The Knowing Psychical Body :: Psychology Psychological Papers

The Knowing Psychical Body ABSTRACT: By offering four epistemological structures as guidelines, I will review the relationships as described by Freud between internal and external perceptions, conversion, and over-determination. In doing so, I have speculated that a second preconscious dynamic should be recognized as functioning within this system, namely the psychical body. The activity of this preconscious psychical body promises to resolve the aporias that arise in Freud's work concerning the role of internal perceptions in the processes of conversion and over-determination. In the end, I show that the positing of an imaginary, psychical body is the means by which the arguably intuitive, internal perceptions which Freud at times refers to as sensations and feelings are expressed according to the logic of imagination. The unconscious has access to a wealth of knowledge, and it is not expressed in a form we have come to expect truth to be in, i.e. following rational logic. But rather, it is a direction, an unconscious motion, that can be described to be more of an affect than a statement and is epistemologically the function of intuition resulting from a repressed logic. In the end, I show that the positing of a psychical body is the means by which, the arguably intuitive, internal perceptions that Freud at times refers to as sensations and feelings are expressed according to a repressed logic. First I will outline four possible ways of knowing. The first two belong to the realm of reason and, I will argue, occur at the level of a well-defined ego. Within the parameters of reason, one finds the mode of knowing which is common and well-known, that of rational, scientific, observation which concerns itself with moving bodies and their respective interaction within the realm of the visible in the sense employed by Merleau-Ponty. The second mode is what is known as abstract, rational, thinking, and here the individual is interested in the interaction of abstract bodies. The force behind this method of knowing resides in the abstracted bodies, which are extrapolations of what one once observed in the first mode of knowing. With regard to the two modes of rational knowledge, we see the individual observing the interaction of a plurality of bodies, for rationality operates on the assumption that the smallest number is two, (1) that is, rational logic are based on a binary system. Within this realm, all comparisons and observations need to be performed under standardized, regulated conditions, i.