New Data Effortlessly Adhere to Old Certainties; or, Freud as Unreliable Narrator

[Note: This post is composed of all natural American prose.  Un-American  "wits" with poetic souls must seek their solace elsewhere.]

Brace yourself: Frederick Crew's Follies of the Wise opens with an anti-psychoanalytic screed.  A couple of them, actually.  It should come as no surprise that I'm sympathetic to his systematic dismantling of psychoanalytic claims to truth or continued relevance.  (Note to Jonathan: I've already linked to that site.)  What I find odd is that someone with the reputation I have has been asked to review this book for a decidedly pro-psychoanalytic journal.  Does the editor believe that the narrative I share with Crews will reduce my review to the banal prattlings of the also unindoctrinated?  Or does he believe Crews characteristic vehemence is something I'll rightly shy away from given the esteem the humanities afford psychoanalysis.  What about neither? 

I'm undecided.  But I must admit that reading Crews has been an enlightening stroll down memory lane.  How so? 

I'm glad I asked:

Way, way back in the long, long ago, the Little Womedievalist and I worked at a used bookstore directly off the LSU campus.  That "directly" is no empty modifier, you see, because the close of each semester inaugurated The Great Influx of course materials the campus bookstore refused to repatriate.  I gobbled up those discarded course books like canned-fruit on the eve of nuclear winter.  No potentially useful pamphlet, tome or pamphlet-quality tome escaped my clutches.  I read them all.

And I did so with a criminally uncritical eye.  I took it all at its face as only a 20 year old, budding intellectual can.  The best days of my life–stop giggling, I mean it–I spent in cornershop cafés reading and re-reading Freud and Lacan while the Little Womedievalist studied Sanskrit.  It was a moment of remarkable freedom, both economically and intellectually.  We were working in a used bookstore, spending our money on books and coffee, and preparing to go to our respective graduate institutions with the  enthusiastic naïveté of prospective graduate students.  On the days we didn't work, we would drive to a deserted coffee hut, hunker down and spend seven or eight eager hours devouring the material we thought we'd have to master.

Life was good.  We had the shakes but our faith remained intact.  Mine did, at least.  The Little Womedievalist had a healthy skepticism about psychoanalytic truth claims from the get-go.  (Do you realize how many subsequent arguments I could win were she unable to play that card?)  The point being: Crews is right. 

My infatuation with Freud resembles honest intellectual work as much as my marriage resembles my first infatuation.  I possessed a shallow but empowering knowledge, what Crews calls "instant depth."  Psychoanalytic thinkers imagine bland positivism the only alternative to psychoanalysis, but I question their familiarity with those alternatives.  For that matter, I question my own.  But I don't consider my ignorance convincing proof of that argument.  I was duped, plain and simple, and reading Crews reminds me of the pain accompanying that deception.

But it also showcases a rationale for my failing, one which, as a literary scholar, I find increasingly convincing with each passing hour:

Freud is the unreliable narrator par excellence. 

Feel free to discuss this for the moment.  I have more processing to do and a more sustained rebuttal to write.  But before I sign off, I must say that it feels wonderful to have half a brain again.  I almost feel like I can write a sentence which don't immediately demand deletion now.  (Even if it ain't altogether grammatical.)

Comments

[Adam Roberts]

"Freud is the unreliable narrator par excellence." But of course he is. It's hardly a criticism of Freud to say so; rather it puts a finger on precisely what is so fantastically cool about Freud. You think Freud isn't constantly aware of his own fundamental unreliability?

[Adam Roberts]

And by the way, just to say:

The best days of my life ... spent in cornershop cafés reading and re-reading Freud and Lacan while the Little Womedievalist studied Sanskrit. It was a moment of remarkable freedom.

This is the closest I've come in any online forum to a defnition of paradise. Spending time reading books in the company of the woman I love and with a plentiful supply of good coffee ... in what conceivable way could it get better than that?

[Rich Puchalsky]

As a "can't get better than that" scenario, it lacks an element of activity. Over the last couple of months, small groups of people that I've been a part of have won a U.S. House of Representatives vote, quashed a lawsuit threat by a Fortune 500 company, and received about 20 thank-you letters from activists in local struggles -- admittedly, mostly victories that help to stop bad things from happening rather than ones that build up new things, but that's happened before and will come again.

[Alex Leibowitz]

What bothers me about Crews is a little phrase somewhere near the end of his book, "Empiricism is the only successful epistemology mankind has produced..." What?! Who is this man?! I'm all for a critical evaluation of anything -- but Crews, to me, belongs in the camp of thinkers who are purpetually bitching about what they disagree with and never doing any work of their own. Case in point: The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh. He just laughs at other people from the sidelines. He has a wealthy store of opinions -- he has convictions --he's a convict.

[Alex Leibowitz]

In other words -- philosophy of science without the philosophy, for those who think the subject begins and ends with Popper.

[Jodi]

I agree with Adam Roberts re unreliable narrators. Not only is Freud aware of this but the very challenge of unreliability, the necessary unreliability of speech, emotion, desire, is crucial to psychoanalysis.

[CR]

I agree with Jodi and Adam on this one.

Taught a grad seminar last semester in which Beyond the Pleasure Principle was assigned. And opening that text involves becoming sensitive to the "unreliability" of the "narrator," if that's the word.

While I'm very sure you can find a few retro-Freudianism-as-science papers out there, I'm also quite sure, Scott, that for everyone who does good work with Freud nowadays takes the unreliability as a given, a starting point.

[Adam Kotsko]

Empericists are the worst dogmatists of all.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Would've been back sooner, but it's unbearably hot and, well, we only have an A/C in one room. It's complicated. But here I go:

I'm increasingly dissatisfied with Crews' criticisms because, after about five chapters (a.k.a. "articles from the NYRB") the same damning evidence of Freud's incompetence and/or manipulation begins to bore. That said, I think that may be a failure of the book more than his argument, but still, I've had enough.

Still, I find the question of Freud's self-awareness interesting, because the more I read, the more I'm convinced that he's 1) an unreliable narrator and 2) unaware of it. That's important because, despite the importance of unreliability to psychoanalytic thought, I don't think Freud practiced what he preached. I don't mean to hold Freud to his own standards, but now that I'm reading his letters, he fails so magnificently, and he's so, so, so, I can't even muster an adjective capable of expressing my disgust, so I'll call him an "evidence manipulator" and leave it at that. The liberties he took, and admitted to taking, and boasted of taking, disgusts me. His letters overflow with requests for evidence which "demonstrate" the "validity" of the theories he needs evidence to demonstrate the validity of. And much as I'd like to say, boldly and baldly, that he was aware of his penchant for fishing expeditions, I don't think he was.

I don't think he realized that from 1890 until 1910 he wrote 400 letters, the sole purpose of which was to find evidence which corroborated the theories he'd already formed. (Or, to be precise, formed, dismissed, reformed and re-reformulated.) I must admit that I've found the fruits of this research distressing, since I'd always held Freud in the same esteem I held James; namely, that he was a man who did the best he could with the evidence available. Now that I've read his letters, I know different. He was a clever fraud who sought evidence to verify the conclusions he already had; whose narratives about later "discovering" evidence, say, in Greek plays he hadn't read when he formulated certain theories, were absolute lies; and who abused his power in psychoanalytic circles to quash any empirical work not that openly repudiated psychoanalysis, but which merely failed to verify it.

The only redeeming quality he still possesses, to my mind, is that he was completely oblivious to his intellectual dishonesty. He didn't realize that, for example, he chose to relate only those facts which supported the conclusions he'd already drawn, or that he'd related them in a narrative whose attraction was compelled by its Holmesian quality. Only Freud didn't "discover," via inference or intuition or analysis, what he claimed to discover. No, he coldly, calmly, and Republicanly manipulated the facts to suit the theories he needed them to fit. Oedipal complex, extreme rendition, whatever.

I must say, were it not for the heat, my utter disillusionment would silence me. I endeavored to read his letters to vindicate him, to best-case-scenario his scientific foibles as typical of their time; only instead of the earnest, honest searcher I thought I'd find, I collided smack into a complete fraud so desperate to prove his theories viability that he attempted to extort victims of rape and incest into changing their stories such that they validated his theories of who was guilty of these crimes. I mean, I'd read feminist criticism of Freud and psychoanalysis before, but until I read his letters, I had no idea the extent of his dishonesty, or, for that matter, his utter immorality, his devotion to a narrative whose reality he would prove no matter what.

Which he did.

And which we live with to this day.

Christ.

[Ray Davis]

I don't have a horse in this race, but couldn't help but be struck by this, from Michael Wood's LRB review of The Penguin Freud Reader:

The most touching and in one sense the most Freudian moment in the translators’ prefaces comes when Bance explains that he couldn’t bring himself, any more than earlier translators could, to translate Freud’s word ‘guess’ as ‘guess’, ‘in contexts that related to the analyst’s attempts to put a construction on the meaning of the patient’s revelations’. You mean the man was just guessing? Erraten: the word is not difficult, but it is ‘brutally honest’, as Bance says. ‘“Conjecture” or “interpret” seem more respectable terms, offering fewer hostages to fortune.’ Ah, respectable.

Regarding the theory first, evidence later approach: This wasn't particularly unscientific of Freud, if you look at the way science has actually worked. More basic troubles in Freud's case, as for the human sciences in general, include the difficulty of eliminating variables (observer bias, notably) and of allowing for disconfirmation. These scientific bugs are literary features, which may help explain the typical salvaging move for Freud.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Cr: "While I'm very sure you can find a few retro-Freudianism-as-science papers out there, I'm also quite sure, Scott, that for everyone who does good work with Freud nowadays takes the unreliability as a given, a starting point."

Same with Marx, right? Which has nothing to do with how Marx or Freud intended to be read.

[forgottenboy]

Scott: what is your current theory of mind? It may seem like an enormous question, or an odd one, but I ask because for me most of Freud's enduring value involves ground broken on questions like "What does the content of dreams mean?" I'm willing to consider alternative theories of dream content, such as Dennett's, but I'm not presently disposed to simply give the question up. (And with it, other questions, like "What role do life experiences play in the onset of mental illness?" or "What sorts of things structure individual desires?") After all, I'm a literary critic, so I'm used to finding that the apparently arbitrary details of a text are rich with meaning -- even if common sense says that some details are "just there" and cannot speak.

Thus, while I have a mixed response to your various particular criticisms of Freud's work and reception, I find that the more pressing and interesting question is what you think a mind looks like from the standpoint of a literary critic. This is particularly relevant since, divorced from any theory of mind, many literary texts show up as transparent allegories, hardly worth the trouble of their creation.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Well, FB, it's certainly enormous, but I don't think irrelevant, question. I'll answer it in part here, then in part later this afternoon, possibly in a post of its own.

On the one hand, I don't think we need access to an author's conscious or unconscious mind to understand what he or she attempted in a literary work. Think of, say, a literary archeology: we identify moments in the text, date them, and try to describe their intent not via an appeal conscious or unconscious authorial intent, but to observable features of the text. Statement A fits into Literary Tradition B, or it flouts it, or it is informed by it, &c. We can point to similar moments in dissimilar texts and then attempt to think through their implications. We can, if we'd like, turn such an archeology into an investigation of authorial intent, but I don't think we necessarily have to. If we impute intent, then I think we have to do so strongly; i.e. stuff happens for identifiably intentional reasons, or for no reason at all. For example, a shirt a character wears may not be intended to mean anything, but it still may signify something like, say, class, race, age, membership in a particular sub-culture, &c. That's incidental intention, as opposed to, say, a race riot. (New motto: "A blue cotton-poly v-neck is not a race riot.")

I'm wild today, I realize that. So put that aside the interesting question of what any theory of mind implies for literary scholarship for a second, and let me address the rest:

for me most of Freud's enduring value involves ground broken on questions like "What does the content of dreams mean?"

This is where I now find Freud the most dishonest, least valuable thinker. You can't understand dream content from a Freudian perspective without sinking knee-deep in psychoanalytic nonsense. Freud was never more forceful and arbitrary with his patients than when he was interpreting their dreams. Think, for example, of "the Wolf Man":

I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again.

That's the dream as Pankejeff related to it Freud, years later. What's curious, and frankly arbitrary, about Freud's interpretation is its predication on the logic of reversal. Yes, there is a folk tale about a lumberjack being treed by a pack of wolves; and yes, after a year or three of prodding, Pankejeff confessed that he may heard that story as a child. But, as Freud's notes make clear, it was Freud who knew the folktale, and Freud who told him the story. When Pankejeff said he may have heard it, Freud declared the logic of the dream to be that of reversal, then used that logic to to create the dream's latent content, the primal scene of Pankejeff witnessing his parent's in coitus canis, three times, each of which led to soiled trousers. (The dream, according to Freud: whiteness = bedsheets; stillness = coital motion; big tails = castration; &c.)

Now, you can say that Freud "interpreted" that dream, or you can say he hunted for evidence, imposed on Pankejeff what he couldn't find in him, and published the results as if this all happened organically, in some natural fashion, over the course of his treatment. (These are the bits I've learned recently which have caused the most dismay.) All that said, I realize you say "ground broken," as in, I think, "he has a primacy of place in the serious investigation of what dreams mean," and that may be true. I know that "dream manuals" of the sort Freud rebukes regularly were popularly, but they lack the requisite seriousness you allude to. What, then, about literature? Dreams had always figured strongly in literature, their meanings, their relation to life, often functioning as a form of actual or imagined prophecy. Unless you mean "Freud systematized the study of dreams," I'm not sure why we should grant Freud such primacy.

[Nate]

Scott, Forgottenboy,
I'm curious - do either of you think that philosophy of mind is required for literary studies? This is not to say that, say, Dennett or McDowell might not have a use for literary studies, but "might have a use" or "has a use I like" is not the same as "necessary condition for." In another register, I used to hang out with a group of Hegelian Marxists in Chicago, good smart well meaning folk who spent loads of time reading Hegel and Hegelian Marxism and lamenting the lack of understanding of the dialectic in far left/activist circles. For them it was a matter of the reification of thought etc, all of which implied claims about the philosophy of mind. Same deal, not to say reading Hegel or Hegelian Marxism (or Marx, for that matter) or reading/doing work in the philosophy of mind is a priori useless in those arenas, but I can't see how it's in any way required.
Cheers,
Nate