Freud's Memory Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign

Body

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/freuds-memory-psychoanalysis-mourning-and-the-foreig
n-body/

Click Download Now

© Rob White 2008
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-00264-7
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified
as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2008 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-28089-6 ISBN 978-0-230-22756-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230227569
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
Contents

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction: the Psychoanalytic Labyrinth 1

1 Figures of Freudian Theory 9

2 Others’ Memories 37

3 Mourning as Ethics and Argument 66

4 Across Limits 92

5 The Foreign Bodies of Psychoanalysis 120

Conclusion: Freud’s Secret 146

Notes 156
Bibliography 171
Index 181

v
Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Maud Ellmann, Andy Gallacher, Jeanne Gamble,

Pelagia Goulimari, Gerard Greenaway, Franck Guyon, Stephen Heath,
Vidhya Jayaprakash and her team in Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd.,
Jill Lake, Colin MacCabe, Forbes Morlock, Denise Riley, Christabel
Scaife, Roy Sellars, Robert Smith, Caroline Jane Williams, Sarah Wood.
In memory of Malcolm Bowie (1943–2007).

vi
Introduction:
the Psychoanalytic Labyrinth

Intervening in contemporary debates about psychoanalysis, this book

emerges from the post-structuralist account of Freud, especially as it
was undertaken by Jacques Derrida – but not without some scepticism
towards that account, especially its celebration of apparent failures of
meaning that are, rather paradoxically, presented as a sort of hedonistic
melancholy. Having particular value as a practice of close reading
(though one which tends to be amplified philosophically), the post-
structuralist account has shown above all how internally complex
Freud’s writings are. To quote Leo Bersani: ‘philosophers, psychoana-
lysts, and literary critics have convincingly made it seem very naive to
take what might be termed the official Freud literally.’1 Rather than
being a quasi-scientific explanation of general psychological function-
ing – or at least in addition to that – it becomes possible to redescribe
Freud’s work as an especially intricate and labyrinthine series of writings
whose patterns of rhetoric and argument put into question their own
concepts and conclusions. As Tom Conley puts it, Freud’s writing ‘works
through a gnostic rationale by the myriad ways that it rides along the
paradoxes its expression puts forward as emblems, conundrums, or other
shapes of wit.’2 The readings of Freud in this book constitute a wide-
ranging attempt to explore some of these emblems and conundrums.
My focus therefore is Freud’s language, which I approach using
literary-critical methods. What is the relationship between my own
critical language and Freud’s own? The post-structuralist approach to
Freud has been assiduous in posing versions of this question, as with a
recent formulation by Samuel Weber:

[C]an psychoanalytic thinking itself escape the effects of what it

endeavors to think? Can the distortions of unconscious processes be

1
2 Freud’s Memory

simply recognized, theoretically, as an object, or must they not leave

their imprint on the process of theoretical objectification itself?
Must not psychoanalytical thinking itself partake of – repeat – the
dislocations it seeks to describe?3

Despite Freud’s claims to classify psychological processes and compo-

nents, the manner of his doing so always seems to yield complexity
rather than unitary explanation. Weber suggests that such self-
complication is inescapable: psychoanalytic theorizing cannot help but
be tangled up in the processes it ventures to define. There is therefore
repetition; objects do not remain static – instead they cease to be know-
able as stable entities; dislocations occur; ‘theoretical objectification’
begins to seem like an impossibility because theory cannot achieve
proper disentanglement. And so it begins to be possible to imagine an
endlessly self-implying process whereby theory confounds itself and so
fails ever to exit the maze of its peregrinations.

Close to Freud

In one of his later interpretations of Freud, to be found in the book

Archive Fever, Derrida poses his own set of questions:

Must one apply to what will have been predefined as the Freudian or
psychoanalytic archive in general schemas of reading, of interpreta-
tion, of classification which have been received and reflected out of
this corpus whose unity is thus presupposed? Or rather, has one on
the contrary the right to treat the said psychoanalytico-Freudian
archive according to a logic or a hermeneutic independent of Freudian
psychoanalysis, indeed anterior even to the very name of Freud,
while presupposing in another manner the closure and the identity
of this corpus?4

These remarks are in certain respects typical of the deconstructionist

approach. One may note the use of complicated tenses (‘will have been
predefined’) which sometimes take on a quasi-prophetic air, Derrida a
reader of auguries; the insistent self-qualifications (‘a logic or a herme-
neutic’) that seem to be designed to pre-empt through the listing of
alternatives any possible suggestion of terminological imprecision; the
invocation of portentous ethical considerations (‘the right to treat’)
framing the work of interpretation. This is, in its way, powerful
writing and the business of its rhetoric is to refute conventional
 The Psychoanalytic Labyrinth 3

interpretative claims of dispassionate scrutiny whose viewpoint is extra-

neous to what is being studied. Post-structuralism has often forcefully
and successfully critiqued such claims: the interpreter, it is argued, is
always already implicated in the material being interpreted. One cannot
stand quizzically back, be separate and then look squarely at, for exam-
ple, a writer’s work as if it were some classifiable, delimited object.
Deconstruction often therefore arrives at some version or other of an
idea of interpretative inescapability and then affirms the idea as the
necessarily inconclusive end-point of its critique, as if nothing were so
good as to be caught in a hall of mirrors.
Derrida has taken this argument beyond argument into quasi-literary
experiments that enact a drama – it is something more emotionally
serious than a game – of inextricability based on what I would call
conceits of intimacy. In one text this goes as far as prosopopeia, Derrida
speaking not on behalf of Freud but (in the terms of the rhetorical
conceit) as if he were Freud:5

You have always taken me, like Fliess, for a ‘mind reader’. Contempt.
You are waiting holding your breath. You are waiting on the
telephone, I imagine you and speak to you on the telephone, or the
teleprinter seeing that I’ve prepared a lecture which I will never
give … . Well, you are wrong, for once, you will discover nothing
from me as regards the ‘enigma of telepathy’. In particular, I will
preserve this at all costs, you will not be able to know ‘whether or not
I believe in the existence of a telepathy.’ This opening could still
allow one to think that I know, myself, whether or not I believe, and
that, for one reason or another, I am anxious to keep it secret, in
particular to produce such and such a transferential effect (not
necessarily on you or on you, but on this public within myself which
does not let go of me). … I pretend … to admit that I do not myself
know. I know nothing about it. I apologize: if I have given the impres-
sion of having secretly ‘taken sides’ with the reality of telepathy in
the occult sense.6

There is a certain winning jokiness in this essay, which is to some extent

a skit on the idea of telepathy (see also Chapter 5) and a writing-exercise
that plays out rather than simply asserting the proposition that inter-
pretation is necessarily implicated in its object. In Derrida’s later work,
the playfulness is increasingly replaced by tones of grave seriousness:
the idea of interimplication is reinforced to the extent of becoming the
basis of an ethical theory of indissoluble interpersonal bonds (see
4 Freud’s Memory

Chapter 3). Some of that seriousness, a sense of pathos, is evident

here: ‘I will preserve at all costs … I am anxious to keep it secret.’ Derrida
adopts the conceit of intimacy to such an extent as to use the first
person, but this is consistent with the emphasis on inescapability.
In the deconstructionist account, one cannot penetrate the labyrinth
of Freud’s writing and then simply pass through it. The process is thus
like getting caught in a trap. But it may also start to seem, as in Derrida’s
telepathy-simulation exercise, rather like taking a part in a melodrama.
Emotional considerations come into play. An argument about episte-
mology develops a psychological dimension: it becomes personal. It is as
if the questioning of concepts were a pretext not simply for biographical
speculation but for some more transcendent communion between
persons, as if theory were transforming into prayer. I find it odd, to say
the least, that those who are concerned with psychoanalytic theory
should think it appropriate, desirable or even feasible to imagine some
intimate affinity with Freud; it seems to me that it is overfamiliar.
Arguably such overfamiliarity may be justified when it is part of a
writing-experiment, yet the trait is not confined to Derrida. Another
conceit of intimacy is to be found in a book on Freud by an otherwise
more traditional cultural historian, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, in which
he uses the device not of prosopopeia but of apostrophe, in the form of
a ‘Monologue with Freud’:

Professor Freud, at this point I find it futile to ask whether, geneti-

cally or structurally, psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science; that we
shall know, if it is at all knowable, only when much future work has
been done. Much will depend, of course, on how the very terms
Jewish and science are to be defined. Right now, leaving the semantic
and epistemological questions aside, I want only to know whether
you ultimately came to believe it to be so.
In fact, I will limit myself even further and be content if you
answer only one question. When your daughter conveyed those
words to the congress in Jerusalem, was she speaking in your name?
Please tell me, Professor. I promise I won’t reveal your answer to
anyone.7

In this curious passage, the author seems to be asserting a kinship with

Freud or privileged access to his ideas. It is moreover an assertion that
Derrida discusses in Archive Fever and the claim of intimacy is com-
pounded by further remarks he makes in the context of Freud’s book on
Wilhelm Jensen’s novel, Gradiva. Derrida refers to a passage in that book
 The Psychoanalytic Labyrinth 5

(a passage I will quote fully in Chapter 1) in which Freud recalls

something that once happened to him, having initially suggested that
what is described in fact happened to someone else. Derrida glosses his
paraphrase of Freud’s remarks in this way:

Here is the coup de théâtre, the dramatic twist. Freud pretended to

speak of someone else, of a colleague. (If I were to be immodest to
such a point, doubly immodest, I would say that he did what I am
doing in speaking of a colleague, Yerushalmi, while I am speaking of
myself).8

The claims to intimacy here become serial and replicative. Derrida claims
to draw together himself, Yerushalmi and Freud into a confraternity.
Again individual personalities have come to the forefront in these imagi-
nary conjunctions; again argument has given way to a psychodrama.
A remark from a practising analyst about the nature of professional
psychoanalytic debate exemplifies the problem of overfamiliarity in
another way. Patrick Mahony writes:

[R]eading Freud as opposed to reading other colleagues is an espe-

cially complicated matter, given the transferences we may have to
him, to the human subjects of his writings, to his fictively created
interlocutors, and to the psychoanalytic institution. Time willing,
diverse readings of Freud will be classified by century and nation,
much as has happened with the Bible and Shakespeare (the Spanish
Shakespeare, eighteenth-century Shakespeare, and so on). Perhaps
the embittered rivalry seen between the interpretations of the ‘French
Freud’ and the ‘Anglo-American Freud’ will serve for future reflec-
tion on the possible psychopathologies of reading Freud in order to
distinguish among hysterical, obsessional, narcissistic, fetishistic,
and other kinds of readings. Such possibilities notwithstanding, we
should conceive of a reading alliance according to which we as agents
participate and observe ourselves in our reading of Freud.9

Freud is one colleague among many. Though reading Freud is ‘especially

complicated’, according to Mahony, it is not different in kind from other
professional relationships; the protocols of professional debate apply,
though added care is needed. Once it had become a profession worthy
of the designation, Freud occasionally made comments about profes-
sional psychoanalysts, as in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’
(1937, an essay I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 5): ‘we often
6 Freud’s Memory

hear [analysts] say, when they are deploring or excusing the recognized
imperfections of some fellow-mortal: “His analysis was not finished” or
“he was never analysed to the end”‘ (23: 219).10 Being a lay commentator,
I will avoid discussion of psychotherapy as a practice and a branch of
medicine; I am interested in Freud’s writing. But it is appropriate to note
here the existence of significant and often credible accounts of a disrepu-
table professional culture pertaining to psychoanalysis.11 Freud’s remark
conjures up for a moment a rather poisonous, bickering atmosphere, with
analysts gossiping about each other’s shortcomings. No doubt in such an
atmosphere, psychoanalytic labels would be flung about in the manner
of Mahony’s inventory of pathological interpretations: ‘hysterical’,
‘narcissistic’ and so forth. Mahony’s project of classification looks to me
rather like a scheme for the codification of insults. Presented in the plain
language of peer-to-peer professionalism rather than the differing but
equally quasi-literary styles of Derrida or Yerushalmi, the personalizing
approach seems to me no less problematic.12
Mahony claims that psychoanalytic concepts can categorize and
explain any difficulties that might arise in the scrutinization of Freud’s
insights. Mahony’s weird idea of a taxonomy of ‘psychopathologies of
reading Freud’ is both indicative of complete assurance in psychoana-
lytic explanations and a self-valorizing account of professional compe-
tence: the psychoanalyst can stand apart, self-supervisorily, even in
the act of participating in a ‘reading alliance’. For Mahony, it seems,
psychoanalysis is a paradigm and a set of diagnostic categories that
may be applied functionally; their application, however, needs to be
understood psychoanalytically – so that any ‘psychopathological’
elements or trends in it may be recognized in psychoanalytic terms.
Mahony’s idea of ‘reading alliance’ as a kind of self-observed participa-
tion claims that there can always be an external vantage point. But in
another sense there is no such position: the vantage point is still
psychoanalytic. Mahony envisages the psychoanalysis of psychoana-
lyses of psychoanalysis.

On the outside

I approach Freud in a fundamentally different way, resisting wherever

possible implication in psychoanalysis. This may be my own conceit –
one of distance rather than intimacy – but it seems to me to be necessary
to draw attention to it, especially in respect to the terminological deci-
sion that is a premise of this book. I have avoided all psychoanalytic
terms (including common words such as ‘unconscious’, ‘repression’,
 The Psychoanalytic Labyrinth 7

‘symptom’, ‘fantasy’, ‘ego’) except, with great care, when I am

paraphrasing particular formulations by Freud.
I have entirely avoided one term in particular, ‘trauma.’ Given what I
have to say about transgression, mourning and even anguish and
brutalization, this decision may seem perverse and it is therefore worth
offering some brief explanation, showing in so doing some examples of
my avoidance of psychoanalytic terms. As is well known, the psycho-
analytic theory of trauma is complex. ‘Trauma’ may refer either to an
event (and especially sexual abuse) or to something imagined or wished-
for. The traumatic incident, whether real or not, has this particular
specific elusiveness in psychoanalysis: it causes psychological damage
only after a while. According to psychoanalytic theory, the mind can-
not originally cope with the incident – it is too much shocked by it –
and so it sets it to one side, hides it, denies it or in some other way keeps
it at bay. But it may return – in a powerfully damaging but necessarily
distorted, partly unintelligible guise, prompting illness and distress.
Psychoanalysis aims, through therapy as well as theory, to undisguise
the incident as best it can, which is never so well since it is always a
matter of inference. The complexity at stake is therefore considerable:
traumas, according to psychoanalytic theory, are radically elusive by
virtue of both their variable reality-status and the malformations ensu-
ing in the course of delay. The instigating incident becomes meaningful
only in its eventual disguised or substituted form; it is hard therefore to
speak of a trauma even as an incident (let alone an event). Its belated
shapeshifting involves an erasure of its notional existence as a distinct
intelligible entity. ‘Trauma’ in psychoanalytic theory is both labyrinth
and minotaur, a concept once more involving interimplication.13 In a
psychoanalytic context, ‘trauma’ is moreover almost always used meta-
phorically, the literal and original meaning having to do with wound-
ing, with injury done to the body. The usage in Freud’s writing begs
especially vexed questions about ideas of harm, given that much of his
work was directed at proposing psychological theories of conditions
that had been explained in physiological terms; I shall have plenty to
say about these questions and to use ‘trauma’ (as opposed, at least in
some instances, to ‘pain’ – see especially Chapter 4) in my own
commentary would beg the very question about the status of figurative
language (concerning especially metaphors of wounding) that I am
seeking to address.
That argument involves the contention that Freud is often deceptively
confident about his explanatory achievements: he declares that he has
managed to understand something but when one stops to consider the
8 Freud’s Memory

terms of this declaration, they tell another story, a sadder and more
troubled story. (That is not to say that Freud is dissembling or duplicitous.
I am not seeking to add to the voluminous Freud-as-fraud literature. I
refer rather, as I explain in Chapter 1, to the idea that Freud’s figurative
language has ‘countersense’: concepts are, as I put it, ‘smuggled’ like
contraband into psychoanalysis – contrapuntal concepts, which are to
do with unintelligibility rather than effective explanation.)
Methodologically, therefore, I seek to interpret Freud without the
help of specifically psychoanalytic terminology. In so doing I claim, for
the sake of argument, a position outside psychoanalysis.
1
Figures of Freudian Theory

How significant are apparently incidental or subsidiary features of

Freud’s writing to his larger theoretical enterprise? How seriously should
one take asides, disclaimers, interruptions, digressions, counterintuitive
points of textual organization or essayistic structure and, in particular,
metaphors and other devices – what, in rhetoric and literary criticism,
are called figures or tropes, turns of phrase and thought that somehow
shift the meaning of words or ideas? Is it important, for instance, that
Freud’s psychoanalysis is often preoccupied by thoughts of physical injury,
or that its rational, scientific approach permits the discussion of ghosts
and other apparently preternatural phenomena?
Let me take a small local example. In The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), Freud remarks: ‘Children know nothing of the horrors of
corruption, of freezing in the ice-cold grave, of the terrors of eternal
nothingness – ideas which grown-up people find it so hard to tolerate,
as is proved by all the myths of a future life’ (4: 254, 4: 354). This state-
ment, with its emphasis on childish ignorance framed in terms of an
implicit ethics of reality-directed rationality, is conventional in a
psychoanalytic context, and yet we may notice its unexpected (though
perhaps sophomoric) intensity, its quasi-poetic interest in imagining a
cold, lonely, terrible death, or even, given the concern for the sensation
of freezing, in being buried alive.
This melancholy flourish reminds me of Lionel Trilling’s comment
that Freud’s work exhibits a ‘quality of grim poetry’.1 There is in the
passage a broad negativity. Horror, fear, the agony of freezing – these
concerns seem palpable. If they are also to be found elsewhere in Freud’s
work, then this aside may be read as more widely significant than its
local context would initially allow. I am interested precisely in prob-
lems of negativity and pain in Freud’s work. I believe these problems are

9
10 Freud’s Memory

fundamental and I want to demonstrate through a reading of Freud’s

texts in what ways this is so. My contention is that scattered but recur-
rent figures in his work have more than incidental or illustrative sig-
nificance for psychoanalytic theory: they amount to a kind of dispersed
argument which it is possible to reassemble. I want to undertake some
of that reassembling in this book and in this first chapter I will set out
both my method and some of the themes and questions that will emerge
in the chapters that follow.

Theory’s sense of itself

The turn of phrase or argument at stake is often of a conspicuously self-

referential kind: Freud changes his subject in order to say something
about himself, his method, an incident in his life or in the history to
that point of psychoanalysis. A good example of this tendency, and one
which resonates with the remarks quoted a moment ago, is to be found
in Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907 [1906]):

It must be remembered … that the belief in spirits and ghosts and the
return of the dead [Geister und Gespenster und wiederkehrende Seelen],
which finds so much support in the religions to which we have all
been attached, at least in our childhood, is far from having disap-
peared among educated people, and that many who are sensible in
other respects find it possible to combine spiritualism with reason. A
man who has grown rational and sceptical, even, may be ashamed to
discover how easily he may for a moment return to a belief in spirits
under the combined impact of strong emotion and perplexity. I
know of a doctor who had once lost one of his woman patients
suffering from Graves’ disease, and who could not get rid of a faint
suspicion that he might have contributed to the unhappy outcome
by a thoughtless prescription. One day, several years later, a girl
entered his consulting-room, who, in spite of all his efforts, he could
not help recognizing as the dead one. He could frame only a single
thought: ‘So after all it’s true that the dead can come back to life.’ His
dread did not give way to shame till the girl introduced herself as the
sister of the one who had died of the same disease as she was suffer-
ing from. The victims of Graves’ disease, as has often been observed,
have a marked facial resemblance to one another; and in this case
this typical likeness was reinforced by a family one. The doctor
to whom this occurred was, however, none other than myself[.]
(9: 71–2, 14: 95, 7: 98–9)