Why Latency?

As a biological metaphor that draws on theories of vitalism, latency presents an advantage over the psychoanalytic metaphor of repression, now trivialized to the point of meaninglessness. “Repression” implies an underworld of compacted experience that takes its cue from social space distribution: the lower suburbs and out-of-view districts and ghettos of modern cities, or, pushing the metaphor, the “closeted” lives of pre-twentiethcentury sexual minorities. Whereas the term is helpful in suggesting the relation between memory and space, it has difficulty accounting for temporal discontinuities and the anachronistic reappearance of phenomena. To explain leaps in time the theory of repression multiplies the psychic containers (subconscious, preconscious, consciousness) and resorts to another metaphor from the realm of physics, that of communicating vases: what the ego represses from consciousness reappears in the form of neuroses and manifests itself through various somatic outlets. In this view, the unconscious is like an everglade, with the fluid element seeping through apparently solid ground. Repression tends to ignore time, because the theory relies on the eternity of the unconscious, or what amounts to the same thing, the contemporaneity of memories.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Freud resorted to the concept of latency to explain the paradox between the delay between the onset of the cause and the manifestation of the effects, in other words, to bridge the conceptual gap opened in the mechanical idea of repression by the phenomenon of traumatic neuroses. Freud introduced the idea of latency in Moses and Monotheism, where he attempts to explain the long delay between the murder of Moses by the Jews and the ritualization of guilt feelings in Judaism and Christianity. Trying to find comparable phenomena, he turns to the traumatic accident with belated onset of psychic and motor symptoms, which he explains as follows: “The time that elapsed between the accident and the first appearance of the symptoms is called the ‘incubation period,’ a transparent allusion to the pathology of infectious disease … It is the feature one might term latency” (109–10). Later in the same essay he posits the notion that such processes as can be observed in the life of individuals with regard to the formation of neurosis must also have developed in the human species.