Reading Psycho-Analysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (review)

This impressively researched and stimulating book has two rather distinct aims. First it is a history of Freud's rebellious sons working in the first part of the 20th century, and a discussion about the disciplinarity of psychoanalysis and its fragile status poised between a natural science and a hermeneutic study akin to literary criticism. Full of fascinating biographical insights, the book is nevertheless much more successful in its second aim, as a validation of the continuing use of psychoanalysis both clinically and theoretically, than in its first aim, where its attempt at what would appear to be the less contentious aspect of its thesis—a hermeneutic and historical account of the psychoanalytic literature of Freud's errant disciples—is partial and assertive.

Starting with Freud's own literary criticism in Gradiva (1907), Rudnytsky symptomatically reads Freud to suggest that for Freud, literature is the uncanny double of psychoanalysis and vice versa. Freud's treatment of characters from literature and history (Gradiva and Leonardo) as if they were real, and his understanding that his own case histories such as Dora and Little Hans read as literature, as short stories, enable Rudnytsky's own starting point in reading the subsequent psychoanalytic texts through the psychobiographies of their authors. Thus, when Rudnytsky takes up the subject of Little Hans (1909), Freud's analysis of phobia in a five-year-old boy, it is to set out his major argument that Freud's own psychobiography caused him to disavow the role of female sexuality in psychic life and to create the misogyny of the Oedipus Complex and its single signifier of sexuality—the male penis. The excessive patriarchal masculinity and role play that Rudnytsky ascribes to Freud is therefore responsible for what Harold Bloom has called the "anxiety of influence" in Freud's subsequent followers. It emerges as their cruel expulsion from Freud's analytic circle and in their various attempts at analytic practice and writing to redress the sexual and Oedipal balance. Thus Rank moves in his later career to supplant the Oedipus Complex with a pre-oedipal psychoanalysis of birth trauma and resites the mother as the critical role in child development. Ferenczi, Freud's vulnerable yet loyal son, is first treated by Freud (he is the unacknowledged subject of Analysis Terminable and Interminable [1937]). He is encouraged by Freud, as authoritarian father, to marry a woman he does not love, rather than her daughter, whom he desires. As a result Ferenczi finds an analytic mother figure in Groddeck, who offers him the sympathy Freud withholds. Ferenczi subsequently forms his own practice and writing in opposition to Freud. Ferenczi's Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1924) predates and influences object-oriented psychoanalysis in its emphasis on the mutuality between analyst and analysand and the containing and maternal role of the therapist.

In Chapter 8, Rudnytsky provides the first analysis of Groddeck's The Book of the It (1923), arguing that it is a far more coherent and scientific account of the unconscious than Freud's drive theories because it corrects Freud's original misogynistic accounts through its own understanding of womb envy. Groddeck also criticizes the theology of Freud's empire and his authoritarian policing of its psychoanalytic borders.

There are several problems with Rudnytsky's narrative here. Perhaps the most crucial is the way that he relies on psychoanalytic auteurism to tie down the meanings of the texts too neatly. He fails to do the psychoanalytic work and look at the overdetermination in the texts and the possibilities of multiple readings. His disavowal, or at least dismissal, of post-structural literary criticism and psychoanalysis means that he reads the texts and the analysts in schematic, depoliticized and even hysterical ways. Lacan's key re-reading of Freud with Lévi-Strauss revealed not that Freud was a misogynist (whether he was or not is neither here nor there), but that his revelation...