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Few twentieth-century discourses have shaped the humanities and social sciences like
psychoanalysis. The work of Sigmund Freud and his inheritors has been a driving
force behind countless efforts to rethink the most fundamental questions of
subjectivity, history, and politics. This enduring influence is
readily evident in contemporary gender studies, film theory, and media studies--to
list only the most obvious
examples. Perhaps even more uniquely, the authority of psychoanalysis has crossed all methodological and ideological lines,
impacting Anglo-American analytic as much as Continental philosophy, empirical
anthropological research as well as semiotics and formalist hermeneutics. Freud
himself
sets the stage for these developments. Throughout his oeuvre, he routinely
moves between observations about the dynamics organizing a singular psyche and
broader reflections on cultural experience, considering art, literature, and religion
as well as the nature of charismatic leaders, mass movements, and the possibilities
for world peace. At the same time, it is in the midst of his strongest assertions of
parallels between individual and sociopolitical systems that Freud betrays the most
profound doubts about the explanatory reach of his work. Paradoxically, the
status of psychoanalysis as a "master discourse," its seeming ability to model
everything under the sun, may be the product of the profound skepticism it directs toward
its own mastery.
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Near the close of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud asks
whether his account of "the integration of a separate individual into a human group"
provides a basis for understanding the "creation of a unified group out of many
individuals" (21: 140).[1] Given the "similarity
between the means employed and the resultant phenomena," he writes, one can in this
instance speak of "the same process applied to different kinds of objects" (140). In
explaining the analogous development of the singular human psyche and civilization
in general, Freud describes a cultural superego that resembles the individual
superego in origin
and function. Both formations establish ideal demands that lead to the
creation of a conscience, and at times, they appear almost completely interdependent,
as if one could not exist without the other. If the two differ, Freud
suggests, it is only in that the injunctions of the cultural superego tend to be more
legible than those of individual ones, whose commands largely remain unconscious
and can thus be difficult to discern. In other words, even if one's primary
goal is to study the singular psyche rather than its social counterpart, focusing
on the latter may still be the best means of understanding the former.
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On the basis of these remarks, it would be a gross understatement to say
that the development of the singular psyche is "mirrored by" or "reflected in" a
larger communal field. Taking their cue from Freud's characterization of these
substantive parallels between individual psychological processes and social ones,
several generations of cultural critics have felt licensed, if not required, to
pass judgment on the mental welfare of entire societies. As Freud canonically
formulates it:
If the development of
civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the
individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching
the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or
some epochs of civilization--possibly the whole of mankind--have become "neurotic"?
(21: 144)
The elaboration of "a pathology of cultural communities," as Freud also terms it, has
become a sine qua non of much contemporary research, even in disciplines in which the
word "psychoanalysis" is rarely uttered. From anthropologists to art historians,
from poetry critics to urban economists, scholars routinely pursue a host of
different diagnoses of the psycho-logics of mass formations, implicitly and
explicitly analogizing individual dynamics with groups ranging from reading or
consuming publics to the populations of nations or continents. -
Given the authority that Freud's views on this topic have acquired, it is
important to consider whether his claim that "the development of civilization" is
"comparable to the normal maturation of the individual" is entirely compatible with
his other views about social experience (21: 97-98). As is well known, a central
concept in his later work--and a topic of considerable controversy for many of his
inheritors--is the death drive. Freud maintains that both the singular psyche and
civilization are structured by the same irresolvable clash between Eros and
a Todestrieb, between a Lebenstrieb and a
Destruktionstrieb. In fact, near the end of Civilization and its
Discontents it is Freud's confrontation with the all-permeating
influence of
this collision of forces that first prompts him to detail the analogy between the
development of the individual and the development of culture.[2] Yet these reflections on the parallels between individual and
cultural superegos take place in a book whose overarching theme--a theme
that predominates in Freud's later thought--is that
"aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man" and
"constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization" (122). In The Future of
an Illusion, written two years before Civilization and its
Discontents, Freud declares that "every individual is virtually an enemy of
civilization, though civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human
interest," adding that "civilization has to be defended against the individual" and
that "in consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized
society is perpetually threatened with disintegration" (21: 6/112). In other words,
the development of the individual and the development of culture, two dynamics
that proceed according to the same methods and produce remarkably similar results,
are nonetheless essentially at odds with one another. Crucially, the divisive
tension common to both processes, the clash of Eros and the death drive, does not
explain this mutual antagonism; i.e., it is not a question of a discord internal to
the individual reproducing itself as a conflict between self
and other(s):
But this struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the
contradiction--probably an irreconcilable one--between the primal instincts of Eros
and death. It is a dispute within the economics of the libido, comparable to the
contest concerning the distribution of libido between ego and objects.
(21: 141)
Not only does Freud avoid claiming that it is the developmental similarities between
the individual and its society that inexorably bring them into conflict with one
another, but he also goes to some lengths to complement the parallels he has
identified between these processes with a list of their differences, ultimately
concluding that the overarching aim of culture is "one great unity, the unity of
mankind," a goal to which no individual psyche even vaguely aspires (122).[3] For its part, the individual tirelessly seeks its
own happiness, as a consequence of which "the development process of the individual
can thus be expected to have special features of its own which are not reproduced in
the process of human civilization" (140).[4] The
remarkable similarities between the methods and results of individual and social
development notwithstanding, it is no longer clear that communal phenomena can
be understood as "extensions" or "reflections" of the individual or that one can look
to a cultural superego as a way of learning something about an individual one.[5] More bluntly, it may be that despite what Freud
himself argues in earlier works such as Group Psychology and the Analysis
of the Ego, the libidinal model of an individual psyche cannot account for
social dynamics.[6] As useful as Freud's
discussions of conscience, the Oedipus complex, or the relationship
between
sadomasochism and narcissism may be for understanding political logics,
Freud is far more skeptical about the reliability of such "applied" analyses than
many of his followers. -
In fact, it could be argued that from the moment he introduces the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud's discussions of
the relations between individual and cultural processes of development are
characterized by this dual--at times almost graphically divergent--emphasis on their
striking parallels and their profound mutual antagonisms. The resulting aporias are
well known and account for the pessimistic reputation of Freud's later writings:
the regulation of aggression becomes virtually indistinguishable from the causes of
aggression; the self-destructiveness of civilization stems from the way in which
it gives either too much or too little expression to libidinal forces; and, most
generally, the dynamics within culture that
threaten to tear it apart are also the source of its most celebrated achievements.
It therefore comes as no surprise that in Civilization and its
Discontents Freud asks for forgiveness for wasting everyone's time by writing
down what is simply common knowledge and yet simultaneously declines to offer an
opinion on the inherent worth of culture and denies having any real insight into the problems he is
exploring, as if this "common knowledge" were uncommonly obscure, even to him.
-
The presence of these stark tensions in Freud's later work does not
necessarily mean that any "pathology of cultural communities" is destined to
fail, but if the processes of civilization and the dynamics internal to
individuals are both identical to and antithetical to one another, it is clear
that psycho-cultural research cannot proceed along the straightforward lines
that Freud himself seems both to propose and to undertake. In fact, it may be
that psychoanalysis has been a tremendous resource for cultural criticism
because in Freud the theory of an analogy between the individual and the social
is always also a critique of the authority of analogy as such. In first
introducing the parallels between the development of the singular psyche and
the development of civilization, Freud explicitly acknowledges that it is
difficult to know what inferences can and cannot be drawn from such an
alignment of systems, stressing that one may easily take the comparison too far
and find that the resulting conclusions are not coherent in the original terms
of the demonstration. If, for example, treating the development of culture
like the development of an individual allows us to attribute psychological
maladies to an entire people or epoch, we immediately see that unlike with a
neurotic patient, who can be contrasted with a "normal," non-neurotic man or
woman, there is no overarching baseline of comparison that would make it
possible to deem one culture "sick" and one "healthy." Of course, this
objection is far from damning. Freud casually acknowledges a solution--making
comparisons across multiple cultures--which he does himself when he notes that
he is working hard to avoid "the temptation of entering upon a critique of
American civilization" (21: 116). In addressing the formal structure of
analogy in abstract terms, however, Freud underscores the inherent instability
of the schema. The issue is not simply that any analogy posits an implicit
difference between the terms it aligns, e.g., that an analogy between the
individual and the cultural is tantamount to a statement about their
differences. More importantly, by according authority to a tertium
comparationis, one introduces new distinctions that may not be so easily
controlled. It is this question of how best to manage the conceptual
implications of his comparisons that Freud, having just articulated his crucial
analogy, immediately tries to resolve:
The process of the civilization of the human species is, of course, an abstraction
of a higher order than is the development of the individual and it is therefore
harder to apprehend in concrete terms, nor should we pursue analogies to an
obsessional extreme [die Aufspürung von Analogien soll nicht zwanghaft
übertrieben werden]. (140)
Having established foundational connections between the development of the
individual and the development of human culture as a whole--indeed, having gone so
far as to say that the latter process clarifies dimensions of the former that may otherwise remain invisible--Freud notably does not try to explain why this
argument might be at odds with the general theme of his book, the antagonism
between the individual and society, and instead pauses to warn that such an
"analogy" may get out of hand. Far from being led astray by what we are (or are
not) learning about the relationship between the individual and its culture, it is
the seductiveness of analogical demonstration itself that arouses our obsessive
impulses. If we are not careful, the analogy will take on a life of its own,
compromising its reliability by saying too much. To be clear, the
seductiveness of analogy in general is not grounds for worrying that
any particular analogy is fallacious. To the contrary, the analogy in question
here gains its potentially misleading momentum from the fact that the parallels it
highlights are "true." -
Naturally, we are not dealing with just any analogy. On the basis of it,
one can draw (or reject) countless conclusions about the parallels between social
reality and the workings of singular minds. For this very reason, however, this
analogy indicates why such correspondences are simultaneously vital, dangerous,
and,
most crucially, unavoidable. At the beginning of this essay, we noted that over
the last century psychoanalysis has shown itself to have seemingly boundless
explanatory powers that cross virtually all methodological and ideological borders.
The irony is that for Freud doubts about the argumentative scope of psychoanalysis
arise not because its models are somehow limited, but rather because they are
never limited enough. In this particular instance, it turns out that once
the authority of analogy is given full reign, it acquires a paradigmatic status
that may undermine the articulation of the very distinctions it is intended to
clarify:
I would not say that an attempt . . . to carry psychoanalysis over to the cultural
community was absurd or doomed to be fruitless. But we should have to be very
cautious and not forget that, after all, we are dealing only with analogies and that
it is dangerous, not only with people but also with concepts, to tear them from the
sphere in which they have originated and been involved. (21: 144)
Formulated in blunter terms than anything we have to this point considered, the
suggestion that using psychoanalysis as a basis for broader cultural reflections
rests on what is ultimately "only an analogy" threatens to undermine much of the
scholarship that has been done in Freud's name over the last century. At the same
time, Freud's concern about the standard of comparison on the basis of which one
culture could be termed "neurotic" and one "healthy" applies equally well here: By
what standard is an analogy "only" an analogy? Is not psychoanalysis, of all fields,
a discourse in which the ideational or intelligible content of a comparison is no
more or less "real" than some physical or material phenomenon or register?
What external reference point or third term allows for a clear
differentiation between an analogical and a non-analogical assertion of identity
between two concepts, entities, or processes? In this regard, it is important to
observe that precisely what Freud has not been doing with the individual and the
collective in Civilization and its Discontents is "tearing them from the
sphere in which they have originated." Indeed, his entire discussion aims to explore the parameters of their respective emergences. Moreover, by implicitly
analogizing people with concepts in the very gesture of trying to qualify the
demonstrative authority of analogy ("it is dangerous, not only with people but also
with concepts") Freud reveals just how obsessive our reliance on analogy actually
is. Not only is his rejection of analogy indirectly made through an analogy, but it
is through an analogy that repeats the error he wants to avoid. By
aligning human beings and concepts, Freud, far from grounding his discussion in
concrete terms, moves it to "an abstraction of a higher order," for if the
development of the individual and the development of civilization can be likened to
one another on the basis of a host of similarities in their methods and results,
Freud has done nothing to show that there is any justification for paralleling people
and concepts along similar lines. Having just given us good reason to be concerned
about the complications introduced by the fact that any analogy in effect becomes an
analogy of analogy, it is Freud who seems to be the one on the verge of tearing his
arguments from the sphere in which they have originated. -
All of this suggests that the questions of logic and rhetoric raised in
Freud's treatment of analogy play an essential role in his conceptualization of
cultural systems. At the start of his discussion of the relationship between the
development of the individual and the development of civilization, Freud acknowledges
that since these dynamics and "organic life in general" all appear to be
characterized by the struggle between Eros and the death drive, "we cannot . . .
avoid going into the relations of these three processes to one another" (21: 139).
If the set of comparisons and contrasts that ensues is "imperative and unavoidable"
("unabweisbar"), that is, if the resulting demonstration is reliably
inevitable, it
is nonetheless inevitably unreliable, as well. We cannot help but undertake the
analysis, yet we do so with the knowledge that we will fall prey to the seductions of
analogy. To put this more prosaically, if Freud challenges us to pursue the insights
garnered by the unavoidable recognition of the similarities between the development
of the individual and the development of culture, we must at the same time problematize the integrity of the analogies thereby produced. The argument
succeeds by generating results that it has to question rather than embrace. If
psychoanalysis is a powerful paradigm of interdisciplinary research or of
social experience in general, this is because it articulates a forceful
critique of the claims of its own models to be exhaustive. Psychoanalysis is one
discourse that will never unambiguously present itself as a master discourse, even at
the points at which its doctrines acquire their most universal pretensions. In what
respects, then, does the illustrative power of Freud's analogy between the individual
and culture run its course? Is our obsession with it terminable or
interminable? In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud offers
no definitive way to decide whether it is possible to "work through" the obsessive
impulses analogy
excites. If anything, he suggests that the effort to fight against such
impulses may actually intensify them.
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These difficulties are by no means unique to Civilization and its
Discontents. Whenever Freud wants to coordinate the singular psyche and
communal dynamics, he introduces a representational schema as a supplemental
element; but in each instance, the figure in question, far from remaining
marginal or secondary, generalizes to become the central semantic paradigm.
The question of how insights into individual psychological processes can or
should guide the study of history, aesthetics, or politics is thereby
subordinated to concerns about the relationship between thought and language;
e.g., the task at hand is suddenly to articulate a concept of analogy that can
be distinguished from an analogy of analogy.
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The discussion of dream symbolism in The Interpretation of
Dreams and the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis is a
case in point. In the first version of the Traumdeutung, Freud argues that
the individual dreamer's own associations are the core of any systematic
interpretation of a dream. Emphasizing the singularity of each oneiric expression,
he writes that he is "prepared to find that the same piece of content may conceal a
different meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts" (4:
105). However, with the new material added to the book between 1914 and 1923, the
discussion of the dream-work is greatly expanded, and Freud appends example after
example of codified dream symbols (kings are the dreamer's father, rooms
represent
women, children stand in for the genitals, and so on).[7] As fixed relations between manifest and latent contents that
have not been forged by a singular dreaming psyche, these symbols are entirely
resistant to interrogation through the dreamer's associations. Nicholas Rand
and Maria Torok identify this tension as a fundamental impasse in Freud's
thought, something that calls for
outright repair.[8] Yet it would be equally
accurate to say that it is in dwelling on the forces that organize this
"impasse" that psychoanalysis becomes a discourse about the individual and
the collective. From his first remarks on the topic, Freud makes it clear that
symbols are not products of dreams or in any way unique to them. To the contrary,
symbols are part of a broader cultural milieu, a means of expression that can be
found in idioms, myths, and folklore. When symbols appear in a dream,
they are highly expressive, but they are not the individual's
expressions--to use them is akin to speaking a language one does not
actually know. Initially, Freud argues that the presence of symbols in
dreams is a contingency, that is, symbols are indirect representations that
just happen to be available for the dream-work to take advantage of as a tool for
censorship. As a consequence, Freud is adamant that the interpretation of dream
symbols is to be regarded as a supplement to the main analytic focus on the patient's
own associations with the manifest dream text: "Interpretation based on a knowledge
of symbols is not a technique which can replace or compete with the associative one.
It forms a supplement to the latter" (15: 151). As with the obsession-inducing
analogy, however, this hierarchy proves to be anything but stable. Having made the
point that symbolism is only one of the techniques of indirect representation relied
on by the dream-work for censorship, Freud almost immediately grants it
the more substantial status of "a second and independent factor in the distortion of
dreams, alongside of the dream-censorship" (168). The difficulties involved in
keeping the "supplement" in its place become even more obvious as Freud tries to
clarify the boundaries between dream symbolism and the other three types of relations
between manifest and latent dream content: part for whole, allusion
(Anspielung), and plastic portrayal (Verbildlichung). "The essence
of this symbolic relation," Freud writes, "is that it is a comparison
(Vergleich),
but not a comparison of any sort. Special limitations seem to be attached to the
comparison, but it is hard to say what they are" (152). If some symbolic comparisons
are so obvious as scarcely to qualify as indirect representations (and hence as
instances of censorship), others are so obscure that the tertium
comparationis remains forever unknowable. In the latter case, the symbol links two
contents, but there is no way to explain why, as if on a semantic level the alignment
were completely unmotivated. To make matters even messier, Freud says that there is
no guarantee that any given element in the manifest content of a specific dream is
functioning in its symbolic capacity, i.e., sometimes a room or a child is just a
room or a child. Given the vexing character of symbolic relations--at once obvious
and obscure, restricted and unrestricted, direct and indirect--"we must admit . . .
that the concept of a symbol cannot at present be sharply delimited: it shades off
into such notions as those of a substitution (Ersetzung) or representation
(Darstellung), and even approaches that of an allusion
(Anspielung)" (152). Introduced as a particular type of indirect
relationship between two contents, the symbol potentially comes to infect all
representations, whether by reducing them to purely contingent codifications
(linked
mechanically, with no substantive connections between the elements), dissolving them
into fields of imprecise allusions, or transforming them into indifferent sequences
in which any term can be a substitute for any other. In submitting all semantic
relations to the tyranny of its "special" comparison, the symbol negates the
conceptual specificity of comparison itself and threatens to undermine the
very idea of the dream-work as a forging of relations between manifest and
latent contents.
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In confronting this nexus of problems, Freud argues that
anthropologists and linguists probably understand the topic better than he and
that it is in trying to account for this special form of comparison that
psychoanalysis discovers its essential connections with and dependence on
discourses such as philology, sociology, and religious studies. Once again,
the bond between the individual psyche and the cultural is articulated through
an analysis that is as much poetics as it is psychology. When Freud writes
that symbols are part of the unconscious "Vorstellen des Volkes"
("ideation/imagination of the people"), we see more clearly why his repeated
additions to the symbolism section of The Interpretation of Dreams
constitute an intervention into the debates about individual and social
formations and a "collective unconscious" that raged in the teens between
Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, and Carl Jung (Schriften
II/III: 356). By 1915, Freud was subjecting his concept of the unconscious to
a series of tests that would ultimately produce the second topography and the
figure of the cultural superego. To the extent that Freud accords the symbol
an unusual status as unconscious knowledge (Kenntnisse) rather than
unconscious impulses (Strebungen), we should regard his analysis of
its complexities as a key moment in his efforts to recoordinate onto- and
phylogenetic accounts of the human psyche. Whatever our conclusions about
these more general points, Freud's consideration of symbolism shows how each of
his attempts to describe the relations between individual and cultural dynamics
turns, or founders, on the way in which an ostensibly restricted figure--such
as the symbol or analogy--comes to infect, if not to control, the
representational schemas that ostensibly delimit it.[9]
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Our discussion suggests that the abiding challenge for
psychoanalytically guided criticism is to embrace both Freud's optimism about
the explanatory potential of his research for all areas of human experience and
his tacit (pessimistic) acknowledgement that any theoretical articulation of
the individual with the social seems fated to occur on the basis of a
representational dynamic that is far from stable. This special issue of
Postmodern Culture was originally conceived as an opportunity to
reflect on these issues by looking at the changing aesthetic and political
significance of psychoanalytic thought over the last several decades. On the
one hand, the basic parameters of such a review seem clear. Any discussion of
psychoanalysis and politics today almost necessarily takes as its central
reference point French thought of the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era in
which the relations between Freudian and Marxist doctrines were explored with
unprecedented vigor. Indeed, it is doubtful that the enthusiasm for
Freudo-Marxism has ever subsequently waned. From Julia Kristeva and Jacques
Derrida to Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek, efforts to come to
terms with the political implications of psychoanalytic arguments have
repeatedly been linked to philosophical reconsiderations of Idealism and its
most prominent nineteenth-century critic, Karl Marx. On the other hand, it is
easy to muddy this picture. No thinker has had more influence on contemporary
debates about gender and politics than Michel Foucault, and his singular impact
has arguably had a great deal to do with the extent to which he cannot be
situated in a psychoanalytic camp. More specifically, one could ask whether
Foucault's ideas about bio-power and their reinterpretation in the work of
Giorgio Agamben or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri mark the petering out of the
Freudo-Marxist rage of the 1960s and 1970s, rather than its continuation. When
it comes to the Frankfurt School, it is similarly uncertain just how crucial
some conjunction of Freud and Marx is for confronting basic questions about
liberalism and capitalism. Although both Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin
are known for their cryptic--in Adorno's case highly ironic--engagements with
Freudian doctrines, it is far from clear how much this facet of their work
influences their readings of Marx, their understandings of culture, or their
theories of fascism. Finally, much could be said about the way in which
historicist paradigms have gradually displaced the influence of psychoanalytic
models, particularly when it comes to studies of ethnicity and globalization.
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The essays in this issue take as their starting point these and related
uncertainties about the coherence of any Freudo-Marxist synthesis. In "In Theory, Politics
Does Not Exist," Brett Levinson begins by revisiting one of this field's founding
dilemmas: why should the masses desire fascism rather than socialism? Starting with
George Bataille's claim that without the help of psychoanalysis no Marxist project
can explain why modern capitalist democracies should witness the emergence of
right-wing populist movements rather than left-wing ones, Levinson focuses on Lacan's
Seventeenth Seminar and his notorious challenge to the Parisian students in the
aftermath of May of 1968: "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You
will get one." For Lacan, argues Levinson, freedom from mastery and master
signifiers occurs not by rioting in the streets, but through the jouissance and
knowledge made possible by the analysis of language and the reading and overwriting
of the language of the other that occurs in the transference. What is ironic,
concludes Levinson, is that Slavoj Zizek, the most prominent self-proclaimed Lacanian
of our day, has missed this lesson entirely. Turning to Zizek's recent debate with
Ernesto Laclau about populism as a paradigm for the political as such,
Levinson shows that both writers end up claiming that political praxis is based on
the avoidance of the knowledge and joy central to Lacan's thinking. In the
end, neither one of these two theorists can
understand his own work--theory--as political.
-
This focus on Lacan and his reaction to the events of 1968 brings us
face to face with one of the central concerns of late twentieth-century French
thought: must social movements be understood in terms of dynamics of desire
and energy that escape traditional categories of subjectivity and unsettle any
clear opposition between the ideal and the material, or the body and language?
In "The Desire Called Mao," Eleanor Kaufman asks whether the synthesis of
psychoanalysis and Marxism celebrated in the "libidinal economy theory" of
Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard is
resurrected in the work of a thinker who at first--and even second--glance
could not appear to be more different: Alain Badiou. One of Kaufman's key
insights is that the interest of libidinal theorists in energistic flux is
complemented by a concern with inertia, a vestige of Freud's death drive
encapsulated by notions such as the "zero point" of desire and the
immobilization of the body. If Badiou shares neither the methods, assumptions,
nor goals of these philosophers, he nonetheless addresses this question of
stasis and its significance for his conceptualization of the event when he
breaks with Marxist ideas of periodization and change and directs a great deal
of skepticism toward the structuring authority of temporality itself. The
consequence, Kaufman shows, is that these very different thinkers all confront
an a-material materialism that contemporary discussions of trauma, memory, and
the haunting of the past have failed to understand.
-
These two articles suggest that any consideration of the relationship between
psychoanalysis and Marxism must take as a central task a rethinking of the concepts
of time and history. This is true both for Badiou's concern with the waiting
involved in the inevitably belated recognition of the event and for Lacan's
interest in the temporality of affect as a time "on the other side" that is
forever on the brink of arriving.[10] It has
been argued that Marx never subjects time to the critique he directs at the other
bedrocks of
bourgeois thought. But is psychoanalysis also guilty of under-theorizing time? In
"The Mystery of Sex and the Mystery of Time," Alan Bass explores this problem,
starting with the deceptively simple question of why sexuality is a theoretical issue.
Working from Laplanche's effort to link the Freudian unconscious with Heidegger, Bass
asks what it would mean to coordinate psychoanalytic models of sexuality with a
theory of
ekstasis. He focuses on the idea of "eruptive time," the moment
at which the tension defining sexual need opens up a relation to the other that
cannot be grasped by a traditional subject-object opposition. The crucial thing to
recognize, Bass suggests, is that this unsettling of self-enclosed identity by an
unconscious memory of non-presence is a profound source of violence against the
other. As an expression of anxiety about the other's unconscious, eruptive time must
therefore be central to any explanation of the relationship between the intrapsychic
and the cultural. In "Endopsychic Allegories," Laurence Rickels approaches
the conceptualization of social relations in psychoanalysis from a somewhat
different perspective, focusing on "endopsychic perception," which Freud
describes in a famous letter to Fliess: "The dim inner perception of one's own
psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected
onto the outside and, characteristically, into the future and the beyond.
Immortality, retribution, the entire beyond are all reflections of our psychic
inside" (Complete Letters 286). In an intertextual study of
Daniel Schreber's Memoirs, Freud's case study of Schreber, and
Benjamin's Trauerspiel book, Rickels considers this endopsychic
perception as "the inside view (afforded through certain psychotic delusions)
of the psyche at the intersection between technology and the unconscious."
Highlighting the parallels between the sadism of the allegorist and the
paranoid, Rickels reads Philip K. Dick's quasi-autobiographical final novels
and his earlier Time Out of Joint as meditations on the
Freudo-Benjaminian understandings of un-mourning and melancholy and the
relationship between psychic reality and loss.
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As a discourse at once enthralled by and profoundly at odds with its
own explanatory powers, Freudian thought remains one of the best examples of
what a genuinely critical project can be. Together, the essays in this volume
offer a complex picture of what is involved in articulating a psychoanalytic
theory of society or culture. In one respect, their lesson appears to be that
some of the basic categories of political philosophy have to be rethought from
the perspective of dynamics of repetition and mourning or stasis and
ekstasis, that is, with schemas that bear little resemblance to the
traditional paradigms of development, regression, or revolution. At the same
time, there is a sense that the progressive potential of this kind of research
is not predicated on a complete rejection of Enlightenment presuppositions
about the value of knowledge and the hierarchies that inevitably obtain between
intellectual and material labor. Whatever the ultimate point of emphasis, it
is clear that psychoanalysis continues to be central to the way in which the
historicity of theory is being explored.
German Department
Reed College
mieszkow@reed.edu
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Notes
1. Throughout Das Unbehagen in der
Kultur, James Strachey translates Kultur as "civilization." The
canonical status of the Standard Edition speaks against any "correction" on this
score, and there is no reason to think that Freud would have complained. At the
beginning of The Future of an Illusion--a crucial forerunner to
Civilization and its Discontents--he writes: "I scorn to distinguish
between culture [Kultur] and civilization [Zivilisation]" (21:
6). In his exchange with Albert Einstein ("Why War?") and in his New
Introductory
Lectures, Freud makes similar references to the interchangeability of the
terms Kultur and Zivilisation in his thought (22: 214/179).
2. Freud actually goes further to argue that
this clash between Eros and the Todestrieb is essential for understanding
not only the emergence of the individual and the cultural, but the nature of
organic life as such:
Some readers of this work may further have an impression
that they have heard the formula of the struggle between Eros and the death drive
too often. It was alleged to characterize the process of civilization which
mankind undergoes but it was also brought into connection with the development of
the individual, and, in addition, it was said to have revealed the secret of
organic life in general. (21: 139)
In the final analysis, for Freud the meaning
(Sinn) of civilization is nothing more or less than its exhibition of
this clash in the human species:
And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution
of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present (zeigen) the
struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of
destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what
all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore
be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species. (122)
3. Freud insists on this point while disclaiming
any knowledge of why it is the case: "Civilization is a process in the service of
Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that
families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of
mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely
this" (21: 122).
4. Freud elaborates:
But in the process of
civilization things are different. Here by far the most important thing is the
aim of creating a unity out of the individual human beings. It is true that the
aim of happiness is still there, but it is pushed into the background. It almost
seems as if the creation of a great human community would be most successful if no
attention had to be paid to the happiness of the individual. (21: 140)
5. On the tensions organizing the closing
sections of Civilization and its Discontents, see Bersani, esp.
12-25.
6. On this point, see Ricoeur 303-09.
7. In The Language of
Psycho-Analysis, Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis go out of their way to
note
that the history of additions to The Interpretation of Dreams can be
misleading and that Freud "recognized the existence of symbols from the first"
(444). They also add, however, that "the fact remains that it was only gradually
that Freud came to accord increased significance to symbols" (444). The
discussion of dream symbols in the Traumdeutung is complemented by a
lengthier and in many respects more systematic elaboration of the topic in the
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
8. See their Questions for Freud: The
Secret History of Psychoanalysis.
9. These problems were not lost on the generation
of analysts who immediately followed Freud. In this regard, the interventions of
Ferenczi are particularly instructive. In an effort to reassert a clear taxonomy
of representational figures--precisely the clarity that Freud's discussion of
symbolism and manifest-latent relations undoes--Ferenczi claims that what
distinguishes symbols from allegories or metaphors is that one element of a
symbolic relation is repressed into the unconscious; i.e., the indirection of the
symbol is to be explained by something peculiar to the mind rather than to
language. With this move, Ferenczi seeks to reverse the priority Freud confers on
symbolism as a discourse that precedes any particular psychological set-up in
which it is manifest; i.e., Freud's response to the confusions introduced by dream
symbols is to designate them the traces of a now-dead Ursprache, whereas
Ferenczi's gesture is designed to defend the dream-work against the threat of
being subsumed by a linguistic dynamic.
10. If Derrida's Specters of Marx
remains the best-known recent discussion of this problem, the relationship (or
lack thereof) between temporal and historical dynamics is a preoccupation of
Paul de Man throughout his career.
Works Cited
Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York:
Columbia UP, 1986.
Ferenczi, Sándor. Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Ernest
Jones. Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1916.
Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess,
1887-1904. Trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1985.
---. Gesammelte Werke. London: Imago, 1942.
---. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.
Laplanche, J., and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis.
Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
Rand, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. Questions for Freud: The Secret History of
Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
Ricoeur, Paul. Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1970.
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