While answering forgotten boy's question about the necessity of a theory of mind to literary studies, I recalled a conversation with a fellow graduate student had about a week ago:
Him: The interplay of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary are an aid to serious thought. They provide a systematic way of thinking through issues that, when applied to literature, open new avenues of investigation . . .
Me: But do you believe in the processes by which the Lacanian Tripartite comes into existence?
Him: I don't have to. The system itself describes something interesting about human experience, how it's translated into literature . . .
Me: But that system has to come into existence.
Him: No it doesn't. It has to do its job and it does.
Me: Couldn't almost any system so applied do the same job? I mean, why not a vertical hydrocarbon diffusion theory of ideology?
Him: Because Lacan's talking about the mind . . .
Me: So a groundless, bullshit theory of human cognition tops a sound, scientific theory when applied to literature? I mean, if its origins really don't matter, why does bullshit cognitive theory trump solid chemical theory?
Him: I see where you're headed with this, but Freud and Lacan were describing human relations, so their theories . . .
Me: Their bullshit theories . . .
Him: Their theories of human cognition are more likely to correspond to the kind of things you find in literature.
Me: Do you mind if I make you like an idiot when I post this?
Him: Only if you make yourself look like a hectoring asshole.
Me: Done.
Notice how my interlocutor granted me the argumentative edge—Freud and Lacan are pseudoscience—but then tried to sneak it in the backdoor by claiming that, removed of its baggage, psychoanalysis can still produce interesting readings of literature. I could almost find the strong form of that particular argument convincing: i.e. that since Freud explicated works of literature and Lacan translated those explications into structural linguistics, the insights generated by psychoanalytic theory are fundamentally literary. Had that argument surfaced, I would have had problems side-stepping it (for reasons I'll return to shortly).
My friend's initial concession denuded psychoanalytic theory of its inherent explanatory power. No longer could the truth-claims of psychoanalytic theory justify the interpretative moves made through it. The justification becomes something more literary—something like "generative of interesting readings"—but it also lost its purchase, in that it is no longer descriptive of a cognitive process. At this point, you can't argue that a vertical hydrocarbon diffusion theory of literary interpretation is inherently irrelevant, only that it's bad. If the psychoanalytic model works even if stripped of its cognitive content, then other models, ones which contain no cognitive content, could generate equally pregnant analogies applied alongside literary texts.
The common response—"Then why aren't there any out already?"—I can answer by appealing to the argument my friend doesn't want to make. Namely, that there is something ludicrous about scouring the sciences for theories adaptable to the study of literature, a point which returns us directly to the defense of psychoanalysis. Freud struggled to understand the workings of the human mind, and he did so largely through the production of narratives and their influence on our mental lives. (Even the interpretation of dreams falls into this category, with the emphasis on secondary and tertiary elaborations.) He produced a powerful system of interpretation because he made more hay than anyone previously of the materials at hand.
So I thought before reading his letters. Think I'm a hectoring asshole above? Imagine I'm your therapist:
Every session I tell you same story I had heard as a child – the one about the woodsman treed by a pack of wolves – and ask whether your mother told it to you too. You always respond that she told you nothing of the sort. I always respond by becoming visibly frustrated and unresponsive. Maybe my frustration worries you—you're vulnerable in the therapeutic environment, and you have come seeking help—so you let me hypnotize you.
While in this highly suggestible state, I repeat the story about the woodsman and the wolves and ask whether your mother told it to you. You deny for the first couple of sessions. But eventually, while hypnotized, you admit that she did. You don't remember doing so, but I assure you that you did and you believe me. Why?
I'm your doctor. I wouldn't lie.
You're thrilled that doing so has allowed me to discover the cause of your distress. That dream you told me months ago—the one about the white wolves outside your window—clicks into place. Now I can interpret it. Now you can find peace. (Or light the torches 'longside the road to mental health.) You have made us both happy.
Oh, didn't you know, I have something to gain from this too. I'm building this whole conceptual ideas around developmental traumas. Discovering yours helps me immensely. Thank you. I couldn't have done it without you. I'm lucky—that's what I'll write to my friends—I'm lucky that your experience fit into the general pattern I've established. If it hadn't, I would've had to rethink some of my operational premises. So thanks, Wolfmann, for saving me the embarrassment.
Do I need to rehearse the literary equivalent of Freud's "interpretive" method up there? Do I need to force upon some unsuspecting text an inflexible analytic designed to yield a response whose discovery I will then turn around and claim is fortuitous? Who wants to see that? No one. And you know who knows that better than you or I?
Dr. Freud. That's why the narratives of his sessions studiously avoid mention of his badgering. Why would he admit that his discoveries were the psychological analogue of setting up a mining equipment store, planting gold nuggets in some thick quartz veins, then claiming to have hit the mother-lode? The analogy works better than you might assume: he frequently hypnotized or drugged patients into highly suggestible states and asked leading questions. Over the course of additional sessions, they would then "discover" the very thing Freud had planted, thus providing more "evidence" for the validity of psychoanalytic theory. While I doubt Freud did this intentionally—the mechanics of suggestion were well-known, as many of his contemporary mesmerists would attest, but poorly understood—he certainly did it, and repeatedly, and for decades as he constructed his theory of cognition.
I write at length because this particular fraud deflates arguments about the genius of Freud's interpretations. He wrote about them magnificently, that remains, but the notion that their brilliance as interpretations earns them a place in the literary-theoretical toolbox is highly questionable. I could say more—much, much more—but if I stuff a week's worth of thinking into a single post, what will I write about tomorrow?
forgotten boy: You could address the question I asked instead of dancing around it.
Me: I certainly could. But I not "dancing around" so much as "circling in." Give me a couple of days. I'll get there. For now, we can discuss the merits of studying sketchy analytics after its shady past has been revealed.
I think that the critical quote here is "Because Lacan's talking about the mind . . . ". There is a distinct first-mover advantage for any theory of something. "the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary" is just another scheme for dividing everything into three or four constituents, the favored primitive theoretization for every topic. But taking common knowledge and systematizing it into a three-or-four entity scheme is likely to at least *sound* reasonable. People still think that earth, water, fire, and air make pretty good divisions for the kind of matter that you're likely to run into. So the first-ever systemized theory that's about something is never going to entirely die out, and will sound better than a more modern model misapplied.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Wednesday, 05 July 2006 at 11:11 PM
Rich,
Symbolic, Real, Imaginary.
There's language, and something beyond language that we can't reach except through language but which seems to drive language, and then there's my relationship to language, the way that I understand and constitute myself (only) through it.
Seems rather uncontroversial to me.
People still think that earth, water, fire, and air make pretty good divisions for the kind of matter that you're likely to run into.
Really, Rich? Who?
Scott -
What makes fictions valuable for you? Their "truth-value"? Or something else? Why do you bother working on fictions at all? Is there anything special about fiction?
Because, for me, Freud's value has nothing to do with his scientific integrity. He is valuable in the same way that Flaubert or Joyce are valuable. I never give a second thought to his scientific methodolgies... No more than Flaubert's or Joyce's.
Seems to me that you're blaming Freud for something that may well be blameworthy, for sure, in terms of his actual relationships with patients etc. But which doesn't touch the value that many people find his works.
Posted by: CR | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 12:43 AM
CR:
Yet it's spoken of in reverent tones and considered a fount of maximal insightfulness. I don't mean to turn this into a general complaint about theory, but if Lacanian insights about language and literature are straightforward and uncontroversial, why the cultish devotion to a particular articulation of its commonplaces? (Nevermind this point, however, as it's counterproductive. Just couldn't let it slip. Reflex, you know?)
Of course there is, but here is where this conversation is derailed: I can account for the uniqueness of literature without recourse to a psychoanalytic unconscious. Despite the extreme annoyance I have with Crews' book, I find his notion of psychoanalytic "instant depth" persuasive to the nth power. It's a crutch, a convenient way of avoiding the bumps great literature throws in our analytic roads. Sure, it seems valuable because, well, because it draws inroads into "depth" which intelligent people like my friend find and take advantage of. Only the thing is—and the more I think about this, the more convinced of it I am—depth so easily acquired and rigorously imposed denies works of literature the depths they actually contain.
To turn your question back around, why do you deny works of literature their unique depths in order to impose psychoanalytic ones upon them? (I realize that sounds combative, but I don't mean it to be; at least, I don't mean it to be personally so.)
So you treat Freud as literature, then? Not as someone who generated theories about literature, but as someone who produced literature which is, oddly, applicable to other literature? I don't buy it. Would you, for example, apply the theories of literature present in Dickens to a T.S. Eliot poem? I don't mean to attack, but I don't think I've seen you or anyone else do so. Ever. That move is a convenient excuse, I think, one which allows psychoanalytic theory to remain in permanent vogue.
As to his scientific integrity, I raised that question not because I'm interested in the veracity of his claims, but because it demonstrates that he commits the cardinal sin of literary study: he's a profoundly terrible reader, one who manipulates the material presented to his own ends when he can, and invents it when he can't. Were Joyce an equally dishonest reader, well, his work wouldn't be worth what it's worth. I would resemble Thomas Dixon's The Clansman or—I'll say it—the corpus of Ayn Rand. It'd be single-minded, ideologically driven, and boring to boot. It would be read as historical curiosity, but it wouldn't be taken seriously as literature.
Psychoanalytic theory has denuded literary study of the complexity belonging to the works it purports to examine, and has replaced them with a framework of deceptive rigidity, able to convince even the best scholars that its strictures illuminate nuance. It does, I suppose, but always the same nuance, and in the same places.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 02:52 AM
By the way: I've gotten three emails claiming that my interlocutor doesn't exist, that he's some strawman invented for this occasion—oddly, though, none of those three accused me of doing so with intentional irony, which would've capped the point nicely. Anyhow, the other four emails I received were from my interlocutor, who confessed to having argued a little cavalierly, like he thought a discussion had over two vodka tonics and into the night wasn't "serious." Pffft. But he also said, and smartly:
As I noted earlier, I think that connection obvious. So much so, I wonder why people must defend psychoanalytic theory in order to make it. The appeal is to an established authority, and unnecessary, the equivalent of CR's footnote nightmare, I'd say. A perfunctory walk in the park to justify a point which could be justified better via an analysis of the work under examination. Some works, as forgotten boy noted earlier, would seem thin, like intellectual gruel, if forced to account for themselves on such grounds. Fine then. They're interesting on other accounts. (What, do you think Silas Weir Mitchell a writer of literary masterworks?) But those works which deserve the name, well, those works can justify their own depth without recourse to the instant depth psychoanalytic theory provides. More importantly, they can provide their own depth as opposed to the instant depth psychoanalytic theory provides. Sure, it may seem like an endless reinvention of the wheel, but isn't that precisely what it is? Isn't literary uniqueness the endless reinvention of the wheel? The sum total of all the individual experiences of a particular artist filtered through the traditions available to him or her? Why stop with unscientific distinctions designed to account for the first stages of cognitive development, esp. when it's been proven that it's physiologically impossible for them to do so? (The brain can't record what Freud, Lacan or any psychoanalytic thinker claims it can at the time it claims it does.) Why not hie to the unique experiences which shaped a uniquely talented intellect at a particular moment in time? Why appeal to a false universal instead?
(Apologies for writing so quickly, but I'm thinking fast now and am surely about to crash. Better to write it all down before it disappears than lose it to the pillow.)
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 03:13 AM
Cr, the way that you've uncontroversially presented Lacan is an exact illustration of how its an earth-water-fire-air type of model. Of course it seems uncontroversial, because it has that neat prarcelling-up gesture. First there's language -- OK, fine, language exists. Then there's "something beyond language that we can't reach except through language but which seems to drive language." OK, given the existence of language, there must be something that drives it, but recognize what a huge and varied group of concepts are being shoehorned together as "the Real". Lastly
"there's my relationship to language, the way that I understand and constitute myself (only) through it." Note here how the "only" part, indeed everything after the comma, kind of tags along with the rest. But it's part of the nature of three-or-four part schemes that by the time you've gotten to the last part, people are predisposed to let you treat it as All Other not included in the first two or three. This not only does the work of jamming unrelated entities together that happened in step 2, it also allows you to gloss in claims about the residue.
The thing about fire-earth-water-air is that it does correspond to the four basic states of matter: solid, liquid, vapor, plasma. Usually there is some kind of common sense and history of observation behind these classifications. The problem is that it becomes an excuse to carry along more "advanced" theorizing that isn't justified at all.
Lastly, I should say that there really is something wrong with taking the writing of someone who was trying to write about scientific or economic truth and treating it as if it were purely literary. At least people are going to spare e.g. Newton and Einstein that, since they weren't such great writers, but also perhaps since literary people generally can't understand their work. It's the equivalent of what Moretti does when he counts books instead of reading them, except that he at least realizes what he's doing.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 08:10 AM
Resistance...
Freud invented a hermeneutic, that's all. Psychoanalysis works with language.
Posted by: laura | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 08:52 AM
As soon as CR called the Lacanian triad "uncontroversial," I thought to myself, "Wow, there's a 99.5% chance that someone is going to respond, 'Then why's it such a big deal, then?'"
Imagine my delight when I scrolled down and found exactly that!
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 08:52 AM
So much of what we're ultimately talking about is the stance of the current writer to previous ones. If your point is that we shouldn't feel obligated to take Freud as an authority figure, useful to read but not be read in turn, is a fine one. And there certainly is work out there that handles this badly. I would simply argue that it doesn't make the grade as "theory" (little-t, ugh, I think...)
1) To stop with the Symbolic, Imaginary, Real division isn't to go very far at all, no. Thankfully, for those who work on Lacan, Lacan didn't.
2) Of course there is, but here is where this conversation is derailed: I can account for the uniqueness of literature without recourse to a psychoanalytic unconscious.
Me too! That wasn't what I was saying. I was talking about Freud's literary value, not the psychological depth of literature.
And I definitely don't do this:
To turn your question back around, why do you deny works of literature their unique depths in order to impose psychoanalytic ones upon them?
Rather, when working with Freud, I work upon his "unique" literary depths. Right.
3) Not as someone who generated theories about literature, but as someone who produced literature which is, oddly, applicable to other literature? I don't buy it.
Now Scott, this sounds a bit naive. Is that really a mindblowing idea? That is exactly what I do. And I was taught to do this, so I can't be the only one. My advisor would routinely stick Dora into his Victorian Lit classes as a strange sort of novel. And when I assign Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it is to read it against the grain, not to borrow a system.
4) Would you, for example, apply the theories of literature present in Dickens to a T.S. Eliot poem? I don't mean to attack, but I don't think I've seen you or anyone else do so. Ever.
OMIGOD! That is exactly what I do in my work! In a certain light, my current work is a prolonged reading of Benjamin's Theses on the Phil. of History (and, connectedly, Being and Time) through the theorizations of time performed by a bunch of modern novels! Of course, sometimes I use the "theorists" to read the lit, as turnabout is fairplay. But in general it works in the other direction. The literary texts are just as or more "authoritative" in my work as Benjamin & certainly Heidegger.
(You've not read much of my work - but what you have - if you're familiar with the Benjamin essay - think about what that sliver of a chapter might be trying to say about it - and you'll catch my drift, perhaps...)
5) To return to my initial question. You've said that literature is special, but you can only define that specialness negatively - it's not psychological depth that makes it special. But I have my doubts - from this and other materials - that your approach is capable of mobilizing literature as anything other than illusory, delusional, a symptomatic illustration (har). It's no coincidence that I find the same limitation in the WBM that I've read. "Why does this guy write about literature? It's nothing more than a catalogue of errors for him..." Which is fine, but always leads me to wonder why someone like you is interested in working on literarture in the first place.
Posted by: CR | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 08:56 AM
Rich,
But the problem is that canny readers of Lacan know that it's not a triangle at all. It's not like "everything is fire/water/earth/air or solid/liquid/gas/plasma." The pieces don't fit together like that, and they're not supposed to. A worst case scenario is someone picking through a text and assigning elements to this rubric. That's, um, not how it's supposed to work. People have done it, I suppose. Scott's friends probably do it all the time - who knows? But it's not a triangle like that.
Posted by: CR | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 09:09 AM
Laura, are you saying I'm doing the Ol' Resistance Shuffle? Or that psychoanalysis is a conventional hermeneutic, its origins notwithstanding?
Adam, what Rich aimed at, and what I did too, was the specific defense my friend employed, in which he emptied psychoanalytic categories of their cognitive values and claimed them a tool to thought. That defense, as you rightly, albeit sarcastically, point out, is rarely made honestly. (My friend, cavalier or not, did so. I think.)
CR:
No need for the capitalization debate now, as it'd be counterproductive. Maybe I'm muddled, but are you saying that psychoanalysis doesn't qualify as theory, however defined and/or capitalized? Because it seems to me a cornerstone of contemporary literay criticism.
That was my point, and I'd like it back please. Unlike my friend, most psychoanalytic thinkers work with the full complement of the Freudian/Lacanian toolbox, i.e. they rely on concepts, or concepts based on concepts, whose foundations are unscientific (it that's what matters) or forced, terrible readings (if that is). What makes my new criticism unique to me is that it's not predicated on a drive for literary empiricism but on the quality of Freud as a reader and interpreter of literature. He is the bald applicator, the "I only look at the evidence I want to and even if it somehow contradicts the point I've committed to make, I'll make it anyway by force" type of reader.
I understand that, and, I'm fine with treating Freud as a writer of compelling, late-Victorian narratives. (I said as much above.) But you have to admit that, in this respect, you're the exception, not the rule. Also, while this position may justify the continued importance of Freud, I don't think you can extend it to Lacan, can you? Unless, of course, you're interested in the intellectual and cultural scene in France. In other words, I don't think you're defending the thing that I'm attacking.
Yes, and were I to teach a class on mid- to late- 20th Century literature, I'd include a healthy dose of Freud too. But there's a difference, isn't there, between throwing works with a direct genealogical connection like that and, say, analyzing Milton via a Lacan-informed perspective? The latter partakes of a universality, a universal applicability of psychoanalytic thought.
This is an important misunderstanding, here: I'm not saying that psychological depth fails to make it special, but that psychoanalytic depth doesn't. Henry James presents incredible psychological depth, but why does psychoanalysis occupy the place of privilege in sounding it? Inertia? Familiarity?
To say that my approach doesn't value literature-qua-literature is, I grant, true of my scholarship; but to say that I don't value literature-qua-literature is another matter entirely. I'm still a closet Joycean, after all.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 09:40 AM
Once again, in many ways, we agree. I just get my yayas out by teaching my grad students to do it correctly / writing pieces that work through things like Freud the right way, whereas you tear away at Freud's authority.
Still, I think there's a major gap between us on the value of the sort of knowledge that literature can provide. We might agree that Freud's value is "literary," but for you I think that means "only literary," whereas for me, that's exactly the sort of value that I'm after...
The other major gap between us, in all of these debates. When I think of the field, I think of the best that's been done and the possibility of still better works that might come. You tend to think of the mean, the conventional, the status quo. (This - a gloss on the psychoanalysis as "theory" bit...)
And yes, you're right - I should have said psychoanalytical, not psychological.
Posted by: CR | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 10:12 AM
Didn't doubt it for a second. My target here—and this speaks to your other concerns—has more in common with articles in the profession's flagship journal then what I've read of your work. But I do see articles like that one in PMLA constantly, if not egregiously. Or, to be a little nuanced about this, I see articles based on similar assumptions which, even if they don't determine the course of the entire argument, still mar its logic.
That's not quite right. I think literature possesses inherent value—in this respect, I'm a liberal humanist at heart—and while Freud's work may do so to, it does so despite its explicit claims to an entirely different category of knowledge. I'm not saying you collapse those distinct claims, but some people do: they defend him on the basis of his literariness only to proceed to forward his "scientific" claims. That backdoor legitimization bothers me even more now that I know the manufactured nature of his evidence. Literature, on the other hand, doesn't make the kind of claims Freud makes, and it doesn't back it up with the kind of evidence Freud does. If I read a novel with pretensions to cognitive theory, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it because, well, because it claimed to be a novel. (If people started to believe in it, that would be a different story, one akin to the transformation of The Five Books of Moses into the Bible, and then we'd have to have an entirely different conversation, but you catch my drift.)
That's part my natural pessimism, part the product of thoroughness. The ratio of brilliance-to-nonsense I encounter skews pathetically to the latter, and it bothers me. So I search for the root of the nonsense, the theories which validate the moves that frustrate me, and I find what I find. Often it's psychoanalysis. But I want to reiterate that I don't think we're at odds here:
We both buck at dry, tired thinking and the readings it produces. One difference may be that I'm frustrated by the limits of psychoanalytic thought despite its ability to generate endless, interesting readings of literary texts. Other people are satisfied by that bounded infinite, but I can't help but wonder what's beyond it, what all these intelligent people could produce if they could escape psychoanalytic gravity.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 11:04 AM
Scott, I don't understand your response.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 11:55 AM
If Freud didn't ultimately care about the 'evidence', why on earth would he go through so much trouble to 'procure' it? That's a serious question -- it seems a bit odd to me that he could be so cynical and yet feel an overwhelming need to get what he wanted out of his patients. Wouldn't it have been just as easy (if not easier) to make up these accounts?
The real problem with Freud, I think, gets into a problem with Hegel -- and I see it over and over again, in the existentialists for instance. It's a problem with dialectic: if you deny a dialectician's argument, your denial bounces back upon you, because your denial is exactly what he's trying to account for in his system. If you disagree with him, you still agree with him.
The problem is, without dialectics, I think it's hard to avoid some kind of relativism. Namely -- if I can be wrong, ultimately wrong, then how do I ever know that I'm right? People really thought Newton had things figured out -- and then Einstein, Godel, and quantum physics came along and sort've tossed the whole thing in the garbage, tossed out Kant too -- it turns out that the world of 'appearances' cannot be salvaged.
The problem is how to be dialectical responsibly? Well of course if you apply a theory to a text just in order to find that theory, then you'll always find yourself in the position of just proving what you want to prove. But if you simply try to engage with the text and insist that we *can* look at certain things that people might have ignored -- and if you can convince your readers that these things in fact have an important role to play in our interpretation of the text -- then I think you can side-step the need to prove a theory, because that theory always ends up just as a certain kind of engagement.
I do think that if you're going to insist that the value of a theory lies in its truth, then we might as well dispense with literature altogether. Because I don't think that literature on the whole is a good place to look for 'the truth'. Not anymore than psycho-analysis. In other words -- if we can salvage Freud, we can do it for the same reasons that we can salvage literature.
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 11:56 AM
I just wanted to add -- I'm worried that you're rejecting Freud for positivistic reasons -- either his theories are not confirmed by observation or they're meaningless because they can't be confirmed by observation. I'm not a big fan of that litmus test (though probably it has nuances I don't understand), I think that empirical investigation is not the be-all-end-all of our intellectual work, and in light of this I think engagement with Freud remains necessary and that that engagement should be through conceptual analysis. Imagine, for instance, someone rejecting the idea of the unconscious because it isn't confirmed by 'the evidence' when in fact he's misunderstood that idea, hasn't followed it's full implications, hasn't reconstructed it in terms of its place in the history of thought, etc.
I tend to think that 'the false' is a thread we can follow to truths we hadn't suspected. Of course, truth has its uses -- because if we know something is true, we can use it to set up an implication test for other truths (which we can't do with false statements) -- but I think that setting up such tests is only one way of thinking and that another, equally important way of thinking is 'conceptual analysis'. Most literary work is conceptual analysis, not empirical work (setting up implication tests) and so I don't think that the complaint, "Well Freud doesn't work in implication tests" is a just one in terms of literary work.
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 12:09 PM
Alex:
"I do think that if you're going to insist that the value of a theory lies in its truth, then we might as well dispense with literature altogether. Because I don't think that literature on the whole is a good place to look for 'the truth'. Not anymore than psycho-analysis. In other words -- if we can salvage Freud, we can do it for the same reasons that we can salvage literature."
But surely we read--not just as critics and scholars, but as enjoyers of literature--in part to find complex and difficult truths, wonderfully expressed? These truths aren't universal, and I may find one work truthful while you find it false or simplistic, but we're both looking for that spark of truth. So to me, it isn't enough to say, "Freud's ways of looking at the mind form an interesting hermeneutic, one that can be applied in interesting ways to the books I read." I want to know, "Are Freud's ways of looking at the mind true?" It can't "ring true" in the way Flaubert or Joyce can--I have no memory of my oral stage, I don't feel a thanatos instinct--so it becomes very important to know whether the data he gathered were gathered using sound methodology.
As for your dismissal of empiricism: to my mind, literary criticism is a pretty empirical process. I formulate a hypothesis about the text based on what I've read. If, on further investigation, the text doesn't support that hypothesis, I have to withdraw it. I think that the endpoint of your downgrading of empiricism is, unfotunately, exactly the kind of shoddy scholarship that is clogging the academy today. There are scads of theorists and grad students, some fairly successful, who don't have a real interest in supporting their theories and claims with textual evidence, or really any evidence. I'm not saying that Freud gave birth to all of them, only that he is an example of that phenomenon.
All of that said, I think Freud is interesting and valuable to read, as a great writer who gave birth to important avenues of thought. Aristotle is worth reading too, even though he was wrong about falling bodies. But applying Freud, or "salvaging" him, is a different matter. Aside from the fact that it's a house built on sand, it's also worth remembering that Freud's theories are still applied to patients, as well as books, and we have to take a position on that. If we say that Freud's theories are true to life and psychoanalysis works for patients...well, why would we say that, when there's no evidence that it does? If we say that Freud's theories aren't true in life but they are true in literature, then we're lowering literature to the status of a hobby, one without any real import for how we live our lives.
Posted by: Tom Hitchner | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 01:08 PM
Literary people may not care whether scientific ideas are really true or not, but other people do. Saying that you're going to go ahead and use ideas for literary purposes without regard for their truth value, *even when they were developed for scientific purposes*, is certainly something that you can do, but it isn't intellectually serious.
And I don't mean that only in a positivistic sense, as in "you shouldn't hold on to ideas that aren't true." It's also just sloppy and disrespectful, rather like basing readings of primarily non-religious texts on the intertwining presence of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost, then when confronted by a Christian who says that they really believe in that stuff, saying that's OK, you don't, you just find it to be a helpful hermeneutic and that you've progressed far beyond the simple religiousity that would invalidate your procedure.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 01:31 PM
Adam, the fact that you can't understand me when I'm speaking in coded shortcut out both sides of my mouth isn't my problem. But I'll indulge you: one common defense of psychoanalytic theory is that, structurally, it aids in the production of interesting readings. These readings ignore the content of the Lacanian Real, but borrow its relation to the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The end result is a reading facilitated by, and borrowing the authority of, the logic of psychoanalytic theory sans its content. This is the "backdoor" justification I describe above, and which my friend forwards in the post.
Alex:
That's a damn fine question, one his letters help illuminate. No one disputes that the man was intensely curious and committed to understanding how the human mind worked. It's not his motives I impugn, but his methods I question. His letters demonstrate that his clinical practice often took the form of bullying highly suggestible patients: he admits to hypnotizing them, doping them up, then asking questions we would consider leading. Only—and I say this with the same caveat I invoked above—he wasn't aware of the power of suggestion the way we are. He thought he hypnotic states revealed deeply buried truths, the experiences of trauma that he believed responsible for the symptoms that brought his patients to him; however, the questions he would ask while they were hypnotized are the same sort which, in the '80s and '90s, were responsible for the "recovered memory" craze. (Consider the sad case of the Ingram family, for example.) In short, he created what he claimed to describe, and the evidence points to him not realizing it.
That's the Ol' Psychoanalytic Shuffle I mentioned above, and the way to avoid it is to dismiss the relevance of both the dialectical prongs. This is why a foundational—and to a large extent, biographical—critique is the only means to refute it. You deny the dialectician his or her premises, demonstrate their weakness, and in so doing undermine the dialect one unsound assumption at a time. The real problem lies with people who embrace a dialectic so tightly that they'll never accept that anything exists outside it.
There's a reason former psychoanalytic thinkers like myself argue so vehemently against it is because we understand the comfort it provides: you cultivate your own hermeneutic garden endlessly, and when anyone challenges you, you put them in your place—your garden, where everyone has to play by your rules. Eventually you recognize such "thought" for the rigged game it is. You realize that while you busted your ass wrestling difficult problems through ornately complex patterns, you never left your garden. You thought you could bring the world to you, but it turns out everyone stood on the other side of your tiny fence laughing.
In short, I don't take the difficulty surmounting the psychoanalytic dialectic too seriously. And now I have more evidence as to why I shouldn't, which is in itself an interesting happening. When I read psychoanalytic theory, I read psychoanalytic theory; that is, other people who bought into the same general scheme I did, and with whom I could circumlocute about psychoanalytic niceties for days. (The narcissism of small differences, indeed.) But I never read anything which seriously challenged it. Sure, Lacan seemed to, but in the end he always circled back again. If my experience in coursework and conversations with certain faculty members is any indication, I'm not alone in this. (I vividly remember the mention of a behaviorist in a class led by a post-feminist psychoanalytic cyborg theorist. All visible skin—even the whites of her eyes—sanguined and everyone feared for their lives.)
Well put. As my friend conceded, sometimes you can do precisely that via a theory which is, itself, bullshit. Which works in the same way that CR describes above: in a particular historical context, with works belonging to a continuous intellectual tradition, &c. But to universalize the utility of psychoanalysis, well, that's another matter entirely.
But isn't this dangerously close to claiming that Freud is literature? I say "dangerously," but that's a poor choice of words for someone who leans in the general direction of cultural studies. Between my use of newspaper articles and Dr. X's use of Freud sits a gulf, however; Dr. X invokes the scientific authority of Freud to make his point, whereas I merely point out homologous logic to make mine. The difference is crucial, I think.
Actually, I'm going to great lengths not to. I'm considering him from a literary perspective, and thus from a position in which I neither want nor expect positivistic results. What I want from Freud is an intellectually responsible account of the material presented to him; reading his letters, I've discovered I'll never get that. All we ask of fellow literary scholars is that engage with a text honestly—that they avoid imposing patently preposterous meanings upon it—and consider the evidence before them intelligently.
We would, and should, mock the critic who claims that a character described as "gay" in 1831 is a homosexual. The critic who claims the constellation of characteristics which would provoke the adjective "gay" in 1831 shares a cultural genealogy with contemporary homosexual identities, however, is another story. And more often than not, Freud resembles the former more than the latter.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 02:39 PM
Damn, Tom and Rich beat me to it, only better. One quick addition:
This is certainly true, and it's where Crews is at his cranky best. (In Follies of the Wise, the book I'm reviewing. I assume most of you know that, but just in case you didn't.) The connection between the naive, pictoral theory of mind—in which "images" are "stored" in ways the brain doesn't actually store memories, and at a moment in human development during which it's physiological impossible for it to store any information even remotely similar to what psychoanalysis requires—and the "repressed memory" fad drawn by Crews presents damning evidence of negligence in the circles of both professional and professionally dilettante psychoanalysts.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 02:53 PM
Scott,
My attempted joke was more about the structure of your knee-jerk response than the structure of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Your response would've worked for any number of highly controverted thinkers and schools -- in fact, it's one of the most frequently used argumentative tropes in broadly "anti-Theory" types of discussions. First one claims that the body of ideas is deeply wrong and destructive of genuine inquiry. When a defender notes that they aren't as outlandish as all that, one retorts that they are therefore trivial. It's as though the only two options are "worthless" or "actively destructive." (This was first elucidated by Michael Berube under the title of "the Derrida two-step.")
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 03:54 PM