The production of desire : the integration of psychoanalysis into Marxist theory by Lichtman Richard

Author:Lichtman, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939, Marx, Karl, 1818-1883, Marxian school of sociology, Personality -- Social aspects, Psychoanalysis, Psychology -- Philosophy
ISBN: 002919010X
Publisher: New York : Free Press
Published: 1982-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

The Creation of the Child

Freud carries out the task of encouraging Dora’s confession not only through the specific therapeutic interpretations, which we have already noted, but in the general metapsychological account he offeis of the origins of agency. Typically, it is the child who is held responsible: “a child in its greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affections of its parents with brothers and sisters” and discovers that it can receive the whole of their affection by falling ill. Becasue Freud believes in a mechanistic relationship between need and its object, he is incapable o attributing any real agency to the “objects”—individuals—who make up the family system. That is why his early promise to “pay as much attention to the purely human and social circumstances of our patients as to the somatic data” so quickly collapses. The Other, for Freud is the object of an instinct already formed, not the agency through which a very general tendency is given its particular shape and significance. Dora’s mother and father are not seen as contributing to her character and consciousness, but rather as forming the natural terminus of her already predetermined nature. As Schatzman has noted.

Psychoanalysts say their patients (and all people) relate to objects, internal and external. By objects they nearly always mean persons or parts ol persons not things—who are the objects of their patients’ (and other people s) acts or feelings. When psychoanalysts call a person an object, it is a person ol a kind who is not and could not be alive. For instance, the object, in psychoanalytic theory, never acts or experiences; it cannot affect or be affected by anyone, it

cannot see, feel, know, plan, wish, hope, or act. Psychoanalysts use the term to represent a person, but the person it represents is not real . 49

I his passage is overstated but contains a truth that is significantly obscured by psychoanalysis. Freud consistently ignores the contribution ot the child’s parents to its development. This child is represented as “choosing” to act toward them on the basis of its original disposition. The child is naturally greedy for love and naturally attracted toward the parent ol the opposite sex—Dora toward her father, and Dora’s brother toward his mother. I have insisted throughout this work that the child is “chosen by the parents, who determine, as society’s representatives, the meaning of its dispositions, needs, and capacities and, therefore, its nature as a social being. But what I wish to emphasize now is the fact that Freud notes this fact himself, though he is incapable of grasping the meaning of his own observation.

Consider this account of Dora’s attraction toward her father:

The nature ofher disposition had always drawn her towards her father, and his numerous illnesses were bound to have increased her affection for him. In many of these illnesses he would allow no one but her to discharge the lighter duties of nursing. He had been so proud of the early growth of her intelligence that he had made her his confidante while she was still a child .

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