Freud's Psychoanalysis: Interpretation and Property

Psychoanalysis, writes Freud (1923), is “an art of interpretation” (239). In his major contributions to the history of psychoanalysis, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914) and An Autobiographical Study (1925), Freud revisits those defining moments when he first claims a knowledge unavailable to others, a knowledge that allows him to distinguish himself as psychoanalysis. In these critical encounters, property is allocated, identities are shaped, meaning is contested—the proper, in all senses, is distributed. Such scenes of interpretative election double as rites of initiation, passages into maturity that prove (both test and confirm) Freud’s responsibility for psychoanalysis. Claiming responsibility rather than originality, Freud can assert a moral right to psychoanalysis without arguing for genetic ownership. He can advance an alternate origin story less indebted to the essentialist narrative of a decisive break between pre-psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis “proper.” ¹ Freud approaches ownership from the outside; he assumes responsibility for psychoanalysis, an assumption (“taking upon oneself”) that identifies him with psychoanalysis and, the one supporting and propping up the other, effectively creates both himself and Psychoanalysis in a single act. His paternity—which has more to do with affiliation than filiation—involves adopting contingent, local, even non-existent properties and, through what amounts to an instituting act, contracting them into service as “psychoanalysis.”

In On the History, Freud recalls the silence with which his early researches were greeted by an unresponsive and even hostile scientific community. ² He is careful to add that this isolation is not without its compensations: in a familiar autobiographical topos, ascetic withdrawal generates mystical conversion. “I learnt to restrain speculative tendencies and to follow the unforgotten advice of my master, Charcot: to look at the same things again and again until they themselves begin to speak” (Freud 1914, 22). He is liberated from external influences and the politics of professional competition and jealousy. Publications “could be postponed as long as I pleased, since there was no doubtful ‘priority’ to be defended” (Freud 1914, 22). Property and ownership have no place in this Edenic “splendid isolation.” Indeed, according to Ernest Jones (1957), “Freud was never interested in questions of priority, which he found merely boring [. . .]” (100). But Freud’s anxieties about priority have been well-documented. ³ Even in what Michel de Certeau has called the “Freudian Novel,” a kind of hybrid historiography open to the impropriety or “non-topos” of poetry, Freud never completely abandons his pretensions to a proper, authoritative voice. De Certeau (1986) writes: “He needs to assure a surplus of institutional force in the place where it is lacking in his discourse so that it might be supposed to have knowledge” (33). ⁴ Freud is aware that property is contested and, moreover, that “splendid isolation”—taking oneself and one’s property out of circulation—is tantamount to abrogating one’s rights. Priority must be defended, counter-claims answered, one’s own position advanced and aggressively publicized. Throughout his career Freud is concerned with commemorating originary acts and celebrating discoveries. ⁵

Despite his epochal decentring of the subject, Freud’s authority depends upon a faith in ownership indebted to a liberal construction of the subject and its property. ⁶ If for Locke (1980) labor removes raw materials from a nature held in common, converting them into personal property (see 18–30), then for Freud and his hermeneutic economics, possession passes to the speculator able to extricate meaning from the meaningless through the addition of interpretive labour. This production of property is not modelled on self-expression, on the reproduction of the self from within. Instead, the subject claims responsibility by making an ethico-legal commitment to stand behind its property and accept—be fully conscious of—its liabilities. Freud’s faith in informed, responsible agency therefore allows him to acknowledge the alterity of self-formation without sacrificing the proper.

The discovered “fact” may pre-exist Freud, then, but if he arrives upon this information independently and, more important, through the proper kind of work (scientific methodology), he is justified in claiming discovery. Freud (1914) deliberately stunts his reading in order, as Byron would say, to “manage...