Introduction
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Notes Introduction 1. Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921) is translated into Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psycholog- ical Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII. In the pages that follow, we will refer to that book as Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (abbreviated as Mass psychology, to remain closer to the German title). The history of the French translation of this essay is worth recalling as an illustration of the seman- tic confusion that surrounds the term mass. S. Jankélévitch, the first French translator of the essay, rendered Massenpsychologie into psychologie collective (Psychologie collective et analyse du moi, Payot [1924], 1950). In the two sub- sequent French versions of the essay, Massenpsychologie is turned into psy- chologie des foules (in S. Freud, Essais de psychanalyse, trans. by J. Altounian, A. Bourguignon, O. Bourguignon, P. Cotet and A. Rauzy, Payot, 1981) and into psychologie des masses (Oeuvres complètes, Vol. XVI, 1921–3, ed. by A. Bourguignon, P. Cotet and J. Laplanche, Presses universitaires de France, 1991). The translator’s note of the 1981 publication expounds on the prob- lems that the translation of the words Masse and Massenpsychologie pose in relation to the other terms used by Freud, such as, for example, Gruppe, Menge and kollectiv in the 1921 essay, but also throughout his work. They refer their choice of the word foule to G. Le Bon’s La Psychologie des foules (Alcan, 1895), which Freud discusses at the beginning of his book. It is inter- esting to note that they rule out the rendering of Massenpsychologie into psychologie des masses, because they associate the latter with the French translation of W. Reich’s Massenpsychologie des Faschismus and consequently argue that the ‘word masse [in French] has socio-political connotations which are absent in Freud’ (p. 122). The problem is taken up again in Traduire Freud, the first volume of the Oeuvres complètes, this time, in order to justify the translation of Massenpsychologie into psychologie des masses (pp. 112–13). There, in addition to recalling the socio-political connotations to the term mass, the question arises as one of retranslation or ‘trilinguisme’. Indeed, in Massenpsychologie, Freud refers to the 2nd edition of R. Eisler’s translation of Le Bon’s book, Psychologie der Massen ([1908], 1912), but also to William McDougall, The Group Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1920). The term Masse is thus, according to the editors, ‘from the outset, an hybrid of two erroneous translations’ of foule and ‘group’. The editor of The Stan- dard Edition justifies the use of the term ‘group’ in the title and through- out Freud’s essay, in terms of uniformity. It is also the best English equivalent to the ‘more comprehensive German Masse’, even if, according to the editor, the English equivalent of foule is crowd (see the English trans- lation of Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, London, 1920). 2. ‘Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses’, SE I, p. 160; The Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV, p. 104. 141 142 Notes 3. ‘Project of a Scientific Psychology’ (1950 [1895]), pp. 304, 361. 4. SE XXII, p. 221. 5. See, for example, T. Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and in Context (Stanford University Press, 2000). 6. See ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1937) (SE XXIII, p. 269) 7. As Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe well indicated in ‘La Panique politique’, the implicit theme of which is the mass as a ‘limit- concept of the social’. Cahier Confrontations, 2 (1979), pp. 33–57 [‘La panique politique’ in Retreating the Political, trans. C. Surprenant ed. S. Sparks (Routledge, 1997)] p. 40. 8. ‘Was ist nun eine “Masse”’ (GW, p. 76). 9. See respectively letters to Sandor Ferenzci dated 17 April 1923, and to Romain Rolland dated 4 March 1923 accompanying the sending of the book to the addressee: ‘Not that I consider this work to be particularly suc- cessful, but it shows a way from the analysis of the individual to an under- standing of society’ in The Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. E. Freud, trans. T. and J. Stern (New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1960), p. 342. 10. See S. Samuel Weber’s discussion of the notion of the mass in ‘Mass Medi- auras; or, Art, Aura, and Media in the work of W. Benjamin’ in Walter Benjamin. Theoretical Questions, ed. D. S. Ferris (Stanford University Press, 1996). On the one hand, ‘nothing, Weber writes, could seem more dated than this heavy-handed notion of mass, which reeks of the collectivist dis- courses of the 1930s,’ but on the other hand, ‘the mass entails a dynamic element [in Benjamin’s writing] that demands attention’ (p. 34). 11. See T. W. Adorno’s classical text: ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. Bernstein (Routledge, 1991), pp. 114–35. 12. (Flammarion, 1982). The book is inspired, the author tells us, by J.-L. Nancy and Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe’s arguments in ‘La Panique politique’. 13. See among others, M. Henry, Généalogie de la psychanalyse (Presses univer- sitaires de France, 1985). 14. The Freudian Subject, trans. C. Porter (Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 192. The translator follows the English translation of Freud’s essay and says ‘the group’ where the French says ‘la masse’: ‘la masse serait à l’origine (sans origine) de l’individu’ [Le Sujet freudien (Flammarion, 1982), p. 239]. 15. The Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV, p. 100. 16. Chapter VII of The Interpretation confirms that: ‘We have thus been able to find a place in our structure for the most various and contradictory find- ings of earlier writers, thanks to the novelty of our theory of dreams, which combines them, as it were, into a higher unity’ (p. 592). 17. Consider this statement by Freud to Lou Salomé: ‘I so rarely feel the need for synthesis . what interests me is the separation and breaking up into its component parts of what would otherwise revert to an inchoate mass’ in Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas Salomé – Letters, ed. E. Pfeiffer, trans. W. and E. Robson-Scott (The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanaly- sis, 1963). Or else, the way in which ‘The ego is an organization charac- terized by the urge towards synthesis. This characteristic is lacking in the id; it is, as we might say, “all to pieces”, its different urges pursue their own purposes independently and regardless of another’ (SE XX, p. 196). Notes 143 18. ‘On Dreams’, SE V, p. 648. 19. See W. Granoff, J.-M. Rey, L’Occulte, objet de la pensée freudienne (Press universitaires de France, 1983), p. 149, n. 9. 20. See notably Gaston Bachelard in La Philosophie du non. Essai d’une philoso- phie du nouvel esprit scientifique (Press universitaires de France [1940], 1994), where the concept of mass is the point of reference for the ‘demonstration of the philosophical maturation of scientific thought’ ([my translation] p. 22), or Ernst Mach, The Sciences of Mechanics, a Critical and Historical Account of its Development [Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung historisch-kritish dargestellt] (Open Court [1883], 1960). Walter Benjamin describes the pres- ence of the mass in Baudelaire in a way that might extend beyond the poet’s work: ‘The mass is for Baudelaire so inward that in his texts one will seek its depiction in vain’ [Die Masse ist Baudelaire derart innerlich, daß man ihre Schilderung bei ihm vergebens sucht.]’ ‘Über einige Motive bei Baude- laire’ Gesammelte Schriften 1.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), p. 621 [quoted in S. Weber, op. cit., p. 219, n. 14]. 21. See the Introduction to Max Jammer, Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics (Harvard University Press, 1961). 22. The main points of reference for this line of argument are inspired by Martin Heidegger who states in the Zollikon Seminars: ‘For conscious, human phenomena, [Freud] also postulates an unbroken [chain] of expla- nation, that is, the continuity of causal connections. Since there is no such thing “within consciousness”, he has to invent “the unconscious” in which there must be an unbroken [chain of] causal connections. The postulate is the complete explanation of psychical life whereby explanation [Erklären] and understanding [Verstehen] are identified. This postulate is not derived from the psychical phenomenon themselves but is a postulate of modern natural science. What for Kant transcends [conscious] perception, for instance, the fact that the stone becomes warm because the sun is shining, is for Freud, “the unconscious”’ (Zollikon Seminars. Protocols – Conversations – Letters, ed. M. Boss, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay, Northwestern University Press, 2001, pp. 207–8 [Zollikoner Seminare, Protokolle – Gespräche – Briefe [Klosterman GmbH, 1987]). See J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest [Erkenntnis und Interesse, 1968], trans. J. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) and P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation [De l’Interprétation. Essai sur Freud] (Seuil, 1965)]. A. Grünbaum in The Foun- dations of Psychoanalysis, a Philosophical Critique (University of California Press, 1984) provides an extensive bibliography on the question. See Jonathan Lear’s critical commentary on Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas’s endeavours, which he describes as attempts to develop ‘non-causal hermeneutics accounts’ of human motivation and action in Love and its Place in Nature. A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (Yale University Press [1990], 1998) p. 49, n. 36. 23. Works on that topic are numerous, see P. Mahony who, in Freud as a Writer (New York: International Universities Press Inc., 1982), discusses W.