A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture

Laura Marcus, Ankhi Mukherjee

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118610220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This concise companion explores the history of psychoanalytic theory and its impact on contemporary literary criticism by tracing its movement across disciplinary and cultural boundaries.

• Contains original essays by leading scholars, using a wide range of cultural and historical approaches
• Discusses key concepts in psychoanalysis, such as the role of dreaming, psychosexuality, the unconscious, and the figure of the double, while considering questions of gender, race, asylum and international law, queer theory, time, and memory
• Spans the fields of psychoanalysis, literature, cultural theory, feminist and gender studies, translation studies, and film.
• Provides a timely and pertinent assessment of current psychoanalytic methods while also sketching out future directions for theory and interpretation

Part I
Histories

Chapter 1
The Freudian Century

Stephen Frosh

Psychoanalytic culture

The idea that western culture is saturated by psychoanalysis may seem excessive, given how controversial psychoanalysis continues to be, and how often we are faced with the assertion that “Freud is dead.” Certainly its clinical manifestations are constantly under threat from ostensibly more efficient short-term therapies and supposedly more effective “evidence-based” approaches, or from simple market forces that work against the slowness and expense that characterize psychoanalytic forms of treatment. Whilst psychoanalytic training in some parts of the world (notably Latin America) is thriving, in Anglo-American settings there is much more concern over its future, and in the UK there have been several psychoanalytic psychotherapy training programs that have failed to recruit sufficient students to sustain themselves. In the universities, too, clinical psychoanalysis is a small area; and in the social sciences the longstanding struggle over the place of psychoanalysis in research continues. There may in fact be a small resurgence here, with the emergence of a psychoanalytically informed new “discipline” of psychosocial studies and with regular attempts to find ways to draw on, or incorporate, psychoanalytic ideas into qualitative research methodologies (see, for example, Frosh and Saville-Young 2011) and to fight for its place in sociology and psychology (see, for example, Roseneil 2006). But in the social sciences it is still the case that psychoanalysis is a minority position, facing all the accusations of “subjectivity” and unscientific speculativeness that it has always faced (Frosh 2006).

There are, however, various ripostes to this. The first is that whatever one might think of the validity or efficacy of psychoanalysis, it has come to define a very widespread form of cultural experience and to be indispensable to ways of living in, as well as understanding, that cultural form. This has its ironies, given the roots of psychoanalysis in the clinic; but it also reveals what has happened to psychoanalysis in terms of influence – that it has created a way of thinking and a mode of reflexive self-consciousness that has become a taken-for-granted element of much cultural experience. This argument relies on the idea that humans are constituted as self-reflexive subjects in culture – as social subjects – continually making sense of themselves through the application of discourses that surround them. Put more simply, culture constantly throws up modes of self-understanding that are then drawn on by subjects in a self-referential way, strengthening some of these cultural discourses and weakening others. In the case of psychoanalysis, the early idea of the dynamic unconscious was extraordinarily seminal for twentieth-century self-understanding, in that it named and explained the widespread experience of how something dangerous and exciting might break through from “below” to upset the balance of the supposedly rational, yet actually repressive, surface (Frosh 1991). This might sometimes be life-enhancing, as with the new forms of art, music, and literature that emerged in the early years of the twentieth century; but sometimes it might manifest destructively, for instance in the outbursts of vicious irrationality expressed in the plethora of wars and in the rise of Nazism in the heart of European “civilization.” In the light of these cultural phenomena, can western subjects understand themselves without recourse to notions such as the “unconscious,” “repression,” or “defenses”? Of course the answer to this must be “yes,” but these notions have nevertheless been amongst the most potent and widespread of those available for self-explanation in the past hundred years.

An obvious caveat applies here, which is about the geographical and political limitations of the claim that the last century was “Freudian” and that culture is saturated by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis grew up in the crucible of Europe; it had very specific origins in the scientific culture of the late nineteenth century alongside the then-current fascination with various branches of occultism; and it was laced in its original location with the complexities of Jewish emancipation and hence also with antisemitism (Frosh 2005). It was relatively quickly exported to Britain, where its early history was rather different, being closely connected to the widespread interest in psychical research and also linked from near the start to feminism and the arts (Frosh 2003); and of course it found quite considerable acceptance in America. But whilst there was interest in psychoanalysis in various other places before World War II, it was only with the “diaspora” of European psychoanalysts that it really took off in South America and elsewhere. One increasingly important issue that arises from this narrative of dissemination is the connection between psychoanalysis and colonialism. This is not a statement about how psychoanalysis gradually “colonized” societies around the world; it is, rather, a comment on the connection between psychoanalytic culture and theories and practices that draw on, and sustain, oppressive social structures – despite the many psychoanalytic radicals who have populated the psychoanalytic movement, and the longstanding investment of psychoanalytic social critics in social change (Frosh 1999; Jacoby 1975, 1983). For example, psychoanalysis has a complex history of reproduction of colonial tropes such as the “primitive,” meaning both foundational (basic) states and “crude” sexual and destructive impulses akin to those of the “savage” of the nineteenth-century European imagination (Brickman 2003). This association is found in Freud’s own use of the “ontology recapitulates phylogeny” model to match the development of the European infant with that of the “savage,” but it continues in relatively everyday clinical use as an uninterrogated marker of the difference between the “civilized” and “primitive” mind. This places psychoanalysis as a discourse of colonialism, meaning both that it may not be “applicable” to non-European cultures, and more strongly that where it does apply, it may be as a subjugating discourse rather than an emancipatory or therapeutic one.

In this context, it is perhaps surprising to discover that psychoanalysis is proving to be a useful ground for postcolonial studies. This is because, speaking as it may from the heart of colonialism, it nevertheless offers a range of expressive ideas that can be used to unpick both the colonial mind and its legacy in the postcolonial world. Much of the work here draws on the famous intervention of Frantz Fanon (1967), which deploys psychoanalytic ideas to examine the psychological effects of colonialism and in so doing draws a picture of a whole social world infiltrated by Freudian (and Lacanian) categories. More recently, this has been taken up energetically by a wide range of authors interested for example in the “melancholic” aspects of the postcolonial state, meaning by that a cultural situation in which there is haunting of the present by a felt loss of a treasured past, which has been so comprehensively occluded as to make even mourning it impossible. The consequence of this is the creation of postcolonial societies still in thrall to colonialism; and the articulation of this is in psychoanalytic terms. Ranjana Khanna (2004), for example, advances this general thesis by using Freud’s idea of melancholia, outlined in “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud 1953–74, 14:237–58), in conjunction with a social analysis of postcolonial states, as in the following passage:

Whereas Freud wrote of the work of mourning as the work of assimilating the lost object, the work of melancholia has a critical relation to the lost and to the buried. It manifests, sometimes in paralysis, stasis, or demetaphorization, loss, and it thus calls upon the inassimilable remainder. It does not merely call for inclusion, assimilation, reparation, or retribution. It calls for a response to the critical work of incorporation, and the ethical demand that such incorporation makes on the future. In the context of newly formed colonized nation-states, the critical response to nation-statehood arises from the secret embedded in nation-state formation: that the concept of nation-statehood was constituted through the colonial relation, and needs to be radically reshaped if it is to survive without colonies, or without a concealed (colonial) other.

(Khanna 2004, 25)

The shift from a psychological to a social frame is very obvious and deliberate here, and evidences the way in which the psychoanalytic paradigm is being used to advance thinking at a cultural level. One might expect this to feed back subsequently into critical thought in literature and the humanities, given the importance of postcolonial ideas there, and indeed this has happened. For example, Edward Said’s (2003) analysis of Freud’s 1939 text Moses and Monotheism (1953–74, 23:138) under the expressive title of Freud and the Non-European is perhaps characteristic of one postcolonial use of psychoanalysis. Rather than draw on psychoanalysis as a privileged discipline for comprehending the psyche from the point of view of the “European,” he attends instead to the fractures within psychoanalysis itself as revealing openings through which a broader understanding might emerge. This has two forms: first, the lacunae of western thought are brought out into the open, manifested in the contradictions of psychoanalytic theory. Secondly, at a “meta” level there are ways that psychoanalysis performs that might be deployed counter-hegemonically (and even against psychoanalysis itself) in these “non-European” settings. For Said, pursuing a view of psychoanalysis as a disruptive discipline, Moses and Monotheism dramatizes an opposition to be found in Freud’s writing to a notion that identity might be formed once and for all, coherent and complete, at either the individual or cultural level. This is constituted in “Freud’s profound exemplification of the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity – for him, this was the Jewish identity – there are inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into one, and only one, Identity” (Said 2003, 53). Making Moses an Egyptian, as Freud did in his book, has the effect of asserting a brokenness within Jewish communal identity: at its source is an outsider, so claims for national or racial purity must always break down, in the specific case of Jews and in the general case of all cultures. What this does therefore is make a general point that can be applied everywhere (that identities are always broken); and it also specifically disputes claims for the fixedness and superiority of European colonial culture. There is no one identity, it is always open to the other; and so the European is infected from the start with the disruptive presence of the colonized, and psychoanalysis shows how this occurs.

This account of how psychoanalysis both shares in colonial practices and offers some routes out of it is paralleled elsewhere, most notably in the debates over sexual difference that stemmed initially from feminist criticism of psychoanalytic assumptions. For Freud (1953–74, 23:252), sexual difference (“the wish for a penis and the masculine protest”) was the “bedrock” of psychoanalysis, beyond which it could not go, and this took the specific form of the refutation of femininity and the pursuit of masculinity. This was contested from very early on, in the work of psychoanalytic writers of the 1920s and 1930s, and the general sexual normativeness of psychoanalysis has continued to be the object of critique, both from feminists and from gay and lesbian writers (see Frosh 1999, 2006). However, especially since the publication in 1974 of Juliet Mitchell’s book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, psychoanalysis has also been drawn upon by many theorists in a search for theoretical leverage on gender and sexuality. This does not mean that Mitchell’s promotion of psychoanalysis as a sexually progressive discipline has gone unchallenged. Indeed, psychoanalysis’s conservatism in this area is well documented: in theory and in clinical work it has rarely supplied...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Histories
• Part II: Literatures
• Part III: Visual Cultures
• Part IV: Transformations
• Index
• End User License Agreement