Translation by Annabelle J. de Croÿ
Introduction by Harriet Margolis
Uploaded 16 April 1999 | Modified 20 April 1999
Neurosis, blockage, projection
“If you cannot love me,” says the naïve lover, “at least help me to cure myself.” And he was never more ill. “Flee me,” replies the one he loves. But how to flee when one is not yet cured? The man in love should flee himself, flee this image that dwells within him. All help steals away, both within and without.
Like love, neurosis seems to be without remedy. I shun this life in which I suffer, but it is I who make it bad; neurosis patiently recreates about it this same unhappiness, this same failure of which it will later be called the victim, and is entangled in the web that it has woven. Erecting its barriers itself, it is obliged to flee into phantasy, symptoms, or dreams. One cannot penetrate [investir] [1] it by attacking it from without, because it ceaselessly creates for itself an exterior as hostile as its interior, nor reach it from within itself, because it refuses life and its struggles.
What can be done with this sick man who cherishes his disorder? Nothing, if he truly cherishes it. Everything, if this disorder is experienced as the other side of well-being. I never choose to suffer for suffering’s sake. Perhaps I have not even chosen anything. The failure and suffering of the sick man are only failure and suffering in our eyes. He sees them differently. If he seeks failure, it is not out of a taste for failure but to appease his remorse or to justify his laziness. He fails to achieve happiness but has never stopped seeking it. A deceptive game played by a sick consciousness: a slave to the pleasure principle, it refuses effort, waiting, and work, and allows its failure to occur in order to take refuge in dreams. Thus the neurotic attains only the slightest degree of well-being. But it is the highest degree that his weakness lets him achieve.
Is it truly a matter of weakness? Janet, for whom the neurotic man, impoverished and weakened, is literally economically weak, believed it to be so. The sick man simplifies his lifestyle, squeezes in his psychic budget. Frustrated with his returns, he pulls back his expenditure, renounces all activity, wears himself out in fruitless attempts at action. Like Spinoza, Janet sees man in terms of strength and weakness, of powerfulness and impotence. The inside follows the fate of the outside; cessation of activity reveals the death of strength. The cure will be limited, at least in theory, to a new arrangement of my budget: wiser savings of action, liquidation of old debts. Energy is lost or gained; it is not conserved.
Freud’s universe is more stable. There strength is never lost, at most it is distanced. A hidden dam prevents it from flowing out. My strength is there , visible in [à ] this duel that I impose on myself. It is there, blocked against me. I shall have to tear it from its infantile fixations, from its archaic regressions; I shall make it confront the days and their works. I shall have to give birth to it, as it were. Stubbornly pulling against itself, separated from me, my power aped impotence. Everything was turned away, but nothing was lost. Along the way I became exhausted from building this new Great Wall of China. I put my own hand to it; it is I who provided the stones. I shall have to throw them far away, to unblock my knotted strength.
Projection in hatred and in transference
It is truly a matter of projection, but this projection is not just one thing . [2] I can attribute to another my own feelings, ascribe to him my own faults. I can imagine him the author of my failures, see in his strength the excuse for my weakness. I shall project onto him the image of my disorder. I shall attack believing that I am defending myself, forgetting that I delivered the blows. Thus I shall escape the nameless anguish, the obscure ruminations in which I threw at myself the blocked game of my strength. I shall attack instead of attacking myself. Thereby I shall gain first of all a little more happiness. One fights badly at night; it is good to attack this or that enemy, truly real, very visible before the projector of hatred. Totally floundering among his first failures, the timid man does not have time to hate; it is with himself that he is angry. Hatred will free him, at least ostensibly, from the wrappings and shackles; he will stop suffocating in the asphyxia of auto-aggression. The walls of his prison recede. He finally has some elbow-room for his combat. Projection turns timidity into hatred; it finally puts my own strength to work in the world.
However, I find in it only breathing space. As in the tale by Poe, moving walls close in around me. I shall accuse another in order to divert my remorse, but new remorse, heavier, will follow my calumny. I shall accuse more violently to ward off the resurgence of my increased guilt. I have not suppressed, I have simply delayed the aggressive return of my blocked strength. The counter-blow comes from further away, and also hits harder.
I thought to have thrown my captive energy outside of me. But here it is thrown back at me. An infernal circle of projection and hatred. The more I hate, says Baruk, [3] the more I tend to punish myself; increased, my remorse engenders new hatred. At the limit this projection runs aground in delirium. The timid man slides down into melancholy, and from melancholy to persecution. An alibi is not a transference.
The psychoanalytic cure permits only a stable projection. In it I transfer onto the analyst my infantile reactions. I replay, in front of this impassive and seemingly translucent partner, the conflicts whose resolution had been closed to me formerly by some shock, the dramas whose décor I reconstituted, repeating them in both senses of the word. [4] I fight my first campaign on him. In front of this benevolent father I deal with my claims, the claims of a frustrated kid. I finally attain free air; I can walk without fear.
Filmic transference/analytical transference
One can only handle [manier]objects. Hatred, false projection had not been able to transform my complexes into objects or to allow me to handle them. Hardly were they thrown outside me, when my guilt took them up again of its own accord. I could not handle them; I remained too caught up in them; they put me back under their influence, came back periodically to the fold. At last, through transference, I escape this deceptive coming and going. Projection takes place there in a single direction, as if on a one-way street. The icy impersonality of the analyst and the impassivity of this untouchable adversary prevent any reprecussion, ward off any trick of the mirror. My eyes shall not see this witness; I must turn my back on him; I will not make him my rival; I will not show him my face. In the shelter of his absent presence, I can finally regain mastery of myself.
In an earlier study, [5] we contrasted two forms of identification, one healthy, the other neurotic. In neurosis I turn my model into a super-ego; I block my strength against myself; I identify myself only with his shadow. Thus the child whips himself in order to assume the rôle of the father. Filmic identification, related to hypnosis and dreams, is supposedly situated at the half-way point: closer by its nocturnal setting to the magical relationship with fantasy; closer by the content of the types that it assimilates to the fertile contagion of a gesture. Can cinema, like the analyst, use influence in order to render influence impossible? The sick man’s identification with the doctor provides in this sense the surest guarantee. Healed, the sick man “takes away his doctor in his pocket,” as Lacan so beautifully puts it. But this identification is a sign of the cure, not the means of the cure. It supposes that the transference has been completed. Once the links between transference and projection have been recognised, the problem presents itself more clearly. In its present state, can the cinema support the projection of neurotic complexes? What would this type of projection be like?
Two conditions are necessary: that the complexes be given form, expelled from their dark depths, presented from the outside like manageable objects [objets maniables]; that, once projected outside me, and set up in a sort of operating room, they be dissolved and lost there forever. All repercussions, all comings and goings must be exorcised here. Hatred gave me a deformed reflection, immediately taken up on my own account. Transference demands more than these mirror tricks.
The filmic attitude satisfies, we believe, the first condition; it does not entirely contradict the second. Despite everything, the filmic image remains outside me; it gives an objective body to my dreams, projects them in front of me, too familiar strangers. I can detach them from me, treat them as manageable objects. In order to exorcise them I shall only have to shut my eyes. Present formerly within me, the screen now represents them to me. I know with whom I am dealing; I no longer fight blindly against these unknown people who used to haunt my house. I shall be dealing with an equal power.
Filmic “projection” and Freudian “projection” are confused at this level. Before they existed my complexes were present to me without my having the right to see them; I was endlessly confronted with the unknown. The screen gives them form, situates them in a world, which, although mine, remains the world. They escape me and I escape them. The hands that serve at the Beast’s banquets adopt the complexes that used to weigh on mine. The filmic image fascinates me enough for the transfusion to be possible and for my hands to entrust my burden to its hands; it remains foreign enough to me for me to be able to disown what I put there. Too complex a fascination would exclude this fraudulent gesture by a hand that denies the presents that it has made. Incomplete, filmic hypnosis plays on its very ambiguity. The image is not entirely mine; at least it is sufficiently so for projection to occur. I keep my accomplice, the image of the dream, at arm’s length [à bout de bras]; it had nothing to teach me, neither could it take anything from me. The screen, more so than an accomplice, is supposed to be a partner, more than a figurehead, a receiver of stolen goods. A marvellous receiver whom I shall never ask to return my goods; who, if I ask for them back, will return them to me for a few hours, the time that the screen lights up, then is extinguished. Can he, however, take them back completely whole? Herein lies the problem of transference. More than through his image, the analyst acted through the situation that his presence engenders. A situation that is sufficiently favourable for resistance to drop and for my complexes to be revealed; sufficiently austere, too, to oblige me to take myself in hand on my own, and pass from the realm of pleasure into the realm of reality. Cured, I shall leave the analyst without regret.
We believe that it is neither possible nor desirable for filmic transference to attain such rigour. Identification, of whatever kind it is here, prevents the screen from effecting that liberation. When it is hypnotic, it will impose on me a lasting fascination that will survive the film and lead a hidden life in me. When authentic and enriching, it will correct the general schema of my actions. This correction is no doubt something more than transference. At the least, it follows other paths. In order for the filmic image to generate only a transference, it would have to take without giving, leaving no trace with me. Filmic identification often stays beneath transference; sometimes also it rises above it. But the two mechanisms supplement each other therefore without becoming confused. We shall confront them in a further study.
Footnotes:
This article first appeared in Revue international de filmologie 1.2 (Septembre-Octobre 1947): 205-07.
[1] The use of investir [literally, as a transitive verb, to beleaguer]here would seem to be connected with the concept of cathexis, according to Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 211. (HM’s note.)
[2] Thing here in the sense of an abstract and intangible entity. (Translator’s note.)
[3] On hatred as a case of projection manqué, see Baruk, “Haines et délires de haine”, in Revue philosophique, and Janet, L’amour et la haine. For Janet, however, hatred is a projection of weakness, whereas for Baruk, it is of remorse. (Author’s note)
[4] “Répéter” means both to repeat and to rehearse. (Translator’s note.)
[5] “Cinema and identification,” in Revue international de filmologie 1 [1947].