Whose Freud? by Brooks Peter Woloch Alex & Alex Woloch

Author:Brooks, Peter,Woloch, Alex & Alex Woloch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2000-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, S.E., 7: 139n2.

2. Masud Khan, When Spring Comes: Awakenings in Clinical Psychoanalysis (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988); published in the United States as The Long Wait and Other Psychoanalytic Narratives (New York: Summit Books, 1989).

Part Four Psychoanalysis and the Historiography of Modern Culture

Introduction

Near the beginning of his essay Robert Jay Lifton argues: “Without psychoanalysis, we don’t have a psychology worthy of address to history and society or culture. But at the same time, if we employ psychoanalysis in its most pristine state, its most traditional form, we run the risk of eliminating history in the name of studying it.” The eclectic essays in this part all point to both the “worth” and the “risk” of a psychoanalytically inflected historiography. Such an enterprise can move toward one of two extremes. On one hand, “psychohistory” has sometimes devolved into the simplified analysis of historically significant individuals through received Freudian models. As Dominick La-Capra describes this cookie-cutter approach, one “tak[es] the conceptual repertory of psychoanalysis and appl[ies] it to figures or groups in the past, so that you have an analysis of Max Weber in terms of his Oedipus complex.” On the other hand, the psychoanalysis of culture often applies Freudian models derived from individuals to the social body as a whole: analyzing an entire society or culture as though it were one large psyche.

These two approaches both founder on, and thus call attention to, the complex relation between historical change and individuals. Eric L. Santner’s suggestive essay shows how psychoanalysis might productively focus on the relationship between individuals and their sociohistoric roles, or on the psychodynamic processes that govern an individual’s insertion into history. Santner examines this space between individual desire and social role by analyzing Schreber’s psychosis (in Freud’s case history) as it sheds light on the way that individuals take on, or fail to take on, social and historical identities. He begins by highlighting “symbolic investiture,” a process that mediates between psychoanalysis and history: “By symbolic investiture I mean those social acts, often involving a ritualized transferal of a title and mandate, whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status and role within a shared linguistic universe. It’s how one comes into being as, comes to enjoy the predicate of, husband, professor, judge, psychoanalyst, and so on.” Although we often assume such roles unconsciously, the unfortunate Schreber, according to Santner, constantly experiences and reenacts the liminal point where an individual cathects onto a social role: “the rites of investiture become a repetition compulsion that never stabilizes into the status of a second nature.” We might notice that in Santner’s list of roles we find both “professor” and “psychoanalyst.” And, indeed, Schreber here is almost a metaphor for the psychoanalytic historian, who must remain acutely aware of that space between the individual and the social roles that this individual assumes.

Like Santner, Meredith Skura addresses fundamental questions about the project of psychoanalytic history through a case study. Her essay, a meditation

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