This whole experience was not necessarily a dramatic one; it did not even have to give rise to the anxiety-laden explorative urge that David Grossman (1989) examines through his character Momik in See Under: Love. For many of us, it just meant that there was always something in the background that haunted the present, something not quite nameable even if we could give it an approximate name (‘the War’, ‘the Nazis’ or – later – ‘the Holocaust’), something like a mist that slightly obscured the details of everyday life, fading the colours a little, infiltrating the small nooks and crannies of our imagination. It keeps coming back, too, and it is very difficult to deal with: after all, we did not experience the trauma, so how can we lay claim to it? Those many of us who were not even ‘second generation victims’, the children of survivors, how could we speak of the Holocaust without falsifying it, without demanding an inheritance that was not actually our own? What kind of inauthenticity were we playing with there? Yet, something keeps cropping up, something that hovers a little in the background and cannot be put to rest, but that cannot be expressed without embarrassment, self-dramatisation, insufficiency and inaccuracy.

The imagery of ghosts and haunting is inescapable in contexts such as this, and is writ large not only in Jewish experience, but also in much of the cultural consciousness of the contemporary era. Indeed, it is starting to become a cliché, which presents difficulties for attempts like this one to mine it for new and productive insights. Its fullest exploration in the recent academic social science literature is that by Avery Gordon (1997), who has a clear idea that haunting is a social phenomenon, an index of oppression. She writes (p. xvi), ‘I used the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future.’ The temporal disturbance produced by haunting is possibly its key feature, and one of the claims it has to critical usefulness: something that is supposed to be ‘past’ is experienced in the present as if it is both fantastic and real. This is especially the case with suffering. One of the things that Holocaust scholarship has demonstrated is how strongly a trauma lived through in one generation continues to have effects in later ones. Indeed, the question of how suffering is transmitted to those who ‘come after’ pervades discussions of memorialisation. In some respects it is no mystery: how surprising is it, after all, that people who live through terrible times should communicate to their children their own anxieties and grief? But like most apparently easily explicable phenomena, something else operates in the mix as well, making the response ‘excessive’ in the sense that it does not reduce easily to what might have been seen and heard. To be haunted is more than to be affected by what others tell us directly or do to us openly; it is to be influenced by a kind of inner voice that will not stop speaking and cannot be excised, that keeps cropping up to trouble us and stop us going peaceably on our way. It is to harbour a presence that we are aware of, sometimes overwhelmed by, that embodies elements of past experience and future anxiety and hope, and that will not let us be.

The language I am using here is openly psychoanalytic, reflecting my own intellectual concerns but also how psychoanalysis and haunting go together. To some extent this is simply due to the way in which psychoanalysis saturates Western culture to such a degree that it is hard to escape it. This is so even if we hate it, which is perhaps the only honest response one can ever have to it. Why is this? Because psychoanalysis intentionally stirs up demons, it refuses to stay silent about trouble and pain, it insists on talking about the things we would much rather hide or lay to rest. How can we do anything but hate it, especially as it is so evasive? If the unconscious exists, then whatever we say to avoid it, it always comes back at us, nipping at our heels as we try to outrun it. So there is this hateful thing, psychoanalysis, which refuses to allow its subjects to escape their ghostly remainders, the things that are left over from past happenings, or left out of conscious recognition. They are the peripheral things, sniping from the sidelines and the depths, harrying us as we go about our supposedly ordinary lives. We might think we are acting reasonably, but psychoanalysis knows that behind this rational façade there is something else lurking, waiting to mess things up, to make claims of its own.

The penetration of psychoanalysis in culture is not always easily visible. It crops up mostly in the background assumptions that many people hold about motives, desires, fantasies and blind spots. These are viewed not as accidents but as having causes, often unwitting ones; that is, we are willing to accept, in theory at least, that we know little of what we speak. Psychoanalysis is there particularly in the understanding we have of repetition and of certain kinds of memories – traumatic ones in particular. Strangely, it seems, the things we do not know trouble us more than the things we are aware of. They keep coming back, forcing us to return to the scenes of distress, enticing us to replay over and over again the disturbances that shape our lives. It is as if we think that we are seeing clearly, but smoke gets in our eyes. This is one source of the book’s argument, expressed vividly in a quotation from Freud that I will deal with more thoroughly in Chapter 5. Defending his belief in telepathy from the criticism levelled at it by Ernest Jones, Freud says that Jones should reassure everyone that it is of little consequence for psychoanalysis. Tell anyone who asks, he writes (Freud, 1926: 597), that ‘my acceptance of telepathy is my own affair, like my Judaism and my passion for smoking, etc., and that the subject of telepathy is not related to psychoanalysis’. Judaism, smoking, telepathy – the occult in general – these are strange and somewhat disreputable things, personal to Freud. The personal, however, is central to psychoanalysis as a discipline, and the ‘affairs’ of Freud remain crucial to understanding how psychoanalysis has come about and what it might mean. What influenced him was always related to psychoanalysis; because of this, Freud’s biography continues to haunt his invention and – through the transference that binds each generation of analysts with its predecessors – will inescapably do so. Judaism, smoking, telepathy: we have to admire the juxtaposition of these things that cloud the air, things we know about and can sometimes see, but can never quite pin down. Ghostly substances, indeed.

Psychoanalysis is one of Avery Gordon’s base disciplines for her exploration, even though she has many criticisms of it. She credits psychoanalysis with being ‘the only human science that has taken haunting seriously as an object of analysis’ (Gordon, 1997: 27). But, she writes, ‘psychoanalysis does not know as much about haunting as it might seem’ (ibid.). This is because it (or at least Freud, with whom she deals) tries to reduce haunting to what comes from the unconscious and so tends to understand it as based on repression, which means that it can be exorcised through the usual analytic process of ‘identifying the visible and disquieting symptoms of repression and bringing their origins and nature to light’ (Gordon, 1997: 53). For Gordon, Freud’s troubled awareness that there might be something real about ghosts, in the sense that one is haunted by things that actually exist, has been obscured here. This is what we have to get back to, she suggests that: ‘The “reality-testing” that we might want to perform in the face of hauntings must first of all admit those hauntings as real’ (ibid.). They are real because they are manifestations of actually existing, present-tense losses, resistances and suppressed wishes. They happen because there are people who are made ghostly by the silencing of their voices; and even if these people belong to the past, the effects of their silencing, of their writing out from history, can be felt today. Because of this, ghosts cannot be removed just by being spoken about; they can only be set free by some kind of action to bring them the justice they deserve. Haunting therefore demands a liberatory practice. One question is, to what extent can psychoanalysis be a basis for this?

The horizontal dimension refers to what passes between people whether or not they are in active conscious communication with one another. Psychoanalysis is the science that deals with the permeability of personal boundaries in the face of unconscious events. As a practice of horizontal haunting, psychoanalysis may appear to seek clarity, as the analyst reflects on the patient’s speech and tries to return it in a more rational, bounded form; but it is mired in an unconscious presence. Something moves across space from person to person, creating shivers of joy, recognition and anxiety. This has a professional vocabulary attached to it (for instance, ‘transference’ or ‘projective identification’), but in truth it is close to occult ideas about thought-transmission or telepathy. Where it fits the rubric of haunting is in the sensations to which it gives rise. We each find ourselves troubled by the other, to a greater or lesser extent possessed by others who can get inside us and also read our mind. Telepathy and transference may be names for this mechanism, but the mechanism itself is a ghostly one. Otherness constitutes us as beings that can lose track of ourselves and of our boundaries; we can fade and flow as subjects, and be troubled and excited by such experiences at one and the same time.

There are of course many worries about adopting psychoanalysis as one’s frame of reference. For this book, a major concern is the extent to which psychoanalysis is laden with baggage that prevents it from being the kind of emancipatory practice that is needed to free people from their ghosts. The key issue here is the location of psychoanalysis in a historical and cultural position that aligns it not with critical and progressive trends but rather with repressive factors that if anything maintain the presence of ghostly remainders of past – and continuing – oppression. Colonialism is the central problem. Psychoanalysis draws on colonialist thinking often and unreflectively, particularly in its use of the idea of the ‘primitive’ to refer to ‘unreasoning’ elements of people’s psychic lives. Absolute hate is usually what is meant when psychoanalysts talk about primitive feelings, for example in formulations like a ‘primitive fantasy of destruction’ – though sometimes (but quite rarely) the metaphor is extended to mean unmitigated love. Why are these elements ‘primitive’? Notionally, because they are ‘basic’, and ‘fundamental’, the building blocks of all mental functions. This does not seem so bad, but the term has too many associations – it is, to use the trope, haunted by too much history. For Freud, there were ‘savages’ and their way of thinking was contrasted to ‘civilised’ mentality; one could learn from them because their minds were like ‘ours’ in earlier times. At the beginning of Totem and Taboo, he writes, ‘There are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental life must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing in it a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development’ (Freud, 1913: 1). The repetitive first person plural pronoun is important here: ‘we believe’, ‘we do’, ‘we regard’, ‘our view’, ‘we describe’, ‘us’, ‘our own development’. Over here, civilised ‘us’; over there, the ‘savage’ and the ‘primitive’. Freud also drew an association between ‘savages’ and children: ‘It seems to me quite possible, however, that the same may be true of our attitude towards the psychology of those races that have remained at the animistic level as is true of our attitude towards the mental life of children, which we adults no longer understand and whose fullness and delicacy of feeling we have in consequence so greatly underestimated’ (ibid.: 99). ‘Our attitude’, again; ‘we adults’, those who have not remained at the ‘animistic’ level. It is worth noting the ambivalence here: Freud recognises that something is lost in moving away from the ‘savage’ and the child, specifically, ‘delicacy of feeling’. Nevertheless, this fits within a generally colonialist and patriarchal paradigm. The innocence of child and racialised other (and of the idealised woman, although she does not appear explicitly in this quotation) is also a way of legitimising domination: they cannot fend for themselves. It is clear where these associations come from – the prehistory of psychoanalysis and its foundation in a society that is grounded in racist ideology and a sense of itself as superior.

The relationship between psychoanalysis’ Jewish origins and this colonialist mode of thinking is not straightforward. As has been documented very thoroughly (for example, Gilman, 1993; Frosh, 2005), the intense antisemitism of Freud’s time was a highly significant backdrop, and maybe spur, to his achievement. Amongst the antisemitic discourses that were most prevalent were embedded ideas such as that Jews were castrated (hence, feminine), that they were ‘oriental’ and maybe even ‘black’, and that they were primitive both in the religious sense (Christianity having displaced Judaism, to which contemporary Jews clung) but also psychologically, socially and racially. Freud, in response, conjures up castration as a universal attribute, so that all people – including the most civilised – are in a sense Jews. But he also works on the conceit that the real primitives are the ‘savages’ of tribal societies, not the Jews of Europe; that is, as a riposte to antisemitism, Jews become lined up as ‘same’ (white) against the primitive, black ‘other’. Celia Brickman (2003: 165) comments on Freud’s ‘universalizing reconfigurations’ that turn the despised Jewish body into the model for humanity as a whole, writing that they ‘were made at considerable expense’, because ‘the modalities of inferiority previously ascribed to the Jews did not simply disappear but were ambivalently displaced onto a series of abjected others: primitives, women and homosexuals’. Brickman notes especially the way in which the Jewish other comes to be displaced by the ‘primitive’ other of colonialism. Hence her critique of psychoanalysis’ own racial politics:

Despite all of this, psychoanalysis also influences contemporary postcolonial theory. This is because, speaking as it may from the heart of colonialism, it nevertheless offers a range of expressive ideas that can be used to unpick both the colonial mind and its legacy in the postcolonial world. Much of the work here was kick-started by the famous intervention of Frantz Fanon (1952), which deploys psychoanalytic ideas to examine the psychological effects of colonialism and in so doing draws a picture of a whole social world infiltrated by Freudian (and Lacanian) categories. More recently, this has been taken up energetically by a wide range of authors interested for example in the ‘melancholic’ aspects of the postcolonial state, meaning by that a cultural situation in which there is haunting of the present by the felt loss of a treasured past, which has been so comprehensively destroyed as to make even mourning it impossible. Psychoanalysis becomes available for use in two ways here. First, the fractures and lacunae noted above make it an exemplary instance of the way in which Western intellectual systems are infiltrated by racist and colonial ideas. Despite its potentially ‘postcolonial’ formation in Jewish responses to European antisemitism, psychoanalysis carries within it a history of racism and antisemitism that is still visible, not ...