On Sat, 2 Oct 1999 10:36:38 -0400 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> You
> actually don't think that "Freud's version of the mind and its drives" is
> correct, do you? Have you read _Inventing the Psychological: Toward a
> Cultural History of Emotional Life in America_, eds. Joel Pfister & Nancy
> Schnog (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998), for instance? You might find the book
> interesting.
(I haven't read Pfister and Schnog).
There is a real problem here. The charge that Freud's account is ahistorical is, in many respects, correct. But this doesn't say much - that's Freud's point. The psychical life of the mind *isn't* historical. Yes, it is embedded contingently in history, but its "reality" is deeply and profoundly ahistorical. So claiming that psychoanalysis has no social grounding is, in many respect, a fine and dandy claim. But a historicist account simply cannot explain the pscyhe then (see Joan Copjec's book, Read My Desire for a critique of Foucault from a Lacanian perspective here). Psychoanalysis remembers what hermeneutics forgets (to spin Wellmer's phrase about critical theory) - that the reality that we live in is a product of our imaginary. Fantasy makes reality possible.
ken