the unconscious has excellent hands

the crime scene is a grocery store at 11 pm.

i am buying a single lemon because i have decided, at the age of twenty-twor, to become a person who buys lemons.^*1 this is the kind of decision you make when you have run out of larger decisions to avoid. and then it happens. a thing i said in 2014 walks into the produce section and stands next to me. not a significant thing. not a cruel thing. just a sentence that left my mouth once and has been living in the world ever since, paying no rent, sending no updates.

my stomach drops.

and i think: why now. why here. why in front of the legumes.

that is freud. that is freud arriving at the scene with his little notebook, adjusting his spectacles, saying ah yes. the legume memory. very significant. tell me about your mother.

i did not invite him. i did not call the station. but there he is. because the unconscious, unlike most criminals, does not clean up after itself. it leaves fingerprints everywhere. and freud is the detective who refuses to close the case.

here is what i have learned about the detective. he is not good at his job. he is not bad at his job. he is something worse. he is thorough.

he was a mess, the man himself. cocaine enthusiast. terrible husband by most accounts. wrote letters that would get him cancelled today. believed that children had sexual desires and that this was a universal truth rather than a viennese suspicion.^*2 and yet.

he understood that the crime is never what it looks like. the crime is never even where it looks like.

freud's unconscious is not chronological in the way consciousness likes to imagine itself being chronological. past and present do not maintain the polite distance we insist upon in daylight. freud called this nachträglichkeit, which gets translated as deferred action, though that is a slightly misleading translation. the german means something closer to after-the-factness. the way a memory gets revised retroactively to fit new experiences. you experience something when you are young. it sits there. then later, something happens, and the old thing gets rewritten.

so the crime scene is never the crime scene. the crime scene is a grocery store at 11 pm, but the crime happened in 1998, got rewritten in 2014, and is now being rewritten again in the cereal aisle. you are not solving a mystery. you are solving a mystery that keeps rewriting itself while you are solving it.

this is why i resent freud. not because he is wrong. because he is never finished.

freud noticed this early, with his hysterics. the women whose arms went numb, whose throats closed, whose legs stopped working. he called it conversion. the unbearable idea becomes a physical symptom. the mind cannot say the thing, so the body says it instead. you do not get to forget. you only get to relocate.

the body is a crime scene that keeps producing new evidence.

but he also noticed something else, something more interesting, something that gets buried under all the mother jokes and the cocaine and the cigar. he noticed that the first sexual instinct in childhood is without an object. the child sucks its thumb, not because it wants the breast, but because it wants the pleasure. and the hand, the thumb, the fingers, these become the first tools of desire.

the hand is the organ of touching.

the hands know what they want before you do.

the surrealists eventually figured out that the hand could be useful precisely when the mind was being useless. breton called it psychic automatism. the attempt to express the actual functioning of thought without the interference of reason or aesthetics or morality. ernst rubbed charcoal over whatever texture happened to be underneath and called the accidents art. the hand moved; the ego watched. apparently this was a methodology.^*3

and then there was hans bellmer, which is where the crime scene becomes considerably less respectable.

bellmer built a doll. a life-sized female figure whose limbs could be disassembled and reassembled in any configuration he wanted. he photographed it. he drew it. he took the female body apart and put it back together in ways that make you feel something in your teeth.

bellmer had a theory about this. he called it the physical unconscious. he described how the body might respond to a toothache with a reflexive clenching of the hand. the fist formed by the clenched hand becomes an approximation of the form of a molar. the tooth is superimposed upon the hand. the sensation is displaced from one body part to another.

and this displacement, this imaginative relocation of sensation, is not just about pain. it is about desire. bellmer wrote that his reconfigurations of body parts were provoked by the intense erotic desire that exists between a man and a woman. the hand becomes a concentrated image evoking the whole of the desired woman. a fixation upon a body part not for itself alone, but for the complex associations which desire projects upon it.

this is the erotic unconscious. the one that knows the exact pressure of a palm against your lower back. the one that archives the precise humidity of someone's neck. the one that remembers the weight of a body that the mind has classified as a mistake or a phase or someone i used to know.

bellmer understood something that freud only circled around. desire is not an emotion. desire is physics.

things pull. things repel. bodies remember trajectories. pressure migrates. distance becomes unbearable. something invisible keeps exerting force long after everyone involved has agreed that nothing is happening.

freud's primary-process thinking does not do negation. no no. no not. no opposite. love and hate are the same thing. big and small. high and low. strong and weak. all of it collapses into a pre-verbal sludge where everything is simultaneously true and nothing is ever resolved. this is why you can be furious at someone and desperate for their approval in the same breath. this is why you can know someone is bad for you and still want them to text back.

it just has hands. and the hands remember.

freud called this the return of the repressed. the thing you pushed down does not stay down. it comes back. sometimes as a symptom. sometimes as a dream. sometimes as a slip of the tongue, the honourable member from hell instead of hull.^*4 sometimes as a hand that reaches for something before you have decided to reach. repression is not a one-time event. it is an ongoing process, an energy-consuming process, a dynamic repression that has to be maintained. you are always pushing. it is always pushing back.

the crime scene is never closed.

the unconscious is not a mystery. it is not a beautiful artist. it is not a wounded child. it is a filing clerk with excellent hands and no sense of shame. it does not care about your narrative arc. it does not care about your growth. it does not care about your healing journey.

it knows where to touch.

it knows which memory will hurt. which person will undo the argument. which room will make the old feeling return. which hand will make the body betray the autobiography.

it has excellent hands.

terrible ethics.

but excellent hands.

you can keep the press secretary. you can keep the story. you can keep the greek names and the german theorists and the poetry. you can keep the therapy and the journaling and the i have moved on that you say to your friends at brunch.

but the hands know what they know.

and they are not going to explain themselves.

freud is still at the crime scene.

he is smoking a cigar that is definitely not just a cigar. he is taking notes. he is asking about your mother. he has made the grocery store unbearable.

i resent him for this.