The Legend of Freud (review)

141 reviews such salutary consternation. One is reminded here of Benjamin's brief piece entitled Blattpflanze (Leaf-plant) which is discussed at length in Chapter One. Like that fantasy which the lover enters at the instant hope of consummation is threatened, this interpretation propagates itself indefinitely in luxuriant sterility, never coming to flower. Stern's book finds uninterrupted pleasure with Benjamin's tools, enjoying the text in rhetorical effigy while evading those savage contradictions in historical actuality. MARCUS BULLOCK NOTES inationen (Frankfurt am Main: Sul Ibid. 'Illuminationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), p. 253 2 3Ibid., p. 266. "Ibid. '·'Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 262. Illuminationen, p. 260. Samuel Weber. The Legend of Freud. MinneapoUs: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. 179 pp. $25 (cloth); $10.95 (paper). Sam Weber's The Legend ofFreud is one of the most convincing and comprehensive rereadings of Freud to appear recently in the EngUsh language. It is presented within the framework of the questioning of the status of psychoanalytic discourse found in the writings of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. Without sliding into tedious or confusing expositions of those writings Weber makes them the instruments of a discourse inteUigible in its own right, offering witty and engaging explorations of psychoanalysis which radically and decisively displace the traditional conception of Freud's thought as dualist and based on oppositional categories. The problem posed is that of the conflict involved in a theory which derives consciousness from the "confUctual dynamics of the unconscious" (xvi) but is itself necessarily informed by categories of consciousness which include a quest for a plenitude of meaning and comprehension. Weber's project is to retrace the marks of struggle in Freud's text and to reveal its dynamics, ramifications and consequences not the least of which would be the dislocation of "the conception of cognition and truth on which theory has traditionally depended" (xvi). While Weber explores this problematic with the utmost finesse it is in his marking of the difference between and priority ofa deconstructive reading of Freud as opposed to a Lacanian reading that his project falls prey to the very narcissistic totalization of which he accuses Lacan. It is the problem of narcissism and its implications for the constitution ofthe ego as identity , as it is inseparable from a confUctual and ambivalent relation to alterity, that is central to all of Weber's argument. The essence of narcissism is the desire to see the same and the familiar; it is a defensive gesture against alterity through which the ego tries to consoUdate its integrity. The dynamics of this effort, which according to Freud is never fully abandoned , are epitomized with the advent of the castration complex, where the ego confronts its disunity and non-identity, the narcissistic shock of the sight of the female genitals, by constructing a story in which the threat of non-identity is mitigated by transforming original disunity into a loss of original identity. The self-deception and ambivalence of this position is sharpened in Freud's topology of the ego, id and superego where it is made clear that the ego depends on what it tries to reject and control. For the relations of these three terms point to a dispersal of self in an interminable confUctual overlapping between entities that 142 the minnesota review cannot be self-identical since they depend on each other for their existence. Consequently, the ego becomes a "highly ambivalent, more or less precarious 'compromise formation': the resultant of forces that it seeks to organize but can never control."1 Weber's aim is to demonstrate that this ambivalent process of constitution, as a distinguishing from another as weU as a disruption from within, emerges as the very "figure of psychoanalytic thinking" and that the form of Freud's "new type of theorizing" mirrors the "precarious compromise formation" of the ego. Freud's theorizing is then characterized "as the confUctual result of the . . . effort to determine and systematize, through the construction of oppositions, and the . . . tendency to displace and dislocate such determination" (168, fn. 12). Such a confUctual movement is traced by Weber within the context of Freud's efforts to establish the integrity...