2/6/22: The Sixth

A Strangely Sexually Stimulating Substack.

I met up with a friend last week, who left just before the pandemic. I asked him why he left, and he told me “I wanted to let my nervous system relax,” after 15 years of living in the city. As I’ve been dealing with a case of the nerves, that thought stuck with me. I’m writing this from my parents’ place, 3 hours north of the city, hoping to give my own nervous system a chance to relax, if only for a week.

A typical suburban house (not mine).

What is it about the city that makes it so stressful, so stimulating? I personally always think of the noise, the faint hum of city life, whose absence is so obvious whenever I leave. The noise is not from nowhere, though: the original cause of the stimulation of city life is people, people everywhere, driving, walking, working, taking the subway, living their lives. This is what visitors mean when they say they crave the excitement of the city, and also what exhausts those urbanites who struggle.

Let’s say I want to calm my nerves further, where else do I find myself engaged with other people in a stimulating way? Twitter. So I also took the step of deactivating. I did it on impulse, without thought, breaking all the Twitter links in my past newsletters. I promise I’ll either reactivate, or go back and replace everything with screenshots, or some combination of the two.

Now, for the good stuff. You may have had the thought “well, that’s all cute personal details, but what would Freud say about this?” And, surprisingly to some, the answer is “quite a lot”.

Freud the Neuroscientist

Psychoanalysis would not exist if not for Freud’s study of the nervous system. More specifically, psychoanalysis is the child of Freud’s desire to relate certain weird phenomena — symbols, language, dreams, and so forth — back to the biological functioning of the human organism. In the post-Lacanian world, post-Linguistic Turn, it’s all to easy to forget that psychoanalysis began by rooting itself firmly in neuroscience (at least as firmly as one could do with 19th century tools). Lest we readers of psychoanalysis be accused of such slights as floating signifiers, map with no territory, trivial games of language, etc., we should take another look at Freud, and ask ourselves “how does psychoanalysis root itself in physiology?”

The answer could take many forms, and is a developing field in contemporary neuroscience. Karl Friston refers to Freud’s theories in his work on the serotonin system, and several psychoanalysts have been working on extending his research, most notably this three part series on “Sex and Prediction Error”. In this post, I want to focus specifically on the idea of “stimulation”, in the sense I meant in my little opening section, as well as provide an overview of how Freud’s system(s) “quilt” with the biological layer, thus making them acceptable to our thinking, the staunch materialists we are.

The lineage of Freud’s work on neuroscience and biology goes all the way back to Freud and Breuer’s “Studies on Hysteria” (1895), specifically a discussion by Breuer on the mouthful “intracerebral tonic excitations,” themselves hypothesized well prior to Freud, as far back as Helmholtz’s mid-1800s work on nerve physiology. A few years later, Freud wrote an unpublished manuscript called “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, which only saw the light of day in the 1940s, and which I haven’t read, where he elaborates some of his neurological theories from Interpretation of Dreams. After a decade or two latency period, Freud picks up the thread again in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, which provides us with the general biological basis from which psychoanalysis proceeds.

The gist of “intracerebral tonic excitation”, which I summarized at some length, is that neurons exist in a dynamic network, such that we can speak of an organism existing with some level of total excitation, or “tension”. Plenty of folk psychology terms (“stimulation”, “nervous”) refer to this idea that we can treat the entire nervous system as having a state of tension, which Breuer describes as a spectrum from the deepest sleep to the most acute awakeness (in relation to the degree of synchronization occurring across the brain), using a funny metaphor of an electrical grid. This seems relatively well-supported by current neuroscientific research.

The Drives

In “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, which I also wrote a summary of a while back, Freud takes the idea of excitation further, and asks: what are the causes of excitation, or tension? Certainly some have external causes, like loud noises, intense visuals, overwhelming stimuli in general, but much tension stems from within ourselves as biological organisms. In particular, organisms have needs, which build up over time and press upon the organism for satisfaction. Freud refers to this sort of need as a Trieb, meaning “instinct” or “drive” (not to be confused with Instinkt, which refers to automatic reflexes, rather than needs that relate to objects).

Mammalian nervous systems in a state of high excitation due to external cause.

Freud also claimed the existence of what he called the “nirvana principle”, which maps quite cleanly onto Friston’s “minimization of free energy”: the nervous system attempts to reduce its level of tension, and decreases in tension are felt as satisfying. However, Freud felt that this alone was insufficient to characterize all organismic behavior, because certain increases in tension are felt as pleasurable, such as sexual arousal. So, he came up with another principle, the “pleasure principle”, which describes the organism’s pursuit of pleasures through excitation rather than through a decrease in tension.

When combined with the idea of repetition, which seeks to return us to baseline, we can easily see how he derived the ideas of “Death Drive” and “Life Drive”: the former seeks to (compulsively) repeat the same actions with intent of reducing tension, while the latter seeks out pleasurable tensions which serve to expand our range of experience. Homeostasis vs Transistasis (a word I’ve only ever seen in Neon Genesis: Evangelion). Lacan’s idea of joussance also relates to the repetition of tension-increasing behaviors, specifically when they are no longer felt as pleasurable, and yet repeated anyway, like overeating or smoking too many cigarettes.

What do drives consist of? Freud identifies four elements: pressure, the demand for work, in terms of nervous tension, source, which is the underlying somatic process, that we can’t always identify easily, because “we know [drives] only by their aims”, and that aim is always “satisfaction, which can only be obtained by removing the state of stimulation at the source of the drive”, and finally object, “the thing in regard to which or through the drive is able to achieve its aim.”

In other words, drives apply pressure stemming from some source within our biological substrate, aiming at satisfaction, i.e. the reduction of tension, by attaching themselves to some externally desired object. What Lacan wondered was, what is the actual relation between the drive and the object? Rarely do we want to destroy, the object we desire. Rather we want to possess it, and use it repetitively; we “circle around the object”, deriving satisfaction as we go, hence Lacan’s notion of the “drive circuit”. This is most obviously seen in the case of “autoerotic” behaviors, in which the drive can be satisfied by one’s own body, most notably seen in the case of “autistic” behaviors like stimming, to such an extent that Eugene Bleuler invented the term “autism” as a contraction.

The Body

There is much one can say about the drive object in particular, as it relates to our entire process of desire, fantasy, “object choice” (Freud’s euphemistic term for “who we desire as a sexual partner”), etc. But as I have been struggling with my own anxiety, which is ultimately a state of high nervous system tension without obvious means of discharge (and therefore felt as unpleasurable, according to Breuer), I want to focus in on the notion of the body in the psychoanalytic-neuroscientific sense. To do this, I will consult another Freud text, Three Essays on Sexuality, written in the intermediate period between his early work on hysteria and his more mature work on the drives.

To begin with, I need to clarify what exactly Freud means by “sexuality” — it is meant, in its broadest sense, as the “organ pleasures”, in the sense of releases of tension caused by stimulation of the body. Thus, for Freud, a baby breastfeeding is considered a “sexual activity”, as it derives “organ pleasure” from it. It is not until later in life when sexual activity becomes “independent of [the purpose of self-preservation]”.

“No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.” Image from the credits scene of “Tampopo” (1985).

Freud also believed that erotogenicity — the capacity to be experienced as sexually pleasurable — was not limited to the genitals. He claims, working off the example of a child sucking his thumb, that:

The character of erotogenicity can be attached to some parts of the body in a particularly marked way. There are predestined erotogenic zones, as is shown by the example of sucking. The same example, however, also shows us that any other part of the skin or mucous membrane can take over the functions of an erotogenic zone, and must therefore have some aptitude in that direction. Thus the quality of the stimulus has more to do with producing the pleasurable feeling than has the nature of the part of the body concerned. A child who is indulging in sensual sucking searches about his body and chooses some part of it to suck — a part which is afterwards preferred by him from force of habit; if he happens to hit upon one of the predestined regions (such as the nipples or genitals) no doubt it retains the preference.

…

The sexual aim of the infantile instinct consists in obtaining satisfaction by means of an appropriate stimulation of the erotogenic zone which has been selected in one way or another. This satisfaction must have been previously experienced in order to have left behind a need for its repetition; and we may expect that Nature will have made safe provisions so that this experience of satisfaction shall not be left to chance. We have already learnt what the contrivance is that fulfills this purpose in the case of the labial zone: it is the simultaneous connection which links this part of the body with the taking in of food. We shall come across other, similar contrivances as sources of sexuality. The state of being in need of a repetition of the satisfaction reveals itself in two ways: by a peculiar feeling of tension, possessing, rather, the character of unpleasure, and by a sensation of itching or stimulation which is centrally conditioned and projected on to the peripheral erotogenic zone. We can therefore formulate a sexual aim in another way: it consists in replacing the projected sensation of stimulation in the erotogenic zone by an external stimulus which removes that sensation by producing a feeling of satisfaction. This external stimulus will usually consist in some kind of manipulation that is analogous to the sucking.

In short, a part of the body presents itself to consciousness through a feeling of unpleasureable tension (think: pressure), which demands release through stimulation. These parts of the body tend to originate in the early satisfaction of certain biological needs. Freud adds an intriguing footnote in the 1915 edition: “After further reflection and after taking other observations into account, I have been led to ascribe the quality of erotogenicity to all parts of the body and to all the internal organs.” What was this further reflection?

We find it in Freud’s later book The Ego and the Id:

A person's own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen like any other object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of sensations, one of which may be equivalent to an internal perception. Psycho-physiology has fully discussed the manner in which a person's own body attains its special position among other objects in the world of perception. Pain, too, seems to play a part in the process, and the way in which we gain new knowledge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way by which in general we arrive at the idea of our body.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the 'cortical homunculus' of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces backwards and, as we know, has its speech-area on the left-hand side.

The “cortical homunculus”, aka the ego (the “I”).

One more note on the ego, from “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, before I can tie this all together. Freud writes that the ego, at its essence, is fundamentally self-preservative, in opposition to sexual instincts which require going beyond the ego: “biology teaches that sexuality is not to be put on a par with other functions of the individual; for its purposes go beyond the individual and have as their content the production of new individuals—that is, the preservation of the species.”

Further, he claims that “the ego hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are a source of unpleasurable feeling for it, without taking into account whether they mean a frustration of sexual satisfaction or of the satisfaction of self-preservative needs. Indeed, it may be asserted that the true prototypes of the relation of hate are derived not from sexual life, but from the ego's struggle to preserve and maintain itself.”

Panic

What’s my problem, that pushed me to take such drastic action as driving to my parents’ house to “relax my nervous system”? I’ve been dealing with anxiety and panic responses surrounding, in particular, a fear that I will have an overwhelming and deadly allergic reaction when I eat certain foods. I almost certainly have some degree of adult allergy developing, and that is surely linked to stressors in my day-to-day life, but the panic response seems far out of proportion from what I can expect from the allergies: my dad has similar allergies, and they were never life-threatening, merely annoying.

What is a panic attack? At risk of “owning myself” again, as I did in my last post on getting into online arguments (but hey, this is so far down in the post that you must really be interested in the topic to get this far), I quote a secondary source (original Freud paper: “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description ‘Anxiety Neurosis’”, 1895):

For what concerns their genesis, Freud maintains that panic attacks occur in those who abstain from normal sexual relationships. Having then linked anxiety to sexual desire, Freud makes a further differentiation between psychic tension and psychic desire in order to explain why anxiety also manifests itself in those individuals who seem to have no interest in sexual relations. He states that there can be psychic tension without it reaching a representation of a sexual kind and, therefore, without conscious desire. In any case, there can be sexual tension, though not experienced as sexual desire, which, having reached a certain degree of intensity, will then determine the triggering of anxiety. I have recalled here this Žfirst Freudian model because I believe it contains a useful intuition: the panic attack is not the outcome of a process of repression of emotional conflicts, but, rather, it is supported by primitive, automatic and pre-verbal mechanisms.

The key here is that panic springs from sexual tension, which as we saw earlier, originates in a drive at the biological level, but is then not experienced as desire, but rather “short-circuits” to panic. (NB: I am not in a relationship, nor using dating apps, nor even experiencing sexual desire in my day to day life — but recall that “sexual desire”, despite Freud’s focus on sexual relationships, refers not only to the genitals, but to all drives, including the pleasure of eating). This insight would lead Wilhelm Reich to his famous conclusions about the Sexual Revolution, as he noticed his analysands who found satisfying relationships seemed to recover from their neuroses (which he already identified with the body) almost without any further intervention on his part.

With the above background, we can go a step further: the specific panic response for me relates to sensations of the mouth, one of Freud’s classical erogenous zones (which experiences an excitation, an increase of tension accompanying my feelings of hunger), which I immediately short-circuit to “allergies”. This is likely because I had a traumatic experience as a child where I witnessed a peer having a life-threatening allergic reaction (similarly, I have a complex relationship with food in general, having been quite overweight in my childhood — the “sexual desire” that doesn’t reveal itself to me as desire may well be the pleasures of food, especially considering I eat the same couple of “boring” foods every day). My affective response to that traumatic memory becomes reactivated in my instances of panic, and I suffer an intense anxiety, which Freud would “signal anxiety” (quote again from secondary source above):

Freud (1926) differentiated the anxiety associated to a real danger (automatic anxiety) from that experienced in a situation of threatened danger (signal anxiety). Signal anxiety warns us about an imminent danger situation and prepares us to deal with it. This differentiation works well under normal conditions, but in the specific case of panic attacks the ego is unable to differentiate signal anxiety from automatic anxiety and the potential danger becomes a real one. The traumatised ego becomes hypervigilant and reacts to all alarm signals as if they indicated the presence of a concrete danger. The loss of the internal container is accompanied by the loss of the capacity for symbolisation, whereby an individual undergoing a panic attack behaves just like one who has actually been traumatised: images, sounds, certain patterns of relationship and, in particular, somatic signals can all set off a flashback reaction that is a sensation of actually reliving the traumatic event instead of merely remembering it (Garland, 1998).

Although I attempt to relieve my symptoms through reality-testing, empirically testing my experience against what I know rationally about the severity of allergic reactions, I am only so successful at this, as my “capacity of symbolisation” is diminished at precisely the time when I need it, to maintain my internal equilibrium.

Noting that the entire situation of nervous tension is mediated by the factors involved in Breuer’s original discussion of “intracerebral tonic excitation”, I figured that spending some time in a peaceful place could decrease my set-point of tension (“letting my nervous system relax”) at least a little bit, and help ward off some of these panic responses, at least until I can deal with some of the underlying structural problems in my life. And so I finish this post from my parents’ house, with Youtube Autoplay having moved on from my chosen music to play me some nice ambient music with raindrop samples in the background.

Miscellania

One aside that all this material made me think about is how music interacts with the nervous system. I’ve always struggled to describe the features I like in music, relying on vague terms like “tension and release”. I’ve even blogged about it in the past. It seems like these terms are effectively accurate, and that one thing I enjoy in music is the satisfaction of the climax, the “drop”, especially when I was a teenager.

Electronic music in particular is about the mastery of tension and release, so I’ll share with you, as song of the week, a favorite tune from high school, when I was deep in the kaleidoscopic waters of happy hardcore.