Giving Life, Giving Death: Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Philosophy
420
Giving Life, Giving Death: Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Philosophy
420eBook
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| ISBN-13: | 9781628952674 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2016 |
| Series: | Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 420 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Giving Life, Giving Death
Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Philosophy
By Lucien Scubla, M. B. DeBevoise
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2016 Michigan State University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-267-4
CHAPTER 1
Freud and the Oedipus Legend
Psychoanalysis and anthropology became known to each other almost at once, and for a long time they went forward together, without, however, ever really getting to know each other. The history of their development, growing up side by side, is above all the story of a missed opportunity. And yet all signs seemed at first to foretell a mutually rewarding relationship. Psychoanalysis appeared at a time when anthropology was in its ascendancy, and shared its ambition to develop a human science no less robust than the natural sciences. Freud, a contemporary of the great early figures of religious ethnology, was an attentive reader of William Robertson Smith, James Frazer, and Émile Durkheim, but also, as we know from Totem and Taboo, of less famous authors and more specialized works as well. His intellectual curiosity and his interest in the customs of exotic peoples were nourished by what appeared in principle, at least, to be a compatibility between the postulates of cultural evolutionism, then dominant in anthropology, and those of the psychoanalytic theory that he was then in the process of formulating. For just as he regarded the unconscious as the infantile part of the human psyche, and mental illness as a fixation on the most remote human past, anthropologists attributed the same type of magical behavior and prerational thought to primitive peoples, children, and madmen. Thus Ernest Jones, for example, held that psychoanalysis and folklore studied survivals of the past — individual in the one case, collective in the other — in complementary ways (see Jones 1951, 5). Fortified by Blondel's social psychology and Piaget's genetic psychology, this "archaic illusion," as Claude Lévi-Strauss was later to call it, persisted in the thinking of psychoanalysts, whereas ethnologists had abandoned evolutionism early on, under the influence first of the diffusionist and then of the functionalist schools. Not until the 1930s was it finally agreed that, among primitive and savage peoples (to use the terminology of the period) on the one hand, and civilized peoples on the other, children are to be distinguished from adults; in each case, some are of sound mind, others not (see Lévi-Strauss [1949c] 1969, 84–97). Freud, even if he was more clear-sighted in this regard than his eminent contemporaries, nonetheless helped to sustain the common misconception by giving it the support of psychoanalysis.
But this is a relatively unimportant point. More disturbing is Freud's inability to profit from his ethnographic learning in order to compare his own hypotheses with much more numerous and varied empirical findings than he could draw upon from clinical experience. Anthropology, though it furnished him with a sort of laboratory where he could test the principles of psychoanalysis and, if need be, amend them, remained for him first and foremost a new territory to be annexed. So convinced was he of being right that he felt sure facts could not help but confirm his ideas. The truth of the matter is that Freud always behaved as a conqueror, eager to push the frontiers of his empire to their furthest possible extent. This can be seen already in his earliest works. Taking a longer view, we can see that his attempt to conquer the human sciences unfolded in three stages.
Freud and the Conquest of the Human Sciences
Psychoanalysis, strictly speaking, is a medical technique intended to heal persons suffering from neuroses. But Freud did not mean for it to be reduced to a therapeutics, a method for treating illness. He regarded it also, and perhaps primarily, as the opening pages of his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Freud [1915–1916] 1963) suggest, as the first scientific theory of mental life. Reflex psychology having proved to be no less incapable than behavioral psychology of explaining mental disorders of any kind, it fell to psychoanalysis to provide psychiatry with the psychological basis it lacked. Although psychoanalysis manages only — or at the very most — to treat neuroses, Freud believed it could supply a general explanation of all mental disorders, not only different forms of neurosis, but also perversions, of which neuroses are the negative, as it were, and psychoses. The apparently modest promise of psychoanalysis as a therapeutics was therefore compensated for by an immense theoretical ambition. This was the first stage of conquest.
The second stage moved from psychopathology to a general theory of mental life through the analysis of dreams and parapraxes, which is to say normal phenomena that structurally resemble psychoses in the first instance, and neuroses in the second, and therefore constitute a natural link between the normal and the pathological. This extension was decisive. The appearance of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and then The Psychopathology of Everyday Life the following year is generally agreed to mark the moment when psychoanalysis achieved the status of a well-formed and independent discipline. All the elements of what is customarily called the "first Freudian topic" (the distinction between the unconscious and the preconscious, between primary and secondary processes, between primal repression and "after-pressure" [Nachdrangen], and so on) were now in place.
It then remained, in a third and final stage, to stake a claim not only to human psychology, but to all cultural and social phenomena, by setting forth a psychoanalytical theory of religion, science, art, economics, and so on. From 1907 onward, Freud lay siege to this new territory by publishing, in the journal Imago, a series of studies on the prohibition of incest, on taboos, and on totemism that a few years later, in 1913, he was to collect in Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. In the second sentence of his preface, he clearly announces his intention, implicit in the work's subtitle, to apply "the point of view and the findings of psychoanalysis to some unsolved problems of social psychology" (Freud [1913] 1955, 13:xiii). Bring me facts, he seems to say, and I will make a theory out of them. Although he had read Durkheim, who insisted on the specifically social character of human relations, Freud was not interested in the social institutions described by ethnologists. It is as though he considered the culture of different societies to be reducible to facts of collective psychology, which themselves are reducible to individual processes, to which psychoanalysis alone held the key. Dragged down to the level of individual psychology, ethnology has nothing of its own to teach us. It is merely a training ground for psychoanalytic theory.
In view of the immensity of the territory to be conquered, Freud thought to surround himself with young disciples having expertise in the various fields it encompassed as well as the enthusiasm required to carry out the missions assigned to them. Otto Rank (1884–1939) published The Myth of the Birth of the Hero in 1909, and then, two years later, a work on the Lohengrin legend (see Rank [1909] 2004; Rank 1911). In 1914, Theodor Reik (1888–1969) began work on a series of four studies — on the practice of couvade, the rites of puberty among primitive peoples, the Kol Nidre declaration, and the sounding of the shofar in the Jewish rites of Yom Kippur — that were collected five years later in a volume to which Freud contributed a preface: Ritual: Psycho-analytic Studies (see Reik [1919] 1931). In 1920, Géza Róheim (1891–1953), an ethnologist by training, published an article in Imago on marriage rites, and then embarked upon an extensive round of field studies in Oceania, Africa, and North America whose principal objective was to refute Bronislaw Malinowski's arguments against the universality of the Oedipus complex (see Malinowski 1927). Then there was Ernest Jones (1879–1958), author of a very detailed article on superstitions relating to salt that appeared in 1912. Following Freud's break with Jung, Jones became the zealous guardian of psychoanalytic dogma and took it upon himself to spread the good word among anthropologists in the United Kingdom, while railing against Malinowski on his own account.
The interest shown by the founder of psychoanalysis and his lieutenants in ethnology is therefore undeniable. To them we owe writings whose erudition rivals that of Frazer, and which have the power to stimulate the thinking of researchers still today. Moreover, they undertook original work that enlarged the scope and enriched the documentary basis of anthropology. It is therefore tempting to believe that their good intentions and their respect for ethnography have not been reciprocated. Indeed, among anthropologists from Kroeber to Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss, psychoanalysis seems to have aroused mainly reservations and criticisms, if not disdain or outright hostility. Even the so-called culture and personality school, which brokered a fruitful exchange of ideas between Adam Kardiner and ethnologists such as Ralph Linton, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Cora DuBois, seems to have taken from Freud hardly anything more than the importance of the earliest manifestations of infantile anxiety and, consequently as well, of the educational systems that arouse or repress them, that give them free rein or channel them in this or that direction. There can be no doubt that the attitude of most anthropologists was rather distant, nor that it was encouraged by an excessive division of labor that tended to isolate disciplines from one another. But it was not necessarily due to any principled rejection. As I have already suggested, and as we shall see later, looking at specific cases, it is rather more on the side of Freud and his disciples that closed-mindedness and rigidity are to be observed.
Malinowski's testimony is significant in this regard. He had fallen under the spell of Freud's theory at once, and even if its obscurities and occasionally specious arguments soon led him to temper his enthusiasm, he nonetheless recognized that psychoanalysis had made a significant contribution to the knowledge of human nature, and that its hypotheses had helped him work out his own ideas (see Malinowski 1927, vii–x). At the same time, he deplored the inability of Freudian analysts to welcome anything coming from ethnology and the social sciences — neither fresh data or new insights that would force them to revise their system or to reconstruct it on a larger basis, nor even information that promised to strengthen its fundamental postulates: "Curiously enough," he writes, "though sociology and anthropology have contributed most [of the] evidence in favour of psycho-analysis, and though the doctrine of the Oedipus complex has obviously a sociological aspect, this aspect has received the least attention" (1–2).
Instead of seeking the genesis and form (or forms) of the Oedipus complex in the interactions between parents and children, which vary from one culture to another, the Freudian approach simply decrees that a somehow pre-established Oedipal structure determines a priori the nature of these interactions at all times and in all places. Assigning primacy to conflicts and to intrapsychic mechanisms, while assuming in advance the completeness of psychoanalysis, it could not help but regard any external theoretical contribution as superfluous. Corresponding to the atomism of the Freudian subject, then, is a sort of autism in the theory itself. This is why psychoanalysis has no other possible relation to anthropology than that of master to servant. It asks only that anthropology confirm its own hypotheses by furnishing new examples that it then undertakes to explain with reference solely to its own concepts. To be sure, the theoretical corpus of psychoanalysis was in a state of perpetual flux during Freud's lifetime, the result of his constantly changing conception of the unconscious, the theory of impulses (or "drives" [Trieb]), and the typology of mental disorders. But it was, so to speak, always the same cards that were endlessly being reshuffled. One searches in vain in Freud's writings for a single concept or a single hypothesis borrowed from ethnography — apart from the notion of taboo, or at least the term.
Occasionally, however, under the influence of his anthropological reading, Freud managed to collect his wits, shake off his radical individualism, and recognize, if only for the length of a paragraph, the primacy of the collective over the individual. Thus, for example, in a neglected passage of Totem and Taboo devoted to affirming yet again the existence of a structure common to the major neuroses and great cultural productions, he astonishes us by inverting the usual relations, of anteriority and dependence, between them:
Neuroses exhibit on the one hand striking and far-reaching points of agreement with those great social institutions, art, religion, and philosophy. But on the other hand they seem like distortions of them. It might be maintained that a case of hysteria is a caricature of a work of art, that an obsessional neurosis is a caricature of a religion and that a paranoiac delusion is a caricature of a philosophical system. The divergence resolves itself ultimately into the fact that the neuroses are asocial structures; they endeavour to achieve by private means what is effected in society by collective effort. (Freud [1913] 1955, 13:73)
By comparison with psychoanalytic orthodoxy, the reversal of perspective is spectacular. Culture here is no longer a prolongation of neurosis and the ego's defense mechanisms by collective means, but a primary and sui generis reality; now, by contrast, it is neurosis that is derivative, an individual byproduct, a crude caricature of culture. Illness is alienating because it makes the subject a stranger to the culture of his group. It results from a failure of the individual, whether due to internal or external causes, to adapt himself to the norms and the cultural symbolism of his environment. Religion, for example, is not an obsessional neurosis that has been enlarged to the scale of an entire people or of humanity as a whole; it is the obsessional neurosis that is a deformed version of religion, because it is purely private.
In this rare and precious passage, Freud reasons as Lévi-Strauss was to do a few decades later in comparing the child, the primitive, and neurosis, as part of a larger inquiry into the unity of mankind and the diversity of cultures. Culture and illness operate on the same materials, precisely the ones that are available to every child in working out his own relationship to nature and society. But while culture uses these materials to create a structurally stable synthesis regulated by norms of collective behavior, the child cobbles them together to produce an anomic synthesis that is much more precarious and purely individual. Unfortunately, this flash of lucidity on Freud's part, a trace of which still remains in the preface he wrote to Reik's book (see Reik [1919] 1931, 10–11), was to have no further consequence — as though, fearful of being seduced by the sirens of culturalism, he had repented a moment of weakness and promptly returned to the fold of psychoanalytic orthodoxy, repeating his canonical definition of religion as universal neurosis loudly and clearly in The Future of an Illusion (Freud [1927] 1961). Even for a psychoanalyst, revising one's own beliefs is a very difficult thing.
And yet Freud, to his credit, continued to navigate cautiously among contradictory hypotheses, not hesitating, even once analytic theory had officially been constituted, to bring together in his writings evidence and ideas that could not easily be reconciled, either with the theory or with one another. Thus, in his autobiographical study, he curiously juxtaposes the notion of obsessional neurosis as a private, deformed religion with the definition of religion as a universal obsessional neurosis (see Freud [1925] 1959, 20:66–67). René Girard has shown in Violence and the Sacred that one finds the same type of inconsistency in his theory of the Oedipus complex — where the son's identification with the father is described sometimes as prior to the rivalry, sometimes as subsequent to it; sometimes as the source of rivalry, sometimes as its consequence — and in the scenario he imagines of the murder of the father of the primitive horde, which likewise juxtaposes, in an ambiguous manner, two different processes (see Girard [1972b] 1977, 169–222). Nevertheless, as Girard notes, this fundamental honesty on Freud's part serves to moderate his dogmatism and makes his works fascinating to read, precisely because of the tensions they contain. Freud's exaggerated confidence in the ability of psychoanalysis ultimately to overcome every difficulty led him to advance speculations that a more circumspect author would have passed over in silence or crossed out on rereading what he had written. Freud did no such thing, hoping one day to produce a conclusive synthesis that in the end eluded him.
(Continues...)
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