TH9. Terrestrialization & Traumatism

As we saw above, Freud had already speculated—in lost and unpublished papers on his phylogenetic fantasies—that we each recapitulate the Ice Age traumas of early humankind.1 However, Freud’s Hungarian protégé, Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933) bore this line of thought out to its furthest, most vertiginous, conclusions. Already in 1913, Ferenczi was supposing that we ‘faithfully recapitulate in our individual life’ the ‘misery of the glacial period’ along with other ‘geological changes in the surface of the earth’.2 In 1915 Freud wrote to his younger colleague, praising Ferenczi’s ‘fruitful and original idea about the influence of geological vicissitude’.3 This ‘original idea’ would see its full explication, however, in 1924’s Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, where Ferenczi extends the scope of trauma-inscription far beyond the confines of human prehistory, announcing our retention of the archaeo-evolutionary trauma of the transition to land. In a radicalisation of the ‘oceanic feeling’ hypothesis, Thalassa suggests that, just as the neonate longs for regressus ad uterum, the migration from ocean to land installs a ‘thalassal regressive trend’ in terrestrialized animals—a longing to return to the sea.

‘[L]eaving the sea two hundred million years ago’, Ballard has one of his characters say in The Drowned World, ‘may have been a deep trauma from which we’ve never recovered’.4 Blumenberg, when he defined bipedalization as a traumatogenic expulsion from any determinate biotope, similarly cited Ferenczi’s notion of terrestrialization as a calamity frozen within our neurons.5 For Ferenczi, indeed, the individual’s ontogenetic desire for uterine retreat collapses into phylogenetic thalassotropism, itself merely the iterated permutation of an abiogenetically-instigated desire to allow the inorganic to compulsively ‘recapitulate’ itself through our extinction. This of course is Freud’s death drive: that ‘old state’ toward which life ‘strives to return through all the detours of evolution’.6 ‘Ururtrauma’ accordingly becomes, for Ferenczi, existence’s vanishing point.7

A key inspiration for Reich’s work, the Hungarian analyst was the first to expand psychoanalysis into ‘bioanalysis’ (a topography of the ‘biological unconscious’): ‘in the biological stratification of organisms’, he speculated, ‘all their earlier stages are in some manner preserved and kept distinct’. The most ‘remote epochs’ therefore lie dormant within us.8 Neuronics, again, revokes temporal unilinearity.

Ferenczi’s Thalassa is a towering fever-dream of recapitulatory reverie, excavating resonant traumatisms across all biological series. Breastfeeding is cast as the ‘ectoparasitic’ newborn’s cannibalistic desire to bore its way back—through the maternal flesh—into its prior state of oceanic ‘endoparasitism’; the penis, later, reiterates the same task via vaginal penetration and preputial invagination, both representing desperate attempts at regaining embryonic suspension and pelagic immersion; and, crucially, our assumption of foetal posture in sleep, again via flexion and adducement, is, Ferenczi suggests, properly read as an attempt to regain an aquatic-amniotic mode of existence. But for this thinker who would himself eventually fall victim to spinal degeneration, vertebrality is, once again, central.9 Coitus and sleep—both relieving the discontinuity of spinal-priapic erection through collapse into horizontal submersion—represent attempts at ‘archaic’ regressions. During both, ‘the whole body assumes [a] spheroid shape’, recapitulating not just conditions in utero, but the morphologies of our pre-bilateral ancestors, the marine radiata. Ferenczi states, moreover, that the sleeper’s executive centre, their ‘soul’, sinks back through nervous laminae, routing down from the hibernating and deactivated encephalon into the proprioceptive spinal column. A katabasis of the CNS, sleeping is thus temporary decapitation: the somnolent ‘has only a “spinal soul”’, Ferenczi exclaims; evidence, then, of the sleeper’s ‘phylogenetic regression’ through neuronic layers. The ‘soul’ descends spinally from brain to thorax; a genuine recapitulation of precephalic existences. Dreams are spinal emissions. Sleep is time travel.10

Certainly, for Ferenczi, caenogenetic organs are mere ‘superpositions’ over older ones, while the oldest remains forever ‘potential’ within our biotic palimpsest. ‘Sleep’ and ‘genitality’ are aligned, therefore, with ‘organic disease’—they are all temporary reeruptions, within the organic ‘present’, of phyletic ‘archaisms’: physiological illnesses are regressions ‘to antenatal and probably likewise to a phylogenetically ancient mode of existence’.11 Disease is inorganic recividism. And therefore a form of internal or mereological time travel: a dyssynchronous lurch of tissue into anorganic posteriority or anteriority. From this perspective, all sickness is time sickness. For, if bodies are just glutinated time, pathologies can be approached as timestep desynchronisations: an organ or tissue’s runaway into its own futurity being therefore indistinguishable from modular time travel—the organic part’s malignant secession into its own divergent mode of temporal production, pathological vis-à-vis that of the whole. Chronoception collapse. All nosologies are dissonances of heterochrony, unravellings of mereological coevality or CNS timestep simultaneity; pathogenic time travel, temporal decentralization, evo-devo arrhythmia, heterotopic futurality. Excrescences can be read either as revenants of ante-organic pasts or as invasions from post-organic posterities, as some ‘part’ progressively disarticulates from the window of simultaneity fabricated by the ‘whole’. Why might not therefore the lithifying spine itself be read (as some of Barker’s early exo-archaeological papers suggested it might), as fulgurite from the future—the retroactive trace of some unliving virus—inhabiting the dorsal axis, puppeting it into the perverted ascent of the reasoning animal, dredging ventriloquising words from receding jaw? For Ferenczi, for whom ‘embryogenesis’ is a thnetopsychic sleep ‘disturbed’ by one’s ‘biographical dream’, life is just one prolonged hypnogogic jerk, and, accordingly, the colossal malignancy of existence itself becomes merely an arrhythmic belatedness or precociousness relative to non-existence’s obsidian repose: a vast, drawn-out chronopathy.12

In an early essay (written in 1916) entitled ‘On the Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money’, Ferenczi derived money and the drive-to-accumulate from the sublimation, corollary with upright posture, of the infant’s desire to play with its own faeces (a desire which Freud, of course, saw as itself a recapitulation of quadruped forms of life and their libidinal olfactions). In spinal erection, we repress our anal desire for our own ‘faecal property’, which duly becomes deflected into the drive to accumulate money’s ‘filthy lucre’:

Pleasure in the intestinal contents becomes enjoyment of money, which, however, after what has been said is seen to be nothing other than odourless, dehydrated filth that has been made to shine. Pecunia non olet.

In this way even capital itself is derived from Ferenczi’s ‘biogenetic ground principle’ of ‘phylogenetic’ repetitiousness. To reach this conclusion, the Hungarian rallied the argument that ‘capitalism’ is ‘not purely practical and utilitarian, but libidinous and irrational’.13

That an entire economic system is neither ‘utile’ nor ‘practical’ is, perhaps, a strange notion at first sight. Yet Ferenczi was writing in the midst of the first of the two world wars. Decades later, just after the Second World War, it was Georges Bataille (1897–1962) who noticed that these global conflicts jointly represented ‘the greatest orgies of wealth—and of human beings—that history has recorded’, and that, whilst they may well ‘coincide with an appreciable rise in the general standard of living’, such an upswell in our quality of life represents—like the wars—just another way of expending surplus energy.14 Bataille was masterful in his sustained revelation of the fact that the capitalist global system is, in Ferenczi’s terms, ‘utterly libidinous and irrational’. For, when any system has an inevitable point of total exhaustion (and our globe is, in the longest term, just such a system), every single process that will ever have taken place within said system becomes utterly indistinct from a route towards that terminal point: thus, what may locally be called ‘means’ or ‘utilities’ are all alike revealed so many avenues through which the wanton and squandrous ‘end’ announces and hastens its arrival. In such a generalized view, where all myriad utilities and means become indistinct from the end of utmost and terminal expenditure, the luxuriations of the upright spine—its unlikely architecture and its pricey burdens—become yet more sumptuosities on the slope toward the ‘immense synthesis of the historical and psychic zero’.15