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Book Review for students...
The Legend of Freud: Cultural Memory in the Present Like many people outside of the discipline of Psychology, I've read much about Freud, most of it in a derivative context, but I've not read much Freud. I decided early on that his was a male-oriented picture of the psyche—from the offensive self-evidence of the castration complex to his obsession with sexual energy as the source of almost every other mental mishap. Thus it was with great surprise that several years ago, after decades of avoiding him, I read the Interpretation of Dreams and suddenly found a description of method which incited my curiosity. Rather than ascribing to a limited, rigid, doctrinaire cipher-code, as prejudices about Freud had led me to expect, an important segment of the text focused on the candid speculation about the process of studying the human psyche. Particularly surprising was the admission that accompanying any systematic attempts to decipher dream elements on the basis of a key-code came an almost meditative, inspirational moment of 'free thinking,' necessary to get in touch with the overall meaning of the individual, decoded elements and the 'story' of the dream. Surprised, but not completely convinced, my newfound interest in Freud slumbered until I read the Legend of Freud, at which point the seed of this interest began to develop roots, thanks to the focus on the 'uncanny' heart of psychoanalysis. In this book, a fruitful but certainly not easy read for the non-psychologist, Samuel Weber, presents multiple essays which whittle away at the idea of the 'dispersed subject,' a concept potentially capable of replacing the traditional Western obsession with the tortures of duality—the black and white, good and evil, Communist and Democratic, Islam and Christian, fat-filled and fat-free universe—as an ultimate description of human uneasiness. The proposition of the uncanny is one with which analysts of literature will be immediately familiar. Anyone who has examined the subtleties of point of view—Where is the narrator speaking? Where the author? Is the narrator reliable? Are there lapses in the perspective?—will immediately take to the notion of the dispersed subject and the uncanny. Proving the breadth of this concept, the initial essay moves from a discussion of the uncanny in relation to ETA Hoffmann's Sandman, in which one may question whether the interiority of the Romantic vision must per force turn into a horror vision, to an examination of a choral ode from Sophocles' Antigone in which Weber sees questioned an uncanny discrepancy between humankind's ability to 'tame nature' and exert power in the world and the inevitable human failure to 'get anywhere with death.' This initial text is followed by a series of essays describing such moments as Freud's confrontation with renegades Adler and Jung or his attempts at describing a metapsychology—all with a sidelong glance at the uncanny, the traces of which Weber traces through various important moments of Freud's writings. Whether focusing on the definition of the point where unconscious and conscious meet, the problem of expressing the unconscious (e.g., as manifested in dream) in the consciously experienced product language, or on the cultural and social content of the unconscious—the text succeeds in finding clear issues while indirectly defending the unease with which one must regard theoretical clarity when it comes to the most basic questions of analysis. For those who have viewed Freud as a writer of fiction, this initial essay may help the reader see his fiction in its capacity as, at the very least, a docudrama. For those who have believed that the problem of psychology was the mere decision as to a particular theory, the book may (hopefully) make them feel the eerie feeling. deborah griggs |