rhetoric and psychoanalysis, yet again

Music: Harold Budd: Luxa (1996) As most academics know, summer is for writing. This summer I had high hopes to work on four projects: a solo-authored essay and three co-authored essays. Well, I at least got the first one done and out, but the other three I am just now getting to (sorry Adria, Chris, and Ken). Part of the problem is that I traveled a bit, but the biggest albatross that got in the way was the tenure packet. I knew it would be work; I didn't realize it was so much work, and that hours upon hours and still yet hours would be spent policing periods, colons, and "table rows." Hell hath no fur(r)y like an anally retentive bureaucrat.

In any event, I managed to bang-out a beginning to a new essay I hope my co-author and I can wrap up in a few weeks. I think it's possible (though I don't know what he's got going on). I plan to draft as much as I can next week and punt it over. I'm leaving town to get away with some friends for a few days, so while the fire is hot---it'll have to wait. A teaser:

Sixth Myths of Psychoanalysis: A Post-amble for Rhetorical Studies

In my opinion, psychoanalysis can only be studied at the university at research level. Some of my colleagues disagree, but I think that students only reach the point when they can approach analytic thinking at the end of their studies. There is no point in teaching students to construct main psychoanalytic concepts after high school, because they have nothing to go back over. Analysis is retrospective, it demands a return. It constructs in deconstructing.
--Jean Laplanche[1]

In an interview with his translator and fellow psychoanalyst Martin Stanton, Jean Laplanche provocatively denies a direct link between psychoanalytic training and research. He claims "a doctorate in psychoanalysis is . . . the same thing as having a doctorate in letters," for "no one thinks a doctorate of letters entails the right to be a writer."[2] At some level, Laplanche is expressing cynicism toward the various credentialing psychoanalytic institutes that hamper academic research by imposing the prescriptive demands of the regulated clinic on to those whom they credential. At another level, however, the famed "critical archaeologist of Freudian concepts" disavows any "distinction between the clinical and the theoretical."[3] Such a distinction is instrumental and prescriptive, establishing the "social aim" of the cure when there is much more to the enterprise than the clinic. Laplance clarifies: "I think that all research in psychoanalysis touches on two or more of the following realms: the theoretical, the clinical, psychoanalysis outside of the realm of the cure, and the history of psychoanalytic ideas."[4] While psychoanalysis is unquestionably a therapeutic practice that emerged in treating clients, producing results (not always preferred results) for those suffering from psychosomatic symptoms, it has also emerged as a metaphysics ("metaphsychology"), a social or cultural theory, a mode of critique, and a way of understanding the self and others. It is both a perspective on the human subject as well as a method of interpretation. Jacques Lacan even maintained that psychoanalysis was an ethic.[5]

Despite these many "realms," as Laplance puts it, the entire enterprise of psychoanalysis is often dismissed by its distracters on the basis of a widely held-yet nevertheless erroneous-myth: science (whatever this is) has disproved psychoanalysis as a clinical practice. In response to such a statement we answer with two questions: "whose psychoanalysis?" and "which clinical practice?" Such an instrumental generalization presumes precisely the scientistic values, as well as the monolithic discourse, that Laplance urges us to reject. Moreover, within the context of the theoretical humanities, such a myth subordinates interpretive and analytic discourse to the values of prediction.

Even taken at face value, that suggestion that all of psychoanalysis has been scientifically disproved is false. For example, although there is disagreement among scholars as to whether Freud was best understood as a medical scientist, a social theorist, or both,6 the debate between those who find his understanding of the interpretation of dreams compelling and the proponents of more recent neurophysiological models is far from over,7 as recent theories have worked assiduously to reconcile the two.8 And although a large number of Freud's assumptions-the hydraulic model of the nervous system and feminine sexuality, to name a couple-are by contemporary standards demonstrably false, as John E. Gedo has argued, Freud's analytical technique, his concept of the unconscious, his understanding of repetition compulsion, and his insistence on the importance of early childhood experience have all been clinically and even scientifically validated to various degrees (e.g., PET scans for the existence of non-conscious brain activity).9 Much of what Freud asserted as scientific conjecture turned out wrong, but not all. Moreover, a focus on Freud's early scientific aspirations completely ignores his shift to cultural and social theory and critique in his lesser read works, such as Civiliztion and Its Discontents (1930) or Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921).

The insights of psychoanalysis are not reducible to what neurophysiology or brain research bears out, then, but nor do they contract to Freud either. Rather, in this essay we endeavor a retrospective of the abuse and neglect of psychoanalysis in the field of U.S. rhetorical studies to encourage further, less reticent research from both psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic perspectives. Our thesis is simply that a psychoanalytic perspective is useful for critical work. Unfortunately, it has been misunderstood among rhetorical scholars, and it is difficult to advance any positive claim without a ground-clearing. To this end, then, we present a "post-amble" or retrospective prologue by first discussing the reception of psychoanalysis in rhetorical studies, suggesting why its insights have been slow to up-take in the field. Then, we proceed by addressing six of the most prominent myths one reads or hears (usually informally or in a classroom setting) about psychoanalysis. Finally, we conclude with a summary of what we think are the most compelling reasons a psychoanalytic perspective is useful for critical work.