I
Reading Notes from the book “Gaze and Voice as Love Objects”, Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek, editors. DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 1996
There is the signifying chain, reduced to its minimal features, which yields, as a result or as a leftover, the voice.
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The subject is always only represented by a signifier for another signifier, as the famous dictum goes. In itself it is without foundation and without a substance; it is a lack, an empty space necessarily implied by the nature of the signifier—such was for Lacan, as it is well known, the nature of the subject that can be assigned to structure. So the voice seems to endow this empty and negative entity with a counterpart, its “missing half,” so to speak, a “supplement” that would enable this negative being to acquire some hold in positivity, a “substance,” a relationship to presence
S’entendre parler—to hear oneself speak—is maybe the minimal definition of consciousness
Where the voice presented itself as a problem for psychoanalysis, it was always as the intractable voice of the Other that imposed itself upon the subject. In its most spectacular form, there was the extensive experience of “hearing voices,” the vast field of auditory hallucinations that imposed themselves as more real than any other voices. In a more common form, there was the voice of consciousness, telling us to do our duty, in which psychoanalysis was soon to recognize the voice of the superego—not just an internaliza-tion of the Law, but something endowed with a surplus that puts the subject into a position of ineradicable guilt: the more one obeys, the more one is guilty. To put it into the somewhat simplified form of a slogan: the surplus of the superego over the Law is precisely the surplus of the voice; the superego has a voice, the Law is stuck with the letter. There was the hypnotic voice that demanded submission, and its mechanism—the repetition of some formula that lost all meaning by being repeated—was precisely an attempt to isolate the object voice from sense.
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The commanding authority of the voice is already inscribed in the very posture of listening. As soon as one listens, one has started to obey. The verb to obey stems from French obeir, which in turn stems from Latin oboedire, to listen. One can find the same etymological connection in German, where Gehorsam, obedience, comes from horen, to listen, and in a considerable number of other languages. His Master’s Voice is thus a most appropriate emblem.
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This real (the part of reality that remains unsymbolized) returns in the guise of spectral apparitions.
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Lacan provides a precise answer to this question: (what we experience as) reality is not the “thing itself,” it is always already symbolized, constituted, structured by way of symbolic mechanisms—and the problem resides in the fact that symbolization ultimately always fails, that it never succeeds in fully “covering” the real, that it always involves some unsettled, unredeemed symbolic debt. This real (the part of reality that remains unsymbolized) returns in the guise of spectral apparitions.
II
Reading Notes from the book The Later Lacan, an introduction, edited by Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf, State University of New York Press
Subjects are not to be cured; they are neither deficient nor helpless victims of their family circumstances. We recall that Freud saw sexuality as the root cause of neurosis; but for Lacan it is the absence of sexual relation that differentiates the human subject from animals. Humans cannot behave instinctively; they need a symptom, or a construct, an invention of their own, to be in- scribed in the social bond. Unlike cognitive-behavioral therapies, for the later Lacan the symptom is thus neither to be removed nor to be cured, for the symptom is a real invention of the subject that anchors him or her in language.
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Interpretation is the unconscious itself?
Interpretation is primarily the interpretation of the unconscious, in the subjective sense of the genitive—it is the unconscious that interprets.
The unconscious interprets.
Let us go along with the paradox. The unconscious interprets, and it wants to be interpreted. The contradiction only exists for a rudimentary concept of interpretation: interpretation always calls for interpretation. To say it otherwise: to interpret is to decipher. But to decipher is to cipher again. The movement only stops on a satisfaction. This is exactly what Freud says when he inscribes the dream as discourse in the register of the primary process, as a wish fulfillment. And Lacan deciphers it for us by saying that jouissance lies in ciphering. But then—how does jouissance lie in ciphering? What is its being in ciphering? And where does it dwell in ciphering?
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To interpret like the unconscious is to remain in the service of the pleasure principle. To place oneself in the service of the reality principle does not change anything, since the reality principle itself is in the service of the pleasure principle. To interpret in the service of the pleasure principle—you needn’t look anywhere else for the principle of interminable analysis. This is not what Lacan calls “the way to a true awakening for the subject.”
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Psychosis, here as elsewhere, strips the structure bare. Just as mental automatism exposes the fundamental xenopathy of speech, so the elementary phenomenon is there to manifest the original state of the subject’s relation to lalangue. The subject knows that what is said [le dit] concerns him, that there is some signification, although he does not know which one.
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This is why, at this point precisely, as he advances in the other dimension of interpretation, Lacan resorts to Finnegans Wake, namely, to a text that unceasingly plays on the relations between speech and writing, sound and sense, a text full of condensations, equivocations, homophonies, but nevertheless has nothing to do with the old unconscious. In Finnegans Wake, every quilting point is made obsolete. This is why, despite heroic efforts, this text can neither be interpreted nor translated. That’s because it is not itself an interpretation, and it wonderfully brings the subject of reading back to perplexity as the elementary phenomenon of the subject in lalangue.
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The passion for the formations of the unconscious and the identification of the concept of the unconscious to the laws of language (metaphor and metonymy) led some of Lacan’s students to an erratic use of homophony, transforming in the worst cases the psychoanalytical treatment into an exchange of formations of the unconscious, those of the analyst coming into rivalry with those of the analysand.
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So the unconscious is not the unknown that all psychologies happily accommodate; it is primarily of the order of encounter and revelation; it is not the expression of feelings. Thoughts carry it, but it is primarily explosion, perplexity. This is even why it has an ethical status. Freud showed it clearly, for example, in 1925: “Obviously, one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. What else is one to do with them? Unless the content of the dream (rightly understood) is inspired by alien spirits, it is a part of my own being.”
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The only illness we suffer from as speaking beings is the one introduced into the living by the parasitism of the signifier. Lacan spoke of language as a cancer and evoked the virulence of logos. He defined the unconscious as the effects of speech on the subject, and he showed that the Freudian clinic developed the incidences of the illness of the signifier.
III
Reading Notes from the book Hearing Voices, The Histoires, Causes and Meanings of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations. Simon McCarthy-Jones, Cambridge University Press, 2012
Freud (1856–1939), the creator of psychoanalysis, was, argues John Irving (2011), ‘a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist’. Freud’s stories were to become highly influential. Freud himself had voice-hearing experiences. He recorded how ‘During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city – I was a young man at the time – I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice’ (Freud, 1901/1958, p. 261). Although Freud was originally neurologically-orientated, when his idol, the neurologist Charcot, put forth the proposal that ideas themselves could cause bodily symptoms, Freud correspondingly also moved from neurological-based models of mental disorder to psychological causes based in the person’s mental life (Webster, 1996). For Freud, the development of the ego normally occurred under pressure from the real world, with the ego remaining loyal to external perceptual reality (Eigen, 2005). However, Freud believed that if there was a failure of reality testing by the ego of the person, then hearing voices could result.
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The influence of psychoanalysis began to fade as the century progressed, though, with many writers today dismissing it as ‘only a historical curiosity of the 20th century, like animal magnetism and phrenology’ (Noll, 2007, p. 39). Whilst many would argue that this was a case of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater, in reality the shower curtains were also stolen and the bathroom set on fire. However, despite psychoanalysis being a four-letter word to many in the mind sciences today, the ideas of Jung in particular can be seen to be at the heart of many of the ideas in the Hearing Voices Movement today.
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Bentall noted the work of the Dutch social psychiatrist Marius Romme, who since the 1980s has argued that voice-hearers are more in need of emancipation than cure (Chapter 12). The work of Romme, and the ensuing Hearing Voices Movement, led to a significant shift in how voices were understood in the last decades of the twentieth century, and how they are seen today.
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Loss of consensual reality: qualitative studies show voice-hearers can report that when their voices start they feel like they have lost the sense of living in the same world as everyone else.
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Thus, voices in themselves may not be pathological, but the inability to cope with them or dysfunctional coping may result in a state that can be labeled illness. In this way recovery may not be a matter of changing oneself from a voice-hearer into a non-voice-hearer, but changing from being a patient voice-hearer into a healthy voice-hearer. That this could validly be considered recovery is what Romme and colleagues have referred to as the emancipation of voice-hearers (Chapter 3; Romme et al., 2009). Given that Romme and colleagues’ work on recovery is based on their personal and clinical experience, as well as individual case-studies…
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Given the role of environmental events in the aetiology of voice hearing, this suggests, as Read, Bentall & Fosse (2009) have argued, that there is the urgent need for more research into the social and psychological causes of AVHs (Auditory and Visual Hallucinations), within an epigenetic framework, rather than context-less brain research. In this sense, given that the 1990s were labeled the Decade of the Brain, it would be nice to think that this current decade could be the Decade of the Person in the World. Of course, given the powerful forces with interests in maintaining a focus on the brain, rather than the world people are living in, I suspect this is unlikely to happen. Although a model of voices solely focused on the brain is bad science, it is good politics. Ideally, an epigenetic model which considers the more distal causes of these events (the socio-economic factors that seed such experiences) should lead us to consider ‘treating’ our society, as well as the distressed individual. Rather than continually fishing drowning people out of rivers, we may wish to go upstream and see who or what is pushing them into the river in the first place. And stop them.
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As McGruder puts it, ‘When humans do not assume that they have rather complete control of their experiences, they do not so deeply fear those who appear to have lost it’. Furthermore, we should note the society that a biomedical disease model emerges from. It is a society which likes to focus on explanations of behaviour at the level of the individual, rather than at macro-level social explanations, and which is built on a capitalist base which has a powerful financial and political interest in medicalising distress (McGruder, 2002; Smail, 2005
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If spontaneous thoughts generated by default network activity were to be the raw material of some AVHs, then factors that increase default network activity should be linked to increased levels of AVHs. Thus, given that loneliness and isolation appear to be likely to increase spontaneous inner mentation, we would predict these would be associated with AVHs, which indeed they are. In terms of existing theories, the concept of the default network could clearly be profitably employed in conjunction with both Hoffman’s social de-afferentation model (Chapter 10; Hoffman, 2007 – Afferentation: The sum total of sensory input from a body part or region.) and his unintentional thought model (Hoffman, 1986). Yet we are still talking about thought; how might memory play a role here?
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An obvious problem is that it assumes that there is a core self, which many philosophers of mind would disagree with, instead arguing that there is simply a narrative centre of gravity (Dennett, 1991) which solders thoughts into a coherent but illusory sense of self.
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Here we may return to argument from Chapter 9 that voices may be experienced as non-self produced because they (and indeed all thoughts) are non-self produced. Stephens & Graham (2000), drawing on Frankfurt’s (2007) observation as noted earlier (Chapter 9), that some thoughts are not thought by us, but only found to be incurring in us, to conclude that we are just passive bystanders to some of our thoughts and that there are thoughts which are not ones ‘we think at all, but rather thought which we find occurring in us’ (p. 59, emphasis in original). They conclude that the sense of mental agency for our thoughts comes from whether or not a person is convinced that such thoughts represent his intentional state (i.e. his own beliefs and desires). If we are alienated from thoughts, then AVHs result. What this account implies is that thoughts start off not being ours, and that we create mental agency for this by working them into ourselves at a later time. This can be tied into a Buddhist approach in which there are ‘thoughts without a thinker’ (Epstein, 1999). Indeed, a greater appreciation of Buddhist philosophy of mind may help voice-hearers cope better with their voices/thoughts, and indeed this forms the backbone of third-generation cognitive behavioural therapy in which mindfulness plays a central role.
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Furthermore, as Dein et al. (2010) have recommended, the initial psychiatric assessment for voice-hearers in distress should be ‘far more than a symptom inventory; it needs to be, wherever possible, an enquiry into meaning’ (p. 64, emphasis added)
IV
Reading Notes from the book Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity: studies of verbal hallucinations. Ivan Leudar and Philip Thomas, Routledge, 2000
However, note that psychoanalysis brought the benefit of directing psychological thought and attention to the problem of meaningful connections and the inner life history (what we would call narrative) of the individual.
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The majority of people who hear voices nowadays are under psychiatric care and on neuroleptic medication. Their experiences have been interpreted within a medial framework which regards voices as a symptom of serious mental illness. This framework precludes any exploration of the content of voices, other than that which the psychiatrist considers necessary to establish those features which she regards as important in establishing a diagnosis. Psychiatrists are only interested in the small number of limited features of voices necessary to make a diagnosis. Some types of voices form part of the group of first-rank symptoms described by Schneider (1957), Schneider thought that the presence of one of more of these symptoms, in the absence of organic brain disease, indicated a diagnosis of schizophrenia. FRS include three types of auditory hallucinations: hearing voices speaking your thoughts out loud; hearing two or more voices arguing or having a discussion about you in the third person; hearing one of voices carrying on a running commentary about your thoughts or actions.
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Voices therefore do not just tell the voice hearers what to do; they also judge persons and their conduct… In pragmatic terms, the “commenting” can mean that voices either critique plans and intention and propose alternatives, or judge actions.
