"No third person"

"In Treatment," the new show on HBO based on the amazing Israeli show "Betipul," transforms what we who study narrative understand by "character." It does this because it allows us, to an impressive and perhaps unheard of degree, to be the "third person" that Freud dreams up in the following passage from The Question of Lay Analysis: Freud, trying to familiarize someone who has never really dealt with psychoanalysis legally with what psychoanalysis does, thinks up a short cut, as it were:

It is to be regretted that we cannot let them be present as an audience at a treatment of this kind. But the "analytic situation" allows no presence of a third person. Moreover the different sessions are of very unequal value. An unauthorized listener who hit upon a chance one of them would as a rule form no useful impression; he would be in danger of not understanding what was passing between the analyst and the patient, or he would be bored. For good or ill, therefore, he must be content with our information [that is, a theory of what psychoanalysis does which Freud will present in the coming pages], which we shall try to make as trustworthy as possible.
-The Question of Lay Analysis, 3

That is, it is regrettable that those who have to make a legal decision about the status of psychoanalysis in Austria in 1926 (whether to allow it to be practiced only by certified medical professionals or not) can't simply go and watch a psychoanalytic session or two. This would give them firsthand experience with what they are legislating about. But this can't be so, because psychoanalysis forbids the third person, the witness to analysis, and tries to close off the dissemination of its proceedings as little as possible. This is not because it is inherently something that happens in secret: it is because, as Freud emphasizes, that it is a process that takes place over many many sessions, connecting together, as it were, very many disparate fragments over a long period of time. One can't just stop in on a session and actually be witness to anything--and if they are, it is probably because this witness misconceives the nature of what he is seeing (what he sees would make a different sense if it were placed back in the whole, where it belongs).
In "In Treatment"--and I think this might be less the case with "Betipul," for cultural reasons (that is, the status of therapeutic discourse in the US compared to Israel)--in this show, we get this shortcut. That is, we get to be the third person Freud talks about. And, moreover, we get the full danger that Freud speaks about here which comes with being this third person: we actually only get to witness the fragments of a process that takes a long, long time.
Now, obviously, the show tries to remedy this by following up these patients from session to session. Moreover, it tries to reconstitute the therapist's own experience by airing every day for a whole week, each time with that day's patient. But fundamentally, we are only getting fragments of a longer chain each time we sit down to watch the show. This means that each time we watch it, we are exposed to the danger--and this is the danger itself--of taking one of these fragments as representative of the whole. In other words, each time we sit down to watch the show, we have to accommodate the "very unequal value" that Freud ascribes above to the sessions, not unlike the therapist himself.
What this means, though, is that we can't make the sort of judgments we normally make about character in television shows. That is, we can't ask ourselves questions like we do when we watch "Friends," say (or, in a more dramatic and recent mode, "Lost"), which wonder whether we really "like" Chandler or Joey better (or "trust" Kate or Sawyer). In short, we can't "like" a character in the way we normally do. This also has its obverse: we can't hate a character that we normally would hate. In short, we have to suspend our judgement.
Or, better (because suspension is only a negative phenomenon), we have to judge the characters according to a completely different set of criteria. So in the show that I have posted above, I would normally hate Alex. He is overbearing and intense, and tough to listen to for roughly twenty-five minutes. But, at the same time, I can't (and don't) do this, because I know that his utterances are in question as to whether they really want to be made or not: Alex comes to therapy for the reason that he doesn't, at some level, trust himself, or loves or hates himself too much or too little--so it doesn't make sense to try and once more to hate or love him, or trust or distrust him, because he himself is already at this remove from himself. Thus everything being said, even though it is forceful and unnerving, has this particular provisionality to it because in the analytic setting, character itself comes into question: one doesn't have a character that one likes or dislikes, because the treatment is precisely trying to correct that character. Something is wrong, in other words, and this makes character less something someone is as something one performs. And if it is performed--to state it yet another way--what sense does it make to say you like it or not?
One can only have this sort of judgement over the course of many weeks, and even then it will not be a judgement about the particular character, but about the course this character's analysis has taken. This is the odd phenomenon that the third person produces in analysis, and what, at some level, exempts therapy from the sorts of evaluations that the law, for example, will make about its status. Or at least this is what Freud is getting ready, with this passage, to claim. But what is interesting is that treatment is also exempted from the narrative standards of the medium through which we are able to witness it in the first place--this is what "In Treatment" brings about. In other words, what is interesting is that if there were any third person (that is, even if he weren't connected with the law, but were, as he is with this new show, just an average TV viewer), there could be no judgement at all about the session, either. I might expand on this later, but I think it is really interesting, and makes the episode above a particularly interesting one to watch (as this is the first time you are introduced to this character). In "In Treatment" this particular disruptive feature of the witness to analysis is brought out even more by the fact that the therapist (Paul) is also analyzed (we are witness to this too), and so we can't even judge him unless we do it in this more holistic sense--that is, where we judge how his analysis (and all the analyses he himself is carrying out) as a whole is progressing, not him himself.
Everything, to sum this all up, suddenly has "unequal value."

Vicissitudes

So I realized in class I never really understood what the heck "vicissitude" meant in Freud, and I wanted to get a little background. And because I realized this with our consideration of the mention of "the vicissitude of the idea as distinct from that of the affect" in the 1927 paper on fetishism, I thought I'd try and work out the use of the word in that sentence--which, as I'll say again in a moment, I found particularly odd because the word appeared apart from any mention of the drives or instincts, as if "vicissitude" meant something almost apart from being only, in Freud, the vicissitude of an instinct.
So, the word for "vicissitude" is "das Shicksal," which is a very complicated word in German, usually meaning something like "destiny" or "destination" or "fate," as in "It was the fate of my Saturday to be spent looking up this word in Freud." It can even mean "luck," as in "It's just my luck that..." What we mean here by "luck" or "fate" is something like "how things have ended up," or, better (since it implies more direction, selection, the fact that what happens is one of many possible outcomes) "how things went."
The English word "vicissitude" is relatively obscure in comparison, and the effort of translation here resembles what happened when Strachey and Jones and others famously decided upon "cathexis" (a made up "Greek" word) for "Besetzung" (which means something simple like investment)--in other words, James Strachey's (and Cecil Baines', I think) choice of "vicissitude" appears as a sort of making technical of a word that, in German, works on a lower register.
This doesn't necessarily mean "vicissitude" was a bad choice though, as some people are usually quick to think: "vicissitude" carries a lot of similar meanings as the more abstract uses of the German term. Looking at some dictionaries (OED, Webster), I see most often something like "a fluctuation of state or condition," as in the phrase "The vicissitudes of daily life." But, coming from the Latin vicis (change), the word lacks that sort of fatedness that Shicksal has with it. Thus it has been proposed that the last part of the title "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" ("Triebe und Treibshicksale") should be retranslated as "and their Fate."
However, before we just go ahead and do this (as if this alone would solve the problem), we have to note that "vicissitude" does have a certain sense that corresponds to the way that Freud thinks the instincts or drives are working. For all vicissitudes are vicissitudes of instincts, though--strangely--that only remains implied the essay on fetishism. All that is talked about is the vicissitude. This is because (I gather) Freud doesn't think he has to recall a very basic point about repression--that repression deals with instincts.
We can see all this if I recall fully the sentence under consideration in class:

If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the vicissitude of the idea as distinct from that of the affect, and reserve the word 'Verdrängung' ['repression'] for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be 'Verleugnung' ['disavowal'].

In German this is the following:

Will man in ihm das Shicksal der Vorstellung von dem des Affekts schärfer trennen, den Ausdruck "Verdrängung" für den Affekt reservieren, so wäre für das Shicksal der Vorstellung "Verleugnung" die richtige deutsche Bezeichnung.

To return to the question of what "vicissitude" means, and how the word "vicissitude" gets at what Freud is doing here with "das Shicksal:" the picture I get from the rest of Freud is that a vicissitude is a "function" of an instinct--this is how Freud in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" introduces sublimation, for example. That is, the vicissitude is, precisely, "the fluctuation of a state of condition of the instinct." And this is what is going on here, it seems: Freud is saying that if we want to talk about the particular fluctuation in the state of condition of the instinct that is ideational, as distinct from that fluctuation that is affective, well, we should talk about "disavowal" instead of "repression." So though "vicissitude" is a bit more awkward than "das Shicksal," it is more precise than that German word--which can mean so many things--because it has a particular connotation that is closer to what Freud is getting at concerning instincts.
This is usually the case with Strachey: he chooses a word that will bring out, not the various connotations of the German, but the function of what the German signifies. In short, he reads Freud to look at how his view of the mind is working, and then chooses words to bring out how this work proceeds. This makes him a very detailed and reflective reader of Freud, but ultimately a bit of a problematic translator--whose task is also, with theoretical writing, to bring out a bit of the wording of the source text, its particular way of articulating its ideas. As you can see from all his introductions in the Standard Edition, what is not at issue, usually, is his word choice, but how the concept functions. It is as if the English word chosen doesn't matter, because we'll learn how to regard it in a particular technical sense. This is more what I mean when I say Strachey makes Freud technical. Suddenly words like "vicissitude" carry their own weight, become more reified (again like "cathexis"), and we lose their ability to just take place casually in the context of the sentence (which is how Freud, as well as most German medical language, loves to let them signify).
The problem is that there is a tension between the use of the word in the context here and what the sentence is doing, which is classifying. That is, the word "vicissitude" is used actually to classify something as "disavowal" rather than "repression." This makes things really complicated when we look at how "vicissitude" is working, because it's not just occurring to describe what is going on, but is also doing some work on its own for the other words in the sentence.
I can maybe get a little more precise about this problem, though, by looking closer inside "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" and the essay "Repression." In the first essay Freud states that there are four generally discernible vicissitudes for instincts. These vicissitudes are like subspecies of the two general "types" of instincts (under the libido-theory, which gets changed later) which are the sexual-instincts and the preservative- or ego-instincts:

The reversal of an instinct into its opposite
The turning round of the instinct upon the subject's own self
Repression of an instinct
Sublimation of an instinct

Note that repression is itself just a vicissitude. Doesn't this conflict with the task in the essay on fetishism, which talks about a vicissitude within repression, as it were--that is, a vicissitude of a vicissitude? How can that be? Look again at the text:

If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the vicissitude of the idea as distinct from that of the affect, and reserve the word 'Verdrängung' ['repression'] for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be 'Verleugnung' ['disavowal'].

Perhaps, however, Freud just talking about the particular way something in the repression "ends up"--that is, using the word "das Shicksal" more in context and not in a technical way, so that we should really regard this passage as saying the following:

If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the fate of the idea as distinct from that of the affect, and reserve the word 'Verdrängung' ['repression'] for the affect, then the correct German word for the fate of the idea would be 'Verleugnung' ['disavowal'].

We now see the problem more clearly: either we take the word in its more technical sense or take it in this other sense, which, frankly, makes things clearer. So we are led to ask, couldn't this problem, then, just be solved by rendering the passage in this new way? "Vicissitude" could thereby be retained as only relating to instincts, not to the distinct parts of the instinct (affect and idea).
The answer to this question is no. If we rendered the passage this new way, this would merely dodge what we have to address, because for Freud "das Shicksal" is also used in this confusing way (as applying to what is already a vicissitude) in the essay "Repression," and precisely to define the parts of the instinct:

Repression acts, therefore, in a highly individual manner. Each single derivative of the repressed may have its own special vicissitude...

Freud is talking about the (primal) repression of the instincts. He is saying that in the unconscious ideational formation that instincts bring about (their setting up of ideational associations--or "derivatives"--which later draw certain other thoughts towards a need for secondary repression) each idea associated with the instinct has its own vicissitude. What this means is that "vicissitudes" are also just the other repressed aspects of the vicissitude that is the repressed. (It is telling that in this instance Baines, the original translator of "Instincts..." just used "have its own special fate" to avoid this problem altogether.)
So, it seems like "vicissitude" is used in two ways, and can vary its sense depending on your point of view. Either the vicissitude is just the vicissitude of an instinct, or it is the vicissitude of a vicissitude. That is, in our language that we used above, the vicissitude of the instinct is something like its function, then, but it is also something like the minor twists and turns of that function itself which makes it a function. Freud's use of the same word in both cases, though, hints that whether you are talking about the parts of the vicissitude (its derivations or associations--that is, its affective associations or its ideational associations) or the vicissitude of the instinct itself (repression, sublimation, etc.), both operate like a function of the instinct, its particular "fate" or "how it ends up." Thus the use of the word in the more consistent manner of Strachey (as opposed to Baines, who uses two words depending on the case), is actually more justified, though it could cause confusion.
In the end, it seems that adopting "fate" (or, what I like, "how it went")--but only if it were done uniformly--would help out. That is, what has to be done is two things simultaneously: we have to regard "das Shicksal" as something more plain, but we also have to do this by making its use less dependent on context. Strachey tried to do this with "vicissitude," but it lost all connection to the German original. "Fate" has the virtue of allowing both these moves--it is just vague enough to be used uniformly without forgoing its connotations. Thus, in this instance in "Fetishism," we are talking about the derivative of the fate of the instinct, which is itself a fate of the instinct: its affective association and its ideational association:

If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the fate of the idea as distinct from that of the affect, and reserve the word 'Verdrängung' ['repression'] for the affect, then the correct German word for the fate of the idea would be 'Verleugnung' ['disavowal'].

(Or, to indulge myself, I'll throw all sorts of other ways of putting it in: If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between how the idea went as distinct from how the affect ended up, and reserve the word 'Verdrängung' ['repression'] for the twists and turns of the affect, then the correct German word for how the idea went would be 'Verleugnung' ['disavowal'].)

What we're saying here, then, is that the fate of the fate of the instinct that is ideational is disavowed, not repressed--and that this disavowal is the mechanism of fetishism. Thus we can see how fetishism is like repression but also not like it: it operates as a fate on one of the fates of the instinct, repression. The mechanism of fetishism takes up repression and only concerns itself with one fate of this, and thus brings it away from repression proper, which really just concerns itself with the repression of the affect.

Drives and (primal) repression

I'll be concerned in the following with connecting repression (or, more precisely, primal repression) to the drives (or instincts), using the 1915 essays "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" and "Repression." I hope I got it all (somewhat) right!
Primal repression is the fate (vicissitude) of a drive whose aim is not satisfaction but an increase in pain--that is, repression is what happens when the aim of the drive is changed into one of seeking unpleasurable satisfaction. Or, since we can't really speak of such an aim (the aim of a drive is always satisfaction, and satisfaction is precisely pleasure, so there cannot be a drive whose aim is unpleasure), we have to say that repression is what happens when the pleasure of an instinct's satisfaction also causes an experience of unpleasure.
Freud rules out the idea that this confluence of pleasure and unpleasure in the aim of the drive--this vicissitude--is merely one that is occasioned by having satisfaction delayed for a long time: repression is not just the result of the drive getting confused about what satisfaction is (as it were), creating more and more tension to the point where the satisfaction itself would still not be pleasurable. This is an important counterexample, because it sets up an idea of different localizations of pleasure and unpleasure rather than one homogenous psychic experience of them.
That is, he proposes that the satisfaction is unpleasurable in a different part of the mind than where the satisfaction itself goes on: this is how the satisfaction of the drive can be a satisfaction (a pleasure on some level) and unpleasurable (on some other level) at the same time (so to speak). The unpleasure then is merely the irreconcilability of satisfaction with some other parts of the mind (it is the agent of psychic differentiation, therefore--see below).
So this means that repression is correlated with the development of the consciousness and unconscious. That part of the mind in which the drive would be satisfied is the unconscious, and that part of the mind that would experience the unpleasure--that is, a satisfaction that only increases tension--is consciousness. Primal repression differentiates the two, allowing for the formation of a set of structures (ideas) within the unconscious that are developed more and more without direct relation to their unpleasurable effect. The unpleasurable effect can then be dampened by counter-formations, or "repression proper," so that when one of these drives (or representatives of the drives, Freud shifts his view on this) appears, it can be satisfied and, at the same time, its unpleasurable effects avoided. That is, the idea that the drive is associated with can become represented in consciousness (though in a distorted fashion), without its unpleasurable affect (that is, its effect). Thus Freud will say the affect is what is subject to repression and the idea remains--both in the unconscious and (in the distorted form) in consciousness.
To inscribe this back into the problematic with which Freud started is the toughest part (Freud himself doesn't exactly do it explicitly), but which, when done, gives the full sense of the importance of repression for Freud. The organism deals with drives by transforming its world. This is because drives are excitations or pressures that the organism must get rid of (according to the principal of constancy). In the case of the repressed drive, we have an inability of the organism to transform its world, to act on the outside and thereby get rid of the tension. In fact, getting rid of the tension (letting the drive satisfy itself) would precisely cause pain, or more tension. So the organism turns inward and divides itself up instead. The result is that it transforms its world by transforming itself: it transforms the world by constructing the world for itself in which it can, at the same time, 1) answer to the demands of the drives that are repressed (by repression proper, distortion, etc.) and 2) deal with other drives (by acting on the world). This theme of inner psychic differentiation is present all throughout Freud, from the Project to the odd crust he thinks about in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.