World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  The Frankfurt thinkers quite overpower the opponents they are pitted against, but the writings of this group, as well as those of many other Marxists, tend too often to travel from label to label and ism to ism, from opponents’ error to enemies’ mistake, with the noise and ferocity of a barbarian beating his shield with his sword—that is, with more clangor than clarity—until one feels there might be better results in future if they (and their followers) were forced to express themselves only with words like banana, hausfrau, watchchain, and color-guard.

  Jacoby is appropriately critical of traditional Marxism too, as the Frankfurt school has been, and he has been particularly careful to keep his concept of consciousness dialectical. Crucial to his book, and in many ways its best part, is his assessment of the role of therapy in the psychoanalytic movement. Incidentally, this is one of the better features of Roazen’s book too. He fully exposes Freud’s doubts about (and even disinterest in) therapy, though I suspect this attitude is regarded as still another shortcoming.

  In blunt and in brief: for Freud the self is an accumulation of encounters between instinct and society, and from the first encounter on the libido has been bent by power like a hairpin. The world which the ego feels it must accommodate desire to is composed of lies and illusion laid down like law. Society itself is a structured set of individuals who have been socially deformed. Freud is fierce about this: not even the members of a mob will be permitted to escape into a collective anonymity. They simply regress together.

  Think of the colossal brutality, cruelty and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world [Freud writes concerning the First World War]. Do you really believe that a handful of unprincipled place-hunters and corrupters of men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their followers were not also guilty?27

  Illnesses arise when the ego is unable to find allowable ways to reduce tension. Surface therapy is designed to help the ego do just that. We can compliment ourselves on our cures. Meanwhile, the same mothers lean over the crib the way centers crouch over their ball, and society, as we suffer from it, is preserved.

  Of course Freud hoped to help people, but he valued his clinical practice principally because it gave him data. His movement lived upon the therapeutic promises it made, and he remained uneasy about the purity of his intentions. More than the implications of analysis itself, it made him prickly and unsure about the motives of others. Would an understanding as demanding as Spinoza had asked for enable many to rise and walk?

  “My discoveries are a basis for a very grave philosophy.” Well, Freud knew how necessary it would be for psychoanalysis to free itself from its enemies—religion (even that of his forefathers), many forms of metaphysics, the literature he loved and had a knack for, the medicine he practiced—before his boast could be realized. Not because religion, literature, or medicine were themselves enemies of anything, but because his theories became bent in their service, as altered as Boyle’s Law would be as an account of pipelines, sales, or metered service. Inside them, as one of them, his position lost its identity as a profoundly important, though admittedly partial, criticism of society. Open to physiology at one end and to linguistics at the other, everywhere sympathetic with the most rigorous formal programs of natural science, Freudianism is beginning to emerge at last as one of the most complete and vigorous statements of rational materialism philosophy has yet had the pleasure to challenge and ponder.

  “But where am I? Into what subject have I rushed? What have I to do with Nuns, Maids, Virgins, Widows? I am a Bachelor myself,” Burton writes, “and lead a Monastick life in a College … And yet,” he says, “I must and will say something more, add a word or two on behalf of Maids and Widows, in favour of all such distressed parties,” for did they not begin the whole business? “So,” Burton continues in a manner which could not over several hundred years be improved upon,

  … must I needs inveigh against them that are in fault … and as bitterly tax those tyrannizing pseudo-politicians’ superstitious orders, rash vows, hard-hearted parents, guardians, unnatural friends, allies, … so to find and enforce men and women to vow virginity, to lead a single life against the laws of nature, opposite to religion, policy, and humanity, so to starve, to offer violence [to], to suppress the vigour of youth!… Stupid Politicians! ought these things so to be carried?… They will by all means quench their neighbour’s house, if it be on fire, but that fire of lust, which breaks out into such lamentable flames, they will not take notice of, their own bowels oftentimes, flesh and blood, shall so rage and burn, and they will not see it … For let them but consider what fearful maladies, feral diseases, gross inconveniences, come to both sexes by this enforced temperance. It troubles me to think of, much more to relate, those frequent aborts & murdering of infants in their Nunneries, … their notorious fornications, those male-prostitutes, masturbators, strumpets, &c., those rapes, incests, adulteries, … sodomies, buggeries, of Monks and Friars … I know their ordinary apologies and excuses for these things, but let the Politicians, the Doctors and Theologians look out: I shall more opportunely meet with them elsewhere.

  1 Paul Roazen discusses this aspect of Freud’s personality himself in his first book, Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York: Knopf, 1968).

  2 In regard to Freud’s feelings about suicides (not his theoretical views), two letters are particularly important: the famous “heartless” one to Lou Salomé concerning the death of Victor Tausk (the dramatically central moment in Roazen’s account of their relationship in Brother Animal [New York: Knopf, 1969]), and an earlier letter to his wife-to-be about the career and character of a colleague, Nathan Weiss. This last is a sensitive letter, as Roazen says, but Freud’s interest is psychological and even novelistic. Freud describes Weiss as “madly vain” and declares bluntly that “he died from the sum total of his qualities, his pathological self-love coupled with the claims he made for the higher things of life” (The Letters of Sigmund Freud, edited by Ernst Freud, [New York: Basic Books, 1960], L22). The tone of the Tausk letter (“I confess I do not really miss him; I had long taken him to be useless, indeed a threat to the future,” etc.) is the consequence, of course, of many causes; it is, in fact, almost desperately “over-determined.” For more on this point, and an informed assessment of Freud’s ailments, see Max Schur’s Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972).

  3 HD, Tribute to Freud (Boston: Godine, 1974).

  4 All of Freud’s articles on the drug, as well as letters to his wife, notes on his coca-induced dreams, and so on, have been collected by Robert Byck in a volume called Cocaine Papers (Stonehill, 1974). Anna Freud has contributed a few notes, and many relevant papers from the period are included. Everything in this excellent volume supports a belief in the neurological origins of psychoanalysis.

  5 Letter of January 1, 1896, in The Origins of Psychoanalysis, edited by Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris (Basic Books, 1954).

  6 Perhaps the best general treatment of Freud as a philosopher can be found in Paul Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy (Yale, 1972), a work brilliantly suggestive on every page. Ricoeur has his own ax, of course, but it is sharp and well swung.

  7 In Aphasia, 1891. Freud contended that psychic states were not reducible to physical ones, but he also believed (a) that although physical events could occur without corresponding mental ones the reverse was not the case, and (b) that all conscious states were initiated by and passed between the fibrous interstices of the body. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Basic Books, 1953), Vol. I, pp. 367–68.

  8 Perhaps the most vigorous and valuable examination of the scientific claims of psychoanalysis is Ernst Nagel’s “Methodological Issues in Psychoanalytic Theory,” a contribution to Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy, edited by Sidney Hook (NYU Press, 1959). Richard Wollheim’s excellent anthology (Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays, [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1
974]) contains Wesley Salmon’s somewhat kinder study from that collection, as well as Thomas Nagel’s useful essay on Freud’s anthropomorphism, in which he reasonably concludes that “psychoanalytic theory will have to change a great deal before it comes to be regarded as part of the physical description of reality.” See also William I. Grossman’s and Bennett Simon’s paper, “Anthropomorphism: Motive, Meaning, and Causality in Psychoanalytic Theory,” in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol. 24, 1969, cited by Nagel.

  9 If Freud did not create a science, he maintained a scientific attitude: cool, rational, skeptical, objective, mature. His therapy, like the methods of those philosophers he most resembles, consists in the clarification of consciousness by the removal of illusions. Jung himself wrote that “if Freud is viewed … as an exponent of the ressentiment of the incoming century against the nineteenth, with its illusions, its hypocrisy, its half-ignorance, its false, over-wrought feelings, its shallow morality, its artificial, sapless religiosity, and its lamentable taste, he can be viewed in my opinion much more correctly than when the attempt is made to make him out as the herald of new ways and new truths …” (Character and Personality, Vol. I, 1932).

  Although they may otherwise differ as much as Plato and Bacon do, or Spinoza and Nietzsche, Hobbes or Wittgenstein or Marx, philosophers like them have always been concerned not only with the creation of consolations, but with their critique, even their removal, and to this end have provided us with the most unrelenting exposure of the mythsmiths who design and manufacture these idols, as well as the salvation salesmen who hoop-huckle-and-hawk them. See Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Harper and Row, 1966) as well as his earlier Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Doubleday Anchor edition, revised 1961) for an excellent defense of Freud’s dis-illusionist aims.

  10 See Frederick J. Hoffman’s Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Louisiana State University Press, 1945), for example.

  11 English translation, MIT Press, 1965. This work was kindly called to my attention by a colleague, Professor Richard Watson.

  12 What I want to point out here is that in Freud the rule prevails. There is of course a great deal of opposition to it. See Margaret Boden’s paper in Richard Wollheim’s collection: “… drive-reduction or purely homeostatic theories of motivation are clearly inadequate to the psychophysiological reality.” She cites a number of opponents. Unfortunately, most of the objections to the constancy principle fail to understand its a priori postulational status, which I’ve just suggested it has, and approach it as if it were an empirical conclusion of some kind. That’s a little like asking about the evidence for the rules of chess.

  13 From the opening sentence of the “Project,” in The Origins of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1954), p. 355.

  14 By Richard Wollheim, for example, in his fine introduction to Freud in the Modern Masters series, Sigmund Freud (Viking, 1967), and there is an excellent exposition of the main ideas in this closely reasoned and sometimes difficult work in Raymond Fancher’s Psychoanalytic Psychology (New York: Norton, 1973). The arc reflex model of the mind is considered one of the three basic models Freud employed by John Gedo and Arnold Goldberg in their Models of the Mind (University of Chicago, 1973). The other two are called “topographic” and “tripartite.” Paul Ricoeur (in Freud and Philosophy, Yale, 1970), who wishes to budge Freud from the “Project’s” broadly positivist base, admits nevertheless that “… in any event Freud will never disavow its fundamental convictions.” But in Ricoeur’s judgment “nothing is more dated than the explanatory plan of the ‘Project,’ and nothing more inexhaustible than its program of description” (pp. 72–73). Like Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the “Project” has an editor’s title.

  15 The Origins of Psychoanalysis, p. 370.

  16 Origins, pp. 372–73. Freud had great difficulty placing this perceptual system among the others, and in deciding what sort of energy operated it. It was a little like trying to string lights on an already decorated tree. He felt compelled to revise the “Project” almost at once in this regard (see Letter 39 in Origins), but his revisions were—as he says—in “double-Dutch” and only darkened what he wanted to clarify. It is not the comparatively unsophisticated physiology of the “Project” which causes it to founder, but Freud’s inability to find a real place for consciousness inside the machine. Unfortunately, Freud also had a rather innocent conception of “quantity,” tending to measure out our life in coffee spoons.

  17 A point central to the argument of Russell Jacoby’s Social Amnesia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975): “… psychoanalysis rediscovers society in the individual monad. The critical edge of psychoanalysis is rooted in this dialectic: it pierces the sham of the isolated individual with the secret of its socio-sexual-biological substratum” (p.79).

  18 There is a nice rundown of these images, as well as others, in Anthony Wilden’s important essay “Marcuse and the Freudian Model,” in a double issue of Salmagundi, Nos. 10–11 (Fall and Winter, 1969–1970). This quotation is on page 209. Another substantial essay by Robert Jay Lifton, “From Analysis to Form: Towards a Shift in Psychological Paradigm,” is in the Winter, 1975, issue of that same journal.

  19 Jacques Lacan takes a different tack in The Language of the Self (Johns Hopkins, 1968). See also John C. Marshall’s essay, “Freud’s Psychology of Language,” in Wollheim’s collection.

  20 In the 1915 essay “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” Frequently called “defense mechanisms,” their number varies. Anna Freud, in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (Hogarth, 1937), lists ten, and with a dubious lack of economy, sometimes many more are added. See Margaret Boden’s “Freudian Mechanisms of Defense,” in Wollheim’s collection.

  21 Colby’s work on the computer representation of Freudian defenses is described and extensively cited by Margaret Boden in the essay just mentioned. Colby concentrates on the programming of beliefs like “I am defective,” “Father abandoned me,” and “I descend from royalty.” In my sentences the id is speaking to the ego. In his, the ego is considering what it shall say to the world.

  22 Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1974).

  23 In addition to these, and Freud: Political and Social Thought, Roazen has edited a collection of essays on Freud in the Makers of Modern Social Science series for Prentice-Hall, 1973. It consists mainly of essays from psychiatric journals or chapters reprinted from well-known books and contains important pieces by Erikson, Fromm, Marcuse, Adorno, and Sapir, among others.

  24 Talent and Genius (New York: Quadrangle, 1971). Although Roazen knows of this book and Eissler’s work in general, Freud and His Followers is absolutely silent about it. Eissler himself is too angry, too strident, too concerned to protect the Professor at every point.

  25 Roazen cites Rudolph Binion’s Frau Lou (Princeton, 1968; paper, 1974), but he selects from it very carefully. H. F. Peters’s biography, My Sister, My Spouse (Norton, 1963; paper, 1974), is much more appreciative of Lou and certainly more readable than Binion, who is, like Roazen, “correcting the record,” but it is also much less secure concerning the facts. For a brief, fair account of Lou’s relationship with Nietzsche, see Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, 3rd edition (Princeton, 1969). At least some of Lou’s lurid sexual past is overdrawn. It seems that she remained a virgin for many years after her involvement with Rée and Nietzsche.

  26 Although Paul Goodman’s superb critique in Politics, II, 1945, “The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud,” antedates Marcuse’s initial essay in Dissent in 1955.

  27 Marcuse also quotes this passage from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis in Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

  Food and Beast Language

  In The Colossus of Maroussi, that cranky and beautiful book about Greece, there are a number of passages which describe Henry Miller’s encounters with Katsimbalis, a man once real and now imaginary, who is remade by Miller’s inflationary prose into one of the more robust, unma
nnerly Greek gods. Katsimbalis is a monologist of genius very much like Miller himself, and the style of his talk matches our author’s speech stream perfectly. Indeed, why shouldn’t it, since the objects of Miller’s incessant sentences are sounding boards which echo their origin by responding always “Henree … Henree …” to every shout.

  He could galvanize the dead with his talk. It was a sort of devouring process: when he described a place he ate into it, like a goat attacking a carpet. If he described a person he ate him alive from head to toe. If it were an event he would devour every detail, like an army of white ants descending upon a forest. He was everywhere at once … It wasn’t just talk he handed out, but language—food and beast language.1

  And Miller says of Seferis, the Nobel poet, that “when he talked about a thing or a person or an experience he caressed it with his tongue.”

  The Henry Miller who prowls the Paris streets, or hires and fires for Western Union, is a hungry man in every sense, and every sense is hungry. It is the secret and the glory of his style. He drank in her beauty runs the old cliché, which neglects to mention the emptiness of the result, or the depth of the ensuing belch. He is alert, a little giddy, like one who hasn’t eaten, and angry, too, at every bone he can’t gnaw, and always on the make, looking out for number one, shrewd, devious, untrustworthy, heartless, selfish as the empty stomach is supposed to be, the parched throat, the blood-puffed penis. And though most of Miller’s clinches are clichés, there is no sour aftersmart he fails to mention.

  One is reminded, by its difference, of Rilke’s Paris, which seemed to the poet then like a hospital for contagious diseases. At last I am learning to see, Rilke’s hero wrote, but what did he learn and what did he see? Only horrors: life like spittle on a wall, souls the shape of discarded sacks, fear as general as air—in faces which fell away into the hands which held and hid them, in the urinating nervousness of dogs, in silences which broke the noise of everyday like plates, in the spoonable emptiness of after-midnight streets, and, on the Rue de Seine, in little shops which seemed serene and safe as graves.