Not All
of One Mind: Psychoanalysis and Culturanalysis
Steven Connor
This paper was given as part of the British Pyschoanalytical Society conference. The Freudian Century? The Impact of Psycho-Analysis on Intellectual Life in Britain, London, May 16-17 2003. A shortened version is scheduled to appear in the Times Higher Education Supplement, 23 May 2003.
Around this time, departments of literature, film, gender and
cultural studies are planning their teaching for next year. In
many of the resulting introductory courses, psychoanalysis will
feature prominently alongside feminism, queer theory,
deconstruction and the rest of the standard-issue
Swiss-army-knife of interpretative techniques with which new
students are now kitted out. This enthusiasm will not, of course,
be shared in departments of psychology. Far fewer of these will
allow psychoanalysis any significant role in their teaching.
I have never had analytic training, nor ever been in analysis. I
think it as unlikely that I would now do either as that I would
enter holy orders. While I have no reason to doubt the value in
certain circumstances of the different forms of what is nowadays
called 'psychotherapy', I have only intermittently felt the pull
to believe in any of the systematic forms of psychoanalysis as a
therapeutic technique. I think that, when pressed on the question
of its credentials, many of those teaching psychoanalysis in
English departments and elsewhere would probably not be inclined
to accord it significantly greater scientific standing or
therapeutic efficacy than astrology or aromatherapy. And yet I
have rattled out these lectures and even myself turned in a few
psychoanalytically-inflected readings in my time (look, I was
young, I needed the money). You will find similar episodes in the
back catalogues of many writers and critics of culture.
I mean these preliminaries to be amicably clarifying rather than
polemical. I speak neither as an apostate, nor as an infidel, but
as a sluggishly acquiescent but occasionally surly
fellow-traveller, who sometimes finds himself on a train that he
would on the whole prefer not to have boarded. It is partly about
there being no alternative means of transport, as they say on the
underground, that I will be speaking. But to reject everything
about psychoanalysis and everything written under its impetus
would be to squander a huge trove of insights, accidental and
systematic, regarding the nature of psychological and imaginative
and moral life. Besides, which, the business of dishing
psychoanalysis has itself become such a brutal, militant and
dogmatic business that it would be very uncomfortable to be part
of it.
We should find it odder than we do that, far from expiring in the
atmosphere of tepidly-tolerant semi-respect that prevails in the
humanities, the culture of psychoanalysis should be stronger than
ever, at least when it comes to the analysis of culture itself.
In seminar rooms across the Euramerican world, discussions of
political and cultural relations shake down with alarming
briskness into the question of how states or groups are to
confront, acknowledge and negotiate with the Other.
The energetic trading in the concept of trauma, as applied, not
just to individuals, but also to whole cultures - as in the
notion for example of the trauma suffered by the US as the result
of the World Trade Center attacks - is another example of
the widespread authority of the psychoanalytic paradigm in the
macropsychic sphere. So is the frequent suggestion that peoples
such as the Germans and the Austrians still have pasts which they
need to confront and work through. Psychoanalysis gives a
new lease of life to the venerable but ongoing game of assigning
characters and personal characteristics to nations. In one recent
essay, Slavoj iek gives Tariq Aziz a wigging for
using the word egotistic to characterise Slovenian
politics, only to allow himself, just a couple of paragraphs
later, to jeer at the wounded narcissism of fading
European powers like the French (iek 121, 122)
Or one could point to the remarkable continuing career of
hysteria. Now, in my view, not only is there no hysteria in the
world now, there never has been, not ever. This is not to say
that none of the things that have been called hysteria were real.
But it is to say that there never was a single, secret underlying
cause for all its alleged symptoms, signs and wonders, from
flatulence and forgetfulness to full-blown paraplegia. Nowadays,
you would be as taken aback to get a diagnosis of hysteria from
your GP as to be told that you were possessed by Beelzebub, and
yet the academic standing of hysteria, as a concept useful for
discussing everything from anorexia to aesthetics is undisturbed.
Similarly the profiles of cultural commentators who deploy
psychoanalysis remain extremely high, whether one thinks of
feminists like Juliet Mitchell or Jacqueline Rose, theorists of
the postcolonial condition such as Homi Bhabha, omnidirectional
psychopolitical opinionists like Slavoj iek, or
homely ruminators on the modern soul like Adam Phillips. Despite
the crude periodic denunciations of psychoanalysis, the authority
accorded to it within popular culture itself also remains
considerable. A couple of weeks ago Naomi Wolf could be heard
declaring casually in the course of Channel 4s 100 Best
Films evening (May 4, 2003) that Society in transition
always needs someone to act out its fears. Film is its therapy,
its couch. Psychoanalysis is often called in to provide a
punchline for popcultural commentaries that would otherwise
fizzle away into the merest sez-me. Just the other day, Zoe
Williams clinched a think-piece in The Guardian about the
prominence of the buttocks in contemporary culture with a
quotation from David Marriott, in which he skewered the alleged
obsession with black bottoms as extreme phallic
fascination. Men want to penetrate women as if they were
men
.Thats a very simple narrative: that what people
most want, they most disavow (Williams 2003, 22).
What I am interested in getting at, and then finding some way of
getting round, is the fact that a clinical practice that is
widely regarded, whatever its practitioners and beneficiaries may
think, as at best quaintly anachronistic and certainly no longer
part of the fabric of customary truth, should have so long, if
limping, a lease of life in the area of cultural analysis. Why,
when there is so little psychoanalytic culture in the humanities,
is there so much psychoanalysis in the study of culture? Why this
peculiar condition of incredulous credence?
This
might be the point to observe that the standing of psychoanalysis
in those areas of the humanities concerned with the analysis of
culture appears to be in inverse ratio to the breadth of the the
understanding of the psychoanalytic tradition. For those who put
it to work to analyse texts, whether literary or cultural,
psychoanalysis means, simply, the canonical works of Freud and
Lacan, ceaselessly churned and rechurned, with scarcely a whisper
of the work of British or American mid-century psychoanalysis,
nor any sign of a willingness to learn from the complex and
difficult actualities of contemporary psychotherapy. I return
briefly to one of these areas of omission, group therapy, towards
the end of this paper.
So why has psychoanalysis, albeit in this highly selective form,
become so indispensable for the analysis and understanding of
culture? Perhaps one way to get at this is to ask the question
the other way round. What is it about the idea of culture that
seems to lend psychoanalysis its special role? As Terry Eagleton
has recently suggested (2000), the idea of culture is one of the
great unmolested orthodoxies of our time. We in the humanities
may have ditched all the big old ideas like truth, human nature
or the revolutionary destiny of the proletariat, but it is
seemingly not open to any of us to disbelieve in, or doubt the
shaping and determining power of culture.
But what do we mean by a culture, and why is this word now so
routinely preferred to the word society, which almost
totally dominated the field two decades ago? I think that what we
mean by a culture is a collectivity with an inside. To refer to
an organised set of social habits, behaviours and relations as a
culture is to see those habits, behaviours and relations as
expressive rather than merely characteristic. Your culture is
what you are, rather than what you do. So whenever one is
speaking of a culture, one is scooping out a space for an
imagined subject of that culture, and construing it therefore as
a collective form of consciousness and feeling. Most of us no
longer find the argument-from-design plausible when it comes to
proving the existence of a divinity, but psychoanalysis
encourages thoughts of Paleys watch, or at least Friday's
footprint, when it comes to the complex outward phenomena that
make up what we call a culture. Confronted with the evidence of
culture, we think, not this must mean something, but
rather, something (some mind-like thing at that) must have
meant this. No wonder, then, that the word 'cultural' is so
routinely hitched to the word 'identity'. The phrase 'social
identity', by contrast, though perfectly available for use,
suggests the imposition or imposture of identity, rather than its
spontaneous expression.
There has always been an ambivalence in the word 'culture' which,
in an anthropological usage, simply, neutrally, names a whole way
of life, but, in common usage also signifies the artistic works
by which cultures are supposed to give expression to themselves.
French culture means not just a distinctive language, history and
set of social arrangements, but also Cartesian philosophy,
impressionist painting, and café society and gastronomy raised
to the level of art forms. The anthropological notion of culture,
which is often applied to cultures that are thought not to be
fully aware of themselves as cultures, or as fully aware as we,
takes culture to be a form of life. The artistic-expressive
notion of culture sees it as a style of life. I think that the
well-established preference for the word culture over
the word society, which does not have the same
ambivalence, allows the artistic-expressive meaning of the word
to seep across into the anthropological, allowing us not only to
see works of high and popular culture, such as novels and
Hollywood films, as culturally expressive, but also to see
football matches and the internet as works of culture rather than
just evidence of its workings.
The enlisting of psychoanalysis strongly assists this move from
forms of life to styles of life, most of all through its concept
of the unconscious. For this concept allows one to see actions
and events that seem to be merely accidental, or contingent, or
unwilled, as having significance by reference to a consciousness
of which they are the omitted or undigested residue. The defining
move of psychoanalysis is not so much the discovery of the
unconscious as the personalising and humanising of it - most of
all by its trick of adding the definite article to the adjective:
the unconscious. If there were no such thing as
unconscious actions and mental processes, I would not be able to
hit a forehand or drive a car. But it is a huge leap from there
to the idea that the sum total of everything of which I happen
not to be aware, from the irritating way my hair sticks up at the
back, to the time of the last train to Weybridge, has a
particular and defining shape, a shape that is not of me, and yet
somehow still mine by dint of the fact that I know not of it. The
difference between an individual and a culture is that an
individual has conscious life without suspecting the existence of
his unconscious life. With culture, as psychoanalytically
construed, it is the other way round. Culture is brought into
being by being made conscious of itself, as the imputed
consciousness of those unconscious facts and phenomena of which
it consists.
Perhaps one minor reason for the growth in the psychoanalytic
study of culture (another form of what Freud called lay
analysis) is that it seems to evade some of the ethical
problems that arise in dealings with actual subjects.
Psychoanalytic history itself has not always been very forgiving
in its view of Freuds clinical or therapeutic practice,
particularly in his dealings with his female patients. Dealing
with cultures or collectivities allows one to set
aside some of the difficult responsibilities one would have to
real-life patients. No culture or cultural
formation is going to sue you for malpractice.
A related difference between clinical and cultural-critical
psychoanalysis - let us perhaps call it 'culturanalysis' - is
that the latter has deliberately retreated from concepts of cure
or treatment. Culture may be on the couch, or even sometimes on
the ropes, but it is not the patient. Nevertheless, the horizon
of cure has not completely retreated. The application of
psychoanalytic categories and language encourages the assumption
that societies or collectivities will be stronger and healthier
if they know themselves better, even, or perhaps especially if
that involves a bracing full look at the worst about themselves.
Cultures that do not know themselves are regarded as dangerously
unstable, and indeed perhaps not even worthy of the name of
cultures. Integration and functionality are therefore associated
with conscious self-regulation. Wo es war soll ich werden,
promised Freud. Perhaps the motto of culturanalysis might be said
to be wo sie waren sollen wir werden. We
will arise where once there was only they.
At this point, it would be as well to note that the historical
links between psychoanalysis and the study of society are more
than adventitious. It seems striking that psychoanalysis should
have arisen during a period at which the idea of society as a
viable object of study and sociology as the form of knowledge
designed for its study should also have arisen. Just as sociology
was being invented, with the idea of society reaching
its fullest articulation in the work of Spencer, Simmel, Durkheim
and the rest, Freud began trying to map the internal socius
of the psyche, its squabbling family romance of internal agencies
and functions. Like the sociologists who were seemingly shifting
authority away from the bourgeois individualist subject, Freud
seemed to be stripping the subject of its internal
self-possession. Between society on the one hand and the
unconscious on the other, and especially given the fact that the
unconscious is primarily the imprinting on and in the individual
of social prohibitions, it looked as though the scope of the
subject was bound to be very much abridged. But, in fact,
subjectivity was enlarged, in both directions. The idea of the
individual self became richer and more compelling through its
internal adversities and differentiations, its singularity
secured through its very populousness. The individual became a
culture. This reinforcement of the idea of the
allegedly-imperilled subject was paralleled by the slow
replacement of the always abstract notion of society
with the more richly-textured, affectively-saturated notion of
culture.
When Freud himself started to become interested in cultural
questions from the 1920s onwards, he tended to characterise what
he was doing as mass psychology. Freud could conceive
of nothing that lay in between the individual and
the mass. Mass psychology would either show the
individual drawn back into seething swamp of infantile instincts
and gratifications that is the mass mind, or in cases
where the mass mind seemed capable of something more, as in
folksong and folklore, would see it beginning to exhibit the
qualities of the individual mind (Freud 1921, 82-7). In
fact, however, the alternatives of the individual and the mass
represent for Freud different states or allotropes of individual
psychology. He takes from Gustav Le Bon the assumpton that the
mental life of the mass is the mental life of the savage or the
child. Both the mature individual and the infantile
mass are of one mind.
Of course, both psychoanalysts and what Marxists there still are now have a
horror of this term mass, as though the term had become tainted
by the history of the phenomenon. Perhaps the deflation of the idea of the mass,
and the individualising of our contemporary mass existence both encourages and
is encouraged by the propagation of psychoanalysis across so many areas of collective
life. Though we live a more thoroughly mass-mediated existence than ever before,
the mass neither sucks us in nor bears darkly down on us. The mass is now not
swamp, but smoke. We experience our aggregate existence not as an inchoate bog,
but as a fizzing mist of complex and changeable identifications and interactions.
Our mass society is at once abstract and intimate, at once continuous and intermittent,
experienced at once as out there and in looming close-up. Ours is
an age of extimacy (a word I thought I had made up but turns out
to have been used by Lacan to mean something different): of ecstatic intimacy
experienced at mediated arms length, in which the anonymous is no longer
impersonal. In some ways, psychoanalysis may seem particularly adapted to responding
to this new experience of collective life, in which, to adapt Dickenss
Mrs Gradgrind, somebody must be feeling all this, but we cant be sure
it is us.
There is a form of psychoanalysis that takes as its object
collectivities that can be assimilated neither to the individual
nor to the mass. There may be something promising as well as
depressing in the very fact that the group analysis
derived from the work of Wilfred Bion or S. H. Foulkes is rarely
if ever invoked by the exponents of culturanalysis. For what
group analysis seems to me to promise is the possibility of
starting to describe the mental life of that middle ground
between monadic individuals and homogenous masses. We spend so
much of our lives in the shifting habitat constituted out of our
exchanges, interactions and transmissions, that there may be
profit in attending more closely to its workings. Michel Serres
has introduced to social theory the idea of what he calls the
quasi-object, based upon the idea of the object that, passed
rapidly from hand to hand in a game (of football for example, or
rugby), comes to constitute the games mobile focal point or
centre of gravity.The trajectory of the quasi-object is neither
determined in advance from outside, nor able to be controlled by
any of its individual participants. Social life, suggests Serres,
takes its shape from the forking, unpredictable itineraries of
such quasi-objects, such as money, myth or mobile phones. They
form a pass-the-parcel of intersubjectivity, in which subjecthood
flares up at the moment when one has the ball in one's hand and
then is passed on:
This quasi-object that is a marker of the subject is an astonishing constructor of intersubjectivity. We know, through it, how and when we are subjects and when and how we are no longer subjects. We: what does that mean? We are precisely the fluctuating moving back and forth of I. The I in the game is a token exchanged. And this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects, weave the collection The we is made by the bursts and occultations of the I. The we is made by the passing of the I. By exchanging the I. And by substitution and vicariance of the I. (Serres 1982, 227)
I
know too little of the psychoanalytic tradition of group analysis
to know whether this would be viable, but perhaps culturanalysis
might take from it a sense of the formation of quasi-objects and
the collective quasi-subjects to which they give
rise, through our complex social mediations and passages.
Serres's notion of the quasi-object has helped to form what is
known as 'actor-network theory', of which the most well-known
exponent is Bruno Latour. For Latour, the most important and
arresting consequence of the proliferation of the middle ground,
of forms and objects, and ideas and practices, which lie between
the inhuman realm of nature and the human realm of culture, is
that there is no such thing as a culture, in the sense
of a realm of human human self-exception or subtraction from
nature; there are only ever 'natures-cultures' (Latour 1993,
104).
I have said that, when lifted out of its original micropsychic sphere, psychoanalysis
offers us too readily the self-recognition of pathetic fallacy, showing us what
we take to be our own natures animistically mirrored in the workings of culture,
just as other cultures once sought mythic ways of identifying human will and
purpose in the operations of nature. Do we dread the condition of a soulless
social life as we dread the prospect that we ourselves might be shown to be
without a soul? Or is that the same kind of projection as the one I am trying
to work around? The humanities traditionally see their job as safeguarding the
realm of the human from the threat of the machine, or from the anonymous collective
relations which may degrade us to the condition of machines. But in helping
guard us from this fate, psychoanalysis is being recruited to secure the
future of an illusion. For one thing, the idea of what a machine is that predominates
in the humanities is date-stamped about 1750 - machines as conceived by those
determined to rescue us from them are clanking, gurgling things of pipes, levers
and pulleys, rather than the kinds of machine represented by a virus, a whirlpool
or a weather system. As our cultural lives become simultaneously more fissile
and more interknit, our best, or better hope, is not to enlarge the business
of soul-making, or seek more reassuring ways of being of one mind with our cultures.
Given a notion of machinery suitably enlarged and diversified by what the natural
and mathematical sciences have learned and could teach us, we would do
better to try to understand the fluid mechanics of our collectivity, giving
it a mind of its own rather than building in our own image, building our own
image in, the psychopolis of mental life.
References
Eagleton, Terry (2000). The Idea of Culture. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Freud, Sigmund (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of
the Ego . In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey
et. al. London Hogarth Press.
Latour, Bruno (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Trans.
Catherine Porter. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Serres, Michel (1982) The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence
R. Schehr. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Williams, Zoe (2003). A Bit Behind. The Guardian,
10 May 2003, Weekend section, 16-22.
iek, Slavoj (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the
Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London,
Verso.
| Steve Connor | School of English
and Humanities | Birkbeck |