Subterranean Politics and Freud's Legacy

Critical Theory and Society

A. Buzby

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137330642
• eBook ISBN: 9781137349378
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Subterranean Politics and Freud's Legacy seeks to reestablish psychoanalysis as an ally to critical theory's efforts to restore subjectivity and oppose systemic domination in modernity. Given critical theory's ongoing crisis of identity and purpose, this project makes a significant contribution to contemporary political theory.

CHAPTER 1

Freud and the Critical Method

Sigmund Freud was a man who played many roles—most notably thinker, therapist, pioneer, and, yes, bourgeois—and he was fearless in all of them. Even an unsympathetic reading of Freud, indeed, must cede that as both theorist and practitioner, he was uncowed by either the challenges society threw against his work or the devastating weight of history itself. The First World War, above all, tested intellectuals with an unprecedented display of what human beings are capable of, especially in an increasingly reifying modernity. For psychoanalysis, a system concerned from its inception with the psychological foundations of dissatisfying modes of living, this challenge was especially important. If Freud’s concern was to merely fit his patients for an impoverished life in modernity (and thereby flatten their subjective resistance to alienation and oppression), the war should have caused him to confirm his pessimistic forecasts for humanity. Instead, Freud was mobilized by the war to radicalize in both theory and practice. Where death swept across Europe, Freud countered with an instinctually rooted Eros. Where ovine mass mentalities threatened, Freud challenged the psychological dimension of reactionary groups. Where, above all, aggression and illusion held deadly court, Freud denied the efficacy of both, demanding that man become autonomous and develop a just, free, and fulfilling mode of living. It follows, therefore, that Freud is better understood as an opponent of domination, internal and external, than as its advocate. Unfortunately, many critical theorists have reached precisely the opposite conclusion about Freud, particularly in terms of his praxis.

When Freud’s rejection of oppressive trends is coupled with his concern for the subjective, however, it follows that Freud is more of an ally to the project of critical theory than those critical theorists have given him credit for. In short, it is thus time to reimagine what psychoanalysis can mean for critical theory. In this chapter, I present psychoanalysis as a process meant both to restore the subject to health and to propel the subject to grow into autonomy and social agency. As such, psychoanalysis is an important wellspring for critical theory, which urgently needs to support these developments in the present. The central goal of the chapter is to reveal psychoanalysis as an ongoing process of reflection, criticism, and action with implications for critical theory that go far beyond the couch. I argue that direct engagement with psychoanalysis reveals its militantly optimistic and compassionate character. Freud’s optimism is important because it informs a process of critique and action that challenges not only the suffering of the individual, but also the structural conditions that produce that suffering through the reorientation of subject to self and world. Psychoanalysis therefore, anticipated critical theory in terms of subjectivity and social agency, and has emancipatory potential that critical theory has yet to tap. Today, where extremes of hope and disillusionment dance together to an often-bewildering tune, it is long past time to reconsider Freud’s legacy to critical theory and society.

Reimagining psychoanalysis for critical theory, however, is challenging, as critical theory has a complex relationship with psychoanalytic methods. As Martin Jay recalls, the original push to couple Freud and Marx was audacious for its time, particularly given psychoanalysis’s mystique as a thoroughly bourgeois enterprise.¹ Early efforts, especially Erich Fromm’s, focused on using psychoanalytic mechanisms to mediate between the individual and society, and perhaps reveal something about each in speaking to the relation between the two.² The drive, in other words, was to couple psychoanalysis with sociology, and to bring out the sociological dimension of Freudian categories. The critique of Freud as a patriarchal absolutizer of the status quo arose from this work.³ Even Adorno’s “Social Science and Sociological Tendencies in Psychoanalysis,” which castigates the revision of psychoanalysis, ends with the gloomy assessment (borrowed from Benjamin) that “it is only for the sake of the hopeless that hope is given” and contests, “I suspect that Freud’s contempt for men is nothing but an expression of such hopeless love which may be the only expression of hope still permitted to us.”⁴ Adorno here ascribes a clear pessimism and scorn for “men” to Freud; it is worth noting, perhaps, that the Frankfurt’s School’s “intensified appreciation of Freud’s relevance” in the 1940s and beyond was bound to its “increased pessimism about the possibility of revolution.”⁵ For thinkers like Adorno, Freud was the brilliant, but terribly grim, prophet of a world from which the promise of history was seeping out, like the life from a dying man.

In rethinking critical theory’s utilization of psychoanalysis, it is important to remember Bronner and Kellner’s claim that “against the trends toward conformity, massification and submission, the critical theorists all advocate strengthening the ego and developing critical individualism.”⁶ This statement speaks equally to psychoanalysis. The common views of Freud as man, intellectual, and practitioner, however, work against the correlation of psychoanalysis with this goal. To take an example, the reading of Freud as striving to “[turn] hysterical misery into mere unhappiness,”⁷ obscures the necessary relationship within psychoanalysis between “strengthening the ego,” a goal made clear in Freud’s work, and, “developing critical individualism” against the emergent dangers of “conformity, massification and submission,” an end of psychoanalysis frequently missed by those who read Freud as urging his own form of submission.⁸ In short, the major critical theorists read psychoanalysis as dogmatically crafting, particularly through authoritarian clinical practices, subjects capable of enduring, not challenging, the world around them. Freud’s were the frail subjects who betrayed the full realization of humanity and its species-being, who laid down arms they could no longer understand and were too weak to carry.

Critical theory has maintained that a nondogmatic perspective is essential to emancipatory work from its inception.⁹ It is easy to see how the image of Freud as something of a primal father in his own right, policing a rigid orthodoxy, not to mention the bourgeois biases that pepper his work, could color the perception of radical thinkers. Still the worse, the sale of Freud action figures, the proliferation of Freudian quips on sitcoms, and the publication of endless “self-help” volumes drawing on Freud in more or less crude ways (one could go on), might indicate that we have come far too close to Freud as commodity to substantively approach Freud as thinker who knew himself to be making contributions and sought to prime new discoveries that would surpass his own. In other words, critical theory generally treats psychoanalysis as something of a fellow traveler, a source of potential insight, but one whose aims call its methods into question. Critical theory, therefore, approaches Freud’s work as exampling a genius that identifies the limits of alienation, but cannot transcend them.

As a harbinger of the loss of history’s emancipatory potential, the stilling of the very heart of Marxism, Freud was an ally who could never be fully trusted. Critical theory’s work with Freudian categories—gradually seen as more or less social in themselves due to society’s engulfment of the subjective—eventually turned from the psychoanalytic process. Today, however, Freud must be picked up in an antipodal fashion: as a militant optimist compassionately contesting domination in the hope that mankind might be other than hopeless. I argue that psychoanalysis, contrary to the common reading of Freud, is one of the strongest means for restoring the emancipatory hope so many have lost. In this volume, I hope to return Freud, whom critical theory has turned on his head, firmly to his feet.

Reimagining Freud: A Search for a Method

Fresh study of Freud’s critical method, indeed, has much to offer to critical theory. The question becomes: What is the psychoanalytic process, and how can it enrich critical theory? To answer this question, one must know how to read psychoanalysis as a process that evolved over time, and not just as it remains frozen in the most commonly read of Freud’s works. To read Freudian methods through the early case studies alone, for example, is to miss the forest for the trees. The case studies, most importantly the infamous account of Dora’s unsuccessful treatment,¹⁰ are windows on the development of the psychoanalytic process, not examples of the deployment of mature methods. Freud used his early forays into clinical practice to refine his methods. The psychoanalytic process that emerged from this period, directly from the active linking of theory and practice in line with human interests, cannot be reflected upon unless Freud’s methods are examined in detail. This is because, as Freud famously noted in his controversial lecture, “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” psychoanalysis is not and does not lead to a set worldview, and is instead a critical push against the illusions, most importantly religion, which structure identity and reality. Freud argues that a Weltanschauung is:

an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered. . . . As a specialist science, a branch of psychology—a depth-psychology or psychology of the unconscious—[psychoanalysis] is quite unfit to construct a Weltanschauung of its own: it must accept the scientific one.¹¹

More than this, though, Freud fears that any reliance on or construction of a Weltanschauung is a troubling attempt to sate psychological needs, and that even science posits a uniformity that psychoanalysis cannot sanction.¹² Critical theory errs, therefore, where it presumes Freud promotes a set worldview and seeks to adjust the subject to an inflexible system of principles demanding renunciations. Instead, psychoanalysis questions all worldviews with an eye to building autonomy that needs no “uniform” solutions to “the problems of our existence.”

Psychoanalysis, indeed, neither sets goals for the subject nor imposes interpretations and roles upon her in practice. Instead, the analysand is empowered to make her own interpretations, and thereby take control over her unique life for her own ends. Psychoanalysis is concerned with the subject’s work of uncovering the truth of her inner life and contesting the personal, ideological, and dogmatic illusions that have heretofore restricted her from obtaining this clarity. It is thus an emancipatory process-building autonomy and grounded in reflection, critique, and constructive practice. For Freud, any Weltanschauung is necessarily suspect because it can rest on the same needs and fears behind other demobilizing forms of obscuring the real. He thus embraces science not as worldview, but as a means of contesting illusion and liberating the individual to live creatively in relation to society, as Freud elaborates:

Science takes notice of the fact that the human mind produces these demands and is ready to examine their sources; but it has not the slightest reason to regard them as justified. On the contrary it sees this as a warning carefully to separate from knowledge everything that is illusion and an outcome of emotional demands like these.¹³

This contestation can only occur as an ongoing form of resistance against the delusion and denial that mark mankind in what Freud elsewhere described as its long immaturity. Clinically, psychoanalysis seeks to liberate the patient from all that restricts autonomy and subjectivity, so he can also join this struggle. Psychoanalytic insights thus cannot be disentangled from psychoanalytic methods, as psychoanalysis, like critical theory, is an ongoing process of criticism and action, of fearless discovery, and the bold push against illusion, and nothing more.

The Development of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Self-Interpretation

The ideas that became psychoanalysis began to take shape in Freud’s mind well before his earliest practice. Other scholars, most notably Ernest Jones and Peter Gay, have constructed meticulous genealogies of the long process of discovery that antedates Freud’s first concrete efforts. For the purposes of this work, however, the origins of psychoanalysis must be considered in the deed, the first connection of theory with practice. By this measure, the opening act of psychoanalysis was the self-analysis Freud began during the waning years of the nineteenth century, most dramatically captured in his seminal wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Freud and the Critical Method
• Chapter 2 Freud and the Critical Theory of Society
• Chapter 3 Psychoanalysis as Humanism: Reclaiming Eros for Critical Theory
• Chapter 4 New Foundations for Resistance: The Marcuse-Fromm Debate Revisited
• Chapter 5 Working through the Past: Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory, and Bad Conscience
• Chapter 6 Wrong Life Lived Rightly: Sublimation, Identification, and the Restoration of Subjectivity
• Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index