Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious
by Michael Billig
Cambridge University Press 1999
Michael Billig is not a psychologist or psychoanalyst. He is "Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University." He agrees with Freud that repression occurs, but he disagrees with Freud on its genesis and nature. Billig says that Freud's theory "treats thinking as a series of unseen processes occurring within the individual thinker's mind" and that with this model of thinking "it is difficult to see how children could ever learn to think" and "it is difficult to see how children could learn to repress." (p. 45) Billig calls himself a social constructionist and imagines that a child has to learn to repress and even learn to think. Not what to repress or how to think well, but how to do these things at all. Billig sees no philosophical mystery in human consciousness. What baffles him is how any thought could occur below our conscious awareness or how thought could have any independence from language. To remove the bafflement, he simply sidesteps the hurdle and, in effect, equates thought and language. He believes that "[w]hat is required is a psychological approach, which [. . .] does not distinguish sharply between language and thought." (p. 46) Billig wants to locate the meaning and source of repression in speech. He does not believe that repression is merely evinced in speech — its pre-linguistic existence due to mental structures innate to the human mind, as Freud would say — but, rather, that language-use itself, through the social boundaries of discourse, creates repression, and that repression never lives "deeper" than language. There is no depth psychology in Billig's world. There is only language.
For Freud, the unconscious mind is dynamic and abundant in processes we do not "perceive" consciously, and repression is an inhibitory process, preventing thoughts from reaching our awareness. Billig doesn't like this. He wants everything to happen on our social surface, behavioristically observable, evident in language; and the idea of hidden mental structures and processes underlying our public life disturbs him. His opinion that we need to learn to repress or think — rather than that repressing and thinking are innate processes of the human mind that don't need to be learned at all, but rather initiated — is philosophically flawed. A complex process like repression cannot be simply placed within the mind. There needs to be the requisite hooks and pathways, so to speak. Language itself isn't enough. To use a computer analogy: the operating system (OS) precedes and supports the program it runs. If the operating system doesn't accommodate the program, if the program needs the OS to do things it cannot do, that program, or that portion of the program unsupported by the OS, will not run. In the same way, social or family taboos on language could not institute repression if there were no psychological predisposition to comply with taboos in the first place. Language-use contains evidence of repression; it is not its cause.
Let's clarify this even more. Billig wants to place the origin and residence of thought and repression solely within language. Repression and thought, in his view, are consequences of learning how to speak. Without language they would not exist. A full theory and explanation of language, he believes, would also be a full theory and explanation of thought and repression. He cannot, therefore, call thinking or repression "states of mind" since for him they are simply states of language. This explains the sub-title of his book. The Unconscious, such as it is in his theory, exists solely within the structure and detail of language, the language of an individual and the language of a culture. He does not separate human psychology from human language, but rather packs as much as he can inside language itself. A theory of language, then, will substitute for a theory of mind.
Again: Billig is not speaking of dispositions or latent abilities that exist somehow within the human mind and which learning a language will trigger. And if he were saying this, he would not then have explained how we learn to think (or repress) by learning language, nor would he have explained how repression is even possible within human nature or why it's contingent upon language. In other words, he would not have explained the disposition itself, nor how learning a language triggers that disposition. (Consider the research field of Artificial Intelligence.) Billig is speaking simply of learning how to use language (itself a latent ability in the infant's mind) and, by doing only that, in learning only that, learning also, simultaneously, to think and to repress. Not learning how to think or repress, but, exactly, to think or repress. Learning one is also learning the others.
Since even in Freud's theory, repression is revealed as a symptom within language, and the analytic cure is mediated through speech, we can ask what practical difference arises from Billig's theory of language-based repression. This question cannot be answered, because the bulk of the book is nothing but a species of sociolinguistics. Billig is concerned with social rules of speech, of how things are said and how things are left unsaid, and how family and cultural values and decrees are implicit in language. Billig argues that the social use of language compels the repression of desire. Our desire to disobey the restrictions of linguistic conventions (e.g., "take turns in speaking") and taboos (e.g., "don't speak of such things") is repressed in order to have dialogue. So Billig studies those conventions and taboos, and the nature of dialogue, thinking he is thereby giving a full account of repression. Freud would certainly agree with him that society compels repression. But Billig's contention that the repression of speech constitutes the entire realm of repression is unconvincing and seems an oversimplification of human psychology.
Astoundingly, this "oversimplification" is Billig's goal. What he wants, in fact, is to situate the mind in language. He wants to replace discourse about the mind with discourse about discourse and bodily action. In this, he is following the behaviorist philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (more specifically, his posthumous works, beginning with the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations) and the proposals of American psychoanalyst Roy Schafer, who in his 1976 book A New Language for Psychoanalysis apparently argued that, in Billig's words, we should "rewrite the language of psychoanalytic theory in terms of actions" (p. 185) and "attribute actions to people rather than to hypothetical mental structures." (p. 44) But, of course, if people do, in fact, have "mental structures" (whatever structure might mean in a psychological context), then describing people's behavior as if they don't is like claiming it is enough (in a science of the body) to talk about people lifting their arms without admitting the physiological details of how they do it. Evacuating the mind of everything but language creates as great a conundrum as it was meant to solve. You still have a mind, after all.
In learning language, according to Billig, the child learns not only to think and to repress, but also to remember. It is through language that memory and forgetting occurs. "In important respects, human remembering is based on acquired skills, rooted in language. If remembering is an acquired skill, then so, in a non-trivial sense, is forgetting. We have to learn how to forget in appropriate ways." (p. 142) Billig proposes a distinction between implicit memory and explicit (or declarative) memory, which he says was first made by the neuropsychologist Daniel Schacter. (see p. 154) An implicit memory is a memory that one is unaware of having. It is implicit within the individual, for example as a learned response or a skill in pattern recognition, such as a recognition that the face you see is that of your mother. In declarative memory, one is aware of having the memory, and a narrative is formed about the past event, perhaps with the help of an authority figure such as a parent. Billig says it is declarative memory that depends upon language. An infant, then, can only have implicit memory, because she lacks the linguistic proficiency for talking about events. Only by formulating experience as a narrative, or in dialogue with another, is the memory of that experience possible. (see p. 157) Following Wittgenstein, Billig says that an infant cannot know she has a memory, because she does not know what a memory is. Having no way to talk about it, she has no way to know it, and therefore, no way to, in fact, have it. Language sets the limits of her world.
In order to forget, one must first know. This has implications for so-called repressed memories of infant child abuse. "[T]he sort of forgetting involved in repression is based on acquired skills, which are too complex to be practiced by infants." (p. 145) Repression is an avoidance of particular memories. (see p. 168) It is an omission from all narratives of a past event.
He continues his theory with a discussion of emotions. Regarding the alleged difficulty of accounting for unconscious emotions, he writes: "If the discursive and social aspects of emotions are recognized — and emotions are not treated as internal bodily states — then many of the difficulties evaporate." (p. 185) He doesn't expressly deny those "internal bodily states" but clearly wishes to ignore them (to repress them?) in his theory. Later, he goes so far as to say: "Without words there can be no guilt. Without words there could, in a literal sense, be no love." (p. 188)
Since for Billig, the Unconscious is purely a linguistic tag for gaps in our language, he believes that an unconscious emotion is simply an emotion we misname or do not label at all. The possibility of misnaming, he allows, because for him "we do not have a privileged access to the vocabulary for describing our own feelings." (p. 195, his emphasis) What we say we feel may not be what we feel. (It seems Billig is slipping here into psychological talk and admitting the existence of private, non-observable feelings, but is he?) "Talk of emotions [. . .] is essentially talk about social relationships." (p. 189) We learned the vocabulary of emotion from its use by others, and we can sometimes get it wrong. These moments of misnaming, if we have learned the language correctly, are moments of repression. Despite what he seems to think, this doesn't explain repression. It only gives evidence of its presence.
Billig is following the posthumous Wittgenstein in believing that language can only point to publicly observable conditions, because if it referred only to a psychological event it could not be learned. (see p. 188) There is no way to point to the mind or its content; therefore language cannot logically refer to it; and thus, our vocabulary of emotion refers only to publicly observable (i.e. social) conditions. Emotions are merely sociolinguistic concepts. They are ways of behaving and speaking. This implies that, for Billig, although he never says this, the mind is a social construction. It does not otherwise exist. No wonder he calls himself a social constructionist.
Michael Billig has two essays online relevant to the book. They played no part in the above review.
Michael Billig's website is here.
© 2001 Dubnglas