a former self

Music: Lusine: Language Barrier (2007)

I think one can file this post under "narcissism," but I'm not sure. Then again, given the dynamics of blogging, I'm not sure one can exempt any post from this label, an observation in keeping with the overall trend toward what we might term the Mirror Function of Internet sociability. Nevertheless, I persist.

One of our best and brightest Ph.D. students recently interviewed at my undergraduate alma mater in Washington, DC. The chair of the department formerly known as "Communication" sent back a copy of a paper I wrote for him in 1995. It appeared in my school mailbox mysteriously the week before school let out, and until our student emailed me to explain why it was there, I was a bit baffled. She said my former professor kept the paper because it was one of his favorites.

In 1995 I was a 22-year old junior at the George Washington University, double-majoring in communication (interpersonal focus) and philosophy. The paper I wrote was for a class titled "Persuasion," and subliminal or unconscious persuasion was a topic we touched on in class that intrigued me. I remember for this assignment we were to analyze a print-ad for unconscious prompts and subliminal messages. My paper begins:

The knowing advertiser, armed with knowledge of the weak points of the American consumer---his or her fears, appetites, drives, and vanity---seeks to conquer all the battles of economic survival, without fighting. Fighting would be too honest, for it would force the advertiser to reveal his/her strategy in a rational, clearly understood way. I want you to buy my product and here is how I am going to get you to buy it. In an ideal world, all our advertisers would fight.

Well, fourteen years ago I see I was a little more pugnacious than I am today; reading the paper, however, I also see the roots of a nascent Freudian. I've uploaded a PDF scan of my paper here. In the paper I can see I've already embraced a number of Freudian insights about the drives.

What's a surprise to me about getting this paper is that it ruptures my own scholarly self-narrative. I have often described my interest in the psychoanalytic as beginning in graduate school and coming from three sources: A course I took on Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in the cultural studies department my last semester of coursework; reading Kenneth Burke; and reading Fredric Jameson. I have tended to think of my detour (hat tip to Jim) through Zizek, then Lacan and Freud, as a recent one that began after my dissertation was complete. Now I see, however, I was drawn to thinking about psychology and early formative experiences much earlier.

In the previous post Jim Aune asked the question, "is there a psychoanalytic dimension to why we choose our theoretical lenses?" Certainly there is, of course, as well as a dimension for a certain refashioned intellectual past (one that forgets an interest in a theoretical lens much earlier than one says).

Remembering what it was like to be in this undergraduate class, as well as my decision to go to graduate school, there is a certain compulsion to confess. Foucault notwithstanding, I think one of the reasons Freud's writings resonate with me is because of his obsession with the question, "what is a father?"