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For Beatrice
Preface and Acknowledgements
On my sixth birthday, I realised that, even if I lived to 100, which I sensed was unlikely, I had a maximum of 94 years left…and counting. I understood profoundly the inevitability of my death and, regardless of the uncertainty of when it would happen, that ever-decreasing time was left to me before it took place. I remember trying to stop the temporal unravelling by saying ‘now’ in my mind over and over again, trying to contain the present in its description; but what I was trying to grasp, if it existed at all, was, of course, gone before I could. This current work is, I suspect, all part of the same endeavour to catch hold of time by its tail but one inspired by Freud’s enormous contribution to the temporal debate, making the task meaningful and rewarding. The following paragraph from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1920) was my principal inspiration. It contains the kernel of Freud’s thoughts on time and timelessness and questions the Kantian model of time and space:
At this point I shall venture to touch for a moment upon a subject which would merit the most exhaustive treatment. As a result of certain psychoanalytic discoveries, we are to-day in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary forms of thought’. We have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless’. This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be
Preface and Acknowledgements
applied to them. These are negative characteristics which can only be clearly understood if a comparison is made with conscious mental processes.
(Freud 1920, p. 28)
What follows is my attempt to provide the ‘exhaustive’ treatment of temporality that Freud suggested was necessary back in 1920.
My special thanks to Professor Stephen Frosh and Dr Laurie Spurling, both of Birkbeck College, London, who supervised my PhD from which this book followed. I enjoyed and benefited from our discussions and I will always be grateful to Stephen for his careful reading and insightful and helpful comments on the various drafts of my thesis and this book. I benefited, too, from the thoughts of Professor Charles Stewart, of University College, London, and Ginny Thomas on the manuscript. I am grateful to Michael Molnar for his help whilst curator of the Freud Museum and for showing me some of the unpublished manuscripts of Freud held there. I am grateful, too, for Dr Leonard Bruno’s advice on Freud’s still unpublished correspondence with Princess Bonaparte, when he was head of the Manuscript Section at the Library of Congress.
Finally, a big thank you to my family, friends, colleagues and mentors for their different sorts of support, all appreciated, whilst I was writing. Most of all, my heartfelt thanks to EF for helping me find my own time and space, SJ for sharing it with me, and Beatrice, to whom this book is dedicated, who is so wonderfully forging her own.
1
Introduction
More often than not, there is no reference to ‘Time’ in the index of books on psychoanalysis. This evidence of a lack of psychoanalytic writing on time is striking because temporality forms such an important theme of Freud’s work. The timeless unconscious; Nachträglichkeit; the endless repetition compulsion; and the processes of consciousness, remembering and working through: all these involve temporality. André Green asked rhetorically: ‘Was there ever a point in Freud’s work where he was not concerned by the subject of time?’ (Green 2002, p. 9); if there was, it is difficult to find.
Psychoanalytic theory is permeated by time, and the practice of psychoanalysis seems shaped by it. It is largely the losses that time brings with it which take us into the consulting room: loss of our youth, our opportunities, our loved ones and our future. At the outset, the parties to a psychotherapeutic alliance make a substantial commitment to spend significant time together, and a condition of whether what happens between them is psychoanalysis is the quantity of time, in terms of number of sessions per week, which they share together. Within the sessions themselves, the temporal boundaries are usually strictly observed. Hilda Doolittle’s account of her analysis with Freud includes a nice example:
‘The other day the Professor had reproached me for jerking out my arm and looking at my watch. He had said, “I keep an eye on the time. I will tell you when the session is over. You need not keep looking at the time, as if you were in a hurry to get away”’ (Doolittle 1971, p. 17).
The paradox is this: time and timelessness are fundamental principles of psychoanalysis, yet Freud does not present a consolidated theory of temporality. Although temporal themes run throughout Freud’s work, his specific references to time are highly qualified, any idea of a theory of time being couched in terms of ‘hints’ (Freud 1920, p. 28) or ‘suspicions’ (Freud 1925b, p. 23). Freud seemed extremely reluctant to make his thoughts on time public. In 1914, for example, having seen from the Jahrbuch proofs that Tausk intended to refer to a comment Freud had made connecting time and space to the conscious and unconscious systems at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud insisted that all reference to his comment be removed from Tausk’s paper (Freud 1914d).1 Later in the same year, Freud wrote to Ferenczi: ‘[S]omething […] is in process which shouldn’t be talked about yet. […] I only want to reveal to you that, on paths that have been trodden for a long time, I have finally found the solution to the riddle of time and space’ (Freud 1914e, pp. 29–30). Freud wrote in similar terms to Abraham on the same day (Freud 1914f, p. 30), but neither letter goes on to reveal the riddle’s solution. By 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud was claiming that an ‘exhaustive treatment’ of Kant’s philosophy of time and space was necessary in the light of his psychoanalytic findings (Freud 1920, p. 28) but this treatment never really follows. And, in one of Freud’s last published letters to Marie Bonaparte, whilst he generously praises her paper, ‘Time and the Unconscious’ (Bonaparte 1940), Freud lets her know that she lacked any grounds to write about his ideas on time because he had not divulged them: ‘Your comments on “time and space” have come off better than mine would have—although so far as time is concerned I hadn’t fully informed you of my ideas. Nor anyone else’ (Freud 1938e, p. 455).
1 The periodical Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (Annals of Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Research) was first published in 1909 by Deuticke. Freud and Bleuler were its initial editors, working in collaboration with Jung. Jung and Bleuler resigned in 1914, leaving Freud as managing director with Abraham and Hitschmann as editors.
Not only is there a lack of a consolidated account by Freud of his theory of time, but there is also a marked absence in the secondary literature of its remedy. In 1989, Andrea Sabbadini was able to say that: ‘In recent years, several authors have published their views on various aspects of time in psychoanalysis, but with the exception of Arlow (1984), and Hartocollis, no one has explored these themes systematically or offered original perspectives about their significance’ (Sabbadini 1989, p. 305).
And André Green, in his 2002 work, Time in Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects, wrote: ‘I have often pointed out that contemporary psychoanalysis has come up with many ingenious solutions for the problems raised by the notion of space, but barely any with regard to that of time’ (Green 2002, p. 4). More recently, Green wrote: ‘It is striking that the problem of time has been the source of far fewer discussions than themes relating to space. It would seem that this theme has been avoided’ (Green 2009, p. 1).
In identifying the lack in the literature of a systematic account of Freud’s theory of time, Sabbadini and Green position themselves as contributors to its remedy. Sabbadini identifies two further contributors: Hartocollis and Arlow. These four are members of a small group which writes specifically about psychoanalysis and temporality, the first member of which was Marie Bonaparte. She published her classic paper, ‘Time and the Unconscious’, at the very end of Freud’s life (Bonaparte 1940). Bonaparte’s paper is one usually rather reverentially referred to in any psychoanalytic writing on time. Hartocollis goes so far as to credit the paper alongside Freud’s own work as ‘a landmark in its own right’ (Hartocollis 1974, p. 244).2 Bonaparte asserts that those who come to consciousness too early are likely to be haunted by the idea of time slipping away: ‘Throughout their whole life [time] will continue to exhale gusts of timelessness which will affect even their adult sense of time’ (Bonaparte 1940, p. 442). But Bonaparte’s ‘gusts of timelessness’ remain unexplored and we learn no more about her claim that ‘we destroy time from the moment we begin to use it’ (ibid, p. 431). Bonaparte provides,
2 Pollock goes further still, telling us that it is Bonaparte herself who distinguished the three aspects of ‘timelessness’: that the unconscious has no knowledge of time, is unaffected by the process of time, and does not perceive time (Pollock 1971, p. 441). But these aspects of timelessness had, of course, already been made clear by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1920, p. 28).
as purported proof of the ‘lethal significance’ of time, our personification of time but not of space. But she offers nothing to support her argument that the concepts we personify have lethal significance. And she erroneously suggests that philosophers loathe and thus suppress the idea of time (ibid, p. 454), managing to canter over the philosophies of time of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Spinoza, Kant and Bergson in the space of a few glib paragraphs, concluding that philosophy is the ‘occupation par excellence of the crazy creature man so often is’ (ibid, p. 483). As a technical contribution to the psychoanalytic discourse on time, Bonaparte’s paper is, I think, limited. That said, there is value in her record of Freud’s views about time, provided that a qualification about its accuracy is borne in mind: for (as I indicated above) Freud wrote to Bonaparte after the publication of her paper to say that he had not fully informed her, or anyone else, of his ideas about time. Some of the points Freud made to Bonaparte, as recorded in her paper, are, however, corroborated by their contemporary correspondence, and they add to our understanding of Freud’s thoughts on how we make time.
After Bonaparte, little is said about Freud’s theory of time until Lacan brought attention to Freud’s temporal notion of the après-coup. British psychoanalytic writing on time is scanty, rich, instead, in the provision of spatial metaphors for psychoanalytic concepts represented by Bion’s container, Winnicott’s transitional space, Steiner’s psychic retreats, and Meltzer’s claustrum. In France, on the other hand, acknowledgement of the importance of the après-coup became what Green describes as a fundamental theoretical axis of psychoanalytic practice (Green 2002, p. 7) leading to the development of new theories of temporality in Lacan’s notion of logical time, Laplanche’s insistence of the inclusion of the Other in any theory of time, and Green’s notions of exploded time, antitime and murdered time. Lacan’s theory of time is principally contained in his paper, ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ (Lacan 2006). This paper describes what Lacan takes to be the component moments of logical time: the instance of the glance; the time of understanding; and the moment of concluding. Lacan’s use of the prisoner’s dilemma, as elegantly expounded by Derek Hook in ‘Logical Time, Symbolic Identification, and the Trans-subjective’ (Hook 2013) and John Forrester in his The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida
(Forrester 1990, p. 178 et seq), serves to provide a logical analysis of the (variable) time it takes for us to draw inferences based on our subjective interactions with others. In Lacan’s view, the time for understanding is what takes place between psychoanalytic sessions, hence his controversial punctuated endings, to initiate the time of understanding, a practice to which strict Lacanians still adhere.3 Lacan does not seem to provide an analysis of the nature of time itself nor of Freud’s theory of it but instead his own interpretation of what happens during time. Further, there seems to be an inherent incompatibility between Lacan’s view that the unconscious is structured like a language and Freud’s understanding that the unconscious is timeless. The unconscious is not structured like language or anything else: Freud insists on a negative reading of the timeless processes of the unconscious so that they can only be understood in terms of what conscious processes are not (Freud 1920, p. 28, 1933, p. 73). Language brings with it tenses which imply the temporal order that Freud is adamant is lacking in the unconscious. André Green and Jean Laplanche share the view that Lacan’s formulation of the unconscious is incompatible with that of Freud (Green 1999b, p. 24; Laplanche 1992, p. 26).4 The incompatibility of Lacan’s view of the unconscious with that of Freud together with Lacan’s failure to consider how we develop a notion of time from Freud’s perspective led to my conclusion that Lacan does not address the elements of Freud’s temporality which are central to my investigation. Laplanche, like Lacan, develops his own theory of time rather than elaborate that of Freud, making the Other an essential
3 It is a practice described by Sabbadini as a ‘gross distortion of the analytic atmosphere and [a] persecutory manipulation of the patient’s freedom’ (Sabbadini 1985, p. 311) and is one opposed, too, by Jean Laplanche (Laplanche 1999b, p. 32) and André Green (Green 2002, pp. 165–166). The Société Psychanalytique de Paris still feels it necessary to guard against the possibility of Lacanian interruptions. This is from their website: ‘It is essential for the interpretive elaboration of the transference, that nothing said by the patient, who must be protected by the fundamental rule, pushes the analyst to respond by an action, such as abruptly ending the session or otherwise modifying the setting’ (http: www.spp.assp.fr/Spp/Presentation/index.htm [accessed 22 February 2012]).
4 Green says: ‘[W]hen you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition [of the unconscious being structured like a language] doesn’t work for a minute’ (Green 1999b, p. 24). And Laplanche, replying to the question: ‘can one speak of temporalisation in respect of the unconscious?’, says: ‘I stand by Freud’s general formulation on this. […] I am completely against Lacan’s formulation that the unconscious is structured like a language which means that in some way it is temporal too. I think that it is completely atemporal’ (Laplanche 1992, p. 26, as cited in Johnston 2005, p. 134).
component of both consciousness and time and criticising Freud for failing to acknowledge and account for the necessary role of the Other in the development of our idea of time (Laplanche 1976, 1992, 1999a). My reading of Freud suggests that, on the contrary, there is significant otherness in his metapsychology and I hope to emphasise in this book that an essential component of Freud’s theory of time follows from his understanding of the importance of our loss and refinding of attachments to people. Paul Ricoeur, who also makes other people an essential part of his notion of time, provides a scholarly account of the development of Freud’s metapsychological theory in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (Ricoeur 1970), emphasising the correlative connections between time, consciousness, and reality (Ricoeur 1970, p. 76, footnote) and claiming that negation, explicitly connected by Freud to the death drive, is a property of consciousness and temporal organisation, not the unconscious (Ricoeur 1970, pp. 314–315). In his Time and Narrative volumes (Ricoeur 1984, 1985b, 1988), moving away from Freud, he demonstrates how narrative is a condition of our temporal existence and that it is only through narrative that we can try to represent our experience of time, a theme continued in his later works (Ricoeur 2005).
Of the French writers, it is André Green who has done most, in my opinion, to take forward the literature on Freud’s theory of time, in particular, Green’s 2002 work, Time in Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects (Green 2002). Green is inspirational in his identification of the complex temporal currents which flow through Freud’s model of mind and, of all the contributors to the debate, best illustrates the complexity of Freud’s model of temporality.5 He laments the absence of psychoanalytic focus on time, suggesting that, even when temporality is considered, it tends to be that of the familiar and accessible linearity of the life cycle which Freud describes in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
5 André Green’s ideas are very much in evidence in the works relating to temporality of Rosine Perelberg (Perelberg 2003, 2007a and 2007b). In her book, Time, Space and Phantasy (Perelberg 2008), she takes time, space, phantasy and sexuality to be ‘completely intertwined’ (Perelberg 2008, p. 2). In so doing, however, Perelberg faces the danger of making such a close connection of what are different concepts: entanglement and the consequential difficulty of separating the concepts out. Her undoubted strengths for me lie in her elucidation of Green’s work, not of Freud’s.
(Freud 1905). What tend to get overlooked, according to Green, are Freud’s concepts of non-unified time, as experienced in dreams, in Nachträglichkeit, in the repetition compulsion, which is the main theme of Green’s book, and in negation. Green adds two notions of his own: anti-time, that is, the illusion we have of being able to stop time; and the murder of time which takes place as a result of the death drive at work in the repetition compulsion. What of the other side of this coin, though: not the murder of time but the birth of time? One of my key objectives in writing this book was to clarify the process by which Freud thought we acquire a notion of time.
Green was not alone in suggesting that our sense of time can be distorted or can even disappear in pathological states. Bion earlier and famously made the point in his theory of thinking that, if a baby cannot tolerate the frustration of an absence, of the breast not being here, right now, then time and space are treated as something to be destroyed. Bion writes of a patient ‘who said over and over again that he was wasting time—and continued to waste it. The patient’s aim is to destroy time by wasting it. The consequences are illustrated in the description in Alice in Wonderland of the Mad Hatter’s tea-party—it is always 4 o’clock’ (Bion 1962, p. 307).
Herbert Rosenfeld specifically identified the role of the death drive in removing the capacity to think clearly (Rosenfeld 1971, p. 169), something which, although Rosenfeld does not state this, seems to reflect a loss of temporal structuring. The notion that time is something we can distort and destroy is specifically considered by Otto Kernberg in his paper, ‘The Destruction of Time in Pathological Narcissism’ (Kernberg 2008). Kernberg compares the experience of a life where significant investment is made in intimate relationships, work and society, with the experience of life in the absence of such investment, the latter symptomatic of pathological narcissism, one giving rise to a sense that ‘life lived shrinks, and life itself may seem to be near its end, accompanied by a frightening sense of the brevity of time lived’ (Kernberg 2008, p. 300). The literature, especially that of André Green, does, then, focus on what can go wrong with our sense of time; but it does not seem to address the origins of that sense of time in terms of Freud’s theory of how we develop an idea of past, present and future.
Birksted-Breen is another important contributor to the literature on time. In ‘Time and the Après-Coup’ (Birksted-Breen 2003), she introduces her own concept of ‘reverberation time’, an extension of Bion’s notions of maternal reverie and containment, which constitutes ‘our most primitive and subjective sense of time which exists in the back and forth between mother and baby and which, on introjection, allows development of the infant’s own sense of time’ (Birksted-Breen 2003, p. 1505). Birksted-Breen continues to explore the concept of reverberation time in two later papers: ‘Reverberation Time and the Capacity to Dream’ (Birksted-Breen 2009); and ‘Taking Time: The Tempo of Psychoanalysis’ (Birksted-Breen 2012). This idea of rhythm is also evident in Sabbadini’s paper, ‘Boundaries of Timelessness. Some Thoughts about the Temporal Dimension of the Psychoanalytic Space’ (Sabbadini 1989). By indicating the formal temporal rules which govern the analytic setting, of beginnings and endings, and frequency and breaks, rules almost exclusively controlled by the analyst, Sabbadini is able to contrast these controlled temporal boundaries with the timeless atmosphere of the analytic encounter, suggesting that it is this paradoxical contrast of temporalities which shapes the encounter, providing the rhythm for the session and the punctuation for its discourse. Neither Birksted-Breen nor Sabbadini develops Freud’s own important notion of rhythm, however, something inherent in Freud’s revelation in 1925 that he kept part of his theory of time to himself for a long time: that is, of discontinuity, that the ‘discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time’ (Freud 1925b, p. 231). This is a critical part of how Freud suggests that we develop an idea of abstract time.
I referred to the claim made by Andrea Sabbadini that only Arlow and Hartocollis have explored themes of temporal significance systematically or originally (Sabbadini 1989, p. 305). Arlow has written three papers to do with time (Arlow 1984, 1986 and 1997). Each provides a wealth of clinical and literary material to illustrate how our experience of time is shaped by our sense of self, affect, phantasy and our ideas about death. Arlow does not, however, provide any elaboration of Freud’s own thoughts of time or any explicit connection of his material to Freud’s theory. And the emphasis of Hartocollis’ papers, too, brought together in Time and Timelessness or the Varieties of Temporal Experience (Hartocollis
1983) is on the phenomenology of time, something which seems to be a common trait in North American writings on time (e.g. Abraham 1976; Stern 2004; Stadter and Scharff 2005; Meissner 2007).6 The importance of the phenomenological aspects of time is undoubted, but the works which concentrate on these aspects provide a description of our experience of time, rather than an account of the logically prior acquisition of time, which remains an unexplored aspect of Freud’s metapsychology.
In summary, there is an absence within Freud’s work and within the secondary literature of a full account of Freud’s views on time and timelessness. In this absence, fundamental aspects of psychoanalytic theory are difficult to address fully. What did Freud really mean by insisting that the timeless processes of the unconscious must be understood in terms of what conscious processes are not (Freud 1920, p. 28, Freud 1933, p. 73)? How should we understand our development of an abstract notion of time from an initial state of timelessness? What are we to make of Freud’s cautious suggestion that the ‘time-factor’ (Freud 1914c, p. 96, footnote) develops together with those internal agencies whose voices of judgement produce guilt? How do Freud’s notions of temporality operate within the context of his two topographies which provide different perspectives of the psychical apparatus and account for different regions of unconscious life? And, given Freud’s claim that the interplay of Eros and the death drive ‘dominates all of life’s riddles’ (Freud 1922, p. 339),
6 Hartocollis brought together a selection of his papers from 1972 to 1983 in Time and Timelessness or the Varieties of Temporal Experience (Hartocollis 1983). He develops his own theory of time, based on certain ideas of William James and Henri Bergson, concentrating on experiential time, something akin to Bergson’s idea of ‘lived’ time, as opposed to what Hartocollis calls rational or ‘thought’ time (Hartocollis 1972, p. 93; Hartocollis 1974, p 243). He places affect within a temporal framework, taking anxiety to be the consequence of the ego’s perception of a future, avoidable, danger with depression experienced when the ego perceives reality as having an unavoidable aspect, ‘finality being the essence of the past’ (Hartocollis 1972, p. 95). If consciousness becomes dominated by affect, the sense of time increases to the point where awareness of time becomes lost (Hartocollis 1975). Hartocollis looks at the connection between time and affect in ageing (Hartocollis 1976), and in borderline disorders (Hartocollis 1978) and, more recently, like Sabaddini, at time in the psychoanalytic situation (Hartocollis 2003). The emphasis of the contribution by Hartocollis, like Arlow, is on the phenomenology of time, a common trait in North American writings on time. This is the focus, too, of William Meissner’s Time, Self and Psychoanalysis (Meissner 2007), ‘The Sense and Concept of Time in Psychoanalysis’ (Abraham 1976), Daniel Stern’s The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (Stern 2004) and Dimensions of Psychotherapy, Dimensions of Experience, a collection of contributions by North American psychotherapists on time, space, number, and states of mind (Stadter and Scharff 2005).
how far can this apply to the most fundamental of riddles: that of time? It was with a view to try to answer these questions that I felt drawn to establish an account of Freud’s views on time and timelessness to provide the ‘exhaustive’ treatment of the subject Freud suggested was necessary back in 1920.
Time is, of course, a notoriously difficult and slippery concept. St Augustine famously claimed that, once we are asked to think about time, our intuitive understanding of what it is disappears: ‘What, then, is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not’ (St Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI, quoted in Russell 1993, p. 352).7 The Shorter Oxford Dictionary struggles to keep the definition of time to one page and provides three contexts, all of which depend on space: a space or extent of time; a point in time; and an indefinite continuous duration regarded as that in which the sequence of events takes place.
Technological changes have driven an increasingly regulated and precise measurement of what we call time, from observations of the Sun to the atomic clocks situated around the globe from which Coordinated Universal Time has been derived since 1972. The increase in precision seems to correlate with a decrease in the importance of personal time and local time. When time’s passage was marked by the Sun, for example, each person’s midday was unique, taken at the point when the Sun was at its height for that person. As clocks replaced sundials, a ‘time equation’ became necessary to take account of the difference between the solar time measured by the Earth’s elliptical orbit and the time measurements provided by the regular workings of clocks.8 Clocks kept local time until the development of the railways in the 1830s which brought with it the requirement for standard time. In 1847, the British railway companies replaced the variance of local time with the mean time of Greenwich,
7 St Augustine, whom Freud read (Freud 1918, p. 204), suggested that our abstract understanding of time as containing part, present and future is, in fact, always to do with the present: it involves a current understanding, through memory, that past events have happened; through sight, that present events are happening now; and, through current expectation, that future events will take place.
8 Adam Frank’s About Time (Frank 2011) picks a historical trail through the different ways we have sought to measure time: from the Sun and stars to clocks, and through theories of absolutism, relativism and string theory.
whose meridian is conventionally assumed to lie at zero-degrees longitude, a nice example of time being represented by spatial coordinates. In 1880, England enacted The Statutes (Definition of Time) Act ‘to remove doubts as to the meaning of Expressions relative to Time occurring in Acts of Parliament, deeds and other legal instruments’ and stipulating that all references to time in statute or legal documents should be to Greenwich Mean Time unless otherwise stated, a principle which remains intact in The Interpretation Act 1978.
Freud lived during the surge in technological developments which took place in the second half of the eighteenth century which created the impetus for global uniformity to Greenwich Mean Time. The telephone was introduced in 1876 allowing separated people to speak with each other at the same time and across great distances. It takes time to catch up with technology: when Freud was looking at disturbance of thought in the Project of 1895, he used the example of his forgetting in agitation to use a recently installed telephone to ring for help (Freud 1950, p. 357). The introduction of wireless telegraphy during that period seems to have had an almost religious impact: ‘The omnipresence and penetrating capacity of wireless waves rivalled miraculous action and reversed the direction of divine intervention’ (Kern 2003, p. 317). It brought with it an interest, which Freud shared, in telepathy (Frosh 2013, p. 103). Wireless technology meant that time signals could be disseminated globally and the first global time signals were transmitted from the Eiffel Tower in July 1913. The Greenwich Observatory broadcast its first time signals in February 1924. Standard time gradually followed throughout the world.
Stephen Kern, in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Kern 2003), puts great emphasis on the technological development during the period under his review, concluding that the surge in writings about time to which Freud made his contribution was the cultural representation of the technological explosion which culminated in the First World War. Kern acknowledges Freud’s contribution on time during that period as being revolutionary (but wrongly allocates Freud’s contribution to a discipline which, by and large, has not accepted or even acknowledged Freud’s work):
In addition to the technological developments that were revolutionising the actual experience of time and space, cultural changes were revolutionising ways of perceiving and conceptualising time and space across the cultural world in physics (Einstein’s relativity theory), philosophy (Freud’s unconscious mental processes), sociology (Durkheim’s social relativity of time and space), art (Picasso’s Cubism) and literature (Proust’s search for lost time and Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique). (Kern 2003, p. xii)
William James ought to have been on Kern’s list of contributors to the temporality canon, too. James famously gave voice to the idea of a stream of consciousness in his influential Principles of Psychology (James 1890, p. 240). Freud and James met in 1909, when James came over from Harvard to listen to Freud lecture at Clark. Their theories of attention, perception and time share some interesting common ground which I discuss in Chap. 4.9
The literary contributors to Kern’s list, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, explored the connections between time, memory, and consciousness in their 1920’s publications, Ulysses and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, respectively. H.G. Wells (whom Freud met just before his death) also addressed temporal issues during that period in The Time Machine (1895), When The Sleeper Wakes (1899) and Anticipations (1901). In the same period, J.M. Barrie wrote about Peter Pan and Wendy in his 1904 play and his novel published in 1911. ‘Second to the right and straight on till morning’ are the Darling children’s directions to Never Never Land, a timeless domain, the island of Peter Pan, who defies time in his refusal to grow up.
Kern also refers to Henri Bergson as a contributor to writings on time. Bergson developed his theory of time in his doctoral thesis published in 1889 as Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Bergson 2008). Kern suggests rather controversially of Bergson, Proust and Freud, each a notable contributor to the culture of time in this period, that ‘the wandering Jew is at home only in time’ (Kern 2003, p. 51) and so it is the Jewishness of the three which to some
9 Freud recalled their meeting: ‘I shall never forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch me up as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on. He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death’ (Freud 1925e, p. 52).
extent shapes their evaluation of the primacy of time. I prefer the opinion expressed by Graham Frankland in Freud’s Literary Culture (Frankland 2000), a thoughtful study of the impact of the European literary canon on Freud’s work, that we should revise our view that Freud might be representative of a Jewish thinker because Freud was, instead, far more deeply grounded in the European literature of his education. Frankland says that Freud is ‘typical of the bourgeoisie of his era primarily because of his highly literary German education and culture; and, similarly, he is most typically Jewish, if such a designation means anything at all, in that this Bildung—represented by the towering figures of Goethe and Schiller—represented something of an ersatz religion to so many liberal, secularised German Jews’ (Frankland 2000, p. 2). This Bildung, or education, also included other important influences for Freud: the scientific and the ancient Greek, both of which are in evidence in Freud’s thoughts about time. Hartocollis notes that Freud’s theories are grounded in the nineteenth-century scientific tradition in which energies and cathexes were being discussed in terms of quanta and relativity (Hartocollis 1974); Richard Armstrong, in his excellent A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Armstrong 2005), locates Freud’s ‘compulsion’ within ‘the explosive changes brought about by the Darwinian revolution, the growing visibility of ethnographic and anthropological discourse, the professionalisation of historiography and archaeology, and the ever-expanding public appetite for sweeping historical narrative’ (Armstrong 2005, p. 31); and Frankland places Freud’s literary culture as being logically prior to his psychoanalytic insights, persuasively claiming that to ignore this priority impoverishes our understanding of Freud: ‘the doctrine cannot simply be abstracted from his texts, at least not without stripping it from the tensions and ambiguity that allow us to make sense of his relations with his literary culture’ (Frankland 2000, p. 235).
A defining part of Freud’s literary culture was the ancient Greek canon.10 Tourney claims in his paper, Freud and the Greeks: A Study of the
10 Most of Freud’s biographers refer to the importance of the ancient Greek canon for Freud: Ernest Jones’ Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (Jones 1955, 1957, 1972), Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life for Our Time (Gay 1998), and Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Sulloway 1992) all do; George Makari’s Revolution in Mind (Makari 2008), however, does not. Peter Rudnytsky’s Freud and Oedipus (Rudnytsky 1987) and Robert Young’s Ideas in Psychoanalysis: Oedipus Complex (Young 2001) go further, highlighting Freud’s identification with Oedipus.
Influence of Classical Greek Mythology (Tourney 1965), that it was impossible for anyone within the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century Europe to avoid the influence of the ancient Greeks (Tourney 1965, p. 67). He draws support for this view from Butler whose tome, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Butler 1935), suggests that the Greek influence was, in fact, more of a stranglehold. Butler’s view is not overly controversial: Gomperz, a significant influence in Freud’s life, and whose volumes on Greek Thinkers remain in Freud’s library, opens the first of those volumes with a quote from Sir Thomas Maine to the same effect: ‘To one small people…it was given to create the principle of Progress. That people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this World which is not Greek in origin’ (Gomperz 1905, Vol 1, p. 1). Burkhardt, whose History of Greek Civilization Freud was reading at the end of the nineteenth century, whilst writing The Interpretation of Dreams, took a similar view: ‘All subsequent objective perception of the world is only elaboration on the framework the Greeks began. We see with the eyes of the Greeks and use their phrases when we speak’ (cited in Armstrong 2005, p. 100). The Greek ideal was, in Freud’s time, as Armstrong neatly expresses it, the centre of Europe’s ‘family romance’, a crucial part of an elaborate narrative which operated to make ancient Greece both the source and the governing principle of contemporary Europe (Armstrong 2005, p. 18).
In writing this book, I became increasingly aware of the profound ancient Greek influence on Freud’s thoughts about both time and timelessness, an influence apparent throughout his life. When Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunalreal-und Obergymnasium, a year earlier than was usual, he moved into an elite system whose foundations were laid by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), the Prussian minister for education, who took the Greek character to be representative of ‘the original character of humankind overall’ (cited by Armstrong 2005, p. 16). Freud was top of the class for the last 6 of the 8 years he was there (Jones 1972, p. 22) and, when Freud left aged 17, it was with a distinction in his Matura. Freud tells Emil Fluss that the unseen passage in the Greek paper was from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex which Freud had already read on his own account and ‘made no secret of it’ (Freud 1873, p. 5). Freud
retained a lifelong pride in his Greek. Seventy years or so later, in 1934, Freud wrote to his friend, Arnold Zweig: ‘I have always been proud of how much Greek I have remembered (choruses from Sophocles, passages from Homer)’ (Freud 1934, p. 71). Jones claims that Freud was ‘completely at home’ in Latin and Greek (Jones 1972, p. 24) and this is confirmed by a review of the Latin and Greek references given in the Standard Edition: Aeschylus, Aesculapius, Anaximander, Apuleius, Archimedes, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Artemidorus, Democritus, Diodorus, Diogenes, Euripides, Heraclitus, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Homer, Horace, Ovid, Plato, Pliny, Plotinus, Plutarch, Protagoras, Pythagoras, Socrates, Sophocles and Virgil form an impressive list. At university, Freud formed strong connections with the Aristotelian expert, Brentano, describing him as a ‘genius’ (Freud 1875 p. 95). Brentano almost persuaded Freud to combine his medical doctorate with one in philosophy (ibid). It was through Brentano’s recommendation that Freud translated J.S. Mill’s essay on Plato from English to German, under the supervision of the renowned ancient Greek specialist, Theodor Gomperz, for publication in J.S. Mill’s Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, Leipzig, 1880. This was the start of Freud’s long relationship with the Gomperz family. Gomperz’ Interpretation of Dreams and Magic published in 1866, following the publication of Artemidorus’ Book of Dreams, may well have influenced Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900b). And it was Gomperz’ influential Griechische Denker [Greek Thinkers: A History of Ancient Philosophy] to which Freud referred as ‘a book with which one is on the kind of terms one as with “good” friends, books to which one owes some part of one’s knowledge of life and philosophy’ (Freud 1907, p. 269).
The Greek influence makes itself felt through Freud’s development of psychoanalysis, which incorporates so many Greek terms and themes. His use of the Greek myths of Eros and Narcissus, and the Sophoclean tragedy of Oedipus is very well known. He describes the treatment of hysteria as a ‘Sisyphean task’ (Freud 1893, p. 263); draws on the strength of the immortal Titans and the irrepressibility of the ghosts of Hades to capture the timeless quality of unconscious wishes (Freud 1900b, p. 553; and pp. 577–578); reads The Merchant of Venice and King Lear through
Greek mythology, finding there the source for their common theme of three sisters and a choice of the third needing to be made between them (Freud 1913c); finds in the legend of the Labyrinth a representation of the child’s phantasy of anal birth (Freud 1933, p. 25); interprets Medusa’s head as the motif of both the fright of castration (Freud 1933, p. 24) and the petrifying effects of the female genitals (Freud 1941, p 69); and makes selective use of the Greek myth of a third sex, as expressed by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, to bolster his hypothesis of the death drive.
In Freud’s personal life, the Greek influence is just as apparent: Freud identifies himself with Oedipus, his daughter with Antigone and the Acropolis as a site for a funny turn. Even in death, the influence is apparent: Freud’s ashes were interred in a Grecian urn from his collection until it was smashed in an attempted theft in January 2014. In almost every aspect of Freud’s work on time and timelessness an ancient Greek influence appears to be at work: sometimes as a direct and acknowledged influence; sometimes less so, something which became increasingly apparent as I traced a temporal trail through Freud’s published works.
The trail begins in his early works on hysteria and continues through the ‘Project’ (Freud 1950), The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900b), ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (Freud 1911), the metapsychological papers of 1915, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1920), The Ego and the Id (Freud 1923), ‘A Note Upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’ (Freud 1925b), ‘Negation’ (Freud 1925d), and the Outline of Psycho-Analysis (Freud 1938a). The trail shows that Freud’s notions of timelessness and time remain consistent through his two topographies: the first topography, which distinguishes between the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious; and the second, structural, theory which differentiates the three agencies of id, ego and superego.11 Further fragments of Freud’s various ideas on time and timelessness
11 The first topography, in evidence in the neurological framework of the ‘Project’, and clearly set out in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900b), is further developed by Freud in his metapsychological papers of 1915. The second topography evolves from Freud’s introduction of the death drive in 1919/1920. Freud locates both topographies within a spatial model within which each system or agency has a specialised role: hence Freud’s important insistence, for example, on the incompatibility between the functions of memory, where something is necessarily retained, and perception, which is something necessarily fleeting and without trace. Freud did not think his
are to be found throughout Freud’s daunting Nachlass: in biographies and reminiscences about Freud; in his correspondence; in his readings and the marginalia written into his books; in published and unpublished desk jottings; and in his selective use of certain sources, in particular, that of ancient Greek literature. Further clues can be found in the minutes of meetings of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society.
It was difficult to decide where to begin. Freud defines timelessness in terms of what time is not, so an understanding of what time meant for Freud is required to appreciate the true quality of timelessness. But time is something which emerges from timelessness. All mental events other than external perception begin at the level of the timeless unconscious and only from there can move to the system of consciousness, if at all, ‘just as a photographic picture begins as a negative and only becomes a picture after being turned into a positive’ (Freud 1917, p. 294). To understand time, we need to know something about the timeless state from which it emerges, so I decided to begin by looking at Freud’s use of how we represent our beginnings in the Greek myth of origins which represents a denial of time and the losses it brings with it. Its themes consist of incest, murder, cannibalism and revenge and so provide an excellent framework through which to address temporally important questions not only about our own beginnings (and endings) but also about the phantasies and fears which underlie these themes. Chapter 2 examines the psychic activities which underpin the creation of the material of the myths and the mode of its representation, activities to which Freud explicitly connects our development of a notion of abstract time. The myths allow elaboration of Freud’s largely unexamined notion of the endopsychic process, an important one which underlies both the myth-making and the time-making psychic activities. Chapter 3 continues an examination of how our adaptation to the real world brings with it a transition from an initial state of timelessness to one of time. Loss is a precondition of this adaptation to the external world, one which promotes a transition from pleasure principle functioning, where
two topographies were irreconcilable: various diagrams show the psychic apparatus sub-divided into the systems and agencies of both topographies, the latest in Moses and Monotheism (Freud 1939, p. 96).
we hallucinate what we desire, to secondary process functioning which inserts a delay in the system so that reality testing can take place. Reality testing, and its discontinuous operation, is explored further in Chap. 4 to clarify what Freud meant when he said that:
‘[The] discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time.’ (Freud 1925b, p. 231).
Chapter 5 elaborates the inference we can draw from Freud that we develop an abstract notion of time on or after acquiring an internally mediated sense of guilt. I examine the developmental progression which takes place, according to Freud’s theory of guilt, in a two-stage process dependant on an internalisation of what is external. In its first stage, a sense of guilt is evoked only when one’s actions are discovered by an external figure of authority; it is in the second stage, on an internalisation of these authority figures, that guilt becomes an internally mediated proposition from which there is no escape. What Freud calls the ‘timefactor’ seems to develop alongside an internal agency of observation and judgement, one which will become the superego:
I should like to add to this, merely by way of suggestion, that the developing and strengthening of this observing agency might contain within it the subsequent genesis of (subjective) memory and the time-factor [Zeitmoments], the latter of which has no application to unconscious processes. (Freud 1914c, p. 96, footnote)
Freud thought that our collective and inherited sense of guilt derives from the murder of the primal father by the primal horde. The murder is played out in all sorts of cultural representations of which one of the most enduring is Greek tragedy. The comparison Chap. 6 makes between Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex suggests that the tragedians’ representations of Orestes’ and Oedipus’ deeds, intentionality, guilt, trial and punishment can be differentiated on the basis of the temporal nature of the juridical questions each tragedian frames. Freud makes only one oblique reference in his entire collected works to Orestes yet chose to
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REFUS DE L’IMPOT
Les femmes qui s’étaient vu refuser la carte d’électeur, informèrent leur préfet qu’elles ne voulaient plus coopérer aux dépenses de l’Etat qui les annulait:
«Monsieur le préfet,
«J’ai reçu un avis relatif à mes contributions, comme je n’ai pas l’intention de les acquitter, je viens vous en prévenir et vous prier en même temps de rayer mon nom du rôle des contribuables.
«Je me soumettais aux impositions, parce que je croyais que dans la commune, dans le département, dans l’Etat, qui me trouvent bonne pour supporter ma part de charges, je possédais ma part de droits
«Ayant voulu exercer mon droit de citoyenne française, ayant demandé, pendant la période de revision, mon inscription sur les listes électorales, on m’a répondu que «la loi conférait des droits seulement aux hommes et non aux femmes »
«Je n’admets pas cette exclusion en masse des femmes, qui n’ont été privées de leurs droits civiques par aucun jugement En conséquence, je laisse aux hommes qui s’arrogent le privilège de gouverner, d’ordonner, de s’attribuer les budgets, le privilège de payer les impôts qu’ils votent et répartissent à leur gré
«Puisque je n’ai pas le droit de contrôler l’emploi de mon argent, je ne veux plus en donner Je ne veux pas être, par ma complaisance, complice de la vaste exploitation que l’autocratie masculine se croit le droit d’exercer à l’égard des femmes Je n’ai pas de droits, donc je n’ai pas de charges; je ne vote pas, je ne paye pas
Recevez, etc.
«H A .»
Cette lettre fut publiée par tous les journaux; les plus hostiles à nos idées écrivirent: «La question se trouve par cette logique serrée portée du coup sur son véritable terrain.» Dans une société où tout repose sur le principe d’égalité, il est incompréhensible que les droits que les femmes demandent ne leur soient pas accordés: Nous payons des impôts disent-elles, nous devrions être autorisées à les voter et à en surveiller l’emploi.»
«Vous êtes dans l’impossibilité, d’opposer à ce raisonnement une seule objection qui n’ait pas été réfutée déjà par les partisans de la souveraineté populaire.
«L’examen de ce qui se passe dans l’existence fournit d’excellents arguments à l’appui de la théorie des femmes. Voilà par exemple une dame d’intelligence et de volonté qui a fondé une importante maison de commerce; elle occupe deux cents ouvriers et employés; elle verse à l’Etat sous forme d’impôt des sommes considérables. Vous n’admettez pas que cette femme ait le droit de discuter cet impôt, de peser par sa voix sur certaines questions de tarif, d’apporter l’appui de son expérience à des débats économiques. Ce droit, vous l’attribuez sans hésiter à un rôdeur de barrière, qui n’a jamais gagné honnêtement un liard de sa vie.»
Sous ce titre: Grève des Contribuables M. Charles Bigot écrivit dans Le XIXe siècle: «On ne saurait contester à Mlle Hubertine Auclert d’avoir eu une idée. Ni en Angleterre, ni en Amérique où les champions du droit des femmes ne manquent pas cependant, le beau sexe n’avait encore imaginé de protester contre l’exploitation de l’autocratie masculine par le refus de l’impôt. Mlle Hubertine Auclert coupe les vivres à une société qu’elle trouve injuste pour son sexe. Pas de droits électoraux, pas d’argent. La déclaration est nette au moins.»
Mais ce fut surtout une grêle d’injures qui plut sur ces énergiques lutteuses pour leur faire lâcher pied.
Dans Le Petit Parisien, Jean Frollo en louant la crânerie des insurgées contre le fisc avait prévu les défections qui devaient se produire.
Sur les vingt femmes qui avaient refusé l’impôt, trois seulement, Hubertine Auclert, Vve Bonnaire, Vve Leprou ne furent pas effrayées par les papiers de toutes couleurs qu’elles reçurent, résistèrent aux sommations du percepteur et les huissiers saisirent leurs meubles.
«Je ne plains pas trop, écrivit Henry Fonquier, Mlle Hubertine Auclert, elle a eu du bruit pour son argent. Il lui a suffi de ne pas payer ses contributions pour devenir célèbre. Dans le pays où «paraître est tout», elle a paru. Les curieux de l’avenir, qui voudront écrire l’histoire du refus de l’impôt au XIXe siècle, ne pourront se dispenser de parler d’elle. Elle appartient à l’histoire, en compagnie de M. de Genoude, qui faisait vendre son fauteuil, et de M. Gambon, qui faisait vendre sa vache. Ceci pourrait donner matière à un groupe curieux, et il est bizarre de voir un catholique légitimiste, un socialiste et une femme libre user du même procédé.»
Dans «Les Femmes qui tuent et les Femmes qui votent,» Alexandre Dumas parle de notre refus de payer l’impôt, il démontre qu’on ne peut faire que des objections de fantaisie à nos revendications des droits politiques.
Tous les gens de bonne foi pensent bien que si l’on nous empêche de contrôler les budgets, c’est-à-dire d’avoir l’œil ouvert sur l’administration de nos affaires c’est afin de pouvoir mieux nous duper.
En refusant l’impôt, les femmes ont voulu mettre l’Etat au défi de fonctionner sans elles. Cette protestation est légitime, qui paie est en droit de donner son avis.
Qui paie la dépense doit la consentir.
En 1066 ses amis et conseillers dirent à Guillaume duc de Normandie: «Il vous faut demander aide et conseil à la généralité des habitants de ce pays; car, il est de droit que qui paie la dépense soit appelé à la consentir.»
«Raison est que qui paie l’escot il soit à l’asseoir.»
C’est la première fois, au Moyen Age, que le droit politique est exprimé avec cette netteté.
Les femmes apportent plus que les hommes dans les caisses de l’Etat puisqu’elles sont en ce pays la majorité.
Il y a en France un million de femmes de plus que d’hommes, cependant, le sexe masculin minorité en la nation gouverne seul et étant maître absolu, s’attribue tous les bénéfices sociaux.
Les Françaises spoliées et exploitées, auraient un bon moyen pour forcer les hommes dictateurs à entrer en accommodement avec elles, ce serait de refuser en masse l’impôt.
Dans tous les temps et en tous les pays, le refus de l’impôt a toujours été le grand levier des opprimés:
En Angleterre, le patriote John Hampden qui sous Charles Ier refusa l’impôt, à ce despote, fut incarcéré, plaida, replaida et finit par provoquer un mouvement qui se termina par la défaite de Charles Ier dont la tête roula sur l’échafaud.
Sous Louis XIV des provinces s’insurgèrent contre les intendants financiers, elles refusèrent les redevances; mais le faste royal nécessitait trop d’or pour que l’on n’écrasât pas sous le pressoir du fisc les rebelles. Les intendants furent investis du droit de vie et de mort sur les contribuables récalcitrants.
En 1787, la Bretagne et la Normandie, après avoir vainement réclamé contre les vexations et les corvées, ne trouvèrent pas de moyens plus pratiques pour faire cesser l’oppression, que de couper les vivres aux oppresseurs; elles se liguèrent pour refuser l’impôt.
L’exemple donné par ces deux grandes provinces à une époque où la situation financière était si difficile, décida la réunion des états généraux et hâta par conséquent la révolution.
M. de Genoude légitimiste refusa l’impôt à Louis Philippe. On vendit ses meubles.
M. Gambon propriétaire de la Nièvre refusa de payer l’impôt à l’Empire. On lui saisit une vache qui fut mise à l’enchère.
En Amérique, le refus de payer la taxe des marchandises importées d’Angleterre, a été le signal de la guerre de l’indépendance. Les Américains ont mieux aimé détruire, jeter à la mer des cargaisons de denrées alimentaires que de payer l’impôt qui les frappait.
Vingt-six ans après des Françaises, des Anglaises ont refusé d’acquitter leurs contributions parce qu’elles ne sont, elles non plus, point électeurs politiques. Si cette manifestation se généralisait, elle jetterait l’inquiétude au camp des hommes, puisqu’elle menacerait d’arrêter faute de munitions, la force motrice qui fait mouvoir la machine gouvernementale.
Les femmes peuvent-elles continuer à entretenir un état masculiniste où elles ne sont admises qu’à titre de contribuables?
Quand des individus s’associent dans un but quelconque, pourvu qu’ils apportent le même numéraire, qu’ils soient hommes ou femmes, ils ont un identique pouvoir administratif. Les impôts, qui sont la part apportée dans les caisses publiques par chacun des Français et des Françaises, ne peuvent donc, sans préjudice pour la nation, être livrés à l’arbitraire masculin. Il est urgent que la collectivité féminine dise à la collectivité masculine:—Nous n’avons point confiance en votre administration, voilà pourquoi nous voulons examiner, discuter, voter avec vous les budgets.
Le préfet de la Seine qui avait répondu aux femmes que bien qu’elles soient non électrices, elles restaient contribuables reçut cette lettre:
«Monsieur le préfet,
«Vous m’informez que, pour rejeter ma demande de dégrèvement d’impôt, vous vous appuyez sur l’article 12 de la loi du 21 avril 1832, qui déclare imposable à la contribution personnelle et mobiliaire tout habitant français ou étranger non réputé indigent
«Il y a quelques mois, je m’appuyais sur une loi identique, mais de date plus récente, la loi du 5 mai 1848, qui dit: «Art. 6. Sont électeurs tous français,» pour réclamer mon inscription sur les listes électorales.
«On m’a répondu que, devant le scrutin, «Français» ne signifiait pas «Française». Si Français ne signifie pas Française devant le droit; Français ne peut signifier Française devant l’impôt.
«Je n’accepte pas cette anomalie qui fait mon sexe incapable de voter et capable de payer.
«Comme vous ne paraissez pas tenir compte des motifs qui me font refuser la contribution, j’ai l’honneur de vous informer, monsieur le préfet, que je désire user de mon droit de présenter des observations orales à la séance publique du conseil de préfecture que vous voudrez bien m’indiquer. Je m’y ferai assister par Me Antonin Lévrier.
«Recevez, etc.
«H A »
POURVOI DEVANT LE CONSEIL DE PRÉFECTURE
A l’appel de l’affaire Hubertine Auclert contre le préfet de la Seine, je me suis avancée vers le prétoire et avant que n’intervînt mon avocat Antonin Lévrier, j’ai dit:
Messieurs, vous savez, qu’il existe entre l’impôt et le vote une si grande corrélation que jusqu’en 1848 le cens a été la condition du vote. C’est un principe de notre droit français, que l’impôt doit être voté par celui qui le paie.
J’ai légalement revendiqué mon droit de vote, je suis dans les conditions requises pour l’exercer, cependant, quand j’ai demandé ma carte d’électeur on m’a répondu que je n’avais pas de droits, que je ne comptais pas parce que j’étais une femme!..
Comment se fait-il alors qu’on me réclame, à moi qui ne compte pas, des contributions? C’est illogique, attendu que je ne puis à la fois être rien et quelqu’un. Je ne puis être inexistante quand il s’agit de voter et existante quand il s’agit de payer.
J’ai voulu porter cette question devant vous, messieurs, parce que vous êtes un tribunal obligé de motiver vos jugements; et que la discussion étant contradictoire entre l’organe du gouvernement et moi; vous et par vous tout le public, devant ce débat porté si haut, sera obligé de peser ce que valent les arguties de texte devant les arguments de raison.
Or, la raison enseigne que tout argent déboursé doit avoir son emploi contrôlé par la personne qui le débourse.
Je ne réclame pas de dégrèvements d’impôts pour avoir la satisfaction de ne rien payer. Je ne demanderais pas mieux que de
participer aux charges qui incombent aux habitants de mon pays, mais je veux jouir des droits qui découlent de ces charges. Si je suis contribuable; eh bien, je veux être électeur. Ce ne sont pas ceux qui ont pour mission de rendre la justice qui peuvent me blâmer de la demander.
On vous dit, que si vous me dispensiez de payer les contributions, l’année prochaine d’autres femmes réclameraient, puis d’autres et d’autres encore; si bien, qu’en peu de temps, il se produirait un sensible déficit dans les recettes de l’impôt.
Tant mieux, si cela arrivait, car alors les hommes voyant qu’ils ne peuvent se passer de notre apport se décideraient à compter avec nous, à nous traiter en associées et non plus en esclaves rançonnées. Si un déficit se produisait, les hommes s’empresseraient de remplacer le régime de droit masculin existant, par une constitution réellement basée sur l’égalité des hommes et des femmes devant le devoir.
Vous penserez, messieurs, que l’avenir qui sûrement émancipera la femme enregistrera l’arrêt que vous allez prononcer. Vous vous ferez un honneur d’établir ce grand principe de justice sociale, à savoir: que dans un Etat où les femmes n’ont pas de droits, les femmes ne peuvent non plus avoir de charges.
Me Antonin Lévrier, dans son langage concis et mesuré rappelle que la question de l’impôt, de l’égale répartition de l’impôt, a été aux grandes époques de notre histoire, le point de départ des réformes dont nous jouissons. «Avant 1789, le tiers Etat contribuait seul aux charges de l’Etat, la noblesse payant, disait-elle, de son sang, le clergé de ses prières. L’égalité a enfin prévalu, mais elle n’est pas encore ce qu’elle devrait être, puisque la femme est restée en tutelle, sans indépendance et sans initiative. On la compte pour rien et on lui demande l’impôt.
Mlle Hubertine Auclert s’adresse à vous, messieurs, qui êtes juges des différends entre l’Etat et les individus pour obtenir la réformation d’un abus qui a trop duré.»
Le Conseil a sur le rapport de M. Pasquier pris l’arrêté suivant:
«Considérant que l’art. 12, § 1er de la loi du «21 avril 1832, décide «que la contribution «personnelle et mobilière est due par chaque habitant français et par chaque étranger de tout sexe jouissant de ses droits et non réputé indigent.»
»Que dans la disposition précitée, les mots jouissant de ses droits n’ont qu’un sens spécial et restreint;
»Que d’après les termes exprès du § 2e de l’art. 12 survisé, il y a lieu de comprendre au nombre des personnes jouissant de leurs droits les garçons et les filles majeurs ou mineurs ayant des moyens suffisants d’existence, soit par leur fortune personnelle, soit par la profession qu’ils exercent;
»Considérant qu’il résulte de l’instruction que Mlle Auclert a des moyens suffisants d’existence;
»Qu’elle doit donc être réputée jouir de ses droits dans le sens attribué à cette expression par la loi du 21 avril 1832;
»Que dès lors elle n’est pas fondée à demander la décharge de la contribution personnelle et mobilière à laquelle elle a été imposée au rôle de 1880, 12, rue, Cail, à Paris;
»Arrête:
»La requête de Mlle Hubertine Auclert est rejetée.»
Nous en avons appelé de la juridiction du conseil de préfecture, à la juridiction du conseil d’Etat, pour établir que les femmes sont électeurs en même temps que contribuables.
POURVOI DEVANT LE CONSEIL D’ETAT
A Messieurs les Conseillers d’Etat.
Messieurs,
«J’en appelle à vous, de l’arrêt rendu contre moi, par le conseil de préfecture de la Seine: Le conseil a rejeté ma demande en dégrèvement d’impôts, en s’appuyant sur l’article 12 de la loi du 21 avril 1832 ainsi conçu:—La contribution personnelle mobilière est due par chaque habitant français et par chaque étranger de tout sexe, jouissant de ses droits et non réputé indigent.
Je ne puis être visée par cet article qui stipule qu’il faut jouir de ses droits pour payer la contribution; car moi, je ne jouis pas de mes droits puisque je suis rangée parmi les exclus de l’électorat.
«Le commissaire du gouvernement m’a dit, que je n’étais pas seule à payer sans exercer de droits, que les étrangers, que les mineurs étaient dans le même cas que moi et que cependant ils ne réclamaient pas.
Veuillez remarquer, Messieurs, que les mineurs et les étrangers, qui sans exercer de droits contribuent aux charges publiques, n’ont pas à subir le même dommage que les femmes. Sans légiférer, sans administrer, ils sont servis par les mandataires de leur sexe qui ont reçu mandat de s’employer pour la collectivité masculine. Les étrangers et les hommes mineurs appartenant à cette collectivité, bénéficient naturellement de tout ce qui lui revient d’heureux. Il n’y a donc
aucune analogie, entre les femmes privées à perpétuité de leurs droits et les hommes qui en obtiennent ou par le temps, ou par leur volonté, l’exercice.
«Ce principe; que l’impôt doit être voté par celui qui le paie, qui existe dans la loi de 1832, découle de la constitution de 1791 basée sur «La déclaration des droits» qui dans son article 14 déclare formellement que tous ceux qui paient l’impôt, ont le droit d’en contrôler par eux-mêmes ou par leurs représentants la nécessité. Que tous ceux qui paient l’impôt, ont le droit de le consentir librement, d’en suivre l’emploi, d’en déterminer la quotité, l’assiette, le recouvrement et la durée.» Cet article, abonde dans mon sens. Ou bien, comme je le soutiens, tous les imposés hommes et femmes, doivent régler l’emploi des contributions; ou bien, les hommes qui seuls contrôlent les dépenses, doivent les payer.
«Les femmes, par la contribution directe et indirecte, apportent la moitié des recettes dans les caisses de l’Etat; mais, elles ne bénéficient point du quart des dépenses.
«En examinant les différents chapitres du budget, on voit que les hommes se sont presque tout attribué. Les deux tiers des sommes allouées pour l’instruction publique leur sont accordés, afin qu’ils puissent se donner cette supériorité du point de départ, le développement intellectuel.
«Tous les budgets étant employés surtout à l’avantage du sexe masculin. Ne l’ignorant pas, je suis naturellement amenée à vous présenter ces conclusions que j’espère que vous agréerez.
«Attendu, qu’il est bien démontré que je ne jouis pas de mes droits et ne puis par conséquent être visée par l’article 12 de la loi du 21 avril 1832 qui énumère expressément les conditions requises pour être contribuable.
«Attendu, qu’il est bien démontré que l’argent des contributions que je verse profite presque exclusivement aux hommes.
«Attendu, que je suis exclue de la loi qui donne pour garantie de l’équité de la répartition des impôts, le droit à tout contribuable de les répartir ou de les faire répartir par des mandataires légaux.
«M’en référant à la déclaration des droits de 1789 et à la Constitution de 1791 de laquelle découle toute la législation postérieure relative à cet objet, je conclus que je dois pouvoir contrôler, ou faire contrôler par des personnes mandatées par moi, l’emploi de mon argent, ou que je dois être déchargée de toute contribution.
«Vous écouterez ma réclamation, Messieurs, vous rendrez un arrêt équitable pour la moitié déshéritée de l’humanité et de la chambre du Conseil d’Etat, sortira pour les femmes la réforme de la législation.
«H A .»
Le Conseil d’Etat après avoir examiné notre affaire; a rendu l’arrêt ci-dessous:
L’ARRÊT DU CONSEIL D’ÉTAT
CABINET
DU
Sénateur Préfet de la Seine
1er Bureau
PRÉFECTURE
DU
DÉPARTEMENT DE LA SEINE
RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE
CONSEIL D’ÉTAT
Séance du 31 mars 1881.
Au nom du peuple Français
La section du contentieux du conseil d’Etat
Vu la requête présentée par la demoiselle Hubertine Auclert, demeurant à Paris, tendant à ce qu’il plaise au conseil: annuler un arrêté, en date du 11 août 1880, par lequel le conseil de Préfecture du département de la Seine a rejeté sa demande de décharge de la contribution personnelle et mobilière à laquelle elle a été imposée, pour l’année 1880, sur le rôle de la ville de Paris
Ce faisant, attendu qu’elle n’a pas la jouissance des droits politiques; que, dès lors, elle ne jouit pas de ses droits dans le sens de l’article 12 de la loi du 21 avril 1832, et ne doit pas être imposée à la contribution personnelle et mobilière; lui accorder la décharge demandée;
Vu l’arrêté attaqué;
Vu la réclamation de la demoiselle Hubertine Auclert devant le conseil de Préfecture;
Vu l’avis de la commission des contributions directes, et des agents de l’administration des contributions directes;
Vu la lettre, en date du 28 février 1881, par laquelle le Préfet de la Seine, transmet le présent pourvoi;
Ensemble le rapport du directeur des contributions directes;
Vu les autres pièces produites et jointes au dossier;
Vu la loi du 21 avril 1832;
Ouï, M. Bonnieu, auditeur, en son rapport;
Ouï, M Chante-Grellet, maître des requêtes, commissaire du Gouvernement, en ses conclusions;
Considérant qu’aux termes de l’article 12 de la loi du 21 avril 1832, la contribution personnelle et mobilière est due par chaque habitant français ou étranger de tout sexe jouissant de ses droits et non réputé indigent; que d’après le même article, les garçons et filles majeurs ou mineurs, ayant des moyens suffisants d’existence, sont considérés comme jouissant de leurs droits;
Considérant qu’il résulte de l’instruction que la demoiselle Hubertine Auclert jouit de ses droits dans le sens de l’article 12 précité; que, dès lors; c’est avec raison qu’elle a été maintenue par le conseil de Préfecture de la Seine, à la contribution personnelle et mobilière à laquelle elle a été imposée pour 1880 sur le rôle de la ville de Paris,
Décide:
Article 1er
La requête de la demoiselle Hubertine Auclert est rejetée.
Art 2
Expédition de la présente décision sera transmise au ministre des finances
Délibérée dans la séance du 31 mai 1881 où siégeaient MM. Laferrière président; Bertout, Braun, Tirman, Colonna-Ceccaldi, conseillers d’Etat, et Romieu, auditeur, rapporteur.
Lue en séance publique le 8 avril 1881.
Le président de la section du contentieux
Signé: E . L .
Le Conseil d’Etat invoque la subtilité de la loi qui me fait considérer comme jouissant de mes droits lorsqu’il s’agit de payer les impôts, et qui, quand je veux exercer ces droits, me les dénie.
Si pour les élections je voulais essayer de voter, je suis certaine que l’on me repousserait de l’urne électorale avec cette formule:— Vous ne jouissez pas de vos droits!
Dans tous les actes de la vie sociale et politique, on me dit que je ne jouis pas de mes droits. Cependant quand arrive le moment de payer l’impôt, que, pour ce motif, je demande à en être déchargée; on me répond! «Que je suis considérée comme jouissant de mes droits.»
Ainsi, moi qui ne jouis pas de mes droits pour voter l’impôt, je jouirais de mes droits pour le payer?
Je ne puis cependant être à la fois capable et incapable. Capable pour donner mon argent; et incapable, pour contrôler l’emploi qu’on en fait.
