The Weary Sons of Freud

Fellini

Editor’s Introduction

This book, originally entitled Les Fils de Freud sont fatigués,* demonstrates the combination of multi-disciplinary interests and political concern in the thinking of Catherine Clément since the late 1960s when she was teaching moral philosophy at the Sorbonne (after 1968, at Paris I), writing on Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of tribal ritual, and participating in Lacan’s Ecole Freudienne de Paris. During this period she was also writing book reviews and organizing round-table discussions for La Nouvelle Critique, the theoretical journal of the Parti Communiste Français, for which, in March 1975, she also edited an issue on the women’s movement. She is a reader of culture from many angles, drawing upon critical insights from anthropology and ethics as well as history and psychoanalysis, but the central issue in her writing has remained the same: the possibility of happiness, which she conceives of as a simultaneously psychic and political goal.

Her contributions to a well known text of French feminism, La jeune née,† typify her approach to the politics of culture. In a first section, ‘The Guilty Party’, Clément uses Michelet and Freud together to point out parallels between the symptoms exhibited by witches in the sixteenth century and by female hysterics in the nineteenth. Her argument is that the marginal status of both groups of women, simultaneously celebrated and condemned for their bodies by a culture obsessed with feminine sexuality as a danger to social order, led to similar body languages: demonic possesion and neurotic anaesthesia fulfilled women’s desire to escape bodily repressions but as forms of social and medical malady, they also prevented women from putting an end to that repression. The sorceresses were executed; the hysterics disappeared into the concerned embrace of the families their symptoms were meant to throw off balance.

Witches and hysterics were frequently invoked in the French feminisms of the early 70s as figures of freedom and defiance: Sorcières was an early radical-feminist periodical, and a popular Paris café and meeting-place for feminists was named ‘Carabosse’ after the wicked witch in The Sleeping Beauty. But Clément emphasizes that such women’s spectacular body language failed to transform the social structures (the Church, the masculinization of folk medicine and reproductive technique, the desexualizing hypocrisy of the bourgeois family) that had produced such psychosomatic displacements in the first place. Her goal, then, is to acknowledge the wild creativity of such performances (which she likens to the tarantella, or spider-dance, carried out by young women in southern Italy, dancing out their ‘possession’ — that is, their resistance to the expectations and enclosure of marriage — in a frenzied rite of passage) but also to analyze the historical conditions in which such temporary escapes were the only possibility. She ends by suggesting that the past must be read in order to reveal what needs to be changed in the present: both the power behind the gaze of male observers of witches and hysterics and the continuing entrapment of women in oppressive social and symbolic systems. ‘Rather than toward incompatible syntheses and imaginary transitions, let us go toward real transitions and compatible syntheses.… Rather than looking at the spectacle of attacks, let us turn this look, this look that isn’t ours, elsewhere, and let it see. Let it see both what it was looking at before — and us.‡

In the dialogue with Hélène Cixous that concludes The Newly Born Woman, Clément spells out a central contrast between her version of the politics of culture and Cixous’s psycho-poetic cultural politics. Asserting (with Georges Bataille) irrepressible desire as the motor of change, the unconscious energies that resist repression by speaking in passionate, disruptive forms different from the discourses of conceptual mastery and class power, Cixous says, ‘I think that what cannot be oppressed, even in the class struggle, is the libido — desire; it is in taking off from desire that you will revive the need for things to really change. Desire never dies, but it can be stifled for a long time.§ Clément’s view is more specific and more optimistic. She asks whose desire is at stake in such an assertion: ‘That level of description … seem[s] to me of the order of myth, of poetry. It describes a sort of collective subject, fictitious, desiring — a huge entity by turns free and revolutionary, or subjugated, by turns sleeping or awake.… In reality these aren’t subjects.’ She goes on not to deny the relevance of ‘desire’ to political action but to ask why intellectuals so easily believe that the will to change has been extinguished. Do they overlook the degrees of progress in on-the-ground class struggle because ‘they are in a position where work on language and work on the imaginary have fundamental importance and can put blinders on them’?

This exchange is classic; it foregrounds the central points of the debate in French feminism between the ‘realist’ analyses of Marxism and the poetries of desire invoked by psychoanalytically oriented, academic feminist groups such as psych et po.‖ Clément’s position remained the same throughout the storms accompanying this fundamental disagreement. In ‘Enclave/Esclave’, an article written for the feminist issue of L’Arc,a she described the experience of being shouted down at a panel discussion of Marxism and feminism, when other women accused her, as a Communist, of echoing hyper-rational, authoritarian concepts derived from men. In her afterword to this meeting, she defends the strategic value of using coherent public discourses, however tainted they might seem by masculine mastery; otherwise, she asks, what happens to the possibility of debate among women, as well as between women and men? She also criticizes the belief that preserving women’s positions as outsiders to such discourse, celebrating their ability to say ‘that’s not it, that’s still not it’, as Julia Kristeva had urged in an interview the previous year,b could bring about significant changes in the social system that excludes women. Do not feminine delirium, hysteria, ecstasy finally support the order that tolerates such states as temporary or finally imprisonable deviations? Clément also calls for attentiveness to the relationships between diverse women’s class and professional positions and their interpretations of the state of the world — and of the psyche.

These concerns persist in The Weary Sons of Freud. Yet Clément’s early and later work on psychoanalysis, including her 1981 study of Lacan,c demonstrates that she has never rejected psychoanalytic theory. Instead, she has attempted to integrate its insights into a Marxist theory of the subject. In her writing of the early seventies, she attempted a philosophical articulation between psychoanalytic and Marxist theories of subjectivity.d And she drew upon this synthesis in studies of elite and popular culture in her Miroirs du sujet,e in which she argues that Lacan’s mirror stage is a concept particularly useful to Marxist cultural critique because the false recognition of self at that early stage of individual development is reactivated by the ideological fix built into a variety of cultural forms through which the subject is inserted into conservative gender and spectator positions: myth, film, opera.

Clément’s argument, then, is not with psychoanalytic theory but with psychoanalysis as a social (and economic) practice. This is an issue that preoccupied her for several years before she wrote Les Fils de Freud. In an otherwise withering dismissal of an attack on psychoanalysis,f she wrote a conclusion indicating what this reactionary book failed to do and defining what a Marxist assessment of psychoanalysis should do instead: ‘A rigorous strategy of criticizing psychoanalysis as an institution at the points where its ideological weaknesses call for it is necessary, but one that acknowledges systematically the irreversible accomplishments of the science founded by Freud: on this condition, psychoanalysis can escape from the worthless bourgeois rock in which it is still half imprisoned’.g This sentence could stand as an epigraph for The Weary Sons of Freud. Clément’s target is the theoretical and literary direction that psychoanalysis has taken in France where imitators of Freud and Lacan have adopted self-aggrandizing modes of speaking and writing while abandoning the responsibility of treating patients or of confronting the social meaning of the exchange whereby they offer a listening ear in return for so many francs in payment from their analysands. She respects the vocabularies and techniques of analysis, but she calls into question the motives of many of its practitioners.

Defining psychoanalysts as a particular class of the intelligentsia, she argues that they are the nouveaux riches of the intellectual establishment, eager to mystify the cash nexus of their profession. To do so, they play at belles lettres, publishing exploitative second-hand versions of their clients’ narratives and performing allusive punning language games for ever more restricted coteries. Her mocking portrait of pseudo-Lacanian ‘gurus’ combines the detachment of the anthropologist with the indignation of a serious student of psychoanalysis who has been an analysand herself. Although she points out certain precedents for the anti-therapeutic trend — Freud’s resigned avowal that he lacked the time to be both scientist of the mind and a miracle-worker for his patients, Lacan’s conviction that the goal of analysis was the patient’s recognition of incurable lack rather than any attainment of fantasized plenitude — she locates the contemporary problem at the intersection of the academic appropriation of psychoanalysis and the lack of systematic cultural education in the process by which the analysand becomes an analyst. Freud and Lacan knew languages, myth, literature and the sciences and used them provocatively and precisely; their imitators, knowing less, mystify their knowledges more. And they turn their backs on the less prestigious and less predictable processes of treatment as a means of psychic cure.

Clément defines her own intervention as an effort to resist self-deception, on her part and on the part of others. She structures the book around an alternation between objectively presented chapters of socio-historical commentary on psychoanalysis as an institution and autobiographical sections of self-analysis in which she recounts the interaction of social and psychic determinants in her own life as a Jew, the daughter of a nouveau riche father, and a woman. All three categories of marginality alert her to the dialectic between the social and the psychic self, shaped in response to expectations derived from the ethnic and class position of parents, fellow schoolchildren, teachers and friends (including friends who are psychoanalysts). These ‘inside’ views are meant as a counter-demonstration, as episodes of self-interpretation as free as possible from the blinders of unconscious distortion and professional vanity. Self-analysis and self-criticism are similar activities, Clément argues, although they are carried out in different situations; both bring the subject face to face with her own history in the interest of greater collective as well as individual freedom, and both are necessary for psychoanalysts and for psychoanalysis as a social activity. Only the institution’s consciousness of its past and of its practitioners’ motives in the present can keep the critical edge and the liberatory potential of psychoanalysis from decaying into deadening and pretentious dogma.

After an often harsh and occasionally amusing critique of psychoanalytic blindness, Clément offers two counterexamples. The first is the case of Madame Victoire, a cleaning woman whose analysis led her to extraordinary skill in the attentive listening, the ‘ear’ of the psychoanalyst, but whose class denied her any access to training. What are the economic rules and the ideological assumptions that close this particular subject out of a profession for which she has carried out such a successful apprenticeship? Another, more utopian, example of analytic aptitude that challenges institutionalized discourses is the case of Georg Groddeck, the German analyst from whom Freud took the use of the term ‘Es’ (Id) to describe the process of the primordial unconscious. Clément’s last chapter is a homage to this writer/analyst who, in his Das Buch vom Es,h addresses a series of letters to a woman friend, explaining the logic of psychoanalysis and assuring her of its potential for bringing greater freedom and pleasure into psychic life. Groddeck signed himself ‘Patrik Troll’ in this book, and Clément concludes with a lyrical celebration of the garden of paradise into which Groddeck’s impish troll invites the reader, to enjoy a blissful series of transgressions of the rules the id has never obeyed.

As this summary suggests, Clément adapts the structure and the style of her own writing to reinforce her political questioning. As a result, The Weary Sons