Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review
(Date Approximate)
The banal is a cover story.
. .
Psychoanalysis,
like religion and medicine, turns panic into meaning. . .
If we
banned the word love it would be interesting to see what we found ourselves
saying (and doing) to each other. . .
A
phobia, like a psychoanalytic theory, is a story about where the wild things
are. . .
HB: There's such a stripping down of Freudianism in
"Terrors and Experts," the reader can wonder, what's left? What makes
your work Freudian at all?
AP: I'm certainly a believer in, take seriously,
transference, dream work, repression, all the defenses, certainly the
centrality of sexual desire, so no, I would think of my work as very Freudian.
But that doesn't imply obeisance to Freud. My interest in Freud is to have
something I can use to make something of my own with.
HB: It reads as though there's a cleansing process at work,
and what's left in the end is a belief in free association and a commitment to
a search for meaning. Those are your boundary conditions. The unconscious, for
example, is less a repository of motifs to be uncovered than an endpoint, a
limit to knowledge, as in, "With the unconscious you never know where you
are." You speak of your work as post-Freudianizing Freud. For example, you
emphasize undecidability, transgression, gaps -- the litany of postmodern
virtues.
AP: For me, these are straightforward Freudian. I've come to
understand everything entirely through psychoanalysis. What one can make sense
of? What is inside oneself that prevents sense-making? Those seem to me to be
fundamentally Freudian ideas, and that's what I like about him.
HB: In "Terrors and Experts" you are placing this
post-Freudian Freud alongside the better known, the Enlightenment, Freud.
AP: That's absolutely right.
HB: Which is your Freud?
AP: The Freud I like is the conversation between the two
Freuds.
HB: You move between one and the other. It's not clear where
your loyalty lies.
AP: Nor to me.
HB: The style of many Freudian writers is dense,
overdetermined, systematic. You go in the opposite direction. What stands out
is your gift for aphorism, for the fragment.
AP: I do love aphorisms. I don't try and write them; they
turn up. The aphorism contains a kind of inner delirium. It arrests the flow of
what's been written. I don't think people come away from my books knowing, for
example, what my theory of worrying might be. A sentence strikes you, you go
away humming a tune. I don't want to have theories.
HB: You point out the ways in which Freudianism today is
blending into modes of discourse it resembles more than science. This can seem
like evasive action against its attackers or a form of camouflage.
AP: All the controversy about Freud is irrelevant. I really
think psychoanalysis is only for the people who like it. It's manifestly not
scientific. And psychoanalysis should be attacked. For its first years, it was
a cult. You couldn't find out about it unless you were in the game. Suddenly
the game is open, and people are finding out whether they like it or not.
But the attempt to discredit Freud is like trying to
discredit Wordsworth or Wallace Stevens. People should read Freud and see
whether there's anything in it for them, rather than trying to find things that
will finally disprove it.
HB: You say the analyst is likely to use a word like
"depression," the patient more likely to use a word like
"sad." It brings to mind something E.L. Doctorow wrote: "We have
in such concepts as 'complex,' sublimation,' repression,' identity crisis,'
object relations,' borderline,' and so on, the interchangeable parts of all of
us. In this sense modern psychology is the industrialization of
storytelling."
AP: Absolutely. I agree with that. The trouble with having
special languages is that they create a mystique of authority.
HB: Then, why would someone come to you? Because they've
heard you are a good conversationalist?
AP: That's exactly why they come to me. I'd rather call
myself a conversationalist, that's it. The name "psychoanalytic" is
no longer an honorific. It brings so much baggage that it's a real problem. I'm
selling a special kind of conversation.
HB: In the United States, as opposed, perhaps, to England,
where you work, it would seem the dominant form of therapy is chemical, which
is more about the exchange of neurotransmitters than the exchange of meanings.
AP: Fixing the machine.
HB: And we have the trauma theorists. Trauma, which was part
of Freud's thinking, now takes up the whole screen, edging everything else out.
AP: I value Freud because he is committed to personal
history and to meaning. These seem to be the central and crucial factors. I
also value Freud because he sees, and maybe post-Freudians see it too, that, in
a sense, prioritizing trauma is itself a trauma. The problem with putting
trauma at the center of the theory is you put a fixity at the center of the
theory, and it's as though you've created a specialization. I would prefer less
generalization in psychoanalysis and more specific detailed personal histories.
And that would mean that the whole slew of psychoanalytic theory would be
redundant. If you create syndromes, you risk creating a language which
imprisons you in specific kinds of life story -- survivors, etc.. These
syndromes invite you to join a club, the club of incest survivors, or whatever
it might be.
HB: Freudianism was not necessarily different; though their
language was more complex, those undergoing psychoanalysis were also a club.
AP: I think that's right. Learning to be a psychoanalyst is
learning to speak a language. And becoming a patient is also learning to speak
a language. What we need is ways of talking about the languages we learn.
There's a spectrum. At one end there's indoctrination, at the other end,
acquiring a language that you can make something of your own with.
HB: Wouldn't you say that's true of any good conversation?
AP: Exactly. Someone gives you an idiom out of which you
make your own idiom. A good conversation would be the model. But the
psychoanalytic conversation is a specific variety. It's the kind of
conversation you can't quite have with your friends, your family.
HB: Does the conversation take place differently in England
than here?
AP: I think psychobabble is a terrible catastrophe here.
HB: Less so in England?
AP: Yes, but it's going that way. It's a matter of time. As
more people have unimaginative therapy more people are going to speak psychobabble.
It's emotionally impoverished. The vocabulary is so limited. That's why we
should be reading novels, poems, history, rather than psychoanalysis. We should
read psychoanalysis as well, but if we read just psychoanalysis we are in deep
trouble, vocabulary-wise
HB: There's the possibility of a tremendous stratification.
Psychoanalysis will be for the people who want it and, as you add
parenthetically, can afford it. For the others, there are chemicals .
AP: That's terrible. Psychoanalysis should be free. I've
worked in the health service in England for twenty years. One of the great
things about that health service -- it no longer really exists -- was that any
child and many adults could have psychotherapy for free. Insofar as
psychoanalysis becomes a province of the middle class it will be corrupted. It
should be available
HB: You allude to the occult often in your work. You
describe Ferenczi, For example, attending a seance, and Freud holding back.
What is the relationship between the two worlds? Is repetition compulsion, for
instance, a psychoanalytic way of talking about what simply used to be called a
curse?
AP: Yes, absolutely.
HB: And you talk about phobias as a psychoanalytic way of
referring to what used to be called possession. Is it a case of the age-old
superstitions being outfitted with a new vocabulary?
AP: That's right. Inevitably, there's an overlap and an
evolution of vocabularies.
The reason I'm interested in occult phenomenon is it's a way
of describing whatever doesn't fit into our patterns of intelligibility.
There's a whole range of experience that is fundamentally unintelligible though
it absolutely preoccupies us and we're forever trying to find ways of talking
about it. At one end, the ways we have of talking that really are spurious and
woolly. At the other end, we're over-scientized. It's very difficult to find a
good language for what could loosely be described as mystical experience.
HB: You allude to paradox all the time. Why do you find it
so interesting?
AP: Because it defies the illusion of alternatives. The
problem of binary structures of thought is they limit the field; they limit the
range of ways of thinking. One of the things we do in psychoanalysis is show
people the paradoxical nature of their acts, the fact that they're always doing
at least two things at once, and that to call these acts contradictory
oversimplifies the conversation. In any one thing that we're doing, an awful
lot of people -- an awful lot of different aspects of ourselves -- participate.
If we create impossible choices, we create impossible lives.
If the choice is either you love someone or you hate someone, you're in deep
trouble if you want to have a relationship. You don't get pure state feeling,
you always get a mixture. Paradox is a semi-impressive word, an abstract word,
to describe the mixture, the mixture and irony. The multiplicity of internal
voices means you are deeply ironized. There's likely to be an ironic point of
view in there somewhere.
HB: So for you, paradox is not something to avoid but to
court, as when Neils Bohr, the physicist, said, "No progress without
paradox."
AP: It's the opposite of scapegoating. Once we acknowledge
there aren't bad people over there and good people over here but actually we're
all in one way or another implicated in all these schemes that we're trying to
get rid of, it's very different. In a world of paradox, there can be no
scapegoats because we couldn't locate all the bad things in one person or one
group.
HB: If we lived in a world of paradox only, wouldn't we be completely paralyzed?
AP: I'm not sure. Having grown up in a world of
contradiction, as we have, one could end up feeling paralyzed rather than
inspired by paradox. Actually, paradox can be empowering, because it allows
one's own complexity.
HB: You write, "It is, indeed, dismaying how quickly
psychoanalysis has become the science of he sensible passions, as though the
aim of psychoanalysis was to make people more intelligible to themselves rather
than to realize how strange they are." But how would we ever be anything
if we were forever suspended between possibilities?
AP: You can't help but act. We're making choice all the
time. What interests me about psychoanalysis is it's about how complicated we
can let ourselves be and at the same time have the kind of lives we want. And
find ways of thinking out what a good life is. That's why, for me,
psychoanalysis is really beginning. It's not remotely all over. I think we are
just -- I am just -- getting a glimpse of internal multiplicity, of how there
are ways we evolve to anesthetize ourselves, how certain voices or sounds or
rhythms are muffled, modularized or disavowed.
HB: It seems your Freud is haunted by Sartre, your
psychoanalysis haunted by existential psychology.
AP: For me, Sartre's critique of psychoanalysis is still very
interesting. At its worse, the idea of the unconscious is the worst version of
bad faith, the perfect alibi for never taking responsibility. If somebody comes
to me and says, I can do anything I want, I want to talk to them about their
parents. On the other hand, If somebody comes to me and says, my parents have
ruined my life, I want to talk to them about the anxiety they have about making
choices. You need both perspectives.
HB: One of my favorite of your essays is
"Psychoanalysis and Idolatry" (in "On Kissing, Tickling, and
Being Bored".) You portray Freud's inner circle, largely Jewish, meeting
in his room filled with masks, icons, idols of all kinds, and you say that to
be a Jew was not just a question of belief; it was at least as much a question
of disbelief, of the overturning of idols and beliefs, including Jewish
beliefs. You depict Freud in this respect as absolutely Jewish.
AP: That's absolutely right. And for me, it's a way of
discovering a kind of trans-generational affiliation, because to be a British
Jew is a strange thing. We're more assimilated. There's little Jewish-English
culture to provides a context I want to affiliate to.
HB: And so you write about Philip Roth and Karl Kraus, as
well as Isaac Rosenberg.
AP: One of the things I'm working out in the books is about
being a British Jew. Kitaj and Lucien Freud -- those painters give me something
of what I am looking for.
HB: You talk about common-sense analysts, like Anna Freud
and Erich Fromm, and bizarre analysts like Lacan. Is your work a sort of
domesticated Lacan?
AP: If you are interested in psychoanalysis, I can't see how
you can avoid being interested in Lacan, who I think is fabulous. I don't like
a lot of what he's given birth to, but the writing is astonishingly
interesting. He's definitely an important figure for me. I've read him not
rabbinically but with a lot of pleasure.
In a way, Lacan would like to think that everybody after him
could only domesticate him. I feel consciously what I'm doing is using the bits
and pieces of anybody, and I mean anybody, who comes along, to say whatever it
is I find myself wanting to say. And the reason I have so many quotes in
"Terrors and Experts" is because other people have said great things.
HB: More than your other books, "Terrors and
Experts" is a book of quotations, yours and others. You show yourself to
be quite a connoisseur of quotes.
AP: I am. I love quotes, and the way in which they can be in
circulation. The end of "Mr. Sammler's Planet" someone, maybe
Sammler, says, good things have to be said, have a heart. I feel that. I love
it when people say good things, myself included, and I want them to be in
circulation. That's part of my project, too.
HB: In your essay on Karl Kraus (in "On
Flirtation") , Kraus says all that's left to us is quotation; we are each
other's thoughts. How utterly contemporary that sounds. But Kraus feels it as
an erosion of individuality, the result of mass media -- in his day,
newspapers. It's not something he applauds.
AP: There are senses in which I would like the erosion of
individuality. Certain aspects of self are important, other aspects
circumstantial. An overprotective version of the self, the idea of the self as
private property or as virgin territory, is a problem in psychoanalysis: What
is one protecting oneself from? Why should one need to guard oneself in that
way? If guarding oneself is a compulsion, or an unexamined assumption, that
seems to me to be worth investigating or redescribing.
I think we should steal each other's ideas. I don't mind if
anybody appropriates my ideas. At its best, there would be a commonwealth of
good sentences.
HB: You quote Wordsworth, from "The Prelude," on
the primacy of childhood:
Our simple childhood sits upon a throne
That hath more power than all the elements.
In Freudianism, as in most forms of psychology, an ounce of
childhood is worth a ton of adulthood. Why?
AP: In his great book, "Centuries of Childhood,"
Philip Aries points out that childhood was invented in the 17th century. We
live, today, in a cult of the child, and that's very interesting because it
says something about an anxiety about adulthood. Obviously, ideas about
childhood are inventions of adults; children are constructed by adults. All our
fears about childhood are questions about what kind of adult you want to
produce. They are fundamentally conflicts about adulthood.
HB: Freudianism is under fire from so many sides -- from the
computer model of the mind, the bio-chemical model, the trauma theorists,
Hobson's dream theory. It's an ambush.
AP: This is good. I really think we should celebrate this.
People should be coming at it from every points of view. And then we can see
what it looks like afterwards. After, say, a neuro-biologist has done
psychoanalysis, what does it look like? Do we end up thinking it's a total waste
of time?
For me, psychoanalysis, like Freud, is inexhaustible. I may
tire of it, who knows, but it's more like reading Shakespeare than like reading
some fad. It's literature. Psychoanalysts shouldn't be trying to placate all
these scientists. It's silly; it's not a religion, it's not a political party;
it's not something you defend like that. Psychoanalysis is not that important.
It's important if you like it, but it doesn't matter if it passes. Things do
pass. When people find -- when I find -- a better story, that will be fine. It
wouldn't matter to me if Freud is disproved.
HB: If Freud is like Shakespeare, in what sense can he be
disproved?
AP: Exactly. The question, when one goes on reading this
stuff, is does it give one more life? It still does for me. I'll go on reading
Freud.
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