Towards a Psychosocial Psychoanalysis

A Personal Affair

It would be hard to wriggle out of the admonishment that an attachment to psychoanalysis always happens more for personal than for intellectual reasons. After all, the great founding text of the new “science,” The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), had at its center a set of dreams dreamt by its author, Sigmund Freud. Of few, if any, other sciences could it be asserted that the dreams of its originator not only motivated it but actually constituted its scientific credentials. Freud’s achievement here is really quite extraordinary: at a time in which the scientific revolution was paying off in ferocious advances in knowledge and technology, and science itself was perhaps at its most esteemed, Freud came along and announced that its source was a set of dreams. And behind these dreams are all sorts of peculiarities, including embarrassing ones. For example—perhaps the most egregious one—an element in one of Freud’s central dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, the “Count Thun” dream, is traced back to a memory of urinating in his parents’ bedroom and being faced by an irate father who declares, “the boy will come to nothing.” This paternal injunction flatly contradicted Freud’s mother’s endorsement of him as special—“Goldene Sigi”—and clearly rankled with him through much of his life. Freud comments, “This must have been a frightful blow to my ambition, for references to this scene are still constantly recurring in my dreams and are always linked with an enumeration of my achievements and successes, as though I wanted to say: ‘You see, I have come to something’” (p. 216). Given that Freud also declared The Interpretation of Dreams to be “a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death” (p.xxvi), it takes little imagination to see that this founding text of psychoanalysis is born from a fairly infantile emotion, that of embarrassment due to incontinence. How often can one openly say this about an intellectual activity—or rather, how often is it admitted that this is the case?

A special contribution of psychoanalysis is that it breaks down the division between different kinds of knowledge and opposes the fetishizing of objectivity, in the humanities and social sciences as well as in clinical practice. You cannot know anything, it suggests, without knowing something about yourself, even if what you know about yourself is the extent to which you are ignorant of yourself. Amongst other things, as Adam Phillips (2013) has argued in a provocative non-biography of Freud, it makes it impossible ever to write a full biography or autobiography: psychoanalytically speaking, how can we ever be sure that we know ourselves or others sufficiently well to be able to give an account of our, or their, life? If one core discovery of psychoanalysis is our “opacity” to ourselves and others, to use Judith Butler’s (2005) vocabulary, in which she makes an acknowledgement of this opacity a necessary bulwark against what she calls “ethical violence,” then to be truthful one has always to know how partial one is being; and to describe, autobiographically, an investment in psychoanalysis is always to leave open the possibility that one is not describing anything “real” at all, but rather is writing fiction.

So writing impersonally about psychoanalysis is inadequate, because psychoanalysis is such a personal affair, from Freud onwards. Yet, writing (auto)biographically about the origins and development of one’s investment in psychoanalysis is an impossible task, because even if it were reasonable to give a very personal, introspective account of it, that account would never be sufficient to grasp the truth. What is hidden from us is what matters most; and the more we explain, the more likely we are to become tied up in evasions and false trails. That said, however, it is worth a try. Even in psychoanalysis, fully aware of the limits of speech, one has to speak, or nothing happens at all. And most of us have some idea of what we are about, even if we know that there are a lot of unknowns hovering around—and that sometimes...