The Annual of Psychoanalysis, V. 29

Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World

Jerome A. Winer, James W. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134906291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World, volume 29 of The Annual of Psychoanalysis, is a comprehensive reassessment of the influence of Sigmund Freud. Intended as an unofficial companion volume to the Library of Congress's exhibit, "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, " it ponders Freud's influence in the context of contemporary scientific, psychotherapeutic, and academic landscapes.

Beginning with James Anderson's biographical remarks, which aregeared specifically to the objects on display in the Library of Congress exhibit, and RoyGrinker Jr.'s more personal view of Freud, the volume branches out in various directions in an effort to comprehend the multidimensional and multidisciplinary richness of Freud's contribution. In section II, we find authoritative summaries of Freud's scientific contributions, of his continuing impact as a thinker, of his notion of symbolization in the context of recent neuroscientific findings, and of his status as a "cultural subversive".
In section III, contributors hone in on more specific aspects of Freud's legacy, such as an experimental method to review how Freud's idea of childhood sexuality has fared anda look at the women who became analysts in the United States. In the concluding section of the volume, contributors turn to Freud's influence in various humanistic disciplines: literature, drama, religious studies, the human sciences, the visual arts, and cinema.With this scholarly yet highly accessible compilation, the Chicago Institute provides another service to its own community and to the wider reading public. Sure to enhance the experience of all those attending "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, " Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World will appeal to anyone desirous of an up-to-date overview of the man whose work shaped the psychological sensibility of the century just past and promises to reverberate throughout the century just born.

IV
Freud’s Impact on Humanistic Studies

Freud in Time: Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism in the New Century

PAUL J. EMMETT WILLIAM VEEDER

Love is a long close scrutiny.

—John Hawkes

Sigmund Freud, characteristically, did not go gentle into the 21st century. The 1990s visited upon the man and his ideas a virulence of critique that exceeded in its range and publicity anything he encountered in his professional life. In addition to ongoing opposition to Freud's theories, there have been highly personal attacks on his ethics and basic probity. Especially since Freud's partisans have addressed these attacks frequently and cogently, we as literary critics will forego filial piety and will, instead, pose a core question: what of Freud's legacy remains viable for humanistic studies? What tools for analysis, and what truths about motivation and desire, will foster literary criticism in the new century?

In posing the question this way, we are entering into a debate that psychoanalysts have staged, often acrimoniously, for more than 30 years, a debate over what they call the two Freuds. On the one hand, Freud is the scientist, the researcher-theorist-metaphysician whose Newtonian-Darwinian orientation prompted him to insist that psychoanalysis is a science. On the other hand, Freud is the reader, the clinician-exegete-mythmaker whose masterpieces include the books on dreams and parapraxes and jokes, the case histories, and the incidental studies of verbal and visual texts. This debate within psychoanalysis has serious import for literary criticism, as two partisans of Freud-the-reader establish. Michel de Certeau in France and Roy Schafer in America make arguments against Freud's metapsychology that highlight Freud's persisting usefulness for the humanities, and for students of fiction especially. De Certeau (1986) reminds us of Freud's admission in 1895 that his " 'histories of the ill ones' (Krankengeschichte) read like novels (Novellen)." Freud finds indispensable to treating hysteria "a detailed description (Darstellung) of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of poets (Dichter)" (p. 19). Freud's achievement, for de Certeau, is that he transcends "science" and achieves "fiction." He acknowledges the data that theory cannot account for, the unique elements of a patient's case that scientific rules would dismiss as fanciful or ignore as irrelevant. Producing narrative rather than reproducing schema, "he ... thus substitutes for 'objective' discourse ... a discourse that adopts the form of a 'fiction' (if by 'fiction' we understand a text that openly declares its relation to the singular place of its production)—to the particular situation of each analysand" (p. 6).

Also commited to the analysand's specific vicissitudes, Roy Schafer's (1976) espousal of Freud-the-reader has proven attractive to literary critics because it emphasizes "language." Schafer focuses on "disclaimed actions" (p. 130). Like characters in fiction, patients are "engaged in contradictory or paradoxical actions" (p. 135) which are often revealed in verbal slips. "The slip is not a disrupted action; it is a special kind of action in which two courses of action are taken up simultaneously" (p. 131). Thus Schafer, like de Certeau, emphasizes how any particular narrative exceeds in its richness any theory we might apply to it. Whether we call this richness overdetermination, or latency, or, in Lacanian/Derridean parlance, the supplement, the basic admonition of Freud-the-reader is our bedrock. "There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure. . . . This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown" (Freud, 1900, p. 525).

Freud's admonition is especially germane for literary criticism today. By the 1990s, our profession had reacted so severely against New Criticism's exclusively textual focus that contextual study was all the rage, and close analysis was quickly becoming a lost art. We believe that, in the new century, extreme antiformalism will give way to two more moderate, fostering attitudes toward reading. On the one hand, contextualists will come to see close analysis as an ally rather than an enemy. Close analysis will generate complexities that enrich contextual discussions both by revealing the limitations of ideology (including the contextualist's own) and by problematizing that reductive mining of texts for "themes" which happens now all too often. On the other hand, close analysis will provide readers of every stripe with exquisite pleasure, the pleasure of discovering and appreciating textual richnesses. Genius in play. What limited New Criticism was not only its anticontextualism but also its failure to live up to its own billing. We agree with Peter Brooks (1987) agreeing with Geoffrey Hartman that "the trouble with Anglo-American formalism was that it wasn't formalist enough" (p. 337). We have chosen for our epigraph the words of the contemporary novelist John Hawkes (1961) because they define our ideal of literary-critical relations. "Love is a long close scrutiny" (pp. 8-9). For us as critics, love of textual intricacy generates the long scrutiny of close analysis and produces intense delight. This delight we want to share with the readers of our essay. (Spatial constraints prevent us from also assaying the other pleasure we've defined in this paragraph, the pleasure of moving out from textual to contextual analyses.) Before doing so, however, we need to make one more general point.

Much of what Freud can teach us today about psychology and reading he found in the novels of his contemporaries and their predecessors. "In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which have not yet opened up for science" (1907, p. 8). This is the Freud whom de Certeau values, the Freud who knew the limits of his "science." "[Creative artists] know a whole host of things ... of which our philosophy has not let us dream" (p. 8). The very ambiance of Freud's formative 1890s is alive with "psychoanalytic" thought. In What Maisie Knew (1898), for example, Henry James' heroine knows "the art of not thinking singly" (p. 189). Able "to read the spoken in the unspoken" (p. 205), Maisie knows that "everything had something behind it" (p. 54). She is indeed "a young person with a sharpened sense for latent meanings" (p. 189). Half a century earlier, Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrator in "Roger Malvin's Burial" (1832a) could say of his protagonist, Reuben Bourne, "unable to penetrate the secret places of his soul where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him onward" (p. 356). Clearly Hawthorne knew about the unconsciousness, suppression, and self-deception. Now that we know, Fredrick Crews (1966) and other critics have brought Freud to Hawthorne with promising results. But they have yet to penetrate the secret place of Hawthorne's text where Reuben Bourne's motives still lie hidden. Who, for that matter, thinks that any of us, Freud, friends or foes, have plucked the heart out of Hamlet's mystery?

To indicate how Freud can foster readerly pleasure in the new century, we study the enduring features of his legacy—first his techniques, then his concepts. In the process we advance an overall argument. We believe readers should take seriously what Freud theorized but hedged about, what he practiced, though only at his best: literary texts can, and should, be read as we read dreams. Our argument is shaped by several factors particular to the occasion that has evoked it. Because we are writing to general readers rather than to professional literary critics, we forego footnotes and other scholarly apparatus; restrict ourselves to texts in English; focus on fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both recognized masterpieces and major achievements that either have been unfairly forgotten (such as Harriet Prescott Spofford's "Circumstance") or have not yet been accorded their full due (such as John Hawkes's The Lime Twig, 1961, and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, 1989). Finally, we want to acknowledge a substantial debt—to the many students of criticism and theorists of psychoanalysis whom we draw upon but have no space to cite individually.

The Legacy Techniques

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) is where Freud teaches us how to read, to parse the stylistic techniques of the unconscious. Here Freud establishes that texts—be they dreams or "literature"—are multileveled structures where the manifest is a distorted presentation of the latent. Techniques for distorting are manifold, the most prominent being displacement, condensation, and overdetermination. The trick is to reverse the process in order to understand the unconscious content that is struggling to—and not to—be revealed. Displacement is "a transferring of psychical intensities" (p. 308); the affect associated with one object at the latent level is transferred to another object at the manifest. We can begin to reverse this process, as Freud does, by paying close attention to inappropriate affects. To take a seemingly straightforward example: Can anyone hate felines as much as Poe's narrator in "The Black Cat"? When he attempts to axe the cat and ends up axing his wife, we suspect that the answer is "no." The rage and loathing that the narrator cannot admit to feeling for his wife are displaced onto the cat which was her "great favorite" (p. 854). Simple: a psychoallegory of suppressed rage. So straightforward a logic is what has caused "Freudian" analysis to be dismissed by many readers as "reductive." The most famous Poe Freudian, Marie Bonaparte, uses displaced hatred in "The Black Cat" to read the animal as "a totem of Poe's [phallic] mother." But nothing more. Simple. Problems of jargon and biography aside, if Freud at his best shows us anything, it's that nothing is simple, and nothing is nothing more. The very fact that Bonaparte says cat = Phallic Mother, whereas we've already seen that cat = wife, indicates that displacement is not, in itself, a reductive technique. We're not done when we find a source for an affect, because displacement often operates along with the second technique of distortion, condensation, where a manifest element has multiple latent associations. The narrator's cat is, in fact, associated with wife, and mother, and Phallic Mother, and women, and the threat of gender fusion. Because the cat has these multiple associations, when the husband blinds the cat, his motives, and his story, are masked through the third technique of distortion, overdetermination, where a manifest action has several causes. To interpret the causes here, we must again turn to Freud because blinding is the Freudian representation of castration. The narrator blinds the cat in order to castrate the Phallic Mother, his wife, and all women, and he does so to escape the threat of gender fusion.

This is still too simple. We can read "The Black Cat" as a tale of suppressed misogyny—fear and hatred of the feminine, and of the female within—but, though the story is just that, just that is exactly what it isn't. To enter further into Poe's complications, we could repeat the circuit of displacement, condensation, overdetermination. The narrator doesn't displace just rage onto the cat; he also displaces tenderness. The cat that makes a "cry . . . like ... a child" (p. 859) and clamors up the narrator's "dress" to his "breast" (p. 855) is condensed into more than wife, mother, and female. It is also the child he has never had, and the child he has never been (his distant, bizarre parents give him pets rather than hugs). Thus when the narrator makes his overdetermined attack on the cat's vision, he himself isn't so determined: he cuts out only one eye. Moreover, although our first reading of the cat—involving misogyny and rage against mother and the female within—was decidedly "masculine," our second reading—with "dress . . . breast" and the longing to be maternally nurturant and protective—is "feminine." Freud knew that texts were distorted because they presented feminine and masculine, two antithetical readings simultaneously. He told us that another technique of distortion was, in effect, bisexuality. He told us, but we didn't listen so well. Twentieth-century psychoanalytic critics have tended to emphasize displacement, condensation, and overdetermination at the expense of other methods of distortion, and other methods of reading—especially juxtaposition, verbal play, absurdity, and associative patterns.

What Freud (1900) says about dreams—"whenever they show two elements close together, this guarantees that there is some specifically intimate connection between what corresponded to them among the dream thoughts" (p. 349)— is true of literature too. Juxtaposition suggests latent connection. So when the narrator of "The Black Cat" ends one paragraph by telling us that the cat "became immediately a great favorite of my wife" (Poe, 1843, p. 854) and then begins the next paragraph with "For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me," we realize the "intimate connection" here is causality. He dislikes the cat because it—and not he—is his wife's favorite.

Juxtaposition is so powerful a technique that it can operate across, through, punctuation, in order to reveal latent desires (even as the unconscious itself recognizes no "no"). In Frankenstein, for example, Victor insists he's being a devoted bridegroom when he leaves Elizabeth alone in their honeymoon bed...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Editor
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgment
• Contents
• Contributors
• I Sigmund Freud the Man
• II Freud's Impact: Larger Perspectives
• III Freud's Impact in Specific Areas
• IV Freud's Impact on Humanistic Studies
• Index