This reader confronts : The Impossible Patient by Amia Srinivasan!
Former Analysand confronts the exhumation/reberth of Freud?
Editor: 10,818 words is a challenge to the reader! I recall reading Freud, Biologist of the Mind by Frank J. Sulloway in 1979, Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, Self Analysis by Karen Horney and Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud. And later I read with great interest Frederick Crews essays publiched in the New York Review of Books. It takes time for Amia Srinivasan to arrive at a viable point in her essay, after this interjection exposes her ‘methodology’ as fellow traveler!
As Jake Romm wrote in Parapraxis, a magazine founded in 2022 dedicated to psychoanalysis and left politics, ‘temporalities and geography mix and collapse in the ruins of the crematoria and emerge, reformed, from the barrel of a gun in Gaza.’
Editor: Amia Srinivasan declares the fact that ‘the unconscious never left the scene’
In fact, the unconscious never left the scene. Psychoanalysis tells us that it is the unconscious that sets the scene. What has returned of late is not the unconscious itself, but the felt need, in some quarters, for the unconscious and its workings as a diagnostic tool, as an explanans for the explanandum of irrationalism that seems to be taking hold everywhere. No purely materialist or realist or folk psychological analysis seems to suffice. We need to go beyond talk of parties and platforms; of beliefs, values and identitarian affiliations; of class, jobs, wages and exploitation. We need to speak of phantasies and their repression, the libido and the death-drive, disavowal and displacement, trauma and its disfiguring aftermath. We need to speak of vulnerability: not just the sort that arises asymmetrically from poverty and racism and sexism; but the universal infantile vulnerability that haunts us all – including (and perhaps especially) the most powerful.
To what end? Despite more than a century of debate about the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident. You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture. (For example, the idea of penis envy, as Simone de Beauvoir complained, seems to assume precisely what’s to be explained.) But can we doubt that there is more, much more, to our individual and collective lives than that of which we are consciously aware? Do we doubt that each of us encounters reality not directly, but through the thicket of our individual psychic realities, with their stubborn frames and secret desires, the vast sediment of our past histories? That, to put it mundanely but not inaccurately, each of us brings with us a helluva lotta baggage?
The interesting question to my mind is not whether there is truth in psychoanalysis, but whether its truth will set us free. This might seem an odd question for a philosopher to ask. Philosophers tend to be preoccupied with questions of truth and knowledge – and in the specific case of psychoanalysis, whether it deserves the status, as Freud thought it did and Karl Popper thought it absolutely did not, of a science. But insofar as a philosopher, or anyone, is interested in politics – interested, that is, not just in describing the world but changing it – the real question is whether psychoanalysis can liberate us, not just from the violent divisions of our individual psyches, but from the violent divisions and resulting despair of our political moment.
Editor: Amia Srinivasan forgets that the asention of Freud was fraught with problems of his own making: Cocaine papers Hardcover – January 1, 1974 by Sigmund Freud (Author), Robert Byck (Editor), Anna Freud (Contributor) and the time it took to arrive at a realized conceptualization of what Psychoanalysis might be?
There is reason for doubt. Psychoanalysis was born out of a collective retreat from politics on the part of the Viennese intelligentsia. In the 1880s, Austrian liberal hegemony, with its confident ideology of Enlightenment reason and social progress, was threatened by the emergence of new mass parties that channelled various anti-liberal currents – Christian, antisemitic, socialist and nationalist. In 1895, the electorate in Vienna voted for Karl Lueger, a populist antisemite and reactionary Catholic, as mayor. Emperor Franz Joseph, disliking Lueger’s antisemitism, refused to ratify his election; Freud, a liberal and a Jew, smoked a cigar in celebration. But just two years later, in 1897, the emperor bowed to the popular will, and Lueger became mayor, bringing the liberal era to a close. Describing the dying days of 19th-century Austria, the historian Carl Schorske writes: ‘Anxiety, impotence, a heightened awareness of the brutality of social existence ... these features assumed new centrality in a social climate where the creed of liberalism was being shattered by events.’
Psychoanalysis, then, was born of a moment not dissimilar to our own: a moment when the image of the human as a rational animal seemed fragile if not preposterous, and the progressive liberalism founded on that image was revealed to be dangerously naive. In turning inwards to the drama of the human psyche, Freud was part of an aestheticised culture of feeling and self-cultivation that resulted from political paralysis. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, what mattered was not objective reality but one’s affective response to it. Freud took this focus on inner feeling and instinct, synthesised it with the scientific rationalism of mid-century liberalism, and created in psychoanalysis a theory that at once offered a powerful reckoning with human irrationalism and a welcome refuge from its terrifying political manifestations.
As Schorske observes, Freud would put psychoanalysis to use in explaining away his own sense of political guilt. In his pivotal work of 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reports one of his own dreams – he calls it a ‘revolutionary phantasy’ – in which he confronts an aristocratic Austrian statesman only to frantically flee the scene. The dream Freud rediscovers the statesman at a train station, now transfigured into Freud’s blind and dying father, whom Freud must help to piss into a urinal. On display in the dream is Freud’s guilt at having abandoned his youthful ambition to enter politics – to confront and conquer the old, antisemitic world represented by the aristocrat with the secular, liberal values that his father venerated. But Freud reads the dream as merely the phantastic fulfilment of his wish to take revenge on an overbearing father; a father who had once suggested that the young Freud, as he immodestly urinated in front of his parents, would never amount to anything. On this reading, the dream loses its political specificity; it is simply an expression of the universal desire for patricide. The Oedipus complex, the centrepiece of Freud’s mature theory, thus promised to acquit an entire generation of politically disengaged sons from the accusations of their fathers.
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Former Analysand.