The Real/Rael of Psychogeography

The Real/Rael of Psychogeography:
Urban Walking as a Method of Ameliorating Castration Anxiety in Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

I will be presenting a paper at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington DC w.b. 1st April 2019 in the Lacanian Landscapes session. Here is the abstract:

Rael is not real, but he is a popular culture representation of a real individual who is a stranger in a new city. Having recently moved to New York, Rael has to negotiate the alien space that has suddenly become his home. Part hero, part graffiti artist, part urban explorer, we witness our protagonist traversing the physical landscape of the city and that of his own psyche.

This paper explores the Lacanian concepts of castration anxiety, lack, the Other, and the real, in the context of the album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (Genesis, 1974). It examines the anxiety displayed in the character of the story and his attempts to work through this by using the landscape of the city as a vehicle for his own self-therapy.

By analysing Rael’s behaviour in the story, Richardson demonstrates that by taking a psychogeographic approach to the physical space of the city, and the abstract space of his own mind, Rael manages to work his way through the aesthetics of living in New York, as a 'foreigner', by facing his own troubled past.

Freud’s Kettle Logic

Sigmund Freud uses his ‘kettle logic’ in his discussion in The Interpretation of Dream [1899], as part of his analysis of Irma’s Injection Dream. I remember studying this dream as an undergraduate in my ‘Reading Freud Reading’ module. It’s a fascinating dream, not least because it is Freud’s own dream and involves Freud and is friend and colleague Otto Rank, as well as Irma, of course.

Before I go onto the kettle logic aspect of the dream (which appears in the chapter ‘The Method of Dream Interpretation’), I will post the full dream in order to get to the kettle section, which is near the end. Irma was originally Rank’s patient, but was referred to Freud by Rank. This is Freud's dream:

A large hall—numerous guests, whom we were receiving—among them was Irma. I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet. I said to her: ‘If you still get pains, it’s really only your fault.’ She replied: ‘If you only knew what pains I’ve got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen—it’s choking me’—I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that.—She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white1 patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose.—I at once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination and confirmed it. . . . Dr. M. looked quite different from usual; he was very pale, he walked with a limp and his chin was clean-shaven. . . . My friend Otto was now standing beside her as well, and my friend Leopold was percussing her through her bodice and saying: ‘She has a dull area low down on the left.’ He also indicated that a portion of the skin on the left shoulder was infiltrated. (I noticed this, just as he did, in spite of her dress.) . . . M. said: ‘There’s no doubt it’s an infection, but no matter; dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated.’ . . . We were directly aware, too, of the origin of her infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls . . . propionic acid . . . trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type). . . . Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly. . . . And probably the syringe had not been clean.

I won’t go into the analysis here (it’s not a long analysis and is really interesting, so I would recommend it), except to say I did always wondered why Freud ‘missed a trick’ on occasions in his analysis of his own dream (although he somewhat covers himself for that in the conclusion to his analysis – see below). I remember asking my undergraduate lecturer why Freud didn’t question the dynamics of his own relationship with Rank more, in regard to how it was played out in the dream, which I thought might have reflected some degree of competition between the two of them (however, since Rank deferred to Freud here in referring Irma, maybe Freud saw no competition, perhaps seeing himself as the superior of the two). Interestingly, Freud does acknowledge the competition between Rank and another psychoanalyst that he mentions in the dream analysis, Leopold. I also thought that the injection itself was an Oedipal symbol (given in the mouth of Irma by Rank), which Freud also seemed to overlook in this regard, analysing it in relation to another friend of his who took cocaine via injection and also reproaching Rank, later, for giving injections too readily.

So, onto the kettle logic...

In his summary, Freud acknowledges the contradictions in his dream, which he says “unite in acquitting me” and “do not agree with one another”. Providing his kettle logic analogy, he attempts to explain how these contradictions work when one is defending oneself, but also contradicting oneself at the same time, putting into question what the reality of the situation really is. In regard to the dream story (the latent aspect of the dream), Freud believes that contradictory dream elements often appear simultaneously:

The whole plea—for the dream was nothing else—reminded one vividly of the defence put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbours with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbour at all.

I think we can probably all recount examples of others (maybe even ourselves) in an argument, ‘grasping at straws’ in order to acquit themselves and throwing out contradictions at every turn. In this regard I see it as an overdetermination inasmuch as multiple elements all point to one cause, which never appears in the contradictory list of defences. And for our kettle ‘thief’, the returned/damaged/never-borrowed kettle all point towards one cause, a stolen kettle!

Uncanny Effects and Perambulatory Weirdness…

. . . at Birmingham New Street

On 18th May I was kindly invited to Birmingham for the day by the artist Ally Standing to see the new development around the New Street area and also Spaghetti Junction. I took this photo at New Street. This contemporary building has one of the classic motifs of postmodern architecture, a mirror-effect that reflects the surrounding environment back onto the space: what Reinhold Martin describes as “feedback loops…a doubling back of the surface onto itself” (Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again 2010: 106).

The building is ‘uncanny’ in the Freudian sense of the word: unheimlich. This is what I have said about the term ‘uncanny’ elsewhere:

Sigmund Freud takes the word from the German unheimlich which means the opposite of what one might find familiar (heimlich meaning familiar - homely, but be careful here, because for Freud the two terms become conflated in what he means by 'uncanny'). So, the uncanny has the qualities of both the familiar and the unfamiliar at the same time. I would describe it as producing a strange kind of affective dissonance, which is disturbing. It throws you into this spaceless space in between the two binary oppositions (recognisable/unrecognisable, understandable/incomprehensible). Sometimes 'the thing' recognised is known, but is out of place and this decontextualisation can create the feeling of the uncanny. (Particulations 2012)

The image creates a doubling back, as Reinhold describes above, and the reflection of the nearby Redbrick building is both familiar and unfamiliar, hence uncanny. You recognise it to be a Redbrick, but it appears to be sitting atop a single pillar which couldn’t possibly support it. The image below contextualises the setting better. It becomes less strange as you start to work out what is going on.

While I do think this image is very weird in its own right, I must say even standing there in this very spot produces an uncanny affect, despite the full context of the landscape being available to you. I am wondering if there is a potential for a perambulatory hinge to evolve at this spot over time. I posted the uncanny image on facebook today to see what people’s reaction might be. Here’s a lovely piece of haiku in response to it, written by Rob Lycett:

Related links:
A Psychogeography of the Westin Bonaventure
Taking an Urban Walk with Freud
An Encounter with the Uncanny

Schizoanalytic Cartographies Part 1: Guattari on Psychoanalysis and Religion

Félix Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies has finally been translated into English. I've been waiting for it for a year since I heard it was going to be published. This series of blogs will include some short discussions - or 'tasters' if you will - of Guattari's that are included in the book and you might find interesting. I've deliberately sought out the more jargon-free passages, so as to make them accessible to those of you who may be interested in the title of the blog, but not familiar with Guattari's own work:

Psychoanalysis is not a science; it is not an art, it is not for all that a religion - although it does mobilize powerful phenomena of belief, Freud is venerated like a Father of the Church, his first patients are celebrated like holy martyrs, his writings treated like the Gospel and the congregations that invoke him practise the excommunication of schismatics just like in the good old days of the Inquisition...I have already mentioned the difference in position of religious and psychoanalytic subjectivity with regard to scientific rationality, the first ostensibly separating itself from it, the second endeavouring to absorb it in various ways. Two other different equally deserve to be noted: 1) psychoanalysis requires a more active participation of its users in its rituals; 2) its myths are more deterritorialized that those of religion.

Psychoanalysis and the monotheistic religions have in common that they seek to grip subjectivity in ethical axes in conformity with the requirements of what I will call capitalistic logics, that is to say, systems of judgement proceeding by generalized equivalence, the conjuring and repression of animist intensities, the conversion of singular trajectories, the system of reiteration and circulation of formal entities on deterritorialized 'markets' (those of the economy, of morality, of art...) . Whilst, to achieve their ends, religions act by direct suggestion, by the imprint of standardized representations and statements, at least to begin with psychoanalysis gives free reign to a certain individual expression, the better subsequently to take it over and to submit of its own accord to other, perhaps even more tyrannical, kinds of stereotypes. Whilst religion, dare I say it, straitjackets subjectivity in the open air, psychoanalysis gets rid of some of the ballast of statements in order to concentrate its efforts on remodelling enunciation. (Guattari, page 43)

Part two of this series of blogs is here: Guattari on Enunciation
Part three of this series of blogs is here: Guattari on Postmodernity
If you would like to see a 'methodology' for using schizoanalysis in conjunction with psychogeography, please visit my website: Schizocartography