Gray/Freud/Kohut, 4/21: Discussion Questions

Our next Using Theory lunch takes place tomorrow, Monday, April 21, at 12:30 p.m. We will be debating the status of psychoanalysis for the humanities, as Patrick Gray leads a discussion of Freud's "On Narcissism" and Heinz Kohut's "Forms and Transformations of Narcissism."

In the meantime, CG and AG offer some preliminary thoughts and questions, as a way to set up the debate; to read them, follow the link below.


AG: Although I recognize that there are interesting passages and side-points we might discuss in the readings, I want instead to try to put the big question as strongly as possible. What possible use could any form of psychoanalysis have within literary studies, given its invalidity as an account of human psychology? Why pay any attention to something so wrong?

Of course, many in literary studies would by no means accept that psychoanalysis is invalid as an account of psychology. But this is the consensus of the scientific community, and for reasons that even humanists ought to, but seemingly often don't, understand. Other people can explain the consensus and the reasons far better than this humanist, but, since we are blogging, here is my version. The discrediting reasons are more than visible in the Freud essay--the reliance on reasoning by analogy, the tremendous apparatus of unfalsifiable hypotheses (e.g. sublimation, p. 74: certain desires are really, underlying sexual, even though they are not sexual in any observable way), the pervasive gender, sexual, and racial stereotypes shaping the "explanations." (Freud's stereotypes are common for his time and place, of course, but the point is that they are used as the principal evidence for major psychoanalytic claims, especially ones about sexual desire. If the stereotypes are untrue, then the claims lack evidence.) Freud's bad understanding of evolution also looms large, in the way he essentializes and opposes reproductive and self-preserving instincts. And then the central ideas of "energy" or "libido" flowing through the psyche have about the same scientific status as analogous notions from many cultures--qi in traditional Chinese thought, for example--which is to say, they serve as infinitely flexible cover terms for many heterogeneous phenomena. Freud's--and Kohut's--use of the vocabulary of science should not deceive any but the most naive readers. For them, "empirical" observation seems to consist entirely in the ad-hoc interpretation of single clinical cases--and they usually assert the validity of their theory on the basis of the clinical successes they claim to have made by following it. These are norms of evidence which have been out of date since Francis Bacon.

What I am saying, in short, is that psychoanalysis is folk science. That doesn't mean it isn't very interesting for cultural history and for the history of science, in the same way as astrology or alchemy are. Freud certainly did open up ways of thinking about mental processes that have been important in the development of scientific understandings of the brain. But mostly he, along with the pseudo-discipline he inaugurated, testifies to the enduring appeal of manifestly invalid kinds of reasoning. (In light of Lisa Zunshine's session, I reflect that psychoanalysis makes strong appeals to our Theory of Mind capacities, because it populates the mind with a whole set of homunculi--ego, superego, id--all of them acting just like persons, with intentions, strategems, etc.) But when it comes to formulating and trying to answer questions about how the mind works, we now have something better, in the accumulated knowledge of empirical science and in the philosophy of mind--principally Anglo-American--which is developing in concert with that science.

My own suspicion (not, of course, unique or original to me; compare Frederick Crews' statements in this PBS interview), which depresses me tremendously, is that psychoanalysis retains its appeal in the humanities precisely because it is unscientific. Psychoanalysis--posed, despite its protestations to the contrary, against reason and empiricism, dependent on the individual case study for "evidence," endlessly staging and celebrating the sophistical ingenuity of the analyst--offers humanists a vision of the triumph of humanism over science. Freud's and his successors' love for quoting and appropriating literature and myth reinforces this vision by granting to literature an unsurpassable insight into human cognition. Given the manifest victory of science as the premiere form of knowledge (the existence of "creation science" testifies to this prestige better than anything else could) in our culture, such a vision has obvious appeal to humanistic disciplines struggling to be taken seriously by the wider culture and to keep their hold on institutional resources. [John Guillory has offered convincing descriptions of this struggle and its ideological products in Cultural Capital and related work since, especially his 2002 Critical Inquiry essay "The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism".] Needless to say I also think psychoanalysis' vision is wholly phantasmatic and ought to be discarded forthwith. Literary studies should place itself in something other than a blindly oppositional relation to scientific knowledge and scientific methods.

Now let me imagine utopia for a moment. Suppose that the bankrupcy of psychoanalysis as an account of the workings of the mind were fully acknowledged within literary studies and its cultural prestige annulled. Psychoanalytic understandings of desire, motivation, development, memory, and language production would no longer contaminate interpretations of these themes by literary critics, who could then take up Zunshine's call for a criticism that would understand historically specific interactions between our cognitive capacities--as far as we understand them--and cultural formations. What use might then be made of the interesting cultural artifact of late-19th/early-20th century pseudoscience that was psychoanalysis? What comparative method would be adequate? And would there be any payoff?

CG: I share AG's skepticism about psychoanalysis as a theory of mind as a theoretical framework for literary scholarship. I think using Freud or his psychoanalytic followers (however far they depart from The Founder's original system of ideas) to describe some universal and transhistorical feature of human nature, without acknowledging the contested status of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind, is a deeply problematic enterprise; indeed, it verges on dishonesty. If we as literary scholars are going to use psychology to analyze literature and to explain the creative processes of the author and the reading practices of his audience, then it is our responsibility as scholars to use the most truthful theory of psychology, not merely the most attractive one (or the most attractively complex). This means that we should respect the consensus of our colleagues in the sciences, when there is a consensus (and there is a consensus regarding psychoanalysis, as Andrew stresses); and keep up with ongoing debates in the fields of psychology most relevant literary scholarship.

However, I'm not quite ready to toss all 24 volumes of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud onto the fire just yet. The present and past cultural prestige of Freud and Freudian theory, however misplaced, means that Freud will continue to demand the attention of scholars of the twentieth century (and probably of the twenty-first as well). That is to say, psychoanalysis may be a pseudo-science, but it has been more influential than astrology or alchemy and, indeed, we still feel its influence today. As many historians of sexuality have observed, Freud played an important role in the emergence of the modern concept of sexuality as a crucially important yet partially knowable domain of the self. We live in a world made possible, in part, by Freud, and, by analyzing psychoanalysis as a cultural artifact, we can show how certain things (like modern categories of sexual identity, e. g. heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, etc.) are not immutable facts of natural reality but historical phenomena. For this reason alone, I believe Freud should and will remain a major subject of scholarship in the humanities for decades to come. Before Freud's historical influence can fully be assessed, however, Freud (and all of psychoanalytic theory) must be returned to its original historical context--the vestiges of which are visible in Freud's citation of and passing references to other psychological and medical scientific work in "On Narcissism: An Introduction." (Freud's works are an archive that would benefit hugely from digitization. Imagine you could instantly click through html links to all of Freud's sources!)

The question that I'll pose for our discussion concerns the status of current scholarship that draws on psychoanalytic concepts. I'm not ready to toss this stuff on the fire either, and not simply because it's been influential in our field. (This brings us right back the issue of citation and authority that AG brought up regarding Althusser in the last post and that PR expanded on in his comment.) A lot of extremely valuable and interesting scholarship has made use of Freudian theory (Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler come to mind first). Is it possible to use such scholarship while also recognizing that psychoanalysis is a flawed and outmoded science? And, if so, what is the most responsible way to do that?