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- Title
"לכתוב כמו כלב שחופר לעצמו בור, כמו חולדה שחופרת לעצמה מחילה": נרטיבים של פרידה מנקודת המבט של מטופלי פרויד.
- Authors
ענת צור מהלאל
- Abstract
My goal in this essay is to grapple with a collection of unique narratives of separation – unique because the separation here is from psychoanalysis and from Freud as analyst. These narratives were originally published as parts of memoirs of Freud written by three of his former analysands. Case studies are the most central and prominent window into psychoanalytic work, both for professionals, for whom such studies provide the ‘data’ of interest, and for the broader public for whom these offer a glimpse into the intimacy of analytic work. The starting claim of this article, derived from an extensive research project (Tzur-Mahalel, in press),2 is that not enough attention has been paid to the fact that psychoanalytic case studies are written exclusively by psychoanalysts. This is an intriguing state of affairs because psychoanalysis is by its nature dialogical, based as it is upon the dialogue between at least two different worlds: the worlds of analysand and analyst, and, broadly speaking, between two sets of consciousness and the unconscious and, finally, between two vectors of self and other. To what degree can only one of the analytic partners lay claim to have best represented the experience of the other partner? A literature written by analysands has been part of the larger psychoanalytic literature from the outset, yet has been underemphasized in the field’s academic and theoretical writings. Analysand’s testimonies have tended to be treated as no more than personal stories, necessarily biased against full clinical awareness and anecdotal in their theoretical importance. This stance has pushed these texts aside and made them irrelevant. Drawing attention to the analysand as author elicits questions that have until now been overlooked, such as the motivations for writing, the content and form of the texts, and the dialogue that these texts as a unit, as a genre, might create within the literature of analyst’s texts, as a unit! Texts written by analysands are in one sense autobiographical case studies. Reading such texts makes clear that in many senses the analytic situation has been represented in a biased way because of the one-sided authorship that has predominated. There is an inherent irony here, as psychoanalysis, the field so profoundly occupied with liberating the analysand’s repressed reminiscences and muted inner voices, has unwittingly or even wittingly collaborated in the analysand’s literary silence. The insistence on one-sided reportage has created a situation in which only one subject is given the authority to author in the discipline of psychoanalytic data collection. The memoirs written by Freud’s patients offer an opportunity to shed light on psychoanalysis in its initial evolution. These analysands arrived in Vienna from various locations around the world for the singular purpose of meeting Freud and benefiting from his innovative thought. These authors write about their initial encounters with the Great Man and his thought – which they had encountered up until that point solely by reading the slowly evolving analytic texts – and often about their encounters with his family and entourage. They describe reading Freud’s texts as a revelation of new realms of knowledge and experience, an innovative and yet-to-be-discovered path. Subsequently, they followed their curiosity to Vienna itself, full of hope and expectations for the opening of new personal and professional horizons. When we glimpse into the experience of being an analysand of Freud’s, we need to bear in mind the intensely structured setting at the time, involving five to six analytic sessions a week. During analysis, patients were instructed not to make any significant life decisions, whether personal, familial, or professional. Many of these hopeful analysands came alone, and some came with their entire families, taking temporary lodgings in the hotels near Freud’s residence. Freud’s patients chose to leave their homes, their familiar habits and most every framework of affiliation by imparting on an adventurous, even perilous journey that revolved almost exclusively around the near-constant analytic sessions, the transference relationship and perhaps the budding analytical politics and local cultural atmosphere as well. It may also be said that these early patients were undertaking to take part in the very discovery of this revolutionary pathway to the mysterious realms of the psyche. As a body, the known collection of texts written by analysands were in analysis with the most famous analyst of all, and his writing, as we know, became a canonical, inseparable dimension of the specific art and of modern thought in general. The very decision on the part of Freud’s analysands to publish their memoirs of this essentially intimate and private partnership can be understood as a courageous but no less a subversive act of re-presentation. In literary theory, Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992) offer the concept of minor literature, the literature of the minority, or the writing that emerges from canonical literature and gives expression to the voices that had been left muted, that were not even presented as voices. Because minor literature has to do with giving a voice to the voiceless, it can be understood as a subversive political act. Deleuze and Guattari characterized this distinct process of writing as “writing like a dog digging a hole, a rat digging its burrow. And to do that, finding his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third world, his own desert” (1986 [1975], p. 18).3 Understanding the memoirs written by Freud’s patients as minor literature is not only a result of their relationship to Freud’s canonical stance, but also has to do with the writers’ initiative to adopt for themselves the active stance of author. By writing, the analysand arrogates to him- or herself a modicum of authority to offer a textual sketch of Freud, an act whose heroism must not be taken for granted, especially not at the time these analyses took place.4 I draw mainly from three autobiographical texts: Abram Kardiner’s (1891-1981) memoir My Analysis with Freud (1977), the memoir of Sergei Pankejeff (1886-1979),5 known as the Wolf Man (Gardiner, 1971a), and the Tribute to Freud (1974) by the poetess Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961). These patients’ narratives of separation provide an innovative perspective on the psychoanalytic process, especially with respect to the importance they place on the termination phase of the analysis at a time when Freud himself had not given that domain much consideration I discuss the three narratives as works of translation, as the term is understood by Walter Benjamin (1968 [1955]), Paul Ricoeur (2006 [2004]), and Jean Laplanche (1999 [1992]). That is, these stories are translations in three aspects: (a) as a reconstruction of the past; i.e., the work of memory, (b) an interpretation of the conscious residues of the transference; i.e., the work of mourning, and (c) as a piece of deferred action; i.e., a retroactive deciphering of the enigmatic messages received from Freud as the parental figure. This representation of the analysand’s writing suggests that separation from analysis, as a concept or process, is an endless work of translation within the endless process of deciphering the unconscious. Specifically, for Abram Kardiner, the most significant aspect of his analytic experience requiring translation and further working-through via his memoir was its abrupt termination, itself a recurrent traumatic aspect of his own childhood! Kardiner emphasizes his naïve surrender to the analytic process and the massive working-through of the incompletely resolved transference relationship that was required afterwards – most specifically, the regressive aspects of his personality that were revived therein, his own disavowal of the termination date, and Freud’s apparent unawareness of the devastating effect the termination would have on this analysand. Pankejeff’s memoir translates both his own strange analytic experience as well as much of the rich psychoanalytic literature that had come to be written about him, foremost Freud’s own canonical case study of ‘The Wolf Man’ and his ‘infantile neurosis.’ The complex matrix of analytic and literary portraits he experienced suggests that there were various messages that had to be deciphered. His writing expressed a personal reconstruction of his personal and analytic past but also served as a way for him to make his voice heard on conflictual issues (such as the imposed termination and the mourning it entailed). H.D.’s initially anonymous diary about her analytic history with Freud, in comparison, centers on her encounter with Freud as Other and the enigmatic messages that he addressed to her, in both the analytic and the literary sense. Doolittle’s writing is represented as a quest for signs from her past and present that might help her to find answers to troubling questions. H.D’s memoir stands distinctly as a unique gift of love to Freud as well as a later translation of deep and yet-to-be deciphered encounters that were woven into her mind. It bears emphasizing that the narratives of separation’s value lies not only in the innovative point of view it offers. This literature should also be evaluated in terms of the practical inroads it offers for expressing the unexpressed, vocalizing the muted, representing the unrepresented, and drawing attention to various blind spots in the obvious.
- Publication
Ma'arag: Israeli Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019, Vol 9, p43
- ISSN
2413-290X
- Publication type
Article