Freud's Uncriticality, Pelléas's Multiplicity

The essays collected in this journal's "Opera after Freud" issue (vol. 31/1–2, winter–spring 2015) ask what psychoanalysis and opera have learned from one another. Adrian Daub's introduction makes clear that while Freud may not have dramatically reshaped how composers and librettists write operas, he has changed the way we experience the genre—including the operas that came before him. But Freud's writings also have something to say about their own time, especially if we consider how they reflect the discursive field around them. Thinking about Freud's writings in their cultural moment and focusing on their rhetorical strategies and aesthetic underpinnings show what he and his opera-producing contemporaries were dealing with and helping to bring about. This discursive context reminds us: before opera came after Freud, it proceeded along with him.

Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and Freud's Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens share an odd moment in the history of arts and letters. These two major works began life in the 1890s, amid an explosion of print in which words about words were notably prominent.¹ These early works of Debussy and Freud started to have an impact almost a decade before the fateful year of 1910, when (as Virginia Woolf famously put it) "human character changed."² The notion of a fin de siécle doesn't capture the sense of these years, but that's not because people weren't consciously looking back. This is a moment when techniques, materials, and aesthetic strategies were running ahead of the means for assessing them, when older aesthetic ideologies were being brought to bear on new modes of aesthetic comportment. Pelléas and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life helped drive modernist aesthetics that didn't yet exist, and that their own authors hardly sought to encourage.³

And indeed both works share aesthetic strategies and presuppositions. Both can be said to present many small objects. Debussy's Pelléas stands out for its multiplicity of small, charming, highly defined musical objects—delicately orchestrated (and reorchestrated) instrumental snatches lasting two to ten measures—and for the way it presents them in a relentlessly broken-up flow. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life also amasses what Freud called "an accumulation of examples [eine Häufung von Beispielen]" whose surface interest as forms of life often seems to exceed their value as psychoanalytic object-lessons;⁴ these objects too appear to have charmed many readers through ten editions during Freud's lifetime, each of which added new examples.

An ontology of more and more stuff emerged in the late-1890s as a way of adjusting cultural production to a world that seemed to be getting bigger and denser. This ontology became key to philology, classics, and textual scholarship. Like Debussy and Freud, scholars and lay authors in these fields reflected and helped produce this accumulation. William James actually theorized this ontology at the time. In 1904 James offered a telling picture of what he called "radical empiricism," a picture he opposed to the idealist's "crystal globe in which goldfish are swimming":

You would have to compare the empiricist universe to something more like one of those dried human heads with which the Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every description float and dangle from it, and save that they terminate in it, seem to have nothing to do with one another. Even so my experiences and yours float and dangle, terminating, it is true, in a nucleus of common perception, but for the most part out of sight and irrelevant and unimaginable to one another.⁵

At the beginning of the new century James saw "signs of a great unsettlement" in philosophy. "Life is confused and superabundant," and the "younger generation" wants this "temperament of life" to be reflected "in its philosophy, even though it were at some cost of logical rigor and of formal purity."⁶ As his image of the Dyak head makes clear, James lays the "explanatory stress on the part, the...