Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture (review)

In this bold and entertaining study, Esther Rashkin takes as a starting point the “vexed” relationship between psychoanalysis and cultural studies over the past fifteen years in order to argue that, contrary to the orthodoxy within some circles, psychoanalytic methodology is uniquely apposite for studies that seek to expose the tacit ideologies and meanings of cultural products. Rashkin further proposes that textual close reading, “a practice that cultural studies has marginalized along with psychoanalysis itself” (2), is the most valuable means of apprehending hidden cultural significance and mapping the meeting points between text and contexts. While this characterization of cultural studies may be accurate with respect to some of its exponents (e.g. practitioners of New Criticism), the claim tends towards the homogenization of “cultural studies” and ignores the contributions of existing psychoanalytically-informed publications within the field (e.g. work by Naomi Schor, Calvin Thomas, Tim Dean and Naomi Segal).

The author’s polemical insistence on privileging psychoanalytic method as uniquely valuable may be strategically unwise if her aim is, in fact, to persuade the psychoanalytically disinclined. It risks instead reinforcing some cultural critics’ mistrust of psychoanalysis as a dominant authority discourse with diagnostic power (a view that may issue from the perspectives of materialism, feminism, or Foucauldian critiques of normative discourse). Moreover, the blanket statements about the importance of psychoanalysis for cultural studies are themselves somewhat misleading. Rashkin does not go on to demonstrate that psychoanalysis offers the best tool for exploring all forms of hidden political valence, affective resonance or unsung signification in cultural products; rather she focuses on the excavation of certain types of previously ignored contextualization and hidden meanings in a range of texts. The particular strand of recent cultural studies that Rashkin seeks to refocalize using psychoanalysis is the field of investigation that intersects and conjoins trauma studies, Holocaust studies, and the study of mourning. In the Introduction, by way of initiation into Rashkin’s audacious and against-the-grain reading method, Roland Barthes’s essay from Mythologies ‘Saponides et Détergents’, usually seen as a semiotic investigation into the marketing of cleaning products, is re-read from an explicitly psychoanalytic point of view to reveal a “dirty secret”—the repressed French history of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers.

In the chapters that follow, Rashkin reads a very disparate selection of literary and filmic texts according to this formula, with varying degrees of success. The revelation that the focus on occultism in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël can be read as masking late-nineteenth-century France’s growing tendency towards anti-Semitism is ingenious and convincing. On the other hand, the far-fetched attempt to read the sado-masochistic subject matter of Bertulocci’s Last Tango in Paris as a manifestation of France’s inability to mourn its history of colonialism and collaboration, while undeniably imaginative, failed to convince this reader entirely. Indeed, in the case of the analysis of Last Tango in Paris, it is notable that adherence to textual close reading is subordinated to psychoanalytic diagnostics. The familiar psychoanalytic tendency to make of non-normative sexual practices a pathological symptom of “something else” is a feature that readers suspicious of psychoanalytic ideology, particularly those who work with queer theory, will find predictable and frustrating.

Overall, Rashkin makes a striking and memorable argument for utilizing the tools of psychoanalytic methodology, that have become unfashionable in some cultural studies circles, to reveal the unspoken horrors of atrocity, veiled anti-Semitism, and the guilty secrets of national history that lay beneath the surface of a range of cultural products. However, the larger claim—that psychoanalysis is the methodology par excellence for transforming the whole, broad field of cultural studies—is not satisfactorily substantiated by the study.