that separates World from Human and studies “subjects” opposed to “objects” connected through causal relations. We refer instead to the World as the articulated and moving Whole, which does not act as a cause—real, metaphysical, or metaphorical—but as a moving togetherness, present-absent, unified and differentiated simultaneously, undergoing multiple metamorphoses without our being able to say which dimension precedes and which follows.

The Metaphysics of Psychoanalysis

The metaphysical–philosophical spacetime that grants meaning to the Freudian experience is the dominant Subjectivity (objective in character) of modernity, together with its vital myths—chief among them the myth of the omnipotence of Reason, techno-scientific rationality, and positivity. Although Freud works with a spirit of radical deconstruction and subversion of metaphysical dualism and hints toward another perspective, he ultimately does little more than invert the terms of metaphysics and remains subordinate to idealist philosophy, making Matter the transcendental signifier while remaining captive to the naturalistic epistemological paradigm and its materialist expression.

Yet one must remember that the epistemological “paradigm” of his era was founded upon Cartesian metaphysics, which divides the world into res extensa and res cogitans, while the cosmological “paradigm” rested upon Newtonian physics and the deterministic conception of time.

Despite Freud’s questioning of the foundational concepts and terms of Western metaphysics, his anthropology remains anthropocentric. He continues to employ schemas of interpretive understanding and causal explanation. Not only does he fail to free himself from these distinctions and think what is given for thought and construction, but he remains attached—despite his critiques—to the concepts of truth and reality and does not dare displace them toward the horizon, toward networks rather than causes, toward the wandering world.

This world unfolds and folds back upon itself, remaining without beginning or end through ceaseless metamorphosis. The groundless World, through which causes and bonds, parts and complexes, and even the famous metaphysical Whole appear, constitutes the unity of fullness and emptiness, of Everything and Nothing. This non-tautological Unity opens and traverses a non-topological place, which remains gaping because it has been deserted by that which withdraws: time, the non-chronological.

Freudian thought, therefore, is structured within the framework of the “archetypal totems” of classical philosophical and cosmological thought: binary oppositions and the principle of causality, which have historically determined systems of social representation.

Although Freud dethrones the modern worldview of consciousness, the ego cogito, and replaces it with the unconscious (the Id), even this unconscious—this primordial imaginary horizon—is rationally investigated and grasped by the knowing Subject and its representational capacity. Freud overlooks the mythological horizon of psychoanalysis, its metaphysical core, insofar as he distinguishes Human from World, and reality from representation, without suspecting the co-belonging of human and world: the unified and double manifestation of the unique Invisible-One-Multiple unfolding in spacetime.

World and Human mutually belong to one another and are always situated at the center of the whole relation, inseparable from time, which inhabits the center of this relation and the movement of its metamorphoses.

The questions that arise are these: Is not the unconscious, as a logical construction, interpreted by the conscious subject? Is not this interpretation itself an interpretation consciousness formulates about the unconscious? Is not the unconscious included within the interpretation consciousness produces? Does the unconscious not possess its own consciousness? Does not the very possibility of interpreting it demonstrate this?

The answers traditionally given to the relation between consciousness and unconsciousness are dualistic: one is placed in the field of spiritual forces, the other in the field of material forces. A more radical approach sees neither antagonism nor complementarity between these forces, nor synthesizes them into an undifferentiated unity. What appears under the form of duality is governed by a unified and multiplying rhythm: the two manifestations are neither identical nor separate, but act together as one.

If we move beyond the logical principles—the principle of identity, contradiction, excluded middle, and sufficient reason—then we will understand that what is, is not identical with itself; it is contradictory, excludes no middle, and possesses no sufficient ground.

We will understand that psychoanalytic work, and all scientific work, do not aim at that from which all things arise and in which they participate. Rather, they concern themselves with the secondary production of the world into “subject” and “object, ” the result of the intentional act of the conscious subject and its creative capacities. They do not ask: What is the impulse behind all this? What is the origin of “subject” and “object”? From what horizon did this division and these determinations emerge? What causes them to appear, disappear, and reappear according to the rhythm of metamorphoses?

Are the “laws of nature, ” the “principles, ” and the “rules” governing subject, object, and their relations immutable and eternally static? Are they not themselves subject to time? That is, do they not transform according to the interpretive dynamic unfolding through time and with time?

What is it that admits unlimited interpretive determinations without being exhausted by them? What causes interpretations to differ and change? Does not the very phenomenology of interpretation reveal the Openness of the World—that is, its metamorphoses?

Openness constitutes human anxiety. So long as the cognitive enterprise remains intramundane—that is, captive to truth, totality, reality, and the real—it will leave the World unthought and humanity confined to its phenomenological/individual existence.

We may take up the binary opposition between consciousness and unconsciousness and inscribe it within spherical spacetime and its metamorphoses. Going beyond the distinction by traversing it, we must think the enigmatic center from which later differentiations and oppositions emerge. This center—the articulated and moving Whole—does not act as a cause, real, metaphysical, or metaphorical. Rather, this center, present-absent, one and differentiated at once, undergoes multiple metamorphoses without our being able to say which dimension precedes and which follows.

Consciousness and unconsciousness are merely identical and opposed aspects of this fragmentary-total Design—a primordial Design without model or prototype. A Design in which chance is the instrument of necessity, though necessity itself is never irrevocable, never wholly arrives, never fully actualizes itself. The event of the world is indeterminately differentiated. For Nothingness is perpetually at work, nihilating. What appeared, was created, or produced has already been erased. Nothingness is at once the insignificant nothing annihilating everything and the other face of the Whole. Whole and nothing unite, differentiated.

Consciousness as interpretation, and interpretation as consciousness, are governed by the principle of causality, which constitutes an interpretation of the topology of the visible world of phenomenal consciousness—a stable representation of the finite texture of the material World theoretically idealized.

The unconscious, as non-conscious, does not admit total clarification. It escapes complete integration into symbolic order. It is a play of light and shadow, a non-topological place governed by a non-chronological time. The unconscious constitutes a transversal rupture where the horizontal deterministic and causal interpretation of the conscious subject collapses, together with its certainty of prediction. From the primordial non-chaotic chaos emerge conceptual “entities” and unpredictable bifurcations, structures of dispersion and dissemination, nonlinear forms exploring new modes of organization within spacetime.

The points of bifurcation compose a map of the irreversibility of time. The dynamics of bifurcation reveal that time is irreversible, though it may fold and unfold indeterminately. They also reveal that the movement of time is immeasurable. Although causal connections function at every moment, bifurcations occur unpredictably. This suggests that the unconscious constitutes a mixture of necessity and chance. This mixture composes the history of Being inscribed within the time of cosmohistorical becoming, which does not coincide with Time itself—Pan-temporality.

From this perspective, precisely because the unconscious is irreducible to symbolic order, though it leaves traces and imprints within it, there can be no final synthesis in the dialectic of oppositions, contrary to what is represented by the Hegelian notion of absolute knowledge. Trembling spacetime—as manifested in symbolic structure, where any stable relation between signifier and signified is absent—overturns the illusions of permanence and stability of the Ego and reveals anxiety, lack, and deprivation as constitutive dimensions of human formation, dimensions that function as psychic forces of transcendence and becoming.

Going beyond the analytical distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness—which are logical constructions—we may say that the visible world of rational/non-rational consciousness and its interpretation, together with the invisible world of the non-rational rationality of the unconscious, fundamentally ineffable, constitute that which constitutes them: the Sphere. The Sphere is the minimal point of “encounter” and “dialogue” between Logos and the Ineffable, Voice and Silence, Reality and the Imaginary—a non-topological place, homogeneous and a field of equilibrium, symmetrical, governed by the temporal timelessness indeterminately differentiated: another face of Nothingness.

Dream

Freud, in the interpretation of dreams, perceptively intimates that dream interpretation can only reach a certain point, thereby revealing the radically finite character of the interpretive enterprise. The dream springs from the chaos of the unconscious—or perhaps from the chaos of the World itself. But what relation exists between them? And what chaos are we speaking of? The chaos of mythology, poetry, philosophy, or that which science studies and technology attempts to manage through classifications—classifications of a structure already chaotic or already ordered?

Are we referring to the lightning flash of the abyss—that is, the World itself—or to the chaos that surrounds and traverses us? We may say that all these questions possess a common yet suspended and invisible center, differing only in the directions toward which they orient themselves.

If chaos is the primordial chasm from which all things emerged, and if we inhabit the chaos within us, then we speak of chaos while already regulated by a world that itself is regulated. The world is inevitably interpreted—that is, transformed—without there ever existing an authentic and immutable state or becoming. Interpretation transforms and questions; it becomes itself the question of that which is not, yet unfolds as time.

All interpretations are temporary shelters destined to become ruins, while another interpretation awaits its own time to become the place and moment of the world, only to be led in turn toward destruction. Everything that is and becomes—without distinction between Being and becoming—is never complete or whole. Within lack and deprivation, all things inscribe a mark upon the primordial spiral of the world that repeats itself through differentiation.

The dream—the manifestation of the radically uncanny, of that which cannot be thematized—the subjectless Openness where there exists no ego, causality, locality, linear time, or binary opposition: within the dream, everything communicates instantaneously within a non-topological place and a non-chronological time.

This reveals that from an archaic abyss, from the abyss of nothingness, emerges the non-chaotic chaos of cosmic poeticity: the unexpected, inconceivable, and unlimited horizons of the soul, its miracles and its wounds, to which they return, transforming it and being transformed by it.

Within the dream converse the Id as the radical imaginary of existence and the cosmic Id as the radical indeterminacy from which the radical imaginary emerges—an imaginary that renews the radical indeterminacy of the cosmic Id.

This—the Sphere—constitutes a predicate that cannot be categorized by its “self” and therefore does not form a definable set or totality. On the contrary, it “is” the Set of all sets, open to the primordial spiral of Time and to its unlimited metamorphoses.