The unconscious being unknowable, how can the psychoanalyst be certain that the memory he recovers with the help of hypnosis is real, or that his interpretations of the patient’s free associations are correct? How, in other words, can his theories be validated? The patient’s assent or dissent cannot be trusted in this regard since the theory predicts that he or she will “resist” the unveiling of the repressed, as illustrated by the “Dora” case. The scientific controversy that is the analytic cure cannot come to a conclusion since it takes the form of an analysis of resistance to analysis, more specifically, of an analysis of patients’ positive or negative transference onto the analyst. Even a confirmation by the patient of the analyst’s interpretations is not going to settle the matter since it might be yet another ruse of transference resistance. In the end, it is the analyst who decides whether the interpretation – and the theory behind it – is correct or not. Hence the crucial importance in psychoanalytic theory of Freud’s “self-analysis,” since it – and it only – guarantees that the founder initially gained unfettered access to the unconscious.

After the biological turn of the Fliess years, the key word in psychoanalysis is no longer “trauma” but “drive.” The ultimate cause of neurotic disorders is no longer to be found in an external accident but in internal, hereditary instincts that repeat, in a compulsive and reflex way, the history of life and the species. As a result, everything that was previously described in terms of neuro-physio-psychological conflicts (desire/defense, will/counter-will, repression/return of the repressed, etc.) is henceforth interpreted as expressing conflicts between biological drives: sexual drive (reproductive instinct)/ego drive (self-preservation instinct); object (erotic) libido/ego (narcissistic) libido; and finally, life drive/death drive, Eros/Thanatos. Freud’s metapsychology is a speculative metabiology.

Freud very quickly complemented his psychobiology with a sociobiological theory of culture and society. As early as 1897, he rooted the psychological phenomenon of repression (shame, disgust) in what he called a “primary,” “organic” repression that corresponded in the history of the species to the adoption of the erect stature and the abandonment of the oral-anal-urethral zones as sources of sexual excitement. To this biological origin of the civilizing process, Freud added in Totem and Taboo the murder and cannibalistic incorporation of the “primal father,” an event supposed to account at the collective, phylogenetic level for the prohibition of incest, and at the individual, ontogenetic level for the “decline” of the Oedipus complex during the latency phase of the libido and the corresponding emergence of an internal “superego.” The whole development of culture is thus viewed by Freud as a constant recapitulation and commemoration of this guilt-producing event whose unconscious memory is imprinted in the “archaic heritage” of the human race and transmitted compulsively through the generations, in conformity with Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.

What kind of discourse was Freud’s psychoanalysis? A typical late-nineteenth-century positivist, Freud claimed that it is was a scientific, empirical psychology based on the always revisable observation of clinical data and distinguished it sharply from the a priori, meta-physical “speculations” of philosophy. Except that the ultimate object of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, is by definition beyond consciousness and therefore also beyond observation. So what distinguishes Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretations and “constructions” from philosophical speculations? In the end, what distinguishes his “metapsychology that leads behind consciousness” from a metaphysics? This is the question that this book attempts to answer by following Freud’s way of thinking, step by step and as closely as possible to the texts.

Freud is not the first to have admitted the existence of unconscious psychic processes. Since the discovery of the reflex function of the spinal cord, many researchers had speculated that this reflex action also extended to the higher areas of the nervous system. For these psychophysiologists, reflex action is the very foundation of psychic activity, and consciousness (the ego) emerges from a background of unconscious automatisms that it inhibits, delays, and represses. Freud inherited this notion from Charcot who postulated that hysteria and hypnosis were a regression to this “unconscious cerebration” caused by a “traumatic shock.” This was the starting point of Freud’s initial theorization of the “psychical apparatus” as well of his first attempts at a therapy of the neuroses: psychical activity is governed by unconscious “primary processes” that tend towards an immediate “discharge” but are slowed down by the “secondary processes” of the conscious ego; the psychotherapy of the neuroses aims at bringing the unconscious part of the mind under the control of the conscious by lifting the pathogenic repression that caused the “dissociation” of the traumatic memory.

We asked in the introduction whether Freud was a philosopher rather than a scientist. The answer must now be “yes,” despite Freud’s many protests to the contrary. Frank Sulloway describes Freudian psychoanalysis as a cryptobiology, meaning that it is a biological theory presented in the form of psychology. It should be added that this cryptobiology is even more profoundly a cryptophilosophy, a speculative philosophy of nature built from evolutionary postulates borrowed from the biology of the time and placed on clinical material in an entirely a priori way to guarantee the internal coherence of the system Freud was building.

Starting from the mid-1890s, Freud assumed that the trauma whose memory was repressed by neurotics was of a sexual nature. More specifically, he claimed to obtain from his patients’ memories of sexual abuse suffered in early childhood at the hands of an adult pervert, most of the time the father. In late 1897, he abandoned this “seduction theory,” having realized, he said, that his patients’ memories were in fact fantasies expressing an infantile sexual wish to be fondled by a parent. This reversal, which marks the beginning of Freud’s theories about infantile perverse sexuality and the Oedipus complex, was due to his adoption of his friend Wilhelm Fliess’ speculations regarding biorythms, themselves based on Ernst Haeckel’s “biogenetic law”: the individual development (ontogenesis) of an organism recapitulates the development of the species (phylogenesis). Hence Freud’s theory of the various stages (oral, anal, phallic, etc.) of libidinal development, which was not based, as he claimed in the “Little Hans” case, on an empirical investigation of children’s sexuality but on purely speculative (and since then debunked) biological assumptions.

WHILE RESERVING AN INTEREST in the ideal of which it is a part in order to violate it, minor literature causes the major language to lose its power as an inhibiting force for expression. The major language is a body from which to flee, from which to forge a new language that resists its structural forms, rules and even grammar. In the words of Kafka, Miller's parallel act of concession and defiance in his writing is his “ape-nature” fleeing out of him “head over heels and away” (“A Report to the Academy,” 258). Like Kafka, in Deleuze and Guatarri's analysis, Miller bores the way out by fleeing to the extent of becoming peripheral, becoming childlike, and, like Kafka, by becoming-animal — ultimately, by becoming that which is marginal, always simultaneously provoking, in Miller's words, “the fleshly and the angelic” (Sexus, 227).

Miller uses this expression “the fleshly and the angelic” to refer to the dual nature of the human figure in the text, specifically alluding to a figure in Sexus called Melanie. She sends Miller into a reverie on this division in mankind itself but also, more importantly, on this division in writing which, Miller states, is “[h]uman gestures. All borrowed from the animal and insect worlds” (Nexus, 242).

THIS BOOK EXPLORES the “secret violence” that the American writer Henry Miller inflicts on language over the course of his expansive body of work from the 1930s through the 1970s. Few critics have examined the provocative questions of linguistic volatility raised in Miller's works, ignoring his innovative style and thereby missing the potential impact of his work in literary studies. Having been marginalized on moral grounds since first publication in 1934, Miller's works require reexamination in order to bring new attention to his unwritten connections with other writers during this period, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Miller is not often thought of in academic circles in studies on modernism, despite the innovative and influential style of his work. The aim of this book is to suggest a new way of reading Miller that is alert to the aggressively writerly and self-conscious form of his work, and to undertake an examination of his texts without integrating him into another socially constructed, literary category.

GILLES DELEUZE AND FéLIX GUATTARI'S TEXT Kafka : pour une littérature mineure (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 1975) is useful for contextualizing questions that arise in a study on Miller's inventive literary form. Miller's writing exhibits qualities of a minor literature in the way that it subverts the conventional assumptions of functionality of the major language of English from within. Upon close inspection, his seemingly haphazard, obscure, or nonsensical and plotless literature reveals itself to contain significant allusions and stylistic nuances that call attention to the act of writing as more than just a secured literary form being submitted to the process of categorical and reductive literary analysis. Instead, Miller's fragmented and forceful, sometimes insipid and vulgar prose, often traipses along calculatingly, as though its only purpose is the traipsing itself, and, indeed, this activity is precisely what is of interest in Miller's style. Writing becomes an endeavor motivated solely by its existence as writing — the movement of writing — and through its resistance to the submission of literary standards.

MILLER'S TEXTS REGULARLY ENGAGE in discourse on the arts, specifically painting and literature (and occasionally music). Throughout these works, Miller makes extensive direct citations and references as well as oblique allusions to texts, paintings, writers, painters, and musicians. Such widespread traces of these arts in Miller's texts mediate both the narrator and the reader's relation to the text and to the world. Taking Miller's interest in painting as its focus, this chapter explores the manner in which Miller engages his reader via “literary images” in his writing. By means of ekphrastic writing — using one artistic medium to remark on another; in this case, painting through writing — the reader encounters the world of the depicted art. Yet there is more at stake in Miller than simply perspectival representation or an attempt to illuminate the qualities and form of painting through writing. The ways in which these artistic elements enter Miller's texts are not always straightforward and are in fact multifarious.