Impious Fidelity

Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801450341
• eBook ISBN: 9780801463341
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In Impious Fidelity, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg investigates the legacy of Anna Freud at the intersection between psychoanalysis as a mode of thinking and theorizing and its existence as a political entity. Stewart-Steinberg argues that because Anna Freud inherited and guided her father's psychoanalytic project as an institution, analysis of her thought is critical to our understanding of the relationship between the psychoanalytic and the political. This is particularly the case given that many psychoanalysts and historians of psychiatry charge that Anna Freud's emphasis on defending the supremacy of the ego against unconscious drives betrayed her father's work.

Are the unconscious and the psychoanalytic project itself at odds with the stable ego deemed necessary to a democratic politics? Hannah Arendt famously (and influentially) argued that they are. But Stewart-Steinberg maintains that Anna Freud's critics (particularly disciples of Melanie Klein) have simplified her thought and misconstrued her legacy. Stewart-Steinberg looks at Anna Freud's work with wartime orphans, seeing that they developed subjectivity not by vertical (through the father) but by lateral, social ties. This led Anna Freud to revise her father's emphasis on Oedipal sexuality and to posit a revision of psychoanalysis that renders it compatible with democratic theory and practice. Stewart-Steinberg gives us an Anna Freud who "betrays" the father even as she protects his legacy and continues his work in a new key.

Chapter 1

A Wider Social Stage

In what ways might an institution constitute a piece of acting out against its own main discovery?

—Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep

When psychoanalysis organizes itself into an institution, such a move immediately puts to work the three impossible professions: that of psychoanalysis itself, that of education, and that of politics. Here I approach the relationship between these three professions on two intersecting fronts: on the one hand, the politics of psychoanalysis, or psychoanalysis as an institution and the politics that inevitably underwrites its institutional existence; on the other hand, that of psychoanalytic politics, which is to say, the impact (or lack thereof) that psychoanalysis has had on how we think the political domain per se.1 Both of these aspects entail multiple approaches to psychoanalytic and political theories and practices. I propose to investigate the extent to which such theories and practices are perceived as either distinct or mutually influencing fields. I therefore interrogate the specific identities of psychoanalytic and political thought, while also wondering about the degree to which these identities are always ever constituted in either an overt or more submerged form and/or as a defense of one against the other.

Psychoanalytic Borders

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have spoken to the personal or autobiographical element that resides within psychoanalysis and within the domain that pertains to a delimitation of the political within psychoanalysis as both the latter’s internal and external limit.2 Sigmund Freud himself referred to this domain as a “wider stage”—which must be understood in both its temporal and spatial aspects, that is, in terms of an arkhe, a search for origins, and also as he famously described in his analysis of dreams and of the unconscious as the other Schauplatz, the other theater of the human psyche. Freud made this move from the personal to the political, not coincidentally, in his own autobiographical study written in 1924, to which he appended a postscript in 1935. The following comes from this later text: “I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than the reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id and the superego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual—are the very same processes repeated upon a wider stage.”3

To think such a wider stage, along with all the multiple determinants that such a staging in its very “otherness,” its wider, shifting borders, even its transgression, may imply, raises a series of questions. How is psychoanalysis staged and therefore placed? How does it define its borders and yet also transgress them in the very act of its self-definition? How does the autobiographical element enter into an essential and perhaps essentializing definition of psychoanalytic borders? And how does such an element impact on what we may think of as the political realm? What does the question of the political, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy ask, do in and to psychoanalysis? Is the result an overflowing that is so important that it ultimately acts as a kind of displacement of psychoanalysis itself?4 Furthermore, does psychoanalysis’s repetition upon a wider social stage constitute, as Sigmund Freud himself suggests in his own autobiographical study, “a phase of regressive development”?5 And, finally, how does Anna Freud play a role in all of these questions? To what extent is she not only the embodiment of psychoanalysis’s continued success in the form of the latter’s institutionalization, but also—in the form of her embodiment—a challenge to a certain gender politics within the psychoanalytic association of brothers itself? Where, I ultimately ask, may one situate her honor, that is, the possibility of placing her own signature, her speaking in her own name—one always already dictated (or so psychoanalysis would have us believe)—as being that of the/her own father? And how may one engage this honor without obsessively and continuously passing through the legacy of the father—except, perhaps in a gesture of loyalty to the daughter herself, who made the same moves? And what does such a “passing” look like; what are its implications? How, in other words, write, in a form of a signature, in Anna’s own name?

The passage or repetition of psychoanalysis upon a wider social stage is anything but an easy or straightforward move. Not only does it describe a double move in space and time, but within Freud’s own challenge to more common-sensical perceptions of space and time, what is opened up is a space of the unconscious dictated by laws that are radically other to those of consciousness, rationality, and logic; it also proposes a time of repetition, one inscribed by difference and therefore insistently challenging the possibility of identity and propriety. Freud’s comparative “wider stage” pertains to a logic akin to Jacques Derrida’s own engagement with such a logic, one that the French critic names “differance”—the not same and the not now: the different and the deferred.6 For this reason, the time and propriety of psychoanalysis is inevitably uncertain. Its division between inside and outside, its self-being—so Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue—is inevitably blurred; the political constitutes both the limit of psychoanalysis and “its origin, its end, and the line of an intimate fold which crosses it” (5). Thinking the political, the wider stage, is therefore never simply an addendum to Freudian theory; or when it is so, then such an addendum, supplement, or even annexation takes on radically new functions for the body of psychoanalysis itself, generating thereby shock waves, floods of anxiety that breach its protective borders. Hence, the political in psychoanalysis most certainly cannot be understood in terms of a more tranquil logic of derivation or reflection—and this, I would argue, despite what Freud himself claimed in 1935, that human history is “no more than the reflection” of the conflicts between ego, id, and superego. This is the case because, first, a psychoanalytic theory of the singular, private, nonpolitical subject does not provide us, by transposition, derivation, or reflection, with a theory of sociality: it provides us neither with a theory nor even with a discrete social object; for sociality—once filtered through the psychoanalytic interpretive lens—proves itself to be an entity that is imaginary, fantasmatic.7 Second, a psychoanalytic theory of the political subject cannot immediately furnish us with an analysis of the institutionalization of either that political subject nor of the authority that such a subject may either embody or even disavow, and this, again, insofar as such an authority derives its force, within psychoanalytic thinking, from a different, unconscious logic.

If not of derivation or reflection, then what kind of logic of “widening” is implied by the Freudian move? At least a first point of departure is provided by Freud’s thinking about the category of the subject, that category that implies simultaneously autonomy and submission, a category that Freud in his later work would refer to as the ego.8 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are certainly correct in their assertion that Freud thought of “the emergence of the subject neither from other subjects nor from a subject-discourse (whether it be of the other or of the same, of the father or of the brother), but from the non-subject or non-subjects” (6). By this they imply—or so I understand their far more radical claim—that the Freudian subject is not the result of some form of social constructivism; that is, the Freudian subject does not come into being as simply the result of an act of obedience (whether identificatory, adaptational, or ideological) to prevailing social norms—and this even when motives for obedience may also be true. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy continue: “the non-subject, the without-authority, the without-father…, the without-superego and thus without-ego, anterior to every topic as well as to every institution, of an anteriority, with which no regression can properly catch up, and ‘wider’ than every founding agency—the ‘non-subject’ forms…the joint limit of psychoanalysis and of the political” (6). The subject comes into being in that place where it ceases to be itself: at its borders.9

All of this is certainly true: the subject comes into being from his provenance as a non-subject. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in fact immediately cite an extraordinary passage from Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, a passage that quite surely makes their point—and I insist on this certainty here, for certainty is somewhat the point:

Moreover, in the case of some advances in intellectuality—for instance, in the case of the victory of patriarchy—we cannot point to the authority which lays down the standard which is to be regarded as higher. It cannot in this case be the father, since he is only elevated into being an authority by the advance itself.10

The certainty of such a claim or pointing, and one not cited by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in this context, rests on an earlier, prior claim that Freud makes in his text, one that in fact depends on a decision or indeed on a turning: “It consists, for instance, in deciding that paternity is more important than maternity, although it cannot, like the latter, be established by the evidence of the senses, and that for that reason the child should bear his father’s name and be his heir” (118; my emphasis). And: “this turning from the mother to the father points in addition to a victory of intellectuality over sensuality—that is, an advance in civilization, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premiss. Taking sides in this way with a thought-process in preference to a sense perception has proved to be a momentous step” (114; my emphases).11

The momentous step that the passage to civilization, the wider social stage signifies, is then a turning, a decision, perhaps even a pointing of a finger. Such a passage—one that takes place against all evidence—initiates the social contract in the form of a radical hypothesis or theory. In this sense, Freud’s thought belongs also into the long tradition of Western political theory that posits the contract as the foundational pointing gesture of the political realm—a tradition that Freud both prolongs and yet also significantly displaces.12 For this latter reason, the Freudian social contract also constitutes a rupture, most significantly a rupture with the certainty of maternity, in favor of the father who becomes such only as a result of the rupture itself. I will address in the following chapters just this ungroundedness, attempting to think through the rupture that takes us away from maternity to a space that is defined as a paternal one, for sure, but nevertheless a space that also proposes a system of kinship relations that do not inevitably descend from the father to the brother/son in the meanings that such a descent may more common- sensically call forth. I will later have occasion to investigate the implications for political theory or indeed social science more broadly that are predicated on a double move: on the one hand, the repression of an initial sense-certainty; and on the other, the nachträgliche transformation of the Freudian decision, turning or pointing that produces the possibility of scientific objectivity. More immediately, however, patriarchal authority is indeed, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy insist, radically ungrounded: the first subject, as Freud thinks of the primal father of the horde, comes into being out of a non-subject. The “birth” of authority is nevertheless a birth, one produced by (the certainty of) maternity. It is indeed a “birth trauma” upon which civilization, that is, theory (both psychoanalytic and political theory) can come into being. I will address the implications of the trauma of birth for psychoanalysis and politics in more detail in the fourth chapter. Here I simply want to emphasize that the Freudian turning or decision against maternity is predicated on a withdrawal, on a move whose agency is situated rather ambiguously in both Freud’s text and in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s commentary. Who, in fact, withdraws in order to make civilization possible? Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, famously remarked:

Women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence—those very women who, in the beginning, laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love. Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men…. What [man] employs for cultural aims he to a great degree withdraws from women and sexual life. His constant association with men, and his dependence on his relations with them, even estrange him from his duties as a husband and a father. Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.13

While, in this passage, man is certainly the agent of a certain withdrawal, nevertheless it is also the case that woman’s so-called hostility to civilization, in the form of a birthing expulsion, fuels man’s continued need to withdraw himself in order to turn himself, self-reflexively, into a subject and thereby bring civilization into being. Man’s self-reflexivity, his existence as a subject—a subject who is both autonomous and submissive—is therefore predicated on a womanly claim that results in a masculine withd...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Wider Social Stage
• 2. Girls Will Be Boys
• 3. Anna-Antigone
• 4. The Defense of Psychoanalysis/The Anxiety of Politics
• Conclusion
• Bibliography