The Mystery of Sex and the Mystery of Time: An Integration of Some Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives

 
Why is Freud’s 1905 work called Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality? What makes sexuality a theoretical issue? The Three Essays are famous for their focus on a wide range of sexual expression (the perversions) and on infantile sexuality. Freud was not the first to explore the former and he did not discover the latter. The theoretical issue emerged out of their integration. The understanding that the supposedly exceptional, abnormal “perversions” are rooted in universal, normal infantile sexuality changed the assumption that sexuality is grounded in the biology of reproduction, and therefore has natural, pre-formed objects. Auto-erotic, “polymorphously perverse” infantile sexuality is the foundation of a new theory of sexuality. From the first, this theory is temporal. Freud gives sexuality a much more complex history than it had before. This history extends over a life, even determining adult neuroses. The great issue, then, is the linkage of an expanded sexuality and time in the theory of unconscious processes.
 
The temporalization of the seemingly immutable has been central to changing essentialist assumptions about nature. Species evolve. Particle emission explains how elements are transformable. Space itself can contract and expand. Sexuality changes over time. All of these changes compel rethinking time itself. They imply that time is not only a measure of duration, but shares qualities with evolution, sub-atomic processes, cosmic space, and sexuality, if they are all mutable. This means that science itself has to meet the philosophical rethinking of time.
 
In this essay, I wish to pursue this topic by extending some of the thinking about sexuality and time I elaborated in Interpretation and Difference. I necessarily synthesize some of that book (the arguments from Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze; Freud on Eros, bisexuality, and primary scopophilia). New are the dialogues with Laplanche and with the relational psychoanalysts from Gender In Psychoanalytic Space and the expansion of Winnicott’s conception of transitionality.
 

 

Sexuality, Tension, Time

 
In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud offers practical advice about the end of analysis: “Our aim will not be to rub off every peculiarity of human character for the sake of a schematic ‘normality,’ nor yet to demand that the person who has been ‘thoroughly analysed’ shall feel no passions and develop no internal conflicts. The business of analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego; with that it has discharged its task” (250).
 
What are the “best possible conditions” in the realm of sexuality? In Freud’s early and middle periods, neurosis is a conflict between infantile sexual wishes and repression. To reverse repression is to make such sexual wishes conscious. In his later ego-psychological phase (reflected in his statement about the “business of analysis”), anxiety is the central motivating factor for repression. Neurotic anxiety is mostly a question of the super-ego’s threats of punishment should the ego ally itself with forbidden id impulses. In the realm of sexuality, “the best possible conditions” would thus be the ego’s freedom from infantile anxieties, irrational defenses, and super-ego pressures. This is the picture of an ego made stronger and more autonomous as a result of analysis, an ego not in conflict with the id and the super-ego. Such liberation is possible because psychoanalysis recognizes that all sexuality, even the most apparently “normal,” is polymorphously perverse. The successfully analyzed neurotic no longer has to repress “unacceptable” sexual impulses.
 
Yet Freud is perfectly aware that sexuality will always resist enlightenment (in all senses of the term). It is not simply illusory to think that the thoroughly analysed person will feel no passions or conflicts, and that there is no schematic sexual normality. Sexuality is conflict itself. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud said that there is “something in the nature of the [sexual] function itself which denies us full satisfaction” (104). He gives two examples of such sexual impasse in Analysis Terminable and Interminable. One is his notorious statement that the repudiation of femininity is “bedrock,” a “biological fact, a part of the great riddle [Rätsel] of sex” (252). What Freud means here is that the castration complex is the source of unmodifiable–immutable, apparently atemporal–envy and anxiety. One can justifiably criticize his phallic monism, his blind insistence on the “reality of castration” as a wound to all women and a warning to all men. And one must also note Freud’s typical inconsistency: what he is calling “biological fact” is actually the inevitable fantasy of castration. But the riddle, the mystery, is the castration complex itself. What makes it such a stubborn interference with sexuality? Why is there conflict at the heart of sexuality?
 
The other example of sexual impasse concerns something Freud calls “normal in mental life” (Analysis Terminable 243)–but normal only for an enlightened psychoanalysis. He is referring to bisexuality,[1] to the distribution of libido “either in a manifest or a latent fashion, over objects of both sexes” (244). Some people do not experience bisexuality as a problem. But for many, homo- and heterosexual trends “are in a state of irreconcilable conflict” (244). One would expect Freud to attribute this conflict to the castration complex, but he does not. Rather, he speaks of conflict itself: “An independently emerging tendency to conflict of this sort can scarcely be attributable to anything but the intervention of an element of free aggressiveness” (244). When this “free aggressiveness” is turned inward, internal conflict replaces external conflict. Freud then speaks of Empedocles’s cosmic principles of philia (love) and neikos (strife), eternally contending with each other (246). Normal bisexuality, then, is a manifestation of philia, Eros, the life drive, and is inevitably attacked by neikos, discord, destructiveness, the death drive. Why?
 
One has to recall that Eros, for Freud, is a “disturbance” because it counters the basic trend of the id toward tension reduction (Ego and Id 46-47). Sexuality as Eros raises tension by endeavoring “to combine what exists into ever greater unities” (Analysis Terminable 246). But because sexuality also serves tension reduction, attempting to “dissolve . . . combinations” (246), again sexuality is at war with itself. Laplanche comments on this aspect of Freud: “psychic conflict . . . is a drive conflict between the ‘sexual death drives’ . . . and the ‘sexual life drives’ . . . . It could be defined . . . as the struggle between two principles: binding and unbinding” (“Aims” 75). If Freud sees “normal bisexuality” as part of the sexual life drive, it must bind. It “combines” what might be thought of as two opposed entities: homo- and heterosexuality.
 
Can one interpret Freud here? Is the binding tension of normal bisexuality destructively unbound to create the apparently irresolvable conflicts of the castration complex? The castration complex then would not be “bedrock,” but rather–in Laplanche’s terms–the fantasy produced by the “sexual death drive” in conflict with the “sexual life drive.” The tension of sexual binding will always be met by the tendency to reduce tension, creating a conflicted bisexuality.
 
The relation of sexuality to the increase and decrease of tension, to binding and unbinding as Laplanche puts it, always gives Freud a great deal of trouble. He summarizes the problem in “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Here his most basic idea is that mind works to get rid of stimuli, making unpleasure an increase and pleasure a decrease of “mental tension” (159-60). The pleasure principle warns “against the demands of the life instincts–the libido” (160). (This is why Freud called Eros a “disturbance.”) But he then cedes the obvious objection: “there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations of tension. The state of sexual excitation is the most striking example of a pleasurable increase of stimulus” (160).
 
How to define pleasure and unpleasure if the mind seeks tension increase and tension decrease? Freud says he does not know, but wonders whether they have to do with “the rhythm, the temporal sequences of changes, rises and falls in the quantity of stimulus” (160). In a footnote, Strachey reminds us that Freud already raises the issue of sexuality, tension, and rhythm in Beyond the Pleasure Principle . In its last paragraph, Freud says that we experience not only pleasure and unpleasure, but also a
 

peculiar [eigentümlich] tension, which in its turn can be either pleasurable or unpleasurable . . . . [I]s the feeling of tension to be related to the absolute magnitude . . . while the pleasure and unpleasure series indicates a change in the magnitude of the cathexis within a given unit of time?
 

(Beyond 63)

 

Here Freud is thinking about time and tension.[2] In itself, this is not unusual. We often call cyclic states of tension increase and decrease “biorhythms.” It is unusual, however, to think time in relation to a tension between pleasure and unpleasure.

 
We have quickly accumulated several mysteries: “the riddle of sex” in relation to the castration complex, the inevitable conflict over normal bisexuality, tension increase and tension decrease, the possibility of a tension that is potentially pleasurable or unpleasurable, and last, but hardly least, sexual tension as time and rhythm.
 
The time factor is perhaps the greatest mystery. In Freud’s early work on trauma, sexuality explains why adult neurotic symptoms are linked to the infantile past. Changing our understanding of sexuality itself, Freud then gives it a long, complicated history, beginning with birth. Although this aspect of Freud’s theory is well known, it is less well known that he thought that the infant’s original relation to the breast is simultaneously self-preservative and erotic (Three Essays 222). Sexuality emerges as a force independent of self-preservation with the infant’s exploratory stimulation of its own body–the great example being thumb sucking. Infantile sexuality is auto-erotic and spread over the entire body–polymorphously perverse. Moreover, we do not proceed directly from infantile, non-reproductive sexuality to adult reproductive sexuality. Because of the latency period and the relative repression of infantile sexuality, the sexual past is carried over into the sexual present. Infantile sexuality continues to act after the fact; it has the temporality of Nachträglichkeit, deferred action. Psychoanalysis emerged as a temporal, historical discipline at first because of Freud’s investigation of memory. But because this theory of memory became a theory of sexuality, history itself became sexual and sexuality itself became temporal.
 
When we think of history as temporal, we usually think of time as the medium in which events unfold. But Freud also occasionally thinks of a time internal to sexuality. When he writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a sexual tension that in itself is neither pleasure nor unpleasure and wonders what it has to do with rhythm, it is as if he is looking into sexuality as tension. He is envisaging a temporal process that does not act on the larger scale of connecting past and present, even by deferred effect. It is rather a pulsation within sexuality: the variable beat of sexual rhythm between pleasure and unpleasure.
 

Laplanche: Sexuality, Time, Otherness

 
The relation between historical, sexual time and the time internal to sexuality has been examined by Laplanche in “Time and the Other.” The title of the essay indicates its place in his thought. For Laplanche, there is an “uncompleted Copernican revolution” in psychoanalysis. Although Freud went very far in decentering consciousness, making the unconscious the “other” within, Laplanche thinks that he used this theory to re-center the subject. The originally auto-erotic, wishing unconscious makes everything come from within “me,” even if from a “me” I do not know. Hence, Laplanche counters Freud’s idea that sexuality is originally auto-erotic. For Laplanche, sexuality emerges in the infant’s relation to the other’s other, i.e., the mother’s unconscious. There is an inevitable “implantation” of the mother’s incomprehensible, “untranslatable” sexual wishes (enigmatic signifiers) into–or rather onto–the infantile psyche. Disturbing enigmatic signifiers make sexuality an “internal foreign body,” always acting by deferred effect (256). Deferred effect is of course a temporal concept, but Laplanche thinks that his revised sexual theory demands a more sophisticated relation to time, one that makes time itself “other.”
 
Laplanche distinguishes four “levels” of time: 1. cosmological or world time; 2. perceptual time, the time of immediate consciousness; 3. the time of memory, of “the individual project, the temporalization of the human being”; 4. the time of the history of human societies (238). Where does psychoanalysis fit into these four levels? Laplanche says that Freud mainly works at the second level, the level of perceptual time, but that he has an implicit, undeveloped theory of the third level, the temporalization of the human being. Laplanche states that “Heidegger and existentialism” have done the most to explain this level, which has the greatest potential for thinking an “other” time. Laplanche also claims that the theory of the enigmatic signifier is situated there, “on the same terrain of being” as Heidegger’s rethinking of temporality as the “ecstatic” “stretching out” between past, present, and future. (I explain what this means in the fourth section of this paper.) In other words, the inevitable deferred effect of the enigmatic signifier, which accounts for unconscious sexual history, is conceivable in Heideggerian terms. Sexuality is always “other,” and its time is the other time of Heideggerian ek-stasis, “standing outside.”
 
This is a brave attempt to integrate a theory of unconscious sexuality with perhaps the most important rethinking of time in twentieth-century philosophy. It indicates where psychoanalysis has to go if it is to come to grips with what has always been at its heart: that the mystery of sexuality is the mystery of time. However, although Laplanche asks the right question, I do not think that he comes up with the right answer. To explain why, I need to say more about the second level, perceptual time.
 
Laplanche reminds us that in “The Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” Freud offers a theory of time that he (falsely) claims to have kept secret until then. In “The Note,” Freud says that consciousness of time is a result of the unconscious stretching out of “feelers, through the medium of the system Pcpt.-Cs.” (231). The “feelers” are withdrawn “as soon as they have sampled the excitations” of the external world (231). This is a periodic, rhythmic turning on and off of consciousness by the unconscious. Freud suspects that “this discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time” (231).
 
What does this mean? Freud is saying that consciousness is transitory, because the unconscious is the greater, if invisible, permanent part of the mind. When the unconscious “samples” the external world, consciousness is “turned on.” When the “sampling” ends, consciousness is “turned off.” This explains time as periodicity. It is a different version of the rhythmic theory of time from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (This is why Freud’s claim in “The Note” that he had kept this theory of time secret was not true.)
 
In both “The Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” and Beyond the Pleasure Principle , time is discontinuous. Freud’s idea is that because unconscious tension states are rhythmic, consciousness is periodically “lit up.” An obvious analogy is to the baby periodically aroused by needs that can only be relieved by the “external world”; later, sexuality will function in the same way. This is the familiar picture of the cyclic increase and decrease of tension. However, this picture is too simple. As Laplanche cannily remarks, Freud is linking consciousness of time to “the time of time . . . to rhythm. Linear time . . . must be reduplicated materially as rhythm–the rhythm precisely of interruption and connection” (“Time” 239). Laplanche finds this opening to a rhythmic thinking of time intriguing, but deficient: “Not one of the major concepts of theory and practice can be found there: sexuality is absent, as are repression, defense and transference” (240). Moreover, there seems to be no way to integrate this theory of rhythmic time into the theory of “temporalization” that accounts for the “history of a life” (240), the theory that would have to be linked to Heidegger’s ecstatic time.
 
Is it possible to integrate the discontinuist, rhythmic notion of time with the notion of time as the “temporalization of the human being”? I believe so, and I believe that this integration depends upon a greater understanding of the mysteries of sexuality, for example, the riddles of “unanalyzable” castration anxiety and inevitable conflict about bisexuality. In fact, some psychoanalytic relational thinkers have already taken important steps in this direction. Although these thinkers say nothing about time, their ideas potentially open onto it.
 

Sexuality, Difference, Tension, Transitionality

 
In the collection Gender In Psychoanalytic Space, Ken Corbett, Muriel Dimen, Donna Bassin, and Jessica Benjamin all speak of sexuality as tension between what are usually taken as essential opposites. Corbett, for example, says:
 

opposites that are held in a dialectical tension are not negated through such tension. They may contradict one another. They may fold into one another, as passivity may fold into activity, and thereby be transformed. But contradiction and transformation do not neutralize the dialectical poles; rather they hold them in a qualified tension.
 

(25)

 

Corbett’s particular focus is the sexual experience of gay men. He makes the simple observation that most gay men “interchange activity and passivity in sexual relations.” He goes on to say that this takes one into

 

the heart of the mystery: gay men move between passive and active sexual aims that do not reflect the kind of binary tension falsely associated with heterosexual masculine activity and feminine passivity . . . . The deconstruction of this binary tension not only speaks to the mystery of homosexuality, but to the mystery of sexuality—the ways in which all sexualities are informed by the push and pull of activity and passivity.
 

(27)

 

When Corbett says that the binary tension of masculine activity and feminine passivity is falsely associated with heterosexuality, he is thinking of the castration complex. He wants to separate masculine and feminine identifications from the equations phallic-active, castrated-passive. Corbett says that gay men do indeed experience both masculine and feminine identifications during sex, but he claims never to have met a gay patient whose fantasy that passivity equals femininity also made him feel castrated. Fantasies of castration lead to a “shut down of sexual . . . behavior” (31).[3] Being penetrated, even if accompanied by a fantasy of feminine identification, is arousing:

 

For the man who is simultaneously penetrated and erect, orgasm is generally achieved following manipulation of his penis by his partner; this behavior is underscored by the wish for his partner to see and manipulate the penis, not deny it . . . Through their reluctance to imagine a male body that is simultaneously penetrated and erect, analysts have conflated passive phallic arousal with castration.
 

(31-32)

 

The last point is extremely important. Corbett is implying that Freud’s assumption of the castration complex as bedrock betrays the psychoanalytic project: the commitment to the kind of unblinking look at sexuality that acknowledges that penetration can be arousing for men. Such an unblinking look would have compelled Freud to think about the “mystery of sexuality” as the “push and pull of activity and passivity.”[4]

 
Muriel Dimen takes this argument one step further by focusing on gender not as masculinity or femininity, but as the difference between them. Dimen here broaches an enormous philosophical question: the nature of difference itself. She grasps a position first articulated by Nietzsche: traditional thinking is oppositional thinking (1968, passim.). Since difference always implies both separation and relation between things differentiated, it cannot be confined to oppositions.[5] Sexual difference, the relation and separation of masculinity and femininity, is a “space between.” It is transitional, in Winnicott’s sense of a “third,” “intermediate area of experiencing” (“Transitional” 230). Dimen contends that the conventional meanings of masculinity and femininity are a result of splitting, in either the psychoanalytic sense (splitting of the ego or the object), or the cultural sense (privileging of “dichotomies and dualisms”) (41-42).
 
Dimen then addresses Freud’s question about the relation between tension and pleasure. She cites Edith Jacobson–a classical ego psychologist–on the question of constancy. Jacobson redefined constancy as an axis with “‘a certain margin for biological vacillations around it'” (qtd. 55). Pleasure is paradoxical: it is an oscillating cycle of increase and decrease of tension. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud already began to think in these terms when he spoke of a potentially pleasurable or unpleasurable tension linked to rhythmicity. But Freud (apparently) does not do what Dimen does here: she links tension and oscillating rhythmicity to difference itself. If sexual difference is transitional in Winnicott’s sense (the intermediate space between masculine and feminine, active and passive), then one should think of something like transitional tension. Dimen envisions this possibility when she says that movement between positions “might be regarded as pleasurable . . . [but] when we leave the preferred polarity [i.e. occupy the space between positions] . . . we are . . . extraordinarily uncomfortable” (56). Again, this discomfort is handled by splitting, whether in individuals or in theories.
 
Dimen’s idea of “theoretical splitting” can certainly describe Freud’s position on the castration complex as bedrock. It exemplifies the “uncomfortable” response to normal–i.e., differential, transitional, tension raising–bisexuality. While Freud does not make this connection, he certainly does link bisexuality to the “tension of life,” and does give us a tool with which to rethink the castration complex as a destructive, tension reducing conflict (Laplanche’s binding and unbinding). Transitional space as “binding tension” (not part of Winnicott’s formulation of transitionality) will always be met by a tendency to tension reduction.
 
This is the point at which the intrapsychic and the cultural–the preference for fantasies of opposed positions–meet. It is why one can find the same kind of splitting in individuals as in theories. There is a potential expansion of the political implications of psychoanalysis here. Freud familiarly thinks that civilization demands repression of the drives, heightening both aggression and guilt. But when he envisions something like aggression (neikos) inevitably attacking the “life drive” (philia) manifested in normal bisexuality, we can interpret it to mean that the tension of “sexual transitionality” will also inevitably provoke an aggressive splitting response. This splitting can range from the outright murderous and persecutory, to the construction of theories designed to eliminate, marginalize or attack such transitionality, to the self-attacking manifestations of individual psychopathology. Such splitting always appears to provide relief from the disturbing tension of intermediate states; it feels like protection against the unbearable.
 
Donna Bassin also emphasizes oscillation and splitting, raising a point that is addressed in the last section of this paper. Freud does say that in fantasy, dreams, and some sexual practices–e.g., voyeurism and exhibitionism, sadism and masochism–apparently opposed active and passive positions are transformable. Bassin comments:
 

I postulate an interchangeability of positions within fantasy which Freud (1915) discussed in ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ . . . Whatever the individual choice, the opposite aim is simultaneously being realized and gratified in the unconscious. What appear to be dichotomies are merely defensive surface splits.
 

(167; emphasis added)

 

Like Corbett and Dimen, Bassin extends this idea to gender polarity conceived in terms of active and passive, a polarity that “masks the underlying oscillation” (167).

 
One might question Bassin’s emphasis on fantasy here. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud certainly does explain that active and passive, voyeuristic and exhibitionistic, sadistic and masochistic fantasies are always linked. But Freud is also interested in the fact that a voyeur can actually become an exhibitionist, a sadist a masochist, and vice versa. And “normal bisexuality” is a reality–an old theme for Freud. (The first chapter of the Three Essays counters any irreducible essentialism about homo- and hetero-sexuality by observing the movement between them in the histories of many people’s lives.) Corbett’s observation that penetration itself is arousing for men makes this reality mysterious: it is the reality of oscillation in Dimen’s transitional sexuality. Dimen could even say that transitional sexuality itself would make us wonder about a simple opposition of reality and fantasy. If both sexual fantasy, as Bassin emphasizes, and sexual reality, as Corbett and Dimen emphasize, take us to the place of oscillation, then another mystery of sexuality might be its position between fantasy and reality. This idea is part of Winnicott’s conception of transitional space. His claim that transitionality is between the subjective and the objective explains why transitionality is the possibility of “fantasy related to fact, but not confused with fact” (“Depressive” 267). He emphasizes that the baby’s relation to the famous transitional object is neither active nor passive, because the question whether the baby creates it or is given it is not to be posed (“Transitional” 239-340). However, it does not occur to Winnicott to integrate the theory of transitionality with the theory of sexuality. Corbett, Bassin, and Dimen do so, with their emphases on oscillation between active and passive as the very nature of sexuality.
 
Jessica Benjamin takes these questions in another direction. She understands difference itself as both separation and relation.[6] Relation moves toward sameness, separation toward difference. But this means that an opposition between sameness and difference, which in psychoanalytic theory generally leads to a privileging of the latter over the former, is impossible. Benjamin is well known for her position that the coexistence of sameness and difference means that we need room for identification alongside object love, which she extends to sexual difference. She argues for bisexual “over inclusiveness,” so that one can retain cross-sex identifications. Referring to Dimen on transitional sexuality, Benjamin speaks of oscillating opposites in a state of pleasurable tension. And like all these authors, she wants to overcome “split polarities.” Uniquely, though, Benjamin says that to reduce difference to the “one Difference” always implies that “identity exists on either side of the line” (182). Sexual difference itself, then, is plural. Benjamin wants to overcome the split between “the One Difference, gender dimorphism” and the “polymorphism of all individuals” (204).
 
Benjamin might be surprised to learn that her critique of the One Difference echoes some of Jacques Derrida’s thinking. In Glas (1974) Derrida devotes a great deal of attention to the way in which Hegel insists on transforming sexual difference as natural diversity into sexual contradiction, sexual opposition (168). For Derrida, Hegel’s insistence on sexual opposition is a model for the way in which all oppositions (e.g., active/passive, the example I am emphasizing) function in order to guarantee the purity, independence, and mastery of each term (223). To conceive sexual difference as something other than opposition, Derrida says, means to understand how “sexual differences efface themselves and determine themselves as the difference” (223).
 
In another context, discussing Heidegger’s insistence on the sexual neutrality of Dasein (the human mode of existence), Derrida similarly says that Dasein is “asexual” only as concerns the One Difference. He expands:
 

[Dasein’s] asexuality would be determined as such only in the extent to which one immediately takes sexuality as binarity or sexual division . . . . If Dasein as such belongs to neither of the two sexes, this does not mean that the being it is is without sex. On the contrary, one can think here a . . . pre-dual sexuality, which does not necessarily mean unitary, homogenous and undifferentiated . . . . And on the basis of this sexuality more original than the dyad, one can attempt to think a “positivity” and a “power” . . . the positive and powerful source of all “sexuality.” (“Geschlecht” 402; emphasis added)

 

For Derrida, as for Nietzsche, to think outside metaphysics is to think difference as that which makes self-enclosed identity impossible. This is why he is so interested in Hegel’s attempt to formulate sexual contradiction, or why he sees Heidegger’s sexual neutrality of Dasein as an alternative to the One Difference. Difference, for Derrida, is always the relation to an otherness that one is. Difference is the oscillation between identity and otherness. This oscillation is a binding tension. In their respective ways, Corbett, Dimen, Bassin, and Benjamin speak of the tension holding together the sexual as transitional, and of oppositional thinking as a splitting of relational difference. They can thus be said to participate in a non-metaphysical theory of sexuality. But they say nothing about time.

 
For Derrida, difference is temporal in two ways. It is always related to temporal deferral, as in Freud’s Nachträglichkeit. It is also unthinkable without repetition, as in Freud’s rhythmicity. Derrida shares the idea of difference as repetition with Deleuze, who defined difference as the interval between two repetitions, and repetition as the differentiator of difference (Difference 76). Derrida says that the most important point of intersection between the deconstruction of metaphysics and psychoanalysis is around the repetition compulsion (“Resistances” 32). Integrating the themes of time and the transitional, Derrida conceptualizes difference as the rhythmic repetition of the intermediate “zone” between apparently opposed terms (Post Card 351-52). If there is any justification to Derrida’s position, then everything Corbett, Dimen, Bassin, and Benjamin say or imply about transitionality has to be linked to a thinking of repetition.
 
Freud, we know, does begin to think the sexual in terms of a rhythmic tension between pleasure and unpleasure. We might interpret this as an opening to thinking the mystery of sex as the mystery of time, as the repetition of the intermediate. Laplanche wants to think sexuality in relation to Heidegger’s rethinking of time as “ecstatic,” but does not find a way to integrate this project with Freud’s theory of discontinuist, rhythmic time. To bring these strands together, we need a better understanding of Heidegger’s conception of time, of temporality as ecstasis and as auto-affection.
 

Ecstasis, Auto-Affection, Transitionality

 
What does Laplanche mean when he cites Heidegger on the “temporalization of the human being” as the “ecstatic stretching out” between past, present, and future?
 
Heidegger’s overall project is to develop an understanding of the history of philosophy as the history of a forgetting–the forgetting of the question of Being (Sein). Being is necessarily forgotten when it is equated with the present. In our era, the present is what is objectively present for a subject. The objective is externally there, independent of the subject whose mind functions so that the objective can be known. The scientific method emerged out of these metaphysical positions.
 
In philosophy, time has always been a problem. On the one hand, time is conceived in terms of presence. Time is the infinite series of now points, stretching endlessly backward and forward, such that every now passes into a successive now. On the other hand, time is never present itself. The difficulty is that what makes presence possible, time as the now, is not itself present. Time is somehow real, but never objectifiable. (As Heidegger says, one can take apart any device for measuring time, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, and one will never find time within it.) The question of what is, Being itself, is tied up with this problem of time and presence. The history of metaphysics conflates time with the present in order to forget other ways of thinking the “is,” ways that would disrupt the presumed certainties of philosophy.
 
From Heidegger’s point of view, Being and Time is a prolegomenon to the rethinking of the “is.” Heidegger chooses to investigate the human mode of existence–Dasein–as a way of reviving the forgotten question of Being. Dasein is his point of departure because, in however unformed and intuitive a way, Dasein always has a sense that it exists. By starting with the simplest observations about how Dasein exists, Heidegger eventually develops a complex way of thinking about time that is not confined by the metaphysics of presence. His first observation is that Dasein is not a “free floating” independent entity. It only exists in relation to others and things; it is always in a “world.” Since Dasein only exists in relation to others and things, it cannot be a self-enclosed interiority. Dasein is always open; it always has the possibility of encountering others and things, and is always related to them. For Heidegger, because Dasein is always in a “world,” it is always “outside itself.” This being outside itself makes Dasein never simply “at home” with itself. Heidegger says that “being-in-the-world” is always unheimlich , “uncanny”–a theme he conspicuously shares with Freud. “Being-in-the-world” is itself the source of Angst, existential anxiety. Dasein always flees what it “is”–open, in a world–in order to evade uncanniness and Angst. One result of this flight is the severing of the relatedness of Dasein and world. The metaphysical assumption that the world is external objectivity and the person is internal subjectivity is precisely the result of what Heidegger calls Dasein‘s evasion of itself. The discomfort and tension (uncanniness, Angst) of relatedness is split into an opposition of subject and object. Here we have a philosophical account of splitting that calls for integration with the psychoanalytic, cultural, and political ones (see Dimen et al., above).
 
This bare bones description cannot capture the complexity of Heidegger’s analysis, and what is to follow summarizes even more complex material. Heidegger calls Dasein‘s way of existing “care” (Sorge). At first, care simply means that whatever Dasein does takes time. Dasein‘s encounter with anything implies “being with” it, depends upon time. Out of this simple statement, Heidegger develops a complex structure of care. The key is that Dasein is always “outside” itself (an extension of being-in-the-world). Dasein is always “ahead of itself,” always in relation to what it is not yet, its possibilities, its future. Ultimately Heidegger articulates a temporal structure of care out of being-ahead, being-in-a-world, and being-together with things and others. Care is at once: 1) possibility, the relation to the existential future; 2) “always already” being in a world prior to Dasein, the existential past; 3) being together with others and things, the existential present. I have used the word “existential” to stress Heidegger’s point: as temporal modes of relating, future, past and present are not present themselves. Further, these modes of relating only exist together–they are what make Dasein an historical being whose present is always related to its future and its past. Time itself is this interrelation of the three coexisting temporal modes. As the non-present possibility of presence, time is their “stretching toward each other” (the phrase cited by Laplanche). Time thought beyond presence, time as the “temporalization of the human being,” is this “outsiding relation.” Time is ecstasis. Just as Dasein‘s flight from itself as being-in-the-world produces the metaphysical assumptions of subject and object, so the forgetting of the question of Being “levels down” time as ecstasis into time as the infinite series of now points.
 
One of Heidegger’s most counter-intuitive points about time as ecstasis is that it is finite. He sees the assumption that time is infinite as part of the privileging of the present–again, the infinite series of now points. However, when Heidegger says that existential, ecstatic time is finite he does not mean that time stops. He means that Dasein‘s relation to its possibilities is most of all a relation to the future it assumes as soon as it is: the possibility of its death. After Being and Time , Heidegger had serious reservations about being-toward-death. But he did not waver in his thinking of ecstatic time as finitude, as the possibility of relatedness, as openness, and as tension and uncanniness.
 
Another difficult aspect of Heidegger’s conception of time is the understanding of how it “works.” Clearly time is the possibility of all history and all change. One might call time “process” itself. If time is process, and if it is never an objectifiable entity, then how does it “temporalize”? Heidegger’s answer is that because time cannot be “acted upon” by an object or a subject, it makes history and change possible by acting upon itself. Time temporalizes itself. He elaborates the idea that time temporalizes itself in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, the immediate successor to Being and Time. Here Heidegger uses the thinking of time as “auto-affective” to develop a theory of what can rigorously be called the “transitional.” His point of departure is an explication of the problem that Kant set for himself in the Critique of Pure Reason: How do human beings, whose capacities are finite, i.e., who do not create the things they encounter, know what they do not create? Like Descartes, though more than a century later, Kant is elaborating the metaphysics of scientific method. Or so it is usually thought. For Heidegger, the Critique of Pure Reason is about the possibility of “mind’s” encounter with things. As Kant himself says, this makes the Critique a “transcendental” investigation, i.e., an investigation that is not dependent on any particular experience of objects. In Kant’s familiar terms, pure reason is experience-free, a priori. Starting from the position that empirical knowledge has two “stems,” sensory perception and concept formation, Kant seeks to elaborate a transcendental version of the sensory and the logical. At the beginning of the first Critique, this produces what Kant calls the “transcendental aesthetic” (from the Greek aisthesis, sensory), with its famous statements about space and time as the a priori conditions of all perception.
 
Throughout Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger emphasizes the relation of transcendence and the a priori to time. In the transcendental aesthetic, Kant speaks of space as the pure external sense and of time as the pure internal sense. For Kant, time as the pure internal sense is what Heidegger calls “the subjectivity of the subject,” but such that the “subject” is open to beings. As always, Heidegger is thinking time as relation, making Kant’s conception of the a priori synthesis a question of “ontological connectedness” (Being). Kant opens up this theme when he speaks of time as “synopsis,” the possibility of connectedness. Heidegger seizes upon synopsis and synthesis as two aspects of time. He pays particular attention to the way Kant himself synthesizes the transcendental aesthetic (the sensory) and transcendental logic (the conceptual). The key moment in the first Critique for Heidegger is when Kant says that the possibility of synthesizing the aesthetic and the logic is the “transcendental imagination” (44).
 
Heidegger pursues all of Kant’s references to the transcendental imagination that show it to be a) the faculty of synthesis itself; and b) intrinsically related to time as synopsis. For Heidegger, the transcendental imagination as the “third faculty” of mind, between the sensory and the conceptual, is not simply the external tying together of the other two. Rather, as synthesis itself, the imagination is the “structural” belonging together of the two stems, a “third” that is “first” in its relation to the a priori (41). It is impossible not to think here of Winnicott’s idea of the transitional as the “intermediate area of experiencing,” which is neither subjective nor objective, neither internal nor external, neither active nor passive, but that which brings them together while holding them apart.
 
This “transitionality” of the transcendental imagination is even more marked in Heidegger’s discussion of Kant on the sensory as receptive (passive) and the conceptual as spontaneous (active). As the synthesis of the sensory and the conceptual, the transcendental imagination “is the original unity of receptivity and spontaneity” (107). (In Winnicott, the baby is neither given nor creates transitional phenomena.) Here we confront the possibility of passive turning into active because of their transcendental synthesis. One must always remember that synthesis itself is time. Heidegger returns to Kant’s idea that time is the “pure internal sense,” the possibility of sensory reception, i.e., of anything affecting us. But where does time come from if it is to be an affecting yet never a present entity? Time, Heidegger says, can only be a “pure affection of itself,” auto-affection (132). Because time temporalizes itself, it is the pure possibility of anything affecting us. For Heidegger, this is the key to reframing Kant’s question about the possibility of finite knowledge. As the synthesis of the receptive and the spontaneous, the passive and the active, as pure auto-affection, time opens us–relates us–to things.
 
For Heidegger, the transcendental imagination as auto-affective time, as pure relationality, is the “abyss of metaphysics” from which Kant had to “shrink back” (Kant and the Problem 118). It is the “abyss” because it is the place where Kant’s own certainties would be undermined. As in Being and Time, this rethinking of time demonstrates that time presumed to be the infinite sequence of now points is a kind of splitting off of time as auto-affection. Kant’s own postulation of a universal, timeless cogito that produces the binding rules of thought, the very possibility of Enlightenment, is disrupted from within: the “I think” is made possible by time and by the transcendental imagination. For Heidegger, the differences between the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason demonstrate Kant’s “recoil.” In the second edition, the transcendental imagination is minimized, particularly in Kant’s transfer of the possibility of synthesis from the aesthetic to the logic. In other words, the more familiar reading of Kant, the one that sees him as the spokesman for modern science, while not incorrect, prefers his retreat from what was gained in the first edition. When in the first edition Kant describes the transcendental imagination as “a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no knowledge whatever, but of which we are seldom conscious, even once,” the psychoanalyst can only wonder what this might have to do with the unconscious (44). Given the thrust of Heidegger’s reading, however, the psychoanalyst would also have to wonder about the unconscious as transitional, intermediate, and temporal.
 
To summarize this rethinking of time: 1. Time as the infinite sequence of now points is a “leveling down” of ecstatic time. 2. Ecstatic time is the coexistence of future, past, and present as modes of relation. 3. Ecstatic time is finite. 4. Since it is not present and is neither subject nor object, time temporalizes itself; it is auto-affection. 5. Auto-affective time is both passive and active, the intermediate “third area” that precedes and links passivity and activity, subject and object. 6. Auto-affective time is the possibility of relation.
 

Primary Scopophilia

 
There is a singular moment in Freud’s theory of sexuality that integrates these six points, while opening onto a thinking of a discontinuous, eruptive time. For an instant, Freud conceives an intermediate, transitional organization of sexuality in relation to history as time. This moment gives the answer to Laplanche’s question: how to integrate the theory of sexuality with the theory of time as ecstasis and as periodicity, rhythm, repetition.
 
The moment comes toward the end of the 1915 “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (the unhappy rendering of “Triebe und Triebschicksale,” “Drives and the Fates of the Drives”). Bassin reminds us that in this paper Freud speaks of active and passive fantasies turning into each other, a familiar theme. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud had said that the “component drives” of infantile sexuality occur as pairs of opposites, i.e. in active and passive versions. Here he is interested in the genealogy of these pairs of opposites. He first examines sadism-masochism and says that originally the child simply wishes to “exercise violence or power upon some other person as object” in a non-sexual way (“Instincts” 127). This non-sexual, active aim to hurt is then turned around upon the subject, and the object is given up. The wish is now to hurt oneself. As Laplanche emphasizes, a non-sexual wish to hurt becomes sexual in the turning around upon oneself (Life and Death 89). In a third stage, an extraneous object is sought to inflict pain upon oneself. Freud calls this masochism proper. He notes that in the second stage, originally active sadism is not yet passive. Rather, the “active voice is changed, not into the passive, but into the reflexive, middle voice” (“Instincts” 128). The middle–intermediate–voice can be called the voice of auto-affective processes. Laplanche claims that because erotism emerges in this “intermediate” moment, it is sexually “primary” (Life and Death 94). However, his emphasis, like Bassin’s, is on fantasy. In Laplanche’s reading, sexuality as fantasy emerges in turning around upon oneself.
 
When Freud examines voyeurism-exhibitionism, he initially finds the same structure as in sadism-masochism. An active wish to look is turned around upon the subject, setting up the passive aim of being looked at; then one seeks an extraneous object who looks at one–voyeurism has become exhibitionism. But, says Freud, this is actually not right, because there is a stage prior to the active wish to look. He distinguishes between the genealogy of sadism-masochism and voyeurism-exhibitionism: the wish to hurt is not originally sexual, while the wish to look is. Once voyeurism is originally sexual, however, it has to be thought in relation to auto-erotism, the essence of infantile sexuality. So, says Freud, “the scopophilic instinct is auto-erotic; it has indeed an object, but that object is part of the subject’s own body” (“Instincts” 130). Moreover, the “preliminary stage is interesting because it is the source of both the situations represented in the resulting pair of opposites” (130). In the “preliminary stage,” “oneself looking at a sexual organ” equals “a sexual organ being looked at by oneself” (130). The first half of the equation (“oneself looking”) becomes active looking at “an extraneous object” (the voyeuristic subject); the second half (“at a sexual organ”) becomes a part of oneself passively being looked at by an “extraneous person” (the exhibitionistic object) (130). The preliminary stage then, is one in which the oppositions subject-object and active-passive do not hold. It can rigorously be called transitional.[7] This “intermediate” moment is now primary (131).
 
The “auto-erotic stage of scopophilia” might seem to be a purely theoretical inference. However, the idea that looking at a sexual organ equals a sexual organ being looked at by oneself exactly describes the situation of the infant and the breast. To interpret “primary scopophilia” this way, I must call upon other things Freud says about the original “baby-breast” relation. The tie to the breast is originally identificatory. In the oral phase, the baby “incorporates” the breast. For Freud, as for Jessica Benjamin, identification is the root of all love. At the end of his life, Freud expands this idea when he says that “being” the breast precedes “having” the breast (“Findings” 299). He could just as well have said that in 1914 he had described the original psychic organization as one of primary narcissism, in which there is not yet inner or outer, subject or object (74-75). In primary narcissism the baby “is” its “objects.” Even earlier, in the Three Essays, Freud says that the original relation to the breast is both self-preservative and erotic. In the state prior to the division of self-preservation and sexuality, there is always a relation to what Freud calls an “object” (222). If one factors in primary narcissism here, it is immediately apparent why “object” is the wrong word: there is not yet a subject. Rather, one can say that there is originally a relation to an other that one is. This is the structure of difference itself: simultaneous connection and separation without a subject-object structure. In primary scopophilia, reinterpreted as the baby-breast relation in an organization of primary narcissism, the infant is the breast it sees, making this a reflexive, auto-affective seeing. Because this “seeing” is not in itself self-preservative but is sexual, it is, as Freud says, auto-erotic. And because it occurs within the organization of primary narcissism, it is auto-affective. This interpretation of primary scopophilia is an attempt to link Freud on “being the breast” to Heidegger on being as relatedness without a subject-object structure, a relatedness conceivable as auto-affective process. Or more accurately, as Derrida would put it, as auto-hetero-affective process: primary narcissism is a relation to an otherness that affects one as affection of oneself.
 
If this linkage has any internal coherence, it would have to be related to time, finitude, ecstasis. Finite time for Freud is always a question of periodicity, a question he immediately raises in relation to “primary scopophilia.” He is attempting to account for the way in which voyeurism can be succeeded by exhibitionism, because both derive from “primary scopophilia.” He writes:
 

The only correct statement to make about the scopophilic instinct would be that all the stages of its development, its auto-erotic, preliminary stage as well as its final active or passive form, co-exist alongside one another . . . . We can divide the life of each instinct [Trieb, drive] into a series of separate successive waves, each of which is homogenous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava. We can then perhaps picture the first, original eruption of the instinct [Trieb] as proceeding in an unchanged form and undergoing no development at all. The next wave would be modified from the outset–being turned, for instance, from active to passive–and would then, with this new characteristic, be added to the earlier wave, and so on. If we were then to take a survey of the instinctual impulse from its beginning up to a given point, the succession of waves which we have described would inevitably present the picture of a definite development of the instinct [Trieb] . . . . This reference to the developmental history of instincts [Triebe] and the permanence of their intermediate stages should make the development of instincts fairly intelligible to us.
 

(130-31, emphasis added)

 

How does the “permanence” of the intermediate stages of the drives make their developmental history “intelligible”? One can read Freud to say that because the active and passive forms of looking derive from the preliminary phase, all the phases actually co-exist. (This is related to Bassin’s point that no matter what the overt sexual behavior, the opposite position is alive in fantasy. But Bassin, like Laplanche, does not raise the issue of the “primary, intermediate” drive organization as reality.) Certainly either the active or passive form can appear to dominate a given period of drive activity, like a discrete eruption of lava. The collection of discrete “eruptions” is the history of the drive. But the “source” of the “lava” is the primary, intermediate phase, which is “permanent.” Otherwise, there would be no “eruption” at all. Nor would one have a way of explaining how and why a phase of exhibitionism can succeed a phase of voyeurism, despite their apparent opposition.

 
The “permanence” of the intermediate stage, the “volcanic” source of successive eruptions, is the permanence of its periodic repetition. In Derrida’s sense, it is the repetition of the differential intermediate. Freud, of course, does not say this directly. But one can link this disruptive repetition to one of Freud’s rare considerations of a possible relation between unconscious and conscious time. For a moment in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud imagines a traumatic unconscious temporality that calls for the conscious (specifically Kantian) notion of time as a protective device, a stimulus barrier.[8] I am pushing on this metaphor of the volcano to link Freud’s idea of disruptive time to the tension of intermediate states, the tension that Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle links to periodicity and to something between pleasure and unpleasure, and to the tension of “normal bisexuality” as “life,” inevitably in conflict with tension reduction.
 
Further, because Freud explains the “developmental history” of the drive as a function of periodic “eruption” of auto-affective, primary, intermediate drives, the temporalization of the drives is the repetition of their transitional states. The apparently self-identical organization of any given period, in which one can say “I am a voyeur, an exhibitionist, a sadist, a masochist,” or–if one thinks “normal bisexuality”–“a homosexual, a heterosexual,” is the tension reducing response to the “primary intermediate.” To say, “I am now . . . ” is to privilege a presence made possible by the repetition of an intermediate state, a state that can never be present. It is always split into active-passive, subjective-objective, seemingly uniform periods. But the historical linkage of the periods, the fact that present sexuality is always in relation to its past and its future, sexuality as ecstasis, is due to the coexistence of the auto-erotic, auto-affective primary intermediate phase with the passive-active, subjective-objective, phases.
 
There is another element of the baby-breast relation that must be mentioned here, one that goes back to Freud’s very early work. From the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology on, Freud always thought that the origin of unconscious wishes is the registration of the “experience of satisfaction.” His idea was that when the baby is fed it forms an unconscious memory trace. This kind of memory formation has two axes: the opening of a pathway and the storage of an image. The opening of a pathway depends upon one tension meeting another: the force of what comes from the outside meeting the resistance of the inside. The result is a differentiation of pathways (Project 317-19). If one imagines such memory formation occurring within the organization of primary narcissism, then again one would have to think of it as an auto-(hetero)-affective process.
 
Here, the relation to repetition is clearly grounded in the rhythmic cycles of bodily need (hunger). Need is finitude. Need is originally both self-preservative and erotic. The inference is that repetitive bodily need carries the unconscious memory of primary narcissism, of the tension between pleasure and unpleasure, of the primary, intermediate, i.e., the transitional. In place of Laplanche’s theory of the enigmatic signifier of seduction, I am proposing this integration of registration of the experience of satisfaction with primary scopophilia and primary narcissism. This is the model of how transitional sexual difference temporalizes, because it is an ecstatic, auto-affective process: the needy, finite baby is other than itself in order to be itself. (This is why Derrida’s expression “hetero-auto-affective” is critical. It brings “otherness”–à la Laplanche–into the heart of auto-affection and ecstasis.) Being the breast precedes having the breast. The baby is “in the world.” And the future history of all the oppositions that will color the repetition of sexual need, sexuality as the “stretching toward” each of past, present, and future, is written in the tension of this ecstatic auto-hetero-affection. As a tension it will always be split into what appear to be opposite essences, which can actually oscillate with each other (the voyeur becomes an exhibitionist, etc). But here we also have the answer to Laplanche’s question: a conception of time as periodicity, as rhythm, is tied to a sexual time as ecstasis.
 
Derrida writes of time, rhythm, tension, and difference as the repetition of the intermediate. Deleuze, outlining the relation between difference and repetition, also integrates his conception with the temporality of need: “The repetition of need, and of everything which depends upon it, expresses the time which belongs to the synthesis of time, the intratemporal character of that synthesis. Repetition is essentially inscribed in need, since need rests upon an instance which essentially involves repetition” (Difference 77). Here Deleuze is speaking of repetition in the way that Laplanche speaks of rhythm, as the “time of time.”[9] These sentences are the bridge between “the mystery of sex and the mystery of time.” Need as repetition opens a thinking of time as temporal synthesis–essentially Heidegger’s project in Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Sexual need, the “biorhythm” of a finite body, is the repetition of the unconscious memory of the non-present, transitional tension in which need always opens us to relation, a relation that undermines self-enclosed identity and the opposition of essences.
 
The tension of what Derrida called a “pre-dual sexuality,” which is not necessarily “unitary, homogenous and undifferentiated,” will always be split into what appears to be the “bedrock” of active and passive, from which all other sexual “oppositions” derive. As finite temporal-sexual beings, we are constituted by transitional tension and by splitting. This means that psychoanalytic theory and practice have to expand. When “cultural,” or even “philosophical” splitting meets “intrapsychic” splitting, we all too easily assume that we are saying something about foundational reality. (I believe that this is Freud’s problem when he calls the repudiation of femininity–i.e., castration–“bedrock,” which implies immutability.) To take sexuality into the transitional realm is to see why psychoanalysis has to challenge assumptions about reality, if it is not to perpetuate splitting. This challenge inevitably opens onto time as repetition of a tension between pleasure and unpleasure. This is no simple affair, either for theory or for practice. But it is unavoidable, once sexuality and time inhabit each other unconsciously.
 
Above, I suggest the possible political implications of such thinking: the inevitable social, theoretical, and individual violence directed against “transitional tension.” Laplanche also says something important about the political implications of his theory of the unconscious:
 

In the face of the alterity of the other, the methods of defence are immutably the same: attempt at assimilation, denial of difference, segregation, destruction. These are quite clearly found in attitudes to cultural and ethnic differences. But what is lacking in all the analyses of ‘racism’ is any consideration of the internal split inherent in the other himself: it is this internal alterity which is at the root of the anxiety provoked by external alterity, it is this that one seeks to reduce at any price.
 

(230, n.21)

 

Laplanche here means that the “other’s unconscious,” first embodied by the mother, is traumatizing. Violence against the other is the result of anxiety about the “other’s other.” And Laplanche understands that this is also a question of time. I am stating here that seeing time and sexuality as transitional tension, embodied in all forms of relatedness not conceivable in oppositional, subject-object terms, is a more consistent way of approaching this question. Once sexuality and time inhabit each other unconsciously, the rethinking of both is a rethinking of destruction–neikos –against life as love–philia–which is disturbance, eruption, almost a volcano.