Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge 9780804780025

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      

ultural Memory in the resent Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

FREUD AND THE INSTITUTION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC KNOWLEDGE

Sarah Winter

   , 

Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publications Fund of Yale University Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©  by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP

data appear at the end of the book

For Panos and Alexia

Contents

List of Abbreviations Preface Introduction: Freud’s Afterlife: Toward a Cultural History of the Psychoanalytic Thought Style

xi xiii



 .  :        Schoolboy Psychology: Freud’s Classical Education and the Institution of the Psychoanalytic Oedipus



 Psychoanalysis as “Necessity”: Freud’s “Tragic” Theories of the Psyche, Gender, and Cultural History



 Lacanian Psychoanalysis at Colonus



 .     Professionalization and Freud’s Cultural Theory



 Applied Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Disciplinary Imperialism and the Methodology of Modern Psychological Culture



Afterword



Notes



Bibliography



Index



Abbreviations

AI

Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture AS Freud, An Autobiographical Study (), SE, : ‒ AT Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (), SE, : ‒ BT Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I)” (), SE, : ‒ CD Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (), SE, : ‒ CSM Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness” (), SE, : ‒ DM Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” ( ), SE, : ‒ E&A Freud, “Explanations, Applications and Orientations,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (), SE, : ‒ EI Freud, The Ego and the Id (), SE, : ‒ Fitzgerald Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Robert Fitzgerald () FI Freud, The Future of an Illusion (), SE, : ‒ FL Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (), SE, : ‒ FP Freud, “The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy” (), SE, : ‒ GP Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (), SE, : ‒

xii Grene HPM ID IL LA LPT OT PC PCS Q RP RSM

S S SE SP TT WW

Abbreviations Oedipus at Colonus, trans. David Grene () Freud, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (), SE, : ‒ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (), SE, ‒ Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (‒), SE, ‒ Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis ( ), SE, : ‒ Freud, “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (), SE, : ‒ Freud, “On the Teaching of Psycho-Analysis in Universities” ( []), SE, : ‒ Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification () Freud, “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage” ( [‒ ]), SE, : ‒ Freud, “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (), SE, : ‒ Freud, “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis” (), SE, : ‒ Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (), in The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method Lacan, Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre I: Les écrits techniques de Freud, ‒ Lacan, Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre II: Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique psychanalytique Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud,  vols. Freud, “Some Reflections on Schoolboy Psychology” (), SE, : ‒ Freud, Totem and Taboo (‒), SE, : ix‒ Freud, “Why War?” ( []), SE, : ‒

Preface

In a memoir of her analysis with Sigmund Freud, the American poet H.D. describes her first impressions of Freud’s consulting rooms, viewed from a “reclining yet propped-up” position on the famous couch: I face the wide-open double door. At the foot of the couch is the stove. Placed next the stove is the cabinet that contains the more delicate glass jars and the variously shaped bottles and Aegean vases. In the wall space, on the other side of the double door, is another case or cabinet of curiosities and antiques; on top of this case there are busts of bearded figures—Euripides? Socrates? Sophocles, certainly. There is the window now as you turn that corner, at right angles to this cabinet, and then another case that contains pottery figures and some more Greek-figure bowls. Then, the door to the waiting room. At right angles again, there is the door that leads through the laboratory-like cupboard-room or alcove, to the hall. These two last doors, the entrance door and the exit door, as I call them, are shut. The wall with the exit door is behind my head, and seated against that wall, tucked into the corner, in the three-sided niche made by the two walls and the back of the couch, is the Professor. [Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), “Writing on the Wall,” in Tribute to Freud, ]

This cluttered, enclosed space—part office and consulting rooms, part laboratory, part collection of antiquities—is inhabited by two persons, and two personas: “the Professor” and (in this case H.D.’s) “I.” There is a documentary impulse at work in H.D.’s description, but it also provides a metaphorical register through which the arrangement of the rooms comes to mirror the mind as psychoanalysis renders it: a jumble of seemingly unrelated thoughts, its passions represented and impelled by figures that may at first seem marginal, like the elderly man squeezed into a corner behind the sofa. The contents of this analytic interior are intrinsically fascinating because of what transpires there, but the element that most interests me is

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the one set of objects that H.D. attempts to interpret: whose busts are displayed on that case? As she speculates, H.D. attributes one of her own preferences to Freud—Euripides—and lights upon Socrates, that other famous seeker of knowledge about the self, but finally expresses certainty about one identification: Sophocles. Of course: it has to be Sophocles in the history of psychoanalysis, even if the identity of the busts remains a mystery. This is the insight with which I began this project to account for the seeming inevitability of psychoanalytic knowledge and its pervasive effects on twentieth-century habits of mind. The story that I shall tell about the impact of Freud’s ideas does not attempt to characterize the psyche and its contents, or the analytic scene and its private transactions, but instead unfolds the institutional and cultural affiliations of psychoanalysis that the busts signify as part of the typical office decor of a professor with a taste for the classics. One of the greatest pleasures of concluding this book is the opportunity to acknowledge the many friends and colleagues who have criticized, reoriented, and sustained my research and writing. From the beginning, this project has been motivated by an intensely interested skepticism about psychoanalytic ideas, evolving out of the strong feminist critique of Freud’s views on gender. I do not mean to imply that all the people whose names appear below share the book’s perspectives on Freud. The guidance and encouragement of Nancy Armstrong, Peter Brooks, Christine Froula, David Marshall, Sheila Murnaghan, and Linda Peterson fostered my work on this project, and I thank them wholeheartedly for their example and support. Peter Brooks deserves particular thanks for his role as director of the dissertation that laid the groundwork for the book, and he has been a key reader of the work over the years. Sarah Kofman’s readings of Freud’s texts were important models, and she encouraged some of my initial efforts to interpret Freud’s writings and question psychoanalytic ideas. Jann Matlock has exemplified how to do interdisciplinary feminist research in cultural history and literary studies. A number of readers of the manuscript offered suggestions that allowed me to revise and improve it substantially, among them Alan Liu and the two other, anonymous reviewers for the Stanford University Press. Alan Liu is due particular acknowledgment for inspiring important aspects of the Afterword and for exchanges on Bourdieu. Abundant thanks likewise

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xv

go to Elaine Hadley, Langdon Hammer, Barbara Koziak, and Joel Pfister, who generously read and commented in detail on the entire manuscript at various stages. Langdon Hammer’s responses to drafts of the Introduction helped me to consider the place of Freud and psychoanalysis in contemporary American culture more fully. I also thank Leslie Brisman, Frederick Crews, and Alexander Welsh for their responses to the manuscript. Marshall Brown, Ian Duncan, Sander Gilman, and Michael Levine offered cogent criticisms of drafts of individual chapters. A conversation over lunch with Anne Higonnet helped crystallize one of the book’s main theses. I have also benefited from many discussions of the goals and ideas of the book, especially with Nicholas Baechle, John Forrester, Paul Fry, Christopher L. Miller, Thomas Whitaker, Deborah White, and Susanne Wofford. For many congenial and intellectually nourishing exchanges, I salute my fellow editors of the Yale Journal of Criticism, past and present: Nigel Alderman, Ian Baucom, Esther DaCosta Meyer, Elizabeth Dillon, Ian Duncan, Wayne Koestenbaum, Charles Musser, Debarati Sanyal, Michael Trask, Maurice Wallace, and Laura Wexler; and former and current managing editors James Najarian, John MacKay, Laura Saltz, and Joanna Spiro. Audrey Healy’s sublime conscientiousness and consideration in helping me with my share of administering the English major have made my life easier in many ways. A year of leave funded by a Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship from Yale University in ‒ provided a crucial time of transition from dissertation to book and allowed me to pursue the interdisciplinary research that will inform my future work. The Frederick W. Hilles Publications Fund of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale has generously assisted in offsetting publications costs. Helen Tartar and Pamela MacFarland have guided the book through publication with exemplary editorial savoir faire. I thank Peter Dreyer for his expert copyediting. Jennifer Davidson and Joseph Thompson provided timely and precise bibliographic assistance, and John MacKay helped me obtain photographic permissions. I am deeply grateful to all of the teachers at the Phyllis Bodel Child Care Center, particularly Xin Zhou, and to Sonja Brennan of Walnut Creek Kinder World; their loving care for my daughter has enabled me to work knowing she is happy.

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It is impossible to imagine the completion of this book without the company, aid, and encouragement of these friends: Susan Bianconi and Robert Voght, Ian Duncan, Elaine Hadley, Lanny Hammer and Jill Campbell, Vivian Irish and Iain Dawson, Lazaros Kakalis and Constantina Christopoulou, Barbara Koziak and Russell Rainbolt, Karen Lynn, and Joel Pfister. I owe to Barbara Koziak not only an orientation to the politics of the emotions that enabled me to be attentive to Freud’s own efforts to categorize emotional life, but also many delightful hours of discussion, exercise, and companionship. Joel Pfister has been an interlocutor whose scholarship, insight, experience, and belief in the book have been invaluable. I thank the members of my extended family for their confirmation that lives can change and get better. My parents, Jan Winter and Don Winter, have always supported my choices and interests. John Winter’s courage is a constant inspiration, and Rivah Norwood Winter reminds me how good it is for a girl to read voraciously and contentedly. With their warmth and hospitality, my second family in Greece have also shown me alternative ways of living. I dedicate this book to my husband and daughter, Panos and Alexia Zagouras, with many thanks for their understanding and humor. ..

      

Introduction ’ :         

“Is Freud dead?” a Time magazine cover article asked in the early s—and, if so, who or what could replace psychoanalysis at the end of the twentieth century? The question is provocative, but at the same time strangely rhetorical. After all, the author concludes that “the reassurances provided by Freud that our inner lives are rich with drama and hidden meanings would be missed if [psychoanalysis] disappeared, leaving nothing in its place.”1 Despite the fact that Sigmund Freud has most assuredly been deceased since , it is hard to imagine a world where our “inner lives” would not be inhabited by the “dramas” and “hidden meanings” that still carry his name: the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, the ego, and the superego, to list only some of the psychoanalytic concepts that have achieved popular currency. The fact that the name “Freud” is so inextricably attached to these psychoanalytic terms should not surprise us; from its inception the psychoanalytic movement has used its founder as a kind of trademark. The  charter of the International Psycho-Analytical Association proclaimed that the organization’s object would be “to foster and further the science of psycho-analysis founded by Freud” (HPM, ). To disseminate psychoanalytic knowledge is always to reestablish and ramify Freud’s foundations, and Freud’s writings as foundation. What kinds of conceptual, ideological, cultural, and even subjective



Introduction

“vacancies” would result if psychoanalysis were really to succumb to doubts about its qualifications as a science or to critiques of its gender biases— criticisms that have become as characteristic of its cultural identity as its doctrine? If a general disenchantment with psychoanalytic assumptions about the mind and the self were to set in, would we really be left with “nothing in its place”? Or would a plethora of rival ideas and practices rush in to challenge the sway of “depth psychology,” to substitute some other conceptual framework for the seemingly irreplaceable premise that we are determined psychologically —by an “inner,” individualized, sexualized, and gendered life story? These questions are all in some sense rhetorical, since it is clear that psychoanalysis still draws the public’s attention. To worry about the “survival” of psychoanalysis, however, is always to assume that its fate matters,2 when, in many places in the world, and in American society as well, “Freud” is just about the farthest thing from anyone’s mind. If Freudian ideas have become both common psychological assumptions and symbols of soul-searching “individuality” and elite social status, tracing their genealogy may allow us to begin to understand their continuing consequences, as well as pronouncements that the Freudian influence on modern culture is coming to an end. Fears that if the cultural and psychological prevalence of psychoanalytic notions should fade there would be “nothing” to take its place testify to the status of psychoanalysis as a form of expertise, always in search of, and in the process of constructing, its audience and clientele. A case in point is the recent controversy over the exhibit at the Library of Congress, on view from October  to January , entitled “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture.” Even a show that seems intended to emphasize the “conflict” surrounding Freud and his ideas was denounced by critics of psychoanalysis as a potentially “uncritical and partisan” affair arranged to confirm Freud’s authority once again. One prominent supporter of the exhibit replied by characterizing its adversaries as “angry anti-Freudians”; the furor reinvokes the familiar polarized groupings, in which it seems one can’t escape clustering, of those who are either “for” or “against” Freud. But the paradoxical message is clear: the continuing cultural significance of psychoanalysis seems to surface every time its “truth” is questioned.3 The psychoanalyst and Harvard professor of law and psychiatry Alan A. Stone recently concluded that psychoanalysis has failed to produce the “cumulative knowledge” that would qualify it as a science—a primary ob-

Introduction



jective of the psychoanalytic movement. He also relinquishes one of the most basic principles of psychoanalysis, the childhood origins of neurosis: “Psychoanalysts can no longer assert that what they learn about their patient’s childhood will help them to explain the etiology of the patient’s psychopathology, or even of the patient’s sexual orientation.” He nevertheless predicts the “survival” of psychoanalysis as a “hermeneutic discipline” in the arts and humanities and as a form of therapy that will rely on medication to treat symptoms, and concentrate instead on the substantial and significant task of relieving “ordinary human suffering.”4 Nathan G. Hale, Jr., a historian of psychoanalysis, reports that despite the waning of the dominance of psychoanalytic approaches among psychiatrists since the s and the sense that the psychoanalytic movement has reached a state of crisis, analysts still regularly occupy top posts in psychiatric departments of medical schools and in the American Psychiatric Association, and psychoanalytic practice continues to flourish around the world, particularly in Europe and Latin America.5 Psychoanalysis is also beginning to establish its authority again in Russia, according to a recent front-page feature story in the New York Times. After having gained its first official recognition as a science and state funds from the Soviet government in , psychoanalysis was banned by Stalin in . In July , however, President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree declaring psychoanalysis a legitimate psychiatric treatment, and it is now taught as part of the university curriculum for psychology students and also at the Military University of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. The president of the new Moscow Psychoanalytic Society describes the political causes underlying this renaissance: “For  years the Russian people were robbed of self-knowledge. . . . Psychoanalysis is one weapon with which we can restore some order to our society.” This social justification for psychoanalytic expertise is one that Freud offers as well in his cultural theory: the self-knowledge attained through analysis provides a basis for political and social reforms intended to rationalize and support social order. In a photograph accompanying the article, a freely rendered portrait of Freud smiles benevolently, one might almost say smugly, down from the office wall of another Russian analyst and founder of a rival psychoanalytic organization, who insists that “we need to develop a purely Russian psychoanalysis to understand ourselves.” The Freudian “inner life” will be refitted to suit the Russian soul.6



Introduction

Thus there still seems to be a Freud for every nation, and for every time, as the title of Peter Gay’s biography Freud: A Life for Our Time () might suggest. The Sigmund Freud Archives, Inc., have attempted to ensure Freud’s relevance to posterity by securing immense quantities of unpublished documents relating to Freud and his circle in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. The timing of the archive’s accessibility to scholars and ultimately to the public is uncertain; while many papers will become available in , the moratoriums placed on some groups of documents expire on various dates well into the twenty-first century. Despite the continuing international spread of psychoanalysis, the figure of Freud and the long-term, intensive psychotherapy that psychoanalysis represents have come under particular pressure in the United States during the past decade. Freud’s always insecure scientific reputation has never received such intensive scrutiny and criticism as at the present. The use of “recovered memories” as evidence in legal cases involving murder or sexual abuse brought against parents by children has also garnered a great deal of media attention that has fueled a controversy over the accuracy of psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic reconstructions of repressed, unconscious material from childhood.7 Less spectacularly but perhaps more consequentially, the fate of psychotherapy as a profession has been called into question by cutbacks in coverage for long-term treatment by health maintenance organizations and other insurers.8 Merely to articulate a fear that the Freudian “inner life” might be slipping away also implies that in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, psychoanalytic ideas may no longer seem so inevitable and so necessary. Given the current controversy, the cultural climate seems propitious for a reassessment of Freud’s own part in shaping the recognition of psychoanalysis as a form of psychological knowledge. Despite Freud’s beleaguered reputation, the depth psychology that he framed so decisively still carries substantial epistemological authority and remains culturally pervasive as a form of psychological common sense. With the goal of accounting for these cultural and disciplinary ramifications of psychoanalysis, I shall offer a historical and critical analysis of Freud’s project to institutionalize psychoanalytic knowledge and practice. My central focus is on the ways in which Freud formulated and promulgated psychoanalysis using the materials of a pre-psychoanalytic world. I explore some of the things Oedipus meant before Freud inaugurated that narrative’s psychoanalytic iden-

Introduction



tity; scrutinize Freud’s rhetorical and theoretical tactics for popularizing psychoanalytic teachings; and compare his scheme for the consolidation of an autonomous psychoanalytic profession and discipline to contemporaneous projects for the establishment of other, competing occupations and academic fields. Understanding the institutional, conceptual, professional, and disciplinary agendas that enabled psychoanalysis to take hold—to persuade the public, to found a research method, to provide psychotherapy— allows us to discern the seeming historical and psychological “necessity” of psychoanalysis as an effect of Freud’s reworking of authoritative, nonpsychoanalytic cultural discourses. The void that seems to loom as a result of the reputed decline of psychoanalysis, I contend, should instead be seen as a content: the historical, theoretical, and social positions of all the other forms of knowledge and professional practices that have been vying with psychoanalysis since its inception to explain what is most fundamental and meaningful about human existence. Freud asserted that he could actually take advantage of criticisms of psychoanalysis to spread its influence: “Of course I know that the adversaries, diluters and misinterpreters also perform an important mission in that they garnish the otherwise unpalatable fodder for the digestive organs of the masses. But one must not acknowledge this openly, and I can only support them in the proper execution of this mission if I am allowed to abuse them for the pollution which the cause suffers at their hands.”9 Freud does not hesitate to disclose in this private communication to a colleague his participation in the popularization of psychoanalysis as “fodder for the masses”—a development he sanctions as vital to the widespread diffusion of psychoanalytic teachings. Psychoanalysis, like many other forms of knowledge, but in particularly salient ways, has clarified its identity in public declarations and elaborations of doctrine prompted by rivals’ attacks. The popular transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge may in fact take place most effectively through controversy: the “conflict” surrounding psychoanalysis has consistently kept “Freud” on the public agenda. I have chosen to tell the story of the cultural career of psychoanalysis by investigating the legitimizing processes by means of which the institution of psychoanalytic knowledge has emerged as a form of expertise about psychology and a means of understanding the significant elements of human existence. As Alan Stone has described it, the concept of psychoanalysis as a cumulative science “embodied in the work of Freud held the



Introduction

enterprise together,”10 and Freud’s writings—so crucial to securing psychoanalytic authority—are my main focus. If Stone is right in thinking that this project to establish psychoanalysis as a science must be abandoned, Freud’s texts nonetheless provide the cultural historian and critic with the means to reconstruct some of the decisive conditions under which the psychoanalytic method has prospered and to discern why its scientific status has always been both essential and problematic. I pay particular attention to Freud’s works of cultural theory and his descriptions of psychoanalytic doctrine and technique in order to investigate their designs for the consolidation of psychoanalysis as a scientific psychology and psychotherapy. This is not yet another book dedicated to “debunking” Freud himself, but rather an investigation of the historical origins and ideological effects of the ways in which his writings configure the cultural authority of psychoanalysis. I can introduce the historical and theoretical framework of this inquiry most succinctly by foregrounding what the exemplary professional success of an influential teacher in his life, Jean-Martin Charcot (‒), represented for Freud as a young neurologist. In his affectionate and laudatory obituary of Charcot, Freud recounts how his former “master” reached “the zenith of his career” when the French government recognized his scientific achievements in neurology by creating a chair of neuropathology for him in the Faculty of Medicine and establishing a “clinic with auxiliary scientific departments” at the Salpêtrière asylum for women in Paris, where Charcot would pursue his clinical research on hysteria: “Le service de M. Charcot ” now included, in addition to the old wards for chronic female patients, several clinical rooms where male patients, too, were received, a huge out-patient department . . . a histological laboratory, a museum, an electrotherapeutic department, an eye and ear department and a special photographic studio. All these things were so many means of keeping former assistants and pupils permanently at the clinic in secure posts. The two-storeyed, weatheredlooking buildings and the courtyards which they enclosed reminded the stranger vividly of our Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna, but no doubt the resemblance did not go far enough. “It may not be beautiful here, perhaps” Charcot would say when he showed a visitor his domain, “but there is room for everything you want to do.”11

Freud celebrates here an ideal culmination of a brilliant scientific career. Charcot’s work and international fame have won him an exalted status as

Introduction



“part of the assets of the nation’s ‘gloire,’” and he is rewarded by becoming not only the focus of a “school” of research but also the head of an academic research institute. Freud indicates that a key element of such an institute’s “abundance of facilities for teaching and research” is its sustained capacity to perpetuate itself, and the scientific project and fame of its founder, because of the “secure posts” that it affords to Charcot’s students and associates. The dilapidated hospital premises physically encompass but misrepresent the extent and potential of Charcot’s “domain”; in reality, he has won a comprehensive institutional space, marked by the specific functions of each of the sections of the clinic, which Freud carefully lists, to carry out “everything [he] wants to do” as a scientific researcher.12 Freud could not have known when he wrote this eulogy that he himself would never achieve academic success like Charcot’s. The signs of “glory” accorded to his own research and clinical project, psychoanalysis, would be very different. We cannot identify psychoanalysis with an academic department or a particular hospital or asylum like the Salpêtrière or the Allgemeines Krankenhaus. Instead, when we attempt to locate Freud, we may think first of a city, Vienna, and a local address there, Berggasse , where he both lived and had his consulting rooms from  until he was forced to flee from Nazi-controlled Austria to England in . “Freud” and psychoanalysis seem simultaneously to inhabit domestic and public spaces: the couch, the middle-class household, the psychotherapist’s office, the city, the world. Freud’s name has become a catchword—unlike Charcot’s, it might be heard today on the street corner. And some of Freud’s ideas, unlike Charcot’s, have gone beyond being possessions of his “school” or entries in textbooks of medical history to become attitudes and “complexes,” explanations that people rely on to make sense of their lives. If the success of psychoanalysis does not accord with Freud’s description of Charcot’s achievement of a personal, academic “domain,” what does it mean to give an account of the institution of psychoanalytic knowledge—its foundations and its trajectory? Charcot’s clinic exemplifies the pattern of academic institutionalization that psychoanalysis would have taken if it had been like most other successful late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific and disciplinary research projects. I propose Charcot’s clinic, however, not merely as a counterexample to psychoanalysis—what Freud’s “new science” failed to attain—but also as a model incorporating career expectations and methods of institutionalization on



Introduction

which Freud and his followers sought to pattern the future of psychoanalysis. If psychoanalysis were not to develop primarily in a universityaffiliated institute, hospital, or asylum, if it were not to have its own academic department, what would its proper setting be? Studying Freud’s efforts to circumvent what turned out to be the impossibility of academic institutionalization is one of the best ways to understand the cultural pervasiveness of psychoanalytic ideas. In speaking of “the institution of psychoanalytic knowledge,” then, I refer to the strategies Freud adopted in his writings and his professional life to ensure that psychoanalysis would prosper and expand as an autonomous profession and research project—ideally, as a science validated by scientists—and also how he attempted to orchestrate the broader social and international recognition of psychoanalysis by asserting the historical, political, social, and cultural indispensability of its account of human psychology. “Institution” is a term that can encompass both the process of establishing psychoanalysis as a profession—an organization as well as an expertise— and its ultimate cultural vogue as a popularized form of psychological common sense. As the sociologists Marcel Mauss and Paul Fauconnet specify, the word “institution” may apply not only to “political constitutions” or “main juridical organizations” but can also describe “a set of actions and ideas, already in place, that individuals encounter, and that more or less imposes itself on them.”13 To study the institutionalization of psychoanalytic knowledge means to come to understand historically how psychoanalytic ideas have become both the property of analytic training institutes and also a frame of reference for the “inner life” in popular culture. Established institutions contributed to shaping Freud’s work, and Freud in turn fashioned psychoanalysis itself to perform its own institutional “imposition” of culturally and subjectively formative behaviors and assumptions. I shall focus on three related institutionalizing strategies that Freud pursued to this end. The first involved incorporating into psychoanalytic theory generic elements of ancient Greek tragedy, as well as reputable current theories of its origins and effects, so that tragedy could lend the “universality” of its concerns and its embodiment of “Necessity” to the psychoanalytic principles of unconscious determination and Oedipal sexuality.14 This affiliation also served to identify psychoanalysis with the classical curriculum and with the general respectability and learning characteristic of professional men trained in classical studies.

Introduction



The second major strategy was to define psychoanalysis as an independent profession, distinct from psychiatry and neurology, and basic to the developing discipline of psychology, with its own institutions of certification and training and its own diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Freud relied on the professional credentials of psychoanalysis to ground its scientific and disciplinary claims to a role in achieving turn-of-the-century social reform goals such as general mental hygiene and secular education, and on its professional organization, the International Psycho-Analytical Association, to pursue its expansion. A third important agenda involved Freud’s endeavor to present psychoanalysis as a new scientific discipline in competition with the emerging disciplines of anthropology and sociology. Freud “applies” psychoanalysis to the study of culture and society in order to perform a psychological reduction that is meant to enable psychoanalysis to annex these rival disciplines. This last strategy derives from the institutionalizing projects of sociology and anthropology themselves in the process of their becoming autonomous disciplines in the university from the end of the nineteenth through the early decades of the twentieth century—a period coinciding with the rise of the psychoanalytic movement. As a result of bringing these institutionalizing schemes to light and understanding their rationales historically, it also becomes possible to perceive how, at the same time that psychoanalysis took shape as a particular form of psychological knowledge and psychotherapeutic technique, it also underwent a specific institutionalization through its deployment of existing forms of social, cultural, professional, and disciplinary authority. The discourses that psychoanalysis adopted and reworked had their own ideological significations, which also became attached to psychoanalysis and supported its legitimacy. Freud validated psychoanalytic knowledge by allying it with classical learning and scientific rationality, and in this way, too, he identified psychoanalysis with both the high culture of the educated elite and the specialized training and “objective” perspective of the scientific expert. Psychoanalysis has also associated itself with the the cultural dominance of forms of middle-class subjectivity. The philosopher and historian of the human sciences Michel Foucault has described the role of psychoanalysis in redefining the function of the discourse of “sexuality” as “the self-affirmation” of the bourgeoisie. According to Foucault, the eighteenth-



Introduction

and early nineteenth-century bourgeoisie initially deployed the characteristic “sexuality” of its body both to dispute the aristocracy’s claims to superiority based on “blood” and to demonstrate its own difference from the lower classes, whose sex signified procreation rather than individual identity. Psychoanalysis reconfigured the relation between “sexuality” and class following a period when administrative measures put in place during the nineteenth century to control the working class’s living conditions had begun to encode the “sexuality” of the laborer’s body as well. Psychoanalysis entered the scene to reassert the middle-class person’s social difference by making the “repression” of sex, as revealed through analytic “confession,” the renewed sign of his or her distinctive “sexuality”: “Those who had lost the exclusive privilege of worrying over their sexuality henceforth had the privilege of experiencing more than others the thing that prohibited it and possessing the method [psychoanalysis] which made it possible to remove the repression.”15 Foucault contends that psychoanalysis provided a crucial form of legitimation for bourgeois “sexual” identity—an identity that works to differentiate the bourgeoisie even while psychoanalysis posits a sexualized psychological interiority as universal. Many feminist critics of Freud’s masculinist and patriarchal biases have argued that psychoanalysis tends to conflate sex and gender, a category that stresses the social signification of sex. As the literary and cultural historian Nancy Armstrong has succinctly stated, “Freud makes gender the essential component of consciousness by locating the origin of all conscious development in genital sexuality,” even as he defines psychoanalysis around a sexuality understood as based in biology. Armstrong also observes that although Freud frequently declares in his case histories that the familial and social situations of the patient are significant for analytic treatment, “the case history in fact regularly effects semantic inversions that establish psychological truth in a contradictory relationship to the ‘family circumstances’ surrounding the patient.” She argues that such inversions enact “a form of alienation that does not appear political because it occurs at a presocial, sexual level.”16 Thus psychoanalysis translates “circumstances” of family, class, and gender into the “psychological truth” of sex. As the Russian semiotician V. N. Volosinov put it in , psychoanalysis participates in a typical substitution of bourgeois ideology, by which “the sexual aims at becoming a surrogate for the social.”17 I maintain that, in addition to the psychoanalytic elaboration of “sex-

Introduction



uality,” Freud’s particular institutionalizing procedures also persist as ideological and cultural effects of psychoanalytic knowledge. Freud’s impetus to professionalize psychoanalysis—to persuade both experts and the public of its cogency, effectiveness, and reputability—and his desire to place psychoanalysis at the basis of a scientific discipline of psychology on which all the social science and humanities disciplines should depend, also support and necessitate the strongly normative operations of psychoanalysis as therapy, theory, and research program. These operations include not only the gender identifications that the psychoanalytic Oedipus codifies and reinforces, but also middle-class assumptions about the proper shape of a successful professional life and the intrinsic value of work, supported by a general confidence in the progress and social benefits of science. The normative impact of psychoanalysis also depends on its rationalization of everyday experience—even the most illogical, seemingly arbitrary actions or thoughts can be explained through a painstaking reconstruction of unconscious motives. Psychoanalysis as an institutionalized form of knowledge has provided a crucial set of categories for thinking about and organizing the world in psychological terms. In the context of theorizing about “how institutions think”—how people’s thinking depends on various kinds of institutionalized cognitive styles—the anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued that “a classification of classificatory styles would be . . . a challenge to the sovereignty of our own institutionalized thought style.”18 She proposes that in order to understand basic questions of interest, agency, social solidarity, and knowledge that philosophers have often dealt with abstractly or hypothetically, it is necessary to delimit concretely the specific ways of categorizing, establishing priorities, and making decisions that persistent social groupings such as institutions cultivate and require. Douglas takes the notion of “thought style” from the Polish Jewish physician and scholar Ludwik Fleck, who in  described it and its related term “thought collective” as follows: “If we define ‘thought collective’ as a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction, we will find by implication that it also provides the special ‘carrier’ for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture. This we have designated as thought style.” A central assumption of Fleck and Douglas that my study shares is that cognition is a social process—as Fleck puts it, “what is already known influences the particular method of



Introduction

cognition; and cognition, in turn, enlarges, renews, and gives fresh meaning to what is already known.”19 Freud’s writings have the institutionalizing effect of teaching a psychoanalytic thought style to receptive readers as a powerful method of psychological reduction. When these readers “apply” a psychoanalytic method, they become part of a psychoanalytic thought collective, constantly reproducing, reworking, and expanding the “stock” of psychoanalytic knowledge. One of my larger goals, then, is to contribute to a cultural history of the psychoanalytic thought style, in order to determine what kinds of cognitive modes, schemes of classification, and social and political priorities have both produced psychoanalytic knowledge and continue to be mobilized when we think through psychoanalysis as a psychological common sense and employ psychoanalytic methods. My historical analysis of Freud’s institutionalizing strategies assumes that some of his tactics are quite conscious and purposeful, and that others take place at the level of practice, and can be described theoretically as arising out of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has termed habitus. Habitus describes “systems of durable, transposable dispositions,” a person’s “embodied history” that incorporates sets of expectations, possibilities, and objectives inculcated by particular conditions of familial and social life.20 Embodied history in habitus is an “infinite yet strictly limited generative capacity,” that is, a process of formation and productive agency, and a predictable yet flexible repertoire of assumptions and behaviors—not a fixed inheritance provoking mere mechanical repetition.21 Thus the dispositions of a given habitus provide for a fit between desires and socially available positions; they act as “principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.”22 Through habitus, a person also “partake[s] of the history objectified in institutions”; habitus comes into being through and is suited to the appropriation of the meanings and cognitive dispositions that institutions reproduce only with the active participation of agents.23 Habitus produces the strategies of everyday life and social interaction that involve, not a “conscious, rational calculation,” but rather “a practical sense as a feel for the game, for a particular, historically determined game

Introduction



. . . acquired in childhood by taking part in social activities.”24 As with any “game,” habitus as “the social game embodied and turned into a second nature” can generate an infinite number of moves that exhibit “regularities,” while producing novelty because of the variability of events that can impinge upon a person or larger, structural changes in social life that occur over the long term.25 Habitus can seem “natural” because it forms the “schemes of perception and appreciation” through which the history that structures it is conceived. As an example of such a naturalization, Bourdieu argues, the concept of “the unconscious” implies a “forgetting of history which history itself produces by realizing the objective structures that it generates in the quasi-natures of habitus.”26 In other words, the unconscious is a misleading concept when it comes to signify the autonomous source of individual actions and desires, since what is “unconscious” in human agency, according to Bourdieu, is its social and historical genesis through the teachings (conscious or unconscious) and meanings of others.27 To understand the unconscious as ultimate cause is explicitly to render internal what has already been incorporated through social processes. Thus beliefs and practices that have been legitimized over time in the course of becoming habitual to human subjects are endowed with a specifically psychological rationale for their naturalness and inevitability—even for their arbitrariness or violence—while their historical origins, objectivity, and susceptibility to change are obscured. Bourdieu has also criticized the psychoanalytic presupposition that the sexual can be a universal and originary subjective category apart from its specific social significations, since the child “constructs its sexual identity, the major element in its social identity, at the same time as its constructs its image of the division of work between the sexes, out of the same socially defined set of inseparably biological and social indices.” Psychoanalysis overlooks the constitutive effect on subjectivity of “the countless acts of diffuse inculcation through which the body and the world tend to be set in order.”28 These acts proceed from multifarious cultural practices that can give rise to social situations in which the intimately individualized psychological development that psychoanalysis terms “sexuality” may not register as a matter of any importance. One example of an aspect of habitus that Bourdieu has analyzed through the sociological study of contemporary France is the social cate-



Introduction

gory and individual attribute of “the judgment of taste,” which he correlates with educational and familial background—with access to cultural capital. For example, according to Bourdieu’s findings, when asked to indicate a preference among J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz, a French factory worker is most likely to choose the last, while secondary school teachers generally favor the Bach.29 This correlation of taste with class and education does not mean that such predilections are artificial or predetermined, but it does render them elements of social formation. Bourdieu’s sociology challenges the very modern, and in a disciplinary sense psychological, assumption that the social self is inauthentic, a mask for a more profound and unique “inner self.” For Bourdieu, originality transpires when persons incorporate and rearticulate a repertoire of activities and significations that preexist the self. I make use of the concept of habitus without assuming that it is the only possible tool for such purposes.30 Bourdieu’s sociological understanding of practice is intended to break down dichotomies such as “determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society”31 by introducing the determinate variability of history, rather than that of the individual mind or unconscious desire, as its explanatory matrix. In order to examine psychoanalysis historically, it is necessary to step outside of its dominant psychological frame of reference, within which every event is interpreted as a psychodynamic scenario, however personalized, impelled by desires defined as arising “from within” the individual and the mind.32 The inside/outside opposition is not even as important to the theoretical impasse I am describing as the assumption that the psychological constitution of the subject precedes social and cultural formation, rather than being a process of individual and familial experience socially conditioned —with one of the crucial conditions being the cultural currency of the category of the psychological itself. By demonstrating one possible use of a theoretical tool like habitus, I hope to provide an example of a way to rethink and theorize subjectivity without forgetting the history of psychological discourse—a history that psychoanalytic theorizing often ignores as its own condition of possibility and continued relevance. Because contemporary conceptualizations of subjectivity have relied so extensively on psychoanalysis, it seems incumbent on a study of the implications of the psychoanalytic method to

Introduction



provide a potential alternative framework. Habitus has also helped me to perceive and make sense of how the specific elements of Freud’s educational and cultural formation affect psychoanalysis; in this sense, Bourdieu’s sociology serves rather than drives this project.33 To understand the cultural authority and political effects of psychoanalysis historically, it is necessary to interrogate the scientific, cultural, and professional rationales of psychoanalysis as a form of knowledge that takes shape in response to and also gives direction to cultural demands for psychological expertise. The ways in which Freud answers and reformulates such demands are grounded in what we can cogently call his habitus —his familial, educational, social, and cultural formation—at the intersection of class, culture, and history. I seek to demonstrate that psychoanalysis emerges in crucial ways as the product of Freud’s particular embodiment and reworking of history. In fact, the things that habitus designates are precisely those social and historical “circumstances” that Freud’s project of institutionalization requires be consistently marginalized in order to assert the priority and explanatory power of a psychoanalytic, psychological classification of subjectivity. A number of scholars have offered theories of why psychoanalysis caught on so dramatically in the United States. Nathan G. Hale, Jr., and the sociologist Andrew Abbott both correlate the success of psychoanalysis with a “crisis” in the “somatic style” of diagnosis and treatment in American psychiatry and neurology. Abbott observes that late nineteenth-century neurology possessed exhaustive diagnostic categories to describe nervous illnesses but failed to coordinate diagnosis with treatment. Thus when psychoanalysis appeared, its claims to effective therapy and provision of a detailed system of professional inference connecting psychological symptoms appearing independently of organic disease to a fully elaborated psychotherapeutic treatment, appealed immediately to many psychiatrists. American psychiatrists trained in Freudian techniques soon prevailed over neurologists in the definition and professional treatment of “personal problems.”34 Abbott has also shown how psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists and social workers medicalized and professionalized the treatment of “personal problems” that had traditionally been confronted either within the family or through counseling by priests and ministers.35 Hale and the historian of the family John Demos have also proposed



Introduction

that there were particular connections between turn-of-the-century American sexual morality and family life and the popularity of psychoanalysis. Hale contends that Freud and psychoanalysis arrived in the United States just in time to meet a social trend among middle-class Americans toward greater openness about sex. This pursuit of sexual honesty arose from a rebellion against a nineteenth-century restraint on sexuality fostered by strong religious beliefs in moral and bodily purity and characteristic especially of recent immigrants pursuing wealth and respectability.36 Demos pinpoints the nineteenth-century “hothouse family”—with its strict division of roles by gender and age, its repudiation of feminine sexual desire, and its childrearing focus on appeals to conscience and internalized forms of discipline—as a receptive institutional and experiential framework for psychoanalytic ideas, particularly those describing Oedipal family dynamics.37 Psychoanalysis also owes its prevalence in American culture to the various ways in which it has become useful within capitalist and corporate society. According to the socialist psychoanalyst Joel Kovel, the U.S. “mental health industry,” whose business is “the production and distribution of emotional order and well-being,” has expanded so dramatically in the course of the twentieth century in part because its emphasis on psychological causes of individual desires has supported a consumerist ideology that has made the “demand” for commodities appear “internal” to each person, rather than requisite to the expansion of capital. Kovel argues that seeing one’s fate as a product of the psychological struggles of the “inner self ” means that the social, economic, and political causes of human suffering under advanced capitalism cannot be perceived and therefore cannot come under the kind of political pressure that might help to generate social change.38 Psychoanalysis supplied the “depth psychology” and basic psychotherapeutic techniques that were crucial in forming the expertise of the expanding mental health occupations. In the context of research on “the invention of the psychological” in American culture, Joel Pfister has outlined another set of cultural conditions related to corporate capitalism and consumerism that favored the acceptance of psychoanalytic ideas. He maintains that psychoanalytic terminology began to appear “glamorous” to educated Americans in the s and s at the same time that they were pursuing high-status lifestyles through professionalism and conspicuous consumption. In a  article in the high-society publication Vanity Fair, for example, the socialist writer

Introduction



Floyd Dell called psychoanalysis “the most charmingly recondite technical vocabulary ever invented” to enliven sophisticated dinner-party conversation. Pfister observes more generally that psychoanalysis became “chic” as one of the “discourses of psychological ‘depth’” that compensated whitecollar professionals for social and work situations in which corporate authority seemed omnipresent by providing an infinitely meaningful and private realm of psychological interiority.39 I would like to contribute to this research on the rise of “the psychological” by focusing on it as an epistemological domain constructed in decisive ways by psychoanalysis, even as cultural, economic, political, familial, ideological, and administrative factors also supported the advent of psychoanalysis itself. I conceive of this book as engaged in the emerging interdisciplinary field of research that Lorraine Daston and Mary Poovey have recently defined as “historical epistemology”: the study of the “assumptions and conventions that constitute the epistemological field . . . [which] allows for the production of what counts as knowledge at any given moment.”40 Historical epistemology, according to Daston, “asks the Kantian question about the preconditions that make thinking this or that idea possible.”41 Far from being an unquestioned assumption, the problem of who “we” are when we care about the cultural fate of psychoanalysis can also be made historically concrete by reconstructing how modern psychological culture as an epistemological field has been sustained in significant ways by psychoanalytic knowledge. I am interested both in how psychoanalysis comes to “count” as knowledge and why its knowledge “counts” within the psychological domain.42 To the extent that they can win institutional space, legitimacy, and a secure clientele, disciplines and professions can function, in Foucault’s terms, as forms of knowledge/power.43 The method of psychological reduction that psychoanalysis popularizes and also offers as a thought style— “a recondite technical vocabulary”—to its initiates emerges out of its struggles with other disciplinary forms of classification, including forms that would give precedence to social and cultural factors affecting individual identity. Psychoanalysis has a normative ideological impact: it helps to rationalize and naturalize the prevailing political and economic order by providing a psychological classification that makes institutionalized thought styles in general appear to be intimate aspects of “my inner life.” By extending the strategies through which it staked out its own disciplinary field



Introduction

to the larger culture, psychoanalysis reinforces the ascendancy of the “psychological” as an epistemological domain that obscures social and historical causes of the way people understand themselves and the world. The point is not to eliminate institutionalized ways of thinking—since classification is a constitutive part of cognition—but, by recognizing such thought styles as institutional, to target a mechanism for changing institutions to foster greater social and political equality.44 A cultural history of the psychoanalytic thought style, then, should disclose the historical contingency of the “psychological” as a product of disciplines and institutions. In Part I, “Recognizing Psychoanalysis: The Institutional Uses of Greek Tragedy,” I perform literary readings and draw on literary history to reconstruct the complex and vital relationship between psychoanalytic theory and ancient Greek tragedy. Although the functions of tragedy in psychoanalysis have received some critical attention, virtually all parties, with some important exceptions among classicists, have shared a basic assumption: that questions are always addressed to psychoanalysis about tragedy and not the other way around. Psychoanalytic critics have engaged Greek tragedy primarily in the service of elucidating and confirming psychoanalytic principles. The association of psychoanalysis with Greek tragedy does not result merely in Freud’s periodic expression of a pessimistic worldview. Rather, I demonstrate that the appropriation of tragedy allows psychoanalytic theory to claim the kind of transhistorical relevance and universality that has traditionally been associated with the tragic genre.45 By assimilating and transforming tragic plots, characters, generic conventions, and critical theories of Greek tragedy, psychoanalysis sets itself up to play a “tragic” role in modern culture. Freud translates tragic recognition, and the cultural recognition of the tragic as a representation of fundamental aspects of human experience, into the recognition of the “truth” of psychoanalysis itself. We need to understand Attic tragedy in its historical context in order to analyze the transformations it undergoes when psychoanalysis adopts it. My study of the institutional and ideological uses of Greek tragedy in Freud’s writings practices what the classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant has termed “historical psychology”: “For the historian of today, the psychological no longer constitutes a principle of intelligibility, a self-evident norm to be imposed. Rather it has become one aspect among others of historical material, one of the dimensions of the subject, a problem that needs to be accounted

Introduction



for in the same way as the rest of the data.” Vernant points out that the various fields of psychology have rarely dealt with the possibility of historical and cultural differences in the formulation of the psychological and of psychological functions.46 Psychoanalytic theorizing has not usually taken these differences into account because it proposes to characterize human psychology in general; consequently, all nonpsychoanalytic psychologies become metaphors to be translated into psychoanalytic terminology. Following Vernant’s valuable approach, I proceed from scholarship suggesting that there were distinctive fifth-century Greek ways of conceiving what we would term the psychological that are not equivalent or even necessarily analogous to psychoanalytic formulations.47 The methods of historical psychology also enable me to distinguish how the Freudian Oedipus emerges to codify and universalize psychological and emotional styles characteristic of Freud’s own cultural, social, and educational formation. Tragic pathos becomes in psychoanalysis a form of legitimation of a psychological theory based on the primacy of unconscious determination and guilt. Tragedy also designates a set of experiences and moral questions in relation to human capacities and limitations, over which psychoanalysis must continuously claim authority. That constant claim and repeated gesture of appropriation exhibit one place where psychoanalytic knowledge reaches its limits, since it can never entirely incorporate tragedy. My investigation of this psychoanalytic assumption of tragedy discloses the procedures through which Freud and subsequent theorists, such as Jacques Lacan, construct and perpetuate the theoretical autonomy and “necessity” of psychoanalysis. By specifying the conditions of Freud’s reading of tragedy, it also becomes possible to locate a nonpsychoanalytic source of the cultural authority of psychoanalysis and hence to establish a critical distance from its own aura of tragic universality. In Chapter , “Schoolboy Psychology: Freud’s Classical Education and the Institution of the Psychoanalytic Oedipus,” I analyze how Freud deployed classical learning as a source of prestige and authority—as cultural capital—for psychoanalysis. I demonstrate that Freud’s formulations of the Oedipus complex worked to promote public “recognition” of psychoanalysis by affiliating the “new science” with classical Bildung and, more specifically, with the canonical and generically paradigmatic status of Sophoclean tragedy within the nineteenth-century Austrian/German secondary school curriculum.48 Through the Oedipus complex, Freud also mobilized



Introduction

the socially reproductive function and competitive ethos of the nineteenthcentury all-male secondary school on behalf of psychoanalysis. Chapter , “Psychoanalysis as ‘Necessity’: Freud’s ‘Tragic’ Theories of the Psyche, Gender, and Cultural History,” explores how Freud’s writings on culture position Greek tragedy as a point of origin and then surpass tragedy in order to appropriate its history and generic conventions for specifically psychoanalytic theories of the relation between sexuality and culture: the Oedipus complex and primal parricide. Chapter , “Lacanian Psychoanalysis at Colonus,” demonstrates how Lacanian theory follows Freud’s lead in purveying an ahistorical reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays to authorize its reimagining of the Oedipal subject. I show how the Lacanian interpretation of Oedipus as a figure of the unconscious “history” of the subject overlooks both the multiple and contradictory formulations of agency and causality explored in Sophocles’ plays and the difference in characterization between the Oedipus of Oedipus Tyrannus and of Oedipus at Colonus. Lacanian psychoanalysis never reaches “Colonus”—that is, “Colonus” becomes another means to devise the cultural centrality of psychoanalysis through Greek tragedy. In Part II, “The Psychoanalytic Domain,” I delineate the social and historical conditions that supported not only the linking of psychoanalytic knowledge with tragedy, but also a much broader agenda of institutionalization. I place psychoanalysis in the context of the history of professionalization and of the academic consolidation of the social science disciplines at the turn of the century and argue that Freud’s cultural theorizing, often seen as marginal to psychoanalytic theory, was, in fact, crucial to its institutionalization, because it worked to assert the professional and scientific legitimacy of psychoanalysis and its epistemological priority among the social sciences. Through his extension of Oedipal sexuality to the history of civilization, Freud claimed a pervasive cultural influence for psychoanalysis, like that of classical learning, and unprecedented comprehensiveness as a scientific discipline, reaching beyond its purview as a psychotherapeutic practice. Chapter , “Professionalization and Freud’s Cultural Theory,” demonstrates how the definitions and prestige of professionalism provided Freud with a source of legitimation and an institutional framework for psychoanalytic knowledge. Drawing on theories of the sociologists of the professions Magali Sarfatti Larson and Andrew Abbott, I offer a historical ac-

Introduction



count of the social logic of Freud’s professional ambitions and specify the implications of this professionalization for psychoanalytic theory. In Chapter , “Applied Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Disciplinary Imperialism and the Methodology of Modern Psychological Culture,” I disclose the disciplinary agenda of Freud’s cultural criticism as a crucial institutionalizing strategy. After providing brief histories of the academic consolidation of anthropology in Britain and of sociology in France, I then compare Freud’s disciplinary “imperialism” with analogous and contemporaneous efforts by the Durkheimian school to define and extend the domain of sociology. Although Freud did not ultimately prevail in his attempt to render psychoanalysis epistemologically basic to the human sciences, he projected a paradigmatic disciplinarity and refined a method of psychological reduction that underwrote the institutionalization of psychoanalysis as expertise, popular psychology, and a culturally pervasive practice of psychological classification. This investigation of Freud’s disciplinary forays will also afford a context in which to consider the institutional stakes of current interdisciplinary research in such contemporary hybrid fields as cultural studies. Throughout the text, I have provided the lifespan dates for Freud’s teachers, collaborators, and scientific and academic peers, so that the reader may have a sense of which generations these figures belonged to, who were Freud’s contemporaries, and how to place the scientific, intellectual, and disciplinary debates in which he involved himself in terms of nineteenthand twentieth-century developments in various fields such as medicine, social science, and classical studies. I also wish to indicate the ways that Freudian theory is a product of the nineteenth century, as well as an influential contribution to the twentieth.

1 Schoolboy Psychology ’         

In his memoir of his famous father, Martin Freud recalls an evening during his student days when he and his parents discussed classical education with a professor of philology. Martin was asked to recite the opening lines of Homer’s Iliad in Greek: I began with enthusiasm, but after a few lines I lost the place in my memory and felt I should start all over again. Detecting this thought, my father instantly began where I had halted and marched along very well, certainly with more assurance than I had shown, although I had, in fact, learnt the lines only a few weeks earlier and my father had not recited them for thirty years. However, he, too, reached a point where his memory failed and he began hesitating, perhaps showing a little inaccuracy. Instantly, the guest took over and, being a professional one might say, easily excelled the two amateurs.1

In this chapter I explore the historical and ideological significance for psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud’s (‒) “amateurism” in the classics. The majority of professionals in Freud’s day were amateur classical scholars—classical languages, literature, and history made up a central part of the common knowledge of professional men across Europe and America. The classical education that Freud and his sons received passed on a shared masculine culture of classical heroism and endowed its initiates with an



                      

elite social identity as members of the educated and professional classes. The most striking aspect of Martin Freud’s story is the sense of very unOedipal, comfortable generational continuity it conveys, under the auspices of the value of professionalism. The ability to recite at least a few lines of Homer becomes the sign of having undergone a pre-professional formation, and demonstrates the possession of what Pierre Bourdieu has called cultural capital—the knowledge, bearing, pronunciation, tastes, and structure of identity necessary to achieve the “material and symbolic profits” of economic success and social distinction in a particular society.2 Bourdieu has analyzed the function of the school in inculcating and reproducing a given society’s consensus as to what qualifies as culturally significant knowledge: If it be accepted that culture and, in the case in point, the scholarly or academic culture, is a common code enabling all those possessing that code to attach the same meaning to the same words, the same types of behavior and the same works and, conversely, to express the same meaningful intention through the same words, the same behavior patterns and the same works, it is clear that the school, which is responsible for handing on that culture, is the fundamental factor in the cultural consensus in as far as it represents the sharing of a common sense which is the prerequisite for communication.3

Because the school is the crucial institutional location for the reproduction of formal knowledge, thinking bears the mark of the schools in which it was formed. Through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth in Europe, the crucial institutional location for the passing on of knowledge about classical Greek culture was the secondary school—in the Germanspeaking countries, the Gymnasium—with its classical curriculum. Classical learning, I argue, played a crucial role in the institutionalization and popularization of psychoanalytic knowledge as psychological common sense. When Freud associated his controversial ideas about childhood sexuality with the tragic figure of Sophocles’ Oedipus, he not only attempted to frame them in terms of the familiar and authoritative classical culture of educated men but also built that culture into his general theory of human psychology. Psychoanalytic knowledge thus becomes not only a product but also a purveyor of a particular kind of classical education. I examine Freud’s writings to show how the Freudian Oedipus draws on the cultural capital of classical learning and Greek tragedy in three related ways: () tragic recognition provides a model both for the individual’s

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unconscious recognition of Oedipal sexuality as psychological “necessity” and for the “inevitable” public recognition of the scientific validity of psychoanalysis itself; () the prestige of Sophoclean tragedy and its canonical status in the Gymnasium curriculum lend authority and persuasiveness to the psychoanalytic Oedipus, while psychoanalytic formulations of the psyche also mirror formal characteristics associated with Sophoclean drama; and () classical learning, or Bildung, as professional ideology legitimizes psychoanalytic professional practice and expertise. I also explore how Freud’s account of the larger cultural and social functions of the Oedipus complex relies on his theorization and generalization of the psychology of the nineteenth-century schoolboy. When Freud elaborates the social aspects of Oedipal desire, he argues that men’s ambitions are governed by an emotional ambivalence about social relationships that draw on and extend familial rivalries between fathers and sons.4 He discusses such ambivalence most extensively in Totem and Taboo (‒), where he describes it as a kind of acquired trait that individuals have inherited through the vicissitudes of the “father complex.” Ambivalence originates in the primal parricide and manifests itself as a “simultaneous existence of love and hate” in each son’s feelings toward his father (TT, ).5 In his  essay on “schoolboy psychology,” Freud locates the school as the first institution beyond the family in which ambivalence functions to reproduce the Oedipal identifications that structure all social relations between men. I argue that Freudian ambivalence must be understood, not only as a sense of inextricably mixed emotions, but also, historically, as a theory of a complex of feelings and behavior produced by a particular kind of institutional arrangement. Oedipal ambivalence is also historically tied up with classical education: because the Gymnasium structured Freud’s own association of a hierarchical, competitive, patriarchal institutional organization with classical culture, it provided an indispensable institutional matrix for the formulation of the psychoanalytic Oedipus.

The Psychoanalytic Oedipus and Tragic Recognition The intimacy of psychoanalysis and Greek tragedy almost goes without saying—whenever we think of Oedipus, we think of Freud. It is not simply Oedipus’s suffering that psychoanalysis identifies as paradigmatic,

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but also the space of the theater. As André Green has pointed out, when we ask why Freud should have privileged tragic drama over other literary genres in his theory of the structure of the psyche, the answer seems obvious: “Is it not that the theatre is the best embodiment of that ‘other scene,’ the unconscious?”6 This self-evident connection between psychoanalysis and tragedy depends, however, upon the theoretical appropriation by psychoanalysis of a particular play, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. Freud’s first published discussion of the Oedipus myth occurs in The Interpretation of Dreams ().7 Freud introduces his hypothesis of a universal Oedipal psychic configuration by describing his neurotic patients’ dreams about the deaths of their parents. He argues that such dreams are not to be dismissed as the symptoms of a neurosis, but rather occur in everyone: “[Neurotics] are only distinguished by exhibiting on a magnified scale feelings of love and hatred to their parents which occur less obviously and less intensely in the minds of most children” (ID, ). This discussion of the specific conclusions to be drawn from dreams and children’s rivalry with parents of the same sex leads the argument to Freud’s thesis about Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus: This discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity: a legend whose profound and universal power to move can only be understood if the hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psychology of children has an equally universal validity. What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’ drama which bears his name. [ID, ]

Jean-Pierre Vernant has criticized Freud’s demonstration here as a “vicious circle” that positions the Greek text to “confirm” a theory elaborated according to the contemporary clinical evidence of patients’ dreams, while eliding the historical problem that “the text can only provide this confirmation provided that it is itself interpreted by reference to the framework of the modern spectator’s dream—as conceived at least by the theory in question.”8 The play not only functions as a piece of evidence for the “truth” of Freud’s theory, but also becomes another instance—another genre—of “psychoanalysis” that nevertheless awaits psychoanalysis to find its identity as such: in a much quoted passage, Freud calls the action of the play a “process of revealing . . . that can be likened to the work of a psychoanalysis” (ID, ). Freud notes repeatedly in this introductory exposition of Oedipal desires that Sophocles’ play is one possible treatment of a “legend” about

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Oedipus (ID, ). He points to the greater antiquity of the “dreammaterial” that is the source of the legend (ID, ), and to the fact that it can appear in multiple versions, just as during an analysis, the Oedipus complex will function as a narrative structure into which various individuals’ stories can be inserted. Thus treating Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as one version of a primal legend also allows Freud’s argument to transcend the play itself, as well as the specific context of fifth-century Athens, and even of classical Greek culture, in order to demonstrate the existence of “universal” unconscious wishes. Freud’s procedure here follows the approach of much turn-of-the-century scholarship on mythology and folklore that identified and compiled “analogues” in myths across cultures and historical periods to construct a general theory about cultural origins.9 Freud’s account of the play itself emphasizes its “tragic effect” on the spectator (ID, ). The play’s power to “move” a modern audience as much as it did its ancient one depends not on its moral and generic message—“the contrast between destiny and human will”—but instead lies in “the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified”: There must be a voice within us ready to recognize [anzuerkennen] the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus, while we can dismiss as merely arbitrary such dispositions as are laid down in [the Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer’s] Die Ahnfrau or other modern tragedies of destiny. And a factor of this kind is in fact involved in the story of King Oedipus. His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. [ID, ]10

According to Freud, each spectator can recognize himself in Oedipus because the action of the play mirrors his own unconscious aggressiveness against his father and sexual desire for his mother. Freud appropriates the generic message of the tragedy even as he dismisses it: while he claims that the transhistorical effect of the play is due to its specific story of Oedipus, and not to its demonstration of the power of fate over mortals, he still endows Oedipal desires and relations with the inevitability of tragic destiny. The psychoanalytic theory of Oedipal dreams and wishes implies that if every man is an Oedipus, more or less actively, then he is also a heroic figure, and humanity in general also takes on tragic stature from the weight of this determinative and universal process of psychological development. Freud thus seems to follow Aristotle in his emphasis on the recognition built into the “tragic effect.” Aristotle in the Poetics makes recognition,



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or anagno¯risis, one of the three most important constituents of tragic plots, (the others are peripeteia, or reversal, and pathos, “a destructive or painful act”). According to Aristotle, tragic anagno¯risis is “a change from ignorance to knowledge, bringing the characters into either a close bond, or enmity with one another, and concerning matters which bear on their prosperity or affliction.”11 The tragic plot turns on the recognition of missing or loved family members, or of enemies, and often this recognition brings about a peripeteia, or reversal in the plot and state of the characters. Aristotle points to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as an example of the best kind of recognition because Oedipus’s anagno¯risis —his discovery of his identity and those of his relatives—and peripeteia —his self-blinding and fall from prosperity—occur simultaneously (a‒, ). In Aristotle’s account, however, the characters in the play are the ones who experience anagno¯risis, whereas Freud emphasizes the recognition that the spectator experiences when confronted with Oedipus’s fate at the end of the play. Moreover, in Freud’s version, the spectator’s recognition depends on Oedipus’s own recognition of his crimes and his identity. Thus the “tragic effect” Freud describes is a recognition of a recognition, in which the spectator substitutes himself for, or identifies with, Oedipus. In the psychoanalytic language of the theater, the play should provoke in the spectator “another scene” of Oedipal recognition. In a posthumously published essay, “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage” (written in  or  ), Freud explains that tragedy enables the spectator to fulfill “his ambition to stand in his own person at the hub of world affairs . . . to feel and to act and to arrange things according to his desires” by allowing him “to identify himself with a hero” (PCS, ). Freud’s theory of the spectator’s identification with the tragic hero suggests a link between the concepts of identification and ambivalence. In the chapter on “Identification” in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (), Freud makes it the primary building block of relationship, and cites the boy’s “special interest in his father” as his example (GP, ). The boy takes his father as his early “ideal” (GP, ), but this identification must also arouse the phylogenetically determined ambivalence Freud postulated in Totem and Taboo. The hero on the stage also offers the spectator the possibility of acting upon his desires, of embodying his unconscious fantasies through identification with an idealized character. Freud’s essay on drama suggests that identification with the hero of tragedy and what he would

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come to theorize as ambivalence toward the father are analogous structures. Both focus on a “heroic” figure who inspires contradictory emotions: a sense of vicarious transgressive power and suffering in the case of the spectator of tragedy, and idealization, rebellion, and guilt in the case of the son. The simultaneous production of pleasure and pain in the spectator’s identification with the hero of tragedy (PCS,  ) also resembles the inextricable love and hate that the ambivalent son feels for the father figure. By bringing together the accounts of identification in “Psychopathic Characters,” Totem and Taboo, and Group Psychology, we can see the parallel between the “tragic effect” of the recognition of Oedipal desires that Freud describes in The Interpretation of Dreams and the particular conflicts and ambivalence of the father-son relationship. The experience of Oedipal “recognition” not only dramatizes the presumably male spectator’s unconscious desires before his eyes, but the identification with Oedipus himself as tragic hero permits the spectator to relive his ambivalence toward his father as both an idealized and an abject figure. Thus Freud’s association of Oedipal identifications and recognition with the effects of tragedy constructs Oedipal subjectivity, and particularly masculinity, as both “heroic” and “tragic.” Tragic recognition in Freud’s texts also has implications for the recognition and acceptance of psychoanalytic ideas. The specifically theatrical identification with the hero extracts an emotional price, which Freud calls the masochism of the spectator. According to The Interpretation of Dreams, the spectator of Oedipus Tyrannus recognizes that he cannot master his own desires, or even have desires of his own, since he is caught up in a universal predicament that dooms him to live out an Oedipal fate, in his unconscious wishes, if not in his actions. Similarly, in “Psychopathic Characters,” Freud explains that since “suffering of every kind is the subject matter of drama,” the spectator gets a masochistic pleasure out of identifying with the hero’s pain: “Heroes are first and foremost rebels against God or against something divine; and pleasure is derived, as it seems, from the affliction of a weaker being in the face of divine might—a pleasure due to masochistic satisfaction as well as to direct enjoyment of a character whose greatness is insisted upon in spite of everything” (PCS,  ). The spectator exhibits his masochism by seeking out unnecessary, because fictional, suffering. But identification with the “greatness” of the hero also brings pleasure, because it elevates the spectator to an imaginary heroic stature. Identification allows



                      

the spectator to put himself in the other’s place, while at the same time protecting himself from becoming identical with him: “[The spectator’s] suffering is mitigated by the certainty that it is someone other than himself who is acting and suffering on the stage, and . . . after all it is only a game, which can threaten no damage to his personal security” (PCS,  ). This conscious, “certain” distance built into identification raises the issue of how Freud’s writings themselves provoke in the reader a recognition of the “truth” of psychoanalysis itself. In other words, what happens when psychoanalysis itself is “on the stage”? Freud suggests that even the “safe” distance built into the spectator’s experience of successful tragic drama can lend itself to potentially pathological identifications. In his analysis of the effects of drama, Freud is most interested in the kind of play he calls “psychopathological,” and he cites Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the first example of this type of modern drama. Non-neurotic spectators, Freud explains, would never identify with a character like Hamlet, who displays the repressed impulses that they would prefer never to acknowledge: “Here the precondition of enjoyment is that the spectator himself should be a neurotic, for it is only such people who can derive pleasure instead of simple aversion from the revelation and the more or less conscious recognition of a repressed impulse” (PCS, ). A nonneurotic person when faced by a performance of neurosis will immediately repress again whatever partially conscious recognition of Oedipal desires the play has managed to summon up. But the neurotic spectator has trouble with repression. He derives pleasure from identifying with the psychopathological character because this moment of recognition temporarily relieves the strain of constantly reexerting repression (PCS, ‒). Freud’s examination of the spectator’s response to a “psychopathological” play implies that neurosis is the necessary state for both tragic and psychoanalytic recognition. Yet his account of the recognition of the psychopathological character’s repressed impulse by both clinically neurotic and non-neurotic “spectators” also suggests that, by analogy, the non-neurotic reader of Freud’s text must avoid the immediate repression of that text’s effect, and must instead work toward a conscious recognition and understanding of its own dramatic analysis of the causes of neurosis. This reading of tragic recognition in Freud’s texts raises questions about the larger aims of his strategy of postulating the universality of Oedipal desires: how does psychoanalysis conceive of, and construct, its

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own audience? Oedipus Tyrannus is not a modern psychopathological drama. Yet the injection of neurosis into Oedipus Tyrannus occurs in another place: Freud’s texts, with their own reworking of tragic suffering and recognition through the theorization of Oedipal desire, arouse painful and pleasurable identifications. Psychoanalysis seems to ask for a kind of recognition that only a neurotic can give it. But by constructing his audience as neurotic, Freud runs the risk of dangerously restricting it. Since the theory of the “tragic effect” introduced in The Interpretation of Dreams requires its own recognition, it also relies on a theatrical structure: the reader should recognize his or her own desires as Freud’s text uncovers the meaning of Sophocles’ drama. The “dramatic” space of the text, however, raises the problem of where identification occurs. Does the reader identify with Oedipus, or rather with the psychoanalytic reading of the play, or even with Freud himself ? The “safe distance” that Freud postulates in his account of identification may also prevent the conscious, objective recognition that psychoanalytic theory requires from its readers/audience in order to persuade them of its scientific truth. Freud, therefore, seems to take a double risk in his identification of psychoanalysis with the space and effects of tragedy. The psychoanalytic “tragic effect” needs to surpass the confines of a theatrical structure, breaking down the separation between spectator and stage. But such a collapse of theater may make psychoanalysis into a failed tragedy that causes the spectator/reader, as well as the analysand, too much suffering.12 Although it stresses the recognition by the audience or reader rather than by the character, the “plot” of The Interpretation of Dreams does seem to follow the Aristotelian model by placing recognition of Oedipal desires at a crucial moment for the understanding of both the theory of dream interpretation, and later for the entire analytic therapy. Not only does Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus become a kind of psychoanalysis, but Freud’s text also works like a drama. In fact, Freud rhetorically places Oedipus “on stage” again in order to display him to the reader: Here is one in whom these primeval wishes of our childhood have been fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the whole force of the repression by which those wishes have since that time been held down within us. While the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to light the guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling us to recognize our own inner minds [nötigt er uns zur Erkenntnis unseres eigenen Innern], in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be



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found. The contrast with which the closing Chorus leaves us confronted—“You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus, / him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful / not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot— / see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him!”—strikes us as a warning at ourselves and our pride, at us who since our childhood have grown so wise and so mighty in our own eyes. Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been forced upon us by Nature, and after their revelation we may all of us well seek to close our eyes to the scenes of childhood.13

Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of the play claims tragedy as the master genre of human psychology, while itself taking on the tragic role of enacting and analyzing psychic determinism. His text plays the part of the Chorus it quotes: it displays incestuous and aggressive Oedipal desires to the reader just as the Chorus displays Oedipus to the audience. Both the Chorus and Freud’s analysis draw conclusions about human contingency and hubris: the man who sees himself as “wise and mighty” is really driven by fate and the gods—that is, Freud translates, compelled by “Nature” and unconscious repressions.14 Freud rewrites Sophocles’ play as he restages the myth of Oedipus and appropriates its generic exemplarity within Aristotle’s account of tragedy: the psychoanalytic solution to the riddle of the play’s “universal” effect produces that effect in its own audience, who should undergo a simultaneous recognition of the universality of Oedipal desire and reversal of their sense of self-knowledge and self-mastery. Yet like Oedipus, psychoanalysis also risks rejection. Despite Freud’s warning, “we,” his readers, may still “close our eyes,” (“den Blick abwenden von,”15 literally, “turn the gaze from”), and refuse to identify with both Oedipus and Freud himself. In a footnote added to The Interpretation of Dreams in , Freud writes that the predominant responses to his theories have been distortions, denials, and opposition (ID, ). He provides an example of such reactions in one of the Introductory Lectures (‒) on “The Development of the Libido.” Freud builds up the suspense of his audience by introducing his explication of the Oedipus complex with an anecdote about the rejection of the theory by German military doctors during World War I, even though one of their colleagues, a practitioner of the “methods of psychoanalysis,” was able to achieve an “unexpected influence” with his patients. Freud reports that the analyst arranged an impromptu lecture series at the front on “the secret doctrines of psycho-

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analysis.” The lectures “went well for a while,” but they were abruptly canceled when he introduced the Oedipus complex: “One of his superiors rose, declared he did not believe it, that it was a vile act on the part of the lecturer to speak of such things to them, honest men who were fighting for their country and fathers of a family, and that he forbade the continuation of the lectures” (IL, ). Freud’s telling of this story in his own lecture seems to be an apotropaic gesture, as if he could ward off the disbelief of his present audience precisely by recounting another occurrence of such rejection. He also illustrates the power of his theories, since they were thought to be virtually as threatening to fatherhood and fatherland as the enemy, and might even undermine the efforts of “honest men” to do battle. The stakes of war were too high for this audience to entertain the possibility of the kind of internecine warfare that the Oedipus complex conjures up, and psychoanalysis, on this occasion, failed to achieve its “tragic effect” of recognition. In On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (), Freud relates another rejection of psychoanalysis by the presumably more objective academic medical establishment. In the context of describing the personal nature of the attacks on his theories and his perseverance in attempting to gain approval for psychoanalysis, he offers the example of the response to a paper on “The Aetiology of Hysteria”: I innocently addressed a meeting of the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology with Krafft-Ebing in the chair, expecting that the material losses I had willingly undergone would be made up for by the interest and recognition [Anerkennung ] of my colleagues. I treated my discoveries as ordinary contributions to science and hoped they would be received in the same spirit. But the silence [Stille] which my communications met with, the void which formed itself about me, the hints that were conveyed to me, gradually made me realize that assertions on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses cannot count upon meeting with the same kind of treatment as other communications.16

The language of this account is strikingly similar to the language Freud used to describe the recognition of Oedipal desire in The Interpretation of Dreams. The recognition, “Anerkennung,” that he expects from his audience recalls his formulation of the effect of Sophocles’ play on the spectator, that “a voice within” is “ready to recognize [anzuerkennen] the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus.” Freud’s lecture audience does not greet his scientific contributions with the “inner voice” of recognition,

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“eine Stimme in unserem Innern.”17 Or rather, if they do, there is no way for Freud to know this, since their only outward response is silence, “Stille,” and a void forms around him as if he were on an empty stage, abandoned by his audience. Unconscious recognition is not enough to guarantee professional success and scientific legitimacy, just as tragic heroism means nothing if there is no chorus to take note of the hero’s downfall. When Freud describes himself as ostracized by the scientific community, he exhibits both a desire for acceptance and a contradictory pride in his “revolutionary” accomplishments and “heroic” determination in the face of professional setbacks. He expects compensation, in the form of professional recognition, for the “material losses” he has sustained in pursuing his work with neurotic patients and his self-analysis, and yet he also refers to the early years of psychoanalysis as a “heroic age,” a period of “‘splendid isolation’” (in English in the original), and compares himself to Robinson Crusoe (HPM, ). Freud’s descriptions of his embattled position in On the History also refer to more recent schisms within the young psychoanalytic movement. The writing of this account in  was prompted by Freud’s desire to distinguish his own ideas from and to criticize the work of his former associates Carl Jung and Alfred Adler—in other words, to maintain exclusive control over a set of necessary principles for orthodox psychoanalytic theory and professional practice. In another of the Introductory Lectures, Freud bolsters the scientific claims of psychoanalysis by reminding his audience that two other scientific breakthroughs that “de-centered” the world—the Copernican and the Darwinian hypotheses—also met with great opposition, and he asserts that psychoanalysis has received the same treatment due to its analogous revolutionary significance (IL, ). His essay “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis” ( []) states explicitly Freud’s suspicions that antisemitism also lies behind the medical establishment’s hostility to psychoanalysis (RP, ).18 In all of these texts, Freud attempts both to stage the rejection of psychoanalysis rhetorically as confirmation of its scientific truth and to expose the hidden prejudices of its enemies. Henri F. Ellenberger and Frank Sulloway have contested reports of the general neglect or rejection of psychoanalysis by the scientific and medical communities, arguing that such stories have constructed a psychoanalytic “myth” of the “heroic” Freud, working in isolation and oppressed by the scientific prejudices of his peers. Both Ellenberger and Sulloway con-

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tend that with this myth, psychoanalysts suppressed their intellectual and historical debts and contexts in order to claim scientific priority and theoretical purity and thus to enhance the prestige of the psychoanalytic movement. They conclude that psychoanalysis was from the beginning controversial, but never as thoroughly distorted, repudiated, or ignored as Freud and his followers claimed.19 Despite the clearly rhetorical and even propagandistic elements of Freud’s various accounts of the rejection of psychoanalysis, his professional anxieties and ambitions had decisive effects on psychoanalysis itself. Thus it is essential to investigate the strategies he adopted to make psychoanalysis publicly persuasive in order historically to understand the cultural impact of psychoanalysis.20 To start a psychoanalytic movement, Freud needed to gain from an ever-widening circle of other educated persons a recognition and “confirmation” of the existence of unconscious Oedipal desires. By analyzing the theatrical structures of recognition and identification that Freud’s texts deploy, it is possible to locate one strategy by which he legitimized psychoanalysis: tragedy itself, and not merely the story of Oedipus, serves as a powerful and authoritative generic matrix through which to construct theories about gender, sexuality, and culture. Freud risked turning psychoanalysis into a “failed tragedy” so that he might ultimately gain public recognition of his ideas by claiming the cultural authority that adheres to those professing the ability to interpret classical literature. Tragedy also works to thematize Freud’s early professional efforts as the “heroic” struggle of an intellectual rebel against the irrational prejudices of his scientific peers, and therefore as a necessary stage on the way to what he continually asserted was its “inevitable” scientific and social legitimacy: “It is a matter of common knowledge how often in the history of scientific research it has happened that innovations have met with intense and stubborn resistance, while subsequent events have shown that the resistance was unjustified and that the novelty was valuable and important” (RP, ). Freud translated Oedipus’s tragic recognition not only into the spectator’s, patient’s, and reader’s unconscious recognition of Oedipal desires, but also into a conscious and public recognition of the “truth” of psychoanalysis—a “truth” that retains tragedy’s generic effect of demonstrating the workings of “destiny,” but also offers a “safe distance” from tragedy by promising a professional psychotherapeutic means to avert the potentially disastrous consequences of self-knowledge.

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“Sophoclean” Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Sophocles To understand more precisely what kind of tragic paradigm Freud builds into the human psyche, it is important to examine the status of Sophocles and the canonization of Sophoclean tragedy in the nineteenth century. Ann Norris Michelini has argued that the nineteenth-century revival of Greek literature made fifth-century Athens a unique and privileged reference point for the Western tradition. This classicizing interpretation also framed Sophoclean tragedy as the culmination and realization of whatever was stable and enduring about Athenian culture.21 The literary critical writings of the German romantics Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel exemplify the tendency to assimilate Greek tragedy as a genre to Sophoclean tragedy. They appropriate the mostly legendary “biographical” material from antiquity about Sophocles and his works in order to create a poetics on the “classic” Sophoclean model.22 Friedrich Schlegel (‒ ), who considered Sophocles the greatest tragedian, attributes to Sophoclean drama an ideal poetic unity, a “beautiful organization in which even the smallest part is necessarily determined by the laws and purpose of the whole, and yet is autonomous and free.”23 He praises other Greek writers by granting them Sophoclean status: Homer is an “epic Sophocles,” Socrates a “philosophical Sophocles,” and Pindar a “Doric Sophocles.”24 Friedrich Schlegel’s views on poetry and on Sophocles in particular were influential during the nineteenth century, especially as mediated and expanded by his brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel (‒), whose Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature () had been reprinted four times by  and was translated into almost every European language.25 The Lectures functioned to delineate a canon of European drama. In discussing the Greek dramatists, the elder Schlegel enhanced and codified for the nineteenth century the report of Sophocles’ popularity in antiquity: “If I may speak in the spirit of the ancient religion, it seems that a beneficent Providence wished to evince to the human race, in the instance of this individual, the dignity and felicity of their lot, as he was endowed with every divine gift, with all that can adorn and elevate the mind and heart, and crowned with every blessing imaginable in this life.”26 A. W. Schlegel echoes his brother’s idealizing assessment of Sophocles as the poet who perfected the tragic art. His history of Greek drama casts Aeschylus as “the rough designer” and Sophocles as “the finished successor.” He also claims

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that the “perfection” of Sophocles’ works arose from the “harmonious perfection” of his mind, “by which he fulfilled from inclination every duty prescribed by the laws of beauty.”27 By associating psychoanalysis with Sophoclean tragedy, Freud allied psychoanalytic ideas with a powerful critical discourse on canonical authorship, classical tradition, and formal perfection. Freud, like Schelling, focuses on Oedipus Tyrannus rather than Antigone, which was the most important Sophoclean drama for Hegel and Hölderlin. Freud’s appropriation of Oedipus Tyrannus, however, continues and extends nineteenth-century German philosophical and literary practices of favoring Sophoclean tragedy.28 The index to the Standard Edition of Freud’s writings lists seventeen references to Sophocles. In addition to thirteen references to Oedipus Tyrannus, Freud also briefly discusses Ajax, Antigone, and Philoctetes. Yet he only refers once to both Aeschylus and Euripides. His overwhelming theoretical interest in and preference for Sophocles among the Greek dramatists are evident.29 Michelini has outlined a consensus among critics about the basic attributes of Sophoclean tragedy: a unified style with a tighter focus on an individual protagonist and a shift from trilogic form to the single play, which, by excluding the broad temporal and social contexts characteristic of the Aeschylean trilogy, contributes to a representation of the protagonist’s individual experience as timeless and universal. According to Michelini, these characteristics produce an “effect of intensification, . . . integrity, persuasiveness, and urgency . . . that we are accustomed to call ‘dramatic.’”30 This description of the dominant critical understanding of Sophoclean drama also sheds light on the usefulness for psychoanalysis of the formal aspects of Sophoclean tragedy, especially as they had been codified and made into the generic paradigm by nineteenth-century criticism. The classicizing understanding of Sophoclean drama as having a unified, timeless, and universal structure focused on a single hero suits the psychoanalytic project of constructing a general, scientific psychology and professional therapy of the individual. In addition, the critical commonplace that Sophoclean drama is structured according to an inherent formal necessity, which makes every part take a particular place in creating a unified whole even as the plot enacts violent conflicts, also suggests that Sophoclean tragedy as a generic paradigm reinforces the psychoanalytic elaboration of a simultaneously whole —inextricably interconnected and psychogenetically organic—and

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internally conflicted psychic structure that conforms to a set of universal patterns of family relationship. Freud reads Sophocles as wishing to reconcile humanity and destiny and criticizes his drama for this reason (ID, ), but psychoanalysis itself also attempts, without religion, to bring a “Sophoclean” tragic perspective to bear on the workings of human psychology in order to construe human sexual development as determinative and “tragic,” that is, as a scenario that provokes suffering. Hence the centrality of the Oedipus story enables psychoanalysis not only to thematize itself as “tragic” but also to legitimize its constructions of the psyche by making them “Sophoclean.” However, we must bear in mind that the psychoanalytic appropriation of Sophoclean drama also defines it in a way specific to the needs of psychoanalysis. Freud’s elaborations on nineteenth-century critical and philosophical understandings of the Schicksalstragödie or “tragedy of destiny,” also devise a particular, psychoanalytic version of Sophoclean tragedy. Sophoclean tragedy and the literary doctrine of its formal perfection were not simply free-floating cultural material available to the theorist of human psychology; they had a specific institutional location in the classical curriculum of the Gymnasium. Freud describes his classical education as providing the basis for strategies to deal with his professional isolation: the Gymnasium made possible his “first glimpses of an extinct civilization,” which brought him “as much consolation as anything else in the struggles of life” (SP, ). If a classical education could console Freud for the pain of professional obscurity, it also lay at hand to promote professional success.

Classical Education and “Schoolboy Psychology” Nineteenth-century German Bildung was an educational philosophy and practice that claimed to cultivate the deepest intellectual and spiritual resources of the individual. A Weimar-period encyclopedia provides this definition: The fundamental concept of pedagogy since Pestalozzi, Bildung means forming the soul by means of the cultural environment. Bildung requires: (a) an individuality which, as the unique starting point, is to be developed into a formed or valuesaturated personality; (b) a certain universality, meaning richness of mind and person, which is attained through the understanding and experiencing [Verstehen und

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Erleben] of the objective cultural values; (c) totality, meaning inner unity and firmness of character.31

The social anthropologist Louis Dumont has termed Bildung a “genuine institution”: a “set of representations . . . as important sociologically as that on which any of our public establishments is founded.”32 In its sense as “the name and ideology of middle-class professionals and bureaucrats [Bildungsbürgertum],” Bildung was most strongly associated with the classical curriculum of the Gymnasium.33 For eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury German proponents of Bildung such as Friedrich August Wolf (‒) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (‒), the “leisured cultivation of intellectual and aesthetic interests” that they advocated was to be undertaken on an individual basis and should not be seen as a preparation for any specific career. By the mid nineteenth century, however, a Gymnasialbildung, including intensive instruction in Greek and Latin, had become a crucial element of upper-class and professional status in Germany and the German-speaking countries.34 In the Vienna of Freud’s youth, any aspiring civil servant or professional underwent a classical Gymnasium education as preparation for university admission. Sigmund Freud attended the Leopoldstadter KommunalReal und Obergymnasium (also known as the Sperlgymnasium), from , when he was nine years old, until .35 He spent eight hours a week for eight years studying Latin, and six hours a week for six years learning Greek. His formal classical curriculum ensured that he read Livy, Ovid, Sallust, Cicero, Vergil, Horace, and Tacitus in Latin, and Xenophon’s Anabasis, most of Homer’s Iliad and parts of the Odyssey, some Herodotus, several of Demosthenes’ speeches, Plato’s Apology and Crito, and Ajax and Antigone by Sophocles in Greek. Honors students like Freud also took on additional readings of classical authors suggested by the professor.36 In a letter to his friend Emil Fluss on the subject of his Matura (the examination required for graduation), Freud wrote that he had done well on the Greek translation passage from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, which he had previously read on his own.37 The examination, which he passed with distinction, provides an early association of Freud’s reading of Oedipus Tyrannus with the successful attainment of required pre-professional certification.38 Freud may have read the works of the other two tragedians in Greek as well while he was at the Gymnasium, but the curriculum clearly makes Sophocles the most significant of the canonical tragic dramatists.

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In a letter to his fiancée Martha Bernays in , Freud describes an evolution in his attitude toward authority as a Gymnasium student: “One would hardly guess it from looking at me, and yet even at school I was always the bold oppositionist, always on hand when an extreme had to be defended, and usually ready to atone for it. As I moved up into the favoured position of head boy, where I remained for years and was generally trusted, people no longer had any reason to complain about me.”39 In An Autobiographical Study (), Freud again refers to his accomplishments at the Gymnasium: “I was at the top of my class for seven years; I enjoyed special privileges there, and had scarcely ever to be examined in class” (AS, ). Freud’s discussion of his own successful career at school—a graduation from rebellion into a position of privilege and confident authority as head boy—offers a more personal account of the Gymnasium student’s psychology, which he outlines in more general terms in the essay “Some Reflections on Schoolboy Psychology” (“Zur Psychologie des Gymnasiasten”), written in  as a contribution to a volume celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his school. He begins with an anecdote about the surprise of a typical middle-class, middle-aged man like himself upon glimpsing one of his former schoolmasters in the street: “‘How youthful he looks! And how old you yourself have grown! How old can he be today? Can it be possible that the men who used to stand for us as types of adulthood were really so little older than we were?’” (SP, ). Freud interprets his amazement at his childhood ignorance of the relative youth of his professors by providing an analysis of the schoolboy’s relation to his own father and to “father substitutes” (SP, ). He explains that each schoolboy has contradictory feelings toward his professors: We courted them or turned our backs on them, we imagined sympathies and antipathies in them which probably had no existence, we studied their characters and in theirs we formed or misformed our own. They called up our fiercest oppositions and forced us to complete submission; we peered into their little weaknesses, and took pride in their excellences, their knowledge and their justice. . . . We were from the very first equally inclined to love and to hate them, to criticize and respect them. Psychoanalysis has given the name of “ambivalence” to this readiness to contradictory attitudes, and it has no difficulty in pointing to the source of ambivalent feelings of such a kind. [SP, ]

Freud locates the source of this ambivalence in early childhood and points out that all later relationships in a person’s life will replicate those with par-

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ents and siblings (SP, ). He argues that since the most important early relationship for a boy is that with his father, the boy’s teachers become “father substitutes,” and therefore are targets of the same kind of emotional ambivalence that the boy feels toward his father: “That was why, even though they [the professors] were still quite young, they struck us as so mature and so unattainably adult” (SP, ). Freud’s description of the schoolboy’s contradictory and passionate sentiments toward his professors testifies to the intensity and variety of feelings that the concept of ambivalence draws together and even tends to assimilate. According to Freud, the difference between the status of the father within the home and his social standing provokes ambivalent feelings in the boy. He realizes that his father does not wield the power in the world that he does over his family. This realization effects a necessary “detachment from the father” (SP, ), which allows the boy to begin the search for “father substitutes” like teachers. In the life of a typical adolescent boy, the school becomes the first social institution beyond the family to afford an occasion for forming ambivalent identifications with “father substitutes.” Freud’s examination in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego of the authority structures of the army and the church suggests that these function analogously to the school to produce the same kinds of ambivalent identifications by subordinates with those situated above them in the institutional hierarchy. The Gymnasium, with its classical curriculum, provides Freud with an institutional model to construct his theory of the way the larger social world intersects with the Oedipal configuration within the family—or, to follow the direction of determination in Freud’s account more precisely, the way that the Oedipal structure of the family and the Oedipal origins of civilization ultimately shape social institutions. Freud stresses the positive aspects of school life in this commemorative essay, and his attitude is not surprising given his own success in school. In contrast, Freud’s acquaintance and corespondent, the writer Stefan Zweig, who also attended a Viennese Gymnasium, states in his autobiography that school was like a prison, that he does not remember the face of a single one of his professors, and that when he was asked to speak at his school’s fiftieth anniversary, he refused.40 In his review of memoirs relating to a Gymnasium education in imperial Germany, James C. Albisetti notes a “striking range” of opinion about the Gymnasium, with one-third of the one hundred autobiographers he surveyed reporting positive sentiments

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and the other two-thirds being ambivalent or highly negative, like Zweig. Albisetti’s research suggests that Freud’s sense of the schoolboy’s admiration for his teachers may not have been typical of Gymnasium students: “The most common accusation leveled at teachers concerned not their excess of patriotic zeal, but their total lack of sympathy with and for their pupils. Whereas many foreign observers admired the pedagogical training of teachers in the German secondary schools, most of the boys taught by them viewed the majority as incapable of understanding or inspiring young minds.”41 Thus Freud’s account of schoolboy ambivalence seems to be more autobiographical in its theoretical generalizations than first appears: he highlights the positive as much as the ambivalent or negative feelings of the Gymnasium student toward his professors in order to postulate that the teacher inherits the father’s psychological role as ego ideal. Freud’s account also focuses on the emotional sources of emulation and competition within the Gymnasium and does not broach the possibility that there were social, economic, intellectual, or political factors leading students to excel or rebel. As a model for Freud’s account of the Oedipal structure of social authority, the Gymnasium has particular ideological significations. Anthony J. La Vopa has shown that the “ideal of personal wholeness developed through self-disciplined scholarship” that classical Bildung offered became part of an ideology that allowed nineteenth-century German schoolmasters to consolidate the normative authority and independent disciplinary status of classical studies (Altertumswissenschaft ). The status of classical scholarship as a “science” and “scholarly discipline” (Wissenschaft ) enabled both the philologist and the professional man who had undergone a classical education to combine the “disinterested,” autonomous practice of a historian and aesthetician of classical culture with the training in rigorous scholarly self-discipline that served as preparation for work in state-controlled, bureaucratic professional structures.42 Through the teaching of the philological techniques of grammatical analysis and textual criticism (Grammatik and Kritik), the German schoolmasters also promulgated an idealization of the Greek language as unique in its “fusing of concrete sensuality with logical abstraction,” a combination that permitted it to embody the “integral unity of the culture.” Their educational argument that the study of Greek produces a “broad-minded, or ‘liberal,’ personality” justified the institutional and pedagogical dominance of a “Wissenschaft that defined itself in

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and through its Hellenism.”43 Through the appropriation of Greek tragedy, Freud also derives authority for psychoanalysis from this professional ideology of Hellenism, as well as from the historical and institutional role of classical philology as “one of the earliest models for a research-based profession.”44 The classical philological methods of Grammatik and Kritik, with their rigorous attention to detail for the purposes of constructing a critical appreciation or translation faithful to the original, may also have functioned as frameworks for the psychoanalytic interpretive practice of constructing a narrative of the patient’s past based on close attention to the details and symbolism of his or her utterances, dreams, and gestures.45 The historian of education Fritz Ringer has analyzed how the definition of Bildung embraced in the German-speaking educational tradition is based on a conception of reading and interpretation as a particular kind of hermeneutic practice involving a combination of “active” understanding, Verstehen, and more passive experiencing, Erleben, of a text. The mode of Verstehen posits possible interpretations, which the text then “‘shows’ to be more or less effective in clarifying and integrating what at first appeared to be obscure or incoherent.” Erleben implies an identification with the author that allows the reader to reproduce or “‘relive’ the inner states that gave rise to the text.” Such an identification enables the interpreter to become “‘saturated’ with the values embodied in what he reads.”46 Ringer argues that “the concept of Bildung . . . engendered cognitive dispositions that played a structuring role far beyond the formative field of discourse on education itself.”47 His account suggests that Freud’s use of tragic recognition as a model for the recognition of psychoanalysis itself also draws on the hermeneutic assumptions of classical Bildung. Through his own interpretation of Oedipus Tyrannus, Freud leads the reader to practice upon the text of The Interpretation of Dreams what we can identify as a combination of Verstehen and Erleben. The psychoanalytic interpretation should permit the reader to reach an active “understanding” of the “true,” psychological reasons for the “universal power” of Sophocles’ drama, while simultaneously achieving a “saturation” with the psychoanalytic method and “values” of Freud’s own narrative by “experiencing” and identifying with the “tragic effect” of Oedipal recognition. According to Freud, the patient in analysis “should be educated to liberate and fulfill his own nature, not to resemble ourselves” (LPT, ). This description of the educative effect of psychoanalysis resembles the so-

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ciologist and philosopher Georg Simmel’s (‒) definition in  of the effects of Bildung as a “cultivation” that “comes about only if the contents absorbed out of the suprapersonal realm [of objectified cultural values] seem, as through a secret harmony, to unfold only that in the soul which exists within it as its own instinctual tendency and as the inner prefiguration of its subjective perfection.”48 Through Bildung, the subject should “recognize” as internal, “instinctual,” and the “prefiguration” (destiny) of its “perfection” the “cultural values” that in fact have produced the form of subjectivity under “cultivation.” The consonance between the “internal” transformation and “realization” of the individual envisioned by Bildung and by psychoanalysis arises not only out of the educative influence of analytic therapy but also from the alliance of psychoanalysis with the ideological and social-reproductive functions of the Gymnasium and its classical curriculum. Through Freud’s and his followers’ writings and training analyses, the cognitive dispositions Bildung encouraged became part of the psychoanalytic thought style.49 How can the patient in analysis fail to resemble the analyst—not as an individual, but in his or her acceptance of the professional, scientific, and cultural authority underwriting the analyst’s capacity to “liberate and fulfill” the patient’s individuality through a psychoanalytic “educational” intervention? Given the centrality of Sophoclean drama to the classical curriculum, it is not surprising that the generic characteristics attributed to Sophoclean tragedy—individuality, universality, and totality understood as internal unity—also correspond to the “inner” qualities of the person who has undergone Bildung. The literary text comes to instantiate the educational criteria that justify Bildung, so that aesthetic, linguistic, cultural, and psychological forms of “totality” all mirror and reinforce one another.50 Freud’s appropriation of Oedipus Tyrannus was virtually the ideal way to transfer the social and cultural prestige, interpretive methods, and ideological significations of classical Bildung and the institutional culture of the Gymnasium to psychoanalysis. As a result of this association, psychoanalysis adopted and extended the ideological function of Bildung after the turn of the century “to confirm the social miracle that elevates the ‘truly’ educated man above his fellows.”51 Freud also imposes a powerful reinterpretation of Oedipus Tyrannus as Aristotelian generic exemplar—the play whose protagonist simultaneously experiences both recognition and reversal—by positioning it within his writings and psychoanalytic theory to provoke the

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recognition of psychoanalysis itself as simultaneously a privileged inheritor and modernizer of the classical tradition. Oedipus would not have been such a powerful figure for the founder of psychoanalysis if the Gymnasium professor had not inspired (or cajoled or coerced) all of his students to work through the original texts of Greek literature. Since Freud could only have encountered Sophocles’ play as freighted with the prestige of its canonical status and the promise of professional and social advancement that classical learning held out, Oedipal ambivalence can also be understood as an attitude produced by the hierarchical institutional arrangement of the school—where professional men are the models to emulate, where a standardized curriculum means that everyone must learn the same thing regardless of individual proclivity, and where competition for academic honors acts as preparation for the competition of the larger capitalist society. What I say here does not apply to ambivalence as a general psychological attitude, or even to all connotations of ambivalence within psychoanalysis. Instead, I am characterizing the historical and social genesis of Freud’s theory of Oedipal ambivalence. Ambivalence can only become “Oedipal” historically when it is codified and endowed with cultural significance through its affiliation with classical education in its function as cultural capital. Freud’s Oedipus as a theory of social and cultural reproduction thus translates a social symptomatology produced by a particular set of institutions—the bourgeois family and the Gymnasium—into both a psychological complex “universally” constitutive of masculinity and a central component of a psychotherapeutic expertise called psychoanalysis.

Classical Education and the Figure of the Father Martin Freud’s story of his father’s recitation of Homer thus reveals a good deal about the history of psychoanalysis and its cultural authority, and another detail of Freud’s biography suggests that it may be possible to delimit the Oedipus complex historically by reconstructing Freud’s own reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. The episode with Martin and the professor of Greek was not a repetition of similar events in Freud’s childhood—he could not have reenacted a shared experience of the routine of the Gymnasium classroom with his own father.52 In a letter to the writer Romain Rolland (‒) on the occasion

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of his seventieth birthday, written in , when Freud himself was nearly eighty, he offers one of his final meditations on the father-son relationship and classical education. In addressing Rolland’s questions about the “oceanic feeling” in religion at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents (), Freud had answered Rolland’s objections to his critique of religion by claiming that he himself had never experienced such feelings (“a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded”) and saying that he interpreted them, not as a response to a higher reality, but rather as connected to the infant’s need “for a father’s protection” (CD, , ). The  letter to Rolland also concerns feelings toward the father, but Freud delays the revelation of this theme by presenting it as the solution to a disturbance of memory that had occurred during a trip to Athens in , which had been puzzling him for many years. Freud wonders why it had been so difficult for him and his younger brother, Alexander, coincidentally the same age as Rolland, to believe that they were actually seeing the Acropolis for themselves. At first, Freud explains to Rolland, he had surmised that even though he had thought he was convinced of the reality of ancient Athens as a schoolboy, perhaps he had in fact unconsciously disbelieved in it. Further analysis had brought him to the conclusion, however, that the “feeling of estrangement” (“Entfremdungsgefühl ”) that he experienced on the Acropolis did not arise from present disbelief in its reality, but rather repeated in a different form the memory of his adolescent doubts that he would ever travel to Athens (DM, ). When Freud finally reveals the reason for his strange “derealization” of the Acropolis (DM, ), he seems to voice his own ambivalence about the dependence on the father to which he had attributed Rolland’s “oceanic feeling.” Freud explains that as an adolescent, he had fantasized about visiting Athens. Yet these fantasies testified to his dissatisfaction with his home and his father, so that once he had really reached the desired destination, his guilt prevented him from fully experiencing it: “It seems as though the essence of success were to have got further than one’s father, and as though to excel one’s father were still something forbidden” (DM, ). Yet Freud’s guilt does not arise simply from travel. He explains that in desiring specifically to visit Athens, he had already transgressed against his father: “The very theme of Athens and the Acropolis in itself contained evidence of the son’s superiority. Our father had been in business, he had had no secondary education [Gymnasialbildung ], and Athens could not have

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meant much to him. Thus what interfered with our enjoyment of the journey to Athens was a feeling of filial piety.”53 Even before he went to Athens, Freud had surpassed his father because of his classical education; unlike his father, he was able to read Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus in Greek. A psychoanalytic reader might argue that by reading Oedipus as a schoolboy, Freud committed a symbolic parricide. But I want to reconstruct this act of reading differently, and not to diagnose it psychoanalytically, because I see it as a pre-psychoanalytic event, and one whose significance for the history of psychoanalysis psychoanalytic theory cannot adequately explain. Steven Beller has demonstrated that Jewish young men in mid nineteenth-century Vienna, particularly the sons of merchants like Freud, pursued a Gymnasium education and entered the professions in greater numbers than comparable non-Jews; they were driven by a desire for professional status and income, as well as by the larger goal of cultural assimilation.54 Beller contends that the Viennese Jews built upon their own tradition of valuing education, but that their specific emphasis on Bildung in the Hapsburg empire resulted in their being better educated as a group than non-Jews of the same class.55 Through examination of educational records, he establishes that among Jews there was a clear predominance of young men who, like Freud, chose to enter medicine.56 Beller’s research suggests that Freud’s reading of Oedipus Tyrannus must have been a typical event in a specific historical, cultural, and individual trajectory: the social and professional advancement of a mid nineteenth-century Viennese Jewish Gymnasium student. The factor that makes this event typical is not only the reading of the play itself but the competence to read a classical text that one’s father could not have read in the original language. This account of Freud’s classical education and professional formation does not empty his reading of Sophocles of all psychological interest. Many young Jewish men in Freud’s situation may have found the experience of surpassing their fathers difficult and painful, and may have felt ambivalent about their own advancement. Such psychological effects, understood in their historical context, can be seen to result from conscious efforts to achieve within a competitive and antisemitic society.57 Frequently, the fathers themselves would have set their sons on the path to “excel” beyond them. Freud recounts that in his own case, his father “insisted that, in my choice of a profession, I should follow my own inclinations alone”

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(AS, ). This “freedom to choose” a profession, as we have seen, meant that Freud should undertake a rigorous educational program that moved him through a specific series of institutions to gain the necessary professional credentials. Freud also points to the “freedom to choose” as a defining element of professional work (CD,  n).58 Thus by giving him that “free choice” of profession, Freud’s father was reinforcing the decision to follow a professional career path that had already been made for him through the kind of education he received. Freud’s attempt to universalize father-son dynamics in a psychological theory renders such particular occasions of ambivalence instances of repressed unconscious aggression.59 The psychoanalytic theory of Oedipal desire should not require that there be a play by Sophocles called Oedipus Tyrannus; if it had not existed, there would have been some other exemplary work to draw on—Hamlet, for example. Unconscious incestuous and aggressive childhood wishes should make their appearance inevitably, since they supposedly preexist and give rise to any phenomena that we might be tempted, after Freud, to characterize as Oedipal. Yet Freud’s story of filial piety suggests that there did have to be a particular play, or rather, that there occurred in Freud’s youth a socially formative and personally decisive acquisition of classical literacy and an act of reading that broke with the past in a familial sense. These were also characteristic events in a predictable, although not automatic, rise in the social and professional hierarchy, beyond the status of his father. No other play, and no other Bildung, would have worked so powerfully for Freud—or, historically, for psychoanalysis—to accomplish, universalize, and accentuate the difficulties of this experience of intergenerational transition, professionalization, and cultural assimilation. Thus the association of psychoanalysis with Oedipus occurred through a complex conjuncture of specific social, cultural, and institutional conditions and individual actions, and not merely as the result of Freud’s own “recognition” in the play of a transhistorical and essential dynamic between parents and sons. The psychoanalytic Oedipus universalizes and codifies elements of what Bourdieu would call Freud’s habitus —his familial, institutional, and cultural formation.60 Psychoanalysis not only bears Freud’s name, and incorporates his own ways of thinking, dreaming, and striving for success, but also transmits a central element of his cultural formation—his schooling—transformed into a “universally” human psychological condition.61

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Some Consequences of “Schoolboy Psychology” With his Oedipal theory of the reproduction of culture and society, Freud offers a psychological and masculine-centered account of social institutions that naturalizes their patriarchal and hierarchical organization. Freud emphasizes conflict in relationships between fathers and sons and stakes the institutional identity and professional claims of psychoanalysis on the recognition of masculinity as essentially “Oedipal.” He constructs Oedipal masculinity as tragic and “heroic” in its inevitability, not only by association with Sophoclean drama and the figure of Oedipus, but also— in texts like Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism ()—because of the “historical” and psychological necessity he posits for Oedipal ambivalence in the evolution of civilization.62 Even at the end of the twentieth century, when “the Oedipus complex” has become common knowledge in Western societies, tragedy still lends its prestige and aura of universal significance to psychoanalysis.63 One institutional advantage for psychoanalysis itself of this appropriation of tragedy is that its theories, in their claim to transhistorical validity, also partake of tragic “necessity.” Freud’s concept of ambivalence also dehistoricizes and generalizes the psychological dynamics of competition within institutions specific to capitalist, industrializing Europe. I have been arguing that the classical school is historically crucial to Freud’s formulation of the theoretical, professional, and ideological agendas of psychoanalysis. The Oedipus complex does not simply extend to “schoolboy psychology” and its offshoots, as Freud claims, but rather the Gymnasium, through its classical curriculum and pre-professional training, provided an indispensable social space and institutional underpinning for Freud’s construction of the psychoanalytic Oedipus. In elaborating Oedipus, Freud also builds a particular institutional form of subjectivity—the ambivalent, middle-class student of the all-male Gymnasium—into his general scenario of psychosexual development. Thus psychoanalysis itself is, in this specifically historical sense, “schoolboy psychology.”64 Given this history of the relation between classical education and the institution of psychoanalytic knowledge, I would suggest that the acceptance of psychoanalytic ideas as psychological common sense, as well as the application of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary academic research

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in the humanities, have been promoted by the historical and cultural role of the school in Freud’s conceptualization of social reproduction as tragic, psychological necessity. Freud worked out the psychoanalytic Oedipus by thinking through an educational institution and curriculum that still in significant ways structures the classroom situations in which we read Freud’s texts today.65 We may “recognize” ourselves in and through psychoanalysis in part because it both replays the history of and confers an individualized psychological value on our middle-class, pre-professional educational formation. Freud reconstitutes within psychoanalytic theory the social prestige that already adhered to professionalism in the early decades of the twentieth century and converts a particular variant of the experience of preprofessional, liberal education into an internal psychological drama.66 The “psychoanalytic effect” should be just as universal and powerful as the “tragic effect” it interprets and appropriates, according to Freud’s strategy. But the social logic of this strategy itself stems from the function of classical learning as cultural capital in turn-of-the-century Europe—the “universality” of the Freudian Oedipus could only have been conceived of in a society that coded classical civilization as universally significant through an elite, literary education that posited the experiences of its students as universally human. Psychoanalytic knowledge is in this sense an instance of what John Guillory has termed “school culture.” Guillory defines “school culture” as the actual forms of knowledge inculcated by the school that derive their legitimacy from the conformity presumed to exist among the curriculum, the values it embodies, and a national culture. Guillory argues that the culture produced by the school is, in fact, “the culture of the school ” itself, and that one of the most significant social effects of this “school culture” is to accomplish “the differential tracking of students according to class or the possession of cultural capital.”67 Bourdieu has also indicated that the school does not merely reproduce and “sanction” the elite status and “distinction” of the educated classes, but also imparts a culture that “separates those receiving it from the rest of society by a whole series of systematic differences.”68 The association of psychoanalysis with the culture of the classical curriculum means that it participates in confirming the social distinction of the educated classes, and the success of psychoanalytic knowledge as a “popular” psychology—always, in fact, more current among some social groups than others—thus also derives in part from this socially

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differentiating operation. Not only do Freud’s texts perform a complex mobilization of the pedagogical goals and interpretive methods of Bildung, but this psychoanalytic “school culture” has a specifically psychological component. Psychoanalytic knowledge not only becomes a form of cultural capital, it also functions as a new kind of “psychological capital” for the educated classes.69 Psychoanalytic knowledge redeploys the capacity of school culture to produce “the imaginary cultural unity of a nation”70 in order to generate the imaginary psychological unity of an educated class, represented as the basic psychological homogeneity of humanity. In this way, psychoanalytic knowledge also works ideologically to make a middle-class person’s “heroic” struggles to get ahead through education seem expressive of a “destiny” inherent in every individual’s “inner life.”

2 Psychoanalysis as “Necessity” ’ “”    , ,   

Our modern investigators in the sciences of inorganic nature are foremost to recognize, both within and without their special fields of work, the unity of nature, the fixity of its laws, the definite sequence of cause and effect through which every fact depends on what is to come after it. . . . They affirm, with Aristotle, that nature is not full of incoherent episodes, like a bad tragedy. —Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture ()

In The Question of Lay Analysis ( ), Freud declares that “nothing has damaged [psychoanalysis] more in the good opinion of its contemporaries than its hypothesis of the Oedipus complex as a structure universally bound to human destiny” (LA, ). He asserts the power of his theory of Oedipal sexuality by pointing to its tendency to provoke resistance, and reminds his readers that psychoanalysis itself partakes of both “universality” and “destiny.” In Chapter , I argued that Freud’s writings on Oedipus depend on a reworking of tragic recognition in staging psychoanalytic knowledge for both lay and scientific audiences. By allying psychoanalysis with Sophoclean tragedy, Freud also appropriated its generic characteristics and canonical status within the Gymnasium curriculum. Freud deployed the cultural capital accruing to classical learning in order to advance his project of endowing psychoanalytic knowledge with the kind of universal relevance that classical civilization was believed to possess. Here I shall examine Freud’s use of theories about the origins and

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generic conventions of Greek tragedy in his texts on metapsychology and culture theory. Freud’s critiques of tragic morality in several of his early formulations of the Oedipus complex function to open up a space where specifically psychoanalytic constructions of the psyche, history, and culture can be inserted, while retaining the determining force of tragic “necessity.” Freud’s cultural theory represents tragedy both as cultural origin and as a repetition of the primal parricide that ultimately cedes its “originality” to psychoanalysis itself. Freud’s clinical focus on the individual extends to his analysis of civilization, and tragic “history” leads inevitability to the psychoanalytic construction of an originary male individual who must violently differentiate himself from a group, whether the primal horde, the tragic chorus, or the “masses.” Since Freud’s tragic stories of cultural beginnings trace a “heroic,” patriarchal genealogy for masculinity, and then secondarily postulate a particularly feminine biological necessity, the psychoanalytic production of the Oedipal subject also stages a tragedy of gender.

Psychoanalysis and the “Tragedy of Destiny” Freud’s introduction of the notion of Oedipal dreams in his letter to Wilhelm Fliess of October , , is the earliest formulation we have of his understanding of tragedy’s generic characteristics. Calling Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus the paradigmatic “psychoanalytic” tragedy, Freud asserts to Fliess that it proves the universality of Oedipal dreams “in spite of all the objections that reason raises against the presupposition of fate,”1 and in The Interpretation of Dreams (), he echoes this language, referring to Oedipus Tyrannus as a Schicksalstragödie, or “tragedy of destiny,” whose “tragic effect . . . is said to lie in the contrast between the supreme will of the gods and the vain attempts of mankind to escape the evil that threatens them.”2 Psychoanalysis, however, explains the universal “tragic effect” of the play as linked to its display of incestuous and parricidal wishes. The drama brings about a momentary lifting of repression that allows the spectator to recognize his own Oedipal desires. In addition to claiming that modern tragedies have failed to produce this effect in their audiences, even when they attempt to portray the human struggle against destiny, Freud criticizes the ostensible message of the tragedy of destiny—that the spectator should learn “submission to the divine will and realization of his own impotence” (ID, ). In equating the legend that preexists the play with

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incestuous and parricidal dreams, Freud dissociates the newly defined “Oedipal” aspects of the play from its “theological” message: And just as these dreams, when dreamt by adults, are accompanied by feelings of repulsion, so too the legend must include horror and self-punishment. Its further modification originates once again in a misconceived secondary revision of the material, which has sought to exploit it for theological purposes. . . . The attempt to harmonize divine omnipotence with human responsibility must naturally fail in connection with this subject-matter just as with any other. [ID, ]

Even as he uses it to demonstrate the universality of Oedipal desires, Freud thus rejects Oedipus Tyrannus as a tragedy of destiny, notwithstanding that Sophocles’ depreciated “further modification” of the tale matches his own earlier definition of a Schicksalstragödie. What does it mean to call this “secondary revision” of the Oedipus legend by Sophocles “misconceived” and to say that it “must naturally fail”? Freud would later observe that the specific contribution of psychoanalysis to the understanding of art and literature was to have shown “that myths and fairy tales can be interpreted like dreams,”3 and in chapter  of The Interpretation of Dreams, he uses the term “secondary revision” to describe the process that works on dream thoughts and “seeks to mold the material offered to it into something like a day-dream” (ID, ). The secondary revision can also introduce an already formed daydream or fantasy into a dream (ID, ‒). Freud explains that dreams that the secondary revision has “played about with . . . most freely,” “might be said to have been already interpreted once, before being submitted to waking interpretation” (ID, ). Most important, the distinguishing feature of the secondary revision is its “purpose”: “This function behaves in the manner which the poet maliciously ascribes to philosophers: it fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with shreds and patches” (ID, ).4 The secondary revision attempts to render the dream intelligible, so that it can become a “model” (Vorbild ) of waking experience (ID, ).5 Yet that model, because it marks the interference of something like conscious thought, turns out to be a complete misunderstanding of the dream, just as waking interpretations of events often falsify reality (ID, ). In comparing the conventions and message of the tragedy of destiny to a secondary revision, Freud suggests that what makes Sophocles’ play paradigmatic, a “model” of experience, also misleads the spectator into a false attitude toward the “legend of King Oedipus,” which he distinguishes

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from the play itself (ID, ). In a strange twist on the poet’s accusation against the philosopher, Freud accuses the poet, Sophocles, of filling up the gaps in the Oedipus legend with a “theological” message about reconciling divine power and human responsibility. What may seem like a quibble, since Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus works so well for Freud’s theory in so many other ways, actually turned out to be a source of many further theoretical elaborations in later texts. Freud did not simply exclude the tragedy of destiny in arguing for the universality of Oedipal dreams. Rather, he inaugurated an interpretive conflict between psychoanalysis and tragedy that psychoanalytic theory would perpetuate—which interprets the Oedipus “legend” better, tragedy or psychoanalysis (Sophocles or Freud)? Freud’s strategy is first to equate the Oedipus legend with a dream, so that the psychoanalytic interpretation of the play can supersede its tragic message. Even though Freud quotes from it to confirm his theory, the actual text of Sophocles’ play gets lost in this set of analogies, becoming merely one version of the legend. Although Freud seems to take pains to differentiate his earliest formulations of the psychoanalytic Oedipus from the conventions of the tragedy of destiny, with the concept of secondary revision and the suggestion that the action of Sophocles’ drama presents “a process that can be likened to a psychoanalysis” (ID, ), he simultaneously identifies psychoanalysis with ancient Greek tragedy. Psychoanalysis no longer meditates upon the relationship between mortals and the gods, but it does describe psychological functions—unconscious instincts, both Eros and the death drive, and the Oedipus complex itself—that enact their own kind of necessity and overarching power in constituting the psyche. We might wonder, then, what prevents the psychoanalytic interpretation of the legend of Oedipus, and of Sophocles’ play, from itself becoming a misleading secondary revision, merely another tragic “model” of experience? In propounding the Oedipus complex in the Introductory Lectures of , Freud again criticizes the morality of Sophocles’ play. He accuses Sophocles of “pious sophistry” in creating a play whose message is “that to bow to the will of the gods is the highest morality even when it promotes crime” (IL, ). This attempt to disengage the theory of Oedipal desire from tragedy, however, serves to ally psychoanalysis all the more inextricably with it. Freud’s analysis of tragedy in “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage” ( or  ) suggests that the successful modern (post-

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Shakespearean) playwright must introduce neurosis into his hero’s plot without alerting and thus repelling the audience (PCS, ‒). In the same way, Freud’s own anti-tragedy rhetoric also disparages tragic conventions as disturbingly deterministic, while psychoanalytic theory assimilates their determinism for other purposes. By criticizing tragedy, Freud guards against the possibility that the same objections that reason raises about “the presupposition of fate” may also lead it to question the psychological and scientific validity of the Oedipus complex. With his rather simplistic account of the play’s morality, Freud marginalizes the historical question of the function of tragedy in Greek religion in order to appropriate the “tragic effect” for psychoanalysis. In all these accounts of tragedy, Freud insists that the problematic morality of the Oedipus Tyrannus does not detract from its overwhelming effect upon the audience. The spectator reacts to “the secret sense and content of the legend” (IL, ), the Oedipal desires that psychoanalysis reveals, just as it decodes the latent content of dreams. Thus we understand why Freud interprets Sophocles’ play so strangely, for to define the Oedipus Tyrannus as a play that preaches acquiescence in the failure of human agency certainly contradicts the conclusion that the play resembles a psychoanalysis. Without Oedipus’s relentless drive to know who is the killer of Laius, there would be no psychoanalysis-like process of revealing Oedipal desires and identity. These contradictions suggest that Freud’s criticism of the tragedy of destiny and the “amorality” of Sophocles’ play function to separate the tragic “form” from its psychoanalytic “content” and “effect.” I call Freud’s criticism of Sophocles’ morality a critique of form because the message that Freud finds and condemns in the play is a generic one that applies to the tragedy of destiny. By criticizing tragic conventions and attributing the play’s preoccupation with destiny to Sophocles’ piety, Freud attempts to avoid the complications of a reading that would foreground the resemblance between psychoanalysis and the tragedy of destiny. This disparagement of tragic form, in the guise of objections to its morality, also explains the impossibility of locating the text of Sophocles’ play in the analogy to dreams. The text cannot be resolved into a distinction between form and content, between the secondary revision and the latent dream thoughts. In fact, when analyzed closely, the analogy between Oedipus Tyrannus and the structure of a dream breaks down, as though only meant to hold tragedy temporarily at bay.

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This rhetorical separation of tragic form and psychoanalytic content is also consistent with Freud’s later claim that psychoanalysis cannot elucidate the formal and aesthetic exigencies of works of literature, yet can provide “the final word in all questions that touch upon the imaginative life of man.”6 If contemporary critics are correct in their understanding of psychoanalytic theory as an extended reading of Oedipus Tyrannus,7 then why should Freud, in the places where he directly discusses Sophocles’ play, disown tragedy? In fact, even while attempting to maintain a distance between psychoanalysis and the formal aspects of tragedy, Freud appropriated them to construct specifically psychoanalytic, tragic models of the psyche and human culture.

The Primal Parricide and the Origins of Greek Tragedy The psychoanalytic deployment of tragic conventions relies upon specific nineteenth-century accounts of the origins and functions of Greek tragedy. Freud cites and revises several well-known theories of tragedy in Totem and Taboo (‒) and in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (). Totem and Taboo sets the agenda and the terms in which tragedy will appear in Freud’s texts explicitly to authorize and exemplify the theory of the primal parricide. Greek tragedy turns out to be the generic matrix for the “scientific myth” of the origins of culture (GP, ). At the end of Totem and Taboo, just before the definitive pronouncement that “the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex,” Freud enters into what seems to be a long digression on the primal father as tragic hero. As an introduction to the link he will posit between the primal parricide and tragic drama, he provides a short history of the origin of tragedy: A company of individuals, named and dressed alike, surrounded a single figure, all hanging upon his words and deeds: they were the Chorus and the impersonator of the Hero. He was originally the only actor. Later, a second and third actor were added, to play as counterpart to the Hero and as characters split off from him; but the character of the Hero himself and his relation to the Chorus remained unaltered. [TT, ‒ ]

In introducing tragedy as authoritative evidence of the primal parricide, Freud emphasizes the way in which the origin of tragedy mirrors the drama

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he has set at the source of culture. The hero was always there from the beginning, Freud insists, facing an unindividuated group. The actor on the tragic stage and the chorus represent this primal cultural scene, and even the addition of two more actors, differentiated from the chorus, fails to dilute that paradigmatic confrontation between the individual and the group. Freud’s emphasis on tragedy as the representation of an anterior scene or legend allows him to argue for the historicity of the primal parricide, which tragedy repeats and reenacts. Before launching into this discussion of tragedy, Freud mentions that he is taking up a suggestion of Salomon Reinach’s (‒) anthropological study of the death of Orpheus. In the chapter of his Cultes, mythes et religions (‒) entitled “La mort d’Orphée,” Reinach rehearses the definition of tragedy offered in the Etymologicum Magnum, saying “the tragic choruses carried this name because the chorus members were satyrs, which were called goats, tragoi ” (“les choeurs tragiques portaient ce nom parce que les choristes étaient des satyres que l’on appelait des boucs, travgoi”). Reinach goes on to specify the role of Dionysus in tragedy: “Tragedy is therefore the song or lament of the goats; the dramatic element is the death of the divine goat, that is, what was later called the Passion of Dionysus, Dionysou pathe¯ ” (“La tragédie est donc le chant ou la complainte des boucs; l’élément dramatique est la mort du bouc divin, c’est-àdire ce qu’on appela plus tard la Passion de Dionysos, Dionuvsou pavqh”).8 Freud follows Reinach almost word for word, speaking of the Dionysiac origins of tragedy and the analogy between Greek tragedy and medieval passion plays.9 Although Freud does not refer to the Poetics in this discussion of tragedy, the theory that tragedy sprang from the satyr play was authorized by Aristotle’s comment that it originated “ek satyrikou.”10 Totem and Taboo incorporates numerous stories of origins gleaned from anthropological texts and repeated at several removes from the “primitive” cultures from which they were gathered and catalogued. This story of the passion of the “divine goat” and his chorus of satyrs robed in goatskins also has its own history, and Reinach, if he is Freud’s source, is only a stopping point in a complicated trajectory. In , the German philologist Friedrich Gottleib Welcker (‒) was the first modern scholar to propose the derivation of trago¯idia from satyroi = tragoi, but the theory’s most illustrious supporter and promulgator was the classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (‒), a violent critic of Nietz-

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sche’s The Birth of Tragedy.11 Wilamowitz’s profound influence on the course of German and European classical studies through the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth makes it likely that Freud, through his teachers at the Gymnasium and at the university, would have been familiar with his ideas.12 By citing the Dionysiac “goat-song” theory of tragedy, from whatever source, Freud again associates his own controversial Oedipal theory with contemporary, mainstream, and authoritative German classical scholarship.13 Walter Burkert has described the strangeness of this “goat-song” theory in a way that may explain its affinity with Freud’s project in Totem and Taboo, observing that trago¯idia is “a word which seems to impose the animal on the development of high human civilization, the primitive and grotesque on sublime literary creations.”14 Freud’s theory of the Oedipal origins of culture traces the highest achievements of civilization to violent infantile or “primitive” instincts and practices. He also bases his argument for the equation of the primal father with the totem animal on the infantile tendency, discovered in analysis, to transfer dread of the father to an animal substitute (TT, ‒). The most important aspect of the “goat-song” theory for Freud’s purposes, however, has to do with its reference to sacrificial ritual. If tragedy originates in the ritual dramatization of the “death of the god,” then Freud can link Greek tragedy with William RobertsonSmith’s (‒) theories about the ritual totem meal, and therefore with the primal parricide (TT, ‒). The brothers’ ambivalence following the murder leads them both to institute prohibitions against incest and the killing of the totem and periodically to celebrate and commemorate in ritual fashion the overthrow of the paternal tyrant by killing and eating the totem (TT, ). Freud also makes tragedy a product of this ambivalence: it ritually reenacts the “heroic” rebellion against the father, while the tragic hero’s downfall atones for the crime. Freud’s focus on ritual origins not only draws on the work of Robertson-Smith but also participates in a trend in early twentieth-century classical studies that attempted to locate the beginnings of organized religion and culture in ancient religious rituals involving the enactment of myths.15 Thus Freud’s theory of the primal parricide places psychoanalysis at the center of early twentieth-century debate on the social origins and function of religion and art. The crucial link between the two origins—the primal parricide and the origin of tragedy—is the suffering ( pathos) of the individual at the

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hands of the group. Freud claims that the hero’s rebellion and consequent suffering are the “essence” of tragedy (TT, ‒ ), which he explains by linking it to the murder of the primal father. According to Freud’s theory, when tragedy reenacted the ritual observance of the death of Dionysus, it commemorated the murder of the primal father by the company of brothers: But why had the Hero of tragedy to suffer? and what was the meaning of his “tragic guilt”? I will cut the discussion short and give a quick reply. He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the Hero of the great primaeval tragedy which was being re-enacted with a tendentious twist; and the tragic guilt was the guilt which he had to take on himself in order to relieve the Chorus from theirs. The scene upon the stage was derived from the historical scene through a process of systematic distortion—one might even say, as the product of a refined hypocrisy. In the remote reality it had actually been the members of the Chorus who caused the Hero’s suffering; now, however, they exhausted themselves with sympathy and regret and it was the Hero himself who was responsible for his own sufferings. The crime which was thrown on to his shoulders, presumptuousness and rebelliousness against a great authority, was precisely the crime for which the members of the Chorus, the company of brothers, were responsible. Thus the tragic Hero became, though it might be against his will, the redeemer of the Chorus. [TT,  ]

The transfer of guilt mediates between the hero and the chorus; tragedy defuses and disguises the “primaeval” conflict between them, and between those they represent, the tyrannical primal father and his murderous sons. Freud’s concern with tragic morality shifts its focus from human responsibility, as in the critique of tragedy in The Interpretation of Dreams, to “‘tragic guilt.’” With the quotation marks, Freud indicates both that he has imported this concept from elsewhere, and also that “tragic guilt” is such a well-known convention of tragedy, or of the interpretation of tragedy, that he need not bother to refer to any particular authority for this reading. Yet guilt is difficult to find in tragedy by the standards of our everyday life (TT,  ), and Freud implies that it is also difficult to know how seriously psychoanalysis should take such a conventional and “tragic” idea. Tragedy represents the primal parricide by distorting it: as if in a dream, some kind of censorship has required that the killing of the father never appear as such. The “tendentious” tragic representation of the crime provides an alibi for the true criminals, while transferring onto the hero the sense of guilt

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they ought to feel. The chorus members, who take the role of mere sympathetic spectators, witness a transgression committed by an individual in order to forget “the historical scene” in which those for whom they are surrogates, the band of brothers, rebelled against “a great authority.” Freud’s alignment of the primal parricide with the “goat-song” theory of the Dionysiac origins of tragedy also introduces an emphasis on the chorus’s sympathetic identification with the suffering hero: “In Greek tragedy the special subject-matter of the performance was the sufferings of the divine goat, Dionysus, and the lamentation of the goats who were his followers and who identified themselves with him” (TT, ; my emphasis). In the essay “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage” (written ‒ ), Freud argues that the spectator of the drama identifies with the hero. Thus if both the chorus and the spectator identify with the hero, and with his transgressive rebellion against authority, then they identify with his guilt as well, even if they ultimately escape punishment by allowing the hero to act as scapegoat. The fact that the tragic hero does not really redeem anyone from guilt also tallies with Freud’s assertion that the spectator’s identification with the hero feeds his masochism by making him participate in the hero’s pain and suffering (PCS, ‒ ). But if the tragic hero demonstrates the pervasiveness of guilt—one is always in the guilty position and never in the place of the father or of authority—then why does Freud equate the primal father, instead of the son, with the tragic hero? In fact, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, which reconsiders the problem of the relation between communal responsibility and individual suffering, Freud makes the son both the tragic hero and also the epic poet, the creator of the heroic myth. This text takes up the thread of Totem and Taboo by focusing on what it posited as the transhistorical and transcultural conflict between the individual and the group. Group Psychology attempts to deal with the phenomenon of mass psychology by arguing that the relation between the individual and the group is analogous psychologically to the ties between a leader and his followers. When Freud comes to the point in his argument of postulating the primacy of the group’s identification with the leader, who becomes their common ideal, he inserts this dynamic into his story of cultural origins in the primal parricide. In Totem and Taboo, neither the tyrannical primal father nor the murderous sons explicitly become social types whom one might meet on the street or see in the mirror—the text implies that this historical scene generates repet-

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itive psychic structures, social institutions, and historical events, but it focuses on simply putting the paradigm in place. Group Psychology, however, attempts to extend the implications of Totem and Taboo in order to do for sociology what the previous text did for anthropology.16 If all of group psychology originates in the primal horde, then sociology has only to understand its dynamics in order to predict and control the behavior of groups.17 By locating the origins of group psychology in the primal horde, however, Freud raises the possibility that “the psychology of groups is the oldest human psychology,” and that individual psychology merely derives from it (GP, ). Yet this conclusion cannot stand, and Freud introduces it only to call it into question: “Individual psychology must, on the contrary, be just as old as group psychology, for from the first there were two kinds of psychologies, that of the individual members of the group and that of the father, chief, or leader” (GP, ). As soon as group psychology seems primary, the individual resurfaces and even begins to define the group, since it gets broken down into “individual members.” Group Psychology reexamines the problem of whether the Oedipus complex can really be a group phenomenon: can it be experienced en masse, or is it rather an individualizing structure, and an individual experience that repeats a common, phylogenetic history? If the primal father had no Oedipus complex, then can he be the first individual? How do a group murder and the ritual observances and institutions that commemorate and disguise it give birth to the individual? In the postscript to Group Psychology, Freud fills in some of the details of the aftermath of the primal parricide in order to answer the question of how “the advance from group psychology to individual psychology was achieved also by the individual members of the group” (GP, ). After the murder, the brothers learned that none of them could take the father’s place, and that any attempt to do so would inevitably lead to violent conflict. They formed the “totemic community of brothers,” whose social organization and purpose was both to provide unity and equality and “to preserve and to expiate the memory of the murder” (GP, ). But the members of the band of brothers were not content with their state, and, according to Freud’s model of social evolution as instinctually motivated, this dissatisfaction must have provoked change. The chronology of evolution in social organization that Freud outlines makes it clear that the brothers are dissatisfied specifically with their lack of patriarchal power.

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Therefore, in the next stage, each one establishes himself as the “chief ” of a family in order to displace the “gynaecocracy” that had existed during “the fatherless period.” This transition suggests that the period of nonpatriarchal fraternal equality came during the stage of female rule, but Freud does not elaborate on this stage. Instead, he implies that even the return to the patriarchal family proves too egalitarian for the brothers: “The new family was only a shadow of the old one; there were numbers of fathers and each one was limited by the rights of the others” (GP, ). This scenario revises the account in Totem and Taboo, where the brothers return to their solidarity as the most important social advance and the one that had allowed them to unseat the father (TT, ). When Freud focuses specifically on “mass psychology” in the later text, he seems to find it both less attractive and less progressive. Being a father fails to resolve the problem of wanting to be “the Father.” But Freud lends substantiality to this shadowy and seemingly unattainable source of patriarchal power by linking it to the origins of Greek literature. The first individual and the epic poet are born simultaneously: It was then [at the stage of the “shadow” patriarchy], perhaps, that some individual, in the exigency of his longing, may have been moved to free himself from the group and take over the father’s part. He who did this was the first epic poet; and the advance was achieved in his imagination. This poet disguised the truth with lies in accordance with his longing. He invented the heroic myth. The hero was a man who by himself had slain the father—the father who still appeared in the myth as a totemic monster. Just as the father had been the boy’s first ideal, so in the hero who aspires to the father’s place the poet now created the first ego ideal. [GP,  ]18

The poet individualizes himself by devising as ego ideal the hero who attempts to take the father’s place—the first ego ideal aspires to take the place of the first ideal. This transition resembles a tautology because Freud is attempting to describe a “historical” period before there was an ego or an individual. He wants to capture the exact moment when one of the brothers has suddenly differentiated himself enough to know that he wants to take the father’s place—by himself. Greek literary history dictates the priority of the epic poet in Freud’s reconstruction of generic and human development. As epic came before tragedy, so the epic poet must be the one to create the hero of myth, or ego ideal, who becomes the model of the tragic hero, or ego.



                      

Yet this story of origins contradicts the one inTotem and Taboo. There the primal father was the tragic hero, while here the hero is the rebellious son/brother. Group Psychology also constructs two conflicting models of the origins of the individual: the father stands over against the group as the first individual, yet the son/brother/epic poet also individualizes himself by creating the myth through which the individual as a model emerges. Both kinds of heroes, however, take part in distortions of the truth of the primal parricide. The primal father/tragic hero assumes the guilt of the horde/chorus, while the first epic poet also makes one man responsible for the murder of the father instead of many. The epic poet, the new individual, spreads this “lie” by returning to the group in order to recite his poetry (GP, ‒), and he passes on, almost like a contagion, the structure of identification, ambivalence, and both the aggressive and the “poetic” individualization built into Freud’s version of the heroic myths. Both of these distortions of the primal parricide sound like Oedipus’s failed alibi: he found out that it was not many men who had murdered Laius at the crossroads, but one, himself.19 We arrive at Oedipus again because in order to place psychoanalysis at the theoretical origin of the Oedipal individual and of the Oedipal culture he stands for, there has to have been something older than tragedy, and psychoanalysis must open up that space, calling it epic, in order to occupy it. Freud’s deployment of tragic paradigms throughout his work attempts to theorize the relation of the individual to authority. Because that relation to authority constitutes the individual, Freud has a problem accounting for it in his stories of origins: where would authority come from before the birth of the subject? This problem contributes to the need for the primal father to be both the first individual and a preexisting authority to be rebelled against by the first individual. Freud’s scenario replaces the Schicksalstragödie’s emphasis on fate and the gods as arbiters of destiny with the figure of the primal father, who is both arbitrary and violent in his exercise of authority and heroic in his victimization. The story of the epic poet also justifies the permutations of the male positions (father/son/brother) within the narrative of the primal parricide. The creation of the heroic myth reminds the first individual that he is a son and not just a brother. In other words, it reinstates generational hierarchy as the primary structural principle, replacing the horizontal and therefore insufficiently differentiated (for Freud’s purposes) structure of the band of brothers. This shift toward universalized hierarchical social groupings of

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

male individuals occurs in both Totem and Taboo and Group Psychology, which focuses on institutions such as the church and the army. For Freud, however, social hierarchies are manifestations of the psychic structure’s own complex and shifting hierarchy of id, ego, and superego. I have maintained the language of individual versus group, horde, or mass throughout my discussion of tragic paradigms and the theory of the primal parricide to emphasize Freud’s translation from customs, institutions, dramatic representations, and rituals involving individuals and groups to originary scenes and narratives involving the ego and its development within familial relationships, both real and imaginary. Read as the drama of the ambivalent hero, Greek tragedy facilitates the move from social conflicts and group rituals to the internal “scene” of the individual psyche. Freud positions tragedy as origin in order to substitute psychoanalytic tragic stories of origins, the Oedipus complex, and primal parricide. The primal father has to be the tragic hero in order for there to be a logic and “history” through which psychoanalytic tragic paradigms can appropriate and replace tragedy. The authority and canonical status of Greek tragedy—the genre for representing conflict between individuals and various forms, social and religious, of “Necessity”—makes the psychoanalytic assimilation and supersession of tragedy an incomparably powerful theoretical move. But this appropriation leads to a series of substitutions and seeming equivalences, as the shifting priority of father and son, tragic hero and epic poet demonstrates. If the epic is historically older than tragedy, then there must be another originary cultural event that came before the primal parricide. In Freud’s scenario, the primal parricide occupies the historical place of the epic as prior to tragedy and generates the tragic model for the psyche. But the primal parricide story itself already works like a tragedy. Consequently, Freud’s theory of cultural origins revises Greek literary history by making tragedy give rise to the epic, just as, in The Interpretation of Dreams, he positions psychoanalysis itself as the “origin” of the Oedipus it reads in Sophocles’ play by being the first to reveal the true reason for the play’s “tragic effect.” This analysis of Freud’s replacement of Greek literary history with psychoanalytic “tragic history” also provides a way of understanding the institutionalizing power for psychoanalysis itself of what psychoanalytic thinkers have understood as Freud’s most radical innovation in thinking about history and temporality: Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, the



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phenomenon of a traumatic event in a person’s life that cannot be experienced as traumatic when it occurs because the person does not really know or understand—and therefore represses—what has happened to him or her. The person only experiences the trauma of the “first” event when a second event that resembles the first occurs at a later time. This “second” time the person’s knowledge (usually of sexuality) causes him or her to experience the trauma, not of the second event, but of the original event. Often, however, the first event is completely lost to memory, and all that is available is the traumatic emotion, which the person cannot explain by reference to the later event alone.20 Freud’s revision of Greek literary history makes psychoanalysis itself the necessary “second event” that triggers the tragic, Oedipal “history” of culture and human psychology. Freud’s scenario posits the primal parricide as the “original” traumatic “Deed” (Tat ) of culture (TT, ), but this “Deed” has been forgotten or repressed until the deferred action of the historical appearance of psychoanalysis itself unleashes its traumatic effect, witnessed to by the resistance of both patients and the scientific experts to the “universal destiny” of Oedipal sexuality. But psychoanalysis follows its model of tragedy in this, since tragedy also functions to reenact the primal parricide in a disguised form and arouses its own particular “tragic effect,” which Freud calls Oedipal. The difference that psychoanalytic theory claims to make to the “history” of culture is that it discloses to historical consciousness this originary traumatic act—it supersedes tragedy, which merely repeats the parricide through dramatic representation. Like the analyst in relation to the hysteric, psychoanalysis claims to know what tragedy only acts out, and therefore, as Freud’s revised history of Greek literature attests, it “precedes” tragedy. Freud’s appropriation of Oedipus Tyrannus and his cultural history of the tragic reproduction of father-son rivalry and ambivalence also demonstrate his great ambitions for psychoanalysis. The Oedipus story is not just a psychology, it is also a psychoanalytic history that substitutes the nonlinear temporality of deferred action for linear models of historic causality.21 Not only the psyche and culture but also history all become Oedipal. But Freud’s positioning of psychoanalysis as the historical triggering event in the revelation and recognition of Oedipal “history” also relies on the cultural authority of Greek tragedy, an authority that has its own history, which is not itself Oedipal. When Freud makes culture Oedipal, he also

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makes it tragic—even if his theory of tragedy becomes specifically psychoanalytic, its persuasiveness still relies on the institutionalized prestige of tragedy in European literary and philosophical traditions and within educational curricula. Freud’s elaboration of deferred action as a universalized phenomenon of history and culture also functions as part of a strategy to claim a disciplinary purview for psychoanalysis over the scientific and historical study of “human nature” and culture. Despite the pages and pages of references to various cultures and their totems and taboos, it is not an accident that Freud’s final thesis in Totem and Taboo —“the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex” (TT, )—immediately follows his story of tragic cultural origins. Greek tragedy is the crucial generic matrix for Freud’s Oedipal theory of culture: to authorize his reduction of culturally diverse religious practices to the universal structure of the Oedipus complex, Freud boldly “psychoanalyzes” Greek tragedy. The “goat-song” theory gives him a way to make the genre specifically relevant to the primal parricide, while tragedy’s paradigmatic cultural value allows him to generalize from it to a comprehensive theory of the psychological evolution of civilization. Since the line of descent of the primal parricide theory turns out to be historically and culturally specific, and dependent upon the institutional status and universal relevance of classical learning in the nineteenth century, it remains for us to explore the consequences of this genealogy for the psychoanalytic theory of the psyche. What are the implications of their “birth” in tragedy for the ego, id, and superego?

“Tragic Guilt” and the Structure of the Psyche The shifting relations of fathers and sons, individuals and masses, heroes and choruses, rely on ambivalence, identification, and guilt to effect their narrative and theoretical displacements. Freud translates the themes and conventions of tragedy into the Oedipus complex through the permutations in the family constellation provoked by ambivalence and identification, which in turn give rise to more ambivalence and guilt. In this psychoanalytic version of tragedy, the violent aspects of ambivalence toward and identification with the father produce guilt, and the tragic scenario lends its particular “morality” to the struggles of whatever entity, whether hero or ego, defies (paternal) authority. When the tragic hero becomes the



                      

first ego ideal, then “tragic guilt,” however distanced by its conventionality, constitutes both individual and group identity, since psychoanalysis universalizes the Oedipus complex and makes it the primary mechanism of socialization and the formation of institutions. Guilt, as both symptom and cause, becomes central in two later texts, one on the structure of the psyche, The Ego and the Id (), and one that attempts to diagnose a pervasive malaise of “Kultur,” Civilization and Its Discontents ().22 While Freud does not refer to tragedy, both texts deal with guilt as an obstacle to psychoanalytic therapy and to human happiness in civilization. When guilt blocks all progress, whether analytic or social, it exhibits its tragic genealogy in Freud’s writings. The Ego and the Id maps out the psyche, defining the differences and interconnections of id, ego, and superego. Freud explains that the ego is a specialized part of the id that puts it in contact with the outside world. The reality principle reigns in the ego, while the id functions according to the pleasure principle. The id consists of the repressed and unconscious drives, and it lends its energy to the ego, which nevertheless attempts to guide it, like a man on horseback (EI, ‒). The array of metaphors (horse and rider, ovum and germinal disk [ibid.]) and diagrams with which Freud provisionally describes id and ego testifies to the difficulty of defining a mental function that has no physical characteristics. Yet a further complication arises when Freud introduces the superego: it accomplishes the internalization of the proscriptions of the outside world (parents and society), but although it is part of the ego, it is not fully conscious. As in Group Psychology, Freud gives prominence to the earliest identifications of the ego, and “the first and most important identification” with the father that creates the ego ideal (EI, ). Freud seems to displace the importance of the anaclitic object choice of the mother’s breast, and then the mother herself, in favor of this primary identification with the father, which “is a direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than any object-cathexis” (EI, ). Depending upon the outcome of the Oedipus complex, the little boy will end up identified primarily with father or mother, although a strengthening of the earliest identification with the father would be the more normal outcome. Analogously, the little girl would be most likely to identify with her mother and take her father as object. In any case, Freud explains, some combination of these identifications will form “a precipitate in the ego” that “con-

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

fronts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super-ego” (EI, ). The superego, a function of authority that has been internalized, becomes a crucial determinant of the psychic structure on the level both of the individual and of the species (EI, ). In setting up the ego ideal, the ego subjects itself both to the superego and to the id: it elevates the residues of its relationships to its first objects, which have remained in the id, to the level of censoring agents of the ego (EI,  ). This process also takes place at the phylogenetic level: “Through the forming of the ideal, what biology and the vicissitudes of the human species have created in the id and left behind in it is taken over by the ego and re-experienced in relation to itself as an individual” (EI,  ). The ego ideal, or superego, serves to mediate between the psychic and social worlds, and between personal and cultural history. As in the account of the primal horde in Group Psychology, Freud makes the superego responsible for social solidarity, because individuals come together in groups by identifying with the same ego ideal and thus sharing the same superego (EI, ).23 The ego’s failure to live up to the demands of the superego also creates the sense of guilt, which may be unconscious (ibid.). Although tragedy drops out of Freud’s discussion of the “dependent relationships of the ego,”24 the psychic apparatus itself perpetually reenacts the kind of tragedy he identifies at the origins of culture. The superego not only internalizes the authority of the parents, especially the father, but also treats the ego in the same way that the gods or fate treat the tragic hero in Freud’s descriptions of tragedy. The superego emerges to carry out the repression of the Oedipus complex (EI, ) and chastises the ego for its “moral” failures and transgressions: “It is a memorial of the former weakness and dependence of the ego, and the mature ego remains subject to its domination” (EI, ). Freud traces both morality and religion to the internalized aggressiveness of the superego: “Even ordinary morality has a harshly restraining, cruelly prohibiting quality. It is from this, indeed, that the conception arises of a higher being who deals out punishment inexorably” (EI, ). The patient in analysis often has the same difficulty recognizing his unconscious guilt that the spectator has in understanding why the hero of tragedy must suffer. But this guilt, a result of the harshness of the superego toward the ego and of the ego’s ambivalence toward the id’s objects, often stymies therapy:



                      

In the end we come to see that we are dealing with what may be called a “moral” factor, a sense of guilt, which is finding its satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the punishment of suffering. We shall be right in regarding this disheartening explanation as final. But as far as the patient is concerned this sense of guilt is dumb; it does not tell him he is guilty; he does not feel guilty, he feels ill. This sense of guilt expresses itself only as a resistance to recovery which it is extremely difficult to overcome. It is also particularly difficult to convince the patient that this motive lies behind his continuing to be ill; he holds fast to the more obvious explanation that treatment by analysis is not the right remedy for his case. [EI, ‒]

Freud attributes this resistance and underlying guilt to the affinities between the id and superego, since the superego derives from the id’s earliest object-cathexes: the reason for the guilt is unconscious (EI, ). Yet the same “‘moral’” factor that blocks the cure also puts the neurotic patient in the position of the tragic hero. The patient clings to his (or presumably her) suffering as if it were the mark of individuality. He does not know that he is guilty, just as Oedipus does not know, and he may only “recognize” this guilt and thus attain a cure if he accepts the analyst’s explanation for his illness. Instead, he perseveres in his rebellion against the analyst’s authority by insisting that the analysis has failed. Freud does not diagnose this resistance as “heroic,” even though psychoanalytic theory has set up the tragic scenario in which resistance and rebellion become constitutive of the subject: the subject, as psychoanalysis understands “him,” is constructed to rebel against authority internally and hence continually replenishes, consciously or unconsciously, his stock of guilt. While Freud criticizes tragedy for its morality—the conventional message he attributes to it that humans must bow to “Necessity”—this description of resistance to psychoanalytic therapy suggests that the sense of guilt inherent in the ego’s relation to its counterparts in the psyche functions in the same way as the “tragic guilt” of the hero: it gives a tendentious moral valence to multiple psychic structural phenomena that determine the ego’s fate beyond its agency, unconsciously. Thus, on their own terms, Freud’s texts end up conveying a doubly tragic message: the therapy fails because of the “heroic” efforts of the patient to rebel against the authority of the analyst, while the psychic apparatus enacts its own tragic struggle among inextricably antagonistic entities, the ego, id, and superego. The psychoanalytic tragic scenario produces a subject of tragic pathos—either in

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his familial and social relations, or in his illness and analysis, or in his unconscious—because the individual, as psychoanalysis constructs him or her, must both accept the psychological “Necessity” of the psychic structure and identify with the tragic Oedipal paradigms of the analysis. There is no way out of this specifically psychological tragedy, as mind, history, society, and culture are all structured analogously and merely repeat and intensify one another’s effects. Thus the dubious tragic message that Freud attributes to Sophocles and then banishes from psychoanalysis resurfaces in his account of the resistance to the cure. Guilt as a phenomenon in therapy not only undermines the distance between psychoanalysis and the tragedy of destiny but also underwrites psychoanalytic theories of the subject with the tendentious determinism Freud read in Sophocles. Freud broaches this phenomenon of resistance to being cured in order to demonstrate the manifestation of the death drive in the superego’s sadistic treatment of the ego (EI, ). But the sadism does not belong originally to the superego. In its study of psychic and social aggressiveness, Civilization and Its Discontents elaborates that the superego takes over the ego’s aggression, the negative side of its ambivalence toward the ego ideal (the father). The ego plays the role of the degraded father, while the superego punishes it with all the vehemence that the ego had reserved for the primary obstacle to its instinctual satisfactions (CD, ‒). This set of identifications and transfers of emotional responses echoes the story of the primal parricide and its tragic genealogy. The sons kill the father, then set him up as the authority that punishes them for their transgressions. The tragic hero rebels and suffers retribution because the epic poet has made him stand in for the group of brothers who really committed the murder. But we can “go back” even further in accounting for the causes of all this displaced violence. Since the tyrannical primal father expelled and perhaps even destroyed his sons, his aggression, like the father’s prohibitions, provoked the retaliation of the first individual/son /ego/band of brothers— their violence answers his. Therefore, the tragic structure of the alibi centered on the figure of the father—the tendentious “secondary revision” and displacement of responsibility, aggression, and guilt—also accounts for the “negative” dynamics of the psyche with its conflicts among ego, id, and superego: the superego, or internalized paternal function, provides an alibi for the violence of the ego toward the “father.” Civilization and Its Discontents extends the tragic guilt of the psyche’s



                      

constitution and makes it the root of cultural malaise and the failure of civilization to provide happiness. According to Freud, society exists to prevent any one individual from obtaining too much power, but human solidarity cannot do away with the resentment of individuals, who must renounce various instinctual satisfactions in favor of social life. The group can never eliminate individual aggression and, remaining true to its origins in the primal horde, it also inflicts violence upon individuals. Civilization restrains individual aggression through its surrogate in the psyche, the superego: The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening it and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city. [CD, ‒]

While Civilization and Its Discontents begins as a refutation of the universality of the “oceanic feeling” that Romain Rolland described to Freud as the root of religious feeling (CD, ‒), it quickly moves to substitute another universal, guilt, and especially the unconscious version that Freud calls “das Unbehagen,” a pervasive dissatisfaction. By analogy with this seemingly inevitable individual experience of guilt, Freud diagnoses the entire culture that passes on this psychological disposition as “neurotic” (CD, ). Although Freud cautions against straining analogies without regard to contexts (CD, ), his thesis linking the inefficacy of social progress to the inevitability of human aggression overwhelms his reserve, since it leads him to employ his Oedipal version of individual psychology as a model, by analogy, for human civilization. The diagnosis of a pathological culture implies that the tragic paradigms Freud locates in the psyche and in his story of cultural origins also contribute to the “discontents” of civilization. By the time he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud had, among other things, devised a tragic poetics of culture.

“Tragedies” of Gender One of Freud’s final texts, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (), focuses on a particularly difficult problem of technique, the end of the analysis. At one point, Freud calls the last resort of setting an arbitrary end date to one patient’s analysis a “heroic measure” (AT, ). The refer-

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ence to heroism may at first seem offhand, but in fact it brings up again the relation between the individual and “Necessity” that Freud mentions throughout his writings. The analysis itself cannot avoid arbitrariness and coercion, and the analyst must sometimes act “heroically” in risking the outcome that “blackmailing” (AT, ) the patient in order to break a deadlock will thwart the cure rather than abet it. Although the threat of termination may cause certain of the patient’s resistances to collapse, parts of the repressed material may become buried permanently, thus endangering the complete success of the analysis (AT, ). Freud goes on to discuss the resistances to the cure that obstruct a successful ending to the analysis. He locates a force working against the analysis that “is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering” (AT, ). Part of this resistance comes from unconscious guilt arising from the ego’s relation to the superego, and ultimately from the workings of the death drive (AT, ‒). Yet Freud reserves his most pessimistic comments on resistance for the refusal of male patients to recognize the authority of the male analyst, and of female patients to accept the exigencies of their biological sexuality. The male patient rebels against taking any kind of passive position toward another man, even though, Freud argues, this position does not always amount to castration: “[The male patient] refuses to subject himself to a father-substitute, or to feel indebted to him for anything, and consequently he refuses to accept his recovery from the doctor” (AT, ). The woman patient’s resistance comes from her refusal to abandon her desire for a penis. Freud explains, however, that both of these resistances actually amount to a repudiation of the feminine: We often have the impression that with the wish for a penis and the masculine protest we have penetrated through all the psychological strata and have reached bedrock, and that thus our activities are at an end. This is probably true, since, for the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock. The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex. [AT, ]

Freud adds a footnote to the final sentence cited here in which he specifies that the “masculine protest” does not entail a rejection of “his passive attitude [as such]—what might be called the social aspect of femininity,” since “such men often display a masochistic attitude—a state that amounts to bondage—towards women.” These men reject “not passivity in general, but passivity toward a male”—that is, they really fear castration (AT,

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n).25 This footnote calls into question the “biological” nature of the femininity that both men and women are said to reject. If the primary definition of what men reject in the feminine is not passivity but castration, then how can Freud call this a rejection of the “biological” feminine, since the woman is not actually castrated, but only looks that way to the man who fears castration? Psychoanalysis itself codifies the feminine as the sign of castration, since, in a biological sense, a female cannot be castrated. Because the diagnosis of penis envy also follows the logic of interpreting the woman as castrated, it belongs to the realm of representation, and of masculine or culturally produced fantasies and fears, as many feminist critics have demonstrated.26 Freud’s account of the “masculine protest” also reveals that the blockage of the cure must come from readings of sexuality on the body, from what we would call gender, and not from biology.27 If the analysis ultimately finds its end in the biological “bedrock” of the repudiation of femininity, then therapy fails because of the socially constructed gender categories that psychoanalysis revises, elaborates, and biologizes. Freud’s configuration of femininity in this late text as both the sign and product of a particularly rigorous, biological necessity of sex is consistent with his earlier formulations of femininity as the outcome of a severe suppression of libido required by the reproductive function of sexuality: “Nature takes less careful account of its [the woman’s libido’s] demands than in the case of masculinity. And the reason for this may lie—thinking once again teleologically—in the fact that the accomplishment of the aim of biology has been entrusted to the aggressiveness of men and has been made to some extent independent of women’s consent.”28 Here Freud articulates the repercussions for women of the origin of civilization in the primal parricide: because masculine individuality comes into being through aggressiveness and competition, feminine individuality must be subordinated both by “Nature” and by culture to masculine aggressiveness. Freud seems to reserve some of his most uncompromisingly “teleological” descriptions of the “aim” of sexuality for his formulations of femininity as the product of a particularly complicated and painful psychological development: A man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful, somewhat unformed individual, whom we expect to make powerful use of the possibilities for development opened to him by analysis. A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her

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psychical rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further development; it is as though the whole process had already run its course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influence—as though, indeed, the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned. As therapists we lament this state of things, even if we succeed in putting an end to our patient’s ailment by doing away with her neurotic conflict.29

Freud’s description of the thirty-year-old woman recalls his essay of  on the “Medusa’s head” in which he equates the effect of the male’s view of the female genitals with the petrifying effect of the Medusa’s gaze.30 In this case, the thirty-year-old woman herself seems to have been petrified by her own femininity, as if her fate were to embody the “necessity” of castration that she exhibits to the “frightened” male analyst. She herself is the “end” that “Nature” has designed for her, and the restrictions that reproduction places on her development also limit the kind of change that even a successful analysis can foster. All the analyst can do, like the tragic chorus, is to “lament” the spectacle of biological determinism that she presents. But the terms of Freud’s diagnosis reinforce the cultural categories of gender that psychoanalysis both naturalizes and figures as “tragic.” The woman herself is not really “petrified” or “rigid”—she is a site for medical, psychotherapeutic, and larger social and cultural definitions that attempt to determine her “nature.” The psychoanalytic account of masculinity endows Oedipal conflicts, whether psychological or social, with the seriousness and grandeur of tragedy. Freud’s theory of the primal parricide emphasizes the male violence and competition that produce culture—masculine aggressiveness causes social change. When Freud outlines the development of femininity, however, even the resistance and rebellion that he thematizes as “heroic” in the male patient are not available to a woman. “Biology” takes over the “moral,” thematic work of tragedy in Freud’s description of woman’s destiny—it becomes the tragic alibi for Freud’s impositions of conventional gender classifications. The “inevitability” of her “difficult development” cannot promise cultural progress, even through conflict, but only inspires a scientific resignation in the face of “Nature’s” exigencies and injustice. Women are not only “hostile” to civilization because it forces them “into the background,” according to Freud; they are disabled by their sex for the work of culture (CD, ‒). But Freud’s tragic theories also accomplish

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this “exclusion” of women from civilization because the social and symbolic role of femininity is to embody the various forms of “Fate” in opposition to which Oedipal culture—and psychoanalysis itself—come into being and establish their own institutionalized forms of “inevitability.”31 I have traced tragedy through the Freudian corpus in order to demonstrate the continuity of Freud’s elaboration of “tragic” psychoanalytic paradigms. Greek tragedy works as a generic matrix for psychoanalytic theory, even as it is criticized, strategically deployed, and then submerged in Freud’s formulations of the psyche, gender, and cultural history. The later texts display the same kind of mistrust of tragedy’s generic effects as evidenced in Freud’s early formulations of Oedipus, while they continue to establish tragic models of identification, the relation of the ego and superego, and of guilt as resistance to the cure. The psychoanalytic version of tragedy also functions to mediate, while preserving a constitutive opposition, between society and the individual, allowing for Freud’s reconstruction of the psychological origins of culture. Thus the “end” of analysis may also be its goal: to arrive at the point where both identification with and resistance to its theories of gender and sexuality become the foundations of the psyche, “biological facts,” and even a kind of tragic “heroism.” Freud’s writings convey a new version of the “moral message” that he condemns in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and the tragedy of destiny: each subject must accept the Oedipal structure of the psyche and of human culture, and, in consequence, recognize the “necessity” of psychoanalytic knowledge itself.

3 Lacanian Psychoanalysis at Colonus

Thus far I have analyzed Freud’s appropriation of tragedy as a strategy to legitimize psychoanalysis. Not only does his claim to provide the most profound interpretation of Sophocles’ drama endow psychoanalysis with the cultural capital associated with the classical curriculum, but Freud also makes use of tragic paradigms to authorize and universalize his theories of specifically psychological determinism. By examining tragic models in Freud’s texts, it becomes possible to arrive at a revised historical understanding of the function of tragedy in psychoanalysis that delimits the scope of the Oedipal. Now I shall investigate how Jacques Lacan’s reconfiguration of Freudian theory deals with the place of tragedy in psychoanalysis. The Lacanian Oedipus, I contend, continues to mobilize tragic thematics inherited from Freud to support the theory of the unconscious, linguistic determination of subjectivity. I focus on the Lacanian version of Oedipus elaborated by Shoshana Felman, who proposes in her book Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture () to delineate the specificity of Lacan’s understanding of analysis and of the unconscious by explicating how Lacan reads Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that these Lacanian extensions of Freud’s tragic paradigms

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are as much concerned with the interpretive and cultural authority of psychoanalysis as with its theoretical and therapeutic identity. My critique of Felman’s argument for the centrality of psychoanalysis to “contemporary culture” pays attention to the way in which her readings of tragedy amplify and underwrite her presentation of the techniques and goals of analysis. The fates of psychoanalysis and Oedipus are so intimately linked that psychoanalytic criticism seems compelled repeatedly to assert the cogency and superiority of its readings of Sophocles’ plays about Oedipus. Lacanian analysis follows Freud’s lead in purveying a decontextualizing reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays that fosters the institutionalization of psychoanalytic knowledge by displaying its ability to reveal the tragic depths of human experience. In examining this strategy, I draw a strong distinction between Sophoclean drama and Lacanian psychoanalysis: whereas Sophocles’ play about Oedipus’s end enacts the particular necessity of his location, the universalizing trajectory of psychoanalysis means that it never arrives at Colonus.

Oedipus Without the Complex Jean-Pierre Vernant has written a definitive critique of the psychoanalytic reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus from the perspective of contemporary classical scholarship. Vernant criticizes Freud’s reading as based on a reconstruction of “an intimate experience undergone by the public, which is historically unlocated.” He contrasts Freud’s approach with his own method of “historical psychology,” which attempts to reconstruct the relation between the “linguistic, thematic, and dramatic” elements of the drama and the “problem of greater magnitude, namely that of the historical, social, and mental context that gives the meaning of the text its full force.”1 Vernant charges that the attribution of “the tragic effect” specifically to Oedipus Tyrannus because of its display of “universal” parricidal and incestuous desires flies in the face of Freud’s knowledge of other equally successful and “effective” Greek tragedies whose plots have nothing to do with either incest or parricide. In other words, in order to give Oedipal desires universal status, Freud has virtually to pretend that other tragedies do not exist, or that they fail to produce any “tragic effect.” Vernant also argues strongly against the tendency of psychoanalysis to reduce all Greek myths to versions of Oedipus: “If [the myths] . . . are all repeti-

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tions of one another, if synonymy is the rule, then mythology in all its diversity can no longer be regarded as a system with meaning. If all it can say is Oedipus, Oedipus, and nothing but Oedipus, it no longer means anything at all.”2 In opposition to the psychoanalytic reading of Oedipus Tyrannus, Vernant, following Aristotle, argues for the importance in the play’s action of peripeteia, or reversal, and anagno¯risis, or recognition, and focuses on the overwhelming ambiguity of its language.3 Through the doubleness of the play’s language—its reversal of the positive to the negative, king to outcast, and wise man to one most ignorant of his criminality—Sophocles makes Oedipus demonstrate the Greek religious understanding of the contradictions of human existence: “The human condition is reversed—however great, just, and fortunate one may be—as soon as it is scrutinized in relation to the gods.”4 The fifth-century Athenians had their own ideas about “human nature,” but it was not the same “human nature” that Freud describes. Vernant’s historical account of tragedy places it at the frontier of two conflicting modes of thought: the archaic religion of heroic myth and epic poetry, and the discourses of the fifth-century polis, with its democratic legal, political, and social institutions: “The tragic turning point . . . occurs when a gap develops at the heart of the social experience. It is wide enough for the oppositions between legal and political thought on the one hand and the mythical and heroic traditions on the other to stand out quite clearly. Yet it is narrow enough for the conflict in values still to be a painful one and for the clash to continue to take place.”5 According to Vernant, the structure of the drama itself, and the ambiguity and contradictions built into the tragic genre, constitute the specifically tragic message of Oedipus Tyrannus: “The logical schema of reversal, corresponding with the ambiguous type of thought that is characteristic of tragedy, offers the spectators a particular type of lesson: Man is not a being that can be described or defined; he is a problem, a riddle the double meanings of which are inexhaustible.”6 Although Freud might have agreed that the play constructs man as a “problem” or “riddle,” the psychoanalytic focus on themes of incest and parricide overlooks the language, structure, and religious and ideological significance of the drama in the context of the fifth-century polis. The doubleness of the play’s language, for Vernant, is not the symptom of a psychological state that the play demonstrates but the linguistic form specific

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to the tragic representation of the human condition—tragic ambiguity represents a moment of transition within fifth-century Athenian culture. For Vernant, the price the critic pays for immediately universalizing this tragic ambiguity is to render the impact of Sophocles’ play, and of Greek drama in general, psychologically and morally predictable, and even banal. Vernant also questions Freud’s interpretation of Jocasta’s comment about the insignificance of incestuous dreams; in The Interpretation of Dreams (), Freud cites the speech as evidence of the universality of such dreams.7 Vernant points out that the fifth-century Athenians had their own understanding of dream symbolism; Sophocles’ audience might have been reminded, for example, of the story of Hippias and his dream in Herodotus’s history of the Persian Wars. In this episode (.), Hippias, who is marching on Athens in hopes of becoming tyrant there with the help of the Persian army, has a dream that he is lying with his mother. He joyfully interprets the dream as a prediction that he will regain control over the land of Athens, since intercourse with the mother symbolizes possession of the earth. Upon disembarking at Marathon, however, Hippias suddenly coughs and sneezes violently, losing a loose tooth in the sand. After failing to find the tooth, and believing that this fulfills his dream, he becomes resigned to the failure of the expedition: “‘After all the land is not ours, and we shall never be able to bring it under [our control]. All my share in it is the portion of which my tooth has possession.’”8 Vernant explains that incestuous dreams could be interpreted in several ways by the Greeks: “to dream of union with one’s mother—that is with the earth from which everything is born and to which everything returns—means sometimes death, sometimes taking possession of the land, winning power.” Vernant concludes that because the Greeks had several different possible meanings for dreams of incest with the mother, not all of which were negative or liable to provoke the repression and anxiety psychoanalysis associates with Oedipal dreams, Freud’s interpretation of Jocasta’s statement is anachronistic, not in its focus on the universality of incestuous dreams but in its insistence that they always signify the same thing. Vernant concludes that “it is impossible that dreams, seen as a reality outside of history, should contain and yield up the meaning of works of culture.” In Sophocles’ play, Vernant also reminds us, it is not a dream that brings about Oedipus’ downfall but his actions, and Oedipus himself cannot have an Oedipus complex.9

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I have broached Vernant’s historicist critique of Freud both because I rarely see it cited in psychoanalytic discussions of the Oedipus plays, and also because it does substantial work toward loosening the grip of psychoanalytic readings on Oedipus Tyrannus. Vernant’s analysis demonstrates that Freud’s reading of Sophocles’ play is “innovative,” not only because it provides a new interpretation of its meaning, but also because it assigns a meaning and defines a “tragic effect” that would have been new to Sophocles and the Athenian audience. Freud did not discover the “essence” of the drama but rather provided a new version of the Oedipus myth. Given the ways in which Freud’s appropriation of Greek tragedy parlays the prestige of classical learning, Vernant’s critique enables us to perceive how anti-philological Freud’s interpretation of Oedipus Tyrannus is, even though his methods were informed by philology. Freud was ultimately not interested in ascertaining the historical or moral meaning of Sophocles’ play, especially not within its own religious framework, but rather wished to provide a theory explaining and monopolizing for psychoanalysis the play’s relevance for all time. The scandalous aspect of this institutionalizing strategy for a disciplinary rival, as Vernant’s argument demonstrates, lies in its claim to render all such historical research as the classicist’s secondary and finally irrelevant, even as it relies on the cultural authority of classical Greek literature.

The Clinical Performance: Oedipus as Interpretation Vernant’s objections to psychoanalytic readings of Oedipus Tyrannus cannot be dismissed as merely a dispute over disciplinary boundaries, although it does not take a great deal of professional sympathy to understand his frustration with psychoanalytic interpretations of the play that ignore the work of classicists and methodologies of classical scholarship. Reading Greek drama requires not only attention to the texts themselves but also an awareness of the difficulties of the scholarly labor involved in piecing together the historical, social, political, and religious contexts of tragedy. Although Freud himself showed great interest in the theories about tragedy that were prevalent in his day, contemporary psychoanalytic critics commonly overlook classical scholarship.10 The subordination of a philological interest in Greek drama is a hallmark of psychoanalytic criticism that also indicates its institutionalizing agenda. Felman begins her analysis of Oedipus, which she terms “the speci-

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men story of psychoanalysis” (AI, ), with the problem of the narrative, interpretive, and clinical efficacy of the Oedipus story. She suggests that Freud’s discovery of Oedipal desires in The Interpretation of Dreams created a new way of linking autobiographical narration and theory, and opened up the question of the relationship between the structures of truth and fiction in psychoanalysis (AI, ‒). Most important to her study, however, is the way Lacan revises Freud’s understanding of the theoretical, clinical, and literary functions of the Oedipus story. Felman points out that Lacan moves away from Freud’s emphasis on repressed fantasies and wishes about incest and parricide toward a structural understanding of the Oedipal. For Lacan, she explains, the Oedipus complex is a triangular and a “complex” structure that “implies a radical asymmetry between the Imaginary (archetypal relation to the mother) and the Symbolic (archetypal relation to the structure of alliance between mother, father, and child).” The Lacanian Imaginary involves a “dual perspective (narcissistic mirroring, exchangeability of self and other),” while the Symbolic is a tripartite formation (AI, ‒). The Symbolic differentiates itself from the Imaginary, not only by virtue of its triangularity, but also because it subverts duality and introduces a third position, that of “Father, Language, Law, the reality of death, all of which Lacan designates as the Other.” The subversion of the duality of the Imaginary by the Symbolic also brings about the unconscious as an “otherness to oneself ” (AI, ). The Symbolic constitutes the entrance of the subject into the “socio-symbolic” order.11 In order to delineate the clinical function of the Oedipus complex, Felman refers to Lacan’s reading of an essay by Melanie Klein (‒), “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego” (), in which Klein describes the case of a four-year-old boy whom she calls “Dick.” Klein observes of him that “adaptation to reality and emotional relations to his environment were almost entirely lacking.”12 Klein diagnoses Dick as unable to engage in symbol formation, and thus to form relationships with objects.13 His very limited vocabulary of object relations consists of an interest in “trains and stations and also in door-handles, doors and the opening and shutting of them.” Klein interprets these interests as having “a single source: . . . the penetration of the penis into the mother’s body.”14 When Dick came to her for the first time, Klein was confronted with the problem of making contact with a child who seemed completely indifferent to his surroundings, including all the objects and toys in the

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consulting room. Although she does not explain whether she knew of his interest in trains and doors from his parents or nurse before the interview, Klein immediately makes use of these objects in a way that Lacan and Felman focus on in their interpretations of the analysis: I took a big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them “Daddy-train” and “Dick-train.” Thereupon he picked up the train I called “Dick” and made it roll to the window and said “Station.” I explained: “The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy.” He left the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the room, shut himself in, saying “dark” and ran out again directly. He went through this performance several times. I explained to him: “It is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside mummy.” Meantime he picked up the train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors. While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said twice in a questioning way: “Nurse?” I answered: “Nurse is soon coming.”15

As a result of Klein’s intervention, using the trains to place little Dick in the position of Oedipus, he is able to articulate need and anxiety toward his nurse, and Klein sees this event as the beginning of symbolization for him. She reports that soon after this session Dick began to relate to other sets of objects based upon the Oedipal symbolism she had introduced. Lacan finds this case fascinating, and he uses it to illuminate several difficult aspects of his theory of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, as well as to illustrate the clinical effect of the Oedipal strategy.16 According to Felman, Lacan focuses on the Oedipus complex as structure, rather than as interpretation: The success of the interpretation, its clinical efficacy, does not proceed from the accuracy of its meaning (“You want to fuck your mother”) but from the way this discourse of the Other situates the child, in language, in relation to the people who surround him, are close to him. This is what the Oedipal intervention is all about. “Melanie Klein does not proceed here to any interpretation,” insists Lacan. What the preconceived and heavy-handed interpretation does is to give the child—through the verbalized Oedipal constellation—not a meaning but a structure, a linguistic structure by which to relate himself to other human beings; a structure, therefore, in which meaning—sexual meaning—can later be articulated and described.17

In explaining this clinical effect of the Oedipal “intervention,” Felman sets out a schema of equivalences and analogies for both the Imaginary and the Symbolic. According to Felman, Klein succeeds in bringing Dick into lan-

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guage by allowing him to situate himself as a signifier in relation to other signifiers, thereby opening up for him the possibility of relations with other people. Dick’s problem was his inability to differentiate himself from his mother; he was caught in a specular relation, which, for Lacan, is constitutive of the Imaginary. Klein succeeds in introducing triangularity and symbolism by suggesting that Dick and Daddy are in the same position in relation to mummy, as Felman explains: “Me : mother :: father : mother. A : B :: C: B. The equivalence here is not between two objects but between two relations, in which the substitution of A (Dick) and C (Daddy) is not accomplished by resemblance (projective identity) but by a parallel position in a structure (metonymy, desire)” (AI,  ). I am most interested, however, in the question of whether this clinical intervention, this violent “slapping on” ( flanquer) of the Oedipus complex, as Lacan calls Klein’s procedure (S, ), constitutes an interpretation, or something else. According to Felman, Lacan understands the clinical effectiveness of Klein’s Oedipal intervention as a “performative” rather than a “cognitive” interpretation (AI,  ). Klein’s statements to Dick function as “speech acts,” that is, as enunciations that accomplish what they say. By giving Dick the Oedipal structure that introduces the possibility of a third term, and of symbolization, Klein also grants him the ability to see himself as part of a system of signs and objects distinct from but related to one another. When he calls for the nurse, he opens himself to language, because he understands the possibility that something different from himself, the nurse, is missing, and he is able to function within the linguistic system of differentiation and symbolic substitution. Felman argues that Klein’s intervention is performative because her speech constitutes Dick as a subject who is able to speak to others: “What Klein in effect does through her first spoken intervention (Oedipal interpretation) is thus not simply to identify the child’s initial structure of address, but to create it” (AI, ‒). Felman explains that for Lacan, the analyst’s role is “to identify the symbolic structure in whose terms the interpretations are received” (AI, ). This symbolic structure is Oedipal, then, not because of its sexual or incestuous content, but rather because of its triangularity, which allows for the introduction of a third term and thus the system of differentiating signifying relationships constitutive of language. While the pronouncement that Klein’s intervention is not a cognitive interpretation may sound potentially convincing in the case of a dysfunc-

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tional four-year-old boy, it is difficult to agree with Lacan’s and Felman’s generalizations from this case to the analytic situation as such. How could an adult analysand, for example, fail to understand cognitively that the Oedipal structure has to do with certain figures, or positions in the triangle, namely, the father, the mother, and the son (leaving aside for the moment the question of the daughter’s position)? Is it really possible that in the schema Felman sets up to explain the structural workings of the Oedipus complex, there is no system of sexual difference already in place that allows for the substitution of “Dick” for “Daddy”? Felman claims that the substitution of Dick for Daddy does not work according to resemblance, but if this is true, then why does Klein represent them both with trains, which only differ in size, while the mother becomes the “tunnel,” the distinctive element in the structure? The father may intervene in the Imaginary relation between mother and child in order to introduce the Symbolic, with the possibility of relations of difference among signifiers, but it seems that ever afterward, the feminine will function as the sign of difference. On the basis of this case study, one might even be tempted to presume that it is actually the mother’s embodiment of sexual difference that permits the Symbolic difference inaugurated by the paternal function to appear at all. On the evidence of Klein’s pseudonym for her patient, it cannot be a coincidence that for the structure of substitution in relation to the mother to work, both “Dick” and “Daddy” have to be anatomically male—little Dick does not merely have a metonymic relation to Daddy, he physically resembles him.18 Equally problematic is Lacan’s and Felman’s claim that Klein “unconsciously” produces her Oedipal intervention and in this way creates Dick’s unconscious: If Klein rejoins, thus, Dick’s unconscious, it is not because she truly understands its message or directly hears its discourse, but because she is herself inhabited by the discourse of the Other—inhabited by the discourse of the Oedipus myth—of which she is herself nothing but an unconscious medium when, at a loss with respect to any understanding of the child and “out of habit,” she quasi-automatically ventures her mechanical interpretation. [AI, ; my emphasis]

Klein herself gives a very different account of her technique in this case. She explains that with Dick she had to alter her usual analytic procedure: “In general I do not interpret the material until it has found expression in various representations. In this case, however, where the capacity to repre-

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sent it was almost entirely lacking, I found myself obliged to make my interpretations on the basis of my general knowledge, the representations in Dick’s behavior being relatively vague.”19 To suggest that Klein “unconsciously” intervenes, rather than provides an interpretation based on her “general knowledge”—that is her analytic expertise and clinical experience—directly contradicts Klein’s own testimony. How can a trained analyst perform an Oedipal intervention purely unconsciously? Lacan patronizingly implies that Klein’s success with Dick is due to some kind of (feminine) clinical instinct that she has trouble theorizing.20 “Melanie Klein does not proceed to any interpretation here, and she is vividly conscious of this,” he concludes (“Melanie Klein ne procède ici, elle en a vivement conscience, à aucune interprétation”[S, ]). In following Lacan to suggest that Klein does not intervene consciously, analytically, in a particular and concerted way, and that she is not interpreting cognitively, Felman actually puts forward a reading that attempts to displace or even erase Oedipal interpretation.21 It is revealing that Felman writes of the Oedipus complex as related to “sexual meaning,” in the singular, since the Oedipal intervention, despite the complexity for which she and Lacan argue, projects the psychic structure toward a single destination, a constellation in which the valences of desire may shift, but in which the hierarchy of the “triangular” positions is fixed and socially sanctioned. The Oedipus complex “works” and has its “effect” not because it merely articulates a structure where narcissistic dyads become complex symbolic triangles, and where subjectless inarticulacy becomes a subject’s “address,” but also because it inscribes a specific version of sexual relations and set of symbolizations of gender difference that are already in place in the social world of the patient’s family. Lacan says as much: “What is at stake in this whole observation [of the performativity in therapy of the Oedipal speech act] . . . is the virtue of speech, insofar as the act of speech functions in coordination with a preestablished, typical, and in advance, significant, symbolic system” (S, ; AI, ). The analytic intervention therefore interprets both cognitively and performatively: it determines that little Dick will only be able to speak as a little Oedipus, and sets him in a particular relation to a masculine figure of authority, the father, with whom he identifies, and to a primary object, the mother’s body.22 If Dick was able to communicate after Klein’s intervention, it is not only because the Oedipus complex constitutes the psychoan-

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alytic version of an essential structure for his entrance into language and human relationships, but also because it opens up the possibility for him to occupy the dominant subject position of “Daddy.” (Both Dick’s and his Daddy’s names are capitalized in Klein’s essay, while “mummy” remains in the lower case, implying a regressive term that must be surpassed.) Lacan’s and Felman’s “performative” Oedipus is a normative Oedipus. If the Oedipal intervention “worked” for Dick in the miraculous way Klein describes, this effect relies on its cognitive, sexual, and socially sanctioned meanings. One way of questioning the theory that the necessity for symbolization also necessitates the gender paradigms built into the Oedipus complex would be to change the sex of the patient: what if Klein’s patient had been a little girl? We cannot know from Felman’s account of the clinical Oedipus what would have “worked” for a little girl who was also trapped in reality without language. What if a little girl were also caught up in a specular relation with the mother? In order to follow the Oedipal paradigm for femininity, would she have to be brought to identify with the mother’s desire for the father? Would she have been told, “You’re the little tunnel,” or even, “You’re the little train,” as Dick was? How would such a clinical event fracture the “sexual meaning” that the universalized Oedipal interpretation brings into being? The social asymmetry of masculinity and femininity, and the masculine-centered nature of the Oedipus complex, despite Lacan’s and Felman’s insistence on its primarily linguistic, “structural” function, indicate that Oedipal interpretations require a specific social and analytic context to perform their psychotherapeutic “work.” The precedence of the linguistic constitution of subjectivity reinforces the claim that the Oedipal structure is universal, and also explains the theoretical and clinical efficacy of the Oedipal intervention in Lacanian theory. However, to say that the Oedipus complex is an unconscious linguistic structure does not demonstrate its necessity: if all human beings are constituted by language, they are not all constituted by the same language, and with the same relations of authority within and toward language. Pierre Bourdieu has characterized the ideological effect of structuralist linguistics, on which Lacanian psychoanalysis bases its theory that the unconscious is structured like a language, in ways that illuminate the institutionalizing force of the linguistic unconscious: The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure’s inaugural act through which he separates the “external” elements of linguistics from

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the “internal” elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects. Transferring the phonological model outside the linguistic field has the effect of generalizing, to the set of symbolic products, taxonomies of kinship, mythical systems or works of art, the inaugural process which makes linguistics the most natural of the social sciences by separating the linguistic instrument from its social conditions of production and utilization.23

The Lacanian theory of the unconscious “signifying chain” also postulates the autonomy of language from its social conditions of reproduction and use, despite the stated relation of the Symbolic to the social order. This theory assumes, for theoretical and clinical purposes, that there could be a psychological realm so separate from the world that its “language” would have the almost scientific status of a grammar. But Lacan’s and Felman’s readings of Klein’s technique demonstrate that it is the practice of psychoanalysis itself that necessitates this radical abstraction of the unconscious signifier. The “performance” of the Oedipal intervention also naturalizes the products of history: it turns a particular hierarchical familial constellation into the abstract structure of symbolic differentiation that inaugurates subjectivity. Its ideological effect is to mask relations of power between analyst and patient, and social hierarchies—between parents and children, professionals and lay people, men and women—that are mobilized through linguistic exchanges.24 Thus the Oedipal intervention “works” because of its didactic function—if Dick becomes a speaking subject through Klein’s interpretation, he does not merely come to inhabit a constitutively Oedipal subjectivity but also embarks on a process of acquisition, inaugurated in part by his analysis, of socially constituted subject positions, which the Oedipal scenario both repeats and encodes as universal. The “performative” effect of analytic dialogue as described by Felman and Lacan depends on the symbolic power of the analyst’s speech, an expertise that masks its specifically social authority by claiming to articulate the antisocial—or “presocial”—language of the unconscious.

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“Psychoanalysis at Colonus” Felman’s account of the clinical Oedipal intervention excludes several issues from consideration.25 She omits the feminine subject in order to talk about the Oedipus complex as primarily a clinically effective symbolic structure and to deemphasize its homology to patriarchal social and familial structures. And she postpones the “sexual meaning” of the Oedipus complex, and the Oedipal intervention, to give priority to the seemingly “neutral” linguistic constitution of the subject. Since her case study of Dick suggests that he already had a limited symbolic vocabulary, related to sadistic fantasies about the mother’s body, Klein did have some sexual material to work with, and there was at least a rudimentary link between the sexual and the symbolic. Theoretically speaking, Felman’s and Lacan’s emphasis on the linguistic constitution of the subject may “work,” but in order to sidestep the question of gender hierarchies and the authority of the analyst over the patient, they have to empty both Klein and little Dick of cognition—about Oedipal sexual paradigms, sexual difference, and their social origins, significations, and consequences. Felman’s exegesis of the Lacanian Oedipus proceeds from this account of subject formation to her central argument for the distinctive “truth” of psychoanalysis as evidenced in the myth of Oedipus, and in Sophocles’ dramas about him. The Lacanian understanding of the analytic situation insists that Klein’s Oedipal intervention was “unconscious” because of the analyst’s own “inscription into language” (AI, ). Felman explains that unconscious discourse can never be possessed by either the analyst or the analysand; rather, it is always in the position of a third term, constituted by the analytic dialogue, what Lacan calls the discourse of the Other (AI, ‒). For Lacan, the Oedipus complex implies the human subject’s radical dispossession of “his” own history, precisely because that history is unconscious. According to Felman, “the Oedipal question is thus at the center of each practical psychoanalysis, not necessarily as a question addressing analysands’ desire for parents but as a question addressing analysands’ misapprehension, misrecognition (méconnaissance) of their own history” (AI, ). Unlike in Freud’s original formulation, the Oedipus complex does not primarily signify the incestuous and parricidal desires that are the sexual constitution of subjectivity, but rather the subject’s “blindness” or ignorance of his own unconscious history. Analysis, like the



                      

tragedy of Oedipus, must bring the analysand to recognize that unconscious, linguistically structured history: “Recognition is indeed, for Freud as for Lacan, the crucial psychoanalytic stake both of the clinical and of the literary work” (AI, ). However, Felman points out that Lacan is not satisfied with the Oedipus of Oedipus Tyrannus as a figure for the subject of psychoanalysis: “In Lacan’s eyes, . . . Oedipus the King, while naming his desire and his history, does not truly assume them; at the end of Oedipus the King Oedipus accepts his destiny, but does not accept (forgive) himself ” (AI, ). Lacan emphasizes instead the subject position “beyond” Oedipus Tyrannus, which he locates in Oedipus at Colonus. He focuses on the scene where Ismene, having arrived in haste from Thebes, finds Oedipus and Antigone at Colonus, where they have taken refuge in the sacred grove of the Eumenides; Oedipus knows that this is the place where the oracle has predicted he will die. Ismene reports that the Thebans have received word from the oracle at Delphi that they must bring back the exiled Oedipus. Commenting on the scene, Lacan quotes Oedipus’s response to this news: “In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus says the following sentence: ‘Is it now that I am nothing that I am made to be a man?’ This is the end of Oedipus’ psychoanalysis— Oedipus’ psychoanalysis ends only at Colonus. . . . This is the essential moment which gives its whole meaning to the history.”26 Felman gives the context of Oedipus’s speech by quoting the preceding several lines in two different English translations. She does not interpret the scene itself, however, but rather focuses on Lacan’s elliptical but far-reaching comment, suggesting that for Lacan, Oedipus’s speech is an assumption of his own death, but that “death” signifies also his assumption of the unconscious determinations of his destiny: He assumes the Other—in himself he assumes his own relation to the discourse of the Other . . . he assumes, in other words, his radical decenterment from his own ego, his own self-image (Oedipus the King) and his own consciousness. And it is this radical assumption of his own self-expropriation that embodies, for Lacan, the ultimate meaning of Oedipus’ analysis, as well as the profound Oedipal significance of analysis as such. [AI, ]

“Death” here does not refer primarily to the death of the body. Rather, Felman refers to the notion of death that Lacan reads in Freud’s controversial Beyond the Pleasure Principle (). In order to demonstrate the importance of this text for Lacan, Felman embarks upon her own reading of

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Oedipus at Colonus. Focusing on the several moments in which Oedipus is forced by the Chorus to tell them the story of his crimes,27 she interprets this retelling as Oedipus’s assumption of his own history. The retelling is a “self-expropriation” because he must recount his misrecognition of his identity and of the meaning of his actions. This “self-expropriation” enacts the repetition complex that Freud identifies with the death drive: Oedipus “repeats” not only by narrating his suffering but also by renouncing possession of that narrative, thus “performing” a symbolic death. Oedipus is the figure who represents the working of the unconscious in his own acts: he “assumes” his history as a “de-centered” self under the sway of and dispossessed by his unconscious (AI, ‒ ). For Lacan and Felman, Oedipus at Colonus represents the subject of psychoanalysis, who, through a recognition of his unconscious history, comes to use this knowledge of “death”—symbolic, unconscious, linguistic determination—in order to deal with life (AI, ). In Oedipus’s case, this knowledge also comes at the point where he faces his own physical death. I shall now examine in detail how this theorization of the Oedipus at Colonus relates to Sophocles’ drama. It carries out a translation of terms from the tragedy to psychoanalysis (which depends in part upon a prior translation from Greek into either English or French). This method of translation, however, from one language to another and from one culture and one historical moment to another, does not become salient in the psychoanalytic theory that it produces. Lacan’s and Felman’s psychoanalytic translations accomplish two major tasks: transforming tragic location into psychoanalytic dislocation (“exile”) and “self-expropriation” and making tragic religion mirror and authorize the psychoanalytic discourse on the unconscious. In order to understand the first of these translations, we must explore the “Colonus” in Oedipus at Colonus, a play about the trials of old age, written in old age, and believed to have been completed shortly before Sophocles’ death at the age of ninety sometime between  and  B.C.E. First produced posthumously in ,28 it tells the story of the exiled king of Thebes, Oedipus, who becomes a resident, even a citizen (empolis) of Athens (),29 commencing with the arrival of Oedipus and Antigone in the grove of the Eumenides at Colonus, near Athens. When Oedipus realizes that he has finally reached the place at which the oracle of Apollo had long ago foretold he would die, he asks the Chorus, the elders of

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Colonus, and Theseus, the king of Athens, to receive him into their city. In return, he offers a blessing. The oracle that predicted his doom also promised him that he would be able at the end of his life to benefit his friends and curse his enemies. In return for shelter at Athens, Oedipus pledges to Theseus that his sacred grave will sustain the prosperity of Athens, while bringing destruction upon the city’s future enemies, including Thebes. Next Ismene arrives and warns Oedipus that Creon is coming to seize him and escort him back to Thebes in order to gain control over his grave. When Creon accosts him, Oedipus refuses to return to the city that has exiled him. In retaliation, Creon orders his attendants to abduct Antigone and Ismene. Theseus succeeds in rescuing them, and after he has restored them to their father, he rebukes Creon for his violation of Athenian laws and expels him from the city. In the meantime, the exiled Polyneices has come to persuade his father to fight with him and the Argive captains against Thebes, now ruled by his younger brother, Eteocles. Oedipus violently rejects his supplications, and in punishment for his sons’ failure to defend and care for him in the past, he curses the brothers, predicting that they will kill each other in battle. Polyneices goes to his death, after requesting that his sisters bury him. Then, suddenly, thunder and lightning announce that Oedipus must prepare for his death. The blind man miraculously leads the way to the site of his grave, whose location no one but Theseus and the heir to his throne is permitted to know. A messenger reports that the gods have called Oedipus to them, and the Chorus closes the play by admonishing Antigone and Ismene not to grieve over such an accomplishment of divine authority. The first Athenian audience of this play would have found its dramatization of a rivalry between Athens and Thebes particularly relevant, because in  Athens lost the last in a series of conflicts with the Spartans and their allies. The Peloponnesian War lasted, with several intermissions, from  to . In the final phase of the war, Thebes had become a particularly bitter enemy. The play, while not a piece of propaganda, does offer Athens a fictional moral as well as political victory over Thebes by bringing Oedipus to Colonus.30 Perhaps because of, or in spite of, the dire circumstances at the time of its composition, the play sets out to celebrate the rituals, institutions, history, physical environment, and traditions of Athens.31

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Sophocles was born at Colonus, a “deme” or township of Athens lying to the northwest of the city. At Colonus stood a temple to Poseidon Hippias, who gave the horse to Athens in the famous competition with Athena for the patronage of the city, which she won by giving the olive tree. The play refers to this temple, where Theseus’s sacrifice to the god is interrupted by Oedipus’s arrival, but the most important religious location for the action of the drama is the sacred grove of the Eumenides, the euphemistic name for the Erinyes, or Furies. The setting of the play not only has autobiographical resonance for Sophocles but may also draw upon a local legend associating the grave and cult of Oedipus with a shrine of the Eumenides at Colonus.32 Although Oedipus, the parricide, might be expected to be a victim of the Erinyes, who pursued those guilty of crimes against relatives, in Sophocles’ play Oedipus comes as a suppliant sent by the oracle of Apollo to the grove of the Eumenides, the “benign” ones. Aeschylus’s Oresteia had dramatized the transformation, through Athena’s invocation of divine Persuasion, of the Erinyes into the Eumenides, resulting in their permanent association with the legal institutions of Athens. In the Oresteia, the taming of the Furies allows legal trial to replace the endless cycle of blood guilt and retribution. By recreating the legend of Oedipus’s association with the Eumenides at Colonus, Sophocles provides a religious sanction for the transformation of Oedipus himself into an avenging spirit, while the play’s echoing of themes from the Oresteia suggests that it places itself in a position to reflect upon the tragic tradition.33 Virtually all (nonpsychoanalytic) readers of this play agree that it adopts as one of its major themes the religious, political, and moral implications of location: what it meant for fifth-century Athenians to dwell in one place rather than another, and more specifically, how necessary it was to belong to a city, whether as citizen or resident.34 Socrates chose death rather than exile, and in Greek culture, those two fates were considered to be virtually equivalent, since exile amounted to a social death, a loss of all status, claim to legal protection, and property. The play tells the story of Oedipus’s and Antigone’s arrival at Athens after years of wandering in exile. This exile has been particularly bitter for Oedipus, because it happened precisely when he no longer desired it. After he had blinded himself, he had suffered so greatly that he wished to be cast out of the city, but Creon and the Thebans had refused him this. Many years later, when he had become accustomed to a quiet life hidden away in the palace, the Thebans began to

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fear his father Laius’s curse and decided to banish him from the land. Antigone accompanied him, while Ismene remained behind in Thebes to watch after his interests. But his sons, who by this time had reached their majority, failed to save him from exile or to look after him in any way, thus provoking Oedipus’s great anger against them (‒). Oedipus’s condition of exile therefore fuels both his overwhelming and characteristic anger (thumos) and his curses, and Theseus is able to sympathize with his suffering because of his own experience of exile (‒). When Oedipus and Antigone first arrive at Colonus, they repeatedly comment upon their status as foreigners and the consequent necessity of learning and conforming to the laws and customs of the native inhabitants. In the speech that opens the play, Oedipus articulates two sets of lessons, one that he has learned and one that he must still attend to: stevrgein ga;r aiJ pavqai me cwj crovno~ xunw;n makro;~ didavskei kai; to; gennai`on trivton. . . . manqavnein ga;r h{komen xevnoi pro;~ ajstw`n, a}n d’ajkouvswmen telei`n.

[‒; ‒] My sufferings have taught me to endure— and how long these sufferings have lasted!— and my high breeding teaches me the same. . . . we have come to be learners as foreigners from citizens, to do as we are told.35

This speech summarizes the major elements of the drama: Oedipus’s sufferings (hai pathai ), as well as the passage of time and his own nobility, have taught him to endure (stergein). The idea of himself as one who has suffered, rather than acted, will also constitute the basis of Oedipus’s protestation of his innocence and moral purity. Yet in order for those sufferings and his innocence to be recognized, he depends, as a stranger, upon the inhabitants of Colonus (hoi astoi ). Without protection and guidance from Theseus and the Chorus of elders from Colonus, Oedipus will not be able to die both in the place and in the way that he chooses. The word xuno¯n, “being with,” or “coexisting,” also points to an issue of great significance for the play in addition to Oedipus’s own experience of seemingly endless suffering: who will coexist with Oedipus, and how and where can he, the murderer of his father and husband of his mother, live with others? In fact, the verb suneimi or xuneimi and its derivatives also

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refer in Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus to the incestuous cohabitation of Oedipus and Jocasta and the double nature of Oedipus’s relation to his children.36 However, the later play stresses the potentially positive aspects of coexistence with Oedipus, and the occurrences of the vocabulary of sunousia indicate the transformation of Oedipus from one who was living too closely with his relatives to one whose presence brings benefits.37 When Oedipus arrives at Colonus, he learns that he has unknowingly trespassed in the sacred grove of the dread goddesses, whose names one fears to pronounce, the Erinyes. What would be a sacrilege for anyone else, however, makes possible the blessing that will result from Oedipus’s death, since the oracle long ago promised him that he might finally cease his wandering when he reached a shrine of the Furies: I should find rest here, in this final country [ cwvran termivan] when I should gain the haunt of the Dread Goddesses, a place of hospitality for strangers. There I should round my wretched life’s last lap, a gain for those that settled me, received me, but a curse to those that drove me out. [‒; Grene, ‒ ]

Along with a terrible fate, Apollo had also promised Oedipus a “hedra” and a “xenostasis,” a seat or abode, and a lodging place for a stranger—an end to his exile in the “final country.” At the end of the play, Antigone registers the fulfillment of Oedipus’s choice to die in a foreign land, “a|~ e[crh/ze ga`~ ejpi; xevna~ / e[qane” (‒), even as she protests the fact that she cannot see his tomb. When he promises Theseus an eternal blessing upon Athens if the city will shelter him and allow him to avenge himself upon those who have exiled him, Theseus realizes that this is a “dwvrhma th`~ xunousiva~” (), a gift of coexistence, or dwelling together. Oedipus becomes especially angry when he finds out from Ismene that, as a result of the oracle’s pronouncement of an unfortunate outcome for Thebes if it fails to possess his tomb, Creon will attempt to bring him back to Thebes and hold him there against his will, but bury him outside the borders of the land because of the pollution that accompanies a parricide (‒). Precisely because the Thebans refuse sunousia, as they did when they exiled him, they will receive his curse. I emphasize the language of coexistence, dwelling, borders, territory, earth, land, and city in order to demonstrate how concretely the play conceives of location, and how the

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power that Oedipus possesses and embodies at the end of the play directly relates to the way in which he understands how and where he has been permitted finally to rest and to die. In addition to the language of exile and sunousia, Sophocles also dwells on the natural and physical characteristics of Colonus and Athens. In the first stasimon, or choral ode, the Chorus describes and interrelates the natural, sacred, and political attributes of Colonus and Athens, praising the beauty of the sacred grove of the Eumenides, with its narcissus, ivy, crocus, rivers and streams, and its protecting divinities, including Dionysus with his maenads, the Muses, and Aphrodite (‒). They then sing patriotically of the power of Athens, attribute it to both the natural resources, the horse and olive tree associated with the founding of the polis, and allude to the empire gained by the Athenian fleet’s control over the sea (‒). As the first inhabitant of Colonus whom Oedipus meets tells him, however, the place receives its due honor not so much in words but rather in living there (xunousia) (‒). Poetry can recreate the power of place, but the play’s language also suggests that even tragedy is limited in its ability to convey the concrete reality and significance of everyday life at Athens. When the Chorus learn the identity of the stranger who has trespassed on the sacred grove, however, they wish to cast him out, even though they had promised to protect him if he told them his name. They accuse Oedipus of having deceived them when he asked for their succor (‒ ). Oedipus challenges them to live up to the reputation of Athens as “the holiest of cities,” which “always rescues the wretched stranger” (Grene, ‒). Oedipus defends himself, echoing his opening speech, as one who has suffered his deeds, rather than committed them: “ejpei; tav g’ e[rga me / peponqovt’ i[sqi ma`llon h] dedrakovta” (‒). This distinction rests on Oedipus’s insistence that his nature (phusis) was not bad. He argues that he only retaliated after having been attacked by his father (“paqw;n me;n ajntevdrwn”), and that in his actions toward both of his parents, he had not known what he was doing, but that he had been destroyed by those who did know—meaning the gods, as well as his parents: “oujde;n eijdw;~ iJkovmhn . . . / . . . eijdovtwn ajpwlluvmhn” (‒). If the Athenians refuse to shelter him, they betray both the gods and their own reputation for justice to those who have suffered, but if they accept him, they will be fulfilling their civic ideals. The benefit that Oedipus promises to Athens is

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a political one, according to Laura Slatkin: his spirit will abide at Athens and bring victory over the enemies of the polis, and his fate will also serve to unify the city by helping its citizens and institutions integrate their notions of the relationship between the individual and the polis.38 In addition, Oedipus’s life benefits the city, because it illustrates the reversals of fortune that time can bring. As Froma Zeitlin has demonstrated, Oedipus translates his tragic experience of reversal into a gift of political wisdom, since relationships between cities, as he explains to Theseus, can also undergo changes, and friends can become enemies (‒).39 Thus the tragedy sets up a direct correlation between the place of Oedipus’s death and the kinds of benefits and curses he bestows upon Athens and Thebes. If Oedipus had not been received at Athens as a suppliant and protected by Theseus from Creon’s attempts to seize him and his daughters, he could not have lived out his destined and chosen end. The play demonstrates that the experiences, both joys and pathai, of the individual cannot be abstracted from their metaphysical, physical, and political locations. Now that I have outlined some of the terms in which Sophocles framed his final drama about Oedipus, it will be possible to compare the play with the psychoanalytic interpretation. Felman’s account of Lacan’s reading of Oedipus at Colonus disregards the historical situation of the play, as well as all the elements of plot, imagery, and language having to do with location. As we have seen, she focuses instead on Oedipus as individual, separated both from his dependent relations upon Antigone, Theseus, and the citizens and traditions of Athens and from his powerful political function in the rivalry between Athens and Thebes.40 Felman’s and Lacan’s readings dislocate Oedipus and make him represent the permanence of exile, rather than the particular determinations of place. In addition, instead of registering and analyzing Sophocles’ emphasis on the struggle over the disposition of Oedipus’s body, Lacan and Felman elaborate upon what they call his “self-expropriation.” The context of the line that Lacan interprets as the end of Oedipus’s analysis (“Is it now that I am nothing that I am to be made a man?”) offers a way to understand how the psychoanalytic focus on self-dispossession works in relation to the play. Ismene has arrived from Thebes to report that the Thebans have received new directions from the oracle concerning Oedipus—that they must repossess him, for their city’s benefit. Oedipus cannot understand what possible benefit he could confer:



                       : With you, they say, there rests their victory. : When I am no longer then am I a man? [o{t’ oujkevt’ eijmi,v thnikau`t’ a[r’ ei[m’ ajnhvr;] : Yes, father, for today the gods exalt you; then they destroyed you. : It is a poor thing to exalt the old when he fell in his youth. [‒; Grene, ‒]

The “victory”—the Greek word kratos also means rule, force, power—of the oracles of the gods is in Oedipus. Even though such force comes to him late in life, he will use it, and the rest of the play enacts his growing power, especially through his cursing of Creon and his sons. In Greek, this line also emphasizes Oedipus’s new power as particularly masculine: the latest oracles make him an ane¯r, a man, rather than an anthro¯pos, or human being. The Lacanian interpretation pinpoints an important theme of the play by privileging this line referring to Oedipus’s masculine power, which works itself out as an exercise of paternal prerogatives, but Lacan and Felman do not explicitly connect Oedipus at Colonus to a theory about paternity or masculinity. Their concern is to show how he is representative of human psychology in general. When Ismene warns Oedipus that Creon wishes to take him back to Thebes and to keep him on the border, she emphasizes that they will prevent him from having kratos over himself (“mhd’ i{n’ a]n sautou` kratoi`~” [‒]). If Creon succeeds in bringing Oedipus back to Thebes, then he will also succeed in possessing him, as well as his body and tomb. Creon makes clear his interest in possession when he argues with the Chorus about his right to kidnap Antigone and take her back to Thebes by force: : What are you about, sir? : I will not touch the man [Oedipus]; but she is mine [ajlla; th`~ ejmh`~ ]. [‒; Grene, ‒]

Creon also refers to Oedipus as a rusion (), “a piece of property seized in reprisal for a wrong.”41 Although Creon fails in his attempt, his violence and violation of the laws of Athens threaten the integrity of the city and

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mock the manhood of its ruler. Theseus’s success in rescuing Antigone and Ismene earns him Oedipus’s gratitude and confirms his blessing upon Athens, but Oedipus himself is also capable of imagining possession of relatives and accomplishing their ruin. He promises Creon that he will become an avenging spirit of the land (cho¯ras alasto¯r), and he curses his sons: “And as for those sons of mine, they will get hold of only so much of my land as they need to die in” (“e[stin de; paisi; toi`~ ejmoi`s i th`~ ejmh`~ / cqono;~ lacei`n tosou`ton, ejnqanei`n movnon”) (‒). The repeated use of firstperson possessive pronouns as well as the violence of Oedipus’s defiance emphasize how much in possession of himself and of the fates of his sons he feels. Oedipus may have been dispossessed in the past when he was exiled from Thebes, but the later play works to give him back his kratos. Oedipus’s exercise of that power allows him to become the one who expropriates, who disinherits and condemns Polyneices and his brother: “Therefore my curses overcome [kratousin] / your suppliant seat, and that, your throne, in Thebes, / . . . Get you gone! I spit you from me.”42 Felman’s reading of Oedipus as a figure of “self-expropriation” must thus disregard the play’s linkage of his power to the possession of his body by Athens and to his self-possession, as well as Oedipus’s assertions that he has the right to punish and reward those who “belong” to him. Most important, Oedipus desires throughout the play to give his defiled body, one that is unimpressive to look at, as a gift to those whom he wishes to benefit, as he explains to Theseus: “dwvswn iJkavnw toujmo;n a[qlion devma~ / soiv, dw`ron ouj spoudai`on eij~ o[yin” (‒). Theseus and the Athenians must learn through the course of the drama to value that gift, despite Oedipus’s abject state and pollution. But the fact that Oedipus can give his body where he wishes in the end, because of the protection he receives from Athens, its laws, and deities, signifies the success of his struggle to possess it, even if only fleetingly in death. Sheila Murnaghan interprets the Thebans’ expulsion of the blinded Oedipus from the city as a failure to understand that his power resides in the simultaneously criminal and sacred character of his embodiment: “This paradox is made palpable by reminders that the whole of Oedipus’ life is united in the continuity of his body, that the body that now has an extraordinary religious power is the same body that once entered into horrifically transgressive contacts with the body of his father and with the body of his mother.”43 The struggle, both physical and moral, over Oedipus that the play



                      

enacts clearly represents the possibility of divinely and politically sanctioned “possession” of self and of others. Such possession in its more positive aspects also implies reciprocity; in addition to the language of sunousia, the play also refers frequently to such ties as filia, an affective bond between family members or friends, and xenia, a political obligation of friendship, alliance, and hospitality entered into by aristocratic families and rulers such as Oedipus and Theseus. In order to function for Oedipus, all of these forms of relationship require the overarching framework of his acceptance into and protection by Athens.44 The Lacanian notion of Oedipus as a figure for the analysand who finally assumes his self-dispossession by the unconscious, then, has virtually nothing to do with the fundamental concerns of Sophocles’ drama except insofar as the idea of Oedipus’s “self-dispossession” inverts the figuration surrounding Oedipus’s body and power to curse. For Felman and Lacan, Oedipus is not a contested body but is rather a paradigmatic story. Felman writes: Oedipus is born, through the assumption of his death (of his radical self-expropriation) into the life of his history. Oedipus at Colonus is about the transformation of Oedipus’ story into history: it does not tell the drama, it is about the telling of the drama. It is, in other words, about the historicization of Oedipus’ destiny through the symbolization—the transmutation into speech—of the Oedipal desire. [AI, ]

Felman’s reading of the play, following Lacan, emphasizes the scenes where Oedipus is compelled, by the Chorus and by Creon, to tell the story of his past life and to defend himself: only by “transmuting” his unconscious desires and crimes into speech and thus by “historicizing” them can he accept his destiny. This psychoanalytic interpretation of the play, however, itself “transmutes” the oracle, which has all along predicted Oedipus’s destiny, into the unconscious linguistic determination and “history” of the subject. The oracle becomes, in Lacanian terminology, the unconscious signifier. Because Oedipus is the figure whose life was told for him—he only had to live it—then he also becomes the figure for the subject determined by unconscious desire. According to Felman’s account, the play itself would serve as a vehicle for Oedipus to tell and accept his unconscious determination and history, as if the plot and language of the drama were merely a contrivance, like the mysterious machinery necessary for a deus ex machina, to present Oedipus’s life as a narrative act.

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This interpretation may work toward the construction of a psychoanalytic myth about the Oedipal, but it can only take Sophocles’ play as its evidence through a forceful act of translation and decontextualization.45 In strong contrast to his assumption of guilt and self-punishment at the end of Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus argues that he does not deserve to be condemned for his crimes. In response to the Chorus’s curiosity about his past, Oedipus explains that all of his actions were suffered rather than committed, and that he acted without knowing what he was doing (‒). Later, when Creon tries to turn Theseus and the Chorus against Oedipus by reminding them of his crimes, Oedipus defends himself even more vehemently (‒). Again he insists that his fate was foreordained, and that he had no knowledge of the true effects of his actions, but this time he emphasizes that his ignorance meant that he acted against his will (ako¯n) (, , ). Oedipus also justifies his accidental parricide by asserting the naturalness of retaliation and self-defense when one is attacked: “If someone tried to kill you here and now, / You righteous gentlemen, what would you do, / Inquire first if the stranger was your father? / Or would you not first try to defend yourself ?” (Fitzgerald, ‒). Lowell Edmunds has characterized the structure of Oedipus’s defense against the accusations of parricide as a “carefully constructed brief ” that would have been typical of the Athenian law courts and also recognizable to an Athenian audience as a common tragic adaptation of legal rhetoric and terminology.46 None of these moments when Oedipus tells his story demonstrate that he has “forgiven himself ” and accepted his guilt; instead, they enact his resistance to the idea that he should be an outcast. He defends himself in both legal and religious terms and stresses that his lack of knowledge acquits him of criminality.47 He even implies that he regrets his violent self-blinding and his “excessive rage” after he learned the truth (‒). Oedipus virtually repudiates the characterization that Lacan and Felman would assign him: his insistence that he did not know what he was doing, and therefore was not evil (kakos), does not mean that he “assumes” and accepts his lack of conscious agency. Rather, he depends upon the Chorus’s recognition of the possibility of acting knowingly and willingly, so that they may believe and acknowledge his protestation that he himself did not do so. Lacan’s and Felman’s readings of the play do not register Oedipus’s reliance on the distinction between juridically provable, purposive, and knowing actions and



                      

ignorant or involuntary ones. While the psychoanalytic focus on the linguistic unconscious makes a concern with conscious actions seem irrelevant, in fact, Lacan’s and Felman’s use of Oedipus to demonstrate the predominance of unconscious determinations upon agency requires that they overlook the question of how human agency was understood in fifth-century Athens. Arthur W. H. Adkins has argued that during the period between the production of Oedipus Tyrannus, around ‒ B.C.E., and the writing of Oedipus at Colonus in ‒, Athenians came to focus on the problem of “individual intention and moral responsibility” in the commission of violent acts. It is possible to argue, on the evidence of the two plays, that both an archaic understanding of crime and pollution that ignored the intention of the criminal and a sense of the difference between knowing and unintentional acts developed in the context of the democratic legal system were to be found in fifth-century Athens, even if a transition from one view to the other did not take place in the time frame that Adkins proposes. The debate about intention and pollution resulting from crimes that Adkins documents would provide a context for the impossibility of conceiving of Oedipus’s innocence in the earlier play and his strong claims to it in the later one.48 This kind of reasoning about responsibility also structures Aeschylus’s Oresteia in its account of the shift from cycles of crime and retribution attached to blood guilt to the institution of the legal trial. But the conceptualization of voluntary and informed action plays an even greater role in the Oedipus at Colonus, and given Oedipus’s final status as sacred and powerful hero, his reasoning about his lack of evil intention and character cannot be regarded as mere sophistry. Rather, the play makes him an authoritative figure on these issues. Vernant also theorizes that tragedy arose during a period in Greek culture when concepts of individual agency were evolving, and that tragedy itself took as one of its most significant functions the elaboration and complication of fifth-century thought on human agency: “The action of a tragedy presupposes that a notion of human nature with its own distinctive characteristics should already have emerged so that the human and divine levels are distinct enough to be set in opposition. But if it is to be tragic it is also necessary that these two levels should continue to be seen as inseparable.”49 In particular, Vernant suggests that the problem of how to distinguish willed from unwilled actions is central to the genre. He

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stresses the ambiguity of the tragic portrayal of two kinds of causality, daimo¯n, or divine intervention,50 and ¯ethos, or human character. He proposes that a “double reading of Heraclitus’s famous dictum” ¯ethos anthro¯poi daimo¯n provides a useful formulation of a basic assumption of tragedy about agency: “For there to be tragedy it must be possible for [Heraclitus’s] text simultaneously to imply two things: It is his character, in man, that one calls daimo¯n and, conversely, what one calls character, in man, is in reality a daimo¯n.”51 That is, tragedy posits two inextricable possibilities for explaining human agency—that human character has something in it approaching divinity, and that gods can act in and through human beings. Attic tragedy repeatedly enacts the interrelatedness of these two conceptions of divine and human causes of human actions, and Oedipus’s famous speech on his self-blinding in Oedipus Tyrannus provides one exemplary instance of this sense of dual agency : “It was Apollo, friends, Apollo, / that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to completion. / But the hand that struck me / was none but my own.”52 Both Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus participate in this construction of the concept of the agent, and their representations of the tragic character of Oedipus, while they do not merely refer to such debates within Athenian culture, cannot be understood fully apart from them. Euripides’ Hippolytus, which was performed in  B.C.E. and hence falls between Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus, also raises the possibility of differentiating knowing and unknowing actions. At the end of the play, Artemis absolves Theseus of blood guilt in the death of his son, Hippolytus, because, she tells him, “your hamartia, / in the first place, not knowing [to me¯ eidenai ] sets you free from baseness; / in addition the woman [Phaedra] by dying destroyed / the verbal proofs, that might have persuaded you” (‒).53 This passage not only relies on the notion of hamartia —an intellectual error, “missing the mark”—which Aristotle makes central to his analysis of tragedy,54 but also suggests that not knowing the truth means that although catastrophic, Theseus’s curse that leads to Hippolytus’s death is not criminal. Through Artemis’s legalistic speech, Euripides also provides divine sanction for the judgment that the criminality of actions depends upon the intention of the agent. A thorough understanding of tragic ideas of agency and causality would have to consider, not only the other plays of Sophocles, but also the dramas of Euripides and Aeschylus.55



                      

Although Sophocles’ Oedipus plays represent agency and responsibility as problems that can lead to several possible effects and explanations, they serve Lacanian theory primarily to authorize its argument for the transhistorical and transcultural existence of the unconscious, and its displacement of the significance of conscious or willed actions. The psychoanalytic version of the Oedipus story, however, ignores the ways in which the Oedipus of Oedipus at Colonus distinguishes himself, as he explains in the opening lines of the play, from the Oedipus of Oedipus Tyrannus. Citing line  in the passage Felman highlights, Lacan says, “Oedipus’s psychoanalysis does not complete itself until Colonus, at the moment when he tears away his face” (“la psychanalyse d’Oedipe ne s’achève qu’à Colone, au moment où il s’arrache la figure” [S, ]). But Oedipus’s violent act of self-blinding does not occur at Colonus, and Lacan’s insistence that he also disfigures himself there reveals the persistence of Freud’s reading of Oedipus Tyrannus in his own version of Oedipus. We can interpret Freud’s criticism of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus —“the attempt to harmonize divine omnipotence with human responsibility must naturally fail in connection with this subject-matter as with any other” (ID, )—as also representative of the way psychoanalysis views the relation between Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus. For Freud and Lacan conscious volition (“human responsibility”) and unconscious desire (“divine omnipotence”) cannot be recognized as exerting equal, indistinguishable, or potentially variable effects on human agency; they must always be understood to exist in a causal hierarchy in which the unconscious ultimately overrides intellect, reason, and will. Lacking a historical understanding of Athenian culture and tragedy, psychoanalytic theory can only read Oedipus one way— the specifically tragic tension between divine omnipotence and human responsibility must be interpreted as both a logical incompatibility and an internal psychological conflict. The Lacanian version of Oedipus strategically obscures tragedy’s participation in articulating for the democratic polis a concept of knowing and conscious actions that psychoanalysis, at its own historical moment, calls into question and attempts to supersede. If Oedipus at Colonus takes the delineation of a distinction between the concepts of willed versus unwilled or purposeful versus unintentional actions as one of its most significant themes, and if this treatment constitutes historically innovative thinking within Greek culture, then to interpret the play as being about the accep-

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tance of unconscious determinism is to project upon it a modern psychoanalytic necessity and commit an anachronism. All contemporary analyses of texts historically distant from the reader are in some way anachronistic, because their methodologies, ideological presuppositions, and theoretical approaches are generally foreign in some way to the text. The anachronism of these psychoanalytic readings of tragedy, however, becomes particularly problematic because Lacan and Felman, like Freud, claim to reveal the “essence” of the play and of Oedipus. By restricting its understanding of tragic agency to its most involuntary aspects—and translating daimo¯n into the unconscious—Lacanian theory neglects to register the difference between the two Sophoclean versions of Oedipus. The psychoanalytic Oedipus never gets to Colonus, then, despite Lacan’s claim that the end of Oedipus’s “analysis” happens there. By analyzing Felman’s and Lacan’s readings of Oedipus, it becomes clear that in order for psychoanalytic discourse to argue that its account of human subjectivity is the most cogent and fundamental one, it must universalize its claims: the unconscious as figure for the linguistic limitations on human agency would seem to work in any context. But when the knowledge of the limitations upon each individual mind constitutes its basic paradigm, then psychoanalysis may not be able, as we have seen in the case of Oedipus at Colonus, to account for situations in which the “necessity” that bears down on the individual is constantly conceived through his effects on other persons (Antigone and Ismene, Theseus, Creon and Oedipus’s sons) and communities (Athens and Thebes). Oedipus’s tragic identity is also a social one: it is enmeshed in the beliefs, institutions, and systems of signification of the polis. It is not possible fully to understand his fate or his symbolic power in isolation from his world and the contexts and functions of Attic tragedy. If there is more than one Oedipus in the dramas of Sophocles, then there must also be histories of subjectivities and sexualities for which “Oedipus” cannot provide the only or the essential name.

Oedipus as Local Hero Oedipus at Colonus repeatedly emphasizes the contrast between Oedipus’s life of wandering and begging and his death, which will finally end his exile and establish him at a particular place, so that he may have the power to confer benefits on Athens. The fifth-century audience would

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have understood Oedipus’s ability to bless friends and punish enemies as the attributes of a cult hero, and the action of the play shows how he is transformed from perhaps the most wretched example of humanity to something more than human, culminating in the establishment of a hero cult. Oedipus’s status as hero also explains his association with the Furies: like them, the hero is a chthonic deity, that is, an earth daimo¯n, whose rituals were associated with death, lamentation, and night.56 The chthonic deities were called upon to ratify curses and magic directed against enemies, but they were also connected with the sources of life and fertility, since the earth produces food and sustains life. According to Walter Burkert, “a hero cult involves setting apart one particular grave, known as a heroon, from other burials by marking off a special precinct, by bringing sacrifices and votive gifts, and occasionally by building a special grave monument.” This localization of the site of worship also extends to the effectiveness and scope of the hero’s activity, since a cult hero’s powers were limited to the particular locality of his grave and exercised on behalf of his family or city. The hero cult makes Oedipus “a centre of local group identity.”57 Thus Oedipus’s heroization concludes the play’s movement toward locating Oedipus. Paradoxically, while his ¯ethos has led to his heroization, Oedipus finally sheds his humanity when he himself becomes a daimo¯n. Oedipus Tyrannus makes Oedipus an exemplary human figure—a “paradeigma” () as the Chorus calls him—precisely, and ironically, through the singularity of his fate: he was the only man to have unknowingly committed the crimes of incest and parricide. Yet his lack of knowledge of the meaning of his acts, whose religious significance was to demonstrate the difference between the meaning of events for the gods and for mortals, made him exemplary of the human condition for the Greeks. Oedipus at Colonus has precisely the opposite trajectory: through his status as hero, Oedipus becomes associated with a specific location and unapproachable, no longer human and no longer representative of humanity. His strange death realizes the exceptional and extreme aspects of his fate. In this final play, Sophocles separates Oedipus from his audience: he can no longer be pitied and deplored but instead must inspire fear and wonder. He is no longer one of them, and the contrast between his love for his dutiful daughters and the extreme violence of his anger against his sons displays the juncture where the human metamorphoses into the daimonic: in cursing Polynei-

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ces, Oedipus not only punishes his ingratitude and neglect but also behaves as a god would in triumphing over his enemies by bringing them to utter ruin.58 Oedipus’s heroization is manifested in the mysterious manner of his death at the end of the play. His disappearance and the secrecy surrounding his burial place serve the religious and dramatic functions of setting Oedipus apart, even from the daughters he loves. The messenger reports that he died a death so strange that it hardly qualifies as death: “It was no fiery thunderbolt of God / that made away with him, nor a sea hurricane rising; no, it was some messenger / sent by the gods, or some power of the dead / split open the fundament of earth, with good will, / to give him painless entry. He was sent on his way / with no accompaniment of tears, no pain of sickness; if any man ended miraculously, / this man did” (Grene, ‒). The messenger does not know exactly how Oedipus died, but he nevertheless rules out natural causes. Illness and suffering frequently accompany death, and mortals learn to expect them. Oedipus’s death not only lacks these signs of humanity, however, but cannot be properly observed by those left behind: as Antigone and Ismene protest, the secret location of the grave also prevents them from visiting it and accomplishing the funeral rites that are their final duty to their father (‒ ). Although Greek tragedy conventionally represents death in words rather than enacting it on stage, the messenger speeches that recount the death of the protagonist usually describe it, and the manner of its coming about, in detail.59 The final messenger’s emphasis on Oedipus’s end as lacking violence, suffering, and mourning suggests that his death was as exceptional as his life, and that only he could have “died” in a way that was hardly death at all. Oedipus’s body becomes a place. The disappearance of his body does not undo his localization, since his beneficial and destructive power as cult hero is articulated in terms of political and physical locations—for Athens, against Thebes—while the drama itself contributes to Athenian civic ideology by attaching Oedipus to Athens. Thus the play seems to pose the question of whether such a mysterious death provides the kind of end to a life that one usually associates with the individual’s knowledge of mortality—because there is no pain, and no mourning, can such a death signify anything to mortals besides the “consummation” (Grene, ) of divine authority (kuros) to which the Chorus testifies in the last line of the play?



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According to Lacan and Felman, in addition to the question of the analysand’s recognition of his unconscious history, Oedipus at Colonus also demonstrates the importance of Freud’s theory of the death drive.60 As we have seen, Felman contends that Oedipus’s repeated, painful telling of his story in the play enacts the repetition compulsion, which Freud identifies as one of the very few signs of the silent and invisible workings of the death drive. In addition, just as Oedipus was “cursed” by the oracle, so he in turn curses his sons, thereby enacting the repetition compulsion attached to a kind of “Oedipal death instinct” (AI,  ).61 Felman explains that Lacan sees the same relation between Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams () and Beyond the Pleasure Principle as between Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus (AI, ). Freud’s earlier text and Sophocles’ earlier play, according to Lacan’s interpretation, both deal with an exploration of wish-fulfillment connected to parricidal and incestuous desires—Freud focuses on wish-fulfillment in dreams, and Oedipus, by his actions, demonstrates the existence of “Oedipal” desires. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, begins as a set of speculations on the enigma of dreams that bring no pleasure, that seem to fulfill no wishes but rather to repeat painful, traumatic scenes. In the same way, Oedipus at Colonus, according to Felman, goes “beyond” the earlier play by posing the enigma of Oedipus’s death: “This enigma is not reducible to (goes beyond) Oedipus the King’s ultimate self-recognition, amounting to the self-denial and the self-appropriation inherent paradoxically in the final gesture of self-blinding” (AI, ‒). For Lacan and Felman, the self-blinding results from Oedipus’s recognition of who he is and what he has done—it is a violent appropriation of self, even if that self is a criminal. His death at Colonus, however, signifies an assumption of his self-expropriation, that is of the “death” (understood as symbolic, linguistic, the destiny of the oracle) that he has been living. In the lecture that touches on the relation between the death drive and Oedipus at Colonus, Lacan asserts that Oedipus’s death and life are inextricable: “Oedipus at Colonus, whose being consists entirely of the speech formulated by his destiny, makes present the conjunction of death and life. He lives a life that is death, that is the death that is there exactly underlying life” (“Oedipe à Colone, dont l’être est tout entier dans la parole formulée par son destin, présentifie la conjonction de la mort et de la vie. Il vit d’une vie qui est mort, qui est la mort qui est là exactement sous la vie” [S, ‒]). Clearly, it is not possible to refute this reading on the

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basis of Sophocles’ text, because, as we have seen, it has little relation to the concerns of that drama. Rather, it appropriates some of the language and themes of the play and translates them into psychoanalytic terms. However, I would like to address the question of how the play’s depiction of Oedipus’s end, and his heroization, authorizes the psychoanalytic version of Oedipus’s death, and of the importance of “death” in psychoanalysis. While I cannot give a complete account here of what “death” signifies in psychoanalytic discourse, Felman’s exegesis of Lacan sets up the possibility of elucidating at least what Oedipus has to do with it. The act of translation most basic to the psychoanalytic interpretation of the play is to equate Oedipus’s destiny, as pronounced by the oracle of Apollo, with the unconscious signifying chain. Because this chain is symbolic, like a language, according to Lacan, it “manifests itself first of all as the murder of the real thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire.”62 This equation of symbolization with death underlies Lacan’s pronouncements that Oedipus has been living the death of his life, since his life has been determined by the oracle/unconscious. Oedipus is able to bestow the gift of speech because his destiny came into being through the language of the oracle, and therefore he is able to demonstrate, to give to others, the “enigma” that every life is determined by “death,” that is, by unconscious signifiers (AI, ). And this is why Oedipus also stands for the analyst (AI,  ). Lacan interprets the violent actions leading to Oedipus’s heroization—his cursing of Thebes, Creon, and Polyneices and Eteocles, all of which ultimately lead to the death of the person he loves most, Antig one—as signs of the inhumanity of the unconscious meaning that determines human life: “When speech is completely realized, when the life of Oedipus is completely transformed into his destiny, what is left of Oedipus? This is what Oedipus at Colonus shows us—the essential drama of destiny, the absolute absence of charity, fraternity, or anything that might relate to what one calls human feelings” (“Quand la parole est complètement réalisée, quand la vie d’Oedipe est complètement passée dans son destin, que reste-t-il d’Oedipe? C’est ce que nous montre Oedipe à Colone—le drame essentiel du destin, l’absence absolue de charité, de fraternité, de quoi que ce soit qui se rapporte à ce qu’on appelle les sentiments humains” [S, ]). Lacan’s conclusion raises the question once again of what tragic destiny and psychoanalysis have in common—what exactly permits the

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virtual synonymy of tragic religion and psychoanalytic theory that Lacan implies? This part of my analysis must become more speculative, in part because of the gaps in modern knowledge about Attic drama and also because of the complexity of the function of “death” in psychoanalytic discourse. The examination I have conducted of the psychoanalytic appropriation of Oedipus at Colonus, however, does point toward several conclusions about what kinds of questions Sophocles may have been posing about tragedy itself by representing Oedipus’s transformation into a cult hero, and how one might address these questions to psychoanalysis as well. At the end of the play, both the Chorus and Theseus admonish Antigone and Ismene to cease lamenting their father’s death—they interrupt, one might even say violate, the normal, culturally sanctioned women’s rituals for the observance of death because of the miraculous, supernatural manner of Oedipus’s passing. Theseus offers one reason for the suspension of mourning in Oedipus’s case: “Those to whom the night gives benediction / Should not be mourned. Retribution [nemesis] comes.”63 He warns Antigone and Ismene that they risk the wrath of the chthonic deities if they cast doubt upon the honor of their father’s new residence among them by mourning him. In the final lines of the play, the Chorus also tells the sisters to cease lamenting, and supplies them with a more enigmatic reason, which like most final lines in tragedy reflects back upon the action of the drama: “For all these things have authority” (“pavntw~ ga;r e[cei tavde ku`ro~” []). The word kuros points to divine sanction and the validity and permanence of the events that have taken place. Oedipus’s death and heroization, as well as the drama that has enacted them, “stand fast” according to R. C. Jebb’s translation, because they bear witness to the will of the gods.64 John Jones has distinguished the religious effect of the death of the Greek tragic protagonist from the modern drama of “outraged individuality”: “In both Aeschylus and Sophocles, the moment when a man perceives the operation of the powers that are destroying him is one of solemn religio-tragic exaltation—not because the individual is ‘saved’ thereby, but because Necessity and Fate and the ways of Zeus have been exposed for human consciousness in a flash of perfect clarity: a demonstration which is also a sufficient vindication.”65 Oedipus at Colonus also displays the action of divine will, but in addition it provides a variation on the model of Greek tragic heroism by giving its audience a hero who is not destroyed but rather enters into the company of the divine. Thus Oedipus not only dies in a

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way no mortal has done before, but the play itself also offers an exceptional version of the death of the tragic protagonist. The authority and consummation that Oedipus’s death demonstrates must be the same “ways of Zeus” that other plays point to, but his death is not the death that other tragic characters die. Therefore, with this final play, Sophocles seems to be posing a question about the relation between death, or mortality, and divine authority: the gods do not always manifest their overarching validity, permanence, and power—their kuros —by destroying a mortal; rather, they may recognize an exceptional mortal by taking away his mortality. One characteristic piece of tragic wisdom cautions that it is never wise to judge a human life good or happy until it comes to an end. This stricture occurs at the end of the Oedipus Tyrannus, and thus the final line of the Oedipus at Colonus might be read as a response to or elaboration upon the earlier tragedy’s conventional gnomic conclusion.66 By providing a reversal of the usual tragic pattern, Sophocles also suggests that the authority of tragic action itself may not be linked automatically to the kind of reflections upon mortality that the destruction of the tragic protagonist usually brings. In other words, Oedipus’s end, because it is not typical of either humanity or of tragedy, may not offer the kind of general meditation upon the meaning of mortality that tragedy has stereotypically been said to offer, even though it still manifests the validity of the gods’ design. Because Oedipus does not die like a human being, we could say that he does not “die” at all. The end of Oedipus at Colonus suggests the possibility that death may not always be the most important means or occasion to understand who a person has been—death itself may not be the ultimate metaphor for the authority or authenticity of human experience. Oedipus’s particularly human “necessity” has been his living, not his dying. For Oedipus, the end of his life is not death, but a transformation into another kind of being. If a man does not end up dying, but rather becomes a daimo¯n, then his mortality no longer works to put all of life into perspective for him, so that he can “assume it” as Lacan and Felman would argue. Rather, Oedipus’s mysterious end is significant in what it teaches its audience, both within the play and in the theater, about how fully implicated human beings are in particularities of family, city, place, and, where Greek religion is concerned, in the larger cosmic order. While I would not disassociate tragedy and the representation through the protagonist’s death of the fragility of human fortunes, Oedipus at Colonus does

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seem to suspend the automatic association of the authority of tragedy itself with the authority of death, so that tragedy would not always require that almost narrative sense of finality to make possible the proper interpretation of the tragic protagonist’s actions. Sophocles’ play reminds the audience that tragedy can pose the significance of mortality as a question rather than as given, and that it can “enact” death as an event whose repercussions for those surrounding the deceased are more dramatically compelling than the mere demonstration of its inevitability. The ways in which Oedipus’s death is metatragic raise questions about the functions both of “death” in all its various connotations and of tragedy in psychoanalytic discourse. The Lacanian reading of tragedy as the genre about the meaning of death and mortality works to legitimize its adaptation of the story of Oedipus. Because “death” becomes the central signifier of unconscious “necessity”—repetition compulsion, death drive, the agency of the signifying chain—Oedipus’s “death” seems to verify the truth of the psychoanalytic Oedipus. Lacanian theory formulates the unconscious as operating with the same kind of determinative agency that it reads into the oracle as it both decrees destiny and organizes the tragic plot. Psychoanalysis does not promote a new version of Greek religion, then, but rather appropriates tragic signs of necessity for its own ends. One major reason that the Oedipal version of gender and subjectivity seems so compelling is because psychoanalytic knowledge parlays the cultural authority attached to Greek tragedy and combines it with the almost irresistible assumption that the individual’s recognition of his or her own mortality is the most significant, determining element of what it is to be human. When metaphorized as “death,” the agency of the unconscious becomes almost unsurpassably powerful, and so, in turn, does the psychotherapy that seeks to reveal its operations and make them bearable. Psychoanalytic theory never analyzes the historical reasons for the authority of Greek tragedy in Western cultures, and neither does it address tragedy’s formal and cultural specificity, because tragedy must operate as a medium of psychoanalytic cross-cultural and transhistorical translations, and as support for institutional claims about the necessary conditions of subjectivity. And when “death” becomes the symbolic location of the experience of inevitability that defines the individual’s self-knowledge, it can no longer appear as one element in a range of constraints affecting human lives differently in different cultural and historical contexts. Within psy-

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choanalytic discourse, then, tragedy and “death” function as the signifiers of a universality that thematically reinforces the institutionalizing project to provide a generally valid theory of the essentially psychological constitution of subjectivity.

Oedipus as Psychoanalytic Myth The Lacanian reading of Oedipus at Colonus is a not an exegesis of the play but a creative adaptation that is not interested in Colonus as a place except insofar as it represents finality or death. Whereas Freud drew on theories about Greek tragedy prevalent among nineteenth-century classical scholars, Lacan and Felman show little interest in contemporary classical scholarship, because they are engaged in complicating and rendering even more inextricable the identification of psychoanalytic knowledge and Oedipus. Felman’s final arguments about the “psychoanalytic myth” reveal these institutionalizing goals. According to Felman, Freudian theory constitutes a “mythical” access to psychic reality through dialogue: Insofar as it is mediated by a myth, the Freudian theory is not a literal translation or reflection of reality, but its symptom, its metaphorical account. . . . Between reality and the psychoanalytic myth, the relation is not one of opposition, but one of analytic dialogue: the myth comes to grips with something in reality that it does not fully comprehend but to which it gives an answer, a symbolic reply. The function of myth in psychoanalytic theory is thus evocative of the function of interpretation in the psychoanalytic dialogue: the Freudian mythical account can be thought of as Freud’s theoretical gift of speech. [AI, ]

Felman’s presentation of the “mythic” approach of psychoanalysis proposes to answer many difficult questions about the psychoanalytic access to truth, both literary and scientific—the psychoanalytic myth is the symbolic response to a reality that is otherwise unrepresentable. Her understanding of the “mythic” truth of psychoanalysis, however, does not account for the status within it of the texts of Sophocles. What is the difference between a tragedy and a myth? Fifth-century Athenians would not have made any great distinction between tragic and “mythic” content: for Aristotle, muthos refers to the plot of tragedy,67 as well as to a familiar story from the heroic past. Yet there would have been an obvious difference for an Athenian audience between

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the form and performance of tragedy—staged as part of a dramatic competition at the festival of Dionysus, with actors, chorus, music, and accompanying public ceremonies—and, for example, the epic form and performance of Homeric heroic poetry. Myth in its modern usage refers to groups of narratives, often transmitted orally, that are central to a given culture’s understanding of its history, institutions, and origin, and the term is often used to facilitate the comparison of such stories cross-culturally. A twentieth-century literary critic would be inclined to distinguish between tragedy and myth, based on the existence of a written text and specific dramatic form for tragedy. Clearly, tragedy contributes to the construction of myth, but can it be equated with myth? Vernant explains that the transition from the oral mythic to written literature in Greece gives Greek myths such a particular status that “many contemporary students of myth are doubtful whether the same methods of interpretation are valid for a body of oral accounts, such as those studied by the anthropologists, as for the written texts that are the concern of Greek scholars.”68 At one point in her analysis, Felman refers to the plays about Oedipus as “literary myths” (AI, ), and this combination of terms reveals the status of tragedy in her analysis. Felman obliquely acknowledges the textuality of Sophocles’ dramas while still permitting them to function the way psychoanalytic theory requires and she herself describes: as symbolic carriers of a timeless and universal “psychoanalytic truth” (AI, ) that does not have to be located in any specific text, or historical moment, or cultural, social, or religious context. By recreating Oedipus as a psychoanalytic myth, Felman also resolves the tension between theory and clinical practice by using “myth” as an intermediate term (AI, ). Because the texts that recount the story of Oedipus are dramas, they can seem to support her argument about the “performative” nature of the Oedipal. But by transposing drama into myth, Felman also avoids the question of audience— who the audience of the plays were in the fifth-century, how it has changed since then, and how specific the audience of psychoanalysis itself might also be, despite its claims to general applicability. This universalization through myth allows for the further move that asserts that the Oedipus story is simply a narrative structure that works in an analytic setting (AI, ), and not a conventional and recognizable scenario about sexual difference, authority, and hierarchy that psychoanalysis relies on to support its own effects. Felman’s characterization of the Oedipal as “myth” allows her

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to generalize it while still retaining a psychoanalytic specificity—although one must assume from her account that there is something special about Oedipus and about psychoanalysis, her discourse never limits the range of either of these categories in order that their cultural as well as psychotherapeutic and hermeneutic relevance may remain unbounded. The Lacanian Oedipus is an interpretation, and an authoritative one. But Lacan’s reading also attempts to mask its imposition of interpretive authority by “dialogizing” it. That is, if psychoanalytic knowledge can never be possessed but only constituted through dialogue with the unconscious, with the other and the Other, then it also aspires to a radical equality among subjects. Yet the psychoanalytic Oedipus renders this equality impossible because of its reproduction of gender and familial hierarchies and the social and institutional hierarchies that it codifies as analogous to the patriarchal family. The psychoanalytic Oedipus is not just a neutral vehicle for symbolic access to the unconscious, but a structuring relation based upon a historically and socially constituted “symbolic system.” The interpretation of Oedipus as the figure of self-expropriation of knowledge screens the dependence of the authority of Oedipal knowledge on this symbolic system, thus rendering psychoanalysis simultaneously more universal and less susceptible to critique. Felman and Lacan proceed as if Freud’s original gesture of appropriating Oedipus for psychoanalysis entitles them to repeat it. This procedure, of course, also amplifies the authority of the original appropriation. My critique has not aimed merely at showing that Felman and Lacan misread Sophocles—their interpretations would not have made sense in fifthcentury Athens, but that does not disqualify them for the members of “contemporary culture” that Felman’s book addresses. In fact, as we have seen, at stake in psychoanalytic readings of Sophocles is the project of distinguishing the cultural and psychological significance of psychoanalytic knowledge by displaying its unsurpassed capacity, like that of tragedy, to plumb the depths of human experience. Lacan’s theorization of Oedipus seeks to inspire the same kind of awe and recognition—of psychoanalytic necessity—that Greek tragedy aims to invoke by revealing the ways of Zeus. This staging of the recognition of psychoanalytic necessity should itself be recognized as an institutional strategy. At the end of one of his most influential essays, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan

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suggests that the most revolutionary aspect of Freudian thought is its mode of interpretation, the way in which it changes “the relation between man and the signifier, in this case in the procedures of exegesis” leading to human self-knowledge: “Everything, not just the human sciences, but the destiny of man, politics, metaphysics, literature, the arts, advertising, propaganda, and through these even economics, everything has been affected.”69 Lacan conveys to his academic audience,70 as well as to his later readers, the enormous stakes of establishing and confirming psychoanalytic knowledge as institution, and of laying claim to Freud’s legacy. Lacan not only reformulates Freud’s own pronouncements about the world-historical significance of psychoanalysis, but also adopts Freud’s institutionalizing strategies. By extending the association of psychoanalytic knowledge with Oedipus and tragedy, Lacan and Felman pursue Freud’s project for the institution of psychoanalytic knowledge, thus demonstrating the legitimacy of their affiliation with the founder of psychoanalysis. The “truth” of such institutional performances of psychoanalytic authority through tragedy can become an open question, however, if we begin to understand how the cultural centrality of the tragic genre, and of Oedipus, have been produced at different times and in different places. If the primacy of unconscious desire within human agency seems both individually and culturally inescapable, we have only to look carefully at Sophocles’ dramas about Oedipus. If psychoanalysis itself also seems inevitable, we must look even more deliberately, not “within” ourselves but at the history of contemporary psychological culture. In the next two chapters I shall continue to account for the nonpsychoanalytic—professional and institutional—constraints and opportunities that conditioned Freud’s construction of the cultural authority of psychoanalytic knowledge.

4 Professionalization and Freud’s Cultural Theory When once the discussion in a meeting turned to the question of what means we have at our disposal to motivate a patient to undergo analysis, Freud pointed out that we promise him relief from his symptoms, an increase in his working capacity, and an improvement of his personal and social relationships. Anna Freud objected: “How can we do this when we are not sure that we can keep these promises?” Freud quickly answered, “There one can see that you are not a physician.” —Richard F. Sterba, Reminiscences of a Viennese Psychoanalyst 1

Throughout his writings Freud makes no secret of his professional and scientific ambitions for psychoanalysis. His attempt to legislate a stable and productive future in a text like On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement () displays what is perhaps the most overt of his strategies to professionalize psychoanalytic knowledge. Freud’s social agenda and epistemological claims for psychoanalysis, however, extended beyond his efforts to distance the psychoanalytic movement from the dissenting theories of former adherents such as Carl Jung (‒) and Alfred Adler (‒) and to prescribe correct psychoanalytic practice. In his address to the Second International Psychoanalytic Conference at Nuremberg in , for example, he envisioned far-reaching social ramifications of the spread of psychoanalytic knowledge, predicting that as psychoanalysis exposed the causal relation between the social suppression of instincts and neurosis to public view, the neurotic’s “flight into illness” would become socially unacceptable, and individuals would be forced to “confess to the

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instincts that are at work in them, face the conflict, fight for what they want, or go without it.” Freud was also willing to enlist public opinion on the side of psychoanalysis to pressure neurotics to reform themselves, notwithstanding his criticisms of “‘civilized’ sexual morality” as a cause of neurosis.2 Concluding his speech to the Nuremberg Psychoanalytic Conference, he assured his followers that they were “doing their duty” in manifold and crucial ways by practicing psychoanalysis: “You are not merely working in the service of science, by making use of the one and only opportunity for discovering the secrets of the neuroses; you are not only giving your patients the most efficacious remedy for their sufferings that is available to-day; you are contributing your share to the enlightenment of the community from which we expect to achieve the most radical prophylaxis against neurotic disorders along the indirect path of social authority” (FP, ‒, ). At the end of Totem and Taboo (‒), Freud articulates one of his most expansive epistemological claims for psychoanalysis: “[This inquiry’s] outcome shows that the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex” (TT,  ). He repeated and extended such claims until the end of his life. In The Question of Lay Analysis ( ), he suggests again that psychoanalytic knowledge “may be destined to the task” of “preparing mankind for . . . a corrective” to the “intolerable pressure” that civilization exerts on the instincts (LA, ‒). He endows psychoanalytic knowledge with profound historical significance: it arises in the evolution of civilization as a force that “corrects” the oppressive mechanisms of its previous development. Psychoanalytic knowledge thus takes on both historical and biological necessity in its “destiny” to defend human nature against culture. Finally, toward the end of his life, in Moses and Monotheism (), Freud returns to his theory of cultural origins in the primal parricide in order to apply it to the specific, historical case of Moses and the Jews. In establishing the scope and persistence of Freud’s epistemological and professional agendas for psychoanalysis, I do not wish merely to point to the self-evident fact of his ambition. Rather than offering another history of the psychoanalytic movement, or a close reading of Freud’s rhetorical strategies of persuasion, I focus here on the ideological assumptions and cultural effects of Freud’s writings.3 My goal in this chapter is to provide a historical account of the social logic of Freud’s claims for psycho-

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analysis as a profession and to show how the cultural authority of psychoanalytic knowledge depends on its association with professionalism. Freud’s construction of the professional purview of psychoanalysis is both an overt and an implicit object of his writings. Sometimes he is shrewd and polemical, while at other times he seems almost desperate to retain control over his intellectual property. Freud’s aims for psychoanalysis as a profession stem from the kinds of dispositions and objectives that his education and his own professional training inculcated. The social position that psychoanalysis fills as a profession is in part shaped by Freud’s and the other early psychoanalysts’ writings and clinical practice, but it is also the outcome of their competition with other occupations and other kinds of psychological and medical expertise. The autonomous identity and cultural success of psychoanalytic knowledge are products of such strategies. In analyzing Freud’s professionalizing agenda, I shall leave aside the question of the correctness or “scientific truth” of the doctrines that he articulates as central to psychoanalysis and focus on how the elaboration of psychoanalysis as a depth psychology relies on the cultural and social value of science. Freud’s texts on culture are configured as if they were written to embody and promulgate the “disinterested” social perspective of the early twentieth-century scientific expert, whose “special understanding of a segment of the universe” permitted him or her to “release nature’s potential and rearrange reality on grounds which were neither artificial, arbitrary, faddish, convenient, nor at the mercy of popular whim.”4 Freud’s masterful mobilization of scientific professionalism worked to legitimize psychoanalytic expertise and facilitated the institutionalization of psychoanalysis as a popular psychology. Psychoanalysis became common knowledge by redefining accepted social priorities and problems as part of its distinctive professional purview.

The Rise of Professions and the Rise of the Educated Middle Class This chapter builds on the analysis in Chapter  of the Freudian interpretation of the story of Oedipus and its ties to classical education and pre-professional training. Fritz Ringer has argued that by the early twentieth century in England, France, and Germany, “a systematically articulated

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hierarchy of educational institutions came to define status positions within the middle-class spectrum.”5 The practice of a profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the product of access to specialized training based on elite educational credentials. Although professionalization of occupations occurred in many different ways in the various industrializing countries during the nineteenth century, three common characteristics of the social position of the person who practiced an occupation that came to be called a profession have stood out for historians: he was male, from a middle- or upper-class background, and had a secondary and university education. During the nineteenth century, as we have seen, secondary education for the aspiring professional man was almost always in a primarily classical curriculum, which conferred elite social status.6 The social historian Harold Perkin has shown that the characteristic of professional labor as “based on human capital and specialized expertise” made it translatable, at least theoretically, into almost any kind of work, and unlike the ownership of land or capital, it could thus eventually be claimed by members of nonelite social groups, such as the rising middle classes. Focusing on Britain, Perkin also contends that the extension of professional status through the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth had the potential to transform both the social structure and social ideals; it created a system of “professional career hierarchies rearing up alongside one another . . . each in competition to persuade society to yield as much power as it could win,” which “overlay[ed] the horizontal structures and vertical antagonisms of class.”7 The professional man also claimed to embody a different social ideal than that of the capitalist entrepreneur: The latter was an ideal based on capital as the engine of the economy, setting in motion the production of goods and services and calling forth the other factors of production, land and labour, and on competition as the fairest and most efficient way of distributing its rewards. Its ideal citizen was the self-made man, the entrepreneur who had made his way to success and fortune by his own unaided efforts. The professional ideal was based on trained expertise and selection by merit, a selection made not by the open market but by the judgment of similarly educated experts. Its ideal citizen was also a self-made man of sorts, who had risen by native ability (with a little help from his educational institutions) to mastery of a skilled service vital to his fellow citizens. The difference was that the entrepreneur proved himself by competition in the market, the professional by persuading the rest of society and ultimately the state that his service was vitally important and therefore

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worthy of guaranteed reward. The first called for as little state interference as possible; the second looked to the state as the ultimate guarantor of professional status.8

The professional’s claim to the greater social utility of his work depended upon the specialized knowledge that he brought to bear on crucial social and individual problems. Educational institutions and also official forms of certification, either by the state or by boards of professionals, underwrote the professional’s expertise. The social historian Jürgen Kocka defines the culture of the nineteenth-century Central European middle class, or Bürgertum, in similar terms: it assumed a “critical distance” from both the aristocracy and the working class; stressed individual achievement and autonomy as a basis for claims to “rewards, recognition and influence”; and promoted the separation of a family-oriented private life from the public sphere of politics and economic competition. The Bürgertum also based both its self-definition as a class and its sense of social priorities on education, rather than on religion, and maintained the universality of its values, although actual social conditions restricted access to the middle class. Kocka explains that the educated sector of the middle class, or Bildungsbürgertum, including the (male) members of the various professions, shared a common “cognitive, normative and aesthetic” framework based on their education, which functioned as “a basis on which they communicated with one another, and which distinguished them from others who did not share this type of (classical) education.”9 Even more pertinently to Freud’s case, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin describe the cultural values of the turn-of-the-century Viennese bourgeoisie as “reason, order and progress, perseverance, self-reliance and disciplined conformity to the standards of good taste and action.” They avoided “the irrational, the passionate and the chaotic” and in return expected to be “rewarded with a good name and whatever measure of success was regarded as commensurate with individual talent.”10 Janik and Toulmin also view the earliest organizing efforts of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society as part of a larger move toward professionalization in the cultural and intellectual spheres of Viennese society after the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire and creation of the Austrian republic following World War I. They outline a shift from aristocratic or bourgeois patronage to a professional autonomy of standards governing intellectual and artistic production, including the activities of Freud’s circle: “The dispersal of cultural authority

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thus followed a pattern very similar to the dispersal of social and political authority. During an initial transitional period, circles of like-minded artists, philosophers or others gathered together, for lack of more formal professional institutions, into coteries, which still had a strong air of patronage about them.”11 The fact that state bureaucracies were already in place before industrialization in much of continental Europe meant that, in contrast to the situation in Britain, the professions were commonly consolidated through the civil services, and the middle-class entrant into a profession would frequently become a public employee.12 The professionalization of German physicians, for example, took a course like that of many other continental occupations: they defined themselves as experts whose professional autonomy was based on “specialized scientific training” at a university, and they supported their elite social status through a “marked authoritarian posture toward laymen, an expanding monopoly in the health services field, influential professional organizations, and finally high social prestige and a privileged position vis-à-vis other occupational groups.” The state, however, played a distinctive role in the consolidation of German medicine, and in the other professions as well, because aspirants to the various professions were educated in state-run institutions, certified by state-appointed examination boards, and subject to greater government regulation than doctors in the United States or England.13 The case of the German medical profession brings out patterns of professionalization common to many nineteenthcentury occupations, but also shows that unique circumstances obtained for each profession and also for each national situation. Two sociologists of the professions, Magali Sarfatti Larson and Andrew Abbott, provide valuable methods for understanding how Freud’s strictures on psychoanalytic practice function as claims to professional standing typical of many professionalizing projects.14 Larson analyzes a profession’s procedures of self-definition within a society—how it formulates its expertise, and based on this, its ideological claims to protection from competition and privileged social status for its practitioners. Abbott’s study focuses on how occupations compete with one another for jurisdiction over the definition and performance of kinds of work that are in demand as the result of complex historical and cultural conditions. I shall draw on both of these accounts of profession in order to delineate Freud’s professionalizing strategies.

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Larson has defined professionalization as a “collective process of upward mobility,” in which an occupation succeeds in achieving a monopoly of a service based on the social acceptance of its claims to competence and expertise. She highlights the way in which professional expertise must define itself in the context of a particular market for its services in industrializing capitalist societies. Professionalization consolidates two independent elements: “a body of relatively abstract knowledge, susceptible of practical application, and a market—the structure of which is determined by economic and social development and also by the dominant ideological climate at the time.” Because they sell services rather than a product, professions must oversee the training of new practitioners. Although they depend on the public to grant them professional status and legitimacy, professions are also able to maintain autonomous standards of accreditation, usually through control over professional schools and procedures of certification.15 As Perkin notes, professions “live by persuasion and propaganda, by claiming that their particular service is indispensable to the client or employer and to society and the state.”16 Thus professions are distinguished from other kinds of work by a greater autonomy in setting the standards by which their usefulness and their right to a monopoly of a particular expertise are to be judged. But the achievement of this autonomy requires them to convince the public and the state that their particular expertise is rational, effective, and socially beneficial. The necessity for professions to persuade and propagandize, however, also goes along with a powerful capacity to produce ideology in the form of rationales for a profession’s own legitimacy as well as for existing social conditions. Because of the expert status claimed by and granted to professionals, and their autonomous self-definition, they are also permitted by the larger society to “define their own particular area of social reality”— their specific cognitive and normative domains.17 Perkin maintains that because, historically, many professions have addressed themselves to larger social problems—whether public health, in the case of physicians, or public administration in general, in the case of civil servants and politicians— “the client [becomes] in effect the whole community.” During the proliferation of the professions in nineteenth-century industrial societies, professionals “became much freer to act as critics of society, apologists for the emerging classes of the new industrial system, and purveyors of the terminology in which people came to think about the new class society.”18 The

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nineteenth-century German Bildungsbürgertum, for example, claimed moral authority over questions affecting the public interest based on the ideologically powerful combination of a rigorous self-discipline and work ethic— suitable to the bureaucratic posts that most middle-class professionals would ultimately occupy—inculcated through the pursuit of a disinterested, “scientific” education in the classics.19 Professions also require a “common cognitive base,” a formalized and rigorously reproduced body of knowledge, in order to maintain control both over the production of new members of the profession and over the definition and provision of the particular professional service. Such a standardized curriculum operates both to exclude the unqualified and to train new members of the profession. Formalized knowledge also “depersonalizes the ideas held about professional practice and its products,” gives them “the appearance of neutrality,” and deemphasizes the role of such expertise in the professional’s efforts to earn income and prestige—professional legitimacy should not seem to depend on the professional’s personal qualities. Professionals also frequently base their expertise on the relation of their knowledge to science, which carries the legitimating connotations of objectivity and universality.20 Like Perkin and Kocka, Larson sees the middle-class ideology of professionalism as promulgating meritocratic principles, while at the same time reinforcing an existing situation of unequal access to elite social status. In the context of the larger occupational and class structures, she traces a shift in the model of profession from “a predominantly economic function—organizing the linkage between education and the marketplace—to a predominantly ideological one—justifying the inequality of status and closure of access in the occupational order.” The ideology of professional meritocracy derives historically from the creation of national systems of education, which by seeming to guarantee equality of opportunity also justify the claims of those who possess monopolies on expertise to have simply “proved their ability,” irrespective of any superior access they may have had to training because of social background or economic advantage. Larson also contends that the professional’s prestige derives from and reinforces the middle-class ideological focus on the individual as locus both of problems and of their only possible solutions in bourgeois society. In professional work, “individualized service becomes an ideological remedy for the ills of a social situation.”21

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While Larson and Perkin focus on the historical and social genesis of professions—their strategies of legitimation, monopolization, public persuasion, and normative claims—Abbott’s work stresses competition among occupations for control over specific kinds of work. With his productive concept of the “system of the professions,” Abbott advances the theses that “it is the history of jurisdictional disputes that is the . . . determining history of the professions,” and that “jurisdictional claims furnish the impetus and the pattern to organizational elements” of the professions. Like Perkin and Larson, Abbott stresses professional status as a public claim “of both social and cultural authority” that works to obtain a monopoly over a particular kind of work. But he focuses on the jurisdictional elements of such claims, including a profession’s assertion of the right to exclude other kinds of work from its purview and to “dominate public definitions of the tasks concerned, and indeed to impose professional definitions of the tasks on competing professions.” One profession ejects another from a jurisdiction, according to Abbott, by successfully criticizing and replacing its “subjective” understandings of a problem or task with its own more coherent and “objective” classifications—in other words, by convincing the public that its classification system not only is more adequate than its competitor’s to define and treat a given problem but also lacks any content directly related to the history and organization of the profession itself—a content that might make it seem self-serving or abitrary. Jurisdictional claims typically pass from the public to the legal arena, so that professional organizations and state licensing procedures can guarantee both professional competence and the exclusivity of training and control over the given work.22 Abbott asserts that jurisdictional contests are fundamental to the existence of professions: “A profession is not prevented from founding a national association because another has one. It can create schools, journals, ethics codes at will. But it cannot occupy a jurisdiction without either finding it vacant or fighting for it.” He proposes that a profession’s system of classification functions as a “map” of its jurisdiction, and he points to the importance of abstract knowledge in interprofessional competition because it allows a profession to “redefine its problems and tasks, defend them from interlopers, and seize new problems.” Academic knowledge in particular legitimizes professional work by clarifying its foundations and tracing them to the “major cultural values . . . of rationality, logic, and science.” Abbot’s model limits the historical and social agency of individual professions, and

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stresses that their evolution can only be understood if professions are seen as constituted through their interrelations.23 Larson’s and Perkin’s attentiveness to educational, ideological, and economic factors in the consolidation of professions and Abbott’s focus on interprofessional competition open up new ways of understanding, not only the scope and effects of Freud’s ambitions for psychoanalysis, but also the reproduction of particular social and cultural forms of authority in psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalytic classifications, as we shall see, not only constitute a professional jurisdiction, but also build a specific professional habitus —a respected social position, elite educational formation, and scientific agenda—into psychoanalytic knowledge.24 I am not trying to suggest that Freud’s strategies enact a predetermined professionalizing scenario. Rather, I wish to use the sociology of professions as a tool to delineate the overt and subtle ways in which Freud elaborates a distinctive professional domain for psychoanalysis as a psychological expertise directed at the “personal problems” of members of the educated upper and middle classes.25

Staking Out the Psychoanalytic Profession: Practitioner, Client, Expertise As the founder of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud was most personally responsible for the shape psychoanalysis took in its early years. He engaged in organizational activities and theoretical debates that exhibit many of the elements of professionalization outlined by Larson and Abbott. Before analyzing Freud’s elaboration of psychoanalysis as a profession in his writings, it is useful to review the chronology of the founding dates of the earliest European and American psychoanalytic professional organizations. The Wednesday Psychological Society, a group of physicians and interested laymen who became Freud’s first followers and associates, was formed in the fall of , and was later renamed the Vienna PsychoAnalytic Society. By the close of the first decade of the century, the organization of psychoanalysis as a “movement” and profession was gaining momentum: in the spring of , a first meeting of “friends of psychoanalysis from Vienna, Zurich and other places” (HPM,  ) was held at Salzburg; Freud gave his lecture series at Clark University in Worcester,

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Massachusetts, in the fall of ; in , at the Nuremberg Congress, the International Psycho-Analytical Association was formally founded, with local groups in Vienna, Berlin, and Zurich; and psychoanalytic associations were established in Budapest, London, Munich, and New York in . Publications devoted to psychoanalytic research also originated during this period: the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen came out for the first time in ; the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse was begun in  as the official publication of the International Psycho-Analytical Association; the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse replaced the Jahrbuch and the Zentralblatt in , and the same year saw the founding of Imago, a journal dedicated to applied psychoanalysis. A psychoanalytic publishing house, the Internationaler Psychoanalitischer Verlag, was established in Vienna in . Ernest Jones founded a new British Psycho-Analytical Society in February of . In , the International Journal of Psychoanalysis began publication and the first official psychoanalytic polyclinic and training institute opened in Berlin under the direction of Karl Abraham (‒) and Max Eitingon. A psychoanalytic ambulatorium, or outpatient clinic, began operation in Vienna in  as a diagnostic and referral center, and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute initiated its first seminars for training analysts in . The Gesammelte Schriften von Sigmund Freud were published by the Internationaler Psychoanalitischer Verlag in . James Strachey undertook the translation into English and publication of Freud’s works in England by the Hogarth Press in , and another psychoanalytic training institute began operations in London in .26 Thus, by the mid s, psychoanalysis had an international professional organization and an official journal, many local professional societies in Europe and the United States affiliated with the international association, several training institutes in place to certify the training and accreditation of new analysts, and the beginnings of an authoritative English translation of Freud’s complete writings. I would like to focus on one development in the history of the psychoanalytic movement as crucial to the modes of institutionalization that Freud followed: the fact that psychoanalysis did not become an independent academic discipline. As it became clear that the University of Vienna would not create a permanent place in the curriculum for psychoanalysis, either as an addition to existing disciplines like philosophy or developing disciplines like psychology or as a new branch of scientific or medical re-

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search, Freud could not promulgate psychoanalysis as an accepted academic discipline.27 Therefore, Freud and his followers had to rely on strategies of professionalization: they needed clearly to define psychoanalytic practice and knowledge; to provide for standard and exclusive training procedures, carried out in accredited, independent institutes; and to found professional organizations and journals. Freud certainly did not give up on the possibility that psychoanalysis would ultimately become a recognized scientific discipline, but the most significant professionalizing task of his writings was to stake a claim for the autonomy of psychoanalysis as a professional practice and form of knowledge. If psychoanalysis was rejected by the academic medical establishment, it must stand solidly on its own as a profession, and persuade the public—both medical and lay—of its historical and epistemological necessity and practical psychotherapeutic indispensability. The final stage that Freud envisioned for the professionalization of psychoanalytic practice was state sponsorship: for psychoanalysis to fulfill as fully as possible its professional commitment to serve society, psychoanalysts should become civil servants. In his writings on psychoanalytic technique and the psychoanalytic movement, Freud defines the professional jurisdiction of psychoanalysis: the work, personal characteristics, and training of the psychoanalytic professional, the analyst; the attributes of a likely candidate for analysis, the patient ; and the expertise, or autonomous, common cognitive base, of psychoanalytic work that distinguishes it from any other kind of psychotherapeutic technique.

The Analyst In “On Psychotherapy,” a lecture given before the Viennese College of Physicians in , Freud makes a broad appeal to the medical market for psychoanalytic technique by suggesting that the doctor is always involved, intentionally or otherwise, in supplying the psychotherapy that the patient demands along with the treatment of his or her specific physical ailment: “Is it not then a justifiable endeavor on the part of a physician to seek to obtain command of this factor [psychotherapy], to use it with a purpose, and to direct and strengthen it?”28 Freud attempts to create a large constituency for psychoanalytic practice by suggesting that most physicians

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are already performing a crude version of “psychotherapy” and simply need to avail themselves of his much more refined techniques. In numerous later texts where he more pointedly addresses the way in which one can have access to psychoanalytic knowledge, however, Freud insists on the necessity of a specifically psychoanalytic training. One of Freud’s repeated rhetorical procedures in his expositions of psychoanalysis is to attempt to rule out the possibility that he will fail to persuade his audience by claiming that the very format of his exposition is insufficient to inspire belief, and that only by undertaking an actual analysis can a person become convinced of the truth of psychoanalysis. Not only does he stress repeatedly that psychoanalysis cannot be learned from books or lectures, but he also ties both certification for psychoanalytic practice and the more general emotional and cognitive readiness to be persuaded by psychoanalytic ideas to the experience of analysis.29 The training analysis, formally proposed as a requirement for all new analysts after the  Budapest congress and officially mandated in ,30 came to serve both as a professional apprenticeship and also as a means to preserve the orthodoxy of psychoanalytic practice. In , Freud attacked the problem of unauthorized, or “wild,” analysis by insisting on the necessity of a “monopoly” of psychoanalytic technique, both through proper training “from those who are already proficient in it,” and through the agency of a professional organization, the International Psycho-Analytical Association, which had just been founded that year: “The members declare their adherence by the publication of their names, in order to be able to repudiate responsibility for what is done by those who do not belong to us and yet call their medical procedure ‘psycho-analysis.’” In warning of the potential “dangers to patients” from unauthorized analysts, Freud also, however, makes clear his primary concern for the future of the psychoanalytic movement in this explicit claim to a monopoly of psychoanalytic training: “For as a matter of fact ‘wild’ analysts of this kind do more harm to the cause of psycho-analysis than to individual patients.”31 Freud refined this position two years later by warning physicians that without going through the experience of being analyzed himself, a practitioner “will easily fall into the temptation of projecting outwards some of the peculiarities of his own personality, which he has dimly perceived, into the field of science, as a theory having universal validity; he will bring the psychoanalytic method into discredit, and lead the inexperienced astray.”32

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The training analysis should ensure that the analyst is in a position to know the difference between self and psychoanalysis. The analytic community also plays a crucial role in translating the materials of analytic experience into “science” by screening new cases against prior analytic findings, and can protect both unwary patients and the “credit” of psychoanalysis by repudiating unqualified and uncertified analysts. The objectivity of psychoanalysis as “science” depends upon the objectivity of the properly trained analyst, but the prerogative of assessing that training, as is typical of professions, belongs to the psychoanalytic profession itself.33 After , most of Freud’s own analyses were training analyses; not only was he very much in demand among eager prospective analysts, but by referring candidates that he could not analyze himself to other analysts whom he approved of, he also “helped to determine both the financial rewards of his institution and its hierarchy of social prestige.”34 In The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud uses his intervention in a particular controversy within the psychoanalytic movement—the question of whether people without medical degrees should be able to practice psychoanalysis—as a further opportunity to define psychoanalysis for the public as scientific theory, therapy, and profession. This text was written in response to a failed attempt by the government of Vienna to invoke a law against “quackery” in order to prevent Theodor Reik (‒), a prominent nonmedical Viennese analyst, from practicing analysis. That Lay Analysis is a strategic professional intervention is evident, not only from Freud’s strong claims for the autonomy and legitimacy of psychoanalytic practice, but also because of its being addressed to a representative of the state, who, Abbott says, stands for a continental profession’s “public . . . in its informal sense—the common opinion of state officials.”35 Freud presents his defense of lay analysis in the form of a dialogue with an “Impartial Person,” a fictional rendering of the official whom Freud actually dealt with in the matter. In his text, Freud must persuade the “Impartial Person” that medical training is not necessary to practice psychoanalysis. At one point, Freud predicts that his efforts to convince his interlocutor will be in vain, because even analysts themselves must pass through a training analysis in order to have more than an academic and intellectual belief in psychoanalysis: “How then could I expect to convince you, the Impartial Person, of the correctness of our theories, when I can only put before you an abbreviated and therefore unintelligible account of them, without con-

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firming them from your own experiences?” (LA, ).36 While Freud seems to concede failure in his fictional debate, he is also implying the necessity of a strictly psychoanalytic control over the production—education and training—of analysts, in order that only those who have passed through a professional apprenticeship will have the necessary “experience” to practice analysis. Psychoanalytic knowledge, Freud implies, is an expertise that cannot be judged adequately by the uninitiated. As in many of his discussions of the “resistances” to psychoanalysis, he also stages the lack of belief in analysis as an inability or refusal to understand it. At this point in the history of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud can also indicate the existence of two psychoanalytic institutes, in Berlin and Vienna, and one in the process of being founded in London, at which a specific, stringent psychoanalytic training is given: At these Institutes the candidates themselves are taken into analysis, receive theoretical instruction by lectures on all the subjects that are important for them, and enjoy the supervision of older and more experienced analysts when they are allowed to make their first trials with comparatively slight cases. A period of some two years is calculated for this training. Even after this period, of course, the candidate is only a beginner and not yet a master. What is still needed must be acquired by practice and by an exchange of ideas in the psychoanalytical societies in which young and old members meet together. Preparation for analytic activity is by no means so easy and simple. The work is hard, the responsibility great. But anyone who has passed through such a course of instruction . . . is no longer a layman in the field of psycho-analysis. [LA, ]

Freud gives an account here of a fully institutionalized psychoanalytic professional training, and based on it makes a claim for the recognition of a professional monopoly on psychoanalytic practice: “I lay stress on the demand that no one should practise analysis who has not acquired the right to do so by a particular training. Whether such a person is a doctor or not seems to me immaterial” (LA, ). Freud distinguishes psychoanalysis from the profession of medicine precisely by distinguishing psychoanalytic from medical training. As Sander Gilman has noted, the psychoanalytic training institute is “created after the pattern of academic institutions.”37 In order to define the immense challenge of attaining psychoanalytic expertise more precisely, Freud sketches for the Impartial Person the purely academic curriculum of a hypothetical “college of psycho-analysis” (psychoanalytische Hochschule):

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If—which may sound fantastic today—one had to found a college of psychoanalysis, much would have to be taught in it which is also taught by the medical faculty: alongside of depth-psychology, which would always remain the principal subject, there would be an introduction to biology, as much as possible of the science of sexual life, and familiarity with the symptomatology of psychiatry. On the other hand, analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature [Kulturgeschichte, Mythologie, Religionspsychologie und Literaturwissenschaft ]. Unless he is well at home in these subjects, an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material.38

In addition to important medical subjects, Freud calls for a broad humanistic training,39 with the notable exception of philosophy. This proposed curriculum for the “psychoanalytic college” is not meant to suggest that there should be a supplemental institution to the training institute, but rather serves to delineate how far psychoanalytic knowledge surpasses mere medical expertise.40 It also indicates both Freud’s hope that psychoanalysis might become an academic discipline, and his project of constructing its autonomy—this is not a faculty or department of psychoanalysis, after all, but a “psychoanalytic college.” The graduate of this college would bring to bear a demanding interdisciplinary training whose priorities are set by a psychoanalytic agenda. The other disciplines are useful as encyclopedic sources of cultural materials, but their own systems of classification are subordinated to the theoretical and therapeutic goals of psychoanalysis. Thus, along with a psychoanalytic professional certification, the analyst would have a particularly wide-reaching and authoritative knowledge of history and culture derived from his being “at home” in many disciplines, each itself the domain of an academic specialist. Abbott observes that from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries, there was a shift in values supporting professional expertise toward the justification of professional practice as both scientific and efficient, but that “general learning . . . was an important predecessor of efficiency as a specific legitimation of technique.”41 Freud’s hypothetical curriculum also outlines a standard of extensive general learning for the professional analyst that would function both as a basis for analytic work and as a means of broadening and defending the disciplinary reach of psychoanalytic expertise. Freud also rhetorically turns the tables on those who accuse the non-

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medical analyst of quackery by criticizing doctors who claim to practice psychoanalysis without having passed through analytic training: Permit me to give the word “quack” the meaning it ought to have instead of the legal one. According to the law a quack is anyone who treats patients without possessing a state diploma to prove that he is a doctor. I should prefer another definition: a quack is anyone who undertakes a treatment without possessing the knowledge and capacities necessary for it. Taking my stand on this definition, I venture to assert that—not only in the European countries—doctors form a preponderating contingent of quacks in analysis. They very frequently practise analytic treatment without having learnt it and without understanding it. [LA, ‒]

In the strongest terms, Freud argues that the most important criterion for assessing the “legality” of psychoanalytic practice should be whether the analyst has received a proper psychoanalytic training. He also implies that governmental oversight should be directed, not toward lay analysts, but toward the analytic “quacks” who may possess a state medical diploma but lack psychoanalytic credentials. In this way Freud also claims the same legitimacy for the primarily professional, private psychoanalytic training and certification as obtains for a public medical education. In addition to his or her specifically analytic training, the analyst also draws on other socially available models of professional status. Richard Sterba, a Viennese analyst trained at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, recalls his colleagues’ awareness of their status as “an assembly of ‘gebildete’ people”: The noun form of gebildete, Bildung is generally translated into English as “education.” However, one would not call somebody who has merely graduated from university a gebildeter Mensch. To be considered gebildet, one had to be able to speak at least two living languages (predominantly English and French) besides German, the language of the meetings; . . . The knowledge of ancient Latin and Greek, the obligatory studies at the gymnasium, was taken for granted. A gebildeter Mensch had to be familiar with the most important works of Western literature and the most important events of the history of Western culture. He had to be familiar with its outstanding artists and their chefs d’oeuvre. Interest in and information about current events should not be missing. One expects a Gebildeter to be well mannered and to use the vocabulary of the gebildete circle. A great deal of the behavior, interests, and mentality of the Gebildete is absorbed from childhood on if he is brought up in the gebildete milieu; it is difficult to acquire it later. Of course, the gebildete Mensch as I have described him here was an ideal; however,

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most of the society members attained some degree of this Bildung. . . . Sigmund Freud was above all of us; his Bildung was of the highest level, as one can easily recognize in his publications and letters.

Sterba notes that his description of the gebildete Mensch fits the educational backgrounds of the Austrian liberal bourgeoisie, but that the Viennese analysts were in a special category because of their relation to Freud: “We were aware of being privileged to be near the creative source of the new science, which we knew was destined to have a decisive impact on our culture and was already a major factor in shaping modern Western thought and life in the twentieth century. . . . Each new publication by Freud renewed and intensified this emotion and, since the Viennese analysts all shared in it, the feeling of belonging to a community of privileged individuals was unavoidable. This led to a sense of unity and harmony among the members.”42 As professionals and psychoanalysts, the Viennese group recognized themselves as a cultural elite within a professionally and culturally elite educated class, and this knowledge of their privileged status and pioneering work, confidently reliant as they were on the superiority of Freud’s own Bildung and on the glorious future of psychoanalytic ideas, enhanced their solidarity and productivity. Physician analysts could also parlay the respectability accruing to the medical profession. Roy Porter has characterized nineteenth-century medicine as a field involved in intense transformation and competition for social and professional legitimacy. Because of the greater focus of medicine on teaching and research and intensified efforts to consolidate professional organization, “medical discourse became increasingly directed to professional peers,” while the patient “was increasingly downgraded to an object of ‘the medical gaze.’”43 The psychoanalyst must show the greatest possible attention to the patient’s every utterance in order to provide a therapeutic construction of his or her psychological history; in this sense, the analysand is not a “mere object” of the medical gaze. It is clear, however, from Freud’s early comparison of the psychoanalyst’s and the physician’s influence that the medical analyst could also rely on the growing professional authority and social prestige of medical expertise to help establish the “superior position” that, Freud suggests in his late essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (), is needed if “in certain analytic situations . . . [the analyst] can act as a model for his patient and, in others, as his teacher” (AT, ).44 For Freud, the doctor, teacher, and analyst exercise an

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analogous authority, because they are all professionals who, owing to their greater knowledge, occupy a commanding position in relation to their clients or students. In a letter to the psychoanalyst and writer Lou AndreasSalomé (‒), Freud describes the analyst’s dominance in even stronger terms by once again likening it to the teacher’s influence: “In education as in analysis one partner must be the superior and the unassailable.”45 Individual analyses, like medical cases, also undergo inevitable objectification as material for psychoanalytic clinical and theoretical research. John Forrester has argued persuasively that the psychoanalytic technique of free association also relies on a model of the physician’s authority. The physician gains the cooperation of the patient based on a professional contract, under which the patient’s seeking out of the expert is presumed to be a free choice, and the expert’s treatment or advice can be refused. But the psychoanalytic mobilization of this contract through the fundamental analytic rule of free association creates a particularly powerful version of professional medical influence through its therapeutic medium of speech: The [physician psychoanalyst] diagnoses hysteria. He then says to the patient: “Say whatever comes into your head.” Even if the patient takes this to be a command, whatever response he gives is appropriate—even if he says, “There is nothing in my head,” he will be seen to be obeying the rule—seen (eventually) even by himself to be so doing. In this way, psychoanalysis amounts to a discovery of a new form of discourse, in which whatever is said complies with the wish (or the rules) of the doctor, and whatever is said implicitly bolsters his authority, in so far as saying anything falls within the domain of what the doctor ordered, thus reinforcing his position as utterer of that speech-act. Even if the patient says “I find your rule politically suspect—I refuse to obey it,” he is obeying it, thus crystallizing an authority relation between the two speaking subjects—an authority relation constituted by the demand for speech. As long as he keeps talking, the doctor’s authority remains intact, and, indeed, is confirmed.

Forrester situates psychoanalysis historically as a response to the crisis of medical confidence that arose out of the controversy over hypnotism. Hypnotism employed as a therapeutic technique exposed the authoritarian relation between doctor and patient that had always existed but had been masked and thus protected from criticism by resort to drugs as a more impersonal mode of treatment. By Forrester’s account, psychoanalysis turned a historical moment of potential weakening of the physician’s professional authority into an opportunity to provide an even stronger elaboration of

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medical authority in the most basic and characteristic element of its clinical technique.46 In the essay “On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psychoanalysis I)” (), Freud also straightforwardly explains another crucial element of the professional contract between analyst and analysand: the proper procedures for the analyst’s handling of his professional fees. He warns that if he is to make a living, the psychoanalyst should not follow medical men in their tendency “to act the part of the disinterested philanthropist” and then grumble in private when patients fail to pay what they owe (BT, ). Psychoanalysts both need to be as open about matters of money as they are about matters of sex, and to take greater care than the average doctor about collecting their fees, because so large a part of their working week is devoted to a single patient. Freud also advises against gratuitous treatment for the same reason—it results in a disabling loss of income for the psychoanalyst (BT, ). While he acknowledges a departure from standard professional practice among medical specialists in the analyst’s readiness to demand his fee, even when the patient is not able to attend a session, Freud distinguishes the psychoanalyst from the physician as actually more “respectable and ethically less objectionable” in his candor about his professional right to compensation, and compares the psychoanalyst to the surgeon, who “is frank and expensive because he has at his disposal methods of treatment which can be of use” (BT, ). Freud asserts the moral and professional superiority of psychoanalysts over doctors, and over neurologists in particular, by suggesting that because the analyst, like the surgeon, effectively remedies the ailments he attempts to cure rather than merely diagnosing them, he can dispense with the hypocritical, pseudo-aristocratic stance that allows the physician to distance himself from a potential failure of treatment in the same way that he distances himself from the patient by pretending not to need money.47 Freud’s recommendations seem to be a variation on the usual procedures by which an occupation claims professional status; by exhibiting their economic motives, psychoanalysts distinguish themselves from other medical professionals. They acknowledge their standing as middle-class men who must earn a living even as they work toward the disinterested goal of a science of the mind. Freud also implies that because their livelihood is at stake, the public should trust psychoanalysts, since if they fail to provide high-quality services, they risk losing their clients to competing specialties.

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In “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud counsels that both the lay and medical analyst must continually refresh their specific psychoanalytic training by entering analysis every five years. Such regular resumption of analysis should counter the tendency toward “hostility . . . and partisanship” that threatens the objectivity of persons who are constantly treating the neuroses of others without subjecting themselves to “the critical and corrective influence of psychoanalysis.” This voluntary subjection to scrutiny by a professional peer, along with the “considerable degree of mental normality and correctness” desirable in an analyst, should keep at bay the “‘dangers of analysis’” for the analyst. Freud goes on to characterize psychoanalysis as the third of three “‘impossible’” professions—the other two being “education and government”—“in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results” (AT, ‒). He sardonically reflects on the immense difficulty of measuring up to the personal and professional standards required of psychoanalysts and also of producing a cure, but he also posits a subtle but powerful analogy between psychoanalytic and both parental and political authority. Freud intimates that like other professionals, but in ways far more influential, because of their contact with the “deepest” needs and desires of those they treat, psychoanalysts can claim to exercise a parental and governmental power, which would otherwise ordinarily be oppressive, for both the patient’s and society’s benefit. Psychoanalysis is thus an “impossible”—that is, exceptional—profession in its attempt to offer the most perfect package of what professional ideology promises: expert, personal service that can mediate between the demands of society and family on behalf of beleaguered individuals.

The Patient Magali Sarfatti Larson points out that the professions were in a different position from capitalist enterprises when it came to finding a market for their services, in that “unlike the early capitalist industries, they were not exploiting already existing markets but were instead working to create them.”48 In addition to generating public recognition of their specific expertise based on rigorous specialized training, professions must also target their services to particular clienteles; in part they respond to an already existing demand, and in part they redefine this demand so that the service they offer provides the best diagnosis and treatment of the reconstituted

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problem. Andrew Abbott defines the professional construction of a problem as “claims to classify a problem, to reason about it, and to take action on it: in more formal terms, to diagnose, to infer, and to treat.”49 Freud’s An Autobiographical Study () demonstrates that his earliest career decisions were based on a shrewd analysis of the potential market for a new treatment of neurotic disorders. In his attempt to find a niche within the medical profession, he located the “personal problem” that would unfold a new jurisdiction for psychoanalysis. During his medical studies at the University of Vienna, Freud embarked on neurological research in the laboratory of the physiologist Ernst Wilhelm Brücke (‒). While at Brücke’s institute, from  to , he published five scientific papers and showed great promise as a researcher.50 However, there were no openings for Freud to move into a permanent position and therefore, acting on Brücke’s advice, he shifted his focus to medical practice and the study of “nervous diseases” and, ultimately, to a specialization in the treatment of patients suffering from psychoneuroses.51 Freud provides both a practical and economic rationale for his initial choice of both clientele and therapeutic procedures: Anyone who wants to make a living from the treatment of nervous patients must clearly be able to do something to help them. My therapeutic arsenal contained only two weapons, electrotherapy and hypnotism, for prescribing a visit to a hydropathic establishment after a single consultation was an inadequate source of income. . . . It thus came about, as a matter of course, that in the first years of my activity as a physician my principal instrument of work, apart from haphazard and unsystematic psychotherapeutic methods, was hypnotic suggestion. This implied, of course, that I abandoned the treatment of organic nervous diseases; but that was of little importance. For on the one hand the prospects in the treatment of such disorders were in any case never promising, while, on the other hand, in the private practice of a physician working in a large town, the quantity of such patients was nothing compared to the crowds of neurotics, whose number seemed further multiplied by the way in which they hurried, with their troubles unsolved, from one physician to another.52

Freud is quite frank about his professional calculations, and there was no reason for him to hide them, given the expectations of his readers, many of whom, even today, would have made similar calculations in launching a career. Based on his training and personal considerations of how to earn enough as a doctor to get married and start a family, Freud surveyed the

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field of possible clients and located an existing demand that psychoanalysis would ultimately redefine, both in order to meet it and, potentially, to monopolize the treatment of the psychoneuroses. That these patients were clearly willing (or obliged) to consult various medical specialists meant that they might also undertake a new kind of treatment, and Freud’s account also suggests his assessment of the intense competition for the business of these “hurried crowds” of neurotics. This professional move to focus on the particular problem of the nonsomatic treatment of nervous diseases also led Freud to revise his technique by abandoning hypnosis, a crucial step toward the psychotherapeutic practice that would become the new professional jurisdiction of psychoanalysis. Freud’s more specific definitions of the proper candidate for analysis paint a picture of a middle- and upper-class clientele. In “On Psychotherapy,” while specifying “conditions under which [this method] is indicated or contra-indicated,” Freud infers that the patient should preferably be a member of the educated classes: “It is gratifying that precisely the most valuable and most highly developed persons are best suited for this procedure.” He also advises that “those patients who do not possess a reasonable degree of education and a fairly reliable character should be refused.”53 In regretting the inability of analysts to treat the lower classes because of their own poverty and need to earn an income (IL, ), and also by his telling comment in a letter to Jung that “if I had based my theories on the statements of servant girls, they would all be negative,”54 Freud indicates that psychoanalysis is most suitable as a therapy for educated upper- and middleclass people, whose nervous illnesses it was in fact formulated to treat. In a letter to Martha Bernays of , in the context of some comments on a performance of Carmen, Freud articulates his sense that psychology varies to some extent according to social class. He suggests that economic security leads middle-class people “like ourselves” to “economize” on emotional expenditures. In contrast, the “common people” (he also refers to them as “the mob”) “give vent to their impulses [sich ausleben]” and dissipate their psychological and physical resources because their economic deprivation and physical vulnerability give them no incentive to “deprive themselves” as “we” do. Middle-class people “feel more deeply,” Freud observes; the poor do not “feel their desires intensely” because “the evils of our social structure” cause a situation that makes the loss of loved ones so likely: “Such people also have more feeling of community than we do: it is

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only they who are alive to the way in which one life is the continuation of the next, whereas for each of us the world vanishes with his death.”55 Freud is reflecting here on the painful necessity that he and Martha “deprive themselves” by postponing their marriage until he can earn a living. But he also articulates a set of distinctions that provide an ideological background for the psychoanalytic focus on a middle-class clientele. Members of the middle class are characterized by their individuality: their psychological “integrity”;56 the “depth” of their feelings; their ability to suppress their instincts; their emotional attachment to other, irreplaceable individuals, whose deaths, because they are the deaths of individuals, are irrecuperable; and, somewhat paradoxically, the solitariness of their experience of death. The “common people,” on the other hand, do not qualify as individuals— they can’t afford the luxury of individuality. They embody a communal identity and social continuity that the young Freud seems to value, partially because such ideas form a backdrop against which he can romanticize his and Martha’s own attachment to each other, thus making their separation more bearable. Even though Freud explains these differences in behavior and values between working- and middle-class people as the results of the “social structure,” he also classifies them as essential psychological differences—middle-class individuality is a norm that the poor cannot achieve, in part because their social vulnerability also makes them closer to a “natural,” undifferentiated, almost species-level existence.57 Freud carries out a complex encoding of social stereotypes and personal experience as the rudiments of a social psychology that he would elaborate theoretically in texts like Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (), The Future of an Illusion (), and Civilization and Its Discontents (). When Freud specifically addresses the possibility of analysis for the poor, he always points to both the practical difficulty of treating them and their unsuitability as psychoanalytic patients. In an address before the Fifth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Budapest in , Freud proposes that psychoanalytic treatment might be extended free of charge to the mass of poor and uneducated people, “so that the men who would otherwise give way to drink, the women who have nearly succumbed under their burden of privations, children for whom there is no choice but between running wild or neurosis, may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance and of efficient work” (LPT, ). He predicts, however, that “the large-scale application of our therapy will compel us to alloy the pure gold

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of analysis freely with the copper of direct suggestion; and hypnotic influence, too, might find a place in it again, as it has in the treatment of war neuroses” (LPT, ). Freud indicates that because of the greater number of analyses, each one would have to take less time, and therefore analysts would have to rely on less effective but quicker methods, rather than the time-consuming procedure of “pure” analysis. Thus when Freud raises the possibility of expanding psychoanalysis to the working class and poor, he alters its identity, not completely but significantly: he describes the difference between analysis for the poor and for its regular, paying clients in terms that refer directly to the economic status of the patient. The statesponsored treatment of the poor he envisions becomes “large-scale” analysis by the “copper” of “direct suggestion,” and even hypnosis, while the “pure gold” of the intensive working through of a particular life story, the true psychoanalysis, remains a service to be purchased by those who can afford it. Nathan G. Hale, Jr., a historian of psychoanalysis in the United States, shows that the American clientele of psychoanalysis from the early part of this century to the present has been predominantly upper- and upper-middle class and highly educated.58 Abbott contends that the success of psychoanalysis in the United States offers an example of a profession that consolidated itself by “alliance with a particular social class,” and that “in such a case, a profession draws both its recruits and its clients from the upper classes, locates its training in elite universities or similar settings, and affects an ethic of stringent gentlemanliness.”59 Following Larson’s formulations of the relation of professions to the bourgeois ideology of individualism, we can perceive that Freud, too, positions psychoanalysis as an individualized professional service for people who have the income and leisure to sustain a long-term therapy; psychoanalytic treatment reconstitutes and confirms the value of such clients’ “individuality” and thus ideologically reinforces the patient’s superior social position. While Freud’s proposal to extend analysis to the poor seems to grant them a version of this middle-class individuality as well, we can see that it also participates in the professional project of promoting individualized service as “an ideological remedy for the ills of a social situation.”60 Psychoanalysis offers no remedy for the poor person’s “burden of privations,” but rather a way to cope psychologically with them. While Freud recognizes that perhaps only a combination of “mental assistance with some material support” can truly make the treatment of their neuroses pos-

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sible for members of the working class and the poor, he nevertheless suggests that the role of analysis would be to fortify them for “resistance” against neurosis so that they can engage in “efficient work,” rather than any organized, political “resistance” against the social and economic causes of their suffering (LPT, ). In an earlier formulation of the problem of treating the poor through psychoanalysis, Freud overtly diagnoses impoverished lower-class neurotics as malingerers: Perhaps there is truth in the widespread belief that those who are forced by necessity to a life of hard toil are less easily overtaken by neurosis. But on the other hand experience shows without a doubt that once a poor man has produced a neurosis it is only with difficulty that he lets it be taken from him. It renders him too good a service in the struggle for existence; the secondary gain from illness which it brings him is much too important. He now claims by right of his neurosis the pity which the world has refused to his material distress, and he can now absolve himself from the obligation of combating his poverty by working. [BT, ‒]

Instead of performing a “service” to himself and society by taking up his “obligation” to work, Freud’s neurotic pauper takes advantage of the “service” his illness renders him by claiming the “right” to be “pitied” for his illness, since his “material distress” has failed to register as a claim upon the world for more material forms of redress. My point here is not to condemn Freud for failing to propose more radical solutions beyond the purview of psychoanalytic therapeutic interventions, but rather to show that his sense of the limitations on the expansion of psychoanalysis to treat the poor and workers is typical of the ways in which the professions dealing with “personal problems” historically formulated their task. Larson explains that professional services were only extended on a mass scale after the formation of the social-welfare state, but even then, “professional services of a personal kind either continue to be reserved to those who are rich enough to pay, or they tend to be qualitatively different according to the client’s capacity to pay,”61 much as Freud’s plan for making psychoanalysis available to the poor envisions. Freud’s professional targeting of a middle- and upper-class clientele must also be understood as a strategy to deal with the fact that many psychoanalytic practitioners at the turn of the century could not rely on a primary attachment to an institutional setting like that of the asylum or hospital for income or patient referrals. Although the diagnosis of hysteria in members of all social classes during the nineteenth century certainly could

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not have escaped Freud’s notice, particularly once he had been exposed to Charcot’s many working-class patients at the Salpêtrière in Paris during his visit there in , as an independent specialist who could not depend on institutional support, the psychoanalyst had to concentrate on patients who could pay. In his defense of analysts’ prerogatives in collecting their professional fees, Freud does not neglect to outline the potential cost benefits to the patient of analytic treatment: As far as the middle classes are concerned, the expense involved in psychoanalysis is excessive only in appearance. Quite apart from the fact that no comparison is possible between restored health and efficiency on the one hand and a moderate financial outlay on the other, when we add up the unceasing costs of nursinghomes and medical treatment and contrast them with the increase of efficiency and earning capacity which results from a successfully completed analysis, we are entitled to say that the patients have made a good bargain. Nothing in life is so expensive as illness—and stupidity. [BT, ]

Once again, Freud’s professional claims are both straightforward and subtle. On the one hand, he asserts that psychoanalytic treatment is actually cost-effective for the majority of middle-class patients: it is both briefer and cheaper than medical treatment and nursing-home care, and, most important, it provides a cure that allows the patient to return to his or her own wage-earning activities. Freud’s frequent defenses of neurotics as victims of hypocritical and oppressive sexual morality may seem to contradict this diagnosis of neurotic illness as “stupidity,” but if we see this charaterization in the context of an essay that outlines the specific professional practices of the psychoanalyst, then the rationale behind Freud’s rhetoric becomes clearer. Psychoanalysis also views neurosis as an escape from reality, and through his pejorative classification of neurotics Freud reestablishes the professional analyst’s moral, intellectual, and psychological superiority— which he may momentarily have ceded in his discussion of the economic necessities that the analyst himself faces—over the fellow member of the educated classes who is his client.62

Constructing an Autonomous Psychoanalytic Expertise In the context of examining Freud’s professionalizing strategies, it becomes clear that the internal disputes over psychoanalytic doctrine, and

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the famous (and infamous) splits in the psychoanalytic community, were moments when Freud moved to solidify the professional status of psychoanalysis. Freud wrote On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement to repudiate “unpsychoanalytic” theoretical innovations by Jung and Adler. He also took this polemic as an occasion to define psychoanalysis as a specific, autonomous professional expertise. In explaining the reasons for the establishment of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, Freud argues that he wished, not only to secure the succession of the leadership of the movement (“I felt the need of transferring this authority to a younger man, who would then as a matter of course take my place after my death”), but also to ensure that there would be an official professional organization to safeguard the identity of psychoanalytic knowledge and technique: “There should be some headquarters whose business it would be to declare: ‘All this nonsense is nothing to do with analysis; this is not psycho-analysis’” (HPM, ‒). In addition to his opening announcement that psychoanalysis is his “creation” (HPM, ), Freud asserts intellectual ownership of psychoanalysis when he refers to Jung’s and Adler’s initial use of the name “psycho-analysis” as “usurpation” (HPM, ) and “misappropriation of property by attempted impersonation” (HPM,  ). Such pronouncements work to stake out a monopoly of the legitimate professional practice of psychoanalysis. Freud also repeatedly insists on the autonomy of psychoanalytic knowledge from judgment according to standards “external” to it. He argues that the passage of time will allow for the unbiased evaluation of psychoanalytic findings, as has happened with every other science (HPM, ). He also points out that because in disputes between “opposition movements” within psychoanalysis, each party uses analysis against the other, “the discussion will reach a state which entirely excludes the possibility of convincing any impartial third person” (HPM, ). In other words, no one outside of psychoanalysis can judge which of the two parties is really voicing objections based on resistances, and which is defending analysis against such resistances, since both sides will accuse the other by means of psychoanalytic diagnoses of the unconscious reasons for their criticisms. The concept of resistance itself therefore functions as a guarantor of psychoanalytic professional autonomy. Freud acknowledges that he should not have been so surprised at the “secessions” of Jung and Adler, since “daily experience with patients had shown that total rejection of analytic knowl-

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edge may result whenever a specially strong resistance arises at any depth in the mind; . . . I had to learn that the very same thing can happen with psycho-analysts as with patients in analysis” (HPM, ‒). Freud also dismisses the suggestion that psychoanalytic knowledge is relative and a product of “arbitrary personal views” by calling such attacks products of “reactionary currents of present-day feeling which are hostile to science,” and which attempt “to dispute the right of psycho-analysis to be valued as a science” (HPM, ‒). If any science can be labeled by reactionaries as “relative” in one way or another, then psychoanalysis, as science, is merely facing the wrath of its critics’ anti-scientific biases. Many critics of psychoanalysis have observed that the concept of resistance allows psychoanalysis to dismiss objections to its theories on its own, psychoanalytic terms, and to rule out the possibility that there could be any intellectual position outside of psychoanalysis from which it could be questioned.63 During the mid s, Freud was particularly active in writing popular expositions and defenses of psychoanalysis, and many of these articles resulted from solicitations.64 The Question of Lay Analysis, for example, functions virtually as a manifesto for the professional autonomy of psychoanalysis, even as it is addressed to the state as a potential guarantor of that autonomy. At its conclusion, Freud acknowledges that he did not succeed in “converting” the Impartial Person to a belief in psychoanalysis, but suggests that the lack of government sanction for lay analytic practice will ultimately not affect its independent scientific development: “It is by no means so important what decision you give on the question of lay analysis. It may have a local effect. But the things that really matter—the possibilities in psycho-analysis for internal development—can never be affected by regulations and prohibitions” (LA, ). That is, the only attention that Freud desires from the government is official sponsorship, not mere oversight and regulation, although these also would follow on state funding of psychoanalysis. The central purpose of Lay Analysis, however, is to assert the autonomy of psychoanalytic expertise from medicine: psychoanalysis must not be “swallowed up by medicine” and “find its last resting-place in a text-book of psychiatry under the heading ‘Methods of Treatment,’ alongside of procedures such as hypnotic suggestion, autosuggestion, and persuasion, which, born from our ignorance, have to thank the laziness and cowardice of mankind for their short-lived effects” (LA, ). Freud both rejects the incorporation of psychoanalysis into medicine as a mere

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“method” among others and also deftly defines it as a legitimate, scientific therapy by distinguishing it from unscientific treatments that “ignorantly” rely on the powers of suggestion. In “Explanations, Applications and Orientations” (), one of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud provides a broad and often polemical overview of the state of psychoanalytic practice and research. He again takes up the question of whether psychoanalysis should be subsumed under medicine or practiced as one kind of therapy along with others: Psycho-analysis is really a method of treatment like others. It has its triumphs and its defeats, its difficulties, its limitations, its indications. . . . If we turn to mundane competitors, we must compare psycho-analytic treatment with other kinds of psychotherapy. To-day organic physical methods of treating neurotic states need scarcely be mentioned. Analysis as a psycho-therapeutic procedure does not stand in opposition to other methods used in this specialized branch of medicine; it does not diminish their value nor exclude them. There is no theoretical inconsistency in a doctor who likes to call himself a psychotherapist using analysis on his patients alongside of any other method of treatment according to the peculiarities of the case and the favourable or unfavourable external circumstances. It is in fact technique that necessitates the specialization in medical practice. Thus in the same way surgery and orthopaedics were obliged to separate. Psycho-analytic activity is arduous and exacting; it cannot well be handled like a pair of glasses that one puts on for reading and takes off when one goes for a walk. As a rule psycho-analysis possesses a doctor either entirely or not at all. Those psychotherapists who make use of analysis among other methods, occasionally, do not to my knowledge stand on firm analytic ground; they have not accepted the whole of analysis but have watered it down—have drawn its fangs, perhaps; they cannot be counted as analysts. This is, I think, to be regretted. But co-operation in medical practice between an analyst and a psychotherapist who restricts himself to other techniques would serve quite a useful purpose. [E&A, ‒]

Theoretically, Freud allows, there is no incompatibility between a doctor’s practicing psychoanalysis along with another psychotherapeutic technique, but he then proceeds to argue that in practice this kind of combination of approaches never occurs, and in fact the dominant message of this seeming opening toward other psychotherapeutic methods is that psychoanalysis should “possess a doctor entirely or not at all.” A psychoanalytic training, Freud argues, is a rigorous specialization like any other, and just as medical specializations such as surgery and orthopedics have had to sepa-

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rate, so psychoanalysis must be practiced as a distinct specialty. Freud’s overture toward other methods quickly turns into a declaration of the necessity of psychoanalytic autonomy, both as therapy and as specialized science. Any attempt to combine it with other techniques diminishes its effectiveness—a “watering down” or “drawing of fangs”—that also amounts to a failure both to practice psychoanalysis at all and to practice it up to professional standards. Even Freud’s compromise proposal of cooperation between a psychoanalyst and a specialist in another psychotherapy keeps each practice clearly distinct. Despite its “difficulties” and “limitations,” Freud finally contends that, “compared with other psychotherapeutic procedures psycho-analysis is beyond doubt the most powerful” (E&A, ). His rhetorical and professional stance modulates from pragmatic modesty to defiant assurance about the therapeutic power of psychoanalysis. By this point in the lecture, Freud has also dismissed the “eclectics,” pseudo-adherents of psychoanalysis who will only accept certain parts of the theory and not others: “Though the structure of psycho-analysis is unfinished, it nevertheless presents, even today, a unity from which elements cannot be broken off at the caprice of whoever comes along” (E&A, ). His conciliating gestures notwithstanding, Freud deeply disapproves of combining psychoanalysis with other psychotherapies, both for professional and for theoretical and practical reasons. He ultimately leaves no doubt that psychoanalysis must be considered a distinct, autonomous, and unified professional practice and form of scientific knowledge. As Larson indicates, when the use value of a professional service has not been fully established in the public mind, and this was certainly the case with psychoanalysis even at the end of Freud’s life, then that profession has to take special care to control and to “standardize” the training of professionals, particularly by strictly formalizing, codifying, and limiting access to its expert knowledge.65 In the evolution of Freud’s definitions of psychoanalysis as a profession from an early text like “On Psychotherapy,” through On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, The Question of Lay Analysis, and the New Introductory Lectures, we can see, then, that as psychoanalysis achieved public recognition and institutionalization as a profession—by attracting clients and new analysts, and founding psychoanalytic organizations and training institutes—Freud enlarged his claims for the autonomy of psychoanalytic knowledge from government oversight, “external” scientific

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evaluation, and other competing theories, disciplines, and professions (as subsequent discussion will show in greater detail). At the same time, however, by not limiting his delineations of psychoanalytic practice to the analytic community, he sought to win broad approval of the “new science” of psychoanalysis and put it in a position to benefit from state sponsorship and wider public recognition alike.

The Psychoanalytic Jurisdiction: Contending with Psychiatry and Neurology In his analysis of jurisdictional competition among professions, Andrew Abbott delineates three common strategies that one profession often uses to redefine a problem and seize a jurisdiction from another: () reduction, which “replaces one profession’s diagnosis of a problem with another’s”; () metaphor, which “extends one profession’s models of inference to others”; and () contesting treatment, by which “the attacking profession claims simply that its treatments apply to problems diagnosed by others.”66 The earliest and probably most significant jurisdictional contest that Freud entered was the struggle to wrest the diagnosis and treatment of the neuroses, particularly hysteria, from psychiatry and neurology. In , as we have seen, Freud was still trying to persuade doctors of the reasonableness of his findings by appealing to their own experience of the informal but significant “psychotherapy” they were already practicing in their consultations about their patients’ physical problems: here he challenges the medical jurisdiction simply by annexing the physician’s power of “suggestion.”67 But Freud begins the first of his five lectures at Clark University in  much more aggressively by expressing his satisfaction that so few of his audience are “members of the medical profession,” and he goes on to attack the psychiatric method of diagnosing and treating hysteria: Thus the recognition of the illness as hysteria makes little difference to the patient; but to the doctor quite the reverse. . . . Through his studies, the doctor has learnt many things that remain a sealed book to the layman: he has been able to form ideas on the causes of illness and on the changes it brings about—e.g. in the brain of a person suffering from apoplexy or from a malignant growth—ideas which must to some degree meet the case, since they allow him to understand the details of the illness. But all his knowledge—his training in anatomy, in physiology and

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in pathology—leaves him in the lurch when he is confronted by the details of hysterical phenomena. He cannot understand hysteria, and in the face of it he is himself a layman. This is not a pleasant situation for anyone who as a rule sets so much store by his knowledge. So it comes about that hysterical patients forfeit his sympathy. He regards them as people who are transgressing the laws of his science— like heretics in the eyes of the orthodox. [FL, ‒]

It is hard to imagine a more explicit example of an attack on a professional jurisdiction through reduction. Freud asserts that the doctor’s diagnosis and inferences fail completely when he comes to deal with hysteria, because its etiology does not fit the “laws” of his particular professional knowledge and training in anatomy, physiology, and pathology, which lead him to assume a somatic cause for the hysteric’s symptoms.68 His helplessness to alleviate the hysteric’s suffering, Freud alleges, is thus a specifically professional failure, both in terms of diagnosis and treatment and in the doctor’s rejection and blame of the patient. This attack on psychiatry’s diagnoses and professional ethics is particularly striking given Freud’s own extensive education, laboratory research, and clinical experience in neurology. Freud was not a psychiatrist, but he was a medical practitioner trained to interpret disease physiologically.69 His categorical conclusion that only psychoanalysis can treat hysteria not only discounts psychiatric diagnostic procedures, it also goes beyond the specific case of hysteria to dispute the medical specialist’s purview over the treatment of mental disorders. As Porter has argued, when the body is called into question as the cause of illness and domain for its cure, “the autonomy and jurisdiction of biomedical science and clinical practice melt like May mist,” and “medicine . . . forfeits its title as a master discipline, grounded upon prized clinicoscientific expertise.”70 Freud rhetorically ejects psychiatry from its professional jurisdiction over nervous illnesses—his account of medicine’s incompetence to deal with hysteria reduces the psychiatrist to a “layman” (FL, ). Psychoanalysis, however, claims to offer a different diagnosis and effective treatment of hysteria; when Freud tells his audience that “our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences” (FL,  ) and introduces free association as “the main rule” of psychoanalytic treatment (FL, ), he also lays claim for psychoanalysis to a professional jurisdiction over the psychoneuroses that would rely on both psychological and medical knowledge but would radically displace medical expertise. These jurisdictional claims were not merely a mat-

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ter of rhetoric: Freud’s public explication of psychoanalysis in the Clark Lectures was a crucial beginning for the adoption and dissemination of psychoanalytic theory and technique within American psychiatry, as well as for the founding of purely psychoanalytic associations and training institutes in the United States.71 Given Freud’s attack on the jurisdictions— the systems of classification—of psychiatry and neurology, we can understand the “resistance” to psychoanalysis that he encountered in the medical establishment (and attributed to unconscious emotional factors) as a response to his encroachment on that establishment’s lucrative claim to psychiatric expertise regarding nervous illness.72 In his essay “On Beginning the Treatment” (), Freud articulates how psychoanalysts and psychiatrists differ both in their approach to diagnosis and in their attitudes to the consequences of diagnostic error. He advises analysts that they should take on patients for a two-week trial period before committing themselves to an analysis, because this initial contact will allow them to detect if a patient is suffering from a psychosis, particularly “paraphrenia” (schizophrenia). Freud asserts that despite the ease with which some psychiatrists claim to distinguish between obsessional neurosis or hysteria and paraphrenia, they actually can demonstrate no greater diagnostic success than analysts: To make a mistake, moreover, is of far greater moment for the psycho-analyst than it is for the clinical psychiatrist, as he is called. For the latter is not attempting to do anything that will be of use, whichever kind of case it may be. He merely runs the risk of making a theoretical mistake, and his diagnosis is of no more than academic interest. Where the psycho-analyst is concerned, however, if the case is unfavourable he has committed a practical error; he has been responsible for wasted expenditure and has discredited his method of treatment. He cannot fulfill his promise of cure if the patient is suffering, not from hysteria or obsessional neurosis, but from paraphrenia, and he therefore has particularly strong motives for avoiding mistakes in diagnosis. [BT, ‒]73

Freud again attacks psychiatry’s jurisdiction over the neuroses by calling into question its procedures of diagnosis—the basic classification of the problem over which it claims competence. He reduces the professional stakes of psychiatric diagnosis to primarily “theoretical” and “academic” ones, rather than the “practical,” therapeutic consequences he asserts for psychoanalytic diagnosis. And he contends that psychoanalysts have a greater professional incentive to diagnose their patients correctly because

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they are actually interested in curing them, thus attaching greater legitimacy, value, and efficiency to psychoanalytic therapy itself. In his Introductory Lecture on “Psycho-analysis and Psychiatry” (‒), Freud sets out to defend the scientific status of psychoanalysis against attacks by ignorant physicians and psychiatrists. He describes the conflict between psychiatry and psychoanalysis as a specifically professional rather than scientific one: “What is opposed to psycho-analysis is not psychiatry but psychiatrists” (IL, ). Freud argues that psychiatry’s deficiencies lie in its failure to go beyond descriptive classifications to etiologies and effective treatments of mental disorders; psychoanalysis, on the other hand, will “give psychiatry its missing psychological foundation” (IL, ). Freud emphasizes professional rather than theoretical differences in this context in part because he wants to dismiss any scientific basis for attacks on or neglect of psychoanalysis by psychiatrists.74 He also stresses the areas of medical expertise and the etiological assumptions about the influence of heredity that psychoanalysis and psychiatry share, although psychiatry fails to advance beyond them.75 Freud concludes his argument that psychoanalysis is a more basic science than psychiatry with a powerful analogy based on the history of medicine: Psycho-analysis is related to psychiatry approximately as histology is related to anatomy: the one studies the external forms of the organs, the other studies their construction out of tissues and cells. It is not easy to imagine a contradiction between these two species of study, of which one is a continuation of the other. Today, as you know, anatomy is regarded as the foundation of scientific medicine. But there was a time when it was as much forbidden to dissect the human cadaver in order to discover the internal structure of the body as it now seems to be to practise psycho-analysis in order to learn about the internal mechanism of the mind. It is to be expected that in the not too distant future it will be realized that a scientifically based psychiatry is not possible without a sound knowledge of the deeper-lying unconscious processes in mental life. [IL, ]

Once again, Freud positions psychoanalysis as both the culmination and necessary opening toward the future of a particular historical development, in this case, that of medicine. Like anatomy, current psychiatric investigations of the life of the mind are a necessary, but less basic and therefore more rudimentary, stage in the development of scientific medicine. Just as “external” anatomical investigations of the organs were followed by deeper investigations into their structuring components, so psychiatry, by analogy,

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deals only with external descriptions of symptoms, while psychoanalysis deals with their “internal,” unconscious causes. Implicit in Freud’s historical comparison is the invention and perfection of the microscope, which allowed for the closer examination of tissues and cells. Freud’s analogy thus makes psychoanalysis both the basic knowledge of the mind and the “technical” innovation that provides the tool through which this more basic knowledge becomes possible and its objects become “visible.” Consequently, Freud constructs a history of medicine in which psychoanalysis displaces psychiatry’s professional jurisdiction over treatment of pathological mental states by setting itself up as the fulfillment of psychiatry’s preparatory work: “anatomy” (psychiatry) is not irrelevant after the development of “histology” (psychoanalysis), but organ function (mental function) can no longer be explained without reference to the more basic study of tissues (psychoanalytic depth psychology). Freud also figures psychoanalysis as scientifically revolutionary, like the early anatomical investigations that broke social taboos by dissecting cadavers. Freud clearly means for the historical resonance of these analogies to justify their rhetorical impact, but the scientific status of psychoanalysis itself also depends on its ability to prove professional and therapeutic efficacy. Freud’s attacks on the psychiatric jurisdiction challenged a medical specialty that had only recently been officially recognized as a “compulsory teaching and examination subject” at the University of Vienna in . One of the psychiatrists most deeply involved in this academic consolidation was Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (‒), who wished to subordinate neuroanatomy, experimental pathology, and physiology to positions as “auxiliary sciences” to clinical psychiatric research, and who also categorized psychiatry as “a descriptive, not an interpretive science.”76 Freud’s professional offensive against the psychiatric jurisdiction contests not only its classifications but also the institutional status of psychiatry as a newly established academic medical specialty—a status that psychoanalysis itself might achieve by displacing, or colonizing, psychiatric expertise. Thus psychoanalysis, while resisting medicalization, could nevertheless challenge the professional jurisdictions of psychiatry and neurology by claiming to provide both a more effective treatment and more powerful diagnostic logic. In other words, the impasses of somatic medical approaches to nervous illnesses left open a theoretical, scientific, and practical problem with great potential for professional jurisdictional consolidation and expansion.

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A Psychoanalytic Psychology By situating psychoanalysis as the psychological basis of psychiatry, Freud also claims that same foundational role for psychoanalysis in another, more far-reaching discipline: psychology. In the first of the Introductory Lectures, Freud points to a “defect” in the medical education of his auditors that makes them ill-prepared to receive the knowledge he is about to impart: “psychological modes of thought have remained foreign” to them. Freud asserts that neither speculative philosophy, descriptive psychology, nor experimental psychology “as they are taught in the Universities” are of use to the physician in the study of mental disturbances. He contends that psychoanalysis seeks to fill the “gap” left by the failures of psychology and psychiatry to account for “the relation between body and mind.” Psychoanalysis, Freud explains, “tries to give psychiatry its missing psychological foundation” and “hopes to discover the common ground on the basis of which the convergence of physical and mental disorder will become intelligible” (IL, ‒). In The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud argues that none of the psychological subdisciplines can provide what he characterizes as the specific psychological contribution of psychoanalysis: a “depth psychology” or “psychology of the unconscious” (LA,  ). In his most sweeping dismissal of academic psychological research, Freud associates the imprecision of its findings with the average educated person’s notions of how the mind works: What does [psychology] comprise to-day, as it is taught at college? Apart from those valuable discoveries in the physiology of the senses, a number of classifications and definitions of our mental processes which, thanks to linguistic usage, have become the common property of every educated person. That is clearly not enough to give a view of our mental life. Have you not noticed that every philosopher, every imaginative writer, every historian, and every biographer makes up his own psychology for himself, brings forward his own particular hypotheses concerning the interconnexions [sic] and aims of mental acts—all more or less plausible and all equally untrustworthy? There is an evident lack of any common foundation. [Da fehlt offenbar ein gemeinsames Fundament.] And it is for that reason too that in the field of psychology there is, so to speak, no respect and no authority. In that field everyone can “run wild” as he chooses. If you raise a question in physics or chemistry, anyone who knows he possesses no “technical knowledge” [“Fachtkenntnisse ”] will hold his tongue. But if you venture upon a psychological

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assertion you must be prepared to meet judgments and contradictions from every quarter. In this field, apparently, there is no “technical knowledge.” Everyone has a mental life, so everyone regards himself as a psychologist. But that strikes me as an inadequate legal title [Rechtstitel ].77

Freud defines psychology as a domain of knowledge crying out for a codification that can establish its status and “authority” as a scientific discipline and thereby discredit or silence the speculations of those who lack true expertise. Both a profession and a new discipline must distinguish their particular knowledge from both the everyday knowledge of the lay public and from the specialized knowledge belonging to other disciplines and professions—and ultimately professionalized knowledge should come to shape popular conceptions of its particular objects. Psychology, Freud implies, should only be distributed as “common property” after it has been formalized by scientific experts. In the  postscript to Lay Analysis, Freud explicitly puts psychoanalysis in a position to provide this much-needed “technical knowledge” and “common foundation” for psychology: “Psycho-analysis is a part of psychology; not of medical psychology in the old sense, not of the psychology of morbid processes, but simply of psychology. It is certainly not the whole of psychology, but its sub-structure and perhaps even its entire foundation” (LA, ). By basing psychology on psychoanalytic knowledge, Freud clearly hopes to claim for psychoanalysis the “property,” “legal title,” and “respect” that would go with a professional or academic specialization in a fully formed science of psychology. Moreover, by “possessing” the “legal title” to scientific psychology, psychoanalysis would also have the authority to inform and even provide the terms of that “common” psychological knowledge of “every educated person.” Ernest Jones reports that Freud was “ill-informed in the field of contemporary psychology and seems to have derived only from hearsay any knowledge he had of it. He often admitted his ignorance of it, and even when he tried to remedy it later did not find anything very useful for his purpose in it.”78 While it is difficult to be sure whether this characterization of Freud’s knowledge of psychology is accurate, his own experience of conducting experiments in physiology, a discipline whose methods were crucial to the formulation of the methods of experimental psychology,79 qualifies Freud’s dismissal of academic psychology as informed but also demonstrates its tendentiousness. Freud’s claims to the “legal title” of psychological knowl-

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edge for psychoanalysis were clearly as professional and strategic as they were scientific. Freud’s project to supply a scientific basis for psychology also serves to bolster the significance and prestige of psychoanalysis by making it basic to every domain of knowledge related to or derived from psychology. As he writes in , psychoanalysis has “ended up by claiming to have set our whole view of mental life on a new basis and therefore to be of importance for every field of knowledge that is founded on psychology” (RP, ). In the context of his dismissal of sociology as a kind of Marxism in the “The Question of a Weltanschauung ” (), Freud asserts that “strictly speaking there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and natural science [Streng genommen gibt es ja nur zwei Wissenschaften, Psychologie, reine und angewandte, und Naturkunde].”80 Freud defines psychoanalysis as an indispensable, foundational scientific knowledge because it forms the basis of one of the two most basic branches of science. Freud’s characterization of psychology as a fundamental science was not unique. Wilhelm Wundt (‒), professor of physiology at the University of Leipzig and founder there in  of the first laboratory for experimental psychology, defined psychology in even broader terms as the science upon which all the natural sciences are based, because it is the “science of immediate experience.” All other sciences, including the social sciences, are “mediate” in that they abstract their subject matter from immediate psychological experience.81 Freud’s somewhat more restricted formulation places psychoanalysis as the groundwork of a scientific psychology that does not lay claim to epistemological precedence over the natural sciences but rather, although Freud does not explicitly say so, implies a role for psychoanalysis in the demarcation of the social sciences and humanities and their division from natural science. A psychoanalytically based psychology would become a fundamental knowledge for the Geisteswissenschaften, the “moral,” mental, human, or social sciences, as Freud’s curriculum for a psychoanalytic college and programmatic articles like “The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest” () and “A Short Account of Psychoanalysis” () also indicate.82 In the posthumously published An Outline of Psychoanalysis (), Freud specifies that psychoanalysis takes as its definition of the psychical “the supposedly somatic concomitant phenomena” neglected by “[psychological] science” and philosophy as irrelevant, given their understanding

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that only what is conscious is psychical. Instead of reducing the psychical to the mere “discrimination . . . between perceptions, feelings, thoughtprocesses and volitions,” as psychology and philosophy have done, according to Freud, the psychoanalytic focus on the “more complete” but often unconscious somatic processes makes all the difference, because it “enabled psychology to take its place as a natural science like any other.” At the end of his life, Freud continues to affirm that psychoanalytic knowledge is essential to the status of psychology as a scientific discipline. Furthermore, he once again dismisses philosophical “speculations,” physiological “descriptions,” and instrumental measurements by criticizing the adequacy of the research conducted in “academic psychology.”83 In these critiques, he echoes the ambitions of his early and unfinished project for a scientific psychology, a “Psychology for Neurologists” of , in which he attempted to introduce a quantitative account of the nervous system in order to explain mental functioning.84 The distance between the two elaborations of the scientific status of psychoanalysis is clearly immense, however: the failed “Project” sketched an ambitious contribution to a pre-psychoanalytic quantitative psychology, while the Outline delineates psychology as a domain that requires and thus must derive from a basis in a fully established psychoanalytic depth psychology. By positioning psychoanalysis as the basis of psychology, and by asserting that only such a psychoanalytically grounded psychology can be a truly scientific one, I would argue, Freud also endeavors to make psychoanalysis instrumental to the institutionalization of psychology itself as a discipline. At the end of the nineteenth century, academic psychological research was often categorized and institutionally located as part of philosophy. For example, Wundt was a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Leipzig, and in  he entitled the new journal that would disseminate his research Philosophische Studien. According to Wolf Lepenies, this title asserted that experimental psychology would be “a legitimate part of philosophy, capable of influencing other fields like epistemology and demonstrating in a conspicuous way that the question of what was to be regarded as a truly philosophical system was far from settled.”85 Wundt needed to position his new science between speculative Naturphilosophie, a “science” partaking too much of metaphysics, and a “pure philosophy” that rejected any kind of scientific method; he wished to chart a path for psychology to be both scientifically empirical and still relevant to philoso-

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phy.86 Thus psychology at first had to define itself as a discipline in respect to both the existing discipline of philosophy and contemporary understandings of the appropriate objects and methods of scientific inquiry. Freud, too, acknowledges the difficulty of defining psychoanalysis, given the “disadvantage” of its “middle position between medicine and philosophy”: “Doctors regard it as a speculative system and refuse to believe that, like every other natural science, it is based upon a patient and tireless elaboration of facts from the world of perception; philosophers, measuring it by the standard of their own artificially constructed systems, find that it starts from impossible premises and reproach it because its most general concepts (which are only now in process of evolution) lack clarity and precision” (RP, ). Doctors criticize psychoanalysis for being too much like philosophy, while philosophers reject it as not philosophically coherent; neither group grants psychoanalysis the status of science. This complaint in  about the disadvantages for psychoanalysis of being associated with philosophy may indicate why a year later Freud excluded the latter subject from the curriculum of his hypothetical psychoanalytic college. Freud’s project to frame psychoanalysis as constitutive knowledge for psychology therefore had to grapple with psychology’s own disciplinary history—between philosophy and science. Yet at the same time that he distances it from philosophy, Freud places psychoanalysis in competition with the various branches of psychological research by contending that it is more scientifically basic and cogent because it is concerned with causes and not merely with the description of what amount to effects of mental processes. In order to appreciate the professional, scientific, and disciplinary stakes of Freud’s attempt to reconstitute psychology based on psychoanalysis, it is important to understand at least in outline the history of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many different areas of research—philosophy, physiology and anatomy, evolutionary theory, clinical medicine and psychiatry, astronomy, mathematics, and statistics—contributed to the experimental approaches to psychological investigation that began in the mid nineteenth century and were initially centered in Germany.87 Typically, the psychological researcher was “a believer in the methodological unity of all the sciences” and “demanded actual investigations conducted in a well-controlled environment arranged to yield concrete, recordable responses from a subject.”88 Wilhelm Wundt,

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who is most often characterized as the founder of experimental psychology, began his laboratory as a “private institute” at Leipzig in  in a small room in the refectory building and supported his research from his own income until about . The laboratory was only officially recognized by being listed in the university catalogue in , and finally, in , the Saxon government granted Wundt an institute with a large budget. Despite his modest facilities, during the early years of his work, Wundt soon attracted students. In the s and s, students began to arrive from Europe and the United States, enrollment in his courses reached a peak of  in , and by the end of his career, Wundt had directed  Ph.D. dissertations, approximately a third of them on philosophical topics.89 Wundt, like Freud, had to embark on his new disciplinary endeavor with few financial resources and little official recognition, but institutional and political circumstances, as well as the general interest in psychology as a field at the turn of the century, ultimately fostered his academic success.90 Wundt’s tenure at the University of Leipzig from  to  represents the academic institutionalization of one very influential branch of experimental psychology, although psychology did not become an independent academic discipline in Germany until .91 Wundt himself opposed the creation of a separate discipline of psychology, and in  he argued, against philosophers in various German universities who objected to the allocation of more professorships in philosophy to experimental psychologists, that psychology should remain part of philosophy. His rationale was both epistemological and practical. Many aspects of psychology were not accessible to experimental methods of investigation and inevitably involved philosophical concerns such as metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. In addition, the separation of experimental psychology from philosophy would mean that psychologists would fail to obtain adequate philosophical training. And psychology, because of its lack of practical applications, would no longer have any justification for its existence in the university curriculum if it ceased being a part of the required course of philosophical study pursued by all future Gymnasium and university teachers. Wundt argued that “the most essential portion of the influence of the psychologist today is linked to the fact that in lectures and in state teachers’ and doctoral examinations he is also a philosopher,” and he warned that “an isolated psychology would inevitably become a minor field.”92 Thus experimental psychology was gaining considerable ground as a

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new academic field of research at the same time that Freud was attacking it in the s and s, and although it was not yet an independent scientific discipline it did hold its own as a part of the existing discipline of philosophy, whose social usefulness for the education of the German elite was taken for granted. As Wundt’s remarks suggest, the inclusion of psychology in the philosophy curriculum allowed it to gain respectability and significance in its early years as a research field by becoming part of the general knowledge of educated professional men, rather than existing only as a developing branch of scientific research.93 Mitchell Ash points out that experimental psychology also took form in Germany as “a network of social institutions strictly bound neither to the traditional rubrics of the university system nor to the confines of a single university.” Experimental psychologists initiated their own journals in  and , and the Society for Experimental Psychology was founded in .94 The formal organization of experimental psychology in Germany and of the psychoanalytic movement were contemporaneous efforts, with the founding of psychoanalytic journals and associations following those of experimental psychology by roughly a decade. Experimental psychology also comprised many competing methods in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In addition to Wundt’s, there were also other “schools”: structuralism, characterized by the work of Edwin B. Titchener in the United States; the functionalists, a primarily American group following upon the work of William James and John Dewey, and including psychologists such as James Angell, G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, Edward L. Thorndike, and Robert S. Woodworth; behaviorism, particularly influential in America through the work of John B. Watson; and Gestalt psychology, a movement led by the German psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler.95 Psychological research was clearly proliferating during this period. Consequently, Freud’s attempt to displace experimental psychology from a central role in the field of psychology must be seen as a bold disciplinary and professional strategy to legitimize psychoanalytic knowledge. Patricia Kitcher observes that the focus of Wundt’s “physiological psychology” was on psychology and not on physiology; Wundt explains that “the proper objects of our science are those named by psychology, and the physiological standpoint is added only as a further determination.”96 Wundt’s disciplinary distinction underscores what was at stake for Freud if he could

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prove that psychoanalysis afforded a more cogent foundational psychological knowledge than this already institutionalizing discipline. Beyond his disagreements over method, Freud was vying with “academic psychology” for the “legal title” to the discipline of psychology. Freud had to do largely without the powerfully legitimating institutional structures of the university and its curriculum in his attempts to consolidate psychoanalysis. But his pronouncements about the superiority of psychoanalytic psychology also make strategic sense within his project for psychoanalysis as a discipline, given the fact that psychology itself had not attained a definite and independent disciplinary standing. Like psychoanalysis, experimental psychology as practiced by Wundt was received with skepticism by the medical community but appealed to “a younger generation of students from the liberal arts.”97 Psychology was a field that, like psychoanalysis, was both intent on establishing its scientific status and also competed with other research programs for the attention and interest of highly educated men (and some women) who were not necessarily doctors but wanted to pursue scientific investigations of the mind. Freud also needed to challenge experimental psychology because of his defense of the scientific status of psychoanalytic clinical findings, despite the analyst’s reliance on observation rather than experimental methods and complicated instrumentation. He repeatedly affirms the empirical nature of psychoanalytic research; psychoanalytic findings are based on “either a direct expression of observations or the outcome of a process of working them over” (IL, ). In texts like Beyond the Pleasure Principle () and “The Economic Problem in Masochism” (), Freud draws on the “tendency to stability” proposed by the German physicist and psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner (‒) to elaborate his theory of the compulsion to repeat and the death instinct, and he also alludes to the possibility that his hypotheses about the relation between quantity of excitation and feelings of pleasure and unpleasure might eventually be investigated through experimentation, but he does not recommend that psychoanalytic research should undertake such experimental investigations.98 When Freud dealt with the issue of scientific method, therefore, he sought to undermine experimental psychology’s own attempts to establish a scientific psychology by criticizing its instrument-based procedures of investigation as inadequate to found a discipline whose object, he maintained, largely eludes measurement.99

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Freud’s intervention in the jurisdictional contest over the disciplinary and scientific status of psychology also took place during a time of intense activity in many fields of psychological research in Vienna itself. In the early decades of the twentieth century, university research, methods of psychotherapy, and psychological research institutes and schools were multiplying in Vienna, and competition among various “psychologies” for scientific recognition and public resources was intense. Psychology at the University of Vienna, as in Germany, was “a subfield of philosophy.”100 Three prominent founders of modern psychology who held academic positions at the University of Vienna from the s to the s represented three different disciplines: Ernst Brücke was head of the Physiology Institute of the medical school; Franz Brentano (‒), whose lectures Freud attended, was a philosopher; and Ernst Mach (‒ ) was a physicist who did research in physiological psychology. The university began to offer courses specifically in “psychology” in , when Karl Bühler (‒), the first full professor appointed specifically to teach psychology in the context of courses to train public school teachers, joined the Philosophy Department, which was renamed “Philosophie und Pädagogik.”101 In the case of the University of Vienna, then, the institutionalization of psychology as a discipline was also linked to the curriculum for teacher training, and combined research programs in a variety of disciplines. At the time of Freud’s proposal in Lay Analysis in  to “authorize” psychology by founding it on psychoanalysis, psychology was still not an academic discipline with its own department. Its lack of an independent disciplinary status at the university offered a more local opportunity for Freud’s jurisdictional claim for psychoanalytic knowledge. Karl Bühler’s course in general psychology in the Philosophy Department was nevertheless the most popular course taught at the university.102 Thus Freud was attempting to attach psychoanalysis to a new discipline that promised growing academic prestige as well as general popularity and public relevance. In fact, socialist, interwar Vienna (the Social Democrats ran the city from  to ) became a “Mecca for psychology.”103 The Vienna Psychological Institute was founded in , after Bühler requested that a psychological laboratory be set up as a condition of his acceptance of the appointment in philosophy. The new institute was affiliated with the University of Vienna and sponsored and funded jointly by the Ministry of Education and the Vienna School Board, which engaged Bühler and his

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wife, Charlotte Malachowski Bühler (‒), a child psychologist, to teach additional courses at the Vienna Pedagogical Academy.104 From  to , the institute presided over research in experimental psychology, child and youth psychology, pedagogical psychology, developmental psychology, and economic and social psychology. Mitchell Ash has shown that the ability of the institute to pursue such a varied research program resulted from its multiple sources of support—state, municipal, and outside grants from the Rockefeller Foundation—and that its funding by the socialist Social Democratic government of Vienna during this period influenced the creation of projects related to educational reform and the study of working-class community and family life.105 In addition to the research and teaching at the Vienna Psychological Institute, there were many other institutions of psychological research, training, and treatment in interwar Vienna. Paul Lazarsfeld (‒ ), a student of Karl and Charlotte Bühler’s, opened the Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle (or Economic Psychology Research Center), which “established social psychology as a specialty at Vienna.” Erziehungsberatungsstellen (counseling centers for the rearing of children), many of them formed and staffed by Adlerians, and the child-rearing clinics of the Municipal Youth Bureau also came into existence to meet the goal of the Viennese school reform program to “provide free mental health services to all school children.”106 Adler himself established several informal child guidance “clinics” in Vienna in  and , and he and his colleagues gave lectures on child guidance both to the new parent associations affiliated with the reformed elementary and secondary schools and to teachers.107 He also offered psychology courses, starting in , at the Vienna Volksheim (People’s Institute) as part of a curriculum designed for working-class students.108 The municipality also funded a Vocational Guidance Bureau staffed by psychologists. In , Wilhelm Reich (‒), who was also a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, organized the Socialist Society for Sexual Advice and Sexual Research and set up six “Sex-Pol” clinics in working-class neighborhoods that specialized in sex education.109 In s Vienna, psychological expertise was very much in demand, and it was frequently funded by the city government. As part of this psychological ferment, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society also undertook to promote psychoanalysis by forming a “propaganda [publicity] committee” that organized a series of public lectures, published

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a psychoanalytic Volksbuch, and inaugurated a bimonthly journal on psychoanalytic pedagogy. A popular publication called Bettauer’s Wochenschrift recommended psychoanalysis in its advice columns on sexual matters, with the result that the ambulatorium was overwhelmed with patients. These efforts brought official sponsorship to the society as well; the municipal government granted a free plot of land at the end of the Berggasse for a new building to house the ambulatorium and Psychoanalytic Institute, but the society could not raise enough money to build it, and the project had to be abandoned.110 The disciplinary and jurisdictional contests in which the psychoanalytic movement engaged complicate any history that would focus only on its “internal” development. It should be apparent from this brief outline of the many types of psychological theories and services available in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Vienna, not to mention elsewhere in Europe and America, that there was no scarcity of psychological “technical knowledge.” Freud’s assertion that psychology lacked both “authority” and “technical knowledge” thus functioned both tendentiously and strategically. This tactic undermined the legitimacy of any psychology that was not psychoanalytically informed and simultaneously attempted to adopt as part of the psychoanalytic jurisdiction a domain of knowledge and set of practices—academic psychology—that had not yet attained autonomous disciplinary status in the university curriculum. In addition to furthering the theoretical agenda arising from its professional focus on the treatment of the neuroses, Freud’s definition of psychoanalytic knowledge as basic to psychology worked to consolidate and occupy a professional, ideological, and epistemological position arising from the particular interdisciplinary history of psychology and the social reform agenda of the socialist government of interwar Vienna. In the s, no one had yet provided a unifying theoretical framework or principle—a “common foundation,” as Freud puts it—for scientific psychology, and this situation encouraged many psychological researchers, including Freud, to make the attempt.111 Freud explicitly enters psychoanalysis into competition with psychiatry and neurology at the level of diagnosis and therapy, and also with existing psychological research programs and forms of psychotherapy, in order to delineate the disciplinary and theoretical organization of a psychoanalytically based psychology. The perspective of the sociology of the professions makes it possible to identify as strategies of professionalization

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Freud’s various efforts to position psychoanalysis in a dominant relation to these other occupations and academic research projects. Now I shall turn to Freud’s cultural theory to show how it marshals the ethos of professionalism and the rationality of science to construct the larger social and epistemological relevance of psychoanalysis beyond its contributions to the study of the mind and treatment of the neuroses.

The Normative Domain of Psychoanalysis: Education, Social Prophylaxis, and a Scientific-Professional Culture The normative domain of a profession includes “the service orientation of professionals, and their distinctive ethics, which justify the privilege of self-regulation granted them by society,” according to Larson.112 In the analysis that follows, I shall describe the normative professional project of psychoanalysis both as an attempt publicly to maintain professional—scientific and ethical—standards and to apply psychoanalytic knowledge to reform and rationalize existing social arrangements. Freud’s writings on the psychoanalytic movement demonstrate the ways in which psychoanalysis draws on already existing ideological supports of professional prestige and also generates its own specific, normative account of society. The claim of expertise on the unconscious allows psychoanalysis to construct as its jurisdiction a domain of psychic reality with enormous implications for the understanding of all aspects of individual and social life: As a “depth-psychology,” a theory of the mental unconscious, [psychoanalysis] can become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilization and its major institutions such as art, religion, and the social order. It has already, in my opinion, afforded these sciences considerable help in solving their problems. But these are only small contributions compared with what might be achieved if historians of civilization, psychologists of religion, philologists, and so on would agree themselves to handle the new instrument of research which is at their service. The use of analysis for the treatment of the neuroses is only one of its applications; the future will perhaps show that it is not the most important one. [LA, ]

Freud raises the possibility here that the significance of analysis as therapy may be superseded by that of applied psychoanalysis within other fields, and seems to diminish the centrality of professionalized analytic practice.

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One of the ways in which a profession gains legitimacy, however, is by asserting the larger social and scientific benefits of its work. We can understand Freud’s predictions for the broader relevance of psychoanalysis, not only as extending a “new research tool” to other disciplines, but also as projecting the far-reaching academic institutionalization of psychoanalytic knowledge, based on its foundational relevance and epistemological and methodological indispensability for other disciplines. These larger claims for psychoanalysis bolster its prestige as a profession by promising a substantial social and scientific utility that surpasses, but also justifies, professional prerogatives. Abbott explains that psychoanalysis became a professional expertise that could be translated effectively into a way of describing everyday life: “Freudianism succeeded because the routine aspect of the system made it comprehensible to laymen, while the nonroutine aspect justified the creation of a specialized corps to apply it.”113 We can extend this observation by examining the normative domain of psychoanalysis as Freud’s texts construct it—how Freud translated the “routine aspects” of psychoanalytic knowledge, its psychological explanatory framework, into a set of proposals for the momentous social and cultural effects of psychoanalytic knowledge and professional practice. Freud’s schemes for the social applications of psychoanalysis were also normative in another sense: the social implementation of psychoanalytic knowledge should help civilization to develop and function more rationally without disrupting the existing political and economic order. It is impossible to delineate the normative domain of psychoanalysis exhaustively here, and I shall focus on how Freud’s cultural theory makes psychoanalytic knowledge essential to what he envisions positively as the inevitable cultural dominance of the rational values of science. A psychoanalytically informed pedagogy also becomes requisite to this scientific culture because through such an education society may attain the ultimate goal of a general prophylaxis from neurosis and can also reconcile the individual to the instinctual sacrifices demanded by civilization. Both the claims of psychoanalysis to impart scientific rationality to all forms of knowledge and social processes related to psychology, and its potential role in education and social prophylaxis, I argue, depend on its attainment of professional status. Without the autonomy and authority granted to the professions, psychoanalysis cannot exercise its rationalizing normative power to the fullest extent. Freud’s social reform proposals are thus meant

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to earn psychoanalysis the privileges of profession through their direct address to the educated public and their application of psychoanalytic knowledge for the public good, as well as to ramify the professional values that Freud’s texts themselves purvey. Freud’s writings advance a new kind of “psychological” professionalism, which seeks to legitimize itself by diagnosing and treating the ills of society based on the model of the psychopathology of the individual.114

Social Prophylaxis, Education, and Professionalism Freud frequently predicts that the dissemination of psychoanalytic knowledge has the potential to produce a social prophylaxis of neurosis. One of his early and most influential interventions into debates on the problem of “modern nervousness,” the essay “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness” (), attributes the high incidence of nervous illness among members of the educated classes to “the harmful suppression of the sexual life” required by so-called “civilized” morality. Freud provides the outlines of his diagnosis of how civilization has required the suppression of the sexual instincts—an account of the “injurious influence of culture” on the individual (CSM, ) that he will develop much more extensively in works like Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and Its Discontents. Although in “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality,” he does not recommend psychoanalysis as a means of correcting the sexual misery he describes as typical, Freud does allude to the ways in which the neuroses that inevitably arise from these cultural arrangements defeat the purpose they were intended to serve of suppressing socially destructive individual instincts: “Thus, when society pays for obedience to its far-reaching regulations by an increase in nervous illness, it cannot claim to have purchased a gain at the price of sacrifices; it cannot claim a gain at all” (CSM, ). Freud concludes that while “it is certainly not a physician’s business to come forward with proposals for reform,” his psychoanalytic explanation of the sexual etiology of modern nervousness should help to demonstrate “the urgency of such proposals” (CSM, ). As the psychoanalytic movement began to attract more adherents outside the Vienna circle, Freud articulated more ambitious claims about the potential role of psychoanalytic treatment in the social prophylaxis of the neuroses. As we have seen, Freud made a series of grandiose predictions

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for the “general effect” of psychoanalytic professional practice in his  address to the Second Annual Psychoanalytic Conference. He describes the momentous results for the “society—suffering as a whole from neuroses” when the “riddle” of the causes of the psychoneuroses is revealed by psychoanalysis and the “secret” of the neurotic’s “‘gain from the illness’” is exposed to public view: “The final outcome of the changed situation brought about by the physician’s indiscretion can only be that the production of the illness will be brought to a stop” (FP, ‒). While Freud admits that some individuals are actually better off as neurotics than they would be if they had to face the awful reality of their lives, he believes that such cases are few, and that the benefits to society of eliminating neurosis outweigh the possible harm of a broadly based social prophylaxis to some individuals: “All the energies which are to-day consumed in the production of neurotic symptoms serving the purposes of a world of phantasy isolated from reality, will, even if they cannot at once be put to uses in life, help to strengthen the clamour for the changes in our civilization through which alone we can look for the well-being of future generations” (FP, ‒). Freud forecasts that psychoanalysis will not be granted authority by the community immediately, but that the power of intellect will enable the “unwelcome truths” of psychoanalysis to prevail “after the interests they have injured and the emotions they have roused have exhausted their fury” (FP, ‒). Freud’s optimism about the future of psychoanalysis was tempered in subsequent years by the experience of World War I and the effects of disputes internal to the psychoanalytic movement. Nonetheless, his basic programs for the social prophylaxis of neurosis and for increasing the authority and prestige of psychoanalysis remain very much the same throughout his writings on culture. While Freud circa  suggests that psychoanalysis only provides an incentive for “changes in our civilization” that must occur at a social level, his later writings on culture increasingly affirm that the current state of civilization can only be accounted for as the product of psychological factors, and that beneficial social change must therefore be dependent upon a change of mind that only psychoanalytic knowledge can accomplish. Freud in  asserts that reason will prevail over offended sensibilities in the case of psychoanalysis, but he does not enter into the details of how psychoanalytic knowledge will become common knowledge. In the  address to the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Bu-

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dapest, however, Freud is more explicit about a possible provision for making psychoanalytic treatment widely accessible, particularly to the poor: he envisions that ultimately the state must sponsor free psychoanalytic treatment on a large scale, and that government-funded “institutions or outpatient clinics will be started, to which analytically-trained physicians will be appointed” (LPT, ). This was not a wholly unrealistic expectation, since from the second half of the nineteenth century on, continental European states such as France, imperial Germany, and Austria-Hungary began to exercise increasing control over professional education and certification and also employed professionals as civil servants, especially in such fields as medicine and law. That Freud should have articulated this goal for psychoanalysis in  also makes particular sense in the Viennese context, where the socialist government was poised to undertake many social reform initiatives to benefit the working class. Although Freud acknowledges that it may take a long time for psychoanalysis to gain state sponsorship, he regards the development as inevitable and essential if psychoanalysis is to fulfill its professional and scientific promise to benefit society at large (LPT, ). In The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud offers a different potential scenario for the extension of psychoanalysis as a professional practice and form of treatment accessible on a mass scale. He concludes his dialogue with the Impartial Person by proposing in the most self-consciously audacious manner that psychoanalysis has a role of major historical significance to play in the evolution of human culture: “Our civilization imposes an almost intolerable pressure on us and it calls for a corrective. Is it too fantastic to expect that psycho-analysis in spite of its difficulties may be destined to the task of preparing mankind for such a corrective? Perhaps once more an American may hit on the idea of spending a little money to get the ‘social workers’ of his country trained analytically and to turn them into a band of helpers for combating the neuroses of civilization.” “Aha! a new kind of Salvation Army!” “Why not?” [LA, ‒]

One may wish to detect satire or at least broad popularization in Freud’s staging of his dialogue with the “Impartial Person,” especially given his general disdain for American culture. In a text so intent upon delineating

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psychoanalytic professional practice and autonomy, however, Freud’s idea of a psychoanalytically trained “Salvation Army” demonstrates his ambitions for psychoanalysis not only as a widely available form of treatment but as psychological common sense with the power and wide appeal of the populist religion of “self-help,” but without religious belief. In this way Freud also constructs the mass ideological appeal of psychoanalytic knowledge as a substitute for religion in its role of consoling individuals for their suffering by attempting to inspire moral self-improvement.115 In the  postscript to Lay Analysis, Freud allies psychoanalysis even more overtly with religious authority in order to construct a model of professional legitimacy for the lay analyst to compensate for the lack of medical credentials: he suggests that the analyst, both medical and lay, functions “toward the public” as a kind of “secular pastoral worker” (LA, ). As Freud pointed out in a letter to his friend the Swiss pastor Oskar Pfister, The Question of Lay Analysis and The Future of an Illusion are companion volumes precisely as they relate to the professionalization of psychoanalysis: I do not know if you have detected the secret link between the Lay Analysis and the Illusion. In the former I wish to protect analysis from the doctors and in the latter from the priests. I should like to hand it over to a profession which does not yet exist, a profession of lay curers of souls who need not be doctors and should not be priests.116

This psychoanalytic profession of “lay curers of souls” would both be institutionally independent of medicine and combine scientific and professional expertise with the traditional social authority and access to the “soul” of the priest. Freud popularizes psychoanalytic therapy and knowledge— he makes them more accessible and attractive to potential clients—by translating them into the promise of the possibility of salvation by a “secular pastoral worker.” This new definition of the analyst endows psychoanalysis with the ideological power of a secular mode of healing, which would nevertheless redeem the failed (for Freud) promise of religion, but with its “salvation” in everyday life rather than in the next world. Freud also appropriates and redefines for psychoanalysis the social function of religion as a widely shared belief promising relief from and justification for suffering. There is a new epoch coming in the history of mankind, according to Freud, but it is not a Christian one—instead, it is the arrival of psychoanalytic knowledge in the life of every person oppressed by the many

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psychological stresses of modern civilization. Freud seems to have been quite prescient about the eventual pervasiveness of psychological knowledge and psychotherapy in the twentieth century, especially in America.117 The possibility of psychoanalysis as a profession carrying the social authority of religion raises the question of exactly what kind of secular “salvation” psychoanalysis would provide. Freud’s writings on the relation of civilization and its institutions to the sexual life of the individual do the work of mapping the normative domain of psychoanalysis by specifying what kind of “corrective” psychoanalytic knowledge offers to the “almost intolerable pressure” of civilization. In particular, both The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents extend Freud’s diagnosis of the cultural causes of the neuroses and address how psychoanalytic knowledge might mitigate them. Freud’s analyses of culture should teach the reader to understand, criticize, and finally come to terms with civilization as the product of the psychological development of the human species. The Future of an Illusion is a critique of religion that functions to demonstrate the indispensability of psychoanalytic knowledge to social reform efforts aimed at controlling the social and political effects of secularization. Freud’s opening chapter rehearses a crucial question raised by the book as a whole: if individuals are opposed to civilization because of its injurious restrictions of their instincts, how can any social arrangements be devised that would alter this constitutive flaw of human culture? Freud at first allows that it is only the development of specific “cultural forms” that has resulted in a situation in which customs and institutions are established with the primary purpose of coercing the individual to sacrifice his or her instinctual needs to the demands of the community. He nevertheless explains these particular “cultural forms” as originating in the “psychological fact” of “destructive . . . anti-social and anti-cultural, trends,” or instincts: Whereas we might at first think that [civilization’s] essence lies in controlling nature for the purpose of acquiring wealth and that the dangers which threaten it could be eliminated through a suitable distribution of that wealth among men, it now seems that the emphasis has moved over from the material to the mental. The decisive question is whether and to what extent it is possible to lessen the burden of the instinctual sacrifices imposed on men, to reconcile men to those which must necessarily remain and to provide a compensation for them. [FI, ]

Freud deliberately shifts the “emphasis” of cultural and political criticism to necessitate the intervention of psychoanalytic knowledge: if the problem

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of the disjunction between technological advances and lack of progress in “the management of human affairs” (FI, ) cannot be solved by understanding and then altering specific “cultural forms,” but rather must be explained in terms of “psychological facts,” then Freud’s conceptual move from “the material to the mental” becomes requisite. Freud stages a subtle disciplinary and political contest rigged for psychoanalysis to win: an approach that would focus on “cultural forms”—by implication, anthropology, history, or sociology—is displaced by an articulation of civilization and of religion as problems that only psychology, and thus only psychoanalysis, can address decisively. Freud’s “scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization” (FI,  )118 implies, then, that culture is civilization— that is, as Freud defines it, the product of a universal psychological process of development. Freud’s “mental emphasis” substitutes a diachronic, evolutionary, and psychological framework for analyzing culture in place of a potentially relativist, historical, or synchronic analysis. The stakes of this understated methodological contest are high, because Freud intends to reformulate the political problem of how to maintain order in a secular society, which likewise preoccupied many of his contemporaries, in psychological terms. This question was not merely theoretical. Joel Pfister has offered a groundbreaking reading of The Future of an Illusion as a “management scheme” for the bourgeoisie to deal with working-class unrest. Pfister argues that both Freud’s disparagement of the “lazy and unintelligent” masses (FI, ) and his proposals for educational reform must be understood as political interventions in a concrete situation of class conflict. In the spring and summer of —the period when Freud was writing The Future of an Illusion —Viennese workers rioted in response to the acquittals of three royalists who had allegedly fired on a crowd of socialist sympathizers and killed several people. The riots were violently put down by the police, who were not under the control of the socialist municipal government. Freud suggests that “a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence” (FI, ). Yet his class rhetoric and the violent events of the late s in Vienna demonstrate that the demise of “civilization” is a frightening possibility that psychoanalytic expertise might be called upon to prevent by supplying a psychological technique to control the potentially revolutionary working classes, who, Freud fears, “are intent on destroying the culture itself ” (FI, ).119

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Given what he sees as the inevitability of the individual’s resistance to the social suppression of instincts, Freud hypothesizes that civilization could only have arisen from political oppression: “Civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion” (FI,  ). This situation persists into the political and economic systems of the present, according to Freud, so that just as the necessity of curbing the individual’s instincts means that civilization must coerce the individual, so the contemporary “human masses” must be governed and controlled by a “minority” (FI, ). Freud specifies that the “underprivileged classes” will not be willing to make the necessary sacrifice of their instincts for civilization because their superegos have not developed fully: “It is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share. In such conditions an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is not to be expected” (FI, ). Thus Freud’s psychological account of class conflict argues: () that because of two basic human characteristics—“that men are not spontaneously fond of work and that arguments are of no avail against their passions” (FI, )—coercion is unfortunately necessary to maintain social order; and () that an educated minority who have more thoroughly internalized cultural prohibitions will always govern the masses under the existing cultural and psychological conditions, which have never yet been successfully altered. This minority of leaders must be “persons who possess superior insight into the necessities of life and who have risen to the height of mastering their own instinctual wishes” (FI, ). At the end of this opening chapter, Freud revises his potentially deterministic portrayal of the human masses by broaching an objection to his own argument: if the human masses could be reeducated to support civilization, it would be necessary to find a group of “unswerving and disinterested leaders . . . to act as educators of the future generations,” and their most realistic goal would be “merely to reduce the majority that is hostile toward civilization to-day to a minority” (FI, ‒). It is not at first clear what this account of both the general resistance of individuals to civilization and the specific discontent of the “lazy and unintelligent” masses has to do with Freud’s psychoanalytic critique of re-

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ligion as an illusion based on a childhood fear of helplessness that is focused on the father’s protection and then transferred to imaginary divinities (FI, ). In effect, Freud intends to articulate, in order to refute, the argument that religion is necessary to the moral order of society. The educated classes, Freud submits, have already lost their religious beliefs to a great extent because of “the increase of the scientific spirit” and “the fatal resemblance between the religious ideas which we revere and the mental products of primitive peoples and times” (FI, ). Freud diagnoses religious ideas as irrational, infantile, and atavistic. But he warns that dangers to civilization will arise when the uneducated masses in their turn discover that religion is an illusion; they may rebel completely against civilization, not only because they lack strong superegos, but also because they have not undergone the “change . . . in them which scientific thinking brings about in people” (FI, ), that is, the ability to discipline self-interest and emotion by means of reason and intellect. The “compensation” provided by religion for the sacrifices that civilization requires is replaced in the educated classes by a strong internalization of cultural prohibitions and an informed confidence in scientific progress. But what can recompense the “underprivileged classes” for their loss of belief in religion? Because their enlightenment too is inescapable, Freud cautions, the problem is whether to take the risk of letting things run their course or in some way to frame a program for how society should conduct its inevitable secularization without falling into violent class conflict, moral collapse, or severe political oppression (FI, ‒). Formulating the problem of religion, science, and culture in this way seems to demand the psychoanalytic solution that Freud goes on to offer in the rest of his book. He moderates the skepticism about social reform through education voiced in the opening chapter but extends the application begun there of psychological explanations to the modern problem of religion. On the one hand, Freud offers the recommendation that the “regulations and precepts” of civilization should be openly acknowledged as products of “purely human origin” so that they will lose both their “sanctity” and their “rigidity”: “People could understand that [social commandments and laws] are made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; and they would adopt a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition, would aim only at their improvement” (FI, ). But Freud follows this optimistic supposition by ob-

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jecting to it as a “rationalistic construction” (FI, ‒). Instead, he proposes his own “historical,” psychological argument about the human origins of civilization based on the example of the crime of murder, the target of the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” so that he can provide the psychoanalytic explanation of the primal parricide as the “historical truth” behind the religious “distortion” (FI, ‒). The psychoanalytic account of the primal parricide thus displaces an explanation of civilization as based on “social necessity” (FI, ) and returns the analysis of religion to the psychological causes of the genesis of culture. Freud’s psychoanalytic reduction of religious belief enables him to create a functional equivalence between “religious teachings” and “neurotic relics,” so that religion contains “historical residues” of earlier psychocultural stages. Freud seeks to demonstrate that psychoanalytic knowledge is essential to uncovering the psychological “historical truth” behind the veil of religious illusion, and thus it is also crucial to his prescription that certain “cultural precepts” should undergo a purposeful “remoulding” and “revision” in order to “reconcile men to civilization” without religion. In the case of religion, too, “we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect” (FI, ). If the analogy between civilization and individual psychology works—and despite his willingness to accept the analogy’s limitations (FI, ), Freud nevertheless relies on it in all of his cultural theory—then psychoanalytic knowledge should permit the rational observer to face inevitable social changes with a certain amount of assurance: “Our behavior should therefore be modelled on that of a sensible teacher who does not oppose an impending new development but seeks to ease its path and mitigate the violence of its irruption” (FI, ). The psychoanalytically informed ruling class become “educators” who can help guide the childlike masses into psychological adulthood—and whose own intellectual maturity precedes and leads the way to the maturation of society.120 Freud’s comparison with “analytic treatment” reveals that the model for the liberal observer and guide of social change is also the analyst, whose expertise and professional ethos also characterize the psychoanalytic perspective of the governing class. Freud follows his psychoanalytic overview of the secularization of culture with the proposal that in order to help the masses “attain the psychological ideal, the primacy of the intelligence”—and also to maintain

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control over their exposure to “any chance of intellectual awakening” about the illusionary nature of religion (FI, )—they must cease to be subjected at an early age to religious teaching. Putting aside for the moment his earlier reservations about the psychological “facts” of human nature, Freud suggests that “it is worth making the experiment of an irreligious education” to find out whether or not human nature is amenable to education and whether society is capable of reform: “Should the experiment prove unsatisfactory, I am ready to give up the reform and to return to my earlier, purely descriptive judgement that man is a creature of weak intelligence who is ruled by his instinctual wishes” (FI, ‒). Freud asserts that the real aim of his book is to argue for the necessity of this “‘education to reality ’” (FI, ). By the end of The Future of an Illusion, Freud has overcome the reserve he evinced earlier in his career about proposing social reforms. He offers a measure—secular education—with social therapeutic aims that extend those of the prophylaxis against neurosis. In a gradual process of carefully administered social change, the fractious and even violent masses will slowly abandon religion as they too are educated to leave behind their childish, emotional, and instinctual responses to life’s vicissitudes. Even if Freud’s hopes for secular education prove illusory, however, he retains the “support” of scientific work, which “has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.” In fact, Freud implies, it is ultimately upon science that the secular “education to reality” will be based: “We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life” (FI, ). The psychoanalytic understanding of religious “illusion” allows for it to be replaced in the psychological development of culture by a pragmatic and rational belief in scientific progress—presumably, this would be one of the goals of the “Salvation Army” of psychoanalytic “secular pastoral workers.”121 Another broad social benefit of the detachment from religious belief would be to allow individuals to redirect energies that had been devoted to religion: “By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone” (FI, ). Society remains oppressive, Freud implies, not primarily be-

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cause of those “material”—political and economic—conditions, the causal effects of which he has thoroughly subordinated, but because people have wasted too much energy and thought on religion. In linking psychoanalytic understandings of culture with educational applications, Freud extends to the field of culture the notion that he articulates in various of his writings on the technique of psychoanalysis as itself a kind of education. For example, in a statement likening the aims of psychoanalysis to those of a liberal pedagogy or Bildung, Freud suggests that “the patient should be educated to liberate and fulfil his own nature, not to resemble ourselves” (LPT, ). More generally, Freud also explains that “psycho-analytic treatment acts as a second education of the adult, as a corrective to his education as a child.”122 In his survey of the psychoanalytic field in the early s, “Explanations, Applications and Orientations,” Freud also moves beyond the educative function of analysis itself, however, and describes the application of psychoanalysis to the field of education as “so rich in hopes for the future, perhaps the most important of all the activities of analysis” (E&A, ). In this text, Freud enters into the details of what a psychoanalytically informed education would and would not do.123 While he admits that the current resistance to psychoanalysis remains strong, and that therefore a psychoanalytic educational program is merely hypothetical, Freud points to the desirability of a psychoanalytic education as a “hygienic” and prophylactic measure to protect children against neurosis in later life (E&A, ‒). Based on psychoanalytic findings, he states that “the first task of education” is to teach the child “to control his instincts,” but he points out that the coercion necessary to achieve this itself also “involves the risk of neurotic illness” (E&A, ). Freud argues that given the particular difficulties of the educator’s work—“how he has to recognize the child’s constitutional individuality, to infer from small indications what is going on in his immature mind, to give him the right amount of love and yet to maintain an effective degree of authority”—it becomes apparent that “the only appropriate preparation for the profession of educator is a thorough psycho-analytic training.” Moreover, the educator should undergo an analysis himself in order to be trained properly, since “it is impossible to assimilate analysis without experiencing it personally” (E&A, ‒). Freud makes a claim here to yet another professional jurisdiction: if the “only appropriate preparation” for the profession of educator is a psychoanalytic training, then all professional educational

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work would need to be based on psychoanalytic expertise and would thus be dependent upon its procedures of certification, even though most educators might never practice analysis professionally.124 The remainder of Freud’s discussion of psychoanalytic education gives a further indication of why his jurisdictional claims are so extensive: It has been said—and no doubt justly—that every education has a partisan aim, that it endeavours to bring the child into line with the established order of society, without considering how valuable or how stable that order may be in itself. If [it is argued] one is convinced of the defects in our present social arrangements, education with a psycho-analytic alignment cannot justifiably be put at their service as well: it must be given another and higher aim, liberated from the prevailing demands of society. In my opinion, however, this argument is out of place here. Such a demand goes beyond the legitimate function of psycho-analysis. In the same way, it is not the business of a doctor who is called in to treat a case of pneumonia to concern himself with whether the patient is an honest man or a suicide or a criminal, whether he deserves to remain alive or whether one ought to wish him to. This other aim which it is desired to give to education will also be a partisan one, and it is not the affair of an analyst to decide between the parties. I am leaving entirely on one side the fact that psycho-analysis would be refused any influence on education if it admitted to intentions inconsistent with the established social order. Psycho-analytic education will be taking an uninvited responsibility on itself if it proposes to mould its pupils into rebels. It will have played its part if it sends them away as healthy and efficient as possible. It itself contains enough revolutionary factors to ensure that no one educated by it will in later life take the side of reaction and suppression. It is even my opinion that revolutionary children are not desirable from any point of view. [E&A, ‒]

Despite his condemnation of “civilized” sexual morality, Freud does not advocate a sexual/social revolution accomplished through a psychoanalytic education of the next generation of children. He makes clear that even if psychoanalysis has a “revolutionary” effect on the individual by accomplishing a cure of his or her neurosis, it should have a normative—rationalizing—social and political effect. In fact, psychoanalytic education as Freud describes it seems ideal for twentieth-century capitalist society, inasmuch as it would prepare a person for a productive life of both “health” and “efficiency”—values that under capitalism are necessarily conjoined. Children too should be affected by psychoanalytic education in an individual sense, in that psychoanalytic teachings would keep them free as adults of antisocial behavior and reactionary beliefs, especially in the area

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of sexuality in their personal lives, but it would not set them on a path toward a political consciousness of solidarity with all those oppressed by civilization. Freud rejects the idea that a psychoanalytic education might produce people who would rebel against authority either as children or later in life. This description of the effects of psychoanalytic education differentiates Freud’s liberal reform proposals from the educational policies of the socialist government of Vienna, for example, which aimed to improve the conditions of the working class economically and politically in part through improvements in primary and sex education, but also attempted to foster the class consciousness of workers.125 Freud’s comparison of psychoanalysis with medicine also indicates the specifically professional stakes for psychoanalysis itself of this educational proposal. Freud asserts the independence of psychoanalysis from any “party”—that is, from any politics—by claiming for it the status of expert professional practice—objective, disinterested, and scientific—like the doctor’s treatment of a case of pneumonia without any judgment about the social value of the patient’s life, and without attempting to treat any other problems the patient might have that would “go beyond the legitimate function,” or specifically professional purview of his work. Freud’s analogy of the psychoanalytic educator with the doctor works again to emphasize the primacy of the professional ethics of psychoanalysis and also justifies his jurisdictional claim to the training of the educator. A psychoanalytic education, Freud suggests, would inaugurate the first truly nonpartisan, scientific pedagogy. In this way, Freud also attempts to limit the “revolutionary” implications of psychoanalysis to its own social effects as a profession and form of scientific knowledge, precisely for the good of psychoanalysis as a profession. Why, when he has seemed to go beyond what he defines here as the “legitimate function” of psychoanalysis in so many other writings, and in fact has just finished boldly laying claim to the training of the educator, does Freud so ostentatiously circumscribe psychoanalytic politics? Clearly, he does not want psychoanalysis to be identified with, and appropriated by, any specific political party. Freud’s analogy with the doctor’s work here functions similarly to one in The Future of an Illusion, where he describes psychoanalysis itself as merely “a method of research, an impartial instrument, like the infinitesimal calculus, as it were” (FI,  ). Freud can successfully extend psychoanalysis into other professional and disciplinary do-

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mains only if it has the status of an autonomous and scientifically valid professional expertise. His likening of psychoanalysis to a research “tool” operates, in part, as a rhetorical strategy for asserting its scientific objectivity; Freud’s description of psychoanalysis as an “impartial instrument” is not impartial. The professional rhetoric of his writings enhances their presentation of the potential usefulness of a psychoanalytic method of research because it allows psychoanalysis to participate in and benefit from the ideological justification of profession as the “nonpartisan” exercise of expertise. Freud’s various projects for the larger social effects and benefits of psychoanalysis work in both obvious and implicit ways, and in two seemingly contradictory but actually coordinated and reinforcing directions. On the one hand, for example, he confidently proposes to revolutionize the field of public education by making it scientific while retaining its liberal, individualist goals. On the other hand, he subtly solidifies the professional status of psychoanalysis itself by stressing its potential contribution to a sound and ordered society by inculcating “health” and “efficiency,” but not rebellion, in psychoanalytically educated children. Freud claims professional standing for psychoanalysis precisely by showing how psychoanalytic practice and ideas already exemplify the normative ethics of professionalism and science. In addition, by delineating a larger normative domain specifically for psychoanalysis through psychoanalytically based social reform proposals, Freud further establishes the professional credit of psychoanalysis, and by maintaining his stance as objective, scientific professional, he earns the right to propose social reforms dependent on psychoanalytic knowledge, as he does in The Future of an Illusion. This range of professional positioning throughout Freud’s writings—between demonstrating the professional ethics and autonomy of psychoanalytic therapy and knowledge, and extending the domain of psychoanalysis beyond what should seem to be the “legitimate” scope of professional practice—maps a strategy crucial to Freud’s part in the institution of psychoanalytic knowledge.

Psychoanalytic Rationality and the Scientific Community The sociology of the professions emphasizes that the legitimacy of professional expertise in this century has been based fundamentally on the cultural values and ideological effects attached to science, which represents, Abbott says, “logic and rigor in diagnosis, as well as a certain caution and

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conservatism in professional therapeutics” and “extensive academic research based on the highest standards of rationality.”126 Larson suggests that “the rationality of science” functions as a source of authority for professional expertise “as a method and as a world view, more than as a body of knowledge,” and that it also becomes a quality associated with the “scientifically oriented experts who act in the bureaucratized institutions of the new [corporate capitalist] social order.” In other words, scientific rationality inheres both in knowledge and practices, and in experts and institutions. A science-based profession not only possesses an enhanced “capacity for standardizing training and research within the confines of normal science and for excluding competing paradigms,” but also “the ultimate legitimation of an objective, independent, incontrovertibly more effective inquiry, which opens up the possibility of unlimited progress.” The professional also embodies the cultural authority of scientific objectivity—he or she individually stands for “the legitimacy of a general body of knowledge and a mode of cognition, the epistemological superiority of which is taken for granted in our society.”127 Freud’s undeviating understanding of the psychoanalytic project as a scientific one arises from his medical training as well as his desire to uncover the objective conditions of mental life—we must classify Freud biographically and historically as a scientist. Despite his numerous references to the rejection of psychoanalysis by “the representatives of official science” (E&A, ), Freud never wavers in his defense of “the right of psychoanalysis to be recognized as a science” (HPM, ). From the time of Freud’s first overtly psychoanalytic publications, the status of psychoanalysis as science has been under debate.128 I am interested not in settling this debate but in how Freud’s writings mobilize the ideological significations of science in order to establish the cultural authority of psychoanalysis. For the purposes of understanding Freud’s scientific professionalism, I shall analyze his formulations of psychoanalysis as science according to Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of scientific capital. Bourdieu has described specific forms of capital that operate within the scientific field: First is the capital of strictly scientific authority, which rests upon the recognition granted by the peer competitors for the competency attested to by specific successes (notably success in finding solutions deemed legitimate to problems that are themselves held as legitimate within the state of the field in question). Second, there is the capital of social authority in matters of science, partly independent of

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the strictly scientific authority (more so as the field is less autonomous), which rests upon delegation from an institution, most often the educational system.129

The first kind of capital adheres to a set of ideas or findings, which may be attached to a particular discipline, practice, or person, that have been accepted as scientific by a consensus among those institutions and individuals who already possess scientific capital. The second kind of capital seems to imply a primarily professional prestige that inheres in the scientist himor herself in the eyes of the public, stemming from the attainment of proper scientific credentials. Freud’s declaration that psychoanalysis forms the basis of psychology and renders it scientific asserts the possession and operation of the first kind of scientific capital—psychoanalysis calls for the recognition of the scientific community that it alone can provide the crucial link between biology and psychology. With its focus on sexuality, Freud maintains, psychoanalysis opens up a way to relate these fields through the analogous psychological and biological operations of instincts: We have found it necessary to hold aloof from biological considerations during our psychoanalytic work and to refrain from using them for heuristic purposes, so that we may not be misled in our impartial judgment of the psychoanalytic facts before us. But after we have completed our psychoanalytic work we shall have to find a point of contact with biology. . . . The contrast between the ego instincts and the sexual instinct, to which we have been obliged to trace back the origin of the neuroses, is carried into the sphere of biology in the contrast between the instincts which serve the preservation of the individual and those which serve the survival of the species. In biology we come upon the more comprehensive conception of an immortal germ-plasm to which the different transitory individuals are attached like organs that develop successively. It is only this conception which enables us rightly to understand the part played by the sexual instinctual forces in physiology and psychology.130

While Freud is wary of biological reductions of psychoanalytic and psychological concepts, he openly speculates about biological extensions of psychoanalytic findings, particularly when he wishes to verify their scientific status.131 We have already seen that in the description of psychoanalysis as “the science of the unconscious,” Freud also garners strictly scientific authority for psychoanalysis by categorizing unconscious processes as somatic ones, and thus his science as more complete than philosophy and psychology, which merely investigate consciousness.

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If we analyze the situation of psychoanalysis in the first decades of the twentieth century in Bourdieu’s terms, we see that Freud faced the problem that psychoanalysis did not yet possess the first kind of scientific capital because it lacked full recognition as a science by the medical and other scientific communities. While Freud and many of the early analysts possessed impeccable academic credentials, they could not rely on the support of academic institutions for access to the first kind of scientific capital. Thus they were obliged to address the educated public directly and to emphasize their possession of the specifically social capital of scientific authority. In this context we can understand why Freud, even in the years before his cancer, limited his participation in medical and other specialist meetings and conferences; in addition to his negative past experiences with presenting his ideas in such forums, he also had decided to focus his attention both on the psychoanalytic audience and on a larger educated public as well as experts in nonmedical fields who might be persuaded to apply psychoanalytic methods. Freud attempted to construct the scientific status of psychoanalysis by asserting its social authority as the expertise of scientifically trained professionals, and this is the task that he positions his cultural theory to accomplish by displaying the significant, even earthshaking, implications of psychoanalytic knowledge. Freud also rests the legitimacy of the claims of psychoanalysis as science not only on its specific findings but also on its participation in science “as a method and as a world view.” For example, his central, long-term project of constructing a scientific, psychoanalytic explanation and critique of religion relies on a pivotal consideration of the scientific method and worldview as the only sound, rational approach to understanding both nature and the development of culture/civilization. I am not arguing that Freud claims a scientific status for psychoanalysis merely to establish its professional legitimacy, but I do want to show how he attempts to situate psychoanalytic knowledge to contribute decisively to the cultural dominance of the values and goals of professional science. Freud bases all of his arguments for the social benefits of psychoanalysis—as prophylaxis against neurosis, in justifying and facilitating the necessary “fundamental revision” in the “relationship between civilization and religion” (FI, ), and in education—on the specific capacity of psychoanalytic expertise to diagnose social problems in psychological terms and to offer solutions that address psychobiological and psychosocial causes of hu-

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man suffering. All of these psychoanalytic measures for social reform pursue several interrelated goals oriented toward the individual person: the strengthening of intellect, orientation toward reality, and educated identification with the good of society in opposition to infantile dependence and neurotic escape from reality. On the social level, Freud’s social reform ideas are intended to promote scientific rationality and progress in opposition to the “illusion” of religion, and he diagnoses any refusal or failure to identify with the social good as induced by a combination of economic deprivation and thwarted psychological development. Freud’s psychoanalytic critiques of culture promulgate the social value of science—in the form either of an individual, reasoned orientation to reality or a larger scientific project to understand and affect reality. Freud identifies the scientific tendencies that should prevail as an essential part of the basic values of an educated class, despite its own resentment of civilization’s oppression of its sexual instincts (FI, ). As we have seen, Freud poses the problem of who is going to accomplish the necessary cultural reforms that will reconcile the majority to civilization and science. This is not just a question addressed within the framework of Freud’s reform proposals; it is also one that his texts on culture ask: who is the privileged reader of The Future of an Illusion, for example? In several texts from the s, Freud is more specific about who will constitute the minority able to reform society, or at least monitor its psychological evolution toward maturity. In “Why War?” (), an open letter addressed to Albert Einstein as part of an exchange sponsored by the League of Nations,132 Freud again takes up the problem of the psychological sources of violence and the unstable constitution of social solidarity in order to deal with the specific question of “what can be done to protect mankind from the curse of war” (WW, ). In his letter to Freud opening the dialogue, Einstein solicits Freud’s response to the problem of war by referring directly to the need for his psychological expertise: Isn’t it gratifying that some of those who are practically and professionally concerned with this problem now wish, out of a certain feeling of powerlessness, to learn from the men whose scientific work has given them the objectivity that this subject requires? As for me, my customary way of thinking does not give me an insight into the depth of human wishes and feelings. In this exchange of ideas, I cannot do much more than try to define the question and, by dealing with the more superficial attempts at a solution, enable you to discuss the problem from the vantage point of your profound knowledge of human instincts.

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Einstein pinpoints nationalism and the economic interest of the ruling class as two major causes of war, but concludes that there must be deeper, psychological causes that produce the tendency of “the mass of the people” to acquiesce in violence. He locates the educated populations as the most important targets of reform; they “succumb most readily to mass suggestion, because they are not used to drawing immediately on experience but encounter life in its most easily and completely understood form—the printed page.” In contrast to Freud’s distrust of the uneducated masses, for Einstein, given technological advances in weaponry, civilization is threatened by the political manipulability of the “intelligentsia” by governments and the mass media. Yet Einstein, like Freud, believes in the promise of a nonrevolutionary, psychological remedy that can transcend national boundaries: “I trust that you will be able to point out educational methods which might, in an apolitical way, remove psychological obstacles at which the psychologically untrained may only guess, whose connections and nature he may not judge.”133 As in Totem and Taboo, in answer to Einstein’s question about the possibility of “guiding the psychological development of man so that it becomes resistant to the [mass] psychoses of hate and destruction,”134 Freud accounts for the origins of social solidarity and “right” in the group’s seizing from tyrannous individuals the power of violence and coercion. The community redirects that power for the purpose of establishing laws and institutions whose authority takes precedence over individual interests: “violence overcome by the transference of power to a large unity, which is held together by emotional ties between its members” (WW, ). Freud indicates how schematic and preliminary this formulation is by outlining all the ways in which communities are involved in internal conflicts, because of power hierarchies within them, as well as in conflicts with other communities. In this way he prepares the reader for his introduction of the even more “basic” conflict—“internal” to the human psyche—between Eros and the death instinct. Ultimately, psychoanalysis teaches that “there is no use in trying to get rid of men’s aggressive inclinations,” because they are instinctual (WW, ). Freud does suggest two measures to deflect those aggressive instincts from expression in violence, however. One is to promote the emotional ties that lead to solidarity through identification and the sharing of common interests (WW, ). A second hope for progress lies in the trend of cultural evolution that psychoanalysis has charac-

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terized as “a strengthening of the intellect, which is beginning to govern instinctual life, and an internalization of the aggressive impulses.” As a result of these cultural developments, Freud argues, pacifists like Einstein and himself actually have “a constitutional intolerance to war,” but unfortunately they will have to wait “until the rest of mankind become pacifists too” (WW, ‒). Freud and Einstein themselves therefore belong to the psychologically mature minority forming the vanguard of the psychological evolution of civilization as Freud describes it in The Future of an Illusion and exemplify those who, like teachers, must guide the moral development of their society. Freud describes this educated minority in greater detail in the open letter: A complaint which you make about the abuse of authority brings me to another suggestion for the indirect combating of the propensity to war. One instance of the innate and ineradicable inequality of men is their tendency to fall into the two classes of leaders and followers. The latter constitute the vast majority; they stand in need of an authority which will make decisions for them and to which they for the most part offer an unqualified submission. This suggests that more care should be taken to educate an upper stratum of men with independent minds, not open to intimidation and eager in the pursuit of truth, whose business it would be to give direction to the dependent masses. It goes without saying that the encroachments made by the executive power of the State and the prohibition laid by the Church upon freedom of thought are far from propitious for the production of a class of this kind. The ideal condition of things would of course be a community of men who had subordinated their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason. Nothing else could unite men so completely and tenaciously, even if there were no emotional ties between them. [WW, ‒]

The characteristics of this ruling “upper stratum of men”—their “devotion to truth,” their “independent minds,” and their subordination of their instincts to “the dictatorship of reason”—make them unmistakable as men of science. Freud seems to be proposing that the international scientific community, men who ideally share “no emotional ties” and hence perhaps no “partisan”—political or nationalist—aims should be entrusted with the government of the dependent masses. Beyond their commitment to reason and science, these men would also have in common an educational background in the classics and the characteristic ideology and normative goals of the professional scientific ethos: disinterestedness, objectivity, service to

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society, and the cultural and social authority and career expectations of the credentialed expert.135 Although he does not say so explicitly, the international quality of this scientific community would also suit it for the role Freud calls for, and that the League of Nations was supposed to play, of functioning as a “central authority to which the right of giving judgement upon all conflicts of interest shall be handed over” (WW, ). Freud has greater faith than Einstein in the educated public, and shares Einstein’s view of the scientific community as uniquely capable of exercising objective expertise on behalf of the world. We must take Freud’s proposals here quite seriously; they were meant to appeal not only to one of the most distinguished living scientists and humanitarians, but also to the educated, progressive, and influential supporters of the League of Nations. “Why War?” thus functions as highly sophisticated propaganda for psychoanalysis. It also participates in the ideological signification of the scientific community as unified, internationalist, and politically disinterested.136 The letter also suggests another enormously consequential benefit of psychoanalytic knowledge in the hands (minds) of an educated elite: it can help them guide the world away from war. As we can see in part from Freud’s description of its members as psychologically advanced educators of their society and directors of its cultural development, there is also a crucial role for psychoanalytic knowledge to play in constituting this ruling scientific community. In “The Question of a Weltanschauung ” (), Freud argues that psychoanalysis is specially suited to defend the scientific worldview against its detractors, who criticize science for “overlooking the claims of the human intellect and the needs of the human mind”: Psycho-analysis has a special right to speak for the scientific Weltanschauung at this point, since it cannot be reproached with having neglected what is mental in the picture of the universe. Its contribution to science lies precisely in having extended research to the mental field. And, incidentally, without such a psychology science would be very incomplete. If, however, the investigation of the intellectual and emotional functions of men (and animals) is included in science, then it will be seen that nothing is altered in the attitude of science as a whole, that no new sources of knowledge or methods of research have come into being. [Q, ]

This passage demonstrates one of the crucial professional and ideological implications of Freud’s claim that psychoanalysis decisively establishes psy-

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chology on a scientific basis. If psychoanalytic knowledge is fundamental to a scientific psychology, and if a legitimately scientific psychology is essential to the larger cultural authority of the scientific worldview, then psychoanalysis itself not only predicts but is also instrumental in effecting the psychological evolution of culture to a scientific, rational maturity. Psychoanalysis itself becomes essential to the realization of all the accompanying social benefits Freud envisions for a scientifically rational world—the reduction of class conflict and political oppression, the reconciliation of the individual to civilization, and the redirection of the energies wasted on religious faith toward more socially productive purposes, as well as the prevention of the individual’s psychological suffering through broad public access to psychoanalytic professional practice. Freud announces that psychoanalysis will change nothing and bring nothing new to science in its “attitude as a whole,” or in its “sources of knowledge or methods of research”—psychoanalysis is a “new” science, but it is also a science like any other. This sounds like realism and modesty yet such a statement, like the ones calling psychoanalysis a mere tool of research, also justifies the larger institutional project of psychoanalysis by suggesting that it “merely” allows science to realize itself fully both in thought and in the world. The much greater pessimism of a text like Civilization and Its Discontents is not inconsistent with Freud’s social and professional agenda for psychoanalysis, because by diagnosing modern civilization as “‘neurotic,’” Freud also expands the purview of the diagnostic and therapeutic applications of psychoanalytic expertise (CD, ). In fact, the scientific importance of psychoanalysis is monumental, Freud implies, because it not only promulgates the scientific worldview but also provides a psychological basis for scientific epistemology. Freud attacks several philosophical competitors with the scientific Weltanschauung, which, he points out, is not actually a Weltanschauung in the usual sense of the term, inasmuch as it does not pretend to give a complete account of the world but rather makes such an account its goal for the future (Q, ‒). He criticizes the claim that there is “no assured knowledge of the external world,” which he calls “a counterpart to political anarchism.” According to these “intellectual nihilists,” “What we give out as being scientific truth is only the product of our own needs as they are bound to find utterance under changing external conditions” (Q, ). Freud mordantly observes that “the relativity theory of modern physics seems to have gone to their head”

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(Q, ), but in fact these critics seem to be applying to science the same kind of psychological reduction that Freud applies to religion. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud had defended science in general against just this kind of psychological relativism and skepticism by outlining the conditions of possibility of an objective scientific knowledge of reality: In the first place, our organization—that is, our mental apparatus—has been developed precisely in the attempt to explore the external world, and it must therefore have realized in its structure some degree of expediency; in the second place, it is itself a constituent part of the world which we set out to investigate, and it readily admits of such an investigation; thirdly, the task of science is fully covered if we limit it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence of the particular character of our organization; fourthly, the ultimate findings of science, precisely because of the way in which they are acquired, are determined not only by our organization but by the things which have affected that organization; finally, the problem of the nature of the world without regard to our percipient mental apparatus is an empty abstraction, devoid of practical interest. [FI, ‒ ]

Freud’s characterization of science unfolds a number of implications for the role of psychoanalysis in supporting a scientific epistemology. As a “genetic psychology,” which “consists in tracing back one psychical structure to another which preceded it in time and out of which it developed,”137 psychoanalysis claims to explain the evolution, and thus the structure, of the mental apparatus. Psychoanalytic knowledge can thus contribute fundamentally to establishing scientifically the first of Freud’s premises in The Future of an Illusion for the objectivity of science, namely, the proposition that the mind has developed in relation to the external world and so must be able to perceive it with some accuracy. Psychoanalysis as a genetic psychology can also ground the research project entailed in the third premise, which proposes to characterize “how the world appears to us” based on a prior understanding of “our organization.” This third premise is actually the broadest for scientific epistemology, according to Freud, and in order to understand how central a role in supporting it he allocates to psychoanalysis, we need only remember his claim that psychoanalysis is the first psychological approach to go beyond mere description to understanding the causes of mental phenomena. The second premise is actually that of psychological research itself, but Freud also makes it a condition of scientific research as a whole. The fourth premise again suggests that the mind itself and the methods of scientific research partake of a common objectivity,

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and that therefore they are not in conflict or ontologically different. This hypothesis seems vital to a nonexperimental psychological research method like psychoanalysis, because most of its data are collected in analysis, where the person of the analyst is involved in constituting the object of study. The fifth premise may have many other implications, but it does assert that science can only be a human project, and human psychology must thus always be of interest to it. These comments are not meant to exhaust the possible meanings of Freud’s description of science. But the expansiveness of Freud’s claims for the relevance of psychoanalysis to science should be clear: if science is not an illusion, it would owe the possibility of proving that fact in no small part to a psychoanalytic psychology. Normal science, then, would find an invaluable support in the normative domain of the psychoanalytic profession. Whether or not psychoanalysis itself is scientifically valid, Freud’s writings clearly deploy the epistemological and ideological repertoire of early twentieth-century professional science.

A Psychoanalytic-Professional Culture Psychoanalysis seems to be one of those exemplary professions of which it can be said that “the client [becomes] in effect the whole community”;138 as Freud puts it, “it was no small thing to have the whole human race as one’s patient” (RP, ). Freud defines the psychoanalytic audience more hypothetically as the professional scientific community and more concretely as the educated classes from whom it largely draws its clientele, and whom Freud’s writings address as their nonspecialist readership: “the multitude of educated people to whom we may perhaps attribute a benevolent, even though cautious, interest in the characteristics and discoveries of the young science.”139 A central political message of Freud’s writings on culture, then, is that a scientific psychology, such as psychoanalysis claims to provide, is an absolutely essential form of knowledge to any ruling class that seeks to understand the psychological causes of cultural development and social life, and to govern those human “masses” who have not yet psychologically “internalized” the beneficial and future-oriented—that is, soon to be dominant—cultural values of reason and science. If society has not yet learned to embrace science, Freud suggests, it is up to a rising educated middle class to seize a position in the

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forefront and, with the help of the psychoanalytic perspective on culture, as well as therapy for their own psychological suffering from civilization, to lead the way toward a distant but plausible future in which all people will share a scientific worldview. Freud stakes out an almost incomparably influential cultural and social role for the psychoanalytic profession: analysts will continue to focus on the treatment of individuals, but psychoanalytic knowledge will be very much in demand throughout society. Far from being an “‘impossible profession,’” as Freud sardonically characterized it in , psychoanalysis will actually make more rational and effective those other two “impossible” professions to which he compares it, “education and government” (AT, ). The analyst himself or herself will become the consummate professional—that “Impartial Person” to whom one can entrust both one’s “deepest” secrets and the future of human civilization. Freud claims “legal title” to professional jurisdiction over the most scientifically significant “depth” psychology and most powerful psychotherapy. Given such expertise, psychoanalysis will replace the unauthorized psychological common sense of the educated person with an informed background in scientific psychology, and psychoanalytic knowledge will ultimately constitute a form of cultural capital, very much like classical learning. An educated person will be distinguishable by his or her objective, psychoanalytic grasp on the workings of the mind, garnered either through the reading and discussion of Freud’s works with experts and peers, or through a psychoanalytic education, or through undertaking an analysis. The project that Freud’s cultural theory enacts of making psychoanalysis into a psychological common sense is an extremely powerful institutionalizing strategy, since, as Bourdieu argues, “the sharing of a common culture, . . . is probably one of the surest foundations of the deep underlying fellow-feeling that unites the members of the governing classes, despite differences of occupation and economic circumstances.”140 Even the “masses” will need to become familiar with the basic teachings of psychoanalysis in order to facilitate their shift from religious belief to a rational comprehension of where human beings stand in the world. Freud predicts that civilization will ultimately privilege psychological over other kinds of expertise, and people will come to understand both their own lives and the workings of society from a psychological standpoint. Psychoanalytic knowledge should both contribute to the realization and ultimately form the essential basis of this new psychological worldview and common sense.

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Freud’s writings on culture function to construct psychoanalysis as a “dominant profession” distinguished by its ability “to publicly define cultural values in terms of successful results of [its] own work,” and hence to contribute to the construction of a dominant ideology.141 Larson observes that the potential of professions for producing ideology does not inhere only in a profession’s own ideological use of cognitive and normative elements of its work to construct its legitimacy; once professional status has been attained, “this structural position allows a group of experts to define and construct particular areas of social reality, under the guise of universal validity conferred on them by their expertise.”142 I want to focus in conclusion on how Freud’s agenda for psychoanalysis as a profession puts to use three major aspects of the ideology of profession: universality, meritocracy, and individualism. Larson explains that professional expertise claims universality in order to assure the public that the profession’s social authority and cognitive autonomy are not based on “traditional and external guarantees of status stratification”: the professional should be respected not because of who she or he is, but because she or he possesses a certified and socially beneficial “superior expertise.”143 Clearly, claims like Freud’s to the universal applicability of psychoanalysis rely on the universality of science, but they also work according to the ideology of the seeming independence of the professional’s service from any social determinations such as educational or cultural background. For example, consider the following assertion: “I have been able to help people with whom I had nothing in common—neither race, education, social position nor outlook upon life in general—without affecting their individuality” (LPT, ). While Freud’s declaration may be correct in an obvious sense—he treated people who were different in many ways from himself—it also justifies the objectivity and universality of psychoanalytic expertise. In fact, Freud and all of his patients did have a crucial “outlook” in common: precisely their belief in the legitimacy and potential efficacy of professional psychotherapeutic treatment of neurosis— rather than, for example, a vacation, a visit to the confession box, or a potion devised by a village healer. Meritocracy is an ideological legitimation of the elite social status of the professional that becomes most effective when the state begins to sponsor free, compulsory, and universal education. The state’s provision of education fosters the assumption that because everyone begins with the same

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educational “opportunity,” groups, such as professionals, who establish “monopolies of competence” have done so merely through “proving their abilities.”144 The ideology of meritocracy works to justify the elite social status of professionals and the exclusiveness of certification by asserting that professional training is open to all, based on general qualifications, “virtualities of the person which appear as randomly distributed or . . . [as] the result of effort and moral virtues,” such as “intelligence, studiousness, dedication, perseverance, and general culture as the result of prior efforts.”145 Freud attaches meritocratic ideological justifications of profession to psychoanalysis in several ways. In addition to protecting nonmedical analysts and asserting the autonomy of psychoanalysis from medicine, his defense of lay analysis functions ideologically to persuade the public that entry into the psychoanalytic profession is based on meritocratic principles and specific psychoanalytic training, and not on the prior completion of another pre-professional training tied to a privileged social, educational, or cultural background. Freud’s proposal that in the evolution of culture, reason, intellect, and the accompanying psychological maturity will prevail over the irrationality of the masses also purveys a meritocratic legitimation of psychoanalytic knowledge. This psychologization of cultural history implies that all people will ultimately be included in and served by the dominant scientific worldview. In fact, as both Freud’s scheme for a ruling scientific community and his more general belief in the “innate and ineradicable inequality of men” (WW, ) reveal, only those who already have access to an elite education and cultural background are in a position, both psychologically and socially, to assimilate psychoanalytic knowledge, to apply it in their own lives, and to use it in efforts to reform and govern society. Individualism is the ideological process, related to meritocracy, through which “the principle of equality among atomized individuals becomes a central source of legitimacy for the class system,” according to Larson, who defines its essential ideological effect as “‘the subjective illusion’ by which the individual believes he acts as a free agent in identifying with the political and ideological structures of his society.” She argues that in transactions between expert and client, particularly in the personal service professions, the ideology of individualism functions through the supposition that “personal problems of all kinds are purely private and admit, as such, individual ad hoc solutions.” The effect of this individualist agenda of professional work is that “structural causes, as well as collective

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action upon those causes, are relegated to a vaguely utopian realm.” The expert’s competence also ideologically signifies his or her superior social value as an individual—in fact, that he or she embodies what it means to be an individual: “The expert appears to be freer and more of a person than most others.”146 Freud’s texts on culture and social psychology do address social and cultural causes of the neuroses—for example, in his critique of “civilized” sexual morality. In this way they seem to move psychoanalytic knowledge, if not psychoanalytic therapy, beyond the ideological individualism of “personal problems” professions. Freud’s procedure of focusing on the “mental” rather than the “material,” however, gives priority to psychological explanations of culture and society and persistently shifts attention away from social causes of both psychological and social problems. Freud translates the characteristics of psychoanalysis as a “genetic psychology” into a method that depicts a psychological genesis for virtually every aspect of culture. Freud’s cultural theory, in fact, practices a methodological individualism in its use of analogies with individual psychology, as psychoanalysis understands it, to explain social conditions and the evolution of culture. The methodological prominence of models of individual psychology is particularly apparent in works like Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and Civilization and Its Discontents, where social solidarity is explained in terms, not only of the relation of a child to his father, or a follower to a leader, but also of the ego to the superego, and cultural development and “pathology” emanate from psychological causes. In a programmatic description of psychoanalysis for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in , Freud states categorically that “the social instincts are not regarded as elementary or irreducible.”147 Describing his lifelong interest in “cultural problems” in the postscript to An Autobiographical Study, Freud provides one of his most succinct formulations of the psychological methodological individualism that psychoanalysis practices: “I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primaeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id and the super-ego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual —are the very same processes repeated upon a wider stage” (AS, ; emphasis added). Thus, according to Freud, a psy-

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choanalytic psychology can explain virtually everything human and can contribute to the solution of every kind of problem based on its grasp of the workings of the individual mind—all cultural or social phenomena are in some sense ramifications of individual psychology. Psychoanalysis, then, puts into play one version of the ideological individualism characteristic of professions, and of bourgeois society, and its focus on the individual also underwrites its therapeutic and epistemological claims: despite Freud’s protestations, psychoanalysis does affect “individuality” by confirming a person’s embrace of individualism. The “legitimate” professional domain of psychoanalysis does not extend to fostering social revolutions, but should instead direct and sustain the psychological transformation that psychoanalysis sees as inherent in a culture whose motive “evolutionary” force is the “historical” dynamics of the human psyche. Freud envisions a fully psychologized, twentieth-century world that would owe both its “order” and recognition of its own imminent meaning to psychoanalytic knowledge. Freud also understands work as beneficial to the individual, as well as to society. He explains that professional work is particularly valuable because it exercises a choice based on qualities inherent in the individual person, as he explains in a footnote to Civilization and Its Discontents: It is not possible, within the limits of a short survey, to discuss adequately the significance of work for the economics of the libido. No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one—if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems. [CD, n]

It is clear that Freud’s positive model for work in general is, in fact, professional work. A person’s choice of work is clearly influenced by his or her particular proclivities. But Freud’s formulation of the “free choice” of a pro-

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fession as the way that “constitutional” and “instinctual” qualities of an individual are channeled into a particular kind of work elides the role in that choice of crucial factors of social formation such as cultural and familial background, gender, economic status, and access to education. Freud’s suggestion that “aversion to work” is an attribute of human nature also mobilizes the ideology of professional work as individual vocation. Within such a set of significations, “aversion to work” cannot readily be understood as the psychological effect of specifically social and economic “necessities” that force some people who do not have the professional’s “free choice” into dangerous, debilitating, demeaning, or demoralizing forms of labor. Even the stress and anxiety provoked by many kinds of bureaucratized “brain work” are not merely symptoms of an inherent “aversion to work” but also products of work and social environments. Freud’s understanding of the “libidinal significance” of work designates as a requirement of a productive and psychologically healthy life a model of professional work that is saturated with ideological messages about the superiority of the professional person’s work itself, of his or her psychological attitude toward that work, and the greater social value of professional work because of the voluntary and committed, rather than reluctant or coerced, nature of its contribution to the “human community.” This favorable assessment of professional work should not surprise us given the general prestige of the professions at the time and, in particular, among the Viennese bourgeoisie.148 As in his formulation of the Oedipus complex, Freud’s theory of the psychological benefits of work extends parts of his habitus —his own cultural, educational, and professional formation—into a general formulation of human psychology. This definition of work also harks back to Freud’s comments in The Future of an Illusion that human beings “are not spontaneously fond of work” (FI, ). Freud’s various defenses of the social value of scientific rationality also contribute to the professional ideology that education confers on the individual superior powers of rational government, both of his own life and of society, by making these powers seem to be the product of a more advanced intellectual “maturity,” rather than dependent on the prerequisite of access to an elite education and professional training. The ideological context and effects of Freud’s professional agenda for psychoanalysis operate particularly powerfully through his writings on culture precisely because these texts are not overly technical and specialized, but

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are rather overtly addressed to a larger educated public beyond the psychoanalytic professional readership. These professionalizing functions of the cultural criticism are crucial: as Larson argues, professional specialties have to be recognized by the larger public in order to sustain the full ideology of profession.149 Freud’s cultural theory confirms the attitudes toward work of his professional and educated readers, informing them with a psychoanalytic knowledge fully arrayed with the ideological and cultural accouterments of professionalism. The “subjective illusion,” according to psychoanalysis, is the illusion of consciousness: the ego “is not even master in its own house,” the subject is shaped by unconscious wishes and mental processes (IL, ). Psychoanalytic therapy is formulated to deal with individuals, and Freud’s cultural theory explains social phenomena as manifestations of the workings of the individual mind. Ideologically, these organizational and theoretical emphases work to deflect attention away from attempts to effect larger, structural and institutional changes in the social conditions of personal life, including the structure of the family. Thus a specific contribution of psychoanalytic knowledge to bourgeois individualism is to argue that all aspects of human subjectivity can be explained by a scientific psychology. As a central legitimating strategy of his psychological critiques of culture, Freud’s social reform agenda also participates in the ideology of professionalism as public service. This is not to say that professions perform no kind of service to the public, but rather to point out that the claim to benefit society helps to authorize the elite social status and monopolies of competence in particular fields that members of professions procure without regard to any concrete proof of their work’s beneficial social effects. Freud’s reform plans seek not only to justify psychoanalysis as a profession but to spread professional values to society at large and restructure society according to professional and scientific standards of rationality. In formulating such an agenda, Freud was in distinguished company. The historian Thomas Haskell has argued that the disinterestedness of professionals, especially in contrast to the acquisitive culture of businessmen, “was very widely accepted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century”: “within the academic world the professions had no enemies [until ], nor even critics worth mentioning.” Haskell shows that a group of theorists writing in the early decades of the twentieth century—the British economic historian and Fabian R. H. Tawney (‒), the French sociologist Émile Durkheim

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(‒), and the American “pragmaticist” philosopher Charles S. Peirce (‒)—shared the belief that professional disinterestedness could mitigate the privileging of self-interest in capitalist society, and Tawney and Durkheim put forward specific reform proposals based on the extension of professional values to society at large. Haskell identifies these reform projects as part of an intellectual “counter-movement” that was critical of the social effects of the culture of capitalism but did not go so far as to recommend the overthrow of the existing economic structure. Instead, these reformers suggested that the values of professionalism could control the market’s drive toward fostering only motives of self-interest, because they encouraged an orientation toward service to the community that could restore communal bonds.150 In the s and s, Tawney advocated the professionalization of all occupations so that they would be organized around the corporate value of “the discharge of functions . . . for a social purpose” rather than the individualist aim of mere acquisitiveness. He predicted that such a reform would make people in every job feel themselves bound to uphold the ethical standards characteristic of the professions.151 Haskell argues that “the sincerity of Tawney’s commitment to equality is beyond question,” but that he was also aware that members of his own class of “brain workers” would benefit from such a restructuring of society, because they would become its leaders. Tawney seems to have believed that this kind of empowerment was not as morally reprehensible as the capitalist’s ascendancy based on exploitation and greed.152 In lectures given from the s to his death in , Durkheim also criticized the progressive extension of market values into every sphere of life, with the exception of “‘the scientific function’—a category in which Durkheim undoubtedly included sociology and probably most other university disciplines.” He proposed to alleviate the social disintegration caused by the transience, impersonality, and competitiveness of human relationships in capitalist society by universalizing “professional ethics”—that is, “the establishment or reinforcement of a collegial mode of occupational control.”153 Durkheim envisioned the reorganization of French society into “clusters of related industries with an administrative council, or ‘miniature parliament,’ presiding over each, regulating wages, conditions of work, . . . and beneath them a succession of parallel regional and local bodies.”154 Durkheim’s plan also entailed a prominent cultural, political, and social

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role for professionals themselves. Haskell concludes that this culturally anticapitalist “counter-movement” “implicitly took the collegial community of scholars as a model for human relations throughout society.”155 Haskell’s account suggests that Freud’s concept of a rational ruling class, while not as detailed a proposal for the cultural dominance of professionals as those of Tawney and Durkheim, relies on the same widely shared confidence in the legitimacy and disinterestedness of professions and professional ethics that their programs do. Freud’s analyses of civilization are based overtly on scientific values, however, rather than stemming from a critique of capitalism’s effects on work relationships. The comparison of Freud’s reform agenda with these others makes clear the plausibility of his strategy to consolidate the professional prestige of psychoanalysis through schemes for social reform linked to psychoanalytic diagnoses of culture. Freud elaborated these schemes at a point in history when many intellectuals saw the translation of the culture of the professions to the larger society as a feasible and promising means of social improvement. While the content of such reform proposals could provoke disagreement, the professional values that supported them were taken for granted, as were the special qualifications of professionals for positions of influence and power. The professional’s disinterestedness put him or her in a special position to inform the public and thus help to direct social progress, as Durkheim stated more specifically in  of the public role of the writer and scholar: “[It is] by means of books, lectures, and contributing to popular education that our influence should be exercised. Before all else we should be advisors and educators. Our function is to help our contemporaries to understand themselves through their ideas and their feelings rather than to govern them; and in the state of mental confusion in which we live is there any role which is more useful?”156 Larson has contended that the dependence of profession on ideologies of meritocracy or “democratic elitism”—“the ability of the gifted to command the deference of the many for the well-being of all”—undermines the social reform efforts of professionals, since “even the purest and worthiest of professional behaviors cannot help legitimizing inequality and elitism by their factual demonstration that knowledge is beneficent power.”157 Reform proposals like Tawney’s, Durkheim’s, and Freud’s are not acts of bad faith, but they do ideologically justify the authority of professional expertise and the privileged social status of professionals.158 In upholding the cultural

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prestige of professionalism and expert knowledge, Freud’s writings also support the political influence of those who practice professions. The history of professions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows that they participate in a new division of labor based on the substitution of the occupational hierarchy for previous systems of social differentiation based on status or the ownership of capital. Professionalization accomplishes “a new form of structured inequality,” through which the possession of “marketable” and “socially recognized” expertise allows for a profession’s “collective assertion of special social status and . . . collective process of upward social mobility.” Those who have educational credentials can claim a cultural centrality and social standing previously reserved for capital or rank.159 Thus as psychoanalysis became an established profession, new analysts became members of an occupation that had a prestigious and clearly defined social position specifically in its role as profession, a role that depended on its staking out of a particular jurisdiction. The institutionalization of psychoanalysis cannot be understood apart from the historical and social conditions making professional work culturally paradigmatic, and a psychological expertise like psychoanalysis marketable and ideologically persuasive. One of the reasons for the cultural vogue of psychoanalysis, then, is its embrace and elaboration of professionalism in its historical, ideological, ethical, scientific, and normative aspects. Freud understood his own life in terms of education and career. Psychoanalysis, as Freud constructs it in his writings, also arises historically from professional scientific projects in fields such as medicine, particularly neurology, and it purveys a style of thinking that is historically and ideologically suited to members of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich have called, in the context of the United States, the professional-managerial class. They define this class as “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”160 The American context of this analysis of the professional-managerial class is particularly appropriate, because it is in the United States that psychoanalysis has been most successful as a psychotherapeutic technique, as a profession, and as a popularized form of psychological common sense.161 American culture, according to Burton J. Bledstein, has been from the end of the nineteenth century a culture of professionalism; this culture emerged institutionally, par-

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ticularly through education, and also as “a set of learned values and habitual responses—by which middle-class individuals shaped their emotional needs and measured their powers of intelligence,” and that offered Americans “a pattern of acceptable options.”162 Profession, then, has been and continues to be an authoritative subjective and social means of giving form to a life. Psychiatry provides a particularly salient example of a profession that in America was able to translate its expertise into a culturally central psychological vocabulary of selfhood. From the mid nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth in Europe and America, psychiatry changed from a marginal medical specialty concerned with the supervision and study of the insane in hospitals and asylums to an influential profession whose diagnostic terms became categories according to which new areas of social and cultural reality were organized. As the historian Elizabeth Lunbeck has pointed out, twentieth-century psychiatry would no longer be concerned primarily with the study and treatment of mental pathologies but arrogated to itself the ability to define psychological “normality.” Such a purview over “normality” allowed psychiatry as a profession and discipline to assert normative social judgments. In many ways, American psychiatry became the dominant science of everyday life, not because it was institutionally powerful within the medical profession, but because it succeeded in establishing its cultural authority by popularizing its “conceptual apparatuses.”163 One of the ideological effects of this psychiatric jurisdiction has been that mental health in America, in the words of Martin Gross, becomes “falsely equated with the usually unreachable ideal state which combines success, love and lack of anxiety,” with the result that “we are all sick, for normality is almost unattainable.”164 Shortly before his death, Freud also described normality as a kind of ideal: “Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent” (AT, ). In typical fashion, Freud simultaneously formulates therapeutic principles and professional prerogatives. He reassures his reader that normality is only an “ideal fiction,” and thus brings the psychotic, as he did the “pervert,” back within the pale of “normal” humanity. Yet in his discussion of the technical problems raised by the varieties of “‘alteration of the ego’” on a diagnostic spectrum from that hypothetical, but theoretically and therapeutically necessary position, of “normality” to psychosis, Freud also indicates

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that psychoanalytic expertise is applicable to all those people whose “approximations” of “normality” might require treatment (AT, ). Thus if everyone is defined as in some way emotionally or psychologically ill, everyone also becomes a potential client of some kind of psychotherapy provided by the “mental health industry,” whose “business,” according to the socialist psychoanalyst Joel Kovel, is “the production and distribution of emotional order and well-being.” Kovel observes that the assumption “that feeling, mind, the self, or whatever cognate can be advanced to describe purely psychological relations, is to be considered the primary factor in the human situation” has become “a ruling passion of contemporary late capitalist culture.” In his radical history of the rise of the concept of “mental health” in twentieth-century America, Kovel understands the progressive comprehensiveness of the psychological domain as a development of the shift from “living labor” to technology and the accompanying emphasis on work that primarily involves technical supervision of the production, distribution, and sales of commodities and provision of services. As commodity production accelerates with advanced technologies, the assurance of commodity consumption acquires greater urgency for the capitalist state, and other social sectors such as the managerial class of experts, advertising, and the mass media also increasingly involve themselves in the ideological promotion of consumerism. The mental health industry has flourished so dramatically because, under these conditions of commodity expansion, “the administration of everyday life was fast becoming a necessity for capital.”165 In order to shape “the experience of the consumption of commodities as if it were a law of nature,” Kovel contends, consumer culture had to be “secured” ideologically “from within, through the institution of perverted forms of rationality and desire.” A distinctive space for the mental, separate from the social, took form in part through its construction as an object of “hygiene,” and as the medical model of mental illness gained currency, mind and behavior came to be viewed “as a substance” to be categorized and treated according to medical techniques. Psychiatry in particular defined the patient as an “individual as monad,” and his or her characteristics as “an active social agent, determined by . . . class, community, or history” became increasingly irrelevant within an approach intent on reaching “diagnostic accuracy.” In short, “the medical-psychiatric model must deny the social activity of people by labeling their disturbance as disease

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inside them that can be treated from the outside by an expert from the upper classes.” Thus “mental health” as institution and discourse codes desire through and channels it into consumerism, and medicalized psychological “reason” mirrors the rationales of capitalist technocracy.166 In the late twentieth century, with the proliferation of mental health occupations and therapies, the industry has grown into a “big business” and mental health itself has become a “commodity-form,” “part of the vision of the good life of consumption, a life built out of administered pleasure.” As Kovel tellingly concludes, even late twentieth-century “humanistic” trends in psychotherapy misleadingly promise “the humanity erased from social existence by history”—that is, a “humanity” that is inaccessible because of the ideological colonization, individualization, and commodification of the domain of the psychological in advanced capitalism. New family-oriented therapies often fail to address the family structure itself as a cause of psychological suffering, and also generalize the family as model to the entire society, with the result that “an ultimately psychological causation is substituted for history.”167 Kovel judges that despite the real help mental health professionals have afforded to individuals and families, the “large-scale social effects” of the mental health industry on American society have been “to increase alienation and false consciousness”—through its authority as psychological expertise, the industry holds out a false promise of psychological well-being “in the midst of a diseased society.” Kovel proposes that these ideological factors in the rise of the mental health industry in the United States created a situation in which a simplified version of psychoanalysis became useful and pertinent because it could be practiced as “a doctrine that permitted the registration of psychological relations and the expression of impulse, only to trap them in a net of banality,” such banality being conducive to consumerist individualism and conformism. However, he does not consider the possibility that psychoanalysis, both in Freud’s texts and in the early efforts of the psychoanalytic movement to consolidate, is already framed as the kind of individualist psychological expertise whose social and political effects he deplores.168 I would like to build on and revise Kovel’s analysis by suggesting that one of the reasons for the success of psychoanalysis in the United States has been its psychological defense of the culture of professionalism. The analyst could reorient the middle-class person in many ways, but one of these must surely have been to offer the reassuring prospect of normality and ob-

Freud’s Cultural Theory



jectivity associated with professional expertise. This professional ethos does not, of course, in itself constitute psychoanalysis’s claim to fame, since any mere medical practitioner could also offer it, but as the underlying guarantee of a probing psychological intervention into the most private recesses of the self, the professional status of psychoanalytic therapy invokes a particularly powerful recognition of a common faith in the power of the knowing, disinterested expert. Psychoanalytic knowledge in a broader sense also appeals to members of the professional-managerial class, not only by treating their neuroses, but also by defending and extending their “special” status in the psychological vanguard of civilization. Psychoanalysis participates in a trend in the division of labor that gives particular cultural authority, economic rewards, and political influence to expertise, and it helps to naturalize the function of the professional-managerial class in that division of labor by offering a psychological—simultaneously individualizing and psycho-historical—justification of its cultural role in reproducing class relations. The professional-managerial class seems to have needed a psychological rationale for the joys and hardships of its emerging cultural centrality.169 As the Ehrenreichs point out, the category of the professional-managerial class is “an analytic abstraction” that “describes a phenomenon existing most clearly at the level of society as a whole.”170 My point here, then, is not to characterize the content of analytic treatment exhaustively, or to suggest that all American clients or practitioners of psychoanalysis were culturally or socially homogeneous, but rather to propose that the simple fact of their association with psychoanalysis suggests their participation in the cultural legitimation of professionalism. Thus psychoanalysis, as a fundamental form of knowledge and psychotherapeutic practice within the mental health industry, has contributed to the ideological formation of the professional-managerial class in the United States. This analysis of Freud’s professionalizing strategies yields several clear conclusions. One of Freud’s constitutive goals in his writings, and particularly in his cultural theory, was to ensure a future for psychoanalysis by definitively establishing its identity as an autonomous scientific profession. This effort produced mixed results, in that the status of psychoanalysis as science is still disputed. The pervasive cultural presence of psychoanalytic knowledge, however, both as expertise and as a basic framework of psycho-



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logical common sense, remains to be explained. A culturally significant outcome of Freud’s efforts of public persuasion—his attempt to shape a psychoanalytic culture—was the institution of psychoanalysis as a form of psychological knowledge reliant on and supporting the values and social prestige of professionalism. Psychoanalysis formulated a new, specifically psychological meritocratic rationale for the mental health professions. Freud’s writings participate crucially in the configuration of psychology, a form of knowledge that still retains its ties both to philosophy and to common sense, as a distinct disciplinary expertise to which one could claim a “legal title.” They also purvey a psychological thought style that generalizes abstract knowledge and practical technique—the actual possession of a few—into the conceptual architecture of a “universally” accessible “inner life.” Such an “inner life” is most available to those who seek out psychoanalytic training or psychotherapy, but it has also come historically to mark the normative epistemological domain of the psychological. In this paradoxical sense, the cultural success of psychoanalysis lies in its evolution into a professional knowledge popularized almost beyond recognition that nevertheless still functions as a form of “indispensable” psychological expertise.

5 Applied Psychoanalysis ’         

The use of analysis for the treatment of the neuroses is only one of its applications; the future will perhaps show that it is not the most important one. —Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis We felt that we were the first who had been given a key to the understanding of human behavior and its aberrations as being determined not by overt factors but by the pressure of instinctual forces emanating from the unconscious. —Anna Freud

In the Preface to Totem and Taboo (‒), Freud seems intent on containing some of the risks involved in his “pioneering” psychoanalytic study of the origins of culture: The four essays collected in these pages aim at arousing the interest of a fairly wide circle of educated readers, but they cannot in fact be understood and appreciated except by those few who are no longer strangers to the essential nature of psychoanalysis. They seek to bridge the gap between students of such subjects as social anthropology, philology and folklore on the one hand, and psycho-analysts on the other. Yet they cannot offer to either side what each lacks—to the former an adequate initiation into the new psychological technique or to the latter a sufficient grasp of the material that awaits treatment. They must therefore rest content with attracting the attention of the two parties and with encouraging a belief that occasional co-operation between them could not fail to be of benefit to research. [TT, xiii]

Freud initially constitutes the potential audience of his text as a broad and varied one. He addresses both a more general public of “educated readers”



                    

and a narrower group of specialists in the relevant disciplines that he names. Yet as quickly as he manifests a desire to “arouse interest,” he also deflects the possibility of the reader’s noncomprehension or rejection of the book by asserting that only those familiar with psychoanalysis can truly understand it. In fact, Freud’s overtures toward beneficial “co-operation” between psychoanalysis and the disciplines of social anthropology, folklore, or philology must be accepted strictly on psychoanalytic terms. Despite his indication of the text’s “deficiencies” (TT, xiii), Totem and Taboo is meant to demonstrate the importance of a psychoanalytic method to the scientific understanding of all the diverse phenomena of culture that the disciplines he names have distributed among themselves. Researchers in these other disciplines “lack” a “technique” to make sense of culture, while psychoanalysts simply need to become acquainted with the “material” that lies ready to hand and “awaits treatment.” Freud’s formulation here of his intervention across disciplines epitomizes what I shall define as the disciplinary project of his texts in cultural theory. He emphasizes the aptness of psychoanalysis for collaborations with other disciplines in terms that underline the epistemological indispensability of psychoanalytic knowledge. For Freud, “applications of psychoanalysis are always confirmations of it as well” (E&A,  ). Chapter  examined Freud’s professionalizing strategies and the dependence of his writings on the ideological significations and larger cultural authority of professionalism and science. In this chapter I argue that Freud’s cultural theory sets out to perform the crucial task of “confirming” the disciplinary status of psychoanalytic knowledge, thereby lending prestige and legitimacy to psychoanalytic expertise. Some might suggest that Freud’s writings on culture fail to advance this project, given their almost hubristic ambitions. How can Freud’s cultural theory work to consolidate the professional authority of psychoanalysis when books such as Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (), The Future of an Illusion (), Civilization and Its Discontents (), and Moses and Monotheism () seem so “unprofessional”—unauthorized, marginal to psychoanalytic theory, even embarrassingly speculative? Freud’s cultural theory is instrumental to the institutionalization of psychoanalytic knowledge because by diagnosing the problems of civilization and social life psychoanalytically, he aims to prove the unprecedented explanatory power and social value of psychoanalytic knowledge. Freud’s cul-

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tural theory goes beyond the “legitimate” boundaries of psychoanalytic professional practice precisely in order to define and extend the boundaries of psychoanalysis as a discipline. Moreover, in order to provide the “new scientific discipline”1 of psychoanalysis with a potential academic foothold, Freud’s primary strategy is to attempt to annex the jurisdictions of three key social science disciplines: anthropology, sociology, and psychology. I shall show that each of the texts on culture sets out to demonstrate that only psychoanalytic knowledge is adequate to answer questions that Freud pinpoints as essential to the discipline he is contesting. Psychoanalytic knowledge thus becomes both more basic and takes on greater scientific and cultural significance than the rival discipline Freud intends to render subordinate to psychoanalysis. But by incorporating the jurisdictions of this entire series of disciplines, Freud also constructs psychoanalysis as a unified field of knowledge or master discipline. Freud takes such risks in his cultural theory in part because the disciplinary stakes are so high, and in part because of his constant professional need to address the public. His success—if he actually persuades his audience—will be greater the larger his claims are. If he only sets out to account for the origins of totemism, perhaps a few anthropologists will be impressed, but if he can explain the origins of civilization in that psychological language of guilt and sexual repression that everyone can presumably identify with, but must also recognize now as definitively explained by psychoanalytic expertise, then surely all the world must eventually take notice of psychoanalysis. “Psychoanalysis is not only a therapy for my individual unhappiness,” Freud’s educated reader ought to conclude, “it’s also a decisive turning-point in the history of knowledge, in which I too am invited to participate.” I define Freud’s cultural theory specifically in relation to the disciplines it challenges.2 I do not here consider The Interpretation of Dreams (), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (), or The Ego and the Id (), which are also relevant to his study of culture, nor do I deal with Freud’s excursions into the fields of art and literature. My characterization of Freud’s cultural theory is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather aims to delineate yet another way in which his writings work to institutionalize psychoanalytic knowledge. I shall begin by examining some rhetorical strategies, as well as the



                    

primary theoretical agendas of Freud’s extensions of psychoanalysis to other fields. Next follows a sketch of the disciplinary histories of anthropology and sociology, two fields whose fates are tied to the university and whose establishment as academic disciplines is either recent or roughly contemporary with the main period of the professional consolidation of psychoanalysis, ‒. These histories will allow me to elucidate the specifically disciplinary logic of Freud’s texts on culture: they function as vital strategic interventions in the creation of a psychoanalytic discipline that could compete in academic and public standing with the social sciences. I then proceed to analyze how Freud’s major texts of cultural theory contest the disciplinary jurisdictions that they target: Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents appropriate the agendas of anthropology; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and The Future of an Illusion rework the objects of sociology. Chapter ’s discussion of Freud’s strategies to supply a psychoanalytic foundation for psychology provides important background for his forays into anthropology and sociology, since he viewed them both as epistemologically dependent on psychoanalytic psychology. I do not identify Freud’s texts of cultural theory as directed exclusively toward a single discipline—all of them are also involved in his larger project of founding psychology on psychoanalysis, for example. Nor am I attempting to separate the cultural theory from the rest of psychoanalytic theory, on which it clearly relies. Rather, I wish to demonstrate how Freud’s writings on culture produce the cultural authority and epistemic program of psychoanalytic knowledge through interdisciplinary contests. Thus I am extending to the investigation of disciplines Andrew Abbott’s framework for examining interprofessional competition for jurisdiction over particular kinds of work and for public recognition.3 Wolf Lepenies has articulated a similar sense that “the history of disciplines starts with the . . . observation that the cognitive, the historical and the institutional environments of disciplines consist first of all of other disciplines.” He points out that “an ‘economy of [institutional] resources’ . . . requires that each discipline that tries to articulate, to systematize and to institutionalize or professionalize a set of ideas or practices, also try to distinguish itself from other existing disciplines.”4 Psychoanalysis too was involved in a historical situation of limited resources and institutional locations for the practice of professionalized research. In such circumstances, its ad-

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herents had to stake out their claims to institutional support and public recognition. In his discussion of several early twentieth-century reformers who were advocates of professionalism, Thomas Haskell analyzes the American philosopher C. S. Peirce’s understanding of professional collegiality according to his focus on the “epistemological consequences of communal organization.” For Peirce, the professional and academic “community of inquiry” is geared toward producing objectivity, and it functions on the basis of rivalry and competition rather than of cooperation and love. Following Peirce, Haskell offers a definition of professions, particularly the academic profession, as “special communities (more accurately, intense communicative networks) that deliberately intensify competition among insiders in non-pecuniary dimensions of achievement, such as glory and reputation.” Haskell maintains that professions do not differentiate themselves from the capitalist market by producing altruism, as theorists of professional ethics such as Émile Durkheim and R. H. Tawney expected, but rather prompt the professional “to calculate self-interest twice: once in pecuniary terms that are shaped by the consumer sovereignty of an uninformed mass public, and again in non-pecuniary terms dictated by his struggle for eminence within a body of specially competent consumers, his professional peers.”5 Freud’s texts on culture are also products of the professional’s double calculation of self-interest, as Haskell describes it. They are addressed to the survival of psychoanalysis as a profession and to the economic survival of analysts themselves, but they also strive to obtain acceptance for psychoanalysis by constituting the members of the other disciplines they address as its professional and scientific peers. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Freud’s psychoanalytic epistemology by thinking through the disciplinary implications of two puzzling, even outrageous claims that accompany the primal parricide theory in his texts on culture. In Totem and Taboo, Freud asserts that his solution to the origins of the incest taboo is “quite different from any that we have so far considered, and might be described as ‘historical’” (TT, ). James Strachey’s translation enacts a desire to contain the scandal of Freud’s claim that the primal parricide is “historical” by enclosing the word in quotation marks and thus adding a sense of “as if,” or of metaphor, to Freud’s formulation that does not appear in the German.6 More than two decades later, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud again insists on the “historical truth”



                    

of the primal parricide.7 Yet in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud refers to the “scientific myth of the father of the primal horde” (GP, ). I suggest that the simultaneously mythic, scientific, and “historical” status of the primal parricide is not contradictory for Freud, but rather that this combination asserts the scientific and cultural authority of psychoanalysis itself. Consequently, Freud’s pronouncement at the end of Totem and Taboo that “the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex” (TT,  ) is a “primal” articulation of his disciplinary ambitions for psychoanalysis. Unlike his proposals for universal psychoanalytic education or state sponsorship of psychoanalytic training, Freud’s disciplinary agenda for the institutionalization of psychoanalysis through its “application” in other disciplines actually succeeded, although not exactly in the ways he envisioned. Freud’s cultural theory failed to persuade many anthropologists about the truth of the primal parricide, but it did contribute crucially to making psychoanalysis into a research method to be applied in other disciplines, particularly in the humanities, and this methodological success is in turn linked to the status of psychoanalysis as professional expertise. Freud’s texts on culture also work to “popularize” psychoanalytic knowledge among the broader educated public who would come to orient their lives according to the assumption that psychological explanations are the most basic and significant ways of understanding self and world.

“Explanations and Applications” Andrew Abbott has connected the particular success of psychoanalysis in the United States in part to its attempts to address cultural problems, and has characterized psychoanalytic forays into other disciplines as a kind of “professional imperialism.”8 One of Freud’s own accounts of the crossdisciplinary applications of psychoanalysis in “Explanations, Applications and Orientations” () offers an explicit analogy with imperialism: Psychoanalysis became a depth-psychology; and, since nothing that men make or do is understandable without the cooperation of psychology, the applications of psycho-analysis to numerous fields of knowledge, in particular to those of the mental sciences, came about of their own accord [von selbst], pushed their way to the front and called for ventilation. . . . An application of this kind presupposes specialized knowledge which an analyst does not possess, while those who

Applied Psychoanalysis

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possess it, the specialists, know nothing of analysis and perhaps want to know nothing. The result has been that analysts, as amateurs with an equipment of greater or less adequacy, often hastily scraped together, have made excursions into such fields of knowledge as mythology, the history of civilization, ethnology, the science of religion and so on. They were no better treated by the experts resident in those fields than are trespassers [Eindringlinge] in general: their methods and their findings, in so far as they attracted attention, were in the first instance rejected. But these conditions are constantly improving, and in every region there is a growing number of people who study psycho-analysis in order to make use of it in their special subject, and in order, as colonists, to replace the pioneers [als Kolonisten die Pioniere abzulösen]. Here we may expect a rich harvest of new discoveries.9

So that there can be no dispute about the legitimacy of applying a psychoanalytic method across disciplines, Freud insists first on the indispensability of psychology to research in all the social sciences and humanities. Since psychology as a discipline must be based on a “depth psychology” that only psychoanalysis can provide, all psychological approaches must in this way be psychoanalytic as well. Freud unmistakably indicates his awareness of the politics of interdisciplinary work. He acknowledges that psychoanalysts are often not well prepared to conduct research in other disciplines and are inevitably seen by “specialists” as interlopers. In Freud’s extended metaphor of colonization, the analysts who first attempt to apply psychoanalysis to other fields are “pioneers,” whose admittedly amateuristic and ad-hoc efforts may nevertheless lead researchers in other fields to take an interest in psychoanalysis as a method. Freud’s rhetoric once again seems to diminish the claims of psychoanalysis while in fact it subtly inflates them: when the specialists, who are native “residents” in their own fields, begin to adopt a psychoanalytic method, they become the “colonists” of a new field defined by psychoanalysis itself, a master discipline in which the psychoanalytic, psychological method would be applied to the study of everything that “men make or do.” As a result of the unifying explanatory power of psychoanalytic expertise, Freud implies, the resentful and protective specialists will begin to take possession and “harvest” the fruits of a new world of knowledge. The analysts, who were originally seen as “trespassers”—that is, as colonists— have converted the “native” specialists to their own ways, and all become participants in a seemingly inevitable epistemological expansion that takes place as though “of [its] own accord.”



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Freud is completely unabashed about this analogy for, after all, he is only speaking of disciplinary conquests. But the potential professional rewards of such disciplinary “imperialism” are considerable, because all of those specialists in other fields now need to acquire psychoanalytic expertise, and their research in the new field of applied psychoanalysis also “confirms” psychoanalytic knowledge (E&A,  ). Freud means, of course, that applications substantiate the truth of psychoanalysis, but without granting him this, we can still see how he is right in the sense that the more the psychoanalytic method takes hold, the more the scientific respectability of psychoanalysis should grow. It is evident from the numerous invitations to apply psychoanalysis and explanations of the relevance of psychoanalysis to other fields throughout Freud’s work that the function of psychoanalysis as a “new instrument of research” is a crucial selling point (LA, ).10 In various writings, Freud proposes the extension of psychoanalytic methods to numerous fields: biology (particularly developmental biology) and psychiatry; psychology (particularly social psychology); social anthropology, the history and psychology of religion, sociology, education, and the science of mythology and folklore; the history of civilization; and philology, philosophy, and the science of aesthetics, that is, the study of art and literature.11 Freud develops two major theoretical trajectories that lead from psychoanalytic findings to their cultural and social applications: through dreams and dream symbolism, and through the Oedipus complex. According to Freud, psychoanalytic work in interpreting dreams has shown, in the light of analogies with “linguistic usage, mythology and folklore,” that “symbols seem to be a fragment of extremely ancient inherited mental equipment,” and that “the use of a common symbolism extends far beyond the use of a common language.”12 Here Freud offers a model of how research in other fields supports the disciplinary expansion of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, psychoanalysts can interpret the symbolism of their individual patients’ dreams on the basis of dictionaries and compendia of mythology and folklore. On the other hand, their claim that psychoanalytic findings point to the existence of an “ancient . . . inherited mental equipment” extends the foundational relevance of psychoanalytic knowledge to a wide variety of social science and historical disciplines. If psychoanalysis has located common mental processes that are deeper than and hence cut across linguistic differences, breaking down one of the most

Applied Psychoanalysis

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significant barriers that separate and differentiate cultures, then it becomes not only a universally applicable (and scientific) psychology but also an essential part of any other generalizing anthropological or sociological project. Freud’s theories of dreams and parapraxes facilitated the public diffusion of psychoanalytic ideas because they appealed to the everyday experience of the nonspecialist.13 Freud also accounts for the scientific and disciplinary importance of dream research in terms of its extension of psychoanalysis to the field of normal psychology: If dreams turned out to be constructed like symptoms, if their explanation required the same assumptions—the repression of impulses, substitutive formations, compromise-formation, the dividing of the conscious and the unconscious into various psychical systems—then psychoanalysis was no longer an auxiliary science in the field of psychopathology, it was rather the starting-point of a new and deeper science of the mind which would be equally indispensable for the understanding of the normal. Its postulates and findings could be carried over to other regions of mental happening; a path lay open to it that led far afield, into spheres of universal interest. [AS, ]

The analysis of dreams affords both a particular clinical technique and also a way to move beyond a narrow specialization in psychopathological conditions by supplying a psychological method of interpretation. If the dreams represent the “bridge that leads over to the mental sciences,” the methodological extension of psychoanalysis into other disciplines occurs most aggressively through the applications of the Oedipus complex. As Freud puts it, “the significance of the Oedipus complex began to grow to gigantic proportions.”14 Freud’s Oedipal theory of culture makes possible his reconfiguring of the objects and methods of anthropology, sociology, and history through his genetic, psychoanalytic psychology. In a  postscript to An Autobiographical Study (), Freud emphasizes how important to his own work his early interest in “cultural problems” was and concisely outlines his method of psychological reduction: I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primaeval experiences (the most prominent of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id, and the super-ego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual—are the very same processes repeated upon a wider stage. [AS, ]



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Like his claim to make psychology scientific by founding it on a more basic “depth psychology” provided by psychoanalysis (LA, ), Freud maintains here that psychoanalysis has identified, and by implication holds disciplinary jurisdiction over, the most basic matter of all the mental sciences. Every other discipline enters into a relation of epistemological dependence on the objects—the dynamics of id, ego, and superego—and the psychological explanatory method of psychoanalysis, which becomes “of importance for every field of knowledge that is founded on psychology” (RP, ). Thus the disciplinary “stage” of psychoanalysis is “wide” enough, not only to encompass all the other disciplines “founded on psychology,” but ideally to surpass their ability to attract public attention and institutional support as well. Later in the postscript, Freud reflects that his writings on culture may perhaps have “awakened more public sympathy than psychoanalysis itself,” and that they may also have won him his award of the Goethe Prize in  (AS, ‒). As a cultural critic, Freud not only joins the company of the greatest writers of the German tradition but also enhances the stature of psychoanalytic knowledge. Freud’s major goal, however, was not that psychoanalysis be viewed as great literature but that it be accepted as science. Freud always argued for the scientific status of the Oedipal theory in all its ramifications. Frank J. Sulloway’s groundbreaking work on the biological assumptions of psychoanalysis allows us to understand the crucial role of “the Darwinian-historical point of view” in Freud’s turn to applications of psychoanalysis across disciplines based on his phylogenetic conception of Oedipal cultural origins. The analogy between the working of dreams and the genesis of myths makes possible a specifically psychoanalytic application of the biogenetic law that “‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’” that is, “in man, the development from fetus to adulthood (ontogeny) provides a brief recapitulation of the entire history of the race.”15 Freud employs the biogenetic law to extend the Oedipus complex (ontogeny) to the history of culture (phylogeny) in Totem and Taboo; he asserts that “primitive” cultures exhibit the childhood of mankind, and that therefore their social arrangements give clues to what civilization was like in its earliest moments (TT, ).16 He also understands the psychology of “primitive” peoples as analogous to the psychology of children and neurotics according to the idea that they all exhibit either elementary or, in the case of neurotics, inhibited stages of psychological development (TT, ). Sulloway argues persuasively that “Freud’s implicit en-

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dorsement of this [biogenetic] law constitutes perhaps the least appreciated source of a priori biological influence in all of psychoanalytic theory.”17 This bioevolutionary framework provided a conceptual ground crucial to Freud’s psychoanalytic account of culture, and I shall return to it later. For the purposes of analyzing the institutionalizing functions of Freud’s disciplinary project, however, it is necessary to examine the ways in which he defines psychoanalysis specifically as a discipline in contest with other disciplines and their definitions of their objects and methods. In other words, we need to bear in mind Freud’s biological agenda but also to elucidate how he attempted to place psychoanalysis in a position to take advantage of available institutional mechanisms for consolidating and legitimizing a scientific discipline. The dominant institutional location for establishing a discipline is the school, and in the case of a new research discipline, the university. The most effective institutionalizing strategy for a nascent discipline is to develop a persuasive rationale for its inclusion in an academic curriculum.

Disciplines and the University: Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis received a certain amount of academic recognition as it was undertaking professionalization during the early decades of the twentieth century. Freud himself held solid academic credentials: he obtained his medical degree from the University of Vienna Medical School in ; he was named Privatdozent (lecturer) in neuropathology, a highly prestigious position in itself, in , and after an unusually long delay was promoted to the rank of Ausserordentlicher Professor, or professor extraordinarius (assistant professor) in .18 This appointment occasioned Freud’s appearance before the emperor in gratitude for this recognition, and it endowed him with the title that his growing group of followers and his analysands would most often use in addressing him: “Herr Professor.” This promotion also played an important role in enhancing Freud’s social status and solidifying his professional practice. While the promotion did not entail a salary or a seat in the medical faculty council, it did entitle him to charge higher fees and increased his professional and scientific authority; in Freud’s words, a professorship “elevates the physician in our society into a demigod for his patients.”19

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From the time of his docentship until , when he delivered his final series of lectures on psychoanalysis, published as Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (‒), Freud also gave many courses at the university.20 Probably the historically most important academic recognition psychoanalysis received took place when Freud delivered a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in early September . However, psychoanalysis never became an independent discipline or even a subdiscipline, as was the case with experimental psychology in the German philosophy faculty, in any European university during Freud’s lifetime.21 The establishment of psychoanalytic curricula at the university was proposed both in Budapest after World War I, and in Berlin in  and , but neither of these possibilities ever materialized.22 A course in psychoanalysis was not offered at a German university until .23 In the United States from the s to the s, psychoanalysis was taught primarily in training institutes and as “an explanatory medical psychology . . . in the psychiatric programs of medical schools,” and at the peak of its prestige in the s and s, it was still linked to psychiatry in medical education.24 Although the influence of psychoanalysis cut across many kinds of psychological and psychiatric practices, even in America, the country and culture of its greatest success, it has never become an independent academic discipline. Freud himself specifically relates the founding of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in  to the rejection of psychoanalysis by “official science,” and “official” here must be read as meaning academic (HPM, ‒). He also recounts how he ceased attending meetings of the Gesellschaft der Ärzte (Society of Medicine) after a lecture in  on male hysteria was received unfavorably by his audience: “As I was soon afterwards excluded from the laboratory [of Theodor Meynert, professor of psychiatry] of cerebral anatomy and for terms on end had nowhere to deliver my lectures, I withdrew from academic life and ceased to attend the learned societies. It is a whole generation since I have visited the ‘Gesellschaft der Aerzte’” (AS, ‒ ).25 As a result both of this failed lecture and his experiences of antisemitism during his student days at the University of Vienna, Freud maintains that he was placed “in the Opposition” (AS, ,  ). In his academic career, Freud seems to have found himself positioned both culturally and institutionally as an outsider—and also to have used this sense of alienation to rhetorical advantage in his assertions of the autonomy of psychoanalysis.

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While it would be inaccurate to characterize Freud as having been excluded from the university, it is clear, especially in comparison with a figure like the psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Wundt, that his academic career was not highly successful, and that psychoanalysis was institutionalized almost exclusively as a profession outside the university.26 In On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (), Freud hints that the early Vienna group, at least in his own mind, functioned as a surrogate for an academic research institute: “On the whole I could tell myself that [the small circle] was hardly inferior, in wealth and variety of talent, to the staff of any clinical teacher one could think of ” (HPM, ). Freud’s comparison reveals that despite the “talent” of his followers, they were not, in fact, a clinical staff, and he himself was not the head of an academic research department. While Freud wrote On the History to publicize the break with Jung and the Zurich School, he also makes a point of recognizing the crucial role that the Swiss contingent played in the early consolidation and spread of psychoanalysis because of the institutional setting the Burghölzli clinic provided: “Nowhere else did such a compact little group of adherents exist, or could a public clinic be placed at the service of psycho-analytic researches, or was there a clinical teacher [the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler] who included psycho-analytic theories as an integral part of his psychiatric course” (HPM, ). The Swiss held out the promise of corroborating psychoanalytic findings through experimentation, and thus of building “the first bridge linking up experimental psychology with psycho-analysis”; they had begun to interpret the results of the Wundtian school’s association experiments psychoanalytically, so that, “by this means it had become possible to arrive at rapid experimental confirmation of psycho-analytic observations and to demonstrate directly to students certain connections which an analyst would only have been able to tell them about” (HPM, ). The alliance with the Swiss and with Jung did not ultimately serve Freud’s purpose of providing an “heir” to head the psychoanalytic movement after his death (HPM, ). But the Swiss group did offer psychoanalysis an important early institutional affiliation with a state-supported center of psychiatric practice and training. Zurich, unlike Vienna, was for a short but crucial time “a place in the heart of Europe . . . where an academic teacher had opened the doors of his institution to psycho-analysis” (HPM, ). In , Freud published a short paper in a Hungarian medical periodical addressing the possibility of including psychoanalysis in the univer-

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sity curriculum. He begins by immediately differentiating between the attitudes of psychoanalysts and of the university toward such an event, indicating his awareness of the tensions that can exist between disciplinary and larger academic institutional agendas in the consolidation of a new discipline. Freud asserts that while “the inclusion of psycho-analysis would no doubt be regarded with satisfaction by every psycho-analyst . . . it is clear that the psycho-analyst can dispense entirely with the University without any loss to himself ” (OT, ). At this high point for psychoanalysis going into the s, Freud asserts the psychoanalyst’s independence from the university, but he also proceeds to outline a series of advantages that psychoanalytic course work would offer to doctors, including a training in depth psychology that would repair a “flagrant blind spot” in the physician’s understanding of the “mental factors” involved in illness (OT, ‒ ). Freud argues that “psycho-analysis, in fact, more than any other system, is fitted for teaching psychology to the medical student” (OT, ). He proposes a psychoanalytic curriculum for medical students and a series of more advanced courses for psychiatrists, and also suggests that in order to conduct research, psychoanalytic faculty would require “access to an out-patient department for the supply of the necessary material in the form of ‘neurotics,’” and that for psychoanalytic psychiatry, “a mental in-patient department would also have to be available” (OT, ). Medical students who wished to pursue psychoanalytic training would continue their studies after university at an institute, just as they would pursue any other medical specialization (OT, ). Freud also advises that all courses in psychoanalysis should be “thrown open” to students in other disciplines, so that they can become acquainted with the potential applications of psychoanalysis to their fields, and concludes that “a University stands only to gain by the inclusion in its curriculum of the teaching of psycho-analysis” (OT, ). As in his fictional debate with the government official in The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud asserts psychoanalytic autonomy while seeking institutional sponsorship. He affirms that while psychoanalysis—as a selfsufficient profession and research program with its own training institutes—can do without the university, the university would profit from an infusion of psychoanalytic knowledge. As Henri Ellenberger reminds us, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe “the main center of science and culture was the university . . . every cultured man had gone to a university, and a scientific

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career was necessarily linked with a university career.”27 In such conditions, lack of a secure institutional setting for clinical research, either in a university faculty or a mental hospital, was a significant disadvantage for the psychoanalytic movement, despite its successes at professionalization. Freud’s cultural theory and invitations to apply psychoanalysis as a method across disciplines were designed in part to remedy this deficiency, and to open the way in the future for an academic institutional base for psychoanalytic research.28 As disciplinary interventions, Freud’s texts on cultural theory were based on the premise that if psychoanalysis could succeed in becoming both a method to be applied in other fields and a distinct field encompassing all other academic specialties based on psychology, then it too must ultimately become a recognized academic discipline. Freud addresses psychoanalysis to other fields precisely in their status as either established or currently consolidating research programs in the university. His cultural theory gives evidence of his strategic supposition that the institutional resources attached to an academic discipline will become available to his “new science” if, in part through the agency and example of his writings, it can win epistemological competitions with other fields. In order to explore what kind of academic trajectory is at stake in Freud’s interdisciplinary contests, I shall outline the histories of two social science disciplines in two national contexts: anthropology in Britain and sociology in France. In doing so, I focus on a time period—the first two decades of the twentieth century—that coincides with the initial period of professionalization of psychoanalysis. Anthropology was a full-fledged academic research program in Britain by the early s, while sociology became an official part of the degree examination in the French universities also in the s. I shall delineate these disciplines as works in progress, as products of contests over knowledge and methods and also over resources and prestige, both within a given field and with other disciplines. Lepenies argues that “disciplinary identities cannot simply be ascribed once and for all by recourse to the ‘ultimate meaning’ of a science,” but rather “are acquired, challenged, maintained and changed under specific historical and cultural circumstances.”29 Disciplines are both forms of knowledge and the formal institutionalized practices that reproduce and distribute that knowledge. Their practitioners must demonstrate the distinctiveness of their objects and procedures and make a case for the scientific and professional legitimacy and usefulness of their research to the larger society. Because both

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anthropology and sociology were in the process of defining their distinctive domains of knowledge, place in the university curriculum, and larger social relevance at the time that Freud was writing his cultural theory, they provided both models and incentives for his own disciplinary project for psychoanalysis.

Anthropology in Britain The historian of anthropology George W. Stocking, Jr., recounts that the first generation of students who could “receive systematic university training as an ‘anthropologist’” in Britain were those who attended university at the close of the nineteenth century. Anthropology had attained its own independent section in the British Association for the Advancement of Science in . Edward Burnett Tylor (‒), a prominent member of the Anthropological Institute and writer of Primitive Culture ()—a book that offered one of the first and most influential definitions of the anthropological idea of “culture”—gave two public lectures in anthropology at Oxford in  and was appointed reader in anthropology there in .30 In the early s, however, attempts to make anthropology an official honors subject at Oxford failed against the opposition of a coalition of “theologians, classicists and natural scientists,” and it was granted merely the status of a “special subject,” which students would be unlikely to take because it would make a further addition to a full course load.31 Anthropology only became a permanent part of the curriculum at Cambridge in . Stocking argues that anthropology had a “marginal” position at the end of the nineteenth century; institutionalized anthropological research was not in demand either by the government, missionary movements, or the educated public. Instead, anthropology was primarily of interest to “the scientific community itself,” as anthropological knowledge was seen to be useful to various other scientific projects. By , only a dozen scholars were conducting full-time research in anthropology, and virtually none of them were involved in training the next generation of anthropologists. Thus, at the turn of the century, anthropology was a project “for which the term ‘discipline’ seems appropriate only in a rather loose sense.”32 In her social history of anthropology in Britain from  to , Henrika Kuklick shows that the academic professionalization of anthro-

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pology gained substantial momentum at the time of World War I, although a chair in anthropology was created at Cambridge only in , and at Oxford in . These universities resisted supporting anthropology at this time in part because of diminishing financial resources, but the official recognition of other new social science disciplines came even later: psychology at Oxford in , sociology at Cambridge not until . In the first three decades of the twentieth century, then, anthropology’s academic institutionalization proceeded gradually but at a steady pace: a School of Anthropology was created at Oxford in , and a Board of Anthropological Studies at Cambridge in ; the first university chair in social anthropology was endowed at the University of Liverpool for James G. Frazer (‒) in ; by , eleven British universities offered courses in anthropology; and by the mid s, Ph.D. degrees in anthropology were being granted. The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, which had been founded in , finally received its Royal Charter in . Bronislaw Malinowski’s (‒) seminars at the London School of Economics in the s and s attracted a varied and enthusiastic public,33 and by the early s, when it was clear that psychoanalysis would survive and prosper primarily as a profession, anthropology in Britain had achieved the status of a full-fledged research program and university discipline. According to Kuklick, the legitimacy of anthropology as an academic discipline was defended in three ways: it was recognized and given scientific respectability by some of the most distinguished scientists of the time; colonial officials eventually solicited from the universities some kind of instruction in anthropology for colonial officers, thereby confirming the practical value of anthropological knowledge; and anthropology succeeded in becoming part of the common knowledge of the educated person, “a subject university students were expected to master at some minimal level regardless of the formal courses they took.” Anthropology came to be viewed as supporting the larger goals of a university education—not merely to teach “useful information” but also to endow students with knowledge that enhanced their ability to understand and discriminate among levels and kinds of culture. With the academic institutionalization of anthropology, anthropologists themselves also became assured of a stable context within which to pursue their professional careers.34 Kuklick indicates that the British “amateur” anthropologists whose

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careers spanned from the mid nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth were not themselves university men and did not aggressively pursue academic institutionalization of their discipline. In their explanations of the utility of their knowledge, however, these early anthropologists focused on the possibility of their field’s institutionalization through government service; they hoped that the state would sponsor a set of institutions leading from university training to work in government agencies and museums. Kuklick examines the failed effort during the years between the last decade of the nineteenth century up to World War I by a group of distinguished British anthropologists, professionals, and scientists under the auspices of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to lobby the government to create an “imperial bureau of ethnology” to fund research in anthropology on the model of the Geological Survey. The bureau’s mandate would be to document cultural forms that were in the process of “disappearing” and to provide interpretations of local customs that would facilitate colonial administration by helping officials to avoid the violation of indigenous customs, thus winning the consent of colonial subjects to their government. The political ideology of empire during this period would have encouraged such efforts to gain state sponsorship of anthropological research, since government officers often pointed to “scientific reasoning” as the proper basis for political decisions, but the financial realities of colonial administration made the hiring of scientific consultants rare.35 Kuklick maintains, however, that all major branches of anthropological research being carried out in the s and s—evolutionist, functionalist, and diffusionist—argued for the value of their work to colonial administration.36 Like the anthropologists, Freud also envisioned governmental support for psychoanalysis, in this case through the founding and financing of clinics, so that analysts might be able to provide social prophylaxis from neurosis by serving the general public and particularly the poor en masse (LPT, ‒). Kuklick also situates the expansion of the curricula of Oxford and particularly of Cambridge to include subjects like anthropology during the last two decades of the nineteenth century as part of a larger reform effort aimed at competing with the new regional colleges and the University of London to attract students oriented toward the practice of professions such as medicine and law. She stresses that the professionalization of anthropology during this period was part of a larger trend in nineteenth- and early

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twentieth-century British society toward a class system that gave new social and cultural authority to those who possessed specialized expertise. Anthropologists were part of a “reforming intelligentsia, who explained social progress as the result of the application of scientific method to the rationalization of all human affairs.” Thus the public appeal of anthropology was based in part upon the fact that anthropologists’ understanding of their own social role as middle- and upper-middle-class, professional “brain workers” in a newly “meritocratic” social order informed their analyses and made them plausible to educated readers who shared their cultural assumptions and occupational experiences. In particular, anthropologists observed pervasive social changes, particularly the emergence of the middle classes as an increasingly dominant social and political force, and “characterized them as manifestations of general laws of development.”37 As I showed in Chapter , Freud’s writings display the major ideological presuppositions of middle-class professionalism, like those that underwrote the inclusion of anthropology in the undergraduate curriculum. Like the anthropologists, Freud also devised a set of “general laws of development” to explain psychoanalytically what he interpreted as the greater psychological maturity of members of the educated classes, and to justify the more extensive rationalization of social life.

Sociology in France The academic institutionalization of sociology in France at the beginning of the twentieth century is directly linked to the career and school of Freud’s contemporary Émile Durkheim. Sociology did not exist as a university discipline when Durkheim was appointed lecturer in “education and social science” in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Bordeaux in . According to a historian of the Durkheimian school, Victor Karady, until Durkheim began to publish his major works in the s—The Division of Labor in Society (), The Rules of Sociological Method (), and Suicide ()—“in France . . . there had been no systematic attempt to lay the paradigmatic foundations of sociology.”38 At Bordeaux, Durkheim took over a course in pedagogy that had been taught since  by Alfred Espinas (‒), professor of philosophy and later dean of the Faculty of Letters, who had in fact defended the first doctorat d’État (or Ph.D.) in sociology, Les sociétés animales, in . According to Durkheim’s biographer,

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Steven Lukes, this appointment “was the cover under which sociology was first officially introduced into a French university,” and he relates that “it was only as a special favour that [Durkheim] was allowed to add the word ‘Sociology’ to ‘Pedagogy’ in the Faculty List.”39 Durkheim’s university career was from the beginning aimed at achieving both academic and public recognition for sociological ideas and methods. In his inaugural lecture at Bordeaux, he announced his plan to develop the new science of sociology, and after reviewing its history, he argued for its usefulness to philosophers, historians, and lawyers. Social science would allow problems that had been treated by philosophical ethics to receive scientific study, so that institutions could be understood not only normatively, as they “should be,” but first of all as they are—how they arose and what needs they meet. Sociology could also supply an account of general social laws to guide the studies of the historian and a theory of the social conditions that give rise to law. Analogously to Freud’s emphasis on the significance of his genetic approach to psychology, Durkheim propounded an innovative and broadly relevant sociogenetic study of institutions. During his fifteen years at Bordeaux, Durkheim taught courses on topics such as “social solidarity,” moral and intellectual education, the history of pedagogy, the family, suicide, legal and political sociology, psychology, criminology, religion, the history of socialism, and the history of sociological theories. Durkheim’s lectures were attended by students in a variety of disciplines, as well as members of the educated public. Probably the most important event for the institutionalization of sociology that took place during this period was the founding in  by Durkheim and a group of colleagues and students of the journal L’Année sociologique, which was to include both original articles and reviews of recent publications in sociology and related fields.40 In the same year Durkheim also became the first in France to hold a chair as professeur de science sociale.41 In , Durkheim was named chargé de cours in the “Science of Education” at the Sorbonne; he was appointed to the chair in . He also gave courses at the École Normale Supérieure and the École des Hautes Études Sociales. He sat on governing committees of the University of Paris that approved all university appointments, and advised the Ministry of Public Instruction.42 In , Durkheim’s chair at the Sorbonne was renamed “Science de l’Éducation et Sociologie,” but there was no university professorship designated exclusively for sociology in France until after the

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war. Young scholars wishing to pursue research in sociology after  had to specialize in some other discipline in order to ready themselves for an existing faculty position. Chairs in sociology were finally created for Marcel Mauss (‒), Durkheim’s associate and nephew, at the Collège de France in , and at the Sorbonne in . Sociologists publishing in the Année attempted to gain ground for sociology by offering new disciplinary designations for work that would normally be claimed by other disciplines: Durkheimian studies on “economic sociology” would be considered economics or history by scholars in those fields, and “moral sociology” was likely to be categorized by philosophers simply as philosophy. These forays into other disciplines were in part a process of defining sociology, so that a particularly important field like ethnology might be seen as virtually equivalent to sociology, at least until the s.43 Scholars in other fields, however, also viewed such sociological redefinitions of their subject matter as poaching on their disciplinary domains. The most contentious dispute arose between sociology and psychology, particularly in the debate between Durkheim and the sociologist, statistician, and magistrate Gabriel Tarde (‒). Tarde professed that society should be studied as a product of the actions of individuals, while Durkheim held that “social facts” were sui generis and therefore had to be understood as independent of individual psychology and explainable only by reference to other social facts.44 The stakes of the contest with psychology and psychologizing sociological theories were high, not only because Durkheim was defending sociology against a reduction to psychology, but also because sociologists and psychologists were competing for the small number of university appointments in pedagogy and “scientific” philosophy. Durkheim’s influence nevertheless obtained many academic positions for his collaborators.45 After the deaths of many sociologists in the war, and Durkheim’s own death in , the production of the Année sociologique became difficult to sustain; after two volumes of a new series came out in  and , the project was abandoned.46 Karady argues that the loss of the younger generation of Durkheimians in the war, and the dependence of sociology on the teaching of philosophy, which thwarted its potential extension to more applied research, led to the institutional demise of the Durkheimian school, although its ideas were perpetuated in many social science disciplines, particularly social anthropology.47

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The academic institutionalization of sociology was not only a product of Durkheim’s and his co-workers’ excellence in research and zeal on behalf of the discipline; the teaching of a pedagogy thoroughly informed by sociology also came to be seen as central to the policies of successive governments to establish a system of secular education. The governments of the Third Republic enacted a series of liberal educational reforms between  and , including the expansion of primary and secondary schools, the creation of more scholarships for higher education, and the establishment of new professorships; these reforms were focused in part on improving public education and also on bringing French education up to the standard of Germany.48 For these Radical republicans (not to be confused with Radical socialists), school reform was crucial so that education could function “to wean the people away from the Church on the one hand, and from socialism on the other . . . to insure improved opportunities for the middle class, and to disseminate a progressive and socially integrative ideology.”49 Durkheim was also a committed secularist when it came to matters of public policy, and believed, like Freud, that modern society should rely on science to provide a valid moral framework. Lukes has shown that Durkheim aimed “to develop a new republican ideology that was both scientifically grounded and pedagogically effective” in his sociological approach to education. Durkheim maintained that a scientific sociology could function as the theory of the practice of education, and that sociology could therefore “become a rational substitute for traditional religion.”50 Durkheim’s pedagogy for teachers would inculcate a “sociological point of view,” while children would be instructed in such topics as “the nature of society, the family, the State, the principal legal and moral obligations, the way in which these different social phenomena are formed.”51 Because of Durkheim’s role in teaching education at the Sorbonne, sociology became influential within the university despite its lack of independent disciplinary status. Durkheim’s lecture courses in the history of education in France from  to  were the only ones required at the Sorbonne of all students pursuing degrees in philosophy, history, literature, and languages.52 The normaliens among his students were required to prepare for a degree in secondary school teaching.53 Thus Durkheim’s sociology was in a position to become a highly authoritative discipline in both the university and the French educational system, and even in the larger

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culture, because his courses in pedagogy not only taught sociology and a secular morality to future lycée professors, but those professors would also pass on sociological perspectives to their students.54 The  reform of the liberal-arts faculties of the university also joined sociology and ethics together as part of four examinations leading to the licence de philosophie. Thus sociology finally found an explicit and official place in the degreerelated curriculum, but only as subsidiary to the discipline of philosophy. In fact, all of Durkheim’s closest associates who pursued university careers were trained in philosophy, as were most of the younger recruits to the Année collective.55 Durkheim and his collaborators were successful professional academics with elite educational credentials; they came primarily from middle-class backgrounds, and their politics were characterized by “passionate devotion to the Republic, militant anticlericalism, and Radical Socialist or Socialist political preferences.” They were also all Dreyfusards, showing various degrees of political activism. In fact, both critics and advocates of the Durkheimians often regarded sociology, social science, and socialism as virtually synonymous, although Durkheim himself consistently distinguished between sociology as a scientific discipline and socialism as a political program.56 Durkheim’s ideas were also influential because they dealt so authoritatively with issues such as education, secular morality, the problem of social solidarity, and the causes of social deviance, which were of pressing concern to the educated classes in turn-of-the-century France.57 Thus during his lifetime, through his academic career, Durkheim achieved for his new discipline much greater public currency, political and governmental efficacy, and institutional power in France than Freud was able to achieve in Austria through his writings and professional practice. In addition to these historical, cultural, and ideological factors, the legitimation strategies undertaken by the Durkheimians as a research collective were crucial to the establishment of sociology as an academic discipline. As an instrumental way to meet the republican goal of providing a scientific basis for social solidarity in French society, the Durkheimians offered sociological research of a kind methodologically and intellectually more systematic and thus superior to the often more diffuse theories of competing disciplines. According to Karady, what was seen to be the “doctrinaire edge” and “extremism” of Durkheimian theory was in fact “a working strategy” undertaken to represent their sociology as a more rigorously

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scientific program than other sociological approaches: “By dramatising its distinctive features the Durkheimians sought to establish theirs as the only plausible paradigm.” Karady concludes that the “disciplinary imperialism” the Durkheimians were often accused of practicing, through tactics such as their confident proposals to ground all the other social science and even the liberal arts disciplines epistemologically in scientific sociology, was “indispensable to the assertion that an autonomous science of society was possible and legitimate.”58 Karady also stresses that the collaborative organization and interdisciplinary format of the Année sociologique made it especially effective as a vehicle of institutionalization, scientific legitimation, and public propaganda for the new discipline. The Année as a collective venture functioned like a research institute and maintained consistently high intellectual and scientific standards. The Année collective recruited and furnished a kind of apprenticeship for younger scholars, and also operated according to a cooperative division of intellectual labor that encouraged specialization among its members.59 Although other disciplines in France had their own publications that surveyed recent research in the field, no other discipline made use of a journal precisely to constitute a new discipline through the process of review. This review structure allowed the Durkheimians to comment upon work in an almost unlimited range of fields and draw it into the sphere of sociology, and also gave them ways continually to define sociology through commentary, while their own original research necessarily progressed more slowly. The Année also had a critical function, which enabled it publicly to offer a Durkheimian perspective on all major areas of debate in the social sciences. Karady foregrounds the disciplinary work of the journal’s epistemological tactics as well. The review format permitted the redefinition of research problems in sociology, shifting attention away from the common “social problems commentaries” on such topics as prostitution, hygiene, and poverty toward research on “problem-solving in sociology” that overturned whole categories of thinking taken for granted up to that time in the social sciences, such as oppositions between “synchronic and diachronic approaches (history versus sociology proper), the study of ‘primitive’ vs. Western societies (ethnography versus sociology), or between techniques of fact-finding and fact-description (like the statistical and quantitative versus the qualitative).” The review structure of the journal also

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enhanced sociology’s scientific contribution by framing the conduct of social science research as “part of a cumulative process leading to the establishment of falsifiable statements about specific subjects consistent with evidence and with broader theoretical principles.” The “cult of reviews” characteristic of the journal thus functioned as a crucial practical mechanism for the theoretical “breakthrough” that Durkheim’s sociology envisioned as a hallmark of its disciplinary identity.60 In other words, the reviews were “confirmations,” in Freud’s terms, of the Durkheimian school’s sociological methods and principles.

Comparisons These brief accounts of the academic trajectories and legitimation strategies of anthropology in Britain and sociology in France provide a comparative context that is essential to understanding historically Freud’s interdisciplinary project for the institutionalization of psychoanalytic knowledge. Like anthropology and sociology, psychoanalysis supplied theories of the social order modeled on the changing class and occupational structure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, based on the assumption that “the moral basis of a society derives from its division of labor.”61 Freud constructs psychoanalytic practice as exemplary in its professionalism, while advocating professional work as a desirable attribute of a psychologically healthy and productive life. He establishes a particular correlation among culture, psychology, and class by endowing the Oedipus complex with the competitive dynamics of middle-class professional training. Anthropologists, sociologists, and psychoanalysts also shared a middle-class, meritocratic ideology stressing the social value of specialized, scientific knowledge gained through education and hard work, and the social expectations attached to a life focused on a professional career. We can judge that a discipline has reached a relatively stable academic institutionalization when it has attained a permanent presence in the university curriculum as well as an independent disciplinary status, or an ancillary but consistent relation to another discipline. A firmly established discipline necessarily includes faculty positions funded to provide both undergraduate teaching and advanced training in research, including the granting of doctoral degrees. Both anthropology in Britain and sociology in France were in the process of gaining permanent disciplinary status in

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the university during the period from  to . As I suggested in Chapter  in the case of psychology in the German and Viennese universities, because these social science disciplines had not yet been fully institutionalized, their purviews were more open to forays like Freud’s than they would have been if they were autonomous and long-established disciplines or research programs. Yet anthropology and sociology were also more advanced than psychoanalysis was at this time (and would ever be) in the process of academic consolidation, and they embodied an academic trajectory and scientific respectability that psychoanalysis could aspire to attain. Freud did not seek disciplinary status only for the scientific legitimacy that it would confer on psychoanalysis but also in order to accomplish the comprehensive and sustained reproduction of psychoanalytic knowledge through the institutional mechanisms of the university. Anthropologists in Britain and sociologists in France had to tie the inclusion of their subject in the university curriculum to rationales stressing applications of their research—to liberal education in the case of anthropology, or to instruction in pedagogy, the history of education, and secular morality for future teachers in the French public school system in the case of sociology. These disciplines were officially recognized as a result both of the scientific and intellectual quality of their research and the usefulness of their knowledge as perceived within particular ideological climates in the university. In addition, anthropologists and sociologists turned to extracurricular ways of making a case for the value of their knowledge: anthropologists offered their expertise to colonial administrators, while sociologists made their approach essential to the Third Republic’s social reform efforts. Sociology’s own association with philosophy meant that its recognition as an autonomous academic discipline was delayed, and the Durkheimians’ failure to recruit new students from disciplines other than philosophy ultimately thwarted their ambitions to create a general social science based on sociology.62 The institutional alliance of sociology with philosophy, however, seems to have functioned similarly to the situation of experimental psychology in Germany: philosophy gave these new disciplines an academic foothold by which they could justify their inclusion as part of a broader course of study that was basic to an already defined curriculum leading to a specific degree. In both of these cases, the new research program was institutionalized through being attached to the training of schoolmasters. Philosophy was also the most pres-

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tigious humanistic discipline with which both sociologists in France and experimental psychologists in Germany could affiliate themselves. In his cultural theory, Freud supports the rationalization of society through secularization and the displacement of religion by psychology, a program that we can see as analogous to, although much more hypothetical than, Durkheim’s plan to replace religious education with a sociologically based pedagogy. Freud’s texts on culture, however, are aimed at advancing this argument for psychoanalysis not only as a profession but also as a discipline. If psychoanalysis became basic to the education of teachers, as Freud envisioned when he proposed that “the only appropriate preparation for the profession of educator is a thorough psycho-analytic training” (E&A, ), then like philosophy, sociology, and psychology, it could gain a place as an essential element in the university curriculum. Like Durkheim, Freud also promoted the recognition of psychoanalysis as a discipline by stressing its usefulness to research in other disciplines. In this way, Freud solicited academic alliances—“conversions” as well as conquests. Because there was no institutional opening for psychoanalysis at the time when Freud was writing, the only realistic way to gain disciplinary status and academic recognition was through research “applications” that might ultimately lead to the epistemological prominence of psychoanalytic knowledge. The example of Durkheim’s career as a professor of pedagogy thus offers another means to perceive the social logic of Freud’s ambitions for psychoanalysis. I am not arguing that Freud knew the details of and imitated Durkheim’s institutionalizing strategies, but rather that there were contemporary precedents for a new discipline’s academic consolidation through its attachment to normal school curricula, and that Freud’s writings also responded to a cultural and political climate favoring social reform projects dependent on education. The disciplinary agenda of Freud’s cultural theory also becomes evident in the context of a comparison between the operations of the Année sociologique collective and the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society from its beginnings as the Wednesday Psychological Society in  until the founding of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in . Both the Année group and the Vienna Society were organized around a charismatic founder of a new discipline, whose work became the basis for all further research. The Vienna Society was not structured like the Année as a research institute focused on the production of a scholarly journal, but rather as a

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discussion group where members would present and receive responses to their work. This is not to say that the sessions of the Vienna Society were not intellectually and ultimately institutionally productive, but they were not public; the society lacked the formal structure and institutional support that the members of the Année enjoyed through their own academic positions and the prominence of the journal as the embodiment of both influential, cutting-edge work in sociology and opinion in general social science. The psychoanalytic journals themselves did not have the disciplinary effectiveness of the Année, not only because they were not primarily organized in terms of a review format, but also because they lacked its role as the structuring principle of a research institute. I would argue, however, that Freud’s cultural criticism functioned analogously to the review format of the Année, in that it attempted to address work in other disciplines in a way that allowed him both to define the broad applications of psychoanalysis to cultural and social questions and to assert the centrality of psychoanalytic knowledge to research in all the social sciences and humanities. Many of the early psychoanalysts, especially those like Otto Rank (‒) who were not physicians, followed Freud’s lead in applying psychoanalysis to other fields.63 Nevertheless, while the psychoanalytic movement after  was theoretically and psychologically focused on Freud, it was also thoroughly international in structure, unlike the Durkheimian school. Thus we should not forget the immense cultural success of psychoanalysis and its psychological worldview even as we note Freud’s efforts to obtain more elusive academic recognition. A crucial difference distinguishes the Durkheimians’ and the early psychoanalysts’ projects of institutionalization. The Durkheimians’ efforts were exclusively focused on the university, to the extent that they even avoided participating in other sociological organizations and did not found a professional association,64 while the psychoanalysts pursued professionalization. Clearly, the fact that psychoanalysis was a psychotherapy, made professionalization a logical outcome of Freud’s work. Freud and many of the early psychoanalysts were already medical practitioners, while the Durkheimians were academics and perceived that the university was the most likely institutional location to sustain sociological research and train new scholars. Despite significant organizational differences,65 there are nevertheless striking parallels in Freud’s and the Durkheimians’ interdisciplinary, epis-

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temological legitimation strategies. One can hardly fail to notice the extravagance of Freud’s pronouncements about the “gigantic” significance of the Oedipus complex (RP, ), or the indispensability of psychoanalytic knowledge to research in “every field of knowledge founded on psychology,” for which psychoanalysis is “its sub-structure and perhaps even its entire foundation” (LA, ). Freud also makes similarly sweeping claims for the application of psychoanalysis to the study of art and literature, arguing that although “the aesthetic appreciation of works of art and the elucidation of artistic gifts are, it is true, not among the tasks set to psychoanalysis,” nevertheless “psycho-analysis is in a position to speak the decisive word in all questions that touch upon the imaginative life of man.”66 Freud’s texts of cultural theory actualize these claims as research projects by providing psychological reductions of the objects and questions guiding the disciplines that he wished to annex or persuade to apply psychoanalytic knowledge as a method. Thus Freud’s description in The Question of Lay Analysis of a hypothetical “college of psycho-analysis” separate from the training institute (LA,  ) both envisions the autonomy of the new discipline of psychoanalysis, which would have its own college and not merely its own faculty within the university, but also reveals the inadequacy of the training institute as an institutional mechanism for the establishment of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline. The training institutes are necessarily exclusive in their role as professional schools for psychoanalysts, but for this reason they do not have the capacity of the university curriculum to instruct a larger educated public in psychoanalytic ideas and methods. Durkheim asserted in  that sociology “is and can only be the system, the corpus of the social sciences.”67 He predicted an epistemological reach for sociology analogous to the broad scope that Freud staked out for psychoanalysis in his cultural theory. Freud’s own “imperialist” scheme for psychoanalysis was also, in Karady’s terms, a “working strategy” to realize the disciplinary identity and autonomy of psychoanalysis. The comparison with Durkheimian sociology allows us to understand historically that Freud’s writings on culture are specifically disciplinary initiatives, and that they respond to and contest initiatives in other disciplines that are also rhetorically framed in grandiose terms in order to assert the epistemological and scientific reach of their new paradigms.68 Freud’s institutional ambitions for psychoanalysis were not rash, “unprofessional,” or exceptional, but strategically pragmatic and typical of disciplinary projects at this time.

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The Disciplinary Tactics of Freud’s Cultural Theory Reduction describes the scientific goal of organizing knowledge according to the level of complexity of its objects, which also extends to relations of epistemological dependence among disciplines. Victor Karady defines the “sociological reductionism” practiced by the Durkheimian school as “the explanation of individual behavior with reference to the state of society, its institutional arrangements, the survival of earlier social forms, the force of specific collective consciousness or representations and social ‘functions.’” Even though during this period many disciplines were formulating generalizing theories, most accounts positing “laws” of biological or historical evolution (with the exception of psychoanalysis) did not provide anything comparable to the Durkheimians’ fundamental critique of “the classic representation of man as autonomous master of his destiny.” Because of the sociologists’ disciplinary threat to “vested interests,” their “social relativism” was perceived by contemporaries as imperialistic, Karady argues, since “it tended to picture the various disciplines as mere purveyors of facts, while reserving for itself the noble tasks of interpretation and explanation.”69 These tactics of sociological reduction are directly analogous to Freud’s own strategy of psychological reduction. It is evident that psychoanalysis is another form of knowledge that overtly decenters notions of human autonomy and, as Freud himself demonstrates in the preface to Totem and Taboo, the “application” of psychoanalytic method also positions other disciplines as “mere purveyors of facts,” while reserving the powers of interpretation and explanation for psychoanalysis. While neither Durkheim nor Freud directly challenges the other’s work, their theoretical reductions are mirror images of each other: sociology reduces psychological explanations to “more scientific” sociological ones, and psychoanalysis reduces sociological explanations to “more basic” psychological ones. These are also both epistemological reductions that function strategically to constitute the identity of the discipline rhetorically positioned as dominant. Freud’s procedure makes sexuality the object that defines specifically psychoanalytic research and allows for the psychological reconstitution of the other fields. Frank Sulloway has shown that Freud’s focus on sex permitted him to base psychoanalytic theories in the authoritative tradition of evolutionary biology, while Patricia Kitcher reasons that sex as the privi-

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leged object of psychoanalysis allowed Freud to construct “a unified treatment of mental phenomena” because it brought together fields such as physiology, psychiatry, and sociology.70 Sexuality also works in a disciplinary sense as the justification of psychoanalytic psychological reduction because it is intimately linked to the body and therefore grounds psychoanalytic investigations of culture not only in natural science but also in the educated middle-class person’s everyday experience. Michel Foucault has argued that psychoanalysis is part of a historical linkage between sexuality and the bourgeoisie; the “cultivation” of the body and sex works to distinguish the bourgeoisie and affirm its dominance as a class.71 Sexuality is also the hallmark of the psychoanalytic profession. With the theory of the Oedipus complex, Freud can define culture as the product of psychological dynamics that come into being through the reproductive functions of the human organism: The Oedipus complex is the psychical correlate of two fundamental biological facts: the long period of the human child’s dependence, and the remarkable way in which its sexual life reaches a first climax in the third to fifth years of life, and then, after a period of inhibition, sets in again at puberty. And here, the discovery was made that a third and extremely serious part of human intellectual activity, the part which has created the great institutions of religion, law, ethics, and all forms of civic life, has as its fundamental aim the enabling of the individual to master his Oedipus complex and to divert his libido from its infantile attachments into the social ones that are ultimately desired.72

According to this framework, human culture arises as a sublimation of sexuality, and as a substitution for forbidden desires constitutive of the self. And so the Oedipus complex, which correlates the biological determinations built into human sexual life with the emotional dynamics of the family, becomes the characteristic explanatory matrix that identifies the psychoanalytic discipline in its extensions to the study of culture and society. When Freud diagnoses psychosexual causes for social arrangements, the human predicament becomes a validation of the truth of psychoanalytic findings. Another set of crucial theoretical assumptions that ground Freud’s psychological reductions of other disciplines describe the dynamic between need or instinct and external reality: Psycho-analysis has established an intimate connection between these psychical achievements of individuals on the one hand and societies on the other by postu-

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lating one and the same dynamic source for both of them. It starts out from the basic idea that the principal function of the mental mechanism is to relieve the individual from the tensions created in him by his needs. One part of this task can be achieved by extracting satisfaction from the external world; and for this purpose it is essential to have control over the real world. But the satisfaction of another part of these needs—among them certain affective impulses—is regularly frustrated by reality. This leads to the further task of finding some other means of dealing with the unsatisfied impulses. The whole course of the history of civilization is no more than an account of the various methods adopted by mankind for “binding” their unsatisfied wishes, which, according to changing conditions (modified, moreover, by technological advances) have been met by reality sometimes with favour and sometimes with frustration.

Freud postulates that human beings and the world exist in opposition; the human psyche comes into being through the conflict between instinct or desire and the object or fulfillment of desire. The actual satisfaction of desire or the availability of nature to meet human needs and frame human work does not compensate for the constant threat of frustration or natural limitations on human knowledge and activities, despite advances in technology. As culture progresses, human beings move from a “primitive” or childlike belief in their own ability to control the world and an avoidance of unpleasure to a mature attitude of facing reality and adapting to the external world.73 The critical basis in this psychodynamic model for Freud’s psychological reductions of sociology and anthropology is his idea that until human beings can truly face reality through a scientific worldview, they seek various kinds of compensation for their thwarted desires, in the form of wishes, myths, religion, art, and social institutions. In other words, he moves from a biological notion of instinct or need to a psychological idea of wish, a transformation of a physical or even chemical phenomenon to a kind of mental visualization or fantasy of fulfillment that spurs culturally productive activity or causes neurosis.74 Freud postulates that the way to understand the relation between sexuality and the body—what defines human beings biologically as organisms and as a species—and culture is through the mind, and through the crucial psychobiological notion of wish that designates the psychological impetus for all of human activity, and thus for society and culture. The psyche itself partakes both of the body and of the world and makes any relation between the two possible, but it is

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located in individual human beings: “Our knowledge of the neurotic illnesses of individuals has been of much assistance to our understanding of the great social institutions. For the neuroses themselves have turned out to be attempts to find individual solutions for the problems of compensating for unsatisfied wishes, while the institutions themselves seek to provide social solutions for these same problems.”75 The fundamental “problem” remains at the psychological level of the wish, even though the “solutions” may be individual or social. In addition to his evolutionary naturalist framework, according to which the origins of culture must be defined as proceeding out of biological exigencies, Freud’s epistemology makes an understanding of the world dependent upon an analysis of how it can be perceived by human beings: “The problem of the nature of the world without regard to our percipient mental apparatus is an empty abstraction, devoid of practical interest” (FI,  ). This assumption, which many of Freud’s scientific contemporaries shared, makes psychology a foundational science. In disciplinary terms, the epistemological hierarchy of Freud’s premises proceeds from the natural sciences, which establish the biological, chemical, and physical conditions of human life, to a psychoanalytic psychology, which explains the linkage between the body and the world, to the social sciences and humanities, which describe the products—while relying upon psychoanalysis to explain the causes—of that transformation of libido, psychical dynamics, and the Oedipus complex into social activity and the production of culture. This epistemological hierarchy is characteristic of Freud’s evolutionary and biological framework, but through it he also elaborates a particularly central role for a psychoanalytic psychology.76 The role of the study of the neuroses in providing evidence for Freud’s theory of the psychological origins of culture also indicates how psychoanalysis can legitimately move from its professional expertise—the data derived from clinical work—to a research program that stakes out the specific disciplinary domain of a psychoanalytic depth-psychology. Given his sense of the foundational status of psychology, it is not surprising that for Freud the genesis of every object or institution is analogous to dream work. Freud’s somewhat later principle for psychological reduction based on his model of the psyche, that history and culture are “no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id, and the superego, which psycho-analysis studies in the individual” (AS, ), follows

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from his understanding that the dynamics that characterize and produce the mental apparatus must also determine the causal relations of that apparatus with the external world. When Freud first elaborated his theory of the primal parricide, then, he had the tools he needed to perform his psychological reduction of other disciplines: the Oedipus complex, the dream and the wish, and the psychodynamic model of the relation between instinct and the external world, although not his ego psychology. In each of the major texts of cultural theory that I shall proceed to analyze, Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud poses what he thinks are the central questions of a particular discipline and then answers them psychoanalytically; in doing so, he also attempts to annex these disciplines to the new discipline of psychoanalysis, and to subordinate them epistemologically to a psychoanalytic psychology. In describing Freud’s strategies of psychological reduction, I am not proposing to limit these works to their disciplinary function. But I do contend that by examining these texts as crucial elements of Freud’s disciplinary project, it becomes possible to understand historically another aspect of the institutionalization of psychoanalytic knowledge—as a salient interdisciplinary research method.

Totem and Taboo and Anthropology Totem and Taboo translates psychoanalytic expertise into a theory of the psychological dynamics of the history of civilization that grounds all of Freud’s other writings on culture. Freud establishes his own credentials in the fields of social anthropology, ethnology, and social psychology through extensive references to both anthropological studies by eminent researchers and travel narratives that provide ethnographic information.77 The two pivotal questions for anthropology are in his view the origins of totemism and of the incest taboo (TT, ). Totem and Taboo sets out to demonstrate that psychoanalysis can provide what anthropologists, despite their intensive research on the topic, have failed to construct: a theory of the common origin of totemism and the practice of exogamy: “Thus psychoanalysis . . . requires us to assume that totemism and exogamy were intimately connected and had a simultaneous origin” (TT,  ). A basic presupposition guiding Freud’s study—one that also characterized much of nineteenth-

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century evolutionary anthropology—is the equivalence of contemporary “primitive” and prehistoric social organizations and psychologies.78 This assumption permits Freud’s introduction of the parallel between the thinking of the neurotic and of the “savage,” who both exhibit either inhibited or regressive mental tendencies. Freud sets out to show that despite their expertise and general learning, anthropologists do not know what taboo really is, where it comes from, or why it has such a powerful and pervasive cultural function. He proceeds to distill the cultural and historical multiplicity of taboos into one psychological explanation of their causes based on analogy with the findings of the psychoanalytic clinical study of obsessional neurosis: “The basis of taboo is a prohibited action, for performing which a strong inclination exists in the unconscious” (TT, ).79 Freud’s plan to provide a unifying theory to elucidate the many kinds of taboo would not be foreign to many of the evolutionary approaches in anthropology he cites, but his psychological definition is clearly meant to supplant explanations of taboo by reference to another culturally indigenous classification. For example, Wilhelm Wundt traces taboo to the fear of a demonic power hidden in the tabooed object (TT, ).80 Freud, in contrast, insists on a psychological cause; because “we know” that demons and gods are not real, but are merely “creations of the human mind,” Freud contends, “neither fear nor demons can be regarded by psychology as ‘earliest’ things, impervious to any attempt at discovering their antecedents” (TT, ). For Freud, to offer a culturally contextual explanation of a cultural phenomenon is almost as erroneous scientifically as believing in demons or gods. My point here is not to defend Wundt’s interpretation but to illustrate Freud’s disciplinary procedure of psychological reduction. In similar fashion, he takes on the anthropologists’ explanation of the taboo surrounding slain enemies, that the peoples concerned are “dominated by a superstitious fear of the ghosts of the slain” (TT, ). The anthropologists all account for practices of “appeasement, restriction, expiation and purification” related to this taboo according to some combination of two factors: “the extension of taboo from the slain man on to everything that has come in contact with him and the fear of the slain man’s ghost.” But Freud objects that these two principles are applied indiscriminately and do not provide a coherent account of the taboo, whereas “we, on the other hand, can lay stress on the unity of our view, which derives all of these observances

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from emotional ambivalence towards the enemy” (TT, ). Once again Freud criticizes anthropological accounts of taboo for being merely descriptive of cultural connections among observed phenomena. He faults them for failing to provide precisely what the psychoanalytic explanation itself offers: a psychological principle, ambivalence, that unifies the disparate phenomena and hierarchizes their causal significance. Ambivalence works so effectively because it describes a culturally productive emotional contradiction —the conflict exists between conscious and unconscious impulses and thus provokes various kinds of cultural and institutional compensations, including the establishment of taboos—but also functions theoretically to ground a unifying psychological explanation. Freud also emends the account of the fear of the dead and belief in their malevolence toward the living offered by the Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck (‒), who indicates as their causes both the “primitive ideas [that] a person only dies if he is killed—by magic if not by force—and such a death naturally tends to make the soul revengeful and ill-tempered” and the human fear of death.81 In Freud’s view, these beliefs can only be understood by reference to the psychoanalytic understanding of emotional ambivalence—each person unconsciously hated as much as loved his or her dead relative and displaces the unconscious, negative component of that ambivalence by projecting it into the malevolent “ghost” (TT, ). Here too Freud seems to dismiss interpretations based on sets of ideas specific to the particular cultures in question, but he then goes one step further by claiming that even the belief that death is always caused by magic is itself reducible psychologically to unconscious causes: “In the view of unconscious thinking, a man who has died an unnatural death is a murdered man: evil wishes have killed him.” Freud implies strongly that his psychoanalytic explanations are superior to those of the eminent scholars in the field—Wundt, Sir James Frazer, and Westermarck—because they are more basic and avoid the temptation to rationalize superstitious beliefs: “It is true that we have accepted the presence of demons, but not as something ultimate and psychologically unanalysable. We have succeeded, as it were, in getting behind the demons, for we have explained them as projections of hostile feelings harboured by the survivors against the dead” (TT, ).82 I do not wish to rule out the possibility that such emotional attitudes as ambivalence and projection might exist in human beings in various societies, but rather to register the way that Freud codifies and deploys them

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as psychoanalytic concepts to translate various ideas that are culturally specific into the manifestations of basic emotions, and then through this procedure to call into question the methods and findings of another discipline. Freud converts the characteristic objects of anthropology (which in this case is also universalistic in its theoretical ambitions)—“cultural facts” such as belief in demons, taboo, and fear of ghosts—into psychological facts and the objects of what he contends is an epistemologically more basic psychoanalytic psychology. Freud’s medical and scientific training may guide his assumption that there is a biological, instinctual basis for psychology, and therefore that psychological explanations are more general because more basic than those he characterizes as anthropological or sociological (TT, ). But his biological framework supports his method of psychological reduction as a strategy of interdisciplinary contestation. In other words, Freud’s agenda is not only scientific and theoretical but also one of displaying and promulgating psychoanalytic knowledge as a superior research method for the social sciences. In a theoretical move crucial to his elaboration of the primal parricide, Freud also makes the expiatory function of taboo ceremonials primary over their purificatory function, according to the psychoanalytic principle that the renunciation of an object or desire to make up for the transgression of a prohibition reveals the presence of an unconscious desire to commit the transgression—obedience to the taboo is itself a renunciation (TT, ). Again, this characteristic set of psychoanalytic reversals— prohibition really reveals unconscious desire rather than conscious aversion—allows Freud to generalize away from the anthropological data, which speak of the fear of ghosts and rituals to avoid pollution from the dead, toward a psychological explication that accords priority to guilt—an emotional response with particularly modern and civilized connotations. By analogy with obsessional neurosis, Freud identifies purificatory rituals as displaced symptoms, like the neurotic’s hand-washing, of repressed, aggressive desires that produce taboo, and their purificatory ritual significance is thus subordinate for Freud’s purposes to rites of expiation that much more directly act out the transgressive desires themselves. Purification can accomplish a social remedy for crimes that have occurred without regard to causes or individual responsibility, while expiation immediately brings up the problem of guilt.83 Freud defines the “taboo conscience” as the consciousness of guilt “of which the origin is unknown” (TT, ).

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Guilt is a cause that immediately serves as evidence for the primal parricide theory, however, while the fear of pollution and rituals to purify oneself from it without regard to the question of individual responsibility become marginal within Freud’s theory of the origins of totemism, because they find no clear counterpart in the emotional constellation of the Oedipus complex. After proposing his theory of the primal parricide, Freud concludes that “totemic religion arose from the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that feeling and to appease the father by deferred obedience to him” (TT, ). In another confident disciplinary reorientation, Freud implicitly justifies the superiority of a psychological explanation of the animistic system of belief out of which totemism and taboo arise by describing this “first human Weltanschauung” as “a psychological theory” (TT, ). If animism is a specifically psychological worldview, then a psychological method is needed to understand it adequately, and Freud’s purpose is to demonstrate that psychoanalysis provides the most cogent elucidation of this set of cultural complexes: “We are thus prepared to find that primitive man transposed the structural conditions of his own mind into the external world; and we may attempt to reverse this process and put back into the human mind what animism teaches us as to the nature of things” (TT, ). Strangely enough, what Freud “puts back into the human mind” is a version of “animism” deciphered and reconfigured by psychoanalysis. Freud’s psychoanalytic framework also gives priority to explanations based on emotional causes over those based on cognitive or intellectual motivations for the elaboration of customs, beliefs, and institutions. He points to the inadequacy of Frazer’s account of the origin of animism, that “men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things.”84 For Frazer, the mistake is on the level of knowledge; for Freud it is on the level of desire, since “the motives which lead men to practice magic . . . are human wishes” (TT, ). Freud replaces Frazer’s explanation of the cognitive function of animism with one that emphasizes emotional conflicts as the sources of animistic beliefs: Here again [in the case of mourning for a dead relative] we are in agreement with the writers who derive the idea of a soul from the impression made by death on the survivors. The only difference is that we do not lay stress on the intellectual

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problem with which death confronts the living; in our view the force which gives the impetus to research is rather to be attributed to the emotional conflict into which the survivors are plunged. [TT, ]

The “only difference” from the authorities Freud designates as generally correct is the decisive, psychoanalytic difference. This set of substitutions is typical of the way Freud criticizes both anthropological and sociological accounts of the origins of religion that point to a human need to understand and order the world. Instead, Freud’s cultural theory stresses the affective sources of religious belief, making it a compensation for childhood or primitive fears that have become unconscious. These theoretical priorities arise from the psychoanalytic premise that the unconscious determines conscious processes, and that explanation of the emotional manifestations of unconscious conflicts is therefore more primary than an account that models culture on modes of cognition or makes culture or society the source of “elementary” categories of thought.85 But this agenda also means that psychoanalytic knowledge of the unconscious provides a more fundamental explanatory matrix than sociological or anthropological theories that interrelate culturally apparent ways of thinking and classifying: as instinctual and emotional processes precede and shape cognition, Freud’s argument implies, so a psychoanalytic psychology must epistemologically precede both sociology and anthropology. At the beginning of his long final essay on “The Return of Totemism in Childhood,” Freud announces that a successful exposition of the relation between totemism and exogamy “should be at once an historical and a psychological one” by elaborating “under what conditions this peculiar institution developed and to what psychical needs in men it has given expression” (TT, ). Freud’s general objection to most of the theories of totemism that he reviews in the opening sections of the chapter is that “in the judgment of a psychologist . . . they are too rational and take no account of the emotional character of the matters to be explained” (TT, ). While Freud does not individually refute the theories of Durkheim and Salomon Reinach, who define the totem as an embodiment of the community (TT, ), he undermines these and other “sociological” explanations of totemism through his account of Frazer’s own revision of his hypothesis that totemism functions as a magical system for coordinating the supply of food. In Frazer’s preliminary formulation, one clan would provide to the others the food forbidden because of its totemic associations (TT, ):

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[Frazer] came to see himself that the motive from which that second [sociological] theory derived was too “rational” and that it implied a social organization which was too complicated to be described as primitive. The magical cooperative societies now seemed to him to be the fruit rather than the seed of totemism. He sought for some simpler factor, some primitive superstition behind these structures, to which the origin of totemism might be traced back. [TT, ]

The specifically social functions of a social organization, especially if it is complex, cannot be originary for Frazer’s and Freud’s studies of “primitive” societies, and hence “sociological” explanations are also not elementary enough. Freud is not referring to specific disciplinary distinctions between sociology and anthropology here; rather, he is questioning approaches that are characteristic of particular disciplines but are also often applied across fields and sometimes employed as means to annex the characteristic objects of other disciplines. Durkheim’s theories on religion, for example, drew on anthropological findings and also served to define the field of sociology. Freud is reworking for his own ends, in this case with particular reference to anthropology, the various modes of investigation in use and under contest both within and among the social science disciplines that psychoanalysis seeks to displace.86 I have been focusing so far on the explanations Freud rejects or marginalizes in order to construct his psychoanalytic anthropology. But it is also important to see what kinds of theories he adopts from his sources. Freud’s primal parricide theory depends on Charles Darwin’s (‒) hypothesis of small hordes governed by a single male with many females who were his mates, and on William Robertson Smith’s theory of the totem meal as a communal sharing of essence between human worshipers and the totem animal. Freud joins these theories with the psychoanalytic interpretation of the totem animal as the father, based on the analysis of children’s phobias that identify animals with their fathers (TT, ).87 Darwin’s theory forms part of Freud’s evolutionary anthropological framework, while Robertson Smith’s account of the totem meal gives him a way to proceed both conceptually and “historically” from sacrificial practices to the Oedipus complex. Freud also credits J. J. Atkinson with formulating a hypothesis of primal hordes and the murder of the father by the excluded sons similar to his own, but insists that his theory “fails to effect a correlation with many other issues” (TT, ).88 Freud does not situate the two writers he claims to rely on most, Darwin and Robertson Smith, as part of

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the mainstream of social anthropology that he is debating. He takes particular care to establish Robertson Smith’s personal and scientific respectability and credibility by characterizing him positively as “physicist, philologist, Bible critic and archaeologist . . . a man of many-sided interests, clear-sighted and liberal minded” (TT, ).89 Freud’s theory of the common origin of totemism and exogamy proposes that prehistoric humans lived in primal hordes in which one man, the father, monopolized all the sexually mature women and expelled all the young males who might compete with him. At some point, the young men acted together to kill the father and seize the women for themselves. According to Freud, this act generated the practices of totemism and exogamy, and all the social institutions resulting from the brothers’ cooperation: to assuage their guilt over their murder of the tyrannical father, the brothers set up the totem, whose killing was forbidden except at certain exceptional festivals or totem meals; out of remorse, they also renounced the possession of the women they had won and thereby created the practice of exogamy; and through these two renunciations, they also began to cooperate with one another instead of competing. From the primal parricide ultimately arose morality, social solidarity, and religion: “Society was now based on complicity in a common crime; religion was based on the sense of guilt and the remorse attached to it; while morality was based partially on the exigencies of this society and partially on the penance demanded by the sense of guilt” (TT,  ). The crucial element of the primal parricide theory for Freud’s psychological reduction of anthropology lies in the role of the Oedipus complex as both causal and explanatory matrix: “If the totem animal is the father, then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core—not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem—coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as the two primal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or the re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis” (TT, ). Freud also insists that the sons’ emotional ambivalence—a triumph at their common struggle to overthrow the father conjoined with a sense of guilt and remorse, attitudes corresponding to the mixture of love and hatred they felt for him before his death—spurs the creation of the totemic religion and characterizes all other religions and so-

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cial institutions as well. Because only psychoanalysis can supply the psychological and “historical” principles—ambivalence and the Oedipus complex—necessary to explain the origins of religion, culture, and society, it also claims disciplinary jurisdiction over the defining objects and questions of anthropology. I shall pinpoint one more subtle and powerful strategy through which Freud authorizes the Oedipus complex to do the enormous disciplinary work he stakes out for it in Totem and Taboo. To produce the analogy between Robertson Smith’s theory of the totem meal and the primal parricide and Oedipus complex, Freud has to prove that the totem is a substitute for the father. He bases his argument for this equivalence on children’s animal phobias, as we have seen, but he also turns to evidence from the beliefs of the “primitive” men themselves: It will be observed that there is nothing new or particularly daring in this step forward [interpreting the totem animal as the father]. Indeed, primitive men say the very same thing themselves, and, where the totemic system is still in force to-day, they describe the totem as their common ancestor and primal father. All we have done is to take at its literal value an expression used by these people, of which the anthropologists have been able to make very little and which they have therefore been glad to keep in the background. Psycho-analysis, on the contrary, leads us to put special stress upon this same point and to take it as the starting-point of our attempt at explaining totemism. [TT, ]

Freud’s vaunting of the psychoanalyst’s willingness to take the native at his word when the anthropologist fails to do so seems to contradict his observation that “there is no sense in asking the natives to tell us the real reason for their prohibitions—the origin of taboo.” They cannot answer, according to Freud, because “their real reason must be ‘unconscious,’” and therefore the psychoanalyst must proceed to “reconstruct the history of taboo” based on the model of obsessional neurosis (TT, ). Although the natives who point to the equivalence between the father and the totem do not offer a theory of the origin of taboo, they do supply the material on which the psychoanalytic “reconstruction” is based. The psychoanalyst, therefore, treats the native like a patient, not only in assuming that the native’s, the neurotic’s, and the child’s psychological processes are analogous, but also because the psychoanalytic account of the Oedipal origins of culture relies on the testimony of natives, just as the clinical material derived from actual analyses—dreams, free associations, and the analyst’s constructions of

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the patient’s unconscious—provides the data for psychoanalytic theorizing. To extend the reach of psychoanalysis to a psychoanalytic anthropology by grounding the Oedipus complex in ethnographic evidence, Freud needs to argue that he pays closer attention to that evidence, and to the native, than does the anthropologist. In fact, the legitimizing moment for Freud’s “literal” reading of the equivalence for the primitive man of the totem and the primal father takes place earlier in the text, during the discussion of the custom of the mutual avoidance of mother-in-law and son-in-law as a form of incest taboo. This is the only moment when a native “speaks” in Totem and Taboo: “A Zulu woman, questioned as to the basis of the prohibition, gave the sensitive reply, ‘It is not right that he should see the breasts which suckled his wife’” (TT, ).90 Freud interprets this testimony as an instance when a practitioner of totemism does not know the “real,” unconscious reason why a prohibition exists but nevertheless exhibits that reason for the psychoanalyst to discern. Not only is mother-in-law avoidance another form of incest taboo, according to Freud, but it also arises from the emotional ambivalence—attraction and hostility—that the mother feels toward the man who has deprived her of her daughter (TT, ‒ ). I am not so much interested in pursuing Freud’s interpretation, however, as in the fact that through the Zulu woman he creates a native informant for his psychoanalytic “reconstruction” of the origins of totem and taboo. Nowhere in the works he cites as sources for this information is there direct quotation of a Zulu woman on the custom of mother-in-law avoidance. Freud transforms paraphrases of native explanations of the custom in his sources into a direct quotation in his own text.91 Native informants almost always figure in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropological, ethnographic, missionary, and travel writings, but their roles and the way their words are interpreted can vary greatly. They can be represented as mere purveyors of cultural material for the scientist to explicate or as ethnographic collaborators or protagonists, witnesses to be trusted or “actors” to be suspected of prevarication. In this case, however, Freud’s text and the history of psychoanalysis give us the clues that we need to understand why he makes the Zulu woman speak: she works to establish a specifically psychoanalytic anthropological authority. Her presence as an authentic and “sensitive” witness whose words the analyst respects as he reveals their meaning sets up that pivotal moment in Freud’s argument

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where he calls upon native beliefs in the totem as a primal father to prove their “historical” as well as symbolic equivalence. The text accomplishes a transference of the Zulu woman’s reliability and “sensitivity” to the psychoanalytic anthropologist, whose own extension of the Oedipus complex to the origins of totem and taboo, of religion and culture, through the theory of the primal parricide should then become credible: “As in the case of totemism, psycho-analysis recommends us to have faith in the believers who call God their father, just as the totem was called the tribal ancestor” (TT, ). The “faith” Freud calls for here is not really in the natives themselves, but rather in the accuracy of the Oedipal scenario—like a kind of disciplinary missionary, he wants to convert his readers into “believers” in psychoanalysis. The authority Freud gains by interpreting native testimony also supports his demonstration of the superiority of the methods of psychoanalytic psychology over those of the anthropologists; by claiming to be able to understand the natives better than they can, Freud can beat them at their own game and undermines their expertise. In addition, by conjuring up the Zulu woman as a witness to a universal psychological truth that only psychoanalysis can decipher, Freud is replaying the history of psychoanalysis itself: he puts the Zulu woman in the position of the hysteric, whose brilliant knowledge without knowledge gave psychoanalysis its foundational object and technique. Because she personifies this psychoanalytic professional history within the text, Freud’s Zulu woman informant also enables his cultural theory to combine a specifically psychoanalytic mode of interpretive authority with a recognizably anthropological form of evidence in order to reconstitute the anthropological domain as dependent on psychoanalytic knowledge.92 The American anthropologist Robert Lowie (‒) may not have noticed Freud’s giving voice to the Zulu woman informant, but he did dispute his explanation of the custom of mother-in-law avoidance in terms that highlight Freud’s strategies of psychological reduction: The facts of psychology to which Freud appeals possess avowedly universal validity; they must accordingly act with equal force in the most diverse, in all communities, except so far as there may be racial differences. But the parent-in-law taboo is found to have a most capricious distribution. In North America the Navaho avoid the mother-in-law, while the neighboring Hopi view the custom merely as a Navaho peculiarity. . . . The psychoanalytic theory falls to the ground because it is

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a psychological theory, and because we are not dealing with simple psychological facts but with psychological facts socially determined.

Lowie argues that the Navajo woman avoids her son-in-law “not because she individually feels this way or that way about her son-in-law” but because her society has prohibited as taboo “intercourse between certain relatives by marriage.” Any conflict she might feel in the observance of this taboo would result from a discord between a “personal reaction and the sentiment of blind obedience to an accepted social norm” and would not be the symptom of ambivalent feelings toward her daughter’s husband.93 Lowie’s criticism detects Freud’s tactic of annexing anthropology to psychoanalysis through the reduction of customs to expressions of ambivalent emotions, and he disputes Freud’s own disciplinary objects, “psychological facts,” by redefining them as “psychological facts socially determined ” (emphasis added). Lowie’s objections confirm the disciplinary stakes of Totem and Taboo. We shall see that the problem of the psychological versus the social nature and constitution of emotions also characterizes the psychoanalytic contest with sociology.94

Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion, and Sociology I identify Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego () and The Future of an Illusion () as texts that challenge the methods of sociology. Although Group Psychology specifically surveys and criticizes work in the field of social psychology that focuses on the behavior of crowds, the questions that Freud attempts to answer and to annex for the discipline of psychoanalysis are also typical problems of sociology: the sources of authority, social solidarity and the feelings that bind individuals together in groups, and the relation between society and the individual. As we shall see in greater detail, these are issues through which Émile Durkheim attempted to define sociology as a science of society in competition with both the social psychologists and the psychologizing sociologists. Freud frames The Future of an Illusion specifically as a psychoanalytic critique of religion, but this text’s attention to the modern manifestations of religious sentiment also places psychoanalysis in contest with sociological explanations of religion. Group Psychology sets out to dominate debates on the psychology of

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crowds, or mass psychology, which is the more literal translation of Freud’s German title, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, by elaborating upon the theory of the Oedipal origins of civilization in the primal parricide. But it also reorients the social psychology of writers such as Gustave Le Bon (‒), William McDougall (‒), and William Trotter (‒ ) by arguing that they rely on too vague a notion of “influence” or “suggestion” to explain the most basic element of group psychology, “the conditions under which influence without adequate logical foundation takes place” (GP, ).95 Freud contends that theories of mass psychology like Le Bon’s have neglected to define the “bond” that unites individuals, which “might be precisely the thing that is characteristic of a group” (GP, ). He begins his challenge to the disciplinary rationale of social psychology in the opening sentences of the book by implying that there is no real difference between individual and social psychology. Freud broadens the definition of the objects of psychoanalytic research in order to make the jurisdictional claim that psychoanalysis has been studying social psychology all along: “The relations of an individual to his parents and to his brothers and sisters, to the object of his love, and to his physician—in fact all the relations which have hitherto been the chief subject of psycho-analytic research—may claim to be considered as social phenomena” (GP, ). According to the social psychologists, group psychology has a distinctive character: “Group psychology is therefore concerned with the individual man as member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, of a profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have been organized into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose” (GP, ). However, Freud criticizes the idea that a separate discipline of social psychology might be differentiated from individual psychology only on the basis of “the factor of number”: “Our expectation is therefore directed towards two other possibilities: that the social instinct may not be a primitive one and insusceptible of dissection, and that it may be possible to discover the beginnings of its development in a narrower circle, such as that of the family” (GP, ). Thus Freud disputes the validity of any approach that would posit the existence of an irreducible social instinct, but in this way he also follows the social psychologists in formulating the study of the social as a problem that should be addressed by a psychology of instincts. The focus on instinct facilitates Freud’s incorporation of social psychology into a psychoanalytic depth psychology, even as he disclaims any

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intention of addressing in “the narrow dimensions of this little book” any more than “a few chosen questions” in the field of social psychology (GP, ‒). Thus Group Psychology seems intended in part to conduct a dispute within the larger discipline of psychology by distilling social into individual psychology.96 This book extends a far more openly aggressive challenge to the specialists in group psychology than Freud’s earlier text posed to the anthropologists. In contrast to his stance in Totem and Taboo, where he grants the importance of the questions of the origins of totemism and exogamy that were central to anthropological research, here Freud expresses grave doubts as to whether the problems that constitute social psychology as a field independent of individual psychology are scientifically legitimate. This difference may be in part owing to the progress of the psychoanalytic movement between  and ; by the s, Freud had accomplished many professional as well as theoretical advances, which may have fueled his confidence when he approached the experts in any discipline. Through his scrutiny of mass psychology, Freud goes beyond the immediate confrontation with social psychology to define the social as the proper object of a psychoanalytically based psychology. He systematically reduces all the characteristics that social psychology has argued are distinctive of the psychology of groups into outcomes predicted by psychoanalysis as a depth psychology of individuals. Le Bon’s approach is once again portrayed as a description, a “brilliantly executed picture of the group mind” (GP, ), rather than an adequate theory. Freud translates McDougall’s definition of the highly organized group —continuity, common identity, coordination with other groups, characteristic traditions, and a definite structure—into a definition of “those features which were characteristic of the individual and which are extinguished in him by the formation of the group” (GP, ; emphasis added). In criticizing the procedures while appropriating the objectives of Le Bon’s and McDougall’s work in mass psychology and social psychology, Freud was attempting to supplant authoritative and popular theories. Le Bon’s book Psychologie des foules () was translated into sixteen languages and reprinted more than fortyfive times in France over a period of eighty years. McDougall was a wellknown psychologist and author of the enormously successful Introduction to Social Psychology ().97 The field of mass psychology as it was developed in the s and s in Italy and France was theoretically congenial

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to psychoanalysis, since it was also based on dynamic psychology and evolutionary biology.98 Despite his reductions of the specifically social orientation of their theories, Freud does build on elements of Le Bon’s and McDougall’s definitions of the mentality of the crowd: its effect of releasing repressed instinctual impulses; the psychological “contagion” present in it; its particular openness to influence by those exercising authority; its willingness to act on suggested ideas; its low collective intellectual state; its intensification of the emotions of its members. Freud posits libido or love as the “bond” that unites people in groups (GP, ‒). He defines “the principle phenomenon of group psychology” as “the individual’s lack of freedom in a group,” and faults the social psychologists for having failed to perceive that individuals in groups are “bound in two directions” by an “intense emotional tie” both to a leader and to the other members of the group (GP, ). According to Freud’s psychoanalytic explanation of groups—including both crowds and highly organized institutions like the school, church, and army—their collective psychology arises from the relations that exist among the individuals that compose them. Freud offers two technical terms from psychoanalysis to explain these relations—identification and ego ideal. Identification is “the original form of emotional tie with an object” (GP, ) that “endeavours to mould a person’s ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as a model” (GP,  ). The “‘ego ideal’” is “a critical agency within the ego” that has been differentiated out of the ego and endowed with the ego’s original narcissism (GP, ‒), and in cases of extreme love or devotion, the ego may put the object in the place of the ego ideal (GP, ). These redefinitions bring Freud to his first specifically psychoanalytic formulation of group psychology, according to which members of a “primary group,” that is, in McDougall’s terms, one that is not sufficiently organized to take on the characteristics of an individual, share a common psychological pattern that ties them together: “A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego” (GP,  ). Freud turns to the British physician William Trotter’s theory of “the herd instinct,” a basic instinct of human gregariousness, in order to refute it by arguing that the child’s fear of being left alone is not based on an instinct to group together with other human beings, as Trotter argues, but on

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an unsatisfied desire for a particular missing person, usually the mother. The child is only forced into identifications with his siblings, and thus into group feeling, when he realizes that his hostility toward his brothers and sisters and desire to monopolize the parents is impossible and censured (GP, ‒). Freud traces the demand for justice, or “equality for all,” and esprit de corps, or “group spirit,” to a common emotional source in childhood envy: “No one must want to put himself forward, every one must be the same and have the same. Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well, or, what is the same thing, may not be able to ask for them” (GP, ‒). He argues that there is no basic social instinct (GP, ), and that “social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification” (GP, ).99 This set of reversals based on the Oedipal psychodynamics of the family, as well as his focus on the demand for equality in groups, lead Freud to postulate that the specifically psychological origins of social life stem from the primal parricide. The identification characteristic of groups is based upon a common desire to be loved by the same person, the leader, or, “historically,” the primal father. But equality therefore exists only among the members of the group and does not apply to the leader, by whom they all wished to be ruled. Freud proceeds to “correct” Trotter’s theory by insisting that “man is . . . a horde animal, an individual creature in a horde led by a chief ” (GP, ). Freud’s derivation of group psychology from individual psychology enables him to suggest that groups activate a set of identifications that have their source not only in the family but also in the phylogenetic endowment of the primal parricide: “Just as primitive man survives potentially in every individual, so the primal horde may arise once more out of any random collection” (GP, ). Despite his criticisms of Le Bon, Freud does adopt his definition of the authoritarian dynamics of group psychology.100 Throughout his study, Freud repeatedly insists on the coercive action of social life and social groupings on the individual, in keeping with his evolutionary biological framework that identifies the progress of civilization with the repression of instincts. For Le Bon, however, this coercion is a product of the leader’s exercise of influence or suggestion over his followers. In postulating the leader’s influence, Le Bon relies on the model of hypnosis, a phenomenon that had formed one of the original objects of study of mass psychology.101

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Freud too deals with the problem of explaining hypnotic influence in order to introduce the similarity between the hypnotized subject’s servile obedience and fixation on the hypnotist and the attitude of the person fanatically in love (GP, ‒ ). After formulating his psychoanalytic theory of the origins of group psychology in the primal parricide, Freud can also dispose of hypnotic influence and group suggestion: The uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formation, which are shown in the phenomena of suggestion that accompany them, may therefore with justice be traced back to the fact of their origin from the primal horde. The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father; the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority; in Le Bon’s phrase, it has a thirst for obedience. The primal father is the group ideal, which governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal. Hypnosis has a good claim to being described as a group of two. There remains a definition for suggestion: a conviction which is not based upon perception and reasoning but upon an erotic tie. [GP, ‒]

Le Bon points to the imposition of powerful ideas in which the leader believes fanatically as the source of his influence over the group (GP, ). As in his criticisms of the “intellectual” solutions to the problem of totemism offered by anthropological theories, Freud dismisses the force of ideas as a way to explain the leader’s authority in favor of the “erotic tie” that overthrows “perception and reasoning.” One of the most important conceptual reversals in a disciplinary sense occurs through Freud’s emphasis on the internal, psychological causes of what the social psychologists have characterized by analogy with hypnotism as the group’s external coercive force of suggestion on the individual. This reversal installs an epistemological hierarchy that makes individual psychology more basic than social psychology and also implies that all disciplines focusing on the social must be derived from the psychological study of the individual, and thus must ultimately be dependent on the conceptual infrastructure of psychoanalysis. Through Group Psychology, Freud positions psychoanalysis to take sides in disputes over the definition and disciplinary status of sociology by stressing the role of identification in the formation of groups and social institutions. During the s, Durkheim and Tarde engaged in a debate over the relation of the psychology of individuals to society, and thus of psychology to sociology. Tarde was a “methodological individualist,” who explained society “in terms of beliefs and desires that are imitated, spread and susceptible of increasing and diminishing, and these rises and falls are

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measurable by statistics.”102 He theorized social reproduction as occurring through individuals’ imitation of one another, while social change was the random product of acts of genius.103 In the course of his debate with Durkheim, Tarde published an article entitled “Social Reality” () in which he argued that social reality existed but that it was made up of psychological states, and that sociology as a discipline should focus on “belief, desire and imitation.” For Tarde the formative and constraining effect of society must be explained according to “the similarity and simultaneity of multiple central imprints produced by an accumulation and a consolidation of individual actions.”104 In contrast, in The Rules of Sociological Method (), Durkheim identifies “social facts” as the distinctive objects of sociology and defines them as independent of individual psychology: Here then is a category of facts which possess very special characteristics: they consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him. Consequently, since they consist of representations and actions, they cannot be confused with organic phenomena, nor with psychical phenomena, which have no existence save in and through the individual consciousness. Thus they constitute a new species and to them must be exclusively assigned the term social. [RSM, ]

Durkheim establishes the existence of social facts because of their externality and constitutive effects on the individual. For example, the duties attached to familial roles, the beliefs and practices of religious life, language, money, and professional routines all preexist the individual, who receives them as given elements of his or her identity through upbringing and education: “Even when they conform to my own sentiments and I feel their reality within me, that reality does not cease to be objective, for it is not I who have prescribed these duties” (RSM, ‒). For Durkheim too the constraint that social facts exercise on individuals is their distinguishing characteristic (RSM, ), but this constraint itself is also a product of society, since it is an effect of prestige and authority that are social in origin: “It is all the more difficult (although we do not say that it is impossible) for [the individual] to modify [collective ways of acting and thinking] because in varying degrees they partake of the material and moral supremacy that society exerts over its members” (RSM, ‒). Durkheim characterizes Tarde’s reduction of the social to the process of imitation by individuals as mere description. Every social fact is imi-

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tated, but this is because it is social, that is, “obligatory”: “Its capacity for expansion is not the cause but the consequence of its sociological character.” Individual states, even when they affect other individuals, can be distinguished from social facts simply because they exert no general constraint and therefore remain merely isolated attributes of persons (RSM, ). As Durkheim’s own formulation indicates, the specifically social character of social facts also guarantees their “sociological character”—the objective and disciplinary identities of “social facts” constitute one another. Freud cites Tarde’s Les lois de l’imitation () in the bibliography of Group Psychology, and while he does not overtly adopt his theories, he clearly enters into the disciplinary arena of the definition of the social on the side of psychology and psychologizing sociology. Although Freud’s position is predictable, the disciplinary stakes of his attempt to claim the field of social psychology for psychoanalysis cannot be fully understood without placing them in the context of debates between sociology and psychology. The status as disciplinary jurisdictional claim of Freud’s position on the causes of the coercive effects of social institutions becomes more evident in the context of Durkheim’s theories. Durkheim neither dismisses the scientific legitimacy of psychology nor excludes all psychological assumptions from sociology, but he does demarcate sociology as a discipline by differentiating its objects, social facts, from the objects of psychology: Social facts differ not only in quality from psychical facts; they have a different substratum, they do not evolve in the same environment or depend on the same conditions. This does not mean that they are not in some sense psychical, since they all consist of ways of thinking and acting. But the states of the collective consciousness are of a different nature from the states of the individual consciousness; they are representations of another kind. The mentality of groups is not that of individuals: it has its own laws. The two sciences [psychology and sociology] are therefore as sharply distinct as two sciences can be, whatever relationships may otherwise exist between them. [RSM, ]

Durkheim’s assertions here are both powerful disciplinary and crucial methodological claims. For Durkheim theories of society that make it a manifestation of individual psychology are not scientific, because they do not grant objective reality to the social, and hence fail to perceive it as a thing that one must learn about through the usual scientific means of observation and experiment. Psychologizing theories of society neglect to recognize the independence of social facts from any individual consciousness,

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both because of society’s different order of magnitude and complexity and because it preexists the individual: “Most social institutions have been handed down to us already fashioned by previous generations: we have had no part in their shaping; consequently it is not by searching within ourselves that we can uncover the causes which have given rise to them” (RSM, ‒). The possibility of distinguishing between the two fields also resides in a related epistemological presumption that it is possible to learn about an object without necessarily projecting onto it the mind’s own capacities of perception. Durkheim believes that distinct social facts can be isolated and studied because the mind is capable of “going outside itself ” through a scientific method. Understanding facts as things means “to observe towards them a certain attitude of mind”: “It is to embark upon the study of them by adopting the principle that one is entirely ignorant of what they are, and that their characteristic properties, like the unknown causes on which they depend, cannot be discovered by even the most careful form of introspection” (RSM,  ). Freud’s view of the role of the mind itself in scientific observation suggests that its workings are always implicated in the observation of the object: In the first place, our organization—that is, our mental apparatus—has been developed precisely in the attempt to explore the external world, and it must therefore have realized in its structure some degree of expediency; in the second place, it is itself a constituent part of the world which we set out to investigate, and it readily admits of such an investigation; thirdly, the task of science is fully covered if we limit it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence of the particular character of our organization; fourthly, the ultimate findings of science, precisely because of the way in which they are acquired, are determined not only by our organization but by the things which have affected that organization; finally, the problem of the nature of the world without regard to our percipient mental apparatus is an empty abstraction, devoid of practical interest. [FI, ‒ ]

Reviewing this defense of science in the context of Durkheim’s definition of sociological method, we can recognize again that Freud’s epistemology is a strongly psychological one. The disciplinary identity of sociology seems to depend on the possibility that scientific observation can arrive at an objectivity that is independent of the mind’s influence, in part because that “influence” has already been formulated and claimed by the psychological domain: if the mind cannot “go outside itself ” through science, Durkheim

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implies, then all disciplinary objects in some sense become psychological ones.105 In contrast, while he also defends the ability of the “mental apparatus” to perceive the world accurately, because it has evolved biologically to perform that function, Freud seems to relish the implication that if the mind is a “constituent part of the world,” then the world can never ultimately be perceived as completely external to the mind’s capacities—and a scientific psychology, to which psychoanalysis can contribute foundational principles, becomes epistemologically indispensable to all scientific investigation. With his concepts of the ego ideal and superego, Freud firmly places the source of the constraint that he and all of the social psychologists make characteristic of the effect of society on the individual, and that for Durkheim characterizes specifically social facts, in the individual mind—in the dynamics of the psychic apparatus, its libidinal and emotional ties and identifications, and its phylogenetic heritage from the primal parricide. The superego is an internalization of society that embodies the history of the human race as well as parental authority. Its coercive and prohibiting power—its taboo function—comes not from the specifically social and cultural authority attached to those familial and social institutions, however, as Durkheim would have it, but from fundamentally psychological causes: the original narcissism of the ego that the superego “inherits” (GP, ).106 Thus Freud’s explanation of group psychology both makes sociology epistemologically dependent on psychoanalytic theories of how individuals internalize “social facts,” and claims to offer a more “basic” explanation than sociology’s of the origins of social solidarity and the authority of social institutions through the theories of the superego, the Oedipus complex, and the primal parricide. The Future of an Illusion does not directly confront the sociological experts the way that Totem and Taboo and Group Psychology challenge specialists in anthropology and social psychology. By , when Freud was writing The Future of an Illusion, however, the problem of the origins and social function of religion had already become a central and defining object of sociological study. In Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (), which Freud cites in Totem and Taboo, Durkheim proposed a specifically social origin of religion; it serves as “a system of ideas by means of which individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members.”107 In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (‒), Max

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Weber (‒) attempted to correlate the rise of capitalism with the psychology of Protestantism and went on to develop a comprehensive sociology of religion during the period between  and .108 Thus through his psychoanalytic demystifications of the social, psychological, and moral functions of religious belief, Freud also challenges sociology for jurisdiction over the scientific study of religion. Freud opens The Future of an Illusion by staging a methodological contest between approaches that explain the coercion of the individual by society as a product of specific and therefore alterable “cultural forms,” and approaches, such as psychoanalysis, that shift attention from “the material to the mental” and explain social conflict and individual suffering, not merely as the results of particular economic conditions and social arrangements, but rather as outcomes of inevitable instinctual sacrifices necessitated by social life (FI, ‒). Freud diagnoses religion as “a store of ideas . . . born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable and built up from the material of memories of the helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the human race” (FI, ). The strength and universality of religious ideas find their common source in religion’s fulfillment of both culturally primitive and individually infantile wishes for protection against danger and for justice. The prolongation of life after death that religion promises “provides the local and temporal framework in which these wishfulfillments shall take place” (FI, ). Answers to questions such as “how the universe began or what the relation is between body and mind” arise from “the underlying assumptions of this system” (FI, )—all aspects of the human relation to the world through a religious orientation work out the childhood conflicts “arising from the father-complex” (FI, ). The social and cultural functions of religion, therefore, can only be explained scientifically from a psychological perspective, according to Freud. A comparison of Freud’s agenda with Durkheim’s and Mauss’s account of the social sources of modes of classification can clarify the stakes of the methodological shift we noted in Freud’s reformulations of totemism and exogamy—a shift away from “rationalistic” explanations of totemism and toward explanations that give causal precedence to emotional factors. Durkheim’s and Mauss’s sociological theory of the social constitution of cognition does not overlook affective causes of the formation of classifications, but rather argues that intellectual operations are subordinate to sentiments in the construction of the categories that organize individual and

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social life. Durkheim and Mauss begin their joint publication “De quelques formes primitives de classification: Contribution à l’étude des représentations collectives” () (“On some primitive forms of classification: Contribution to the study of collective representations”) by questioning the assumption of philosophers and psychologists that “the classificatory function” of mind is innate and can be understood as “a product of individual activity” (PC, ‒). They argue that a first objection to such theories lies in the fact that the idea of class as “a circumscription with fixed and definite outlines” is relatively recent, and dates to Aristotle, while many more “primitive” forms of classification permit various degrees of “indifferentiation” or “metamorphosis” from one group of things to another (PC, ‒). In place of philosophical and psychological theories that lack an account of the historical development of notions of class, Durkheim and Mauss propose to provide a sociological theory of the social origins of classification. The Australian aborigine’s custom of “dividing the universe between the totems of his tribe” does not arise from a moral or political function of “regulating his conduct” or “justifying his practice.” Rather, the totem itself is a basic principle of classification, so that, “the idea of the totem being cardinal for him, he is under a necessity to place everything else that he knows in relation to it.” Durkheim and Mauss assert that social life is the source of these “ancient” systems of classification, which form the basis for all other practices and institutions: “Far from being the case, as Frazer seems to think, that the social relations of men are based on logical relations between things, in reality it is the former which have provided the prototype for the latter. . . . Society was not simply a model which classificatory thought followed; it was its own divisions which served as divisions for the system of classification” (PC, ‒). In addition to the specifically social authority that propels classification, Durkheim and Mauss also locate affective motivations for the creation of forms of classification. Classes are “represented in the form of familial connections, or as relations of economic or political subordination,” so that “there are sentimental affinities between things as between individuals, and they are classed according to these affinities” (PC, ). Thus “logical creations are . . . , in a sense, domestic relations” (PC, ), and ideas are “products of sentiment” (PC, ). Durkheim and Mauss look to emotions as the crucial motivating

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force that creates classifications based on the social order, but within their sociological framework, these emotions are also products of social life, since they only arise through established social relations. For Durkheim, the individual and his or her “sentiments” are formed by society through the socially constituted categories by means of which he or she thinks, while for Freud the “social” instincts “are not regarded as elementary or irreducible,” because they derive from instinctual components of individual psychology.109 Freud’s theory of the emotional sources of the evolution of civilization emphasizes desire rather than cognition—wishes rather than classifications—according to its psychodynamic and biological framework that makes the sublimation of unsatisfied instincts provoke the founding of social institutions and development of civilization. In addition, Freud’s psychological explanations target the working of the mind and the development of the psyche through the Oedipus complex, and thus the integral objects that epistemologically ground psychoanalytic investigations of culture are the individual and the family, in contrast to Durkheim’s and Mauss’s methodological focus on society as “the unique whole to which everything is related” (PC, ).110 This is not to say that the mind for Freud or society for Durkheim and Mauss are in reality unconflicted totalities, but that theoretically their “unity” functions to distinguish and legitimize the disciplinary domains of psychoanalysis and sociology. Thus another major disciplinary and epistemological goal of Freud’s cultural theory is to place psychoanalysis in a position to offer the definitive psychological explanation of the cultural role of emotions—a “problem” forming the object of disciplinary contests that make Freud’s intervention both theoretically and scientifically significant. Given that the relation between the passions and human knowledge had been a foundational issue for the social sciences since the seventeenth century, Durkheimian and Freudian contributions take on a particularly disciplinary cast within an ongoing philosophical tradition of debate.111 One could come up with a different set of contrasts by juxtaposing Freud’s account of religion with Weber’s.112 My aim here has not been to adjudicate between psychoanalytic and sociological understandings of the origins of religion, although the sociological bent of my own project should be evident by now. Rather, I wish to provide a context within which the disciplinary rationale of Freud’s psychoanalytic diagnosis of religion can become visible and to convey a sense of the significant and complex dif-

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ferences in the epistemological assumptions that underlie the articulation of these disciplinary distinctions. Developing social sciences such as anthropology and sociology were attempting to explain religion for various intellectual, scientific, cultural, and political reasons, including the aspiration to provide a scientific basis for the secularization projects of many European educational systems. By attempting to supply a definitive account of the psychological origins of religion in his cultural theory, Freud moved to the center of a crucial project in the social sciences that was also an occasion for jurisdictional contention both within and among social science disciplines.

Civilization and Its Discontents and a Psychoanalytic Psychopathology of Culture Civilization and Its Discontents completes Freud’s psychological reduction of anthropology and sociology by elaborating the cultural and social reproductive functions of the superego. This text is meant to show how the psychoanalytic model of the dynamics of the psychic apparatus—id, ego, and superego—accounts for what Freud argues is the crucial civilizing role of the emotion of guilt. Through the theory of the primal parricide, Freud sets guilt at the genesis of civilization, only to diagnose it psychoanalytically as the source of modern malaise. By the time Freud gets to Civilization and Its Discontents, he has worked through the questions that characterize his disputes with social science disciplines—what the roots and functions of religion are, how to explain the coercive character of social institutions on individuals, what the nature of social bonds is—and arrived at a fully psychological agenda: the origins of culture must lie in the social manifestations of ambivalence and guilt that derive from the Oedipus complex. Civilization and Its Discontents diagnoses a cultural symptomatology of envy, dislocation, violence, and guilt that psychoanalysis traces to a basic human instinct of aggression. Freud mobilizes his ego psychology to define psychoanalysis as a discipline that explains culture by following “the line of thought which seeks to trace in the phenomena of cultural development the part played by a super-ego” (CD, ). This is no longer a mere “application” of psychoanalysis to the study of society and civilization but a full-fledged psychoanalytic psychopathology of culture: “If the de-

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velopment of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become ‘neurotic’?” (CD, ). In the conflict between ego and superego, society finds its aboriginal “inner life” and Freud accomplishes a decisive psychological reduction of the political and social aspects of power. It is not possible to explore in detail here how far late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology and sociology focused their efforts on providing accounts of how cultures or societies are reproduced, but I have offered one example of such a theory in Durkheim’s and Mauss’s understanding of how classifications arise. I contend that Freud set out to elaborate a specifically psychological, Oedipal theory of social and cultural reproduction through his writings on culture, and that this project is as much a strategy to establish the disciplinary status of psychoanalysis among the other “mental sciences” as it is a development of psychoanalytic theory itself. In his lecture on the scientific Weltanschauung, Freud makes his sense of the political alliances of sociology explicit by associating it with Marxism, whose account of the effects of economic conditions on human beings he finds “sagacious” but which he also criticizes for overemphasizing the “economic motives of individuals in society”: It is altogether incomprehensible how psychological factors can be overlooked where what is in question are the reactions of living human beings; for not only were these reactions concerned in establishing the economic conditions, but even under the domination of those conditions men can only bring their original instinctual impulses into play—their self-preservative instinct, their aggressiveness, their need to be loved, their drive towards obtaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure. . . . And finally we must not forget that the mass of human beings who are subjected to economic necessities also undergo the process of cultural development—of civilization as other people may say—which, though no doubt influenced by all the other factors, is certainly independent of them in its origin, being comparable to an organic process and very well able on its part to exercise an influence on the other factors. [Q, ‒]

Freud’s biological substructure for his cultural theory is particularly apparent in this refutation of Marxism. Marxism is not a “genuine social science,” according to Freud, and by linking it to Marxism, he taints sociol-

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ogy with “unscientific” political partisanship. Moreover, he makes it perfectly clear that he views sociology as epistemologically subordinate to psychology: “For sociology too, dealing as it does with the behavior of people in society, cannot be anything but applied psychology. Strictly speaking there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and natural science” (Q, ).113 By the time he wrote this, in , Freud seems to have been confident that psychoanalysis was in a position successfully to ground the scientific analysis of culture.

The Psychoanalytic Discipline as “Scientific Myth” If Freud succeeds at all in constructing psychoanalysis as a master discipline by contesting the methods and incorporating the objects of anthropology and sociology, he also ends up making psychoanalysis into a hybrid field drawing on certain characteristics and agendas of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities in the early decades of the twentieth century. We can see from the academic histories of sociology in France and experimental psychology in Germany that they too found themselves somewhere between the humanities and the natural sciences through their institutional and intellectual relations with philosophy.114 Freud’s disciplinary goal for psychoanalysis was to make it the foundation of a scientific psychology, if not a field in its own right. But given the expansive applications he envisioned for psychoanalytic knowledge outside of the natural sciences, and more concretely, the central role of his cultural theory in his disciplinary project, he needed to elucidate how ideas like the primal parricide that were essential to the cultural applications of psychoanalysis could be scientific. In Totem and Taboo, and finally again in Moses and Monotheism, Freud insists on the “historical” truth of the primal parricide, while in Group Psychology, he calls the theory a “scientific myth.” An exploration of what Freud means by the simultaneously “historical,” mythic, and scientific status of the primal parricide also affords a way to define the cultural characteristics of the psychoanalytic discipline that Freud constructs. Despite the currency at the turn the century of the Lamarckian assumptions behind Freud’s conception that each human being bears the phylogenetic heritage of the primal parricide, the theory itself is still a problem for the plausibility of psychoanalysis as a form of knowledge that can reach beyond psychotherapy, and by the s, Freud’s bioevolu-

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tionary framework had itself become scientifically retrograde.115 Nevertheless, by calling it “historical” and a “scientific myth,” I contend, Freud was attempting to turn disciplinary dependence on the theory of the primal parricide into evidence of its scientific truth. At the beginning of his essay “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (), Freud introduces the preliminary and conventional nature of the psychoanalytic notion of instinct by explaining that scientific ideas are often works in progress: We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basic concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the observations alone. Such ideas—which will later become the basic concept of the science—are still more indispensable as the material is further worked over. They must at first necessarily possess some degree of indefiniteness; there can be no question of any clear delimitation of their content. So long as they remain in this condition, we come to an understanding about their meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to be derived, but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed. Thus, strictly speaking, they are in the nature of conventions—although everything depends on their not being arbitrarily chosen but determined by their having significant relations to the empirical material, relations that we seem to sense before we can clearly recognize and demonstrate them. It is only after more thorough investigation of the field of observation that we are able to formulate its basic scientific concepts with increased precision, and progressively so to modify them that they become serviceable and consistent over a wide area. Then, indeed, the time may have come to confine them in definitions. The advance of knowledge, however, does not tolerate any rigidity even in definitions.116

Freud repeatedly demands that psychoanalysis be granted the right to be treated like all other sciences as an investigation seeking to refine the definitions of its objects, as he describes here. In an open letter to Einstein on the topic of preventing war, Freud concludes his explication of the psychoanalytic notion of the death instinct as the source of human aggressiveness by attempting to deflect any doubts it may have provoked: “It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come

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in the end to a kind of mythology like this? Cannot the same be said today of your own Physics?” (WW, ). The death instinct, Freud implies, should receive the same treatment as Einstein’s relativity theory: scientific research is necessarily ongoing, and both theories may have to wait for definitive proof. The theories of the death instinct or relativity should have the status of working “conventions” that make further research in a science possible, and their conjectural, even “mythical” quality and susceptibility to redefinition and clarification are inextricable from their status as scientific hypotheses. If all sciences are in some sense “scientific myths” because they are always open-ended research projects based on the constant testing and revision of hypotheses, then Freud’s description of the primal parricide theory as “scientific myth” would seem to place the emphasis on the scientific part of the term. The primal parricide is a “myth” because it too is a working idea, susceptible to further elaboration and not yet fully defined, within the new science of psychoanalysis. All of Freud’s cultural theory could be understood in this sense as a scientific myth—the Oedipal theory of civilization may seem outrageous and speculative because it is new, but it should be understood, Freud would argue, as part of the repertoire of conventions necessary to research and permitted to psychoanalysis as a psychological science of mind and culture. According to Freud, one of the virtues of the primal parricide as psychoanalytic convention is its synthesizing interdisciplinary potential: “I think it is creditable to such a hypothesis if it proves able to bring coherence and understanding into more and more new regions” (GP, ). Thus by insisting upon the scientific status of the theory of the primal parricide, based on its unifying theoretical power as well as the scientific character of psychoanalysis itself as a depth psychology, Freud attempts to legitimize psychoanalysis as a discipline precisely by displaying the grandiosity and ambition of its synthesis. In other words, Freud was constructing psychoanalysis as exemplary, both rhetorically and concretely in the theory itself, of the most strongly inductive, and even speculative, and the most representatively “unprofessional” and “unscientific” aspects of professional science. The “historical” status of the primal parricide adds another dimension to its function as metaphor and exemplar of psychoanalytic disciplinarity. Sulloway has argued that when Freud refers to the primal parricide as “historical,” he is basing the claim on the biogenetic law that the indi-

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vidual’s development recapitulates the development of the species (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny): “It was in this . . . Darwinian-historical spirit that Freud later distinguished purely material truth embodied in . . . social institutions from the historical truth that originally inspired their evolution.”117 Within Freud’s evolutionary biological matrix, “historical” truth is the psychological evolution of the species. The primal parricide theory uncovers the “history” of social institutions such as religion in the psychological origins of culture—the murder of the father by the sons that becomes a phylogenetic psychological heritage of every individual. The “truths” of myth, religion, and even history are not the actual “material” stories or beliefs themselves—those things that the anthropologist or sociologist might focus on, not necessarily to credit them, but perhaps to connect them to other practices or beliefs within the culture—but are to be found in the remains of originary (for the individual and for the species) Oedipal conflicts, which, like symptoms and dreams, they reveal in distorted forms.118 The disciplinary importance of this psychoanalytic distinction between “material” truth and “historical” truth lies not only in its redefinition of what kind of history is truly significant—not “external,” singular events but universal, repeated psychological complexes. In addition, Freud offers here an index of the disciplinary identity of psychoanalysis that, like the role of the hysteric’s testimony in the formulation of the psychoanalytic theory and treatment of the neuroses, points to the psychotherapeutic procedures and experience of analysis. This notion of the “historical” status of the primal parricide also refers to the “historical” truth of the patient’s repressed past, which can sometimes attain consciousness in the distorted form of delusions or dreams that must be decoded by the psychoanalyst.119 Freud also relates the originality of his psychoanalytic solution of the “enigma” of the incest taboo directly to the fact that it provides a “historical” account: “I must, however, mention one other attempt at solving it. It is of a kind quite different from any that we have so far considered, and might be described as ‘historical’” (TT, ; emphasis added). In Freud’s texts, then, “historical” truth is also a way of naming psychoanalytic truth. The “historical” truth of the primal parricide is based theoretically on the clinical practice of analysis and marks the “unifying” disciplinary synthesis through which psychoanalysis reduces and epistemologically subordinates anthropological and sociological explanations of culture to psychological ones, and the primal

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parricide thus becomes a “convention” for articulating the disciplinary status of psychoanalysis itself as a “scientific myth.” Freud’s pronouncement at the end of Totem and Taboo that “the beginnings of religion, morals, society, and art converge in the Oedipus complex” (TT, ), then, both demarcates the discipline of psychoanalysis and also characterizes disciplinarity in general. Such ambitious, seemingly excessive claims establish the specific objects of the discipline and define its boundaries paradoxically by asserting the simultaneously limitless, comprehensive, and distinctive identity of its domain. In this way, the claim metaphorically mirrors the social and institutional contingency of the discipline, which is never fixed, always under construction, and needing to be justified to various audiences. Disciplines are “myths,” because they are open-ended research projects, but also because they do cultural work— they have social and ideological effects and are produced in contention with other forms of knowledge. These contests are not merely rhetorical but are also struggles for resources, for epistemological jurisdictions, and for scientific and public recognition. Freud’s cultural theory attempts to actualize psychoanalysis as a discipline by configuring it as a “scientific myth” through the theory of the primal parricide, while constructing psychoanalysis as a consummate example of scientific and social scientific disciplinarity. And by making psychoanalysis paradigmatic in this way, the cultural theory also advances the project of institutionalizing psychoanalysis as an academic field and interdisciplinary research method. Freud’s notions of science as “myth” and “historical” truth do not make psychoanalysis scientifically valid or the primal parricide historical, but they do provide a brilliant theory of disciplinarity, which is meant to authorize psychoanalysis as a master discipline. Suggesting that “the historical reality of the primal crime was by no means essential to Freud’s argument,” his recent biographer Peter Gay expresses the wish that Freud had simply remembered the psychoanalytic principle that Oedipal “crimes” are almost always fantasies. Gay interprets Freud’s steadfast adherence to his original assertion that “‘in the beginning was the Deed’” (TT, ) psychoanalytically as symptomatic of his desire to escape the implications of his own aggressive impulses toward his father.120 But the primal parricide cannot be a fantasy if it is to do the disciplinary work that I have been demonstrating here. In addition to grounding Freud’s evolutionary-historical theory of mind, the primal parricide

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conceived of as “Deed” also performs the act of staking out a psychoanalytic discipline—such a disciplinary “Deed” is institutionally as well as linguistically performative and symptomatic, not of a personal psychological conflict, but rather of an epistemological contest.121 The Oedipus complex, as symbol (and trademark) of psychoanalytic disciplinarity, both draws specific boundaries and also characterizes the psychoanalytic domain as extending in seemingly infinite directions. But this Oedipal “Deed” makes no concretely historical sense until we understand it as a specifically disciplinary agency within a competition for epistemological jurisdiction and academic recognition. Thus Freud’s Oedipus, based on a tragedy about the limitations of human knowledge, becomes a figure for the comprehensiveness of psychoanalytic knowledge.

“Applied Psychoanalysis” Freud institutionalized psychoanalysis as a “scientific myth.” As such, it should both have the prestige, respectability, and objectivity of science and arouse the almost instinctive public recognition that attaches to myth as a shared narrative of cultural origins. Freud also designed psychoanalysis to function as a master discipline, consolidating research across the social sciences and humanities through its depth psychology. Beyond its role as a professional practice, as a unifying disciplinary field, psychoanalytic knowledge had the potential to fulfill Freud’s goal to gain for his ideas the kind of general cultural currency and significance that classical learning and literature possessed in his day, and to some extent still possess. But all of these disciplinary ambitions, tactics, and metaphors also depend on the successful professionalization of psychoanalysis. In a productively ironic sense, Freud needed to solidify the professional standing of psychoanalysis in order to gain credibility for its techniques and concepts, but he could not establish psychoanalysis as a discipline without taking risks that seem almost unprofessional. He relied on the fact that professionals also possess a great deal of social prestige and authority, which the analyst is in a particularly advantageous position to mobilize, given his or her probing psychological method and social role as an expert “secular pastoral worker” (LA, ). His cultural theory nevertheless represents a daring and hazardous venture: although psychoanalysis must provoke a quasi-religious conversion and faith, its doctrine and cultural “teleology” must neverthe-

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less be scientific. Freud’s institutionalizing project, then, was an attempt to invent the cultural authority of psychoanalytic knowledge rhetorically and materially through competition with other academic disciplines and kinds of professional expertise. We might echo the terms of Freud’s own midlife self-assessment by calling him a disciplinary “conquistador,”122 but only as long as we recognize that he was not unique in his pursuit of disciplinary “conquests.” Psychoanalytic knowledge has succeeded, as Freud hoped and predicted, in becoming a central part of the repertoire of psychological common sense of educated people in much of Europe and the United States, where it has been particularly significant historically to the formation of what Philip Rieff and others have characterized as a therapeutic culture.123 Patricia Kitcher has shown to what a large extent Freud’s disciplinary synthesis was left behind by developments both in virtually all the fields on which psychoanalysis depended—developmental biology, physiology, and neurology—and in those to which it extended psychoanalytic methods— sociology, anthropology, and psychology.124 Although psychoanalysis may have failed historically to become a master discipline, or to achieve broad institutionalization as an autonomous discipline in the university, it did manage to a significant degree to become an influential and versatile method of psychological interpretation and research practiced in various fields, particularly in the humanities. Freud’s own “applications” of psychoanalysis played a role in this methodological success by leading the way out of strictly clinical theorizing and treatment. I argue that it is not only the content of Freudian theory that has been instrumental for the purposes of interdisciplinary expansion, but also the status of psychoanalysis as professional expertise and its characteristic technique of psychological reduction. Durkheimian sociology and Lowie’s response to Totem and Taboo have served as examples to demonstrate that historically the psychoanalytic attempt to create a dominant psychological discipline did not go unchallenged. Nevertheless, it goes almost without saying that we do not all think according to a “sociological” worldview that understands “psychological facts” as “socially determined.” The Durkheimians’ own efforts to institutionalize sociology demonstrate that Freud did not own the disciplinary and epistemological strategy of reduction. In fact, if the sociological episteme had prevailed historically, so would its particular form of reduction,

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although its specific political and cultural effects would obviously have been different from those of the psychological domain. To understand the prevalence of psychoanalytic ideas, it is important to realize what is distinctive about psychoanalysis’s mode of reduction.125 Freud pursued disciplinary reduction to particularly powerful ends; he made the shift from scientific epistemology to psychological common sense in order decisively to establish the modern method of psychological reduction that produces the “inner self ” as the ultimate source of human reality and meaning. As Freud’s own description of the elaboration of concepts in science indicates, psychoanalytic “conventions” are in part products of a preexisting set of assumptions, “ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the observations alone.” Psychoanalytic ideas were recognizable, even when new, because Freud conveyed them in forms that were already taken for granted, such as tragedy. Once the specifically psychoanalytic concepts materialized, however, they were imparted as a thought style to those who obtained psychoanalytic expertise. The cultural prominence of psychoanalysis has arisen from the persuasiveness of that thought style beyond the confines of professional psychotherapeutic practice, so that psychoanalytic knowledge also appears in the guise of a popular-cultural approach to self-understanding. This extension into a subjective framework of the psychological reduction characteristic of the psychoanalytic thought style has produced specific social and ideological effects within the psychological domain. The “inner self ” as a psychologically reduced mode of identity has “internalized” all forms of social relation—that is, social relations are viewed as “essential” to a subjectivity shaped through “psychodynamics,” and when they do appear as “external” to the self, their forms and effects are explained as proceeding from psychological causes. The psychologized self also practices this reduction as a cognitive procedure that posits a primary psychological reason behind virtually all aspects of everyday life. Psychological reduction becomes a dominant form of classification; it is the way of thinking and assessing value—a kind of cognitive “alter ego”—accompanying the ways of feeling and desiring that psychoanalysis openly advertises as its territory. The disciplinary project that I have analyzed here was historically crucial to the institutionalization and cultural success of psychoanalysis, then, because it supplied a method of psychological reduction that helped to theorize and cultivate in persons the ideological authority of a modern psycho-

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logical culture. Thus to the extent that we employ psychoanalytic theory to grant priority to psychological explanations of self, society, and culture, we are still carrying out the disciplinary agenda of applied psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic knowledge has also prospered and continued to evolve because it contributes to the social and cultural distinction of the educated classes. It was originally formulated to serve an upper- and middle-class clientele, and well-educated and economically advantaged men and women have always had the greatest access to—and a culturally determined “need” for—psychoanalytic expertise. Psychoanalysis purveys a particularly rigorous technique and terminology to cultivate a “psychological” and “sexual” identity that distinguishes the minutely articulated—“analyzed”—“inner life” of the psychoanalytically initiated person, in addition to its provision of a popular vocabulary of the self. Its psychological mode of classification also enhances the “naturalization” of institutionalized ways of thinking that have been characteristic historically of highly educated and professionalized people. The psychoanalytic habitus bears the hallmarks of professionalism and Bildung. This “psychologization” of reality makes the vicissitudes of social aspects of identity—such as gender, the acquisition of formal knowledge, occupation, familial role, taste, and relationships with others—seem as if they have originated from and can only make sense in light of an individual’s “inner life.” Such a correlation between a unique self and a social trajectory is historically typical of those social classes whose members can take their “individuality” for granted—whose “individuality” is in fact confirmed as the norm. These classes’ privileged access to education and job opportunities has been defended as the result of “equality of opportunity” within meritocratic state ideologies based on the provision of public systems of education. Psychoanalytic knowledge also underwrites such meritocratic schemes by proposing that one’s successes or defeats in life are intimately determined by “psychological” and “personal” factors, thus making such crucial experiences as schooling or the practice of an occupation seem the result only or primarily of individual “choice” and performance rather than also of access and early socialization. Psychoanalysis, along with the other mental health professions, has worked to install as the psychological “norm” the middle-class expectation that life should be an unfolding of the private self ’s latent potentials. Whether this expectation is met or thwarted, such an outcome appears dependent on an individual’s ability or failure to seize “opportunities” for mental health and individual

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achievement that are proclaimed to be available to all—with psychotherapeutic experts standing by to reveal and treat any “hidden” sources of inadequacy. When human relations—in the family, in the school, at work, in the day-to-day business of larger society, in the imaginary worlds of the entertainment media—are seen as most basically motivated by psychological factors and intelligible through psychological explanations, then it becomes difficult to substantiate and change the social, economic, and historical conditions affecting the ways in which people feel, think, and act. I am not saying that there is no room for psychological insight, or denying that psychotherapy can help troubled individuals and families. Rather, I am criticizing psychological reduction as an epistemic strategy and cognitive habit whose predominance and even exclusivity—an outgrowth of disciplinary and professional contests—is damaging to individuals and society as a whole, because it makes the conflicted “inner life” the measure of how the world works.126 In order to contest the sway of the “psychological,” then, we must seek to reorder our cognitive priorities and begin by questioning the intellectual and emotional necessity of the “inner self ’s” compelling “dramas” and “hidden meanings”—a necessity that psychoanalysis as an institutionalized form of knowledge has so powerfully and contentiously promoted.

Afterword

The cultural history of the psychoanalytic thought style presented here suggests that the conflict surrounding “Freud” has arisen, not only in response to psychoanalytic ideas, but also from the jurisdictional struggles accompanying the institutionalization of psychoanalytic knowledge. I have aimed neither to portray what takes place during a psychoanalytic treatment nor to examine the clinical techniques of current psychoanalytic practitioners. Instead, I have sought to delineate the cultural and institutional effects—the disciplinary and class profile—of psychoanalysis. The cultural pervasiveness and personal habit of psychological explanation are in crucial ways outcomes of disciplinary histories and not simply the results of an essential development of human self-knowledge. Freud’s institutionalizing project formulated psychoanalysis, on the model of classical Bildung, as what Louis Dumont has called a “modern ideology” and “international common sense,” meaning “the set of representations that prevail in our world beyond all boundaries.”1 Psychoanalysis reformulates into a psychotherapy the cultivation of the individual conceived in Bildung. In a discussion of attempts to defend the continued teaching of classical languages in contemporary France because of their intrinsic “logical qualities,” Bourdieu argues that such justifications fail to appreciate the fact that “one cannot save the value of a competence unless

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one saves the market” for that competence.2 Freud saved the value of the competence of classical Bildung by transforming it into a psychological search for self-knowledge that retained for psychoanalysis both Bildung’s market—educated and professional people—and its social functions of supporting class distinction. Anyone can experience neurosis and repressed desires, psychoanalysis teaches, yet only the psychoanalytically initiated can know that they do so and thus come into possession of the styles of identity that differentiate socially, even as they universalize psychologically, certain forms of selfhood and psychological suffering. Despite the failure of psychoanalysis to achieve the status of science, its cultural and ideological success may be unique and exceed even the scope of classical Bildung because of its systematic and scientifically oriented psychologization of experience. Perhaps Freud’s most effective institutionalizing strategy was to popularize the individualistic cultivation that Bildung promised by formulating it as a mass cultural psychological common sense, thus extending its relevance beyond the educated classes, while psychoanalysts themselves have continued to serve the more privileged few. The dissemination of psychoanalytic ideas has produced the historical and ideological effect of converting the self-cultivation through education promised by Bildung into a general cultural process through the pervasive techniques of psychotherapy—thus contributing to the dominance in the twentieth century of the psychological domain. The “psychological” promises to the individual what the domain of culture did within Bildung : a reconciliation and development of human capacities.3 Freud was pessimistic about civilization, but he was fully convinced that psychological knowledge and psychotherapeutic practice, when based on psychoanalysis, would eventually reshape the world from the inside out. Freud constructed psychoanalytic knowledge on the pattern of institutionalized classificatory schemes such as classical learning, but he could not depend on a particular institution like the school, the clinic, or the scientific research institute to ensure its reproduction. In his writings, therefore, he adapted larger cultural discourses such as profession, discipline, science, and classical learning itself to ensure the respectability, epistemological power, and popular acceptance of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was consolidated as a hybrid form of institutionalized knowledge that ultimately depended on multiple cultural and institutional locations—the training institute, the medical school, the psychiatrist’s office, the literature

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classroom, advertising—for its “survival.” This abundance of institutional affiliations has been historically advantageous, to say the least, for the cultural circulation of psychoanalytic knowledge, but it has also contributed to the controversy over Freud’s ideas, since their authority seems to stem simultaneously from “nowhere” and from “everywhere.” While popularized versions of psychoanalytic ideas are more widespread than classical learning, psychoanalysis itself still lacks the transcendent cultural value of classical literature and its almost unquestioned capacity to confer legitimacy. Freud engaged psychoanalysis in the occupational and disciplinary fray— the wear and tear of epistemological contests—and set out to serve clienteles whose personal problems were the objects of competition among psychotherapeutic, medical, and pastoral caregivers. The unseemly, worldly controversies that continue to circulate around “Freud” testify to the “price” psychoanalysis pays for its continuing relevance. The rewards for moving beyond the school have been substantial, however. As a form of psychological capital in its function as a central element of eclectic psychotherapeutic techniques based on depth psychology and accessible to the educated, and as a vocabulary of selfhood circulating within popular culture and the mental health industry, psychoanalytic knowledge still works powerfully to shape subjectivities. As the example of Durkheim’s sociology illustrates, from the very beginning of the psychoanalytic enterprise, there have been other ways of theorizing the reproduction of society and culture, which do not presume that the internal workings of the individual mind, however complex, are always the most basic agency and cause of all things human. Those other theories, of course, would necessitate the writing of other histories of institutionalization to assess their cultural impact. I would like to redirect my analysis of Freud’s project of institution reflexively toward my own procedures, theoretical tools, and institutional formation in order to sketch a rationale for the interdisciplinary approach I have followed in this study. In the process, I shall suggest some of the implications of Freud’s position, and my own attempt to reconstruct it, for cultural studies and interdisciplinary research, particularly in the humanities. Throughout the book but primarily in its second half, I have demonstrated the dependence of psychologizing and sociologizing theories on one another, and align my own approach with sociological methods. The recip-

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rocal constitution—through contradiction and contestation—of the psychological and sociological disciplinary domains means that these disciplines’ claims to scientific legitimacy and autonomy operate in significant ways through the reorientation or reduction of their disciplinary adversary’s objects and methods. One discipline, while attempting to dispute, dislodge, or encompass the other, nevertheless relies on it conceptually—and from our point of view, historically—to distinguish its identity. By juxtaposing Freud and Durkheim, I demonstrate that this kind of “imperialism” was characteristic of early twentieth-century disciplines pursuing institutionalization, and thus competing for resources, in the university. Both Foucault and Bourdieu, whose approaches I draw on, have to some extent inherited and continue this disciplinary competition between sociology and psychology.4 They each position Freud and psychoanalysis as aspects of a psychological epistemic framework that they must contest, even as they turn psychoanalytic concepts inside out in order to demonstrate their historical genesis. Foucault argues that the repressive hypothesis generates “sexuality” as the “inner truth” of the self, while Bourdieu calls for the practice of a “socioanalysis” that does not locate unconscious desire as the source of the subject but rather permits one to understand, and in some measure free oneself from, unthought social conditions that shape subjectivity.5 Thus we arrive at what seems like a theoretical impasse arising from the institutional histories of disciplinarity: one only perpetuates the contest between fields by studying a discipline from the point of view of its rivel. My working solution to this apparent circularity is first to acknowledge the liabilities of my sociological method: there is always a temptation to oppose sociologism to psychologism, even if only for the purposes of establishing one’s own methodological priorities. This is the danger of performing a “sociological reduction” in response to Freud’s psychological reduction. I attempt to eschew sociologism, as well as characteristically hyperbolic claims to the comprehensiveness of a particular disciplinary approach or interpretive operation, by drawing on the methods of several different disciplines. I also elucidate and extend the cognitive aspects of habitus, elements that at times seem submerged in Bourdieu’s theorization of practice. In a disciplinary sense, habitus works in Bourdieu’s sociology as a way to describe the subject without giving up any ground to psychology. By the time Bourdieu was elaborating his sociology, psychology had become a domi-

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nant epistemological field; if it has not won the specifically disciplinary contest with sociology that I use Freud’s and Durkheim’s careers to represent, psychology has certainly attained far greater currency as a professional expertise and conventional explanation of human relations. The ambiguity in Bourdieu’s work surrounding precisely how a habitus is reproduced—the explanation that psychology might be asked to provide, or the place where we might learn what the specifically cognitive aspects of the habitus are—is therefore a purposeful one, I believe, in part because Bourdieu does not want to concede any systematic conceptual reliance on psychology.6 Given psychology’s cultural dominance, such reliance would amount to a recognition of psychology’s claims to provide a more basic knowledge of subjectivity. Bourdieu is thus engaged in a disciplinary contest to establish the identity, autonomy, and cultural authority of sociology. By applying sociological theory as I do, I too am pursuing this disciplinary competition with psychoanalysis as a psychologizing epistemology. Here, then, is one specifically disciplinary reason for the polemical aspects of my own project. The term “thought style” has allowed me to describe how certain aspects of a habitus are inculcated through formalized pedagogical, therapeutic, and research practices as forms of cognition, consisting in particular of classificatory schemes. While thought style is not the same as habitus, which also includes embodied and informal dispositions such as gestures and practices, it is an element of it. One of the most methodologically and theoretically persuasive aspects of habitus for me is its capacity to theorize the historical constitution of specific forms of subjectivity.7 By combining the concepts of habitus and thought style, I wish to move toward a historical psychology, both in Jean-Pierre Vernant’s sense of the study of historical and cultural variation in what modern psychology has typically defined as universal mental attributes and functions, and also in the sense of a psychology that could become a tool for the historical study of forms of cognition. Where I depart from Bourdieu’s approach, then, is in a substantially interdisciplinary practical orientation and intellectual commitment: I am not interested (institutionally or otherwise) in upholding the autonomy or epistemological superiority of any single discipline, but rather engage in historical sociology and literary studies as a hybrid field.8 Limitations on resources for research and teaching mean that there are real material and in-

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stitutional stakes implied in justifications of disciplinary agendas. Rallying cries of disciplinary distinction can nevertheless also be highly rhetorical, since in fact fruitful cross-disciplinary borrowings happen all the time in the work of many scholars, and also in Bourdieu’s work, which is almost as anthropological as it is sociological. Disciplines cannot take shape independently of the disciplinary field, and in pragmatic terms, I would argue, no one method is sufficient to allow for the formulation of research questions related to the manifold conditions and effects of a text, discourse, or event. Interdisciplinarity as methodology should not be justified as a fundamental virtue in and of itself, however, but only as it comes to define the outcome of the research that has required it.9 I have endeavored to develop an interrelation and responsiveness of research priorities to the objects of study, and the most prominent instance of this procedure is the analysis of Freud’s texts of cultural theory from a series of different angles—literary, sociological, anthropological, professional, rhetorical—by the end of the book.10 Not all methods are compatible, however, and I do institute a hierarchy based on the capacity of an approach to accommodate historical specificity. Freud’s texts themselves, and particularly the cultural criticism, also incite interdisciplinary investigation: it was essential to draw on a variety of approaches to understand how psychoanalytic knowledge took shape in the context of other disciplinary projects. But Freud’s own interdisciplinarity, at a time when a system of academic specialization was arising from the mid nineteenth century on in Europe and America, clearly differs fundamentally from a late twentieth-century interdisciplinary agenda. Freud was interdisciplinary by training and by institutional necessity—his disciplinary synthesis was meant to provide the kind of scientific basis for psychology that would establish psychoanalysis as a legitimate field of research and subordinate competing fields to a psychoanalytic epistemology. My own interdisciplinary penchant, an outcome of larger trends in academic culture, as well as of chance and inclination, also partakes in its historical moment, but cannot evince the same order of academic or professional imperative as Freud’s.11 My investment in literary study, which reflects my academic specialty and institutional affiliation, should be evident in the book’s privileged object of inquiry: Freud’s writings. I rely on the literary critical method of close textual analysis to disclose Freud’s disciplinary project as it appears in the conceptual and rhetorical strategies of his cultural theory—elements of his writing that do not immediately lend

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themselves to sociological analysis. I could not have detected the strategic efficacy of Freud’s deployment of Greek tragedy’s generic conventions without a literary training, and in this sense the book, as it participates in interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies, also provides a defense of literary modes of reading.12 The book’s specific contribution to literary studies might best be defined as a further attempt to conceive the constraints and powers of authorship historically and to explore the cultural uses and epistemological ramifications of literary genre. I would also distinguish between my own classical, philological training and Freud’s use of classical learning: despite the continued, if limited, importance of the classics, classical philology is no longer the preeminent humanistic disciplinary methodology that it was in Freud’s time. Perhaps I have been able to perceive Freud’s mobilization of the cultural authority of nineteenth-century classical Bildung because I have been in a position to rework philological methods from within an English department, the twentieth-century home of the liberal educational ideal that Bildung informed. In that familiar disciplinary move of turning the adversary inside out—and in the process producing something different despite the similarity of logical and rhetorical operations—I would suggest that Freud’s institutionalizing strategies are also relevant to the emerging field of cultural studies. While in his historical moment Freud parlayed the rising prestige of expertise, current interdisciplinary research projects such as cultural studies involve a far-reaching reevaluation of disciplinary specialization, even as academic institutions and research foundations continue to demand it. The conditions surrounding the academic successes of the social sciences at the turn of the century, in contrast to the lack of disciplinary status for psychoanalysis, suggest the institutional necessity for a new research field, such as cultural studies, to pursue institutionalization by attaching itself to existing disciplines, supporting their curricula, and even providing them with new rationales and forms of legitimation. This sense of disciplinary history raises an important question: what are the current and future markets (among students, the educated public, institutions supporting research, political organizations, etc.) for cultural studies?13 Whatever the ultimate institutional fate of cultural studies, I’ll wager that interdisciplinary research will persist in a productive—if sometimes tense and competitive—dialectic between specialization and cross-disciplinary adventure including, ideally, collaborations among scholars, not only from various

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fields, but also from different divisions of knowledge, such as the humanities, law, and the natural and social sciences. An attempt to elaborate the historical conditions fostering the institutionalization of psychoanalysis does not inevitably imply a relativist (or deconstructive) stance on the groundlessness of psychoanalytic as well as all other forms of epistemic or academic authority, including my own. In fact, I have argued that psychoanalytic authority has been powerfully socially and institutionally grounded in the prestigious practices of classical scholarship and professionalism that it has adopted. My own authority to scrutinize psychoanalysis is based in the same tradition of scholarly professionalism that psychoanalysis itself deploys. I do not criticize psychoanalytic knowledge for its authority or its professionalism per se, but rather for its propensity to codify historically specific and culturally variable relations of authority as “internal,” individualized psychic dramas and universal psychological principles. This book’s critical cultural history of psychoanalysis, a history in which I, as a member of the American middle class educated in psychoanalytic literary theory am deeply involved, also arises from the kind of curiosity that Michel Foucault has described so eloquently: “After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself ?”14 I see this attempt to think differently as both an individual and collective, institutional and political project. It is not simply a question of demystification, or of replacing one set of representations with another, but of understanding the history of the ways people—including ourselves—customarily distinguish and categorize objects and explain events.15 The particular conceptual knot that I have been working to undo relates most directly to the dichotomy between the individual and the social. This modern mental habit of opposing self and world often makes it difficult to conceive of identity as social and social selves as authentic. Even ideological critiques can reproduce this set of oppositions by equating such social configurations of identity as taste with “false consciousness.” People’s desires when shaped though the consumption of goods in the capitalist, consumerist marketplace, for example, may make them wish to embody images purveyed by advertising, but such desires are not merely mistaken, manipulated apprehensions of reality but concretely experienced and valid subjective stances. My preference

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for classical or jazz music over rock or country music may mark me as in this way representative of a specific kind of social and cultural formation, but that typicality does not thereby make me any less an individual, or any less me. Social life is the realm of human agency; it should not be defined as the source of alienation or as a mere backdrop for the conflicts of my “inner life.” The point of cultural critique, I believe, is not to persuade people that they misapprehend the world, but rather to foster the creation of more equitable alternatives to such ideological formations as consumerism and therapeutic individualism. We shall not be able to recognize and embrace such alternatives when they appear until we are able to see our lives in terms of social relations, and to understand that the ways in which we are typical—in terms of education, class, social expectations, how we reasonably determine which things are significant and relevant to us and which are unimportant—have as much bearing on human identity and potential as the ways in which we are unique, both as individuals and groups.16 The intellectual and political agenda of the late twentieth-century search to delineate particularity (in human constructions and experiences of culture, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, or race, for example) should not require the avoidance or abandonment of all forms of generalization—a cognitive, scientific, and disciplinary impossibility in any case—but rather should seek the forms and methods of generalization that most accurately account for the ways people live and think, and have lived and thought in the past, and that can most effectively guarantee social justice. In his autobiography, after a lifetime of intellectual and political work, John Stuart Mill observed that despite reforms in political institutions and more general public acceptance of such social “facts” as political economy, the improvements that he had expected to follow these reforms had not in fact occurred: “I had learned from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are the result.” He concluded that “no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.”17 Mill illustrates the dilemmas of the progressive intellectual. Social change clearly requires and accomplishes changes in thinking, but both these effects are traceable one to the other. As institutions are modified, so the characteristic cognitive styles that they inculcate alter, but there

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may be some lag or disjunction, as Mill notes, between political reform and social change. Older mentalities persist amid new or evolving social arrangements. Novel research practices inspire the programs that aim to orchestrate larger trends in opinion. It is hard to know whether an intellectual agenda or an alteration in institutional structures would lead most effectively to new versions of social relations and thus give rise to fundamental transformations in modes of thought. As the cultural historian Roger Chartier has stated, cognitive styles or ways of understanding do not exist in a relationship “of dependence . . . on their material determinations. The representations of the social world are themselves the constituents of social reality.”18 Histories of the cultural vogue of forms of knowledge can have a bearing on social reality to the extent that they help to uncover the instrumentality of particular representations for people’s deliberations about their lives. Despite the difficulty of knowing exactly where to start—institutions or modes of thought—I have staked my interests19 in exploring the relation between the two and focused on the role of the school because of its social position as hinge or point of transition, as pedagogical gateway from the family into formal knowledge and the social relations of adult life. By foregrounding the school and its disciplines as objects of historical and theoretical investigation, I have aimed to suggest how institutions might be open to change by delineating their characteristic modes of reproduction and expansion through contestation. Disciplines and disciplinarity seem to thrive on conflict,20 and perhaps interdisciplinarity no less so. I hope that this examination of Freud’s institutionalizing strategies provides the reader with the knowledge that the outcomes of disciplinary contests and the antitheses and syntheses, new research projects, and even new forms of subjectivity that they incite are unpredictable, mutable, undecided. Another conclusion that a reader may draw from this study is that Freud as a figure and his ideas have been greatly culturally overinvested. To write a history of this overinvestment may almost seem to require a lack of investment—a seemingly impossible neutrality on the question of Freud. If the book has succeeded as cultural history, however, it should have allowed the reader to disengage from what we might call, for once to adopt a psychoanalytic term, a cultural “transference” of twentieth-century modernity onto Freud by understanding his strategies in identifying psychoanalysis with the knowledge of modernity. This is not to settle the question

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Afterword

of the future of psychoanalysis, but rather to encourage both curiosity and skepticism about what that future might be—and also to relinquish the inevitability of Freud’s legacy. One way in which “nothing”—that is, any of all the possible and even “unthinkable” things—might some day appear in the place of psychoanalysis, and hence of “Freud,” would be if the “psychological” should slowly recede as a dominant epistemological and subjective framework. It seems certain that the recent controversy surrounding Freud manifests not only the signature “psychoanalytic effect” but arises from other causes as well. The exponential expansion of the Internet and other information technologies must have an impact on the sufficiency and authority of the psychological domain. Perhaps the new multidisciplinary focus on cognition (implying, in relation to psychoanalysis, a move away from a focus on unconscious desire) stems in part from a cultural shift toward an informational model of knowledge, which may also be a different version of an older, representational model of mind.21 In lieu of a prediction about the direction of these epistemic shifts, I simply want to affirm that the possible decline of the “psychological” as the most intimate truth of the self should not be equated with an erosion of “humanity” or human meaning. The “psychological” is only one version of the human capacity to make order and meaning; this capacity, history tells us, will persist through and beyond a transition to a new array of resurgent, and competing, paradigms.

 

Notes

 . Gray, “Assault on Freud,” . . Stone, “Where Will Psychoanalysis Survive?” ‒. The fate of psychoanalysis has clearly been deemed of compelling interest to educated American readers, and especially to New Yorkers: Columbia University’s alumni magazine recently published an article on the question (Goldenberg, “Freud is Dead! Long Live Freud!”), and see also the October  New York magazine cover story by James Kaplan, “The Final Analysis.” My thanks to Langdon Hammer, Joel Pfister, and Vivian Irish for supplying me with these articles. . Linton Weeks, “Sometimes a Show Is More Than a Show: Library of Congress’ Much-Debated Freud Exhibit Will Open After All,” San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. , , § A, , reports that the show was delayed in part owing to shortfalls in funding but also because of a petition involving fifty psychologists, historians, and others—including such public figures as Gloria Steinem and the physician and writer Oliver Sacks—that complained of the pro-Freudian bias of most of the show’s organizers. Sacks distinguished himself from the “angry antiFreudians,” however, and has contributed to the reorganized show’s catalogue, Freud: Conflict and Culture, edited by the curator, Michael S. Roth, in association with the Library of Congress. In response to the petition, Roth included two Freud critics on his advisory panel and added essays critical of Freud by the philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum and the historian of science Frank Cioffi to the catalogue. The reorganized show, October , ‒January , , also included quotations from critics in its displays. For a review of the exhibit and an account of its reorganization, see Margaret Talbot, “The Museum Show Has an Ego Disorder,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. , , ‒. Three classic examinations of the cultural impact of psychoanalysis are Marcuse, Eros and Civilization; Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, and Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis. The list of works that aim to “debunk” or attack psychoanalysis and Freud is a long one. Among the most highly publicized and recent contributions are Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O.; Crews, Skep-

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Notes to Introduction

tical Engagements; Farrell, Freud’s Paranoid Quest; Kerr, Most Dangerous Method; Masson, Assault on Truth; and Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong. John Brenkman mounts a persuasive critique of psychoanalysis from the perspective of feminist and cultural theory in Straight, Male, Modern. John Forrester analyzes historical and current controversies surrounding psychoanalysis in Dispatches from the Freud Wars, while Nathan G. Hale, Jr., outlines the “crisis” of American psychoanalysis in the s in Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis, chaps.  and . Richard Wollheim has argued recently for the continued relevance of psychoanalysis to an understanding of mind in Mind and Its Depths, and Paul Robinson defends psychoanalysis against the critiques of Frank Sulloway, Jeffrey Masson, and Adolf Grünbaum in Freud and His Critics. . Stone, “Where Will Psychoanalysis Survive?” , ‒. This redefinition of psychoanalysis as primarily a hermeneutic discipline finds a parallel in the recent series of lectures by the literary critic Peter Brooks on the importance of psychoanalytic theory to an understanding of narrative, storytelling, and literature. For Brooks, psychoanalysis is indispensable because of what he describes as the persistent “conviction” that “there must be some correspondence between literary and psychic processes.” He contends that psychoanalysis is correct in seeing sexuality, broadly conceived, as the motive force of human subjectivity and fiction-making, and that as a theory of interpretation, it supplies uniquely pertinent and flexible methods of formal analysis that nevertheless move beyond formalism to deal with the human relevance of literature (Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, ‒). For examples of Brooks’s own influential psychoanalytic criticism, see Reading for the Plot. A seminal account of psychoanalysis as hermeneutic discipline is Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy. Mark Edmundson offers an analysis of the relation between literary interpretation and Freud’s reading practices in Towards Reading Freud. For an example of a reconfiguration of psychoanalytic ideas through a Marxist literary criticism, see Jameson, Political Unconscious. . Hale maintains that in the s “psychoanalysis remains the most carefully elaborated of the medical psychologies” and that “more candidates are being trained and more patients treated than ever before, although the rate of growth has slowed” (Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis, ). . Alessandra Stanley, “Freud in Russia: Return of the Repressed,” New York Times, Dec. , , § A, , . For a fascinating examination of the ways in which Freud and psychoanalysis were from the beginning deeply involved with Russia, see Rice, Freud’s Russia. A special issue of Social Research, edited by James Walkup, includes essays examining the reception of psychoanalysis in France, Russia, Argentina, Japan, and India. . Frederick Crews and a host of respondents debate the psychoanalytic understanding, and therapeutic and legal ramifications, of recovered memory therapy in Memory Wars; this book contains an exhaustive bibliography on recovered

Notes to Introduction



memory therapy and its relation to Freudian theory. An account of the possibility of recovering childhood memories of abuse is Bass and Davis, Courage to Heal. . For some recent assessments of the economic situation of psychotherapy and the effects of HMOs’ treatment priorities on psychotherapeutic practice, see Austad and Hoyt, “Managed Care Movement”; N. A. Cummings, “Dismantling of Our Health System”; and Kiesler and Morton, “Psychology and Public Policy.” For a related article from the popular press, see Goode and Wagner, “Does Psychotherapy Work?” . Freud, letter of June , , to Andreas-Salomé, in Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters, . The German reads: “Natürlich weiß ich auch, daß die Widersacher, Verwässerer und Umdeuter auch ein wichtige Mission erfüllen, indem sie die sonst ungenießbare Sache für die Verdauungswerkzeuge der Menge zubereiten. Aber das darf man nicht laut anerkennen und ich unterstütze sie nur in der richtigen Erfüllung dieser Mission, indem ich über die Beschmutzung schimpfe, welche das reine Ding durch diese Prozedur erleidet” (Freud and Andreas-Salomé, Briefwechsel, ). Freud is referring to the recent publication of On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (), and among the “polluters” and inadvertent popularizers of psychoanalysis are Freud’s former associates Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. . Stone, “Where Will Psychoanalysis Survive?” . . Freud, “Charcot” (), in SE, : ‒. . Ibid., ‒. . Marcel Mauss and Paul Fauconnet, “Sociologie,” in Mauss, Oeuvres, : ; cited in Dumont, German Ideology, . . Because I want to stress the cultural specificity and history of the Freudian notion of the Oedipal, I capitalize the adjective throughout. Lowercased as “oedipal,” it takes on the status of a primarily theoretical and “objective” concept, which I contest. . Foucault, History of Sexuality, : , , ‒. Foucault defends psychoanalysis, however, for what he perceives as its “rigorous” opposition to “the political and institutional effects of the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system” that had diagnosed sexual “perversions” as results of hereditary “degenerescence” (‒ ). For interpretations of the theoretical, historical, and political consequences of Freud’s reconfiguration of sexuality, perversion, and homosexuality, see Abelove, “Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans”; Davidson, “How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis”; and Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, ‒. See also Davidson’s analysis of the emergence of sexuality as a category producing new types of subjects and linked to psychiatric reasoning in “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality.” A recent survey of changes in attitude toward homosexuality among analysts in the United States is Erica Goode, “On Gay Issue, Psychoanalysis Treats Itself,” New York Times, Dec. , , § A, , .

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Notes to Introduction

. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, , . Armstrong focuses on Freud’s analysis of Dora, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” ( []), in SE, : ‒. . Volosinov, Freudianism, . . Douglas, How Institutions Think, ‒. . Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (), ‒; emphasis in original. I was introduced to the work of Fleck and Douglas on thought styles and institutional thinking in the course of reading Christopher Herbert’s Culture and Anomie. . Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, . . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . Bourdieu, “From Rules to Strategies,” in id., In Other Words, . . On the relation between social “regularities” and individual agency, Bourdieu details: The genesis of a system of works or practices generated by the same habitus (or homologous habitus, such as those that underlie the unity of the lifestyle of a group or a class) cannot be described either as the autonomous development of a unique and always self-identical essence, or as a continuous creation of novelty, because it arises from the necessary yet unpredictable confrontation between the habitus and an event that can exercise a pertinent incitement on the habitus only if the latter snatches it from the contingency of the accidental and constitutes it as a problem by applying to it the very principles of its solution; and also because the habitus, like every “art of inventing,” is what makes it possible to produce an infinite number of practices that are relatively unpredictable (like the corresponding situations) but also limited in their diversity. [Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, ] Bourdieu has spoken elsewhere in even stronger terms about how a habitus changes: On the “durability” of habitus and the charge of “determinism” which goes with it. First, habitus realizes itself, becomes active only in the relation to a field, and the same habitus can lead to very different practices and stances depending on the state of the field. . . . secondly, habitus, as the product of social conditionings, and thus of a history (unlike character), is endlessly transformed, either in a direction that reinforces it, when embodied structures of expectation encounter structures of objective chances in harmony with these expectations, or in a direction that transforms it and, for instance, raises or lowers the level of expectations and aspirations (which can in turn lead to social crises proper). . . . Habitus can, in certain instances, be built, if one may say so, upon contradiction, upon tension, even upon instability—and I believe that there is a sociogenesis of psychoses and neuroses. Thirdly, not only can habitus be practically transformed (always within definite boundaries) by the effect of a social trajectory leading to conditions of

Notes to Introduction

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living different from initial ones, it can also be controlled through awakening of consciousness and socioanalysis. [Bourdieu, “A Reply to Some Objections,” in id., In Other Words,  ] Craig Calhoun argues that the strength of Bourdieu’s sociology lies in its exploration of social reproduction rather than social transformation, but he does not see it as excluding considerations of social change (Calhoun, “Habitus, Field, and Capital,” , ). . Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, . . This is not to rule out the possible existence of unconscious mental processes, but rather to question the determinative functions of a mental structure or system called “the unconscious” in the psychoanalytic sense. . Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, ‒. . Bourdieu, Distinction, ‒. . In Bourdieu’s sociology, habitus is usually articulated in relationship to a field. As Loïc J. D. Wacqant has usefully summarized: “Habitus and field designate bundles of relations. A field consists in a set of objective, historical relations between positions anchored in certain forms of power (or capital), while habitus consists of a set of historical relations ‘deposited’ within individual bodies in the form of mental and corporal schemata of perception, appreciation and action.” Bourdieu offers the following guidelines for a sociological study of a field: An analysis in terms of field involves three necessary and internally connected moments. First, one must analyze the position of the field vis-à-vis the field of power. . . . Second, one must map out the objective structure of the relations between the positions occupied by the agents or institutions who compete for the legitimate form of specific authority of which this field in [sic] the site. And, third, one must analyze the habitus of agents, the different systems of dispositions they have acquired by internalizing a determinate type of social and economic condition, and which find in a definite trajectory within the field under consideration a more or less favorable opportunity to become actualized. [Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, , ‒] Although I concentrate on a reconstruction of Freud’s habitus, my project could also serve as a mapping of the elements of the psychoanalytic field related to Freud’s writings and institutionalizing strategies. . Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, . . In contrast to the position I am taking here, a number of scholars have considered the relevance of psychoanalysis to historiography, and the possibility of a psychoanalytic history. See, e.g., Brennan, History after Lacan; Enterline, Tears of Narcissus; Gay, Freud for Historians; LaCapra, “History and Psychoanalysis”; M. G. Levine, Writing Through Repression; Roth, Psychoanalysis as History; Santner, My Own Private Germany; and the essays in Smith and Morris, eds., Telling

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Notes to Introduction

Facts. One of the areas of research in which psychoanalysis has been applied to explain in psychological terms the human experience of history is in trauma theory, particularly in relation to Holocaust studies. Important books in the field of trauma theory include Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; id., ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory; Felman and Laub, Testimony; J. L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery; LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust; and Roth, Ironist’s Cage. For critical responses to trauma theory, see Kleber et al., eds., Beyond Trauma. In Rewriting the Soul, Ian Hacking provides a history of the “memory-thinking” implied in trauma theory by studying the elaboration of the person designated as possessing multiple personalities. For attempts at correlation of psychoanalysis and social or Marxist theory, see Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society; Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis; and Zˇizˇek, Sublime Object of Ideology. . For a sense of the intellectual history of the concept of habitus in the work of the Annales school and Norbert Elias, see the essays in Chartier, Cultural History. . Abbott, System of Professions, ‒; Hale, Freud and the Americans, chaps.  and . . Abbott, System of Professions, ‒, ‒. . Hale, Freud and the Americans, chap. . . Demos, “Oedipus and America,” ‒. . Kovel, “American Mental Health Industry,” ‒. . Pfister, “Glamorizing the Psychological, , . Pfister quotes Floyd Dell’s partly admiring, partly satirical article “Speaking of Psycho-Analysis,” . . Poovey, Making a Social Body, ‒. . Daston, “Historical Epistemology,” . Daston explains how “historical epistemology” differs from the history of ideas: Historical epistemology . . . poses a different kind of question: not the history of this or that particular use of, say infinitesimals in the mathematical demonstrations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the history of the changing forms and standards of mathematical demonstration during this period; not the history of the establishment of this or that empirical fact in, say, the physiology of the mid-nineteenth century, but rather the history of the competing forms of facticity—statistical, experimental, and other— in the physiological institutes and laboratories circa ; not the historical judgment as to whether this or that discipline has attained objectivity, and if so, when and how, but rather a historical investigation into the multiple meanings and scientific manifestations of objectivity. [ibid., ‒] This epistemological focus is akin to what the French Annales historians understood as l’histoire des mentalités; see Chartier, Cultural History, chap. , for an outline of the Annales approach. Another foundational investigation that could be defined retrospectively as historical epistemology, is Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (), translated as The Order of Things. The larger question of what cultural his-

Notes to Introduction

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tory entails should be answered in part by this book itself. Chartier defines cultural history as a “two-dimensional,” diachronic and synchronic investigation, “which permits simultaneous conceptualization of an intellectual or artistic product within the specificity of the history of its genre or discipline, within its relation to other contemporaneous cultural products, and within its relations with various referents situated in other fields, socio-economic or political, of the whole society” (Chartier, “Intellectual History and the History of Mentalités: A Dual Re-Evaluation,” in id., Cultural History, ‒ ). Arnold I. Davidson’s notion of “conceptual history” is also similar to historical epistemology; see his “Styles of Reasoning.” . Mary Poovey suggests that “institutions are best understood as subsets of domains,” which she defines as follows: In common usage, domain refers to a geographical territory that has been appropriated as property, as well as to the absolute ownership of that property. . . . In adopting the term domain, I want to signal the transformations that occur when land becomes property: territory is appropriated; boundaries are drawn; rules governing usage are established; unequal privileges are codified by law and then naturalized by repetition. As a category that helps define an epistemological field, domain signals the outcome of a similar transformation. This transformation also involves the drawing of boundaries and the codification of rules in such a way as to create from what once seemed to be an undifferentiated continuum of practices and ideas new and more specialized conceptual—or imaginary—entities. This transformation occurs both in the register of representation (what Foucault calls the “order of discourse”) and in the register of materiality, producing effects that can be measured or felt. [Poovey, Making a Social Body, ] To delineate the emergence of the psychological domain would be a task too large for this study; I shall, however, focus on the effects of the psychoanalytic intervention in professional and disciplinary discourses surrounding the individual and society, psychology and sociology, and so on, that contributed to the cultural dominance of the psychological as an epistemological domain. Psychoanalysis becomes an institutionalized form of knowledge within the psychological domain. Poovey’s understanding of domain is similar to what Bourdieu designates as field. . On the rise of “discipline” as a form of knowledge/power, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish. Foucault specifies what he sees as the difference between knowledge/power and ideology thus: I do not believe that what has taken place can be said to be ideological. It is both much more and much less than ideology. It is the production of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge—methods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for investigation and research, apparatuses of control. All this means that power, when it is exercised through these subtle mechanisms, cannot but evolve, organise and

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Notes to Chapter  put into circulation a knowledge, or rather apparatuses of knowledge, which are not ideological constructs. [Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, ]

. This is to second Mary Douglas’s recommendation (How Institutions Think, ‒). . For a related and influential study of the generic configurations of European historiography, see White, Metahistory. . Vernant, “History and Psychology” (), in id., Mortals and Immortals, . . The feminist classicist Page du Bois has also offered important evidence for differences between classical Greek and psychoanalytic understandings of sexuality and the body, and has recommended that psychoanalysis be historicized and revised, although she also sees it as “an inevitable theory for the description of gendering in our culture” (Sowing the Body, ). Another important argument for taking the Greek understanding of mind seriously by refusing to treat Greek terms for organs involved in mental functioning as direct analogues of modern psychological terms, is Padel, In and Out of the Mind. There is also a large body of scholarship in the field of psychological anthropology that finds that culturally diverse psychologies cannot be easily assimilated to a general (i.e., Western, modern, and scientific) psychological theory. Good introductions to this field can be found in Heelas and Lock, eds., Indigenous Psychologies (), and Schwartz, White, and Lutz, eds., New Directions in Psychological Anthropology (). A significant aspect of this research focuses on the cultural variability of the emotions: see, e.g., Lutz and Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion; Lutz, Unnatural Emotion; Pfister and Schnog, eds., Inventing the Psychological; and Harré, ed., Social Construction of Emotions. For a recent survey and critique of “constructionist” approaches to the history and ethnography of emotional life, consult Reddy, “Against Constructionism.” Charles Taylor contributes a philosophical history of forms of interiority and subjectivity from antiquity to modernity in Sources of the Self. . For a very different treatment of how psychoanalysis relates to education— understood in a general and psychological sense as a primal “Scene of Instruction”—and the writing of poetry, see Bloom, Poetry and Repression.  :   An earlier version of chapter  appeared in Cultural Critique  (Winter ), published by the Oxford University Press. . Martin Freud, Sigmund Freud, Man and Father, . . See Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” ‒, . . Bourdieu, “Systems of Education and Systems of Thought,” . . The psychoanalytic concept of ambivalence is more specific than a general notion of “mixed feelings.” According to Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, am-

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bivalence refers most generally to “specific conflicts in which the positive and negative components of the emotional attitude are simultaneously in evidence and inseparable, and where they constitute a non-dialectical opposition which the subject, saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the same time, is incapable of transcending” (Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, ). Freud first introduces this concept in his account of the coexistence of negative and affectionate transference in “The Dynamics of the Transference” (), in SE, : ‒. . Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation, , points out that Freud’s account of ambivalence in Totem and Taboo defines individual and mass psychology in their relation to institutions. . Green, Tragic Effect, . On the theatrical elements of analysis, see also Lacoue-Labarthe, “Theatrum Analyticum.” . Freud first revealed his insight to Fliess in a letter of October ,  (Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, ‒). . Vernant, “Oedipus Without the Complex,” in id. and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, . Terrence Cave has also noted the “paralogistic” workings of Freud’s account of tragic recognition (Recognitions, ‒, ). Bennett Simon’s treatment of the relation between the Aristotelian and psychoanalytic conceptions of recognition shows the same circularity as Freud’s: “Although Aristotle does not enunciate this proposition [that tragic recognitions are a form of self-recognition] in either the Poetics or any other of his works, it can be shown to be compatible with his beliefs. As we shall see, a psychoanalytic interpretation of Aristotle makes this assumption explicit” (“Recognition in Greek Tragedy,” ). . Mitchell-Boyask, “Freud’s Reading,” . Mitchell-Boyask combs Freud’s library and provides a compelling account of the significance for the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams of his readings of works by three such scholars: Jacob Burkhardt, Leopold Constans, and Ludwig Laistner (‒). . Freud, Traumdeutung, . Cynthia Chase has called for changes in the Standard Edition translation that I have reflected in the passage by omitting the extraneous phrase “something which makes” before “a voice within us” (Chase, “Oedipal Textuality,” ‒ ). . Aristotle, Poetics, a ‒. I rely on the translation of Halliwell, “Poetics” of Aristotle, ; all further references will appear in the text, first to the line number of the Greek, and then to the page number of the Halliwell translation. . In thinking about theatrical structures in Freud’s texts, I have benefited from David Marshall’s understanding of narrative theatricality; see his Figure of the Theater, and Surprising Effects of Sympathy. . Freud, ID, ‒; Traumdeutung, . I have substituted David Grene’s translation of Oedipus Tyrannus, ll.  ff. (Sophocles I [],  ) for the translation in the Strachey edition. . In An Autobiographical Study (), Freud outlines more explicitly this set of translations from Sophocles’ drama to the psyche: “Fate and the oracle were no



Notes to Chapter 

more than materializations of an internal necessity; and the fact of the hero’s sinning without his knowledge and against his intentions was evidently a right expression of the unconscious nature of his criminal tendencies” (AS, ). . Freud, Traumdeutung, . . Freud, HPM, ; “Zur Geschichte der psychoanalytichen Bewegung,” . This lecture on “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (in SE, : ‒), took place in May  and outlined Freud’s “seduction theory” of hysteria. Freud describes the audience’s “icy reception” in a letter to Fliess dated April , ; in his next (extant) letter, Freud complains that “word was given out to abandon me, for a void is forming all around me” (Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, ‒). Freud refers to the presence as chair of the meeting of Richard von KrafftEbing, the eminent Austrian forensic psychiatrist and author of the influential Psychopathia Sexualis ( ), which inaugurated the modern medical study of sexual pathology. With Krafft-Ebing presiding, the professional stakes of this lecture must have been particularly high for Freud. . Freud, Traumdeutung, . . For a fascinating reading of the repercussions for psychoanalysis of antisemitic, racial medical theories of Jewish sexuality and character, particularly as implied in the figure of the lame Oedipus, see Gilman, Case of Sigmund Freud. . Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, ‒; Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, ‒. For a collection of reviews of Freud’s works by his contemporaries, see Kiell, ed., Freud Without Hindsight. The British response to psychoanalysis is surveyed in Rapp, “Reception of Freud by the British Press,” and extensive documentation of the response in the United States is provided in Hale, Freud and the Americans and Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States. . Several critics and historians have argued persuasively for the crucial role of professional ambitions and contemporary political concerns in Freud’s accounts of his dreams. See Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis, ‒; Schorske, “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,” in id., Fin-de-siècle Vienna, ‒; and Welsh, Freud’s Wishful Dream Book. . Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition, . . For the status of ancient “biographies” and the biography of Sophocles, see Lefkowitz, Lives of the Greek Poets. . Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, : , quoted in Behler, “A. W. Schlegel,” . Clearly, this ideal of poetic unity owes a great deal to earlier European classicizing elaborations of Aristotle’s Poetics. . Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, : , , , quoted in Behler, “A. W. Schlegel,” . . See Behler, “A. W. Schlegel,” ‒. . A. W. Schlegel, Course of Lectures, . . Ibid., ‒.

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. Peter Szondi has shown that Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel all overwhelmingly admired and made use of Sophoclean tragedy in their poetic and philosophical projects; Schelling focused on Oedipus Tyrannus, Hölderlin on Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone, and Hegel on Antigone (Szondi, “The Notion of the Tragic in Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel,” in id., On Textual Understanding, ‒ ). For a classic discussion of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German preoccupation with classical Greek culture, see E. M. Butler, Tyranny of Greece over Germany. A recent cultural history of German archeology and philhellenism is Marchand, Down from Olympus, which analyzes the institutionalization of the philhellenist aesthetic of Winckelmann, Lessing, Wolf, and Humboldt in the German education system, academic archaeology, and state museums (‒). . Peter L. Rudnytsky has constructed a literary and philosophical genesis of the “Oedipal” from Sophocles, through German philosophy, to Freud in Freud and Oedipus. His assumption that the Oedipus complex is transhistorical and universal forms the basis of his argument for the psychological equivalence of the events experienced by the characters in Sophoclean drama and events in Freud’s life. . Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition, . Michelini’s characterization addresses the critical tradition on Sophoclean drama and is not meant to endorse such an understanding as the only correct one. For a reading of Sophoclean drama that places its emphasis on the way the plays address evolving notions of human agency specific to fifth-century Athens, see the essays by Jean-Pierre Vernant on Sophocles’s Ajax and Oedipus Tyrannus in id. and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, ‒, ‒. . Der grosse Brockhaus, th ed. (‒), quoted in Ringer, Fields of Knowledge, ‒. A useful survey of the theme of Bildung in German culture and literature is Bruford, German Tradition of Self-Cultivation. . Dumont, German Ideology, . . Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion, ‒. . Albisetti, Secondary School Reform, ‒. . See Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, . . Sterba, “Humanistic Wellsprings of Psychoanalysis,” ‒; Sterba reprints Freud’s curriculum in the classics (the record for  is missing). William J. McGrath also discusses Freud’s Gymnasium career in Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis, , . See also Knoepfmacher, “Sigmund Freud in High School,” and Trosman, “Freud’s Cultural Background.” . Letters of Sigmund Freud  ‒, ‒. The passage Freud translated was ll. ‒, where the Priest begs Oedipus to save Thebes from the plague (MitchellBoyask, “Freud’s Reading,” ). . Freud reports his high marks in a letter to his friend Eduard Silberstein dated July ,  (Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, ‒). . Letters of Sigmund Freud  ‒, . . Zweig, World of Yesterday, ‒.

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Notes to Chapter 

. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform, ‒, . . La Vopa, “Specialists Against Specialization,” ‒. . Ibid., . . Ibid., . On the development of academic research in the German universities based on the model of philological study, see also Turner, “Growth of Professorial Research.” Sander Gilman provides an additional explanation for Freud’s Hellenism. He argues that Freud chose Greek words and Greek versions of classical myths in his formulations of psychoanalysis both as a way to distance his work from the latinate vocabulary of the widely antisemitic medical and psychiatric professions and to associate psychoanalysis with nineteenth-century revolutionary Greece and with the “unabashed masculinity” believed characteristic of classical Greece—so that in Freud’s theory the effeminized, “castrated” Jew of racist medical science “vanishes completely” (Gilman, Case of Sigmund Freud, ‒). . John Forrester has also examined the philological aspects of psychoanalysis in terms not so much of its institutional affiliations as of its understanding of language and interpretation (Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis, ‒). . Ringer, Fields of Knowledge, ‒. . Ibid., . . Ibid., , quoting Georg Simmel, “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur,” ; emphasis added. . On thought styles and thought communities, see Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. . Louis Dumont analyzes how, during the period from  to , ideas of aesthetic totality in the work of German philosophers such as Karl Philipp Moritz were adapted into the full-fledged cultural ideology of Bildung, which posited both an individual self-cultivation ideally producing a subjective totality, as well as the cultural totality and identity of the German nation (German Ideology, ‒). . Ringer, Fields of Knowledge, ‒. . Freud’s younger sister, Anna Freud Bernays, writes of his early education that, unlike other boys, her brother never attended a primary school. Instead, his father “taught him privately until he entered high school” (“My Brother, Sigmund Freud,” ). Thus the Gymnasium was Freud’s first experience of public schooling away from home. . Freud, DM, ‒; “Brief an Romain Rolland,” . Curiously, Heidegger—also an alumnus of the Gymnasium—seems to have had rather similar difficulties visiting Greece. He twice cancelled plans to do so when tickets had already been bought, and when he finally did go (in ), he was assailed by doubts as to “whether what is attributed to the land of the fled gods is not perhaps something imagined and might prove one’s thinking to have been a wrong road” (Aufenthalte [Frankfurt a./M., ], , quoted in Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger, ). One wonders whether Freud was similarly afraid of the reality of modern Greece somehow undermining his confidence in his theories. Safranski

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suggests too that Heidegger’s Being and Time () and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents articulated the same “general crisis mood of the s” (ibid., ‒ ). I am grateful to Peter Dreyer for supplying me with this reference. Freud’s and Heidegger’s responses were also typical of German Hellenism. Vassilis Lambropoulos has shown that the kind of “derealization” that Freud experienced involuntarily was a deliberate choice on the part of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Romantics and philosophers, in contrast to their counterparts in England, France, and America: “[The Germans] turned to the Hellenic ideal with such exultation that they refused to taint it with any experience. Winckelmann, Schiller, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Nietzsche never visited Greece, while Lord Charlemont, Robert Wood, Byron, James Flecker, and John Symonds, like Gérard de Nerval, Alphonse de Lamartine, Théophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Le Corbusier from France, and Americans from Herman Melville to James Merrill did.” Lambropoulos points out that Goethe and Humboldt also never set foot in Greece, they, like the others, evincing a “shying away from direct contact with Hellenic reality which had been idealised and mythicised to the point of refusing to visit the place” (Rise of Eurocentrism, ). . Beller, Vienna and the Jews, ‒. . Robert S. Wistrich also stresses that “German culture and German schools were clearly the gateways to economic advancement and rising social status” for Jews under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy ( Jews of Vienna, ‒). George L. Mosse states that Bildung for many Central European Jews became “synonymous with their Jewishness,” as well as a means to assimilation (German Jews, ‒), while Carl E. Schorske suggests that the classical cultures of Greece and Rome provided “a religiously neutral gound” for a cultural assimilation that would not imply a betrayal of Jewish values (Thinking with History, ). For an extended treatment of the cultural and political aspirations of the early Viennese Jewish psychoanalysts, consult D. B. Klein, Jewish Origins; Oxaal, “Jewish Origins of Psychoanalysis Reconsidered”; and Shorter, “Two Medical Worlds.” . Beller, Vienna and the Jews, ‒. . Ivar Oxaal offers an account of the cultural and familial contexts of achievement among educated Viennese Jews: It is argued that Jewish religious and secular values, reinforced by a family centered system of instilling ambition, intellectual discipline and solidarity, shaped the character of Sigmund Freud, and that of thousands of other members of the Viennese middle class. . . . Achievement-motivation was a precondition of creative accomplishment and upward social mobility, and the two were often inextricably linked, as the case of Freud perhaps illustrates. Even well-born Jews could only gain recognition and prestige within artistic and intellectual milieus though originality and productivity. [Oxaal, “Jewish Origins of Psychoanalysis Reconsidered,” ]

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Notes to Chapter 

. I discuss Freud’s definition of the cultural value of professional work in Chapter . . A seminal account of the political contexts and symbolism of the fatherson relationship in mid nineteenth-century Vienna is Schorske, “Politics and Patricide.” For two speculative accounts of the significance for psychoanalysis of Freud’s relationship with his father, see Krüll, Freud and His Father, and Balmary, Psychoanalyzing Psychoanalysis. . On habitus, see Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, ‒. . In another but related context, Ian Hunter has pointed to such universalizations as typical of implications tied to the nineteenth-century notion of aesthetic cultivation: the scholar “mistakes his own cultivation for a more general ‘cultural process’” (Hunter, Culture and Government, ). . I analyze Freud’s “tragic” theories of gender and cultural history in greater detail in Chapter . . For a related observation about the function of tragedy in psychoanalysis, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, . . I would not question or deemphasize the importance of the bourgeois family structure, in its various versions and cultural contexts, as a crucial historical and institutional matrix for the Freudian Oedipus, but I do want to draw attention to the Gymnasium as another indispensable historical and social source for Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex. For research that seeks to historicize the Oedipus complex through a study of the history of the family, sexuality, and personal life, see Coward, Patriarchal Precedents, ‒; Demos, “Oedipus and America”; Donzelot, Policing of Families; Foucault, History of Sexuality, : ‒; Mitterauer and Sieder, European Family, esp. chap. ; Poster, Critical Theory of the Family, ‒; and Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life. Dominick LaCapra has offered another, more psychoanalytic and psychological, explanation of the particularity of the Oedipus complex by calling it “a culturally and historically specific variant of transferential relations” (“On the Line,” ). . While most Americans have not studied a Gymnasium-style classical curriculum, undergraduate (particularly liberal arts) and graduate educations still constitute a pre-professional training in a middle-class culture of professionalism. For a history of the specific relation of “academic track” secondary schooling and university education to professionalism in the United States, see Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism; Kimball, “True Professional Ideal” in America, ‒; and Derber, Schwartz and Magrass, Power in the Highest Degree, ‒. . See Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, and Haskell, “Professionalism Versus Capitalism,” . . Guillory, Cultural Capital, ‒. . Bourdieu, “Systems of Education and Systems of Thought,” . . For a history of how “psychological depth” comes to function as a distinc-

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tive form of “subjective potency” for the U.S. professional-managerial class, consult Pfister, “Glamorizing the Psychological,” and id., Staging Depth, ‒. . Guillory, Cultural Capital, .  :   “” . Freud, Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, . . Freud, ID, ; Traumdeutung, . In this same paragraph, Freud also calls Oedipus Tyrannus a “Trauerspiel,” which has different connotations from “Schicksalstragödie.” Yet this passage and the discussion of Sophocles’ play that follows specifically criticize the conventions of the “tragedy of destiny,” as if Freud does not distinguish between the two types of play. For an illuminating discussion of Die Traumdeutung as “Trauerspiel,” see Reinhard and Lupton, “Shapes of Grief.” Although Hamlet was another key text in the construction of the theory of the Oedipus complex, I do not consider Shakespearean tragedy in this chapter, because I wish to focus on how Freud’s tragic paradigms depend on the definitions of tragic conventions and “morality” that he elaborates in his various discussions of Greek tragedy, which served as the generic model for his theories of history and culture. . Freud, “A Short Account of Psychoanalysis” (), in SE, : . Freud refers here to Otto Rank’s work on mythology and folklore. . The reference here is to Heine’s “Die Heimkehr”: “Mit seinen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen / Stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbas.” . Freud, Traumdeutung, . . Freud, “A Short Account of Psycho-analysis” (), in SE, : . For a discussion of the increasing claims Freud made for the psychoanalytic approach to art and literature, see Kofman, L’enfance de l’art, ‒. Suzanne Gearheart offers an analysis of the relations among psychoanalysis, philosophy, and tragic drama in Interrupted Dialectic. . See, in particular, Chase, “Oedipal Textuality.” Shoshana Felman has also examined Jacques Lacan’s readings of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays in Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight. I discuss Felman’s readings of psychoanalysis and the Oedipus plays in Chapter . . Salomon Reinach, Cultes, mythes et religions, ; my translations. The etymology is from the Etymologicum Magnum .. For a refutation of this etymology (“trago¯idia = trago¯n o¯idê, ‘song of goats’”), see Else, Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, ‒. According to H. G. Liddell, Robert Scott et al., A GreekEnglish Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), the word trago¯idia is explained by the (d century ...?) Marmor Parium  as “goat-song” because a goat was the prize; moreover, the Oxford Classical Dictionary, d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, ), s.v. “tragedy,” points out that goat costume would have been “inappropriate to the mainly equine satyrs of Attica.” My thanks to Peter Dreyer for alerting me to these etymologies.

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Notes to Chapter 

. Reinach, Cultes, mythes et religions, ; TT, . . Aristotle, Poetics a. . Welcker, Nachtrag zu der Schrift über die Aeschylische Trilogie, . On Welcker’s career, see Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, : ‒, and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship, ‒. For Wilamowitz’s account of the origins of tragedy, see esp. id., Euripides Herakles I and Einleitung in die griechische Tragödie,  ff. I have relied upon the detailed history of the “goatsong” theory in Burkert, “Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual.” . On Wilamowitz’s career and influence, see Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s introduction to Wilamowitz’s History of Classical Scholarship, i‒xxxii. For an account of his attack on Nietzsche, see Silk and Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, ‒. . For differing theories of the ritual and sacrificial origins of tragedy, consult Burkert, “Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual”; Girard, Violence and the Sacred; Gould, Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy; and Winkler, “Ephebes’ Song.” . Burkert, “Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual,” . . See Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual. At the turn of the century, several well-known theories focused on the practice of ritual murder and sacrifice in ancient cultures and in contemporary “primitive” cultures. The framing narrative of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough () attempted to reconstruct the ritual murder of the priest of Diana at the grove of Nemi, near Rome. Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, F. M. Cornford, and A. B. Cook made up a group that came to be known as the Cambridge ritualists. They were active from  to , when Harrison left Cambridge. Murray’s theory of the origin of tragedy in sacrificial ritual became highly influential among Anglo-American literary modernists. He posited the death and rebirth of the “spring-daemon” as the origin of tragic drama. Freud’s bibliography in Totem and Taboo cites the third edition of The Golden Bough (London, ‒). Murray’s “Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy” appears in Harrison, Themis, ‒. . I analyze Freud’s disciplinary competition with anthropology, sociology, and academic psychology in Chapters  and . . Gustave Le Bon, whose influential work Psychologie des Foules () Freud sets up as the starting point for his own work on masses, certainly aimed at categorizing crowds in order to provide methods to control them. . In a return to J. J. Atkinson’s version of the primal parricide, which he cites in the bibliography of Totem and Taboo, Freud suggests that the youngest son, the mother’s favorite, was most likely to have become the epic poet and to have separated himself from the group (GP, ). Atkinson makes the youngest son the first to put an end to the repetitive system of murdering the father and replacing him; the mother persuades the father to allow this one son to remain as a subordinate within the family, and a truce thus develops between the generations (Atkinson, Primal Law, ‒).

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. For an account of how Oedipus convicts himself by failing to take advantage of this alibi, see Goodhart, “Oedipus and Laius’s Many Murderers.” . Freud first discusses the concept of Nachträglichkeit in the Project for a Scientific Psychology (), in SE, : ‒. . Moses and Monotheism (), perhaps Freud’s most dramatic (and potentially “traumatic” for some of his Jewish readers) example of psychoanalytic history, interprets the biblical story of Moses as that of an Egyptian murdered by the Jews (in SE, : ‒). On the reaction to this text, see Gay, “The Question of Jewish Science: ‘A Title of Honor,’” in id., A Godless Jew, ‒. For an in-depth treatment of Freud’s Judaism in relation to Moses and Monotheism, see Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses. . According to Norbert Elias, the term Kultur in German has different connotations from both the German word Zivilisation and the English “civilization”: The French and English concept of civilization can refer to political or economic, religious or technical, moral or social facts. The German concept of Kultur refers essentially to intellectual, artistic, and religious facts, and has a tendency to draw a sharp dividing line between facts of this sort, on the one side, and political, economic, and social facts, on the other. . . . The German concept of Kultur places special stress on national differences and the particular identity of groups; primarily by virtue of this, it has acquired in such fields as ethnological and anthropological research a significance far beyond the German linguistic area and the situation in which the concept originated. [Elias, Civilizing Process, ‒] Elias describes this usage as arising among eighteenth-century German bourgeois intellectuals (ibid., ‒). If Freud’s use of the term draws both on this German usage and on evolutionary anthropological theories originating in England and France, then he may be defining a larger notion of Kultur in which the particularities of different national and cultural identities are transcended in order to devise a general psychological history of the development of human civilization. . Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis point out that in The Ego and the Id (), the “ego ideal” and “superego” appear as synonymous, whereas in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (‒), the ego ideal is described as one of the functions of the superego (Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, ‒). . This is the title of chapter  of The Ego and the Id. . One can also read this passage as alluding to a fear of homosexuality, although Freud does not make this point explicit. Freud also adopts and redefines here one of Alfred Adler’s key concepts, “masculine protest.” . Two recent surveys of the relation between psychoanalysis and feminism are Kurzweil, Freudians and Feminists, and Young-Bruehl and Wexler, “On ‘Psychoanalysis and Feminism.’” On the early female analysts, see Appignanesi and

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Forrester, Freud’s Women. Feminist criticism of psychoanalysis is rich and diverse; it would be impossible for me either to cite all the important contributions to this field or to do justice to the controversies over whether feminism should rely on and revise psychoanalytic theory or reject it. A selective introduction to influential and more recent criticism on psychoanalysis from the perspectives of feminist theory, film theory, and gay and lesbian studies, might include Bernheimer and Kahane, eds., In Dora’s Case; Brenkman, Straight, Male, Modern; Brennan, Interpretation of the Flesh; Bronfen, “The Lady Vanishes,” in id., Over Her Dead Body, ‒; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble; id., Bodies That Matter; Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering; Coward, Patriarchal Precedents; Dinnerstein, Mermaid and the Minotaur; Flax, Thinking Fragments; Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis; Grosz, Jacques Lacan; Irigaray, Speculum de l’autre femme; Jardine, Gynesis; Koestenbaum, “Privileging the Anus”; Kofman, L’énigme de la femme; id., Pourquoi rit-on?; Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism; Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision; and Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins. . In criticizing Freud’s version of biological determinism here, I do not mean to imply the exclusion of biological factors in general from the aetiology of mental illness. For a recent debate on the problem of biology and “constructivist” theories of subjectivity, see Ehrenreich and McIntosh, “New Creationism,” and the responses to them in “Exchange,” Nation, Aug. ‒Sept. , , , ‒. . Freud, “Femininity” (), in SE, : . . Ibid., ‒. . Freud, “Medusa’s Head” (), in SE, : ‒. . For another example of Freud’s elaboration of femininity as fate and death, see the essay on “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (), in SE, : ‒.  :     . Vernant, “Oedipus Without the Complex,” in id. and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, ‒. . Ibid., ‒. The particular object of Vernant’s critique in this article is the work of Didier Anzieu, who attempts to argue both that Oedipus himself had an Oedipus complex—that he unconsciously desired to commit the acts of incest and parricide—and that all of Greek mythology is basically about incest (title not cited, Les Temps Modernes  (Oct.  ): ‒). Jacques Lacan also makes a similar claim about Greek mythology, saying: “It is not an accident that Oedipus should be the patronymic hero of the Oedipus complex. One could have chosen another, since almost all the heroes of Greek mythology have some relation with this myth; they incarnate it with different faces, and by showing other aspects of it” (“Qu’Oedipe soit le héros patronyme du complexe d’Oedipe n’est pas un hasard. On aurait pu en choisir un autre, puisque tous les héros de la mythologie grecque ont quelque rapport avec ce mythe, ils l’incarnent sous d’autres faces, en

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montrant d’autres aspects” [S, ‒; translations are my own unless otherwise noted]). Lacan seems to disavow the importance of Oedipus in a paradoxical manner by asserting that the necessity involved in his association with psychoanalysis lies in the general representativeness of that myth in relation to all of Greek mythology rather than being tied to what Oedipus in particular might signify. . “The finest recognition occurs in direct conjunction with reversal—as with the one in the Oedipus,” Aristotle says (Poetics a ‒); Halliwell, “Poetics” of Aristotle, . . Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of the Oedipus Rex,” in id. and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, . . “The Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece: Some of the Social and Psychological Conditions,” in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, ; see also Vernant’s “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” in ibid., ‒. . Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal,” . . ID, , quotes Oedipus Tyrannus ll. ‒, which David Grene translates thus: “Before this, in dreams too, as well as oracles, / many a man has lain with his own mother. / But he to whom such things are nothing bears / his life most easily” (Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Grene, in Sophocles I [], ). . Herodotus, Persian Wars, trans. Rawlinson, . . Vernant, “Oedipus Without the Complex,” , . Martha Nussbaum has also offered compelling evidence for the difference between ancient and psychoanalytic interpretations of dreams about sex. She argues that ancient dream interpreters understood sex as symbolic not of sex itself but of command or loss of command over “external goods” like marriage, children, social standing, and reputation (Nussbaum, “Oedipus Rex and the Ancient Unconscious,” ‒). . A collection of major essays on Oedipus by psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic critics from the early part of the century to the present demonstrates their overwhelming interest in confirming and elaborating psychoanalytic theories with further evidence from other dramatic and mythic sources. The various authors footnote other psychoanalytic readings of the plays almost exclusively; see Pollock and Ross, eds., Oedipus Papers. Recent psychoanalytic readers of Greek tragedy who do rely on classical scholarship are André Green, Peter Rudnytsky, and Bennett Simon, but they too share an interest in promoting the universality of psychoanalysis; see Green, Tragic Effect; Rudnytsky, Freud and Oedipus; Simon, Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece; and id., Tragic Drama and the Family. C. Fred Alford offers a nuanced psychoanalytic reading of Greek tragedy that practices an “eclecticism” in its use of psychoanalytic theory and proposes to allow the plays themselves to contribute to the construction of “better psychoanalytic categories.” In order to disarm Vernant’s critique of Freud, he characterizes Vernant’s approach as a naive and ridiculous effort to “take the texts as they truly are” without imposing any kind of preconceived ideas. But Alford describes his own book as an attempt to be “as true to the intent of the Greek poets as a psychoanalytic approach

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can be.” Vernant, however, is not an “optimist,” as Alford would have it, in working to reconstruct what tragedy might have meant to the fifth-century Athenians, but a historian—Alford’s project cannot share Vernant’s historicist priorities because his goal is to supply a further elaboration of the universal “truths of psychoanalysis,” based once again on their affinity with Greek tragedy (Psychoanalytic Theory of Greek Tragedy, , ‒, , , ). For recent psychoanalytic readings of Sophocles by a classicist, see Segal, “Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus: Freud, Language, and the Unconscious,” in Freud and Forbidden Knowledge, ‒, and id., Sophocles’ Tragic World. . Although I assess the Lacanian Oedipus through Felman’s exegesis, it is important to note that her appropriation of tragic discourse allows her to assemble many disparate quotations from Lacan’s lectures in order to make a sustained argument about the Lacanian Oedipus in a way that Lacan himself did not. Nevertheless, Felman’s insight as a reader of Lacan’s text is exemplary. In addition to Felman’s work on Lacan, a helpful source on Lacanian terminology is Lemaire, Jacques Lacan. . Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego,” in Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Mitchell, . For an account of the development and history of Klein’s theories and their reception, see the excellent biography by Grosskurth, Melanie Klein. . Melanie Klein explains this disability as owing both to lack of affection from his parents and to his incapacity to deal with the anxiety provoked by a premature genital phase and his identification with the objects of the fantasies accompanying his genital sadism (Klein, “Importance of Symbol Formation,” ‒). . Ibid. . Ibid., . . Lacan’s discussion of this case is included in S, ‒, ‒. . AI, . Felman is reading Lacan’s observation: “She [Klein] screws little Dick in the most brutal way with the symbolism! She begins immediately by slapping onto him the major interpretations. She slaps him with a brutal verbalization of the Oedipal myth that is almost as revolting for us as for any other reader—You are the little train, you want to fuck your mother! ” (“Elle lui fout le symbolisme avec la dernière brutalité, au petit Dick! Elle commence tout de suite par lui flanquer les interprétations majeures. Elle le flanque dans une verbalisation brutale du mythe oedipien, presque aussi révoltante pour nous que pour n’importe quel lecteur—Tu es le petit train, tu veux foutre ta mère” [S, ]). . For an incisive critique of the Lacanian theory of the phallus and its symbolic relation to “having” or “lacking” the penis, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, ‒. . Klein, “Importance of Symbol Formation,” . . “This text is precious because a clinician and woman of experience has written it. She feels things, she expresses them badly, one cannot reproach her for

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it” (“Ce texte est précieux parce qu’il est d’une thérapeute, d’une femme d’expérience. Elle sent les choses, elle les exprime mal, on ne peut le lui reprocher” [S, ]). . In his study of the contexts of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its theories of gender, David Macey also criticizes Lacan’s suggestion that Klein’s Oedipal interpretation was “unconscious”: “No psychoanalyst can spin tales involving trains and stations with impunity. There is nothing unexpected about the meaning precipitated here.” Macey also points out that in the case study of Dora, Freud interprets the word “station” as referring to the female genitals (Lacan in Contexts, ). . It would be intriguing to consider the difference a female analyst might provoke in this general analytic scenario: even though Klein does not discuss issues of the transference in this case study, she might not have theorized the mother only as object, but also, because of her own position, as feminine parental authority figure. Felman does not address the issue of the gender of the analyst in this examination of Lacan and Oedipus. For her work that focuses explicitly on questions of gender in literature and psychoanalysis, see Felman, What Does a Woman Want? . Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, . David Macey argues that Lacan uses structuralist linguistics merely as a metaphor to theorize the unconscious: “No true theory of language emerges from Lacan’s prolonged meditations and explorations” (Macey, Lacan in Contexts, ). . As Bourdieu points out, “although it is legitimate to treat social relations— even relations of domination—as symbolic interactions, that is, as relations of communication implying cognition and recognition, one must not forget that the relations of communication par excellence —linguistic exchanges—are also relations of symbolic power in which the power relations between speakers of their respective groups are actualized” (Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ). . “Psychoanalysis at Colonus” is also Felman’s subtitle (AI, ). . S, . This is Felman’s translation (AI, ) of Lacan; the quotation from the play (l. ) is also in French in his text. . Felman cites ll. ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, and ‒ in English translation. These are all excerpts from speeches having to do with Oedipus telling the story of his life, and the final speech is that of a messenger recounting how Oedipus’s death came about. . I rely for dating and production information on Edmunds, Theatrical Space, ‒. . I quote (indicating line number) from the corrected version of the Oxford Classical Text of the plays of Sophocles, edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Nigel Wilson (), included in Sophocles II: Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus. I have also consulted Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, Part II. The Oedipus Coloneus, ed. Jebb. Pierre Vidal-Naquet disputes the interpretation of Theseus’s acceptance of Oedipus (‒) as granting him the status of citizen (“Oedipus Between Two Cities,” ‒). . Froma I. Zeitlin characterizes the role that Thebes and its inhabitants play

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in Attic drama in general as that of an antithesis, in every way, to Athens (“Thebes,” ‒). . R. C. Jebb points out that the “Tyrannus” in Oedipus Tyrannus was certainly added later. Since the name of Sophocles’ first play about Oedipus must have been simply Oidipous, “the second play required a distinguishing epithet, and the words ‘epi Kolo¯noi ’ must be ascribed to the poet himself ” (Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, ed. Jebb, ix). . Oedipus Coloneus, ed. Jebb, xxvi‒xxxiii. T. G. Rosenmeyer argues that the grove of the Eumenides at Colonus is a fictional creation of Sophocles’ (Rosenmeyer, “Wrath of Oedipus,” ). Lowell Edmunds provides extensive analysis of Attic traditions that connect Oedipus with Colonus and the Eumenides/Erinyes, and comments on where Sophocles seems to be innovating or adding emphasis (Edmunds, Theatrical Place, ‒, ‒). He notes that Oedipus at Colonus is the first extant text to identify a sacred grove of the Eumenides at Colonus (ibid., ). . See Winnington-Ingram, “Religious Function,” ‒. . I have found the following books and articles helpful in preparing this chapter: Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy; Burian, “Suppliant and Savior: Oedipus at Colonus”; Easterling, “Character in Sophocles”; Edmunds, “Cults and Legends of Oedipus,” Theatrical Place; Knox, Heroic Temper; Reinhardt, Sophocles; Segal, Tragedy and Civilization; Shields, “Sight and Blindness Imagery in the Oedipus Coloneus”; Whitman, Sophocles; and Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles. Edmunds argues that with Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles attempted both to valorize the deme of Colonus and to defend Athenian democracy (Edmunds, Theatrical Place, , ). . I rely on the translation of Oedipus at Colonus by David Grene, in Sophocles I (). All further references to this translation are by line number in the text, cited as “Grene.” Oedipus at Colonus, in Sophocles I, trans. Robert Fitzgerald () is similarly cited as “Fitzgerald.” . See Oedipus Tyrannus (the Loeb Classical Library’s Sophocles I: Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones), l. , and Oedipus at Colonus, l. . . In formulating the following argument about the meaning of coexistence with Oedipus in the play, I have benefited greatly from Sheila Murnaghan’s analysis of Oedipus’s tragic embodiment in “Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy.” . Slatkin, “Oedipus at Colonus,” . . Zeitlin, “Thebes,” . Zeitlin also points out that Oedipus provides the only example of a life that has undergone, in the course of the two plays by Sophocles, the full cycle of the Aristotelian schema of tragic peripeteia: in the Oedipus Tyrannus, he falls from great power to abject defilement, and in the Oedipus at Colonus, he reverses that pattern to rise from old age and exile to the status of cult hero (Zeitlin, “Thebes,” ). . Lacan’s interpretation of the play (S, , ‒), which Felman ana-

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lyzes, does not show much interest in its historical, poetic, or religious elements, but it does provide a summary of the plot and an interpretation of Oedipus’s relation to Athens and Thebes. However, Lacan “contextualizes” the quotation that interests him (l. ) in order to emphasize Oedipus’s function as embodying both the gift of speech and the death drive. . Murnaghan provides this definition in “Body and Voice,” . . Oedipus at Colonus ‒; Grene, ‒. P. E. Easterling discusses the vocabulary of supplication (thake¯ma) and rule (thronos kai ske¯ptron) in “Oedipus and Polyneices,” ‒. See also Zeitlin, “Thebes,” . . Murnaghan, “Body and Voice,” . . Edmunds, Theatrical Place, ‒, examines in detail the structures of filia and xenia and their interrelations in the play. . That Lacan knew Greek is evident from his reading of Antigone in his seminars on “the essence of tragedy,” where he cites such authorities on tragedy as Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Claude Lévi-Strauss (Séminaire, Livre VII, ‒). . Edmunds, Theatrical Place, ‒. . Edmunds argues that Oedipus is meant to refer to a law in Draco’s code that had recently been promulgated again in / B.C.E. after the restoration of the democracy. He cites the pertinent part: Even if someone kills someone without premeditation, he shall be exiled. The Basileis are to adjudge responsible for homicide either . . . or the one who instigated the killing. The Ephetai are to give the verdict. Pardon is to be granted, if there is a father or brother or sons, by all, or the one who opposes it shall prevail. And if these do not exist, pardon is to be granted by those as far as the degree of cousin’s son and cousin, if all are willing to grant it; the one who opposes it shall prevail. And if there is not even one of these alive, and the killer did it unintentionally, and the Fifty-One, the Ephetai, decide that he did it unintentionally, then let ten members of the phratry admit him to the country, if they are willing. [IG I2  (I3 ).‒, quoted in Stroud, Drakon’s Law,  ] “Unintentional homicide thus involves a pattern of exile and return,” and “Oedipus has fulfilled this pattern,” Edmunds concludes (Theatrical Place,  ). . Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, ‒. . Vernant, “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy,” in id. and VidalNaquet, Myth and Tragedy, ‒. . Walter Burkert defines daimo¯n as “occult power, a force that drives man forward where no agent can be named . . . Daimon is the veiled countenance of divine activity. . . . something like fate, but without any person who plans and ordains being visible” (Burkert, Greek Religion, ‒). . Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities,” in id. and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, .

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Notes to Chapter 

. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus ‒; Oedipus the King, trans. Grene, ‒. . Euripides, Hippolytus, in Euripidis Fabulae, vol. ; my translation. . Aristotle, Poetics .a ff.; Halliwell, “Poetics” of Aristotle, . . In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams contests attempts like Vernant’s to historicize Greek notions of agency, and criticizes what he sees as their implicit value judgment that ancient Greek formulations of the will were somehow “primitive” compared to modern ones. Williams relies on the assumption of a universal human psychology that is simply understood somewhat differently by the Greeks, however, while Vernant is involved in a project to understand psychology historically, and therefore to entertain the possibility that the Greeks’ psychological categories are not merely descriptive but were constitutive of their particular kind of subjectivity. Vernant’s sense of the “progress” in the Greek elaboration of agency is therefore a historical, rather than qualitative, assessment (Vernant, “Intimations of the Will,” in id. and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, ). Only a tendentious reading of Vernant’s scholarship could argue that he disparages early Greek psychology as somehow inferior to modern selfhood. For another historical study of Greek psychology as evidenced in tragic metaphors of the self, see also Padel, In and Out of the Mind. . Burkert, Greek Religion, ‒. On Oedipus at Colonus and the hero cult, see also Méautis, L’Oedipe à Colone. Edmunds discusses Sophocles’ own association with the hero cult of Asclepius, whose altar he received into his house while the Aesclepion was being constructed, and his own reputed elevation to the status of cult hero after his death (Theatrical Place, ‒ ). . Burkert, Greek Religion, , , . . R. P. Winnington-Ingram argues more generally that the heroes of Sophocles’ plays “are neither models of how human beings should behave nor models of how they should not behave. They are tragic figures who find themselves in tragic situations” (Sophocles, ). . See Murnaghan, “Body and Voice,” ‒. . Salient readings of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and of “death” in psychoanalysis are Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, ‒; Derrida, Post Card, ‒; Laplanche, Life and Death; and Samuel Weber, Legend of Freud, ‒. . Felman also suggests that this kind of curse against “sons” inheres in the psychoanalytic institution itself, and that Lacan identifies with Oedipus at Colonus because of his own “exile,” his “excommunication” from the International Psychoanalytic Association (AI, ). . Lacan, Écrits, ; quoted in AI, . . This is Fitzgerald’s translation of ll. ‒, in Sophocles I (), . . Oedipus Coloneus, ed. Jebb, . Fitzgerald’s more metaphorical translation also points toward divine sanction: “These things are in the hands of God” (). . John Jones, On Aristotle, .

Notes to Chapter 



. The correspondence of the language in the two plays is especially striking when one compares the opening speeches of Oedipus. Such parallels and contrasts suggest that Sophocles had the text of earlier play not only very much in mind but close at hand when he wrote Oedipus at Colonus. . Aristotle, Poetics .a ff.; Halliwell, “Poetics” of Aristotle, ‒. . Vernant, “The Reason of Myth,” in id., Myth and Society, . Dowden, Uses of Greek Mythology, ‒, provides a useful analysis of how the Greeks understood the relation between myth and history. . Lacan, Écrits, . . A footnote to the English translation specifies that the lecture originally took place on May , , in the Amphithéâtre Descartes of the Sorbonne, “and the discussion was continued afterwards over drinks” (Lacan, Écrits,  n). The importance of an academic venue and social milieu for the dissemination of psychoanalytic ideas is a major focus of the next section of the book.  :   ’   . Richard Sterba reports on his recollections, based on notes that he took surreptitiously, of several “special meetings” of a select group of members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that took place at Freud’s office at Berggasse  during the period from  to , after Freud’s oral prosthesis and general health allowed him once again to engage occasionally in group discussions of theoretical and clinical issues (Sterba, Reminiscences, ‒). . See Freud, “‘Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness” (), in SE, : ‒. . For histories of the psychoanalytic movement, see Brome, Freud and His Early Circle; Freud, On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement; Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time; Gelfand and Kerr, eds., Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis; Grosskurth, Secret Ring; Hale, Freud and the Americans; id., Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States; Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud; Kohon, ed., British School of Psychoanalysis, ‒; Kurzweil, Freudians; Meisel and Kendrick, eds., Bloomsbury/Freud, ‒; Roazen, Freud and His Followers; Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.; Roustang, Dire Mastery; Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics; and Wyss, Psychoanalytic Schools. For a reading focused exclusively on the specifically rhetorical strategies of persuasion that Freud employs in one particular case study, see Fish, “Withholding the Missing Portion.” On Freud as writer and on the role of rhetoric in his writings and demonstrations of psychoanalytic findings, see Mahoney, Freud as a Writer, and Spence, Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis. Consult Timpanaro, Freudian Slip, for a critique from the perspective of philology and textual criticism of Freud’s procedures of interpretation in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (). On psychoanalysis as a profession, see Kofman, Un métier impossible, and Malcolm, Psychoanalysis, the Impossible Profession.



Notes to Chapter 

. Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, . Chapter  addresses the ways in which Freud’s texts on culture are “unprofessional”—that is, how they seem to jeopardize the professional authority of psychoanalysis by going beyond what seems to be its legitimate purview. . Ringer, Fields of Knowledge, . . W. J. Reader comments on the “social glamour” of classical education in England throughout the nineteenth century and suggests that the concern for “social standing” among the middle and upper classes, from which professionals came, led them to continue to cultivate the public schools with their classical curriculum to the detriment of educational reform of secondary and higher education (Reader, Professional Men, , ‒). . Perkin, Rise of Professional Society, vii‒viii. . Ibid., xii‒xiii. . Kocka, “‘Bürgertum’ and Professions,” ‒, . . Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, . . Ibid., ‒. . La Vopa, “Specialists Against Specialization,” ‒. . Huerkamp, “Making of the Modern Medical Profession,” . On the government organization of professions in mid nineteenth-century Germany, see also McClelland, German Experience of Professionalization, ‒. . Larson, Rise of Professionalism; Abbott, System of Professions. . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, xvii, , ‒. . Perkin, Rise of Professional Society, . . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, xiii. . Perkin, Rise of Professional Society, . . La Vopa, “Specialists Against Specialization,” ‒. . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, ‒, . . Ibid., xviii, , ‒, . . Abbott, System of Professions, , ‒, . . Ibid., , , , , ‒. Larson’s account of professions is not incompatible with Abbott’s focus on interprofessional competition. She points out that professions are “particular groups of people [who] attempt to negotiate the boundaries of an area in the social division of labor and establish their own control over it” (Rise of Professionalism, xii). . On habitus, see Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, ‒. . On the history of the creation of the “personal problems” professional jurisdiction in America, see Abbott, System of Professions, ‒. Larson also uses the term “personal professions” to refer to professions that supply personal services, such as medicine, social work, psychotherapy, and law. . This chronology is gleaned from the following sources: Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time; Freud, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement ; Kohon, “Notes on the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement in Great Britain,” in

Notes to Chapter 



British School of Psychoanalysis, ed. id., ‒; Kurzweil, Freudians; Sterba, Reminiscences. George Weisz provides a useful overview of the history of the psychoanalytic movement that analyzes its quasi-religious “sectarian” aspects, such as the creation at the end of World War I of the “secret committee” (Freud, Ernest Jones, Otto Rank, Hanns Sachs, Karl Abraham, and Max Eitingon) to centralize the direction of the movement (Weisz, “Scientists and Sectarians,” ‒). For a history of the psychoanalytic publishing house in Vienna, see Hall, “Fate of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.” . For a history of Freud’s association with the University of Vienna, see Eissler, Sigmund Freud und die Wiener Universität. I address Freud’s strategies to define a specific psychoanalytic discipline and to gain academic recognition for psychoanalysis in greater detail in Chapter . . Freud, “On Psychotherapy,” in SE, : . . For examples of Freud’s statements of the necessity of experiencing an analysis in order to be convinced by psychoanalysis, see “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old-Boy (),” in SE, : ; Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (), in SE, : ‒; IL, ‒. . Sterba, Reminiscences, ; Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, . . Freud, “‘Wild’ Psychoanalysis,” in SE, : ‒. . Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis” (), in SE, : ‒. . As Eliot Freidson argues in his study of professional medicine, autonomy is the test of professional status, and one of the typical aspects of that autonomy is the profession’s capacity to police itself. Thus Freud’s caveats about the necessity of the training analysis also function as a “claim that the profession itself may be trusted to undertake the proper regulatory action on those rare occasions when an individual does not perform his work competently or ethically” (Freidson, Profession of Medicine, ). . Sulloway, “Reassessing Freud’s Case Histories,” . . Abbott, System of Professions, . . Freud’s position in favor of lay analysis gave rise to intense debate among analysts; many responses are included in International Journal of Psychoanalysis  (): ‒. . Gilman, “Struggle of Psychiatry with Psychoanalysis,” . . Freud, LA, ; Frage der Laienanalyse, . . See Samuel Weber on the fact that there is no real equivalent in the German-speaking tradition for the “humanities,” however, just as there is no true translation in the English-speaking educational tradition for Literaturwissenschaft (Weber, Institution and Interpretation, ). . Sterba describes the curriculum of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute as a combination of lectures, seminars on technique, work with analytic patients attached to the ambulatorium, and the training analysis (Reminiscences, ‒). Sán-



Notes to Chapter 

dor Radó recounts the history of psychoanalytic training and describes the founding of the Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and Research in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in  (Radó, “Graduate Residency Training in Psychoanalytic Medicine,” in id., Psychoanalysis of Behavior, : ‒). . Abbott, System of Professions, . . Sterba, Reminiscences, ‒. . Porter, “Body and the Mind,” ‒. Foucault elaborates the history of “the medical gaze” in Birth of the Clinic. For a sociological study of the medical profession, see also Freidson, Profession of Medicine. . In this late text, Freud seems to modify an earlier denial that the analyst acts as a mentor for the patient (IL, ‒). . Freud, letter, February , , in Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters, . . Forrester, “Contracting the Disease of Love,” ‒, , . For other examinations of the relation of psychoanalysis to hypnotism, see Borch-Jacobson, Freudian Subject, ‒, and Chertok and Stengers, Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason. . Freud’s siding with the “surgeons” against the “physicians” suggests a historical parallel: in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, middleclass surgeons and apothecaries were competing for professional recognition and prestige with upper-class and aristocratic physicians (Reader, Professional Men, ‒). . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, . . Abbott, System of Professions, . . On Freud’s career as a research biologist, see Amacher, Freud’s Neurological Education; Rosen, “Freud and Medicine in Vienna,” ‒; and Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, ‒. . For accounts of Freud’s early career in medicine, see Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, : ‒, ‒; Rosen, “Freud and Medicine”; and Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, ‒. An authoritative history of the University of Vienna Medical School is Lesky, Vienna Medical School of the Nineteenth Century. . AS, ‒. Gilman suggests that Freud’s choice of neurology as a medical specialty was also influenced by its relative openness, because of its lesser prestige in the hierarchy of medical specialties, to Jews (“Struggle of Psychiatry with Psychoanalysis,” ). See also Shorter, “Two Medical Worlds,” for a detailed analysis of the backgrounds of Jewish neurologists and psychiatrists, versus those of Jewish dermatologists. Shorter finds that overall, Jewish physicians were more numerous than non-Jews; he questions the notion that Freud and his followers were part of a marginalized social or professional group, and concludes that they “could not

Notes to Chapter 



have belonged more profoundly to the cultural and professional life of late thcentury Vienna” (‒). . Freud, “On Psychotherapy,” in SE, : ‒. . Freud, letter  F to Jung (June ), in Freud/Jung Letters, . I am grateful to Joel Pfister for bringing this passage to my attention (see Pfister, “Freud’s Cultural Theory and ‘Red Vienna,’” ). Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have also argued that psychoanalysis conceals the relation of its formulation of bourgeois desire to social and sexual symbolism surrounding working-class women and the city (Politics and Poetics of Transgression, ‒). For an account of workingclass sexuality in Vienna between the wars, see Gruber, Red Vienna, ‒. . Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, : ‒. . Ibid., . . Although Freud suggests the possibility of variations in psychology according to social and cultural situation in personal communications such as those to Martha and to Jung that I have cited, statements like the one in Totem and Taboo proposing the universality of the Oedipus complex work in a contrary and dominant direction in his writings to define a generalized depth psychology as the disciplinary and professional purview of psychoanalysis. For a discussion of the status of such statements as disciplinary claims, see Chapter . . Hale, Rise and Crisis, , , ‒, , , . Data in Gross, Psychological Society, ‒, on American psychoanalytic clients ca.  confirm Hale’s findings: they were typically “high-income,” “highly educated,” and “high-status.” . Abbott, System of Professions, ‒. Sterba reports that the psychoanalytic ambulatorium in Vienna was founded in part to make possible the treatment of patients who could not afford private consultations: “The Psychoanalytic Society had established a rule that every active member had the obligation to treat two patients for a minimal fee,” or they could “absolve themselves” of this duty by paying an amount that was used to employ some younger analysts as staff of the ambulatorium (Reminiscences, ). Sterba does not record what the social and economic backgrounds of the patients at the ambulatorium were, but he himself received a free analysis because his salary as a staff physician at a Viennese hospital just barely covered his living expenses; in return, however, he agreed after his training was completed to treat some future patients at the ambulatorium without a fee (). As Sterba’s case indicates, it would not have been a straightforward matter even for a well-educated, middle-class patient to afford analytic treatment. In his preface to Max Eitingon’s “Report on the Berlin Psycho-Analytical Polyclinic (March  to June )” (), Freud attests that one of the primary missions of the psychoanalytic polyclinic is to treat “the great multitude who are too poor themselves to repay an analyst for his laborious work” but then goes on to specify that among this group are many of “the intellectual strata of the population, which are especially prone to neurosis, [and] are sinking irresistibly into poverty” (in SE, : ).



Notes to Chapter 

Edith Kurtzweil suggests that the politically left-leaning Berlin analysts were committed to treating working-class patients at the polyclinic (Freudians,  ). . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, . . Ibid., . . John Forrester offers a particularly stringent critique of the monetary/emotional transaction of analysis: Psychoanalysis treats money as if it truly were the universal means of exchange, and patients do behave as if they can buy love. . . . Money is intended to dissolve any obligations other than those of a contract entered into and fulfilled—on both sides. Such is the [psychoanalytic] distillation of the liberal, laissez-faire ethos: a contract between free agents, honored and paid for, whose means of accomplishment is the free speech whereby one of the parties will contract the disease of love that the other will cure by treating the precious, seductive words offered to him as if they were simply the universal means of exchange. [Forrester, “Contracting the Disease of Love,” ‒] For another analysis of Freud’s understanding of psychoanalytic treatment in relation to social class, see Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, ‒. . See, e.g., Ernest Gellner, who also characterizes psychoanalysis as a “charismatic ideology” whose propositions preclude “occupancy of a middle ground” between skepticism and belief (Gellner, Psychoanalytic Movement, , , ). . See “Two Encyclopaedia Articles” written for Max Marcuse’s Handwörterbuch für Sexualwissenschaft (), in SE, : ‒; “A Short Account of Psychoanalysis” (), in SE, : ‒, published in  in English translation in the United States by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., as part of These Eventful Years: The Twentieth Century in the Making, as Told by Many of Its Makers; “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis” (), in SE, : ‒; “Psychoanalysis” ( ), in SE, : ‒, written for the Encyclopædia Britannica, th ed., the first to include an entry on psychoanalysis; and The Question of Lay Analysis ( ). . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, . . Abbott, System of Professions, . . See “On Psychotherapy,” in SE, : ‒. . Wilhelm Greisinger’s categorical statement that “mental disorders are diseases of the brain” epitomizes the somaticist approach in nineteenth-century psychiatry (Pathology and Therapy of Mental Disorders [], cited in Lesky, Vienna Medical School of the Nineteenth Century, ). Freud’s clinical professor at the University of Vienna, the neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert (‒), and other eminent nineteenth-century Viennese academic psychiatrists such as Maximilian Leidesdorf (‒) and Richard von Krafft-Ebing (‒) also shared this pathological-anatomical orientation. Theirs are representative of the psychiatric diagnostic approaches that Freud attacks.

Notes to Chapter 



. On Freud as a neurologist, see Rosen, “Freud and Medicine,” ; and Amacher, Freud’s Neurological Education. On the faculties of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna and Freud’s own training there, see Lesky, Vienna Medical School of the Nineteenth Century, ‒. For a detailed treatment of Freud’s clinical training with Theodor Meynert at the Algemeines Krankenhaus, see Hirschmüller, Freuds Begegnung mit der Psychiatrie. . Porter, “Body and the Mind,” ‒. . On Freud’s visit to Clark University, see Hale, Freud and the Americans, ‒, , and the detailed account in Rosenzweig, Freud, Jung, and Hall, which includes Freud’s correspondence with G. Stanley Hall. Rosenzweig argues that in organizing the Clark anniversary event, Hall hoped to reconcile experimental psychology and psychoanalysis; his original invitations were extended to both Freud and Wilhelm Wundt, a founder of experimental psychology with whom Hall had studied in Germany (Freud and Experimental Psychology, ‒). Abbott also provides a compelling analysis of the professional success of psychoanalysis in America (System of Professions, ‒). . For an account of the neurological and psychiatric treatment of hysteria in the nineteenth century, see Porter, “Body and the Mind,” ‒. For a history of the medical specializations and diagnoses that competed to define and treat hysteria in the nineteenth century, see Micale, Approaching Hysteria. Other recent analyses of hysteria in nineteenth-century history, literature, and culture, include Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies; Bernheimer and Kahane, eds., In Dora’s Case; Katherine Cummings, Telling Tales; Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna; Ender, Sexing the Mind; Evans, Fits and Starts; Gilman et al., eds., Hysteria Beyond Freud; Kahane, Passions of the Voice; Logan, Nerves and Narratives; Matlock, Scenes of Seduction; Showalter, Hystories. Abbott has argued that in America, as a result of its successful contestation of neurology’s “somatic style” of diagnosis and treatment, psychoanalysis became the ground on which psychiatry distinguished itself from neurology: “Freudianism in one form or another rapidly became the organizing structure of a new jurisdiction, centered in fact on everyday life problems. Opposed to it was the equally coherent, and equally new, jurisdiction of organic neurology. Although these jurisdictions were in practice served jointly by psychiatrists and neurologists through the s, by the end of the decade the split between the two was nearly complete” (Abbott, System of Professions, ‒ ). Abbott also points out that the American neurologists had too much work for their numbers to handle, and both willingly and unavoidably ceded much of the jurisdiction over “general nervousness” to the psychiatrists (). Abbott does not examine Freud’s career or writings. Ironically for Freud, American psychiatrists would both adopt his ideas and attempt to monopolize psychoanalytic practice by excluding lay analysts. Freud frequently evinced a personal antipathy to American culture, and seems to have been ambivalent about the success of psychoanalysis in the United States, as some com-



Notes to Chapter 

ments in his Autobiographical Study indicate (AS, ). As psychoanalysis was institutionalized in American medical schools after World War II, it became a specialized but dominant method within American psychiatry until the s. Hale reports on the integration of psychoanalytic theory and therapy into American psychiatry in Rise and Crisis, ‒, ‒. One of the Berlin institute analysts who later emigrated to the United States, Sándor Radó, followed Freud’s lead in asserting the dependence of psychiatry on psychoanalysis, and not the other way around: “Psychoanalysis is no sub-specialty of psychiatry; it is an integral part of psychiatry itself ” (Radó, “Psychodynamics as a Basic Science,” in id., Psychoanalysis of Behavior, : ). . Abbott’s account of the separation between neurological diagnosis, which identified a case “as a particular syndrome,” and the analysis of “predisposing, precipitating, and anatomical causes” that would lead to a treatment drawing on an “armamentarium of cures” seems to confirm Freud’s criticisms of neurology and explains the power of his direct linkage of a distinctive psychoanalytic diagnosis with a distinctive analytic therapy (Abbott, System of Professions, ). . For analyses of the responses of the Viennese and German medical communities to psychoanalysis, see Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, ‒, and Decker, Freud in Germany. . Arnold I. Davidson discusses Freud’s reconceptualization of psychiatric classifications of perversion in “How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis.” . Lesky, Vienna Medical School of the Nineteenth Century, ‒. . Freud, LA, ‒; Frage der Laienanalyse, . . Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, : . In Freud and Experimental Psychology, Saul Rozenzweig offers a speculative account of the psychological and theoretical reasons for Freud’s rejection of experimental psychology. . On the importance of physiology to experimental psychology, see Danzinger, Constructing the Subject, ‒. . Freud, Q, ; Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, . . Leary, “Wundt and After,” , points out that Wundt agreed with the early writings of the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (‒) that a scientific psychology was a necessary basis for all the Geisteswissenschaften, or human sciences, including the social sciences. For the history of the use of the term “psychology,” see Lapointe, “Who Originated the Term ‘Psychology’?” . See “The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest,” in SE, : ‒. I take this standard definition of the Geisteswissenschaften from Leary, “Wundt and After,” . Freud’s characterization of psychology in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (), however, does resemble the “immediate” vs. “mediate” distinction among sciences: “Every science is based on observations and experiences arrived at through the medium of our psychical apparatus. But since our science has as its subject that apparatus itself, the analogy ends here” (in SE, : ).

Notes to Chapter 



. Freud, Outline of Psychoanalysis, in SE, : ‒. . Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, . See Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” in SE, : ‒. . Wolf Lepenies, “‘Interesting questions’,’” . . Ibid., ‒. On the politics of the institutionalization of experimental psychology and on Wundt’s views of psychology’s relationship to philosophy, see Ash, “Academic Politics,” and “Wilhelm Wundt and Oswald Külpe.” . Hearst, “One Hundred Years: Themes and Perspectives,” in id., The First Century of Experimental Psychology, ‒, at ‒. For the history of experimental psychology, see also Boring, History of Experimental Psychology; and Littman, “Social and Intellectual Origins of Experimental Psychology.” . Hearst, “One Hundred Years,” . . These data on Wundt’s career are taken from W. G. Brigmann et al., “Wilhelm Wundt, ‒: A Brief Historical Sketch,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences  (): , and M. A. Tinker, “Wundt’s Doctoral Students and Their Theses: ‒,” American Journal of Psychology  (), cited in Hearst, “One Hundred Years,” ‒. . Freud’s Professor Ernst Brücke operated his Physiology Institute in a converted rifle factory (Gewehrfabrik) under austere conditions that were similar to Wundt’s early psychological laboratory; it lacked running water, and gas for light and heat, but despite these hindrances Brücke also attracted many students who produced important new findings (Rosen, “Freud and Medicine,” ‒). . Ash, “Academic Politics,” ; and Woodward, “Wundt’s Program for the New Psychology,” . Kurt Danziger argues that “the strongest grounds for locating the beginnings of experimental psychology in Wundt’s laboratory” are that “it was here that scientific psychology was first practiced as the organized and selfconscious activity of a community of investigators” (Danziger, Constructing the Subject, ). Wundt’s founding of the Leipzig laboratory coincided with Freud’s time with Brücke (Rosenzweig, Freud and Experimental Psychology, ). . Ash, “Academic Politics,” ‒; Ash cites Wundt’s essay “Die Psychologie im Kampf ums Dasein” (“Psychology in the Struggle for Existence”), in Kleine Schriften, vol.  (Stuttgart, ), . For a roughly contemporaneous defense of the applications of psychology to philology, based on Wundt’s work, that is also very much attuned to the problem of disciplinary conflicts, see George Herbert Mead, “Relations of Psychology and Philology.” . Many other psychologists in Germany during the s and early s disputed Wundt’s view, however, and wanted psychology to become either an entirely natural science or a social science (Leary, “Wundt and After,”  ). Richard A. Littman links the rise of experimental psychology in Germany to the crucial relationship of teaching and research in the German university system; in France and England, scientific research was not systematically reproduced and passed on because researchers rarely functioned as teachers (Littman, “Social and Intellectual



Notes to Chapter 

Origins of Experimental Psychology, “ ‒). Turner, “Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia,” is a useful history of the rise of the German system of academic research. . Ash, “Academic Politics,” ‒. . Hearst, “One Hundred Years,” ‒. A collection of essays that offer histories of these various approaches in psychology is Buss, ed., Psychology in Social Context. . Kitcher, Freud’s Dream, , citing Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, . . Woodward, “Wundt’s Program,” . . Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in SE, : ‒; “The Economic Problem in Masochism,” in SE, : ‒. . Rosenzweig, Freud and Experimental Psychology, ‒, documents Freud’s rejection in the s of attempts to validate psychoanalysis by experimental methods and opposition to the field of experimental psychopathology. . Ash, “Psychology and Politics in Interwar Vienna,” . . Gardner and Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age, ‒. . Ibid., . . Ibid., ‒. . Ash, “Psychology and Politics,” ‒. On the Vienna Pedagogical Academy/Institute, see also E. S. Hoffman, Drive for Self, ‒. . Ash, “Psychology and Politics,” ‒. The Bühlers were evidently skeptical about psychoanalysis; other critics of psychoanalysis during this period were the Catholic publications; the journalist, newspaper editor, and author Karl Kraus (‒ ); and the Marxists (Sterba, Reminiscences, ‒). . Gardner and Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age, , ‒. . E. S. Hoffman, Drive for Self, ‒. On Adler’s pedagogy, see also Stepansky, In Freud’s Shadow, ‒. On the educational reforms of the socialist government of Vienna, see Gruber, Red Vienna, ‒, and Dottrens, New Education in Austria. . E. S. Hoffman, Drive for Self, ‒. . Gardner and Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age, ; Ollman, “Introduction,” xiii. . Sterba, Reminiscences, ‒. . Contemporary historians of experimental psychology have suggested that such a unifying theory may never be formulated: “No one has successfully proposed any principle or general framework that serves to unify or encompass many different areas of scientific psychology” (Hearst, “One Hundred Years,” ); “Ever since the founding of experimental psychology there has never been a single completely dominant view of the nature of psychology” (Leary, “Wundt and After,” ). . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, x. . Abbott, System of Professions, .

Notes to Chapter 



. Another application of psychoanalysis that enhanced its reputation among psychiatrists was its use in the diagnosis and treatment of war neuroses during both world wars. Freud supplied an introduction (reprinted in SE, : ‒) to the volume Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses (), which included essays by Karl Abraham, Ernest Jones, and Sándor Ferenczi. Kurt R. Eissler recounts Freud’s expert testimony about the war neuroses in Freud as an Expert Witness. On psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic ideas in the treatment of war neuroses, see also Hale, Rise and Crisis, chaps.  and , and on the relation of the strengthening of the psychoanalytic movement and developments in psychoanalytic theory to World War I, see L. E. Hoffman, “War, Revolution, and Psychoanalysis.” Freud also early on proposed the usefulness of psychoanalysis to determining the truth or falsehood of legal testimony; see “Psychoanalysis and the Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings” ( ), in SE, : ‒. . Psychoanalysis did in fact catch on among American social workers; see Hale, Rise and Crisis, ‒. . Freud, letter, February , , in Psychoanalysis and Faith, . . Abbott has argued that psychoanalysis, as adopted by psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers in America, did in fact contribute to the displacement of priests and ministers as those who would most often provide counseling about “personal problems” (Abbott, System of Professions, ‒, ‒). . Freud, Zukunft einer Illusion, : “Ich verschmähe es, Kultur und Zivilisation zu trennen.” . Pfister, “Freud’s Cultural Theory and ‘Red Vienna,’” ‒. It may also be possible to correlate Freud’s lack of sympathy for the “masses” at this time in part to the failure of the Viennese socialists, the Social Democrats, to distance themselves adequately from the antisemitic politics of their opponents the Christian Socials and the German Nationalists; for an account of the Social Democrats’ political positioning in respect to Jews, see Wistrich, “Social Democracy, Antisemitism, and the Jews of Vienna,” ‒. . Freud formulates concisely his correlation between libidinal, individual stages of development and the developmental stages of civilization in Totem and Taboo: “The animistic phase would correspond to narcissism both chronologically and in its content; the religious phase would correspond to the stage of objectchoice of which the characteristic is a child’s attachment to his parents; while the scientific phase would have an exact counterpart in the stage at which an individual has reached maturity, has renounced the pleasure principle, adjusted himself to reality and turned to the external world for the object of his desires” (TT, ). . Although Freud does not say so here, the most common form of religious education in early twentieth-century Austria-Hungary was Roman Catholic. One of the most desirable long-term effects of the secularization of education, from Freud’s point of view, would therefore also be to remove Catholicism, and the accompanying antisemitism, from the curriculum.



Notes to Chapter 

. Freud, “Psychoanalysis” ( ), in SE, : . . In a footnote, James Strachey points out that the German word that Freud uses for “education,” Ehrzieung, “has a much wider meaning than the English word and includes ‘upbringing’ in a general sense” (E&A,  n). In this particular lecture, however, Freud discusses the future applications of psychoanalysis primarily to the training and formal pedagogical practices of the teacher. . Freud revises and extends here his suggestions for the psychoanalytic training of teachers in the  “Preface” to the Viennese educator August Aichhorn’s Wayward Youth (), in SE, : ‒, where he explicitly differentiates between the work of psychoanalysis and of education. In contrast, “Explanations, Applications and Orientations,” an essay written in the form of a public lecture, although never delivered as such, which addresses itself precisely to the wider applications of psychoanalysis, emphasizes the ways psychoanalytic expertise applies directly to education. In Freudians, Edith Kurzweil reviews some of the educational applications of psychoanalysis: until  the term “applied psychoanalysis” “referred primarily to pedagogy” (); teachers went to Freud’s public lectures (); the educational experiments of August Aichhorn and Siegfried Bernfeld were actually geared toward delinquent youth from working-class families, and provided a concrete extension of psychoanalysis beyond the middle classes through education (‒). The educational and analytic work with children of Anna Freud (‒) was considered a pursuit of the “educational purposes of psychoanalysis” (). Kurzweil notes the rise of psychoanalytic education in the late s and s: “By about , psychoanalytic education had become a new academic specialty in the Germanspeaking countries. In the journal Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik, in addition to theoretical debates, one could find articles on the psychoanalysis of children and adolescents and case reports and studies by psychoanalytically oriented educators” (). This journal stopped publication in  and was not revived after the war (). Neither French nor Anglo-Saxon Freudians considered pedagogy comparable to psychoanalysis (). The early psychoanalytic focus on pedagogy was ultimately replaced by “the ‘preventive’ psychoanalysis” of children and adolescents, as “almost the only psychoanalytic activity around which the Freudians of the world would be able to rally” (). On Anna Freud’s career as a psychoanalytic educator, see Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud. See also Lewin and Ross, Psychoanalytic Education in the United States. . The middle-class Viennese socialists’ project of producing a political consciousness in the working class by creating a working-class culture is the focus of Gruber’s Red Vienna. . Abbott, System of Professions, . . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, , , . For two conflicting perspectives on the social and ideological effects of science and scientific rationality, see Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, and Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society.

Notes to Chapter 



. For some recent contributions to this debate, see Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud; Cioffi, “Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science”; Clark and Wright, eds., Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science; Edelson, Psychoanalysis: A Theory in Crisis; Fisher and Greenberg, eds., Freud Scientifically Reappraised; Mujeeb-ur-Rahman, ed. Freudian Paradigm; Grünbaum, Foundations of Psychoanalysis; Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, ‒; Kitcher, Freud’s Dream; MacMillan, Freud Evaluated; Robinson, Freud and His Critics; Spence, Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis; Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind; id., “Reassessing Freud’s Case Histories”; Timpanaro, Freudian Slip; and Wollheim, “Desire, Belief and Professor Grünbaum’s Freud,” in id., Mind and Its Depths, ‒. . Bourdieu, “Peculiar History of Scientific Reason,” . A useful introduction to the sociology of science can be found in Woolgar, Science: The Very Idea. Merton, On Social Structure and Science, provides an overview of Merton’s important work on the sociology of science. For recent collections of essays exploring the sociology and history of science, see Galison and Stump, eds., Disunity of Science; and Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture. On the cultural history of seventeenth-century England, the development of scientific experimentation, and the establishment of the protocols for claiming scientific truth, see also Shapin, Social History of Truth. . Freud, “The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest,” in SE, : ‒. . See Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind for a discussion of Freud’s relation to biology; I think that Freud is more open about his ultimate biological orientation than Sulloway’s important account allows. . This public correspondence was inaugurated in  by the League of Nations, under the auspices of its International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, to “encourage an exchange of letters between leaders of thought, on the lines of those which have always taken place at the great epochs of European history; to select subjects best calculated to serve the common interest of the League of Nations and of the intellectual life of mankind” (Einstein and Freud, Why War? ). . Einstein to Freud in ibid., ‒. . Ibid., . . Henri Ellenberger’s description of the prevalent educational and social formation of Freud and his peers confirms Freud’s assumption that the international scientific community would possess a coherent worldview: “Freud belonged to a group of men of the same mold, including [Emil] Kraepelin [eminent German psychiatrist (‒ )], [Auguste] Forel [Swiss psychiatrist (‒)], and [Eugen] Bleuler [Forel’s successor, head of the Burghölzli sanatorium in Zurich, and an inconsistent supporter of psychoanalysis (‒)], who had gone through long training in intellectual and emotional discipline; they were men of high culture, puritanical mores, boundless energy, and strong convictions, which they vigorously asserted. Despite all personal and doctrinal divergencies, these



Notes to Chapter 

men were able to understand each other immediately . . . ” (Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, ‒). . In this context it is important also to remember Freud’s  preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, where he hopes that he and his readers share the common “conviction that unprejudiced science cannot remain a stranger to the spirit of the new Jewry” (TT, xv)—the disinterested scientists Freud envisions in the letter to Einstein would clearly not be antisemites. On the shaping of psychoanalysis against the pervasive antisemitism of early twentieth-century European medicine, see Gilman, Case of Sigmund Freud and Freud, Race, and Gender. . Freud, “The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest,” in SE, : ‒. . Perkin, Rise of Professional Society, . . Freud, “Preface,” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in SE, : . . Bourdieu, “Systems of Education and Systems of Thought,” . . Abbott, System of Professions, . . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, xiii. . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . Ibid., ‒. . Freud, “Psychoanalysis,” in SE, : . . Ellenberger characterizes the high value that Freud places on work as typical of the Viennese bourgeoisie, who “viewed the world of work as the real world” (Discovery of the Unconscious, ‒). . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, . . Haskell, “Professionalism Versus Capitalism,” , ‒, . . Tawney, Acquisitive Society, , cited in Haskell, “Professionalism Versus Capitalism,” . . Haskell, “Professionalism Versus Capitalism,” . . Ibid., ‒. . Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, ‒, , cited in Haskell, “Professionalism Versus Capitalism,” ‒. . Haskell, “Professionalism Versus Capitalism,” , . . Durkheim, La science social et l’action, , cited in Lukes, “Introduction,” . . Bachrach, Theory of Democratic Elitism, ; Larson, Rise of Professionalism, . . Gruber points out similar consequences of Viennese socialist reform efforts aimed at providing “culture” to the working class (Red Vienna, ). . Larson, Rise of Professionalism, xvii. . Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, “Professional-Managerial Class,” . . The work I have done here on the professionalizing strategies of Freud’s writings is meant to supplement historical and sociological studies like those of Hale and Abbott tracing the unprecedented success of psychoanalysis in the

Notes to Chapter 



United States. See also Burnham, Psychoanalysis and American Medicine, and id., How Superstition Won and Science Lost, ‒. Two other important accounts of Americans’ embrace of psychoanalysis stress the conditions of family and personal life; see Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life, and Demos, “Oedipus and America.” . Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, x. For another social history of the American “professional ideal,” see Bruce A. Kimball, “True Professional Ideal” in America. . Lunbeck, Psychiatric Persuasion, ‒. . Gross, Psychological Society, ‒. . Kovel, “American Mental Health Industry,” , ‒, ‒, . There has been a great deal of research on the history and ideological effects of consumer culture in the United States; for two salient contributions to this project, see Fox and Lears, eds., Culture of Consumption, and Lears, Fables of Abundance. . Kovel, “American Mental Health Industry,” , , , , . Kovel contends that people seek psychotherapy not only in response to the growing psychologization of experience, but also because of real pressures on family and personal life within a capitalist economy that both undermines parental authority— by substituting the lures of consumerist mass culture—and requires increased mobility for purposes of retaining employment ( ). For another account of the consumerist messages of post‒World War II American psychotherapy, see Cushman, Constructing the Self, ‒, who argues that the ability of psychotherapy truly to alleviate mental suffering depends upon its coming to terms with its history and social and political functions in American culture, and thus addressing the ways in which it “unknowingly reproduces some of the ills it is responsible for healing” (‒). Ellen Herman provides a cultural history of disciplinary and professional consolidation of psychology in the United States in Romance of American Psychology. For an encyclopedic overview of psychotherapy, see History of Psychotherapy. Other recent critiques of the psychotherapy industry include Houghton, “Managing the Body of Labor”; Kaminer, I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional; Masson, Against Therapy; Szasz, Myth of Psychotherapy; and id., Therapeutic State. . Christopher Lasch has also investigated the impact of “therapeutic ideals” on the American family in Haven in a Heartless World, ‒. . Kovel, “American Mental Health Industry,” , , , . Kovel also points to the recent “proletarianization” of mental health workers and the increasing encroachment of the state and media on family life as trends that suggest possibilities for change in the relation between the mental health industry and the reproduction of capitalist social relations. He also insists on the existence throughout this period of various forms of resistance to psychologization (). The factors leading to the rise of psychotherapy are complex, and Kovel’s explanation invites further research. For ramifications of Kovel’s socialist critique and revision of psy-



Notes to Chapter 

chotherapy and psychoanalysis, see id., Radical Spirit. Another radical critique of psychiatry in American society can be found in Castel, Castel, and Lovell, Psychiatric Society. . On the relation of the cultural rise of the professional managerial class to the invention of “psychological ‘depth’” as a dominant cultural category in America, see the work of Joel Pfister, particularly Staging Depth and “Glamorizing the Psychological.” . Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, “Professional-Managerial Class,” ‒.  :   Anna Freud epigraph from the web site of the Anna Freud Centre, Hampstead, England (http://www.annafreudcentre.org), “Anna Freud (–),” on-line, December , . . Freud, “Two Encyclopaedia Articles,” in SE, : . . The texts I focus on here as Freud’s cultural theory coincide with the list that Freud himself offers of his work on “cultural problems” in the  postscript to An Autobiographical Study, with the exception of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, which he describes as part of his work on “the problem of the instincts” (AS, , ). . I outline Abbott’s understanding of profession as jurisdiction in Chapter . . Lepenies, “‘Interesting questions,’” . An influential general study of the history of discipline as a category for the organization of knowledge, and its relation to the rise of the modern prison, is Foucault, Discipline and Punish. Recent books theorizing disciplinarity and interdisciplinary are Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis; Messer-Davidow, Shumway, and Sylvan, eds., Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity; J. T. Klein, Interdisciplinarity; Kline, Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking, and Rowe, ed, “Culture” and the Problem of the Disciplines. . Haskell, “Professionalism Versus Capitalism,” ‒, , . . The German reads: “Man könnte ihn als eine historiche Ableitung bezeichnen” (Freud, Totem und Tabu, ). . Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in SE, : . . Abbott, System of Professions, . . Freud, E&A, ‒; “Aufklärungen, Anwendungen, Orientierungen,” in Neue Folge, . . For similar descriptions of psychoanalysis as a research tool or method, see also “The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest” (), in SE, : ‒; and FI, . . This list is gleaned from TT, “The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest,” “Two Encyclopaedia Articles,” AS, and LA. . Freud, “Two Encyclopaedia Articles, “ in SE, : .

Notes to Chapter 



. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, . . Freud, “Two Encyclopaedia Articles,” ‒. . Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, . . On the pervasiveness in Victorian anthropology of this kind of evolutionary understanding of traditional cultures as exhibiting “survivals” of more ancient social and psychological formations, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, ‒. . Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, ‒. Sulloway also contends that, in fact, the stumbling blocks that Freud faced in his work in psychopathology— “the nature of pathological repression, Why sex?, and the choice of neurosis”—led him to search for answers in other disciplines that could provide him with analogues : “In short, phylogeny was Freud’s final answer to many of the difficulties that threatened to undermine his most basic psychoanalytic claims” (, ). . For accounts of the reasons for this delay, see Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, : ‒; Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, ‒; and Gay, Sigmund Freud: A Life for Our Time, ‒. Freud gives his own version of events in a letter to Fliess dated March ,  (Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, ‒). It seems that Freud’s promotion was held up as the result both of the antisemitism of the responsible officials and of Freud’s own reluctance to canvass for support. On the responses of Austrian Jews to the growing antisemitism in Vienna, particularly after , see Beller, Vienna and the Jews, ‒. . ID, ; Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, : ‒. . IL, . On Freud’s academic career, see Gicklhorn and Gicklhorn, Sigmund Freuds akademische Laufbahn; and Eissler, Sigmund Freud und die Wiener Universität. On Freud as a lecturer, see Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, : ‒. The Gicklhorns document that as many as  students were formally registered in Freud’s courses at the University of Vienna; it is not possible to be certain how many actually attended (Sigmund Freuds akademische Laufbahn, ). . In , Freud did earn a prestigious scientific honor in his induction as a corresponding member of the British Royal Society; in , a deputation consisting of officers of the society visited Freud at his London residence so that he could sign their Charter Book. He was also elected as an honorary member of the British Royal Society of Medicine in  (Diary of Sigmund Freud, , , ,  ). . On the Hungarian plan, see the translation of an article Freud wrote for a Budapest medical journal that was published in , and for which the German original no longer exists, “On the Teaching of Psychoanalysis in Universities,” in SE, : ‒; and Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, . See also Freud’s and Karl Abraham’s correspondence from December  to June  about the possibility that Abraham would be permitted to teach a course on psychoanalysis at the University of Berlin, and the establishment there of a chair of psychoanalysis; both events failed to take place (Psychoanalytic Dialogue, ‒). . A seminar was offered at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt (Decker, Freud in Germany, ‒).



Notes to Chapter 

. Hale, Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States, ‒, ‒. . Ellenberger disputes Freud’s picture of his rejection by Viennese official medicine: “[Freud] never ceased to be a member of the Imperial Royal Society of Physicians, and at least in ‒ was an assessor of the Association for Psychiatry and Neurology, (the same group where his lecture on hysteria had been received with disbelief in  )” (Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, ). Ernest Jones also reports that Freud did attend subsequent meetings of the Gesellschaft der Ärzte and that he also lectured or gave papers at meetings of other medical societies until  (Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, : , ‒). . For an account of Wundt’s career and the establishment of experimental psychology, see Chapter . . Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, . . The shape of Freud’s own career also contributed to determining the academic fate of psychoanalysis, since his decision to pursue medical practice instead of academic research in neurology not only produced the clinical findings that he would call psychoanalysis, but also meant that by the time the psychoanalytic movement got under way, Freud was already embarked on a substantial private practice that might not have meshed well with a full-fledged academic research program. My point, however, is that such a program did not materialize in the university for any of the early psychoanalysts. John Forrester has suggested to me that, as the highly lucrative practice of a physician like Freud’s mentor and collaborator Joseph Breuer (‒) indicates, Freud’s decision to pursue medicine rather than research gave him a very prestigious, respectable, and economically advantageous social and professional position—that Freud did not really need a university clinic and may have done better financially without one. Freud obviously did very well financially as a private physician, and psychoanalysis ultimately prospered outside the university, but I would nevertheless argue that Freud did seek disciplinary status for psychoanalysis, given the institutional means the university provided to sustain and legitimize new branches of scientific research, and that such considerations are evidenced in Freud’s attempts to situate psychoanalysis in relation to other disciplines in his writings. On Joseph Breuer’s medical career, see Hirschmüller, Life and Work of Joseph Breuer, which contrasts Breuer’s and Freud’s efforts to obtain professorial rank in the University of Vienna: “Freud, the fighter, finally managed to wrest professorial status [sic]. He gradually cut himself off from the university which had denied him rank and distinction and proceeded to establish, with his own followers, a kind of private university. Breuer, on the other hand, responded [to repeated failures to obtain promotion to full professor] by resigning his Dozentur, a superior gesture which anyone of consequence in the faculty would have understood well enough, simply because it was so unorthodox” (Hirschmüller, Life and Work of Joseph Breuer, ). . Lepenies, “‘Interesting questions,’” .

Notes to Chapter 



. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, , ‒. . Kuklick, Savage Within, ‒. . Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, ‒. . Kuklick, Savage Within, , , , , . . As the discipline was professionalized after World War I, anthropologists’ public distinction was still more likely to come in the form of recognition by professional peers, rather than “as members of a national intelligentsia” or as public servants (Kuklick, Savage Within, , ). . Kuklick, Savage Within, , ‒, , ‒. Imperial governors in South Africa and Australia created positions for government anthropologists, however, and the colonial government of the Sudan commissioned Oxford and Cambridge courses in anthropology for its officers in  (ibid., ‒). . Kuklick observes that functionalist anthropologists in particular succeeded in dominating the discipline as decisively and rapidly as they did during the period between the wars because of their success in gaining patronage from officials in the Colonial Office, the heads of missionary societies, and wealthy individuals interested in promoting trade through political stability abroad. The functionalists framed their proposals for funding in terms that suited the policies and politics of their supporters, and then used the money provided as they saw fit. Kuklick suggests that most of these anthropologists took a real interest in the reform of colonial administrative policies. Colonial officials on the spot, however, usually preferred to dispense with the advice of scientific experts (Savage Within, , ). . Kuklick, Savage Within, ‒, . Kuklick’s data on the members of the Royal Anthropological Institute during the period she studies show that professional anthropologists came largely from upper-middle-class and middle-class backgrounds, and that their fathers were involved in either professional or commercial occupations (‒). See also Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, ‒. . Karady, “Durkheimians in Academe,” . See also id., “Durkheim, les sciences sociales et l’université” and “Stratégies de réussite.” . Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, . . Ibid., ‒, , . . T. N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons, . . Lukes, Emile Durkheim, . . T. N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons, , , . . Lukes, Emile Durkheim, ‒. Lukes provides detailed references to these ongoing exchanges between Tarde and Durkheim, which took place between  and . . T. N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons, , ; Lukes, Emile Durkheim, . . T. N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons, ‒. . Karady, “Durkheimians in Academe,” ‒. . Clark, Prophets and Patrons, .



Notes to Chapter 

. Ringer, Fields of Knowledge, ‒. Republican politicians such as Jules Ferry, Paul Bert, and Léon Bourgeois advocated educational reform for the purposes of fostering social integration and consensus: “They hoped that professors would apply scientific procedures to the study of social problems in order to elaborate the theories and ideas which in turn would promote political moderation and social integration”; these ideas would in turn then be passed on to students and throughout French society (Weisz, “Republican Ideology and the Social Sciences,” ). Jules Ferry articulated the faith in science that bolstered these secularist educational policies, saying: “The scientific spirit, gradually descending from higher education into the two other levels of education, is really the only barrier against the spirit of utopia and error which, left to itself and not regulated and enlightened by science, readily becomes disorder and anarchy” (Speech reproduced in the Revue internationale de l’enseignement  []: ; quoted in Weisz, “Republican Ideology,” ). . Lukes, Emile Durkheim, ‒. . Durkheim, “Contribution to ‘Enquête sur l’introduction de la sociologie dans l’enseignement secondaire,’” Revue internationale de sociologie  (): n.p., quoted in Lukes, Emile Durkheim, ‒. Durkheim’s post at Bordeaux had been especially created for him, partly through the influence of Louis Liard, the director of higher education in France, who had admired Durkheim’s early articles on German sociology and was “impressed by [Durkheim’s] republican idealism and his desire to establish a secular morality based on science” (Lukes, ). Liard had presided at the turn of the century over the reforms of the École normale that instituted a curriculum focused on pedagogical theory and then united the École with the Sorbonne in  (T. N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons, ). Robert Alun Jones goes so far as to argue that Durkheim was more interested in constructing “a secular morality” for the Third Republic than in creating a scientific sociology (R. A. Jones, “Genèse du Système?” ). . Lukes, Emile Durkheim, . . T. N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons, . . As director of primary education in , one of Durkheim’s collaborators on the Année, Paul Lapie, passed curricular reforms that introduced a Durkheimian version of sociology into the civics curriculum of the Écoles normales primaires, causing much resentment among educators, who argued that they were not adequately prepared to teach the subject (T. N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons, ‒). Sociology became a requirement for acceptance into the higher levels of primary level teaching and administration (Lukes, Emile Durkheim, ). . Karady, “Durkheimians in Academe,” . . On Durkheim’s socialism, see Lukes, Emile Durkheim, ‒. . T. N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons, , , , . . Karady, “Durkheimians in Academe,” ‒. For an example of Durkheim’s sense of sociology’s fundamental epistemological position in relation to the

Notes to Chapter 



social sciences, see “Sociology and the Social Sciences” (), in Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts, ‒. . T. N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons, ‒. . Karady, “Durkheimians in Academe,” ‒, . The Durkheimians’ strict exclusion of political commentary from their published research articles and reviews also worked to emphasize the scientific, objective aims of sociology, although their ideological commitments were never in question (‒). . Kuklick, Savage Within, . . Karady, “Durkheimians in Academe,” ‒. . For a survey of such work in applying psychoanalysis, see Kurzweil, Freudians, chaps. ‒. An early programmatic statement of the cross-disciplinary applications of psychoanalysis is Rank and Sachs, “The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Humanities” (), in Rank, Sachs et al., Psychoanalysis as an Art and a Science, ‒. . Karady, “Durkheimians in Academe,” ‒. . Other significant differences include the highly sectarian and exclusive organization of the secret governing “Committee” (comprising Karl Abraham [‒ ], Sándor Ferenczi [‒], Ernest Jones [‒], Otto Rank [‒ ], and Hanns Sachs [‒]) that Freud and Ernest Jones formed in , and Freud’s own independence from institutional oversight that he enjoyed, particularly in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement, in deciding on the inclusion or exclusion of members. On the secret “Committee,” see Grosskurth, Secret Ring. Many histories of the psychoanalytic movement and psychoanalytic schools treat the sectarian and authoritarian aspects of their organizations; see in particular Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master ; Roustang, Dire Mastery; and Weisz, “Scientists and Sectarians.” . Freud, “A Short Account of Psycho-analysis” (), in SE, : . . Durkheim, “Sociology and the Social Sciences,” in id., Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts, . . Such universalizing goals were not uncommon to positivist disciplinary projects through the beginning of the twentieth century, and also characterized the approach of such fields as experimental biology, psychology, and comparative history (Karady, “Durkheimians in Academe,” ). . Karady, “Durkheimians in Academe,” ‒. . Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind; Kitcher, Freud’s Dream, , ‒. . Foucault, History of Sexuality, : ‒. . Freud, “A Short Account of Psycho-analysis,” in SE, : . . Freud, “The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest,” in SE, : . . For a definition of wish and wish-fulfillment, see ID, ‒. . Freud, “The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest,” in SE, : ; this passage is part of Freud’s elaboration of the claim of psychoanalysis to interest “from the Point of View of the History of Civilization.”



Notes to Chapter 

. For a much more detailed account, and schematic diagram, of the disciplinary hierarchy Freudian psychoanalysis constructs, see Kitcher, Freud’s Dream, ‒. . When I argue here that Freud in Totem and Taboo takes on the disciplinary domain of anthropology, I mean to characterize in a kind of shorthand the variety of approaches in related fields represented by Freud’s reading and also to show how his text itself draws these approaches together in order to encompass their objects and supersede them. I also look toward the actual disciplinary consolidation of anthropology in process at the time when Freud was writing his cultural criticism. On the difference in focus between anthropology and ethnology and the organizational struggles between Victorian anthropologists and ethnologists, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, ‒. . Marianna Torgovnick explores Freud’s notion of the primitive, both in his theories and in his own practices of collecting cultural artefacts, in Gone Primitive, ‒. . Freud’s most important earlier formulation of the psychological equivalence between obsessive acts and religious ritual is in the  essay “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” in SE, : ‒. . Freud refers to the volumes on Mythus und Religion of Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie (Leipzig, ). Wundt’s project of “cultural psychology” is one of Freud’s central disciplinary targets (TT, ix). On the all-encompassing nature and importance of Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie for his own disciplinary program for psychology, see Woodward, “Wundt’s Program,” ‒. . Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, : , quoted in Freud, TT, . . Freud also criticizes Westermarck’s explanations of the avoidance of incest (TT, ‒). For a survey and critique of the “Freud-Westermarck incest-theory debate” in anthropology, and an attempt to revise and combine Freud’s and Westermarck’s theories, see Spain, “Westermarck-Freud Incest-Theory Debate,” and the responses included in “On the Westermarck-Freud Incest-Theory Debate.” For a refutation of Freud’s theory of the incest taboo and a vindication of Westermarck, based on anthropological research in Taiwan and China, see also Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association. I am grateful to John Forrester and to Peter Dreyer for providing me with these references. The reader may surmise my skepticism about the Oedipus complex as an account of the universality of the incest taboo; it is not feasible within the scope of this chapter’s analysis, however, to enter into the incest taboo debate in anthropology. . It is pertinent in this context to revisit once again Freud’s comment that, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, “the attempt to harmonize divine omnipotence with human responsibility must naturally fail in connection with this subject-matter as with any other” (ID, ). Freud detects a failure in the play’s final emphasis on Oedipus’s pollution and exile (related to rites of purification), which he seems to

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find incompatible with the idea that Oedipus feels guilt and responsibility and attempts to expiate his crimes by blinding himself. See Chapter  for a related discussion of the ritual vs. the legal understandings of Oedipus’s responsibility in Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, and how psychoanalytic readings ignore the difference between the two in order to elaborate an account of the primacy of unconscious desire. . Frazer, Golden Bough, d ed., : , quoted in Freud, TT, . . Patricia Kitcher (Freud’s Dream) and John Brenkman have both noted Freud’s lack of interest in cognition, and Brenkman argues that for psychoanalysis itself, this is a significant omission, because “a general theory of cognition is ultimately indissociable from theory’s understanding of its own epistemology” (Culture and Domination, ‒). . Philip Rieff finds similarities between Freud’s and Durkheim’s focus on primitive societies to provide a theory of the origins of social discipline; their significant difference, however, lies in Durkheim’s sense that the individual is derived from collective consciousness, while for Freud the “instinctual individual” is always present from the beginning (Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, ‒). John Forrester also points out a “quasi-Durkheimian move” in Freud’s understanding that envy among siblings, a social sentiment, becomes a constitutive, socially reproduced mode of thought (Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars, ‒). I thank John Forrester for further elaborations on this point. . Freud takes these ideas from Darwin’s Descent of Man and Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. On Freud’s Darwinism, see Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud. . Atkinson’s theory appears in Primal Law (). . In his important treatment of the sources of Freud’s anthropology, Edwin R. Wallace notes that Robertson Smith was also highly respected by Frazer, Durkheim, and many others (Freud and Anthropology, ). On Robertson Smith, see also Morton Smith, “William Robertson Smith.” . The German reads: “Eine Zulufrau, die nach der Begründung des Verbotes gefragt wurde, gab die von Zartgefühl getragene Antwort: ‘Es ist nicht recht, daß er die Brüste sehen soll, die seine Frau gesäugt haben’” (Freud, Totem und Tabu, ). . Freud refers to Ernest Crawley’s Mystic Rose, , citing Leslie, Among the Zulus and Amatongas, , who writes, “When a mother-in-law meets her son-inlaw, she will not speak to him—she will hide her head and [the] breasts that suckled his wife.” Crawley renders this as, “‘She says it is not right that he should see the breasts which suckled his wife’”—quoting Leslie, not the mother-in-law. Freud’s source is clearly Crawley, whose formulation lends itself to but does not necessitate his staging of the Zulu woman’s testimony. . I was aided in perceiving the importance of the Zulu woman’s testimony for Freud’s construction of a psychoanalytic, anthropological authority by James Clifford’s work on “ethnographic authority” in Predicament of Culture, ‒.

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. Lowie, Primitive Society (), ‒; quoted in Wallace, Freud and Anthropology, . . Freud was not unique in attempting this shift toward positing emotional causes of cultural phenomena. Wilhelm Wundt, for one, also offered another theory that explained “Folk psychology”—the nonindividual elements of human psychology such as language, myth, and custom—as having their most basic origins in affective states; see Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology. . Freud cites Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules; McDougall’s Group Mind; and Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. . In his provocative reorientation of the understanding of “the Freudian subject” from the problem of desire to the problem of identification, Mikkel BorchJacobson also notes Freud’s reduction of social psychology to psychoanalysis; he provides an extended reading of Freud’s reworking of the theories of Tarde, Le Bon, and McDougal in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, but without entering historically into the issue of Freud’s methodological and strategic attempt to elaborate psychoanalysis itself as an academic discipline (Borch-Jacobson, Freudian Subject, ‒ ). . Van Ginneken, “Killing of the Father,” , . . Ibid., . . Forrester explores the implications for political philosophy of Freud’s theory that justice stems from envy in chapter  of Dispatches from the Freud Wars. . Joel Pfister has argued that through his adoption of Le Bon’s framework, Freud also associates psychoanalysis with and extends Le Bon’s political program, which offers the study of mass psychology as a form of psychological instruction for the ruling classes in how to understand and thus manage the unruly masses (“Freud’s Cultural Theory and ‘Red Vienna,’” ‒). See also van Ginneken, “Killing of the Father,” , and, for a history of the constitution of mass psychology as an object of study and political concern at the end of the nineteenth century, id., Crowds, Psychology, and Politics. One of the most substantive and challenging analyses of Freud’s vision of the individual’s relation to social authority can be found in Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. . Van Ginneken, “Killing of the Father,” ‒. . Lukes, Emile Durkheim,  and , citing Essertier, La sociologie, . . Lukes, Emile Durkheim, ‒. . Gabriel Tarde, “La réalité sociale,” Revue philosophique  (): , , quoted in Lukes, Emile Durkheim, . On the Tarde-Durkheim debate and its repercussions for sociology, see also van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, ‒. . By stressing Durkheim’s suggestion that scientific knowledge can be independent of psychological determinations, I do not mean to imply that his epistemology is radically anti-psychological or entirely different from Freud’s, or that he believes that the goals of science should be completely objective or self-generating;

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see, for example, his comments in Evolution of Educational Thought, ‒, in the context of a discussion of the role of science in secular education: “If the human mind, freed from dogma, cannot concede that there exists in us a supernatural guiding principle which is an emanation from the divine, it remains true—and empirically true at that—that human consciousness [as in the Christian concept of education] is still for us the single most important fact about the world, that which gives it incomparable value, and to which, consequently, everything should be related. . . . Far from being the case that between the disciplines which deal with the world of persons and those which deal with the world of things there is a great gulf fixed, the fact is that they mutually imply one another and converge on the same end.” . For elaborations on the relation of the prohibitive and constraining power of the superego to its inheritance of the earliest object-choices and identifications of the id, see Freud, The Ego and the Id (), in SE, : ‒, . . Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, . . See Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and Sociology of Religion (). For a recent survey and analysis of historical and theoretical trends in sociology, see D. N. Levine, Visions of the Sociological Tradition. . Freud, “Psychoanalysis” ( ), in SE, : . I am indebted to Mary Douglas’s attention to Durkheim’s and Mauss’s theories of the social origins of thinking; see her How Institutions Think. Robert Bocock considers Freud’s uniqueness as a sociological theorist to stem from his focus on emotions and the body rather than cognition and intellect in his understanding of society. As he offers a defense of psychoanalytic sociology within the “cumulative body of [sociological] theory,” Bocock nevertheless points out the interest of sociologists such as Max Weber in emotions and social life as well (Bocock, Freud and Modern Society, , ). . I am grateful to Robert Meyer Lee for drawing my attention to the problems of “unity” and “limit” in Durkheim’s and Freud’s writings. . See Olson, Emergence of the Social Sciences, . . For another example of a sociological account of the institutional structuring of emotional identifications, see Max Weber: On Charisma and Institution Building, and John Guillory’s reading of the psychological and sociological elements of Weber’s theory of bureaucracy in Cultural Capital, ‒. On Weber’s own project to “unify” the humanistic and social science disciplines, see Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology. . For Freud’s argument that legitimate scientific research should be nonpartisan, see his discussion of the aims of a psychoanalytic education in E&A, ‒. Sándor Radó, an important psychoanalytic promoter in his own right, given his involvement with establishing the psychoanalytic curriculum at Columbia University Medical School, in  echoes Freud’s extensive claims for the significance of psychoanalysis: “Though psychodynamics [psychoanalysis] is an offspring of medical inquiry, its realm of application by far exceeds the province of medicine. It

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includes all social sciences and services concerned with human relationships” (Radó, “Psychodynamics as a Basic Science,” in id., Psychoanalysis of Behavior, ). . For a history of sociology in the context of the history of the novel and literary study, see Lepenies, Between Literature and Science. . For an account of how Freud’s biological assumptions became increasingly scientifically obsolete by the end of his life, see Kitcher, Freud’s Dream, chap. . . Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” in SE, : . Freud’s sense that the initial ideas producing a scientific hypothesis are “derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from observation alone” lends itself to a historical and sociological interpretation of the genesis of scientific facts from nonscientific, even popular, conceptions—what Ludwik Fleck calls “proto-ideas”—of the object under investigation (see his Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact). It is impossible to say whether Freud meant to convey such a fully sociological conception of scientific research in this passage (and it seems unlikely), but his writings certainly bear out his willingness to build extra-scientific concepts into his new science. . Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, . . For an example of such a procedure of interpreting a myth, see Freud, “The Acquisition and Control of Fire” (), in SE, : ‒. . For an account of how this individual “historical” truth can emerge in analysis, see Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (), in SE, : ‒. BorchJacobson interprets the description of the primal parricide as “scientific myth” as a way of representing how subjectivity, in Freud’s texts, arises as a necessary fiction because of the “constant priority” of the emergent ego’s identificatory “modeling,” without the possibility of locating an original for the “model” (Borch-Jacobson, Freudian Subject, ‒). . Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, ‒. For a review essay critical of the ways in which Gay’s biography makes marginal or overlooks the effects of Freud’s historical and cultural context on psychoanalytic theory, see Toews, “Historicizing Psychoanalysis.” For another review essay of Freud biographies, see Young-Bruehl, “History of Freud Biographies.” . Carole Pateman has also persuasively analyzed Freud’s “history” of the primal parricide as a “contribution to the genre” of the story of the social contract and as another “conjectural history of the state of nature,” in the tradition of such political theorists of the origins of civil society as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. In this context, she focuses on Freud’s formulation of the parricide as a politically decisive “deed” in order to emphasize his unique theoretical linkage of the basis of the fraternal contract that founds civil society to a desire to gain sexual access to women, and she reinterprets the Freudian theory of the “primal scene” in light of Freud’s own social contract theory as a politically and culturally originary scene of rape (Pateman, Sexual Contract, ‒). Philip Rieff and Norman O. Brown have also placed Freud’s work on the origins of culture in the context of the political

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theory of contract; see Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, ‒, and Brown, Love’s Body, . . The passage in a letter to Fliess dated February , , where Freud describes himself as a conquistador reveals his awareness of the risks of his professional and theoretical ambitions: Perhaps there are hard times ahead, both for me and for my practice. On the whole, I have noticed that you usually overestimate me greatly. The motivation for this error, though, disarms any reproach. For I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer, if you want it translated—with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort. Such people are customarily esteemed only if they have been successful, have really discovered something; otherwise they are dropped by the wayside. And that is not altogether unjust. [Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, ] . See Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic. . Kitcher, Freud’s Dream, ‒. Kitcher’s detailed study of the conceptual and disciplinary repertoire through which Freud elaborated the psychoanalytic theory of mind is invaluable. Because of her interest in using Freud as a cautionary example for interdisciplinary work in cognitive science, however, she understands his interdisciplinary project primarily as inclusive and constructive, if ultimately inadequate, and she does not consider Freud’s competitive, epistemologically imperialist institutionalizing tactics. She also does not investigate the ideological and cultural effects of psychoanalytic knowledge. . According to Steve Fuller, disciplinary claims to distinctive forms of knowledge since the nineteenth century have been typically “reductionist,” and one of the central goals of epistemology has been “to arrive at rules for adjudicating the various reductionist claims” (Fuller, Social Epistemology, ). . Recent developments in psychotherapy suggest that it can also shift its focus toward social life to offer insight into the ways that factors beyond the control of individuals contribute to the experience of stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as to the occurence of divorce and developmental difficulties in children. In the context of a series for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered on how the advent of managed care is affecting the mental health profession, the reporter Frank Browning recently investigated how some psychotherapists whose clienteles have been diminished by cutbacks in insurance coverage for individual treatment have devised new niches for employment by offering group sessions of “preventive therapy” and “psycho-education” in workplace settings. Browning interviewed one San Francisco area psychotherapist, Lia Fisher, a co-founder of the Center for Work and the Family, who runs such “psycho-education” sessions for large corporations and other major employers to help employees deal with the effects of work-related stress

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on their marriages and families. Fisher allows that “while such psycho-education seminars cannot provide the intense support of traditional therapy, they do help couples to see that not all their troubles are internal, individual problems.” Fisher helps couples to “normalize” problems resulting from work stresses: “Normalized means sending the message loud and clear that yes, this is your problem, but it’s not your fault; that the reason things are so stressful, the reason that you’re having conflicts or no time to work out conflicts is because of something larger than yourselves that’s going on, because of the combination of economic changes, women’s entry into the workforce [resulting in more two-career marriages], changing expectations of men and women.” This new kind of intervention Fisher describes has also been termed “public psychology.” Browning narrates the enthusiasm for psychoseminars of another San Francisco therapist, Maureen O’Hara, dean of the faculty at the Saybrooke Institute, who “believes that much traditional psychotherapy has lost touch with the contemporary world” (“Stress in Life,” narrated by Frank Browning, Robert Siegel, and Linda Wertheimer, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, July , ). Thus one group who might begin to move away from psychological reduction—in part because of institutional and economic pressures of their own—are psychotherapists themselves. Corporations frequently fund such psycho-seminars in attempts to enhance worker productivity. Nevertheless, it seems possible that if “normalization” has come in this context to mean understanding one’s marital problems as caused by institutional and economic arrangements—that is, such seemingly personal problems become a “normal” result of one’s stressful work environment and not of one’s own (or one’s spouse’s) psychological defects or mistakes—then perhaps demands among employees for changes in the workplace, or for specific forms of compensation for work-related stress, might emerge as well.  . Dumont, German Ideology, . . Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, . . This definition of culture in the English language tradition can be traced to Matthew Arnold, who gave it one of its most famous and influential defenses in Culture and Anarchy (). For an exploration of the history of this sense of culture, see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society. Ian Hunter mounts a critique of this historical dialectic of culture in Culture and Government. . Vincent Descombes’s comments on the escalating stakes of the dispute between philosophy and psychoanalysis provide a French context for Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s engagements with psychoanalysis: The French situation since the Second World War has been marked by a rivalry between philosophers and psychoanalysts. They have challenged each other’s intellectual authority in the Parisian marketplace, which has favored

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the formulation of increasingly ambitious and encompassing agendas. Lacan’s role in this affair was to up the ante. After Lacan, it was no longer enough to treat Freud as a great philosopher; psychoanalysis now had to be granted the privilege of a philosophical construction transcending dialectical arguments or conceptual inventions. [Descombes, “Foreword,” xi‒xii] In a situation where many intellectuals and scholars received a basic philosophical training before specializing in a variety of disciplines, the ambition of psychoanalysis to go “beyond philosophy” (ibid., xii) could not remain unchallenged. On the relation between sociology and philosophy in France, see also Bourdieu and Passeron, “Sociology and Philosophy in France.” . Bourdieu advocates “clinical” uses of sociology as a socioanalysis that “treats the products of science as instruments for a self-understanding shorn of self-complacency.” Socioanalysis provides a form of social self-knowledge: “Contrary to what the ordinary representation of self-knowledge as the exploration of singular depths would lead us to believe, the most intimate truth of what we are, the most unthinkable unthought (l’impensé le plus impensable), is also inscribed in the objectivity and in the history of the social positions that we have held in the past and that we presently occupy” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, , ). . Two other elements of Bourdieu’s sociology of practice that could be considered to imply cognition are strategy, which I discuss in the Introduction, and interest; for Bourdieu’s analyses of these concepts, see, on strategy, “From Rules to Strategies,” ‒, and on interest, “The Interest of the Sociologist,” ‒, in Bourdieu, In Other Words. . Craig Calhoun has suggested that there are also transhistorical elements in Bourdieu’s sociology, such as the “universality of interested action,” even given the specific historical content of each kind of interest (“Habitus, Field, and Capital,” ). This observation points to the generalizing tendencies implied in any theoretical abstraction, and also to Bourdieu’s anthropological training and commitment to the scientific goals of social science. On this last topic, see Bourdieu, “Peculiar History of Scientific Reason.” . Perhaps my present position within the English faculty of a private university that offers a liberal undergraduate education provides a significant condition for such a “lack of interest” in defending the discipline with which I am affiliated: it is not likely that funding for the teaching of English language and literature will be cut at such an institution. . Calhoun argues that disciplinary distinctions are often primarily meaningful as characterizations of styles of research (“Sociology, Other Disciplines,” ). . It seems possible that my forays into other disciplines have produced work that might not be acknowledged as legitimately disciplinary by practitioners within those disciplines and might even be perceived as “imperialistic.”

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. For divergent views of “interdisciplinarity,” the characteristic political agendas of its practitioners, and the “crisis of the humanities” as its larger social cause, at least among humanities scholars, see Fish, “Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do,” and Guillory, “Literary Critics as Intellectuals.” Fish and Guillory represent two sides of an intradisciplinary debate, within literary studies, about whether literary study is annexing the social sciences or whether the humanities are undergoing scientization. Fish argues that “interdisciplinary” researchers are really doing one of three things: “either they are engaging in straightforwardly disciplinary tasks that require for their completion information and techniques on loan from other disciplines, or they are working within a particular discipline at a moment when it is expanding into territories hitherto marked as belonging to someone else . . . ; or they are in the process of establishing a new discipline, one that takes as its task the analysis of disciplines, the charting of their history and of their ambitions” (). It seems to me that I am engaged in all three of these interdisciplinary practices. But even though my privileged mode of reading, one that I carry out no matter what genre of text I encounter, is a literary-style close analysis, I have not even come close to “colonizing” sociology or history through literary study; nor have I subordinated the sociological techniques of analysis that I take from Bourdieu, Larson, or Abbott, for example, to strategies of socio/literary close reading. I have tried to retain the specificity of the methodologies I have relied on, while understanding how they contribute to the larger rubrics of historical epistemology, cultural history, historical sociology, and cultural studies—designations that all describe this project and the intellectual history of its endeavour in ways that I find persuasive. Social scientists and cognitive scientists seem to take the viability and even inevitability of interdisciplinary research much more for granted than do scholars in the humanities, perhaps because historically they have been engaged more frequently in the creation of hybrid disciplinary fields and research projects; see Calhoun, “Sociology, Other Disciplines,” and, on interdisciplinary cognitive science, Kitcher, Freud’s Dream, ‒. For an account of historical sociology, see Dean, Critical and Effective Histories. . For a cogent defense of the importance of literary methodologies in interdisciplinary scholarship in the history of ideas, see Herbert, Culture and Anomie, ‒. . For two recent accounts of the rise of cultural studies see Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints, and Pfister, “Americanization of Cultural Studies.” . Foucault, History of Sexuality, : . . Bourdieu details how cognitive changes—changes in one’s understanding of the world—are necessary to projects for political change: As an object of knowledge for the agents who inhabit it, the economic and social world exerts a force upon them not in the form of mechanical deter-

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mination, but in the form of a knowledge effect. It is clear that, at least in the case of dominated individuals, this effect does not tend to favor political action. We know that the social order owes some measure of its permanence to the fact that it imposes schemes of classification which, being adjusted to objective classifications, produce a form of recognition of this order, the kind implied by the misrecognition of the arbitrariness of its foundations: the correspondence between objective divisions and classificatory schemes, between objective structures and mental structures, underlies a kind of original adherence to the established order. Politics begins, strictly speaking, with the denunciation of this tacit contract of adherence to the established order which defines the original doxa; in other words, political subversion presupposes cognitive subversion, a conversion of the vision of the world. [Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ‒] . I take it that this kind of outcome is what Bourdieu announces in a deeply serious, challenging, and, in a disciplinary sense, typically ambitious and exclusionary fashion as the aim of reflexive sociology: In contrast to the personalist denial which refuses scientific objectification and can only construct a fantasized person, sociological analysis, particularly when it places itself in the anthropological tradition of exploration of forms of classification, makes a self-reappropriation possible, by objectifying the objectivity that runs through the supposed site of subjectivity, such as the social categories of thought, perception and appreciation which are the unthought principle of all representation of the “objective” world. By forcing one to discover externality at the heart of internality, banality in the illusion of rarity, the common in the pursuit of the unique, sociology does more than denounce all the impostures of egoistic narcissism; it offers perhaps the only means of contributing, if only through an awareness of determinations, to the construction, otherwise abandoned to the forces of the world, of something like a subject. [Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, ‒] . John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (), . . Chartier, Cultural History, . . These interests could be defined as intellectual, professional, institutional, disciplinary, and political. . This is not to say that there are not fascinating histories to write of research programs that have fallen by the wayside and failed to be sustainable, as much for lack of resources and prestige as for lack of intellectually compelling content. . I am grateful to Alan Liu for drawing my attention to “information” as a historically recent form of knowledge. In harking back to earlier, representational models of mind, I am thinking of Descartes and Locke, among others.

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Index

academic discipline: attainment of status of, ‒; psychoanalysis as, ‒, ‒ Adler, Alfred,  Aeschylus: Oresteia, ,  affordability of psychoanalysis, , ‒n “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, The” (Lacan), ‒ aggression as instinctual,  ambivalence: definition of, ‒n; in identification with tragic hero, ‒; as Oedipal, ; origins of, ; of schoolboy toward professors, ‒; taboo and, ; “tragic guilt” and, ‒ anagno¯risis, ‒,  “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (), ‒, ,  analyst: authority of, ‒; handling of fees by, ‒; medical persons as, ‒, ‒; nonmedical persons as, ‒; training analysis and, ‒ animism, psychological explanation of, ‒, n Anna Freud Centre web site,  Année sociologique, , , ‒, ‒ anthropology: in Britain, ‒; colonial administration and, ‒; incest taboo debate in, ‒, n. See also Totem and Taboo applications of psychoanalysis: cross-

disciplinary, ‒, ; educational, ‒, , n; through dreams and dream symbolism, ‒; through Oedipus complex, ‒; in war neuroses, n Aristotle, Poetics, ‒ Athens in fifth century: cult hero and, ‒; dream symbolism, ideas about, ; human agency and, ‒; human nature, ideas about, ; rivalry between Thebes and, ; tragedy versus myth in, ‒ Autobiographical Study, An (), , ‒,  autonomy of psychoanalytic knowledge, ‒ Bettauer’s Wochenschrift,  Bildung: analogy of psychoanalysis and, ‒, ‒; assumptions and significance of, ‒; definition of, ‒ Brentano, Franz,  Brücke, Ernst, and Physiology Institute, , , n Bühler, Karl, ‒ Burghölzli clinic,  Cambridge ritualists, n capitalism and psychoanalysis, ‒, ‒, ‒ Charcot, Jean-Martin, ‒ Civilization and Its Discontents ():



Index

guilt in, ‒; pessimism of, ; psychoanalytic psychopathology of culture and, ‒ “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness” (),  Clark University, Freud’s lectures at, ‒, ,  class: class conflict, psychological account of, , ; evolution of psychoanalytic knowledge and, ‒; professional-managerial, in United States, ‒; psychology and, ‒; scientific psychology as essential to ruling class, ‒; sexuality and, ‒; sociological theory of social origins of classification, ‒; taste, correlation with education and, ‒. See also middle class classical learning: as cultural capital for psychoanalysis, ‒, ‒; psychoanalytic alliance with,  client. See patients for psychoanalysis cognition as social process, ‒ cognitive change as necessary for political change, ‒n colonial administration and anthropology, ‒ consumerism and psychoanalysis, ‒, ‒ criticism, role of,  cultural capital (Bourdieu),  cultural studies field and institutionalizing strategies, ‒ cultural theory of Freud: client as whole community, ; disciplinary project of, ‒, ‒, ; goals of, ‒; methodological individualism and, ‒; Oedipus complex and, ‒; psychoanalysis as method and field, ; psychoanalysis as psychological common sense, , ‒; religion and, ‒, , ‒; scientific psychology as essential to ruling class, ‒; work, value of, ‒

culture: injurious influence of, ; of nineteenth-century Central European middle class, ; of nineteenthcentury Viennese middle class, ‒; Oedipal origins of, ‒; psychoanalytic psychopathology of, ‒; psychological origins of, ‒; understanding of through mind, ‒; versus civilization, ‒, n. See also Totem and Taboo daimo¯n: definition of, n; human agency and, ; mortality and, ; Oedipus as,  Darwin, Charles, hypothesis of small hordes, ‒ Darwinian-historical point of view, ‒ deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), ‒,  depth psychology, , , ,  Dionysus, role of in tragedy, ‒,  discipline: and attainment of academic institutionalization, ‒; description of, ; “imperialism” of, ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒; rise of as form of knowledge/power (Foucault), ‒n domain (Poovey), n dream symbolism, , ‒ Durkheim, Émile: career of, ‒; debate with Tarde, ‒; Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (), ; influence of, ‒; on professional disinterestedness, ‒; on public role of writer and scholar, ; The Rules of Sociological Method (), ‒; on theory of social origins of classification (with Mauss), ‒ education: psychoanalytic applications of, , n; psychoanalytic understandings of culture linked to,

Index ‒; sociology and reforms of, in France, , n; taste, correlation of with class and, ‒. See also Bildung ego,  Ego and the Id, The (), ‒ ego ideal,  Einstein, Albert, ‒,  emotions, cultural role of,  epic: birth of, ; Freud’s theory of cultural origins and,  Erziehungsberatungsstellen (counseling centers),  Euripides, Hippolytus,  evolutionary naturalist framework,  exogamy, common origin with totemism, ,  experimental psychology: appeal of, ; in Germany, , ‒, ‒n; history of, ‒ expertise, autonomous, constructing of for psychoanalysis, ‒ “Explanations, Applications and Orientations” (), , ‒, ‒, n father-son relationship: classical education and, ‒; identification and ambivalence in, ‒ father substitutes,  Felman, Shoshana: analysis of Oedipus by, ‒; clinical effect of Oedipal intervention, ‒; criticism of Klein’s interpretation of Oedipus complex, ‒; Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, ‒; “mythic” approach to psychoanalysis, ; Oedipus as figure of selfexpropriation, , , , , ; Oedipus complex as related to sexual meaning, ‒; plays about Oedipus as “literary myths,” ‒; psychoanalytic interpretation of Oedipus at Colonus, , , ‒, ‒; on



transmutation of Oedipal desire into speech,  femininity and psychoanalysis, ‒ feminist criticism of psychoanalysis, xiv, , ‒n field (Bourdieu), n folk psychology, n free association and authority of physician,  Freud, Anna, quoted,  Freud, Martin,  Freud, Sigmund: academic career of, ‒; academic credentials of, ; address to Fifth International Psychoanalytical Congress (Budapest, ), ‒, ‒; address to Second International Psychoanalytic Conference (Nuremberg, ), ‒; ambitions of for psychoanalysis, ‒; as cultural critic, ; education of, ; Goethe Prize of, ; lectures at Clark University (), ‒, , ; letters to Romain Rolland, ‒; Library of Congress exhibit on, , n; trip to Athens of in ,  Freud (Sigmund) Archives,  Future of an Illusion, The (): class conflict and, ; cultural forms and, ‒; religion and, , ‒, ‒; and secular education as prophylaxis against neurosis, ‒ German physicians, professionalization of,  Gesellschaft der Ärzte (Society of Medicine),  goat-song theory of tragedy, ‒,  Greek tragedy: elements of incorporated into psychoanalytic theory, , ‒; Freud’s positioning of, ‒; mortality and, ‒; origins of, ‒, ‒; psychoanalysis, identification with, , ‒; religion, function of in, ‒; Sophoclean, ‒;



Index

spectators and, ‒, , . See also Oedipus; Oedipus at Colonus; Oedipus Tyrannus Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (): and origins of group psychology, ‒; and origins of individual, ; psychological reduction of sociology and, ‒ groups, psychoanalytic explanation of,  guilt: civilization and, ‒; Oedipal origins of, ‒; superego and, ‒; taboo and, ‒; “tragic guilt,” , ‒; as undermining therapy, ‒ Gymnasium (German secondary school), , , ‒ habitus (Bourdieu): of Freud, ; institutionalizing strategies and, ‒; interdisciplinary practice and, ‒; professional jurisdiction and, ; and relation between social regularities and individual agency, ‒n; in relationship to field, n Hale, Nathan G., Jr., ,  Heidegger, Martin, ‒n herd instinct, theory of (Trotter), ‒ hero cult,  Hippias,  historical epistemology, , ‒n historical psychology (Vernant), ‒,  “historical” truth, ‒ hordes, hypothesis of (Darwin), ‒ hothouse family (Demos),  human agency, views of, ‒ hypnosis: as model of influence of leader, ‒; as therapeutic technique, ‒,  hysteria, diagnosis of, ‒ hysteric, the: knowledge of, ,  id,  identification, ; of the Chorus with

the tragic hero, ‒; of the spectator with the tragic hero, ‒ Imaginary, the (Lacan),  “Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego, The” (Klein), ‒, ‒,  incest taboo, ‒, n incestuous dreams, interpretation of,  individualism, as aspect of ideology of profession, ‒ “inner self ”: challenge to priority of, ; criticism of psychological reduction to, ‒; psychological reduction and, ‒; role of,  instinct: aggression and, ; psychological reduction of sociology and, ‒; versus external reality, dynamic between, ‒ “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (),  institutionalizing strategies: academic curriculum, rationale for inclusion in, ‒; of anthropology in Britain, ‒; application of psychoanalysis to other disciplines, ; and Bildung, formulation of psychoanalysis on model of, ‒, ‒; and comparison of psychoanalysis to anthropology and sociology, ‒; cultural studies and, ‒; and extending of psychoanalytic domain, ; habitus and, ‒; interdisciplinary research method and, ; and mobilization of ideological significations of science, ‒; overview of, ‒, , ; and psychoanalysis as psychological common sense, , ‒; and “scientific myth,” ‒, ; of sociology in France, ‒; and staging of recognition of psychoanalytic necessity, ‒. See also professionalization strategies institution of psychoanalytic knowledge, 

Index interdisciplinary approach of author, ‒ interdisciplinary research, divergent views of, n Internationaler Psychoanalitischer Verlag,  International Psycho-Analytical Association, , , , , , ,  International Psychoanalytic Congress, Freud’s address to: Fifth (Budapest, ), ‒, ‒; Second (Nuremberg, ), ‒ Interpretation of Dreams, The (), ‒,  Introduction to Social Psychology (McDougall),  “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” (‒), ,  Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Felman), ‒ Jews in Vienna and Austria, , n, n judgment of taste, ‒ Klein, Melanie, “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego,” ‒, ‒,  Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, , n kratos, ,  Kultur, n Lacan, Jacques: “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” ‒; on analyst’s role, ; criticism of Klein’s interpretation of Oedipus complex, ‒; on Oedipal intervention as unconscious, ‒, ; on Oedipus at Colonus, focus of, ; psychoanalytic interpretation of Oedipus at Colonus, , , ‒, ‒; on triangular structure of Oedipus complex, , ‒



Lacanian analysis,  League of Nations,  Le Bon, Gustave, , ‒ libidinal significance of work,  Library of Congress exhibit, “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” , n linguistic unconscious, ‒, ‒ literary critical method of close textual analysis, ‒ Lowie, Robert, ‒ Mach, Ernst,  managed care and mental health profession, , ‒n market analysis for psychoanalysis, ‒ Marxism, sociology as, , ‒ Mauss, Marcel, theory of social origins of classification (with Durkheim), ‒ McDougall, William, , ‒ mental health: managed care and, , ‒n; in United States, ‒ mentality of the crowd,  meritocracy as aspect of ideology of profession, , ‒ middle class: expectations, psychological norming of, ‒; professionalization and rise of, ‒; subjectivity and psychoanalysis, ‒, , ‒ Moses and Monotheism (), ‒ mother-in-law avoidance, ‒ myth: definition of, ; disciplines as, ; plays about Oedipus as “literary myths,” ‒ neurology, in nineteenth-century United States,  neurosis: in audience, ‒; culture and, ; and psychiatric jurisdiction, attack on, ‒; psychological reduction and, ‒; purificatory rituals compared to, ‒; social and cultural causes of, ; social prophylaxis



Index

of, ‒, ; as stupidity, ; as universal,  normality, as ideal, ‒ Oedipus: association of psychoanalysis with, , ‒; as heroic figure, ; secondary revision of legend of, ‒ Oedipus at Colonus: death of Oedipus in, , ‒; defense of self by, ‒, , ; divine will in, ‒; and Felman’s and Lacan’s interpretation of death of Oedipus, ‒; Felman’s reading of, ; Lacan’s and Felman’s psychoanalytic translations of, , , ‒, ‒; Lacan’s focus on, ; location in, ‒, ; major elements of drama in, ; and Oedipus as cult hero, ‒; setting of, ; story of, ‒; themes of, ‒, ‒ Oedipus complex: applications of psychoanalysis through, ‒; disciplinary ambitions for psychoanalysis and, ‒; epistemological claims for, ; gender paradigms built into, ; intervention based on, ‒; triangular structure of, , ‒; universality of, , , ‒,  Oedipus Tyrannus : criticism of Freud’s reading of by Vernant, ‒; doubleness of play’s language, ‒; Felman’s analysis of, ‒; Freud’s criticism of morality of, ‒; Freud’s reading of, ; psychoanalytic appropriation of, , ‒, , ‒; as version of primal legend,  “On Beginning the Treatment” (), , ‒ “On Psychotherapy” (), ‒,  On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (), , ,  ontogeny,  Other, the (Lacan), , ‒ Outline of Psychoanalysis, An (), ‒

patients for psychoanalysis: common outlook of, ‒; definition of, ‒; normality as ideal of, ‒; as whole community,  performative effect of analytic dialogue, ‒ philological techniques, ‒ philosophy, association with: psychoanalysis, ; and psychology, ‒, , ; and sociology, , ‒ phylogeny,  physicians: as analysts, ‒, ‒; German, professionalization of, ; social authority of, in nineteenth century, , ‒,  primal parricide: aftermath of, ‒; and alignment with goat-song theory, ; anthropological basis of Freud’s explanation of, ‒; distortions of, ; as historical, ‒, ‒; origins of, ‒; psychological reduction and, ; psychological reduction of anthropology and, ‒; repercussions for women of, ; tragedy as authoritative evidence of, ‒ Primitive Culture (Tylor, ),  professional disinterestedness, ‒ professionalization strategies: and claim for autonomy of field, , ; conclusions regarding, ‒; contesting treatment and, ‒; and establishment of jurisdiction of analyst, ‒; and expertise, construction of, ‒; metaphor and, ‒; and patient, definition of, ‒; reduction and, ‒; and universality, meritocracy, and individualism, ‒, ‒; writings on,  professions: competition for jurisdiction among, ‒, ‒; definition of, ; founding of psychoanalytic organizations and, ‒; history of, ‒, , ; and legitimacy, gaining of for, ‒, ; normative domain of, ; professional ideology

Index and, ‒; public service and, ‒; rise of, ‒; sciencebased, ‒; shift from economic to ideological function of, ; in United States, ‒; and work, value of, ‒ Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), ‒ psychiatry, attack on diagnoses and ethics of, ‒ psychoanalysis: academic discipline status of, ‒, ; academic recognition of, ; affordability of, , ‒n; Bildung, formulated on basis of, ‒, ‒; claims to “legal title” of psychological knowledge by, ‒, , ; as cumulative science, ‒; desire for state sponsorship of, ; femininity and, ‒; feminist criticism of, xiv, , ‒n; as genetic psychology, ‒, ; as hermeneutic discipline, , n; as master discipline, ‒; normative effects of, , ‒, ‒, , ‒, , ‒; popularization of, ; as psychological common sense, , ; rejection of, ‒; as research instrument, ; in Russia, ; as “scientific myth,” ‒, ; scientific status of, ‒, ‒, ‒; secret committee for, n, n; successes and failures of, , ‒; Swiss contingent and spread of, ; in United States, ‒, , ‒, , ‒n. See also applications of psychoanalysis; social reforms psychoanalytic college, proposed curriculum for, ‒ psychoanalytic institutes,  psychological reduction: of anthropology, ‒, ‒; Freud’s method of, ; instinct versus external reality and, ‒; modern method of, ‒; neuroses and, ‒;



normalization of problems and, ‒n; primal parricide and, ; sexuality and, ‒; of sociology, ‒; taboo and, ‒; thought style and, ‒ Psychologie des foules (Le Bon, ),  psychology: attack on jurisdiction of, ‒; competition of with sociology, , ; depth psychology, , , , ; folk psychology, n; as fundamental science, ‒; psychoanalysis as basis of, ‒; schools of, ; scientific type as essential to ruling class, ‒; in Vienna, ‒. See also experimental psychology “Psychology for Neurologists” (),  “Question of a Weltanschauung, The” (), , ‒ Question of Lay Analysis, The (): dismissal of academic psychological research in, ‒; and justification of nonmedical persons as analysts, ‒; and psychoanalytic treatment on mass scale, explanation of, ‒; purpose of, ‒ Radó, Sándor, ‒n recovered memory therapy, , ‒n reduction: as common to other disciplines, ‒; description of, ; of Greek myths to versions of Oedipus legend, ‒; as professionalization strategy, ‒; of religious beliefs, ; sociological, . See also psychological reduction Reich, Wilhelm,  Reik, Theodor,  rejection of psychoanalysis, ‒ religion: affective sources of, ; critique of, ‒; origins and social function of, ‒; psychoanalysis as



Index

profession carrying authority of, ; reduction of beliefs of, ; tragedy, function of in, ‒ repetition compulsion and death drive, , ,  resistance: to cure, ‒, ; as guarantor of professional autonomy, ‒ reversal, conceptual, by Freud,  ritual murder and sacrifice, practice of, n Rolland, Romain, Freud’s letters to, ‒ Rules of Sociological Method, The (Durkheim, ), ‒ Russia, psychoanalysis in,  Salpêtrière clinic (Paris), ‒ Schlegel, August Wilhelm, ‒ Schlegel, Friedrich,  school: function of, , ; Gymnasium (German secondary school), , ‒; university, role of in Europe, ‒ “schoolboy psychology”: and ambivalence toward professors, ‒; consequences of, ‒ school culture, ‒ science: and categorization of unconscious processes as somatic, ; establishment of cultural authority of psychoanalysis using, , ; Oedipal theory as, ‒; psychoanalysis as establishing psychology on basis of, ‒; relevance of psychoanalysis to, ‒ scientific capital (Bourdieu), ‒ “scientific myth,” ‒,  scientific observation, role of mind in, ‒ secondary revision of Oedipus legend, ‒ secularization of culture, ‒ self-expropriation of Oedipus, , , , , 

sexuality: class and, ‒; psychological reduction and, ‒; as universal and originary,  Smith, William Robertson: and theory of totem meal, ‒,  social class. See class social facts (Durkheim), ‒ social ideal of professional man, ‒ social justification for psychoanalytic expertise,  social prophylaxis of neurosis, ‒,  social reforms: comparison of Freud’s agenda with that of others, ‒; professionalism as public service and, ; psychoanalytic expertise for, ‒; psychological evolution of society and, ‒; secularization of culture and, ‒; sociology and education in France and,  socioanalysis (Bourdieu), n sociology: competition of with psychology, ; in France, ‒; as Marxism, , ‒; versus socialism,  Sophocles: attributes of tragedies of, ‒; birth of, ; status of in nineteenth century, ‒. See also Oedipus at Colonus; Oedipus Tyrannus spectators, of Greek tragedy, ‒, ,  Sterba, Richard, ‒ subjective illusion,  subjectivity: conceptualization of, ‒; psychoanalytic knowledge and, ; theory of psychosexual development and, ; tragedy and, ‒ sunousia, ‒ superego, ‒, ,  Symbolic, the (Lacan),  taboo: description of, ; incest, ‒, n. See also Totem and Taboo Tarde, Gabriel, , ‒, 

Index taste, correlation of with class and education, ‒ theater, as embodiment of unconscious,  thought collective (Fleck), ‒ thought style (Fleck), ‒, ‒,  Totem and Taboo (‒): ambivalence in, ; and animism, psychological explanation of, ‒, n; audience for, ‒; basis and assumptions of, ‒; on primal parricide as historical, ‒; psychological reduction of anthropology in, ‒; psychological reduction of taboo and, ‒; purpose of, ; return of totemism in childhood, chapter on, ; and totemism, Freud’s objections to theories of, ‒ totem meal, , ‒,  tragedy. See Greek tragedy tragedy of destiny (Schicksalstragödie), ‒ tragic effect, ‒,  “tragic guilt,” , ‒ tragic recognition, ‒ trago¯idia, ‒, n training analysis, ‒ trauma theory, ‒n Trotter, William, theory of herd instinct, ‒ Tylor, Edward Burnett, Primitive Culture,  unconscious: concept of, ; in depth psychology, , , , ; in hierarchy with conscious volition, ; linguistic, institutionalizing force of,



‒, ‒; theater as embodiment of,  United States, psychoanalysis in, ‒, , ‒, , ‒n universality, of professional expertise, ‒ university, role of in Europe, ‒ Vernant, Jean-Pierre: criticism of Freud’s reading of Oedipus Tyrannus by, ‒; historical psychology and, ‒ Vienna: Freud’s address and life in, ; Jews in, , n; psychology in, ‒; socialist government of, ; worker riots in,  Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, n Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, , , , ‒, ‒ Vienna Psychological Institute,  war neuroses, n Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ‒ Wednesday Psychological Society, ,  “Why War?” (), ‒, ‒ Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, ‒ Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle (Economic Psychology Research Center),  work, value of, ‒ Wundt, Wilhelm, , ‒,  xuno¯n,  Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Winter, Sarah. Freud and the institution of psychoanalytic knowledge / Sarah Winter. p. cm. — (Cultural memory in the present) Includes bibliographical references and index.  --- (alk. paper). —  --- (pbk. : alk. paper) . Psychoanalysis. . Psychoanalysis—History. . Freud, Sigmund, ‒. I. Title. II. Series. .  .'—dc -

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