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Thursday, June 02, 2005
Same Senseless Ramblings, Slightly Bigger Stage, or Intellectual Investments in Jolly Corners
First, I’d like to thank John for the invite. I’m still 100% committed to writing all my usual nonsense at my place, but now I have a venue for some of my more serious prattle, like…
In “Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History” (later published as Fixed Ideas) Joan Didion represents the Bush Administration’s justification for what future generations will call the Giant Mess O’Potamia as follows:
“I made up my mind,” [Bush] had said in April, “that Saddam needs to go.” This was one of many curious, almost petulant statements offered in lieu of actually presenting a case. I’ve made up my mind, I’ve said in speech after speech, I’ve made myself clear. The repeated statements became their own reason: “Given all we have said as a leading world power about the necessity for regime change in Iraq,” James R. Schlesinger, who is now a member of Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board, told The Washington Post in July, “our credibility would be badly damaged if that regime change did not take place."
Ouch. Didion goes on to discuss the “fixed ideas” responsible for those repeated statements, but that’s not where I’m headed: what I want to do is align academic psychoanalytic thinkers with the Bush administration because it’s 1) counter-intuitive, 2) highly inflammatory and 3) in this extremely limited respect, arguably true.
For the sake of clarity, I should say that I’m talking about the citation of prominent psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic thinkers as authorities and not, for example, scholars who talk about the influence of Freudian thought on American literature in the ‘50s or ‘60s. The latter scholar points to a historical reality; the former to an unverifiable, unscientific explanation for human behavior. But I’m not interested in writing another anti-psychoanalysis broadside. I want to know why, as Frederick Crews argues, “the academic humanities” are one of the “three arenas in which flawed but once modish ideas, secure from the menace of rigorous testing, can be kept indefinitely in play.”
Why would otherwise intelligent people persist in straining their thought through this particular “epistemic sieve”? One answer, as Didion says, may be that “repeated statements become their own reason.” One can easily imagine scholars who have staked reputations to books and articles founded on psychoanalytic principles saying “Given all I have said as a leading figure in this field...” This not only applies to first-order academic psychoanalysts, i.e. those who cite Freud, Lacan, etc. directly; it also applies to second-, third- and fourth-order academic psychoanalysts, i.e those who cite Althusser, Fanon, Butler, etc. Logic would seem to dictate that if Freud’s anathema, then so is Lacan; if Lacan’s anathema, so is Althusser, etc. And if the investment in what’s been said determines what will be said ad infinitum, well, you see where I’m headed: the year 7,349 R.D.E., in which radical academic brains, born in jars and entombed in robotic exoskeletons, discuss the oedipalization issues raised by the latest libro-amniotic sensation. “I.N.T. 9017240-94189 clearly suffers from organic body envy, defined by Freud of the Embodied Era of Eventual and Inevitable Death as...”
Now, because this isn’t a broadside, I’m not interested in flogging the Freudians/Lacanians/etc. for their continued allegiance to one of the available psychoanalytic methods. I’d rather estimate the value of the psychoanalysis as a pure analytic--divorced from Popperian claims to science--one which produces more or less insightful readings of literary texts. As you can tell, I’m inclined to say that for all their complexities these psychoanalytic methods lead to gross oversimplifications of whatever they’re applied to. Then again, I could be wrong.
That may be too abstract: What I want to know is whether you think psychoanalysis produces knowledge about literature or only about psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic interpretations of literature. If it’s the former, I’d want to grade the quality of the literary knowledge produced. (Before you ask, “quality” is indeed about as loaded as a word can get without endangering innocent bystanders.) If it’s the latter, I’d be indebted to anyone who could justify the value of perpetuating knowledge about psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic interpretations of literature.
If you’d rather discuss a couple of specific essays that use psychoanalysis in entirely different ways, I could do that too. Here are some examples drawn from recent articles on Henry James’ “The Jolly Corner" (available through Project Muse):
1. Eric Savoy’s “The Queer Subject of ‘The Jolly Corner.’" Savoy aims to explicate “the psychoanalytic dimensions of Spencer Brydon’s monstrous other, his prosopopoeia-come-to-life...within the theories of gender regulation and identity formation advanced by Sedgwick and Judith Butler. I want to chart a particular intersection between Sedgwick’s work on homosexual panic and Butler’s exploration of the melancholia of gender which bears on the figurative operations of prosopopoeia, the master-trope of haunting that is crucial in the discursive production of the other in paranoid gothic texts.” The article concludes with this ringer: “the allegorical case history of ‘The Jolly Corner’ demonstrates the strange lucidities of a not-so-jolly coroner when backed into a not-so-jolly corner.”
2. Mark Goble’s “Delirious Henry James: a Small Boy and New York." Goble argues that “in A Small Boy and Others that James wants desperately to recall--’reckless almost to extravagance’--a different class of American spectacle, along with the urban modernity that it inspires. We might say James is after a modernity that is still at low pitch, still capable of sounding the ‘tone of time,’ like Cornelia herself, and her ‘small sallow carte-de-visite photographs, faithfully framed but spectrally faded’ ("Crapy Cornelia” 839). I am interested in how James makes history out of these artifacts of the modern. A Small Boy and Others seems an ideal place to begin understanding this particular alchemy, because James’s fond and lavish reconstruction of ‘old New York’ seems less an excursion into the past, and more an excavation of the city’s delirious future.”
3. Shalyn Claggett’s “Narcissim and the Conditions of Self-knowledge in James’s ‘The Jolly Corner.’" Claggett contends that “‘The Jolly Corner’ is a Narcissus narrative with an important difference: Narcissus comprehends his image and dies; Brydon denies his image and survives. Just before encountering the image, Brydon realizes the dangerous nature of the knowledge such a meeting would impart, thinking it ‘would send him straight about to the window he had left open, and by that window . . . he saw himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take his way to the street’ (753). Knowing this, Brydon attempts to avoid his other self at the last moment, and when he cannot help encountering it, he denies it to be him as the only possible means of psychic escape. In so doing, he enables himself to fulfill Narcissus’s alternative fate of living to a ‘well-ripened age’ (347). But James does more than offer a complementary version of the Narcissus myth—he dramatizes the complexities of this dilemma—death or self-knowledge—as fundamental in the subject’s formation of a cohesive self.”
Comments
This is a good article to read if you’re interested in the actual scientific status of psychoanalysis.
I’ve read the Holland before, as well as Seymour Fisher and Roger Greenberg’s The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapy; but I’ve also read Adolf Grünbaum’s Foundations of Psychoanalysis and Malcolm Macmillan’s Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc, to name a few, and they make Holland’s attempt to bootstrap psychoanalysis into science look empty. Holland neglects to mention one significant difference between geology, astronomy, medicine and psychoanalysis; namely, that the first three can produce empirically measurable results, whereas psychoanalysis cannot. Holland confuses the theorizing for practice, equating the theorizing of Lyell, Darwin, etc. with psychoanalytic theorizing, then ignoring the fact that the theories of Lyell, Darwin, etc. could be and in fact were later verified by empirical evidence. The strongest possible version of Holland’s claim is that psychoanalysis is, right now, as much of a science as geology or evolutionary biology in the 1860s...and that’s not the claim he wants to make. (As I’ve mentioned before, I entered grad. school a psychoanalytic critic, but I’m leaving an apostate.)
But this isn’t the discussion I wanted to have; I’m less interested in the truth of psychoanalysis in general than its possible utility for literary studies in particular. Is it possible for psychoanalysis to be utterly wrong about people but eminently useful when addressed to novels/poems/etc.?
I’m not sure how you mean “eminently useful when addresses to novels/poems/etc.”
At any rate, I’m not sure that the scientificity or otherwise of psychoanalysis is as unimportant as you state that it is. Isn’t the point of a science-influenced method of criticizing literature that the science is supposed to reflect something about how people actually behave? If they don’t, then isn’t that theory much more predisposed to lead you in the wrong direction than an accurate theory would?
Let’s do a thought experiment, and imagine that astronomy was as mysterious to us as psychology now is. You could have astronomical theories of literature, focussing heavily on any mention of the sun or constellations, or on the characters’ perception of passing time through cues given by light, or perhaps on the analysis of character or of authorial intent through astrological means. Instead of Narcissus being cited as in your last example, it would be Icarus. And so on. And the historical record of literature could be influenced by a period in which authors kept having the moon be cryptically visible over their characters’ shoulders.
So would it make any difference to literary theory in the thought experiment whether the astronomy was accurate or not? I think it would. A theory based on astrology or pericycles would elaborate literature based on ideas that have no congruence to what actually goes on in the world. Therefore they would be essentially arbitrary. You might luck out and get one that has greater capability for symbolic complexity than another, but eventually, people would realize that nothing was keeping them from using some other critical scheme.
Literary theory based on actual astronomy, however, would restrict the choices that lierary theorists have down to those that you couldn’t convincingly say were replaceable. Of course, people would find that what astronomy lets you usefully say about literature is very limited, and after a while, no one would bother much with it except in a historical sense. I think that’s going to be the final fate of psychological literary criticism —with the obvious proviso that psychology, since it concerns the motivation of people, has a lot more connection to literature than astronomy does. But psychology doesn’t say that much about individuals as individuals, which is most of the literary concern with character.
Gellner in the marvelous and delightfully ascerbic Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason:
Freud did not discover the Unconscious. What he did do was to endow it with a language, a ritual, and a church. The general spirit of the language, which conveys that our instinctual needs are central to us, and that they operate in a hidden, devious and cunning manner, seems to me unquestionably sound. The more specific doctrines articulated in that idiom seem to me questionable, unproven, and above all inherently elusive.
If that’s so, it’s not surprising that psychonalytic literary criticism can provide (albeit at a high cost) genuine insight. What it offers in this light is an overelaborate methodology for doing systematically what good reading would do anyway--attend to the devious and cunning ways in which writers and/or their characters present themselves and their partially obscured motivations for doing so.
Gellner goes on to say that psychoanlysis isn’t a science but a church--and one that in his account provides solutions to the knottiest problems of human existence in the modern world (problems that he says are consistent with some of the fundamental philosophical puzzles). Since literature is bound to be concerned with some of the same problems, psychonalytic criticism is well positioned to highlight the overlap and, in keeping with the habits of the faith, to suggest that psychoanalysis has the true answers to the problems with which writers can only grapple.
Glad you’re here, Scott.
Astronomy is a very nice analogy: it’s been suggested that psychoanalysis is like Ptolemaic astronomy, and when its values and premises seem mistaken, its adherents keep adding epicycles.
I think we’re beyond the stage in which lit scholars who use Lacan, Zizek, Althusser, et al have necessarily staked their credibility upon Freud’s claims being true. If an author has an insight that seems applicable to a specific social or psychological situation, surely one can value it regardless of the author’s theoretical allegiances or influences.
Look at Crews: he says that he originally believed that Freud’s applicability to the works of Hawthorne proved Freud right, and now he realizes that it simply proved both authors share a similar worldview, and that all the valuable insights in Freud had been made by the likes of Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky. I studied once under a psychoanalytic scholar who suggested that to find the striking parallels in the work of Virginia Woolf to the myth of development and identity set forth by Kristeva was indeed to produce knowledge, and I’m inclined in that direction: i.e., I find it credible to say that, at a certain point in literary history, we begin to see narratives that draw upon the same premises concerning human personality, perception, and interaction that the psychoanalytic scholars sought to explain and systematize, and the use of those scholars’ tools and categories can help us articulate questions and hypotheses about those narratives.
Rich,
“Eminently” might have been overstating my case, but I imagine (and given that all three of the essays I cited are very, very recent, I suppose I know) that other intelligent people believe a case for psychoanalysis could be made. While I agree with you, I don’t want to make the environment here so hostile that people who would defend psychoanalysis under different circumstances are reluctant to reply. (This is my teacherly mode: open up conversations and let the chips fall where they may, because oftentimes what other people say against your position is far more compelling than what you can muster to defend it. Then again, sometimes, as was the case in my class yesterday, you end up with conservative Christians defending Didion’s position and you’re forced to defend Bush’s. You never know, but if you lecture instead of teach, you never will. I apologize in advance if this sounds condescending, but I’m trying to foster conversation, not encourage shouting matches [not that you’re shouting] and this way works in the classroom; we’ll see if it works online.)
That parenthetical aside, um, aside, I’d agree with your claim that “psychology doesn’t say that much about individuals as individuals, which is most of the literary concern with character.” I’d wonder what the basis for analyzing the individual motives of individual characters would be if it’s not one psychologizing system or another. I could talk about what the characters believe their motivations to be, but that flattens characters to their understanding of their motivations. This decision can probably only be made on a case-by-case basis, but should literary scholars care more about what Hamlet thinks he’s doing or what he’s actually doing? And I realize I’ve flattened another series of distinctions out there, but you have to start somewhere…
The key is what you mean by “useful” when it comes to literary analysis. Has the work of Freud or Lacan led to interesting readings? Of course, and to say otherwise is to be simply closeminded. Say what you will about Zizek’s personality, but his Lacan-infused approach to Hitchcock and noir is genuinely stimulating. Same goes for folks like Laura Mulvey or Kaja Silverman. In fact, Silverman’s recent book on Lacan and Heidegger is beautifully written and breathtakingly smart about such difficult work.
Another issue is this: I’ll grant that Freud isn’t the last word on even his own theory of mind (as he himself constantly admits in his own work), but has a *better* theory of desire, of erotic attachment, of unconscious motivation been put together? I’m not familiar with it, in any case (Girard has some great points, but he’s still very much an anthropological version of Freud at heart). Compare Freud’s work with, say, William James, whose psychology seems to have panned out surprisingly well. You’ll notice that James has no resources for dealing with the very insideous dynamics of instinctual urges (nor does, say, Beck’s cognitive therapy or medication, for that matter).
But in the final analysis we have to approach psychoanalysis as a methodology like any other methodology: they are all limited. As Albert Murray has written, such approaches are Uncle-Remus nets for capturing experience, some with broad warp and woof, some with tightly woven threads, and all snare different butterflies.
Most literary scholars still adhere to some form of “close reading” at the heart of their methods, despite the fact that many of the basic assumptions of New Criticism have been challenged, despite the fact that New Critical reading practices work best only for small, “well-cooked” (to use Lowell’s terms) verbal objects. Try doing a “close reading” of a Fluxus poem or a Jackson Mac Lowe text! This isn’t to say we should abandon close reading, but that it, like any other approach, has its limitations.
Or take Bakhtin: a brilliant theorist of a certain type of fiction, but he has absolutely nothing to say about the lyric (sort of the inverse of New Criticism).
All approaches are nets, maps, models of how certain verbal forms are assembled and conjure significance. Of course, a pluralist or pragmatic approach is the best, where the critic can bring to bear on a text whatever will generate the most engaging reading for his or her audience.
As Greil Marcus writes, “ . . . it leads one to ask not only what goes into a piece of music, but also a more intense version of the same question: what can you hear in it?” Or elsewhere: “ . . . it is not an interpretation at all. It’s not an attempt to define or decode what a singer meant when he sang what he sang, but a response to a certain provocation. It is an attempt to catch what the singer took out of the air of a particular time and place, to catch what the singer and the musicians with him put back in the air.”
One last point I forgot to mention:
Only the crudest of critics use psychoanalysis anymore to “psychoanalyze” a character, just as only the crudest of marxian critics try to relate a book’s content immediately to an economic context.
The way film studies has incorporated fetish theory, among other psychoanalytic motifs, into its readings of cinema shows a more complex approach: how do images and audience interact? How does identification work when engaging images? How do images negotiate the audience’s own desires?
Or, take Jameson’s work in marxian theory. Against crude Marxists, Jameson looks at form as a symbolic resolution of real social contradictions. A similar approach is taken by those of us who draw on certain psychoanalytic concepts in our work: how does a work’s form seem to resolve in symbolic fashion the double binds the Social wraps around the subject? Of course, such an approach must be culturally and historically contextualized as well.
Or, to take a fabulous novel *about* psychoanalysis: you can’t crudely psychoanalyze Portnoy as a character. But you can look at how his verbal performance is just that: a performance. So rather than exmaining the content of his speech (the sex with liver, the attempted rape of an Israeli woman, etc.), a critic could look at *for whom* is Portnoy performing at any given moment. This is to use Freud’s distinction between Ego Ideal and Ideal Ego (which Lacan revised thoughtfully): who does Portnoy wish to be? But more importantly, for whom does he want to be that? This allows us to use Freudian concepts in a social or culturally-centered way: he “assimilates” in certain ways, but an imagined audience of Jews is his ideal audience (i.e. his blasphemy is a sign of his unacknowledged faith). But that’s just off the top of my head, so don’t hold me to that reading!
SEK.cephalous: “I’d wonder what the basis for analyzing the individual motives of individual characters would be if it’s not one psychologizing system or another.”
Well, people analyzed motives long before there was a scientistic system for doing so. Isn’t the desire to have one a remnant of logical positivism? Of course, if there really is one that meets scientific standards, then it can only help. I’m actually more confident that elements of psychology are real science than you appear to be, but that’s only my opinion.
“[S]hould literary scholars care more about what Hamlet thinks he’s doing or what he’s actually doing?” Perhaps people sometimes behave like Hamlet in part because culture has taken Hamlet as a model. The relationship between psychology and literary culture isn’t necessarily all one way. If so, a psychological explanation for what Hamlet does would have a hidden self-referentiality to it.
Luther Blissett: “Has the work of Freud or Lacan led to interesting readings? Of course, and to say otherwise is to be simply closeminded.”
But that’s not the point. I would assume that a literary theorist, being on average a well-read, intelligent, and educated person, could at least sometimes make an interesting reading out of any theory. I’m sure that astrological analysis has figured in some literary studies, for instance. But there are hazards. Once people figure out that any arbitrary system not matching reality is as good as any other, there is a tendency to discredit the reading as meaningless. And it involves the incorporation of a lot of often poorly understood scientific concepts that may not really be germane to the literature.
Scott, as Holland’s paper gives many examples of psychoanalytic claims (not just those in Fisher and Greenberg) being both testable and falsifiable, you misrepresent the content of his paper. Futhermore, although I often find people’s emphatic opinions about the relative merits of books very interesting, they don’t constitute an argument. Neither is the intellectual biography relevant, unless we are to assume that you’ve mastered this body of knowledge and moved on in a way that mirrors the progression of the world-spirit.
Luther,
You make too many points, all of them worthy of response, but as we live in a universe in which I dissertate in another window, I want to focus on one of them:
The way film studies has incorporated fetish theory, among other psychoanalytic motifs, into its readings of cinema shows a more complex approach: how do images and audience interact? How does identification work when engaging images? How do images negotiate the audience’s own desires?
Excellent points all around, but if psychoanalysis is a discourse that speaks only of itself and not to actual human behavior, aren’t the conclusions drawn from this method, interesting as they may be, only going to amount to “how images and audiences would interact were psychoanalytic ‘truths’ true”?
As to your point about Portnoy’s Complaint, I have no qualms about psychoanalytic accounts of poems/novels/etc. written by authors heavily under the influence...because then you’re likely to produce what, in the end, is as close to a perfect analogue of authorial intent as is possible.
Also, your point about the inherent limitations of all theories is well-taken, but I wonder what the justification of employing one over another would be...because it produces more interesting results?
[And yes, I seem to have run out of words other than “point."]
Jonathan, which are the examples of psychoanalytic claims testable and/or falsifiable? On a quick scan, I didn’t find them. What I did see is in fact an effective concession to Gellner’s argument. Virtually all of what Holland believes lives in psyschonalysis (much of mental life is unconscious; mental processes operate in parallel and in conflict; stable personality forms in childhood and affects adult life; mental representations guide relations with others; personal development involves moving from immature dependency to mature interdependency) can be found in any number of intellectual sources. They’re not at all special to psychonalysis--which is why Luther’s point makes sense--and, frankly, some of them are banal.
Gellner really is indispensible in this context. That book is brilliant. If you haven’t seen it yet, Scott, you’ve gotta check it out.
Jonathan, I’m not misrepresenting the content of his paper. Holland’s claims for what Masling, Fisher and Greenberg have established aren’t very strong:
1. Much mental life, including thoughts, feelings, and motives is unconscious. Neurology supplies massive evidence of unconscious processes of cognition.
2. Mental processes operate in parallel and, often, in conflict.
3. Stable personality patterns form in childhood and shape later relationships.
4. Mental representations of the self, others, and relationships guide interactions with others and shape symptoms.
5. Personality development is not just learning regulation of sex and aggression (Freud’s theory) but also moving from immature dependency to mature interdependency.
That’s wonderful, but look at how vague, how general they are. Holland’s argument boils down to “we should take psychoanalysis seriously because we have evidence that people are confused, conflicted, influenced by their childhood, and think about themselves in relation to others.” Granted, Freud said much of this first, but that’s not a reason to stick with his particular interpretive method.
(And the personal history’s in there to indicate that I’m not shooting from the hip but have actually done the research.)
“how images and audiences would interact were psychoanalytic ‘truths’ true”?
Scott, that was exactly the point I was going to make.
I think pscyhoanalysis in film studies is useful in-so-much-as psychoanalsis and Freudian thought in particular has made its way into the world-view of writers and filmmakers and has been incorporated into the stories, themes, and characters in the work of certain artists (Hitchcock, Lynch, etc).
What I find suspect in film studies is using (especially in an uncritical fashion) psychoanalysis as a basis for a theory of spectatorship; i.e., how spectators interact with a film. So much of contemporary film theorizing assumes the validity of psychoanalytic accounts and proceeds unquestionably from there.
To be fair, I’m a bit of a Bordwellian so....
Has the work of Freud or Lacan led to interesting readings? Of course, and to say otherwise is to be simply closeminded.
Yes, but are they plausible readings?
“Interesting” and “stimulating” readings are easy--it’s readings we are given good reason to take seriously that are hard to build.
It seems to me that psychoanalysis is--and ought to be--a live resource for literary studies. And I’m happy to say that some of what gets called psychoanalysis is scientific enough not to be laughed at. (Lacan and his ilk seem to me dogmatic and obscure, but Wollheim, Lear, etc. are (or in the case of the former, were) capable defenders of the view.)
Of course, insofar as a reading cannot be stated without the language of the psychoanalyst’s extravagant and controversial metaphysics of the mind, we ought to take such readings with a salt lick ready to hand.
Granted, Freud said much of this first . . .
Not. But he said it convincingly and reassuringly.
Rich, “SEK.cephalous”? Ouch. How about “Sc.ephalous”? Or “Scott Ericephalous”? Nevermind. Rotten choices all. (Side note: that’s not a pretentious inclusion of my middle name there. “Scott Kaufman” is also the name of the designer of “Porn Star” clothing; a popular/despised local attorney; and a local grip/actor. Lots of phone calls/emails, none of them for me.)
Perhaps people sometimes behave like Hamlet in part because culture has taken Hamlet as a model. The relationship between psychology and literary culture isn’t necessarily all one way. If so, a psychological explanation for what Hamlet does would have a hidden self-referentiality to it.
As I told Luther, I’m on board with this explanation of, say, Freud and Roth. I’m also inclined to agree with Josh’s contention that it may be
credible to say that, at a certain point in literary history, we begin to see narratives that draw upon the same premises concerning human personality, perception, and interaction that the psychoanalytic scholars sought to explain and systematize, and the use of those scholars’ tools and categories can help us articulate questions and hypotheses about those narratives.
My (evolving) position can accommodate direct influence of psychoanalytic theories or a weak version of Geistesgeshichte, maybe. One of the questions I always stumble over in my own work is how weak those connections can become before they’re entirely my own invention, i.e. am I seeing something here or am I seeing what I expected to find?
Sean, I own but haven’t read the Gellner yet; I’ve moved it to the top of the stack.
So, Sean, you’re an advocate of Harold Bloom’s idea that Shakespeare (or is it Hamlet) not only anticipates but encompasses Freud? It’s not hard to find an antecedent to an idea or argument after it has been influentially formulated (the Whitehead effect). That latter bit is the trick, though. Ecclesiastical enforcing seems a rather dreary and resentful exercise.
Freud was a neurologist, it’s worth remembering. Subsequent neurology and cognitive science have confirmed many of his ideas and intuitions. What are we to conclude form this, again?
You’ll be glad you did, Scott. It’s witty as hell, and it makes the question you’re wrestling with a lot clearer, I think.
I suppose I’d still like to know who these earlier psychologists or philosophers were who posited: (a) a subject at war with itself; (b) a subject without rational control over its most basic choices; (c) that dreams in many cases disguise urges we’re afraid to admit; (d) that there’s a “poetics” of dreams based traceable types of cognitive distorition; (e) that a person’s basic character is formed in her/his first couple of years; (f) that many cultures force the subject to repress “perverse” desires and channel these energies into socially acceptable ways; (g) to challenge such universal or timeless assumptions about social norms; (h) to look for meanings in “everyday practices” like verbal slips, jokes, curses, interjections, etc. The Kantians, the pragmatists, the idealists, the Marxists, the rationalists, and the positivists don’t cover those ideas, nor did Durkheim, Weber, and the sociologists.
As Freud himself points out, the foundation of his thought rests in poetry and drama (i.e., the fullest expressions of the social rituals he saw played out not just on stage or on the page but in the most common person’s daily life). And as in drama and poetry, it’s the ec-centric or perverse moments of individual life that Freud shows are the keys to a theory of mind.
And finally: a good reading of a text is one that makes you want to re-read that text. That’s it. As Charles Olson said, the critic’s job, like the poet’s, is to take the energy from one verbal machine and keep that energy moving to the reader via another verbal machine.
I think that the astrology / alchemy analogy for psychoanalysis is exact. You have a tremendously fertile machine for generating interpretations, but no way of deciding between the individual interpretations, and in most cases no way of even telling what an interpretation means, except via a further psychoanalysis. In what I’ve read of Lacan, he seems diligently committed to pumping out new product which makes the previous product obsolete. The Bill Gates of philosophy or whatever it is that he does.
I’ve read books by Nobel scientists which tried diligently, and in some cases successfully, to explain in common-sense terms what their most abstruse theories meant. People in Theory never do that, because being understood is not their game.
I do think that the psychoanalytic stress on the more lurid myths and archetypes has its value, as long as it isn’t used too heavy-hendedly.
It would strike me that Portnoy is more susceptible to psychoanalytic interpretation than almost anyone.
And finally: a good reading of a text is one that makes you want to re-read that text.
Certainly not every text. There’s also the good reading of the rotten-egg text, which tells you that you do not want to read that one.
To ask whether Freud (d. 1939) contributed anything at all to psychology is not the same as to ask whether contemporary psychoanalytic theory is worthwhile.
Of course, insofar as a reading cannot be stated without the language of the psychoanalyst’s extravagant and controversial metaphysics of the mind, we ought to take such readings with a salt lick ready to hand.
Zehou, the more I think about this sentence, the more it baffles me. (Note: “it’s not you, it’s me.") Are you distinguishing psychoanalytic metaphysics from psychoanalytic language and only complaining about the latter’s jargon? Or is this a case of white-hats and black-hats in which the white-hats’ve been silenced by 100 yrs. of black’s jargogling?
Freud was a neurologist, it’s worth remembering. Subsequent neurology and cognitive science have confirmed many of his ideas and intuitions. What are we to conclude form this, again?
Jonathan, calling the Freud who wrote The Interpretation of Dreams a “neurologist” is a stretch, no? He did some work on cerebral palsy--I think that’s what it was--but it’s no more pertinent to his theories than was his active clinical practice, which is why he eventually turned to metaphor (Ego and Id, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Civ. and Its Discontents, etc.).
As for why the discussion’s headed in this direction, well, it’s because it has. I tried to follow that line from our earlier conversation and address its possible utility in literary studies. But I’m new here, so maybe this is all an elaborate hazing…
He viewed it as a continuation of his earlier work by other (and necessary) means, and he has been at least partially vindicated by subsequent inquiry (and those vindicated ideas are not trivial or old--except in uncharitable hindsight). Because of the pervasive influence of Freud’s ideas, it is very difficult for people to assess them neutrally. Cf. Nietzsche and Marx.
For many items in that list, Luther, ("H" aside) the question would be: who hasn’t spoken of such things. But the most obvious and germane (and unacknowledged) predecessor would be Nietzsche. Daniel N. Robinson’s _Intellectual History of Psychology_ details a long prehistory to pschoanalysis.
Jonathan, I’m still interested to know which are the testable/falsifiable claims or the vindicated ones. I didn’t see much that Holland’s article talked about very specifically. I admit, I read quickly, but on your recommendation I looked at the article and I saw one study (Sampson and Weiss) that Holland referred to in depth, and the methodology there--"transcribing the first 100 hours of one patient’s treatment and using scorers and coders to categorize and count the moves and meanings the patient and the analyst were making"--seems to me obviously pretty weak. (One patient, no control, subjective evaluation.) I’m not sure why pointing that out merits such a heated response.
The neurology of 1899 isn’t really a good selling-point for Freud.
In scientific areas of study, schools formed around founders seldom have the long-term influence that they do in less-scientific areas. You do hear of Darwinism and Newtonians, but “Darwinian” is shorthand for “evolutionist” and “Newtonian” mostly refers to people like Voltaire who advocated Newton’s ideas but didn’t work in physics. In science, the founder’s body of work is critically examined, and the weak parts of it are discarded.
If someone’s ideas are still controversial a century later, that’s a fair sign that they’re not scientific.
I am not a positivist, so Freud’s non-scientific status is not so important to me, but there are other problems with psychoanalysis.
Between Fisher & Greenberg, Westen, and Masling, he cites empirical studies numbering well over a thousand. Are they all meaningless or distorted by blind faith in psychoanalysis?
The example you point out might be flawed, but I’m not sure that I follow your reasoning. What would be “objective” evaluation in that context? A grading algorithm? Perhaps the NSA could share some of its speech recognition and truth-telling technology for future experiments. And what would constitute a control? A lengthy interrogation?
Here’s a relevant quote:
“In short, Westen plus Masling plus Fisher and Greenberg plus the earlier summarizers of experimental work plus the thousands of experimental studies themselves constitute a very large body of empirical evidence. Yet, as the squibs and squillets fly in the Freud wars, neither psychoanalysis’ detractors nor its supporters often mention these experimental results. Psychoanalysts do not find experiments relevant to their practice. Non-analytic psychologists pay little heed, because this kind of evidence runs counter to the deep-seated prejudice against psychoanalysis among academic psychologists, a prejudice embedded in textbooks and indoctrinated in beginning psychology courses. And psychologists rightly point to the unreliability of clinical evidence.”
I’m not a psychoanalytic critic, myself, and Holland’s work has moved into cognitive and brain science. But his point above seems very clear and convincing to me.
In short, Westen plus Masling plus Fisher and Greenberg plus the earlier summarizers of experimental work plus the thousands of experimental studies themselves constitute a very large body of empirical evidence.
You’re bulking up the argument. The number of studies doesn’t prove anything.
Even granted this particular point, the utility pf psychoanalysis in criticism would be quite another question. One of the problems I’ve seen with psychoanalysis wherever I’ve seen it is the difficulty in finding out what psychoanalysis says in any given case. It seems to be more a vocabulary of self-expression and writerly performance than a body of agreed-upon truths.
Jonathan, Holland’s doing what you accused me of doing; namely, citing references without actually presenting an argument. Also, the rhetoric of self-marginalization throughout Holland’s article bristles, esp. when his byline identifies him as a professor of English and he’s criticizing the prejudices of “academic psychologists,” by which he presumably means faculty in psychology departments. But none of this matters. Look, none of us are E.F. Torrey--who, in Freudian Fraud, famously cites contemporary (c. 1910) reviews of Freud and then leaps to the irrational conclusion that since his contemporaries didn’t believe him, neither should we--and I don’t think we’re trying to be. That certainly wasn’t the intent of my post (although intellectual honesty demands I acknowledge my own position and I did). One of my intentions was to address the issue Josh brought up earlier:
I think we’re beyond the stage in which lit scholars who use Lacan, Zizek, Althusser, et al have necessarily staked their credibility upon Freud’s claims being true.
I’m not sure I buy this. You can’t build a house on a poor foundation and expect it to stand; so if Butler borrows from Lacan borrowing from Freud, I think there will, necessarily, be some problems with Butler’s thought. That doesn’t make it worthless, only (gulp) problematic. An example by way of counter-example:
Pretend it turns out that objects actually fall at 33 ft./sec. instead of 32. All the formulas would be re-adjusted to accommodate the new gravitational constant and the world would go about its business. The reason I began with the Didion quotation is because I don’t think that’s how the dynamics of a literary studies work out; we’re much more like Bush and Friends, insisting that because we’ve said something repeatedly and for a long time, that it must be true/valuable/what-not. What’s preventing us from looking at, say, the current state of psychoanalytic thought (which, contrary to Holland, I don’t believe is all that sound) and deciding whether or not to jettison its most untenable tenets? Then Butler and Bhabha and the like can re-think their theories to fit the new, more (but not ever entirely) scientific view of human development/behavior/interaction?
Is it because of the position of the academic super-stars in our small slice of the heavens? Probably. But if it ain’t going anywhere anytime soon, I think the responsible action isn’t to ignore it entirely--that’ll just create two cultures within one of Snow’s--but to gently persuade it to get with the picture.
Maybe.
Your first comment here stated that “[Holland] neglects to mention one significant difference between geology, astronomy, medicine and psychoanalysis; namely, that the first three can produce empirically measurable results, whereas psychoanalysis cannot.”
Holland cites several works which present numerous empirical studies of psychoanalysis. They provide evidence for his claim that these studies exist and that they provide measurable empirical data for some of the psychoanalytic claims. Furthermore, the existence of these studies is inconvenient for many--not all, but many--participants in the “Freud Wars.” If you feel that the works he cites do not in fact support his conclusion, you should tell us why. Simply mentioning Grünbaum and Macmillan isn’t enough.
The point I wanted to raise by linking to the Holland article is that you shouldn’t overgeneralize about psychoanalysis. People talk about Freud far more than they read him, and I’m not sure if even Marx or Nietzsche’s ideas are as distorted in the popular imagination. Even among psychoanalytic literary scholars, much of the relevant evidence about Freud’s scientific legacy has been ignored or deemed a priori irrelevant.
I’m not sure if your original question was a call for the justification of future psychoanalytic approaches or all psychoanalytic literary criticism. I assume the former, as the latter would be cartoonishly arrogant and ignorant.
"objective evaluation in that context? A grading algorithm? Perhaps the NSA could share some of its speech recognition and truth-telling technology for future experiments. And what would constitute a control? A lengthy interrogation?”
Well, there probably isn’t objective evaluation possible in that context. It’s not obvious at first glance to me how you could codify the conversational tactics that show up in an analytic session. Perhaps it can be done; Holland doesn’t give any details, apart from mentioning something in fact like grading algorithms. It’s also not obvious how you could establish a control so that you could be sure that the results weren’t shaped by the interests of the observers. (Maybe by having multiple groups of independent observers each blind to the purposes of the study. Maybe they did this, but we don’t know from this article.) But that’s all reason to doubt the rigor of the study more than it is for sarcasm toward reasonable questions about it. At the very least, it’s obvious that a study of one analysand can tell us nothing at all about general theories of mental functioning.
What makes this all particularly damaging is not only that, as Scott says, Holland doesn’t actually discuss any other study in detail, but also that he says the study “showed that it is possible to test hypotheses about psychoanalytic therapy . . . in ways that are more subtle and particular than simply counting how many treatments achieved a measure of success and how many did not.” In other words, Holland quite clearly says that the promise of this study is that it seems to allow defenders of pscyhoanalysis to step around what was once its major claim to legitimacy and that has know had to be abandoned--success in therapy. That’s an awful lot to hang on a study of one analysand. That this is the major example is not encouraging.
When Holland says “non-analytic psychologists pay little heed, because this kind of evidence runs counter to the deep-seated prejudice against psychoanalysis among academic psychologists, a prejudice embedded in textbooks and indoctrinated in beginning psychology courses,” he comes very near to practicing the basic tactic that Freudians have been using with great success from the earliest days--saying that doubt about their claims is only a sign of resistance and thus a mark of the theory’s truth. This, of course, means that only the already converted can legitimately evaluate the theory. I think that’s more consistent with ecclesiastical attitudes than the questions Scott and others have raised.
There seems to be a weird shell game going on here. If someone mentions good Freudian criticism, the reply is, “But where’s the empirical evidence for Freud’s ideas? Where’s the science?” And if someone gives evidence of such evidence (or questions science’s ability to do with psychology what it does with rocks and cells), the reply is: “But even if Freud’s ideas pan out, what use are they to criticism?”
The burden of proof needs to be on those who would throw out, say, Butler or Zizek because they don’t believe Freud’s ideas are scientifically sound. Let’s see the critique of Butler first. I’d argue that her major insight—the performativity of gender—in no way relies on Freudian or Lacanian crutches.
Let’s also remember the importance of Freud’s ideas to Du Bois, who saw the limitations of a positivist social science of race by the 1920s. Freud’s work opened up research to the unconscious nature of racial hatred, forcing many liberals and progressives to acknowledging that “empirical proof” of black humanity is not enough to counter racism. Let’s also remember the important work done by scholars like Hortense Spillers on race and psychoanalysis, continuing Du Bois’s brave tradition.
Let’s remember that Freud singlehandedly altered the Western world’s attitude toward the mentally ill. Although “scientific” approaches to mental health would continue to use torture and forced surgery as “cures,” Freud’s deep humanism led him to trust in a social, “talking cure.” I don’t want to ignore the important advances in psychotropic medication, but more therapy, and less medication, is clearly necessary today.
And beyond medication, what great advances have we seen in psychology? Cognitive therapy is merely James on habits without Freud’s deep insight into the pleasures we get from self-destructive behavior. Undergoing cognitive therapy myself, I recall the transparently silly attempts by Beck’s doctors to quantify my emotional life: “Are you feeling a 6 or a 7 today?”
I suppose I’d like to see people either offer a coherent critique of Freud’s essential ideas; or offer a coherent critique of those who use psychoanalysis to study literature. People like me, who find much heuristic value in the ideas of Freud and Lacan, will never be able to change the minds of those here who clearly are resistant to those ideas. So until someone here actually posits a real critique of psychoanalytic criticism beyond appeals to scientific rigor, I’ll happily continue to read and learn from Freud.
Again, I forget a point:
Melanie Klein. Founder of the play therapy technique to help children. Founder of Object Theory. Perhaps, with Winnicott, the most important influence still today on child psychology. And a Freudian. Any attempt to kill Freud on the rack of science will need to acknowledge Klein and Co.’s rigorous scientific research (before anti-Freud scares made it difficult for any scholar to study children’s behavior).
Sean, would at least be fair that Holland might know what he’s talking about w/r/t psychoanalysis and its place in academic psychology? Do you have any reason to doubt it? It is awfully uncharitable to tar that obvious truth with the “resistance to theory” gambit.
And by “Ecclesiastical,” I was referring to “nothing new under the sun,” etc.
It is not required of the argument he’s making to reproduce in toto those of his sources. That’s kind of a good thing, as I see it. Papers might get even more tedious to read.
And, if it’s obvious that the one analysand can’t tell us anything about the mind, that takes out a lot of our fancy philosophy, doesn’t it? Perhaps resident philosopher Holbo can comment on the elimination of introspection as a legitimate method of philosophical inquiry.
I wasn’t being sarcastic about the experiment, exactly, but trying to point to some of the difficulties you address in performing these types of experiments with human subjects.
Jonathan: “I’m not sure if your original question was a call for the justification of future psychoanalytic approaches or all psychoanalytic literary criticism. I assume the former, as the latter would be cartoonishly arrogant and ignorant.”
Slick. What was that you wrote before about being aggressive, not passive-aggressive? It’s clear that SEK meant the latter, and your formulation above lets you sneak through an insult that wouldn’t sound as good if you just disparaged SEK directly.
At any rate, no one here is going to settle the scientific worth of psychoanalysis as a field by quoting Holland or any other reviewer, unless someone here is a hot-shot scientist in a related field instead of, or in addition to, being a literary studies person. SEK gave us his views, but didn’t pretend to settle the issue, he only asked whether psychoanalysis was useful within literary criticism. I guess that this is one of those questions that you can’t even ask without being arrogant and ignorant. Good for arrogance and ignorance, then. Saying that you can’t question the use of psychoanalysis within literary criticism because doing so would be arrogant and ignorant is just another way of saying that the academic humanities are one of the “three arenas in which flawed but once modish ideas, secure from the menace of rigorous testing, can be kept indefinitely in play.”
Questioning psychoanalytic criticism is one thing. Justifying its continued value is another. Asking for a justification of all psychoanalytic criticism is, to my mind, foolish. I doubt that’s what Scott intended, but he makes some strong statements; and I wasn’t sure.
Your comment seems unusually peevish. And that’s fine.
I just read the Goble essay (he’s at Irvine, why not ask him to comment?), and I didn’t see any psychoanalytic method in it. A mention of Benjamin and Freud.
Given Taggett’s subject, not using the psychoanalytic literature would be an aberration. I thought it was well argued.
My very quick impression of Savoy is that the references to Freud were apt and logical.
I know that’s not much, but I guess it’s closer to what you were looking for in the original post than Freud-bashing and counter-bashing.
I’m happy Luther Blissett mentioned Klein and Winnicott, since the main thing I wished to say is that there is a great deal more to psychoanalysis than Freud/Lacan etc. The object relations school is fundamentally different from classical Freudian analysis in that the emphasis is on the relation between subjects as the sphere where the deepest, most significant human activity takes place, rather than all concentrated within the monadic, separate self. Winnicott was a paediatrician first and analyst second, and his clinical insights are always grounded in close and detailed observation - does that count as scientific? it ought to. Winnicott’s account of transitional objects and transitional phenomena provides the most convincing, useful, and interesting account of the nature of creativity and ‘reading’, understood as a catchall term, that i’ve encountered anywhere
Jonathan, I understand that you weren’t being sarcastic about the experiment but toward my raising questions about it. You’ve now accused me of being dreary and resentful and Rich of being unusually peevish, and you’ve implied that Scott might be cartoonishly arrogant and ignorant. That’s all over the top.
I don’t think I’ve been especially uncharitable to Holland. I’ve made an effort to take his paper seriously, but there is in fact reason to scrutinize his arguments carefully. The essay is an entry in a polemic, and it establishes its own polemical intentions quite clearly from the start. By casting critics of psychoanalysis as “bashers” who repeat their views as “mantra,” it puts a discount on criticism of psychoanalysis that it would be very hard for any argument to rise above. (Everything will seem like more bashing and mantra, as this thread bears out.) It also suggests quite clearly that Freud critics are simply scientifically ignorant.
Those implications raise high expectations for the essay that will follow. I don’t think the essay meets them. And given that Holland has positioned himself as a polemical entrant in a highly contentious debate, there’s no reason that I should simply accede to the argument from authority (“that Holland might know what he’s talking about w/r/t psychoanalysis and its place in academic psychology”). In that context, I see it as quite damaging that the one study Holland mentions at length has obvious methodological flaws. (You’re right, of course, that, similar questions might be raised about any introspective evidence, and, yes, that might be damaging to some “fancy philosophy”—if the argument was being made that its claims were empirically testable. The title of Holland’s essay is “psychoanalysis as science.” There’s nothing unfair about holding the author to the standards he invokes himself.) The Freudian theories he claims that have been verified, btw--in the third paragraph of the section “Experimental Evidence”--don’t add up to a very robust defense of psychonalysis. If what he lists in that paragraph were all that were to survive of Freud, it wouldn’t amount to very much.
Luther, I don’t doubt that psychoanalysis has heuristic value. That it does, but at a high cost, was my original point. As a method for tracking out the unconscious cunning of the desiring self (including, say, the pleasures of self-destructive behavior), it has (like Nietzsche) a lot to be said for it. And, agreed, there’s lots more that’s interesting as well. So long as it’s being defended as a science, though, appeals to scientific rigor will be completely appropriate. So long, too, as Freud is invoked as someone with a uniquely or particularly authoritative account of human pscyhology, it will be fair to doubt that that’s true. And so long as reasonable doubt about psychoanalysis is cast as “resistance,” it will be fair for critics to note that the playing field is being tilted.
Reading over the thread, I see that a couple of people have agreed with an analogy of psychoanalysis to astrology. As the first person within the thread to bring up something like this, I should clarify that it’s not exactly what I meant. I was analogizing psychoanalysis to early astronomy, with the implicit suggestion that as knowledge increased, some parts of it would be found true (but would be elaborated extensively with better theories) and some parts of it would be found to be false. I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but it was my impression that there aren’t many Freudians left. Of course it’s possible for intellectual fashions to change without scientific knowledge being gained; I don’t know enough to guess whether this is occuring in this case or not.
I don’t think it’s really valuable to obsess over whether Freud was right, or whether literary theorists who “descend” from Freud are wrong because of that descent. No founding member of any branch of scientific inquiry is expected to remain current. Whatever they discovered is expected to be replaced by or at least modified by later work. So if you think that the scientific status of psychoanalysis is important to literary theory, the question is not whether Freud was right, it’s whether the psychoanalysis that literary theorists now use has any connection to modern psychoanalysis. Does it reflect any new information now thought to be true, and has it successfully dropped those parts now thought to be false? (Please, no philosophy of knowledge quibbles about what “true” and “false” mean; I know that I’m using them casually.)