Psychic Apparatus

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PSYCHIC APPARATUS

The notion of psychic apparatus (or of the intellect) is common in Freud's work from the very start (cf. for example, the article of 1898b, "The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness"). It appears continuously from then on, and is the title of Chapter I of one of his last texts, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940a [1938]). It was borrowed from the vocabulary of nineteenth-century psychologists who were seeking to accord to animal and human mental functioning a representation conforming to the exigencies of the natural sciences (physiology and especially physics).

Considered from a static point of view, the Freudian versions of the psychic apparatus correspond to what was subsequently called the "topographies." The first one (yet to be designated by this word) appears in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) and essentially comprises the distinction between the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious. The second topography (cf. The Ego and the Id, 1923b) distinguishes between id, ego, and superego, which are depicted in a diagram reminiscent of an egg, that was to be reworked into a slightly different form in Seminar XXXI of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933a [1932]).

Still from the start the notion of psychic apparatus also pointed to a dynamic perspective: it presupposed something that functions. The schema outlined in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams occupies a place within the time's general psychological framework concerned with the passage from perception to movement (to be found, for example, in Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory of 1896, and which corresponds with experimental psychology's stimulus-response pairing). Freud's aim was to demonstrate how "unconscious systems," which he was not yet referring to as "complexes," acted upon the information gathered by the perceptual apparatus to create representations and conscious movement, and in particular, in this respect, oneiric representations. Likewise the group comprising the three instances—id, ego, and superego—was also to have permitted an accounting of psychic functioning, in particular the resolution of certain difficulties regarding the unconscious and the non-conscious. Freud never specifically says whether the id, ego, and superego were to replace the schema in The Interpretation of Dreams, thus rendered obsolete, or only to add another perspective to it.

In more precise terms, the Freudian notion of psychic apparatus entails the idea—borrowed from physics—of a sort of "energic economy." Although he never attempted to specify the precise nature of sexual energy (as would Wilhelm Reich), nor, even less, that of psychic energy in general, Freud, (inspired by Gustav Fechner), conceived the workings of the human psyche from the perspective of the flow, equilibrium, and transformation of a certain "energy." The "pleasure principle" articulated the idea that when tension in the psychic organism reaches a certain level, a release will ensue which is lived subjectively in the form of pleasure, but whose objective effect is to lower tension and avoid the dangers of overflowing. Although the pleasure principle itself derives from thermodynamics, the notion of sublimation, which envisions the transformation of a socially-incompatible sexual "energy" into socially-acceptable activities, originates in chemistry.

Finally it is worthwhile to note that some of the most suggestive representations of the psychic apparatus refer to models taken from optics (cf. for example the passage cited above from The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as the Question of Lay Analysis, 1926e). The fact that Freud sometimes uses the adjective psychisch (psychic), sometimes seelisch (relating to the intellect), does not seem significant, as the two words may be considered synonymous.

The notion of psychic apparatus and the uses Freud puts it to raise the issue of the value models taken from the physical sciences have for psychoanalysis. Some, such as George Politzer and Jean-Paul Sartre, have concluded them to be an inexcusable misunderstanding of the psyche's specificity. Indeed as Sartre says in Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) concerning the notion of defensive mechanism, that such a representation "burdens the workings of the ego with an a priori inertia." If, as Georges Politzer reasons, the psyche as such is a kind of drama, no apparatus could represent it. These arguments could be countered by noting that these are metaphors—that topography—despite its etymology—does not imply the brain as locale, but only a "locus of the psyche" as such, and that from a dynamic point of view the flows and transformations of energy are not physiological or chemical processes. Freud was perfectly aware of these difficulties and explained himself clearly, for example concerning the problems posed by the visualization of the psyche (cf. New Introductory lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1933a, xxxi). Nevertheless for him, the representations he called "psychic apparatus" seemed to be much more than merely images, useful but misleading, which as Plotinus and Bergson have taught, should be employed with other images, incompatible with them, to avoid one's being duped by them. Freud seems to have tried to forge a path between the neurological perspective, where psychic functions are supposedly lodged in their cerebral headquarters (a view he no longer shared at the time he invented psychoanalysis), and the phenomenological perspective which excluded anything to do with topographical location, functioning, or mechanical operation. He adopted this perspective at times, furthermore, but not in those texts where the notion of psychic apparatus intervened. Still, this path seems so narrow we may wonder if it is navigable. Without going so far as to challenge its legitimacy, we may at least consider it—in Freud's own words—"provisional."

Yvon BrÈs

See also: Agency; Consciousness; Discharge; Disorganization; Dynamic point of view, the; Ego; Ego and the Id, The ; Excitation; Id; Interpretation of Dreams, The ; Metapsychology; Mnemic trace, memory trace; Model; "Note upon the 'Mystic Writing Pad,' A"; "Outline of Psychoanalysis, An"; Perception-consciousness (Pcpt.-Cs); Pleasure principle; Primary process, secondary process; Principle of consistency; Protective shield; Psi system; Quantitative, qualitative; Regression; Structural theories; Superego; Topographical point of view; Unconscious, the.