Gray/Freud/Kohut, 4/21: Minutes

On April 21 we met to discuss Sigmund Freud's "On Narcissism: An Introduction" and Heinz Kohut's "Forms and Transformations of Narcissism" [link on Yale network only]. Patrick Gray led our lively debate and discussion. He also provided several supplemental readings:

• Nancy McWilliams and Stanley Lependorf. "Narcissistic Pathology of Everyday Life:—The Denial of Remorse and Gratitude." Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26 (1990): 430-51.
  
• Maya Pines. "New Focus on Narcissism Offers Analysts Insight into Grandiosity and Emptiness." New York Times (March 16, 1982).
  
• Susan Quinn. "Oedipus vs. Narcissus." New York Times (June 30, 1981).
  

Many thanks to Jordan Zweck for taking notes for the minutes below. As always, participants and other readers are very welcome to expand on their comments and to add new ones. Please follow the link below for the full minutes.


Readers take note: What follows is, despite its dialogue format, NOT a precise transcription; it is a joint reconstruction by JZ and AG. Nor are participants' comments in our informal setting meant to be taken either as unassailable statements of fact or as rigorous defenses of position. The participants in this discussion often disagreed about basic matters of fact and of principle. We leave it to readers to resolve these matters as best they can. The purpose of these minutes is to record the themes of our discussion and to give an illustration of our conversations about using theory, in the hopes that this illustration will provoke further discussion.

Present: Patrick Gray, Emily Coit, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Margaret Homans, Justin Jannise, Ben Labreche, Jordan Zweck

Patrick Gray: My definition of psychoanalysis--a general category rather than Freud or Freudian psychoanalysis, though Freud invented the term--is analysis of the soul. Psychoanalysis has a long tradition going back before Freud (Descartes, etc.).

PG: Criticisms of psychoanalysis: It's not scientifically sound. One well-known articulation of this in English literary criticism is Lee Patterson's "Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch: Clio and Psyche" [JSTOR], Speculum 76, no. 3 (July, 2001): 638--80. PG gave some references to defenses of the scientific validity and therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis, including a return to Freud within cognitive psychology:

• Jeremy Holmes. "The Assault on Freud." Current Opinion in Psychiatry 9, no. 3 (May 1996): 175-76.
  
• Jim Rosack. "More Data Demonstrate Efficacy of Psychotherapy." Psychiatric News 36, no. 3 (February 2, 2001).
  
• Drew Westen. "The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science." Psychological Bulletin 124, no. 3 (November 1998): 333-71.
  

PG also gave references on the kinship of cognitive-behavioral therapy to psychodynamic therapy:

• Alan F. Javel. "The Freudian Antecedents of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy." Journal of Psychotherapy Integration 9, no. 4 (1999): 397-407.
  
• Jane Milton. "Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy--Rival Paradigms or Common Ground?" International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82 (2001): 431-47.
  
• Eric M. Plakun. "Finding Psychodynamic Psychiatry's Lost Generation." Journal of the American Acaademy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 34 (2006): 135-50.
  
• Drew Westen. "Commentary: Implicit and Emotional Processes in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy." Clinical Psychology 7, no. 4: 386-90.
  

PG: What is Freud's contribution? He's notorious for the libido theory, but then Newton wrote a lot about alchemy, too. A few basic ideas were essential, like Newton's refutation of Aristotle with his gravitational theory of "action at a distance." But Freud's original work was the hypothesis that hysteria was the result of displaced emotion, not organic brain damage. The mind plays a role in the disease. Now Freud thought, as he says in "On Narcissism," that eventually all mental events would be explainable on a material basis, but his theory tends instead to suggest immaterial causes. In any case, it is neither simply true nor simply false that psychoanalysis is scientifically sound. That depends on its definition.

PG: Now a second major objection to psychoanalysis is historicist and constructivist. One famous articulation of this from Renaissance studies is Stephen Greenblatt's "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture" (in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint; rpt. in Greeblatt's Learning to Curse). Greenblatt argues that psychoanalysis derives from rather than precedes or explains developments in the Renaissance. He gives a picture of a radical break between medieval and early modern subjectivities. This has been attacked by Richard Levin, and PG is preparing an essay on Greenblatt's errors. But Greenblatt's favorable turn to Lacan has influenced Renaissance studies. See for example the recent anthology Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor. (This turn to Lacan--mirrored in the selections on psychoanalysis in anthologies of literary theory--distorts the field of psychoanalysis and indeed misses all the theorists relevant to psychoanalysis today. Lacan is regarded as a quack in Anglo-American psychoanalysis.) Many ideas associated with Freud and Lacan are much older. For sublimation, see Montaigne; for denial, see Aesop's fable of The Fox and the Grapes. In short, they look back to faculty psychology, to Aristotle and the classics--as Freud often remarks. Now this leads Greenblatt to say psychoanalysis comes from the Renaissance; but he overlooks the transhistorical persistence of these ideas. For PG, these really indicate truths of human nature.

PG wants to use the idea of the ego-ideal to reconcile cultural and psychoanalytic approaches. The ego-ideal can also be a cultural ideal. Theology could be seen as a defining characteristic of a culture because that is what sets up the culture's ego-ideal.

Ben Labreche: How are you using this in your dissertation?

PG: I discuss stoicism in Shakespeare's Roman plays. The Romans believe in an impassable God, so they are reluctant to acknowledge their own passivity and mistakes--in contrast to a Christian God, who can suffer and act.

Emily Coit: Your references seem to distinguish psychoanalysis from psychotherapy. Is that right?

PG: Kohut said he did psychotherapy, not psychoanalysis. All these terms--interpersonal, psychodynamic, etc.--can be united under the etymological sense of psycho-analytic. I relate this to the concept we learned about from Lisa Zunshine: Theory of Mind or "mind-reading." Interpretation of minds. Many ways.

EC: AG's blog comments focused on methodology. Does the current incarnation of psychoanalysis have a different methodology?

PG: I would say that there are lots of things science can't really rule on, like theology. The competence of science in certain spheres of inquiry has led people to want to apply it everywhere, including in literary criticism. It's an overstepping of bounds.

AG: This is a useful either/or moment. If the choice is between, on one side, the qualitative, the subjective, the singular, and on the other the material, the scientific, the generalizable, and you put psychoanalysis on the former side, then I see that a psychoanalytic approach actually does require admitting non-material causes. That's useful, because it tells me that if I do not admit those causes--and I absolutely do not admit them--I don't have to take on board a psychoanalytic approach.

PG: In speaking of the material causes of mind, it's one thing to say mind is a product of the brain, and another to reject non-material qualities of mind. To say everything is material would mean that thoughts are things in the brain.

AG: This is the philosphical question of the existence and nature of "qualia." See Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, especially the chapter "Qualia Disqualified."

CG: PG's introduction suggested that he, and psychoanalysis, make transhistorical claims about human nature. But if there are precendents for Freudian concepts in Western European texts, that doesn't necessarily prove a transhistorical, universal human nature. Freud read those classical European texts in his education and was influenced by them. You need stronger evidence for the transhistorical claim. Could you find evidence for this human nature in Native American or Chinese culture? Could you give an explanation of how these aspects of human nature evolved by natural selection? Because Aesop, Montaigne, and Freud just aren't that far apart.

PG: I'm not qualified to talk about other cultures. That's really an anthropology question. Nonetheless, there is a remarkable continuity in the human psyche. I can understand translations of ancient Chinese literature.

AG: Okay, but that doesn't mean any of the accounts, including the psychoanalytic one, that seem comparable can be used to explain all the others. The causes for the historical continuity still need to be demonstrated.

PG: What is the proper scope of a literary critic? I use psychoanalysis only for analogy; its concepts help me describe the authors I'm studying. Let me give another example. Jung describes ideas of the anima and animus, female and male natures inside each gender. That's useful for describing what's going on in Shakespeare when he personifies aspects of men's psyches as female, but in saying that I'm not saying the anima is real or that Shakespeare is a psychoanalyist. I don't take the step of saying Shakespeare was right about the mind---that isn't our purview as literary critics.

EC: You're explaining by analogy, then?

PG: Yes, as far as I'm only doing literary criticism.

CG: I wouldn't want to totally dismiss your use of psychoanalytic texts, but you did say that the similarities between Montaigne and Shakespeare and Freud reveal transhistorical human nature. But you didn't have to. As literary critics, we're discussing cultural representations.

PG: I think this argument, about what explains the beliefs of the authors I study, can be separated from literary criticism. New Historicists like to move horizontally within a culture, but I want to move through time.

AG: That's a stronger claim than the claim that you only want psychoanalysis as an analogy. For if there were only analogy, what would it mean? What matters is what explains the analogy.

PG: I concede the point.

BL: But let's talk about your research topic of Stoicism in particular. Do you really need to make claims about universal human nature to make your arguments about Stoicism in Renaissance culture?

PG: In some ways, yes. In literary criticism, we feel that we have to go back to material causes, especially economic ones, but I believe in immaterial causes. To explain a work of literature is to translate it from particulars into a more general statement of the author's belief about humanity. We can leave why an author believes what he believes out of our picture, and we can leave put own beliefs aside when we do literary criticism.

CG: I'd be skeptical of claiming to derive Shakespeare's beliefs from the Riverside Shakespeare. There should be diversity in ideological issues in our field, but truth matters. Even on a practical level: if PG and I were on the same faculty and planning an undergraduate curriculum, we wouldn't agree about what approaches and texts undergraduates should be required to read. I would want courses with a social-constructivist approach, and you wouldn't.

AG: Right, what you proposed about the task of the critic isn't neutral; it is itself a set of claims about what literature is and how it works--that it offers specific examples than can be generalized. So you don't have to be a total relativist; you could argue for a much more forceful and particular version of the basis for your approach.

PG: In my experience, all literary criticism involves this translation from particular to universal. Even Greenblatt says Shakespeare's plays are a personal perspective on reality. When did we become an anthropology department? Why don't we just do literary criticism?

CG: We're a minor social science. That's fine. We should have some standards of truthfulness.

EC: Somehow PG has become the relativist and CG an absolutist. Funny. I'd like to add another term: morality. A recent Yale Daily News op-ed piece ("Shvarts explains her 'repeated self-induced miscarriages'") by Aliza Shvarts defending her senior art project disturbed me with its use of a literary-critical discourse we're all comfortable with. My initial reaction was: If only she'd read George Eliot, she'd never have made these errors. We are teachers, and we have a responsibility to students. We have to trace out the effects of our theoretical work. If I know that PG is a humanist in real life, how do I reconcile that with the relativist position he's advocating here? And CG--

CG: [raises eyebrows] I'm a post-humanist.

EC: What happens when we put morality and humanism on the table?

CG: I don't think PG and I are that far apart. I want to believe literary criticism is a form of knowledge production that doesn't just move from trend to trend, but actually progresses. Evidence-based literary criticism is essential to this. If we're going to take up psychoanalysis, I want it to be evidence-based. Some modes of literary criticism have been discredited, and that's okay, but if it's impossible to disprove a form of criticism, then no knowledge can be produced by it.