Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction by Malcolm Bowie (review)

L ’E s p r it C réa te u r Malcolm Bowie. F r e u d , P r o u s t a n d L a c a n : T h e o r y a s F ic t io n . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xii + 225. The psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan tend to appropriate literary texts. On the other hand, the narrator of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu borrows the tech­ nical vocabularies and the intellectual methods o f scientific and scholarly inquiry. Thus theory becomes fiction and vice versa. And the motor of this rapprochement is of course desire, which Malcolm Bowie calls “ the cosmological principle of our secular age” (3). Professor Bowie shows us that that desire is double. Freud’s belief in empirical observa­ tion and impartial induction conflicts with his irresistible penchant for a hypotheticodeductive approach. In his scientific writings, the metaphors for these two contradictory wishes are his self-images as archaeologist and conquistador. Like the archaeologist, the psychoanalyst excavates a buried past. But the archaeological fantasy also provides Freud with an escape from the necessarily refractive logic of dream interpretation. For whereas the material exhumed by the archaeologist may be broken or incomplete, the pathogenic episodes revealed by psychoanalysis are whole and self-explanatory. Freud’s model of the conqueror is likewise a dream of intellectual heroism, but now it is the quest, the inductive process itself, that offers him the possibility, or indeed the certainty, of omnipotence and omniscience. In sections of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, the image o f the jealous lover echoes the divergent intellectual itineraries that were discernible in certain of Freud’s works. The jealous lover adopts the technical vocabularies and intellectual procedures of scientists and scholars in a variety of disciplines, and the sometimes halting and repetitious texture of Proust’s style completes this portrait of the jealous/scientific mind in process. Ultimately, Proust leads us to speculate upon science as a kind of jealousy. One of the principal lessons to be had from an interreading of Freud and Proust con­ cerns their references to works of art. Literary myth for Freud and painting for Proust serve to confer respectability upon the biological and cultural prehistories they invent to explain the existence of divergent sexualities. In Lacan’s scientific theories as in Freud’s, literature is an instrument of persuasion. Yet Freud sees literature as an effort to reduce the inherent ambiguity of natural language, much in the way that psychoanalysis seeks to reduce the ambiguity of the dream work to a legible text of dream thoughts. Lacan, on the contrary, links the ambiguity of literature to that o f the unconscious and stresses the noncoincidence o f conscious and unconscious signifiers with their elusive signifieds. Unfortunately, Lacan’s writing sometimes disserves the general thrust of his ideas by recuperating the Freudian archaeological metaphor or by identifying literature as but one of numerous structural paradigms for the logic of the signifier. But that logic is eminently articulated in the self-conscious play of Lacan’s style. Professor Bowie examines the typical features of Lacan’s style in the context of the many influences it reflects. And he situates Lacan on the threshold o f a new symbiosis between the resurgent science of rhetoric proper and the increasingly complex rhetoric of psychodynamic theory. However, no rhetoric of the unconscious can be adequate, according to Professor Bowie, unless it is willing to explore the mutual implication of sociohistorical forces and psychical structure. At once eloquent and erudite, Freud, Proust and Lacan exemplifies its own precept that “ all works of the mind . . . are works of passion too” (65). Va h e e d K . R a m a z a n i Emory University 104 S p r i n g 1989 ...