An Act of Will

By Ruqayya Qadir

At the beginning of Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud wrote that the process according to which the displacement of a forgotten name “follows paths which can be predicted and which conform to laws,” indicates the existence of a certain parapraxic logic, just like in symptoms. This is a logic that can only be understood through acknowledgment of the existence of something one does not want to know, something which is called “the unconscious.” What one prefers not to know forces itself into the consciousness, “a name is in fact not only forgotten but wrongly remembered.” One is not in control, is stuck between two opposing forces. Lacan explained this opposition by creating a distinction between: subject of the statement and subject of the enunciation, between what the subject intends to say and what he actually says. Hence, the subject is split.

After giving the example of an inability to correctly remember a proper name, Freud explained: “I suppressed my account of this characteristic trait, since I did not want to allude to the topic in a conversation with a stranger.” He used the word suppression here, and further in the text mentioned: “I had repressed.” Both phrases thereby indicated an act of will.

Freud began his text Neuro-Psychoses of Defence by pointing toward a change needed in the existing theory of hysteria (which could also be applied to phobias and obsessions). Those who worked on hysteria at the time agreed on “the assumption of there being a splitting of the unconscious.” However, further information was required regarding what led to the splitting.

No symptoms were present in the patients Freud analysed, until: “an occurrence of incompatibility took place in their ideational life,” revealing a defence in the form of intentional forgetting of an unacceptable idea. This implied the existence of a motive, resulting in splitting of the consciousness. He wrote that: “[s]plitting of the content of consciousness is the result of act of will on the part of the patient.”

An “act of will” never succeeds, nor fails. An “[a]ct of will misse[s] its target” and reaches a compromise. It escapes the unconscious in form of slips. What Freud wanted to forget and what he wanted to remember merged, and a compromise was reached. He concluded that this compromise revealed “just as much of what [he] wanted to forget as of what [he] wanted to remember.”