Abstract
‘Freud is Not Dead’ proclaimed the cover of Newsweek, 27 March 2006. Actually, ‘Freud is not dead; he’s just hard to find’ said Psychology Today six years later (Whitbourne, 2012). Is Freud the object of Oedipal desire and, as such, responsible for ceaseless internecine conflict within the genealogy he birthed? No, the object of desire is psychoanalysis itself says Kate Schechter, a Chicago medical anthropologist, psychoanalyst and clinical social worker on the psychiatry faculty at Rush Medical College. Schechter has focused her interpretive exploration of twentieth-century history on the role of Chicago’s psychoanalytic establishment, a complex place whose organizational malaise projects an image of chronic crisis arguably emblematic of the whole of US psychoanalysis.
Schechter, who critiques organized psychoanalysis through the postmodern lenses of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, structures her book around one large but particular narrative: how ‘the relationship between the patient and the analyst becomes the consummate biopolitical object’ where market forces, and resistance to them, threatens the very core of the profession. In Chicago of the early 1930s, Franz Alexander founded the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, in part to replicate Berlin’s pre-Nazi treatment and training centre, and also to extend Freud’s classical, if foreign, methodology to Americans. In the 1970s, Heinz Kohut countered the traditionalists with a psychology of unique selfhood consonant with the culture of American capitalism. As a result, today’s analysts find themselves so caught up in the dual disputes of Kohutian vs. Freudian and standardization vs. independence that they question, endlessly, whether or not what they do is actually psychoanalysis. Hence this book.
The categories used by the analysts to describe their anguished identity seem to fit less well into Foucault’s 1975 archaeology Surveiller et punir than, arguably, Derrida’s deconstruction of dialectical im/possibilities in his 1967 De La Grammatologie. The workings of power and modernity leave them in a muddle. Schechter, in her ethnographically-driven interviews with a selection of Chicago psychoanalysts, vividly portrays their sense of capture, trapped in the neo-liberal language of ‘standards and scarcity’ (p. 128) without the relief expected from Kohut’s school. They are virtually immobilized by a sort of ego implosion brought on by images of risk, accountability and standardization, however shallow. Yet their struggle is all interior, and if they are searching for a more palatable alternative to their own exceptionalism, a more satisfying outcome of their desire, neither the aim nor the object shows up in this book.
Schechter’s analysts seem to have introjected people like Frederick Crews whose conservative rhetoric endlessly discredits psychoanalysis as unscientific, an idea that has been promoted equally by mainstream academia and sensationalist media for the last hundred years. How sad. They should be revelling in their profound uncertainty! That is what it is all about. They should be turning for inspiration to the very conflicts and contradictions that illuminated Foucault’s writing. In fact, this is what is happening outside most International Psychoanalytic Association institutes. In Europe of the 1920s, psychoanalysis was as progressive a sociocultural movement as the art, music and architecture of the era. Today we can reclaim the original psychoanalysts’ urban, clinical and social justice legacy. Thousands of licensed social workers and psychologists use psychoanalysis as a treatment of choice in social service agencies (where many exiled analysts settled in the 1930s) and in private practice. The question more important than the paralysing ‘Is it really psychoanalysis?’ should be ‘Does this form of treatment help people?’ In helping people, the spectre of market regulation falls away.
I am not sure if Kate Schechter intended to write such a grim book. She has produced a study (at least a third of the book is notes and references) which, though replete with signature postmodern words, is methodologically sound. She has advanced a critical and accurate representation of discussions we hear prevailing in mainstream psychoanalytic institutes. But does she portray the actual breadth of contemporary practice? Despite the neo-liberal claim to inevitable standardization, most psychoanalytic activity remains quite creative and, it seems to me, no more conformist today than when Freud first outlined his criteria for the treatment. As if to confirm this impression, the psychoanalyst Deborah Luepnitz (personal communication, 22 Oct. 2014) wrote to me, ‘My project with the homeless people in Philadelphia [Leupnitz, 2015] carries on apace. I love my current homeless patient – in treatment for 4 years already. He said the other day: “You know, Dr. L., I really hate my father – but not in a bad way.” Isn’t that great! Clearly he has been reading Winnicott who taught us to “objectively hate” the other. No jouissance needed.’