Wild Analysis

From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life

Shaul Bar-Haim, Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Helen Tyson, Shaul Bar-Haim, Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Helen Tyson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032061153
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000450293
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2022 Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Book!

This book argues that the notion of 'wild' analysis, a term coined by Freud to denote the use of would-be psychoanalytic notions, diagnoses, and treatment by an individual who has not undergone psychoanalytic training, also provides us with a striking new way of exploring the limits of psychoanalysis.

Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life proposes to reopen the question of so-called 'wild' analysis by exploring psychoanalytic ideas at their limits, arguing from a diverse range of perspectives that the thinking produced at these limits – where psychoanalysis strays into other disciplines, and vice versa, as well as moments of impasse in its own theoretical canon – points toward new futures for both psychoanalysis and the humanities. The book's twelve essays pursue fault lines, dissonances and new resonances in established psychoanalytic theory, often by moving its insights radically further afield. These essays take on sensitive and difficult topics in twentieth-century cultural and political life, including representations of illness, forced migration and the experiences of refugees, and questions of racial identity and identification in post-war and post-apartheid periods, as well as contemporary debates surrounding the Enlightenment and its modern invocations, the practice of critique and 'paranoid' reading. Others explore more acute cases of 'wilding', such as models of education and research informed by the insights of psychoanalysis, or instances where psychoanalysis strays into taboo political and cultural territory, as in Freud's references to cannibalism.

This book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and students working across the fields of psychoanalysis, history, literature, culture and politics, and to anyone with an interest in the political import of psychoanalytic thought today.

Part 1

The mystic writing pad

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200765-1

Chapter 1

D. W. Winnicott and the finding of literature

Elizabeth Sarah Coles

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200765-2

In an interview in 2003, the poet Jorie Graham posed the following question: ‘Will a communal action––via a writer’s and a reader’s meeting on the page––create a tenable “we”?’¹ Graham was reflecting on where meaning happens in her poems and to whom exactly it belongs: whether what she calls a reader’s ‘instinct’ is what sets the limits of description, or whether it is instinct that is bound by a ‘communal action’ of literature, belonging to neither reader nor writer but placing intangible demands on both. Graham’s question echoes several lines of inquiry in the recent history of literary studies that seek to recast the bonds between form and social life.² Yet it is at the intersection of literary and psychoanalytic theory that we come closest to her immediate concerns: where to ask about the ‘we’ of reading and writing is to ask about the emotions, fantasies and instincts summoned or suspended on the printed page; and where thinking about the creation of ‘we’ from ‘I’ (and ‘I’ from ‘we’) might compel us to ask another question, with which Graham ends her remarks: ‘Can that “we” combat our capacity for destruction and self-destruction?’.³

Psychoanalysis has long understood that with the beginning of a ‘we’ comes the beginning of thought.⁴ For the British psychoanalyst and paediatrician, Donald Woods Winnicott (1896–1971), the bond between ‘we’ and ‘I’ at the deepest keel of cognition is one of the raisons d’être of psychoanalysis, both as a communal action and a mode of conversation. Throughout his working life, however, Winnicott would return to the problem of just how communal, how equitable, this action can ever really be – or what kind of conversation really goes on between an interpreting analyst and a patient, between interpretation and its objects. It is a problem that runs on a parallel current to Winnicott’s ideas on how conversation with the world – how a shared world, we could say – first becomes possible in the life of the infant; how others come to exist for us, beyond what Martin Heidegger, in his late critique of psychoanalysis, called the ‘container mind’ (Heidegger, 2001, p. 90; p. 227–228). What joins Winnicott’s writings on the ‘nursing couple’ with his vision of the analytic pair is his concern for how a ‘we’ ever becomes real in the first place – and the sometimes radical consequences when it doesn’t.

This essay returns to questions that have long shaped Winnicott’s legacy in the literary humanities, the undisputed centrepiece of which is his ‘transitional object’ and the repertoire of ‘transitional phenomena’ through which the baby begins to comprehend difference.⁵ Beyond infancy and throughout adulthood, the ontological and psychic distinction between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ is a distinction whose precariousness, whose gradations and whose consequences cross from aesthetic and religious experience to the shakier contingencies of social and political life: how we use and talk about the objects of human culture, how we are able (and unable) to agree on their meaningfulness, are questions in Winnicott that understand the tenability of culture in terms of the tenability of relationship. Imagining the kind of object literature might be, reflecting on contemporary and future conversations between literature and its interpretation, this essay brings Winnicott’s notions of what he calls ‘object-relating’ into dialogue with his critique of the relationships of interpretation, in which he consistently emphasises relationships of language. What these elements share, and where the one lends itself to a reading of the other, is a tantalising and troubling distinction that Winnicott himself never clearly or finally theorises, and which offers a powerful set of terms for rethinking the interpretive conversations of literary criticism. The terms Winnicott uses, which together form the central axis of this essay, are the object lesson of ‘finding’ and its would-be counter-experience, the psychic action he calls ‘creating’.

Winnicott’s roughly drawn account of ‘finding’ and ‘creating’ – experiences that, for the child as much as for the psychoanalyst, occupy the tenuous ground between fantasy and action – offers an aesthetics that is far less straightforward than Winnicott’s more explicit remarks on culture and the work of art would seem to suggest. A reappraisal of Winnicott’s aesthetics in light of his thinking on interpretation and interpretive language is now particularly pressing: the concerns converging in recent years around the written discourses of literary criticism, the established vogue for so-called ‘critique’, and the vagaries of what Paul Ricoeur famously called the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, have begun to make a problem of the discipline’s own interpretive conversations (Ricoeur, 1970). From its deterministic commitment to exposure and narrow affective range, to the seductive appeal of the broad-stroked, forceful intelligibility Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls ‘strong theory’, the problem of ‘critique’ is something the literary humanities has only recently begun to get to grips with (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 133). Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, has long been conversant with its own unease regarding interpretation, beginning in the dialogues of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, placed securely on the agenda in the Controversial Discussions of the 1940s, and theorised most forcefully in the late work of Jean Laplanche (Ferenczi, 1988; Laplanche, 1996, 1999). While I will not be suggesting that the current pull against critique is a direct legacy of psychoanalysis, I want to propose that Winnicott’s accounts of interpretive and early object-relating can, in unexpected ways, help to clarify what kind of object literature might be for those of us whose task is to describe it; what kind of ‘we’ might be at stake in its reading; what it is in literary works that certain forms of critical reading appear to betray, denature or deny, and what that might say about the contradictory lures and responsibilities of reading literature.

Critique and creative imagination

In her 2003 volume, Touching Feeling, Sedgwick makes a case for the overriding ‘feeling’ of contemporary literary criticism, going one step further than Ricoeur’s ‘suspicion’ by speaking in terms of ‘paranoia’. The signature affect of criticism in the wake of deconstruction, ‘paranoid reading’ has, Sedgwick says, ‘limited the gene pool of literary-critical perspectives and skills’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 144). Yet its distaste for surprise, its surprising disavowal of curiosity, means paranoid reading makes it ‘less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower or teller’ (Ibid., p. 124). What is at stake, Sedgwick suggests, is possibility – both vis-à-vis the object of reading and, by extension, in the reader’s own self-relation. Invoking possibility again, she notes that the hermeneutics of suspicion is ‘widely misunderstood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities’: suspicion turns possibility into an action that closes down possibilities in its wake (Ibid., p. 125). Sedgwick’s language also evokes Ricoeur, who asked of the hermeneutics of psychoanalysis: ‘does not this discipline of the real, this ascesis of the necessary, lack the grace of imagination, the upsurge of the possible?’ (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 36). Suspicion can unleash deterministic and graceless truths. Finding wherever it seeks, it culls where most it could cultivate.

In the wake of Sedgwick’s essay, several critics have linked the culling of possibility to specific argumentative qualities that turn a key legacy of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the practice of ‘critique’, into a heavy-handed and formulaic operation. Isobel Armstrong homes in on the excision of textual ambiguity, and with it ambiguous emotional states, from the pedagogies and practices of criticism (Armstrong, 2000). Citing a range of rebarbative examples, Lisa Ruddick writes of the determined contemporary vogue for ‘deadness or meanness’, the normative coldness and cruelty of a critical discourse that leaves its own workings unexamined (‘In the name of critique, anything except critique can be invaded or denatured’ (Ruddick, 2015, p. 71)). In her influential 2015 work, The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski argues that ‘suspicious’ styles of reading ‘can be stultifying, pushing thought down predetermined paths and closing our minds to the play of detail, nuance, quirkiness, contradiction, happenstance’. By these means, Felski says, the critic ‘conjures up ever more paralysing scenarios of coercion and control’ (Felski, 2015, p. 34). Sedgwick’s ‘strong theory’ is now more than ever being construed as a theory of force; its vehement interest in exposing the object – doing so ‘strongly’, convincingly – renders such writing indifferent to the object.⁶ It is also, by the same token, a theory of seduction approximating Ferenczi’s sense of the term: a discourse, a tongue, seducing and seduced by its own strength of argument.⁷

Yet if wider calls for a ‘post-critical’ writing go largely unheeded, it is perhaps because the force of argument is something that continues to satisfy – authors arguably more than readers – and that both force and satisfaction now rank among the highest points of value in critical discourse.⁸ While what is and is not of value for literary criticism is a question answerable only by way of literature, the arguments emerging against critique can be understood to express a psychoanalytic problem, a problem to which Winnicott’s thinking in particular offers a vivid set of theorisations and imaginative possibilities. Since Freud first theorised the transference, psychoanalysis has been alert to the allure of forceful and compelling interpretive stories. In his clinical diary, Ferenczi accuses Freud of ‘artificially provok[ing]’ the very transference effect he interprets, by dint of a hermeneutic authority Ferenczi argues should be ‘mutual’ (Ferenczi, 1988, p. 93). The issue here is not the transference – which we might say is, de facto, both artificial and a provocation – but the question of an unchecked or at least un-confessed hermeneutic authority; as opposed to a subjective centre or ‘I’ that, in the words of Augustine’s famous confession, glaringly psychoanalytic avant la lettre, has ‘become a problem to [itself]’ (Augustine, 1961, p. 239).⁹ At the heart of Ferenczi’s insistence on openly discussing the transference and countertransference is a belief that the psychoanalytic cure is only a solution – only really cures – if and because it also remains a problem; interpretation can only do its work, he seems to suggest, if the interpretation’s authority is in doubt from the start.¹⁰

Winnicott’s attitude to interpretation could not have been clearer. In an essay on ‘Interpretation and Psychoanalysis’ (1968) he tells us, citing the same impasse as Ferenczi, that ‘there are analysts who in their interpretative role assume a position which is almost unassailable so that if the patient attempts to make a correction the analyst tends rather to think in terms of the patient’s resistance than in terms of the possibility that the communication has been wrongly or inadequately received’ (Winnicott, 1989, p. 208). Winnicott’s concern is for the preservation not just of possibility but of a driven interpretive precariousness, reflected in his wariness about cultivating what he calls elsewhere ‘an intermediate area in which play can take place, and then inject[ing] into this area or inflat[ing] it with interpretations which in effect are from [his] own creative imagination’, a wariness that led him to ‘retain some outside quality by not being quite on the mark or even by being wrong’ (Winnicott, 1971, p. 102; Winnicott, 1965, p. 167). He...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Wild analysis
• PART 1: The mystic writing pad
• PART 2: Mass psychology
• PART 3: The location of cultural experience
• PART 4: The suppressed madness of sane men
• Index