Both Jung and Lacan have demonstrated the insistence of the letter in the unconscious.
Originally published in New Literary History, A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, Volume XV, 1983-1984.The soul cannot exist without its other side which is always found in a "you." (1)
Jung
Then who is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since, at the heart of my assent to my own identity it is still he who wags me? (2)
Lacan
Both Jung and Lacan have demonstrated the insistence of the letter in the unconscious. (3) Their work bears witness to the fact that it is language, not the ego, that places demands upon us, language who calls us for literary exaltations, that insists that we speak. And, as we do not make up language, so we do not make up our parapraxic response to language but are "taught" this response by our language. Here I follow the lead of Whorf by implying that the unconscious of language is actually dominating our consciousness. (4) When we speak, we experience the "claim" that language makes upon us. For words come to us already embedded in phonetic clusters and pregnant with signification, angels which appear to instruct the ear to hear, the hand to write, and the heart to respond. (5)
Consider, for instance, the role of phonetics in the following case of a traumatic neurosis:
A female patient of Mme. Sechehaye showed psychotic reactions following a traumatic event which took place twenty years ago. She became deprived of her daughter by a court ruling. She was a radically dedicated freedom fighter much like her husband who died in prison as a martyr of liberty . She suffered from the political repercussions of her conduct, the court ruling might have been one of them. She fell in a state of depression but recovered spontaneously by visiting the public library of her home town. This experience has been repeated eight times in a period of nine years. The public library became her healing symbol, she experienced this curative effect as a magic she did not understand. The therapist could interpret the library as the substitute of the good mother she never had and missed badly. In the process of analysis she learned to shift the image of the good mother from the library to the female therapist, through this transference the morbid fixation to the library was resolved and the patient became able to work and establish normal human relationships . (6)
The patient was fixated to the library, something that does not ordinarily elicit ergs, and the etiology of the fixation enlists a factor that is central to archetypal linguistics: an unconscious association of meanings through a parity of phonetic values. On a personal level the patient suffered from an unconscious identification of the missing good mother and her lost child with the library , an identification that was later transferred onto the analyst and successfully resolved in the course of therapy. But why did this "freedom fighter" unconsciously associate the library with her missing good mother and lost child? Is there an underlying deep structure, an archetypal syntax, which imaginally connects the disparate meaning concepts "good mother," "freedom," "child," and "library"?
In an excellent discussion of the psycholinguistics involved in this case, Thienemann has suggested that the patient's associations were unconsciously structured by the "underlying verbal complex of liberty and library on the one hand, and the Latin liberi , 'children', on the other. The verbal complex served as a given structure upon which the individual fantasies of the patient became attached. Liberty meant to the patient Libera in the original sense of the bountiful, nourishing mother, the library appeared to her as the temple of Enlightenment and Liberty . 'It is my daughter,' the patient said, 'who is in the library ; there I rediscovered my spiritual child whom no one can steal away from me.' She identified the libri , 'books', with liberi , 'children.' " (7)
Freud presents a remarkably similar example of the role the letter plays in structuring the symptom. In the case history of the "Rat Man," Freud reveals how a person suffering from an obsessional neurosis came to associate different strands in his obsessions with similar phonetic patterns. The patient had become plagued by fears of being tortured by rats ("Ratten"). Freud carefully analyzed the major conflicts associated with the "rat" complex and discovered that each of the patients's unresolved conflicts was related phonetically to the sound pattern [rat_ ]. The man was disturbed over the installments ("Raten ") he had made on his father's gambling ("spielratte ") debts. He also had never recovered from the early death of his sister Rita , nor could he decide whether or not to marry ("heirate n") at the courthouse ("Rat haus"). (8) The analysis revealed that the patient's obsessions were concatenated along linguistically established lines of phonetic associations.
Notice that in each case it is not the patient that speaks but, in and through him, "language" speaks, and his clinical symptoms, in fact his very nature, have become interwoven with psychic effects exhibiting the structure of language. The patient has now become the substance subjected to the formal structures of language. (9)
Of particular interest here is the role transference plays in reconnecting the patient to the lost objects of desire. In the case of the "freedom fighter," the meaning images of the "good mother" and the missing "child" had become psychically lost, unconscious, and therefore imprisoned in matter through projection. The desire the patient experienced for the "library" was the desire to reconnect with her lost soul, which had become coagulated in physical realities literalized.
The fixation resulted from the experience of her unconscious meanings emanating as a discourse of desire, ergs, from an object in the outer world . The significance of desire is in the fact that it does not originate in the subjective psyche. It is not the subject that desires the soul in the world, but rather the soul that longs to be reconnected with the subject. In other words, it is not "we" who solicit the soul (our other meaning images), but the soul that solicits us. Our 'freedom fighter" was solicited by a radical articulation of her soul . In this particular case the articulation was not mediated through dream images or bodily symptoms, but through a transitional object: the library. But was it the actual object of reference that generated the desire, or was it the object's signifier its phonetic pattern? Here we are making the critical distinction between the actual object of reference (the literal rat or library) and the object's signifier (the sound pattern "Ratte" or "library"). (10) Was the patient's desire directed toward the unconscious meanings emanating from the objects of reference or from the polysemy of the phonetic patterns (signifiers)?
I. The "Transference" of Meaning in Alchemy: The Solution is the Solution
To answer this question, we shall turn to the practice of alchemy. The early alchemists were deeply involved on a literal level with the process of transference. They developed the art of freeing that part of their soul which was "asleep" and imprisoned in matter. The alchemical transmutation, the magnum opus , involved liberating those meaningful aspects of the personality that were unconsciously concretized through projection in the material world.
The alchemical opus began with the prima materia . The actual identity of the prima materia was considered by many to be the most famous secret of alchemy. Ruhland, in his Alchemical Lexicon , lists more than fifty synonyms for the prima materia . (11) The secrecy surrounding the actual identity resulted from the fact that the prima materia represented the unknown substance that carried the projection of the unconscious psychic contents of the alchemist himself. The fantasy content of the projection was referred to as the anima mundi , the soul in the world, while the "prima materia" was the substance in the world that carried the projected contents . It is consequently impossible to specify a particular substance common to all alchemists. Hoghelande, in his text on alchemy, writes: "They have compared the 'prima materia' to everything, to male and female, to the hermaphroditic monster, to heaven and earth, to body and spirit, chaos, microcosm, and the confused mass; it contains in itself all colors and potentially all metals; there is nothing more wonderful in the world, for it begets itself, conceives itself, and gives birth to itself." (12) The "prima materia" functions as an image (signifier) in the world on which, or through which, an unconscious meaning (signified) is transferred.
Through a series of operations performed on the prima materia --for example, on salt, sulphur, or lead the alchemist actually worked on his own "salty" bitterness, "sulphuric" combustibility, or "leadened" depressiveness. By means of concretely physical images, the alchemist simultaneously worked on the "soul" in "matter" and the "matters" in his "soul." Liberating the psyche from its imprisonment in natural matter, from its natural and material perspective, was an opus contra naturum --a work against nature. For although the opus began with substances of nature, through the alchemical operations of fixation, condensation, sublimation, iteration, (13) and so on, these natural "substances" (external objects of reference) were transformed into psychic "substantives" (internal objects of reference) fantasy images. Meaning was extracted from matter, gold from the prima materia.
The true opus contra naturum was the transmutation within the alchemist himself of the natural perspective into the imaginal perspective, transforming the literal, naturalistic ego into an "imaginal ego" (14) capable of "seeing through" the material world imaginatively.
But what actually is involved in the process of "seeing through"? This question can be approached linguistically by examining its acoustic version: "hearing through." What linguistic process is involved in our patients' "hearing through" the phonetic resonance of the signifiers "Ratte" and "library" to their unconscious image meanings? How is the literal word transformed into the metaphoric word?
II. Moving from the Literal to the Metaphoric
The transformation of the literal into the metaphorical is the essence of dream interpretation. The process of interpretation begins with the literal-objective level of the dream and then moves to the metaphoric-subjective level. (15) If, for instance, a dreamer's mother appears in a dream, the objective level of interpretation takes the mother image back to the actual person herself, the external object of reference, and the dreamer's personal associations to her. The subjective level of interpretation approaches the same mother image as an expression of the person's psychic traits. She is a part of the dreamer, to be integrated or at least made conscious of the characterologic essence of motherness. Through the process of moving from the objective to the subjective level of interpretation, we have freed the polysemy of the sound pattern "mother." The interpretation begins with a freeing of those meanings attached to the phonetic pattern "mother" which are associated to the external object of reference: the literal mother. The shift to the subjective level of interpretation now liberates an additional set of meanings attached to the same sound pattern, "mother," and yet referring to an entirely different object of reference: the internal mother image. . As early as 1912, Jung recognized the independence of the child's parental image from the literal parent. He writes:
Among the things that were of the utmost significance at the infantile period the most influential are the personalities of the parents. Even when the parents have long been dead and have lost, or should have lost, all significance, the situation of the patient having perhaps completely changed since then, they are still somehow present and as important as if they were still alive. The patient's love, admiration, resistance, hatred, and rebelliousness still cling to their effigies, transfigured by affection or distorted by envy, and often bearing little resemblance to the erstwhile reality. It was this fact that compelled me to speak no longer of "father" and "mother" but to employ instead the term "imago", because these fantasies are not concerned any more with the real father and mother b .t with subjective and often very much distorted images of them which lead a shadowy but nonetheless potent existence in the patient's mind. (16)
The movement from the objective to the subjective level of interpretation is possible only because the same phonetic pattern ("mother") has two objects of reference, one external (the literal mother) and the other internal (the metaphoric mother imago). The interpretation moves back and forth between the external set of meanings and the internal set of meanings attached to the same sound pattern.
| dream of "mother" | |
 | |
| Subjective level : object of reference is the metaphoric | Objective level : object of reference is the literal mother mother imago |
The acoustic image is the crucial intersection between the external and the internal, between the literal and the metaphoric.
This intersection between the objective meanings and the subjective meanings of the same phonetic pattern is fundamental to the practice of alchemy. The magnum opus is a process which plays back and forth between the external and the internal meaning sets of the words signifying the objects of their work. While the alchemists were working on the soul in matter, they were simultaneously working on the matters of their soul. And the "solution" to these matters they sought in their "solutions." Notice how alchemy "works through" the inherent polysemy of the phonetic patterns. For example, the phonetic pattern "solution" (Lat solutio ) on the objective level means and refers to "a liquid substance.'' On the subjective level, however, the same phonetic pattern refers to an entirely different internal object of reference, a "problem," and has the meaning "resolution of the problem." (17)
The intersection between internal and external meanings is particularly apparent in the polysemy of the following phonetic patterns:
| Subjective Meaning Level |
Phonetic Pattern | Objective Meaning Level |
| answer to a problem | SOLUTION | a liquid substance |
| substance of thought | MATTER | any physical body |
| character of a person | NATURE | a physical world |
| transformation of instinct into imagination |
SUBLIMATION | transformation between solid and gaseous states |
| guide of the soul | MERCURY | the metal quicksilver |
| melancholy decline | DEPRESSION | indentation, economic |
| combine two psychic elements into one |
CONDENSATION | forma liquid from a vapor |
| loss of moral innocence | FALL | to be moved by gravity |
| a grandiose sense of person | INFLATION | abnormal increase in available currency, to fill with air |
| irritable or annoyed | CROSS | two intersecting lines |
| animating force | SPIRIT | alcoholic beverage |
Why should an alchemist seek the answer to his problem (his "confused matters") in a liquid substance? Was he actually working on the literal, external object of reference or was he working with the inherent polysemy of the signifier the phonetic pattern? Is the alchemist playing with substances or playing with words?
III. From the Laboratory to the Oratory (18)
The choice of a liquid as an object to project his unconscious "solution" into raises the question of what constitutes the "hook" for his projection. Is the hook an attribute of the external object of reference (the physical substance) or of the signifier, the sound pattern "solution"? Earlier in our discussion of the clinical cases we arrived at a similar question: Was the "freedom fighter's" fixation to the library and the "Rat Man's" obsessions about the rats precipitated by the external objects of reference or by the signifiers the sound patterns "library" and "Ratte"? This question focuses on the extent to which the acquisition of language separates man from the material world (the external objects of reference) and initiates him into a shared archetypal reality: language . Through the acquisition of language the child is ushered into an archetypal matrix of meaning relations. The importance of this linguistic entry into the collective unconscious cannot be overemphasized. For in acquiring linguistic competence, the infant (Lat. infari , not speaking) has to learn to speak to the world through a network of archetypally related signifiers: language.
The significance of the linguistic matrix lies in the fact that it is a system of unconscious meaning relations organized in advance of any individual ego. (19) The child has to accept the collectively assigned meanings in the linguistic matrix; in doing so, he becomes a meaningful entity himself within the psychological matrix of societal meaning relations. As such his personality exhibits the same polysemous structure psychologically (many meaning complexes) that his "mother tongue" exhibits linguistically. (20)
The acquisition of language, however, separates the child from the material world by allowing the individual to develop a system of phonetic patterns capable of replacing the actual objects of reference in the world. For instance, through the acquisition of language the "Rat Man" developed the ability to substitute the phonetic pattern "Ratte" for the external object of reference: the literal rat. This phenomenon is made possible by the paradoxical status of a word, a presence made of an absence. For language allows us to evoke various experiences of an object of reference (for example, the literal rat) in the very absence of that object. We can speak about a rat, a library, a solution, and so forth, even though the actual object of reference is absent.
In this essay I have attempted to demonstrate that through the acquisition of language, man is separated from the material world (external objects of reference) and initiated into a shared archetypal system of meaning relations a system that collates meanings imaginally through a parity in phonetic values. Jung's early word-association experiments indicated that a lowering of consciousness shifts the linguistic mode of association from a consideration of the meaning concepts associated with the objects of reference to a consideration of the meaning concepts connected through phonetic parity to the object's signifier its phonetic pattern.
| "Rathaus" | "heiraten" | |
 | ||
| "Raten" | "Spielratte" | |
| "Rat Man" | Phonetic Pattern | Object of Reference |
This process involves freeing the soul (the meaning concept) from its imprisonment in matter (the literal object of reference). The acquisition of language enables man to take "matters" out of life and transform them into imagination. Shifting the linguistic mode from semantic to phonetic consideration transforms the material of the "day world" (the objects of reference) into the insubstantial poetic images of the "night world" (image meanings collated through phonetic parity). (21) Matter is transformed into imagination.
Buffalo, New York
Copyright 1983 Paul K. Kugler. All rights reserved.
Notes
1. C. G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy , tr. R. F. C. Hull, Vol. XVI of The Collected Works of C. J. Jung (Princeton, NJ., 1966), par. 545.
2. Jacques Lacan, "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious," in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (New York, 1970), p. 133.
3. C. G. Jung, Experimental Researches , tr. Leopold Stein (Princeton, NJ., 1973), pp. 3196, 414-15, 418; and Lacan, "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious."
4. Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (New York, 1956). In describing the extent to which the language we speak organizes and biases the cosmos we speak about, Whorf notes: "This organization is imposed from outside the narrow circle of the personal consciousness, making that consciousness a mere puppet whose linguistic maneuverings are held in unsensed and unbreakable bonds of patterns" (p. 257). See also pp. 65, 213, and 214.
5. For a discussion of the relation between phonological complexes and unconscious fantasies, see Paul Kugler, "Image and Sound: An Archetypal Approach to Language," Spring (1978), pp. 13b-51; and Kugler, "The Phonetic Imagination," Spring (1979), pp. 118-29.
6. Theodore Thass-Thienemann, "Psychotherapy and Psycholinguistics," in Topical Problems of Psychotherapy , 4 (1963), 41 The actual case is presented by Sechehaye, "The Curative Function of Symbols in a Case of Traumatic Neurosis with Psychotic Reactions," in Psychotherapy of the Psychoses , ed. Arthur Burton (New York, 1961), pp. 124-51.
7. Thass-Thienemann, "Psychotherapy and Psycholinguistics." p. 41, my italics.
8. Sigmund Freud, "Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis" (1909), in Vol. X of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. James Strachey (London, 1955), pp. 165-86.
9. The influence of linguistic structures on the personality has been extensively analyzed by Lacan; see his Ecrits (Paris, 1966), and 'The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious." The role phonetics plays in the "freedom fighter's" symptom formation is particularly problematic in respect to proving the actual coexistence of the phonetic associations in the patient's mind. While all the sound associations in Freud's case of the "Rat Man" were clearly synchronic associations directly accessible to the patient through his own vernacular German, the same access to unconscious phonetic associations cannot with certainty be said to exist for Sechehaye's patient. Nowhere in Sechehaye's case study does she indicate the mother tongue of the "freedom fighter" or in what languages she had competence. I would conjecture that the patient was either French or Spanish; however, this is only a conjecture. It is unfortunate that more information concerning the patient's linguistic competence is not available because the case touches on a central issue: whether the connections between unconscious ideas ("liberty," "nourishing mother," "children," "books," and "library") are directly perceived through the phonetic connections in language (in this case, in phonetic connections existing synchronically between Latin, French, and English and collated in a Joycean manner) or whether the connections between unconscious meanings are indirectly perceived through an unconscious, innate structure, in which case we would have to postulate an explanatory principle within the personality sui generic . Both Freud and Jung adopted the second solution. For Freud, the theory of infantile sexuality supplied an internal accounting for these unconscious chains of linguistic signi-fication. Jung's explanation is also based upon an internal, sui generis first principle: the archetype or primordial image. Jung writes: "Interpretations make use of certain linguistic matrices that are themselves derived from primordial images" ("Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" [1934/54], in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious , tr. R. F. C. Hull, Vol. IX, patient. 1 of Collected Works [Princeton, NJ., 1968], pp. 32-33).
In developing an archetypal linguistics based upon a philosophy of direct realism, we adopt the ecological view which argues that perception is, quite simply, the detection of information. This approach has been labeled by Gibson, Turvey, Shaw, Peter Kugler, and others as direct because a perceiver is said to perceive its environment directly. A knowledge of the world is thought to be unmediated by memories, inference, or representations. In this and earlier essays (see n. 5), I have attempted to demonstrate that the personality directly perceives unconscious chains of signification in language through an attunement of the perceptual system to an invariance in the phonetic pattern. If Sechehaye's patient was familiar with Latin, French, and English (not uncommon for a well-educated European woman), she could directly perceive this unconscious chain of signification ("library," "liberty," "Libera," "liberi" ) through a tuning of her perceptual system to the invariance in the phonetic pattern. The alternative solution to this problem is to postulate internal structuring principles: a theory of infantile sexuality or internal archetypes. We have attempted instead to be as miserly as possible on the number of explanatory principles, sui generis . Rather than developing explanatory principles, we have preferred to develop a greater appreciation of the informational richness in the linguistic environment.
10. For a discussion of the importance of this distinction, see Emile Benveniste, "Nature de signe linguistique" (1939), in Problemes de linguistique generale (Paris, 1966), pp. 49-55.
11. Martin Ruland, Lexicon alchemiae, sine Dictionarium alchemisticum (Frankfort, 1612). See also C. G. Jung, "Prima Materia," in Psychology and Alchemy , tr. R. F. C. Hull, Vol. XII of Collected Works (Princeton, NJ., 1968), pp. 304-7.
12. Theobald de Hogheland, Liber de alchemiae difficultatibus , Vol. l of Theatrum Chemicum (Ursellis, 1602), pp. 178 f.
13. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy , pp. 218-21.
14. James Hillman, "An Imaginal Ego," in Inscape 2 , British Association of Art Therapists (London, 1970).
15. Jung describes the subjective level of interpretation in his essay "General Aspects of Dream Psychology" (1916/48). He writes: "Now if one begins, as the Freudian school does, by taking the manifest content of the dream as 'unreal' or 'symbolical,' and explains that though the dream speaks of a church-spire it really means a phallus, then it is only a step to saying that the dream often speaks of sexuality but does not always mean it, and equally, that the dreamer often speaks of the father but really means the dreamer himself. Our images are constituents of our minds, and if our dreams reproduce certain ideas these ideas are primarily our ideas. in the structure of which our whole being is interwoven. They are subjective factors, grouping themselves as they do in the dream, and expressing this or that meaning, not for extraneous reasons but from the most intimate promptings of our psyche. The whole dream-work is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic. This simple truth forms the basis for a conception of the dream's meaning which I have called interpretation on the subjective level. Such an interpretation, as the term implies, conceives all the figures in the dream as personified features of the dreamer's own personality." Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche , tr. R. F. C. Hull, Vol. VIII of Collected Works (Princeton, NJ., 1969), par. 509.
16. C.G. Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis , tr. R. F. C. Hull, Vol. IV of Collected Works (Princeton, N.J., 1961), par. 305.
17. Jung notes the double sense of the word solutio in the alchemical literature. "The immersion in the 'sea' signifies the solutio 'dissolution' in the physical sense of the word and at the same time, according to Dorn, the solution of a problem " (The Practice of Psychotherapy , par. 454, my italics). Dorn writes in Speculative philosophiae , Vol. Xl of Theatrum Chemicum , p. 303: "Studio philosophorum comparatur putrefactio chemica.... Ut per solutionem corpora solvuntur, ita per cognitionem resolvuntur philosophorum dubia." ("The chemical putrefaction can be compared with the study of the philosophers.... As bodies are dissolved through the solutio , so the doubts of the philosophers are resolved through knowledge.")
18. The importance of the intersection between the verbal and the physical in alchemy can be seen in the vignette that forms the title page to Khunrath's Amphitheatrum sapientia (Hanau, 1604). It is a "graphic illustration of the double face of alchemy. The picture is divided into two parts. On the right is a laboratory where a man, clothed only in trunks, is busy at the fire; on the left a library, where an abbot, a monk and a layman are conferring together. In the middle, on top of the furnace stands the tripod with a round flask on it containing a winged dragon. The dragon symbolizes the vision and experience of the alchemist as he works in his laboratory and 'Theorizes'" (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy , par. 404). The caption on the vignette reads, "The Laboratory and the Oratory."
19. Lacan, Ecrits , pp. 704-5.
20. Ecrits , p. 705; and Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology , tr. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Garden City, N.Y., 1967), pp. 67, 193.
21. James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (New York, 1979).
Copyright 1993 Paul Kugler, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
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