Freud & Psychoanalysis was Re: The death...

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Dec 29 00:52:47 PST 1999


Carrol:
>Nothing very deep -- an intellectual embarassment over sloppy
>use of a rather important term, "fetish." (The next step, why should
>that be embarassing, or more embarassing than other probable
>sloppinesses in any textw written quickly, is the illegitimate one
>all forms of psychoanalysis seem to make. The best critique I
>know of is Timpanaro's *The Freudian Slip.*)

Why not stick to your initial statement and say that the concept of the Unconscious is indeed a fetish, in the anthropological sense of the word: an object that is revered for magical causal powers supposedly inherent in it (a fetish is here different from an idol, which symbolically stands for a deity)? A concept -- a product of mental work -- can be a fetish object in this sense, not just snakeskin, a piece of wood, etc., no?

Also, in a way comparable to how commodity fetishism works, the concept of the Unconscious erases what's social and historical about the production of the "individual." It makes you assume that what's interesting about the "self" begins with a person's childhood within a nuclear family (the father, the mother, the son). Even when psychoanalysts engage in what is said to be a social analysis, society is imagined as if it were a nuclear family or an individual writ large. The premises of psychoanalysis exclude from consideration the conditions of emergence of what is said to be "psychological." "Psychology" didn't always exist, just as wage labor didn't always exist.


>A number of people from the most varied perspectives have
>noted that the peculiar flaw to psychoanalysis is that its
>propositions are never about the world or about some
>model, correct or incorrect, of the human mind, but about
>*you*.

Yes -- no wonder psychoanalysis is endlessly fascinating for Doug. We'll just have to invent and give him another sex toy (or a gift certificate for massage)! Anyhow, psychoanalysis was not possible before the emergence of the nuclear family, "companionate marriage," the mass adoption of the ideology of romantic love, "sexuality" and "sexual identity" as the "truth" of the self, etc. If anyone doubts this, compare, for instance, Sophocles's _Antigone_ and Jean Anouilh's play of the same title, and see the difference.

Yoshie



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