or: What does Freud mean ‘by projection of a surface onto a surface’?
[this is still a draft ...]
About 35 years ago I stumbled across an expression in reading
Freud, which intuitively made a deep impression on me: “the ego is a projection
of a surface onto a surface”. I have not forgotten about it, and it has been
engraved in my mind since then, although I have never been able to locate it
since then (if you can help me find the citation, I would be very grateful – actually I have now found a
reference in Boadella, which I need to pursue – see bottom of doc!!).
I remember having a sense that here Freud was onto some
deep, precious recognition. But my mind could not get its head around it at
all. In those days it constituted a defeat if my mind could not understand something.
But on this occasion, I gracefully admitted defeat: this thing was just beyond
me. I just knew that a powerful, educated, disciplined mind had here formulated
a stroke of genius. I cannot even be sure that I correctly remember the actual
phrase, in its word-for-word detail, so in writing about it I am aware that I
am pushing the boat out.
It has taken me about 25 years or more to get anywhere
close, but over the last 10 years I think I have begun to understand it. And
not only to understand it, but - in my ever humble way – to even improve on it,
or so I fancy.
Freud was a child of his times, and a mental and
psychological giant, but it is also true to say that in those heady
fin-de-siecle days and the decades that followed, he - and those around him - were
taking baby steps in their thinking about the phenomena of the psyche. They were severely hampered by
thinking within, as well as struggling against, the dominant zeitgeist of their time. So much of
their thought – the distinctions they made, the categories they formulated,
leading right into their conceptualisations and models – much of this has stood
the test of time and shaped the 20th century and its consciousness
and thus human evolution, but it also led to all kinds of intellectual contortions
and misleading complications, many of which are to some extent unnecessary.
Of course, they were trying to do justice to the complexity
of the psyche, and so there is a
level of reality where our models do need to match that intricate, quick-changing
mercurial complexity. But the problem is not that the models are complicated –
no, something much more vexing is going on: in trying to make sense of our
perceptions of ourselves (and the human mind and psyche in general), our
own internal conflicts and our ambivalent reactions towards the intensity of emotional
and psychological experience – between the ever-present spectrum of pain and
pleasure - enter our thought process and skew
it. So it’s not surprising that our minds come up with ambivalent and confusing
ideas – this is true for you and me, as well as great minds like Freud’s.
In pursuit of the noble adage "Know Thyself", and
in directing our gaze towards our subjective experience, the conflictedness of
that experience affects our capacity to see and to think. Therefore, as a
consequence, our thoughts, ideas and models tend to reflect the conflicts that
they are embedded in and arise from - rather than constituting any clear, let
alone objective, perception or interpretation of the psychological facts.
In other words: our mental processes are parallel to our
psychological reality. Fritz Perls was polemic about it in saying: all reasons
are lies. But he was onto something: our thinking is not as clear and realistic
and objective as it fancies itself. Our thought process is subtly influenced
and subverted by the emotional agendas and avoidances which it fancies itself
to be devoid of. Thinking is often born out of emotional defensiveness; or at
the very least, it can acquire emotionally defensive functions. Our thoughts
move in characterological grooves, on tracks which we take for granted and
therefore don’t take into account and don’t factor in. Not one of our thoughts
can be presumed to be free of such defensive functions – the defensiveness does
not announce itself through the content
of the thought. The thought itself – more likely than not – is valid and true,
or at least has a truth content. The defensive function is visible only through
the context and the emotional/psychological effect
of the thought – the bodymind state that results from the thought; or the
relational effects, both internal and
external, that are precipitated by the thought.
The history of psychology and psychotherapy is full of
models that are pervaded by - and are manifestations of - a fundamental
emotional ambivalence: on the one hand, we want to, need to, are desperate to
recognise and understand ourselves, right down into the depths of our psyche; to get some insight into those irrational
forces beyond our awareness and control that drive our thoughts, feelings and
behaviour - apparently like Greek gods, constantly and invisibly interfering in
human destinies, but without human rhyme or reason. Such understanding can only
flower when it is based on radical openness and acceptance: an agenda-free
phenomenological enquiry into ‘what is’ – attending to ‘the body in the body’,
‘the feelings in the feelings’ – in the felicitous phrase of the Buddha’s sutra
on mindfulness. Freud’s main focus was not ‘healing’ of the psyche, but a scientific
version of ‘know thyself’ (a courageous enquiry not suited to the
faint-hearted, weak-willed or woolly-minded which would then have
anxiety-reducing and healing side-effects).
On the other hand, we're desperate to overcome those forces
we are at the mercy of – to gain control over these irrational forces of the psyche and appropriate them and turn
them to our ego’s advantage, and so edge closer to establishing a delusional
stability and identity and maintaining an apparently secure, fixed and invulnerable
self.
Our thinking and our models are therefore to a significant
degree compelled by the impulse
not
to understand ourselves, deeply and truly, in a spirit of acceptance and
surrender, but : to eradicate the pain, conquer the vulnerability, transcend
the helplessness
to
overcome of vulnerability, our sense of feeling at the mercy of the irrational forces, emotional pain.
In short, our ego is conflicted: our conscious efforts are
pervaded and guided and compelled and underpinned by a fundamental ambivalence
in relation to psychological reality. The ego is compelled to find its roots
and connect to them, to pursue the cracks down to their roots, to root out its
limitations, heal the splits, cover up the cracks, and ultimately to transcend
the prison of itself - at the same time as being compelled to perpetuate its
existence into immortality. That
ambivalence underpins and underlies all of our Western thinking, and therefore hampers
our grasp not only of our internal world, but - of course - reality altogether.
So what was that statement by Freud that had left that
lasting impression on me?
When talking about the relationship between the Ego and the
Id, he said something to the effect of: the ego is a projection of a surface
onto a surface.
Taking into account that we are here at the beginning of the
20th century, in an age of imperialism before the First World War, with the
vacuum that Nietzsche’s death of God had created still haunting the Western
mind, and at the height of positivism and materialism, with science about to
take over as the new God, Freud is very much thinking in terms of physics –
models of material reality that were taken as understood.
Making sense of psychological process by taking recourse to
supposedly equivalent physical processes, on the one hand using physics as
metaphor, but thereby treating them as much more analogous than they are. The
metaphors become concepts which in turn become frames – Freud’s topographical
model reflecting assumptions of archaeology and geology. Sometimes those
analogies were made explicit – like Freud’s vision that some day all psychology
might be reduced to neurology. With the photographic camera holding sway as one
of the brave new advances of modernity, he’s taking recourse to a process of
projection: the Id as the driving force of psychological process, ever
energetic, it is like a light source projecting its energy onto the mind as a
receptive and passive screen; with the animal-Id driving and radiating its
instinctiveness; and consciousness as the apprehension of that energy and the
mental manifestation and image and thought translation of it.
So Freud implies that the surface of the Id is like the
screen, onto which the film - moving images of the drives - are being
projected. Remembering that Freud was deeply committed to neurology, and
finding ways of rooting psychological process in the nervous system, he is
trying to find a model for the mechanism by which basic unconscious
physiological processes in the body are linked with and can manifest as
psychological and mental and conscious processes and consciousness. He
understands the body as a homeostatic system that goes through cycles of
excitation, which arise in the Id, as instinctual processes. How do these
unconscious, physiological processes become conscious? How does the human mind
become aware of them?
Remembering also that at this point Freud is very much
embedded in his topological model where the Id, the Ego and Superego are like
geological layers - making therapy a bit like archaeology - it is easy to see
why he thinks of the interface between the Id and the Ego as a surface: the
forces within the Id are manifesting as arousal at that surface; this
excitation is then available to be perceived by mental consciousness, and
translated into images, thoughts and self-reflection. So whilst it is not difficult
to see why Freud thinks of the Id as having a surface which the ego is
watching, a bit like a film on a screen, what is more difficult to grasp is why
he is speaking of the projection of that surface onto a surface. How does the second surface come in and what is it?
Here we come to an interesting point, where a whole paradigm
clash manifests. On the one hand, Freud is deeply committed and embedded in the
project of modernity, where mental observation is objective and thoughts are a
direct objective reflection of what's out there. The Enlightenment, with its
worshipping of reason, manifests in the belief (or we might say: the delusion),
that the human mind has evolved to the point (with Western males at the
pinnacle of that evolution, closest to a male God at the top of the pyramid),
where they can see, think about, understand and ultimately control the movement
of the universe. But whilst Freud cannot help being part of that compulsion and
project, in everything he does he also undermines it. Along with Einstein and
others, Freud is instrumental in puncturing the delusions of modernity and helping
Western consciousness to its knees and to crumble (Freud's work effected a
profound revolution in man's attitude towards, and comprehension of, his mental
processes, constituting after Copernicus and Darwin, a third blow to man's
self-esteem - See Stephen Jay Gould's “An Urchin in the Storm”, p. 214, for a
development of Freud's "three great discontinuities”). Freud himself
believed that his theories had struck but the latest blow against human vanity,
the first being Copernican cosmology, which had displaced humankind from the
centre of the astronomical universe, and the second, Darwinian evolutionary
theory, which had removed it from the centre of the biological universe. By
proposing that humans had evolved from animal species, Darwinism denied the
biological uniqueness of humankind and asserted that human beings were but one
of many species of animals. Just as Darwin destroyed the basic opposition
between human and animal by placing human beings within a biological continuum,
Freud similarly destroyed the traditional basic opposition between sanity and
madness by locating normality on a continuum. (Anthropologists, as Levi-Straus then
proposed, similarly replaced a traditional western opposition of civilized and
primitive humanity with a conception of culture that places all social organisations
upon or within continua).
The surface of the second surface he is talking about is the
intuition that the mind is not an
objective perceiver and reflector – not simply an accurate and reliable mirror -
of what is ‘out there’ (or ‘in here’). Freud's key insight is that the
supposedly rational mind is at the mercy of unconscious feelings and thoughts,
and driven and directed by them all the more, the more it fancies itself above
it. Already in his early theorising, Freud consequently does justice to this in
his own thinking. He never fully succumbs to the promises and delusions of the
Western mind. In himself or in others, he has a healthy, fundamental suspicion
of every thought, including his own. In this regard, he is the father of
post-modernity. He does not think of the mind as a single, perceiving point,
like a mirror or an accurate radio receiver. No, he thinks of the mind as a
surface: yes, as a screen, on which the unconscious conflicts are being played
out; but as a screen which is affected by what it reflects, a screen that
morphs under pressure of what it perceives and portrays.
He does not think
of the mind as outside of the bodymind process, he does not succumb to an idea of the mind as the Archimedean lever which
from its outside, dissociated, separated vantage point can leverage the whole
of reality according to its whim. No, he thinks of the mind as a receptive
surface, subject to the pressures of what it is perceiving, and therefore
inexorably connected with it, and responsive as well as reactive to it.
On a deep level we can say that Freud has an intuition that
transcends the subject/object split (this is not to deny the many aspects in
which Freud is caught in perpetuating that very split). There is a long
tradition of people trying to make up their minds as to whether Freud belongs
in the first or second camp. The crux and the genius of Freud is that he, of
course, simultaneously belongs into both camps, being deeply conflicted, but
beginning to notice, attend to and formulate the conflict he experiences and
recognises himself as caught in. The paradigm clash runs right through him, but
his genius is that he is beginning to cotton onto it, recognise it, inhabit it
reflectively.
On the one hand, he is the ultimate perpetrator of
modernity; on the other hand he is the beginning of the end of it, its undoing
and deconstruction.
Freud's formulation of the relationship between the Id and
the Ego, as a projection of a surface onto a surface, manifests this paradigm
clash in a nutshell. He formulates, and his formulations are circumscribed by,
a way of thinking in terms of projectors and screens that is very much trapped
in the subject object/split; and in terms of the relationship between
physiology, nervous system and the soma on the one hand and the mind,
consciousness and psyche on the
other, in the body/mind split. But what he's formulating at the same time is an
intuition not exactly of their mutuality, but their intricate
interconnectedness. He is speaking, thinking and formulating it from within the
dissociated disembodied mind that is beginning to intuit its own limitations
and turning towards the embodied roots of its own disembodiment.
In the language and formulations that have evolved in my
mind over the last 15 years, having the benefit of complexity theory and 20
years of living with the idea of parallel process, I prefer to formulate Freud’s
idea through the notion of the ‘fractal self’.
The idea of the fractal self combines integral thinking with
parallel process. It draws on Wilber’s integral theory, especially as it
applies to the body/mind and subject/object split, but goes beyond it in a
significant way: by drawing on the idea of parallel process, we can make much
more precise and meaningful statements about how the different levels and
layers which integral theory describes in evolutionary terms, are actually
related and linked in the complexity of the human bodymind. We can make much
more useful statements both about the pathologies and contortions of the human
bodymind, as well as about the paradoxical and often self-defeating process
towards integration and wholeness. For a description and mapping of the overall
spiritual individuation process, Wilber’s distinction of the various layers and
states and lines may be sufficient, and integral theory does a good job of it
(probably the best we have currently available, when we include its interested
critics and detractors).
However, the more we get into the nitty-gritty of the
individual human and how they are trapped in self-replicating contortions, the
more we get down to the complexities of the individual subjective human psyche, as therapists do, the more we
need an experience-near understanding of these vicissitudes. We then need to
understand the detail of how the various layers of body and mind are linked and
how patterns conspire to maintain the status quo within characterological
fixations. How are old wounds and traumas embodied, carried from the past into
the present into the future and – most importantly – just how do they replicate
themselves? How come the mind is helpless, even when having understood the
origins and manifestations of a characterological pattern, to actually change
that pattern? Why is the mind helpless to change those patterns? Why is
understanding usually not enough?
Many, if not most, modes and modalities of therapy are still built upon the
mind as the supposed agent of change. Most talking therapies inherit the legacy
of the 19th century, and that half of Freud's work which was caught in
modernity. Many, if not most, modes and models of therapy are
not suspicious enough of their own
thinking, concepts and theories, both in general as well is in the nitty-gritty
of a particular client-therapist relationship. We need to understand more the
other half of Freud, who
did
recognise the mind as a parallel process, as the reflection of a surface onto a
surface.
The more we can recognise, and more importantly, surrender
to parallel process, the more the notion of enactment, being caught in
patterns, whether we have any awareness or understanding of them or not, becomes
significant. The notion of enactment, as parallel process like infinite dominoes
replicating a pattern, regardless of the mind’s understanding or interference,
is much closer to the reality of our vulnerability and susceptibility to these
patterns.