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- 2019 (299) (remove)
This chapter takes to task Elisabeth Roudinesco’s biography, Freud in His Time and Others, for innumerable factual errors and, even worse, for the assumption that she is presenting the objective truth about Freud. Three traditions of Freud biography are delineated: the hagiographic, of which Roudinesco’s is the latest example, the Freud-bashing, and the revisionist, which sees Freud as having created something incontestably great but also as having been tragically flawed as a human being. Roudinesco’s errors range from the trivial, to the mildly compromising, to the inexcusable and disqualifying. With respect to Jung, Roudinesco is shown to rely on Deirdre Bair’s biography, which is itself unreliable, instead of on her own reading of the primary sources. Roudinesco’s true colors are displayed above all in her treatment of Freud’s sexuality, as when she asserts that he has been >accused< of masturbation, claims that an affair with his sister-in-law >doubtless never happened,< and alleges that Freud had a >horror of adultery.< The all-too-human Freud was very different from the lifeless icon worshiped by Roudinesco.
This chapter tackles the perennial critical conundrum of Iago’s motivation. Agreeing with Coleridge’s assessment of his >motiveless malignity,< it argues that all attempts to explain Iago’s character in terms of individual psychology prove inadequate and that he can be more satisfactorily understood by employing Fromm’s concept of >social character.< Iago is the prototype of early modern capitalist man who exhibits the >pathology of normalcy< and exemplifies three of Fromm’s four >unproductive orientations<—exploitative, hoarding, and marketing. Iago’s lack of a sense of self leads him to destroy rather than to create, and thus manifests the impulse for negative transcendence, or what Fromm terms necrophilia. As necrophilia is the most malignant form of the anal character, this analysis accounts for the pervasiveness of anal imagery in Othello, including in the speeches of the otherwise feeble Clown. Iago, neither devil nor human, is at once a product of his age and the quintessence of all those, from Caligula to Hitler, for whom madness is a way of life because they seek to transcend through destruction the limits of human existence.
This chapter employs Caroline Polmear’s contemporary reinterpretation of Michael Balint’s concept of the basic fault as a lens through which to read Othello and Macbeth. In Polmear’s view, borderline pathology arises due to a traumatic rupture in the primal bond between mother and child, and it can take the form of either ocnophilia (clinging to people) or philobatism (clinging to spaces). It is proposed that Othello and Macbeth are representations of these complementary character-types. Othello cannot tolerate any separation from Desdemona, while Macbeth retreats into schizoid isolation. The handkerchief, the loss of which is tantamount to the loss of Desdemona’s love, was received by Othello from his mother at the time of her death, while in Macbeth the rupture of the mother-child bond is figured both in Macduff’s having been >untimely ripped< from his mother’s womb and by Lady Macbeth’s description of killing the baby that was nursing at her breast. Two clinical examples—one of an actual patient, the other of Philip Roth—are offered to illustrate the reciprocal interplay of literature and psychoanalysis. It is argued that the traditional notion of >applied psychoanalysis< should be replaced by what might be called, following Shoshana Felman, >implied psychoanalysis,< or what Fromm has called >literary psychoanalysis.<
Groddeck’s Lessons
(2019)
This chapter examines both >Groddeck’s teaching,< in the sense of the enduing value of his contributions to psychoanalysis, as well as >Groddeck’s lessons,< that is, what we can learn from his blind spots. The question of who is a psychoanalyst stands at the center of Groddeck’s relationship to Freud, and in accepting Groddeck’s assertion that transference and resistance are the >hubs of treatment,< Freud offers his most expansive definition of a psychoanalyst. Groddeck’s genius is most fully displayed in The Book of the It, the epistolary form of which casts him at once in the roles of analyst and patient. From Groddeck’s biography, it is clear that he was an extremely traumatized individual, as is further attested by his analysis in Letter 25 of his penchant for the number 26,783. But Groddeck does not recognize that he has been traumatized, and his one-sided theory that the It is >responsible for everything< reflects his inability to give due weight to environmental factors. Despite his astonishing candor, Groddeck never discusses his divorce from his first wife or the tragic story of his daughter Barbara, wounds that must have too painful for him to expose to the gaze of the reading public.