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Conceptual Niceties

In 1964 Octave Mannoni published in Les Temps modernes what is still considered a seminal psychoanalytic text on disavowal. In 1969 this was republished as part of his book Clefs pour l’Imaginaire, ou l’Autre Scène. Its title succinctly spells out the core formula of disavowal: Je sais bien, mais quand même, ‘I know well, but all the same….’ The time when the text appeared seems to have little in common with our time – except, of course, for the most obvious and general thing: that it was a time of profound social tectonic shifts and turbulence. Despite its generality, this similarity may not be insignificant or merely superficial, especially when we consider the ways in which we – both as individuals and as a society – are responding to these tectonic shifts, turbulences, and the confusions that accompany them. On the contrary, one might say that disavowal has only now reached the status of ‘ordinary perversion’ (I borrow the term from Catheryn Barrena Phipps).

Perversion, or more precisely fetishism, was of course already central to Freud’s treatment of disavowal. However, one of the important and valuable dimensions of Mannoni’s text lies precisely in the fact that he has considerably expanded the concept of disavowal. He has expanded it and linked it to the general structure of belief (which he explicitly distinguishes from faith), which comes into play in a whole range of social phenomena and their constitutive illusions. The Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, for example, has often referred to Mannoni’s work in his writings, emphasizing especially the positive aspects of disavowal-as-belief and its associated ‘illusions’ (for example, the theatrical illusion, about which Mannoni has also written); he showed in what sense belief and illusions are an indispensable and constitutive dimension of all sociality.1 This aspect of Mannoni’s text is largely left out here, which is not to say that we do not pursue his expansion of the notion of disavowal along a different path – namely the path that expands disavowal to include its neurotic dimension and thus considers it also outside the realm of perversion. This extension is particularly important because only against its background do we get a sense of the significant change that the social structure of disavowal has recently undergone.

Belief Starts with Knowledge

Mannoni gives a series of examples in his text, through which he deploys the plethora of different forms in which disavowal takes place. The fetishist disavowal emerges as its most accomplished form, if we might say; and, when he comes to it, Mannoni abruptly concludes his text, as if it was already somehow outside the realm of the question he is dealing with. The fundamental trick of the fetishist disavowal is that it transfers the disavowed belief (the ‘but all the same’ part) to an object – fetish – liberating the subject from all forms of unconscious belief. This means that it is not even that I unconsciously keep believing what I know to be otherwise; in a way, I am free from every belief, even unconscious ones, because it is my fetish that believes for me. Whereas the phrase ‘I know well, but all the same’ is the trade mark or the signature of disavowal, a fetishist will never say ‘but all the same’, since ‘his “but all the same” is his fetish.’2 As is the case with many other operations associated with the clinical structure of perversion (to which we will dedicate more time than Mannoni does), the operation of disavowal is in this case entirely ‘successful’. It leaves no other trace but the fetish, and, as Freud has already pointed out, fetishists are perfectly happy with this solution; they do not usually enter analysis because of their fetish and the problems it causes them. This is why perversion often comes across as resistant to analysis, unreceptive to it: what may appear to others as a problem is not experienced as a problem or a difficulty: ‘For though no doubt a fetish is recognized by its adherents as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by them as the symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering. Usually they are quite satisfied with it, or even praise the way in which it eases their erotic life.’3

In other words, no conflict persists here; the tension is resolved. It is a different story with neurotics: as Mannoni puts it, they spend their life saying ‘but all the same’. Not in a direct way, not by declaring that, after all, they still believe what they know not to be the case, but stating this in many other ways, which constitutes the core of neurotic behaviour. Here, in short, we are in the realm of symptoms and of the possible encumbrances and suffering related to them. The disavowed belief is not entirely externalized and objectified but demands continuous work (of the unconscious), translation, and relocation, and hence persists as a possible source of internal and external conflict.

The most famous example discussed by Mannoni does not involve a fetish but nevertheless exposes perfectly the constitution of ‘magical belief’ that lies at the core of disavowal. It is an example he takes from the autobiography of the Hopi Indian chief Don Talayesva,4 translated and published in France in 1959 under the title Soleil Hopi, with a preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The magical belief at stake in this case is the belief in Katcinas – spirits or gods. At a certain season of the year, the Katcinas appear in the pueblos, much as Santa Claus appears in our culture; and, again like Santa, they take a strong interest in children. They also resemble Santa Claus in that they conspire with parents to deceive the children. The imposture is very strictly maintained, and no one would dare to expose it. Talayesva presents us with the account of how – when presented with the fact that the dancers that children were told were Katcinas are in truth their fathers and uncles wearing masks – at that point he started to believe in the magical presence of Katcinas. The first step is what can be justly described as a traumatizing blow: ‘When the Katcinas entered the kiva without masks’, Talayesva writes, ‘I had a great surprise. They were not spirits…. I recognized all of them, and I felt very unhappy, because I had been told all my life that Katcinas were gods. I was especially shocked and angry when I saw that all my clan fathers and uncles were dancing as Katcinas. I felt the worst when I saw my own father.’5 The next step is that of the disavowal proper, based on the following explanation given by the adults: ‘Now you know’, the children are told, ‘that the real Katcinas do not come to dance in the pueblos the way they did in the old days. Now they only come invisibly, and, on the days of the dance, they dwell in their masks in mystical fashion.’

At this point (though of course we cannot assume this in all cases, and a sequel may unfold differently) a belief is formed in the mystical presence of Katcinas – that is to say, in the real existence of spirits – in spite of the fact that the children now know very well that the dancing figures they saw were not Katcinas and that they have never actually seen one. This belief is further facilitated and consolidated by the existing social institutions. We can see here how social institutions and rituals can play a role similar to that of fetish: they take upon themselves the existence of the disavowed belief; they help both to generate and to sustain it.

But the Hopi case also illustrates something else. It shows how (external) institutions can help us appease some traumatic experience (the young Hopi finding out that Katcinas didn’t exist) as well as the possible internal conflicts resulting from it. It also shows how this traumatic experience functions in fact as the condition of our belief in (social) institutions. If children had not been deliberately misled and systematically encouraged to believe that the Katcinas existed and danced in pueblos, they would also have been spared the traumatic disappointment of discovering that the Katcinas were in fact their fathers and uncles. In other words, in this case we can see that, socially speaking, traumatic experiences are often deliberately induced (in a controlled environment) in order to make institutions and belief in them work. Rituals of ‘initiation’ are usually just that: almost never without a certain traumatic dimension, such rituals aim to reinforce institutions that they seemingly undermine by their extra-normativity.6

Moreover, and as Mannoni also convincingly shows, it would be a mistake to regard belief as a first, ‘childlike’ phase of one’s relation to the world that is later replaced by enlightened knowledge and to conclude that, because this knowledge is sometimes unpleasant or downright traumatic, we regress back into belief or continue to believe what we believed before the better knowledge came along. Belief does not exist before knowledge and its possibly traumatic aspect, but the latter is a condition for the establishment of belief, and belief comes after or at the same time as knowledge. In this respect, too, the case of Talayesva is instructive. It would be a mistake to say that before their initiation...