Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud

2 Past Recognition: Narrative Origins in Wordsworth and Freud

2 PAST RECOGNITION Narrative Origins in Wordsworth and Freud The word egohas a place in the discourse of Romantic literature, but to speak today of the "Romantic ego," or to read Romantic texts in terms of other psychoanalytic concepts, is necessarily to juxtapose two different discourses: Romantic and psychoanalytic .1 And this is also to suggest that our self-understanding, as articulated within psychoanalytic discourse, can be understood historically, in terms of the relation between psychoanalytic theory and the texts of an earlier period called Romanticism. The nature of this gesture— the representation of self-knowledge as a history of its evolving discourses—is not entirely clear, but it is nevertheless entirely appropriate, since it is preciselythis configuration of selfknowledge , history, and discourse which many "Romantic" texts explore. By reading these texts in a search for our past, therefore, we can learn more about this very attempt to recognize ourselves in them. A similar gesture, although apparently inadvertent,ismade by Jeffrey Mehlman in translatinga passage from Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality. In the section explaining the sexual drive in terms of its origins in the nursing baby, Mehlman offers a new translation for the word Anlebnung, which designates the relation of the sexual drive to the instinct of hunger. In place of Strachey's "anaclisis," Mehlman suggests the word propping.2 NARRATIVE ORIGINS IN WORDSWORTH & FREUD / 45 The oddness of the word in this context recallsa striking use of it in Wordsworth's Prelude: after describing the origin of the poetic spirit in the baby at the breast, the poet refers to the mother as the "prop" of the child's affections. Mehlman's translation calls our attention to a problem common to the narratives of personal history in both texts. Each explains the dynamics of a self which cannot be called empirical (the sexual drive or poetic spirit)3 in terms of its origins in anempirically situated event, the physicalrelation of the mother and the nursing baby. But this produces, in each text, two different stories, one of which describes an intimate affective relation between the baby and the mother's body, and another which is less concerned with affect, and less clearly a matter of subject and object , and which refers instead to a propping or leaningactivity. The possibility of understanding Freud's and Wordsworth's narratives of self-knowledge revolves around the problem of reading these two stories together. The importance of emphasizing the role of discourse in this problem, as we have done by focusing on the word egoand on Mehlman's translation, is suggested by both Wordsworth's and Freud's texts. The Blessed Babe passage in The Prelude locates the origins of "our first poetic spirit" in a "being" whose history moves from "mute dialogues with my mother's heart" to "conjectures" that "trace" this progress.4 A "poetic spirit" is a "being" whose history is the mediation of two discourses, or who defines the difference between two discourses as its own history. The place of the empirical world in this history, and the distinction between the affective and propping stories in regard to it, bypass from the beginning any simple oppositions between language, self-knowledge, and the body, and concern rather differences in the configuration of these terms. A similar framework is established in Freud's Three Essays, in which the patient's self-understanding is not strictly distinguishable from the language of the psychoanalytic interpretation . In describing the way psychoanalysis explains neurotic symptoms to certain patients, Freud says: EMPIRICAL TRUTHS AND CRITICAL FICTIONS / 46 With the help of their symptoms and other manifestations of their illness, [psychoanalysis]traces their unconscious thoughts and translates [tibersetzt] them into conscious ones. In cases in which someone who has previouslybeen healthyfalls ill after an unhappy experiencein love it is also possible to show with certainty that the mechanism of his illness consists in a turningback of his libido onto those whom he preferredin his infancy.5 The word translates identifies the process of becoming conscious with the linguistic "return" from a foreign language, the "symptoms and other expressions" of the illness, to the mother tongue. These symptoms turn away from, or translate figuratively , the unconscious thoughts, which are thus conceived of as a "literal" meaning distorted by neurosis. When the literal meaning is retrieved, however, it has become part of a history; the unconscious thoughts are always ultimately revealed to be infantile libidinal desires...