Freud on Trial

...Crews enacts the role of idol smasher...

...Freud speaks of the "tact and restraint" necessary to a psychoanalyst "whenever in the course of his work he goes beyond the standard lines of interpretation, [for] his listeners or readers will only follow him as far as their own familiarity with analytic technique will allow them...

...being...

...Resistance, according to this view, reflects an unconscious experience of the truth as a threat...

...Freud here seems to be addressing both the psychoanalytic theorist who must convince his readers of the truth of his theory and the psychoanalyst who needs to elicit assent to his interpretations from his patients...

...The potentiality for tyranny lies in the asymmetry of authority between analyst and analysand...

...Freud provokes it because his narrative is in the service of a claim to science...

...Freud "theorizes" what may be the critical insight of modern literature...

...Michel Foucault calls them (Freud and Marx are his examples) founders of discursivity...

...In the Marxist view, the self comes to serve its class interest, which is conflated with its personal interest...

...Ideally, the psychoanalyst is no more than a catalyst who makes the reaction possible without entering into or distorting it...

...It is, need I add, what determines the reader's or listener's sense of truth in narrative...

...29, 1993), pp...

...This authority of emotional response, common to psychoanalytic theory and practice and to narrative, is different from the authority of the truth claims in science, which have nothing to do with their emotionally persuasive power...

...Freud finds his theory, so to speak, in stories and the basic structure of the Oedipus complex in the narrative structure of the Greek legend...

...The Oedipus complex is the psychological inhibition of the acted out narrative of Oedipus's murder of his father and marriage to his mother...

...Freud's own interpretation is artistically delayed, withholding until the end the piece of evidence within the Sophoclean text that apparently reveals a proleptic awareness of the Freudian discovery...

...Unlike scientists, these founders of discursivity are not required to conform to the canons of science...

...The class is identical with that in the life of the individual which prevents him from being an individual...

...3 "What is an Author...

...9 Freud, Three Case Histories, p. 167...

...Freud does not have to demonstrate in each particular instance that a "No" is really a "Yes" by examining the evidence and offering criteria for judgment...

...In the eyes of Crews and others, he has become Laius, an invitation to parricide...

...It is reasonable to assume that if a repressed thought has been presented to consciousness that the "No" reflects resistance to it...

...edited and translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1994...

...2 But this is mere gossip compared to the charge that the seduction theory, central to psychoanalysis, was an invention of Freud's without much basis in clinical experience—that he induced his patients to believe in events they did not remember before they came for analysis...

...It is not altogether clear whether Freud means to give advice about rhetorical strategy and tactics or whether he is expressing the self-doubt that accompanies the formulation of new theory and interpretation...

...impossibility...

...2 Crews, "The Unknown Freud," p. 56...

...The conception of the unconscious as inchoate and ultimately unfathomable might have led Freud to a similar view: sometimes he even seems to hold it...

...Freud's confidence derives from a role that he unconsciously played (and which every psychoanalyst inevitably performs): that of a priest, a confessor to the secular minded, to those without religion who nevertheless require its benefits...

...But Foucault is nevertheless right in his sense of how Freud has played in modern culture—that is, in his characterization of Freudianism rather than Freud...

...It would, however, be a mistake to reduce Freud's achievement as a creator of character to the case histories...

...Freud and his followers are most vulnerable, it would seem, when they attribute to a particular interpretation, rather than the activity of interpretation itself, an authority it has not earned...

...I have tried to explain the revisionist attack on Freud as an iconoclastic reaction against his iconic status in modern culture and suggest a view of his work that avoids idolatry and iconoclasm...

...SPRING • 1995 • 243...

...Freud acknowledges that the story can be understood as a conflict between "the all powerful will of the gods and the vain efforts of human beings threatened with human disaster...

...What I have not done is explain why and how Freud achieved his unique authority in modern culture...

...If the Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks, the only possible explanation is that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend upon the conflict between fate and human will, but upon the peculiar nature of the material by which this conflict is revealed...

...The case for Freud can hardly rest on it...

...It does not of course follow from this fact that his influence has been benign...

...For the most part, modern writers do not share Freud's confidence...

...The case histories provide us with portraits of human beings whose thoughts, feelings, and behavior are reducible to neuroses...

...Mann of course was an admirer...

...Griinbaum and Karl Popper, both severe critics of Freud, disagree about whether Freud's thought is falsifiable (a necessary condition of science), Griinbaum arguing that it is, Popper that it is not...

...Freud's characterization of Moses is probably closer to a self-portrait than it is to what Michelangelo intended...

...Michelangelo's Moses, as Freud construes him, is a splendid instance of the transformation of libidinal energy...

...5 See Peter Brooks, Reading For the Plot, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984...

...Of course, the problem of the asymmetry of relationships is pervasive in human life: between parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers, and even friends...

...Most psychoanalytic literary critics use Freudian ideas as a master text to interpret other texts, provoking suspicions among the unconverted that a model of interpretation is being arbitrarily and coercively imposed, much like the psychoanalyst's imposition of his understanding on the experience of patients...

...Unlike contemporaries who wrote fiction, Freud never adopted the position of epistemological relativism...

...Resistance, Freud seems to say, is an irrational function, not susceptible to rational persuasion...

...Moreover, one can quarrel with the interpretive mode as an exclusive means of understanding personality, thoughts, feelings, behavior, because of its unwillingness to accept anything on its own terms, on its face value...

...For Marx the truth of a person lies not in his individuality but in his class character, of which he may not be conscious...

...These are plausible reasons, but they do not explain the extremity of the attack on Freud, which reflects, I believe, his unusual authority in our culture...

...Freud's achievement occurs in the company of the great masters of modern literature: Conrad, Lawrence, Mann, and Proust...

...low does Freud "prove" his theory...

...Philosophers of science do not hold that scientific theories necessarily rise or fall when statements within the theories are falsified...

...But for Freud a "No" unrelated to repression is a (theoretical...

...They may unmask the deceptions and self-deceptions of characters, but they are uncertain about what exists underneath...

...The class is inescapably present to the individual as another self—it is the reality of his unreality...

...Confirmation" in this sense is not scientific proof...

...Lawrence began writing Sons and Lovers before he knew anything of Freud and only heightened the Oedipal pattern already in his work after he learned about Freud...

...Point of view" is never his problem...

...Here caricature need not have a pejorative meaning: it can refer to the exaggerations of certain features of psychological behavior so that they can be studied and understood and the patient cured of neurosis...

...The true technique of psychoanalysis requires the physician to suppress his curiosity and leaves the patient complete freedom in choosing the order in which topics succeed each other during the treatment...

...The Time article suggests several reasons: these include the problematical proliferation of "accusations of sexual abuse" based on the recovery of repressed memory, the superior success of drug treatment "in the alleviation of mental disorders," and the discovery of numerous "errors, duplicities and fudged evidence" in psychoanalytic studies...

...Their achievements, great as they are, don't have a comparable ambition...

...A persuasive criticism of Freud's work must acknowledge its power...

...The issue is further complicated if one takes seriously Thomas Kuhti's theory of paradigms in which the demarcation between science and nonscience 236 • DISSENT Freud on Trial loses its sharpness...

...It is not simply a matter of influence...

...The dream of having sexual intercourse with one's mother was as common then as it is today with many people, who tell it with indignation and astonishment...

...In the very text of Sophocles' tragedy there is an unmistakable reference to the fact that the Oedipus legend had its source in dream-material of immemorial antiquity, the content of which was the painful disturbance of the child's relations to its parents caused by the first impulses of sexuality...

...Proceeding from other premises, Freud regards each individual as unique (not the same as unitary or coherent...

...Crews himself was once a distinguished practitioner of psychoanalytic criticism...

...He acknowledged the fact that his own knowledge of unconscious life was incomplete and that psychoanalysts were always in the process of learning more about their patients, but the unchallenged assumption of the relationship between analyst and analysand is the reliability of the knowledge of the analyst and the unreliability of that of the analysand, whose epistemological condition is one of false consciousness...

...The "No" uttered by a patient after a repressed thought has been presented to his conscious perception for the first time does no more than register the existence of a repression and its severity...

...in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984...

...There is a qualification or check to the psychoanalyst's claim to authority: the confirming response of the analysand...

...The ferocity of his attack has all the animus of a resentful renegade, though he offers the reader no account of his own evolution from champion of psychoanalysis to implacable adversary...

...Though he may be directed to an understanding of himself that he did not intend, he never becomes a mere figure in an ideological drama...

...What would remain is a view of his legacy as a poison in our culture that needs to be purged...

...12 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (24 vols...

...53-66 and Paul Gray, "The Assault on Freud," in Time (Nov...

...Habermas says the analysand, Griinbaum the analyst...

...My expectations were by no means disappointed when this explanation of mine was met by Dora with a most emphatic negative...

...I'm not sure that skepticism of this kind can ever be overcome...

...Freud was able to accomplish this feat by persuading the protege that he was a latent homosexual and that the new marriage would somehow keep him from a homosexual fate...

...Of course, the argument that speculation might SPRING • 1995 • 237 Freud on Trial be true is weak...

...for an interpretation to work, however, it needs an analysand's confirmation...

...In Freud, narrative and theoretical argument are sometimes indistinguishable...

...It is interesting how often a reader's relation to theory replicates the analysand's relation to the 240 • DISSENT Freud on Trial analyst...

...Freudian Therapy But a defense of Freud cannot confine him to modern literature...

...47-51...

...both men and 238 • DISSENT Freud on Trial women...

...Conrad was not influenced by Freud in his writing of Heart of Darkness...

...Analysands lack authority in the sense that they may not know their own motives...

...5 The moderns may not have discovered repression, but they display an exacerbated consciousness of it in the wake of what is experienced as its long Victorian history...

...Their own discourse constitutes the canon that determines its truth value...

...There is also another tendency in which the will shows itself to be an indestructible faculty that guarantees the self and works invisibly to reconstruct it, sometimes in collaboration with a psychoanalyst and at other times heroically by itself...

...Freud, Three Case Histories, p. 19...

...Freud, the narrative artist, elaborates reality rather than simplifying it through reduction...

...In "Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," Freud succinctly formulates the principle that resistance confirms the truth of what is being denied...

...4 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, edited by A.A...

...we were therefore obliged to believe the exact opposite of what he had asserted...

...Freud and Marx have been the idols of our secular culture so we should not be surprised that they provoke iconoclasm, especially in disillusioned idolaters...

...In its systematic and imperial version, the demystification can never be wrong, which makes it a tyrannical exercise...

...To phrase it very schematically: the voice of initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space that science defines . . . " 3 Foucault suggests that the modern founders of discursivity are sui generis, but his characterization of them and their followers evokes an older scholastic tradition in which quarrels about doctrinal issues in matters of religious belief were adjudicated by an appeal to the church fathers...

...Crews's all-out assault takes none of these matters into consideration...

...The criterion is much the same as the one that determines truth in a psychoanalysis: the emotional recognition of the truth of an interpretation...

...The evidence for psychoanalytic discovery is to be found not in statistical averages (the typical person or the "abstract individual"), but in case histories of particular persons and their individual behavior, dreams, thoughts, and feelings...

...The philosopher of science Adolph Griinbaum takes Freud at his word that he be judged as a scientist and finds him wanting...

...The material relations in which individuals have existed until now have never permitted the human being to be himself...

...His theory can be construed as a narrative of the manifold sublimations of unconscious life in the thoughts, dreams, and behavior of persons...

...Perhaps nothing provokes more resistance to Freud than the doctrine of resistance...

...Coerciveness is always present or possible when the powers of self-awareness are thus delegated to someone else...

...Two recent publishing events show how far the anti-Freud attack has carried: a featured review of four works of revisionist literature by Frederick Crews in the highbrow New York Review of Books and a cover story in the middlebrow Time that raises the question, "Is Freud Dead...

...His criterion for the truth of the Oedipus complex is its persuasive emotional power, its capacity to stir a response in the audience...

...Interpretation is not scientific explanation, and it always implies the possibility of competing interpretations...

...John Dowell, Ford Madox Ford's narrator, repeatedly testifies to his ignorance of character (including his own) in The Good Soldier...

...8 "According to psychoanalytical theory, I told him, every fear corresponded to a former wish which was now repressed...

...But the case histories of Freud and others tell us otherwise and the reason is simple: an analyst is a human being with all the limitations and distortions of his finitude, which can never be fully neutralized...

...Though Marx clearly views class as a self-alienating phenomenon, and clearly believes in a transcendence through which the individual will achieve substantial being and genuine freedom, the effect of the Marxian conception of individuals in a class society (the society we know) is imperiously to deny their existence and to disallow their voice, except in their relation to class...

...But an attack that simply tries to dispose of Freud's credibility as a scientist has not accounted for his persuasiveness...

...They provide the master texts that determine truth claims...

...Harold Rosenberg points out that "class [for Marx] has character and individual physiognomy: the individual, independently of class, has neither...

...Certain writers become objects of idolatry...

...Freud, Three Case Histories, p. 24...

...Because the patient is always the victim of repression, he or she is incapable of impartial judgment...

...The more fruitful and persuasive "use" of Freud is what Peter Brooks does, for example, in placing the Freudian narrative, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, alongside other modern narratives...

...Freud and Marx Despite its potential for authoritarianism and coerciveness, the Freudian project maintains a SPRING • 1995 • 241 Freud on Trial respect for the person in his or her individuality as the Marxian project does not...

...He is the theoretical formulator of ideas that are discursively or dramatically present in the work of these writers...

...18, 1993), pp...

...New York: Macmillan), 13:233...

...The implication is that neurosis infects the whole person...

...In this way he has added something new and 242 • DISSENT Freud on Trial more than human to the figure of Moses, so that the giant frame with its tremendous physical power becomes only a concrete expression of the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself...

...Freud's narrative gives us both his version of the Oedipus story and the Sophoclean version by explaining the play as a displacement from family drama to theology...

...If this "No," instead of being regarded as the expression of an impartial judgment (of which, indeed, the patient is incapable), is ignored, and if work is continued, the first evidence soon begins to appear that in such a case "No" signifies the desired "Yes...

...The history of culture is filled with authority figures: Plato, Aristotle, the church fathers, thinkers who have guided, if not determined, our thinking...

...Like Marx, Freud has been read as a critic of false consciousness, a demystifier of selfdefeating illusions...

...But it would be wrong to conclude from Freud's cautionary remarks that he solves the problem of authority in the psychoanalytic situation...

...Freud and Literature We read Freud's work for its heuristic rather than probative value, its suggestiveness, not its proof...

...Jocasta comforts Oedipus . . . : "For many a man hath seen himself in dreams His mother's mate, but he who gives no heed To suchlike matters bears the easier life...

...Freud's great contribution to psychology was in establishing and enriching the interpretive mode in its attempt to discover the hidden motives of thoughts, dreams, behavior...

...1° Harold Rosenberg, Act and Actor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 16...

...Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York: Collier Books, 1969), p. 76...

...He recounts a story of how Freud induced a patient and protege to divorce his wife and marry one of his own patients, a bank heiress, who would then provide funds for Freud's psychoanalytic projects...

...What matters is not that Freud influenced or was influenced by these writers, but that they seemed to have arrived at Freud's insights independently...

...It does mean, however, that like Weber or Durkheim or any figure in the history of culture, he should not be the ultimate arbiter of his own work...

...Readers are moved by their narratives and testify to a sense of their truth...

...The figures and tropes of Freudian theoretical analysis constitute—they do not demystify—the world...

...These opposing views are half-right and half-wrong...

...What are the reasons for the wholesale condemnation of Freud's achievement...

...The debate about where authority lies in psychoanalytic practice has been generated by what seems to me a false polarity...

...Crews devotes a good deal of space to Freud's alleged unscrupulousness in the cooking of evidence (for example, his unreliable reporting of what actually occurred in his therapeutic encounters) and in his manipulation of patients to serve the interests of psychoanalysis...

...Both thinkers write as if they are in possession of a truth unavailable to others and as if resistance to that truth is paradoxically a confirmation of it...

...But it is difficult to see how this solves the problem of authority since the suffering analyst in his specialized knowledge still claims access to the truth of which the analysand is ignorant...

...The truth of persons is double for Freud: their inchoate libidinal energy and their constitutive sublimating capacity that Freud himself had in abundance...

...Brill (New York: Modem Library, 1938), p. 308...

...Their achievements are measured not by their capacity to answer to a reality external to them...

...Psychoanalytic interpretation is not an exercise in reasoning with a person, but rather a battle in which the analyst opportunistically seizes upon his adversary's vulnerabilities...

...Anyone who tries to understand the issues finds himself on treacherous ground...

...The length of the road over which an analysis must travel with the patient, and the quantity of material which must be mastered on the way, are of no importance in comparison with the resistance which is met with in the course of the work, and are only of importance at all insofar as they are necessarily proportional to the resistance...

...q Notes I See Frederick Crews, "The Unknown Freud," in the New York Review of Books (Nov...

...Heuristics is the domain of speculative theory, about whose truth value we may not be certain...

...Freud, the riddle-solver, identified himself with Oedipus...

...The suspicion is only exacerbated by alleged instances of Freud's reprehensible conduct in his professional and personal life...

...There is another category of human being that Freud evokes, the hero who has not submitted his psychic powers to some superior...

...As a narrator of the repressions and sublimations of individual lives and the collective life of civilization, Freud is obliged to sort out self-betraying and defeating lies against the truth of unconscious life and the necessary illusions that protect us against its destructive impact...

...But as the hero-narrator of his case histories, he assumes the privilege of certainty that distinguishes him from most of his modern contemporaries...

...His critics lay recent scandals in repressed memory therapy and clinical practice at the door of his own theory and practice...

...But such skepticism would seem captious if it were applied to the great masters of modern literature, who tell comparable stories...

...The truth of character is indeterminate...

...But the problem of authority in Freud reflects a confusion about the status of his thought...

...One might imagine Freud's emphatic "No" to this interpretation, given his view of religion as an illusion, but the need to be heard, judged, and consoled by a wise, spiritually endowed person may be incorrigible...

...The divorce and remarriage" resulted "in the deaths of both of the abandoned, devastated spouses," an early suit for divorce by the newly married woman and repeated attempts at suicide by Freud's protege...

...Psychoanalysis then, like literary criticism, may be a fruitful conflict of interpretations...

...In exploring the unconscious and its relation to conscious life, he thought he was defining the nature of man, and, to the extent that he succeeded—which is to say, to the extent that we recognize ourselves in the account that he provides, Freud must be the commanding figure of our culture in a way that Weber and Durkheim are not...

...12 Sublimation is the generative force of Freud's own symbolic imagination, as in his envisaging of the human world as a struggle between Thanatos and Eros...

...What emerges is a view of psychoanalytic theory as an imaginative construction drawn from Freud's own fantasy life and a clinical enterprise cynically devoted to supporting it at all costs...

...It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit," he remarks apropos of his case history of the psychotic Doctor Schreber...

...Griinbaum himself makes this distinction, acknowledging Freud's heuristic power, while asserting the inadequacy of validation in clinical studies...

...In its weaker version, resistance may (or may not) be a confirmation of the truth that is being resisted...

...In his role as therapist or secular priest, questions about Freud's moral as well as epistemological authority arise...

...We are moved to accept the truth of the Oedipus complex in the way we are moved by the tragedy of Oedipus Rex...

...it acts, as it were as a gauge of the repression's strength...

...This standard, which Freud provides, is connected with the power of narration...

...Jocasta's speech not only reveals an awareness of the Oedipal drama, it is also a counsel of repression in consciousness, exactly what Freud wishes to overcome...

...In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud goes back to the legend of King Oedipus and tells it as the story of all males, who are "destined to direct [their] first sexual impulses toward [their] mothers, and [their] first impulses of hatred and violence toward [their] fathers...

...Imagine the impoverishment of our intellectual life if the intellect felt constrained from uttering what it could not prove scientifically...

...The truth of his or her individuality whether in conscious or unconscious life is an individual truth...

...8 It is not hard to see the moral objection to such a view...

...in the Freudian view, the person must learn to extricate his or her personal interests from whatever alienates them in familial and social existence...

...Moreover, persuasiveness is no guarantee of truth, since myths can at the same time persuade and deceive...

...From a Freudian point of view, the paradox of Sophocles's play is that it at once acts out the Oedipal drama and represses or sublimates it in a story of theological conflict between will and fate...

...Speculative theory is the space of potential truths, unproven, perhaps even insusceptible of proof...

...Here is a speculation: Freud identified himself with Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the sphinx...

...Psychoanalysis assumes that we do not know our own interests and need to be brought to an awareness of them through the instrumentality of a knowing agent (the psychoanalyst...

...Perhaps he is SPRING • 1995 • 239 Freud on Trial doing both at once...

...Dora, we are told, is lively and intelligent, but what we see of her is nothing more than the manifestations of a neurotic condition...

...If neurosis is the human condition, as Freud sometimes asserts, persons come to be seen as victims of psychic forces over which they have no control...

...Freud has entered so deeply into our cultural life that his thought has affected even those who have not read him...

...I have not tried to absolve Freud of the charge of reductionism: there is a reductionist tendency in his work, but this is not the whole story...

...They themselves are the measures of truth...

...We do not need to destroy Marx and Freud, we need only place them with thinkers like Weber and Durkheim, for example, whose texts for all their authority and power are not the final court of appeal...

...Michelangelo] has modified the theme of the broken Tables...

...Thus the clinical situation gives complete freedom to analysands to express themselves...

...Indeed, it would be hard to understand why Griinbaum would devote so much of his career to the testing and challenging of Freud's work, if it weren't for its extraordinary suggestiveness...

...6 What is required is a balance of caution and boldness...

...The problem is exacerbated, however, when the asymmetry is institutionalized and sanctioned...

...Having then decided that these events did not actually take place, Freud concluded that they were fantasies of the patients, in effect erasing their origins in his own theory...

...So my earlier suggestion that Freud be demoted to a body of knowledge that includes Weber and Durkheim need not imply that one cannot distinguish his cultural status from theirs...

...The whole panoply of Freudian concepts—the Oedipal drama in the family romance, the degraded split sexuality that results in impotence, the return of the repressed, and so on— are confirmed in the imaginative literature of the modern period...

...There is first the question of whether Freud's status as a thinker depends upon his claim to be a scientist...

...If Freud's propositions do not or cannot satisfy the canons of scientific proof, they must satisfy some other standard to become persuasive...

...The main thrust of the attack on Freud is that he lacks scientific credibility...

...Sublimations now are not self-defeating symptoms but productive transformations of the libidinal energies of unconscious life...

...A notable example is his exposition of the Oedipus complex in The Interpretation of Dreams...

...Why Freud and not Weber, Durkheim, or Tocqueville...

...One defines a proposition's theoretical validity in relation to the work of the founders—while, in the case of Galileo and Newton, it is in relation to what physics or cosmology is (in its intrinsic structure and `normality') that one affirms the validity of any proposition that those men may have put forth...

...Interpretation seems always to involve reduction or demystification...

...The moral of this version of the story is "resignation to the divine will...

...Freud would seem to be something of a caricaturist of the psychic life...

...4 He notes that the action of Sophocles's play "consists simply in the disclosure, approached step-by-step and artistically delayed ( . . . comparable to the work of psychoanalysis...

...Habermas and Ricoeur reject Freud's "scientistic self-misunderstanding" and claim him for hermeneutics...

...he does not let Moses break them in his wrath, but makes him be influenced by the danger that they will be broken and calm that wrath, or at any rate prevent it from becoming an act...

...Freud betrays his own commitment to the strong view in the metaphor he employs to describe what is required for the analyst to overcome the analysand's resistance...

...The possibility of redemption lies in a collaboration between the acumen of the psychoanalytic interpreter and the willing susceptibility of the patient...

...The evolution of Freud's theory shows him to be fully aware that his ideas are always susceptible to falsification...

...In a time of doctrinal skepticism and democratic suspicion, Freud's confidence in his own intellectual and moral authority is bound to be suspect...

...And the literary critic is more culpable than the psychoanalyst because the literary critic does not have the excuse of dealing with a living patient who can at least resist an interpretation...

...He urges the analyst "to guard against the risk that an increased display of acumen on his part may be accompanied by a diminution in the certainty and trustworthiness of his results...

...Freud, as we know, rejected the Jungian idea of a collective unconscious...

...He has been read by educated readers who do not or cannot read science—that is, who do not follow the rules of testing truth claims that scientists are supposed to follow...

...they would have declared their affinities with Newton and Galileo...

...In fact, he had little regard for Freud's work...

...6 Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories: The "Wolf Man," The "Rat Man" and The Psychotic Doctor Schreber (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 112...

...Subsequently, he became a critic of Freud's theory...

...If repression is the central fact of modern civilization, perhaps its very definition, then the work of literature in its most serious and ambitious version is to reveal the truth of what is repressed...

...Nor does he provide evidence that it is the incestuous material that stirs the audience (the whole audience...

...But Freud doesn't say that the ancient Greek audience was not moved by the conflict between fate and human will, so perhaps he should not be so confident in his universalizing claim that the tragic effect does not depend upon their (or our) recognition of this conflict...

...9 This of course is the language of power, not reason...

...Authority ideally is a transaction between analyst and patient...

...The difference is momentous for understanding and self-understanding...

...The situation is the same as when today an enemy army needs weeks and months to make its way across a stretch of country which in times of peace was traversed by an express train in a few hours and which only a short time before had been passed over by the defending army in a few days...

...Freud and Marx both would have found this comparison with scholasticism repugnant, since they considered themselves scientists...

...The Freudian view that the person, not the collectivity of class, has primacy makes it ultimately inimical to a Marxist regime, a dangerous example of bourgeois thought and practice...

...Theoretical survival depends upon the character and degree of falsification...

...The analyst anticipates the patient in knowledge, the patient must give assent to what the analyst knows...

...7 Freud makes his case through a sleight of phrasing: "the 'No' uttered by a patient after a repressed thought has been presented" excludes the possibility that a "No" has been uttered without a repressed thought...

...Not as a scientist who presents the evidence of experiments and statistical information, but as ,a storyteller...

...The patient is given freedom, but he is "free" to choose only what his unconscious dictates...

...As may well be imagined, it is the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the death of the father...

...a portion of it...

...There is of course an alternative to idolatry on the one hand and iconoclasm on the other: the demotion of the idol to a body of knowledge or knowledge claims, which we may both consult and criticize...

...Lacan tried to equalize the relationship by reinventing the figure of the analyst as a suffering human being...