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Introduction Notes Introduction The deconstructionist reading of Freud, with which this book has a partial affinity, claims that there is a certain inescapability in the practice: it is not possible to stand apart from what one studies, to escape the labyrinth of Freudian theory. Here and elsewhere (I mention work by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Patrick Mahony), this may be seen to lead to ‘conceits of intimacy’ with Freud, in which a writer claims some special familiarity with him. By contrast, I state that I attempt to stay at a distance from Freud’s work, notably by avoiding psy- choanalytic terminology. I give some examples of how this avoidance is achieved and also note in particular why I have not used the term ‘trauma’. 1. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 2. Michel de Certeau, ‘Translator’s Introduction: For a Literary Historiography’, in The Writing of History (1975), trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. xiv. 3. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (1979), expanded edn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. xiv. 4. Derrida Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 36. 5. It should be added, however, that Derrida is consistent in being sceptical about Freudian terminology. He repeatedly refuses that intimacy in a rigorous way. See Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … : A Dialogue (2001), trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 172: I may be mistaken, but the id, the ego, the superego, the ideal ego, the ego ideal, the secondary process and the primary process of repression, etc. – in a word, the large Freudian machines (including the concept and the word ‘unconscious’) – are in my opinion only provisional weapons, or even rhetorical tools cobbled together to be used against a philosophy of consciousness, of transparent and fully responsible intentionality. I have little faith in their future. I do not think that a metapsychology can hold up for long under scrutiny. Already, it is hardly being talked about anymore. 6. Derrida Jacques, ‘Telepathy’ (1980), trans. Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review 10 (1988), nos 1–2, p. 22. 7. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 100. See Rob White, ‘Archive Power’, Oxford Literary Review 21 (1999), pp. 161–80. 8. Archive Fever, p. 89. 9. Patrick Mahony, Freud and the Rat Man (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 221. 156 Notes 157 10. I have used the following editions and translations of Freud’s work: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, Alan Tyson and Alix Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74). Where possible, I have also cited The Penguin Freud Library (formerly The Pelican Freud Library), which modifies the Standard Edition translations in minor ways, individual volumes edited by Strachey and others, 14 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973–86). When reproduc- ing Freud’s German, I have consulted the Gesammelte Werke, edited by Anna Freud and others, 18 vols (London: Imago, 1940–52 [vols 1–17]; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1968 [vol. 18]). I have included references to Freud’s texts in the main body of my own, referring first – in bold – to the Standard Edition, then (where possible) – in roman – to the Penguin Freud Library, and finally (if I have quoted from it) – in italic – to the Gesammelte Werke. A refer- ence to the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis might read, therefore: (22: 160, 2: 195, 15: 172–3). 11. See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (London: Fontana, 1970), p. 550: Almost from the beginning Freud made psychoanalysis a movement, with its own organization and publishing house, its strict rules of membership, and its official doctrine, namely the psychoanalytic the- ory. The similarity between the psychoanalytic and the Greco-Roman philosophical schools was reinforced after the imposition of an initi- ation in the form of the training analysis. Not only does the training analysis demand a heavy financial sacrifice, but also a surrender of privacy and of the whole self. Jeffrey Masson, Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (London: HarperCollins, 1991); Malcolm Janet, In the Freud Archives (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984); Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), p. 102–3: even in their research, analysts have developed a false empiricism, in which their highest intellectual achievement is often nothing more than yet another report to their colleagues of a case history, complete with pious cross-references in the footnotes to show that they remem- ber the great, who are dead, and the mediocre, who are alive. Paper- reading has begun to bore even the psychoanalysts themselves. In some cities it is difficult to collect even these inferior specimens of intellectual vitality. The movement is softened, its mind lulled by feather-beds of dead data, collected in the ritual act of having been published. While worrying too much about whether they are scientists in any sense of the word acceptable to their most bigoted opponents, the psychoanalysts have become at worst technicians of therapy, and at best erudites, writing up data without any sense of responsibility for their more general import. The curse of erudition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was that it collected trivia, and cluttered the humanist culture of the time with ornamental knowledge. Psychoanalytic work is becoming ornamental to the scientific culture of our own time. False empiricism can have its own pathology; from papers with manifest titles such as ‘On a Theme Suggested by One of 158 Notes My Patients’ it is an easy move to the latent title ‘On a Patient Suggested by One of My Themes.’ 12. Prefatory methodological remarks in a recent book indicate well the kind of difficulties that arise when commentators co-opt psychoanalytic terms in the enterprise of scrutinizing psychoanalysis. In A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 6–7, Richard H. Armstrong writes: my need to explicate Freud’s compulsion for antiquity obviously shows the trace elements of transference which one might expect in any sustained treatment of a controversial figure, a ‘great man of his- tory.’ Any immanent critique of Freud must by definition use the tools he forged or at least popularized (such as the concept of ambiva- lence) in order to pick away at the edifice of his work. … If such an operation inevitably stinks of intellectual patricide, we can at least assert that to kill Freud as the Father is to free him to return to the position of being the father, the historical individual who founded this discourse with all its blindness and insight, and not the impos- sible colossus he often balloons into under the storm and stress of cultural debate. 13. For a summary of recent work in this area, see Nerea Arruti, ‘Trauma, Therapy and Representation: Theory and Critical Reflection’, Paragraph 30: 1 (March 2007), pp. 1–8. 1 Figures of Freudian Theory The chapter begins with an apparent inconsistency. A militant rationalist, scornful of any superstition, Freud nevertheless from time to time invokes pre- ternatural phenomena, especially ghosts and ‘evil spirits’. This inconsistency takes its place alongside other somewhat anomalous aspects of Freud’s writing, and notably his fondness for self-dramatizing autobiographical digressions. These unconventional habits are significant in themselves, evidence of the ingenuity and distinctiveness of Freud’s writing; but they additionally often deal with distressing themes or situations, or they are direct statements of personal sadness or alarm. There is a melancholic vein in Freud’s writing, which I seek to make visible. In so doing, I invoke a passage from Rilke’s Duino Elegies to suggest the extent to which Freud’s habit of retrospection is anguished. These features of Freud’s work are puzzling. They are at odds not only with the rationalism but also with repeated statements of explanatory accomplish- ment to be found elsewhere: Freud often confidently trumpets psychoanalytic achievements in understanding (which he describes in terms of elucidation, riddle-solving, defining, and so on). How, if at all, to reconcile these different elements? In exploring their manifestations and nuances, I propose two ideas. The first is the concept of a ‘figure of theory’, a figural passage that more or less explicitly describes Freud’s theorizing, as with analogies between psychoanalysis and archaeology. The second is the idea of ‘countersense’: the idea that apparently discordant or anomalous or extraneous passages in Freud’s writing may, instead of being Notes 159 dismissed as incidental, be shown to make sense – and in particular to constitute a sort of unofficial commentary on Freudian theory. I argue that this is so, indeed, with the references to ghosts and spirits. I interpret these references as indications of a burdened, preoccupied sense of understanding that is in crisis, as if haunted by the past. 1. Lionel Trilling, ‘Freud and Literature’ (1940), in The Liberal Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 54. 2. Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 44. 3. Ibid., p. 17. 4. Ibid., pp. 43–4. 5. Ibid., p. 25. 6. Ibid., p. 26. 7. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Duino Elegies’ and ‘The Sonnets to Orpheus’ (1923/1922), trans. A. Poulin, Jr. (Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2005) pp.
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