Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >I read through the Modern Library Giant collection of Freud back in 1949
> >or so and was impressed at first.
>
> Lemme see if I've got this right - your very vocal opinions about
> Freud are based on reading an anthology 55 years ago?
No. You really do have trouble accurately paraphrasing a view you do not
share. I tossed that in to indicate that my point of departure was an
acceptance of Freudian views. My rejection of Freud came _later_, based
on _other_ thinking and reading.
>
> > Trilling even impressed me in his use
> >of Freudian concepts. What started me being suspicious was _exactly_
> >arguments like this: i.e., psychoanalytic arguments were never about a
> >shared world but about _you_.
>
> That's just not true. The "you" - or "me" - is formed by one's
> personal history, especially early history with one's parents.
What are you talking about. I have said _nothing_ about how a "you" or a "Me" is formed; I have described the structure of Freudian replies to critics beginning with Freud himself. And you yourself in this thread (and on the whole in your general tendency when you are writing polemics) illustrate my point. Freudians on the whole simply cannot reply to criticism without questioning the motive of the critic or "explaining it away." And the same tendency clearly pervades clinical practice as well. It was not just Freud but up to the very present therapists influenced by him who attempt to bully patients into accepting the therapist's label.
You may really not be aware of just how often you reply not to an argument someone makes but rather to the alleged motives of the person in making that argument. Many decades ago I began to discover that this sort of argumentation seemed particularly prevalent in attempts to expound psychoanalytic theory, and I increasingly came to suspect that the probable reason was the tendency of Freudians to follow the old advice to attorneys, if both the facts and the law are against you, discuss the opposing attorney.
That in itself didn't 'turn me off Freud, but it did open my ears as it were to critiques of Freud.
> But
> those experiences are shaped, as Freud said, by "class and nation"
> and the demands of civilization. The therapeutic process is the work
> of a dyad, and the relationship evokes all kinds of other
> relationships in the lives of both patient and analyst.
No comment. This is simply too general a claim to be debated on a maillist.
> > From that point on I became steadily more
> >skeptical of the whole thing. If the psychoanalysts had anything to say
> >about the world, they wouldn't be so concerned to poison the wells of
> >discourse and cut off debate in advance.
> You & Carl Remick are the ones dismissing psychoanalysis with words
> like "quackery." How is that not poisoning the wells and cutting off
> debate?
Damn it! Read my posts. Every one contains a repudiation of Carl's line of argument. I began the first one by noting that Carl's line had forced me into the position of defending Freud. And a later post tried to point out that Freud has asked a damn important question (though I thought his answer wrong). Do you really assume that your readers won't have read my posts and will believe your paraphrases of them. I'm not that bad a writer, and you shouldn't be that bad a reader.
> >The comparison with Marx is silly because one can substitute so many
> >other names. Why all the excitement about Calvin, or pro and con about
> >Christianity?
>
> I can't remember the last time I read a "Calvin was a quack/Calvin is
> finally really dead" piece. Sure Christianity is controversial, but
> it's never treated in the same summon-to-dismiss fashion.
>
> > This is just another way of foreclosing debate by shifting
> >it away from the world to the (hidden) motives of the critic. Its
> >prevalence among defenders of Freud constitutes a heavy criticism of his
> >worth.
>
> As I've said before, psychoanalysis is a lot like lit crit. You take
> every word, every trope, every association very seriously, and ask
> why that word, trope, or association at that particular moment? How
> does that choice resonate with other patterns in a life or a text? In
> this case, I find it very interesting that people constantly bring up
> Freud and Marx to dismiss them.
You illustrate my point again. You are not talking about either Freud or Marx, you are talking about the "unconscious motives" of those who don't bow down to Freud or Marx. This is exactly the kind of argument that repeated over and over again in "defense" of Freud convinced me that probably Freud was indefensible, since his defenders were, it seemed, more interested in attacking the motives of his critics than in expounding his theories.
> Why the need to dismiss them
> repeatedly?
There you go again. It is simply not a legitimate question. But if I were to propose an answer, I would say for the same reason it is endlessly necessary to dismiss creationists. Psychoanalytic theory as a whole tends to disrupt reasonable exploration of the world by endlessly hauling in irrelevancies.
> It's like Freud's line about negation - an association
> with a negative sign in front of it. How else would you read
> Wordsworth's wondering if Lucy should be dead?
More of the same.
Carrol
>
> Doug
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