My world on the web
Published in DLTV Journal 1.2 December 2014
in Tools for Working
In Search of One Tool to Rule Them All?
This is a summary of the workshop that I presented at ICTEV13: IT Takes a Village
Discovery often starts with a problem. My problem was the use of mundane exercise books and worksheets. After exploring different potentials (Microsoft Word, Evernote and the Ultranet), I finally introduced Google Drive.
Some examples of how Drive has been used to transform learning include:
– access everywhere. With student laptops often re-imaged, work is not only continually backed up, but also accessible from any computer.
– the opportunity to work collaboratively. Some examples have included adding to a single document for book clubs, sharing student goals to all relevant stakeholders and staff working together on a curriculum document.
– the ability to provide flexible feedback. Whether it is a teacher commenting on a workbook anytime, students posing questions on a presentation or using Forms to ascertain different points of information.
On the other side of the coin, there are always hurdles faced when introducing a new application. Although students are usually quick to jump into the potential of new technologies, staff often question why they need to change, just look at the Ultranet. In addition to this, some staff feel that other applications offer more potential.
In the end, the question that remains is that if Google is not the tool to rule them all, then what? I’m ok with not using Google, but doing nothing is no longer an option.
Honors Thesis written as a part of my Bachelor of Arts completed at La Trobe University.
The problem that has to be solved on this early, yet superficial level, must be stated in adult terms by the question, “What is something?” and not the question “Why is something?’’ because “why” has, through guilt, been split off. [1]
Source: Wilfred Bion ‘Attacks on Linking’
Discussing the numerous resistances inside and outside of psychoanalysis, Jacques Derrida declares, ‘psychoanalysis will never gather itself into the unity of a concept or a task. If there is not one resistance, there is not “la psychoanalyse” – where one understands it here as [a] system of theoretical norms or as a charter of institutional practices.’[2] By this Derrida does not mean that psychoanalysis is therefore paralysed and broken but quite the opposite, this absence of a foundational centre opens psychoanalysis up to the ‘chance for success’. As he argues, ‘to say that psychoanalysis does not have the concept of what it itself is … gives movement, it gives one to think and to move’. (p.21.) Denying psychoanalysis existence-in-itself, Derrida opens it up to the endless play of meaning that he has become so famous for. However far one enters into the Derridian quagmire, an emphasis upon the flexibility of meaning is something that is often over looked when we talk about psychoanalysis. Whether as a clinical practice or a literary device the thought that there is more than one impression of psychoanalysis is often denied in the hope of unity. In more recent literary criticism, there has been a push to see the literary text as open, an infinite mass of quotations and citations, yet for some reason psychoanalytic texts (such as theoretical papers or case studies) have been relatively exempt from this process, construed as texts with a meaning-in-themselves. Refuting the stagnant perception of psychoanalysis as a practice made up of privileged members of an undisclosed fraternity, I aim to open it to the world of textual analysis. Like Roland Barthes, I intend ‘to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text’.[3] If, as Derrida suggests, there is no unified concept of psychoanalysis, the question to be asked then is what is it we talk about when we talk about psychoanalysis? Not wanting to give another (banal) description of what psychoanalysis is or isn’t, I will discuss two aspects which work towards forming our understanding of psychoanalysis. Firstly, psychoanalysis as a cultural myth focusing on Freud, a definition of psychoanalysis ingrained within society’s ways of knowing and understanding, and secondly, psychoanalysis as a text, that is, as a practice characterized by readers reading and interpreting.
For the outsider it is still Freud’s classic theory as it evolved over his lifetime. For the insider it is a multifaceted field representing many schools of thought, many innovative concepts, new building on old, new incorporating old, new discarding old, a field with rich diversity and rich in confusing contradictions. The outsiders are challenging psychoanalysis.[4]
Source: Marianne Echardt ‘Psychoanalysis – Myth and Science’
In the prologue to his epic work of Freudian criticism, Why Freud Was Wrong, Richard Webster announces, ‘throughout countless versions of the early history of psychoanalytic movement there is one constant image which recurs. It is that of Freud as an isolated hero, a lonely messiah fighting for the cause of truth in a hostile world’.[5] Discussing the way in which the myth of Freud has slowly circulated itself within contemporary society, Webster suggests the foundations lay in the work of novelist Thomas Mann and psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. Mann spoke highly of the connection between Freud and the arts. For example, in a speech celebrating Freud’s eightieth birthday, he described him as a ‘great Scientist’ whose achievements should be placed along side other great European minds such as Ibsen, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer,[6] while Jones, a member of Freud’s inner circle, wrote a mammoth three-volume biography on Freud.[7] Although many critics have followed in their wake, seeking to disclaim Freud and deny any reverence for the man, they constantly fall back on Freud as a legend; the image of a man who, although he may have got it wrong, still managed to influence society in so many ways. Unlike most critics who argue that Freud’s misinterpretation of Dora or forays into cocaine dismisses psychoanalysis from the very start,[8] Webster suggests that there have been many valuable and creative contributions produced under the guise of the psychoanalytic tradition. He even goes to the extent of saying that psychoanalysis ‘has every claim to be regarded as richer and more original than any other single intellectual tradition in the twentieth century’. (p.8) What is it then that provokes Webster to focus so much attention on a man he himself admits ‘to be mistaken’? Webster claims that his reason for studying Freud is that Freud was mistaken in a particularly interesting way, and partly in order to establish the need for an alternative theory of human sexuality and human nature’. (p.8) From this suggestion, Webster describes Freud as a catalyst for higher aspirations. But why Freud, why is he anymore interesting than say Hitler, Marx or any other great historical icon who supposedly ‘got it wrong’ yet still managed to have an influence on the way we live today? What is it that provokes Webster, a British ‘literary critic who had strayed into neurology, psychiatry and the history of medicine’ (p.vii-viii), to start reading psychoanalytic rather than literary texts, to want to know about Freud in the first place? One does not ask the question, ‘I need a foundation, who would be a good starting point to launch from’? Rather the question is already fixed before Webster has even begun dreaming of it. What needs to be asked then is not whether Freud was right or wrong, but what is the intention and motivation that provokes so many to constantly write about a subject that seems to infuriate them so much? Why is it that people such as Freud take precedents in our society at all? Why are they not simply forgotten with the sands of time like so many other significant figures in history? Is the question even historical? Is there a real ‘unknown’ Freud that is waiting to be discovered, as others have suggested, or is the constant production of myth all we have? What all this leads to is the question, can we study psychoanalysis without being burdened by its so-called tarnished past? I wish to discuss all of these questions, in some way or another, in the following section.
In an interview, Stanley Fish was asked to clarify a comment he had made to the effect that, ‘significant and substantial developments are occurring within and because of feminism’.[9] Neither pronounced nor undefined, Fish describes Feminism as a series of ‘disciplines’ gathered together under the one heading. Using the metaphor of a map with many ‘city-states’ or ‘nation states’, he suggests that it would be foolish to ‘start pronouncing’ feminism as any one thing without being reductive. Returning to the ‘significance’ of feminism, Fish makes it clear that the questions feminism raises are the product of issues raised by the greater community, it is only at a latter date that they are accepted and defined as beginning and originating within the pedagogy of the University. [10] Placing Feminism in society rather than universities, Fish argues that it has had more influence than any other ‘ism’, including Marxism, in the past twenty to thirty years. This influence is reflected in the success of many feminist attributes or assumptions being dispersed within today’s society. As Fish says,
[the] true power of a form of inquiry or thought: [is] when the assumptions encoded in the vocabulary of a form of thought becomes inescapable in the larger society. For example, people who have never read a feminist tract and would be alarmed at the thought of reading one are nevertheless being influenced by feminist thinking in ways of which they are unaware or are to some extent uncomfortably aware. Such influence often exhibits itself in the form of resistance: “I’m not going to fall in with any of that feminist crap,” thereby falling in headfirst as it were. (p.294)
Using an analogy to explain his point further, Fish compares feminism’s place in society with that of Freudianism, describing the way in which terms such as ‘the unconscious, repression and … a vague sense that there’s something called the “Oedipus Complex,”’ (p.295) have blended themselves within minds and concepts of today’s society. ‘That’s when a form of thought has genuine power,’ Fish suggests, when ‘it becomes unavoidable in our society’. (p.295)
This raises many questions, two of which I will discuss here. Firstly, in comparing feminism with Freudianism, is Fish suggesting that Freudianism is a multitude of things (like Feminism), brought together under a unifying banner? Secondly, comparing Freudianism with the other ‘isms’ mentioned in the response, such as Marxism, why is it that Fish uses the name ‘Freudianism’, not ‘Psychoanalysis’, as the collective noun?
A lot can be said of Freudianism in comparing it with the ‘ism’ that Fish leaves almost untouched, Marxism. Originating from the practice of nineteenth century economist, Karl Marx, Marxism today contains more than just a few bare beginnings. Figures such as Lenin and Stalin in Russia and Mao Zedong in China have had as much influence on the spread of Marxism socially and culturally as Marx himself. Unlike Marxism, Freudianism has had no other thinkers that have made an impact comparable to Freud. Jung maybe can be considered as having just as much influence as Freud on the development of Freudianism. But unlike Mao and Stalin who never completely split from their Marxist cultural tag, Jung is usually viewed as outside the Freudian family. For example, it is possible to read Jung and not be put under the banner of Freudianism or psychoanalysis, but it is almost impossible to do the same with Stalin or Mao. One reason for the divide may be the age of the two practices, with Marxism having more time to break apart and form new possibilities. Another may be the hijacking of Freud by those on the outside, preventing the possibility of change within psychoanalysis. Whatever the reason, Freudianism is often still construed as an unchanging event in history, beginning and ending with the life of Freud.
This leads to the second question: in describing Feminism, Fish creates a picture of multiplicities, undiscernible and endlessly open to conjecture, yet in describing Freudianism, he categorises it using terms like ‘the unconscious’ or ‘the Oedipus complex’ as central themes. Although Fish suggests that there are similarities between Feminism and Freudianism in society, one of these seems not to be the question of multiplicity. Fish’s choice in using ‘Freudianism’ as opposed to ‘psychoanalysis’ describes a practice that can be well defined and given a cultural meaning, although this may be the case, what does this say about psychoanalysis? Practically, psychoanalysis is just as diverse as feminism, yet culturally it is described as a singularity revolving around the work of one man. Focusing on Fish’s description of Freudian concepts, I will now examine the way that terms, taken out of their original context, are given new meaning through their performance in society, creating a cover for the real psychoanalysis that always lies just beyond.
In Mythologies, first published in 1957, Barthes discussed the ways in which signs can become layered with a double meaning. On the one hand, signs carry a meaning that is practical and descriptive of the object or subject in question; on the other hand, they carry a meaning that is impractical and involved in the creation of cultural myths that distort a subject’s intended meaning. Barthes gave numerous illustrations of this double coding, ranging from advertisement of soap-powder to the theatre of wrestling. My interest though is in Barthes’s attempt to methodologise the formation of myth in a chapter at the end of the book, ‘Myth Today’.[11]
Barthes described myth as a mode of cultural signification chosen by history. Every sign has the possibility of becoming a myth, what matters is the its suitability for communicating something accepted within a given society and language system. Being already communicable then, the strength of myth lies in the power of first impressions, to manipulate individual preconceptions of a sign. It does not matter that after the initial contact a more rationale meaning be found, a myths power to distort still remains and does not diminish. As Barthes described, ‘[myth] is imperfectible and unquestionable; time or knowledge will not make it better or worse.’[12] Important to a myth’s social distortion is the ability to ‘naturalise’. Being depoliticised, that is stripped of all political agendas to the naked eye, myth is experienced as ‘innocent speech’.
Barthes based his double-layered system on Ferdinand de Saussure’s principles of language (langue) in which every sign is the product of a concept (signified), and an acoustic image (signifier). Take for example a bunch of roses (signifier) used to signify passion (signified). We see the roses as ‘passionified roses’. If we were to break passionified roses down into two parts, we would have the roses and passion. Myth creates a second semiological system on top of this first one. Take the sign of passionified roses, which on a personal level may come to represent a lover’s affection, turned into myth they are transformed from the personal to the collective. They become for instance the representation of national pride.[13] Barthes gave each semiological system its own name. The first he called the language-object, ‘because it is the language which myth gets hold of in order to build its own system’; and the second he calls the metalanguage, ‘a second language, in which one speaks about the first’. (p.115) The sign in the first system becomes the signifier for the second system, with the signified being a concept absent or outside of the first system. This layering of one system on top of another creates the double meaning. To prevent confusion Barthes produced a new set of labels for the second system in order to distinguish it from the first. Firstly, the sign from the first system, is replaced with the label, meaning, while as a signifier in the second system, it is called, form. The signified in the second system, is replaced by concept. Like the signified and signifier, the form and the concept combine to create the signification, that is, the myth-in-itself (passionified roses for my nation). This is best illustrated, with his diagram, showing how the two systems work together.[14]
![[Pasted image 20250403131425.png]]
Another example of the appropriation of language by myth is ‘Steak and Chips’. In Barthes’ short piece, he described the way in which steak was invested with national virtues. ‘To eat steak rare therefore represents both a nature and a morality’. (p.62.) Like the prestige given to wine and chips, to consume steak, is to, assimilate a ‘bull like strength’. In Barthes’s France this ‘life giving substance’ was nationalized, ‘a part of all the rhythms, that of the comfortable bourgeois meal and that of the bachelor’s bohemian snack’. (p.63.) While aboard, steak became the container of both patriotic values and nostalgia. During wartime it was, ‘the inalienable property which cannot go over to the enemy except by treason’, to spur the soldiers on.
The difference between signifiers (the rare cooked steak or the passionified roses) and myth (the sign commandeered for nationalistic purposes) is a constant game of hide-and-seek, occurring between/arm and meaning. As one arrives, the other leaves; there is never any confusion or contradiction between the two because ‘they are never at the same place’. (p.123) The passionified roses are never for both my girlfriend and my nation, they are always ‘either/or’. Distorting truth rather than replacing it, myth is never without its own motivation or intention. But being a distortion of truth, myth can never exist alone; it is always dependent upon some truth to distort in the first place. To properly comprehend myth, one must look past the signification to the first system, the non-place where the sign becomes meaning. It is this initial battle between form and meaning where one grasps the meaning that has been sequestered. In the case of the roses signifying nationhood, it is their initial meaning of passion for a girlfriend that is appropriated by the nation and that which myth must continually return as a way of reinjecting itself with new life.
From Barthes’s point of view, Fish’s ready store of Freudian concepts can be understood as a form of myth. On the one hand, terms have a genealogical or etymological origin, yet culturally they have been removed and bastardised, open to any situation which they can be called into being.[15] One only has to look at television commercials and the subtle use of sexual motifs for an example of Freud’s influence within society. (Freud did say ‘everything relates to sex’ didn’t he?). What is interesting though, is the way in which terms, such as ‘the unconscious’, having first been appropriated by Freud from his own predecessors, such as Goethe and Nietzsche,[16] are subsequently annexed from Freud. One example of a term that has been sabotaged by society is ‘anal’. By referring to someone as ‘anal’ or ‘anally retentive’ you insinuate that they hoard things or are rather fussy and particular, always finding the most obscure aspect out of place.[17] For example, a housewife who meticulously cleans her house first thing each day no matter if the house is clean or dirty, or an art collector who always has the urge to get the last piece to complete a set no matter the piece’s monetary or aesthetic value. Psychoanalytically, the term ‘anal’ derives from Freud’s early mechanistic stage, when he was still being influenced by positivist scientists such as Ernst Brucke and Richard von Krafft-Ebing who, like so many during the nineteenth century, pursued empirical answers to life’s mysteries. (Obviously ‘anal’ has a genealogy running past Brucke and Krafft-Ebing, but it is not my purpose to give a long and drawn out history; I will end my trace with Freud.) The most lucid example of Freud’s work, during this period, is the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Published in 1905, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality described the way in which sexuality was discovered then repressed in early infant development.[18] Freud divided infantile development into three distinct stages: oral, anal and phallic. The first stage formed around, the child’s initial nourishment in the world, the mother’s breast; the second around the pleasure aroused from defecating (a process made all the more exciting by controlling the bowels in order to extract every possible moment of enjoyment and pleasure possible from the process), while the third was when the child discovered his or her genital area and the pleasure produced by touching it. But it was in a short paper, published three years latter, that Freud linked ‘anal’ activities with certain character traits. Freud described the characteristics of a person who is particularly clean and ‘contentious of carrying out small-duties’ as being anal. From these observations, Freud suggested that we could surmise that ‘as infants, they [the subject in question] seem to have belonged to the class who refuse to empty their bowels when they are put on the pot because they derive a subsidiary pleasure from defecating’ .[19] These characteristics of keeping in and controlling, although physically long since overcome by the adult, who no longer gets pleasure out of defecating, continue psychically, in the subject’s day-to-day living, through various excessive obsessions.
I would be surprised to know how many people, who use the term ‘anal’ in colloquial speech, have contemplated reading Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, let alone any of the corrections and additions that have come after it. But this is the criticism that is often made of Barthes’s work. How can one be both affected by myth, whilst at the same time seeing beyond its effects? No matter how much one tries to logically collapse a myth, it does not work. Myth is beyond logic beyond reduction, both ‘imperfectible’ and ‘unquestionable’. As Fish suggests, we have a ready store of Freudian concepts within our language whether we agree with them or not.[20] Having said this, there is an even greater mythification than the use of the word ‘anal’ or ‘the unconscious’, in society today: the presence of Freud as a myth himself.
By Freud the myth, I mean a sign or an image whose meaning is defined by the performance and context, of the speaker using it. In ‘What is the Author?’, Michel Foucault described Freud as not just an author of particular texts, but the founder of an ‘endless possibility of discourse’, that is, ‘the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts’.[21] The problem with this is that Freud is not only the starting point for ‘a certain amount of divergences … that all arise from the psychoanalytic discourse itself but he is also a form of cultural capital, a container who can hold any meaning which society wishes to place on him. To turn psychoanalysis back upon itself, ‘Freud’ can be understood as what British analyst Donald Winnicott called a transitional object. Between the internal fantasies and external cultural realities, the transitional object acts as, ‘an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute’.[22] Neither under the control of fantasy nor external influences, but affected by both, this free space serves as the place for deciding which parts of experience are ‘me’ and ‘not-me’, without fear of reparations. This space or object, tells Elizabeth Wright, ‘enables the child to … enter the field of illusion, moving from subjective (as created by the child) to the objective (as found in the environment)’.[23] Initially transitional objects may be a soft toy or the comer of a blanket, but in a wider perspective, the transitional object can consist of many things from art, music, religion, and in our situation, cultural figureheads, such as a politician or a movie star.
Although in a different context (writing about the figures within the novels of Jane Austen rather than Freud’s placing within society), John Wiltshire suggests that such people (politicians, celebrities, for example, but also acquaintances) occupy a space in the inner theatre like that of the caricature, for in the economy of our psychological lives we cannot spare the energy to lend them as inner being. Instead they serve as objects: objects onto which we may project, or into which we may invest, atavistic propensities of our own.[24]
An example of cultural objects within literature is the use of Hitler within Don Delillo’s novel White Noise. For Jack Gladney, chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-hill, Hitler is nothing more than a style or effect, whose presence exists within mediums like speeches or cheap psychological analyses of his relationship with his mother. Reducing Hitler to the ahistorical allows him to be freely compared with other cultural signs such as Elvis. As Murray, a colleague in the ‘American environments’ department, says to Jack, ‘you’ve established a wonderful thing here with Hitler. You created it, you nurtured it, you made it your own … He is now your Hitler, Gladney’s Hitler … You’ve evolved an entire system around this figure, a structure with countless substructures and interrelated fields of study, a history within history. I marvel at the effort. It was masterful, shrewd and stunningly pre-emptive. It’s what I want to do with Elvis’. [25]
A more practical example of Freud as a container and figure of exchange is in the work of staunch anti-Freudian, Frederick Crews. Originally a prominent figure in the field of psychoanalytic criticism during the sixties, (epitomized by his book The Sins of the Father: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes), Crews gradual dissociation from psychoanalysis, begun in the seventies with his reading of philosophers of science such as Karl Popper and Ernest Nagel. This transformation eventually culminated in Crews first full-blown critique of Freud and Psychoanalysis in his collection of essays, Sceptical Engagements (first published 1985). Crews more recent (but not so recent now) claim to fame is represented in two articles, ‘The Unknown Freud’ and ‘The Revenge of the Repressed’. Published in the New York Review of Books between November of 1993 and December of 1994, the articles provoked considerable outrage amongst analysts and critics alike. Along with many letters sent to the Review in response, Crews’s articles were later republished under the title The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. Although each article covers a different issue (the first on untold stories about Freud, the second on the relationship between Freud and the upheaval of ‘recovered memory therapy), each set out in there own way to demystify and destroy the myth of Freud as a great man. Not wishing to harp on Crews work any more than I need to,2 l will now focus on the second of the two articles ‘Revenge of the Repressed’, by asking whether Crews debunks the Freudian myth of repression by uncovering the truth behind the myth, or simply adds to it: by bringing it into the limelight?
The article deals with the subject of Freud, repression and the seduction theory. It revolves around the recent commotion in ‘Recovered Memory Therapy’ (called RMT for short), incidents where perfectly healthy female adults are (with the help and guidance of their therapists), ‘all of the sudden’ remembering their repressed memories of sexual abuse as children. Sceptical about the truth of many of the claims made in the name ofRMT, Crews suggests that, all one needs is a ‘compliant subject’, an analyst that is a ‘good storyteller’, and anyone can be a victim. After working through numerous books and court cases involving incidents of incest and sexual abuse, Crews turns to Freud as the reason for the many problems associated with the whole RMT movement, in particular his early (discarded) ‘seduction theory’ and, the more obvious link, with repression. This link, between the RMT’s and Freud, is depicted as the uncanniest of relationships. ‘Despite the feminist affiliation, the champions of survivorship cheerfully acknowledge Sigmund Freud, the .male chauvinist per excellence, as their chief intellectual and clinical forebear’.[26] These two extremes (chauvinist/feminist) are used by Crews to undermine the reader’s opinion of both practices. Having set up these damning opinions, Crews quickly announces, that it is not the ‘psychoanalytic Freud’ that the survivors follow, rather it is the ‘pre-psychoanalytic Freud’, a Freud who ‘took pity on his hysterical patients … by unknotting their repression’.(p.206-207) Thus begins Crews’ gallant journey to create a clear definition of what he means by ‘pre-psychoanalytic’ Freud. Crews paints a picture of Freud as one who: ascribed (like a doctor ascribes medicine) repressed desire to his patients; rounded up converts to his all-purpose diagnosis; and pioneered ‘the modern memory sleuths’ technique of thematically matching a patient’s symptom with a sexually symmetrical “memory”’. The early Freud even subscribed to the ‘Lamarckian idea that memory traces from pre-history are passed along genetically ad infinitum’. Having completed this damming yet satirical account of early Freud, Crews announces, as if lifting a veil from the reader’s eyes, that many of these ‘pre-psychoanalytic’ traits were in fact carried through to the ‘psychoanalytic’ Freud. To show this link between ‘psychoanalysis and its hyperactive young successor’, Crews lists ten core assumptions that carry for both. This list largely revolves around the use of repression and the unconscious. Having sullied the face of psychoanalysis with these seemingly shocking claims, Crews returns to the affinity between Freud and the memory movement. Quoting from a book by American Feminist/Analyst, Charlotte Krause Prozon, Crews suggests that ‘whereas analysts used to be watchful for penis envy in women patients, today “we are looking for sexual abuse”’.[27] Throwing a few more ideas on the fire, Crews suggests that each doubtful hypothesis has to find its empirical support in … other settings’ and that psychoanalysis is a romantic pseudo-science, built upon feelings rather than hard methodological facts. He ends the article with the warning, ‘so long as “Freud’s permanent revolution,” as Thomas Nage129 calls it, retains any sway, the voodoo of “the repressed” can be counted upon to return in newly energetic and pernicious fonns’. (P.223)
The question then to be asked is whether or not anything is achieved by Crews’ attack on Freud? My own opinion is no. Assuming (as Crews seems to) that most of Crews’ readers do not know the origins of repression or the history of Freud’s ‘seduction theory’, what does Crews achieve by whining about the subject? Either the reader already knows Freud’s problems, therefore, predicting Crews argument before they have even begun to read his articles, or they don’t know and don’t care, relying instead on preexisting myths surrounding terms such as ‘repression’ and ‘seduction’ for their understanding. As Barthes suggests, discussing the attempt to go beyond myth to the ‘truth’, ‘it thus appears that it is extremely difficult to vanquish myth from the inside: for the very effort one makes in order to escape its stranglehold, becomes in its turn, the prey of myth: myth can always, as a last resort, signify the resistance which is brought to bear against it’[28] Crews suggests that, the truth lies with the greedy archivists, who refuse to release all of Freud’s unpublished notes and letters, but it seems hard to believe that, anything could be released that, could not also be blended into the myth. As Fish suggests, discussing faith in Jesus, ‘it will take more than a body, or carbon dating, or “identifying marks” to shake a faith which is not built on that kind of evidence in the first place’.[29] I would argue then that, instead of crushing the Freudian myth which underwrites our culture, Crews and company only succeed in re-establishing it as a topic of conversation. The only way to destroy myth is to forget it, and that is not something that we can consciously or unconsciously do.
So where to now? What are we to do with the lingering presence of Freud in our lives? In an article, ‘On Killing Freud (Again)’, the American psychoanalysis/philosopher, Jonathon Lear, discusses the way in which ‘Freud Bashing has gone from an argument to a movement’.[30] Lear lists three current trends within ‘Freud Bashing’: the replacement of traditional talking therapies with anti-depressants and other mind altering drugs; insurance companies preference for ‘cheap pharmacology to expensive psychotherapy’; and the unraveling of the inflated claims, made by psychoanalysis, during the fifties and sixties. (pp.17-18) Admitting·that Freud ‘botched some of his most important cases’, and that ‘he was a bit of a cowboy’, Lear argues that critics such as Adolf Grunbaum and Jeffrey Masson miss the point, reducing Freud and psychoanalysis to a singular scientific point-of-view. ‘If psychoanalysis were to imitate the methods of physical science, it would be useless for interpreting people. Psychoanalysis is an extension of our ordinary psychological ways of interpreting people in terms of their beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears.’ (p.25) Restricting Freud to the medical fraternity misses his philosophical contributions, Freud as a ‘deep explorer of the human condition, working in a tradition … which extends through Plato, Saint Augustine, and Shakespeare to Proust and Nietzsche.’ (p.18) Making Freud a scapegoat, for problems such as the rise in childhood abuse cases, misses the real problem, the ‘quackish’ practices of”recovered-memory therapy”. Lear wants to align him with the ancient Greeks, suggesting that Freud (and psychoanalysis in general), toil with the Socratic question, ‘how shall we live?’: ‘the human soul is too deep for there to be any easy answer to the question of how to live.’(p.28) Closing his essay, Lear warns that ‘obsessing about Freud the man is a way of keeping Freud the meaning at bay’, that is, ‘the recognition that humans make more meaning than they grasp, that this meaning can be painful and disruptive, but that humans need not be passive in the face of it … The many attacks on him, even upon psychoanalysis, refuse to recognise that Freud gave birth to a psychoanalytic movement which in myriad ways has moved beyond him.’ (p.32) It would be nai’ve to say that Lear provides us with any definitive answer to the problem of Freud, for his interpretation is just as open to question as any other interpretation. But what Lear does provide us with is, an alternative to the traditional typecast, a philosophical Freud rather than a scientific one.
Returning to the question I raised in the beginning of this section, why is it that Freud has the position in our society that he does? Lear compares the way in which in 1993 Time magazine, asked the question “Is Freud Dead”, to the way in 1966 they asked the question, “Is God Dead?” Although I am not suggesting that Freud or psychoanalysis is a religion, the two have a similarity in the way they are dealt with in culture and society. An understanding of the rise of post-modern scepticism, where people so stringently, disconnect themselves from God or any other unifying or foundational following, can be used to comprehend why so many strongly deny Freud a positive place within society. ln times when fundamental answers are frowned upon, people look for things ‘not-to’ believe in, this cultural vacuum is taken up by epistemologies which proclaim ‘grand master plans’. Where in the past communities and societies were knitted together by forms of collective belief, today it is collective disbelief that rules, with unity in hatred being apart of the illusion. As American Pragmatist, Richard Rorty puts it, ‘Human solidarity is based on a sense of a common danger, not a common possession or a shared power’.33 Many ‘isms’ have therefore become the meeting place for blame, being the only things strong enough to carry the hate of a whole society without collapsing under the burden. Lear describes this epidemic discussing the differences in ‘knowingness’ between ancient Greece and modern society. ‘There is a profound comfort in being able to move almost automatically from hubristic overconfidence in human “knowingness” into humble religious submission. But for us that path is blocked. There is no obvious retreat from “knowingness,” for there is nothing clear to submit to’. For where the Greeks had their gods to fall back upon, we have nothing, for ‘God is dead’, that is, there is ‘no meaning in our lives, no values, which are exempt from our critical scrutiny’ [31] Although we cannot ignore Freud, for an understanding (or misunderstanding) of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism to move beyond the cultural, we must break free from the tainted image of Freud and become open to the myriad of differences and possibilities that psychoanalysis opens itself to. As Lear constantly points out, psychoanalysis must stop trying to be a profession, instead in a Socratic fashion it must, live with the question, ‘How shall I live?’ This would mean becoming open-minded to the possibility that for every question and problem there is always more than one answer.
To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping calls for further naming: I name, I un-name, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labour.[32]
Source: Roland Barthes S/Z
In an article, published in 1968, Barthes dramatically decreed, ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’.[33] Collapsing the classical view of the author as producer of the text, Barthes places the reader at the centre of the text as both writer and producer.[34] Where humanism saw the author as existing outside of the text – thinking, suffering and living for it – Barthes saw the modem author as being born simultaneously with the text. Wishing to do more than replace the idea of the author with the reader, Barthes argued that the classical notion of author as a text’s central unifier never existed in the first place. He showed the modem conception of the author to be a myth produced by capitalist society. ‘The Author is a modem figure. A product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation’. (p.142-3) Originally fiction was conceived as mirroring the author’s life, for Barthes the author’s life is the vain attempt to copy the text. ‘Proust … instead of putting his life into his novel … made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model’. (p.144) With the collapse of the author, there is no difference between author and critic, for both are readers in one way or another, both are embroiled in a complex dialogue of quotations and texts, an endless world of language. The death of the author is also an end to the origin of things, for there is no beginning or centre that is not arbitrary.[35] As Barthes put it,
In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like a thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there can be nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. (p. 147)
Seeing the text as a multiplicity of references without a central unifying condition other than language itself, Barthes did not just put objective knowledge beyond the author or the understanding thereof, but importantly he put objective knowledge beyond the critic who as reader is always marred by his or her own subjective point of view. Although the use of the word ‘death’ may be a little melodramatic, the challenge to the routine of consuming texts cannot be easily discounted. The shift from the singular to multiplicities of meaning provides the critic-cum-reader with an infinite amount of possibilities.
As it happens, many of Barthes’s arguments about multiplicities and the reader are carried into the field of psychoanalysis (whether purposefully is not clear), in Marianne Echardt’s article ‘Psychoanalysis – myth and science: The challenge to become open-minded to infinite complexity’. She boldly begins with the announcement that, what is meant by ‘psychoanalysis’ in no longer clear-cut, it ‘means many different things to different people’. (p.263) The most common divide, is between the ‘insider’, a person familiar to some degree with recent changes and developments within psychoanalysis, and the ‘outsider’, somebody who whose understanding of psychoanalysis begins and ends with Freud. The challenge for psychoanalysis today, Echardt suggests, is to integrate Freud’s world, a late nineteenth century positivism, whose search was for fundamental and universal laws of science, with today’s world of multiplicities and minor narratives, where the focus is on ‘individually created Gestalts arising out of the interconnection of genetic, constitutional, environmental, and cultural factors’ (p.263) For Echardt, the difference between the two periods is best depicted by comparing the dominant framework used in each setting. Freud’s primary metaphor was archaeology; his focus was an excavation of the mind, a ‘psycho archaeology’ as Echardt puts it. In an archaeological comprehension, answers lie donnant beneath the surface, waiting to be unearthed and discovered. Today the focus of knowledge and comprehension is more anthropological than archaeological. ‘By anthropological, I [Echardt] mean approaching each patient [or subject] as being largely unknown territory that needs to be explored with total curiosity and open-mindedness. We bring with us tools. We call them theoretical concepts, but they are guidelines only’. (p.264) An anthropological view does not attempt to consume knowledge as an archaeological or positivist approach might; rather it places the observer soundly within her or his own situation, always with the possibility of a different explanation. As Clifford Geertz describes, ‘the essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said’.[36] The problem that haunts psychoanalysis is that, although its focus has become more anthropologically minded, the tools, theories and aims belong to Freud’s world more than our own. ‘We use the tools designed for a psycho archaeology for our anthropological endeavours, a cause for much confusion and dissension’. (p.263) Echardt suggests a need for revision, rescuing outdated notions of psychoanalysis through the act of re-reading. Two examples she gives of where Freud needs revising are his use of myths and metaphor (where he missed significance as a language and meaning in its own right), and his interpretation of Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex. The problem with Echardt’s ‘return to Freud’ is that, it leaves present conceptions of psychoanalysis untouched and out of the reach of the revisionist. If psychoanalysis is to truly embrace difference and multiplicities, it must whole-heartedly do so, beginning with the question what do we mean when we say psychoanalysis? What is needed is a move from the singular to the plural, from the historical to the genealogical, from psychoanalysis to psychoanalyses. This is not just openness to differences but openness to the proposition ‘I might be wrong’, and to the question, ‘How shall I live?’ One way of understanding psychoanalyses is to consider psychoanalysis from a literary perspective, that is, as a group of texts to be transcribed and translated rather than read, a group of texts beyond categorical organisation, developing and mutating with the addition of new texts and the re-reading of old ones.[37] Just as all signs have the possibility of becoming myth, all texts, whether the journal of a colonial explorer or an article out of a daily newspaper, have the potential of being read from a literary perspective. As Christine Brooke-Rose suggests, ‘it seems to me more dangerous, more “dating” … to “use” psychoanalysis in literary criticism, but fascinating and enriching to consider it, at its best, as a literary text, as Nietzsche’s texts are literary texts’. [38] Approaching psychoanalysis from a this perspective does not mean aligning it with traditional forms of literature,[39] rather it means seeing psychoanalysis as a ‘kind of writing’.[40] Seeing psychoanalysis as a collection of texts, two things would determine its definition, the texts read and any outside influences on the reading of those texts. No longer would psychoanalysis be singular in definition, instead it would be an ongoing collection of quotations and citations, of reading and re-reading, neither better nor worse, just different. From this perspective, Barthes’ ‘death of the author’ would also be the death of the analyst.
To explain properly what I mean by literary, I will focus on the work of two American critics, the post-deconstruction deconstruction of J. Hillis Miller and the rhetorical pragmatism of Stanley Fish. Although settled within different genres of literature, (Medieval texts for Fish, Victorian literature for Miller), both critics are united in the struggle with New Criticism’s control of the text. The most prominent for a literary criticism in America from the thirties to the fifties, New Criticism preached the doctrine of the text as a self-enclosed object. It was believed that ‘through art an alienated world could be restored to us in all its rich variousness’.[41] Take assortment of aspects and contextual issues (author, reader, society and history) out of the equation, the New Critics argued, somewhat irrationally, for a definition of the text-in-itself. Both Fish and Miller, although neither unique in their field, offer their own accounts of the breakdown of the New Critics meaning-in-itself, each moving towards (at least to the possibility thereof) a more open interpretation of the text.
Born in 1928, J. Hillis Miller initially worked under the influence of the Geneva School of consciousness-criticism during the late fifties and early sixties.[42] The Geneva school practiced a form of criticism, which focused on the experience of consciousness between critic and author. By reading an author’s entire overview (including notes and fragments of unfinished material), the critic supposedly interconnected and became at-one with the mind or consciousness of the author in question, in the process continuing quasi-spiritual journey present within all works of literature. Unlike traditional language-based criticisms, which methodically dissected the literary text like a surgeon dissects a dead body, the Geneva critics saw no difference between the two forms of writing, seeing instead critical texts as second-order literature. More importantly the critic, in the attempt to transcend to the text within the text, was seen to be open to the same forms of interpretation as the literary text. As Miller argued, ‘for the Geneva critics, criticism is primordially consciousness of the consciousness of another, the transposition of the mental universe of an author into the interior space of the critic’s mind. Therefore these critics are relatively without interest in the external form of individual works of literature’.[43]
Although Georges Poulet and company had a large influence on Miller’s work, it has been as a deconstructionist that Miller has done most of his work. To comprehend this work, one must firstly understand Miller’s historical situation, in particular the influence of European philosophy on American academia in the seventies and eighties. This period represented a changing of the guard, from New Criticism to Continental methods, including the induction of Heideggerian phenomenology, Sartrian existentialism and as already stated, Genevian consciousness criticism. However, the most prominent arrival on the American scene was the French Post-Structuralism of writers such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and more importantly the Deconstruction of Jacques Derrida. There is no-single definition of ‘deconstruction’. If anything, it is a form of close textual analysis with no specific purpose or requirement outside the text(s) in question: an act of philology in the Nietzschean sense of the word.[44] Usually what is meant by deconstruction is somehow centered on Jacques Derrida’s work during the sixties and seventies, in which he coined such non-terms as ‘trace’, ‘supplement’, ‘dissemination’ and ‘différance’.[45] But as Miller points out, what is often forgotten in reducing an author or a practice to an ‘abstract theoretical formulation’ is that ‘those formulations in every case are attained by an act of reading’.[46] Like Geneva’s ‘literature about literature’ and New Criticism’s self-sufficiency, deconstruction relies on the text to provide its own unraveling. As Miller points out, ‘Deconstruction cannot by definition be defined or delimited, since it is fundamentally a recognition of a mobility within language or from one language to another’.[47] Often Derrida’s openness to infinite play of differences is portrayed as being a nihilistic practice, hostile to any form of meaning or communication, but as Frankfurt critic Peter Dews points out, ‘Derrida’s view is not that meaning is inexhaustible, but rather that any specification of meaning can only function as a self-defeating attempt to stabilise and restrain what he terms the ‘dissemination’ of the text. Meaning is not retrieved from apparent unmeaning, but rather consists in the repression of unmeaning’.[48] While Barbara Johnson, responding to the question of nihilism, attempts to put deconstruction in a more positive light by suggesting that it should be understood as a form of critique whose purpose is making conscious the grounds or foundations of a given system in an effort to make it better.[49]
Miller, along with Harold Bloom, Paul De Man and Geoffrey Hartman, formed what came to be known as the Yale school of Deconstruction, a group which played an important role in the dispersion of continental post-structuralist texts in the American literary and philosophical scene in the seventies and eighties. The Yale group did not simply read continental writers to imitate their ideas and styles; rather they interpreted their text, translating them both linguistically and conceptually into their own circumstances, subsequently continuing the journey of the text. There are more differences than similarities between the works done by various members of the group (Miller describes their practices as ‘Deconstructionisms’ rather than a single act of Deconstruction), but if one were to unify their work in any way, it would be the goal of reinstating the importance of language into the practice of reading and criticism.[50]
Unlike De Man’s discrepancy between reason and rhetoric, or Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, Miller practiced a form of criticism, which focused on the blur between critic and text. Responding to comments made by M.H. Abrams that Deconstructive criticism is nihilistic and parasitical, feeding off the text like a parasite feeds off its host, Miller posed the question, is it Deconstructive criticism that should be considered as the virus, or western metaphysics which has infiltrated ‘culture in its language and in the privileged texts of those languages?’ [51] Instead of giving a definitive answer, Miller argues that both readings, univocal and deconstructive, are paradoxically both host and parasite simultaneously. For there is always a third element which both forms of readings are subject to, this he describes as, the ‘prison-house of language’, a finite universe ‘without origin or edge’, a language beyond all texts. (p.154) The practice of reading, Miller suggests, is comparable to the journey into the labyrinth without promise of success or reward, only a forever-unattainable horizon. Using the story of Ariadne’s Thread [52] as an analogy, Miller’s form of deconstruction involves following a single trace within the text to its extreme limits. As he explains,
No one thread (character, realism, interpersonal relation, or whatever) can be followed to a central point where it provides a means of overseeing, sooner or later, a crossroad, a blunt fork, where either path leads manifestly to a blank wall. This double blind is at once the failure to reach the center of the labyrinth and at the same time the reaching of a false center, everywhere and nowhere, attainable by any thread or path.[53]
Ariadne’s thread, then, is another mise en abyme [discourse by nature without nature], both a mapping of the abyss and an attempted escafe from it, criticism as [the impossible possible] cure [for literature]. [54]
In more recent work, with the inundation of various mediums of meaning (such as cinema and music) other than novels and poems, Miller has replaced both the concepts of language and the labyrinth with the metaphor of ‘black holes’. (This serves a purpose in two ways: firstly there is hypothetically nothing at the centre of a black hole, whilst secondly there is conceptually always more than one of them).
These black holes are not linguistic. They are not made of language. Nor is language the only medium in which such black holes may be indirectly glimpsed, since, as reading Trollope and Proust suggests, painting, music, photography, as well as more recent media like cinema, the duplicities and opacities of the other person or of oneself, the sun setting over the ocean – any of these may function, as well as assemblies of words, as allegorical figures for such unknowable places.[55]
In violently summing up all the differences, Spanish critic, Manuel Asensi suggests that Miller’s practice is a ‘deconstruction of one’, where it is always possible, at a given moment, to reduce a text to some ‘essential or indivisible components’.[56] But Miller is just as likely to turn around tomorrow and deny everything; this seems to be the right of the deconstructive critic-cum-postmodern subject. One such change in Miller’s work has been his return to ethical concerns in the act of reading.
In an article, ‘The Ethics of Reading’ printed in 1987, Miller questions the place of literature in society. Literature’s deterioration in value has lead to the need for a re-evaluation of various issues such as ‘ethics’. ‘history’ and ‘society’ in a post-deconstructive context. Seeing historical interpretations as shallow and social issues as a limited source of understanding, Miller turns his attention to the revival of an ethically and morally influenced act of reading. He divides the prospect into three core ‘convictions’. The first conviction is the need for a ‘willingness to recognise the unexpected’, openness to what Miller describes as ‘non-canonical’ readings. This is not a critical relativism where there is a freedom to make the text mean whatever one likes, but a response ‘to what the words on the page say rather than to what we wish they said or came to the book expecting them to say’.[57] The second conviction is a ‘love for Ianguage, a care for language and for what language can do’, a return to the responsibility of teachers to teach good reading. While the third conviction is the responsibility of the reader not to rely whole heartily upon translation; of texts from other languages, but to read them in their original un-translated form to properly understand them. Although Miller begins dissecting the functioning of an ethics of reading in a book of the same name,[58] it was not until Versions of Pygmalion, that he thoroughly draws out the implications of an ethics in relation to a readers (as opposed to an authors) experience of reading.
In the first chapter entitled, ‘The Ethics of Narration’, Miller divides the ethical influence on the reader once more into three areas, the first is the paradox of freedom within the ethics of reading. Identifying reading as ‘a thing done that does other things in its turn’, he describes reading, from h s point of view, as an act with moral and ethical implications.[59] Having given preference to the act of ‘reading’, as opposed to a reader’s experience, it follows that as an ethical act reading must be free, including choices made by the reader. For ‘how can I be held responsible for something I cannot not do?’ This paradox between freedom to choose and the imperative to be responsible is central to Miller’s conception of reading. Using the account of the prosopopoeia[60] in book ten of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Miller explains the paradoxical situation of a reader’ ethical call. In Ovid’s story, Pygmalion mistakes the statue of Galatea for a real woman, as opposed to a product of his desires. Miller compares this mistaken identity with the act of misreading, ‘the error of taking a figure of speech literally’. (p.11) ln the joy of the moment, Pygmalion conceives a daughter, Paphos, with Galatea, the statue-cum-human. ln turn, Paphos conceives a grandson, Cinyras, who in turn conceives a great-granddaughter, Myrrha. It is not necessarily a reader’s direct response to reading where the consequences lie. It is the cataclysmic effects produced by these initial readings where the consequences lie.
Reading in a certain sense is automatic, involuntary. I just happen to have read a certain book, say one I find in a hotel room or in a rented summerhouse. This accidental encounter may have the most extensive ethical consequences in my own life, and in those of others as m act of reading causes other things to be done in their turn’. P.18
The second area of ethical influence over the reader is the obligation or demand of each text to be read. As Miller describes, ‘it is an intrinsic feature of written pieces of language that they demand to be read, even though they may never find their readers. All those books lining the shelves of all the libraries do not just passively sit there. They cry out to be read’. (p.18) The demand to be read is a double bind upon the reader, for every text (‘each book, text, essay, scrap of written language, even those in lauguages I do not know’ (p.18)) demands to be read, but as soon as the reader responds to one text ‘that has accidentally fallen into my hands’, she or he is betraying the responsibility and duty, to read all other texts. Miller argues that the demand to read is not a fantasy or mere theoretical concept, instead it is a real experience of everyday life. ‘Any reader who takes reading at all seriously will have felt the force of this responsibility, however successfully one may have suppressed it as an absurdity.’ (p.19) It is as if as soon as a reader can read, she or he is caught within an impossible contract, signed by someone else without the reader’s knowledge and without the ability to stop it. ‘As soon as I learn to read I am already bound by an obligation I had no idea I was taking on. I am in this like Joseph K. arrested one fine day without having done anything wrong’.[61]
The third area of ethics is the unpredictable nature of the act of reading.
What happens when I read … is something always fortuitous and unpredictable, something surprising, however many times the book in question has been read before, even by me. One way to define this unexpected quality of true acts of reading is to say that they never correspond exactly to what other readers tell me I am going to find when I read that book, however learned, expert, and authoritative those previous readers have been’. (p.20)
Not to be confused with reader-response theories, the strangeness and unpredictability occurs each time a reader attempts to break on through to the realm of language as such. This is something that no theory can ever encapsulate, ‘you can never be sure what is going to happen when someone in a particular situation reads a particular book’. (p.21) From this perspective, the books which line our shelves because they are seen to contain ‘the values of Western culture’ should instead be thought of as ‘unexploded bombs’ with who knows what results when read. Being ‘dangerous objects’, Miller even wonders whether books should carry warning labels, ‘for strange [and unpredictable] things happen when someone reads a book’. Rather than another tick on the list of books read, the act of reading should be considered as an event. Something which, coming out of nowhere, has the power to turn occupied space into a place, with ‘orienting co-ordinates’. Like ‘birth, copulation, death and the declaration of independence’, reading breaks all notions of predictability.
But what does any of this have to do with psychoanalysis, and in particular, the psychoanalytic text? l believe there are two ways in which Miller’s work, in particular his ethics of reading, can influence the way we understand psychoanalysis. Firstly, the demand to read all texts is too often suppressed when it comes to reading psychoanalytic texts. Take for example reading Freud’s papers on meta-psychology (‘On Narcissism’, ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, ‘Ego and the Id’ etc). For many it would be acceptable to read these papers for an understanding of both Freud, and more importantly, a foundation for psychoanalysis in general. But what is often forgotten, ignored or not even realized in the first place, is the multitude of other texts which were grafted together to produce these texts. A glimpse of this is shown in the eighty or so books and essays, from Aristotle to Ellis Havelock, referenced in the bibliography of the Penguin edition of On Meta-psychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis.[62] (But what is not shown by this list are the texts Freud did not reference and the endless amounts of work produced by writers influenced by Freud’s thoughts which affects how we read his work today.) Reading therefore is not a process of consumption, but in part, a constant realization and discovery of books that lie unknown, calling out for us to read them. Miller exemplifies the problem with an account of Thomas Wolfe, who, while a student at Harvard, ‘was tormented, not only by the impossibility of ever reading through all the books in Widener Library, but also by learning that there were a hundred thousand new books in German published each year, that is, in a language he did not even know’.[63]
The second influence that Miller can have on psychoanalysis is that psychoanalytic texts are ‘unexploded bombs’, with, who knows what, consequences. I remember hearing a story once about people being so moved after reading the work of Carl Jung that they could no longer cope with life and committed suicide. Although this is an extreme example, it does illustrate the possibilities associated with reading psychoanalysis. No matter how much teachers or textual overviews try to place texts within a certain context or a definite way of thinking, the practice of reading always contains the possibility of the breaking any notion of predictability. Derrida describes this dilemma, discussing Speech Act theory’s desire for a pure performative language, suggesting that, ‘every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable’ .[64] There is a need then, on behalf of both reader and teacher, to be wary of the ‘fortuitous and unpredictable’ act of reading, of the offspring produced while making love with a statue.
In closing, I wish to put forward what I see as a possible limit to the use of Miller’s reading practice. When I say limit, I do not mean Miller’s inability to translate correctly or the paradox of not following the rules which he prescribes for others.[65] My issue is with the practical limits of Miller’s ethics of reading. Although more recently Miller has relaxed his definition of the literary canon. nowhere has he made room for the possibility of understanding interpretation and the act of reading from a cultural, sociological, historical or a political source.[66] Though not denying historical or contextual influences in acts of readings, Miller follows Derrida’s line that ‘there is nothing before the text, there is no pretext that is not already a text’.[67] Topics such as history and aesthetics can do nothing, Miller argues, to help our reading and understanding of the text. As he sees it. there is a danger that every text can be explained by its ‘pre-existing historical context’, therefore neutralizing any effect a text may have during the act of reading.[68] Although reading may go beyond any attempts at containment, it still depends upon a situation to give it meaning, a language to give it understanding. Like many Deconstructionist critics, Miller’s lack of contextual evidence always leaves his work somehow unfinished. For a focus on contextual and situational issues in the process of reading, one must turn to more pragmatic interpretations, for this I will now focus on the work of Stanley Fish.
Similar to Miller, Fish argues that acts of reading are defined not by the reader or the text being read, but by a third entity. For Fish, this third entity is the interpretive community of which the reader is a member. Unlike Miller, there is no procreating with statues or becoming lost within labyrinths, according to Fish, reading is never ambiguous. It is always within a situation, which contains its own accounts of what is normal. ‘A sentence is never not in a context. We are never not in a situation. A statute is never not read in the light of some purpose. A set of interpretive assumptions is always in force. A sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one’.[69] Fish lays out this position in the definitive ‘Interpreting the Variorum’. In the space of this essay (written in three parts over three years), Fish manages to change his position from the ‘pressure of judgement’ placed on the reader, by the text, to the view that interpretive strategies shape the act of reading. Aspects such as ‘formal units’ and the ‘author’s intention’, which for so long were perceived to be purely objective, Fish suggests are the product of interpretive strategies brought to bear in the act of reading, not anything inherent within the text itself.
Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and as assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around. [70]
The only choice that the reader ever has is between an interpretation unacknowledged and ‘an interpretation that is at least self aware’ (p.167).
What Fish labels as ‘self-aware’ is not to be confused in any way with the Frankfurt notion of ‘critical self-consciousness’. In an article of the same name Fish discusses the attempt by Hermeneuticians and Marxist critics to transcend their own existence to a higher state of consciousness. But, as Fish argues, what is considered as ‘libertarian or ‘emancipative’ is nothing more than passing from one set of strategies to another. To imagine a situation without constraints is impossible, Fish argues, for everything is the product of constraints in some way or another. This is not to say that there is no freedom, but that what is construed as freedom is always produced through some set of constraints.
To be in a situation (as one always is) is already to be equipped with an awareness of possible goals, obstacles, dangers, rewards, alternatives, etc., and nothing is or could be aided by something called “self-consciousness” … I now say that even though the self reflexive clarity of critical self-consciousness cannot be achieved, the experience of having achieved it is inseparable from the experience of conviction. It is because history is inescapable that every historical moment – that is, every moment – feels so much like an escape’. [71]
Fish also applies his so called ‘no consequence’ argument, (that is, the impossibility of going beyond your own situation or locality), first to the ‘theory hope’ practice of some anti-foundationalists, who deconstruct their own existence only to rebuild it again,[72] then to the claim made by New Historicists that we should be more ideologically minded while denying social and historical existence,[73] and finally against himself.[74] His arguments about theory and critical self-awareness are best summed up in the introduction to Doing What Comes Naturally, where he says, ‘when you get to the end of the anti-formalist road nothing will have changed except the answers you might give to some traditional questions in philosophy and literary theory.’ [75]
The difficulty with Fish’s work is placing it within a succinct school of thought. Whereas most of Miller’s work can be defined as deconstructive, no such definition is possible with Fish. He has been labelled many things in his time: Marxist, reader-response critic, deconstructionist, anti-foundationalist, social constructionist, post-structuralist, communist, contemporary sophist, localist, etc. While some seem more plausible than others, the label that seems to fit Fish’s work best is pragmatist. William James (one of the movements fore-fathers), described pragmatism as a ‘tum away from abstraction … fixed priorities … and pretended absolutes’.[76] While Fish himself describes pragmatism as the ‘solidity and plasticity of the world human beings continuously make and remake.’[77] But not even pragmatism escapes Fish’s scathing tongue. Discussing the link between law and pragmatism, he suggests that various forms put forward by theorists such as Richard Posner and Richard Rorty are too systematic, ‘once pragmatism becomes a program it turns into the essentialism it challenges’.[78] The tendency to systematise evolves from the confusion between, ‘pragmatism as a truth we are all living out and pragmatism as a truth we might be able to live by’. (p.218) The problem is that by its own anti-foundational nature, pragmatism can have ‘no consequences’: nothing to say, no politics to follow and no morality to enjoin. If pragmatism is to be anything, it is ‘an up-to-date version of rhetoric’.[79]
What unites Fish’s work (apart from Milton) is not a school of thought but a constant emphasis upon the act of persuasion, and more importantly, the work of rhetoric in relation to the interpretation of everyday life. As Fish indicates, ‘[rhetoric] is a conclusion that is inevitable once one removes literal meaning as a constraint on interpretation’.[80] The importance of rhetoric in Fish’s work is made clear in an essay titled ‘rhetoric’. The essay reads as an ode to the constant battle through time between ‘plain unravished truth’ and ‘powerful but insidious … fine language’.[81] Unconstrained by politics or morality, rhetoric is the uncanny Other that haunts every foundational system from within. Aristotle argued that, properly utilised, rhetoric has the ability to discover and communicate what is good for a given community or situation. In the absence of truth, rhetoric is the ‘necessary centre’. (p.479) Having said this though, the debate between ‘rhetorical and foundational thought’, is still on the whole, unresolved. Largely a debate involving positions, the quarrel between truth and rhetoric is at the heart of all human activities. Borrowing from Richard Lanham, Fish splits the argument into two groups, homo serious, ‘a central … irreducible identity [combining] into a single, homogeneously real society’ and homo rhetoricus, ‘trained not to discover reality but to manipulate it’. ‘What serious man fears’, Fish explains, ‘is what rhetorical man celebrates and incarnates. In the philosopher’s vision of the world of rhetoric … [it] is merely the (disposable) form by which a prior and substantial content is conveyed; but in the world of homo rhetoricus rhetoric is both form and content, the manner of presentation and what is presented.’ (p.483) By its nature, the debate between truth and rhetoric is one that cannot be resolved; it is a constant confusion of truth with reality.
Rhetoric is a mode of ‘endless reflection’ that will not and must not, ever be resolved. As Fish says, ‘the rhetorical beat must … go on, endlessly repeating the sequence by which the lure of solid ground is succeeded by the ensuing demystification’, (p.493) while foundationalists cannot flee to the ‘protected area of basic communication and common sense’ because what is seen as common sense is product of rhetoric in itself.[82] Having said all this there is an underlying danger in thinking that rhetoric and persuasion are somehow controllable by man, for as Fish argues, they are not. Using Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man, as an example, Fish emphasises that persuasion is not conscious acts on behalf of the analyst or critic, but a medium through which the situation of sickness and cure are made possible. Power lies neither with the analyst/critic, instead it occurs in a fictive space between analyst and interpretation. Cure through psychoanalysis can only occur, Fish argues, if a situation provides for it. Like the analyst’s struggle to ‘get to the side of the unconscious’, the reader-cum-critic ‘cannot get to the side of rhetoric’, because it is always beyond the reader’s control.[83] At the centre of all acts of persuasion and rhetoric is a system of belief which by supporting the process make all action possible.
Moving outside of the classroom into the world of courts and religion, Fish’s emphasis has slowly changed over time from ‘interpretative communities’ to notions of ‘beliefs’ and ‘constraints’. Although belief has always existed within Fish’s work, it is only more recently that he has expanded upon the topic. Discussing the consequences of theory, he suggests that belief is ‘what you think with … the space provided by their articulations that mental activity … goes on’.[84] Whilst critiquing various perspectives on the first amendment, he describes it (under the name of politics and agonisms) as ‘the medium (the soap, the air) within whose ever-expanding confines (there is nothing outside it) one [exists]’. [85] But Fish’s deepest discussion of belief and its various constraints is given in a chapter ‘Beliefs about Belief’, in The Trouble with Principle. Following on from Saint Augustine’s reasoning that ‘to the pure and health internal eye … he [God] is everywhere’,[86] Fish argues that consciousness and belief are not two contrasting entities, just ‘one entity called by different names’. [87] Belief is always prior to such processes as ‘reason’, producing the context of their convictions rather than the product of it. Like Miller’s analogies of labyrinths and black holes, Fish describes belief as being comparable to a ‘lattice or a web whose component parts are mutually constitutive’, supported by others who are within the same set of constraints. (p.280) A person or text, placed beyond the realm of reason, always supplements this ‘web of components’. But this unifying signifier(s), as the product of faith, can be ‘dislodged in an instant’. The question that arises is that of ‘change’. As Fish describes, ‘this picture of belief … achieves self-sufficiency at the price of the ability to explain change’. (p.281) Returning to a statement he made in a previous text, that ‘the mind (and, by extension, the community) is an engine of change’[88], Fish suggests that the sacrifice of change only occurs if we understand it as occurring within a limited system of belief. Change therefore occurs through the uncontrollable intertwining of beliefs. ‘Beliefs … are components of a structure and exist in relationships of dependence and scope to one another, and among the beliefs internal to any structure will be a belief as to what might be a reason for its own revision’. (p.281) Giving an example of how this change can occur, Fish tells the story of a white supremacist, whose eyes were opened, when he realised that the rules of the group he was following, would mean the death of his daughter. He was converted on the spot. Summing up, Fish says that ‘beliefs emerge historically and in relation to the other beliefs that are already the content of our consciousness’. (p.284) Beyond the realm of choice, the only thing we can do is ‘live them out’.
Just as Fish says ‘belief is a particular, not a general, matter’, the same point can be made of psychoanalysis. There is nothing interesting to say of psychoanalysis as a whole because as a whole it does not exist. When we talk about psychoanalysis, it is always within our own set of constraints and perspectives. An example of this is Winnicott’s review of Carl Jung’s autobiography Memories Dreams Reflections. Reading Jung’s memoir as data to be interpreted, Winnicott participated in what he called the ‘game of Jung-analysis’. Placing Jung on the couch, Winnicott announced emphatically that Jung was a childhood schizophrenic. According to Winnicott, Jung partially cured himself of this illness, through self-healing, but more importantly, he dealt with his lack of distinction between fantasy and reality (the symptoms of a child schizophrenic), by splitting his ego into two parts: a true personal self and a false cultural self. Through this analysis, Winnicott endlessly moves between a debate between Freud and Jung. He suggests that from the outset neither could ever have communicated because they were always coming from different positions.
Freud could not have gone to Jung for analysis because Freud invented psycho-analysis, and also Freud needed to leave aside the area of insanity in order to forge ahead with the application of scientific principles to the study of human nature; and Jung could not have had analysis from Freud because in fact Freud could not have done this analysis, which would have involved aspects of psychoanalytic theory that are only now, half a century later, beginning to emerge as a development of psychoanalytic metapsychology’.[89]
After stating the irreconcilable differences between the two men, Winnicott proposes that ‘we cannot help noticing when we meet to discuss human nature that we are apt to use the same terms with meanings that are not only different from each other but that seem irreconcilable. The two worst offenders are the words “unconscious” and “self”.’ (p.488) Winnicott’s statement has further implications than its applications tor Jungian and Freudians; it has implications for how we talk about psychoanalysis in general. Winnicott’s emphasis on the different understandings of the terms by various schools almost mirrors Fish’s assertion that there are no universal or neutral principles, because principles are always within a local set of constraints. But there is a danger in setting a precedent of splitting psychoanalysis into various schools or ‘interpretive communities’ (Jungian, Kleinian, Winnicottian etc). For although Fish said that all beliefs have a text or a person supplementing the centre, a shared faith in a person or a text does not necessarily culminate in a shared belief (one only need turn to the amount of religions which base themselves on different interpretations of the bible). This difference in belief is a product of our context or past. Although we may follow the same person, how we got to that position would most likely be totally different. For example, what is considered as Freudian or Jungian is not a given, but is dictated by its performance within a certain set of constraints. For as I argued in the section discussing the cultural Freud, each situation or group produces its own image of Freud or Jung which is always true within a given system of beliefs.
Having created such a positive portrayal of Fish, his work is not infallible. There have been many criticisms made of Fish’s work, ranging from his links with Nietzschian nihilism to his own placement outside the realm of logic and reason.[90] But the problem that continually remains unanswered is, with all our differences of belief, how we manage to get anything done? If as Fish suggests, we are unable to comprehend anything outside of our own situations, how is it we manage to communicate with subjects different to ourselves? Fish’s usual answer is that, it is rhetoric’s uncanny nature of holding everything together from or with nothing, ‘the art of constructing the (verbal) ground upon which you then confidently walk’.[91] Although rhetoric can explain a lot, there is something within his notion of belief that continually lingers and will not go away.
In the introduction to Doing What Comes Naturally, Fish announced that ‘each of us is a member of … innumerable interpretive communities in relation to which different kinds of belief are operating with different weight and force’.[92] This multiplicity of beliefs and communities, Fish asserts, is not to be confused with the creation of a ‘split-consciousness’. The problem with this is that he gives no reason why a multiplicity of beliefs does not create a split or divided self. This raises a problem that constantly repeats itself all through Fish’s work, the question of subjectivity.[93] Although he is right to reject the notion of an enlightened subject, Fish’s constant rejection of subjectivity leaves his work incomplete. It is this incompleteness which provides some of the most problematic aspects of his work, yet at the same time, some of the most fruitful possibilities for further development. Discussing the identification of other subjects (or beliefs), without assimilating or being assimilated by them Psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin suggests that everyday we unconsciously intermingle with ’different others’. This unconscious recognition provides the foundations for recognizing others in a more conscious sense. For Benjamin, conscious recognition of others relies on a conception of the self that is fragmented. ‘[For] difference, hate, failure of love can be surmounted not because the self is unified, but because the self can tolerate being divided’.[94] Reconciliation and recognition then, involves a ‘constant tension’ between asserting the other while still giving negation its due. Communication between different systems of belief can be understood on a local level between two willing subjects who are ‘momentarily plucked out of the continual common traffic of reciprocal domination’,[95] finding a point of similarity which they can both agree on.[96]
What is shown then through the works of both J. Hillis Miller and Stanley Fish is that no critic can ever completely constrain the text or language as such. One cannot completely side with either without denying some sense of incompleteness. Although Miller offers a subjective comprehension to how we read, he fails to grasp the various influences outside of the text that influence our readings; while Fish reminds us that we are always within a situation, yet fails to adequately describe the complexity of change (other than it happens) and subjectivity. What both Fish and Miller offer are the possibilities for future critics to build upon.
Returning to the question, which began this section, what do we mean when we say psychoanalysis? I argued that two aspects determine psychoanalysis, the texts read and the outside sources that influenced those readings. Although what is psychoanalysis is more complex than this, the proposition that there is both a personal and a collective element represents the core of the matter. For example, it is hard to imagine a reader who (whether knowingly or unknowingly) only reads the work of Melanie Klein ever becoming a Jungian or a Lacanian critic or analyst? For how can they be something they know nothing about? Some might say that only reading Klein is a restricted view of psychoanalysis, therefore an example of a poor reader without a proper understanding of psychoanalysis. Yet for the reader who reads only Klein, their experience of understanding is no different to that of a reader who has read the work of various analysts, from Sandor Ferenczi to Stephan Mitchell. Just because a reader has consumed more texts than another does not necessarily give a monopoly over the truth. All that will have changed, if we take Fish to be correct. ‘is the stock of arguments to which you can have recourse in the presentation and defense of your interpretation.’[97] If anything is certain it is that psychoanalysis is many things to many different people.[98] Although collectively and rhetorically what we define as psychoanalysis may be similar to that of others, individually it can never be the same. What we constitute as psychoanalysis will incorporate a collection of quotes and citations which are always personal to us. We may communicate with others, but this communication always occurs with an element of tension involved.
Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.[99]
Source: Jean Baudrillard ‘On Nihilism’
Having discussed the cultural conception of psychoanalysis, the myth of Freud, and the multiplicity inherent in psychoanalysis as a text, the question that remains unanswered is how this influences the practice of psychoanalytic criticism. What practical purpose does it serve to comprehend psychoanalysis as a multiplicity determined by the readers reading rather a given theory that we apply? Edward Said once questioned whether the critic’s venture had not become the new classical dynasty, the invention of goals and methods all for permitting a vision of ‘pure continuity, progress, activity, and even achievement’.[100] Although the comment was made almost thirty years ago in a different time and context, there is something still strangely familiar about Said’s suggestion, especially in relation to psychoanalytic criticism. Often centered on complex models and complicated theoretical concepts, psychoanalytic criticism is described as having the persuasive power to be applied to any form of text always with the promise of success. This sense of solidarity is achieved through the repression of unmeaning and denial of the other. There are two topics, which need to change if we are to move towards a more plural and open psychoanalytic criticism.
The first topic is the imperative to read. As critics we have a responsibility to read the text(s) and form our own conclusions rather than follow second-hand theories passed on through word of mouth or any other form of disseminated knowledge within society. In an article on the links between psychoanalysis and postmodern literary theory, Kay Torney Souter suggests that not all-psychoanalytic material is useful within literary criticism.
Although a theory of the way that the psyche represent external reality is essential to any literary analysis, not all psychoanalytic approaches are of use to literary criticism (and vice versa). The more medicalized a psychoanalytic theory is, the more centred on the somatic and on symptoms, the less useful it will be to cultural and literary analysis … Literary analysis can make use of a psychoanalysis that is relatively less medicalized, especially one that “gives scope for affects,” as much current clinical research does.[101]
Although I agree with the statement, it is only after we have read the text(s) in question that we can make any such judgment of value. There is a danger in turning texts aside as if we already know what they have to say to us. As Miller says, ‘True acts of reading … never correspond exactly to what other readers tell me I am going to find when I read that book’.[102] Paul de Man labelled this imperative to read, as ‘a return to philology to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces’.[103] Going beyond the meaning of the text, close reading subverts cultural hindrances outside of the text, in what is an ongoing construction of the text. Psychoanalysis then would be a practice determined by readers reading rather than a cultural myth spread unconsciously through our ways of speaking and seeing. As readers we must constantly challenge and break these constraints set upon us, destroying (time and time again) our supposed understanding of the text. Going beyond meaning, we can no longer ignore texts or theorists before we have even read them. We must constantly challenge our sense of knowledge by realizing that we do not and cannot know everything, following references in footnotes and random traces within the text without promise of success or reward. This may mean that on our journey we stumble into other domains such as psychiatry, philosophy, sociology, linguistics etc, but anything that pushes the margins of understanding is a good thing.
The second topic is the emphasis upon a particular school of thought when interpreting a text such as a novel or a poem, rather than an open approach to the text. This restriction occurs in two ways, firstly the emphasis on a single stream of psychoanalysis as if it rules over all others and the privileging of one textual medium over another. Returning to Fish’s notion that all sets of constraints are supplemented by a text or person placed beyond the realm of reason and rationale, too often the emphasis in psychoanalytic criticism is put upon the analyst (such as Freud or Klein) above the text in question. This restricts how much we can say in an investigation of a specific text. What is needed is a change of focus from the work of the analyst to the text in question. For example, instead of giving a Kleinian reading of Virginia Woolf, we can give a Woolfian reading of Melanie Klein. This is one way of breaking down the aura of religiosity that haunts psychoanalysis and would allow a bridging of various schools through a common bond in the analysis of certain text. Focusing on the literary text one could do a Woolfian reading of Freud, Jung, Winnicott etc. therefore for a brief moment opening up the possibility of recognition of differences and similarities between alternative practices of psychoanalysis. The replacement of analyst would open psychoanalytic criticism to infinite possibilities, a constant transfer between two forms of literature.
There is no such thing as a unified concept or practice of psychoanalysis, but this is not necessarily such a bad thing. Instead of being daunted or paralysed by the absence of foundation, we must go on as critics (for all readers are subsequently critics) without fear or trepidation. Like Stephan Dedalus, in Joyce’s A Portrait of a Young Artist, leaving the comfort of the mother and the shadows of the father, we must break from everything that is familiar and constrains us. We must learn to live with the question, ‘How shall I live’, as Lear puts it.[104] (Breaking free is something Fish says we do automatically, yet sometimes this seems questionable.) Breaking free from psychoanalysis as a privileged card-carrying practice, we must work towards a clubless criticism. A criticism that pays as much attention to reading as it does to writing, to listening as much as to stating. A criticism open to the statement, ‘I might be wrong’, to the multiplicities of the text, and most importantly of all, a willingness towards a world of infinite possibilities and endless horizons.
Abrams, M. H. Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory. Edited by Michael Fischer, W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.
Arac, Jonathan, et al., editors. The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Edited by Stephan Heath, Fontana, 1977.
—. Mythologies. Edited by Annette Lavers, Vintage, 1993 [1957].
—. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1974 [1970].
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994 [1981].
Begley, Adam. “Terminating Analysis.” Lingua Franca, vol. 4, 1994, pp. 24-30.
Benjamin, Jessica. Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1998.
Bion, Wilfred. Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis. Pitman Press, 1967.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Clarendon Press, 1984.
Crews, Frederick, et al. Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. New York Review, 1995.
Crews, Frederick, editor. Unauthorised Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. Penguin, 1999.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. Picador, 1984.
de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1981 [1972].
—. Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, Northwestern University Press, 1988.
—. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas, Stanford University Press, 1998 [1996].
Dews, Peter. Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. Verso, 1987.
Donnelly, Phillip J. Rhetorical Faith: The Literary Hermeneutics of Stanley Fish. English Literary Studies, 2000.
Eagleton, Terry. “The Estate Agent.” London Review of Books, vol. 22, no. 5, 2000.
—. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed., Blackwell, 1996 [1983].
Eckardt, Marianne H. “Psychoanalysis – Myth and Science: The Challenge to Become Open-Minded to Infinite Complexity.” American Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 60, no. 3, 2000, pp. 263-75.
Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. Basic Books, 1970.
Faubion, James D., and Paul Rabinow, editors. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Translated by Robert Hurley et al., Penguin, 2000.
Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Duke University Press, 1989.
—. Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard University Press, 1980.
—. The Trouble with Principle. Harvard University Press, 1999.
—. There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech; and It’s a Good Thing, Too. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Edited by James Faubion and Paul Rabinow, Translated by Robert Hurley and others. Penguin, 2000.
Freud, Sigmund. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Penguin Freud Library vol. 11, Translated by James Strachey, edited by Angela Richards, Penguin, 1991.
—. The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay, Vintage, 1989.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, 1973.
Grimal, Pierre. The Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Translated by A.R. Maxwell-Hyslop, Blackwell, 1986 [1951].
Jones, Ernest. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Hogarth Press, 1953-1957.
Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963. Edited by Hanna Segel, Vintage, 1997 [1975].
Lear, Jonathon. Open Minded: Working out the Logic of the Soul. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Athlone Press, 1980.
Mann, Thomas. Essays of Three Decades. Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter, Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.
Miller, J. Hillis. Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines. Yale University Press, 1992.
—. Black Holes [Manuel Asensi, J Hillis Miller, Boustrophedonic Reading, or, translated by Mabel Richart]. Stanford University Press, 1999.
—. Hawthorne and History. Blackwell, 1991.
—. The Ethics of Reading. Columbia University Press, 1987.
—. Theory Now and Then. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
—. Topographies. Stanford University Press, 1995.
—. Versions of Pygmalion. Harvard University Press, 1990.
Nagal, Thomas. Other Minds: Critical Essays (1969-1994). Oxford University Press, 1995.
Nietzsche, Frederick. The Nietzsche Reader. Edited by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1977.
Olsen, Gary. Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric. State University of New York Press, 2002.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, editor. Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature. Methuen, 1987.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
—. Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980). Harvester Press, 1982.
Rudnytsky, Peter L. “Wrecking Crews.” American Imago, vol. 56, no. 3, 1999, pp. 285-98.
Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. Edited by Michael Wood, Granta Books, 1997 [1975].
Shakespeare, William. King Henry VI: Part 1. Edited by Norman Sanders, Penguin, 1981.
Souter, Kay Torney. “The Products of the Imagination: Psychoanalytic Theory and Postmodern Literary Criticism.” American Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 60, no. 4, 2000, pp. 341-59.
Webster, Richard. Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. Fontana Press, 1995.
Whyte, Lancelot. The Unconscious before Freud. Basic Books, 1960.
Wiltshire, John. Recreating Jane Austen. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Winnicott, Donald. Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. Hogarth Press, 1975.
—. Psychoanalytic Explorations. Edited by Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepard, and Madeleine Davis, Harvard University Press, 1989.
Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal. 2nd ed., Polity Press, 1998.
Wilfred. Bion, ‘Attacks on Linking (1962)’, in Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis, (Bath: Pitman Press, 1967), p.102. ↩
Jacques Derrida, ‘Resistances (1991)’, in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas, (Stanford, California; Stanford University Press, 1998 [1996]), p.20. ↩
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, (New York; Hill and Wang, 1974 [1970]), p.4 ↩
Marianne. H. Eckardt, ‘Psychoanalysis – myth and science: The challenge to become open-minded to infinite complexity’, American Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol 60:3, (2000), p.263. ↩
Richard. Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, (London, Fontana Press, 1995), p.13. ↩
Thomas. Mann, ‘Freud and the Future (1936)’ in Essays of Three Decades trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter, (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), pp.411 – 428. ↩
Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, (London; Hogarth Press, 1953-1957). ↩
For example, in the introduction to a collection of essay’s against Freud, Frederick Crews asks the question, ‘on what generally accepted principle has any way of “moving beyond Freud” been proven superior to its myriad rivals?’ Those who boast of progress are hoping we won’t glance past their own table of wares in the ever-expanding bazaar of certified and black market “psychoanalysis”. Frederick. Crews, eds., Unauthorised Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend, (Ringwood; Penguin. 1999), p.xxx. ↩
Gary. Olsen, ‘Fish Tales: A Conversation with “The Contemporary Sophist”’ an Appendix to Stanley. Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech; and it’s a Good Thing, Too (New York, Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1994), p.294. ↩
This goes with Fish’s position that seeds of change are planted long before theory ever makes sense of them. Fish, ‘Change (1983-4), Doing What Comes Nautrally: Change. Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and legal Studies, (Durham, NC; Duke University Press, 1989), p.154. ↩
Although Barthes’ ‘today’ has long since passed, with dramatic changes in media in the last fifty years. The core of his ideas still provoke and enlighten our understanding of the construction myths. ↩
Roland. Barthes, Mythologies, ed. Annette Lavers, (London, Sydney, Auckland; Vintage,1993 [1957]), p.130. ↩
An example of roses being appropriated for nationalistic purposes is in part one of Henry VI with the schism between York and Lancaster over Richard Plantagenet’s claim to the throne. In a heated argument, Plantagenet and the Earl of Warwick pluck a white rose to signify the allegiance to York, while the Earls of Somerset and Suffolk take up a red to signify their allegiance to Lancaster. In time these two factions unite in the ‘war of the roses’ forming the Tudor monarchy. William. Shakespeare, ‘II, iv, 25-38’, King Henry VI: part I, ed. Norman Sanders, (Ringwood; Penguin, 1981). ↩
This diagram is copied from page 115, but I have relabeled the second order as Barthes does in the essay but fails to do in his diagram. Barthes simply puts the second order in CAPITALS to distinguish it from the first. ↩
Interestingly, Fish in recent work on principles, has said, ‘A neutral principle, in short, can have a historical habitation but not a historical cause. Accordingly, the question one asks of it is analytic … rather than genealogical … But once the genealogical question is put and the principle is given a biography, the idea of regarding it as neutral – as without reference to substantive imperatives – will seem less compelling. Fish, ‘Taking Sides’, The Trouble with Principle, (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1999), p.6. ↩
For an analysis of psychoanalysis from the perspective of the history of ideas, see Henri. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, (New York; Basic Books, 1970) and Lancelot, Whyte. The Unconscious before Freud, (New York; Basic Books, 1960). ↩
For the sack of my argument, I will keep ‘anal’ to be retentive. But it must not be overlooked that, anal is just as much expulsive as it is retentive. An example of being anally expulsive is where a football team ‘shits’ all over the other side. As Melanie Klein pointed out discussing a child’s early relationship with their mother, ‘The phantasied onslaughts on the mother follow two main lines: one is the predominantly oral impulse to suck dry, bite up, scoop out and rob the mother’s body of its good contents … The other line of attack derives from the anal and urethral impulses and implies expelling dangerous substances (excrements) out of the self and into the mother’. Klein. Melanie, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946)’, in Envy and Gratitude and other works 1946-1963, ed. Hanna Segel, (Sydney; Vintage, 1997 [1975]), p.8. ↩
Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)’ in The Freud Reader ed. Peter Gay, (Sydney; Vintage, 1989), p. 239-293. ↩
Freud, ‘Character and Anal Erotism (1908)’ in The Freud Reader, p.294. ↩
Olsen, ‘The Contemporary Sophist’, p.295. ↩
Michel. Foucault, ‘What is an Author’? (1969)’, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954/1984, ed. James Faubion and Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others, (Ringwood; Penguin, 2000), p. 217. ↩
Donald. Winnicott. ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena (1951)’, Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis, (London; Hogarth Press, 1975), p.230. ↩
Elizabeth. Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal, 2nd Edition, (London: Polity Press, 1998), p.84. ↩
John. Wiltshire, Recreating Jane Austen, (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.103. ↩
Don. DeLillo, White Noise, (London; Picador, 1984), pp.11-12. ↩
Crews et al, Memory Wars: Freud’s legacy in Dispute, (New York; New York Review, 1995), p.206. ↩
Charlotte Krause Prozan, The Technique of Feminist Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, p.270 quoted in Memory Wars, p.221. In a response to Crews’ one line reference that ‘we are looking for sexual abuse’, Prozan gives the full quote in a letter. She assures readers that she is ‘not the simpleton Dr. Crews would like you to believe I am’. Memory Wars, p.236. ↩
Barthes, Mythologies, p.135. ↩
Fish, ‘Faith before Reason’, The Trouble with Principle, p.268. ↩
Jonathon. Lear, Open Minded: Working out the logic of the Soul. (Cambridge, Mass; Harvard University Press, 1998), p.17. The essay was originally published in the New Republic (Dec 25, 1995) in response to the Library of Congress’ decision to cave in to yet another instance of Freud-bashing. For a full understanding of the case see Frederick Crews’ introduction to Unauthorised Freud. Crews, ‘Introduction’, Unauthorised Freud, pp. xvii xxii. ↩
Lear, p.53. ↩
Banhes. S/Z, p. 11. ↩
Barthes, ‘the Death of the Author (1968)’, in Image Music Text, ed. Stephan Heath, (London; Fontana, 1977), p.148. ↩
Also see S/Z. ↩
For a more though discussion of the arbitrary nature of texts and writing, see Derrida’s ‘Dissemination’, Both an exegeses and an example, Derrida illustrates the uncontrolled dissemination of the text in his analysis of Philippe Sollars novel, Numbers and numerous other unnamed and unmarked quotations and citations. Jacques Derrida, ‘Dissemination (1969)’ in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, (Chicago; Chicago University Press, 1981 [1972]), pp. 287-366. ↩
Clifford. Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture·. in The Interpretation of Culture, (New York; Basic Books. 1973), p.30. ↩
By ‘Literary’ I mean a way of seeing the text, rather than anything inherent within the text itself. ↩
Christine. Brooke-Rose, ‘Id is, is Id?’ in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ed., Discourse Psychoanalysis and Literature, (London, New York; Methuen, 1987), p.35. ↩
For example, Elizabeth Wright compares Winnicott’s case study titled, The Piggle, with the style of Samuel Beckett. ‘Whereas Klein’s narratives partake of the gothic, Winnicott’s have an absurd Beckett-like quality’. Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism, p.85 See also, Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1984) and Edward. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, introduction by Michael Wood, (London; Granta Books, 1997 [1975]), pp.160-188. ↩
I borrow this from American Pragmatist Richard Rorty who, talking about the work of Jacques Derrida and his placement within philosophy, says philosophy is best seen as a kind of writing. It is delimited, as is any literary genre, not by form or matter, but by tradition.’ Richard. Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing (1978)’, in Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980), (Brighton; Harvester Press, 1982), p.92. ↩
Terry. Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd Edition, (Cambridge; Blackwell, 1996[1983]), p.40. ↩
Particularly Georges Poulet, who had been made a chairman in the French department at John Hopkins University in 1952, a year before Miller was made assistant professor on English at the same university. Frank. Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, (London; Athlone Press, 1980), pp. 63-64. ↩
J. Hillis. Miller, ‘The Geneva School: The Criticism of Marcel Raymond, Albert Beguin, Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard end Jean Starobinski (1966)’ in Theory Now and Then, (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p.15. ↩
‘The art [of philology] does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers’. Frederick. Nietzsche, ‘Preface to Daybreak’ (1886) in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. R.J. Hollingdale, (Ringwood; Penguin. 1977), p.17. ↩
For a more thorough discussion of these and other such ‘non-terms’ see Lentricchia, pp.168-177. ↩
Miller, Topologies, (Stanford, California; Stanford University Press, 1995), p.323. ↩
Miller, ‘Ethics of Reading’ (1987) in Theory Now and Then, p.334. ↩
Peter. Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, (London; Verso, 1987), p.13. ↩
Barbara. Johnson, ‘Introduction’ to Derrida, Dissemination, p.xv. ↩
See Jonathan. Arac, et al, eds., The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, (Minneapolis; University of Minneapolis, 1983). ↩
Miller ‘Critic as Host’ (1979), in Theory Now and Then, p.147. ↩
‘When Theseus arrived in Crete to do battle with the Minotaur Ariadne saw him and immediately fell deeply in love with him; to enable him to find his way in the labyrinth where the Minotaur was confined she gave him a ball or thread, which he unwound to show him the way to return’. Pierre. Grimal, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, trans. A.R. Maxwell-Hyslop, (Oxford; Blackwell, 1986[1951]), p.59. ↩
Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Line, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp.21-22. ↩
Miller, ‘Steven’s Rock and Criticism as Cure II’(1976), in Theory Now and Then p.122. ↩
Miller, Black Holes, / [Manuel Asensi, J. Hillis Miller, or, Boustrophedonic Reading, trans. by Mabel Richart], (Stanford,Calif; Stanford University Press, 1999), p.489. ↩
Manuel Asensi, J. Hillis Miller, or, Boustrophedonic Reading, trans. by Mabel Richart / [Miller, Black Holes], p.36. ↩
Miller, “The Ethics of Reading’, p.338. ↩
In this book, Miller depicts the way in which writers rereading their own work in an ongoing effort to break through to the text itself, ‘the ethical law as such’. Miller. The Ethics of Reading, (New York; Columbia University Press, 1987). ↩
Miller borrows this from Henry James, who in the preface to The Golden Bowl says that ‘the whole conduct of life consists of things done, which do other thing in their turn’. Henry. James, The Golden Bowl, Vol. 23. Charles Scribner’s New York Edition on 1909 (reprint New York; Augustus M. Kelley, 1971), p.xxiv., quoted in Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, (Cambridge, Mass; Harvard University Press, 1990), p.15. ↩
An act of prosopopoeia is to ascribes ‘a face, a name, or a voice to the absent, the inanimate, or the dead’. Versions of Pygmalion, p.4. ↩
‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.’ Franz. Kafka, The Trail, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953). p.7. quoted in Versions of Pygmalion, p.17. ↩
Sigmund. Freud, On Metapyschology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library Vol 11, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards, (Ringwood; Penguin, 1991). pp.467-479. ↩
Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, pp.18-19. ↩
Derrida, ‘Signature, Event, Context (1977)’, in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, (Evanston; Northwestern University Press, 1988), p.12. ↩
Harold. Schweizer ‘Introduction’ to Miller. Harthorne and History, (Oxford; Blackwell, 1991). pp.23-41. and M. H. Abrams. ‘Deconstructive Angel (1978)’ in Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Fischer, (New York, London; W.W. Norton & Company, 1989). pp. 237-252. ↩
See ‘The Function of Literary Theory at the Present Time (1989)’ in Theory Now and Then, p.392. ↩
Derrida. ‘Dissemination’. p.328. ↩
Miller. Hawthorne and History, pp.152-153. ↩
Fish, ‘Normal Circumstances and Other Special Cases ( 1978)’. in Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities, (Cambridge. Mass; Harvard University Press, 1980), p.284. ↩
Fish, ·Interpreting the Variorum (1976)” in Is There a Text in This Class?, p.171. ↩
‘Critical Self-Consciousness, Or Can We Know What We’re Doing?’ in Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 466-467. ↩
See ‘Anti-Foundationalism, Theory Hope, and the Teaching of Composition (1987)’. in Doing What Comes Naturally, pp.343-355. ↩
See ‘The Young and the Restless (1989)’, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, pp. 243-256. ↩
‘As I [Fish] say in at the end of “Theory Minimalism,” if after having read me or heard me you go away with something useful, I will have failed, because that would mean that I’m claiming that my argument isn’t. My argument is that theoretical claims made, let’s say, by foundationalists, or anti-theoretical claims by anti-foundationalists, cannot be cashed in – that these arguments, whether you are persuaded by them or unpersuaded by them, will not alter your behaviour when you’re not in the arena where these argument are made’. An interview between Stanley Fish and Gary Olsen. ‘From Mulliculturalism to Academic Freedom: The Case against Universalism’, in Gary. Olsen, Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric (Albany; State University of New York Press, 2002), p.27. ↩
Fish, ‘Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road’, in Doing What Comes Naturally, p.26. ↩
William James quoted in Fish, ‘Truth and Toilets (1998)’ in The Trouble with Principle, p.294. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Fish, ‘Almost Pragmatism: The Jurisprudence of Richard Posner, Richard Rofly and Ronald Dworkin (1991 )’, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, p.215. ↩
Fish, ‘Truth and Toilets’, pp.306-307. ↩
Fish, ‘Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road’, p.25. ↩
Fish, ‘Rhetoric’, in Doing What Comes Naturally, p.478. ↩
Augustinian critic, Phillip Donnelly questions whether Fish’s undermining of Western metaphysics by way of rhetoric and ‘no consequence’ is at all possible. Donnelly argues that Fish’s rejection only works if one presumes that it is possible in the first place, therefore collapsing back upon rhetoric all over again. Phillip J. Donnelly, Rhetorical Faith: The Literary Hermeneutics of Stanley Fish, (Victoria; English Literary Studies . 2000), p.88. ↩
Fish, ‘Withholding the Missing Portions: Psychoanalysis and Rhetoric (1987)’, in Doing What Comes Naturally, p.553. ↩
Fish, ‘Consequences (1985)’, in Doing What Comes Naturally, p.326. ↩
Fish, ‘The Dance of Theory’, in The Trouble with Principle, p.126. ↩
Saint Augustine quoted in Fish, ‘Faith Before Reason’, in The Trouble with Principle, p.265. ↩
Fish, Belief About Belier, in The Trouble with Principle, p.280. ↩
Fish, ‘Change’, p.146. ↩
Winnicott, ‘Review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1964)’. Psychoanalytic Explorations, eds. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepard and Madeleine Davis. (Cambridge. Mass; Har\lard University Press. 1989), pp.483-484. ↩
One more recent example is Terry Eagleton’s contemptuous review of The Trouble with Principle. Eagleton, ‘The Estate Agent’, London Review of Books Vol. 22 No. 5, (2000) ↩
Fish, ‘The Law Wishes to Have a Formal Existence (1991)’, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, p.170. ↩
Fish, ‘Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road’, p.30. ↩
This is a point brought up recently by Fish himself, who in an interview suggested that, ‘if there’s a criticism to be made of my work, it’s that it doesn’t leave any room for subjectivity or for independent choice because of its emphasis on interpretative communities, or on the way in which disciplines work’. Fish and Olsen, ‘The Case against Universalism’, in Justifying Belief, p.139. ↩
Jessica. Benjamin, ‘The Shadow of the Other Subject: Intersubjectivity and Feminist Theory’ in Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis, (London and New York; Routledge, 1998), p.105. ↩
Wilshire, p.107. ↩
Of course, Fish would most likely deny any suggestion of recognition of communication, dismissing Benjamin’s association with Habermas and the Frankfurt school, as going down the barren road of universals. As he says of anyone who aligns themselves with Habermas, ‘as far as I am concerned, any positive reference to Habermas in the course of an argument is enough to invalidate it’. Fish, ‘The Dance with Theory’, p.122. ↩
Fish, ‘Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road’, p.15. ↩
This may come across as a mistaken identity, for am I not talking about psychoanalyses rather than psychoanalysis. But to call it psychoanalyses would mean that we have the ability to hold down multiple interpretations at once. Here I agree with Fish, that although we may be members of a multitude of beliefs, we can only ever articulate one at a time. ↩
Jean. Baudrillard, ‘On Nihilism’ in Simulacra and Simulation. trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, (Michigan; The University of Michigan Press, 1994 [1981]). p.163. ↩
Edward. Said, Beginnings, p.25. ↩
Kay. Torney Souter. ‘The products of the imagination: Psychoanalytic Criticism and postmodern literary criticism’, American Journal of Psychoanalysis 60:4, (2000), p.345. ↩
Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p.20 ↩
Paul. de Man. ‘Return to Philology (1982)’ in The Resistance to Theory, (Minneapolis; University of Minneapolis. 1986), p.24. ↩
Lear, p.28. ↩