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I've swum around in psychoanalysis a little bit, particularly around feminism. I used to think Freud was the devil -- coming from a Foucauldian and Deleuzian background, that was probably inevitable. Now I'm not so sure. Freud really is a lovely writer. I'd particularly recommend Civilisation and Its Discontents as well as the introductory lectures. Some of the case studies are really worth reading, particularly The Schreber Case. (Then you can read the critique of it in Anti Oedipus.)
It's probably important to point out that there are many, many ways of reading Freud: he's considered by some to have two very contradictory 'modes'. One is all about stipulating normative, universal structures of subjectivity, in a fairly prescriptive way and with liberal recourse to biological determinism and dodgy sexual politics. The 'other Freud' could be said to offer tools to think through the connections between perversity, subjectivity and physical bodies, or between sexuality and desire and (even) politics, which may not work in all cases, or be said to be universal, but may work to illuminate some forms of cultural attachments and bodily experiences. The 'other' Freud doesn't so much produce 'sexual perversion' as non-normative that has to be fixed, but claims everyone is perverse. This is the Freud who talks about childrens' sexuality as 'polymosphously perverse', for example. This is the Freud who comes up with the term Besetzung or cathexis, which I think is beautiful and useful. Also, structuralism, deconstruction, post-structuralism, Althusser, Bataille, the whole swathe of French philosophy and marxist thought between 1940 and 1980 simply wouldn't have happened without the influence of Lacan. It's worth reading even to get a grasp of the historical conditions of production of French theory. If you don't want to read Lacan himself but want a historical perspective on how he influenced that generation of thinkers, I recommend Elisabeth Roudinesco's biography, which is quite theoretically comprehnsive, and Jacques Lacan and Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925-1985.
how should one understand what I'd probably call the 'modality' of claims made by psychoanalysts - are they uncovering necessary and universal structures that constitute subjectivity? If they are, what should one make of this, in terms of a) the justifications offered for these claims; and b) their implications? If psychoanalysts are not doing this, what are they doing?
I think it totally depends who you read. Psychanalysis has come a long way since Freud, and there are all kinds of crazy strands of it. Even just in terms of psychoanalysitc feminism, you've got
a) French feminism -- which, like Irigaray or Kristeva, works as a critique of psychoanalysis and by extension, Western philsophy, by using the same tools. I'd advise reading Irigaray over Kristeva any day: maybe This Sex Which Is Not One? I'd also recommend reading Monique Wittig, who sort of appropriates psychoanalysis to explain how lesbians aren't women.
b) Anglo-American psychoanalytic feminism, ie Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell. (I think tihs is who Tom was thinking of above.) Basically, this strand of psychoanalysitc feminism reads Freud 'against the grain' by taking psychoanalysis as a critique of Western gender politics, rather than a prescription for heteronormativity.
c) Melanie Klein, who is not really a 'feminist' per se but who theorises subjectivity in opposition to Freud's focus on the Father as being the most important person in a child's early development, by talking about mothers, breasts, etc. Personally I find this hopelessly deterministic, but some contemporary feminist philosophers (namely Jessica Benjamin) have rethought Klein's focus on intersubjectivity and childrens' capacity to learn how to be intersubjective, rather than separating as alienated, atomised fragments the way Lacan thinks it.
d) Queer theory/feminism, Anglo-American style: Judith Butler, represent. Butler does a lot with Freud. Sometimes she's critical, sometimes she appropriates Freud for her own purposes. In The Psychic Life of Power Butler marries Freud and Foucault to talk about internal experiences of power and subjection. One of her arguments is that everyone who 'becomes heterosexual' experiences grief for the loss of other possible sexual objects -- which is a nice reversal. At the same time, Butler is a real structuralist, which is, I think, why she likes psychoanalysis so much. She really wants o make univrsal claims about psychic strucutres, and sometimes that lets her down. A lot of other queer theorists appropriate bits of Freud and Lacan to talk about homosexuality: Leo Bersani and Sedgwick spring to mind as two of the best.
Then there's uptake of psychoanalysis to explain colonialism and race: Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks is probably the cornerstone of this field. There's probably a whole swathe of critical race studies that appropriates particular psychoanalytic terminology to account for the psychic structures of 'race', ethnicity, migration etc. One of my favourites is David Eng's concept of racial melancholia. (Or there's this book, called The Melancholy of Race -- don't know how the two relate, sorry, although they appeared at around the same time.)
In my own work, I sometimes do piecemeal adaptations and appropriations of Freud without necessarily buying psychoanalysis wholesale. I think it's possible to use concepts like melancholia or polymorphous perversity or cathexis while simultaneously keeping a deconstructive eye on how not to universalise or essentialise those concepts, or the formation of them. Even if there is such a 'psychic structure' as melancholia, it doesn't have to be the case that everyone's melancholia is the same, or even that it has the same effects.
I was going to talk about the whole strand of psychoanalystic marxism, which might be up your alley, nighthawk -- Marcuse, Reich (!) and even some Adorno. But I'm out of time. They're definitely worth reading, though. |
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