Abstract
In a celebrated article, first published in 1973, the intellectual historian Carl Schorske had castigated the project of psychoanalysis as a retreat from political engagement and an escape into a realm of psychological interiority where Freud could claim a superiority over politics. However, it cannot be said of this valuable and sometimes arresting collection of essays, several of which originated as presentations at the ‘Psychoanalysis and History’ seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, that either psychoanalysis or the psyche is in any sense immured in a realm of psychological interiority. Ironically, the keynote to much of the discussion here is set by a remark of the magisterial historian of Freud, and long-standing advocate of a psychoanalytic approach to history, Peter Gay, that his approach, while it paid attention to unconscious factors, was ‘heavily invested in reality’, ironic because the ‘reality’ in which Gay is invested is heavily contested by several contributors and, arguably, by the overall tenor of this volume.
In an essay on ‘Postwar Art and the Psychoanalytic Imaginary’ Alex Potts explores how psychoanalytic art critics of a Kleinian persuasion such as Adrian Stokes and Anton Ehrenzweig, who had come to maturity before the Second World War, were alternately fascinated and troubled by much postwar art, not least because much of it disrupted the ethics of self–other interaction, founded in firm boundaries and an explicit acknowledgement of the distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, on which they held store. In the art of Jackson Pollock, in particular, the inner life of the psyche and the outer formation of the paintwork seemed to blur into each other and Stokes was much struck by a comment of Pollock’s about being in his painting (274).
‘The painter is he whose inner world,’ wrote Stokes, ‘everywhere intertwined with the outer, will be projected in such a way as to communicate to his fellows a freshness of feeling about objects.’ Yet modern industrial society, and ‘the mechanical apparatus that supports our modern living’, was scarcely conducive to producing a ‘freshness of feeling about objects’, for more typically it was the scene of ‘abrupt experiences’. According to Stokes, in modern art there was little sense of the recuperative dynamic and of the process of symbol formation traditionally found in art. ‘The palpable textures of modern painting express the division and disintegration of culture as well as the ambivalent artist’s restitution, often carried no further than an assembly of scaffolding’ (274). In short, modern reality was indigestible.
Alex Potts implicitly chides Stokes and Ehrenzweig for hanging on to an ethic that is outmoded and out of touch with the drastically altered circumstances of the postwar world. In the aesthetics and artistry of Jean Dubuffet, by contrast, we find depicted an urban imaginary ‘in which a profusion of goods and services mingles with intimations of cheating and financial collapse’ and ‘the figures merge with the wayward flow and proliferation of things in the environment around them, at the same time that they are trapped and isolated in their own little worlds’ (277). In contrast to Stokes, remarks Potts, ‘there is a striking absence in Dubuffet of any impulse towards contemplative poise and reparation. Instead one finds an irrepressible striving that feeds off the irrational and unpredictable’ (278). Art such as Dubuffet’s, or Pollock’s, he concludes, ‘bear testimony to a capacity for making something of this environment, and of the largely uncontrollable processes shaping it, which is very compelling’ (279).
On the theme of ‘European Witness: Analysands Abroad in the 1920s and 1930s’, Laura Marcus explores how the experiences of British analysands and training analysts who were negotiating European cities in a period of cultural and political ferment often brought into sharp relief the relationship between psychic and political life. The letters of Alix Strachey, for instance, were full of observations of everyday life in Berlin in which urban and psychoanalytic imaginaries intermingled. The ‘radio pastry shop’ she frequents ‘is exactly like a Hitschmann diagram of the dream-mechanism in which the loud-speaker = the gruesome, cavernous unc. & the Kontrolleur, the repressive Zensur’ (111). Melanie Klein, it is revealed, was becoming a prominent figure in Berlin in the early 1930s, frequently accompanying Strachey to balls and café-dances dressed as Cleopatra (‘Frau Klein as Cleo’).
Rhodri Hayward examines mid-20th-century psychological welfare schemes in Britain to suggest that the psyche is not some form of deep subjectivity that has escaped the determination of history but is instead registered in the changing patterns of psychological suffering, expressed in the body and in the mind, that have marked the British population across the century, and is continually reconstituted in, and also works to reconstitute, new kinds of political settlements. Notably it was insurance administration that provided the apparatus for turning the indications of psychic distress that were marked on the bodies of workers into quantifiable phenomena. In the late 1930s, and during the Second World War, officials involved in the administration of insurance claims, such as James Halliday in Glasgow and Richard Titmuss in London, hugely expanded the indices of psychic distress, demonstrating how the psychological state of the population was traced out in the changing pattern of insurance returns. Psychic distress, Hayward argues, ‘was no longer read in terms of individual frustration or disappointment but instead caught up in a narrative of national life’ (291). There emerged a new political landscape, or ‘psychological economy’, attuned to a recognition of psychological needs and desires. Writing in 1936 John Maynard Keynes underscored the emotional and psychological dimension of economy, insisting that ‘in estimating the prospects of investment, we must have regard … to the nerves and hysteria and even the digestions and reactions to the weather of those upon whose spontaneous activity it largely depends’ (292). During the Second World War there was a strong sense of government and society as a field of psychological forces. In the immediate postwar period the Labour MP Evan Durbin, a close friend and associate of John Bowlby up until Durbin’s premature death in 1948, outlined a vision of a psychological welfare state.
Sally Alexander explores the formidable and enduring contributions of the paediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott to the ethical thinking and practical arrangements that informed this emerging psychological landscape over a lengthy period from the mid-1920s to Winnicott’s death in 1971. As Alexander shows, Winnicott was at one and the same time both an acute psychological and a social observer. For many years he was associated with Paddington Green Children’s Hospital, in the interwar period drawing his patients from the wives of transport and casual workers, many of them in domestic service, who lived in the ‘poor class dwellings’ and overcrowded ‘slums’ in the area around the hospital, working in a large consulting room where mothers and children sat around the room and others waited in the passage outside. His experience at Paddington Green in the 1920s made him acutely aware of the conditions of multiple adversity in which most of his patients were struggling in the aftermath of total war. In Winnicott’s idiom, the psyche is indelibly social and physical, psychic life forming itself out of an elaboration of the body’s functioning. Winnicott succeeded in writing about unconscious life and his patients’ inner worlds without psychopathologizing or patronizing them and he was resolutely opposed to any application of psychoanalytic concepts that might stifle the integrity of the reality he was observing: ‘For instance, one is at a music-hall and on to the stage come the dancers, trained to liveliness. One can say that here is the primal scene, here is exhibitionism, here is anal control, here is masochistic submission to discipline … Sooner or later one adds: here is LIFE’ (165). As Alexander remarks, Winnicott’s style of observing and listening to his patients in this period links him to the work of Mass Observation and to George Orwell’s odysseys into areas of social deprivation as much as it does to psychoanalysis.
But what of Freud himself and psychological interiority? Michael Roth, who is a former student of Carl Schorske and the editor of a collection of essays on culture, politics and the psyche in his honour (Roth, 1994), engages in an extended reflection both on Peter Gay’s understanding of Freud and equally of Schorske’s, arguing for a more radically engaged and less retreatist or quietist conception of Freud than either Gay or Schorske, from very different standpoints, would allow and, above all, emphasizing the sceptical tenor of Freud’s thought that, valuing science above religion, nevertheless did not regard science as a ‘wholly rational enterprise, floating above the messy conflict of human desires’ (15). (In another chapter, T. G. Ashplant draws out the tension in Schorske’s depiction between a Freud with a continuing impulse towards political engagement and a Freud who has made an alternative commitment to a healing and enlightening science.) Where Gay has strenuously resisted attempts to understand psychoanalysis in political terms, adhering instead to a view of Freud as a liberal thinker in the Enlightenment tradition for whom progress can be achieved only through compromise, Roth discovers in him a dialectical thinker who was wrestling with Jewishness and politics towards the end of his life, especially, and for whom the recognition of conflict opened up prospects for radical change as much as for compromise. A heavy investment in Jewish reality did not, of course, entail a superficial immersion in the here-and-now since, as Roth points out, the present for Freud was inevitably saturated with repetition and there was, in a strict sense, no ‘now’ in Freud’s thought (22).
Another significant figure in whom a process of political awakening vied with a more conventional sense of duty and allegiance was the anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, historian John Forrester’s favoured candidate for the title of the ‘English Freud’. Though he sympathized with its outlook, Rivers thought it improper to read the Cambridge Magazine, which espoused heretical views about the war, in public in case it sapped morale, believing, as Forrester puts it, that the reading of the magazine was ‘a private act to be kept in the bedroom – like other private acts’ (86). Possessed of a ‘deep distrust of being unwittingly affected’ (ibid.), Rivers viewed the emergence of the transference in the psychoanalytic relationship between doctor and patient as an evil to be avoided at all costs, instead typically rallying the patient to become independent. Furthermore he disputed the store that Freud set by sexuality, inclining to regard it as an ‘unfortunate excrescence’ (90). Very likely Rivers was a closet homosexual and one might be inclined to conclude that he kept rather too much hidden in his bedroom. Yet, at the same time, he was a restless adventurer, roaming the world and opening up new lines of inquiry, and, among other things, stimulating a thoroughly fruitful engagement between psychology and ethnology. Freud also saw himself as a conquistador or an adventurer but where Freud for the most part roamed imaginatively from within the confines of his consulting room, Rivers put himself about across a wide expanse. Yet it must be admitted that there is something rather elusive about the person of Rivers. He figures, of course, as a real person in novelist Pat Barker’s much-lauded The Regeneration Trilogy and as Forrester reminds us Siegfried Sassoon in his autobiography replaced all real names with fictional names with the exception of that of Dr Rivers. But perhaps this is really the supreme fiction – that there is really nothing fictional about that fictional character W. H. R. Rivers.
Of course, Rivers’s caution may be wise for one may turn out to have over-invested in the wrong kind of reality. Luisa Passerini, whose interest in psychoanalysis dates from the mid-1960s when she was a member of a pro-Situationist group in Turin and Milan, delivers a candid and engaging ego-histoire (a term coined by Pierre Nora to identify a hybrid genre of history that combines autobiography and theory ‘in order to make explicit the link between the history some historians have done and the history that had done these historians’ [318]) about the availability of psychoanalysis as a theoretical and practical resource in a period of social and political ferment. She found herself captivated by texts that joined the political critique of society and family life with psychoanalysis (‘I remember reading and underlining vigorously David Cooper, The Death of the Family’ [319]); she read deeply in Wilhelm Reich and George Groddeck; and she recalls how at a feminist consciousness group on eroticism and sexuality she presented a table drawn up by Michael Balint ‘comparing the characteristics of “preliminary pleasure”, which extended to the whole body, with those of genital “final pleasure” culminating in orgasm’ (307). However, it became obvious by the late 1970s that the radical left in Italy had been taking rather a long walk on the wild side for by then terrorist groups (both ‘red’ and neo-fascist) had become prominent, culminating in the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in Rome in May 1978. This was the confirmation, writes Passerini, in an assessment that ironically recapitulates Freud’s abandonment of politics as characterized by Schorske, ‘that times had completely changed and there was no longer any space for radical left politics. The only form of political engagement that now seemed possible was to transfer some of the ideas that originated in the political realm into the cultural and intellectual domain’ (307). Psychoanalysis, comments Michael Roth, glossing Schorske, may provide ‘compensation for political impotence’ (Roth, 1994: 346).
For Freud, as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips points out in a characteristically thought-provoking contribution, ‘all personal history is defensive history and all defensive history is distance regulation’ (216). In Freud’s account the individual’s psychic survival is achieved only ‘by a person keeping a certain distance from themselves, a distance not just from their dangerous desires, but from their histories, which are histories of desire’ (212). In her ‘Ego-Histoire’ Luisa Passerini delivers a cautionary tale about what may happen when the distance from dangerous desires is erased. Freud was drawn to a passage in Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau: ‘If the little savage were left to himself, preserving all his foolishness and adding to the small sense of a child in the cradle the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would strangle his father and lie with his mother’ (15). Dangerous desires do not invariably disappear because they have been replaced by knowledge but they may be ‘deflected’. The Freudian subject, Adam Phillips proposes, is ‘first and foremost a personal historian, preoccupied by keeping his distance’ (212). Psychoanalyst Phillips draws on recent reflections by the historian Mark Phillips (2013) on historical distance – on the dialectics of distance and proximity in historical thought – to suggest that ‘psychoanalysis as a social practice could be seen as part of a larger history of historical distanciation’ (213). Distancing, as Adam Phillips remarks, is always an experiment, it can never be got right. In another chapter Barbara Taylor draws on Winnicott’s account of the field of play to ask what historians are doing when they engage in historical research and to illuminate a dimension in the dialectics of distance and proximity that has to do with the achievement of empathy as an imaginative historical activity. The issues that are at stake in the taking and making and remaking of history in psychoanalytic thought and treatment and in the writing of history, these discussions suggest, have, perhaps, more to say to each other than has commonly been supposed.
‘Probably it will always be a kind of corner, psychoanalysis and history’, Peter Gay modestly proposed, though ‘a little larger would be nice, a larger corner’ (13). On the strength of the rich contributions to this collection, which in the space available I have been able to explore only very selectively, we can, perhaps, raise the bar slightly and suggest that the relevance and salience of psychoanalysis and history are discernible in all sorts of times, places and conjunctures, some of them familiar, some quite unexpected and surprising, dotted across the historical landscape.