Modernist Resistances to Psychoanalysis DISSERTATION Submitted in P
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Enemies of the Unconscious: Modernist Resistances to Psychoanalysis DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Comparative Literature by Tamara Beauchamp Dissertation Committee: Professor Gabriele M. Schwab, Chair Professor Rei Terada Professor Eyal Amiran Professor Dina Al-Kassim 2014 © 2014 Tamara Beauchamp DEDICATION To my mother, Lena Beauchamp And in loving memory of her mother, Juanita Salazar Lema ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS USED IN CITATIONS iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v CURRICULUM VITAE vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION viii INTRODUCTION “Alas We Ever Looked”: Modernism and the Repudiation of Psychoanalysis 1 METHODOLOGICAL NOTE On Transference 40 CHAPTER 1 The Whale and the Polar Bear: Misunderstanding, Resistance, and Psychoanalytic Epistemology 54 CHAPTER 2 “Watch out, he bites!”: Otto Gross and ‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis 89 CHAPTER 3 “Mind it doesn’t bite you”: D.H. Lawrence and Psychoanalytic Interpellation 143 CHAPTER 4 “The full Idiot”: Wyndham Lewis’s Attack on Primitivism and Psychoanalytic Sociogeny 205 CHAPTER 5 “We fight with Brains”: Mina Loy and Freudian Supersession 254 CONCLUSION Oedipal Rot: Post-Structuralist Appropriation of Modernist Obloquy 294 WORKS CITED 317 iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN CITATIONS FA Freud and Abraham, The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham FEJ Freud and Jones, The Compete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones FF Freud and Ferenczi, The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, 3 vols. FJ Freud and Jung, The Freud / Jung Letters FP Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy FU Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious GW Freud, Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch Geordnet, 18 vols. LDHL Lawrence, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, 7 vols. LP Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis LWSF Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. MN Lawrence, Mr Noon PU Lawrence, Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious SE Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. TLLB Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I must first and foremost thank the Department of Comparative Literature, both for its continued support of this project and the tremendous sense of community that it has provided to me during my time at UC Irvine. I also wish to thank the Critical Theory Emphasis, the Graduate Feminist Emphasis, and the Critical Theory Institute for the exposure they have given me to exciting interdisciplinary scholarship at Irvine. The International Center for Writing and Translation under Director Ngugi wa’Thiongo provided me with a generous grant in 2008 to conduct archival research in Vienna and Berlin, work that now undergirds the second chapter of this project. My especial appreciation goes to the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium for awarding me the Hayman Dissertation Fellowship in 2013 and including me, year after year, in their annual meeting at Lake Arrowhead. The discussions and lectures at Arrowhead, along with the sustained engagement of my work by my UCIPC friends like John Cash, Bettina Soestwohner, and Eric Anders, have shaped this dissertation immensely, and I am truly grateful to have been included in that warm circle of scholars and clinicians. The Byron Davis Fellowship and the Howard Babb Memorial Fellowship afforded me time and space to write this dissertation, and I was able to disseminate my work through travel grants from the UCI School of Humanities and the Associated Graduate Student organization. My advisor Gabriele M. Schwab opened the world of psychoanalysis to me, and she has been unwaveringly supportive of my scholarly and professional endeavors. Her work is a vital testament to what creative interdisciplinary theory ought to be, especially as it helps us to understand difficult histories and tenuous futures. I cannot imagine this project without the mentorship of Dina Al-Kassim, who first directed me to look long and hard at these “jerks.” She has pushed me to be a better, more inventive scholar and the impact of her own brilliant scholarship is surely evident in these pages. Rei Terada asks the right questions of my work, even if it takes me a few months to figure out why. She teaches all of us how to see things differently, how to find ourselves changed by that view, and how to dwell in an oft- disappointing world with integrity and care for others. Eyal Amiran made me take the project of becoming a modernist scholar seriously through his canny critiques of this project, and his above-and-beyond professional guidance has been invaluable. In seminars and talks over tea, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak demanded I dig deeply into texts and think past psychoanalytic morphology in analogic terms, and the methodology of this project is highly informed by those conversations. Her mentorship and friendship over the years I worked as her research assistant altered more than just my research, and she remains my definition of what it means to be both a rigorous academic and an ethical human being. There are many other teachers who have mentored me far beyond the classroom, among them Alvin Dufford, Greg Davis, Sharon Friedman, Mark Poster, and Étienne Balibar, and it is my sincere hope to become the kind of compassionate educator to my own students that these individuals were to me. My appreciation goes to Arielle Read, Lynh Tran-Rood, Mary Underwood, and Bindya Balagia for all they do and have done to keep the department running. The final two years of writing this dissertation were made financially possible thanks to my appointment as a Graduate Writing Consultant at the UCI Graduate Resource Center, and I thank Leigh Poirier for her wisdom and camaraderie. I am grateful to my colleagues and students at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense for the education they gave me during my time as a lectrice d’anglais. In particular, v my appreciation goes to Cécile Birks for her all-hours wrangling that made my two years in Paris possible. I was informally welcomed into the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University during a fellowship year I spent in Bloomington, and wish to thank the faculty and graduate students there for their warm encouragement (and lively interruptions) of my writing. My friends Ameeth Vijay, Brien Karas, Brock Cutler, Chris and Danielle Thompson, Collier Nogues, Jason Wilwerscheid, Jeff Clapp, Kim Icreverzi, Matthew Seybold, Maria Bose, Maria Testani, Mark Cunningham, Sam Arkin, Sami Siegelbaum, Sharareh Frousesh, and Vanessa Barcus have humored me through this process and made these some of the happiest years of my life. Marina Starik consulted on many of my French translations and has provided me with inspiration and love in innumerable other ways. Jessica Ostrower has listened to me kvetch for years now, teaching me in the process what it means to conduct a friendship with grace and generosity. Nasser Mufti was my first and best interlocutor throughout graduate school, and continues to be a most incisive reader and source of guidance. I thank the Garceau-Schlemmer clan—Blair, Bernie, Callie, and Jared—for welcoming me into their wonderful family and cheering me on in the past four years. Any successes in my life I owe to my parents, Lena and Tony Beauchamp, who tirelessly support me in every endeavor and have always believed in me as a writer. Finally, this dissertation simply would not exist were it not for my brilliant partner, Ben Garceau, who has lovingly supported me through this process in a way that is truly humbling. My ideas for this project took shape during our long conversations in the Promenade Plantée, Deam Wilderness, and Crystal Cove State Park. There is not a word in these pages that he has not read and re-read, and many of them were made better by his patient and insightful editing. The mistakes remain my own, but any accomplishments in the pages that follow are the product of the encouragement and care of these mentors, family members, and friends. vi CURRICULUM VITAE Tamara Beauchamp 2004 B.A. in Individualized Study, Gallatin School, New York University 2006–9 Instructor and Teaching Assistant, School of Humanities, University of California Irvine 2007 M.A. in Comparative Literature, University of California Irvine 2009–11 Lectrice d’anglais, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense 2012–14 Graduate Writing Consultant, Graduate Resource Center, University of California Irvine 2014 Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with Certificates in the Critical Theory Emphasis and the Graduate Feminist Emphasis, University of California, Irvine FIELDS OF STUDY Anglo-American, Continental European, and global modernisms; critical theory; psychoanalysis as theoretical and clinical practice; feminist and critical race theory; theories of subjectivity. HONORS, AWARDS, AND FELLOWSHIPS 2014 Howard Babb Memorial Fellowship 2013 Hayman Dissertation Fellowship, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA 2013 School of Humanities Conference Travel Grant, UC Irvine 2013 Associated Graduate Students Travel Grant, UC Irvine 2011–2 University of California Regents’ Fellowship, UC Irvine 2009–11 Nanterre Teaching Fellowship 2008 International Center for Writing and Translation Research Grant 2007 Brython Davis Fellowship 2007–13 University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium Conference Fellowships 2005–6 Graduate First Year Fellowship, UC Irvine vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Enemies of