Freud and the Body

Alan Rowan

Lacan constantly sought to theorise the body; from the imaginary body that founds the ego to the drive-body, to the body as a Real of “enjoying substance” that is contingently linked to the Symbolic. However, other analysts, notably Klein, downplayed the importance of the body in favour of a psychologising move in which the infant’s body is only experienced, is only thinkable, via its experience of the mother’s body as introjected libidinal object(s) that, in turn, underpin the infant’s earliest fantasy life, meaning that it is via fantasy that the body is grasped and represented. In this context it seems to clarify Freud’s thinking on this topic.

 Here an early reference occurs in his correspondence with Fliess (June 1894) which shows that the psyche and soma were for Freud independent fields if also capable of interaction:

“There is a kind of conversion in anxiety neurosis just as there is in hysteria … but in hysteria it is a psychical excitation that takes a wrong path exclusively into the somatic field, whereas here it is a physical tension, which cannot enter the psychical field and therefore remains on the physical path. The two are combined extremely often” (1950, p.195).

Moreover, one can point here to the primary importance Freud gave to sexuality as precisely an organic substrate, a drive, which he defined as: “… a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic … as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (1915a, p.121-2). Here the source of the drive is always a state of bodily excitement whereby, “On its path from its source to its aim the drive becomes operative psychically” (1933, p.96). It can be further noted that the unconscious - as an autonomous structure - was precisely what for Freud mediated between the drive-body and conscious awareness. A final quote: “There can be no question but that the libido has somatic sources, that it streams to the ego from various organs and parts of the body … though in fact the whole body is an erotogenic zone” (1938a, p.151).

References


Freud, S. (1915a). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE 14

Freud, S. (1933). New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. SE 22

Freud, S. (1938a). An Outline of Psychoanalysis. SE 23

Freud, S. (1950 [1892-99]). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE 1

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