Analogy, Terminable and Interminable
Jan Mieszkowski
German Department, Reed College
mieszkow@reed.edu
Few twentieth-century discourses have shaped the humanities and social sciences like psychoanalysis. The work of Sigmund Freud
and his inheritors has been a driving force behind countless efforts to rethink the most fundamental questions of subjectivity, history,
and politics. This enduring influence is readily evident in contemporary gender studies, film theory, and media studies--to list only
the most obvious examples. Perhaps even more uniquely, the authority of psychoanalysis has crossed all methodological and
ideological lines, impacting Anglo-American analytic as much as Continental philosophy, empirical anthropological research as well
as semiotics and formalist hermeneutics. Freud himself sets the stage for these developments. Throughout his oeuvre, he routinely
moves between observations about the dynamics organizing a singular psyche and broader reflections on cultural experience,
considering art, literature, and religion as well as the nature of charismatic leaders, mass movements, and the possibilities for world
peace. At the same time, it is in the midst of his strongest assertions of parallels between individual and sociopolitical systems that
Freud betrays the most profound doubts about the explanatory reach of his work. Paradoxically, the status of psychoanalysis as a
"master discourse," its seeming ability to model everything under the sun, may be the product of the profound skepticism it directs
toward its own mastery.
Near the close of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud asks whether his account of "the integration of a separate individual into a
human group" provides a basis for understanding the "creation of a unified group out of many individuals" (21: 140).[1] Given the
"similarity between the means employed and the resultant phenomena," he writes, one can in this instance speak of "the same process
applied to different kinds of objects" (140). In explaining the analogous development of the singular human psyche and civilization in
general, Freud describes a cultural superego that resembles the individual superego in origin and function. Both formations establish
ideal demands that lead to the creation of a conscience, and at times, they appear almost completely interdependent, as if one could
not exist without the other. If the two differ, Freud suggests, it is only in that the injunctions of the cultural superego tend to be more
legible than those of individual ones, whose commands largely remain unconscious and can thus be difficult to discern. In other
words, even if one's primary goal is to study the singular psyche rather than its social counterpart, focusing on the latter may still be
the best means of understanding the former.
On the basis of these remarks, it would be a gross understatement to say that the development of the singular psyche is "mirrored by"
or "reflected in" a larger communal field. Taking their cue from Freud's characterization of these substantive parallels between
individual psychological processes and social ones, several generations of cultural critics have felt licensed, if not required, to pass
judgment on the mental welfare of entire societies. As Freud canonically formulates it:
If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same
methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some
epochs of civilization--possibly the whole of mankind--have become "neurotic"? (21: 144)
The elaboration of "a pathology of cultural communities," as Freud also terms it, has become a sine qua non of much contemporary
research, even in disciplines in which the word "psychoanalysis" is rarely uttered.
From anthropologists to art historians, from poetry critics to urban economists, scholars routinely pursue a host of different
diagnoses of the psycho-logics of mass formations, implicitly and explicitly analogizing individual dynamics with groups ranging
from reading or consuming publics to the populations of nations or continents.
Given the authority that Freud's views on this topic have acquired, it is important to consider whether his claim that "the development
of civilization" is "comparable to the normal maturation of the individual" is entirely compatible with his other views about social
experience (21: 97-98). As is well known, a central concept in his later work--and a topic of considerable controversy for many of his
inheritors--is the death drive. Freud maintains that both the singular psyche and civilization are structured by the same irresolvable
clash between Eros and a Todestrieb, between a Lebenstrieb and a Destruktionstrieb. In fact, near the end of Civilization and its
Discontents it is Freud's confrontation with the all-permeating influence of this collision of forces that first prompts him to detail the
analogy between the development of the individual and the development of culture.[2] Yet these reflections on the parallels between
individual and cultural superegos take place in a book whose overarching theme--a theme that predominates in Freud's later
thought--is that "aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man" and "constitutes the greatest impediment
to civilization" (122). In The Future of an Illusion, written two years before Civilization and its Discontents, Freud declares that "every
individual is virtually an enemy of civilization, though civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human interest," adding
that "civilization has to be defended against the individual" and that "in consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human
beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration" (21: 6/112). In other words, the development of the individual
and the development of culture, two dynamics that proceed according to the same methods and produce remarkably similar results,
are nonetheless essentially at odds with one another. Crucially, the divisive tension common to both processes, the clash of Eros and
the death drive, does not explain this mutual antagonism; i.e., it is not a question of a discord internal to the individual reproducing
itself as a conflict between self and other(s):
But this struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the contradiction--probably an irreconcilable
one--between the primal instincts of Eros and death. It is a dispute within the economics of the libido, comparable to the contest
concerning the distribution of libido between ego and objects. (21: 141)
Not only does Freud avoid claiming that it is the developmental similarities between the individual and its society that inexorably
bring them into conflict with one another, but he also goes to some lengths to complement the parallels he has identified between
these processes with a list of their differences, ultimately concluding that the overarching aim of culture is "one great unity, the unity
of mankind," a goal to which no individual psyche even vaguely aspires (122).[3] For its part, the individual tirelessly seeks its own
happiness, as a consequence of which "the development process of the individual can thus be expected to have special features of its
own which are not reproduced in the process of human civilization" (140).[4] The remarkable similarities between the methods and
results of individual and social development notwithstanding, it is no longer clear that communal phenomena can be understood as
"extensions" or "reflections" of the individual or that one can look to a cultural superego as a way of learning something about an
individual one.[5] More bluntly, it may be that despite what Freud himself argues in earlier works such as Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego, the libidinal model of an individual psyche cannot account for social dynamics.[6] As useful as Freud's
discussions of conscience, the Oedipus complex, or the relationship between sadomasochism and narcissism may be for
understanding political logics, Freud is far more skeptical about the reliability of such "applied" analyses than many of his followers.
In fact, it could be argued that from the moment he introduces the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud's discussions of
the relations between individual and cultural processes of development are characterized by this dual--at times almost graphically
divergent--emphasis on their striking parallels and their profound mutual antagonisms. The resulting aporias are well known and
account for the pessimistic reputation of Freud's later writings: the regulation of aggression becomes virtually indistinguishable from
the causes of aggression; the self-destructiveness of civilization stems from the way in which it gives either too much or too little
expression to libidinal forces; and, most generally, the dynamics within culture that threaten to tear it apart are also the source of its
most celebrated achievements. It therefore comes as no surprise that in Civilization and its Discontents Freud asks for forgiveness for
wasting everyone's time by writing down what is simply common knowledge and yet simultaneously declines to offer an opinion on
the inherent worth of culture and denies having any real insight into the problems he is exploring, as if this "common knowledge"
were uncommonly obscure, even to him.
The presence of these stark tensions in Freud's later work does not necessarily mean that any "pathology of cultural communities" is
destined to fail, but if the processes of civilization and the dynamics internal to individuals are both identical to and antithetical to
one another, it is clear that psycho-cultural research cannot proceed along the straightforward lines that Freud himself seems both to
propose and to undertake. In fact, it may be that psychoanalysis has been a tremendous resource for cultural criticism because in
Freud the theory of an analogy between the individual and the social is always also a critique of the authority of analogy as such. In
first introducing the parallels between the development of the singular psyche and the development of civilization, Freud explicitly
acknowledges that it is difficult to know what inferences can and cannot be drawn from such an alignment of systems, stressing that
one may easily take the comparison too far and find that the resulting conclusions are not coherent in the original terms of the
demonstration. If, for example, treating the development of culture like the development of an individual allows us to attribute
psychological maladies to an entire people or epoch, we immediately see that unlike with a neurotic patient, who can be contrasted
with a "normal," non-neurotic man or woman, there is no overarching baseline of comparison that would make it possible to deem
one culture "sick" and one "healthy." Of course, this objection is far from damning. Freud casually acknowledges a solution--making
comparisons across multiple cultures--which he does himself when he notes that he is working hard to avoid "the temptation of
entering upon a critique of American civilization" (21: 116). In addressing the formal structure of analogy in abstract terms, however,
Freud underscores the inherent instability of the schema. The issue is not simply that any analogy posits an implicit difference
between the terms it aligns, e.g., that an analogy between the individual and the cultural is tantamount to a statement about their
differences. More importantly, by according authority to a tertium comparationis, one introduces new distinctions that may not be so
easily controlled. It is this question of how best to manage the conceptual implications of his comparisons that Freud, having just
articulated his crucial analogy, immediately tries to resolve:
The process of the civilization of the human species is, of course, an abstraction of a higher order than is the development of the
individual and it is therefore harder to apprehend in concrete terms, nor should we pursue analogies to an obsessional extreme [die
Aufspürung von Analogien soll nicht zwanghaft übertrieben werden]. (140)
Having established foundational connections between the development of the individual and the development of human culture as a
whole--indeed, having gone so far as to say that the latter process clarifies dimensions of the former that may otherwise remain
invisible--Freud notably does not try to explain why this argument might be at odds with the general theme of his book, the
antagonism between the individual and society, and instead pauses to warn that such an "analogy" may get out of hand. Far from
being led astray by what we are (or are not) learning about the relationship between the individual and its culture, it is the
seductiveness of analogical demonstration itself that arouses our obsessive impulses. If we are not careful, the analogy will take on a
life of its own, compromising its reliability by saying too much. To be clear, the seductiveness of analogy in general is not grounds for
worrying that any particular analogy is fallacious. To the contrary, the analogy in question here gains its potentially misleading
momentum from the fact that the parallels it highlights are "true."
Naturally, we are not dealing with just any analogy. On the basis of it, one can draw (or reject) countless conclusions about the
parallels between social reality and the workings of singular minds. For this very reason, however, this analogy indicates why such
correspondences are simultaneously vital, dangerous, and, most crucially, unavoidable. At the beginning of this essay, we noted that
over the last century psychoanalysis has shown itself to have seemingly boundless explanatory powers that cross virtually all
methodological and ideological borders. The irony is that for Freud doubts about the argumentative scope of psychoanalysis arise not
because its models are somehow limited, but rather because they are never limited enough. In this particular instance, it turns out that
once the authority of analogy is given full reign, it acquires a paradigmatic status that may undermine the articulation of the very
distinctions it is intended to clarify:
I would not say that an attempt . . . to carry psychoanalysis over to the cultural community was absurd or doomed to be fruitless.
But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we are dealing only with analogies and that it is dangerous, not
only with people but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been involved. (21: 144)
Formulated in blunter terms than anything we have to this point considered, the suggestion that using psychoanalysis as a basis for
broader cultural reflections rests on what is ultimately "only an analogy" threatens to undermine much of the scholarship that has
been done in Freud's name over the last century. At the same time, Freud's concern about the standard of comparison on the basis of
which one culture could be termed "neurotic" and one "healthy" applies equally well here: By what standard is an analogy "only" an
analogy? Is not psychoanalysis, of all fields, a discourse in which the ideational or intelligible content of a comparison is no more or
less "real" than some physical or material phenomenon or register? What external reference point or third term allows for a clear
differentiation between an analogical and a non-analogical assertion of identity between two concepts, entities, or processes? In this
regard, it is important to observe that precisely what Freud has not been doing with the individual and the collective in Civilization and
its Discontents is "tearing them from the sphere in which they have originated." Indeed, his entire discussion aims to explore the
parameters of their respective emergences. Moreover, by implicitly analogizing people with concepts in the very gesture of trying to
qualify the demonstrative authority of analogy ("it is dangerous, not only with people but also with concepts") Freud reveals just how
obsessive our reliance on analogy actually is. Not only is his rejection of analogy indirectly made through an analogy, but it is through
an analogy that repeats the error he wants to avoid. By aligning human beings and concepts, Freud, far from grounding his discussion
in concrete terms, moves it to "an abstraction of a higher order," for if the development of the individual and the development of
civilization can be likened to one another on the basis of a host of similarities in their methods and results, Freud has done nothing to
show that there is any justification for paralleling people and concepts along similar lines. Having just given us good reason to be
concerned about the complications introduced by the fact that any analogy in effect becomes an analogy of analogy, it is Freud who
seems to be the one on the verge of tearing his arguments from the sphere in which they have originated.
All of this suggests that the questions of logic and rhetoric raised in Freud's treatment of analogy play an essential role in his
conceptualization of cultural systems. At the start of his discussion of the relationship between the development of the individual and
the development of civilization, Freud acknowledges that since these dynamics and "organic life in general" all appear to be
characterized by the struggle between Eros and the death drive, "we cannot . . . avoid going into the relations of these three processes
to one another" (21: 139). If the set of comparisons and contrasts that ensues is "imperative and unavoidable" ("unabweisbar"), that is,
if the resulting demonstration is reliably inevitable, it is nonetheless inevitably unreliable, as well. We cannot help but undertake the
analysis, yet we do so with the knowledge that we will fall prey to the seductions of analogy. To put this more prosaically, if Freud
challenges us to pursue the insights garnered by the unavoidable recognition of the similarities between the development of the
individual and the development of culture, we must at the same time problematize the integrity of the analogies thereby produced.
The argument succeeds by generating results that it has to question rather than embrace. If psychoanalysis is a powerful paradigm of
interdisciplinary research or of social experience in general, this is because it articulates a forceful critique of the claims of its own
models to be exhaustive. Psychoanalysis is one discourse that will never unambiguously present itself as a master discourse, even at
the points at which its doctrines acquire their most universal pretensions. In what respects, then, does the illustrative power of
Freud's analogy between the individual and culture run its course? Is our obsession with it terminable or interminable? In Civilization
and its Discontents, Freud offers no definitive way to decide whether it is possible to "work through" the obsessive impulses analogy
excites. If anything, he suggests that the effort to fight against such impulses may actually intensify them.
These difficulties are by no means unique to Civilization and its Discontents. Whenever Freud wants to coordinate the singular psyche
and communal dynamics, he introduces a representational schema as a supplemental element; but in each instance, the figure in
question, far from remaining marginal or secondary, generalizes to become the central semantic paradigm. The question of how
insights into individual psychological processes can or should guide the study of history, aesthetics, or politics is thereby
subordinated to concerns about the relationship between thought and language; e.g., the task at hand is suddenly to articulate a
concept of analogy that can be distinguished from an analogy of analogy.
The discussion of dream symbolism in The Interpretation of Dreams and the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis is a case in
point. In the first version of the Traumdeutung, Freud argues that the individual dreamer's own associations are the core of any
systematic interpretation of a dream. Emphasizing the singularity of each oneiric expression, he writes that he is "prepared to find that
the same piece of content may conceal a different meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts" (4: 105). However,
with the new material added to the book between 1914 and 1923, the discussion of the dream-work is greatly expanded, and Freud
appends example after example of codified dream symbols (kings are the dreamer's father, rooms represent women, children stand in
for the genitals, and so on).[7] As fixed relations between manifest and latent contents that have not been forged by a singular
dreaming psyche, these symbols are entirely resistant to interrogation through the dreamer's associations. Nicholas Rand and Maria
Torok identify this tension as a fundamental impasse in Freud's thought, something that calls for outright repair.[8] Yet it would be
equally accurate to say that it is in dwelling on the forces that organize this "impasse" that psychoanalysis becomes a discourse about
the individual and the collective. From his first remarks on the topic, Freud makes it clear that symbols are not products of dreams or
in any way unique to them. To the contrary, symbols are part of a broader cultural milieu, a means of expression that can be found in
idioms, myths, and folklore. When symbols appear in a dream, they are highly expressive, but they are not the individual's
expressions--to use them is akin to speaking a language one does not actually know. Initially, Freud argues that the presence of
symbols in dreams is a contingency, that is, symbols are indirect representations that just happen to be available for the dream-work
to take advantage of as a tool for censorship. As a consequence, Freud is adamant that the interpretation of dream symbols is to be
regarded as a supplement to the main analytic focus on the patient's own associations with the manifest dream text: "Interpretation
based on a knowledge of symbols is not a technique which can replace or compete with the associative one. It forms a supplement to
the latter" (15: 151). As with the obsession-inducing analogy, however, this hierarchy proves to be anything but stable. Having made
the point that symbolism is only one of the techniques of indirect representation relied on by the dream-work for censorship, Freud
almost immediately grants it the more substantial status of "a second and independent factor in the distortion of dreams, alongside of
the dream-censorship" (168). The difficulties involved in keeping the "supplement" in its place become even more obvious as Freud
tries to clarify the boundaries between dream symbolism and the other three types of relations between manifest and latent dream
content: part for whole, allusion (Anspielung), and plastic portrayal (Verbildlichung). "The essence of this symbolic relation," Freud
writes, "is that it is a comparison (Vergleich), but not a comparison of any sort. Special limitations seem to be attached to the
comparison, but it is hard to say what they are" (152). If some symbolic comparisons are so obvious as scarcely to qualify as indirect
representations (and hence as instances of censorship), others are so obscure that the tertium comparationis remains forever
unknowable. In the latter case, the symbol links two contents, but there is no way to explain why, as if on a semantic level the
alignment were completely unmotivated. To make matters even messier, Freud says that there is no guarantee that any given element
in the manifest content of a specific dream is functioning in its symbolic capacity, i.e., sometimes a room or a child is just a room or
a child. Given the vexing character of symbolic relations--at once obvious and obscure, restricted and unrestricted, direct and
indirect--"we must admit . . . that the concept of a symbol cannot at present be sharply delimited: it shades off into such notions as
those of a substitution (Ersetzung) or representation (Darstellung), and even approaches that of an allusion (Anspielung)" (152).
Introduced as a particular type of indirect relationship between two contents, the symbol potentially comes to infect all
representations, whether by reducing them to purely contingent codifications (linked mechanically, with no substantive connections
between the elements), dissolving them into fields of imprecise allusions, or transforming them into indifferent sequences in which
any term can be a substitute for any other. In submitting all semantic relations to the tyranny of its "special" comparison, the symbol
negates the conceptual specificity of comparison itself and threatens to undermine the very idea of the dream-work as a forging of
relations between manifest and latent contents.
In confronting this nexus of problems, Freud argues that anthropologists and linguists probably understand the topic better than he
and that it is in trying to account for this special form of comparison that psychoanalysis discovers its essential connections with and
dependence on discourses such as philology, sociology, and religious studies. Once again, the bond between the individual psyche
and the cultural is articulated through an analysis that is as much poetics as it is psychology. When Freud writes that symbols are part
of the unconscious "Vorstellen des Volkes" ("ideation/imagination of the people"), we see more clearly why his repeated additions to
the symbolism section of The Interpretation of Dreams constitute an intervention into the debates about individual and social
formations and a "collective unconscious" that raged in the teens between Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, and Carl Jung (Schriften II/III:
356). By 1915, Freud was subjecting his concept of the unconscious to a series of tests that would ultimately produce the second
topography and the figure of the cultural superego. To the extent that Freud accords the symbol an unusual status as unconscious
knowledge (Kenntnisse) rather than unconscious impulses (Strebungen), we should regard his analysis of its complexities as a key
moment in his efforts to recoordinate onto-and phylogenetic accounts of the human psyche. Whatever our conclusions about these
more general points, Freud's consideration of symbolism shows how each of his attempts to describe the relations between individual
and cultural dynamics turns, or founders, on the way in which an ostensibly restricted figure--such as the symbol or analogy--comes
to infect, if not to control, the representational schemas that ostensibly delimit it.[9]
Our discussion suggests that the abiding challenge for psychoanalytically guided criticism is to embrace both Freud's optimism about
the explanatory potential of his research for all areas of human experience and his tacit (pessimistic) acknowledgement that any
theoretical articulation of the individual with the social seems fated to occur on the basis of a representational dynamic that is far
from stable. This special issue of Postmodern Culture was originally conceived as an opportunity to reflect on these issues by looking
at the changing aesthetic and political significance of psychoanalytic thought over the last several decades. On the one hand, the
basic parameters of such a review seem clear. Any discussion of psychoanalysis and politics today almost necessarily takes as its
central reference point French thought of the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era in which the relations between Freudian and Marxist
doctrines were explored with unprecedented vigor. Indeed, it is doubtful that the enthusiasm for Freudo-Marxism has ever
subsequently waned. From Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida to Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek, efforts to come to
terms with the political implications of psychoanalytic arguments have repeatedly been linked to philosophical reconsiderations of
Idealism and its most prominent nineteenth-century critic, Karl Marx. On the other hand, it is easy to muddy this picture. No thinker
has had more influence on contemporary debates about gender and politics than Michel Foucault, and his singular impact has
arguably had a great deal to do with the extent to which he cannot be situated in a psychoanalytic camp. More specifically, one could
ask whether Foucault's ideas about bio-power and their reinterpretation in the work of Giorgio Agamben or Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri mark the petering out of the Freudo-Marxist rage of the 1960s and 1970s, rather than its continuation. When it comes to the
Frankfurt School, it is similarly uncertain just how crucial some conjunction of Freud and Marx is for confronting basic questions
about liberalism and capitalism. Although both Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin are known for their cryptic--in Adorno's case
highly ironic--engagements with Freudian doctrines, it is far from clear how much this facet of their work influences their readings of
Marx, their understandings of culture, or their theories of fascism. Finally, much could be said about the way in which historicist
paradigms have gradually displaced the influence of psychoanalytic models, particularly when it comes to studies of ethnicity and
globalization.
The essays in this issue take as their starting point these and related uncertainties about the coherence of any Freudo-Marxist
synthesis. In "In Theory, Politics Does Not Exist," Brett Levinson begins by revisiting one of this field's founding dilemmas: why
should the masses desire fascism rather than socialism? Starting with George Bataille's claim that without the help of psychoanalysis
no Marxist project can explain why modern capitalist democracies should witness the emergence of right-wing populist movements
rather than left-wing ones, Levinson focuses on Lacan's Seventeenth Seminar and his notorious challenge to the Parisian students in
the aftermath of May of 1968: "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one." For Lacan, argues Levinson,
freedom from mastery and master signifiers occurs not by rioting in the streets, but through the jouissance and knowledge made
possible by the analysis of language and the reading and overwriting of the language of the other that occurs in the transference. What
is ironic, concludes Levinson, is that Slavoj Zizek, the most prominent self-proclaimed Lacanian of our day, has missed this lesson
entirely. Turning to Zizek's recent debate with Ernesto Laclau about populism as a paradigm for the political as such, Levinson shows
that both writers end up claiming that political praxis is based on the avoidance of the knowledge and joy central to Lacan's thinking.
In the end, neither one of these two theorists can understand his own work--theory--as political.
This focus on Lacan and his reaction to the events of 1968 brings us face to face with one of the central concerns of late
twentieth-century French thought: must social movements be understood in terms of dynamics of desire and energy that escape
traditional categories of subjectivity and unsettle any clear opposition between the ideal and the material, or the body and language?
In "The Desire Called Mao," Eleanor Kaufman asks whether the synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism celebrated in the "libidinal
economy theory" of Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard is resurrected in the work of a thinker who at
first--and even second--glance could not appear to be more different: Alain Badiou. One of Kaufman's key insights is that the
interest of libidinal theorists in energistic flux is complemented by a concern with inertia, a vestige of Freud's death drive
encapsulated by notions such as the "zero point" of desire and the immobilization of the body. If Badiou shares neither the methods,
assumptions, nor goals of these philosophers, he nonetheless addresses this question of stasis and its significance for his
conceptualization of the event when he breaks with Marxist ideas of periodization and change and directs a great deal of skepticism
toward the structuring authority of temporality itself. The consequence, Kaufman shows, is that these very different thinkers all
confront an a-material materialism that contemporary discussions of trauma, memory, and the haunting of the past have failed to
understand.
These two articles suggest that any consideration of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism must take as a central task
a rethinking of the concepts of time and history. This is true both for Badiou's concern with the waiting involved in the inevitably
belated recognition of the event and for Lacan's interest in the temporality of affect as a time "on the other side" that is forever on the
brink of arriving.[10] It has been argued that Marx never subjects time to the critique he directs at the other bedrocks of bourgeois
thought. But is psychoanalysis also guilty of under-theorizing time? In "The Mystery of Sex and the Mystery of Time," Alan Bass
explores this problem, starting with the deceptively simple question of why sexuality is a theoretical issue. Working from Laplanche's
effort to link the Freudian unconscious with Heidegger, Bass asks what it would mean to coordinate psychoanalytic models of
sexuality with a theory of ekstasis. He focuses on the idea of "eruptive time," the moment at which the tension defining sexual need
opens up a relation to the other that cannot be grasped by a traditional subject-object opposition. The crucial thing to recognize, Bass
suggests, is that this unsettling of self-enclosed identity by an unconscious memory of non-presence is a profound source of
violence against the other. As an expression of anxiety about the other's unconscious, eruptive time must therefore be central to any
explanation of the relationship between the intrapsychic and the cultural. In "Endopsychic Allegories," Laurence Rickels approaches
the conceptualization of social relations in psychoanalysis from a somewhat different perspective, focusing on "endopsychic
perception," which Freud describes in a famous letter to Fliess: "The dim inner perception of one's own psychic apparatus stimulates
thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside and, characteristically, into the future and the beyond. Immortality,
retribution, the entire beyond are all reflections of our psychic inside" (Complete Letters 286). In an intertextual study of Daniel
Schreber's Memoirs, Freud's case study of Schreber, and Benjamin's Trauerspiel book, Rickels considers this endopsychic perception
as "the inside view (afforded through certain psychotic delusions) of the psyche at the intersection between technology and the
unconscious." Highlighting the parallels between the sadism of the allegorist and the paranoid, Rickels reads Philip K. Dick's
quasi-autobiographical final novels and his earlier Time Out of Joint as meditations on the Freudo-Benjaminian understandings of
un-mourning and melancholy and the relationship between psychic reality and loss.
As a discourse at once enthralled by and profoundly at odds with its own explanatory powers, Freudian thought remains one of the
best examples of what a genuinely critical project can be. Together, the essays in this volume offer a complex picture of what is
involved in articulating a psychoanalytic theory of society or culture. In one respect, their lesson appears to be that some of the basic
categories of political philosophy have to be rethought from the perspective of dynamics of repetition and mourning or stasis and
ekstasis, that is, with schemas that bear little resemblance to the traditional paradigms of development, regression, or revolution. At
the same time, there is a sense that the progressive potential of this kind of research is not predicated on a complete rejection of
Enlightenment presuppositions about the value of knowledge and the hierarchies that inevitably obtain between intellectual and
material labor. Whatever the ultimate point of emphasis, it is clear that psychoanalysis continues to be central to the way in which the
historicity of theory is being explored.
Jan Mieszkowski
German Department, Reed College
mieszkow@reed.edu
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Notes
1. Throughout Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, James Strachey translates Kultur as "civilization." The canonical status of the Standard
Edition speaks against any "correction" on this score, and there is no reason to think that Freud would have complained. At the
beginning of The Future of an Illusion--a crucial forerunner to Civilization and its Discontents--he writes: "I scorn to distinguish
between culture [Kultur] and civilization [Zivilisation]" (21: 6). In his exchange with Albert Einstein ("Why War?") and in his New
Introductory Lectures, Freud makes similar references to the interchangeability of the terms Kultur and Zivilisation in his thought (22:
214/179).
2. Freud actually goes further to argue that this clash between Eros and the Todestrieb is essential for understanding not only the
emergence of the individual and the cultural, but the nature of organic life as such:
Some readers of this work may further have an impression that they have heard the formula of the struggle between Eros and the
death drive too often. It was alleged to characterize the process of civilization which mankind undergoes but it was also brought into
connection with the development of the individual, and, in addition, it was said to have revealed the secret of organic life in general.
(21: 139)
In the final analysis, for Freud the meaning (Sinn) of civilization is nothing more or less than its exhibition of this clash in the human
species:
And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present (zeigen) the struggle
between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This
struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for
life of the human species. (122)
3. Freud insists on this point while disclaiming any knowledge of why it is the case: "Civilization is a process in the service of Eros,
whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity,
the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this" (21: 122).
4. Freud elaborates:
But in the process of civilization things are different. Here by far the most important thing is the aim of creating a unity out of the
individual human beings. It is true that the aim of happiness is still there, but it is pushed into the background. It almost seems as if
the creation of a great human community would be most successful if no attention had to be paid to the happiness of the individual.
(21: 140)
5. On the tensions organizing the closing sections of Civilization and its Discontents, see Bersani, esp. 12-25.
6. On this point, see Ricoeur 303-09.
7. In The Language of Psycho-Analysis, Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis go out of their way to note that the history of additions to The
Interpretation of Dreams can be misleading and that Freud "recognized the existence of symbols from the first" (444). They also add,
however, that "the fact remains that it was only gradually that Freud came to accord increased significance to symbols" (444). The
discussion of dream symbols in the Traumdeutung is complemented by a lengthier and in many respects more systematic elaboration
of the topic in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
8. See their Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis.
9. These problems were not lost on the generation of analysts who immediately followed Freud. In this regard, the interventions of
Ferenczi are particularly instructive. In an effort to reassert a clear taxonomy of representational figures--precisely the clarity that
Freud's discussion of symbolism and manifest-latent relations undoes--Ferenczi claims that what distinguishes symbols from
allegories or metaphors is that one element of a symbolic relation is repressed into the unconscious; i.e., the indirection of the
symbol is to be explained by something peculiar to the mind rather than to language. With this move, Ferenczi seeks to reverse the
priority Freud confers on symbolism as a discourse that precedes any particular psychological set-up in which it is manifest; i.e.,
Freud's response to the confusions introduced by dream symbols is to designate them the traces of a now-dead Ursprache, whereas
Ferenczi's gesture is designed to defend the dream-work against the threat of being subsumed by a linguistic dynamic.
10. If Derrida's Specters of Marx remains the best-known recent discussion of this problem, the relationship (or lack thereof) between
temporal and historical dynamics is a preoccupation of Paul de Man throughout his career.
Works Cited
Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
Ferenczi, Sándor. Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Ernest Jones. Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1916.
Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904. Trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.
Freud, Sigmund. Gesammelte Werke. London: Imago, 1942.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London:
Hogarth, 1953.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.
Laplanche, J., and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
Rand, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
Ricoeur, Paul. Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970.