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  • The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis: Papers in Philosophy, the Humanities, and the British Clinical Tradition
  • Karin Ahbel-Rappe
The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis: Papers in Philosophy, the Humanities, and the British Clinical Tradition. Edited by Louise BraddockMichael Lacewing. London: Karnac, 2007. 246 pp. $90.00 (hb), $34.95 (pb).

“Strange Fruit”: A Matter of Coherence

The “Strange Fruit” to which I refer is not the haunting Billie Holiday song, but rather an Australian mime and acrobatic group who sit atop very high and flexible poles, arranging and rearranging themselves according to shifting narratives. The name comes to mind in the context of The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis, a volume of essays edited by Louise Braddock (Bye-Fellow, University of Cambridge) and Michael Lacewing (Lecturer in Philosophy, University of London), because of the image on the book’s cover, the sixteenth-century painting Summer by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. This painting depicts a man whose face is constructed as a composite of leaves and pieces of fruit: a squash of a nose, cherries for lips, cornstalk hair, and so on. The effect is comic, rather darkly so. The face of The Academic Face, we might say, has a peculiar coherence that calls coherence itself into question.

There is a striking irony here in relation to one of the editors’ stated program. For Braddock, the orienting fact of the book is the multiplicity of ways in which psychoanalysis has been taken up in the academy, its “dispersed state” (1). As studied by academics, psychoanalysis has many narratives, is many things to many people. The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis is a volume in reception studies of a sort. It provides a sample of the variety of ways in which scholars engage psychoanalysis in the contemporary academy. But for Braddock, this psychoanalytic diaspora, if you will, is problematic. The aim of the book, in her mind, is unifying: Can psychoanalysis be retrieved as a “coherent object of study” (1)? Can all the different perspectives on psychoanalysis [End Page 473] from other disciplines be “shown to present different aspects of a coherent intellectual unity” (3)?

Here we might pause to note that this is already a better class of problem than many of those with deep scholarly interest in psychoanalysis thought they had. For if psychoanalysis is so widely dispersed in the academy, we can take it that it is alive and well there; thus, we can only hope that things are as bad as Braddock says they are. In any case, her stated commitment is to resist a mere pluralism, and instead to see if it is possible to discern an “intellectual edifice” (1): one academic face, the academic face of psychoanalysis. Thus, the choice of a cover image that upsets coherence is an ironic one.

Let me emphasize that the individual essays in The Academic Face do not share this synthetic goal. It is true that each essay is comparative in nature (with the exception of the opening two essays by psychoanalysts, which serve to introduce psychoanalysis); that is, each relates itself to psychoanalysis from within its own perspective—philosophical, literary, sociological—or applies psychoanalysis to a cultural problem. But Braddock has a larger mission—to see these various trees, if you will, as a conceptually coherent forest.

I will return to this synthetic issue after a brief look at the individual essays. These essays, I might add, are in most cases very theoretically dense and complex, resistant to the sort of summary I am of necessity attempting here.

Psychoanalysts on Psychoanalysis

According to Braddock, the four essays by psychoanalysts are intended to provide a baseline understanding of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice for readers who may know relatively little of them. The first essay, “What Do Psychoanalysts Do?”, by Michael Brearley, serves this introductory purpose very well. (It also has the charm of being written by a cricketer-turned-psychoanalyst.) Brearley’s starting point is Wilfred Bion’s formulation that the analyst’s aim is to introduce the patient to himself. In Brearley’s own words, analysts “attempt to tell the truth to someone about the way he or she is behaving, thinking, or feeling” (31). But this aim implies that we...

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