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2005

Beckett's Victors: Quests without Qualities

Paul Shields

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

BECKETT’S VICTORS: QUESTS WITHOUT QUALITIES

By
PAUL SHIELDS

A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded:
Spring 2005
The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Paul Shields defended on January 4, 2005.

____________________________________ S. E. Gontarski Professor Directing Dissertation

____________________________________ Mary Karen Dahl Outside Committee Member

____________________________________ Karen Laughlin Committee Member

____________________________________ Fred L. Standley Committee Member

Approved: ____________________________________ Bruce Boehrer, Director of Graduate Studies

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii

For my mother and father— and for my grandmother, Lucille

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Stan Gontarski for his guidance and encouragement during the development of this study and over the course of my graduate career. His insights are evident on every page. I would also like to thank the members of my committee: Karen Laughlin for her support (and for buying coffee in Sydney); Fred L. Standley for his generosity; and Mary Karen Dahl for her willingness to be a part of this project. I must also thank Yu-Mi Yang for introducing me to Deleuze’s work and Chris Ackerley for reading parts of the manuscript. I am greatly indebted to Lori and Ben York, who have always cared about my pursuits and, more importantly, my well-being. Thanks also to Steven, Alan, Karen, and Zachary for their conversation and friendship. I would like to acknowledge Michael Rodriguez for asking good, tough questions; Dustin Anderson for his company; and Curt and Judith Willits, who made sure I didn’t spend Thanksgiving alone. A special thank you to Marsha Gontarski, who provided me with confidence and sustenance. Debra Brock’s door was always open, and I thank her for her words of encouragement along the way. I also wish to thank Trish Lyons and Diane Thompson for their friendship and useful information about ginger, Linda Mashburn for caring about my project, and Olga Connolly, whose own experiences helped get me through mine. Roxane Fletcher was an endless source of amusement and information and always took an interest in my work. John Bailey was an invaluable listener in trying times, and I thank him for his story about long and short letters. Finally, I am blessed to know Geoff and Kim, good people who didn’t want me sleeping in the Banner office. I owe them my life.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT…………………….………………………………………………………..vii PREFACE……………………………………………………………………………….viii INTRODUCTION: LIFE WITHOUT QUALITIES ……………………………………...1 1. PROCEEDING GINGERLY: BECKETT, MELVILLE, DELEUZE, AND THE
MAKING OF AMMMERICANS ………………………………...………...………..23
2. BECKETT’S VICTORS…..………………………………………………………….53 3. WOLFMAN ON THE LAM: DE-OEDIPALIZING BECKETT…………………….70 4. HAMM STAMMERED: BECKETT’S ATMOSPHERIC STUTTERING …………86 5. BECKETT’S EXAGGERATED OEDIPUS ………………………………………..101 CONCLUSION: BECKETT: THE INVENTION OF THE INHUMAN………………118 NOTES………………………………………………………………………………….121 REFERENCES …………………………………………………………………………133 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………………………...141

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ABSTRACT

This study explores the work of Samuel Beckett through the lens of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s materialist philosophy. More specifically, it chases after what the French theorists refer to as the “new man” or the “man without qualities”—a stuttering, staggering creature whose language, movements, gestures, and thought confuse the organizations and institutions of the “molar world.” Such a figure seeks refuge from the confines of capitalism, the oedipalized family, and other cultural systems that attempt to forge respectable citizens out of immanent bodies, molar men out of tramps.
The “new man” appears in Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy, and proceeds to traverse the terrain of his plays, short prose, and late texts. Significantly, Beckett often situates his stuttering figures in equally stuttering environments, revealing his ability to “carve a foreign language out of language” (as Deleuze and Guattari, following Proust, are fond of saying) and cause entire texts to shake the foundations of molarity. Like Kafka, Beckett thus demonstrates his capacity as a “minor” writer—that is, one who subjects not only his characters but his entire oeuvre to a “minor” treatment to oppose the onslaught of majoritarian ideals.

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PREFACE

This project grew out of an essay I wrote several years ago (and delivered at the
2004 Twentieth Century Literature Conference in Louisville, Kentucky) that reads Samuel Beckett’s Endgame in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze’s theories of atmospheric stuttering in his essay “He Stuttered.” As I proceeded with my research, I encountered a number of critics and scholars whose work proved enlightening, influential, and inspirational. I am indebted to the helpful analyses of various Deleuze scholars, including, among others, Claire Colebrook, Philip Goodchild, Brian Massumi, Mark Seem, and Daniel W. Smith, who was kind enough to meet with me and offer words of encouragement during the early phases.
I am also indebted to the work of countless Beckett scholars, particularly those who have preceded me in the investigation of Beckett and Deleuze: Kateryna Arthur, Ronald Bogue, Mary Bryden, Thomas Cousineau, Garin Dowd, Jennifer Jeffers, Timothy S. Murphy, and Anthony Uhlmann, whose Beckett and Poststructuralism offers fascinating insights into Beckett’s texts. H. Porter Abbott’s Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in The Autograph became an increasingly valuable resource, especially in my studies of filiation in Eleuthéria and Company. All of these critics have played a significant role in the (in)formation of this study.
P.S.

vii

INTRODUCTION

LIFE WITHOUT QUALITIES

It would seem, then, that during the dreaming process he identified with his castrated mother and is now struggling to resist this outcome.

—Sigmund Freud, “History of an Infantile Neurosis [‘The Wolfman’]”

Psychoanalysis contains but a single error: it reduces all the adventures of psychosis to a single refrain, the eternal daddy-mommy. . .

—Gilles Deleuze, “Louis Wolfson; or, the Procedure”

Do you see me, in my dreams. . .
—Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier

In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Harold Bloom

unmasks Freud as an imposter, a quack doctor who is finally his own patient. In the chapter entitled “Freud: A Shakespearean Reading,” Bloom maintains that Freudian psychoanalysis develops out of a poetic anxiety, an agon with Shakespeare’s great plays:
I don’t think it is accurate to say that Freud loved Shakespeare as he loved Goethe and Milton. Whether he could even be called ambivalent about Shakespeare seems to me doubtful. Freud did not love the Bible or show any ambivalence toward it, and Shakespeare, much more than the Bible, became Freud’s hidden authority, the father he would not acknowledge. (345-46)
For Bloom, Shakespeare understands Freud as Freud never could, and Freud’s writings are merely a dark shadow of the psychoanalysis—the true psychoanalysis, as Bloom

argues—that runs through the major plays, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello. A

pseudo-diagnostician, Freud suffers from an illness, an anxiety that causes him to misread
1and revise Shakespeare’s sublime art: “Hamlet did not have an Oedipus complex, but Freud certainly had a Hamlet complex, and perhaps psychoanalysis is a Shakespeare complex!” (350). Bloom thus takes all authority away from Freud in building his literary canon, sending the Austrian doctor—along with his book of imitations—to the margins as a belated poet. Shakespeare remains the original psychoanalyst, a writer who understands the western psyche because, as Bloom argues unabashedly in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he invented it: “He extensively informs the language we speak, his principal characters have become our mythology, and he, rather than his involuntary follower Freud, is our psychologist” (17).
In developing their own literary canon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari form a momentary alliance with Bloom in their suspicion of Freud—momentary because their philosophies otherwise have little in common.1 Bloom is elitist, staunchly hierarchical, and obsessed with centers; Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, are pluralist, antihierarchical, obsessed with rhizomes and multiplicities. Bloom identifies points of origin; Deleuze and Guattari sense intensities, follow lines of flight. Without hesitation, Bloom would enroll Deleuze and Guattari and their wholly political views of literature in the “School of Resentment,” an institution of feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, and semioticians whose sole practice is, according to Bloom, the destruction of all earnest literary study. Bloom, in fact, has a particular distaste for Parisian thinkers, and French theory in general.2 Still, their contempt for Freud affords the theorists a common enemy. Like Bloom, Deleuze and Guattari see Freud as a hack psychologist who pretends to possess an understanding of the human psyche but under whose control the “unconscious ceases to be what it is—a factory, a workshop—to become a theater, a scene and its staging” (Anti-Oedipus 55). Yet Deleuze and Guattari do not dismiss Freudian theory as a misreading of Shakespearean psychoanalysis. In their estimation, Freud is not, as Bloom understands him, merely a writer whose texts evidence a secret wish to dethrone Shakespeare and dominate the center of the western canon. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s view of literature is as clinical as it is critical, and they set out to find a cure for the cultural disease of Freudianism, a quiet but certain killer: “Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolution, we don’t know when it started going bad” (Anti-Oedipus 55).

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In quest of an antidote, Deleuze and Guattari turn to great poets, authors whose keen understanding of the human mind and body far exceeds Freudian theory. Unlike Bloom, the French theorists rarely exalt Shakespeare and instead focus their attention on artists who, to echo Salman Rushdie, write back to the center, send missives from the islands of exile—Melville, Jarry, Artaud, and Kafka, among others. While Deleuze and Guattari, contra Bloom, would disavow any attempt to locate a central figure in their canon of great authors, Samuel Beckett would be a strong candidate.
For the French theorists, Beckett represents a sublime frustration of Freudian thought and is, as Daniel W. Smith3 explains, the better “symptomatologist.” Like all great writers, Beckett “can go further in symptomatology than doctors and clinicians” (Smith xvii). To adapt Bloom’s comments about Shakespeare, Beckett, rather than Freud, is our psychologist. His novels, plays, works for television, and cinematic achievement (Deleuze calls Film the “greatest Irish film”4) upset Freud’s vision of humanity and culture, debunking “underlying truths” and oedipal psychodramas: “[N]o great novelist contemporaneous with psychoanalysis has taken much interest in it” (Deleuze “Bartleby” 81). As the Deleuzo-Guattarian project demonstrates time and again, Beckett defies psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic interpretation. Life-affirming, Beckett’s work is a prophecy, a schizophrenic vision of a late evening in the future, in the den of our universe.

No Man is an I-land: How Freud Misses What Any Child Would Notice5

An understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s specific complaints against Freud illuminates why they esteem writers such as Beckett. As numerous critics discuss, Deleuze and Guattari see Freud as a thinker who perpetuates the notion of a suffering subject, an individual who ails from a psychological disease and who may undergo treatment from one greater man and find a cure for his affliction. The affliction stems specifically from familial relations and involves the child’s oedipal yearning for his mother and fear of his father. Deleuze and Guattari refer to Freud’s family romance as the mommy-daddy-me triangle, a structure they see as not only contrived but oppressive. Throughout both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the theorists expose the lies of Freudianism, arguing for a vision of humanity and nature that has nothing to do with genealogies and filiation. As Smith asserts, Anti-Oedipus “offers a now-famous critique

3of psychoanalysis that is primarily symptomatological: psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari contend, fundamentally misunderstands signs and symptoms” (xx). From the opening pages of the book, which Michel Foucault believes “can best be read as an ‘art’” (xii), the French theorists seek to discount Freud’s preoccupation with interiors and disturbed psyches for breeding guilt and shame—in short, for defining healthy and sick ways of being.
One of Freud’s great sins involves his reduction of the unconscious—indeed the human condition—to Sophoclean myth. Deleuze and Guattari explain: “The neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society, and reduces all of them (les rabat toutes) to Oedipus as the ultimate territoriality—as reconstructed in the analyst’s office and projected upon the full body of the psychoanalyst (yes, my boss is my father, and so is the Chief of State, and so are you, Doctor)” (35). But “Why return to myth?” ask Deleuze and Guattari, “Why take it as the model?” (57). The mind is far too elaborate to fit in the amphitheater: “We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack” (61). As Claire Colebrook observes, the problem with Freud’s oedipalization of the individual is that it takes too much for granted:
[T]he drama [Oedipus] has so much power, according to Freud, because it represents a universal human desire. […] But Oedipus is not a drama about ‘the’ human family; it is about a specific king and political power. […] Before there is a personal and private image of ‘man’ or the ‘father’, social machines (through events such as Greek tragedy) invest in images of the king, the despot, the banker, the cop or the fascist. ‘Man’ is produced from social roles. (144-45)
Thus, Mark Seem eloquently explains, “[I]t is into these back rooms, behind the closed doors of the analyst’s office, in the wings of the Oedipal theater, that Deleuze and Guattari weave their way, exclaiming as does Nietzsche that it smells bad there” (xvii). “Schizoanalysis,” which Seem describes as a “healing process” whose “major task is to destroy the oedipalized, neuroticized individual dependencies through the forging of a collective subjectivity, a non-fascist subject” (xxiii), serves as Deleuze and Guattari’s alternative approach to thinking about the unconscious, the human, and culture at large:

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[S]chizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions. Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. And when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent. Causing Oedipus and castration to explode, brutally intervening each time the subject strikes up the song of myth or intones tragic lines, carrying him back to the factory. (Anti-Oedipus 314)
Reincarnated Futurists, Deleuze and Guattari cause more explosions, indeed wage a shock-and-awe campaign on Freud’s Oedipus in A Thousand Plateaus, the second, more extensive indictment of “General Freud.”
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari waste no time in dismissing the primacy of the cogito, turning themselves into two, three: “To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I” (3). For Deleuze and Guattari, no man is an I-land, everyone and everything is always-already part of the ma(ch)in(e). They soon return their attention to Freud and the havoc he wreaks in the lives of his “patients.” Psychoanalysis, they reiterate, is never a cure for “mental illness.” Rather, it is the infection:
Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child psychoanalysis at its purist: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building, then from the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents’ bed, they radicled him to his own body, they fixated him on Professor Freud). (14)
Professor Freud is thus a stumbling block to the health of humanity, a philosopher Deleuze and Guattari identify negatively as “arborescent”—another branch on the tree of “State philosophy.” As Brian Massumi explains, arborescent thinkers are “employees of the State” who help instill the notion of “truth” and justice” in culture and, in turn, every citizen (xii). “The end product,” Massumi continues, “would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’—each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State” (xii). As a State employee, Freud builds

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“tree-like” hierarchies and instills notions of transcendence into philosophy, and Deleuze and Guattari would have done with such a vision: “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. […] Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not rooted or ramified matter. […] Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree” (15).
One of the most scathing attacks on Freud occurs in the second chapter of A
Thousand Plateaus entitled “1914: One or Several Wolves?” The chapter is a reexamination and re-diagnosis of Freud’s infamous Wolf-Man case and reads like a nursery rhyme: “That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, then filling the void with associations” (26). But this is no children’s tale. And the real wolf of the story turns out to be smoking the cigars of an Austrian doctor—the better to treat us with, cheat us with. Deleuze and Guattari rush in to rip the mask from his face, revealing his true nature, his desire to plant trees in the place of grass. Indeed, “No sooner does Freud discover the greatest art of the unconscious, this art of molecular multiplicities, than we find him tirelessly at work bringing back molar unities. […] On the verge of discovering a rhizome, Freud always returns us to mere roots” (27). Deleuze and Guattari venture to undo the damage done to the Wolf-Man, pointing out how the doctor misses what any child would notice—that wolves travel in packs not only in the content of dreams but by nature (28; my italics). Yet Freud’s desire to oedipalize the world, turn the molecularity of culture into Greek drama, leads him to make false assertions about “patients” like the Wolf-Man: “[I]t was already decided from the beginning that animals could serve only to represent coitus between parents” (28). Deleuze and Guattari would have Freud relive his own childhood, learn things about wolves he should have picked up in his developmental years, for as a psychoanalyst he “sees nothing and understands nothing” (27). Like Belshazzar falling, Freud is again found wanting, only a shell, a husk of meaning.
In his Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze (sans Guattari) further explores the dangers and shortcomings of Freud’s tree of thought and, significantly, champions an anti-Freudian literary criticism that nowhere examines great authors or their characters as patients in need of the talking cure. The inaugural essay, “Literature and Life,” expresses

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Deleuze’s belief that great poets, not psychoanalysts, understand the plagues and oppression of the human condition. Such authors have no interest in traumatic events from their personal childhoods: “To write is not to recount one’s memories and travels, one’s loves and griefs, one’s dreams and one’s fantasies. […] We do not write with our neuroses. Neuroses or psychoses are not passages of life, but states into which we fall when the process is interrupted, blocked, or plugged up” (2-3). Psychoanalysis, therefore, is of little help in understanding the schizophrenic imagination of great poets. According to Deleuze, Freudian theory simply fails to make sense of the “delirium” of great literature, for it has nothing to do with “a father-mother affair” (4). As Smith explains in his introduction to Deleuze’s essays,
This point of view is very different from many psychoanalytic interpretations of writers and artists, which tend to see authors, through their work, as possible or real patients, even if they are accorded the benefit of “sublimation.” Artists are treated as clinical cases, as if they were ill, however sublimely, and the critic seeks a sign of neurosis like a secret in their work, its hidden code. (xvii-iii)
Throughout his essays, Deleuze lauds characters who fight back against the systems and hierarchies of molar culture, who challenge parental, pseudo-parental, and societal authorities that would contain and tame subjects. In his essay “Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure,” for example, Deleuze argues that Wolfson sees through the symbols of the mother and father and detects oppressive powers in their language and behaviors: “Wolfson seems to follow in the footsteps of Artaud, who had gone beyond the question of father-mother, and then that of the bomb and the tumor, and wanted to have done with the universe of ‘judgment,’ to discover a new continent” (19). Of all the authors Deleuze (with and without Guattari) discusses, Beckett emerges as one of the most important to his philosophical vision: “More than an art,” Deleuze writes of Beckett’s work, “this is a science that demands long study” (“The Exhausted” 155).

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    ffirs.qrk 1/10/05 12:25 PM Page i Freud A to Z ffirs.qrk 1/10/05 12:25 PM Page ii ffirs.qrk 1/10/05 12:25 PM Page iii Freud A to Z Sharon Heller, Ph.D. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ffirs.qrk 1/10/05 12:25 PM Page iv Copyright © 2005 by Sharon Heller. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials.
  • 9789461664174.Pdf

    9789461664174.Pdf

    A DARK TRACE SIGMUND FREUD ON THE SENSE OF GUILT FIGURES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 8 Editorial Board PHILIPPE VAN HAUTE (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands) TOMAS GEYSKENS (Catholic University Leuven, Belgium) PAUL MOYAERT (Catholic University Leuven, Belgium) MONIQUE DAVID-MÉNARD (Université Paris VII – Diderot, France) VLADIMIR SAFATLE (University of Sao Paolo, Brazil) CHARLES SHEPHERDSON (State University of New York at Albany, USA) A Dark Trace Sigmund Freud on the Sense of Guilt Herman Westerink The translation was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Original title: Het schuldgevoel bij Freud. Een duister spoor. Authorized translation from the Dutch language edition published by Uitgeverij Boom, Amsterdam. © 2005 Dutch language edition by Uitgeverij Boom, Amsterdam (The Netherlands). © 2009/2013 English language edition by Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven / Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium) ePDF published in 2021 by Leuven University Press / Presses Universitaires de Louvain / Universitaire Pers Leuven. Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium). © 2021 Herman Westerink This ePDF is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Non-Derivative 4.0 Licence. Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Attribution should include the following information: Herman Westerink. A Dark Trace: Sigmund Freud on the Sense of Guilt. Leuven: Leuven University Press,
  • Out of Hours Art

    Out of Hours Art

    Out of Hours art were related to Lucian Freud. Geordie Greig Mad, Bad and Sad: definitely worth a visit. The somewhat writes: wOMen and THe Mind dOcTOrS oppressive interior served to overwhelm Freud Museum, London the art a tad. Perhaps this is also symbolic? ‘He was accused of infidelity, cruelty and 10 October 2013–2 February 2014 The weight of history anchoring down and absenteeism as a father, yet in spite of providing the backdrop to modern female sometimes defiantly selfish behaviour some The house is unmistakably Sigmund artistic expressions. Despite this you of this children and girlfriends, and even the Freud’s, although he only occupied couldn’t really argue with Sarah Lucas’s children of his girlfriends, would defend him it for a year. Emigrating to England as forthright Suffolk Bunny (1997–2004) which over what was pretty indefensible behaviour. a result of Germany’s annexation of was placed in Freud’s study. What could we All his life he got away with it. He was so Austria in June 1938, Freud died there infer from this? A joke at Freud’s expense? charged with charm and charisma, few were in 1939. Now a museum, visitors can Women as subjects but now taking over immune to his power of seduction on some see his collection of heavy furniture, rich the house with humorous, unequivocal, level.’ cloths, and archaeological treasures and in-your-face art? The patriarchal gaze totems of many traditions: Greek, Roman, upturned. To further underline the point This book is perhaps too preoccupied with Mesopotamian. He called them his ‘old and we also had Helen Chadwick’s arresting gossip about the amorous part of Freud’s grubby gods’ who aided him in his work.
  • The Vagaries of Psychoanalytic Interpretation

    The Vagaries of Psychoanalytic Interpretation

    The Vagaries of Psychoanalytic Interpretation: An Investigation into the Causes of the Consensus Problem in Psychoanalysis (Authors version of a paper published in Philosophia 42 (3), pp. 779-799.) Kevin Lynch Abstract Though the psychoanalytic method of interpretation is seen by psychoanalysts as a reliable scientific tool for investigating the unconscious mind, its reputation has long been marred by what’s known as the consensus problem: where different analysts fail to reach agreement when they interpret the same phenomena. This has long been thought, by both practitioners and observers of psychoanalysis, to undermine its claims to scientific status. The causes of this problem, however, are dimly understood. In this paper I attempt to illuminate one important cause of the consensus problem by investigating the role which reliance on ‘associative evidence’ has in generating consensus failures. Various options for overcoming the difficulties with this form of clinical evidence are then examined. It is argued that these problems can be mitigated by the notion of overall associative fit, though they are exacerbated by certain loose standards used for what counts as acceptable associative evidence. The possibility of using more rigorous standards is discussed. 1. Introduction Freud’s psychoanalytic method of interpretation (PMI), in contrast to specific Freudian theories, is often hailed as the most significant and enduring of his legacies (e.g., Lothane 1998, p. 62). With the PMI, Freud supposedly gave us something more valuable than a set of doctrines, namely, the means for deciphering a wide variety of puzzling human phenomena to ascertain the ‘hidden meanings’ supposedly encoded in them, including neurotic and hysterical symptoms, dreams, and even cultural products like religions and art-works (all of which may be called ‘neurotic symptoms’ in an extended sense).
  • Freud's Library a Comprehensive Catalogue Compiled and Edited By

    Freud's Library a Comprehensive Catalogue Compiled and Edited By

    1 Freud’s Library A Comprehensive Catalogue Compiled and edited by J. Keith Davies and Gerhard Fichtner London: The Freud Museum Tübingen: edition diskord 2004 2 Contents 0. Note for the User 3 1. Abbreviations 4 2. Bibliography 6 3. Catalogue of Freud’s Library 8 4. Appendices (Samples of markings, underlinings and annotations) 540 4.1 Appendix 1 (Constans, L.: Oedipe, 1881) 541 4.2 Appendix 2 (Herzfeld, M.: Leonardo da Vinci, 1906) 545 4.3 Appendix 3 (Jensen, W.: Gradiva, 1903) 546 4.4 Appendix 4 (Lipps, T.: Komik und Humor, 1898) 549 4.5 Appendix 5 (Müller, J.: Handbuch der Physiologie, 2 v., 1834–40) 551 4.6 Appendix 6 (Philippson, L.: Family Bible, 1839) 553 4.7 Appendix 7 (Schreber, D. P.: Denkwürdigkeiten, 1903) 557 4.8 Appendix 8 (Smith, W. R.: Lectures on the religion, 1907) 564 4.9 Appendix 9 (Solmi, E.: Leonardo da Vinci, 1908) 573 4.10 Appendix 10 (Wittels, F.: Sigmund Freud, 1924) 573 5. Indices 1* 5.1 Index of Names 1* 5.2 Subject Index (english) 77* 5.3 Subject Index (german) 160* 5.4 Index of Publishers 242* 5.5 Index of Titles 268* 5.6 Index of Titles of Freud’s Works 363* 5.7 Index of Dedications 375* 5.8 Index of the Date of Dedications 388* 5.9 Index of Signatures 396* 5.10 Index of the Date of Signatures 399* 5.11 Index of Markings 405* 5.12 Index of Ex libris 406* 5.13 Index of Ownerships of the library’s parts 407* 5.14 Index of the Languages of Publications 418* 5.15 Index of Pictures on CD 429* 3 Note for the User The following catalogue unites those parts of Freud’s original library which were dispersed as a result of his emigration to London 1938.
  • The Patient Speaks: a Phenomenological Exploration of the Patient's Experience of Psychoanalysis

    The Patient Speaks: a Phenomenological Exploration of the Patient's Experience of Psychoanalysis

    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2020 The Patient Speaks: a Phenomenological Exploration of the Patient's Experience of Psychoanalysis Katherine Williams Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Social Work Commons Recommended Citation Williams, Katherine, "The Patient Speaks: a Phenomenological Exploration of the Patient's Experience of Psychoanalysis" (2020). Dissertations. 3832. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3832 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2020 Katherine Williams LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO THE PATIENT SPEAKS: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF THE PATIENT’S EXPERIENCE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN THE CANDIDACY OF THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN SOCIAL WORK BY KATHERINE M. WILLIAMS CHICAGO, IL MAY 2020 Copyright by Katherine M. Williams, 2020 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My graduate education was conducted as a dual student at two institutions simultaneously, at Loyola University Chicago School of Social Work where I was a doctoral student and at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute where I am training to be a psychoanalyst. These years of training have been the most arduous but the also the most vitalizing of my life. My deep desire to train as an analyst while working on a dissertation become a reality on a cold November morning as I sat in David Terman’s M.D.
  • Freud's Idea of Sublimation

    Freud's Idea of Sublimation

    1 Freud’s Idea of Sublimation Introduction In his short glossary of Freudian ideas and concepts Nick Rennison defines sublimation in this way: Sublimation—the unconscious mental process by which in- stinctual, socially unacceptable energy or libido is transferred to a non-instinctual, socially acceptable activity, e.g., Freud be- lieved that the sublimation of unsatisfied libido was behind the creation of great art and literature.1 Rennison describesSAMPLE libido in this way: Libido—in psychoanalytic theory, the sexual drive and energy which is directed towards individuals and objects in the outside world. Neurotic and other psychiatric illnesses are often the re- sult of libido that is inappropriately directed.2 In this chapter we will present Freud’s concept of sublimation, focusing on his presentation of the concept in several of his writings, including 1. Rennison, Freud & Psychoanalysis, 89. 2. Ibid., 87. 3 © 2015 The Lutterworth Press 4 part —The Liberating Effects of Sublimation Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, which he delivered at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909.3 The Concept of Sublimation Freud spoke about sublimation in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho- Analysis, which he presented in two successive winter terms at the Uni- versity of Vienna (1915 and 1916). In the first lecture he commented on the fact that psychoanalysis has been criticized for asserting that instinc- tual impulses that must be described as sexual, in both the wider and narrower sense of the word, play an extremely large role in the causation of neuroses. But, Freud noted, psychoanalysis has emphasized that these same sexual impulses also make contributions “to the highest cultural, artistic and social creations of the human spirit.”4 Freud also notes that the second assertion has been subject to even greater criticism than the first, and suggests that the reason for this is that psychoanalysis holds that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of the instincts.
  • Reassessing Sigmund Freud's Literary Style Through a Comparative Study of the Principles and Fict

    Reassessing Sigmund Freud's Literary Style Through a Comparative Study of the Principles and Fict

    IMPRESSIONS OF AN ANALYST: REASSESSING SIGMUND FREUD’S LITERARY STYLE THROUGH A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE PRINCIPLES AND FICTION OF FORD MADOX FORD, HENRY JAMES, VIRGINIA WOOLF & DOROTHY RICHARDSON by GEMMA BANKS A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY English Department School of English, Drama, American and Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham April 2018 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract The connection between Sigmund Freud and modernism is firmly established and there is an increasing (though still limited) body of scholarship that adopts methods of literary analysis in approaching Freud’s texts. This thesis adds depth and specificity to a broad claim to literariness by arguing that Freud can be considered a practitioner of modern literary impressionism. The claim is substantiated through close textual analysis of key texts from James Strachey’s Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, alongside theory and fiction by significant impressionist authors Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson.