Hallucinatory and Verbal Modes of Thinking

Abstract

At the beginning of Freud and the Scene of Writing Derrida announced the way he would use Freud: “to locate in Freud’s texts (...) those elements of psychoanalysis which can only uneasily be contained within logocentric closure” (Derrida, 1978, p. 249). In this paper I want to take over Derrida’s reading angle under the form of a question: the question of what escapes the logos in Freud’s work?

I tackle this question at two different levels:
1. The level of Freud’s model: in Freud’s model of the psyche what are the modes of functioning that cannot be verbalized?
2. The level of Freud’s formulation: in Freud’s writings what is not exclusively formalized under a verbal form?
In the first part I identify within the hypothesis that Freud imagined to describe the genesis of the psyche: a primary hallucinatory mode of thinking and a secondary verbal mode of thinking. I try to show how the creation of unconscious presentations by the hallucinatory mode of thinking operates beyond the logos. Moreover I propose that meaning produced by the verbal mode of thinking covers and hides the hallucinatory mode of thinking, which would constitute a form of functioning of repression. In the second part I try to define the ways Freud invented a form of writing in order to model hallucinatory modes of thinking. I propose to name metapsychological writing this form of writing that uses scientific formulations, graphics, analogies and myths. I argue that what is at stake in the invention of a metapsychological writing is the creation of a conceptual framework to express clinical phenomena specific to psychoanalysis.