Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter

Normality/Transgression

10.The call to transgress normality is what structures normality as such

What separates psychoanalysis from almost all other modern thought is the attitude that it takes to normal subjectivity. Rather than seeing normality as a barrier to authentic change, it sees normality as the ability to act and to change the world. For psychoanalysis, pervasive abnormality, not pervasive normality, ensures the perpetuation of capitalist society. We are trapped not by our failure to subvert normality but precisely by our success in doing so. The norm dominates through being transgressed, not in spite of being transgressed. This is why Freud's work focuses on neurosis: it is much more widespread than normality, and we almost never find normality without a neurotic underside. The psychoanalytic challenge to modern thought’s critique of normality forces a rethinking of the problem of conformity and the barriers that it erects to political activity.

Freud’s primary claim is that what we perceive as the normal is actually rife with abnormality. For this reason, neurotics provide the key to the analysis of what seems to be normal subjectivity. In the Introductory Lectures Freud claims: “Neurotics merely exhibit to us in a magnified and coarsened form what the analysis of dreams reveals to us in healthy people as well." Most “healthy” or normal subjects, like neurotics, supplement their experience of the world with a fantasmatic reserve that they keep separate from the world and that renders it bearable. This process of supplementation allows subjects to exist functionally within society, but it also prevents them from authentically acting. The failure to be normal dooms the subject to existing within the structures of ideology through the very activity of struggling against those structures. By becoming a normal subject, one gives up the insistence on one’s own difference, an insistence that paradoxically serves to eliminate it.

The normal subject, conceived in the properly psychoanalytic sense, has no external entity by which to measure its own deviation from the norm. In this sense, to become a normal subject is to recognize that there is no authorized social authority, no guarantee for normality. Psychoanalysis, as Sheila Kunkle points out, “realizes that normality is really just a special form of psychosis."“ The social authority that would define the normal is itself groundless and thus incapable of providing a genuine norm. But normality is not just psychosis but precisely “a special form" that enables a recognition that psychosis proper inhibits. It is not that this absence of an external norm allows the subject to recognize something like “I'm okay, you're okay" but more that the absence makes visible that no one is okay, that the fantasmatic deviation from the norm is part of the norm itself.