Freud’s Three Wishes
The first psychoanalytic concept
Samo Tomšič
Much has happened in psychoanalysis since its invention. The Freudian concepts have been sharped and reworked, some even abolished. It is therefore hardly surprising that from today’s perspective, “wish” (Wunsch) appears a rather curious word in the Freudian vocabulary, a somewhat naïve, perhaps even redundant expression, indicating a wrong terminological choice. The peculiarity of “wish” has been enforced by Lacan’s structuralist revision of Freud, which moved away from the “phenomenology” of wish—or how our wishes aim at (the appearance of) concrete objects, qualities, or scenarios. Having translated “wish” with the French désir,[1] Lacan produced a wide-reaching conceptual displacement, which made of Wunsch a speculative notion, standing in continuity with the long European philosophical tradition of reflecting about the human subject’s “desiring faculty.” We can immediately think of Spinoza and Hegel as two key modern figures in this line of reasoning, stretching all the way back to Aristotle’s and Plato’s reflections on philia and eros (friendship and love).[2] Considering its semantic layers and conceptual intricacies, some of which will be thematized in what follows, Freud’s Wunsch comes across as a kind of “spoiler” in this speculative tradition, staining the perseverance of desire and its directedness beyond sensuousness with the finitude of concrete objects or wishful scenarios. However, this is precisely what the Freudian understanding of Wunsch aims at: a specific indistinction, the fusion of concretion and abstraction, sensuousness and symbolism, satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
Looking back at the years during which Freud laid the methodological, clinical, and theoretical foundations of psychoanalysis, one immediately notices that “wish” assumed a central role. In the so-called first Freudian topography of the psyche (separated into conscious, preconscious, and unconscious functions), the unconscious is mainly theorized through Freud’s analysis of dreams, which he understood as pleasurable “wish-fulfilments.” In this context, Freud also first encountered the specific “fluidity” and “unsharpness” of mental phenomena. To reach pleasurable satisfaction, Freud found, an essential force in the mental apparatus paves convoluted and polymorphous paths. In what follows, I will pinpoint some of the major difficulties in the way Freud introduces and conceptualizes the wish, and then, after a longer “latency period,”[3] how Freud returns to the wish in his analysis of culture, specifically of religion. I focus on The Interpretation of Dreams not only because in this founding work of psychoanalysis the wish plays a prominent role, but also because it is here that we can most clearly observe a particular difficulty pertaining to Freud’s concept of the wish that became obfuscated by subsequent reception of Freud’s work—notably by Lacan, who replaced the term “wish” with “desire.”
The main difficulty concerns how the wish operates in Freud’s theory of dreams and other unconscious formations. To begin, we can find three distinct wishes in Freud’s first systematic work: first, we find the wish whose impulse initiates the dream-work (the unconscious mental work that creates the paths toward pleasurable satisfaction by condensing, displacing, narrating, and visualizing the contents of a dream); second, we encounter the wish as it overlaps with the activity of fulfilment, or the wish defined as the object that fulfills it; and, finally, there is the wish to sleep. While the first two wishes are of immediate interest, the third one seems least thought-provoking. Yet, it is the interplay between the striving for pleasurable satisfaction—which manifests as a disturbance of sleep—and the counter-striving for the perpetuation of sleep that returns in Freud’s later critique of cultural worldviews and of their conservative organization or “fabrication” of reality. Here, we run into a major problem, which I address through the question of the identity and/or nonidentity of the wish, as well as through the question of its origin. Does Freud work with three wishes, which only seemingly blend into one? Or is there one wish, which assumes the appearance of three distinct, even opposing tendencies?
Does Freud work with three wishes, which only seemingly blend into one?
Vocabularies of psychoanalysis meticulously acknowledge the diverse and divergent semantic layers of Wunsch,[4] and it is hardly necessary to recall how crucial the union of distinct, eventually opposing connotations in a single term is for psychoanalysis. This union, or condensation, is what matters most. As Laplanche and Pontalis point out, Wunsch first stands for a “formulated wish,” that is, it aims at an already specified object, condition, or scenario in which it finds satisfaction, even if only temporarily. Another semantic layer covers Begehren, hence Lacan’s désir, which connotes a more general striving or tendency, whose object is less specified and its ties to sensuous concretion and finite satisfaction are looser.[5] Finally, and most crucially, the semantic of Wunsch touches upon Lust, another central and no less complicated notion, normally translated as “pleasure,” but which is more properly covered by “lust.” These different layers of Wunsch immediately show that it contains an oscillation between two types of activities: a temporary and an enduring one. The same oscillation reflects on the level of the wishful object, located in-between (material) concretion and (symbolic) abstraction. The union of both aspects—temporary and enduring activity, concrete and abstract object—is nothing other than repetition, an action that Freud associates with “a wish from the unconscious,” which he claims essentially aims at rerunning the initial or first experience of pleasurable satisfaction, the very experience of wish fulfilment.
In view of this semantic layering, Lacan’s désir comes as a decision that privileges one connotation of Wunsch over others: the aspect of endurance and, consequently, the “speculative” or “supra-sensuous” face of the object of satisfaction. The object in question is not simply providing pleasurable satisfaction, but it is pleasurable satisfaction as such, “satisfaction qua object.”[6] Lacan’s translation, which is in fact a decision and a displacement, seems to contain a betrayal (in accordance with the wordplay traddutore-traditore that Freud mentions in his book on jokes). He betrays the ambiguity of Wunsch, its unsharpness and fuzziness, which, however, allows this early Freudian concept to stand at a crossroad and point in different directions: toward consciousness and the unconscious, toward two aspects of the unconscious (the preconscious and the unconscious proper), toward appearance and the structural dynamic of satisfaction (accomplished and ongoing satisfaction), and so on.
Wishful Thinking and Wish Fulfilment
Wunsch was conceptually first introduced in Freud’s and Breuer’s collaborative Studies on Hysteria, where it was identified as a force around which a psychic conflict is organized. The volume theorized the “hysteric” symptom as the main expression of this conflict, a compromise formation containing an attempt to satisfy the repressed wish, while also channeling resistance against it. Breuer and Freud propose different names for the exclusion of the wish from consciousness. While Freud already speaks of the unconscious, Breuer speculates about the so-called hypnoid states, a hypnosis-like mental state in which his patient, Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O.”), engaged in the activity of daydreaming. These states of detachment from reality were indeed “wishful thinking” in the strong sense of the term: the activity of thinking was indistinguishable from the striving of the repressed wish toward a pleasurable satisfaction. Satisfaction is here not simply displaced in an intellectual register, but thinking itself becomes an activity of the desiring faculty, as Freud’s mature work will explain. This indistinction between “thought” and “wish” was the first major insight preparing the terrain for Freud’s subsequent developments on the structure and the dynamics of the unconscious.[7]
The revolutionary break that Freud aspired to finally took place after Studies on Hysteria, when he progressively recognized that objective or historical reality and psychic or mental reality have equal weight.[8] The complexity of a “hallucinatory wish-fulfilment” is extensively outlined in The Interpretation of Dreams. Just like the symptom before, dreams came to be considered compromise formations, the main motive of their emergence being a repressed wish. Dreams narrate and visualize satisfaction. Freud takes as one of the basic examples children’s wishes, where wish fulfilment seems to be entirely undistorted. A child, for instance, dreams of sweets or other desirable objects it could not obtain during the day; the wish remained in a state of suspension and found its path to hallucinatory satisfaction during the state of sleep. Due to this immediacy, Freud at this point still regards the dreams of small children to be of lesser interest for the “science of dreams”: “They do not offer any riddles to solve.” By apparently lacking the riddle, or distortion through dream-work, these simple dreams fail to provide material for interpretation; they are wishes in the everyday sense of the term, aiming at concrete objects or qualities of an object. They do not contain any complication that would require the work of interpretation, an effort to unfold the combination of motives, images, and symbols that complicate wish fulfilment. These dreams seem to involve a superficial problem (the child not getting what it wanted), which also means that the wish and its object contain no inner discrepancy or nonidentity.
Adults’ dreams, on the other hand, contain compromise formations, meaning that the wish involved is both satisfied and unsatisfied through the dream activity. Dreams unfold a scenario, a script of satisfaction. But this script shows that the wish in question is marked by a dislocation and discrepancy, which is reflected in the fact that fulfilling it requires compromise. It would be too simple to interpret the compromise in question as a sign of tension between direct and indirect, complete and incomplete, or authentic and inauthentic satisfaction. Rather, the dream interpretation reveals that the nature of wish (that Freud eventually describes as unconscious) consists in striving beyond temporary satisfaction. Dissatisfaction is what keeps the unconscious wish alive, and it is this striving that most evidently goes against the everyday appearance and understanding of a wish.
Freud’s concept may therefore come across as counterintuitive. Unlike the conscious wish, the unconscious one does not have a predetermined or “adequate” sensuous object; only if we remain restricted to the appearance of the wish—the hallucinatory staging of satisfaction in a dream scenario—can we speak of an adequate relation between a wish and its object. The unconscious wish, in turn, violates the rule of adaequatio, but it violates the rule from within: the displacement or change of object is inherent to the object. The object of the unconscious wish is both identical and nonidentical to the object that appears in the dream as an offer for pleasurable satisfaction. Because there is, strictly speaking, no predetermined object for the unconscious wish, except pleasurable satisfaction itself, the staging of satisfaction necessarily erases the distinction between authentic and inauthentic satisfaction, or makes this qualitative difference of lesser significance.
Furthermore, even in the simple case of children’s wishes, the dream contains a masquerade. The main point is not the simplicity of the object, but the hallucinatory staging of satisfaction through the appearance of immediacy. In the adult, an unconscious wish takes the appearance of a conscious or preconscious one, which functions as an interpretation of the unconscious wish. However, perhaps a child’s wish comes even closer to this equation of wish and its interpretation, since it most clearly demonstrates a “loop” in immediacy, a redoubling, which equates objective and hallucinated satisfaction, concretion and abstraction of the pleasurable object.[9] Hence, to repeat, the unconscious wish is not to be understood in terms of authenticity, which subsequently gets distorted, but in terms of force or impulse, a push for satisfaction, which initiates work in the mental apparatus that will exemplify satisfaction over and over again. This is also the reason why the encounter with the unconscious wish is always indirect, containing a point of opaqueness that Freud exemplifies in a most peculiar manner when he talks about the dream navel (I will get to this image further below).
Forms of the Wish
There is evidently no “one” wish in Freud’s theory of dreams. Yet, if there are several—one, the trigger of the dreamwork; two, its fulfillment; and three, the wish to sleep—where do they come from and where do they lead?
The distinction between these wishes seems even more significant because they pertain to different instances of the mental apparatus, hence to different localities. The first wish is in the unconscious state of repression, the second results from the preconscious “remains of the day,” and the third belongs to consciousness or the sleeper’s ego. Freud repeats throughout his dream analyses that dreams are not only wish fulfilments but also guardians of sleep, guarantors of its continuity. Here, then, a conflict between the first and the third wish enters the picture. The wish that requires satisfaction functions as the disturber of sleep and is the opposite of the wish to sleep. Consequently, when dreams are formed, this signals that sleep is being threatened, and the task of dream-work consists in integrating the disturbing impulses. Even though Freud does not ignore disturbances from the outside world, those coming from the inside—be it in the guise of physiological or psychological stimuli—are more important, since they testify to an “inner outdoors” of mental life. The unconscious wish is a disturbance and therefore appears to contradict the wish to sleep; the former wish strives for satisfaction that is indifferent to the satisfaction of the latter, even though it can be satisfied only in and through the continuation of sleep. What Freud names dream-work is ultimately the attempt to satisfy both wishes simultaneously.[10]
While the pair of unconscious wish and the wish to sleep still creates the impression of two distinct wishes, there seems to be another discrepancy on the level of the dream-wish itself. Is the unconscious wish identical to wish fulfilment? If a wish stands at the beginning of the process of dream formation, as its cause or trigger, then its essence is dissatisfaction. However, embedded in the process of dream making, in which satisfaction is built up, the wish is essentially wish fulfilment, an achievement of dream-work. Here, then, the wish does not precede the dream but emerges through the process until it finally appears at the end, in the hallucinatory staging of satisfaction, which presents a wish in its fulfilled state. Both wish aspects are brought together in the following lines of The Interpretation of Dreams:
“The accumulation of excitation […] is felt as unpleasure and […] sets the apparatus in action with a view to repeating the experience of satisfaction, which involved a diminution of excitation and was felt as pleasure. A current of this kind in the apparatus, starting from unpleasure and aiming at pleasure, we have termed a ‘wish’; and we have asserted that only a wish is able to set the apparatus in motion and that the course of the excitation in it is automatically regulated by feelings of pleasure and unpleasure.”
Wish is not only a trajectory from unpleasure to pleasure, but a specific relation between dissatisfaction and satisfaction, a management of excitation that continuously navigates between increasing and decreasing. Freud here expresses his familiar view that the pleasure principle aims at reestablishing homeostasis, an ideal state of absence of excitation (“ideal sleep” without any disturbances whatsoever, and eventually death). But this is not the only way to understand homeostasis. Rather than being considered an ideal state, contemporary life sciences refer to homeostasis for designating a process in which balance or equilibrium is continuously negotiated.[11] Here, then, homeostasis is indeed a “state” of ongoing tension and therefore movement. In this dynamic understanding of homeostasis, then, instability is an essential feature of the mental apparats, which is, at least for Freud, from the very offset organized around an underlying psychic conflict, trauma, or disturbance (whether this disturbance is called wish or drive).
One imagery remains particularly striking in Freud’s description of the unconscious wish: the dream navel. This comparison appears in a context where Freud discusses the limits of dream interpretation, a point where interpretation begins to run up against a wall, so to speak:
“There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled, and which moreover contributes nothing to the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation must generally remain without an ending and branch out in every direction into the weblike entanglement of our world of thought. The dream-wish arises from a dense spot of this meshwork, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.”
Freud here certainly addresses the issue of the limits of interpretation, but also that of the origin of the wish, which first appears as some kind of mental abyss (“the unknown”). At the same time, the description suggests that both dream and wish arise together from an opaque, implacable spot, or perhaps a void, which functions less as an absolute limit than as an organizing principle of the multiple strains of thought. The void allows the activity of weaving, which results in the “rising” of the dream-wish and the formation of the dream. The mental mycelium is a texture, woven together, forming a body, which is merely a section of a meshwork, which becomes looser at its margins, eventually decomposing in divergent strains of thought or signifying chains. The wish is thus localized at the margins of a “tangle” or a knot, which is itself not possible without the inclusion of the void. One could say that, to stick to the activity of weaving, the latter can be understood as working with the void, its integration in the texture that the work of weaving aims to produce. The dream thus does not originate simply in the unknown but in the condensation of the strains of thought, at a spot of an intense entanglement.
The origin of the wish was a major concern for Freud, who framed it both synchronically and diachronically. The synchronic version, briefly mentioned above, strives to localize the origin within the psychic apparatus at this point in Freud’s theoretical development (which divided the psyche between consciousness, the preconscious, and the unconscious). Freud then proposes three localizations, which returns us to the question of whether he is talking about three different wishes or one composed, montaged, or woven wish identity in constant movement and negotiation.
In the synchronic theory, Freud enumerates three etiological scenarios. One is that the wish was caused in waking life by a concrete object in a concrete situation, but that the external conditions did not support its satisfaction and so the mental apparatus pushed it into the preconscious. From there, the wish could reach its suspended satisfaction during the state of sleep. Another option is that the wish emerged in the waking state, but immediately confronted rejection in the mental apparatus, and this prevention from satisfaction is entirely situated in psychic life. Consequently, Freud locates the wish on the border between preconscious and unconscious. In this second scenario, the wish could attach itself onto an element of waking life, a feature that does not hold for the third scenario, where, as Freud explicitly remarks, the wish has no relation to waking life and only “awakens” at night, when the mechanism of repression and censorship loosens its grip. In other words, it is a wish that pertains to psychic life only, and whose object is in the juncture between psychological and corporeal pleasure. This wish is presumably incapable of leaving the unconscious. In other words, it cannot appear as such, directly or unmediated, not because it would be prevented from such appearance by mental censorship, but because its whole nature consists in traversing appearances as a structural force. This implies, again, that the wish in “wish-fulfilment” both is and is not identical to the unconscious wish.
The distinction between the conscious and the unconscious wish is not a strict opposition but contains a relation of continuity. Freud writes: “I imagine that the conscious wish only turns into a dream-arouser [Traumerreger] when it succeeds in awakening a same-sounding [gleichlautenden] unconscious wish, through which it is strengthened.” The German terms are quite telling. Freud does not speak of just any kind of “causation,” but explicitly of Erregung, arousal, to point out the aspect of excitation (the increase of tension) and the aspect of pleasure (again Lust with all its semantic ambiguities). At the same time, he makes clear that the (pre-)conscious wish functions as a sort of amplifier, intensifying (arousing) the unconscious wish, which then so to speak parasites onto the former’s concreteness.
Equally important is the insight that the relation between the (pre-)conscious and unconscious wish is framed in terms of Gleichlaut (equivocity). Equivocity implies union and difference, but in a specific manner: we are no longer dealing with one single wish, but also not with two distinct or entirely differentiated wishes either. Rather, what is at stake is a redoubling within one and the same tendency, which contains a point of semantic opaqueness and structural blockade (or entanglement), an unresolvable knot, whose point is precisely not to be resolved, but to function as a support for the desiring faculty. Conscious and unconscious wish “sound the same” but they are neither equal nor the same; they are distinguished by and connected in and through a gap in their presumable sameness. Equivocity thus turns out to be the defining feature of the Freudian wish, as well as the feature that Lacan’s translation of the term with désir resolved and betrayed.
Framed diachronically, the origin of an unconscious wish is sought in the subject’s history, and more specifically, in childhood—which stands, so to speak, for the unconscious of the adult, thus complicating the relation between past, present, and future. For Freud, this temporal relation was never simply linear, but contained the inner loop of retroactivity (Nachträglichkeit), which exposes a specific dynamic in the way the three temporal dimensions interact and transform each other.[12] Here, we encounter another impenetrable point, a navel of history, so to speak, which cannot be entirely appropriated by the work of interpretation. Although Freud remarks that the unconscious wish must have been conscious at some moment in time (infancy), this simplification only strives to resolve a fundamental dilemma that accompanies the reality of the unconscious and the mechanism of repression: How did it come to be?
The problem preoccupied Freud throughout his life. He tried to resolve it in his metapsychology by introducing the notion of “primal repression” and in his writings on culture, which fabricated the myth of the “primal horde” and the “killing of the primal father.” These so-called solutions merely repeat the problem at another, more speculative level—a problem tied to the redoubling that is inherent to both wish and the unconscious. Freud himself acknowledged this dilemma in his Introductory Lectures:
“‘Are the day's residues,’ you will ask, ‘really unconscious in the same sense as the unconscious wish which must be added to them in order to make them capable of producing a dream?’ Your suspicion is correct. This is the salient point of the whole business. They are not unconscious in the same sense. The dream-wish belongs to a different unconscious—to the one which we have already recognized as being of infantile origin and equipped with peculiar mechanisms. It would be highly opportune to distinguish these two kinds of unconscious by different names. But we would prefer to wait till we have become familiar with the field of phenomena of the neuroses. People consider a single unconscious as something fantastic. What will they say when we confess that we cannot make shift without two of them?”
Assuming the existence of the unconscious is not enough. Or, to be more precise, by speaking of the unconscious, one must assume its redoubling. But what could this redoubling be? Are we talking about two distinct unconsciouses? The unfolding of The Interpretation of Dreams provides the following answer. The “unconscious-1” is described with the term “preconscious”; this is the unconscious of the day’s residues. We find here concrete contents of thoughts, memories, and recollections, which are all susceptible to become conscious. This understanding of the unconscious is not new; it can be traced to the discussion of “unclear,” “obscure,” or “dark” representations and ideas in philosophical systems such as the Kantian or the Cartesian.[13] The properly Freudian unconscious may be derived from this pre-Freudian understanding of the unconscious, but it shifts its focus from content to form (which is, moreover, libidinally invested).
Wish Economies
Freud already suggests that his notion is distinguished by the fact of historicity, or how a wish “grows up” (from the dream’s navel, from the early childhood). The unconscious wish is of infantile origin, thus describing the perseverance of the infant in the adult. Still, this perseverance is specifically framed, since the infantile origin concerns the memory trace of pleasurable satisfaction, which is repeated in the construction of a dream in the present (as well as in the formation of a symptom). The question of the form of thought, rather than its “obscured” content, is joined by the problem and the reality of repetition, certainly of a specific memory, the content of which is the experience of a pleasurable satisfaction. Here, the difference between the two unconsciouses overlaps with the distinction between two wishes, or to be more precise, between the appearance of the wish aiming at a specific object of satisfaction, and its inner logic and the mechanisms of satisfaction (repetition, unconscious work). On the second level, the object of satisfaction is itself an abstraction, deprived of positive qualities, be they sensuous or intellectual—with the exception of one quality, according to which it functions as a source of pleasure, or simply is pleasure (depending on whether we situate the object on the level of appearance of the wish or on the level of its formal mechanisms). Then, however, in the Freudian unconscious (“unconscious-2”), wish functions as an orienting force. With its striving for satisfaction, it provides the “drive-force” (Triebkraft) for the working of the mental apparatus. It is with this expression that Freud most explicitly marks the difference between the (pre-)conscious and the unconscious wish on the one hand, and between the “two” unconsciouses on the other. The expression also raises the question: Is the unconscious wish from The Interpretation of Dreams itself an anticipation of the drive from Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious? Both works were published only five years later, and in both the conceptual absence of the wish is striking.
To exemplify the move from content to form, from sensuous to formal character of the object of an unconscious wish, Freud famously recurs to an economic metaphor, which compares the unconscious wish with the capitalist organization of social production:
“The drive-force which the dream required had to be provided by a wish; it was the business of the worry to get hold of a wish to act as the driving force of the dream. The position may be explained by an analogy. A daytime thought may very well play the part of entrepreneur for a dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can do nothing without capital; he needs a capitalist who can afford the outlay, and the capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of the previous day, a wish from the unconscious.”
Here, the entrepreneur functions as an appearance of the capitalist, who is a structural character, even if he may have several social personifications (the entrepreneur being one of them). However, what is interesting in this passage is that Freud seems to move in a direction that somewhat complicates the subsequent distinction between wish and drive. Wish is here described as a “drive-force” of the dream, a striving for pleasure, and evokes Freud’s later characterization of the drive as a “constant force.”[14] Yet there is one significant distinction between wish and drive: while the drive, understood as a constant force, strives for more of the same (hence the compulsion to repeat), the wish always comprises an attempt to actualize an unrealized potentiality. The most superficial, even banal exemplification of such unrealized potential is the “day’s residues.” A more complex and critical example of this aspect of the wish is exemplified in analysis. If analysis stands for working with the analysand’s desiring faculty, then here the unrealized potentiality is expressed in the attempt of the cure to change or transform the given organization of enjoyment.
The wish always comprises an attempt to actualize an unrealized potentiality.
The very expression “day’s residues” or “remains of the day” (Tagesreste) indicates that the content of this thought material consists of unresolved, suspended, or failed actions, which are then repeated and so to speak corrected, in the dream. They go on haunting the dreamer during nighttime, and in doing so they connect with something more fundamental, and equally unrealized, in the subject’s history. When it comes to this latter point, Freud’s earlier engagement with traumatic neuroses already comprises a crucial insight. The cases discussed in Studies on Hysteria may unveil unfulfilled “romantic wishes” of young women, but the critical point of Freud’s analyses consists in the recognition of the role of trauma—experienced sexual aggression—in the causation of “hysteria.”[15] The emergence of an eroticized wish thus inevitably triggers the repressed memory of trauma, which is equipped with an “undischarged” or “strangulated affect,” such as fright, repulsion, or disgust. The affectively charged trauma is, indeed, the key name of the unrealized in this early stage of Freud’s theoretical and clinical development—and a major task of the “talking cure” is to help the patient “abreact” the affect, and thus begin working through the trauma.
From this perspective, a wish does not aim merely at a pleasurable satisfaction, but also at change, such as at liberation from the hostage situation, in which a subject is held either through the perseverance of a trauma or through a problematic striving for pleasure that is experienced as unpleasure. Even though The Interpretation of Dreams argues that the unconscious wish strives for repeating the first (mainly childhood) memories of pleasurable satisfaction, its accent is on what is absent, whereby absence does not mean simply a lack that could or should be filled. Rather, it points toward a possible development of the subject—a potentiality that needed to be excluded, suspended, even forbidden to establish a specific mode of enjoyment or orientation of the subject’s desiring faculty.
This is why Freud’s metaphor of the capitalist for describing the unconscious wish may come too fast, not only because it creates the misunderstanding that the unconscious is coextensive with capitalism, but, more importantly, because the capitalist precisely does not strive for an actualization of excluded potentials. Instead, his aim always consists of excluding every possibility of “qualitative change” (structural social change) in order to sustain the pursuit of “quantitative change” (increase of value, economic growth). In this sense, as Marx already knew, the capitalist is rather a personification of the drive, since he strives for “more of the same” (surplus value).[16] To repeat, in this striving, a change does take place, but only as a quantitative change, which alters nothing in the overall regime of satisfaction. No surprise, then, that both Marx and Freud conceived of the drive as a “conservative” force.
Freud’s main point in his dream analysis, and more generally in the analysis of unconscious formations, is that the described mechanisms and operations are valid for all mental processes. The unconscious wish thus expands onto other thought procedures, to the point that it appears as the drive-force of thinking: “Thought is after all nothing but a substitute for a hallucinatory wish; and it is self-evident that dreams must be wish-fulfilments, since nothing but a wish can drive [anzutreiben] our mental apparatus to work.”[17] Humans think with their wishes, but the wish does not necessarily think; it certainly strives for pleasure, thereby exposing the impersonal kernel of thinking itself. Furthermore, the wish also stands for the force that brings unpleasure and pleasure into continuum. To recall from above: “A current of this kind in the apparatus, starting from unpleasure and aiming at pleasure, we have termed a ‘wish.’” The essence of the wish is a push toward pleasure, yet one that is marked by a fundamental unpleasure, a dissatisfaction, which never goes away. If desire is the essence of the human subject, as Spinoza claimed, then this essence stands for a restlessness that contains the vicious circle of pleasure and unpleasure, the impossibility of “pure pleasure” (of which Aristotle speculated in relation to god).[18]
The essence of the wish is a push toward pleasure, yet one that is marked by a fundamental unpleasure, a dissatisfaction, which never goes away.
In addition to this, the Freudian wish also stands for a specific tension between different orientations of desiring faculty (rather than different wishes). The relation between the “three wishes” in The Interpretation of Dreams is far from simple; they stand in mutual continuity and break with each other. To say that the unconscious wish is equivocal with a (pre-)conscious wish means as much as saying that wish is a nonidentical, double-faced creature, caught between finitude (satisfaction) and virtual infinity (repetition). To this we can add the complication between these two wishes and the wish to sleep. The perpetuation of sleep is necessary for the unconscious wish to manifest, and if Freud eventually equates thinking and wishing, this implies that the waking state is a perpetuation of sleep.[19] At the same time, the manifestation of unconscious wish only comes as a disturbance of sleep, albeit not as an awakening, since the latter would imply the suspension of the given arrangement of satisfaction, the suspension of repetition.
To Sleep or Awaken? Authority or Change?
At the very end of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud seems to feel obliged to comment on the popular use of dream interpretation for foretelling the future.[20] From the perspective of a “science of dreams,” as outlined in Freud’s volume, dreams have no value for the knowledge of the future, that is, no function in forwarding happiness. They are, however, of central importance for knowing the past and the conflicts that mark the subject’s history, specifically when it comes to the fortunes and misfortunes of the desiring faculty. Needless to repeat, the function of this knowledge is to bring about a change in the subject’s relation to enjoyment, as well as to the structure that sustains repression and thus keeps the unconscious wish embedded in the vicious circle of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
Freud then adds: “By presenting our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer takes for present, has been shaped [gestaltet] by the indestructible wish into a perfect likeness [Ebenbild] of the past.” Here, too, several points deserve a closer look. First, the unconscious wish functions as a force that models the future in accordance with the events in the past, thus establishing a continuity between past, present, and future. Second, in doing so, this wish demonstrates its perseverance in the established paths of satisfaction, its “indestructible” character. At first, Freud’s formulation seems to imply that the future always remains a hostage of the past, shaped in accordance with past images, experiences, and scenarios. There is, strictly speaking, no future. When a dream presents a wish as fulfilled, it makes future present, thus abolishing the contingency of future developments, which could potentially contain a break with the past and its workings in the present. The hallucinatory wish fulfilment reaffirms the past as unchangeable, tightening the grip of the past on the present. The predicate “indestructible” here implies constant striving for satisfaction, which keeps the unconscious wish pursuing the exact repetition of pleasurable satisfaction, while at the same time fortifying the vicious circle of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. In doing so, the wish again begins assuming the features of the drive, and perhaps one could detect in these conceptual ambiguities an unresolvable antinomy.
The unification of the three temporal dimensions does not seem to allow any change. But since dreams behave like symptoms, that is, as compromise formations, they still drag along a discrepancy between the repetition of pleasurable satisfaction and the perseverance of a non-realized, potential development of the subject’s desiring faculty that had to be excluded to sustain the repetition of satisfaction. For this reason, dreams may not possess the value of predicting the future; but they certainly possess the value of changing the subject’s relation to the past, and in doing so, they open a displacement in the shaping of the future according to the hitherto prevailing image of the past. The achievement of dream interpretation in psychoanalysis, and more generally the type of work that Freud called “working-through” (Durcharbeiten), consists in destabilizing the historical coordinates in which the subject is embedded. While the unconscious wish shapes the future in accordance with the past, analytic interpretation shapes the past in accordance with the “talking cure” unfolding in the present. This work is not directed against the “indestructible wish”; it is working with it, and, more specifically, it offers this wish another object: a change in the pleasurable satisfaction and thus in the given mode of enjoyment, hitherto sustained by (compulsive) repetition of the past.
The task of bending the “indestructible wish” in a manner that will allow reshaping the past places the Freudian method in perpetual conflict with society, and notably with the prevalent social worldviews, which, according to Freud’s mature cultural critique, operate in the same way as dreams.[21] These worldviews comprise conservative which fulfilments, striving to sustain uniformity between past, present, and future, and thus resisting, or at least attempting to undo every epistemic, social, and subjective change. In this sense, they also stand for the perseverance of the wish to sleep, which now obtains an equally “indestructible” and antagonistic character.
Although wish did not remain a key concept in the work following Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, it made a sudden comeback in his mature critique of religion, which is entirely grounded on the dilemmas raised by the early analysis of wish fulfilment. Freud’s critique of religion is anything but unknown. It comes down to the thesis that religion can be compared with obsessional neurosis, insofar as it introduces in human life a series of compulsive constraints. What distinguishes the two is that religion fabricates a “system of wish-illusions” (Wunschillusionen), which functions as a “disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful [glückseligen] hallucinatory confusion.” The remark is peculiar and counterintuitive at first. Amentia is an acute hallucinatory state of confusion, characterized by a loss of orientation due to a diminished capacity of distinguishing reality and fiction (what Freud here calls “illusion”). Freud suggests that, rather than being simply a generalized obsessive neurosis, religion should be understood as a delirious system, since it tends to organize reality in accordance with the “indestructible wish.”[22] Furthermore, Freud identifies the “delirium” of religion, the disavowal of conflicts, as one that sustains happiness (Glückseligkeit). The striving for happiness is certainly linked with the fact that the unconscious wish is the organizing principle of the system of illusions. But the system works back on the unconscious wish, embedding it in a compulsive mode of enjoyment. That religion contains a “wish-fulfilling and consolatory force” means that it offers the human subject the ultimate illusion of a happy life. This illusion in fact involves a triple promise: “If we are to give account of the grandiose nature of religion, we must bear in mind what it undertakes to do for human beings. It gives them information about the origin and coming into existence of the universe, it assures them of its protection and of ultimate happiness in the ups and downs of life and it directs their thoughts and actions by precepts which it lays down with its whole authority.”[23]
Religion thus comprises a promise of knowledge, stability, and orientation in life. The main actor who is supposed to fulfill this triple promise is the father (the Law of the Father, paternal authority). Read together with the pessimistic interpretation of the “indestructible wish,” this means that the aim of religion is keeping the human subject in a perpetual state of infancy and therefore dependency. Religion treats humans as eternal infans, beings marked by an “ontological lack,” due to which they must be bound to authority (whether concrete, such as a priest or a political leader, or abstract, such as God or capital), and they should even desire such a bond in order to achieve a state of enduring happiness. This bond shapes the “indestructible wish” into a “wish for authority.” It also explains the involvement of the “wish to sleep” in this scenario.
Rejecting the religious ontologization of lack does not mean that the opposite, essentially liberal understanding of a human being as an ontologically complete, individual, and independent being contains more truth. This figure is equally fabricated on the background of the disavowal of a central feature of human subjectivity, its relational being and decentered structure. Religious “illusion” certainly contains an excess, which allows human beings to master the world in which they are thrown; as Freud pointedly writes, religion is “an attempt to master the sensuous world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world [Wunschwelt] which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.” However, the same illusion, which is supposed to serve as protection, turns into a tool of domination, segregation, and violence, and it forcefully, indeed compulsively, places humans in the position of “eternal infancy.”
This does not mean that Freud’s critique of religious worldviews should be read as a condemnation of infancy. If anything, Freud envisages in the infant a conflicted and ambivalent figure. There seems to be two meanings to infancy in Freud’s work. On the one hand, there is the infant as a personification of the relationality that marks human beings and that is open for domination through illusions. On the other hand, there is infancy as potentiality, which has been precisely repressed, forbidden, or excluded by the governing system of illusions and its organization of libidinal economy. Hence the two actualizations of the indestructible, yet non-realized nature of the infantile unconscious wish, which always operates as a marker of conflict: the desire for change and the desire for security, which religion shapes into desire for authority. In his critique of worldviews, Freud insists that the efficiency and the perseverance of religious worldviews stems from the fact that they satisfy three main wishes: for knowledge, for the sense of life, and for predictable future. All three elements—knowledge, sense, orientation—are linked with the idea of happiness, which keeps the subject in the position of subordination and dependency. Hence the proximity between happiness and mastery, at least as old as Aristotle’s eudemonic ethics.
What, then, is the infancy implied in the Freudian remark that the indestructible unconscious wish is of infantile origin, as well as in the notorious polymorphous perversion of infantile sexuality (whose shapeshifting is first explored in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality)? The Oedipal reconstruction proposed by The Interpretation of Dreams was rightly denounced as “mythical” (first by Claude Lévi-Strauss and then by Lacan and others). It places the infant between two opposing scenarios: one is the state of dependency, in which it is torn between the Law of the Father and the desire of the mother (the paternal regulation of desiring faculty); the other is the state of invention, which is the potential, on the rejection of which rests the rule of (paternal) law. The infant is thus to be understood as a subject whose potentials are not exhausted in and through the tension between the Law of the Father and the desire of the mother. Hence the opposition between the father and the symptom in Freud’s work, which reflects the contradiction between religion (qua religion of the law and of paternal authority) and psychoanalysis (qua practice of working with the symptom).
It is worth returning to the Freudian passage relating the “indestructible wish” to temporality. While monotheism strives for reproducing the past by uniforming the future (linear time), the aim of psychoanalysis is to create the future by changing the past (retroactivity). This, again, echoes the two meanings, or the ambivalence of infancy: on the one hand, the infant as a subject in quasi-ontological state of dependency, and, on the other hand, the infant as a figure of the non-realized, a potentiality that cannot be mapped onto the ontological duality of being and nonbeing.
Psychoanalysis rejects the “ontological lack” of the human being, without therefore amounting to the opposite scenario. Instead, it makes of incompleteness, the notorious “lack in being,” a “pre-ontological” and moreover an “ethical” category.[24] Although one could argue for replacing the “ethical” with the “political,” the reference to ethics remains crucial, since it also evokes the psychoanalytic position on the “ideology of happiness.” The aim of psychoanalysis is not to help the analysand achieve a state of happiness, but rather to mobilize the “non-realized” as the driving force of change and becoming. If happiness does result from the process of cure, it is not as its telos, or promise, but as its contingent and therefore surprising side effect.
The Wish of Analysis
Lacan’s terminological choice for Wunsch placed the whole accent on the indestructible nature of the unconscious wish, thus drawing attention to the fact that the production of pleasure involves a “parasitism of the infinite on the finite” (extraction of jouissance from all mental activities, remains of the day, and fleeting sensuous objects of particular wishes). What gets pushed to the background, though, is that the human desiring faculty contains a double complication, in other words, that there is also the inverse “parasitism of finitude on the infinite,” which eventually manifests as a voice of protest against a mode of enjoyment that the subject experiences as unbearable or unlivable.[25] This framework overtly rejects the philosophical assumption, repeated in one voice from Aristotle to utilitarianism and beyond, according to which there is an intimate link between pleasure and happiness. For Freud, the pursuit of pleasure does not forward happiness, since both libidinal forces that he puts into focus, wish and drive, demonstrate indifference toward their psychological bearer.
This indifference is explicated in Freud’s comparison of the unconscious wish with the capitalist, who proverbially cares only for the self-valorization of value and “production for the sake of production” (rather than, say, for the sake of meeting vital needs or improving the living conditions of humanity). If dreaming is indeed a form of work, and its modus operandi in the psychic life of modern subjects comparable with the social role of labor in capitalism, it inevitably comprises progressive expenditure and exhaustion of the subject’s mental apparatus.[26] To pursue Freud’s economic metaphor a step further: in capitalism, the desiring faculty, or “libidinal economy,” is subordinated to the pursuit of “pleasure for the sake of pleasure,” a striving for pleasure marked with “growth” or increase, rather than “degrowth” or decrease.[27]
Analytic work returns to the past in order to loosen its grip on the present and to open the horizon of a different future life. To achieve this, psychoanalysis works with, rather than against, the indestructible wish.
The Freudian subject appears to be divided between two objects, which correspond to the wish to sleep and the indestructible unconscious wish. Sleep and pleasure, though, are not opposites, but, as Freud’s theory of pleasure principle demonstrates, two sides of the same coin.[28] To awaken from this vicious circle means to vacillate the common ground of both strivings, the phantasmatic scenario, on the background of which the indestructible wish pushes the mental apparatus to work on a wish fulfilment. Psychoanalysis therefore does not oppose the indestructible wish, but instead works with the subject’s desiring faculty in a very precise manner, by striving to introduce a third object for the indestructible wish: the change in the structure that has hitherto conditioned the analysand’s mode of enjoyment. Such a change implies an awakening, which displaces the hitherto antagonism in the analysand’s mental life.
It is well known that transference is the privileged name for such displacement. In this libidinal bond, characteristic for the analytic setting, the analyst functions as the object of the indestructible wish and the cure unfolds as a work process, indeed a “co-working” in which the activity of remembering and repeating is joined by the already mentioned third activity, the type of transformative work that Freud called working-through. Dreams and other unconscious formations already remember and repeat a problematic script of pleasurable satisfaction, but this repetitive work of the mental apparatus does not bring about any change; it merely creates a patchwork from the “remains of the day” and other mental material, which is meant to sustain the repetition. Working-through, in turn, strives for rearticulating the coordinates in which a wish is operative, thus transforming the indestructible wish itself. Analytic work returns to the past in order to loosen its grip on the present and to open the horizon of a different future life. To achieve this, psychoanalysis works with, rather than against, the indestructible wish. The predicate “indestructible” now no longer means that the subject cannot be freed from the grip of repetition, nor does it imply that there is no enjoyment other than compulsive enjoyment. The unconscious wish, in any case, stands for the driving force of the subject’s mental life—and should analysis have consequences, it needs to mobilize its indestructible striving in order to feed it in the work toward a livable life.
[1] The more faithful French equivalent for Wunsch would be voeu or souhait. After Lacan, the debates in anglophone academia increasingly started using “desire,” while the Standard Edition of Freud’s psychoanalytic works (the Strachey translation) still uses “wish.”
[2] Worth recalling here is also the following remark by Lacan: “Desidero [‘I desire’] is the Freudian cogito [‘I think’].” Jacques Lacan, Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1998), 154. Desire thus not only links Freud with the early modern philosophical discussion of passions, but also, and more importantly, overcomes the dichotomy between thought and affect (and, consequently, between mind and body).
[3] Recall that the Freudian theory of sexuality and metapsychology work with the concept of drive. From 1905 (the publishing year of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) onward, wish becomes a marginal concept.
[4] I am using Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bernard Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychoanalyse (Paris: PUF, 1967), English translation: The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1988); and Elisabeth Roudinesco and Michel Plon, Dictionaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Fayard, 2000).
[5] Another meaning of Begehren (and of its variation, Begierde) is “appetite,” as Roudinesco and Plon underline. Here, we encounter the same lack of object specification.
[6] See Jacques-Alain Miller, “On Perversion,” in Reading Seminars I and II. Lacan’s Return to Freud (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 313. Satisfaction becoming an object (of satisfaction) implies objectification of pleasure. Miller makes this remark in relation to the drive, but already a quick reading of The Interpretation of Dreams shows that the repetition of pleasurable satisfaction on the level of the unconscious wish attributes to the latter some of the features that Freud will subsequently associate with the drive.
[7] The insight resulted from a double failure: Freud was already abolishing the use of hypnosis, which could not help healing his patients, whereas Breuer was fiercely denying the “erotic” component of hypnotic treatment (what will later be called “transference”). Freud had to learn working with “wish,” Breuer chose to run away from it.
[8] This equation is associated with the renunciation of the seduction theory, introduced in the Studies and elaborated in subsequent Freudian writings on hysteria. Much criticism has been rightly addressed at Freud for making this step, because, in doing so, he relativized the overwhelming evidence of sexual abuse. See, for instance, Elaine Westerlund, “Freud on Sexual Trauma: An Historical Review of Seduction and Betrayal,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 10 (1986): 297–310.
[9] Lacan’s important move consisted in insisting that desire is not to be taken as distinct from its interpretation, it simply is (its own) interpretation. See Jacques Lacan, Seminar, Book VI, Desire and Its Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).
[10] Still, it is worth questioning whether these two wishes are entirely opposite. In his later teaching, Lacan dramatized this Freudian scenario by claiming that there is no qualitative distinction between the waking state and the state of sleep, and, consequently, that all thought comes down to what Freud called dream-work. For a systematic discussion of Lacan’s final years, also regarding the topic of dreams and awakening, see Adrian Johnston, “Lacan’s Endgame: Philosophy, Science and Religion in the Final Seminars,” Crisis and Critique 6, no. 1 (2019): 157–187.
[11] See, for instance, J. Scott Turner, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It (San Francisco: Harper One, 2018).
[12] To recall, retroaction implies the rewriting of the past from the viewpoint of the present; present-day events place past events in new light, provide them with new signification, etc. The analytic intervention, too, is such an event. Extensively on the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, see Jean Laplanche, Problematiques VI, L’après-coup (Paris: PUF, 2006).
[13] See Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Le problème de l’inconscient et le cartésianisme (Paris: PUF, 1950); and Monique David-Ménard, La folie dans la raison pure. Kant lecteur de Swedenborg (Paris: Vrin, 1990).
[14] Freud, Standard Edition, 14:118. James Strachey translates konstante Kraft with “constant impact,” which blurs Freud’s attempt to link the “drive-force” with thermodynamics.
[15] See, for instance, Freud, Standard Edition, 2:6. In their “Preliminary Communication,” Breuer and Freud state that “recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result.”
[16] Correspondingly, Marx speaks of the “drive of enrichment,” the drive of valorization, and the drive of self-valorization of value. Of course, here, too, we encounter historical transformations and displacements. Marx’s point is that, while there is no regime of value without a drive (the drive of enrichment is thus a feature we can observe already in antiquity), the change in the social mode of production brings about a change in the drive (the drive of self-valorization of value is specifically capitalist and requires the regime of financial abstractions). Capitalism, then, is a “vicissitude of the drive” (Freud), which can still be changed.
[17] Freud, Standard Edition, 4:567. To quote a variation of the same point: “All thinking is no more than a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction (a memory which has been adopted as a purposive idea) to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more through an intermediate stage of motor experiences” (4:602).
[18] This impossibility implies that there is no such thing as an “ethic of happiness,” at least not if we want to understand happiness as an enduring state. One could say that psychoanalysis exists because eudemonic ethics is an unrealizable project; psychoanalysis is a symptomatic answer to the damage caused by the ideology of happiness. The only happiness that exists is happiness as “luck” (chance, contingency), which is nevertheless related to an effort to bring about a change in our (social) mode of enjoyment. I rely here on Boštjan Nedoh, “Materialistična teorija sreče,” Filozofski vestnik 43, no. 1 (2022): 129–147.
[19] In his work, Freud proposes two variations of this claim: 1) that psychic reality has equal status to objective reality; 2) that the reality principle is the extension of the pleasure principle.
[20] Dream interpretation then stands in the function of fortune-telling, attempting to predict happiness, which is here again understood in its etymological meaning of “lucky chance.” Interpreting dreams as indicators of the future would then imply as much as predicting chance and, in doing so, converting luck into an enduring state of happiness. The ideology of happiness evolves entirely around this desperate attempt. For a systematic critical take on the notion of happiness, see notably Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
[21] Conspiracy theories, a hot topic of discussion in times of an increased antisocial turn in global politics, behave in the same manner. See Alenka Zupančič, “A Short Essay on Conspiracy Theories,” in Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, edited by Adrian Johnston, Boštjan Nedoh, and Alenka Zupančič (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 232–249.
[22] In doing so, religion tends to disavow the conflicted and contradictory aspects of reality. As a form of systematic disavowal (Verleugnung), religion intersects with the third classical psychopathological category, perversion, but this is another question.
[23] Freud, Standard Edition, 22:163. These three functions of religion correspond to the three fundamental questions that according to Kant form the canon of critique: What can I know? How should I act? What can I hope?
[24] Both expressions are adopted from Lacan: “The gap of the unconscious may be said to be pre-ontological. I have stressed that all too often forgotten characteristic […] of the first emergence of the unconscious, namely, that it does not lend itself to ontology. Indeed, what became apparent at first to Freud, to the discoverers, to those who made the first steps, and what still becomes apparent to anyone in analysis who spends some time observing what truly belongs to the order of the unconscious, is that it is neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized.” Lacan, Seminar XI, 29–30. See also 22 and 33.
[25] Freud invites us to think beyond the dichotomy of finitude and infinity, and his later concept “compulsion to repeat,” developed in relation to the drive, inherits the problem that was already spelled out in The Interpretation of Dreams.
[26] For a well-pointed discussion of this problematic, see Mai Wegener, “Why Should Dreaming Be a Form of Work? On Work, Economy and Enjoyment,” in Jacques Lacan between Psychoanalysis and Politics, edited by Samo Tomšič and Andreja Zevnik (London: Routledge, 2016), 164–179.
[27] Furthermore, capitalism strives to exclude the very possibility of pleasure that is neither exploitative nor marked by aggressiveness. It was indeed aggressiveness that became Freud’s main topic of concern in his later work. For a recent philosophical account, albeit with the focus on the drive, see Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence (London: Verso, 2020), 151–183.
[28] The point is evoked by Lacan’s remark that “reality is approached with apparatus of jouissance.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar, Book XX, Encore (New York: Norton, 1999), 55.