<i>Sigmund Freud</i> (<i>Critical Lives</i> Series) byMattFfytche:Reaktion Books.2022. pp.224. pages. $22.00 (paper). ISBN 9781789145793

Little by little, Freud is drifting away from us. Every day, his intuitions and his theories seem a little more attached to a bygone era. Even the supporters of his theory are becoming increasingly aware of this. To preserve Freud's stature, they frequently undertake to adapt his theories to the sensibilities of the day, starting with those theories that risk appearing outdated—sometimes at the risk of disfiguring the historical Freud. Matt Ffytche (known as the editor of a journal, Psychoanalysis and History, which “is devoted both to the study of the history of psychoanalysis and the application of psychoanalytic ideas to historiography”) too approaches Freud less as a historian than as a renovator, anxious to defend the relevance of analytic theory. He seeks to “produce a Freud” that meets some of today's political expectations: a Freud “beyond patriarchy, beyond colonialism, beyond heterosexuality and gender inequality, beyond privilege”; a Freud “who is useful and relevant for making sense of the contemporary world” (p. 11). Beyond patriarchy: this is not self-evident, given the harsh criticism of Freud by many feminists, who often portrayed him as having exercised “dogmatic authority” over some of his female patients (p. 115). Think of his notorious diagnosis in the case of “Dora” (Ida Bauer), the patient who, at the age of 14, felt disgust after being abruptly kissed by an adult man (a friend of her family): Freud (2001) wrote that her reaction had been “entirely and completely hysterical” (p. 28). Ffytche rightly points out that Freud's “interpretations were likely experienced by Ida as simply another version of the social contrivances she was already exposed to” (p. 121). Perhaps to defend psychoanalysis from this feminist critique, which tends to portray it as a tool of subjugation in the service of paternalism, Ffytche presents it as an essentially introspective and solitary endeavor: psychoanalysis could “only be accessed from within” (p. 79); the “task of [psychoanalytic] interpretation”, far from being the prerogative of a specialist, would be “imposed on the dreamer him- or herself” (p. 100); and the “culture of lay interpretation” that disseminated psychoanalysis outside the walls of the clinic (I'll come back to this later) would have pushed its supporters to undertake “self-interpretations” (p. 106). Ffytche thus approaches the numerous exegetes (from Adam Phillips to Andreas Mayer) who maintain that Freud created a solitary, autobiographical and introspective approach of self-examination, which would basically allow each individual to speak on his or her own behalf. Elsewhere, Ffytche rebuts himself this hypothesis of an introspective psychoanalysis, when he notes that, in the eyes of analytic theory, the power of unconscious thought processes “consigns us to not really knowing who we are, or the reasons why we act” (p. 38): inasmuch as “we feed off illusions about ourselves” (p. 106), the stories we tell about ourselves, those we create to try to order our lives, would be “intrinsically ‘mythologizing’” (p. 181). Direct self-knowledge being for all practical purposes impossible, the only way to access one's inner life would be through a (psychoanalytic) third party. Foucault (2011) points out that in many societies the psychoanalyst is “this other person who is indispensable for me to be able to tell the truth about myself” (p. 5 (transl. modified)). So Ffytche undertakes a sorting exercise, distinguishing between Freud's intuitions and theories that have clearly not aged well (e.g., diagnoses whose sexism is plain to see today), and those that still seem right on the money, and he then makes a case for the latter. One clearly senses a desire to end up justifying Freud's theories, especially in some parts of the book. Consider Ffytche's defense of the explanation which Freud proposed in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to account for submission to the authority of leaders: the mere fact that our age is also marked by “fears of demagogy, incipient or real fascism, and the narcissism of political leaders” would show that this theory is “just as relevant today” (p. 178). As if refusing Freud's theory were tantamount to refusing to recognize the very existence of these phenomena; or as if Freud, to this day, were the only author to have recognized their existence. Several passages in the book dwell on the widespread resonance of Freud's theories, outside the walls of the psychoanalyst's consulting room: “individuals in societies all over the globe learned to speak Freudian, to dream Freudian dreams, to make Freudian slips, to have a neurosis, to free associate and to endlessly re-evaluate their mothers and fathers” (p. 8); several analytical terms thus “disseminated […] through culture at large” (p. 8). In this way, psychoanalytic theory “has traveled far beyond its place and time of origin” (p. 9) (way beyond the narrowly biographical contexts (Jewish, Viennese, etc.) to which commentators frequently confine it); it became “part of so many different cultures and initiatives, be they therapeutic, social, political or intellectual” (p. 9). This “enormously successful expansion of psychoanalysis” (p. 201), implemented in a wide variety of contexts, means that it is both “protean” and “collective” (p. 10). And this widespread extra-clinical use of psychoanalysis reveals that, in the eyes of many contemporaries, psychoanalysis “proved attractive”, that it exerted a “poetic appeal” (p. 107). A historian making such an observation, that of a society's enthusiasm for a belief, and its adoption of a new language, will most naturally be inclined to turn her or his attention to that society, to identify the sources of that enthusiasm. As Bloch (1992) puts it: “A contagion supposes two things: microbe multiplication and, at the moment when the disease strikes, a favorable breeding-ground” (p. 29). This historian can thus wonder whether this new belief “fits” in with other beliefs, those to which this society already gives credence, or with the values this society holds dear; or whether it fulfills needs previously met by other beliefs, which are no longer accepted, and must therefore be replaced; etc. And she or he might just as well be inclined to compare the idiom used by this society to articulate different experiences with similar ones prevailing in other societies. And yet, although Ffytche's sketch of the vast echo generated by psychoanalysis shows perfectly well that the story of psychoanalysis leads “beyond Freud into the broader narrative of the twentieth century” (p. 198), his book does not for a moment stop to consider the factors that may have inspired contemporary society to embrace psychoanalysis. In the way its author sets out to capture in all its magnitude the deep and broad extra-clinical impact of a psychoanalytic idiom, without ever seeming to realize that what he is thus sketching is a social phenomenon, this book is remarkably similar to John Forrester's recent Freud and Psychoanalysis: Six Introductory Lectures (Lamarche, Forthcoming). In the end, Ffytche even writes that psychoanalysis “will endure for as long as our obsessions, our anxieties, our wishes” (p. 209), suggesting that this enthusiasm, born of the depths of human nature, has nothing historical about it: it would have occurred in any society and in any era.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.