I’m a pragmatist, down bone deep and for good, so my question for any idea or proposition is, what difference does it make? If none, then I’m free to ignore it as a metaphysical conceit that can’t be tested or verified by any available means. But if it does make a difference—if it has significant consequences—why then, I can’t ignore it. By this accounting, psychoanalysis becomes an indispensable approach to understanding the human condition. It’s a social theory and a historical method that, unlike most “systems” of thought, say, Marxism, is acutely aware of its own origins and evolution: it treats itself accordingly, as a patient who is far from cured.
I began reading Freud in the 7th grade, having procured A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis on the misplaced assumption that, being all about sex, it was quite possibly a masturbatory handbook. (In shop class that year, where we learned to set type and print the old-fashioned 19th-century way, I made business cards that read: James Livingston/ Psychoanalyst.) I still have the Washington Square Press paperback I bought for 60 cents, which reproduced the Boni & Liveright edition of 1924—newly translated from the German by Joan Riviere, with a preface to the American edition by G. Stanley Hall (!) and to the new English translation by Ernest Jones.
With that imposing apparatus, this little book is an intellectual history unto itself, in a tattered, yellowed, wizened, 7 X 4 inch frame. But the type is so tiny and the pages so fragile that it might as well be a sealed indictment: I’m afraid to open it. What would I remember of my fevered, pubescent reading, anyway? I didn’t fill the margins with notes and queries back then—I read everything as if it were a novel, or a poem (good training for reading economic theory, the court poetry of capitalist society). Besides, just picking it off the shelf and turning it in the light of 60 subsequent years recalls the wonder, the excitement, and the bewilderment of that first encounter. “All bets are off,” I remember thinking, “This guy is nuts, or I am.” Turns out I was right.
Ten years later, having survived my expulsion from college and a 24-foot fall on a construction site, I sat taking notes in a course on British history at Northern Illinois University taught by Marvin S. Rosen, where I encountered another Freud, the kind who bedeviled young professors in the throes of their conversion experience to Marxism. The classroom was the stage on which Marvin acted out this battle for what seemed his very soul. I thought I’d better understand what made this sick teacher, a charismatic wonder, tick, so I went to the bookstore and found Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1958)—that sounded useful—and two collections of essays by the young Marx. So began my career as an intellectual historian, as someone in search of a way to explain why human beings had a history, or rather what historians were supposed to be doing with and about the past.
Marvin’s Freud was a vulgar materialist (so was his Marx), a reductionist device in keeping with the kind of ham-handed literary criticism he favored (his dissertation was on the rise of a literary marketplace in late-18th century England). Mine soon became the Freud of the later, high theorizing, ca. 1915-1925, especially the author of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Ego and the Id, and the papers on masochism, mourning, and “anal eroticism”—these discovered as I ransacked Brown’s footnotes in an impossible search for a unitary psychoanalytical voice.
I still think this is the best way to get a handle on any thinker—in a pragmatic spirit, test his or her consequences by sampling the writers who have put him or her to use. You want to understand Marx, read the Marxists, for example the Brits who came together to launch Past & Present (Hobsbawm, Thompson, Hill, et al.) and inspire a generation of American historians (Gutman, Montgomery, Young); you want to understand Freud, read the Freudians, for example the stalwarts of the Frankfurt School who, like Brown, treated psychoanalysis as an incomplete but promising philosophy of history that could correct the deficiencies of Marxism (Marcuse, Fromm, Adorno, et al.).
Go back to the originary texts, by all means, but do so knowing that you can’t get there by going around those who have already interpreted those texts, those who now stand between you and the “primary” sources. And do so knowing that the point of reading the originals in their archival purity is not to master and recite them but to apply them where possible in the present, to explain how they might help us think differently about the future—even philosophers who favor the ancients want to show us how and why, say, Aristotle is immediately relevant to contemporary problems, whether political or aesthetic (think of Arendt or MacIntyre as they invoke Aristotle to address what they perceive as the ethical emptiness of modern liberalism).
This pragmatic procedure demonstrates, at minimum, that psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis uniquely, equips us to understand:
(1) Why human beings have a history—because, alone among animals, their needs and desires exceed those given by instinctual command. This excess finds its expression in unnatural cultural innovations, foremost among them languages without a fixed correlation between words and things. The most basic drive of this species, which functions as both cause and effect of the cumulative cultural development we call history, is the urge to self-mastery as this is effected by control of one’s immediate material circumstances, first the body and then the world—in other words, the urge to freedom is the essence of human nature We are born unfinished, incapable of foraging for ourselves; the crowning achievement of our infantile development, the acquisition of language, teaches us to be unsatisfied with what already exists, including the state of our selves. And so we learn to change it.
(2) The unreasonable origins of reason, or, to put it in the more familiar terms of epistemological discourse, desire and reason or values and facts are neither antithetical nor identical but are rather indissoluble moments in thinking or behaving as such. Many predecessors and contemporaries of Freud make this claim, among them William James in “The Will To Believe”—”the absence of faith is a mental nullity”—but the discovery of the unconscious, the result of repression, as an active, productive dimension of human being, sealed the intellectual deal. Hereafter (ca. 1905) it was impossible to pretend that Reason was anything but the sublimation of Desire, that is, the expression of antecedent bodily urges by means of abstraction from and then embodiment of them in the real world, as representations and/or as tools. “No ideas but in things” is how a famous poet explained the truth as both pragmatism and psychoanalysis understand it.
(3) It follows from (2) that (a) “objectivity” as conceived by a correspondence theory of truth, through which right ideas map an external reality that is self-evidently factual from any angle, is a chimera because it assumes that there is a point of view above or outside or unaffected by human interests, passions, and purposes, in a word, bodies; and (b) religion is, like dreams and art, an instance of an archaic language that requires translation and, if we are true to our nature as sapiens—which means hoping always for relief from and redemption of suffering—instantiation on earth, as it is in heaven. Brown is as pointed as possible in pressing the claim that psychoanalysis qualifies as a philosophy of history only insofar as it works as a theory of religion, which is why he, like Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber, was obsessed with the change of moral climate we call Christianity and the psychological earthquake we call the Reformation. God is not a non-human standard of truth; he (or she) is the most fundamental human truth, a being that is free because it unites desire and will, purpose and capacity, in changing the world, not escaping or abolishing existing circumstance.
(4) Selfhood or individuality or identity is a hard-won and permanently provisional achievement, not a given datum ready for purposes of political persuasion and analysis. The families that produce it are historically variable, and are always the site of struggle, sometimes murderous struggle. But selfhood or individuality is always a social-cultural artifact because “the” family is; love and intimacy are learned skills, not natural attributes of human being. The modern bourgeois individual is a particularly precarious psychological compound sustained by recessive, anal-compulsive character traits that have become obsolete—useless or worse, downright destructive—under the conditions of material abundance (a “pleasure economy,” or, in contemporary parlance, a consumer culture) specific to late-industrial capitalism.
(5) Selfhood or individuality or identity as such is always already gendered because it is produced by sexual differentiation and genital organization. Modern feminism, which abjures the category of “woman” in view of regional, class, and racial(ized) differences between and among women, is accordingly predicated on a more or less psychoanalytical rendering of male, female, and everything in between or outside of this binary. As Jacqueline Rose puts it in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1987): “The history of psychoanalysis can in many ways be seen entirely in terms of its engagement with this question of feminine sexuality.” At any rate, since the 1970s the most interesting and productive renditions of feminist theory have been animated by their engagement with psychoanalysis; neither can be understood in the absence of the other.
Herewith, then, a decidedly personal, unscientific record of my unfinished encounter with psychoanalysis. From the very beginning of the field or discipline, or whatever we choose to call it, Freud’s voice was answered, complicated, and countermanded by many others, making it a pluralistic universe in spite of the founding father’s urge to contain its extremities; Freud was a notoriously sectarian mastermind who cast out rivals and admirers alike, as if he alone could solve the mysteries he had unearthed in the subsoil of human consciousness. Among these outcasts, my favorite is Sandor Ferenczi, whose essays on money and anal-sadistic character traits are essential supplements to Freud’s own forays. Carl Jung, on the other hand, I never quite got the hang of, despite several good-faith efforts to grasp his importance—efforts inspired, in part, by reading of Jung’s legendary role in defining the plight of the alcoholic for Bill Wilson as he was composing what AA calls the Big Book, and of Jung’s relation to Lewis Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks, two legendary “young intellectuals” of the 1920s and 30s. Wilhelm Reich? He always struck me as a pathetic reminder of William Blake’s limits, and more generally the limits of romanticism in its single-minded celebration of the body.
Norman O. Brown is still the most forceful advocate of treating Freud as a theorist of culture—or, as I would prefer, a philosopher of history—but along the same lines, see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955), a book I thought was superseded by Brown’s Life Against Death, in accordance withe the judgements of Lionel Trilling and Susan Sontag, until I re-read it while writing Against Thrift (2011) and realized that by rehabilitating the concept of sublimation, Marcuse had preserved the practical as well as the utopian implications of psychoanalysis construed as a social theory. Once Marcuse accepted the Trilling/Sontag verdict, One-Dimensional Man (1964), followed inevitably; with this book, he relinquished both the practical claims and the utopian possibilities residing in Eros and Civilization. So ended the hopeful “years of high theory” on the )New) Left.
Along similarly ambitious philo-historiographical lines, see Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990); Geza Roheim, The Origin and Function of Culture (1943); Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (trans. 1983); Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (trans. 1976); Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (trans. 1968); and Teresa Brennan, History After Lacan (1993).
The feminist appropriations and applications of psychoanalysis I have found most useful are Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974); Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction (1982); Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent (1990); Alice Jardine, Gynesis (1986); Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments (1990); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990); and Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1991). The effect of the pathbreaking 1975 essay by Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” can’t be exaggerated; nor can Joan Scott’s landmark piece of 1986, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” See also Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies 2 vols. (trans. 1987-89), Jacqueline Rose as cited above, and related texts cited in the Bibliographic Essay of James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out (2009), chapters 3-4.
What's a good entryway into Pragmatism? (I've read quite a bit of Philosophy, but all over the place and not very thorough.)