Something uncanny at the heart of psychoanalysis.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Ellingsen, Peter
• Date: 22 March 2005

In this country she was afraid. But it was her soul more than her body that knew fear. She had thought that each individual had a complete self, a complete soul, an accomplished I. And now she realized ... that this was not so. D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent.

There is something uncanny at the heart of psychoanalysis that evokes Shakespeare more than science. Jacqueline Rose, the English literary academic, has a sense of it, and--like Freud-- draws on the work of artists to make her case. For her, it is Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. What these writers do, she says, is convey what it 'feels like not to know what distinguishes you from the objects around you, not to know--in the most concretely imaginable sense--who or where on earth ... you are'. (1)

This seems a long way from Freud's positivism and the biological contortions that marked the establishment of psychoanalysis, but it is not so far from Freud himself. As early as 1883, before his psychoanalytic discoveries, he wrote to his fiancee Martha Bernays about the way the oddness behind the facade of life's ordinariness can derail composure. Freud had just read Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, published in 1874. The book left him feeling as if 'all the dross of the world' had been thrown at his head. The effect was to arouse the 'great problems of knowledge and real riddles of life' with 'conflicts of feelings and impulses, confirming the awareness of our perplexity in the mysteriousness that reigns everywhere'. (2)

It is this mysteriousness, of course, that excites novelists but presents a problem to non-fiction writers, especially those writing about psychoanalysis. How do you talk concretely about shadows? Rose describes it as putting poetry back into the mind, and says that this--more than undoing forgetting--is the task of psychoanalysis. Freud, as he wrote to his fiancee, was concerned with the great problems of knowledge, which he saw as problems of science, that is, 'knowledge or cognisance of something known or implied'. (3) Now there is a tendency for science to mean measurement.

Freud thought such questions ever-present and worthy of constant reflection. But instead of facing them, he wrote, we try to sideline them. 'What one does', he says, 'is ... confine oneself to a narrow aim every hour and every day and get used to the idea that to concern oneself with these enigmas is the task of a special hour, in the belief that they exist only in those special hours. Then they suddenly assail one in the morning and rob one of one's composure and one's spirits'. (4)

What he is describing, and what obsessed Woolf and Proust, is the unconscious. It is at the heart of Freud's discovery, and at the core of psychoanalysis, though the way some psychoanalysts function you would be hard pressed to know it. In 1999, for instance, the president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Robert Pyles, called for an end to orthodox 'Freudian soul-searching', saying it was driving him mad. Two years later, the entreaty had been so successful that a speaker at the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists conference was moved to ask why it was that shrinks were no longer curious about the unconscious. Artist Michael Leunig, who many in the audience enjoyed for his cartoons, prodded the gathering by extolling the creative space afforded by 'staying in the unknowing'. Freud called this 'free association'. It involves delving into the unconscious, not the latest medication or CBT (cognitive behavourial therapy) maxim. 'The subconscious is absolutely fundamental to art', Leunig said, wondering what place it had in modern psychiatry. (5)

There was no answer. Some smiled, others looked uncomfortable. The only sound was the ripple of self-satisfied smiles from drug company reps as they arranged their displays in the foyer, one proclaiming that Virginia Woolf would have been better off if she had taken anti-depressants. In the battle between tablets and talk, drugs were clearly winning. For those psychiatrists still interested in psychoanalysis, there was a shrinking place for something as amorphous as the unconscious. Some of those trained in the English Object Relations tradition hung on to their craft, but the buzz was for US-style Ego Psychology, which favours propping up ego defences over exploring unconscious impulses. I will argue that this is the antithesis of psychoanalysis. But first, an historical reflection: What are the events and ideas that have led to this shift?

Some clinicians, particularly Jacques Lacan, have offered their views. Lacan's is to affirm unconscious processes with a poetic flourish: 'something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me'. (6) But only recently has an historical account arrived that dissects the mighty cultural and political forces in which psychoanalysis evolved.

Eli Zaretsky's book Secrets of the Soul is a detailed examination of the ideological ferment from which psychoanalysis arose and the intellectual and cultural climate in which it prospered, at least for some decades. Zaretsky, a left-leaning New York historian, is not a psychoanalyst, nor does he write like one who has been analyzed. But he is passionate, informed and rigorous in finding an ideological context for Freud's baby, notably in his home of North America where, as Freud anticipated, it experienced its greatest success, and most devastating sell-out. His achievement is to link psychoanalysis to the intellectual and cultural tsunamis of the Western world, beginning with the Enlightenment, which psychoanalysis both bolstered and challenged: industrialization, modernism, and the dawning of postmodernism. Freud, of course, has been named, with Darwin and Marx, as among the trio of shapers of the modern age. But such assessments are invariably made without a careful consideration of psychoanalysis. The word itself suggests an examination of the mind, but it is far from clear what this means. Cutting edge neurology is nowhere near describing consciousness, nor do analysts agree on what psychoanalysis actually is.

Zarestky does not dodge these critical issues, though he does not necessarily wrestle them to the ground either. What he does do, and what makes this work valuable, is to provide a non-partisan social and cultural explanation for what befell psychoanalysis. While the practice has had a huge impact, changing, as Zaretsky says, 'the way ordinary men and women understand themselves', he argues it has yet to be historicized. (7) Foucault would have had something to say about that, but it is true that any critique worth the name has to explain the intensity of the appeal of psychoanalysis and the breadth of its influence. Such core considerations have not been taken up by recent critics, like Richard Webster and Frederick Crewes, who have contented themselves with sniping from the sidelines without saying how it is that psychoanalysis has seeped so deeply into culture and survived so long.

Zaretsky answers these questions not simply by quoting Wittgenstein on the 'enormous charm' afforded Freud and his followers as underdogs, but by considering whether psychoanalysis was popular because it fed solipsism. Was psychoanalysis, as Carl Schorske concludes in his 1980 history of psychoanalysis, fin-de-siecle Vienna, a counter-political phenomenon that fostered a withdrawal from rational public life? Philip Rieff and Christopher Lasch, members of the Frankfurt School, have made such arguments about 20th-century 'psychological society',8 claiming that partly under the influence of psychoanalysis the Enlightenment's ideal of autonomy declined into a psychological culture of narcissism.

It is a popular and persuasive critique, but as Zarestky argues, it fails to grasp the dual character of psychoanalysis, noting its liberating effect on the human psyche. He is in particular talking about the 'marginal and exploited classes and women', groups that were also of particular interest to Marx and those, including the younger Zaretsky, whom he inspired.

Zaretsky sees psychoanalysis as the first great theory and practice of personal life, that is, of identity distinct from one's place in family and society and the social division of labour. Psychoanalysis then, constitutes a 'historically significant experience of singularity and interiority, one grounded in the modern process of industrialization and urbanization'. (9) In this context, the Enlightenment becomes not a high point to be emulated, but an incomplete project to be developed into a new principle of subjective freedom. Interestingly, this is how Freud saw psychoanalysis. In the paper he sent to a 1911 Sydney medical congress, he wrote that psychoanalysis was not speculation but the outcome of experience and, for that reason, like any new product of science, unfinished and open to anyone to test through their investigations. (10)

Australian analysts, by and large, did not take up his invitation to explore and research, which led to a particularly derivative sort of local practice...