Eli Zaretsky's Secrets of the Soul
Willis, Ellen
SECRETS OF THE SOUL: A SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS by Eli Zaretsky Knopf, 2004 429 pp $30 THAT PSYCHOANALYSIS has lost its once formidable authority is clear; the question...
...If psychoanalysis has been a potent ingredient of modernism and cultural radicalism, if it dissected the mass psychology of fascism and paved the way for contemporary feminism, it has also sold products, championed social adjustment, pathologized homo114 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 sexuality and female self-assertion, managed and pacified the clients of the welfare state bureaucracy...
...It's not simply that history has moved on to a different phase...
...BUT TERMS OF debate are stubborn things...
...which is to say that Secrets of the Soul is a work of interpretation...
...How do we preserve them without arguing that they are real...
...These include such psychoanalytic "understandings" as that "each individual has an inner world that is, in good part, not only unconscious but repressed" and "society and politics are driven not just by conscious interests and perceived necessities but also by unconscious motivations, anxieties, and half-spoken memories...
...By themselves, conventional categories of class interest and geopolitics do little to enlighten us...
...But Secrets of the Soul argues that psychoanalysis is not merely of historical interest...
...Zaretsky makes a cogent case that the cultural freedoms of modernity owe an enormous debt to Sigmund Freud...
...Certainly psychoanalysis as a practice is a discipline through which one can pursue a kind of secular redemption...
...In effect, Zaretsky the historical materialist defines psychoanalysis as the ideological superstructure erected on the material base of the second industrial revolution...
...Invoking Max Weber's analysis of Calvinism as the psychological motor of early capitalism, he proposes that psychoanalysis played a comparable role in facilitating the transition from a production-based to a consumption-based economy: "Just as men and women did not embark on the transition from agrarianism to industrial capitalism for merely instrumental...
...Psychoanalysis: Is it Science or is it Toast...
...But apparently historical interpretation, like the analytic kind, is now to be discarded as unscientific...
...but toward the future of psychoanalysis he displays an agnostic dispassion: its historical role is what's important, not its intrinsic value as a method or body of knowledge...
...Its central idea is that psychoanalysis came into being as the theory and practice of "personal life"—that is, "the experience of having an identity distinct from one's place in the family, in society, and in the social division of labor...
...Yet it might also be regarded as a strategy, witting or not, for outflanking the reductive and often bullying questions that have set the terms of the Freud debate...
...And unlike religion, it ultimately stands or falls on how well it does what it purports to do: explain human motivation and behavior, uncover objective knowledge of the subjective life...
...or economic reasons, so in the twentieth century they did not become consumers in order to supply markets...
...And yet this silly question has serious implications for what it means to write about psychoanalysis in our time: it points to both the difficulty and the limitations of Zaretsky's project...
...Although the tens of millions of people whose views on labor, race, feminism, gay rights, and the environment are left of center far outnumber the organized Christian right, they feel helpless to assert themselves politically...
...The parallel makes sense, up to a point...
...The science versus toast theme dominates Merkin's review...
...And as Zaretsky observes, the trajectory of religion, in the Weberian formulation, from a sect organized around a charismatic figure through stages of "idealization, rebellion, dissemination, institutionalization, and routinization" is mirrored in the history of the psychoanalytic movement, which begins with the subversive fervor of Freud's early circle, fragments into competing sects, and eventually assimilates to and serves the prevailing order...
...What forces propel the march of the right, the paralysis of the left, the identification of ordinary people with the rich and powerful, rampant sexual anxiety, al-Qaeda's apocalyptic violence, Donald Rumsfeld's delusions of omnipotence, the torture at Abu Ghraib...
...of sadism and masochism that supplies the missing link in the discussion...
...the question remains whether its insights have been surpassed or merely repressed...
...The power of psychoanalytic thought as a force for human emancipation—a power that remains palpable despite its myriad betrayals, not least by Freud and his epigones themselves—is alive in these pages...
...Rather, they separated from traditional familial morality, gave up their obsession with self-control and thrift, and entered into the sexualized `dreamworlds' of mass consumption on behalf of a new orientation to personal life...
...In a revealing conceit, Zaretsky likens psychoanalysis to religion...
...as a result, we are pursuing a war whose central feature is the government's consistent, disastrous denial of reality...
...As Zaretsky puts it in his epilogue, "Since psychoanalysis is unlikely to play the same role in the twenty-first century that it played in the twentieth, we may have to invent new institutions that encapsulate and build upon its insights if we want to preserve its achievements...
...and was manipulated and trivialized by consumerism...
...He goes on to accuse Zaretsky of making "sweeping assertions" about the cultural impact of psychoanalysis rather than offering a "systematic presentation of evidence...
...it's also that the conflicted psyche is pushing back...
...FOR ALL THE philistinism in this genre of commentary, it does suggest a problem with Zaretsky's Marxist-inflected historicism...
...For Zaretsky, one of the earliest New Leftists to recognize the importance of sexual and familial politics, the imperative to be drawn from historicizing psychoanalysis is that its emancipatory potential survive in some form even if the movement itself cannot be salvaged...
...It would seem then that if the basic concepts of psychoanalysis are indeed worth preserving, it is important not only to situate psychoanalysis historically, but to view history psychoanalytically...
...From this perspective, to say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the selfconsciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 115 BOOKS for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression...
...confronted successive challenges to its very existence in World War I, bolshevism, and fascism...
...She is writing a book about psychoanalysis and politics...
...In Zaretsky's account, the self-conscious embrace of individual identity became a major social force with the advent of the "second industrial revolution," which transformed American capitalism into an instrument of mass consumption, stimulating fantasies of personal gratification, weakening familial authority, and promoting greater freedom for women and youth...
...The question has the flavor of "When did you stop beating your wife...
...The flippancy of the title captures the jocular uneasiDISSENT / Winter 2005.113 BOOKS ness that afflicts the press when it contemplates the fact that Freud, buried so many times, refuses to die...
...It allows him to maintain an above-thebattle stance even as he insists on the vital contribution of psychoanalysis to individual autonomy, democracy, and feminism...
...Free-market triumphalists gleefully flaunt their power, deciding the fate of nations with investments and loans made or withheld, rendering political democracy impotent or irrelevant, and this state of affairs is said by economists to reflect "rational choice...
...This is the specter that haunts us as the reaction gathers strength...
...Instead they have repeatedly pinned their hopes on a center-right Democratic Party that, in a cut-rate version of the Republican appeal to Middle America, promises to protect them from radical lunatics—a promise that in November 2004 it once again failed to keep...
...Sigmund Freud's conception of a personal unconscious, of a distinction between public and private, social and individual meaning, resonated profoundly with these changes...
...The passion that once infused left social movements now seems the exclusive property of those dedicated to cultural and economic counterrevolution...
...On the contrary, it offers a critique of all faith, including its own quasi-religious appeal...
...In America, the destruction of the World Trade Center by militant fundamentalists instantly turned an unelected minority president into a hugely popular Strong Leader...
...Secrets of the Soul does not focus on the truth claims of psychoanalysis but on its social meanings and its influence, for good or ill...
...Toast...
...was co-opted and rationalized by post–World War II welfare states...
...While the implicit assumption of Secrets of the Soul is that history shapes psychology, the grounding insight of psychoanalysis is that the psyche is produced by the clash of history— individual and social—with the primal biological energy of the sexual drive...
...Besides, Freud was no angel, especially toward his women patients, and, Scull sniffs, "Zaretsky fails to indicate how deeply this sort of behavior permeated analytic circles...
...One can of course discuss the history of a movement without endorsing or rejecting its ideas...
...In fact, the evidence for Zaretsky's thesis consists of developments in psychoanalysis and events in cultural history that are, in their broad outlines, common knowledge...
...Fundamentalist movements are surging all over the world, while mechanistic technoscience rides an equally messianic logic toward ecological Armageddon...
...Psychoanalysis provided a rationale and a form of permission for this shift...
...medical insurance becomes a privilege even as health maintenance organizations degrade standards of care: where are the crowds in the streets...
...Corporate scandals and abrogated union contracts deprive millions of people of rightfully earned retirement income...
...ELLEN WILLIS directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program in the Department of Journalism at New York University...
...Certainly the ways of thinking that Freud once deconstructed—religious absolutism on the one hand, naive rationalism on the other—now reign more powerfully than ever...
...though she herself is something of a Freud-symp, the greatest compliment she can bestow on Secrets of the Soul is that it is "evenhanded...
...What is new is the way he connects all this BOOKS information and the underlying patterns he discerns...
...Zaretsky is a partisan of self-reflection, openly worried about its decline...
...the understanding that this is so...
...Meanwhile, Andrew Scull, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is vastly annoyed that a new book on psychoanalysis should exist at all: "What on earth remains to be said...
...Is it possible—at this historical moment— to have a meaningful conversation about psychoanalysis without directly joining the issue of whether its basic propositions are true...
...The purging of that vocabulary from the mainstream of public discourse not only hobbles our ability to understand our situation but is, or so I'm convinced, a symptom of that situation, which thrives on the refusal to understand...
...Zaretsky views "personal life" as a finite historical phenomenon that dramatically expanded during the early years of the twentieth century...
...seen in this light, whether there is actually such a thing as repression matters no more than whether there is such a thing as God...
...The contradictions of psychoanalysis, as the book charts them in rich and exhaustive detail, are bound up with the vicissitudes of this cultural history...
...But it is precisely these understandings that are now under withering attack by the anti-psychoanalytic backlash...
...reads the headline above Daphne Merkin's New York Times Book Review piece on Secrets of the Soul, Eli Zaretsky's capacious effort to put Freud's movement in historical and cultural perspective...
...I see an equally strong connection between fear of those freedoms and the passion to obliterate Freud's legacy...
...The president and his party have made no secret of their commitment to redistribute wealth upward, increase corporate power, and crush labor, yet they retain the loyalty of much if not most of the working class...
...because the psychoanalytic method is not amenable to controlled experiments and so is excluded by definition from the positivist conception of science that now prevails...
...Now, he contends, we are going through a "third industrial revolution"—marked by a "globalized service- and information-based economy"—in which personal life threatens to disappear altogether, its emphasis on autonomy and selfknowledge largely supplanted by group-oriented identity and the demand for recognition...
...With jelly on it...
...Similarly, if psychoanalytic claims are valid, the unconscious will continue to exert its influence on the individual and society whether we embrace or repudiate (repress...
...It's the psychoanalytic vocabulary of unconscious conflict and ambivalence ; of sexual desire, guilt, and rage...
...But psychoanalysis is not only a spiritual quest, nor— though it's been as subject as any other influential body of thought to human beings' unfortunate tendency to confuse their theories with gospel—is it dogma meant to be accepted on faith...
...And as personal life loses its grip on the imagination, the energy once invested in psychoanalysis migrates to identity politics, post-structuralism, and other postmodern points...
...This approach follows logically from his disciplinary framework and his intellectual temperament...
Vol. 52 • January 2005 • No. 1
