dead not dead

Music: Haujobb: Freeze Frame Reality This week's Newsweek cover-story is titled "Freud is (Not) Dead," and subtitled with an intriguing promise: "on his 150h birthday, the architect of therapeutic culture is an inescapable force. Why Freud-—modern historys' most debunked doctor—-captivates us even now." It is an interesting "pop" survey of Freud's project, if only because the answer to the question posed is, basically: Freud was right about "human nature," that we are basically conflicted. Freud put a language to something ineffable that many people feel. It is as if the reporter suddenly discovered Juliet Mitchell's 1974 classic, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, as the he identifies a monolithic feminism as the beginning of Freud's demise. The basic story is that feminism killed off Freud in the academy (this is not true, of course; some feminists were obviously apologists, just like the reporter).

There is a curious summary of the article at about.com that provides a tidy demonstration of the phenomenon—the "dead not dead" haunting—the essay is trying to get at: "The article offers a good examination of why Freud is still a topic of conversation, even after most of his theories have been debunked or lambasted by critics." Note the summary passes over "many" or "some" to suggest that most of Freud's ideas have been "debunked." The article, of course, doesn't say that: it validates the dynamic unconscious as an idea (even suggesting some neurobiological studies support Freud's ideas about "the talking cure"), it validates Freud's hermeneutic of suspicion (symbols are not always what they originally seem), and the article in general seems to suggest that, well, the man was onto something. The article does trounce (and rightly so) Freud's understanding of female sexuality and other bad ideas, but in general it’s a fair summary of Freud's influence in American culture. So why the collapse to most? Well, it's a habit, is it not? Of course, Freudians and other from the cultures of therapy would specify an answer: the primal horde. Freud was already dead when he arrived on the scientific scene in 1900 with his dream book. His own defensive style of rhetoric specified the role in advance! Here, more than a century later, we're finding that we are still mourning him, that he haunts as the patriarch we have eaten and now continue to throw-up; the more forceful the trouncing, the more deeply he infects the digestive processes in American bowels.

I have been thinking for the past couple weeks on something Joan Copjec says in Read My Desire that applies as much to Siggy as it does to Bushie:

The situation in America is somewhat altered [from European Cartesianism]. Here we make a point of resisting the universalizing that belongs to the order of the cogito in order to celebrate difference, particularity. This does not mean that we have given up loving our leaders; unfortunately we still continue to participate in love's deception that the Other will give us what it cannot possibly give. We continue, in short, to demand a master, but one that is significantly different from the Other that sustains the cogito, since we require this master to accredit our singularity rather than our commonality.

That is, insofar as the European subject is intellectually more collectivist, here in the states we have the problem of pluralistic individualism. Consequently, being an American subject produces a pickle: "how, then, to maintain simultaneously one's relation to a master and one's uniqueness?" Her answer is this: "America's solution is, in analytic terms, hysterical: one elects a master who is demonstrably fallible—even, in some cases, incompetent. . . . Americans love their masters not simply in spite of their frailties but because of them." This is the reason Freud is dead not dead on the cover of Newsweek, for he is a failed master.

"Yes, it's Sigmund Freud, still haunting us, a lifetime after he died in London in 1939," begins the Newsweek article, and continues on the next page "that he retains any life at all is remarkable. To innocently type his name into a search engine is to unleash a torrent of denunciation . . . ." The Freudian answer to such puzzlement is to note that love and hate are precisely the same affective force (the one we greet our parents with as children, no?), and, as Erasure sings, "I love to hate you" is not a contradiction in terms. When figures like Freud and Bush the Second emerge in the language of Mastery, one is compelled to take a side. I mean, the article's answer to the question, "why does Freud haunt?" is more correct than the reporter realizes: Polarizing figures derive their power from the promises that are impossible to fulfill—failure is the source of the Fatherly Mystique. Forget Freud's ideas about the drives, or dream intepretation, and so on; you need to look at how Freud made sense of his own noteriety with his later work, like that in Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and so on. It's less about his ideas and more about his figure as a master, as an ideal father, as an intellectual tyrant. Copjec continues: "If everything the Other says or does fails to deliver the accreditation we seek, if all the Other's responses prove inadequate, then our difference is saved . . . ." And in this sense Freud has become a master of desire, for, the only way to be that, Copjec rightly observes, is "to be impotent or dead." Dead Not Dead: this is also the logic of the uncanny persistence of George W. Bush.