An Appetite for Poetry by Frank Kermode

Author:Frank Kermode
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Freud and Interpretation

Those who honored a complete outsider like me with an invitation to give the Ernest Jones Lecture must have been well aware that the last thing I had to offer was instruction in psychoanalysis. In what follows I shall discuss several intellectual disciplines, psychoanalysis being one of them—a sort of wide-angle view in which neither psychoanalysis nor anything else can hope to be displayed to the satisfaction of the expert. The only justification for doing this is that to see one’s subject in relation to some of its neighbors may, in spite of distortions in the presentation, provide a view of it that is useful only in so far as it is slightly unfamiliar.

In its origins psychoanalysis depended upon certain assumptions, not inherent in it, about the past. Having the support of the powerful natural sciences, nineteenth-century geology and biology, these assumptions were not even recognized as such; and so they were, for a time, inescapable. They controlled many other kinds of inquiry, for example, linguistics, biblical criticism, history generally and art history in particular. But well within the lifetime of Freud these assumptions came into question. Others began to replace them. There were new notions as to what constituted valid interpretation. The criteria appropriate to natural science no longer seemed so obviously and unproblematically appropriate to the human sciences. In particular, the relations between past and present became vexatious. Once upon a time it seemed obvious that you could best understand how things are by asking how they got to be that way. Now attention was directed to how things are in all their immediate complexity. There was a switch, to use the linguist’s expressions, from the diachronic to the synchronic view. Diachrony, roughly speaking, studies things in their coming to be as they are; synchrony concerns itself with things as they are and ignores the question how they got that way.

More about that later. Crudely, then, my subject is this switch of attention from explanations assuming a very long and rather simple past to explanations focused rather intensely on the here and now, with the past either ignored or given a new and difficult role as a sort of hinterland, in which fact and fiction are not readily distinguished, and perhaps do not need to be. This raises the further question, on which I shall, like Milton’s Satan, gloze but superficially, of the relation between historical fact and fiction in historical constructions, a matter to which Freud gave some attention. Like him, we still have a troublesome remnant of a conscience in such matters, though it is a very long time since St. Augustine remarked that “not everything we make up is a lie”; a fiction may be figura veritatis, a figure of the truth. Perhaps, in the end, we shall find some comfort in that observation.

A lot has been written lately about “the archaeology of knowledge”—about period systems of discourse which put invisible constraints on the kind of thing that can be said at any particular time.

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