The death of John L. Simon, Lincoln Brigade

t byfield tbyfield at panix.com
Tue Dec 28 11:40:41 PST 1999



> Date: Mon, 27 Dec 1999 22:07:45 -0500
> From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>


> Even when psychoanalysis attempts to address the social, it can only posit
> it as if it were an individual writ large. In psychoanalysis, history as
> such doesn't exist -- only "ontogeny that recapitulates phylogeny" as in
> _Totem and Taboo_, _Moses and Monotheism_, and _Civilization and Its
> Discontents_. Here, individualism and organicism work as evil dialectical
> twins.

this seems like a very strange claim, for a number of reasons. (1) practitioners, students, and advocates of psychonanalysis hardly sit around agreeing with each other about much, so how can you dismiss it as a unified and disembodied practice? (2) though it certainly speaks of the 'individual,' as a practice it's fundamentally social; and the theory of that practice is founded on the dynamics of those relations. that's not to say that i'm giving some blanket endorsement to the ways it struc- tures social relations at all, but you can't ignore that fact. (3) its own claims as to the relationship between history and its theories are hardly the only ones; i could cite theweleit, who made some very sharp observations about how its early mil- ieu biased the early theorization (in _male fantasies_ vol. 1) or sebastianaro timpanaro's *debunking* of its associative me- thods from the perspective of a manuscript historian (in _the freudian slip_) as other views. these views aren't mysterious- ly 'external to psychoanalysis,' any more than the history of marxian writings are 'external to marxism.' (4) and generally speaking, the question you bring up--the relation between psy- choanalysis and socio-historical questions has been a serious question for decades, so citing freud's 'historical' writings as though there aren't any others--others that have played de- cisive roles in development of the theory and practice--seems a bit silly.

cheers, t



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