Figures of the Primal Science

The book focuses on the concept of the primal scene in Freudian psychoanalysis. It employs methods from the history of science to address philosophical, epistemological, aesthetic, and political questions, and furthermore tries to situate the Freudian oeuvre in the Foucauldian episteme of the age of history. A primal scene is a traumatic event from early childhood that cannot be directly observed within the analytic setting, but must be gathered from dreams and symptoms. The primal scene is never remembered directly. As Freud says, it is the outcome of the analyst`s constructions. Thus the primal scene is of a very fragile ontological and epistemological nature. It oscillates between factual event, necessary precondition, phylogenetically pre-structured phantasy and construction of the analyst. The book examines Freud`s arguments for (and against) the reality of the primal scene by way of his famous case study Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose. Apart from analyzing the arguments themselves and their metaphorical vehicles, it examines the first edition of the case study, which appeared in 1918 in the volume Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre. Vierte Folge. It also takes into account the manuscript in the Library of Congress in Washington. Both sources have been heretofore neglected by Freud scholars. Special attention is given to a drawing by Freud`s patient, Sergius Pankejeff, which represents the central dream of the analysis. It is located on page 605 of the first edition. The book argues that Freud does not content himself with strategies of indirect conjectural evidence, but that he uses a number of supplementary, ideological techniques to present the primal scene directly to his readers. The author proposes a theory of these techniques or solid metaphors, as Jacques Derrida calls them. The last chapter offers a detailed reading of the last film of French Situationist Guy Debord: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. The film is presented as a twin figure of Freudian psychoanalysis. It is shown that Debord`s cinematographic strategies of both commemorating and controlling the lost avant-garde of the Situationist International bear strong structural resemblance to Freud`s own stance to psychoanalysis not only as a newly founded science but as an institutional movement of which he is the founding father.