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Freud and Degeneracy: a Turning Point
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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In the second half of the 19 th century an “anthropologico-psychiatrical “ doctrine proposed a conception of mental illness which remained prevalent in Europe for a long time: the doctrine of degeneracy. Modern psychiatrical texts and works devoted to the history of ideas usually dismiss it with the slightly annoyed contempt of those who have long since given up such obsolete notions. The doctrine is most often referred back to a purely “hereditary” concept of alienation which psychoanalysis long ago proved of no use. Now the most casual reading of the literature (whether medical or anthropological) shows that this interpretation is not only superficial but radically in error. The doctrine of degeneracy is not limited to this “hereditary” concept inasmuch as it assigns utmost importance to environmental factors such as social, educational and moral. Furthermore, the idea of heredity with which it is concerned has little to do with what genetical science today is studying under this term. Dissimilar heredity, during the second half of the 19th century, was the motivating force which was used to account for a factor that, paradoxically, transmits not likeness but unlikeness. Thus, a pathology o f heredity, or pathological heredity (in the sense that it is heredity itself which is “ill”), rather than hereditary pathology.
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- Copyright © 1977 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
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1 Pages from a work to be published in which we have tried to revive the profound logic of the concept (and doctrine) of alienation beyond this ill-con cealed embarrassment. We have also tried to explain the ideological function of this reluctance on the part of present-day psychiatrists to reconsider this past, which we are too quick to think of as "finished."
2 The formulas intentionally presented here must be justified by an analysis of the texts of Prosper Lucas, Traité philosophique et physiologique de l'hé rédité naturelle, two vols., Paris, 1847; and B. A. Morel, Traité des dégéné rescences de l'espèce humaine, Paris, 1857.
Let us attempt, however, to account for the paradox presented by the concept of dissimilar heredity: the nature of heredity is to transmit likeness. Now, it happens that in neural (and mental) pathology the forms taken by alienation down through the generations vary. Something is transmitted (this confirms heredity) but this something is invisible, latent, purely potential: the "de generative factor" (Morel), the "crack" (Zola) capable of causing quite different forms of disorder but which, because of this factor, may still claim an undeniable unity. The essence of the alienation is certainly "one." It is the manifestations which are unlike. Second idea, introduced by Morel: this transmission of dis similar pathological states does not come about haphazardly, without order, but follows a "law of progressive degradation." Not only is it in the nature of the alienation to transform itself as it transmits itself, but the transformations are necessarily degradations, which lead, by stages, to sterility and the extinc tion of the tainted (pathological) line. If then degeneracy is to be traced back to a "pathological" heredity, it is in the sense that it results in a "dissolution of the heredity" (Charles Féré, La famille névropathique, 1898). This is true for two reasons: one, because it transmits unlikeness (if this may be said) and two, because it results in the extinction of the generation chain. All the subtlety of the doctrine is in this unconfinable paradox. Hence, the discomfiture of the alienists, avid for biological guarantees, when progress in genetics, toward the end of the century, will have taken away all credit from a concept of "dissimilar heredity," considered by the biologists to be self-contradictory. Thus, E. Rabaud: "Heredity implies continuity and continuity in its turn implies similitude. Heredity ceases to exist when dissimilarities appear." ("Hérédité et Dégéné rescence," Journal de Psychologie, 1905).
In the literary key Zola's work is of course an example of such a problematic, cf. especially the last volume of the Rougon-Macquart series: Dr. Pascal, who represents the "theory" of the entire cycle and who marks down entire pages of Prosper Lucas' treatise. A conjunction between (pretended) scientific discourse and the literary process whose fecundity no longer has to be proved, in the domain of the human sciences.
3 These manuscripts, unpublished during Freud's lifetime, have been re grouped along with Freud's letters to Fliess of the same period in a volume entitled La naissance de la psychoanalyse, P.U.F., 1956. Manuscript A, p. 59.
4 Manuscript B, ibid. p. 61, dated February 8, 1893. It is the first draft of this text which gives birth to the following note:
5 "Qu'il est justifié de séparer de la neutasthénie un certain complexe symptomatique sous le nom de névrose d'angoisse"; in Névrose, psychose, perversion, P.U.F., 1973, p. 15. [Trans.: "On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description ‘Anxiety Neurosis'," Col lected Papers, I, 76; Standard Edition, III.]
6 Manuscript B, op. cit., p. 15.
7 In Névrose, psychose, perversion, P.U.F., 1973, pp. 47-59 (This appeared for the first time, written directly in French, in La revue neurologique, IV, March 30, 1896.)
8 Ibid. p. 51.
9 Freud's underlining.
10 Freud's underlining.
11 Art. cit. p. 49.
12 Introduction à la psychanalyse, Petite Bibliothèque Payot, Lesson 16: "Psychanalyse et psychiatrie," p. 236.
13 The present author's underlining.
14 "L'hérédité et l'étiologie des névroses," op. cit. p. 59. Twenty years later, in L'introduction à la psychanalyse, Petite Bibliothèque Payot, p. 363, Freud will again take up this idea: "The symptom of a real neurosis is often the kernel and preliminary phase of the psychoneurotic symptom."
15 Naissance de la psychoanalyse, Letter 55, dated January 11, 1897, p. 164.
16 "La morale sexuelle ‘civilisée' et la maladie nerveuse des temps mo dernes," 1908. In La vie sexuelle, P.U.F., 1969, p. 44. This rarely-cited text is remarkable for its "Reichism" before Reichism existed. In contrast to a large number of more famous formulations of Freud, here it is the social "repression" of sexuality which appears to be at the origin of repression (at least in the parents). It is known that this is the substance of the Reichian thesis. However, Freud will soon be led to give a greater importance to the "repression of origins" whose determinism appears infinitely more precocious. However, in this text, the position of the child, caught up in the neurosis of the parents, is very significant—and very close to modern psychoanalytical ideas. The child's neurosis is not described, neither as the result of social repression operating directly on him nor as the effect of a repression of origins, almost innate, but as the effect on his own subjective position of the mother's repression, itself electively colored by social repression. It is true that such formulations, in their complexity, leave the summary Reichism of many present-day defenders of "sexual liberation" far behind.
17 Modern psychoanalytical research (Lacan, P. Aulagnier, Maud Mannoni) has considerably broadened these ideas, showing how the subjective position of the child (and thus his eventual neurosis or later psychosis) is determined by the way his desire for his mother is expressed and the exact place the father ocuupies in it (with regard to this desire). These studies have provided a better knowledge of the determinism of the psychosis. The statement "It takes three generations to make a psychotic" shows rather well the survival of the "gene alogical" formula. Maud Mannoni: "Let us remember the very particular place held by the psychotic in the field of maternal desire. In the child's impossibility to be recognized by the Other as a desiring subject, he becomes alienated in one part of his body. His relations with his mother remain on a level where the child's only resort is to continually renew a demand, without ever having the right to assume it as desire." L'enfant, sa maladie et les autres, Seuil, 1967, p. 120.
18 S. Freud, Totem et Tabou, P.B.P., p. 163. [Trans: Totem and Taboo, London, 1950; Standard Edition 13]
19 Ibid, preface, p. 5.
20 Here we quote from the version found in "Ma vie et la psychanalyse," series Idées Gallimard, p. 84.
21 S. Freud, Moïse et le Monothéisme, series Idées Gallimard, p. 134. [Trans: Moses and Monotheism, Standard Edition, 23, 3.]
22 Ibid., p. 136.
23 Ibid., p. 135.
24 Here we closely follow the pertinent analysis of Catherine Backes Clément, in Anthropologie, science des sociétés primitives?, Denoel, 1971.
25 Catherine Backes, op. cit.
26 Ibid.
27 S. Freud, Moise et le Monothéisme, p. 134.
28 For the present, this expression must be written in quotes, inasmuch as we are going to show that the characteristic of the Freudian break is to overthrow the idea of both event and origin.
29 Moïse et le Monothéisme, p. 117.
30 Catherine Backes, Le pouvoir des mots, p. 83.
31 Ibid., p. 87.
32 For an initial outline, concise but exact, of this work, refer to the article "Pulsion de mort" by Laplance and Pontalis, in the Vocabulaire de Psychanalyse.
33 S. Freud, "Au-delà du principe de Plaisir," in Essais de Psychoanalyse, Petite Bibliothèque Payot, p. 46. [Trans: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, London, 1961. Standard Edition, 15-16.]
34 Ibid., p. 46.
35 Ibid., p. 48.
36 Ibid., p. 47.
37 Ibid., p. 49. We may note everything that separates this position from the celebrated formulation of Bichat, founding biology: "Life is the ensemble of functions which resist death." (Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort).
38 This is the case of Michel Serres, for example, in his book on Zola, Feux et signaux de brume, Grasset, 1976.
39 This important syndrome, felt to be at the root of all forms of alienation, was for the authors at the end of the 19th century none other than neurasthenia.
40 Magnan, a student of Morel, in the last decades of the century was himself the leader in developing the clinical and nosographic results of the Morelian doctrine. Cf. in particular his descriptions of "dégénérés supérieures" which are the basis of the precise descriptions of neurotic tableaux (especially obsessions and phobias).
41 S. Freud, L'Avenir d'une illusion, 1971, P.U.F., p. 61. [Trans: The Future of an Illusion, London, 1972; Standard Edition, 21.]
42 A demonstration which is outside the scope of this article devoted to Freud, but which has been attempted elsewhere. However, the posthumous texts of Nietzsche organized around the idea of "European nihilism" may be consulted (U.G.E. Col. 10/18 1976).