Freud’s Fixierung and the real

Avi Rybnicki

“It may further be assumed that it was her horror at the noise produced against her will that made the moment a traumatic one, and fixed the noise itself as a somatic mnemic symptom of the whole scene.”1

In his ‘Return to Freud’ Lacan argued and proved again and again that the post-Freudians turned their back to what was essential for the Freudian invention, his ethics, the ‘bone’ of the Freudian Ding. They produced an imaginary Freud, not one anchored in the real.

In fact, the link to the real is already striking in the very early remarks of Freud by his use of the term Fixierung. We can see the presence of bodily effects in producing Fixierung. In A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism2 he speaks of fixation by repetition of the noise produced by the mother’s tongue, or in the case of Emmy3 the arbitrary coincidence of pain and exhaustion. Later in the same text, he writes of the horror of producing a noise against her will.4 By that, the noise becomes traumatic and fixates itself as a bodily (in German leiblich, is related to the flesh) remainder symptom of the entire scenario.

So, Freud connects fixation with the trauma, with Lacan we can grasp that he connects it with the real. In many places such as in The Interpretation of Dreams 5 or in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 6 fixation relates to the intensity of libido, of erogenous zones of the body which is libidinally cathected and by that easily arousable (in German it is besetzt or Haftbarkeit, which is closer to the flesh of the body).

With the help of Lacan’s reading of Freud, what becomes obvious and what one re-discovers, is that Freud’s psychoanalysis is a discipline rooted in the real.

References

1 Freud S., Frau Emmy von N., Case Histories from Studies on Hysteria (1893), The Standard Edition of the complete psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. I. Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (1886–1899), London, The Hogarth Press, p. 92.

2 Freud S., A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism (1892), The Standard Edition of the complete psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. I. Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (1886–1899), London, The Hogarth Press. p. 115–128.

3 Op.cit. Freud S. (1893), p. 92

4 Ibid.

5 Freud S., The Interpretation of Dreams (I) (1900), The Standard Edition of the complete psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. IV. Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (1886–1899), London, The Hogarth Press, p. 1-310.

6 Freud, S., Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, p. 123–246.