對一般人而言，集體回憶的所指，大概是一些童年少年時跟朋友一起做過的傻事，那可以是一起偷東西、一起「出貓」作弊、一起旅行、一起打架......。

近日收到電郵，是教會朋友寄來的。他們在憶述一次少年時的話劇表現。往來的電郵之間，有人提出類似「光陰匆匆」的話。我看過那段演出，也的確感到他們所曾付出過的努力。然而，他們在緬懷過去的當兒，究竟是想回到過去？還是勇往直前、繼往開來？

教會給人的印象多是講耶穌(道理)的地方，十年前的話劇，對人生追求的想法，那句耶穌便是一切答案的公式，我看今天還是沒有甚麼變化、原封不動地搬在面前！十年前的世界跟十年後的今天， 很多事情都變了，耶穌沒錯仍然可以是尋找答案的方向，但那種表述形式是否也要與時並進？十年前我們經過的生活，今天是否又可以重覆做去？

十年前，香港政府還是奉行「積極不干預」的施政方針；十年後的今天，曾蔭權給我們重覆了董建華時代那八萬五已不復存在的「突然消失變戲法」。

十年前，中國只是在改革開放的路上初見成就，香港經濟優勢仍然令港人沾沾自喜；十年後的今天，中國強起來，強得美國本土「中國威脅論」熱賣，香港由走到前頭變成現在被納入十一加五的國策的一部分中。

十年前，世界還是高唱著快樂的九十年代，福山的歷史終結論高唱入雲；十年後的今天，由二零零一年九一一改寫了整個世界，恐怖主義成了今天集權主義的新口號，但旗幟所飄揚的地方不是東歐和俄羅斯，而是整個西方世界。

十年前，全球化議題甫出場，大家還不知其面貌；十年後的今天，每一個經濟體系都要面對全球化正面的衝擊。

十年前，台灣還在國民黨黑金的政治環境中；十年後的今天，台灣經歷了民主選舉抬了一個叫陳水扁的總統上場。

十年前，香港人還在英國手下被殖民；十年後的今天，我們當家作主，我們勇敢地行出了兩次的七一大遊行。

十年前，我們經歷著成長，甚至成功；十年後的今天，我們不知所措，只好重覆且無力地彈著十年前的老調子。

追想過去，可能勾起我們很多集體回憶，但這些記憶在今天看來，卻變成了一種創傷。因為它為我們疲乏無力的信仰宣告添加格外的沉重，令原來已感到無方向的人生披上多一重面紗，愈看愈看不清前路。

Ralf Dahrendorf在上述題目下寫了一篇「九一一」的文章，其中節錄如下：

...「九一一」已經直接或間接地意味著一個巨大的震驚事件，在心理上以及對於政治體系而言都是如此。儘管以民主的名義與恐怖主義作戰，實際上這一鬥爭由於官方的立法以及民眾的憂慮而已導玫對民主明顯的削弱。「九一一」攻擊的令人擔憂的特性之一，就是西方社會的主要特徵，即民主和法治卻已經在捍衛者手中遭到了嚴重的損害，其程度遠遠超過其攻擊者。

 

最重要的是，需要採取兩個步驟為受到「九一一」後果影響的民主國家恢復對自由的信心，首先，我們必須確保應對恐怖主義挑戰的相關立法是嚴格具有時限的。當今的某些對人身自由以及民權的限制含有限制其時效的廢止條款，所有這些法規都應定期接受議會的重新審查。

 

第二，也是更為重要的是，我們的領導人應當力求平息、而不是利用公眾的焦慮。我們目前「交戰」的恐怖分子無法獲勝，因為他們的黑暗的觀點永遠不會贏得廣泛公眾合法認可。這也就是民主派人士應當挺身以遵循我們的價值觀的方式來捍衛它們的原因。

 

作者為德國派駐歐盟委員會前任委員、英國上議院議員、倫敦經濟學院院長以及牛津大學聖安東尼學院院長。文章刊於《信報》2006年9月12日。

Slavoj Zizek為9/11五周年撰文，題目為「On 9/11, New Yorkers faced the fire in the minds of men」，他寫道：

What, then, is the historical meaning of 9/11? Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell. The collapse of communism was perceived as the collapse of political utopias. Today, we live in a post-utopian period of pragmatic administration, since we have learned the hard lesson of how noble political utopias can end in totalitarian terror. But this collapse of utopias was followed by 10 years of the big utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy. November 9 thus announced the "happy 90s", the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history", the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal community was around the corner, that the obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely local pockets of resistance where the leaders have not yet grasped that their time is over.

September 11 is the symbol of the end of this utopia, a return to real history. A new era is here with new walls everywhere, between Israel and Palestine, around the EU, on the US-Mexico and Spain-Morocco borders. It is an era with new forms of apartheid and legalised torture. As President Bush said after September 11, America is in a state of war. But the problem is that the US is not in a state of war. For the large majority, daily life goes on and war remains the business of state agencies. The distinction between the state of war and peace is blurred. We are entering a time in which a state of peace itself can be at the same time a state of emergency.

歷史是否會循環地出現我不知道，但從歷史裏我們往往未能吸取到教訓卻是鐵一般的事實。可憐尋常的老百姓，明明活在和平的日子裏，但卻終日被政權以恐怖危險在心中點火。

一齣中規中矩的電影﹐賣的是推理情節。這部改變自漫畫單行本的電影，在日本據說大收旺場。

買票入場的觀眾不可不知，現在上演的是上集，下集於十一月才公映。由於電影分上下集，所以能把一共十二冊的漫畫那錯綜複雜的人物關係交代得清清楚楚，相比於《達文西密碼》與《龍虎門》，它有更多的時間。當然，電影修改了漫畫版一些繁複的情節，讓觀眾在短時間內便能把握事情的經過，很容易跟得上故事發展。

故事很簡單，講述死神將死亡筆記掉進人間，筆記主人只要依著筆記的使用規則，便能殺人於無形。本集以布局為主，主要交代筆記的物主夜神月如何利用筆記「替天行道」，而另一主角L如何跟他鬥智鬥力。故事確實隨著夜神月如何使用筆記而變得緊張起來，雖然夜神月的心理變化未能方過演員表達出來，令人信服，但電影勝在題材有趣創新，所以也不失為暑假檔期可以考慮觀看的電影。

然而兩人真正的智力對決，要在下一集才可看到。

香港傳媒很好，中共中央文獻編輯委員會編輯的《江澤民文選》三冊一出，便有不少引述內容讓讀者先睹為快。在香港報導的，當然以江就香港在過去二十五年的相關部份為主。其中，江曾說：「維護香港穩定繁榮是中英雙方的共同利益。我們保證回歸祖國後的香港還實行原有的資本主義制度，我們說話算數。有人曾醞釀花數十億英磅在一九九七年後繼續租香港。我看，不要說十億，就是一百億、一千億，我也不會出賣香港。我絕不做第二個李鴻章。」

以上的一段話，豪情壯志，絕對看得出一種所謂的民族情感在其中。然而這番話若是原原本本，沒有經過後期編修的話，那是回歸前說的(報導說是九零年江會見新加坡國會議員、總理政治秘書吳博韜時說的)，那時，香港人真的有多少日朝夜暮著回歸到中國的懷抱？勿論英方繼續租借香港，就是港獨也曾有人大膽地提出過。總之，不回歸便是當時港人最深切的祈願。中國政府也深知香港人的想法和憂慮，所以甚麼創新的一國兩制、港人治港、高度自治，或市井一些的「舞照跳，馬照跑」口號推陳出新。怕就是變，這變不但香港人怕，就連中國政權也怕。因為變則亂，而在中國政府的眼下，香港不是沒有亂的本錢的，這可以上溯至八九‧六四。香港人被中共政權在八九的血腥鎮壓清潔過眼睛，不敢直望這個在八年後重新接管自己的「母親/父親」。江澤民說「說話算數」，叫港人怎能打從心底裏相信他呢？

香港人在回歸前多麼想江澤民做第二個李鴻章，就是真的可以拿十億或一百億英磅出來，這可能還不需要英政府出手，香港大抵自己將這項交易快夾妥地辦好，其中我想不乏在九七後「忽然愛國」的親中人士。當然，英政府就算把這項事情辦理好的話，最終也是從港人的口袋裏拿錢然後扮慈悲而已。

今天，港人看到江的回憶，有多少人會看到昨日的自己？回歸已將近十年，香港人會否為江昔日的講話所感動？還是我們在本身的身份意識上根本沒有長大過？

An essay written by Zizek on London Review of Books in memorizing Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. He asked the crucial question: "Has pychoanalysis outdated?" As an Lacanian and Zizekian, my answer is same as Zizek's with definitely "Yes" in some aspects and "No" in the subversive position which is the core of what psychoanalysis is.

I highly recommend friends to read this essay, especially the interpretation to the Irma's injection, the famous story, of Freud. It's because it disclosed the Unconscious, the very Subject we have to face to but always neglect. The Unconcious Subject is also the core concept in Lacan. I think the link up between Lacan and Freud is in the interpretation of this Subject.

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In recent years, it’s often been said that psychoanalysis is dead. New advances in the brain sciences have finally put it where it belongs, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers in the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist searches for hidden meaning. As Todd Dufresne put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all the fundamentals – with the exception of Marx, some would add. The Black Book of Communism was followed last year by the Black Book of Psychoanalysis, which listed all the theoretical mistakes and instances of clinical fraud perpetrated by Freud and his followers. In this way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and psychoanalysis is now there for all to see.

A century ago, Freud included psychoanalysis as one of what he described as the three ‘narcissistic illnesses’. First, Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth moves around the Sun, thereby depriving humans of their central place in the universe. Then Darwin demonstrated that we are the product of evolution, thereby depriving us of our privileged place among living beings. Finally, by making clear the predominant role of the unconscious in psychic processes, Freud showed that the ego is not master even in its own house. Today, scientific breakthroughs seem to bring further humiliation: the mind is merely a machine for data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy merely a ‘user’s illusion’. In comparison, the conclusions of psychoanalysis seem rather conservative.

Is psychoanalysis outdated? It certainly appears to be. It is outdated scientifically, in that the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of the human mind has superseded the Freudian model; it is outdated in the psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is losing ground to drug treatment and behavioural therapy; and it is outdated in society more broadly, where the notion of social norms which repress the individual’s sexual drives doesn’t hold up in the face of today’s hedonism. But we should not be too hasty. Perhaps we should instead insist that the time of psychoanalysis has only just arrived.

One of the consistent themes of today’s conservative cultural critique is that, in our permissive era, children lack firm limits and prohibitions. This frustrates them, driving them from one excess to another. Only a firm boundary set up by some symbolic authority can guarantee stability and satisfaction – the satisfaction that comes of violating the prohibition. In order to make clear the way negation functions in the unconscious, Freud cited the comment one of his patients made after recounting a dream about an unknown woman: ‘Whoever this woman in my dream is, I know she is not my mother.’ A clear proof, for Freud, that the woman was his mother. What better way to characterise the typical patient of today than to imagine his reaction to the same dream: ‘Whoever this woman in my dream is, I’m sure she has something to do with my mother!’

Traditionally, psychoanalysis has been expected to enable the patient to overcome the obstacles preventing his or her access to normal sexual satisfaction: if you are not able to get it, visit an analyst and he will help you to lose your inhibitions. Now that we are bombarded from all sides by the injunction to ‘Enjoy!’, psychoanalysis should perhaps be regarded differently, as the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy: not ‘not allowed to enjoy’, but relieved of the pressure to enjoy.

Nowhere is this paradoxical change in the role of psychoanalytic interpretation clearer than in the case of dreams. The conventional understanding of Freud’s theory of dreams is that a dream is the phantasmic realisation of some censored unconscious desire, which is as a rule of a sexual nature. At the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud provides a detailed interpretation of his own dream about ‘Irma’s injection’. The interpretation is surprisingly reminiscent of an old Soviet joke: ‘Did Rabinovitch win a new car on the state lottery?’ ‘In principle, yes, he did. Only it was not a car but a bicycle, it was not new but old, and he did not win it, it was stolen from him!’ Is a dream the manifestation of the dreamer’s unconscious sexual desire? In principle, yes. Yet in the dream Freud chose to demonstrate his theory of dreams, his desire is neither sexual nor unconscious, and, moreover, it’s not his own.

The dream begins with a conversation between Freud and his patient Irma about the failure of her treatment because of an infection caused by an injection. In the course of the conversation, Freud approaches her and looks deep into her mouth. He is confronted with the unpleasant sight of scabs and curly structures like nasal bones. At this point, the horror suddenly changes to comedy. Three doctors, friends of Freud, among them one called Otto, appear and begin to enumerate, in ridiculous pseudo-professional jargon, possible (and mutually exclusive) causes of Irma’s infection. If anyone had been to blame, it transpires in the dream, it is Otto, because he gave Irma the injection: ‘Injections ought not to be made so thoughtlessly,’ the doctors conclude, ‘and probably the syringe had not been clean.’ So, the ‘latent thought’ articulated in the dream is neither sexual nor unconscious, but Freud’s fully conscious wish to absolve himself of responsibility for the failure of Irma’s treatment. How does this fit with the thesis that dreams manifest unconscious sexual desires?

A crucial refinement is necessary here. The unconscious desire which animates the dream is not merely the dream’s latent thought, which is translated into its explicit content, but another unconscious wish, which inscribes itself in the dream through the Traumarbeit (‘dream-work’), the process whereby the latent thought is distorted into the dream’s explicit form. Here lies the paradox of the dream-work: we want to get rid of a pressing, disturbing thought of which we are fully conscious, so we distort it, translating it into the hieroglyph of the dream. However, it is through this distortion that another, much more fundamental desire encodes itself in the dream, and this desire is unconscious and sexual.

What is the ultimate meaning of Freud’s dream? In his own analysis, Freud focuses on the dream-thought, on his ‘superficial’ wish to be blameless in his treatment of Irma. However, in the details of his interpretation there are hints of deeper motivations. The dream-encounter with Irma reminds Freud of several other women. The oral examination recalls another patient, a governess, who had appeared a ‘picture of youthful beauty’ until he looked into her mouth. Irma’s position by a window reminds him of a meeting with an ‘intimate woman friend’ of Irma’s of whom he ‘had a very high opinion’; thinking about her now, Freud has ‘every reason to suppose that this other lady, too, was a hysteric’. The scabs and nasal bones remind him of his own use of cocaine to reduce nasal swelling, and of a female patient who, following his example, had developed an ‘extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane’. His consultation with one of the doctors brings to mind an occasion on which Freud’s treatment of a woman patient gave rise to a ‘severe toxic state’, to which she subsequently ‘succumbed’; the patient had the same name as his eldest daughter, Mathilde. The unconscious desire of the dream is Freud’s wish to be the ‘primordial father’ who possesses all the women Irma embodies in the dream.

However, the dream presents a further enigma: whose desire does it manifest? Recent commentaries clearly establish that the true motivation behind the dream was Freud’s desire to absolve Fliess, his close friend and collaborator, of responsibility and guilt. It was Fliess who botched Irma’s nose operation, and the dream’s desire is not to exculpate Freud himself, but his friend, who was, at this point, Freud’s ‘subject supposed to know’, the object of his transference. The dream dramatises his wish to show that Fliess wasn’t responsible for the medical failure, that he wasn’t lacking in knowledge. The dream does manifest Freud’s desire – but only insofar as his desire is already the Other’s (Fliess’s) desire.

Why do we dream? Freud’s answer is deceptively simple: the ultimate function of the dream is to enable the dreamer to stay asleep. This is usually interpreted as bearing on the kinds of dream we have when some external disturbance – noise, for example – threatens to wake us. In such a situation, the sleeper immediately begins to imagine a situation which incorporates this external stimulus and thereby is able to continue sleeping for a while longer; when the external stimulus becomes too strong, he finally wakes up. Are things really so straightforward? In another famous example from The Interpretation of Dreams, an exhausted father, whose young son has just died, falls asleep and dreams that the child is standing by his bed in flames, whispering the horrifying reproach: ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ Soon afterwards, the father wakes to discover that a fallen candle has set fire to his dead son’s shroud. He had smelled the smoke while asleep, and incorporated the image of his burning son into his dream to prolong his sleep. Had the father woken up because the external stimulus became too strong to be contained within the dream-scenario? Or was it the obverse, that the father constructed the dream in order to prolong his sleep, but what he encountered in the dream was much more unbearable even than external reality, so that he woke up to escape into that reality.

In both dreams, there is a traumatic encounter (the sight of Irma’s throat, the vision of the burning son); but in the second dream, the dreamer wakes at this point, while in the first, the horror gives way to the arrival of the doctors. The parallel offers us the key to understanding Freud’s theory of dreams. Just as the father’s awakening from the second dream has the same function as the sudden change of tone in the first, so our ordinary reality enables us to evade an encounter with true trauma.

Adorno said that the Nazi motto ‘Deutschland, erwache!’ actually meant its opposite: if you responded to this call, you could continue to sleep and dream (i.e. to avoid engagement with the real of social antagonism). In the first stanza of Primo Levi’s poem ‘Reveille’ the concentration camp survivor recalls being in the camp, asleep, dreaming intense dreams about returning home, eating, telling his relatives his story, when, suddenly, he is woken up by the Polish kapo’s command ‘Wstawac!’ (‘Get up!’). In the second stanza, he is at home after the war, well fed, having told his story to his family, when, suddenly, he imagines hearing again the shout, ‘Wstawac!’ The reversal of the relationship between dream and reality from the first stanza to the second is crucial. Their content is formally the same – the pleasant domestic scene is interrupted by the injunction ‘Get up!’ – but in the first, the dream is cruelly interrupted by the wake-up call, while in the second, reality is interrupted by the imagined command. We might imagine the second example from The Interpretation of Dreams as belonging to the Holocaust survivor who, unable to save his son from the crematorium, is haunted afterwards by his reproach: ‘Vater, siehst du nicht dass ich verbrenne?’

In our ‘society of the spectacle’, in which what we experience as everyday reality more and more takes the form of the lie made real, Freud’s insights show their true value. Consider the interactive computer games some of us play compulsively, games which enable a neurotic weakling to adopt the screen persona of a macho aggressor, beating up other men and violently enjoying women. It’s all too easy to assume that this weakling takes refuge in cyberspace in order to escape from a dull, impotent reality. But perhaps the games are more telling than that. What if, in playing them, I articulate the perverse core of my personality which, because of ethico-social constraints, I am not able to act out in real life? Isn’t my virtual persona in a way ‘more real than reality’? Isn’t it precisely because I am aware that this is ‘just a game’ that in it I can do what I would never be able to in the real world? In this precise sense, as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded. Therein resides the ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.