TY - JOUR
AU1 - Lucy, Arnold,
AB - Abstract In 2017 a key trend in psychoanalytic scholarship coalesced around radical rethinkings of people, places, things, and theories whose status within the field had for some time been taken for granted or significantly overlooked. As such, this year’s review is divided into five sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Psychoanalysis and Space (exploring Joanne Morra’s reappraisal of the Freud Museums as spaces which are uniquely psychoanalytically and culturally invested); 3. Thinking the Thing: Psychoanalysis and the Couch (examining a recontextualizing of the psychoanalytic couch as a historical and cultural object); 4. Psychoanalysis and its Practitioners: Rereading Sabina Spielrein (assessing Angela Sells’s exposure of the misrepresentations of Spielrein’s life and legacy which have characterized her presence within the scholarship thus far); 5. Psychoanalysis and the Fetish: Renewing the Theory (looking at the ways in which Freud’s theory of the fetish can be contextualized historically and philosophically to give rise to new insights for clinical practice). 1. Introduction 2017 saw the publication of a multitude of texts concerned with reassessing or rereading aspects of psychoanalysis which had been hitherto taken for granted or gone unrecognized within the discipline’s dominant narratives. In this review I examine four monographs whose authors present for re-evaluation figures, spaces, objects, and theories whose complexity and significance for our understanding of psychoanalysis as cultural phenomenon, clinical practice, and theoretical framework have consistently been occluded or denied. I begin by considering two works which seek to unpack a number of complex, and hitherto overlooked, relationships between the history of psychoanalytic practice and the evolution of its theories and visual art: Joanne Morra’s Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art and Nathan Kravis’s On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud. In a productively double gesture, both texts deploy psychoanalytic critical frameworks in order to unpack the material spaces and objects that have come to define psychoanalysis both in practice and, significantly, in the cultural imaginary. In Section 4 of this chapter I consider Angela Sells’s powerful reappraisal of psychoanalyst Sabrina Spielrein, a text which exposes the extensive occlusion, not merely of Spielrein, but of her fellow female psychoanalysts, from the narrative of psychoanalysis’s seminal moments. In my final section I explore a text which radically recontextualizes Freud’s theorization of the fetish, offering new ways of connecting Freudian conceptualizations of this notion both to a wealth of philosophical approaches and also to new ways of approaching psychoanalytic practice. These rereadings of people, things, theories, and spaces exemplify a trend in the field in 2017 for reappraising and in some cases overturning certain apparently definitive shibboleths in favour of an agile and ethically invested theory, history, and practice of psychoanalysis. 2. Psychoanalysis and Space: Rereading the Freud Museums Psychoanalysis […] cannot fail to take into account the fact that it is itself also present, in a privileged way, in that ‘culture’ which has been in-formed and transformed by its very intervention. (Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, p. 237) To begin with Morra’s text, Inside the Freud Museums offers a very specifically inflected history of two unique spaces whose value emerges at the intersection of history, personality, and therapy. The Freud Museum London was established at the request of Anna Freud prior to her death in 1982, and is situated at 20 Maresfield Gardens, the address which became the Freuds’ home following their flight from Austria after the Anschluss of 1938. The museum opened to the public in 1986 and, as Morra explores, develops the fiction which underpins the majority of so-called ‘personality museums’, that the space’s previous inhabitant, whose occupation of these rooms has granted them their significance, has only just taken their leave. While in the majority of cases this is acknowledged as an artificial arrangement of space, the Freud Museum London operates on the basis that, with respect to Freud’s famous consulting room at least, the space is precisely as it was left. 20 Maresfield Gardens is replete with objects owned by Freud. By comparison, the Freud Museum Vienna, located at Bergasse 19, where Freud undertook the majority of his clinical practice and produced the bulk of his theoretical writings, is predicated on absence, emptiness, and facsimile, containing very few of the analyst’s possessions and being structured around a sequence of photographs taken specifically to provide a record of a space shortly to be traumatically dismantled. Indeed this emphasis on the emptiness and absence of the Freud Museum Vienna leads Morra to dub the space a ‘conceptual Museum’, an ‘ideological formation […] based on its constitution and demonstration of the absence and trauma at its core’ (p. 234). Significantly, both spaces have played host to numerous exhibitions of contemporary art since they opened, and it is the interactions between these artworks and heritage spaces which the book seeks to unpack. Morra’s text maps the complex interactions between psychoanalysis (as theoretical system and therapeutic practice), the space of the museum (as both material and ideological), and contemporary art practice, specifically the notion of site-responsive (rather than the more familiar site-specific) artworks. Such a project risks being sprawling, but Morra’s carefully structured text draws out these overdetermined connections and resonances productively, undertaking an analysis of six sets of exhibitions staged in the Freud Museums grouped according to a common concern (hagiography, archaeology, dreaming, trauma, autobiography, and absence). Inside the Freud Museums is built upon three theses. The first of these concerns the concept of the ‘personality museum’, defined by Morra as ‘a type of museum dedicated to the life and work of an individual’ (p. 1). Morra proposes that, rather than being straightforward material biographical records, such museums emerge at the confluence of ‘spaces, objects and practices’ (p. 1). The second principle upon which the book rests is found in the term Morra coins for the artworks installed in both museums, but which have not been specifically commissioned for the site, that of ‘site-responsive’ art. In Morra’s words the term provides a means of ‘understanding the generative and reciprocal nature of this form of art intervention that is temporarily housed in a space that is not primarily meant for contemporary art’ (p. 2). Building on Freud’s own understanding of the relationship between psychic and physical space, wherein ‘space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable […] Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it’ (Freud, quoted in Morra, p. 11), this notion of site-responsivity provides Morra with a productive framework for conceptualizing the shifting significances of those artworks temporarily housed in the Freud Museums, and thus temporarily brought into conversation with a number of understandings of psychoanalysis. It also, I argue, provides a striking mode of thinking the analytic situation as similarly ‘site-responsive’ and dependent upon its ‘staging’ for its particular outcomes and perhaps for its efficacy. The third thesis around which the book coalesces is an assertion of the ability of contemporary art to articulate the significance of psychoanalytical thought and practice while simultaneously ‘interrogating it and presenting it anew’ (p. 2). In many ways Inside the Freud Museums tells the story of two haunted houses, houses haunted by historical trauma and the absent presences of analysts and analysands alike (indeed, Anna Freud herself forms a somewhat spectral figure within Inside the Freud Museums, her sidelining in psychoanalytic history being doubled and redoubled in 20 Maresfield Gardens and in Morra’s treatment of that space). Morra’s account, in Chapters 4 and 6, of the ways in which the Freud Museums each came into being as a result of the persecution and displacement the Freud family, and countless others like them, suffered under the Nazi regime is powerfully articulated through a recognition of the Freud Museum Vienna’s painful emptiness and the Freud Museum London’s striving to be understood as a hagiographic space which reproduces its original incarnation at Bergasse 19. Two moments in the text are particularly striking in this regard. The first of these is an extract from a letter written by Freud to Raymond de Saussure on his arrival in England: You left out one point that the emigrant experiences as particularly painful. It is—one can only say: the loss of the language one has lived and thought in and that in spite of all efforts towards empathy one will never be able to replace by any other. With painful understanding I observe how otherwise familiar means of expression fail in English and how every fibre in me wants to struggle against giving up the familiar gothic handwriting. And yet one has heard so often that one is not German. And indeed, one is happy not to have to be German anymore. (Freud, quoted in Morra, p. 177) The notion of Freud as an emigrant and the painful failures of translation, linguistic and spatial, that emigrant experience generates are succinctly and elegantly drawn in the early movements of Morra’s text, but the ways in which trauma forms a constitutive force behind the Freud Museums are unflinchingly emphasized by the fleeting reference Morra makes to the detention and interrogation of Anna Freud by the Gestapo in March 1938, an experience for which she had equipped herself ‘“with a lethal dose of Veronal that she had received from […] the family physician”, so that, if necessary, she could take her own life’ (pp. 228–29). Trauma is a key unifying principle of this text, and the way in which Freud-the-man and the museums dedicated to his life and work are explicitly located within the broader context of the Holocaust is one of the book’s key achievements. This achievement is in no small part facilitated by the astute and sensitive analysis of the artworks under discussion here. Morra’s fluency and familiarity with the works studied is striking, and the clarity with which the book communicates the nuances of what are often intricate and challenging pieces is central to the successful interaction between culture and psychoanalysis which Inside the Freud Museums sets out to achieve. One of the most striking analyses is found in Morra’s treatment of Ralph Freeman’s second exhibition at the Freud Museum London. In his Foundations and Fragments exhibition Freeman, whose parents fled Nazi Germany for London taking with them numerous transit documents which were to form the basis of much of Freeman’s work, exhibited reliefs, constructions, and collages in the form of book covers, letters, and envelopes in ‘an attempt to imply the essence of the initial documents—with their history, associations and symbolism—without necessarily using them’ (p. 156). Morra’s analysis of Freeman’s installation draws out how, when located inside the Freud Museum, itself a product of the trauma of persecution and exile, and sitting alongside Freud’s own library, the artworks become engaged in ‘the immense task of mourning […] a working through of the psychic and ethical imperative of transitioning the event—represented by the document—into a memory of the past through its historical, symbolic and allegorical associations’ (p. 157). This analysis is one of many which provides a lucid entry point for a psychoanalytic concept; indeed, the text is in many ways defined both by the light-touch approach to the psychoanalytic theory it deploys and the way it puts to work visual art as a way into understanding the complexities of those theoretical frameworks. This is exemplified in Morra’s analysis of Vivienne Koorland’s work (defined by the repetitive intensity of its process, in which burlap sacks are repeatedly subjected to ‘underpainting, overpainting, tearing, scraping, reusing recycling, stitching, cutting drawing and redrawing’, p. 167) as a ‘form of Nachträglichkeit’ (though it should be noted the definition of the ‘afterwardsness’ at work in Koorland’s work is a profoundly Freudian one, a ‘remembering, re-experiencing, reconstruction and revising’ (p. 167) which stops short of Laplanche’s later reworking of the term. In a book which is primarily concerned with the interface between practitioners and the recipients of their practice, whether consumers of visual art or analysands, a particular nuance which Morra’s text brings out fruitfully is the emotional relationship established between visitors to the Freud Museums and the museum spaces themselves. Morra recounts the ways in which the Freud Museum London emphasizes a narrative of authenticity and presence built around the figure of Sigmund Freud through the careful curation of his personal possessions, stating ‘the Freud Museum London abides by a hagiographic model of the personality museum that seeks to stage the aura of Freud’s consulting room and study; an aura that resonates deeply with our own fantasy around these spaces’. Morra’s use of the term fantasy is useful in that it recognizes the profound emotional and psychic investments in Freud as a figure and psychoanalysis as a narrative and a practice which visitors to the museums bring with them. If the London site is concerned with maintaining or reproducing a sense of presence, the Freud Museum Vienna, on the other hand, is demonstrated to function at the level of lack, and is frequently experienced by visitors as angering, frustrating, withholding and ‘derisible’ (p. 226). Morra quotes John Forrester, who describes the Vienna site as ‘a museum of fake souvenirs’, a ‘fake museum’ or ‘screen museum’ (feelings which are echoed by more recent visitors to the museum in online reviews which condemn the space as ‘a fake museum’, going as far as to say it is ‘not a museum’ at all (p. 226). What is striking in Morra’s discussion of the visitor’s experience of both the London and Vienna museums is the ways in which they replicate the psychodynamic interactions common to the analytic situation. The disappointed visitors to Bergasse 19 find themselves confronted by a lack which they frequently interpret as a refusal, a substitution, an expectation that they make do with ‘fakes’, facsimiles, and simulacra rather than the ‘real thing’. The recognition of the presence and complexities of our cultural investments in and understandings of the narrative of psychoanalysis and its progenitor is one of the most resonant moments of Morra’s text, with implications for museum studies more widely, opening up as it does a psychodynamic way of thinking the interaction between heritage site and visitor. Inside the Freud Museums constitutes an important contribution to the rapidly expanding trend of creative and critical endeavours which situate psychoanalysis at the centre of a matrix of interdisciplinary interactions, constituting a sophisticated and thoughtful dialogue between psychoanalysis, art history, and museum studies. Simultaneously, it demonstrates the importance of recognizing and unpicking how psychoanalysis functions in the cultural rather than clinical imaginary, an endeavour to which the second text under discussion here, Nathan Kravis’s On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Psychoanalytic Couch from Plato to Freud, makes a further significant contribution. 3. Thinking the Thing: Psychoanalysis and the Couch Talking in bed ought to be easiest Lying together there goes back so far, an emblem of two people being honest. Yet more and more time passes silently.      (Philip Larkin, ‘Talking in Bed’, Collected Poems, p. 100) Two of the key spectral elements which return to haunt Inside the Freud Museums are constituted by Freud’s iconic therapeutic couch and the words of one of the most famous analysands to recline upon it, the modernist poet H.D., who said of the object: [Freud’s] old-fashioned horsehair sofa […] had heard more secrets than the confession box of any popular Roman Catholic father-confessor in his heyday. This was the homely historical instrument of the original scheme of psychotherapy, of psychoanalysis, the science of the unravelling of the tangled skeins of the unconscious mind and the healing implicit in the process. (H.D., quoted in Morra, p. 29) This ‘homely, historical instrument’ constitutes the focus of Kravis’s study, which, in its critical analysis of the history, function, and afterlives of the psychoanalytic couch, makes present one of the most taken-for-granted symbols not only in contemporary cultural discourse but within psychoanalytic practice itself. Through a reading of the couch’s history which makes it possible to complicate its status as both ‘homely’ and ‘instrumental’, Kravis’s text begins to ask questions of the precursors to the psychoanalytic couch, the objects and practices that allowed it to come into being, and, crucially, the representations of those objects and practices in visual culture. On the Couch opens with Kravis’s own realization that the image of the psychoanalytic couch has become a visual shorthand for talking therapy in Western cultural discourse but that the prevalence of the couch as icon is met with silence in academic and clinical literature. In so doing, Kravis echoes A. Friedberg’s observation that: The couch has always been an integral part of psychoanalytic practice. It has even become a cultural icon representing psychoanalysis itself. However, minimal evidence exists in the psychoanalytic literature that using the couch is necessary or even necessarily helpful to establish a psychoanalytic process and conduct an analysis. (Friedberg, ‘The Couch as Icon’, p. 35) Rather than interrogating the function of the couch from the perspective of a clinician (though Kravis is himself a practising analyst), On the Couch traces the history of the recumbent pose from antiquity through to the present day. As Kravis puts it: the setup, the mise en scène, of the analytic encounter that we now take for granted is an enactment of a ceremony rooted in antecedent healing traditions and cultural meanings associated with recumbent posture. […] Situating the analytic couch within the social history of recumbent posture offers the only way to construct a coherent narrative of the origins of its use in psychoanalysis. (p. 8) Structurally, the book opens with an account of the function of the psychoanalytic couch as used by Freud, and the clinical rationale for such a practice which understands the couch as both synecdochic and mnemonic. Kravis offers a thoughtful interpretation here of Freud’s own, somewhat throwaway, remark that his use of a couch in clinical practice stemmed from his intolerance of ‘being stared at by other people for eight hours a day’, understanding the oft-quoted statement as a ‘proto-theory’ on the ways in which a couch assists an analyst to perform their role successfully and, in doing so, anticipates Wilfred Bion’s understanding of the analyst who must possess the capacity for containment and reverie with regard to their patient (p. 1). Having established the instability of the theoretical ground underpinning the use of the psychoanalytic couch, Kravis moves chronologically through a history of recumbent posture and the furniture designed to facilitate it, beginning with an exploration of recumbence in the classical world. This chapter acts as a compelling complication of critical understandings of the analytic couch as infantilizing, compelling a patient to take up a passive position in response to a dominant and active analyst, outlining how ‘the earliest representations of recumbence connote neither passivity nor submission; rather, they reflect social status, relationships and social hierarchy within social strata, and moral and social values’ (p. 19). Kravis goes on to argue for a linkage between the prestige and authority denoted by recumbence in classical civilizations and the ‘certain ceremonial’ Freud ascribed to the use of the couch in a gesture which reproduces in a number of ways the archaeological discourses that permeate Freudian psychoanalytic thought, and positions the couch as an occulted classical artefact, hidden in plain sight among Freud’s famous collection of antiquities. Chapter 3 moves to think about the evolution of the couch into a commonplace domestic object, and the ways in which that evolution influenced, and was influenced by, significant changes in social mores and a crystallizing of domestic environments into more rigidly purpose-specific units of space. While striking in and of itself, this chapter resonates implicitly with the notion of the psychoanalytic consulting room, particularly in relation to Freud’s practice within his own home, anticipating questions of the intersection between the domestic and the therapeutic which are to be more fully tackled in Chapter 4. Here Kravis underscores the emerging understanding of recumbence as necessarily erotic and transgressive, drawing out how furniture and fashion evolved together to permit a radically more intimate and informal physicality to define social interaction. Crucially for Kravis’s thesis, this emergence of, and anxiety around, the reclining body in the social space and its links to the erotic set the scene for the development of psychoanalysis as a practice while simultaneously reinforcing the erotic and transgressive qualities that constitute an element of the therapeutic exchange between analysand and analyst. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 map the intersection of the domestic and the clinical. The first of these explores the ways in which domestic objects such as the sofa and couch were repurposed as therapeutic objects in a variety of settings. One of Kravis’s most striking observations is his foregrounding of how many of the chairs and recliners designed for medical purposes (for example for the performance of gynaecological examinations or dental procedures) were designed specifically to reproduce the aesthetics of their solely domestic counterparts, a kind of aesthetic disguise that Freud’s own couch also implicitly engages with. Within these three chapters is contained a significant contextualizing of psychoanalysis within a broader historical clinical context, as one new system of therapeutics among many which were seeking new ways of understanding their patients suffering, whether physical or mental, through new ways of positioning and interacting with the body. As Kravis states: The major psychiatric treatments of the nineteenth century—hypnosis, hydrotherapy, cutaneous electrotherapy, phototherapy, diet and rest cures—all sought to import ideals of comfort and healthy relaxation derived from the long dominance of the open-air rest cure of the TB sanatoria. All of these treatment modalities promoted an association in the minds of practitioners and patients alike between recumbence and cure. Freud trained in and was shaped by this medical culture before profoundly shaping it himself. (p. 115) This observation is key to one of the principal achievements of the book, that is, the denaturalization of the relationship between the couch and the practice of psychoanalysis. Kravis’s analysis of the clinical context in which Freud worked and innovated refuses the uncomplicated coupling of object with practice, instead reminding the reader that the couch was a therapeutic tool long before it was a cultural icon for psychoanalysis. Chapter 7 speaks to Freud’s own couch, that object whose presence, authenticity, and aura Morra’s text has already proven to be so powerful, pointing out significantly that ‘Freud’s couch antedates psychoanalysis in that he began using it in the 1880s while he was still practicing hypnosis, massage, and electrotherapy, and just beginning to become interested in the free association method’ (p. 127). The final movements of the book, Chapter 8 and its afterword, set the stage for a broader discussion of the couch as a key part of contemporary psychoanalytic practice, exploring the consulting room as projection of the psyche in a way which chimes usefully with Morra’s psychodynamic understanding of psychoanalytic spaces. In these closing discussions, Kravis hits upon a significant debate which is yet to take place in a meaningful and multivocal way within contemporary psychoanalytic literature, that is, what purpose does the couch serve and why use it at all? Might the couch not be, as Richard C. Robertiello described, simply ‘a ridiculous anachronism […] an interesting museum piece […] something amusing like a chastity belt or a washboard’ (quoted in Skolnik, ‘Rethinking the Use of the Couch’, p. 631)? In one of the most significant interpretations the book offers, Kravis opens up the ways in which what he terms ‘denigrations’ of the couch by contemporary practitioners risks unwittingly subscribing to a contemporary discourse of uncritical openness and suspicion of privacy potentially fatal to the efficacy of the analytic situation. As Kravis puts it, in a passage which warrants quoting at length: In such an age of self-exposure and hyper transparency, privacy and private expression are devalued, and a form of perverse egalitarianism becomes the new piety. Kierkegaard called this a levelling process through which people seek to avert envy. […] This levelling process is actually a cultural therapy of envy operating on the plane of the collective unconscious. In the present age, our digital age, googling one’s therapist is not transgressive, googling is the norm; it is privacy that is transgressive. To amplify Kierkegaard’s insight: in an antiauthoritarian, egalitarian age of hyper-transparency, it is harder to preserve the transgressive space for privacy and interiority. Because of an internalized levelling process, epitomized by attacks on the use of the couch by psychoanalysts themselves, the psychoanalytic couple is at risk for assaulting its own privacy, which is felt to be transgressive in accordance with social norms. (p. 170) Kravis’s book, through its synthesis of carefully curated visual images and robust research, provides a stable, if multifaceted, platform upon which the critical silence that has resistantly surrounded the analytic couch, both as object and fantasy, can begin to be broken, and the question of how the couch functions in the analytic situation can be approached with renewed clarity. 4. Psychoanalysis and Its Practitioners: Rereading Sabina Spielrein If Kravis’s book is centred upon the unacknowledged cultural history of the psychoanalytic couch, and Morna’s study of the Freud Museums allows us to begin to unpack the process of myth-making to which psychoanalysis is still subject, Angela M. Sells’s monograph, Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth, is similarly concerned with an occulted figure in psychoanalytic history, psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein, whose presence has been most forcefully felt in her cultural (mis)representations. In her early twenties, Spielrein was treated by Carl Jung for hysteria, during which time analyst and analysand entered into a sexual relationship. Upon her recovery Spielrein went on to train and qualify as an analyst herself, undertaking pioneering research and being in large part responsible for the introduction of psychoanalysis to her native Russia, in addition to acting as analyst to pioneering child psychologist Jean Piaget. Spielrein’s life has formed the basis of no fewer than three stage plays and two feature films. The most significant of these was Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure (2003), which he later adapted for the screen under the title A Dangerous Method (2011). Both of these works, though ostensibly taking Spielrein as their focus, in fact persistently position Spielrein as ‘inbetween’ Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, her significance only granted as an intermediary between, and a subordinate of, the two founders of psychoanalysis, and her own work as a pioneering analyst in her own right going largely unrecognized. That Spielrein has been brought to wider public attention primarily through her overt fictionalization is paralleled by fictionalizations of a more pernicious kind, found in the critical discourse around Spielrein’s work. As Sells puts it, ‘by transforming her into a figure of fiction […] doubt is cast on Spielrein’s perspective, and once this is done, her credibility as a serious scholar is jeopardized’ (p. 20). It is these fictions which Sells seeks to expose in her book. Sells endeavours here to demonstrate the ways in which Spielrein’s status as a clinician and a thinker has been suppressed in favour of a narrative which problematically dismisses her as merely a mistress or a patient. The project the book undertakes is threefold. Initially, Sells sets out to expose the inaccuracy of such categorizations, rendering explicit the misogyny implicit in so much of the critical writing on Spielrein’s work. Sells problematizes the widespread understanding of Jung’s sexual relationship with Spielrein as a romance or ‘love cure’ and demonstrates the inaccuracy of critical approaches which insistently pathologize Spielrein. Sells then sets out to recover Spielrein’s clinical work from such dismissals, highlighting the nature of her discoveries and their place in the evolution of psychoanalytic thought in order to reposition her academic output as original and significant. The third, and overarching, thesis which unifies this text is Sells’s use of Spielrein’s treatment by the historians of psychoanalysis in order to think more broadly about the ways in which women’s narratives, their voices and writings, have been and continue to be devalued, delegitimized, and otherwise suppressed. Sells’s approach to recovering the figure of Spielrein as an important and individual voice present in the founding moments of psychoanalysis is founded upon a hybrid methodological approach which forms one of the key original contributions of the text. Sells blends a mythopoetic approach with literary criticism (indeed, Sells seeks to put Spielrein in conversation with such female writers as Anäis Nin, H.D., and Simone Weil) and a feminist critical framework in a way which facilitates her forceful and nuanced rejection of the reductive critical strategies which have dominated the field of Spielrein studies thus far. This methodology is exemplified in one of the book’s most striking moments, in which Sells reads the figure of Spielrein alongside the myth of Echo and Narcissus. This critical gesture not only permits Spielrein’s silencing to be placed within a metanarrative of ‘the suppression of female expression and speech’ (p. 45), it also constitutes an appropriation of the technique, famously employed by Freud, of utilizing mythological and literary texts as metaphorical frameworks for articulating psychoanalytic concepts. In this way Sells offers a methodological approach which resonates with the history of psychoanalytic writing but which is nevertheless capable of speaking back to dominant and dominating narratives, interrupting them in a number of productive ways. It is also important to note that this methodological approach is applied not only to existing writing on Spielrein, or Spielrein’s published work, but to a wealth of archival material, including new translations by the author of certain of Spielrein’s works hitherto unpublished in English, predominantly her article ‘Contributions to the Knowledge of a Child’s Soul’. The contribution represented by this translation is significant, explicitly complementing Sells’s project of rendering audible and meaningful Spielrein’s voice as a clinician and thinker. Written with an insistence and energy that are rare in a book of this kind, the text makes an important contribution to studies of Spielrein; indeed, this is a seminal text in terms of the unflinching and meticulous approach which is taken to refuting a significant body of material that has for some time been engaged in denying full presence to a significant figure in the history of psychoanalysis. By refusing the definitions of Spielrein’s life as a ‘love story’ or ‘gruesome ghost story’ (John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein cited in Sells, p. 11) Sells’s book constitutes a crucial moment in an important reassessment of the origin story of psychoanalysis, its authors and adherents, and their motivations. In addition to this specific achievement, however, Sabina Spielrein crucially contextualizes its subject’s story within a number of wider narratives. The work prompts a wider questioning of the lack of visibility of women in the history of psychoanalysis (indeed, the relegation of Anna Freud’s contribution to a single room in the Freud Museum London, as detailed in Morra’s Inside the Freud Museums, stands as testament to this lack). In her analysis of the ways in which Spielrein’s writing was co-opted as a diagnostic tool and used as evidence for spurious diagnoses of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, long after her recovery from her initial illness, can be found the pressing issue of the frequency with which women’s words are pathologized and discounted. The most significant achievement of this text, however, is arguably found in its refusal to deny or minimize the deadly and deadening effects of misogyny on clinical and cultural discourse or to relegate them to Spielrein’s historical moment. In her analysis of the widespread understanding of Jung’s sexual relationship with Spielrein, wherein any possibility of ‘abuse is erased and “seduction” is then cemented into the narrative’ (p. 77), Sells makes a crucial connection to contemporary rape culture. Likewise, Sells’s account of how Spielrein’s death at the hands of Nazi forces during the Second World War has been reframed by multiple critics as Spielrein’s ‘destiny’ in such a way that Spielrein is blamed for her own death rather than acknowledged as a victim of genocide. This is most strikingly borne out in Sells’s citation of one critic’s assertion of the ‘irony’ of Spielrein’s murder, ‘musing that she should have been able to anticipate the Nazis’ sadism being “the author of the psychoanalytic concept of destruction and of the sadistic aspects of attraction”’ (p. 36). That this kind of victim-blaming is to be found in academic studies is arresting in its own right, evidencing as it does the ubiquity of such thinking. However, Sells’s text also importantly highlights how the emergence of psychoanalysis as a mainstream clinical discourse is in many ways inextricable from the trauma of the Holocaust, as the existence of the dual Freud Museums, and the relocated couch that defines both sites, attest. Sells organizes her text in such a way that the figure of Spielrein, as a person and a clinician, gradually emerges as Sells debunks the reductive mythologies which she argues have occluded her in the literature to date. The first three chapters are concerned with how and where the covert silencing of Spielrein within the history of psychoanalysis takes place, working to demonstrate the inaccurate and damaging narratives which Spielrein’s life and work have accrued today—narratives of Spielrein as the ‘ever-patient’ (p. 16), the ‘seductress, or the agent provocateur’ (p. 17), or the self-sacrificing martyr (p. 34). Sells persuasively demonstrates the at times shocking prejudices present in critical approaches to Spielrein and her consistent suppression and (often literal) erasure in the literature. Indeed, she astutely notes that a footnote which appeared in the 1912 edition of Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, which detailed Spielrein’s significant contribution to that work, was erased in subsequent editions (pp. 27–28). The book then looks to Spielrein’s own writing, her diaries, letters, and academic works, not merely to undermine the dominant discourses outlined above but to offer an alternative depiction of Spielrein made possible by a new understanding of these writings not as diagnostic tools (as they function for critics such as Aldo Carotenuto in his tellingly titled book A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Jung and Freud) but as a retrieval of Spielrein’s voice through documents which have profound ‘literary, historical and social importance’ (p. 88). Crucially, this section of the book locates a number of Spielrein’s clinical insights in relation to contemporary psychoanalytic theory, demonstrating how her text ‘Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being’ significantly anticipated not merely Freud’s theory of the death instinct but, implicitly, Jean Laplanche’s reworking of that theory in his paper ‘The So-Called Death Drive: A Sexual Drive’. Sells also astutely identifies here the critical gymnastics undertaken by a number of critics to avoid acknowledging Spielrein’s contribution. She cites Todd Dusfrene’s multifaceted and increasingly emphatic dismissal of Freud’s recognition of Spielrein’s work on the death instinct, in which Dusfrene writes of Freud’s debt to Spielrein as a misdirect to put his competitors off the scent, evidence that Freud did not consider Spielrein to be a serious competitor in his field, or, if a debt was owing, it was in the context of Freud’s complicated relationship to Jung (p. 133). The book closes with a consideration of Spielrein’s later career in Russia and an exploration of the ways in which her experience of being degraded, rejected, and suppressed by an attempt to ‘selectively reorganise the history of psychology’ resonates more broadly and contains an ethical imperative. As Sells puts it: ‘we must remember her achievements and grant her a full and complex humanity in the face of gendered biases and historical silencing. As she reminds us in her Last Will: “I too was once a human being. My name was Sabina Spielrein”’ (p. 196). Sells’s text performs an important function in its emphatic rebuttal of the received narratives in circulation around Spielrein and her work, not only in offering a more expansive account of the voices which contributed to the field of psychoanalysis in its infancy but in demonstrating the ways in which such gendered occlusions and dismissals are orchestrated within the academy itself. This text lays the groundwork for further rigorous critiques of the ways in which the narrative of psychoanalysis ‘repeatedly excludes its fore-mothers’ (p. 75). 5. Psychoanalysis and the Fetish: Renewing the Theory From renewed approaches to certain places, people, and objects whose significance and complexity have failed to be fully acknowledged in the literature to date, I close by considering an extensive reassessment of one of psychoanalysis’s most evasive concepts: fetishism. Alan Bass’s latest monograph builds on his project in Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (2000) and Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care (2006) to recontextualize Freud’s theorization of fetishism and to place it within a much longer philosophical and cultural tradition whose intellectual and ethical implications are frequently oversimplified or unrecognized. Bass’s text is predicated on a recognition of the transformative effect of Freud’s study of fetishism, in particular the 1927 essay, upon the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, emphasizing that this development at the close of Freud’s career sees neurosis displaced by fetishism as the basic structure of all psychic conflict. As Bass puts it, ‘[b]ecause Freud had almost always taken neurosis as his model, the late shift to fetishism potentially dislodges all his basic ideas, starting with the nature of unconscious processes themselves’ (p. 1). Such a shift is significant in itself. However, Bass contends that this evolution of Freud’s thinking has specific implications for the practice of psychoanalysis with a particular group of patients, those ‘concrete patients’ whose resistance to interpretation (and thus to the very structure of psychoanalysis) is absolute. Bass’s key contention here is that the fetishist and the concrete patient share a unique approach to symbolization whereby differentiation (the acknowledgement of difference as predicated on one phenomenon’s simultaneous connection to and separateness from other phenomena) is substituted ‘for a fantasy-based objectifying logic of relieving presence and threatening absence’ (p. 2). In order to get to this point, where the fetishist and the concrete patient are united in their approach to difference, Bass takes his reader through the broader history of fetishism and the ways in which that history, as he puts it, ‘opens onto the very large question of the relations of what we call “mind” to what we call “thing”’ (pp. 4–5). Opening with a chapter on proto-anthropologist Charles de Brosses’s theory of universal fetishism, Bass progresses through Auguste Comte’s reactionary ‘neo-fetishism’, which seeks to expose the ways in which theories of fetishism were co-opted into the service of racist, colonial thinking, before tackling the significance of the Heideggerian Thing for thinking the fetish. He then moves on to read Derrida’s notion of the signature alongside Kant’s theory of the transcendental imagination before considering Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘flesh’, a concept which ‘synthesizes ontological, psychoanalytic, and scientific principles’ (p. 125). Such a synthesis forms the basis of Bass’s final chapter, in which he draws together the numerous philosophical, historical, and psychoanalytical strands of his text through a deconstructivist reading of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Perhaps exemplified in its final chapter, this is a text which takes a profoundly interdisciplinary approach, putting into conversation not only a wealth of philosophical and deconstructivist thinkers such as Heidegger and Derrida, Kant and Hegel, Merleau-Ponty and Marx but also deploying neuro-physiological and quantum physics approaches (courtesy of Gerald Edelman and Roger Penrose) alongside deft literary criticism, with regard to Stevens. While this profoundly multivocal and interdisciplinary approach frequently yields productive insights and weaves a persuasive thread between a number of potentially disparate theoretical concepts, at times the text risks feeling overloaded as the critical voices present double and redouble themselves, frequently in uniquely self-reflexive ways, and Bass’s own voice, which is replete with original contributions (mapped below), begins to fade into the background. This is compounded by the density of much of the philosophical material here, which would have benefited from a more expansive approach, in order to allow the reader to orientate themselves in what is a rich but complex and challenging theoretical matrix. Nonetheless, this rereading of the Freudian fetish generates a number of significant achievements. The central achievements of this text are manifold, but can perhaps be united by the ways in which the text, with clarity and control, exposes the specific relationship of the fetish to Freudian psychoanalysis, to ethics, to poetics, and to the practice of psychoanalysis itself. To begin with the former, a crucial contribution made by this text is its underscoring of the potentially revolutionary implications of Freud’s repositioning of fetishism rather than neurosis as the basis for psychic conflict generally. Bass’s text draws out the ways in which Freud’s ‘Fetishism’ essay, and his thinking on fetishism more broadly, has, to an extent, been neglected in the criticism to date and this late development has remained largely occluded, a trend underlined by the fact that Bass’s multi-vocal text rarely deploys a post-Freudian psychoanalytic approach to the fetish. More broadly, Bass draws out a number of occlusions present within the history of Freudian psychoanalysis itself (the kinds of occlusions present in the myth-making around both material objects and psychoanalytic thinkers already observed in the Sells and Kravis texts). In Chapter 3 Bass invokes Derrida’s reading of Freud’s famous analysis, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of his grandson’s ‘fort:da’ game in which mastery over absence and presence is rehearsed. Derrida argues that Freud’s analysis functions to mirror the writing of the essay itself: Derrida is struck by the way in which Freud distances the pleasure principle, which the title says he is going beyond, only to bring it back: fort:da of the pleasure principle. In French, the abbreviation for pleasure principle, pronounced pé-pé, is also the affectionate term for grandfather. Derrida alleges that the distancing and return of the spool as the pp is a distancing and return of ‘grandpa’ Freud himself in the text. It is his signature in his text, and the role his name plays in the history of psychoanalysis. (p. 105) Not only does Bass invoke Derrida here to emphasize the apparent ‘iridescence’ of Freud within his own theoretical writings and within psychoanalytical thought more broadly, but he also pushes this recognition further, forcing his reader to confront the basis of psychoanalysis itself upon a self-analysis, a self-analysis undertaken by Freud in the presence of his necessary ‘other’ Wilhelm Fliess, of whom Freud states ‘I cannot do without you as the representative of the other’ (The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, p. 374). Bass goes further, suggesting that, in fact, such a self-analysis which requires the presence of an other in fact offers the structure of every analysis, a statement which is potentially transformative for the ways in which we understand the act of interpretation within the psychoanalytic situation. Indeed, a related central contribution made by Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy is the way in which Bass moves seamlessly between the intensely theoretical material which makes up the bulk of the investigation here and a consideration of what practical application such a rereading of fetishism might have in the consulting room, particularly with reference to those patients whom Bass describes as ‘concrete’. Bass, a practising psychoanalyst, defines ‘concrete’ patients as ‘patients who seek out analysis, and who at first seem analysable, but demonstrate intense resistance to symbolization and interpretation once in analysis. […] These patients take the analytic process to its limit, because they specifically defend against the analyst’s major therapeutic tool—interpretation itself’ (p. 1). Departing from a Freudian position which understands that these patients simultaneously register and repudiate objective reality, Bass offers an alternative theorization in which what is both registered and repudiated is not, in fact, objective reality but rather the process of symbolization and interpretation (and the dual separation and connection upon which both processes are predicated). Bass’s theorization articulates not only the difficulty of working with such patients—the risk of the generation of a ‘power struggle with the patient over whose version of objectivity is correct’ (p. 2)—but also the alternative possibilities created by a psychoanalytic practice that acknowledges that ‘[t]he difficulties in life that every patient brings to analysis are grounded in the blind, self-destructive ways that he or she uses to maintain an illusory sense of control’ (p. 153) while also acknowledging that these defences are essentially fetishistic. Bass writes compellingly of the purpose of analysis, that is, the increasing of an individual’s capacity for self-reflection, but crucially warns that such analysis can only be achieved with regard to the so-called concrete patient if the analyst takes into account the ‘unreal reality, the life, on which analysis nourishes itself’, both the undecidability inherent within the mind and the fetishistic disavowals of that undecidability (in which, as Bass puts it, ‘x is x can only mean x, and never y […] x is either there or not there’, p. 3). If this is neglected, in place of self-reflection is found self-referentiality, on behalf of both analyst and analysand. The early chapters of Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy are remarkable not only for Bass’s ability to open up complex and in some cases obscure theory, but for their insistence on an acknowledgement of the ways in which the notion of the fetish has historically been put to work to bolster racist, colonial, and imperial thinking. The examination in Chapter 1 of De Brosses’s theological gymnastics undertaken in order to explain the presence of fetishism, defined by De Brosses as ‘the original, universal, but irrational form of religion’ (p. 13) within De Brosses’ Christian worldview is particularly striking. Bass clearly maps De Brosses’s arrival at a solution to the contradiction posed by the existence of an ‘irrational’ religious practice in a world structured by a rational Christian God, but in doing so also establishes how, within De Brosses’s theories is contained a clear hierarchy which understands monotheistic, ‘rational’ Christian theology as superior to polytheistic, fetishistic religious practice, with the latter co-opted as evidence of an infantile primitivity. As De Brosses puts it: there is no superstition so absurd or so ridiculous engendered by ignorance joined to fear […] [I]t owes its birth to the times when peoples were pure savages ensconced in ignorance and barbarism. With the exception of the chosen people, there is no Nation which has not been in this state … [Fetishism] is practiced by peoples who spend their lives in perpetual childhood. (De Brosses, quoted in Bass, p. 13) This study of De Brosses sets the stage for Bass’s articulation of the ways in which thinkers such as Hegel and Kant reproduced this kind of rhetoric, with Kant in particular speaking about religious fetishism in ways which, as Bass puts it, ‘are consistent with the colonial and racist thinking that dominates the encounter of Europe and Africa’ (p. 32). That Bass takes the time to foreground starkly the ways in which Kant and Hegel use a definition of fetishism as infantile and primitive to justify the slave trade and notions of white supremacy is to his credit, in that it significantly opens up the scope of this text. When read alongside Bass’s analysis of Marx’s treatment of commodity fetishism and Bass’s own thinking about how the analytic situation is doomed to fail certain kinds of patients if it relies on a hierarchy of interpretation whereby the analyst is ‘guardian of a process’ (Freud, quoted in Bass, p. 153), these analyses point to the ethical implications of defining the fetish, culturally, historically, and clinically. The final element of Bass’s argument I wish to draw out is the way in which the work of the poet Wallace Stevens is mobilized in the book’s final chapter as a vehicle capable of rearticulating all that has been achieved in the monograph thus far. The links which are drawn out here—not only between the specific works selected, but also between the poetic and the psychoanalytic—provide a clarity of expression which not only confirms Bass’s argument to this point but, to a degree, fixes expressively what had at points been a problematically ‘iridescent’ approach to the subject matter. Bass’s interpretative approach to Stevens’s poetry models the kind of Nietzschean ‘active interpretation’ espoused as able to respond to the concrete patient and the fetishist alike, an interpretative style which ‘understands all phenomena in terms of unconscious interactions of force’ and ‘disrupts the reactive reduction of force that is the aim of metaphysical, identificatory equations’ (p. 3). Working in a way which privileges the literary qualities of Stevens’s poetry and its ability to draw together the interdisciplinary strands of this text, Bass balances the complexity of the issues at stake here with a recognition of their fruitful interaction, making available that space where ‘disciplines converge in their necessary encounters with uncertainty, complementarity, or, from mathematics, undecidability’ (p. 150). Such a deployment of literary close reading within the confines of a project which orientates itself at the intersection of the philosophical and the psychoanalytical offers, in a similar fashion to Sells’s ethnopoetic methodology, a fresh and compelling approach to the reassessment of that which narratives of psychoanalytic history and practice have hitherto taken for granted. Books Reviewed Bass Alan , Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: The Iridescent Thing ( London : Routledge , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7811 3855 6416. Kravis Nathan , On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud ( Cambridge, MA : MIT Press , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7802 6203 6610. Morra Joanne , Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art ( London : I.B. Tauris , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7817 8076 2074. Sells Angela M. , Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth ( Albany : SUNY Press , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7814 3846 5791. References Bass Alan , Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros ( Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2000 ). Bass Alan , Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care ( Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2006 ). Carotenuto Aldo , A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Jung and Freud ( New York : Pantheon , 1984 ). Friedberg A. , ‘ The Couch as Icon’ , The Psychoanalytic Review , 99 ( 2012 ), 35 – 62 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS PubMed Kerr John , A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein ( New York : Vintage , 1994 ). Laplanche Jean , Essays on Otherness ( London : Routledge , 2005 ). Larkin Phillip , Collected Poems , ed. Thwaite Anthony ( London : Faber & Faber , 2003 ). Masson Jeffrey Moussaieff , ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 ( Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 1985 ). Skolnik Neil J. , ‘ Rethinking the Use of the Couch: A Relational Perspective’ , Contemporary Psychoanalysis , 51 ( 2015 ), 624 – 58 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS © The English Association (2018) All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - 4Psychoanalysis
JF - The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
DO - 10.1093/ywcct/mby004
DA - 2018-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/4psychoanalysis-P6uasWNOPc
SP - 65
VL - 26
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -