Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics 9780801463334

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Wider Social Stage
2. Girls Will Be Boys: Gender, Envy, and the Freudian Social Contract
3. Anna-Antigone: Experiments in Group Upbringing
4. The Defense of Psychoanalysis/ The Anxiety of Politics
Conclusion: Ego Politics
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

 IMPIOUS FIDELITY

IMPIOUS FIDELITY

n

Anna Freud, Ps ych oa na l ysis , Pol i t i cs

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2011 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne. Impious fidelity: Anna Freud, psychoanalysis, politics / Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5034-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Psychoanalysis—Political aspects. 2. Psychoanalysis—History. 3. Freud, Anna, 1895-1982. I. Title. BF175.4.S65S744 2012 150.19'52092—dc23 2011022280 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memoriam Julia Davis Stewart (1932–2010)

For indeed because of piety I was called impious. —Sophocles, Antigone

 Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1. A Wider Social Stage

14

2. Girls Will Be Boys: Gender, Envy, and the Freudian Social Contract

50

3. Anna-Antigone: Experiments in Group Upbringing

96

4. The Defense of Psychoanalysis/ The Anxiety of Politics

144

Conclusion: Ego Politics

197

Bibliography

233

Index

241

 Ack nowledgments

This book could not have been written without the original impulse that came from my own very early engagement with the problem of “group upbringing” many years ago in a seminar taught by Edward Steinberg, when I tangled for the first time with the question of family relations beyond the norm and with the idea that normativity may, quite possibly, not be founded in nature. Quite everything was changed after such a realization. Elizabeth Stewart, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Judith Surkis have had a tremendous impact on the pages that follow. As rigorous thinkers, they harness the demands of thought to a personal commitment to justice that transcends private considerations. Because of this, they are capable of transforming private despair into a “writing of anxiety” (the phrase is Lyndsey Stonebridge’s) and—in that very move and countering Freud’s claim that women do not sublimate (his daughter Anna would prove otherwise)— construct a figure of woman who therefore makes good on her claims. They challenge all things: private, personal, and political, as well as normative and transgressive. They therefore muddle me in the best of ways. Three women have been crucial for my thinking about the institutionalization of psychoanalysis. Elizabeth Weed, the long-time director of the Pembroke Center for the Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, not only provided sustained and intelligent interventions into and criticisms of the following chapters, she also gave me important insights into the very problem of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis (and feminism) and any other critical knowledge that may result from such institutionalization. Ona Nierenburg introduced me to many of the materials that were relevant to the problem of the history and the institutionalization of psychoanalysis. My daughter Anna Steinberg has been my toughest critic: she demands absolute and continuous fairness, toward other women and in the negotiations that may arise between living in an institution and thinking and loving. Charles Sheperdson offered not only an incisive reading of the Freudian social contract, but also—quite coincidentally—spoke eloquently at Brown

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University in the spring of 2008 on the relationship between Antigone, psychoanalysis, and the status of literature. Omer Bartov, Lynne Joyrich, Coppelia Kahn, and Bernard Reginster, as well as all of the members of the Pembroke Seminar at Brown University during the academic year of 2007–8 produced engaged and critical readings of the chapter on Anna-Antigone. I also thank those who pressured on the political frontiers, the participants of the Yale University Political Theory Forum, who gave me a wonderfully hard time. Yaron Ezrahi, Ruth HaCohen, and Idith Zertal—my Israeli readers— were invaluable interlocutors in a dialogue that concerned the relationship between psychoanalysis and Jewish identity. I am deeply grateful for their comments and criticisms as regards the force fields within and between psychoanalysis, Israel, and the orphaned subject after 1945. Ruth HaCohen, in her own work on “noise” as a factor of anti-Semitic music and musicological constructions of gentile “harmony,” alerted me to similar structures at play in political theory. Idith Zertal, a profound thinker about national identity, psychoanalysis, gender, and autobiography, forced me to think in more nuanced ways about the relationship between the repression of psychoanalysis and the repression of women (and especially mothers) and how this relationship affects the construction of national identities after 1945. In addition, I am grateful to Yaron Ezrahi and Ian Shapiro, who, as fellow political scientists, challenged my reservations about the future of political theory and thereby extended an open invitation to think other, wider spaces. Earlier versions of chapters 1 and 2 have been published in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. I thank Denise Davis for her superb editorial interventions in these two chapters.

Introduction

We have become accustomed in our tradition of political thought to regard the authority of parents over children, of teachers over pupils, as the model by which to understand political authority. It is just this model . . . that makes the concept of authority in politics so extraordinarily ambiguous. . . . Following the model of the nursery, it is based on a purely temporary superiority and therefore becomes self-contradictory if it is applied to relations that are not temporary by nature—such as the relations of the rulers and ruled. Thus it lies in the nature of the matter—that is, both in the nature of the present crisis in authority and in the nature of our political thought—that the loss of authority which began in the political sphere should end in the private one; and it is naturally no accident that the place where political authority was first undermined, that is, in America, should be the place where the crisis in education makes itself most strongly felt.1 Anna Freud was born in 1895—the same year as the official birth of psychoanalysis. As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has reported it in her biography of Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter, Anna 1. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Present (New York: Penguin, 1977), 190–91; my emphases.

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considered herself psychoanalysis’s twin. And indeed, family relations, both literal and figural, dominate the life and work of the woman who would become the future inheritor of the psychoanalytic movement. This book concerns itself not only with family relations in their most literal and therefore most contingent sense; it also seeks to trace the paths through and by which the structural analysis of kinship relations has had a profound impact on a domain of knowledge that constitutes psychoanalysis’s main object of investigation: the domain of the unconscious. With Anna Freud, the twin and yet inheritor of this new domain, new forms of pressure came to bear on the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious, pressures that may be named its institutionalization and its passage onto a “wider stage”—which is how Sigmund Freud described his own incursions into the domain of politics and culture. Anna Freud is at once the twin of psychoanalysis, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, his son to the extent that she was destined—among all the band of brothers—to inherit her father’s movement after his death and therefore contribute to the transformation of psychoanalysis from a knowledge or theory into an institution, and strangely also his sister, and this to the extent that she was after all also the daughter of the inventor of the Oedipus complex. Not insignificantly, Freud liked to refer to his youngest daughter as “his Anna-Antigone.” All of this leads me to wonder about the extent to which “Anna Freud” does not represent, in the very confusion she generates within the Oedipal system of kinship relations, a point of convergence between politics and psychoanalysis, thereby turning psychoanalysis—and such a turn was already understood by her father—into one of the “impossible professions,” a designation that psychoanalysis has shared with politics and education. Not coincidentally, Anna Freud has often been more widely recognized as a pedagogue rather than an analyst of children. Indeed, she was frequently criticized for having confused psychoanalysis with an educational project. I am here concerned not with writing a biography of Anna Freud’s life; equally I am not immediately interested in an analysis of her personal intentions or motivations. I am not even particularly intent on assessing her life’s work in the more standard sense of a judgment upon her relative loyalty or not to the psychoanalytic cause.2 And, finally, I am also not directly interested in that force field of psychoanalytic wars in which Anna Freud 2. The most comprehensive biography of Anna Freud is Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Anna Freud (New York: Norton, 1988). Other assessments of her life and work are provided by Robert Scholes, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1992); Uwe Henrik Peters, Anna Freud: A Life Dedicated to Children (New York: Schocken, 1985); and Raymond Dyer, Her Father’s Daughter: The Work of Anna Freud (New York: Jason Aronson, 1983).

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found herself in battle against her two great opponents: Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan. This is because both analysts were not immediately interested in those aspects of Freud’s work that interest me: her defense of the ego for a viable, democratic existence. I pursue here perhaps something of a more experimental type of analysis, one that in fact replicates Anna’s own interest in experiments and one that furthermore speaks to the fact of Anna Freud, to her presence as an event within psychoanalysis: she embodies a moment that describes when and how psychoanalysis becomes but also informs a certain politics and a certain education, the first describing the institutionalization of psychoanalysis, the second describing the transmission of a specifically psychoanalytic form of knowledge. I therefore want to think about Anna Freud as a symptom of the history and vicissitudes of psychoanalysis in the context of her father’s legacy. What concerns me is the mode by and in which a certain (auto)biographical element imagines or transforms itself, within psychoanalytic theory and practice, into a notion of a politics and a school. What are the implications, I ask, that follow upon the transformation of psychoanalysis from a knowledge (that of the unconscious) into an institution, whether that be of psychoanalysis, politics, or education? Not coincidentally, it has in fact been just such a transformation that constitutes the essence of an accusation placed before Anna Freud, insofar as she has been criticized for her contribution to the institutionalization of psychoanalysis and therefore to its petrification. For myself, I prefer to think of this institutionalization that Anna Freud undoubtedly brings about not as a petrification but instead as an attempt—and this always in her father’s name—to construct a form of democratic politics founded in the stable and therefore viable defenses of the ego. Nonetheless, she accomplishes this only by negotiating the task of transmitting psychoanalytic knowledge through what I am calling her impious fidelity. The idea of impious fidelity derives from Sophocles’ Antigone, whose heroine is at once radically committed to the law and yet also violently abjected from and by it. Antigone’s commitment to the polis therefore describes a certain kind of fidelity, one that is brought into being only insofar as it also swerves into another place. At play here is what Judith Butler has described as a movement of power that “initiates” the subject but “fails to remain continuous with the power that is the subject’s agency. A significant and potentially enabling reversal occurs when power shifts from its status as a condition of agency to the subject’s ‘own’ agency.”3 I will be arguing that 3. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 12.

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Anna Freud attempted to articulate an idea of the ego that resides just there: in a swerve, in a failure to remain continuous with power, wherein the ego’s own conditions of existence shift into her own agency. This is the essence of impious fidelity. And yet, this is a place that Anna Freud’s most virulent critic, Jacques Lacan, describes as the site of Antigone’s second, other death: a social death, or the death of sociality; the site where the unconscious rules—the Freudian Schauplatz of psychoanalysis. Judith Butler, in an immensely suggestive volume on the claims that Antigone may make on her critics, asks: “If we were to return to psychoanalysis through the figure of Antigone, how might our consideration of this play and this character lay out the possibility of an aberrant future for psychoanalysis, as that mode of analysis becomes appropriated in contexts that could not be anticipated?”4 If we indeed return to psychoanalysis through the figure of Anna-Antigone, then what would be the nature of the swerving, aberrant impiousness that at the same time speaks the language of fidelity? Anna Freud entered psychoanalytic history with a certain burden, with the (perhaps self-imposed) demand of a “piety” that nonetheless always verges, in her own defensive and “Antigonal” actions, on the edges of the “impious.” Despite or maybe because of her gender-troubled family and professional life, she came to be known as a “difficult” person, and indeed as an “underanalyzed patient”—this was Ernest Jones’s assessment of her—due to her almost rabid, watchdog protection of her father’s legacy. She furthermore came to be known as an important theorist and practitioner of child analysis (where it is somewhat unclear whether “child analysis” means that she analyzed children, or whether she was a “child” analyst, in other words Sigmund Freud’s child), but also as a kind of retrograde force in this domain vis-à-vis the more revolutionary Melanie Klein. She has been steadily identified with a current in psychoanalytic theory and practice that is associated with what is generally referred to as “ego psychology,” a current routinely invoked in connection to an American psychoanalysis and by extension, therefore, to adaptations to heteronormative structures and consequently to a betrayal of her father’s fundamental discovery: that is, his discovery of the unconscious. In other words, in her drive to protect, to defend psychoanalysis as a legacy and therefore as an institution, Anna Freud—or so it has been claimed—betrayed psychoanalysis’s essential insight: that subjects are, perhaps even should be, undermined by unconscious desires, desires that her father understood in 4. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 65.

INTRODUCTION

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terms of both the pleasure principle and the death drive. She, in other words, did everything to defend (herself) against her father’s drive (theory). In her need to defend psychoanalysis, to institutionalize it—or so it is yet again claimed—Anna Freud repressed her father’s drive theory; repressed his theory of repression, repressed theory in general. Anna Freud’s life project was to defend and protect the ego, especially the egos of children and of those who had been torn apart by the results of fascist and Nazi dictatorships, by war and by the Holocaust. What she sought were adequate defenses for the ego in order to create stable democratic institutions, whether these be states, schools, or psychoanalytic institutes. Hers were certainly survival tactics, first and foremost for the movement she had inherited from her father and one that in 1939, when she became its new leader, was most certainly not guaranteed to live. How protect her father’s most fundamental discovery—the laws of the unconscious—against totalitarianism, provide for its continued existence by linking it to the democratic project, and yet not run into a fundamental contradiction: the problem that rational, consenting, and choosing subjects cannot be ruled by the unconscious. Psychoanalytic institutions—to play this out on a microscale—cannot train candidates, release candidates into practice, cannot function properly without having the unconscious of the group and its members well under check. In other words, democracy requires—in order for it to function, be ethical and credible—that it get its unconscious under some form of control. The looming threat, otherwise, is a return to a totalitarian logic. In this book, I depart from this place, that is, a place that straddles the theory of the unconscious and the theory of the democratic ego. It is the vicissitudes of unconscious drives in the construction of democracy that drives the chapters that follow. According to most versions of democratic theory, democracy must, in order to function, assume that the constituent members of political institutions operate within this realm as capable of making decisions and choices that address the interests of both the self and of the community. But must these stable egos, in order to be stable, always act on the basis of “rational choice”? Or may they, alternatively, allow other voices to be given a hearing when these voices—and they do this most of the time— exceed the demands of rationality, that is, speak the language of the unconscious? Can democracy account for a self that is not itself; can it account for a subject who is irrational, desiring? Democracy, so Anna Freud will insist, cannot rely on traumatized subjects: a shattered self undermines democracy, and therefore democracy can only be defended if the ego is defended. Such is the import of her most widely read book, written in 1936 under the shadow of Nazism and of imminent exile and entitled appropriately The Ego and Its

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Mechanisms of Defense. One of the guiding threads in the chapters that follow will be this insistence, and it will interrogate the nature of this defense, asking whether the defense of the ego in the name of democratic politics constitutes an inherent contradiction to her father’s theory of the unconscious, whether, in other words, Anna Freud’s defense of the ego constitutes a betrayal: of psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and on the other, of a better democratic politics, one capable of addressing the failures of liberalism—whose limits had been made all too visible during the interwar period. Anna Freud, throughout her life, made claims to “Etwas haben wollen [to want something for oneself].” She wanted something, and as such she inhabited her father’s famous question: What does a woman want? In the internecine relations that come into being in and through “Anna Freud,” between psychoanalytic interpretation and theory, its politics or institutionalization, “wanting” is a central problem. It is first and foremost a problem of reading. In What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference,5 Shoshana Felman writes: I do indeed endorse the necessity—and the commitment—to “exorcize the male mind that has been implanted in us.” But from where should we exorcize this male mind, if we ourselves are possessed by it, if as educated products of our culture we have unwittingly been trained to “read literature as men”—to identify, that is, with the dominating, male-centered perspective of the masculine protagonist, which always takes itself—misleadingly—to be a measure of the universal? (5) How, Felman asks, can one become a resisting reader to such a history of male protagonism? Anna Freud, I propose, struggled with just this sort of question, and it is not fortuitous that Felman employs here a term (“resistance”) that seems to come straight from within psychoanalysis itself. But does in fact resistance come from within or without—of psychoanalysis, of the ego? And, so Felman: “Can reading be truly subsumed by self-defense?” (5). Defense, as well, is a psychoanalytic term, and one that was central to all of Anna Freud’s work. Felman continues: “The danger with becoming a ‘resisting reader’ is that we end up, in effect, resisting reading. But resisting reading for the sake of holding on to our ideologies and preconceptions . . . is what we tend to do in any case. Simply stepping outside literature by becoming a ‘resisting reader’ might not suffice, thus, to debrief us of our ‘male minds’” 5. Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);page numbers appear in the text, and unless indicated otherwise, emphases are Felman’s.

INTRODUCTION

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(6). For these reasons, Felman insists on a care given “never to foreclose or to determine in advance the reading process,” to become trained “to tune into the forms of resistance present in the text, those forms that make up the textual dynamic as a field of clashing and heterogeneous forces and as a never quite predictable potential of surprise” (6). The effort should thus be “not to ‘resist’ the text from the outside but rather to seek to trace within each text its own resistances to itself, its own specific literary, inadvertent textual transgression of its male assumptions and prescriptions” (6). In effect, what Felman is advocating here is a form of impious fidelity, to the extent that she proposes a fidelity to a text’s structuring operations, while also pressing that fidelity into service for a surprising “other,” impious reading. Felman refuses what she calls “a dogmatic summary of feminist theory and scholarship as yet another legislating process of codification of the real and another institutional legitimation and authorization,” opposing such a move with “strategies of reading sexual difference insofar as it specifically eludes codification and resists any legitimizing institutionalization” (8). I find myself hesitant on this last point and would ask the following question: Can we, in fact, legitimately fend off any codification and institutionalization? Do we, as women, indeed want that? What then does or even should a woman want? I am certainly deeply sympathetic to Felman’s claim that this question resists and should resist closure—and that in her case (as in my own) it inhibited her own writing and delayed completion of her book, made the process of reading and writing difficult. Her own experience as a reader and writer exemplified ironically and vitally, in practice, at once the desire and the difficulty, or the self-resistance, not simply of reading as a woman (since what this means is not immediately graspable outside of the prescriptions and beliefs of patriarchal structure) but of assuming one’s own sexual difference in the very act of reading; of assuming, that is, not the false security of an ‘identity’ or a substantial definition . . . but the very insecurity of a differential movement, which no ideology can fix and of which no institutional affiliation can redeem the radical anxiety, in the performance of an act that constantly— deliberately or unwittingly—enacts our difference yet finally escapes our own control. (10) Without doubt, the question of a woman’s identity must resist both a false sense of security and a substantial definition; it cannot fall easy prey to ideological fixity. I suppose that I am less convinced that, therefore, a resistance to all or any forms of institutionalization will or even should redeem what she calls a “radical anxiety” of existence within the world of politics. Are we

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not in danger here of fetishizing difference for its own sake? Nevertheless, I find myself again supportive of her claim that “getting personal” does not guarantee that the story we narrate is wholly ours or that it is narrated in our own voice. In spite of the contemporary literary fashion of feminine confessions and of the recent critical fashion of “feminist confessions,” I will suggest that none of us, as women, has as yet, precisely an autobiography. . . . We have a story that by definition cannot be self-present to us, a story that, in other words, is not a story, but must become a story. And it cannot become a story except through the bond of reading, that is, through the story of the Other . . . insofar as this story of the Other, as our own autobiography, has as yet precisely to be owned. . . . We might be able to engender, or to access, our story only indirectly—by conjugating literature, theory, and autobiography together through the act of reading and by reading, thus, into the texts of culture, at once our sexual difference and our autobiography as missing. (14) The “conjugation” of theory, politics, and (auto)biography is, I submit, an analytic lens through which to move closer to an understanding of Anna Freud’s life project. Such conjugation gets “personal” very quickly, however. Hannah Arendt was deeply concerned about political authority losing itself in the private sphere of the nursery. She read the reduction of the political to the personal as a sign of a crisis. In this sense, I also engage the trite and perhaps now the claim made all too often that the “personal is political” and the possible perturbations that such an equation may provoke for both political and personal identity. “Anna Freud” is emblematic of just this shuttle movement between the personal and the political, by which I mean anything but personal revelations or confessions. Instead, I am concerned here—as Anna Freud herself was—with the manner in which “nursery relations” deeply inform the polis, and this in both contingent, historical or what she would call “experimental” ways, as well as structural or structuring ways. When we speak of the personal that is always already political, we enter a problematic territory. For this reason, this book engages that personal, biographical element that demands its existence within and on the wider stage of the political. I have been long convinced that psychoanalysis has provided a language within which such a passage can and should be thought, to the extent that psychoanalysis—invented and developed right at that same time when the guarantees afforded by the political contract appeared ever more uncertain—not only queries the specificities of the private and political realms, but also instantiates, in the form of its own symptoms (as precisely the

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return of the repressed private sphere, of the unconscious), both their respective identities and differences. What these identities and differences may be and how they are made to come into play in psychoanalytic theory will be a persistent question throughout this book. In this sense, I will wonder about the extent to which the “autobiographical” impacts on identity, about how one may think the personal as political. These will be the questions to which I attend in “A Wider Social Stage” (chapter 1) and in “Girls Will Be Boys” (chapter 2). The potential conflict between a psychoanalytically conceived subject—a subject internally divided between its unconscious drives and its negotiation with sociopolitical reality—and the subject as traditionally conceived by political theory as a subject who is intact by virtue of his or her rational choices, raises a series of other questions and problems. The first is the one I have already described: To what extent is the theory of the unconscious contradictory to, indeed undermining of, a subject who participates in stable institutional structures—whether this be a state, a psychoanalytic institution, a trade union, or a university department? This question threads it way through all the chapters that follow, though especially those on “Group Upbringing” (chapter 3), “The Defense of Psychoanalysis” (chapter 4), and “Ego Politics” (conclusion). Identities and differences are constituted—as Sigmund Freud well knew but also frequently displaced—in and through sexual identities and differences. The question of woman and of what she wants is therefore central to any investigation into the relationship between politics and psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna provides me with the occasion to think about just this passage from the private to the political, to the extent that such a passage is indeed structured by sexual difference. I want to stress the occasion for such thinking, for what follows is concerned with the problem of legacy, which itself is another form of passage. Within the history of psychoanalysis, as it so happens, this legacy engages a daughter (and precisely not a son). This daughterly legacy—for which Anna Freud is the emblem, sign, and symptom—is deeply implicated in the protection, indeed the defense, of a space that we in daily usage describe as the “political,” a space that has historically sought to differentiate itself from the “personal.” That such a space requires defending has become evident not only through the attacks that have been waged against politics in recent times, but also perhaps through an erosion of what constitutes the concrete demands of politics against the equally concrete demands of a gendered unconscious. The nature of the defenses that this space may inevitably require is addressed in chapter 2 and chapter 4.

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Psychoanalysis is, according to Sigmund Freud—and this leads me to my final set of concerns—an impossible profession; it shares such a designation with politics and education. Never does this imply for him that the three are identical. It does mean, however, that they share a set of questions—first and foremost, the question of authority. Furthermore, all three of these professions concern themselves with the problem of legacy or inheritance; with, in other words, the problem of how authority is or should be transmitted: between rulers and ruled, between teachers and pupils, and between analysts and psychoanalytic candidates. Such a concern, then, firmly binds the question of authority to the question of knowledge—to what Michel Foucault has called a disciplinary savoir. Finally, all three of these professions struggle with the form that such authority must take: Should authority be personal— charismatic, in Max Weber’s terminology—and therefore remain fundamentally arbitrary; or should it institutionalize itself, turn itself into a state, a school, or a psychoanalytic institute, form rules and regulations and demand adherence to a normativity that may come to exist for its own sake? Hannah Arendt evokes in the cited epigraph two of the three impossible professions: education and politics. It is of course generally known that she tended to stay away from the third—from psychoanalysis. Unfortunately, and despite the fact that she has offered some of the most refined reflections on the crisis of politics and of liberal democracy ever since this crisis began more or less in the latter half of the nineteenth century, her exclusion or repression of psychoanalysis leads to a kind of reduction—to a modeling, as she calls it—of political authority to the authority of the nursery; in other words, to precisely the problem she herself seeks to avoid. It is this reduction that Arendt views as the source of a crisis—for both political authority and pedagogical authority. She contends therefore that the crisis is produced because these two forms of authority are made to be the same—and this in the name of the private: the political sphere ends in the private one, as she says. This reduction, furthermore, results in a crisis in both politics and education, and the place where this occurs is America. Sigmund Freud could not have agreed more. If America was for him the “dollar country,” this was because it was a place that reduced everything not just to money, but more importantly because it had developed a culture that was unable to “keep things apart,” because it engaged in a continuous process of reduction, of making things that were different the same. Well before Guy Debord or Jean Baudrillard, Freud detected in the American political imaginary the relentless work of the simulacrum. Freud and Arendt agree on this particular historical and national configuration, and they both name such a reduction as the inappropriate presence of “the private” in the

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realm of politics. The private—and this is the import of Arendt’s and Freud’s thought—may not make itself present or relevant at the level of the political: it may not, therefore, be represented. It must indeed remain private, lest it, through its very (re)presentation, lead to a collapse of distinct spheres. What this implies—or so I understand Arendt and Freud—is that the unconscious must be excluded from politics. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, however, the unconscious must nevertheless be taken into account. Freud not only “discovered” the unconscious; more important, he insisted that the unconscious always makes its claims in some form or the other. He also insisted that such claims must, when they come to function in politics or what he referred to as the “wider social stage,” undergo some transformation precisely so as to not be an actor on this stage. While unconscious claims press upon politics and in this sense must be accounted for, they nonetheless must also, for Freud, be worked over or through in order for a viable democratic order to come into being. Two possibilities therefore propose themselves: either the unconscious and democracy are mutually—and radically—exclusive, or psychoanalysis is capable of furnishing an important insight into how we understand the recurring instabilities of democracy itself. In the following chapters I will argue that Sigmund Freud chooses both, the first for himself and the second by delegating his daughter to find some kind of mediation between the two orders. This is to say that these two alternatives are always already—and so the Freuds understood—rather messy, and it is precisely this messiness in the relations between politics and psychoanalysis, between psychoanalytic theory and political theory, that interests me here. Both: the claims made by the unconscious and the latter’s necessary repression are constitutive of the political domain. One may not therefore demand that personal identity have no political existence or significance. It is the distinction but also reciprocal determination—so psychoanalysis claims— between the private and the political that makes possible a viable political order. Hannah Arendt too hastily excludes the impact of the personal on politics because she avoids psychoanalysis. Anna Freud offers us a thought about politics that—like Arendt—seeks its autonomy but that nevertheless views this autonomy as always a defensive reaction against the intrusions of personal desires. The “model of the nursery” for politics, according to Arendt, is self-contradictory: we cannot, indeed must not, think of the nursery as a model of politics—lest we contribute to the crisis of politics. Sigmund Freud, in the face of just this crisis, makes the opposite move. If Arendt turns away from the nursery, he heads straight into the thicket of it, but then delegates the authorial voice of that nursery to his own daughter Anna (the participant

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observer in and of that nursery and therefore the inventor of child analysis). Sigmund Freud, by virtue of his turn to his daughter, and Anna Freud, by virtue of a pious response to defend the personal (but also the father) against a multiplicity of anxieties, rushes to the nursery in order to find there a nonreductive form of politics, a politics founded, in fact, not in private wars but in the transformation of these wars into political identities to the extent that such nursery identities are always for her group identities, subject to a certain experimentation and therefore to an alternative experience. In chapter 3 I address Anna Freud’s experiments in group identities in the face of traumatic loss, on the one hand, and, on the other, of an engagement with the complexity of familial constellations that come into being as a result of her being the daughter of the inventor of the Oedipus complex. I see two force fields colliding here. In the first, traumatic loss functions within a fantasmatic register. The other field is described by a personal, real, and historical trauma or loss—her father’s death in 1939 and that of her mother in 1951, as well as of her father’s sisters to the Holocaust, and by the more general loss produced by the destruction of the Jewish people and the consequent foundation of the state of Israel. In this chapter I am concerned with how Anna Freud negotiates between what Dominick LaCapra has called structural and historical trauma, between what he names constitutive absence, necessary in order for the subject to come into being, and the historical or real loss produced by events that, in Anna’s case, are marked by both the familial and the political.6 Which is to say: by the event, which Anna Freud embodies, of a collision between the private autobiographical element and the public institution, whether that institution be a nation-state or a professional organization. She accomplishes all of this by rethinking the position of the child, one that has in her estimation been radically orphaned, that is, deprived of traditional structures of legitimacy: those of parents and those of the state. Both of these force fields coincide with her taking over the psychoanalytic movement. It is precisely such a collision of events that furnishes me with the material for chapter 4. After 1945 Anna Freud was faced with the need to take over the psychoanalytic movement, to rebuild it in the face of Nazi destruction, and to participate in the rethinking of a democratic order that takes into account her own father’s death, the annihilation of European Jewry, and the destruction of democracy and of that subject who had sustained democracy before the war. That such an enterprise was grounded in a fundamental 6. Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” in Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 43–85.

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anxiety, I hope to make clear not only through a reading of her father’s seminal text on anxiety, his 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, but also through a reading of his daughter’s most important commentary on her father’s work, her 1936 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense and a text that constituted one her greatest acts of impious fidelity. Finally, and in the form of a conclusion, I treat the import of just such a defense in my comparison of Anna Freud’s text with John Rawls’s notion of defense in his Theory of Justice. The latter is a crucial, indeed founding and canonical, text for political theory after 1945: it has in fact been the text that has kept political theory and liberalism alive after World War II. In the wake of the collapse of liberalism and the social contract after the totalitarian experience in the West, Rawls attempts to rebuild the social contract on radically new foundations, foundations that he significantly names the “original position.” The original position depends on the elimination of all affective investment in sociality. I propose that there exists an uncanny affinity between Anna Freud’s project (she who was busy defending the psychoanalytic institution) and Rawls’s own project (busy defending political theory) of revitalizing democracy in the shape of a defense against the incursions of the unconscious. Both Anna Freud and John Rawls defend democracy after 1945, and both do so on the basis of a defense of the ego and the social contract. But there are also important differences. While Rawls wills his theory of justice into existence on the basis of what he calls a “veil of ignorance,” Anna Freud proposes an intact ego that is nevertheless capable of breaking that same veil.

 Ch ap ter 1 A Wider Social Stage In what ways might an institution constitute a piece of acting out against its own main discovery? —Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep

When psychoanalysis organizes itself into an institution, such a move immediately puts to work the three impossible professions: that of psychoanalysis itself, that of education, and that of politics. Here I approach the relationship between these three professions on two intersecting fronts: on the one hand, the politics of psychoanalysis, or psychoanalysis as an institution and the politics that inevitably underwrites its institutional existence; on the other hand, that of psychoanalytic politics, which is to say, the impact (or lack thereof) that psychoanalysis has had on how we think the political domain per se.1 Both of these aspects entail multiple approaches to psychoanalytic and political theories and practices. I propose to investigate the extent to which such theories and practices are perceived as either distinct or mutually influencing fields. I therefore interrogate the specific identities of psychoanalytic and political thought, while also wondering about the degree to which these identities are always ever

1. I do not here address the question of education in its own right, except as within the context in this chapter of psychoanalytic training. For an excellent analysis of the import of psychoanalysis in the pedagogical domain, especially in relation to the work of Anna Freud, see Deborah P. Britzman, After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and the Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), as well as Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). 14

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constituted in either an overt or more submerged form and/or as a defense of one against the other.

Psychoanalytic Borders Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have spoken to the personal or autobiographical element that resides within psychoanalysis and within the domain that pertains to a delimitation of the political within psychoanalysis as both the latter’s internal and external limit.2 Sigmund Freud himself referred to this domain as a “wider stage”—which must be understood in both its temporal and spatial aspects, that is, in terms of an arkhe, a search for origins, and also as he famously described in his analysis of dreams and of the unconscious as the other Schauplatz, the other theater of the human psyche. Freud made this move from the personal to the political, not coincidentally, in his own autobiographical study written in 1924, to which he appended a postscript in 1935. The following comes from this later text: “I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than the reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id and the superego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual—are the very same processes repeated upon a wider stage.”3 To think such a wider stage, along with all the multiple determinants that such a staging in its very “otherness,” its wider, shifting borders, even its transgression, may imply, raises a series of questions. How is psychoanalysis staged and therefore placed? How does it define its borders and yet also transgress them in the very act of its self-definition? How does the autobiographical element enter into an essential and perhaps essentializing definition of psychoanalytic borders? And how does such an element impact on what we may think of as the political realm? What does the question of the political, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy ask, do in and to psychoanalysis? Is the result an overflowing that is so important that it ultimately acts as a kind of displacement of psychoanalysis itself ?4 Furthermore, does psychoanalysis’s repetition upon a wider social stage constitute, as Sigmund Freud himself suggests in 2. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. and trans. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997), 22. I am in particular referring here to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s essay in this book, entitled “La panique politique,” trans. Céline Surprenant. 3. Sigmund Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959) 20:72; first emphasis my own. 4. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “La panique politique,” 2–3.

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his own autobiographical study, “a phase of regressive development”?5 And, finally, how does Anna Freud play a role in all of these questions? To what extent is she not only the embodiment of psychoanalysis’s continued success in the form of the latter’s institutionalization, but also—in the form of her embodiment—a challenge to a certain gender politics within the psychoanalytic association of brothers itself ? Where, I ultimately ask, may one situate her honor, that is, the possibility of placing her own signature, her speaking in her own name—one always already dictated (or so psychoanalysis would have us believe)—as being that of the/her own father? And how may one engage this honor without obsessively and continuously passing through the legacy of the father—except, perhaps in a gesture of loyalty to the daughter herself, who made the same moves? And what does such a “passing” look like; what are its implications? How, in other words, write, in a form of a signature, in Anna’s own name? The passage or repetition of psychoanalysis upon a wider social stage is anything but an easy or straightforward move. Not only does it describe a double move in space and time, but within Freud’s own challenge to more common-sensical perceptions of space and time, what is opened up is a space of the unconscious dictated by laws that are radically other to those of consciousness, rationality, and logic; it also proposes a time of repetition, one inscribed by difference and therefore insistently challenging the possibility of identity and propriety. Freud’s comparative “wider stage” pertains to a logic akin to Jacques Derrida’s own engagement with such a logic, one that the French critic names “differance”—the not same and the not now: the different and the deferred.6 For this reason, the time and propriety of psychoanalysis is inevitably uncertain. Its division between inside and outside, its self-being—so Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue—is inevitably blurred; the political constitutes both the limit of psychoanalysis and “its origin, its end, and the line of an intimate fold which crosses it” (5). Thinking the political, the wider stage, is therefore never simply an addendum to Freudian theory; or when it is so, then such an addendum, supplement, or even annexation takes on radically new functions for the body of psychoanalysis itself, generating thereby shock waves, floods of anxiety that breach its protective borders. Hence, the political in psychoanalysis most certainly cannot be understood in terms of a more tranquil logic of derivation or reflection—and this, I would argue, despite what Freud himself claimed in 1935, that human history is “no 5. Freud, “Autobiographical Study,” 72. 6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

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more than the reflection” of the conflicts between ego, id, and superego. This is the case because, first, a psychoanalytic theory of the singular, private, nonpolitical subject does not provide us, by transposition, derivation, or reflection, with a theory of sociality: it provides us neither with a theory nor even with a discrete social object; for sociality—once filtered through the psychoanalytic interpretive lens—proves itself to be an entity that is imaginary, fantasmatic.7 Second, a psychoanalytic theory of the political subject cannot immediately furnish us with an analysis of the institutionalization of either that political subject nor of the authority that such a subject may either embody or even disavow, and this, again, insofar as such an authority derives its force, within psychoanalytic thinking, from a different, unconscious logic. If not of derivation or reflection, then what kind of logic of “widening” is implied by the Freudian move? At least a first point of departure is provided by Freud’s thinking about the category of the subject, that category that implies simultaneously autonomy and submission, a category that Freud in his later work would refer to as the ego.8 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are certainly correct in their assertion that Freud thought of “the emer-

7. While Freud may have claimed in 1935 that human history was no more than a reflection of intrapsychic conflicts, in his 1921 “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” he had a number of conflicting things to say about the relationship. Thus, on the one hand, he opens the text with the assertion that “from the very first individual psychology . . . is at the same time social psychology as well” (Standard Edition, 18:69). On the other hand, his critique directed against the growing field of “group psychology” (a critique that fuels the entirety of his text) seeks not only to distinguish psychoanalytic enquiry into the group as distinct from such prevailing analyses of the group, but also precisely to prove that there is no such thing as a “group instinct” per se, that such an instinct always resides as a drive in the individual psyche. It is in this context, in fact, that Freud provides us with his first extended meditation on the phenomenon of “identification,” a psychic mechanism that works simultaneously as a supplement to his theory of drives and yet also as a force that operates in an uncanny manner against both the theory itself and the ego’s constitution as a being in the world. 8. A conception of the subject as the result of both autonomy and submission has been the focus of much of a psychoanalytically inflected structuralist Marxism, first and foremost Louis Althusser’s two important essays, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)” and “Freud and Lacan,” both published in English in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). The importance of Althusser’s essays lies in that his using psychoanalytic categories not only provides a flexible understanding of “ideology” but also proposes that such a flexible notion can only be produced by thinking through the passage between the personal and the political. It is no coincidence that both of these essays were published in France (the essay on Freud and Lacan in a revised version) after the events of 1968. Ideology, for Althusser, is a bridge between the private, personal subject and those state apparatuses that tend to his/her creation and care, and in this sense the subject is both an autonomous entity and a being that gains this autonomy by submitting to the “ideological state apparatuses.” The bridge or passage between these two aspects of the subject is provided, according to Althusser, by a kind of primal scene: the hailing or interpellation of the individual by a state authority into the new position of subject. In this scene, the individual is called, upon which she or he turns around, and it is this turning that constitutes the act of interpellation.

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gence of the subject neither from other subjects nor from a subject-discourse (whether it be of the other or of the same, of the father or of the brother), but from the non-subject or non-subjects” (6). By this they imply—or so I understand their far more radical claim—that the Freudian subject is not the result of some form of social constructivism; that is, the Freudian subject does not come into being as simply the result of an act of obedience (whether identificatory, adaptational, or ideological) to prevailing social norms—and this even when motives for obedience may also be true. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy continue: “the non-subject, the without-authority, the withoutfather . . ., the without-superego and thus without-ego, anterior to every topic as well as to every institution, of an anteriority, with which no regression can properly catch up, and ‘wider’ than every founding agency—the ‘non-subject’ forms . . . the joint limit of psychoanalysis and of the political” (6). The subject comes into being in that place where it ceases to be itself: at its borders.9 All of this is certainly true: the subject comes into being from his provenance as a non-subject. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in fact immediately cite an extraordinary passage from Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, a passage that quite surely makes their point—and I insist on this certainty here, for certainty is somewhat the point: Moreover, in the case of some advances in intellectuality—for instance, in the case of the victory of patriarchy—we cannot point to the authority which lays down the standard which is to be regarded as higher. It cannot in this case be the father, since he is only elevated into being an authority by the advance itself.10 The certainty of such a claim or pointing, and one not cited by LacoueLabarthe and Nancy in this context, rests on an earlier, prior claim that Freud makes in his text, one that in fact depends on a decision or indeed on a turning: “It consists, for instance, in deciding that paternity is more important than maternity, although it cannot, like the latter, be established by the evidence of the senses, and that for that reason the child should bear his father’s name and 9. Harold Bloom makes the claim that the border or “frontier” concepts in Freud, namely “drive” and “bodily ego,” shape the locus and essence of Freud’s theoretical apparatus. Indeed, he asserts that Freud constructs a modern mythology, one that is itself driven and has as its most important place of speculative inquiry the ego. Because Freudian thinking engages borders or frontiers, such thinking is for Bloom precisely “speculative”: “Freudian speculation may or may not be scientific or philosophical; what counts about it is its interpretative power.” Harold Bloom, “Freud: Frontier Concepts, Jewishness, and Interpretation,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 113. 10. Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism,” Standard Edition, 23:118.

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be his heir” (118; my emphasis). And: “this turning from the mother to the father points in addition to a victory of intellectuality over sensuality—that is, an advance in civilization, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premiss. Taking sides in this way with a thought-process in preference to a sense perception has proved to be a momentous step” (114; my emphases).11 The momentous step that the passage to civilization, the wider social stage signifies, is then a turning, a decision, perhaps even a pointing of a finger. Such a passage—one that takes place against all evidence—initiates the social contract in the form of a radical hypothesis or theory. In this sense, Freud’s thought belongs also into the long tradition of Western political theory that posits the contract as the foundational pointing gesture of the political realm—a tradition that Freud both prolongs and yet also significantly displaces.12 For this latter reason, the Freudian social contract also constitutes a rupture, most significantly a rupture with the certainty of maternity, in favor of the father who becomes such only as a result of the rupture itself. I will address in the following chapters just this ungroundedness, attempting to think through the rupture that takes us away from maternity to a space that is defined as a paternal one, for sure, but nevertheless a space that also proposes a system of kinship relations that do not inevitably descend from the father to the brother/son in the meanings that such a descent may more commonsensically call forth. I will later have occasion to investigate the implications for political theory or indeed social science more broadly that are predicated on a double move: on the one hand, the repression of an initial sense-certainty; and on the other, the nachträgliche transformation of the Freudian decision, turning or pointing that produces the possibility of scientific objectivity. More immediately, however, patriarchal authority is indeed, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy insist, radically ungrounded: the first subject, as Freud thinks of the primal father of the horde, comes into being out of a non-subject. The

11. “Pater semper incertus est,” Freud already wrote in 1908, while the mother is “certissima.” Maternal origins are unalterable and certain, while paternity remains a theory. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” Standard Edition, 9:239. 12. Like Freud, Rousseau also places the beginnings of civilization in an ever-so-slight movement of a finger: “He who willed man to be social, by the touch of a finger shifted the globe’s axis into line with the axis of the universe. I see such a slight movement changing the face of the earth and deciding the vocation of mankind: in the distance I hear the joyous cries of a native multitude; I see the building of castles and cities; I see the birth of the arts; I see nations forming, expanding, and dissolving, following each other like ocean waves; I see men leaving their homes, gathering to devour each other, and turning the rest of the world into a hideous desert: fitting monuments to social union and the usefulness of the arts” ( Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Languages [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966], 39).

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“birth” of authority is nevertheless a birth, one produced by (the certainty of ) maternity. It is indeed a “birth trauma” upon which civilization, that is, theory (both psychoanalytic and political theory) can come into being. I will address the implications of the trauma of birth for psychoanalysis and politics in more detail in the fourth chapter. Here I simply want to emphasize that the Freudian turning or decision against maternity is predicated on a withdrawal, on a move whose agency is situated rather ambiguously in both Freud’s text and in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s commentary. Who, in fact, withdraws in order to make civilization possible? Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, famously remarked: Women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence—those very women who, in the beginning, laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love. Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men. . . . What [man] employs for cultural aims he to a great degree withdraws from women and sexual life. His constant association with men, and his dependence on his relations with them, even estrange him from his duties as a husband and a father. Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.13 While, in this passage, man is certainly the agent of a certain withdrawal, nevertheless it is also the case that woman’s so-called hostility to civilization, in the form of a birthing expulsion, fuels man’s continued need to withdraw himself in order to turn himself, self-reflexively, into a subject and thereby bring civilization into being. Man’s self-reflexivity, his existence as a subject—a subject who is both autonomous and submissive—is therefore predicated on a womanly claim that results in a masculine withdrawal. The wider social stage is then the product of a certain negativity that such a withdrawal implies. The ambiguity established between maternal expulsion and masculine withdrawal will eventually allow Freud to turn the withdrawal of love into the depersonalized agency of the superego—which is, in part, what withdrawal itself signifies for Freud.14 It is, one must re13. Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Standard Edition, 21:103–4; my emphases. 14. To a very significant extent, active withdrawal in the face of an expulsion—and this expulsion is maternal but perhaps for Freud also exilic in a broader sense—describes the Freudian logic of masochism, a masochism, that is, that converts passive submission into a voluntary act by a selfreflexive move. Self-reflexivity is in fact one of the central moves performed by the drive in Freud’s 1915 essay “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (Standard Edition, 14:109–40). The example Freud gives

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member, the superego—whose authority is always ambiguously maternal and paternal—that makes possible the real or decisive and turning passage to civilization.15 It is this passage that allows for a transposition to take place. This transposition is in fact triple in nature: from the mother to the father, from paternal authority to the depersonalized, ungendered authority of the superego, and finally, from a maternal, sensual certainty of the loss of love to a paternally defined threat or fear of that same loss, that is, to the hypothetical, theoretical possibility of a withdrawal. Still—and it is well to remember this—we are confronted here with a theoretical ungroundedness perpetually fuelled by the displaced certainty of maternity. And indeed, it is “here at last” that we encounter the idea “which belongs entirely to psychoanalysis and which is foreign to people’s ordinary way of thinking” (128). It is worthwhile quoting these moments in Freud’s text extensively, as they constitute the essence of his thinking about the passage to the “wider social stage.” What Freud is in fact here describing is a multiply defined passage, from maternity to paternity, from some state that precedes civilization to civilization proper, from childhood to adulthood, from simple remorse to superegoic conscience or the sense of guilt. The foundation for all these passages is always a threat: that is, the perpetually active possibility or hypothesis that love may be withdrawn. What is bad is often not at all what is injurious or dangerous to the ego; on the contrary, it may be something which is desirable and

for the instinct’s “turning round on the subject’s own self ” is masochism. Not coincidentally, one of Freud’s profoundest meditations on the structure of the ego and its relationship with the superego occurs in his 1924 essay “The Economic Problems of Masochism” (Standard Edition, 19:155–70), where, in what he calls moral masochism, the ego becomes an ego-subject and an agent precisely to the extent that he submits to the dictates of the superego. That such a situation generates huge problems for (democratic) authority is obvious and certainly signaled already by the title of Freud’s essay: this is indeed a problem and an economic one at that. I have treated these questions more extensively in Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Siècle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) and will return to them again in the following chapter. Here I merely signal the fact that Anna Freud—a profound thinker on the subject of masochism—entered on the scene of psychoanalysis and then became its leader via an act of masochism, or what she called “altruistic surrender,” which she theorized as the “defense of the ego.” 15. What is the gendered authority of the superego? In The Ego and the Id, Freud writes: “Whatever the character’s later capacity for resisting the influences of abandoned object-cathexes may turn out to be, the effects of the first identifications made in earliest childhood will be general and lasting. This leads us back to the origin of the ego ideal; for behind it there lies hidden an individual’s first and foremost identification, his identification with the father in his own personal prehistory.” To this comment, Freud then appends a footnote: “Perhaps it would be safer to say “with the parents”; for before the child has arrived at definite knowledge of the difference between the sexes, the lack of a penis, it [!] does not distinguish in value between its father and its mother” (“The Ego and the Id,” Standard Edition, 19:31; my emphases).

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enjoyable to the ego. Here, therefore, there is an extraneous influence at work, and it is this that decides what is to be called good or bad. . . . [A person’s motive for submitting to this extraneous influence] is easily discovered in his helplessness and dependence on other people, and it can best be designated as fear of loss of love. . . . At the beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with the loss of love. . . . This state of mind is called ‘bad conscience’; but actually it does not deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, ‘social’ anxiety. . . . A great change takes place only when the authority is internalized through the establishment of the super-ego. . . . Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of . . . a sense of guilt. . . . The distinction . . . between doing something bad and wishing to do so disappears entirely, since nothing can be hidden from the superego, not even thoughts. . . . At this second stage of development, the conscience exhibits a peculiarity which was absent from the first stage and which is no longer easy to account for. For the more virtuous a man is, the more severe and distrustful is its behaviour, so that ultimately it is precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness. . . . The docile and continent ego does not enjoy the trust of its mentor, and strives in vain . . . to acquire it. . . . Thus we know of two origins of the sense of guilt: one arising from the fear of an authority, and the other, later on, arising from the fear of the super-ego. . . . Originally, renunciation of instinct was the result of fear of an external authority: one renounced one’s satisfactions in order not to lose its love. If one has carried out this renunciation, one is, as it were, quits with authority and no sense of guilt should remain. But with the fear of the super-ego the case is different. Here, instinctual renunciation is not enough, for the wish persists and cannot be concealed from the superego. Thus, in spite of the renunciation that has been made, a sense of guilt comes about. This constitutes a great economic disadvantage in the erection of the super-ego. . . . Instinctual renunciation now no longer has a completely liberating effect. . . . Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic source of conscience and every fresh renunciation increases the latter’s severity and intolerance. . . . [We must therefore defend] the paradoxical statement that conscience is the result of instinctual renunciation . . . that instinctual renunciation (imposed on us from without) creates conscience, which then demands further renunciation. (124–29; my emphases)

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Despite its asserted centrality, a certain anxiety rules this Freudian passage to “wider” considerations. An unspoken indeterminacy is at work here, precisely because the question of who rules this passage founded on the withdrawal of love cannot be determined—and this because all rules arise as a result of that same withdrawal of love. If in fact rules substitute love,16 then who has denied love in the first place: the mother or the father? And: is this denial a real event or a fear, a hypothesis? Is it, in other words, phantasmatic?17 Significantly, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy waver precisely on these questions and importantly so, because it is the vacuum established by this withdrawal of love and the indeterminacy that such a withdrawal provokes between certainty and theory that furnishes the source not only for Freud’s thinking about psychoanalytic borders, but also for all theorizing about democracy.18 On the one hand, then, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue that the withdrawal of love originates in Freud from the generic Other—and, as we may fathom, such a generic Other always describes the father. And so, the Other “ ‘is’ its own withdrawal . . . on the basis of which there can be an object. . . . The Other is not at first the identical other, but the withdrawal of this identity—the originary alteration.”19 Such a withdrawal of love, both on the part of and also constitutive of the Other, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy define not simply as an originary narcissistic wound, but more fundamentally as “the killing of the father,” insofar as this is a killing only to the extent that it is the death and therefore withdrawal of the Other: “there can only ever be a Father after the death of the (first) dead. In this way, then, nothing begins with the confrontation of the absolute Narcissus [the mother?]: everything begins, on the contrary, with the infinitely originary incision of the narcissus through which their non-relation is sealed. The Father is the re-presented or re-presentified dead. . . . The ban on representation . . . is thus a ban on killing, which itself comes down to a ban on transgressing the withdrawal of love or love in its withdrawal” (27; last emphasis my own). 16. This is the central import of Max Weber’s claim that the modern political order replaces charismatic authority, the love of the leader with a bureaucratic administration by rules. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). 17. Such questions define, of course, also castration anxiety and the erection of the phallus as the organizing signifier of cultural existence. Here, too, for women castration is a fact, for men a threat. 18. Claude Lefort makes a similar point regarding the necessity for a withdrawal in order for democracy to function: “The legitimacy of power is based on the people; but the image of popular sovereignty is linked to the image of an empty place, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public authority can never claim to appropriate it. Democracy combined these two apparently contradictory principles: on the one hand, power emanates from the people; on the other hand, it is the power of nobody” (The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism [Boston: MIT Press, 1986], 279). 19. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “La panique politique,” 27.

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Such considerations are followed by a second or indeed secondary one in these critics’ analysis, a consideration that arrives by a certain delay and a certain deferral, located, seemingly, not in the “killing of the father,” but in the Freudian totemic meal, in an act, therefore, of incorporation. For what is consumed or incorporated in that meal? It is nothing less than the common substance of the kin, here the substance of the mother or the mother-substance. The identification with the father occurs only in consideration of this other identification, wholly other because it is not supported by any figure. . . . The mothersubstance is this immediate sensible presence-evidence . . . whose ‘spiritual progress’ . . . consists in detaching itself. But the mother is herself at the origin of this very progress. (28; my emphases) Progress is dictated, as Freud himself would repeatedly assert, by the privileged relation that exists between the mother and her last born.20 The youngest son, “inside/outside of the mother, relates to her by ‘clinging.’ . . . Paternity only ever follows on: it is always a thing of succession. It follows on from clinging, which is to say from the un-clinging as well. The clinging is the tie without tie, the un-tying in which originates . . . the one who is thus neither a subject nor a non-subject, neither mass nor individual, but the incised Narcissus: that which incises him is the mother who expels and retains him, who presents and conceals the father to and from him” (28). How understand this progression of thought and of civilization, then? Behind the killing of the father—which is certainly a withdrawal of love, but one that favors the advance of civilization—stands some other withdrawal, though this one takes the form of a clinging, or of what Freud had called those “claims of love” that are inevitably hostile to civilization. These claims may in fact constitute the essence of what Freud had described as (an infinite and there20. Wondering how the transition was made from the narcissistic violence of the primal horde to the creation of a just order, Freud hypothesizes that “some individual, in the exigency of his longing, may have been moved to free himself from the group and take over the father’s part. He who did this was the first epic poet; and the advance was achieved in his imagination. This poet disguised the truth with lies in accordance with his longing. He invented the heroic myth. . . . The transition to the hero was probably afforded by the youngest son, the mother’s favorite, whom she had protected from paternal jealousy, and who, in the era of the primal horde, had been the father’s successor. In the lying poetic fantasies of pre-historic times the woman, who had been the prize of battle and temptation to murder, was probably turned into the active seducer and instigator to the crime (Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” Standard Edition, 18:136; my emphases). Again, such sentences are typical of Freud’s theory of the social contract. Couched within a language of an avowedly historical narrative, the beginnings of the social contract are to be located in the imagination, in probability, even in lies, all of which have their source in a longing produced by woman’s active seduction and instigation to a crime.

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fore bad) regression. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy end their essay with the mother’s withdrawal of love, an ending that gives us also the content—insofar as that content can ever be named—of political panic (the title of their essay), a political panic that also names a political anxiety. Panic takes its place—or nonplace—in the unrepresentable truth of the Mother, in the withdrawal that the Mother produces by her act of giving birth. “As dissolution of the Political, it reveals the absence, and more than the absence, of the Pan-Father” (29). And yet, so Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the mother’s withdrawal requires that “a figure loom up”; it requires that “a figure be drawn and determined through the withdrawal. Not a face of love, but its contour which withdraws and redraws itself from the withdrawal. The withdrawal of panic” (31). And so, the father comes back—but always ever for the first time—to stave off a panic/anxiety that instantiates politics as a figure incapable of fending off a certain phantasmatic, looming otherness.

Impossible Professions Shortly before the end of World War I, in September 1918, Sigmund Freud addressed the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress by opening with these words: We have never prided ourselves on the completeness and the finality of our knowledge and capacity. We are just as ready now as we were earlier to admit the imperfections of our understanding, to learn new things and to alter our methods in any way that can improve them. Now that we are met together once more after the long and difficult years of separation that we have lived through, I feel drawn to review the position of our therapeutic procedure—to which, indeed, we owe our place in human society—and to take a survey of the new directions in which it may develop.21 Freud immediately follows up these opening remarks by insisting on the centrality of the unconscious. “We have formulated our task as physicians thus: to bring to the patient’s knowledge the unconscious, repressed impulses existing in him, and, for that purpose, to uncover the resistances that oppose this extension of his knowledge about himself ” (159; my emphasis). Freud ends his address with what he calls a “glance at the future,” one now defined for psychoanalysis as an invitation to active participation in the social domain. In

21. Sigmund Freud, “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy,” Standard Edition, 17:159.

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fact the main topic at the Fifth Congress had been just such a participation, in the form of the treatment of the war neuroses. It was the effects of war that were to lead psychoanalysis out of its splendid isolation and make itself available “for the wider social strata, who suffer extremely seriously from neuroses” (167) produced by the war. But casting a glance at the situation, Freud reminds his audience, demonstrated that the movement’s “therapeutic activities are not very far-reaching” (166). What was required, in fact, was “some kind of organization” capable of efficiently treating “a considerable mass of the population” (167). In the face of the massive traumas produced by a new kind of war, one that had involved the entire populations of all countries—a world war—psychoanalysis would have to discover techniques adequate to the new social conditions that Freud describes in the following terms: It is possible to foresee that at some time or other the conscience of society will awake and remind it that the poor man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the life-saving help offered by surgery; and that the neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis, and can be left as little as the latter to the impotent care of individual members of the community. When this happens, institutions or out-patient clinics will be started, to which analyticallytrained physicians will be appointed, so that men who would otherwise give way to drink, women who have nearly succumbed under their burden of privations, children for whom there is no choice but between running wild or neurosis, may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance and of efficient work. Such treatment will be free. . . . Some time or other . . . it must come to this. (167; my emphasis)22 Freud’s address to the Congress is therefore circumscribed by two requirements: on the one hand, the physician’s task to make the patient knowledgeable of his or her unconscious and repressed impulses; and, on the other hand, the creation of an organization capable of directly intervening in the social sphere in order to treat the population at large. Freud speaks here to a triple passage: from physician to organization, from individual patient to the masses, and, finally, from a therapeutic technique grounded in the discovery of unconscious desires to a therapeutic intervention that is predicated on the alleviation of suffering and the production of “efficient work.” What makes 22. For an extended discussion of Freudian social activism in the form of analytic treatment of the masses, see Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

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this triple passage both necessary and desirable? What, in fact, must intervene in order to make it possible? We know that historical conditions were a decisive factor, conditions defined by war and massive trauma, both powerful enough to breach the boundaries between politics and psychoanalysis—never was psychoanalysis as popular during Freud’s lifetime as it was in the immediate aftermath of World War I—and then to slam the doors shut between the two domains as a result of the rise of fascism. A second event at the Fifth Congress would also prove to have far-reaching consequences for the fate of psychoanalysis, because it was then and there as well that—within the context of a discussion about psychoanalytic training—the formal proposal was first made that all aspiring psychoanalysts had to undergo a personal analysis. I shall return to this point, one that belongs both to the peculiar intersection between the personal and the political and to the question of transmission and inheritance. For now, I will tend to the striking, because double, use Freud makes of the word “resistance” at the beginning and the end of his speech. In his first evocation of the term at the beginning of the address it bears its “proper” psychoanalytic meaning, that is, it points to a psychic force that lays itself in the way against knowledge of the unconscious: it is here a psychic mechanism of defense against psychoanalysis itself and for that reason must be combated with all the therapeutic means at the disposal of psychoanalysis. At the end of the essay, however, resistance has migrated elsewhere, to another and indeed wider social stage: resistance now fights the same battles of psychoanalysis against mass neurosis and against political and economic oppression, if not repression. If in this context a resisting treatment is to be free of charge (even while itself animated by a certain charge), this is because resistance now speaks the language of freedom. So, to reiterate, what factor has intervened in order for such a passage to take its place, for resistance to take a new place, one that is so clearly the place of politics? What must intervene for resistance to be simultaneously a negative and a positive force in the work that the unconscious performs for and against the psyche and in the psyche’s interaction with and constitution by the political domain? What has intervened, I propose, is the discovery by psychoanalysis of the ego, an ego that is at once stubbornly poised against the psychoanalytic knowledge that pertains to unconscious desire and yet so fragile and in need of defense that it always at least potentially threatens the viability of a just, democratic order. Within the history of psychoanalysis, such a discovery of the ego only made its impact belatedly, in a nachträgliche fashion or as a kind of après-coup, and it therefore determined the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics as a coup d’état. It is surely no coincidence that

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Anna Freud’s best-known text, written in 1936, was to be titled The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, or that she would become the recognized leader of a trend within the psychoanalytic movement that defines itself as “ego psychology.” Other, belated dates, as well, speak to the fact that the ego was destined to become the central player in the fate of psychoanalysis after Freud’s 1918 address. The first set of dates belongs to Freud’s own publication history immediately following the end of the war, texts that introduced the death drive and his new topographical model of the mind. I recall here the central texts: Beyond the Pleasure Principle from 1920, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego from 1921, The Ego and the Id from 1923, and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety from 1926. These all are texts that Freud in his 1935 Postscript to his Autobiographical Study considered his last important contributions to psychoanalytic theory. And in a parallel chronology, one should recall the founding of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (the first of its kind) in 1920—the creation of which would eventually lead to the idea of formalizing psychoanalytic training and professionalization; Freud’s cancer diagnosis in 1923; the Nazi rise to power in 1933 and the consequent Anschluß of Austria in 1938; Sigmund and Anna Freud’s exile to London that same year; and finally Sigmund Freud’s composition of his last great text— Moses and Monotheism—the latter an investigation into national identity, the “Jewish question,” the role of the ego in the construction of a national history, and the idea that all of history is—in the final (and perhaps interminable) analysis—the history of the belated, even tragic, construction of the ego. The shift from an investigation into the unconscious to an analysis of the ego signified the passage from a focus on the drive or the movement of desire to a focus on the structures of identification. In the chapter that follows I will have occasion to discuss in more detail the Freudian engagement with identification and the ways in which the latter functions as both supplementary to and at cross purposes with the movements and demands of libidinal desire. Here I would simply note that such a shift speaks not only to a new analytic lens (identity rather than desire) but also to a new analytic emphasis (structure rather than movement). Undoubtedly, this shift was historically determined. “An early confidence,” so Jacqueline Rose states, “in the subversive power of sexuality against the delusional stability of the ego has had to reckon with the fact that the ego’s intransigence, its conviction in its own identity, is not so easy to shift. . . . ‘The ego,’ to use Freud’s famous formula, is ‘the precipitate of its former identifications.’ ”23 If Freudian psychoanalysis 23. Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 174.

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shifted to an analysis of the ego, then this may very well have been dictated by the problem of how to conceive of a psychoanalytically informed politics built on (unconscious) desire. For what would such a politics actually look like?24 How build a democratic society that upholds and therefore defends the rights of the individual and at yet at the same time reckons with a force that undoes the ego-subject who, informed of her unconscious desires, comes to question her own status in the very process of an albeit always imperfect self-knowledge? How, in other words, defend the psychoanalytic subject against herself ? Furthermore—and Rose points this out while commenting on a passage from Elisabeth Roudinesco’s biography of Jacques Lacan, it was in effect by thinking of the ego as a precipitate of past identifications that Freud was able to theorize the social bond in the first place. The passage from Roudinesco reads as follows: After the Freudian revision of 1920, there were effectively two options. One consisted in making the ego the product of a progressive differentiation from the id, acting as a representative of reality with the task of holding the drives in place (Ego psychology); the other, on the contrary, turned its back on any idea of making the ego autonomous so as to study its genesis in terms of identifications. In other words, the first option sought to pull the ego free of the id and turn it into an instrument of the individual’s adaptation to external reality, while the second drew the ego back towards the id so as to demonstrate how it was structured in stages as a function of imagos borrowed from the other.25 As Rose comments in relation to these two options, it was the very possibility of knowing the nature of identificatory social relations that demanded—perhaps in the form of what Freud had called “a phase of regressive development”— the ego’s retreat, its drawing back or indeed withdrawal from reality and from its capacity to act as reality’s representative. If psychoanalysis took the course of “ego psychology,” however, and therefore retreated from the unconscious in favor of reality, then, quite paradoxically, Rose views such a retreat of psychoanalytic knowledge as also a retreat from history and politics. The institutionalization of psychoanalysis, so she claims, pushes “psychoanalysis back inside its own walls. What arises from these crises is an institution in the image of

24. Ever since the invention of psychoanalysis a politics of desire has certainly been attempted, and during Freud’s life such attempts inevitably led to breaks with Freud himself. Alfred Adler is one example, followed by Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, along with many others. 25. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 111.

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the ego.”26 She thereby takes for granted that institutionalization acts against an openness to democratic politics, and it is the assumption of such an oppositional relation that I will question, if not contest, in the following pages. In other words, I will have occasion to challenge this binary structure between institutionalization and democracy, and I will do so not only in relation to the politics of psychoanalysis itself, but also to a theorization of the political realm that takes psychoanalytic theory as one of its points of departure. Indeed, I will argue that it is such an understanding of politics that constitutes the essence of Anna Freud’s work. By making such an argument, I find myself close to Wendy Brown’s claims in her essay “Democracy against Itself: Nietzsche’s Challenge.”27 While Brown’s focus is here on Nietzsche and not psychoanalysis, she is however like me concerned with the possibility that theory (political in her case; psychoanalytic in mine) may perhaps contain within itself an inevitably undemocratic element. Most crucially, Brown argues for the possibility that a defense of democracy may find itself in an at least difficult relationship with theorizations of democracy: “As politics does, theory undoes” (123), she states succinctly. This is the case because as politics is inevitably “untheoretical,” so also theory may often be “unpolitical” (122). In order, therefore, to think in a different way the politics-theory relation—and Brown attempts this, I would hold, in the context of the current collapse of both democracy and political theory in the United States—she proposes to “affirm rather than deny the persistently untheoretical quality of politics—the resistance of political life to theory; the intercourse between politics and theory might then become more productive than one based on identity or application” (122). Democracy, she states in even stronger terms, is by its very nature the most untheoretical of political forms, precisely because it cannot dictate beforehand what the desired outcome of any given social arrangement may be. And yet, paradoxically, democracy also “requires theory, requires an antithesis to itself in both the form and substance of theory” (122), in order to produce a democratic order. This is the case because, while politics requires the “fixing or natural26. Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep, 179. 27. Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Tellingly, Brown also recognizes the extent to which the relationship between politics and its theorization appears to be so predominantly marked by the autobiographical element and by the need to derive opinions from theory: “Conventionally, the ‘politics’ of a given theorist is identified either with his or her explicit political views and alliances, that is, with political biography, or with the political values articulated in the theory (democracy, socialism, individual liberty, community, and so forth), that is, with political ideology. . . . Theory’s value for politics is conventionally indexed by its capacity to affect or predict political life, a capacity about which it is mostly defensive and against which it almost always comes up short (121).

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ization of meanings” in order to take its place, theory “cannot fix meaning in this political fashion without ceasing to be theoretical, without sacrificing the dynamic action of theory, without falling into empiricism, positivism, or doctrine” (123). The relationship between democracy and theory is vexed because, on the one hand, democracy is attached to common sense and to a nervousness about elite knowledges. On the other hand, democracy needs theory because such common sense all too quickly bleeds into a blind trust of the masses and public opinion. Given the necessary and constitutive indeterminateness of democracy, such a fundamental absence is always in danger of being “filled with a historically available principle—nationalism, racism, xenophobia, market values, Christianity, imperialism, individualism, rights as ends—if some other principle is not more deliberately developed and pursued” (124–25). To this end, a “theoretical consciousness may be deployed to interrupt democracy’s relatively automatic cathexis onto undemocratic principles—it may also provide at once enlightenment about this cathexis and a source of alternative principles” (125). Brown ends her essay with the following statement: “Permanent resistance to the state that simultaneously constitutes democracy and is one of the chief sources of democracy’s dissolution becomes a means of sustaining democracy. Only through the state are people constituted as a people; only in resistance to the state do the people remain a people” (137; my emphases). To return to the question of politics and psychoanalysis. Rose makes her remarks in the context of a discussion about the institutionalization of psychoanalysis more broadly, and more specifically in relation to the problem of psychoanalytic training—the latter of course being one of the main functions of any psychoanalytic institute. Psychoanalytic training produces psychoanalysts, and it guarantees the transmission of knowledge. As such, the psychoanalytic institute brings psychoanalysis into direct contact with the other two “impossible professions”: politics and education. What Rose implicitly proposes is that not only are these three professions impossible in their own right, but also that they may very well be an impossibility with and for each other. A strange triangulation is at work here, for it may also be the case—or so I would argue—that such a triangulation inevitably depends on an alliance of two of its participants against the excluded third. To what extent, for example, does the teaching of psychoanalysis in a variety of university departments (which, quite tellingly, does not generally include the social sciences but almost exclusively only the humanities)—to what extent does such a teaching not depend on the exclusion of politics, on the exclusion of a thinking about psychoanalysis and education that would precisely engage a critique of both the psychoanalytic institute and clinical practice, as well

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as of the university itself ? Or, alternatively, to what extent must a political engagement with the demands of education—demands that are necessarily posed at the national and increasingly global level—be predicated on a radical exclusion of psychoanalytic knowledge? Finally, and these questions will be of special concern for me, what happens to psychoanalysis when it becomes either a method of education or an institution with its own power dynamics? Or when it seeks to make an impact on the political stage? Can psychoanalysis do without an institution, and if so, how would it exist, perpetuate itself, teach; provide ethical limits on therapeutic practices themselves? What, in Rose’s words, “might the history of psychoanalysis have to say about the way institutions of learning”—to which I would add, all institutions— “perpetuate and legitimate themselves?”28 Rose’s chapter—from which I have been quoting liberally—in On Not Being Able to Sleep is entitled “What Makes an Analyst?”, which originally provided the introduction to the English translation of Moustapha Safouan’s Jacques Lacan et la question de la formation des analystes. It is in the context of psychoanalytic training that Rose poses her questions to the institutionalization of psychoanalysis. In light of the conflict that may exist between the specificity of the psychoanalytic object of knowledge—that is, the unconscious— and the necessities of institutional existence in the world, Rose asks the following question: “In what ways might an institution constitute a piece of acting out against its own main discovery? ” And alternatively: “What happens when a radical theory, whose radicalness resides at least partly in its unique critique of power as identification, becomes mired in charismatic authority?”29 Furthermore, if psychoanalysis has in its institutional version failed as an engaged politics, is this because it has become institutionalized?30 “If psychoanalysis

28. Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep, 173. 29. Ibid.; my emphasis. 30. Jacques Derrida takes up the question of a possible failed engagement with politics on the part of psychoanalysis in “Geopsychoanalysis: ‘. . . and the rest of the world,’ ” in Christopher Lane, ed., Psychoanalysis of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 65–90. Derrida gave this as a talk in 1981 at a French–Latin American meeting in Paris dedicated to a discussion of the institutions and politics of psychoanalysis; he accused the International Psychoanalytic Association of a wholly insufficient political response to political violence and human rights violations. While the IPA had released a general and rather vague condemnation of human rights violations, what liberal institution in the West, Derrida asks, “could not have made exactly the same declaration? The text bears not the slightest specifically psychoanalytic coloring” (73). And: “Why is the International Psychoanalytic Association, founded seventy years ago by Freud, unable to take up a position on certain kinds of violence . . . in any other terms than those of a pre-psychoanalytic and apsychoanalytic juridical discourse . . . ? Why can the IPA be no more specific than to evoke “the violation of human rights of citizens in general,” merely tagging on “of scientists and of our colleagues in particular”—a corporatist addendum which vitiates but in no way offsets the text’s universalizing

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cannot turn the light of its founding discoveries on politics,” she concludes, “it might have something to do with the history of its own institutionalization.” And so: Is there something about psychoanalytic institutions that is radically at odds with the purpose of psychoanalysis?31 And is the oddity of psychoanalytic institutionalization predicated, inevitably, on the defense of the ego? These questions are central to my own concerns, for they strike at the heart of the accusation against Anna Freud that, in some form or the other, she tamed psychoanalytic knowledge and thereby protected the institution against its own radical foundations. In his 1926 essay “The Question of Lay Analysis,” Freud made two important claims: First, that the “use of analysis for the treatment of the neuroses is only one of its applications: the future will perhaps show that it is not the most important one.”32 In an immediate sense, he was thereby indicating the future necessity of a double task: an intervention into the domain of pathology that would go beyond the diagnosis of the neuroses and tackle also the problem of the psychoses—a passage into which he ultimately failed; and also an intervention that would transgress the field of the medical in order to include the study of human relations, the history of civilization, as well as of biology and evolution. Beyond these disciplinary transgressions, however, Freud also proposed that psychoanalysis should provide a challenge to all thinking, insofar—precisely—as it constituted a challenge to the very concept of disciplinarity: “the things that really matter . . . can never be affected by regulations and prohibitions,” he stated rather laconically.33 I would like to introduce here some remarks that sit somewhat astride of my current narrative and are therefore of a parenthetical nature. These remarks pertain to the “question” of lay analysis, a question that, as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl rightly points out, has significant connections in the historical trajectory of psychoanalysis with the analysis of the child. The “child” in question most certainly and most directly concerns the future professional existence of Freud’s own child, Anna Freud, whose credentials did not rely on a medical degree. Ernest Jones, for instance, thought Freud’s essay to be

abstractness? . . . Despite all the commotion over such issues as “psychoanalysis and politics” . . . at present there exists no approach to political problems, no code of political discourse, that has in any rigorous way incorporated the axiomatics of a possible psychoanalysis (76). 31. Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep, 168–69. 32. Sigmund Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis,” Standard Edition (1959), 20:248. 33. Ibid., 250. For the relationship between thinking, disciplinarity, and institutionalization in the context of the university, see the collected papers delivered at a symposium on Kant’s 1798 essay The Conflict of Faculties: Richard Rand, ed., Logomachia: The Conflict of Faculties (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

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“obviously biased” in favor of Anna. The same Jones, more significantly and perhaps more dangerously, refused the publication of her Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis on the grounds that it was “premature”—thus (con)firming just this link between lay and child analysis. He also, despite Anna’s twin birth with psychoanalysis, implied that she had been born prematurely as an analyst. Anna Freud, apparently and rather wisely, did not push the point, and her book did not find a publisher until 1946. Nevertheless, it was precisely through the conduit of lay analysis that Anna Freud brought a number of nonmedical students not only to the practice of child analysis but to psychoanalysis more generally—and this in the name of political change. That she was able to effect this was largely due to her longstanding involvement in the Austrian socialist movement. Her contacts with nursery and primary-school teachers in Vienna spread concern for child development psychoanalytically viewed into the Viennese school system; and a series of public lectures invited by the Viennese Board of Education gave her, for the first time, a forum for interested school administrators in psychoanalysis. According to Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud’s involvement in the Austrian socialist and reform movements guided not only her belief that “altering environments can improve the psychic conditions of children” but that the combination of social lay activism on the behalf of children and the creation of institutions capable of providing support and guaranteed permanence for such support were absolutely vital. Young-Bruehl, in this context, contrasts Anna Freud’s endeavors in an interesting manner to Anna’s life-long opponent, Melanie Klein: “the English supporters of Melanie Klein, like Melanie Klein herself, were not given to founding institutions for the furtherance or testing of their work, and their upper-class traditions of cultural radicalism and political conservatism set them in great contrast to the Viennese.”34 Nevertheless, even as sympathetic a critic as Young-Bruehl wonders about the extent to which Anna’s insistence on the child’s “positive transference” to the world of adults was not grounded in her reluctance to express negative feelings toward her father or to engage the (her own) mother in any form. Her “unresolved father-complex” had two important consequences. On the one hand, her development of analytic techniques remained rather limited: by insisting on the child’s love of the adult, “she did not say how the temporarily useful pursuit of the children’s love and admiration was to be halted

34. Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 177–78. For the fierce debates between Freud and Klein over the question of child analysis, see Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner, eds., The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–45 (London: Routledge, 1991); and Jacqueline Rose, Why War?: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

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or converted into something else—and this was equivalent to the technical question of how preparation for analysis and establishment of a positive transference could allow, eventually, expression of negative feelings”—not to say, also the expression of political and institutional critique. On the other hand, Anna Freud’s theoretical focus remained bound to the Oedipal period of a child’s life: “she did not—like most of Freud’s female trainees—turn her attention to early childhood, the pre-Oedipal period, and to the role of the mother in children’s lives. Neither female psychology nor the topic of gender differentiation were taken up in any terms except those focused on male castration anxiety and female penis-envy. The father was the main character in the psychic stories Anna Freud told.”35 To return to Sigmund Freud’s own take on lay analysis and his refusal of institutional rules and regulations: his authoritative remarks are arresting, precisely because they point to the extent to which the question of authority is here at stake. As Rose states, “No organization, no social institution, however democratic can bypass [the] site of authority.”36 What sorts of challenges does psychoanalysis raise to and for authority, whether this is the authority of politics or of knowledge, of teaching and of learning? And what kind of authority does psychoanalysis claim for itself ? These are questions that take us directly to the problem of the psychoanalytic institution, an institution— or so at least in its most legitimate and legitimizing forms—that has come to be embodied in the International Psychoanalytic Association, geared as it is both to defend and protect the profession, as well as train future practitioners. Sigmund Freud’s own positions on the matter of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis were complex and often ambivalent. That psychoanalysis should not be annexed to the medical profession he made clear in “The Question of Lay Analysis”—though this would prove to be a position that was eventually resoundingly defeated by the future history of psychoanalysis itself. Rather tellingly, Freud at various times invoked as a metaphor for the psychoanalytic institution—and to say that this was always for him a metaphor is important—the (destroyed) Temple in Jerusalem.37 Thus, in a 1910 letter to Oscar Pfister about the need to defend psychoanalysis against its detractors, he wrote: “Building the Temple with one hand and with the other

35. Ibid., 187. 36. Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep, 189. 37. It is important to insist on his metaphorical use of the Temple, in that it resists a literal reading of Freud in two directions: on the one hand, the possibility of invoking Freud himself to the cause of professionalization; and on the other hand, the overly facile “proof ” that such metaphors may indicate something about Freud’s so-called Jewish identity, reducing thereby identity itself to a stable, self-evident, and literal category.

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wielding weapons against those who would disturb the building—I believe it is a reminiscence of Jewish history.”38 And in a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society called right after the Austrian Anschluß on March 13, 1938, Freud made the following famous remark: “After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, Rabbi Jochanan ben Sakkai asked for permission to open a school at Jabneh for the study of the Torah. We are going to do the same. We are, after all, used to persecution by our history, tradition, and some of us by personal experience.”39 Freud speaks here to a school of study, like the one at Jabneh, to an institution that is to function as a displacement—and precisely not replacement—of the Temple in Jerusalem: not the desire for a rebuilding, but the desire for a site of reflection and knowledge; the desire not for literalization but for the institutionalization of a form of knowledge capable of thinking that same institution as a process of metaphorization. In 1953 Siegfried Bernfeld, one of Freud’s earliest collaborators, a socialist activist in Vienna and one of the many refugees of Nazi aggression to the United States, gave a speech shortly before his death to the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. The speech was only published in an issue of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1962, accompanied by a somewhat defensive explanatory introduction by Rudolf Ekstein, who claimed that Bernstein was clearly “troubled” and furthermore did not “actually” mean what he said in his speech. It is no coincidence that Bernfeld’s speech has been taken up by several Lacanian analysts, foremost among them Moustapha Safouan.40 Bernfeld’s talk before the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, entitled “On Psychoanalytic Training,” was somewhat of a scandal since it

38. Ernst Freud and Heinrich Meng, Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oscar Pfister, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: Basic Books, 1963), letter October 16, 1910. 39. Cited in Moshe Gresser, “Sigmund Freud’s Jewish Identity: Evidence from His Correspondence,” Modern Judaism vol. 11, no. 2 (1991): 229. 40. Moustapha Safouan, Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Other commentaries are provided by Jacqueline Rose in On Not Being Able to Sleep and Ona Nierenberg in “The Lay and the Law: Legislating the ‘Impossible Profession,’ ” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 12 (2007): 65–75. Rose is right in stressing that a central factor in Lacan’s secession, or rather expulsion, from the International Psychoanalytic Association had less to do with his seminars dedicated to a “return to Freud” than with his provocative positions regarding psychoanalytic institutes. In other words, the real threat posed by the Lacanian revolution was not so much one that could have been conveniently located in the “academy.” It was Lacan’s incursions into the wider stage of psychoanalytic politics that proved the real threat, thus necessitating his expulsion. This is a history that, in Rose’s opinion, has been suppressed and, one may hypothesize, repeated within the academy itself, when the latter turns Lacanian thought into a theory only of humanistic studies. In other words, the academic reception of Lacan, so it would seem, has not in the least challenged the institution of learning.

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went straight to the heart of the nature of psychoanalytic institutionalization. His main “thesis is this: the training that is conducted in our professional schools distorts some of the most valuable features of psychoanalysis and hinders its development as a science and as a tool by means of which to change behavior.”41 Too many analysts, so Bernfeld continues, seem hardly aware of the revolutionary content afforded by psychoanalytic education, namely a student-focused education and a concentration on local and human relationships, and these against a “pre-psychoanalytic” position within institutions that are teacher centered and “dominated by questions of administration and policy” (458). Teacher-centeredness and the passion for administration lead to “contradictory attitudes”: a hope that analysis will be taught and learned perfectly—which is unrealistic; the other, a bureaucratic view, where analysis is conceived as a subject to be “taken” in the same manner that one takes a course in anatomy—which, of course, is “unpsychoanalytic” (460).42 If objectivity as a mode of training and assessment is in reality unpsychoanalytic, then the only factor of evaluation and training left to the psychoanalytic institute must be irrationality, that is to say, an authority based on “powers of compliance.” And what, Bernfeld asks, happens to psychoanalysis if it is “taught in such a school?” (461). Bernfeld posits such a school of obedience as fundamentally antithetical to the Freudian ideal, and the gist of his lecture is dedicated to providing an antiinstitutional history of psychoanalytic training, a history that is now in the past and remarkably inflected by some other vision of politics, one grounded in the assertion of a subjective, personal self: “each in his own way,” as he states (463). “Around 1905,” Freud began to conduct analyses of future analysts. Such a practice would eventually harden into the so-called obligatory didactic analysis. According to Safouan, all of today’s practicing analysts would certainly agree on three main points. First, that the training of an analyst has “nothing to do with the reproduction of a model. . . . It is unthinkable that becoming an analyst ‘runs in the family’ ” [except, of course, when we are dealing with the Freud family!]. Second, psychoanalytic transmission is not the transmission of a savoir-faire: while any other institution requires enrollment prerequisites, psychoanalysts do not wonder whether what the subject really desires can function as such a prerequisite, since the very question lies “at the heart of any analysis.” Third, it is firmly believed that one cannot practice analysis without having undergone an analysis oneself (94–95).

41. Siegfried Bernfeld, “On Psychoanalytic Training,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 31 (1962): 458. 42. As Moustapha Safouan has commented in Jacques Lacan, such a policy turned what was a choice into an obligation (102).

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Now, it is precisely the function and import of such a didactic analysis that Bernfeld challenges in his speech, for he views both as an unpsychoanalytic investment in authority. Freud, he states, “tended to let the analysis grow into a relationship between two colleagues, one of whom happened to know a little more than the other. From the first to the very end, Freud kept his didactic cases absolutely free from interference by rules, administrative directives, or political considerations. . . . He continued this long after the establishment of institutes, to the dismay and embarrassment of ‘the authorities’, as he sometimes, and a little ironically, referred to them” (462). The history of the didactic analysis—one that worked as a counterhistory to Freud’s own practices—is divided by Bernfeld into two distinct periods. The first period, extending from the beginnings of psychoanalysis to 1923–4, is characterized by a voluntary, “each in his own way,” approach to the process of becoming an analyst. In Bernfeld’s narrative, this is a period of personal names and anecdotes, and one that Safouan describes as a time when “anyone interested in psychoanalysis, either as a science or as a therapy, is very likely to realize in the end that self-analysis could neither satisfy one’s curiosity nor help one’s personal difficulties and therefore, one is led, of one’s own accord, to ask somebody who seems both to know a little bit more and who can be trusted, for a personal analysis” (98). Such were the practices that largely described the Vienna group, in other words those analysts who were in immediate contact with Freud. In 1923–4 the Berlin group, which in fact had already formed itself into an institute in 1920—and one may conjecture that such a move was made precisely because of the group’s distance from Freud—made the decision to regulate its practices and statutes. First, it invited Hanns Sachs from Vienna to Berlin, with the specific task of analyzing its future analysts. Sachs thereby became the first training analyst. It then fleshed out a training program, replete with admission requirements and contractual promises, the contours of which still hold good today for most psychoanalytic institutes. The Berlin Institute required that psychoanalytic candidates be first admitted to the Institute; that they become familiar with the basic theoretical precepts of psychoanalysis; and that they undergo a personal training analysis before having the formal right to call themselves analysts. According to Bernfeld, such a move was unheard of in the early years of psychoanalysis and it elicited mixed reactions. The question that guides the rest of Bernfeld’s speech is: Why was this approach successful? Why, in particular, was it successful if it seemed to counter Freud’s own personal wishes and inclinations? Bernfeld offers two answers. The first is that by 1920 psychoanalysis had become famous:

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Psychologists, educators, social workers, the whole youth movement, the education departments of the socialist parties and of the new democratic governments all began to adjust their actions, ideas, and even institutions along psychoanalytic lines, though generally according to the more shallow Adlerian theories. Most of our older members neither knew much about these fundamental social changes nor did they care to know. But finally, when one could hardly open a newspaper or go to a nightclub or show without hearing some reference to psychoanalysis or a crack against it, they became alarmed and developed strong xenophobic attitudes in their desire to perpetuate that isolation to which they had grown accustomed and to erect dams against this flood of general interest. (465–66) Such remarks are arresting, particularly if we recall Freud’s own interventions in 1918 at the Psychoanalytic Congress that had positively welcomed the opening of the floodgates to popularity and to the masses. And yet, of course, Freud also refused a dilution of psychoanalytic principles—the evidence for which is provided by his repeated breaks with those of his disciples who deviated from what he considered to be proper psychoanalytic theory. Freud rejected “the more shallow” approaches of the likes of Alfred Adler, and yet he also rejected “respectability,” a respectability apparently desired by his own followers: they, according to Bernfeld, “set themselves up as part of the medical profession, and in order to achieve this aim they felt they had to have clinics, professional schools, and professional societies.” While in Vienna—“close to Freud”—psychoanalysis developed as a field of “serious study,” in Berlin the tendency was in the direction of psychoanalytic professionalization. Rather than the “simple heroism of early times,”43 Berlin chose, as I would describe it, not individual isolation but institutional isolationism. The fact that Berlin won out over Vienna, Bernfeld attributes above all to a second factor. In 1923 Freud was diagnosed with cancer: while the initial prognosis predicted that he would die within a few months, it soon became clear that the cancer was controllable and that Freud would likely live many years longer. For those psychoanalysts who, in Bernfeld’s words, unconsciously thought of Freud as “father and God, ambivalently hated and loved” (467)—a theory that Freud himself had spelled out in his 1912 Totem and Taboo—the death and resurrection of the totemic primal father produced a variety of defensive reactions among his followers. On the one hand, it generated “outbursts of the id forces” by psychoanalysts such as Otto Rank, 43. Safouan, Jacques Lacan, 99.

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who “went his own way”; on the other hand, “others grew intensely anxious because of the threatened loss and became very eager to establish a solid dam against heterodoxy, as they now felt responsible for the future of psychoanalysis” (467). Such a fear of heterodoxy furnished the grounds for institutionalization, and with the (Berlin) mounting of admission requirements, they “punished their students for their own ambivalence. . . . They consolidated the one trend that Freud had always wanted to avoid: the shrinkage of psychoanalysis into an annex of psychiatry” (467). Institutionalization, so Safouan, was a form of acting out, a defense against any form of jouissance: The institutionalization of psychoanalysis was like a ‘repetition’ where staged, behind the back of the ‘actans,’ was the myth promoted by Freud in Totem and Taboo, a ‘fraternal’ arrangement dictated by a murder not so much accomplished as un-admitted, or else, admittable though unaccomplished; it was the outcome of a convergence in repression. . . . In a word, by institutionalizing psychoanalysis, it was precisely as if psychoanalysis never existed. Why so many fears, which turned the accomplishment of a duty into a police operation, if it were not because ‘to take Freud’s place’ was not only to take the place which would allow everyone to serve psychoanalysis best? Why this conformity, this need for respectability or social recognition, if it were not to find in it the alibi of a deep, lonely and yet evident delinquency? (101) The remainder of Bernfeld’s speech is dedicated to comments on the role of the didactic or training analysis and the problem of laws and regulations in psychoanalytic institutes. The personal training analysis is, in his view, “grossly overrated” (477). Apart from the fact that no one really knows what a good analyst even looks like—how, therefore, determine criteria of admission and graduation?—Bernfeld insists that a didactic analysis “gives little knowledge and no skill” (469). He, of course, concedes that any analysis is desirable for its own sake, but he questions the results of an analysis that is “taken” in the same manner one “takes” a course in anatomy. An analysis undergone in such a context transforms psychoanalytic formation into a consumer contract, and—as Ona Nierenberg has pointed out—such an experience can only lead to identification with one’s analyst.44 Bernfeld remarks that “compliance with the demands of authority—of whatever nature—is quite generally considered a poor motive for analysis” (470). It is then difficult to know the motivations and desires of the aspiring analyst, beyond those of compliance. Certainly analysts have proposed other motivations in order 44. Nierenberg, “The Lay and the Law,” 71.

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to justify the didactic analysis. “The love of truth,” is one such motive, but as Safouan comments, “it is precisely ‘the love of truth’ which urges the subject to invent all sorts of ‘truths’, in order to satisfy this very love.” Similarly, “the need to heal” also winds up tripping over itself, to the extent that “if it is a matter of unconscious ‘need’, the whole question would be to know what happens ‘to the vocation’ in question once this need has becomes conscious, that is, recognized as fantasmatic: this is why there is analysis” (116–17). According to Bernfeld, the institutional mandate of a didactic analysis not only infantilizes candidates vis-à-vis the transference authority of the training analyst/father. Bernfeld finds the psychoanalytic institute fundamentally pernicious because it discourages thinking tout court (468). The cause of this lack of thinking resides for him both in a kind of institutional logic and in the fact that the essence of psychoanalytic knowledge runs counter to that logic. In 1924, when I saw the legislators so passionately at work in Berlin, I thought they were, perhaps naturally, animated by the spirit of the Prussian army. Since those days I have come to understand that institutionalization has nothing to do with that specific spirit, but that the laying down of laws is a hobby of psychoanalysts everywhere. A man is likely to choose as his hobby an activity that compensates him for certain frustrations in his professional life. Now if anyone has to frustrate his power drive, the ego satisfactions and the moral, sadistic components inherent in a law-maker, it is certainly the psychoanalyst during his workdays. . . . Unfortunately, the writing of laws and their application and enforcement turns into a hobby with a vengeance. It takes the life out of psychoanalysis by imposing on it . . . more and more nonanalytic regulations. (478–79; my emphasis) It is in the very nature of the institution that, once created, it must provide itself with a whole new set of motives in order to justify and therefore continue its existence. Often—so Bernfeld—these motives are quite different from the institution’s founding motives, and they drive the life of the institution henceforth: It is in the nature of law-making that laws must be precise, and apparently their precision can only be insured by the issuance of other laws. It is not enough to insist that every analyst must have a personal analysis. The law-makers will be strongly tempted—and pressured—to qualify and define the meaning of the term ‘personal analysis.’ Next they will figure out how long the analysis must take. (478)

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The inevitable result of this self-generating and self-perpetuating process of law making is the production of mediocrity and the betrayal of psychoanalysis.45 Institutionalization and professionalization have contributed, according to Nierenberg, to the repression of psychoanalysis itself.46 This is the case because, first, it is precisely the psychoanalytic experience that brings us “to the limits of . . . legal rationalist devices.” Psychoanalysis has as its proper object that unconscious desire that makes legal rationality possible in the first place. Second, however, unconscious desire itself “appears to have the closest relation with a law as universal as language, the law of the prohibition of incest, but a relation whose paradox compared with legal order as well as morality is such that it sometimes throws the subject, in search of an impossible absolution, into crime” (Safouan 114). In other words, psychoanalytic knowledge lays bare the foundation of legal rationality in perverse unconscious desire. Hence the insoluble dilemma: psychoanalysis cannot survive in the format of an institution, and yet without that institution there is no analyst and therefore also no psychoanalysis (119). Anna Freud made her own intervention into the debate on the training analysis in a report written in 1938 to the International Education Commission in Paris. The intervention was subsequently published in German in 1950; an English translation was issued finally in 1965, three years after the publication of Bernfeld’s intervention into the same matter.47 She titled it “The Problem of Training Analysis”; in it she signals the training or didactic analysis precisely as a problem. The essay is essentially divided into two parts. In the first part, she offers a description of the standard institutional position on the training analysis: such training usually is defended because it allows the candidate to directly experience unconscious processes; it demonstrates technique to the aspiring analyst; and it teaches the candidate an understanding of internal psychic events (especially those pertaining to resistance, defense, and transference) through work on his or her similar personal experiences. In other words, and this is an important point, it exposes the future analyst to all those things that cannot be either taught or learned within the setting of a 45. As Max Weber puts the matter: “It would be unfair to impute to the petty characters in the faculties or the government departments, the responsibility of a situation through which so many mediocre people indubitably play a very important role in the universities. We should rather look for the answer in the very laws of the concerted action of men, especially in that of several organizations, in the collaboration between the faculties who propose candidates and government departments which appoints them” (Safouan 119). 46. Nierenberg, “The Lay and the Law,” 72. 47. This essay appears in Anna Freud, “The Problem of Training Analysis,” The Writings of Anna Freud, vol. 4, Indications for Child Analysis and Other Papers (1945–1956) (New York: International Universities Press, 1968), 407–21.

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seminar or through the reading of psychoanalytic theory. That an immediate personal experience of the essential psychoanalytic space—that of the unconscious, of practice and technique, and of resistances and transference—appear as “somehow” beyond or elsewhere vis-à-vis psychoanalytic knowledge, all this is noteworthy. The second part of the essay, structured perhaps by this recognition of contrast between personal unconscious experiences and psychoanalytic knowledge, offers a sustained critique of the actual practice of the training analysis. There exists a “massive contrast in motivation” (411) behind the decision to a enter a therapeutic as opposed to a training analysis. While, she concedes, the actual process of treatment may end up being only slightly different,48 in the case of the therapeutic analysis the neurotic patient is seeking relief from suffering: for this patient repression as well as other defense mechanisms have proved unsuccessful and his ego feels endangered by the threatening return of the repressed. Whatever equilibrium there is, has been achieved by means of compromise formations (i.e., symptoms) which cause suffering. In these circumstances, the analyst’s efforts to uncover unconscious material are re-enforced by the constant spontaneous upsurge of unsatisfied impulses. Furthermore, the neurotic ego, weakened and split by the pathological processes, is less able to resist the dreaded return of the repressed in analysis than the ego of a healthier individual. (412) This presumably healthier individual undergoing training analysis—and doing so for professional advancement—has greater difficulties in uncovering unconscious material: the “relatively normal person’s internal equilibrium is based on successful repressions, on stable defenses, and on conflict solutions which are experienced as ego syntonic. . . . The candidate therefore cannot help but experience analysis as a disturber of mental peace and health and to resist it energetically as such” (411–12). And therefore: “In training

48. But see here, in contrast, Anna Freud’s comments from 1954:“Years ago, in Vienna, we instituted an experimental technical seminar among colleagues of equal seniority, and equal theoretical background, treating cases with similar diagnoses and therefore supposedly similar structure. We compared techniques and found in discussion . . . ‘that no two analysts would ever give precisely the same interpretation throughout an analysis,’ but more surprisingly still, that such uniformity of procedure was never kept up for more than a few days in the beginning of the analysis. After that, the handling of the material would cease to run parallel, each analyst giving precedence for interpretation to another piece or even layer. . . . Even though the final results might be the same, the roads leading there were widely divergent. So far as I know, no one has yet succeeded in investigating and finding the causes of these particular variations” (“The Widening Scope of Psychoanalysis: Discussion,” Writings of Anna Freud, 4:356–76).

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analyses, the most strenuous efforts are usually necessary to overcome the resistances put up by the ego against the uncovering of the repressed. In the therapeutic analyses of severe neurotics, on the other hand, working through becomes the most important weapon in the difficult battle against the perseverance of pathological instinctual processes” (413). While the motive factor points to differences in analytic problems, it does not constitute per se an argument against the training analysis, for these differences could, one must surmise, be solved via means of technique. Anna Freud has far greater reservations about the question of the analytic transference. First, the relatively healthy candidate takes much more time to establish a transference to his or her analyst because “emotional relationships are tied [in the candidate’s case] more effectively to real objects of the present.” Second, once established, the fundamental analytic rule that the transference be a fantasy, does not apply in the same manner in the training analysis, since “the training analyst cannot avoid playing an important role in [the candidates’] real lives” (415). The candidates, for instance, are always fully informed of their training analysts’ professional reputation. Furthermore, admission to psychoanalytic training institutes are usually provisional, contingent that is on the successful completion of a training analysis, and therefore “the training analyst’s approval or disapproval has important realistic consequences for the candidate’s career . . . he fulfills the functions of judging and criticizing in a very real capacity” (417). This situation violates, then, not just the analyst’s impartiality and “noncritical observational function,” but also the essential requirement of confidentiality in order for free association to take place. Third, the analytic transference experience always reawakens infantile sibling rivalries. In the case of the training analysis, “such rivals are provided by the persons of his colleagues with whom he has become familiar in reality and who reciprocate and act out their own feelings. . . . They compete; they envy each other in view of alleged parental preference; they combine forces occasionally to fight the parent, etc. In many instances, candidates in analysis are more intent on”—and one may hypothesize, also encouraged to—“acting out this form of rivalry than on understanding the infantile relations which are revealed by it” (417–18). Fourth, the candidate’s actual knowledge of his analyst interferes with the structure of fantasy and thereby contaminates it. Anna Freud proposes that the fantasy sustaining the primal scene is played out in the institutional setting as the candidate’s investment in the relations that exist between competing analysts within the same institution. For this reason, they become “passionately involved in all the existing feuds between the teachers in [their] Institute, taking sides sometimes for, sometimes against [their] own analyst” (418). Similarly, theoretical positions taken by candidates

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either for or against their own analysts are frequently the result of either positive or negative transference mechanisms. Finally, while in therapeutic analyses all patients at some point or another develop the fantasy of becoming an analyst themselves—the result of an ambivalent identificatory relation to the analyst of both emulation and replacement, such identification is a reality in the training analysis. This means that infantile fantasy merges with the adult’s choice of profession, and realistic elements intermingle with the unrealistic ones. Where therapeutic analysis succeeds, the patient dismantles the transference neurosis, regains his independence, and separates his fate from that of his analyst. The candidate does the opposite. After completing his personal analysis, he enters the analytic world and advances to the status of colleague, co-member, occasionally even co-worker with his former analyst. Whether this happens after transference has been dissolved, or on the basis of unsolved transference residues is not always easy to decide. (420) To state that the professional results of an (un)resolved transference neurosis are “not always easy to decide” was particularly (un)resolved for the writer of this text, for Anna Freud’s personal autobiographic experience and knowledge of psychoanalysis, her therapeutic and training analyses, were fatefully the same. If her therapeutic analysis and also her training as an analyst were performed by her own father—and this analysis was conducted, significantly, in order for her to make a professional decision on her own future profession—if, in other words, her fantasy identifications coincided but also collided with the same figure: Sigmund Freud, father of both Anna and of psychoanalysis, then what kind of meaning could such a space have for the heir of the psychoanalytic institution?

Children of Democracy Anna Freud identified with the position of the child; indeed she envied its position. Not only had her father, so writes Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, provided her with a system of thought with which she was “psychically predisposed to agree.” More vitally, this was a system within which—that is, not as an innovator—Anna Freud attempted to provide her own version of a “wider social stage.” In a 1927 letter to Max Eitingon, she claimed that she found herself in her father’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego: “everything was in there, my old daydreams and all I wanted.” And as Young-Bruehl comments, Anna Freud “had only wanted to be a beloved believer in her father’s

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organization, a soldier in his company, a sibling loved as much as (if not more than) the other siblings.”49 Indeed, she never gave up on this desire, this wanting: her self-avowed foot soldierdom, her altruistic surrender, always remained central to her theoretical and clinical projects. The nursery—that most important group setting for children—provided her with “creative expression that assuaged her fear of passivity or ego-dissolving regression to an [even] earlier stage.” Within such a setting, and reproduced throughout her life, she “could imagine herself as a child—who was going to give herself over to the care of psychoanalysts. This was Anna Freud allowing herself a loosening of her ego boundaries, emotional surrender. ‘It is a most pleasant place,’ she wrote to a business contact, ‘it looks so gay and charming that one regrets not being a problem child oneself.’ ”50 Such ego-dissolving regression was transformed into “emotional surrender,” that is, “the idea that true believers and foot soldiers are bound to their parental figures not just by love but also by ‘identification with the aggressor’ ”—a key term in her own theorization of the ego’s defense mechanisms.51 Group dynamics were always an essential aspect of Anna Freud’s thinking and in her political leadership of the psychoanalytic movement. “My interest is not in individual people,” she wrote to A. A. Brill in 1934, “but in the analytic movement as a whole.” Practical, pragmatic considerations prevailed for her over those that could possibly be dictated by personality or individual brilliance, and were conditioned by her early work in the Austrian socialist movement. As Young-Bruehl writes: In her first years of working with the Vienna Society, its Institute, and its training program, Anna Freud reached conclusions about how groups do and do not work that she retained for the rest of her life. First and foremost, she came to think of leadership as commitment to bringing out the best in everyone by making sure that everyone gave the group’s goal—the maintenance and continuance of psychoanalysis— priority over their individual goals. . . . Second, she came to think that people should hold positions of responsibility on the basis of their abilities to work without arousing mistrust or producing friction in the group. . . . All the institutions that eventually bore her stamp had very strong internal bonds but sometimes had to be recharged from without—or by Anna Freud’s own efforts as one of the rare people combining group mindedness and brilliance.52 49. 50. 51. 52.

Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 215. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 155.

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Obviously, all this is a complicated affair, predicated as it is on a series of necessary requirements. What, for instance, is the import of a “necessary recharge” that comes from without the group itself and furthermore requires “brilliance”? And how does this external source of energy work together with altruistic surrender to the father? Is there not a certain irrationality in play here that supplements the rationality of the group? “I know,” she writes in a 1925 letter to Max Eitingon, “why I always have a bad conscience when I am irrational. Because Papa always makes it clear that he would like to know me as much more rational and lucid than the girls and women he gets to know during his analytic hours, with all their moods, dissatisfactions and passionate idiosyncrasies. Thus, I too, would really like to be as he sees fit, first out of love for him, and second because I myself know that it is the only chance that one has to be somewhat useful and not a burden and a concern for others.” In her drive to be better than all of her father’s female patients, in not succumbing to the depressions that apparently accompanied her menstrual periods or even her fantasy life, Sigmund Freud, so YoungBruehl writes, was her model for group leadership and for triumph over moods, and he was her interior model, her standard setter, her ego ideal; rationality and lucidity were her goals for both inner and outer domains, and they were her counters to anger, jealousy, rivalry. For herself, Anna Freud interpreted her father’s standards as: be above factions, and be above typical femininity.53 In 1952 Ernest Jones, at the time composing his authoritative biography of Sigmund Freud, wrote to Anna: “What parents you had! You have inherited his depth of feeling together with her firmness and intactness [?]. Now I have understood more fully your father’s remark to me in 1938 in Vienna—‘Anna ist stärker wie ich!’ ”54 While Young-Bruehl translates this sentence unproblematically as Freud having said of his daughter that she was stronger than her father—and in 1938 after Anna’s arrest by the Gestapo and her apparently calm response to the situation—this may very well have been possible. Yet it is also possible that Jones may have made the typical mistake

53. Ibid., 155–56. While I think that Young-Bruehl’s portrayal of Anna Freud is absolutely accurate here, I think it should be pointed out that Young-Bruehl is also the biographer of another Jewish and German-speaking woman, namely, Hannah Arendt, the latter sharing in Young-Bruehl’s estimation many characteristics with Anna Freud. This is the same story of self-overcoming as a woman, the same dedication to politics as the transcendence of the personal, the same ironizing of private passions vis-à-vis all those father figures of Western thought. 54. Cited in Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 233.

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in his use of the German word “wie.” The sentence “Anna ist stärker wie ich” does in fact allow for a certain ambiguity, for it also means, “Anna is stronger like me.” While not too much can be attached to such an apocryphal statement, nevertheless it is symptomatic of a certain relationship between Sigmund and Anna: a relationship then of both similarity or identification, as also of difference. The group setting of children—whether this occurred in Anna Freud’s first involvement as a young adult with social and pedagogical reform in Austria, in her later private practice as an analyst, or in her work during and after World War II in Britain—formed the basis not only of her personal cathexis to or her daily activities as a professional. The child as a social creature, as in fact the prototype of the zoon politikon, provided her with the starting point and end product of all her theoretical work, as much as with the framework from within which she shaped the psychoanalytic movement and its institutionalization after her father’s death. This is not to say that she infantilized either psychoanalytic theory or practice. On the contrary, Anna Freud in fact insisted that children were or should be responsible adults. The nursery, for her, was never the site of play and irresponsibility, but more vitally the space from within which social, democratic participation came into being. Not only was the nursery the model of all sociopolitical relations; far more dramatically, it functioned for her as the fantasy space of an idealized, because just and democratic, order, of indeed an imaginary sociality. Her father had certainly recognized the nursery as the place from within which justice came into being. But he detected the source of what he called the “demand for justice” in the nursery in envy, in an unremitting rivalry, to which an end is put only by the “compromise formation” of democracy. For this reason he described the scene that took place there as a “war in the nursery.” As a direct participant in such a war, Anna’s own take on the matter required a different perspective, one from below so to speak, and it therefore also required a rewriting of her father’s own story. As was always the case with her, such a rewriting took the form of an impious fidelity vis-à-vis her father’s work and to the psychoanalytic cause more generally. Her fidelity was always performed as a reiteration of her father’s work—this is a consistent and continuous pattern in all of her writing. And yet, it was precisely by making her father’s theory reiterable that she usually performed her own greatest impieties. How she accomplished this gesture will be the subject of the following chapters. This is a gesture that relied on turning her father’s theory of the democratic social contract as founded in the identificatory love of the father into something else, into a nursery scene that gives a space to the daughter, even if it does so in complicated, even problematic, ways. It was

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predicated on a vision of sociality that effected a translation into the imaginary register without thereby leaving behind the symbolic register of the Oedipus complex. In other words, Anna Freud—ever loyal to her father— attempted to think the extraordinarily complex nature of the Oedipal social contract by taking gender into account without thereby invoking the maternal relation.55 This translation constitutes both Anna Freud’s greatest weakness and also her greatest strength. The term “impious fidelity” is the term I use to denote this double and therefore ambiguous legacy. It is not fortuitous that Anna Freud performed her move—and quite literally so—in her first public lecture on psychoanalytic theory, which was to gain her admittance to the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society. She gained this admittance by subtly rewriting her father’s paper entitled “A Child Is Being Beaten,” whose main case study was—Anna Freud herself. To take the position of the child beaten by the father and this as the object of one of her father’s case histories, to transform that position into the subject of a psychoanalytic talk in order to gain for herself admission into a society that would consequently give her permission to function as a professional psychoanalyst was indeed an extraordinary feat.

55. This has in fact been the typical move made by feminist theory. Of particular relevance here are the writings of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. See, for instance, Luce Irigaray’s seminal Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

 Ch ap ter 2 Girls Will Be Boys Gender, Envy, and the Freudian Social Contract

If you want to know men, study women. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In 1918 Anna Freud entered analysis with her father. The ostensible reason for treatment was what Sigmund Freud called an “indecisiveness in life,” and what Anna herself described as her inability to decide whether she wanted to become a teacher or follow in her father’s footsteps and become an analyst. Many years later, in a 1935 letter to the Italian analyst Edoardo Weiss, who was contemplating at the time an analysis of his own son, Sigmund wrote: “Concerning the analysis of your hopeful son, that is certainly a ticklish business. With a younger, promising brother it might be done easily. . . . There are special difficulties and doubts with a son.”1 Though posited here in the language of generational difference, Freud had no such reservations regarding his youngest daughter. “Anna’s analysis will be very elegant,” he confidently wrote to Sandor Ferenczi during the fall of 1918, and in the just cited letter to Weiss, he described his daughter’s analysis as a complete success.2 Nevertheless, Anna Freud’s analysis was to

1. Cited in Robert Coles, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1992), 7. 2. The success or not of Anna’s analysis would become, almost ten years later, a factor in the discussions between the Vienna and London societies revolving around the question of child analysis. Ernest Jones, in response to the publication of Anna Freud’s Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, a text that had taken up positions antithetical to those of the London-based Melanie Klein, stated in a letter to Freud that his daughter’s theoretical positions could be led back to “imperfectly 50

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last an unusually long four years—and this at a time when analyses were frequently conducted in as short a period as a summer vacation. Indeed, Anna returned to a second analysis with her father in 1924, two years after her indecisiveness in life had been cured in favor of a psychoanalytic career and after she was already in practice for herself. Neither father nor daughter left a record of this second analysis, but what was perceived as Anna’s problem seems to have run much deeper than a career choice to be made. In her biography of Anna Freud, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has traced the prehistory of Anna’s neurosis—one that Anna herself mysteriously referred to as “it,” and that her father referred to as her “illness.” The main symptom was Anna’s compulsion to make up “nice stories,” elaborate daydreams with many characters and intricate plots. Such daydreaming activity, which made her feel “exhausted and stupid,” was in fact Anna’s method of both generating and controlling her excessive tendency to masturbation. Masturbation and the latter’s superstructural “nice stories” appeared, it seems, throughout Anna’s childhood and were still a problem in 1912 when she was eighteen years old.3 Indeed, 1912 was a tumultuous year for Freud on both the domestic and the professional fronts: feeling himself a modern-day Lear, he faced what he saw as ingratitude from his children (of whom all but Anna had left home) and from his followers ( Jung and Stekel having just broken with the psychoanalytic movement). In the face of so much insurrection by children and followers, Freud felt compelled to theorize, that same year in Totem and Taboo, the succession between fathers and sons in terms of a “primal” myth wherein the violent narcissistic father of the primal horde is murdered by his oppressed and resentful sons. These sons, in order to atone for their guilt, establish a joint leadership through the equal division of (political) power among themselves. The social contract is here established and violence is averted, for none of the sons is allowed to occupy the place previously ocanalyzed resistances” (617). Jones found it “a pity that she published the book so soon” (618), but augured that she might nevertheless show herself “as amenable as her father to further experience” (618). Freud replied rather tersely that when two analysts differ on a theoretical point, it might be perfectly justified to assume that the mistaken view is due to the author’s imperfect analysis. Nevertheless, “in practical polemics such an argument is not permissible, for it is at the disposal of each party” (619), and, in fact, he added in a later letter, “such a criticism is just as dangerous as it is impermissible.” Freud then immediately resorted to what he had just forbidden: “Is anyone actually analyzed enough? I can assure you that Anna has been analyzed longer and more thoroughly than, for example, you yourself ” (624). R. Andrew Paskauskas, ed., The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 617–24. 3. In 1924, the year Anna began her second analysis with her father, she wrote to Lou Andreas Salomé that “extra-analytical closeness” to her father produced “difficulties and temptations of untruthfulness” in her analysis. Cited in Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 123.

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cupied by the violent father: by mutual consent, from now on that place will have to remain vacant. Then also in 1912, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society dedicated a series of discussions to the question of masturbation, and in particular to the problem of female masturbation. Freud stated at these meetings that female masturbation—or clitoral sexuality—is “a piece of masculine sexuality” in girls and women and that it must be repressed in order for mature vaginal sexuality to emerge.4 Though these two behaviors, the rebellion of sons and the masturbation of daughters, may appear far apart, I wish to argue here that there is a close connection between female masturbation, this “piece of masculine sexuality” in women, and the constitution of a field in psychoanalysis that might be marked as properly political—a political field the contours of which would eventually allow for the institutionalization of the psychoanalytic movement, in particular, but also for a theory of social institutionalization more generally. I propose here to think together two threads of thought in Freud’s work, one deriving from his investigations into the origins of sexual differences, the other from his analyses of the origins of modern liberal society. The knot that ties these two threads in Freud’s thought is envy. As I will argue, it is envy that allows Freud to clear a space for a modern form of politics, one that relies on the construction, precisely, of the vacant space left by the exit of the father from the political arena.5 In modern liberal

4. Quoted in Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 60. In his 1912 essay summarizing the “masturbation debates” in the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, Freud comments on the as yet unachieved consensus on the interpretation of the phenomenon of masturbation and he links the lack of a unified position by the band of psychoanalytic brothers to the fact that the “subject of masturbation is quite inexhaustible.” The fact that the theory of masturbation just keeps coming appears, then, in flagrant contradiction to masturbatory practices themselves: they certainly made Anna feel “tired and stupid,” and Freud himself does not foreclose on the possibility that they may have long-term damaging, because draining, effects. Masturbation, he remarks, “has les défauts de ses vertus” as much as “les vertus de ses défauts” Sigmund Freud, “A Discussion on Masturbation,” Standard Edition, 12:254, 252. 5. The literature on Freud’s political theories is immense. Of particular note are Carl Schorke’s chapter on Freud in his Fin de Siècle Vienna (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980) and William McGrath’s Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), which both argue that Freud’s metaphyschological theories are to be traced back to the politico-historical circumstances of fin-de-siècle Vienna. José Brunner in Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001), on the other hand, views the relationship between Freud’s theory of the mind and his theory of politics as a dialectical one: Freudian metapsychology relies heavily on political metaphors, while Freud’s politics are dependent on libidinal drives and investments. The consequences of Freud’s political theories for women are traced in Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) and Juliet Flower McCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (New York: Routledge, 1991), among many others. Two outstanding psychoanalytic approaches to psychoanalytic politics are those provided by Jacqueline Rose in Why War?: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (London: Blackwell, 1993) and Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). See also Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the

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political theory, the democratic subject is constituted by or assumed on the basis of the subject’s position of ignorance and affectlessness: the democratic subject must be blind to his or her own desires in order for justice, equality, and democracy to come into being. John Rawls’s famous “original position” of the subject prior to all social contracts is the most sophisticated example of this required blindness.6 Freud makes the claim in Civilization and Its Discontents that such blind justice is “the first requisite of civilization,” the guarantee, that is, “that a law once made will not be broken in favor of an individual.”7 Feminist criticism has challenged this elimination of affect from the realm of the political on the basis that such an exclusion has supported the exclusion of women from the political sphere to the extent, precisely, that women and the family are viewed by classical political theory as the bearers of this (displaced) affect. Affect (and especially love) is thus viewed by masculinist political theory as antagonistic to the demands of civilization and the requirements of justice. Carol Pateman, in her influential critique of modern political contract theory, has claimed that women become the bearers in this theory of a certain “disorder” (biological, personal, and political), of an element of disruption that comes to function as the system’s excluded Other. For Pateman, the symptom of this exclusion may be found in the fact that it is “fraternity” that functions as the third foot of the classic democratic triad of “equality, liberty, and fraternity.” She argues that the critique of patriarchalism effected by the contract theorists and their male critics as the conflict between the political rights of fathers and the natural liberties of sons has left in place the conjugal, masculine patriarchal rights of husbands over their wives: “The contract theorists’ claim was theoretical parricide, not the overthrow of the sexual right of men and husbands. Both sides [patriarchal theorists and contract theorists] agreed, first, that women (wives), unlike sons, were born and remained naturally subject to men (husbands); and, second, that the right of men over women was not political.”8 And Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004) and George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). 6. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). I am much indebted to John Forrester’s essay “Justice, Envy, and Psychoanalysis” in Dispatches from the Freud War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) in which he traces the connection between envy and justice through the history of political philosophy. Forrester claims that passions or affects are put aside by modern political theory, and that envy in particular is transformed into “interest” or “the calm desire for wealth,” all in an effort to stave off the pernicious political effects the passions are perceived to have on relations of justice. Forrester credits Freud (and Nietzsche) with the reintroduction of envy into the political field of vision. I will be returning to a discussion of Rawls in my final chapter. 7. Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Standard Edition, 21:95. 8. Carol Pateman, The Disorder of Women (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 39.

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therefore, the so-called victory of the contract theorists hinged, according to Pateman, both on the separation of paternal from political power and on the gendered separation of politics and affect. It is the cooperation of these two factors, she concludes, that has guaranteed the exclusion of women from the modern democratic sphere.9 In the final section of his late essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud notes that psychoanalysis hits a bedrock named “the biological field” when it must meet the demands of analyzing the distinction between the sexes. What is noteworthy in these pages is that it is not biological difference per se that constitutes this bedrock, but a certain resistance on the part of women and men to such a biological difference: penis envy in women and a passive, feminine attitude in men point to a fundamental disorder in the psychic life of humans, forcing the analyst into “an oppressive feeling that all one’s repeated efforts have been in vain, . . . that one has been ‘preaching to the winds’ . . . when one is trying to persuade a woman to abandon her

9. The Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz has provided a rather different narrative of the role of affect in the process of modernization. She claims that capitalism and its theorists were deeply concerned with human emotions, and she cites some of the greatest thinkers of the sociological canon to make her point. From Adam Smith through Marx, Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, Freud, management and Fordist theorists, popular psychologists to contemporary writers in the genre of “advice literature,” Illouz tracks a Foucauldian paradigm that has the creation of homo sentimentalis as its main object. One aspect that she highlights, and this is relevant for my own analysis here, is the discursive and often institutional alliance created by the idea of “intimate emotions” between psychology (which by the 1960s had become fully institutionalized and begun to form a central aspect of American culture) and feminism in the 1970s, not just in the university but also in and through a network of feminist organizations. Therefore, “feminism and psychology could borrow from each other: for example, both psychology and feminism solicited the very kind of reflexivity which had been an attribute of women’s consciousness. . . . Both feminism and therapy demanded that women be both surveyors and surveyed. . . . Independence and nurture were . . . the two central themes of feminism and therapy, and when properly synthesized would constitute emotional health and political emancipation. Finally . . . both feminism and therapy shared the idea and the practice of converting private experience into public speech” (26). The power of the discourse of intimacy lies, so Illouz, in its ability to mobilize and combine egalitarian claims with the rationalization and instrumentalization of affect both in the family and the workplace. Precisely because in the new psychological imagination the “true self ” is opaque and therefore requires active intervention, it consequently needs a rational, instrumental technique—what, in fact, Foucault has called a “technology of the self.” The “ultimate rationale for expressing and ‘digging out’ these emotions was that intimate relations ought to be fundamentally egalitarian. What made the experience of intimacy both a psychological and a political affair was the fact that it stipulated that partners ought to relate to each other in an egalitarian fashion” (28). This in the home; in the workplace “the language of therapy initiated a realignment of masculinity around feminine conceptions of self, [while] in the family it encouraged women to claim the status of (male) autonomous and self-controlled subjects. If in the corporation, psychologists made productivity an emotional affair, in the realm of intimacy they predicated pleasure and sexuality on the implementation of fair procedures and on the affirmation and preservation of women’s basic rights” (29). See Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007).

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wish for a penis . . . or when one is seeking to convince a man that a passive attitude to men does not always signify castration and that it is indispensable in many relationships in life.”10 In the pages that follow, I would like to interrogate the theoretical and political consequences of this Freudian bedrock where, it appears, it is impossible for Freud to stop women from acting like men and, conversely, to convince men to act like women, and I will claim that Freud requires this bedrock to remain a bedrock for his model of politics to function properly. It is in such a manner, for instance, that one must understand Freud’s claim that a passive attitude in men is indispensable for many relationships in life. It is on the basis of this same claim, furthermore, that I would like to complicate considerably Pateman’s understanding of “the disorder of women,” as well as her criticism of modern political theory as constructed on the basis of an exclusion. I do so by juxtaposing some of Freud’s texts on political justice with his texts on femininity. I would propose, first, that a disorder of women in the Freudian model of either political or sexual relations cannot be understood without taking note of an equally great disorder in men. Second, I claim that Freud requires this gender disorder so that he can make his argument about democracy and justice.11 Furthermore, I want to argue that Freud opens again for thought the link between blind justice and disorderly affect, a link that, according to Pateman, has been disavowed by masculinist political theory. Freud’s great contribution to political theory is to have reintroduced affect into the mechanisms of power, not simply as that which must be contained but as the site where social and political relations originate. Freud posits at the origins of democratic subjectivity—which for him is consonant with modern subjecthood—one affect that he views as crucial to the social contract: envy. Envy lies at the root of both Freud’s theory of democracy and of his theory of gender construction (the latter in the form

10. Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Standard Edition, 23:252. One year later Freud would reiterate this same experience of a bedrock in “An Outline of Psychoanalysis”: “If we ask an analyst what his experience has shown to be the mental structures least accessible to influence in his patients, the answer will be: in a woman her wish for a penis, in a man his feminine attitude towards his own sex, a precondition of which would, of course, be the loss of his penis.” Standard Edition, 23:194. 11. Pateman hints at such a male disorder, though she does not push it to a place where it might do more theoretical and political work: “Feminist scholars are now showing that from ancient times there has been an integral connection between the warrior and conceptions of self-identity, sexuality and masculinity, which all have been bound up with citizenship. The peculiarity of the liberal is that although he is male he is also defined—unlike either his predecessors in the traditional world or the ‘individuals’ that appears in social-liberal and socialist theory—in opposition to the political and the masculine passions that underlie the defense of the state by arms (Pateman, Disorder of Women, 49).

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of the notorious concept of “penis envy”). Envy “engenders” political subjectivity through a series of cross-identifications. In the Freudian fantasy of the social contract, the male democratic subject, I will argue, is a woman who acts like a man. To articulate a Freudian theory of modern social existence hence requires not only the reading of those of his texts explicitly given over to “civilization and its discontents” but also to those texts in which Freud seeks to establish the factors that make up and explain the differential development between boys and girls. One way into this nexus of politics, sexual difference, and affect is through Freud’s relationship to his daughter. Anna Freud, who became her father’s (contested) successor, did so by becoming the carrier of a node of problems and anxieties within the psychoanalytic movement itself: gender and feminine sexuality, authority and law, the transformation of the envious child into a democratic subject but, above all, the handing down of authority and knowledge from one generation to the next. And the name for the mode of transmitting these anxieties was intimately linked, in both Sigmund Freud’s and Anna Freud’s work, to the authority of beating and to the willing consent given to this authority. Such transmission is called: “A Child Is Being Beaten.”

The Father Freud’s 1919 essay “A Child Is Being Beaten” marks a turning point in his thought, for here Freud provides us with his first extended meditation on the girl’s sexual development. At least as far as the origin of sexual perversions is concerned, boys appear different from girls: “the expectation of there being a complete parallel was mistaken.”12 Freud would later amplify and generalize this difference in his 1925 essay “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” where he supposed that things would be fairly “similar” with girls, “though in some way or other they must nevertheless be different.”13 Here, in 1919, as he meditates on the buried secrets of sexual difference, Freud also theorizes the darker side of sexuality as a possible perversion, as an effect of the uncanny, as that which is traversed by an inevitable and tragic difference. The psychic world here

12. Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Standard Edition, 17:196. All further references to this essay will appear in the text. 13. Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” Standard Edition, 19:174. Significantly, as Young-Bruehl points out, such “consequences” were not engaged by his daughter.

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is not that of the polymorphously sexual child as he had conceived it in the past;14 rather, it has become much larger, much deeper, but it is nevertheless confined to a monotonous present tense (as the title would suggest), to a repetitively compulsive and perverse act in the Now. In addition, whereas Freud’s previous patients had had names—Emma, Irma, Dora, Little Hans, Schreber, Wolf Man, Rat Man—now we encounter, as Marcio Giovanetti has pointed out, an unnamed child, a subject who exists only by virtue of an action either performed or undergone. In fact, we encounter here the rudiments of Freud’s new topographical model of the human subject, a theory of subjectivity based on a nonspecified and nonspecific subject—one that is general and abstract, yet and at the same time in a complex dialogue with its own genderedness. Furthermore, precisely because this subject is now conceived in both abstract and gendered terms, this subject will have its own dark side: it will itself be at least partially unconscious and split by the creation of a new psychic function, to wit, the superego. Of course there were more immediate reasons for the subject’s new anonymity, for one of the six cases presented in the essay was Freud’s own daughter Anna. Many readers have commented on the centrality of this fact to the structure of the essay, turning it into the cause of a series of displacements, biases, and incoherencies in Freud’s description of the beating fantasy.15 In a surprising number of patients, Freud tells us at the beginning of “A Child Is Being Beaten,” we encounter the production of the same mo14. For an extended analysis of this, see Marcio de F. Giovanetti, “The Scene and Its Reverse: Considerations on a Chain of Associations in Freud,” in On Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten,” ed. Ethel Spector Person (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 15. Rivka Eifermann attributes to the workings of transferential and countertransferential mechanisms Freud’s assignment of a special position to the youngest child in the family, his universalization, in fact, of this position. Furthermore, Freud never mentions the primal scene as a possible source of the beating fantasy, but instead insists that it derives not from the parents’ bedroom but from the war-torn nursery. Finally, the de-emphasis of the role of sexuality, the complete exclusion of the mother’s role in the girl’s psychic development, and his insistence that the second stage of the fantasy always remains unconscious—all these factors are for Eifermann evidence that Freud was speaking of his own daughter. Rivka Eifermann, “The Exceptional Position of ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ in the Learning and Teaching of Freud,” in On Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.” Arnold Modell, as well, has wondered whether Freud’s conviction that the very heart of the perverse fantasy always remains unconscious was not a way for Freud to distance himself from acknowledging seductive involvement with his own daughter. He wonders, furthermore, what it could mean to publish her masturbation fantasies, and—given that she probably consented—what kind of collusive enactment between father and daughter was entailed in such consent. Arnold Modell, “Humiliating Fantasies and the Pursuit of Unpleasure,” in On Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.” Finally, Patrick Mahoney declares: “The grammatically present progressive of the title suggests that in his iatrogenic seduction and abuse of his daughter, Freud was in the process of symbolically beating her and compounding her beating fantasies.” Patrick Mahoney, “ ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: A Clinical, Historical, and Textual Study,” in On Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 49.

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notonous fantasies in which the fantasizer silently watches on as an adult beats a child. The spectacle of this beating has pleasure attached to it and results in the masturbatory satisfaction of the genitals. The fantasy, confessed to by the patients only with shame and guilt and always involving an unknown child and an unknown adult, has as a rule its beginnings in the patient’s preschool years but is later strengthened by scenes at school, when the child witnesses the beatings of children by their teachers. Just as the role of the school is vital in providing material for this beating fantasy, so also later, when the child can read, will books play a crucial role in further elaborations: “The child began to compete with these works of fiction by producing his own fantasies and by constructing a wealth of situations and institutions, in which children were beaten, or were punished and disciplined in some way because of their naughtiness and bad behavior” (180). Crucial here is not merely the fact that the fantasy requires a social setting for its continued elaboration and material, but that indeed it generates, constructs a social imaginary in the form of “situations and institutions.” In his “exhaustive study” of six cases—four female and two male—Freud finds in none of them a traumatic event in early childhood; all six patients had either never or rarely been beaten at home. The fantasy material is provided exclusively by the inevitable fisticuffs between siblings in the nursery, by experiences at school, and by some general recognition on the part of children that parents and educators are endowed with superior strength (überlegene Körperkraft). Überlegende Körperkraft is related here not to brute and brutal physicality, but to mastery of the self and thereby to the possibility of an eventual pedagogical relationship. The beating fantasy is a sign, then, not of trauma but of a structural relationship to “other children” who are identical to the fantasizer and to persons of authority who gain that authority by virtue of their superior position.16 The fantasy composed of “a child is being beaten” constructs a field of knowledge for the psychoanalyst, the contours of which are given by the child’s own ignorance.17 The child does not know who is being beaten, nor who is beating: “I know nothing more about it: a child is being beaten [Ich weiß nichts mehr darüber: ein Kind wird geschlagen]” (181). Investigation into the

16. This triangulation between children in the nursery who are identical to each other and the authoritative father as the common love object will, of course, be the foundation of Freud’s theory of “group psychology,” formulated only two years later in his “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” 17. Leonard Shengold has remarked on Freud’s prose in the essay, on the latter’s relatively “rare overuse of the unqualified . . . terms always and never as expressions of too much certainty in his generalizations.” Shengold’s point is that the reader is left with a sense of willed knowledge, imposed

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beaten child’s gender elicits the same answer: “I don’t know” (181). Freud makes it immediately clear, as he describes his own acquisition of knowledge about the genealogy of the beating fantasy, that “genuine psychoanalysis” is what is at issue here, and psychoanalysis can only be genuine if it confronts with the utmost strictness the patient’s knowledge (or lack thereof) about her childhood: “Strictly observed [streng genommen]—and why should this question not be considered with all possible strictness?—analytic work deserves to be recognized as genuine psychoanalysis only when it has succeeded in removing the amnesia which conceals from the adult his knowledge of his childhood from its beginning.” (183).18 The first thing the patient learns is that the beating fantasy, like the patient herself, has a history, and that both have undergone several changes by the time the fantasy has become a conscious representation. Thus, the first stage of the fantasy occurs in very early childhood. On analysis, the girl discovers that in its earliest incarnation it is a sibling who is being beaten by the father of the children. The impetus for this first stage is furnished by envy or by what Freud also calls sibling rivalry, so that here the content of the fantasy

on the fantasy material at hand, a need for generalizations, particularly in regard to his female patients. Freud “knows” here with a certainty that the material itself cannot produce. Leonard Shengold, “Comments on Freud’s ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” in On Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 90. 18. Freud’s essay “Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy” appeared in the same year as “A Child Is Being Beaten.” Here, too, Freud stresses the question of knowledge as psychoanalysis’s foremost goal. Thus: “We have formulated our therapeutic task as one of bringing to the knowledge of the patient the unconscious, repressed impulses existing in his mind that oppose themselves to this extension of his knowledge about himself ” (Standard Edition, 17:159). Much of the essay is given over to the ways in which psychoanalytic practice must take an active stance in this process of imparting knowledge to the patient. The analyst must “teach,” “induce,” “point out,” and “show.” Eifermann has noted that such terms are not only metaphors used by Freud to describe the work of psychoanalysis, but that they also dominate the teaching of psychoanalysis in training institutions. In other words, she wonders what effects such “active” teaching may have on psychoanalytic candidates: “We may fall into too active a method of teaching, convincingly showing, perhaps inducing students to accept our view—or even seducing our students into believing our view to be their own; indeed, we may beat it out of (or into) them. We may thus deprive our students of the privilege to search, to be in a state of not-knowing, and to have the freedom to pave their own way and ourselves to have the privilege to be surprised, to learn what their way might be” (Eifermann, “Exceptional Position,” 175–76). It is important to recall here that Freud’s active method of drawing out, if not beating out, knowledge from childhood is intimately connected to his discovery of feminine sexuality. Thus, in “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” Freud justifies his essay by claiming that “everything that can be seen on the surface has already been exhausted; what remains has to be slowly and laboriously dragged up from the depths” (Standard Edition, 19:174). The depths to be plumbed here are the contours of Freud’s “dark continent”—his new forays into feminine sexuality. The method of investigation itself replicates the “anatomical distinction” described—woman’s sexuality lies in the depths, male sexuality is that which can be observed on the surface of things.

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can be described as: “My father is beating the child whom I hate.” Freud thus turns his and the patient’s gaze to the nursery where together they find the child involved in the agitations of its “parental complex”: the little girl has her affections fixed on her father “who has probably done all he could to win her love” (186). The father’s seduction has “sown the seeds” of hatred and rivalry, not toward the girl’s mother, but toward other children. What Freud describes here is not the classic Oedipus complex, but a kind of “war in the nursery” where special hatred is reserved for the youngest child since “it attracts to itself the share of affections which the blinded [sic] parents are always ready to give the youngest child, and this is a spectacle the sight of which cannot be avoided” (187).19 Hence, once understood that being beaten signifies the deprivation of love, many a child, who had believed itself “securely enthroned in the unshakable affection” of its parents, has “by a single blow [durch einen einzigen Schlag] 20 been cast down from all the heavens of [its] imaginary omnipotence” (187). The father’s Schlag is the great equalizer: the child being beaten, that is, the general child, whom Freud refers to as “es” [it], is both the other child and also the fantasizer herself, for the mere existence of the other child, the envy that the child generates, constitutes in itself a beating by the father. The father’s beating is a sign that the father loves and withdraws love in one Schlag. Already, in this first elaboration of the fantasy therefore, there is an indeterminacy at play in the father’s beating: a sign of love and of hate, of a love constituted by its loss. The father’s authority, his überlegende Körperkraft, installs the subject as a general subject in the form of a “passionate attachment,” as Judith Butler calls it, to that power on which the subject depends.21 The abstract quality of the child, coupled with the fact that it is nevertheless specifically a girl who is the author of the fantasy, produces a series of inconsistencies in Freud’s argument. Though the child at this point in her development has reached the stage of genital organization, which expresses itself through her incestuous object-choice, and though, as a consequence, the beating of the other child must in some form gratify the girl’s erotic life, Freud insists that the fantasy does not find an outlet in a masturbatory act. This insistence is curious, for it raises doubts about the fantasmatic character of the scene. Indeed, Freud wonders whether one can in fact talk of this first

19. I take the term “war in the nursery” from Jacqueline Rose in Why War?. 20. The German term for Freud’s “beating fantasy” is of course Schlagephantasie. This resonance is unfortunately lost in the English translation of the text. 21. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 7.

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stage as a fantasy at all, whether it is not a real scene witnessed by the child in the nursery. Nevertheless, this potentially real scene lends itself to a fantasmatic interpretation, since the child is guided by what Freud calls a premonition of what the child must later submit to—normative heterosexuality. This premonition is expressed in the girl’s “constant” wish to have a child by her father, even if the means to achieve this are as of yet unknown. Her “constant brooding [grübelnde Tätigkeit]” has, however, led her to the belief that the dark mystery of the genitals is in some way connected to the matter. The child’s incestuous love must, as we know, come to grief and submit to the fate of repression. Nevertheless, the repression of the girl’s first object-choice leaves a trace in the form of guilt. It is guilt that transforms the sentence “He does not love you because he is beating you” into “He does not love me because he is beating me.” This is the content of the second phase of the beating fantasy, and constitutes a profound change from its first manifestation. The beater remains here the father, but the child beaten is now the author of the fantasy herself. Since the fantasy is accompanied by a high degree of pleasure and ends in masturbatory satisfaction, it points to the very “essence of masochism” (189). This second manifestation of the beating fantasy is “the most important and the most momentous” expression of its three-stage evolution. One of its fundamental characteristics is its inaccessibility to consciousness: “we may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account” (185).22 The combination of its repression with a perverse masochism is what gives the fantasy its particular and peculiar quality: “If the genital organization, when it has scarcely been effected, is met by repression, the result is not only that every psychical representation of the incestuous love becomes unconscious, or remains so, but there is another result as well: a regressive debasement of the genital organization itself to a lower level” (189). The beating brings about a condensation of love and hatred expressed in the form of pleasurable guilt: “It is not only the punishment for the forbidden

22. In his 1937 “Constructions in Analysis,” Freud differentiates between interpretation and construction in the following way: “ ‘Interpretation’ applies to something that one does to a single element of the material, such as an association or parapraxis. But it is a ‘construction’ when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has forgotten, in some way as this: ‘up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. Your mother left you for some time, and even after her reappearance she was never again devoted to you exclusively. Your feelings towards your mother became ambivalent, your father gained a new importance for you’ . . . and so on” (Standard Edition, 23:261).

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genital relation, but also the regressive substitution for that relation” (189). In 1919 Freud has not yet formulated the concept of the superego, but one can argue that it is precisely the superego that is being created here through the father’s beating. Indeed, one might say that this fantasy scene—which is so important, so momentous—is where the later Freudian ego is born “mit einem Schlag.” The ego is constituted here by the father (Freud insists on this point: the mother quite emphatically has no role to play in the fantasy) in and as a moment of handing down or passing on, as the transmission of fatherly authority through the hand that beats. Furthermore, both the form and the content of the fantasy coincide, for the beating fantasy is beaten into the child in and through the act of its very discovery. The father’s Schlag is always experienced as an après-coup, not simply because it must remain unconscious and thus condemned to its status as construction. The most momentous of moments of the Schlagephantasie is lived by the child only as an aftereffect, and it is this that makes the child’s entry into the symbolic order, into society possible. Hence the third and final stage is the one consonant with the patient’s statement: “A child is being beaten.” The beater is now not the father but his societal representative, and the fantasizing child is relegated to the role of spectator who now watches many children being beaten. None of these children are personally known to the author of the fantasy, though—it appears—they are invariably boys. Since the beaten children are the societal representatives of the fantasizer, in the case of girls this means that they have transformed themselves through the fantasy and through their passage into society into boys. And given that the beating fantasy is always a precipitate of the Oedipus complex, it is not only the way for girls to leave behind their incestuous love-object, but also signifies the abandonment of their feminine role at the moment that the beating fantasy takes on social dimensions. Put differently, the beating fantasy is the mode of enactment of the girl’s masculinity complex. Masochistic pleasure is carried over into this final evolution of the fantasy, even if its form seems now overtly sadistic. Furthermore, masturbation is no longer necessarily attached to the fulfillment of the fantasy (though Freud also states that masturbation is “invariably” attached to this stage of the fantasy), for in two of Freud’s female cases, his patients had built an elaborate superstructure of daydreams over the masochistic fantasy. These at times extensive daydreams were able to generate a feeling of substitutive excitation, so that masturbation could be abstained from by becoming transformed into the pleasure of narrative, indeed into the pleasure of the social. The girl, in succumbing to the pleasure of the social, “escapes from the demands of the erotic side of her life altogether” (199). In other words, she chooses masculinity without acting like a

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man, accepting for herself the role of spectator as a substitute for the sexual act, even if this spectator role is itself desexualized. The girl, then, effects a thorough work of repression: she gives up her sexuality and remains nonetheless erotically bound to her father by virtue of the fact that she does not dare do the beating herself. The girl renounces her sexuality by becoming a man without power.

The Daughter In May 1922, Anna Freud had concluded her first analysis with her father, had made a career choice in favor of psychoanalysis, and was now seeking membership in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. There was but one requirement for admission: the presentation of a formal lecture by the candidate before the Society’s members. Anna Freud was scheduled to deliver her presentation on May 31. In the days leading up to the event, Sigmund Freud showed considerable anxiety about his daughter’s lecture, and in a letter dated May 19 told Max Eitingon that he would feel like Junius Brutus the Elder, when the latter was forced to pronounce judgment on his own child. The reference to Junius Brutus was hardly fortuitous: legend has it that he led the Romans to expel from Rome the tyrant Lucius Tarquinius, that he founded the Republic, and became one of its first consuls in 509 B.C. His two sons joined the conspiracy to restore the Tarquins, whereupon Brutus had them both sentenced to death. At stake for Freud, then, was the founding myth of a political society against tyranny, as well as his daughter’s loyalty to such a cause, a loyalty, as it would turn out, dependent on her becoming a dutiful son. And loyal Anna was, or at least it was understood as such in the Freudian imaginary, for the lecture that evening turned into one of her “nice stories” of redemption based on filial devotion and paternal benevolence. Nevertheless, while loyalty appeared complete, it also was charged with a certain complexity, for the title of Anna Freud’s lecture that night was “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams,” certainly signaling thereby her identification with her father and her willingness to confirm his theory of filial consent as outlined by his own “A Child Is Being Beaten,” but also signaling that her father’s theory required some kind of supplement or even secondary revision. With “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams” Anna Freud entered psychoanalytic history, both as analyst and as analysand. Since she had not yet begun to see patients in May 1922, it is fairly certain that the case material presented in the paper is a description of her own analysis with her father. In the paper Anna thus takes on the voice of the father but in that same move effects a subtle displacement, if not an outright replacement. Her entry into

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psychoanalytic history coincides, therefore, with her first great act of impious fidelity. Perhaps Anna Freud’s essay holds an analogous place in her life and work to that of her father’s Interpretation of Dreams in his. Both texts are inherently self-reflexive, insofar as they constitute a form of theory building founded in the self. And both, of course, interrogate their relations with their fathers. It is the presence of this double voicing at the level of both structure and content that must guide any reading of Anna Freud’s paper; her presentation—which she calls a “small illustration of Professor Freud’s essay”—must be understood both as a confirmation of her father’s 1919 paper yet also as a critique of it, where what is at stake is precisely the relative autonomy of the self, articulated here as the autonomy—in the constitution of subjectivity—of daydreams from their masturbatory energy. While Anna then explicitly adopts a kind of “little me” rhetoric in her confrontation with her father, I would argue that one should stay attuned to the fact that her essay in fact constitutes a direct incursion into his own territory. The first paragraph of the essay—a paragraph cut, symptomatically, from the published English version of the paper as it appeared in Anna Freud’s collected works—right away stages the beating fantasy and the consent that it inevitably demands: For quite a few years now I have been taking up your hospitality, but have not made myself noticeable to you through any kind of contribution of work. However, I know from reliable sources that this group does not generally look well upon such inactive looking. But I believe that I would even today have stuck to my old behavior, if your strict rules did not prescribe to all who seek membership in your organization to make themselves be heard. Thus it is my application to being accepted into the Vienna Society that is the cause of and at the same time excuse for my lecture today.23 “Inactive looking” was of course how Freud had described the position of the young author of the beating fantasy, and Anna Freud—quite craftily— seems only too aware that the Society’s “strict rules” were such that she had to give up precisely that fantasy position. Nevertheless, the question is: Does she do so, strictly speaking, in a paper that will argue for the social value and pleasure of such fantasies? In fact, her next step is to refer to her father’s paper in order to provide a “small illustration” of his theory. Of particular interest to her is the presence in two of Freud’s female patients of an elaborate

23. Anna Freud, “Schlagephantasie und Tagtraum,” Imago (1922): 317; my emphases and translation.

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superstructure [kunstvoller Überbau] of daydreams that furnished pleasurable satisfaction in the absence of masturbation. It is daydreaming as a substitute for female masturbation that is the focus of Anna’s argument, and the rest of the lecture will be dedicated to the explication of a case history that is “especially well-suited” to illustrate Freud’s theory: a girl, that is, of about fifteen “whose fantasy life, in spite of its abundance had never come into conflict with reality.”24 As Sigmund Freud had determined in his own essay, the girl’s fantasy of being beaten can be traced back to her early childhood attachment to her father; but in Anna’s case history there is one significant difference: the guilt so necessary to the structure of the fantasy is not attached here to the content of the fantasy per se, but to the accompanying autoerotic gratification. For years the patient had therefore tried to disconnect the two, retaining the fantasy but abstaining from the “act” itself: “In the attempt to enjoy the permissible pleasure as long as possible and to put off the forbidden conclusion indefinitely, she added all sorts of accessory details that in themselves were quite indifferent but copiously described” (140–41). The contents of such accessories are interesting—and we must remember that they bear the entire charge of erotic pleasure—for they include “complicated organizations and complete institutions, schools, and reformatories” (141); in other words, social life. Institution building, social life tout court stand not simply for the postponement of pleasure, but function as the mechanism by which to increase pleasurable tension: the little girl’s fantasy functions as a substitute for pleasure to the degree, precisely, that it is an instantiation, indeed institutionalization of that same pleasure. Social pleasure is not static, however, and as the girl got older and as her ego became stronger, the prohibition against pleasure began to spread to the content of the fantasy itself. As a result, the beating fantasies occurred less and less frequently, and the girl had to find yet another substitute for the ugly beating fantasies in the form of “nice stories.” While the former had been defined by their vagueness, the latter were extremely detailed, all their characters having names, faces, histories, and family lives. The denouements of these nice stories were always accompanied for the girl by a sense of happiness unclouded by guilt. It is the goal of Anna Freud in her paper to analyze the connection, then, between the artistic superstructure of these nice stories and the masochistic and masturbatory substructure deriving from the original fantasy. The nice 24. Anna Freud, “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams,” in The Writings of Anna Freud (New York: International Universities Press, 1974), 1:138; my emphasis. All further references to the essay appear in the text.

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stories all bore an identical structure, one that had as its point of departure a published story set in the Middle Ages. A written narrative thus provided the launch pad for the fantasy, but quickly forgetting the original reading, the girl had spun her own stories on top of the original script: “A medieval knight has been engaged in a long feud with a number of nobles who are in league against him. In the course of a battle a fifteen-year-old youth (i.e., the age of the daydreamer) is captured by the knight’s henchmen. He is taken to the knight’s castle where he is held prisoner for a long time. Finally, he is released” (145). These nice stories centering on the knight always contained two important figures: the noble youth who was totally good and the knight in the castle who was sinister and violent. The stories made up a fundamentally political parable of conflict between one who is all-powerful and another who is weak. The story of their encounter was always the same: the knight threatened to torture the youth in order to get hold of the latter’s family secrets, but every time the knight was about to inflict great pain on the boy, the boy was spared at the last moment. In each instance, the knight’s rage and wrath were transformed into pity and benevolence, at which point the daydreamer experienced a feeling of happiness. Yet, once it became clear to the daydreamer that mercy would be coming, that it was the narrative’s law to arrive, it also became impossible for her to suspend disbelief and therefore to experience pleasure at the story’s climax. The story became all niceness; it came to signify a general harmony between former antagonists. In other words, one might say, power lost its credibility, so that new forms of it had to be found. It is precisely here, in this ever-renewed search for authority, that Anna Freud locates the connection of the nice stories to the beating fantasy. The beating fantasy provides the nice stories with a kind of powerful energy, a model of relating that anaclitically rests on the older model of father and child relationship. The undercurrent of paternal violence makes possible two different resolutions: beating in the fantasy and forgiveness and reconciliation in the daydreams. Or, more accurately put, beating can be transformed into reconciliation only to the extent that the original violence is allowed to persist as an everdisplaced fantasy. It is the continuation of violence, the persistence of its effects, that allows for the following question. Why, Anna asks, are the nice stories nevertheless free of both guilt and for the most part also of sexual gratification? The answer is that, while the beating fantasies represent a return of the repressed Oedipal desires for the father, in the case of the nice stories, desire is sublimated, used, that is, in an aim-inhibited manner, in order to create both a narrative and an “affectionate tie to the parent”:

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The function of the beating fantasy is the disguised representation of a never-changing sensual love situation which is expressed in the language of the anal-sadistic organization as an act of beating. The function of the nice stories . . . is the representation of the various tender and affectionate stirrings. Its theme, however, is as monotonous as that of the beating fantasy. It consists in bringing about a friendship between a strong and a weak person, an adult and a boy, or as many daydreams express it, between a superior and an inferior being. (153; my emphases) A nonviolent relationship between a powerful person and a subject (which is how Anna Freud translates the democratic, representational relation between the state and its citizens) comes about as a result of the sublimation of a prior relationship between father and daughter, one that is itself founded on the eroticization of violence expressed as a beating. For this reason, I would hold, it is no longer strictly possible to speak of sublimation, of a transformation of libido into aim-inhibited affection, since for Anna Freud that social bond can only exist by virtue of its continued relationship to violence. Her transformation of power, its sublimation into a narrative with “real people” who are no longer in conflict with the reality principle or with each other, is dependent on another kind of transformation. She continues: “The sublimation of sensual love into tender friendship is of course greatly facilitated by the fact that already in the early stages of the beating fantasy the girl abandoned the difference of the sexes and is invariably represented as a boy” (153). I will return to this question of gender crossing, for the last sentence bears a great deal of interpretation, since it functions as the linchpin upon which the entire argument hangs. Let us, for now, follow one of its implications as it shows up in the continuing evolution of the youth’s fate. It appears that sublimation, understood by Anna Freud as the pleasure of the social, requires the acquisition of a specifically “masculine” trait: ambition. Several years after the creation of the daydream about the knight and the youth, the girl put the tale into writing. The original daydream was transformed into a short story: framed by a dialogue between the knight and the prisoner’s father, it began with the youth’s torture and ended with his refusal to escape. The youth’s voluntary choice to remain with the knight in his castle was connected, in an analogous manner, to the simultaneous distribution of authorial pleasure through the entirety of the narrative and to the hero’s growing positive feelings for his oppressor. Pleasure was now spread throughout the story, corresponding to a change in the mechanism of obtaining pleasure: In the daydream each new addition or repetition of a separate scene afforded a new opportunity for pleasurable instinctual gratification.

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In the written story, however, the direct pleasure gain is abandoned. While the actual writing was done in a state of happy excitement, similar to the state of daydreaming, the finished story itself does not elicit any such excitement. A reading of it does not lend itself to obtaining daydreamlike pleasures. (154–55) Anna Freud gives two reasons for this transformation of pleasure. First, as a daydream, it was beginning to interfere with reality. Second, and more important, the girl was driven by ambition, an ambition that both produced and was produced by an identification with the story’s hero; ambition gave space to the desire to influence others with poetry or gain the respect and love of others by these same means. It is in the service of ambition, then, that the private fantasy is changed into an address to others. Personal needs and desires are transformed into regard for the reader. Sexual excitement becomes the satisfaction of ambition, and now all the parts of the story can, indeed must, obey the laws of both representability and representation, and in that move counter the dictates of the pleasure principle: “By renouncing her private pleasure in favor of making an impression on others, the author has accomplished an important developmental step: the transformation of an autistic into a social activity. We could say: she has found the road that leads her from her fantasy life back to reality” (157). There is no question that Anna Freud’s candidacy paper “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams” itself constitutes another sublimatory elaboration of her own fantasy life, as well as a complicated and deeply implicating and implicated commentary on her father’s paper. Psychoanalytic orthodoxy has is that, on the one hand, Anna’s paper is a working-through of her own fantasy life, and, on the other hand, that it constitutes a confirmation of her father’s theory about the centrality of beating fantasies in the psychic life of girls, in particular that of his own daughter. As regards the latter point, of course, Freud was anxious enough to consider Anna’s analysis to have been effective. Anna’s successful candidacy generated for Freud “a sigh of relief that praiseworthy social activity has been achieved,”25 but there was no way around the fact for Freud that his daughter had taken her decisive career step propelled along by her “masculinity complex,” theorized by both himself and his daughter as the obliteration of sexual difference.26 In other words, both were 25. Cited in Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud. 109. In 1926 Anna Freud wrote to Max Eitingon that “I have this dependency [Abhängigkeit], this wanting-to-have-something [Etwas-Haben-Wollen]—even leaving my profession aside—in every nook and cranny of my life” (cited in Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 133). 26. According to Young-Bruehl, in December 1925 Anna Freud gave a talk entitled “Jealousy and the Desire for Masculinity.” Unfortunately, this paper was never published.

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working with a female patient who transforms herself into a male subject. Anna’s transformation from female patient to male subject guaranteed that she would become Freud’s most loyal successor as head of the psychoanalytic movement. Her life and work are thus easily viewed as one progressive “nice story” of sublimation, moving from beating fantasies to daydreams to poetic writing to authorship of psychoanalytic theory. Indeed, concepts elaborated by Anna Freud in her later work—in particular those of “altruistic surrender” and “overgoodness”—are frequently mentioned as signs of her almost obsessive bond to her father and to the movement he founded and she inherited. Things are more complicated, however. As Jacqueline Rose has pointed out, while there can be no transmission if the daughter refuses the father’s legacy, then it is equally true that if the father’s law is the law of the unconscious, then the “subservient [daughter] paradoxically disobeys and undoes his heritage no less at the very point of her surrender.”27 Anna’s trajectory is one described by a series of displacing, sublimatory moves that work through her fantasy life, but that remain bound to images of the powerful father. Her insistence on the relative autonomy of daydreams and poetico-theoretical practice from beating fantasies, her later insistence that child analysis had its limits, and her life-long pursuit of “Etwas-haben-wollen [to-have-somethingfor-oneself]” continually refer back to a mode of socialization that is founded in the “eroticization of painful affects,”28 that is, to the fact that the content as well as the very mode of implantation of fantasy life is ultimately dependent on a bond between the powerful adult and the weak child, itself forged not by a reconciliation but by an act of beating. What the case of Anna Freud seems to show is that both options, compliance and resistance, lead to another beating and thus to a confirmation of the theory’s truth. In Rivka Eifermann’s words: “Freud’s active technique achieved its aim—the affirmation on Anna Freud’s part that fantasies of being beaten (by the father?) were part of her experience. The technique may have acted both to increase repression . . . and resistance and to promote a desire to actively, though ambivalently, protect secrets, to have them ‘beaten out.’ ”29

Oedipus To what extent is the girl’s fantasy of being beaten by the father—in other words, the transformation of the girl’s envy into an eroticization of author27. Rose, Why War? 193. 28. Modell, “Humiliating Fantasies,” 72. 29. Eifermann, “Exceptional Position,” 173.

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ity that depends on her becoming a boy—the psychoanalytic model for all modern instantiations of political relations? Are we dealing here with not a minor perversion but instead with an exemplary model of development? Freud’s model of how a child enters society in “A Child Is Being Beaten” is not in fact the only one to be found in his work: his myth of the primal narcissistic father who is killed by his sons in Totem and Taboo and in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and his later theory of the superego as the internalization of the father’s authority in The Ego and the Id and Civilization and Its Discontents articulate a form of the instantiation of the political that is founded in the transmission of authority between father and son: “It is only in male children that there occurs the fateful simultaneous conjunction of love for the one parent and hatred of the other as rival. It is thereupon the discovery of the possibility of castration . . . which necessitates the transformation of the boy’s Oedipus complex, leads to the creation of the super-ego and thus initiates all the processes that culminate in enrolling the individual in civilized society.”30 In “A Child Is Being Beaten,” however, as well as in his later essays on femininity, Freud directly addresses the destiny of girls as they come to be inserted into the social sphere. I would argue that this theorization of femininity does not have the status of a mere addition to Freud’s theorization of how the son becomes a political subject, but rather points to a Freudian parable of politics that fundamentally relies on an undercurrent of gender trouble in all instantiations of political relations. A reading of “A Child Is Being Beaten” can teach us something about how Freud’s understanding of the political realm relies not solely on the intergenerational transmission of authority between father and child, and does so through the eroticization of authority, but also how this transmission can take effect only insofar as it takes place also between genders, whereby it is in this manner that gender itself is both constructed and given a constitutive role in political relations. Ultimately, what the Freudian conception of the political depends on is a notion of gendering that in its turn depends on an eroticization of authority and that produces a complicated structure of cross-identifications across gender lines. In other words, it is possible that Freud has made visible a mechanism of how humans become social and political beings, predicated not simply on the exclusion of women from the social contract but on a form of participation founded in a complex interplay of identifications that cross gender lines but which in that very move create those same gender identifications. In this scenario, therefore, the constructions of the political

30. Freud, “Female Sexuality,” Standard Edition, 21:188.

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and the gendered subject would have to be understood as inseparable and mutually sustaining elements of a single process within Freudian theory.31 Freud distinguishes between two ways for a subject to become attached to an object: object-love and identification, or, as he calls the two forms in his essay on narcissism, anaclitic object-choice and narcissistic object-choice. These two forms of attachment are operative in the constitution of social groups as well: the members of a group identify with each other, and do so on the basis of what they see as their shared characteristic: the love they all feel for the leader of the group. “Group psychology” has its basis, it appears, in the familiar triangular structure of the Oedipus complex; it is founded on the individual’s infantile mode of relating to the outside world. Indeed, in Group Psychology Freud locates the birth of the social in the nursery. Social desire, or rather a desire for the social, “first grew up, in a nursery containing many children, out of the children’s relation to their parents, and it does so as a reaction to the initial envy with which the elder child receives the younger one. . . . The older child would certainly like to put his successor aside, to keep it away from the parents, and to rob it of all its privileges.”32 The envious child has two options available to it in response to the desire for undivided love from the parent. We know already of the first perverse solution: as Freud had stated in “A Child Is Being Beaten,” the child can erotically charge the father’s beating of the other child and in its masturbatory fantasy

31. Wendy Brown, too, has provided a reading of Freud’s essay, though her stress falls somewhat differently from my own. Brown reads Freud here as another example of a counternarrative to the “modernist confidence in the desire for freedom,” a counternarrative “offered by the line of thought that runs from Nietzsche to Weber, cresting in Foucault’s theory of subjectivation.” Her goal here is “not to psychologize political life directly nor to reflect on the ways that sexual life bears on political life, but rather to allegorize a historical-political problem through the story of desire and punishment that Freud constructs” (47; my emphasis). Brown then offers a somewhat different take on Freud’s essay from my own. For her, “A Child Is Being Beaten” constitutes an attempt at inquiring into a postliberal malaise. Hence she asks: “What if the ideal of a just, egalitarian polity and social order promised by liberalism is considered as an object of illicit love for late modern subjects politicized through contemporary identitarian formations?” (52). And: “If politicized identity ‘occurs’ at the point where the liberal promise of universal personhood (and all its attendant goods) is found hollow, might the injury foundational to such an identity contain not simply jealousy and disappointment but also persistent, yet thwarted, desire?” (53). Freud’s essay thus constitutes, in Brown’s estimation, an analysis of a postliberal investment in victimization:” The oft-remarked tendency towards ‘victimization’ . . . might be understood as having one of its sources in a complex need within postliberal identity formations to see and cite victims outside oneself who can stand in for oneself. . . . The ultimate result is a political-psychic economy that produces a surplus of scenes of victimization. . . . The solidarity required to resist victimization is itself broken by the suffering displaced onto others and then resentfully, guiltily, taken up for oneself ” (Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 54–55). 32. Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” Standard Edition, 18:120.

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retain the father’s love for itself. The second possibility, “in consequence of the impossibility of maintaining his hostile attitude without damaging himself ” (120; my emphasis),33 is to identify with the other children. Identification produces a group feeling, a feeling that later on is developed at school. The first result of such a reaction formation, of this identification, is the desire for justice, that is, the desire for the equal treatment of all: “If one cannot be the favourite oneself, at all events nobody else shall be the favourite. . . . Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well, or, what is the same thing, may not be able to ask for them. This demand for equality is the root of social conscience and the sense of duty” (120–21). And thereby “social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of identification” (121). That “Gemeingeist”34 (a feeling of the social or the common) is founded in envy may, says Freud, be observed in later processes where it turns up symptomatically in the self-abnegation people feel before desired objects. Freud gives us a rather peculiar list of examples of such selfdenial: troops of women and girls crowding around a singer or pianist after a performance, who instead of pulling out each other’s hair act as a united group hoping “to have a share of his flowing locks” (120); the syphilitic who dreads infecting other people and in that dread betrays his wish to spread his afflictions; and the two mothers standing before Solomon demanding justice for their claims of being the true parent of the child. What the Solomonic judgment and the other examples point to is the fact that the “high ideal of social justice tendentiously cloaks something altogether more individually self-interested.”35 What appears as a political ideal is in reality personal, destructive, and damaging; what appear as rules aimed at oneself and a general Other are in fact aimed only at specific others who have something the self does not have. Jacques Lacan has pointed to the intimate connection in envy (invidia) between desire and looking: envy is the sin of looking, since it produces a lack in the subject at the very moment of perceiving the fullness of the object possessed by the Other.36 What are, specifically, the structure and the content of Lacan’s sin of looking? It appears to be a sin with inherently feminine characteristics. Fundamentally passive (hence the passive construction in the title of “A Child Is being Beaten”), it opens the subject up to the world of primal fantasies 33. 34. namely 35. 36.

Self-damage, I believe, refers to the other perverse solution, that is, masturbation. It should be noted that the German “Gemeingeist” bears another meaning of “gemein,” “mean” or “petty.” Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars, 16. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1981).

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(through the observation of parental coitus) and to castration. Indeed, all of Freud’s examples showing how envy is the source of justice and equality are women: the adoring fans of a pianist, the Solomonic mothers, and even the feminized syphilitic male who is well on his way to castration. Furthermore, in Freud’s few pages dedicated to the analysis of the beating fantasy in boys, it appears that the first stage of envy in the nursery is for him absent: “I have not been able to demonstrate among boys a preliminary stage of a sadistic nature that could be set beside the first phase of the phantasy in girls. . . . In the case of the girl the phantasy has a preliminary stage (the first phase), in which the beating bears no special significance and is performed upon a person who is viewed with jealous hatred. Both of these features are absent in the case of the boy.”37 For girls, on the other hand, looking generates the most “momentous discovery”: she sees the penis of a brother or a playmate in the nursery and immediately recognizes it as a superior counterpart to her own inconspicuous organ. The difference or otherness recognized in a child’s nursery wars is thus fundamentally gendered, because it produces sexual difference both at the level of the seeing subject and at the level of the observed object. The resultant penis envy is in fact the prototype of all envy, making it thereby the site where envy is born from woman, and woman, in turn, born from envy. Envy, and in particular penis envy, constitutes what Nancy Burke has rightly called Freud’s “epistemology of gender.”38 In the Freudian theory of psychosexual development, sexual difference is therefore created, in part at least, by the difference between a boy’s and a girl’s relationship to envy, that is, to the discovery of the genitals, the sign of which is masturbation. For boys, envy (or rivalry, as Freud also calls it) is absent during the pre-Oedipal phase: “that period includes an identification of an affectionate sort with the boy’s father, an identification which is still free from any sense of rivalry in regard to his mother.”39 Masturbation—at first merely a spontaneous “activity in connection with the genitals” (250)—becomes a properly psychic activity only once it comes to be attached to the Oedipus complex, and it is its suppression that initiates the castration complex. Freud is unsure how boys discover the genital zone; he cannot quite say what kind of knowledge takes place in the boy’s act of masturbation. It seems to be connected to some form of prohibition, that is, to the dawning recognition

37. Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 198–99. 38. Nancy Burke, ed., Gender and Envy (New York, 1998), 4. 39. Freud, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” Standard Edition, 19:250. All further references to this essay appear in the text.

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of law (through the Oedipus and the castration complexes), as well as to the interpretation of the sexual function through observation of parental coitus: “Masturbation . . . later on [becomes] attached to this early experience, the child having subsequently interpreted its meaning” (250). With girls, however, the case is more complicated. Since in both girls and boys the original object of love is the mother, the girl has the additional burden of needing to give up that first object and to replace it with her father in order for her to take the path of femininity. But how does the girl come to “cling with especial intensity and tenacity to the bond with [her] father and to the wish in which it culminates of having a child by him” (251)? And how is it that this same wish is also the motive force behind her infantile masturbation? Freud is unclear about this, and he toys with the idea that the girl discovers her genitals as a substitute for sensual sucking at the mother’s breast. In any case, “the genital zone is discovered at some time or another, and there seems no justification for attributing any psychical content to the first activities in connection with it” (251–52). Most fundamental—and this is the crucial difference between boys and girls—for girls, masturbation, her phallic activity, is not connected to the object-cathexes of the Oedipal situation: instead, it is founded in the “momentous discovery” of her brother’s (or playmate’s) “strikingly visible” penis. In other words, the girl masturbates when she falls victim to penis envy. The girl initiates masturbation in an act of identification with her brother, and not with her mother (or sister, for that matter), precisely because and to the extent that she recognizes sexual difference. It is her wish to be a boy that constitutes the foundation of the girl’s (homo)erotic attachment to her father, not to her mother. From this moment are born all subsequent psychic differences between the sexes. The girl, contrary to the boy’s initial denial of these differences, accepts them as true: “She makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it” (252).40 She thus masturbates, thereby initiating—at the precise moment when difference is acknowledged—her masculinity complex, her penis envy. There are “various and far-reaching” consequences to the girl’s penis envy. For one, she is led to behave like a man, to throw up all sorts of obstacles in the path of her development towards femininity. In fact, even if she does give up all hope of ever becoming a man, she can only give this hope up by a series of displacements that show up later in life as the character trait of jealousy, a 40. The certainty with which the girl makes a judgment and decision recalls, I believe, Freud’s assertion that maternity is the result of sense certainty or what he calls “the evidence of the senses,” and that paternity is only ever a theory or a hypothesis.

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trait that therefore “plays a far larger part in the mental life of women than of men” (254). But, above all, it is here in this penis envy that Freud finally understands the true meaning of the beating fantasies in girls: “This phantasy seems to be a relic of the phallic period in girls. The peculiar rigidity which struck me so much in the monotonous formula ‘a child is being beaten’ can probably be interpreted in a special way” (254). It turns out that the child beaten (or caressed, Freud adds) is none other than the clitoris itself. At its “lowest level” of meaning, then, the narrative of the beaten child is but a confession of masturbation. Furthermore, penis envy helps the girl give up her mother, who is blamed for the girl’s inadequate equipment. Again, it is envy and masturbation that aids the process: The way in which this comes about historically is often that soon after the girl has discovered that her genitals are unsatisfactory, she begins to show jealousy of another child on the grounds that her mother is fonder of it than her, which serves as a reason for her giving up her affectionate relation to her mother. It will fit in with this if the child which has been preferred by her mother is made into the first object of her beating-phantasy which ends in masturbation. (254; my emphasis) A strange economy is operative here, for it appears that at the very moment when the girl encounters her greatest lack (of satisfaction), she also discovers an opportunity for her greatest satisfaction: the girl’s response to loss is pleasure, for when she feels envy, she masturbates. And yet the most important effect of penis envy, the discovery of the inferiority of the clitoris, which coincides with the discovery of the clitoris itself, is that “in general, women tolerate masturbation worse than men” (255). Since masturbation is further removed from the nature of women, they are “unable to make use of it in circumstances in which man would seize upon it as a way of escape without hesitation” (255). Though masturbation is, according to Freud, quintessentially a masculine activity, against which women feel intense opposition even without educational influences, Freud nevertheless finds himself confronted with hosts of confessing women whose sexual lives would remain inexplicable unless this powerful motive is recognized. Envy and its concomitant sense of humiliation thus leads the girl both on to a path of femininity and to the latter’s rejection. She chooses femininity by accepting a substitute for the penis, that is, the child and, with the fulfillment of this desire in view, takes the father as a love-object. The girl has thus “turned into a little woman,” for sure, but only to introduce her into a new, displaced round of envy, now directed in the form of hostile feelings

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toward her mother. And, in fact, nothing guarantees this femininity, since it may come to grief in an identification with her father (and we must remember that identification always means, for Freud, a reaction formation against envy), thus returning her to her masculinity complex. How is the girl’s envy linked to that other envy in the nursery, the envy that leads to the demand for justice? The girl’s Oedipus complex, Freud tells us in the final pages of “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” is a secondary formation. It is preceded by the castration complex. And at this point Freud reveals the most important difference between the sexes: “Whereas in boys the Oedipus complex is destroyed by the castration complex, in girls it is made possible and led up to by the castration complex” (256). The castration complex inhibits masculinity and encourages femininity: with boys, it stands for a threat, with girls for a fact. For boys, castration is a potentiality or hypothesis, for girls a certainty. And because knowledge for boys is always hypothetical, always a theory, the Oedipus complex can be “smashed to pieces,” its libidinal cathexes sublimated or abandoned, and thus the nucleus of the superego can be formed as the complex’s heir. In girls, conversely, since the motivation to destroy the Oedipus complex is absent, the superego remains stunted, it is never “so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men.” Women have a different relationship to the ethically normal: “they show less sense of justice than men” (257). If justice is founded in envy, then this is a surprising conclusion, since—we might ask—if women’s sexuality, their subjectivity, is founded in the repression of their (penis) envy, then should it not by rights follow that women’s psychosexual development provides the very model of democratic citizenship? John Friedman has observed that the most important aspect of Freud’s theory of sexual difference is that girls do not have a penis, rather than the fact that boys do. In other words, it is absence that lends presence to the phallus, which is what puts the boy at risk, while it is “the girl [who] defines and guides the boy’s identity more than the girl’s ‘penis envy’ serves as the basis of her femininity.”41 Sexual difference is organized around absence, and envy is not simply a negative response to this absence but more accurately its positive sign. I would like to avoid the possible implications of Friedman’s argument that the girl, by “guiding” the boy’s identity, is the one in charge of what constitutes subjectivity and what does not. I would, however, like to address the possible implications of an argument that states that subjectivity is mod-

41. John Friedman, “Gender and Envy in Freud’s Discourse,” in Envy and Gender, 70.

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eled across gender lines through a process of identification that is grounded in an understanding of identification as both envy and its sublation. I have said that Freud’s theory of justice, as outlined in Group Psychology, comes from the envy children feel in the nursery in their struggle to hold a special place in their father’s heart. Justice derives from the transformation of this envy into positive identification. In other words, identification puts an end to envious violence. Let us then return to the Freudian nursery again and this time to the boy’s experience of it. From the very beginning, he tells us in the chapter entitled “Identification,” the boy’s object-desire always belongs to the mother, while identification is addressed to the father. Furthermore, identification is not a passive attitude, it is a typically masculine activity. Object-libido and identification exist initially side by side but are united under the influence of the Oedipus complex. At this point, the boy’s identification “takes on a hostile colouring and becomes identical with the wish to replace the father in regard to his mother as well.”42 Freud adds that identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal. And: “It is easy to state in a formula the distinction between an identification with the father and the choice of the father as an object. In the first case one’s father is what one would like to be, and in the second he is what one would like to have” (106). So far, all this may appear as a relatively straightforward situation. And yet major problems arise here. Most generally, Freud introduces here, with identification, a second or another ground of the socialpolitical field. “Sociality,” so Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy write, “rests on identification just as much as on the libido or anteriorily to the libido . . . identification is the ground of the social. Right through the end, through all the texts of culture, the articulation of the two axioms will be maintained: identification forms the limitation of the narcissistic nonrelation and a (the) fundamental socio-political bond.”43 Such a shifting ground of social existence raises two other problems. First, by cautioning that identification is “from the very first” always ambivalent, it is not clear how it can so easily furnish the foundations for a positive tie among the members of a group. Identification is supposed to be an antidote to envy and violence, but is it not also the case that identification is what produces envy? Does envy here not act against itself, whereby it both precedes the social contract and constitutes the very ground of that same 42. Freud, Group Psychology, 105. 43. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, 12. This and all further citations come from Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s essay in this book, entitled “La panique politique.”

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contract? Second, though Freud has insisted that identification is a masculine activity, he immediately turns to examples of the working of identification that all rely on female groups. As already described above, identification as a response to envy and as the basis of group formation appears to be a typically feminine activity. Let us first turn to the possibly envious violence of identification. René Girard has pointed out that identification is the same as mimetic desire: the child makes his desire into a replica of his father’s desire, which generates rivalry that, in turn, generates violence. In other words, identification with the other does not solve the problem of violence but is the essence of the problem.44 In the same vein, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has asked: “How can such a competition and hate-filled identification with a rival ever lead to a peaceful relationship with that same rival?” For Borch-Jacobsen, the problem of identification is inherently the problem of the Oedipus complex, that is, of the son’s subject-constitution, of the son’s need to articulate his own subjectposition vis-à-vis the father. How and why does the son internalize the law? Why does his Oedipal condition not lead to endless violence? And, by the same token, why should identification be exempt from violence? “If group identification is Oedipal in structure, it is necessarily rivalrous.”45 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, as well and as already noted, view identification as a deadlock or as a limit imposed on the psychoanalytic conception of the political: Two conclusions assert themselves: in the first place identification is dismissed [by Freud as the constitutive force behind sociality]; in the second place, the model of the Political (of the horde and of the Father) cannot fulfill Freud’s demand. These two things are linked; it is because identification has not been drawn out as such that the Political returns, in order to explain instead of being explained . . . the Freudian Political, namely, the erection of the Power of the Father or of the Power-Father is nothing other than the pervasive consequence of an uncompleted operation carried out on identification. . . . [And] the hypothesis also comprises its reversal: if the analysis remained sus44. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 169–78. Nevertheless, Girard effects a kind of elision here. Mimetic violence, for Girard, is always, strictly speaking, a violence among equals, therefore not between father and son. He, in this sense, disguises the relationship between father and son—which is after all a relation of power—as a relation between equals through a Catholic transubstantiation of the father who becomes the son. For this reason, in the end, there is no room for Oedipal envy in Girard’s model of rivalry, in his already presupposed overcoming of the father. I thank Charles Sheperdson for this point. 45. Borch-Jacobson, Freudian Subject, 194–95.

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pended on identification, it is also because the model of the PowerFather obscures Freud’s gaze.46 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, as well as Borch-Jacobsen, recognize that something “happens to psychoanalysis” once identification comes to be articulated as a fundamental relation, one that is distinct from the libidinal or love relation. For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy identification constitutes an incision or a kind of accident, whereby what comes into being is a (political) limit “which turns out to be both the cause and the effect of the psychoanalytical limit” (16). Freud’s theory of identification is here presexual and preOedipal, and for this reason they claim that the “wider stage” of psychoanalysis cannot immediately be the stage of the political, of the father. Something predates the absolutely narcissistic father, must do so, for otherwise there would “never be any reason to come out of [narcissism].” And therefore: The wider stage is thus the no man’s land of several narcissi. Which means that these narcissi are not absolute, and that they are in a relation through their non-relation. This is the scene of panic, insofar as it is thus not the scene of a unique totalitarian Pan . . . but that of a violent disorder of identities, none of which is Identity, and each one of which nonetheless posits itself only through the exclusion of the others, each of which thereby finds itself deposed. Neither at the origin or the summit, nor at the basis, in each narcissus there is no Pan, no Arche, no initial Power. Anarchy is at the origin which precisely means that there is no archie, whether ‘anarchic’ or ‘monarchic.’ (21) Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy nevertheless give this anarchy or panic a certain definition, one I already adumbrated in the previous chapter: it describes and comes into being as the withdrawal of the mother’s love. The Freudian political, right at the internal and external limit of psychoanalysis, emerges through and as this withdrawal: “The Father can only be the unnamable, unrepresentable truth of the Mother. The truth, consequently, of love which withdraws, of love which is this face always withdrawing, a relation without relation (a relation of non-relation)” (29). For Borch-Jacobsen, as I have already mentioned, the introduction of identification into the Freudian model of politics constitutes a threat to the model itself, insofar as such identificatory relations always have the potential of reverting to narcissism and violence: the Freudian Subject cannot, in his estimation, survive this threat against the Oedipal, and therefore stable, trans46. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “La panique politique,” 15.

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mission of power from father to son. Both of these readings are extremely suggestive. Nevertheless, I believe that we still have to understand the crucial importance of sexual difference in Freud’s text, on the one hand, and on the other, delineate the precise movement entailed in the mother’s withdrawal. Both of these aspects are of course intimately connected, and, I hold, an analysis of them may give us a more nuanced understanding of what Freud has described as the decision or turn to civilization, to the “wider social stage.” It is crucial to point out, in fact, that in Freud’s text identification does not belong to the son. Despite what Freud says in numerous places, envious identification pertains to women—to female fans of male pianists or the Solomonic mothers. Let me provide a graphic representation of what amount to Freud’s three Oedipal triangles, that of the boy, that of the girl, and that of the social group. The “classical Oedipal triangle” of the boy/son is shown in Figure 1. Here the father stands at the pinnacle of the triangle and is anchored to its base points through object-love with the mother and through identification with the son. The son positively identifies with his father, which guarantees his heterosexual object-choice of his mother. We know that this has always been the son’s object-choice, furthermore, since the mother is the first object of all children. In addition, in order for the boy to become properly Oedipal, his identification with his father must become hostile, envious: he must want to replace the father, thus opening the path to potential violence, the resolution of which is furnished by the threat of castration. The son, in other words, must learn that he will become the mother rather than have her if he tries to act on his violence. Furthermore, he also learns that if he loves the father, that is, makes a homosexual object-choice, he will also be threatened by castration since he will thereby be forced into a relation of identification with his mother. Freud constructs the social group as shown in Figure 2a. Here, in Freud’s Oedipal model of the group, which is supposed to be a transposition of

father

object-love

mother Figure 1. Classical Oedipal triangle

identification

object-love

son

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Figure 1, we find the leader, as expected in the place of the father, bound to the group’s members on the basis of object-love. The members, in turn, are bound to each other through what was originally envious competition for the father’s love, but now transformed by virtue of a recognized shared love into a relationship of identification. The group members are, indeed must be, equals for the group to remain cohesive and just. However, a direct transposition of the model in Figure 1 to that in Figure 2 would lead to two other possibilities, both of which Freud rejects. In the first, represented here as Figure 2b, the father has been replaced by the leader and relates to some members via object-love (the mother or women more generally) and to other members through identification (the son or men generally). Here, the two different types of object-relation have been directly transposed from the model in Figure 1 and conceived as Figure 2b. This is, of course, how Freud does not think of the social group, since it would have to be a model that is inherently violent or authoritarian, that is, unjust. The son would be constantly challenging the father’s authority—his possession, that is, of women—and the father could only maintain power by resorting to violence. This, in other words, is a representation of the primal horde and the absolutely narcissistic father described in Totem and Taboo.

leader

object-love

member

object-love

identification

member

Figure 2a. Freud’s Oedipal model of the group

father/leader

object-love

mother

identification

object-love

son

Figure 2b. Directly transposed from Figure 1—primal horde model rejected by Freud

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In Figure 2c, identification has been placed at the base of the triangle: the triangle has been rotated in order to make identification the basis of social relations while the type of object-relation between father, mother and son has been kept the same. This provides political stability, but at the price of toppling the father and making the mother the leader. This, in other words, is Freud’s “intermediate stage of history” mentioned in Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents—the so-called brief matriarchal stage. Thus, Freud applies the Oedipal triangle to group formation only by analogy, and two things have to occur for this analogy to work: first, the triangle has to be rotated or tipped over—the father must be toppled (the primal father must be killed)—in order to place relations of identification at the base of the triangle; second, the mother must be written out of the picture, for otherwise she would take the place of the leader. I would say that the always potential violence, the potentially envious relations between father and son and between the children in the nursery, is displaced to the disavowed mother. But how does Freud make this move? How can he topple the father, eliminate the mother and disavow this move at the same time? The answer lies in his theorization of the girl’s Oedipal triangle, which can never be identical to that of the boy: it is indeed the same but different. If things were completely symmetrical between girls and boys, then the girl’s Oedipal triangle should be represented by Figure 3a. However, this is not the case, since girls are different, “somehow.” Their development is properly represented by Figure 3b. Here, the father continues to hold his place at the top of the triangle. He is bound to his daughter through a relation of object-love. Ideally, in the proper Oedipal structure, the daughter should identify with her mother and should relate to her father by a relation of love. However, I have marked the third point of the triangle by an X. Why? Because the girl never feels envy for nor identifies with her mother. Freud is quite explicit about this in all of his statements on feminine sexuality: the girl can-

mother/leader

object-love

son

object-love

identification

father

Figure 2c. Matriarchal social group—Freud’s “intermediate state of history”

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not envy her mother, she must envy her brother(s), she must experience penis envy, otherwise she could never accept castration as a fact, she could not give up her first object-choice (her mother) for her later one (her father). The girl must first refuse identification with her mother—a refusal that she shares with her brother but only in order to embrace it later. The girl must both enact her masculinity complex and give it up by herself, ideally becoming a mother. It is feminine sexuality that tips or turns the triangle, that places identification and envy at the base of Freud’s theory of political power. It is the model in Figure 3 that enables Freud’s passage from the first model (Figure 1) to the second (Figure 2) to a modeling of political power on the Oedipal complex tout court. Freud’s model of the democratic group depends on the murder of the father and on the continuous enactment of that murder by keeping his place vacant but nevertheless present. But it also depends on the members of the group operating along the lines of what is essentially feminine sexuality. This feminine sexuality depends, in turn, not on an identificatory relationship with the mother, but on the simultaneous love for and identification with the girl’s father. The envy between the members of a group is

mother

identification

daughter

object-love

object-love

father

Figure 3a. Girl’s Oedipal triangle if things were completely symmetrical between girls and boys

father

object-love

X

object-love

identification

daughter

Figure 3b. Girl’s Oedipal triangle properly representing the development of girls

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contained, transformed to peaceful identification, since it is modeled on the sexuality of the girl. But why? What is it about feminine envy that is different, usable for Freud to contain the potential violence of his Oedipal model? Why is the activation of the girl’s masculinity complex, her transformation into a boy, so crucial to the stability of social and political relations?

Gender Objectivity Once Freud made the discovery of the Oedipus complex, he then sought to work out its consequences for the constitution of subjectivity. “Women,” John Toews has pointed out, were pushed to the periphery of Freud’s individual and collective histories as the story of Oedipus became focused almost exclusively on the problematic relations between sons and fathers. At the same time the Oedipus complex as a moral fable concerning the relation of the individual subject to the object of desire began to lose its prominence in favor of a story in which Oedipus’s primary desire was to be like the father, to be recognized as the subject or agent of the laws that governed his relations to the object and not just a passive “object” on whom law was imposed by force or threat of force.47 The connection, in Totem and Taboo, between the struggle of sons to live with the consequences of the father’s murder in the form of laws established equally for all, and the laws against incest is not an obvious one: “Strictly enforced as [the law of exogamy] is, this prohibition is a remarkable one. There is nothing in the concept or attributes of the totem which I have so far mentioned to lead us to anticipate it; so that it is hard to understand how it has become involved in the totemic system.”48 If the renunciations required by civilization tended to push woman and her demand for love into the background, as Freud famously asserted in Civilization and Its Discontents, this is also true for the demands made by psychoanalytic theory, which, as Toews states, became increasingly concerned with the problem of male passivity at the expense of libido’s vicissitudes. It is this shift from a concern with the subject’s desire for objects to a masculine concern with a kind of “passive objectivity” that this final section addresses.

47. John E. Toews, “Having and Being: The Evolution of Freud’s Oedipus Theory as a Moral Fable,” in Freud: Conflict and Culture: Essays on His Life, Work, and Legacy, ed. Michael S. Roth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 74; my emphasis. 48. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 4.

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Of course the question of a feminine background, the very facticity that it implies, cannot be a matter of indifference, if for no other reason than that it seems to furnish the very ground or foundation of psychoanalytic thinking itself. Psychoanalysis, Freud states toward the end of his 1920 essay “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” “cannot elucidate the intrinsic nature of what in conventional or in biological phraseology is termed ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’: it simply takes over the two concepts and makes them the foundation of its work.”49 Having executed this foundational takeover, however, Freud immediately proposes a further reduction: “When we attempt to reduce them further, we find masculinity vanishing into activity and femininity into passivity, and that does not tell us enough” (171; my emphasis). It is not for psychoanalysis, Freud concludes, “to solve the problem of homosexuality” (171). Psychoanalysis does not tell enough, first and foremost, about homosexuality; therefore, homosexuality elicits from Freud an “I do not know” (155). This is a remarkable confession from the writer of “a case of homosexuality” that in its first sentences had confidently announced “a single case, not too pronounced in type, in which it was possible to trace its origin and development in the mind with complete certainty and almost without a gap” (147). And this is the same writer, we must recall, who had been armed with undoubting certainty in the face of his own daughter’s much more cautious “I do not know” when she was confronted with the activity and passivity of the beating fantasy. Freud’s essay on female homosexuality is placed chronologically at a midpoint between his 1919 essay on female beating fantasies that allow a girl to become a boy and therefore take a place in social and political life and his 1921 ruminations on the envy wars in the nursery that bring about social justice for the son through a complex series of negotiations between desire for the father and identification with his rivals. Strikingly, in this essay the mother returns in full force from the background to which she had been confined by psychoanalytic theory. First of all, she seems to be the single most important factor in the constitution of a homosexual ob-

49. Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” Standard Edition, 18:171. All further references to the essay appear in the text. Diana Fuss has pointed out how the title of Freud’s essay is subject to a crucial, generative ambiguity, insofar as it may be glossed as both the psychogenesis of an instance of homosexuality in a woman, and as the psychogenesis of Freud’s own study of female homosexuality. In the first case, she remarks, Freud would be generating a theory of female homosexuality on one single case—something we have already encountered in the “exhaustive study” of female masturbation in “A Child Is Being Beaten.” In the second instance, Freud would be concerned—self-reflexively, but just as typically—with the status of his own theoretical production. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 60–61.

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ject choice—for both men and women. The “girl” under consideration in this case history—as she is consistently referred to by Freud throughout the text—makes this perfectly clear: “The analysis revealed beyond all shadow of doubt that the lady-love was a substitute for—her mother” (156). And further on: “homosexual men have experienced a specially strong fixation on their mother” (171). Homosexuality has universalizing, indeed equalizing tendencies, for “a very considerable measure of latent or unconscious homosexuality can be detected in all normal people” (171). There exists then a kind of unbreakable, universal link between the mother and homosexuality in this essay that, as Diana Fuss has pointed out, has as its first word that of “homosexuality” and as its last “motherhood”.50 The mother is both the cause of homosexuality and the contractual promise, at least in the case of girls, of a compensation for its renouncement. Hence, in the quite horrific final paragraph of the essay, where Freud contemplates a “cure” of homosexuality by surgical means—in the case of women through the removal of so-called hermaphroditic ovaries—he does not foresee a woman’s participation in such an intervention: “A woman who has felt herself to be a man, and has loved in masculine fashion, will hardly let herself be forced into playing the part of a woman, when she must pay for this transformation, which is not in every way advantageous, by renouncing all hope of motherhood” (172). A woman who gives up homosexuality, in other words, also gives up motherhood. Interventions that sever the connection between homosexuality and motherhood are, then, misguided, both because they cannot elicit consent from the object of such an intervention and because they somewhat miss the point, subject as they are to “exaggerating the closeness of the association” between physical sexual characters and object choice (170). The literature on homosexuality fails, Freud states, to distinguish between the object choices people make and the sexual characteristics and attitudes of the subject making such choices, and, as such, it fails to grasp the “mystery of homosexuality”. Thus, for instance, a feminine man may chose a homosexual object-choice or not; similarly, a masculine woman may with equal probability chose a woman or a man as her love-object. In other words, the mental sexual character and object-choice do not necessarily coincide. “The mystery of homosexuality is therefore by no means so simple as it is commonly depicted in popular expositions” (170). Feminine sexuality in this essay is placed somewhere between the alpha and omega of homosexuality and motherhood and is itself subject to a tripartite

50. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers, 66.

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determination: physical sexual characters, mental sexual characters, and the type of object-choice made by women. While psychoanalysis has “a common basis with biology” (171), as a psychoanalyst Freud must of course privilege mental sexual characters, in other words those characters capable of translating “masculine” and “feminine” into “active” and “passive.” The problem is that this translation is always circumscribed by a fixation on the mother, while at the same time it is strangely devoid of neurotic conflict. Homosexuality, the inversion of desire toward a same-sexed object, requires, in order for heterosexual femininity to emerge, a conversion of that same choice: “Further unfavourable features in the present case were the facts that the girl was not in any way ill . . . and that the task to be carried out did not consist in resolving a neurotic conflict but in converting one variety of the genital organization of sexuality into the other. Such an achievement—the removal of genital inversion or homosexuality—is in my experience not an easy matter” (150–51). Homosexuals are thus not easy subjects of conversion, not just because many of them are quite happy with their choices,51 but also because their mental characters have only a contingent relationship to the choices they make. This may strike the reader as a case of happy, polymorphously perverse whoring where objects of desire are singularly indifferent—and, indeed, Freud’s “girl” seems to have a strong preference for “debased” women who, in order to retain their social standing, provide pleasure to both men and women for money. Nevertheless, in the case of Freud’s analysand, somewhat to his relief, “her genital chastity, if one may use such a phrase, had remained intact” (153). Indeed, the girl “regarded coarsely sensual satisfactions as unaesthetic” (161; my emphasis); she appeared therefore deeply concerned with the more sublime or sublimatory aspects of her love. It is perhaps this combination of a sublimatory chastity and happiness, the absence hence of both neurotic acting-out and conflict with the authorities that be, that undoes this particular analysis, since as a rule it is the patient’s desire for change, on the one hand, and on the other, the desire for a liberation from the analyst’s authority that propels the analysis on toward its resolution (152). In fact, the analysis fails precisely in the realm of the complex relations drawn between love and authority, the love of authority, or what is commonly understood as transference. In an earlier encounter with a female homosexual, the famous Dora who, too, was hauled into Freud’s office by her father in order to have some sense talked into her, Freud was passively 51. “She did not try to deceive me by saying that she felt any urgent need to be freed from her homosexuality. On the contrary, she said she could not conceive of any other way of being in love” (153).

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fired by his patient. In this instance—and proleptically anticipating another failure—Freud actively fires the young woman and suggests to her father that she get psychoanalytic counseling from a woman. It is possible that Freud also terminated the analysis as a result of finding himself placed—once again—into a whoring position. The girl’s father was enraged at his daughter’s homosexuality, and it was this rage that drove him to stoop as low as psychoanalysis to find a cure for her: “The low estimation in which psychoanalysis is so generally held in Vienna did not prevent him from turning to it for help” (149). The girl shared this attitude with her father. Freud cannot overcome the feeling that her seeming cooperation is based on a vision of the psychoanalytic process as a minor irritation and its theorist merely an interesting specimen: “Once when I expounded to her a specially important part of the theory, one touching her nearly, she replied in an inimitable tone, ‘How very interesting’, as though she were a grande dame being taken over a museum and glancing through her lorgnon at objects to which she was completely indifferent” (163). The girl’s response was undoubtedly the cause of much irritation for Freud as he was yet again, in the wake of the Dora case, subjected to the position of the feminizing role of the paid servant.52 Nevertheless, what drives Freud’s theorizing in the essay is precisely the girl’s very indifference toward objects. And it is this theoretical drive, as well, that constitutes an important supplement to the two theories that both precede and follow it: Freud’s theory of female masturbation and the theory of justice in the envy-torn nursery. Freud’s case of female sexuality involves a beautiful and intelligent girl of eighteen who belonged to a family of high social standing and who had incurred her family’s displeasure because of her devoted adoration of “a certain ‘society lady’ ” (147), whom her parents referred to as a cocotte and who in the course of the analysis would prove herself a high-class prostitute servicing, quite indifferently, men and women alike. There are here some interesting parallels with and differences from the Anna case and her beating fantasies. I have no desire to speculate on the question of whether Anna Freud herself was a lesbian: she of course never married, nor did she find satisfaction and compensatory fulfillment in motherhood. She did however live many years with another woman with whom she shared not only a home but also work dedicated to the plight of others’ children. One factor that immediately distinguishes Anna Freud from the “girl” is that the latter’s passion for the “society lady” does not lead her to the love of and for 52. Jane Gallop, “Keys to Dora,” in In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 200–220.

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the social, but instead into its rejection in the form of a kind of devouring of objects: “It is evident that this one interest had swallowed up all others in the girl’s mind. She did not trouble herself any further with educational studies, thought nothing of social functions or girlish pleasures” (147–48). This is not to mean that she eschewed public life: on the contrary, she positively flaunted her love for the demi-mondaine, not only through a public exhibition of her passion but also through her active, masculine approach to loving. The girl’s love thus was publicly all-consuming, and yet made her indifferent to social life. The girl exhibited strong masculine traits of a mental rather than of a physical variety. She was “beautiful and well-made” (154), though she bore “her father’s tall figure, and her facial features were sharp rather than soft and girlish. . . . Some of her intellectual attributes also could be connected with masculinity: for instance, her acuteness of comprehension and her lucid objectivity, in so far as she was not dominated by her passion” (154; my emphasis). Freud insists that these traits should be understood as conventional rather than scientific signs of gender. Instead, it is the girl’s relationship to her loveobject, in its very lucid objectivity, that must be classified as masculine: “she displayed the humility and the sublime overvaluation of the sexual object so characteristic of the male lover, the renunciation of all narcissistic satisfaction, and the preference for being the lover rather than the beloved. She had thus not only chosen a feminine love-object, but had also developed a masculine attitude towards the object” (154). The girl thus exhibited a contradictory relationship to objects and to objectivity in general. As a woman, she was consumed by passion, by an oral voraciousness that either destroyed objects or made her indifferent to them. As a man, she demonstrated lucid objectivity that found expression in a passion, in an adoration of the object. Masculine love of the object, objectivity itself, is thus characterized as submissive, humble, and self-denying; it is a love that “poco spera e nulla chiede” [hopes for little and asks for nothing] (160), as Freud cites Tasso’s words, making courtly love of the “lady” into the model for all masculine investments in the love-object. Indeed, this model looks strangely like Anna Freud’s “nice stories” about youths who love through submission and thus stay with evil knights in distant castles. And, as in these nice stories, this girl’s love, too, was structured by the idea of rescue: her love “took the form of great compassion and of phantasies and plans for ‘rescuing’ her beloved from . . . ignoble circumstances” (161). Homosexuality—and this is indeed a queer theory that may be gleaned from this Freudian text—seems to be constituted by a double gesture. It devours, passionately, all objects and all objectivity, it severs itself from object-choice in its valorization of a purely mental operation;

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and, in that same move, “rescues” the object in its submission to the object’s demands.53 The girl’s childhood had, states Freud, been completely normal. She passed through the feminine version of the Oedipus complex in the expected ways, and had at some point—almost as if to confirm and enhance her feminine Oedipal path—substituted the father as object of desire with a brother who was slightly older than herself. In other words, she had made a heterosexual object-choice twice. Something nevertheless went wrong; the girl did not make her journey properly. Readers of Freud’s essay have stressed the vicissitudes of the girl’s evolving “mother-fixation” after her entry into puberty, a fixation that led to her identification with her father and her substitutive love for her mother. However, so Freud tells us, the girl’s shift of objectchoice coincided with “a certain event” in the family: her mother’s new pregnancy and birth of a third brother when she was about sixteen years old. Why, Freud wonders, did the girl not act here on her own maternal feelings, that is, identify with her mother? Why, instead, was she moved “to bestow her passionate tenderness upon the woman who gave birth to this child, i.e. her own mother” (157)? Should the girl not have felt envy for the mother, particularly in this case, where the mother herself—“still a youngish woman, who was evidently unwilling to give up her own claims of attractiveness” (149)—saw in her beautiful daughter an unwelcome competitor, favored her sons at the girl’s expense, and “kept an especially strict watch against any close relation between the girl and her father” (157)? Why did the girl not experience envy vis-à-vis her mother? The answer, Freud states and in open contradiction to his own question, lies in the girl’s great disappointment: what she desired was her father’s child, but it was not she who bore this child but her hated rival, her mother. In other words—and here we come across the great conceptual difficulties created by the identity but also difference in Freud’s uses of the concepts of identification and envy—the girl did not experience envy toward her mother in an identificatory manner, precisely 53. As Mary Jacobus glosses these same pages: Freud “tends to associate passion . . . with an aberration: [the girl] is masculine in her passion, but her passion makes her less masculine, less like her father. Passion turns out to be a form of masquerade (of courtly love, of masculinity) whose meaning is reversed—much as Lacan alleges, apropos of ‘the phallic mark of desire,’ that ‘virile display itself appears as feminine.’ In Freud’s gender scheme, it is masculine to desire the lady, but feminine to make a virile display of phallic desire. Loving a woman as a man might do . . . takes on the paradoxical appearance of femininity” (Mary Jacobus, “Russian Tactics: Freud’s ‘Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,’ ” in Freud and the Passions, ed. John O’Neill [University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996] 114). Though Jacobus’s reading sustains my own, I would also add that Freud, by having effected the translation from masculinity and femininity to active and passive, is also concerned with the status of the general, abstract subject’s constitution in and through its relationship to an object.

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because she envied her! She did not want to be like her mother, use her as a role model or ego-ideal, identify with her; instead she wanted to be her, occupy her place. Freud does not register this bizarre situation at all, nor does he note that such a conclusion contradicts the one arrived at in Group Psychology, where he had rejected the possibility of an envious relationship toward the mother altogether. He does not explain the difference between wanting to be like another and wanting to be the other, except that such a difference is marked by the woman’s masculinity complex: oddly, to be the mother means being a man in order to love the father homosexually. And therefore Freud states that as a consequence and in order to punish him, she “turned away from her father and from men altogether. After this first great reverse she foreswore her womanhood and sought another goal for her libido. In doing so she behaved just as many men do.” (157) The girl changed into a man and took her mother in place of her father as love-object, a move, Freud remarks in a footnote, typically made by spurned lovers: a love-relation can be broken off through a process of identification with the love-object, and through this narcissistic regression redirect libido toward an object of the opposite sex. Beyond narcissistic regression, however, Freud mentions two additional factors that explain the girl’s nonidentificatory envy of her mother, factors that significantly undermine the narcissistic path of the conversion of objectlibido into identification. Freud refers, first, to a “practical motive,” one that derived from the girl’s “real relations” with her mother and that served as a “secondary gain” resulting from her disappointment in the father. “The mother herself still attached great value to the attentions and the admiration of men. If, then, the girl became homosexual and left men to her mother (in other words, ‘retired in favour of ’ her mother), she would remove something which had hitherto been partly responsible for the mother’s dislike” of her daughter (158–59). The idea of “retiring in favour of someone else” would later find a much more general elaboration in Anna Freud’s work, who renamed it “altruistic surrender [altruistische Abtretung: an altruistic retiring or resignation from one’s position of power]” and who explicitly linked it to penis envy, masculine fantasies of ambition, and the construction of a social bond.54 Freud himself is led in a lengthy footnote to link the process of “retiring in favour of someone else” not only to an explanatory cause of homosexuality, but also to its regressive return to the primal horde. In the case of one of his patient’s, for example, the man had chosen to become a 54. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, trans. Cecil Baines (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), 132–46. I will return to a more detailed discussion of altruistic surrender in the conclusion.

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homosexual in order to avoid direct rivalry with his father: “In his imagination all women belonged to his father, and he sought refuge in men out of submission, so as to retire from the conflict with his father. Such motivation of the homosexual object-choice must be by no means uncommon; in the primeval ages of the human race all women presumably belonged to the father and head of the primal horde” (159). Retiring in favor of someone else activates, then, an identification with the same-sexed parent. It also—and this is a factor often ignored in readings of Freud’s text but one that significantly complicates the picture—returns us to the war in the nursery. In the same footnote dedicated to the explication of this surrender of desire, Freud also mentions two twin brothers, as well as brothers and sisters, who retire in each other’s favor. In the case of Freud’s homosexual patient, an important part is in fact played by the girl’s brother. We have already seen that the girl had from early on taken a slightly older brother as a substitute for the father. “Comparison of her brother’s genital organs and her own, which took place about the beginning of the latency period . . . left a strong impression on her and had far-reaching after-effects” (155). Though Freud is unsure whether this led her to masturbate, it most certainly brought on a pronounced “masculinity complex”: “she was not at all prepared to be second to her slightly older brother; after inspecting his genital organs she had developed a pronounced envy for the penis, and the thoughts derived from this envy still continued to fill her mind. She was in fact a feminist.” (169) The presence of this brother—who, Freud constantly reminds us, was only slightly older than his patient and hence a virtual twin—introduces into the text a series of dizzying sets of identifications and cross-identifications that proliferate endlessly into a game of envious doubling. Hence, while Freud can reveal “without a shadow of a doubt” that the lady-love is a substitute for the girl’s mother, he also insists in that same paragraph that this motherly object of love is given up under a pressure that “grew more and more important”: “Her lady’s slender figure, severe beauty, and downright manner reminded her of a brother who was a little older than herself. Her latest choice corresponded, therefore, not only to her feminine but also to her masculine ideal; it combined satisfaction of the homosexual tendency with that of the heterosexual one” (156). Rivalry or envy is here linked not to identity but precisely to difference; this is a case therefore of a nonidentificatory identification: the girl “homosexually” loves a man, and “heterosexually” loves a woman. What Freud insists on at the conclusion of the essay as the centrality of the so-called mental characteristics of homosexuality in men and in women generates a bewildering array of possibilities for the constitution of gender

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and the construction of relations that may avert the destructive effects of the war-torn nursery. The “girl”—the abstract, nameless girl devoid precisely of any predication of “girlishness”—simultaneously loves and identifies with boys, in a move that dislodges all desire, homosexual and heterosexual, from all objects and bodies. She instantiates or institutionalizes a space between “physical sexual characters” and “object-choice” that Freud names “mental sexual characters” (170), and, as I am here arguing, thereby constitutes the space of politics. Freud, in a footnote to the essay, remarks that the girl’s Oedipal experience does not constitute a difference from that of the boy: “I do not see any advance or gain in the introduction of the term ‘Electra complex’, and do not advocate its use” (155). And indeed, he could not make claims for such an advocacy. Both sexes, Freud states in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in the context of the reiteration of the feminine (back)ground that translates masculine and feminine into the more abstract categories of active and passive, both sexes “seem to pass through the early phases of libidinal development in the same manner. . . . Analysis of children’s play has shown . . . that the aggressive impulses of little girls leave nothing to be desired in the way of abundance and violence. With their entry into the phallic phase the differences between the sexes are completely eclipsed by their agreements. We are now obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man.”55 The equation of the little girl with not a little boy but a little man is of course curious, introducing an odd slippage that will nevertheless guarantee that future men will take “the girl” as their model. And that all this information may be gleaned from “children at play” is not fortuitous, lending support to Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s impression that when it is a question of the feminine variety of the Oedipus complex, it seems invariably to entail an “Oedipus complex minus hatred, a play Oedipus.”56 This “as if ” quality, this analogical structure of the girl’s Oedipal experience, that makes it both the same and yet different, may certainly be aligned to the idea of “femininity as masquerade,” but, perhaps more fundamentally, it also constitutes the model of the boy’s Oedipal experience. Here the “play Oedipus” furnishes the ground or model for the “real Oedipus.” The girl’s masculinity, her existence as a “little man,” becomes the analogical thinking about the ways in which “real men” make the transition into the space of politics. If the aggressive, violent impulses of little girls make it so that difference in the phallic phase is eclipsed by agreement—I would say, by the consent 55. Sigmund Freud, “New Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis,” Standard Edition, 22:117–18. 56. Borch-Jacobsen, Freudian Subject, 196.

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demanded by the social contract—then we are once again back to the Freudian beating fantasies. The beating fantasy is, as Freud insisted, the language through which the girl’s masculinity complex is expressed. It is also the language of all social activity, insofar as it generates the eroticized bond to the leader of the group (the father) in the form of its sublimation. Sublimation depends on the girl’s masculinity (founded in envy) and on the boy’s taking that masculinity by analogy for his own attachment to his father. The girl’s envious sexuality thus becomes simultaneously the model of all identification and yet that which must be transcended, sublimated. And here Anna Freud’s contribution to the trope, to the turn of the Oedipal triangle seems crucial. Not only does she provide her father with a model for the function of the paternal Schlag as the moment when his authority is passed on to the daughter in the very act of turning her into a loyal male successor. And not only does she provide proof that the father’s beating hand is the great equalizer that instantiates justice and equality as political norm. Anna Freud takes things into her own hand, not merely because—as her father had recognized—beating a child can be led back to beating a clitoris, but because she shifts the parameters of what may constitute acts of sublimation. Sublimation, for Anna, is invariably aided by the fact that it depends on the abolition of sexual differences, on the fact, that is, that the pleasure of the social depends on the girl’s transformation into a boy, on the one hand, and on the other hand, that such a “sublime politics” only works to the extent that it is not transformed from violence into harmony but, instead, disguised or represented as such. It is Anna Freud’s particular reformulation of sublimation as grounded in gender trouble that lends the true support to Freud’s theory of sublimation, indeed to the very possibility of psychoanalytic theory per se. The “fact” of Anna Freud, the beaten and beating girl, allows for the construction of that X, that blank, vacant spot that grounds or sustains the emptiness left by the death of the primal narcissistic father. Sublimation relies on the “feminine fact,” so that all absence may from now on exist as a hypothesis or a theory. In this sense, democracy’s reliance on the abstract hypothetical subject as an evacuated space is grounded in the facticity not of the excluded woman (since she is crucial to this construction), but on her capacity not just to eroticize power relations but—more fundamentally—to eroticize thought. In Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Freud mentions a type of intellectual development that is strong enough to resist sexual repression. This is a thought that gains support from sexual desire in such a manner as to make sexual activities “return from the unconscious in the form of compulsive brooding, naturally in a distorted and unfree form, but sufficiently pow-

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erful to sexualize thinking itself and to colour intellectual operations with the pleasure and anxiety that belong to sexual processes proper.”57 Compulsive brooding, or grübelnde Tätigkeit [brooding activity], was of course the very essence of Anna’s “it,” her illness of masturbatory envy. Sublimation in the form of a resexualization of thinking gives support to the father’s death and to the guarantee that he will continue to exist in and as absence. Envy and its sexualized elaboration have both negative and positive effects: they are potentially the source of violence, both political and conceptual or theoretical, because they may set in motion a chain of identifications that lead to anarchy and to a lack of gender distinctions, where women turn into men, and men into women. And yet it is precisely this “Freudian bedrock” that inhibits violence at the very moment that there is a beating, a masturbation, since envy, by virtue of the fact that it precisely beats/masturbates, also guarantees those gender distinctions. The Freudian concept of democratic subjectivity relies on gender difference to the extent that it creates a model of male subjectivity founded in a woman who acts like a man. The positive effects of envy rely therefore on its negative ones: envy produces a nonidentificatory form of identification; it generates, at the very heart of identity, a difference that is designed to ward off violence but that displaces that violence in such a way that, in the transmission of authority, the woman as woman can have no place. 57. Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” Standard Edition, 11:80.

 Ch ap ter 3 Anna-Antigone Experiments in Group Upbringing

Out of envious participation, I don’t want to deny my former travel companion, who now permits himself on his own recognizance to fulfill my unsatisfied travel wishes, a cordial greeting. . . . My kind regards . . . also from my loyal Antigone-Anna. —Letter from Sigmund Freud to Sandor Ferenczi, October 12, 1928

Two arguments provide the support of this chapter dedicated to Anna Freud’s theory of sociality in the aftermath of World War II. On the one hand, I am concerned with psychoanalytic politics, that is, with a particular line of thought contributed by psychoanalytic theory to a delineation of the democratic political sphere as it took shape after 1945. The kind of psychoanalytic political theory I explore here was articulated in proximity to the institutionalization of psychoanalysis itself in the wake of Freud’s death, that is, when Anna Freud became the official leader of the International Psychoanalytic Association. On the other hand, I will also pursue the idea that the politics of psychoanalysis informed, but was also informed by, a renewed engagement with Freud-père’s fundamental discovery, that is, his theory of the unconscious. In the aftermath of Freud’s death and the destruction of European Jewry, official psychoanalysis appeared to be driven by two needs: to defend the unconscious against the assaults it had undergone by the experience of totalitarianism and mass death, and to rethink its nature and place within the human psyche and within the contours of a new social

I thank Yaron Ezrahi, Ruth HaCohen, Bernard Reginster, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Elizabeth Weed, Idith Zertal, the entire Pembroke Seminar 2007–8 at Brown University, and the participants of the Yale Political Theory Workshop in 2009 for their comments on and criticisms of the many drafts this chapter underwent. 96

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conviviality. “The problem of the unconscious,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy write, “is never anything other than that of the ‘collective.’ ”1 Within this context, I am thinking of two particular instances of institutionalization: that of psychoanalysis in the International Psychoanalytic Association and that of Jewish identity in the state of Israel. I see these two instances as related, even parallel processes. Here I want to pursue the arguments of those psychoanalysts, and of Anna Freud in particular, who made the both theoretical and historical claim that the unconscious was now, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, intimately connected to the subject as orphan and to a situation where all social institutions were in effect orphanages. As Deleuze and Guattari succinctly put it, “The unconscious is an orphan.”2 And Derrida asks, “What if the orphanage were a structure of the unconscious?”3 Institutionalization will shore up the (theory of the) unconscious while protecting against its potentially harmful effects. Institutionalization implies, of course, at least some degree of bureaucratization and normativization, a limit placed on the power of charisma and personal rule. The transition from charismatic authority to its institutionalization—an absolute necessity in the aftermath of the totalitarian cult of leaders—does not dispense with the question of fantasy: among the three “impossible professions” (psychoanalysis, education, and politics), psychoanalysis, whose primary object of analysis is the unconscious, is only too conscious of this fact. As Jacqueline Rose has persuasively argued, being “in a state” signifies both a solidification or even a petrification of identity and yet also its collapse, or at least a challenge to its rationality. In this, the state’s double meaning becomes a “symptom of the modern world,”4 as Rose makes clear: the state is always haunted by its destabilizing fantasmatic foundation, by its unconscious, by its potential “being in a state.” “Psychoanalysis,” Rose writes, “can help us understand the symptom of statehood, why there is something inside the very process upholding the state as a reality which threatens and exceeds it.”5

1. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, 17. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 49. 3. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 165. 4. Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12. This double meaning became a symptom of the modern world and therefore, as Otto Rank pointed out, also a symptom of the crisis of patriarchy. See Richard H. Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 221. 5. Rose, States of Fantasy, 10.

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Rose would not, I believe, be averse to extending such an analysis to all institutions, or at least to those institutions concerned with the construction of a viable ego and with the democratic arrangement between such egos. What are, she asks, “the affective or psychic conditions of a genuine democracy?” And, in citing Sigmund Freud’s 1914 essay on the unconscious, she implies that such conditions rely on our fantasy life, on what she calls “hypothetical imaginations,” that is, on the work of a (dangerous) fantasy that posits both not “to believe in the mental existence of others” and yet to assume “that they are a version of ourselves.”6 At stake here are questions that pertain to the working of identification and, as well, to those processes that pertain to the institutionalization of identities, crystallized as they are by the desire both to transform acts of identification into stable identities or subjects, and fantasmatically to undo them. As already noted in the previous chapter, the process of identification guarantees the affective conditions for democracy and yet is also democracy’s undoing. Here I am concerned with the institution of psychoanalysis—with that institution whose knowledge has produced important insights into the life of all institutions. This is a complicated affair because it engages both the question of how one may institutionalize the knowledge of the unconscious (and this is a question of how history impacts on a theory) and because it wonders how the knowledge that pertains to the unconscious informs the needs of the institution (here, how theory impacts on history). Such an affair between the life of the unconscious and that of the institution, between theory and history, is deeply implicated in its frustratingly uncertain results: those pertaining to the construction of a viable and democratic identity or ego. If we take seriously the theory and the work of the unconscious, then stability cannot be guaranteed, precisely because identities are always so frighteningly unstable, traversed as they are by their fantasmatic undoing. Freud, Rose states in her response to Edward Said’s lecture “Freud and the Non-European”—a text to which I shall return—that Freud proposes “no consolation, no utopia . . . but a fissure or wound at the heart of collective identity.”7 In the absence of certitude, Freud demands that we live without consoling fictions and instead with the idea of “broken identities.” And yet the meaning of such a fissure at the heart of identity is not self-evident. The trauma of a fissured identity, so argues Rose, does not of necessity lead to the free play of fluid identities and therefore to a critique of the state: traumatic dissolution of the subject

6. Ibid., 134–35. 7. Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), 68.

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can also bring about a situation where identities are caused “to batten down, to go exactly the other way: towards dogma, the dangers of coercive and coercing forms of faith.”8 Fragmentation can produce equally the critique of identity as well as its petrification. A shattered self in itself is therefore no guarantee for democracy, and this because the “most historically attested response to trauma is to repeat it.”9 In the two texts of Rose I have referred to here, Israel as the “state” in question is what is insistently at stake for her. As a consequence, also at stake is a Jewish identity and psychoanalysis’s implications in such an identity. And all these concerns are connected to an understanding of historical trauma and to the fact that psychoanalysis becomes an institution in the face of a historical trauma that involved the destruction of European Jewry and of psychoanalysis, and the redemption of Jewish identity in and through the state of Israel. In other words, after 1945 psychoanalysis faced the dual necessity of coming to terms with the destruction and the rebuilding of European Jewish identity and of reconstituting the psychoanalytic movement in the absence of its charismatic founding father. Orphans and orphanages are recurring motifs in such an enterprise. Here I will attempt to draw together these two necessities by focusing on those specifically psychoanalytic meditations upon the idea—a radically novel one after 1945—that it was not only possible and perhaps desirable to raise children in groups, that is, beyond the boundaries established by Oedipal relations, but also that it was possible to do so according to the terms of scientific “experimentation.” Before describing a series of “group scenarios” that set the stage for my arguments, I would like to make a detour in the form of a brief excursus: To what extent do the two requirements—that of rebuilding Jewish identity and that of reconstituting and institutionalizing the psychoanalytic movement after 1945—not constitute a common though submerged ground? To what extent, to put the matter bluntly, is psychoanalysis a “Jewish science”? How do constructions of personal and national identity either support or undermine the psychoanalytic institution? And, finally, how are children—and in particular Freud’s loyal daughter Anna—implicated in all these questions?

Excursus: Psychoanalysis, Judaism, Resistance It is possible that the institution of psychoanalysis functions as the fantasmatic Other of the state of Israel. Israel, so Rose glosses Said’s text Freud and 8. Ibid., 76. 9. Ibid., 77.

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the Non-European, represses Freud.10 This is another way of saying that Israel represses psychoanalysis and therefore also its theory of the unconscious, in other words, the theory of repression itself. Such a repression of the theory of repression Israel does not wear lightly, that is, without a symptomatic return of the repressed. While for Rose, the ideology that invests the “land of Israel” is one that is explicitly “built on sand”—but then, one may ask, is there any nation that is not built on sand?—and therefore generative of an anxiety that no “language, boundary, identity could be expected to repair,”11 for the Palestinian Said, the “land of Israel” itself retains a concreteness and identity experienced as lethal, and as such must be uprooted by the lesson of Freud and therefore by psychoanalysis. Freud, for Said, is contrapuntal to the project of national identity, at least as he perceives it and reads it through Freud’s “late style,” one that tragically is in 2002 also Said’s own. Said places Freud’s “contrapuntuality” within the robust Europeanism of psychoanalysis itself, within a thought that, nevertheless and in Freud’s own late-style response to fascism, posits as its nonoriginal origin the Other, that is, the non-European. According to Said, such nonidentificatory origin is to be located in Freud’s final great metapsychological and metahistorical text, Moses and Monotheism, that is, in Freud’s claim that at the foundation of Jewish (national) identity stands the Egyptian Moses. But Said’s comments reach well beyond the now almost common-sensical evocation of nonoriginal origins. His concerns—and they are, as he states, “far more politically charged”—are with a culture that came into being after World War II: in the postwar period “the constellation of words and valences that surround Europe and the West acquired a much more fraught and even rebarbative meaning from observers outside Europe and the West” (17). And therefore: “later history reopens and challenges what seems to have been the finality of an earlier figure of thought, bringing it into contact with cultural, political and epistemological formations undreamed of ” by a thought that posits a sense of tradition as one of its fundamental postulates (25). What Freud, the non-European, opens up is a kind of Nietzschean countermonumental history, whereby “the heritage-style attitudes of an exclusively biblical archaeology are now being challenged” (49).12

10. Said, Freud and the Non-European, 66. This statement appears in the text as Rose’s “Response to Edward Said.” 11. Rose, States of Fantasy, 29. 12. Moses and Monotheism operates, according to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, on the basis of a double refusal, one guided by Freud’s rejection of treating the history of Moses (and therefore also of Judaism) as a myth of origins: Moses and Monotheism is neither an epic, that is, an aesthetics, nor does it constitute a prehistoric primitivity. On the contrary, Freud situates Moses in what Said calls a “later history,” or in what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call a “second moment,” the moment of

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Said’s is not an antiarchaeology, but counterarchaeology,13 and he speaks to the possibility of a form of identity that, “in our age of vast population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants” (53), he wants to name a cosmopolitan consciousness of those who are “both inside and outside his or her community” (53). This would be a consciousness that—to the degree that is it “utterly indecisive and deeply undetermined” (55)—cannot itself be written. True. And yet such a consciousness does take its own form of writing, even if in anguished and attenuated forms. It does not and cannot separate itself from some form of identification or subject-formation. And that a migratory consciousness may find itself ineluctably bound to an unconscious and therefore censored or repressed “other” consciousness, is what the following remarks address. The question whether psychoanalysis is a “Jewish science” or not is a vexed one and, as Yosef Yerushalmi puts it, a veritable taboo within and beyond psychoanalytic circles. It certainly also raises the possibility that the critique of psychoanalysis is perhaps ultimately fueled by an unconscious anti-Semitism. “How many men and women,” Yerushalmi asks, “still lie on couches wondering whether the analyst is or is not Jewish because the name does not reveal the identity, but who will never ask directly because the

historical repetition. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, 24. It constitutes indeed something that is far more politically charged, to the extent that it is a reflection on what constitutes “the political” as such. 13. Said is close here to Jacques Derrida’s idea of the (Freudian) archive. Like Derrida, Said posits this counterarchaeology in terms of an either/or, as an indeterminacy that has the future possibility of justice and democracy as its most fundamental stakes. Thus Derrida: “On the one hand, no one has illuminated better than Freud what we have called the archontic principle of the archive, which in itself presupposes not the originary arkhe but the nomological arkhe of the law, of institution, of domiciliation, of filiation. . . . No one has shown how this archontic, that is, paternal and patriarchic, principle only posited itself to repeat itself and returned to re-posit itself only in parricide. It amounts to repressed and suppressed parricide, in the name of the father as dead father. The archontic is at best the takeover of the archive by the brothers. The equality and the liberty of brothers. A certain, still vivacious idea of democracy. But on the other hand . . . in his theoretical theses as in the compulsion of his institutionalizing strategy, Freud repeated the patriarchal logic. He declared . . . that the patriarchal right . . . marked the civilizing progress of reason. He even added to it in a patriarchic higher bid, even where all his inheritors, the psychoanalysts of all countries, have united themselves as a single man to follow him and to raise the stakes. To the point that certain people can wonder if . . . his sons, so many brothers, can yet speak in their own name. Or if his daughter ever came to life . . . was ever anything other than a phantasm or a specter, a Gradiva rediviva, a Gradiva-Zoe-Bertgang passing through at Berggasse 19” ( Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 95). This extremely rich statement by Derrida requires further commentary. See also Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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topic seems far more sensitive and threatening than sex?”14 The question of course also leaves wide open how one may want to define either “Jewish” or “science.” It also seems insistently to invoke other concerns: the privacy of the self and its relation to the institutionalization of psychoanalysis, the contours and meanings of secularity, the Holocaust, the figures of mothers and daughters, the role of Anna Freud in the construction of a viable continuity of institutional psychoanalysis in a post-Holocaust world, Israel, America. To begin with the question of privacy: most of Sigmund Freud’s own pronouncements on the relationship between psychoanalysis and Jewishness take place in letters, written therefore as a private language of confession and of a cultural/confessional identity for those who understand—more or less. It is well known that Freud worried about the “Judaization” of psychoanalysis— hence the initial elevation of Carl Jung and then Ernest Jones to potential “heirs” of the movement (whereby it is not insignificant that Freud toyed with the idea of “marrying off ” his daughter Anna to Jones), and this in private letters written to both Karl Abraham and Sandor Ferenczi. But it is also in private letters that Freud embraces his newly invented “Jewish science,” most famously in a letter written in 1926 to the Italian psychiatrist Enrico Morselli: “I am not sure,” he writes, “that your opinion which looks upon psychoanalysis as a direct product of the Jewish mind, is correct, but if it is I wouldn’t be ashamed. Although I have been alienated from the religion of my forebears for a long time, I have never lost the feeling of solidarity with my people and I realize with satisfaction that you call yourself a pupil of a man of my race—the great Lombroso.”15 In his final passages of Freud’s Moses—written significantly in the form of a public letter addressed to “Professor Freud”—Yerushalmi states: I have tried to understand your Moses within its stated framework of the history of religion, of Judaism, and of Jewish identity without reading it as an allegory of psychoanalysis. . . . I think that in your innermost heart you believed that psychoanalysis is itself a further, if not final, metamorphosed extension of Judaism, divested of its illusory religious forms but retaining its essential monotheistic characteristics, at least as you understood and described them. . . . Psychoanalysis is a godless Judaism.16

14. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 99. 15. Cited in Jennifer A. Stone, Freud in Italy: Gradiva (New York: javariBooks, 2006), n.p. 16. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 99.

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Yerushalmi proposes, then, that psychoanalysis is both the secularizing displacement of Judaism and yet also a repetition of the latter’s “monotheistic,” perhaps even antidemocratic, traits. Freud’s own most extended meditation on the topic is to be found, however, not in a private letter but in a published and therefore public 1925 essay entitled significantly “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis.” The essay’s first paragraph invokes a child in a nurse’s arms, a pious man and a peasant, all those who refuse the intrusions of an outside (modern) world; and the essay ends with thoughts on the fact that the inventor of psychoanalysis is in fact a Jew. What these examples are to demonstrate is that the resistances to psychoanalysis derive from the fact that the latter proposes something that is distinctively “unpleasureable”—to wit, a radical newness of interpretation and a critique of common-sensical knowledge. Certainly, psychoanalysis thereby places itself uncomfortably between the disciplines of medicine and philosophy and situates itself both within and yet beyond the boundaries of sexuality. And yet the revolutionary quality of psychoanalysis is not posited within an imputed pansexualism, but—and far more dangerously—because it points out the “unfairness and lack of logic” that inheres in all civilization, one that demands that control of instincts upon which depends “a throne [resting] upon fettered slaves.”17 Cultural hypocrisy is dictated by society and forces the subject to live “beyond his means”: it forbids criticism and discussion and—for Freud linked to this latter prohibition—it also forbids a direct confrontation with the incest taboo. Therefore, resistances to psychoanalysis are both emotional and intellectual; indeed, it is through the interconnection between affect and intellectuality that such resistances have gained their major force. The emotional factor explains these resistances’ “passionate character as well as their poverty in logic.”18 Yet beyond this passionate characteristic stands also the fact that Freud is a Jew. Significantly, it is precisely at this point that he invokes the necessity for a certain discretion, and perhaps he even links the incest taboo here to a taboo against a declaration of ( Jewish) identity: Finally, with all reserve, the question may be raised whether the personality of the present writer as a Jew who has never sought to disguise the fact that he is a Jew may not have had a share in provoking the antipathy of his environment to psychoanalysis. An argument of this kind is not often uttered aloud. But we have unfortunately grown so suspicious

17. Sigmund Freud, “Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” Standard Edition, 19:219. 18. Ibid., 221.

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that we cannot avoid thinking that this factor may not have been quite without its effect. Nor is it perhaps entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psycho-analysis was a Jew. To profess belief in this new theory called for a certain degree of readiness to accept a situation of solitary opposition—a situation with which no one is more familiar than a Jew.19 And the reverse is undoubtedly just as true: “Rejection of Freud,” states Jennifer Stone, “is inseparable from unconscious resistances to psychoanalysis”;20 anti-Semitism may be explained as one form of resistance against the theory of the unconscious. Anna Freud at several points in her life broke this unspoken taboo and thereby evoked the specter of a possible “Jewish science.” In a 1934 letter to Ernest Jones she compared the flight of psychoanalysis from Nazi Germany and its new diasporic status to the dispersion of the Jews after the destruction of Jerusalem. In 1966, and repeating her father’s earlier fears, Anna said that the appointment of Clifford Yorke to directorship of the Hampstead Clinic “represented the Clinic to the outside world as what it largely was not—he was male, non-Jewish, native British. . . . In the 1960s, Anna Freud had taken care with her hiring to assure that the Clinic was not isolated . . . by remaining a largely female, Jewish émigré enclave, with thickly accented ‘Hampstead English’ as the predominant language.”21 Most significantly, however, in 1977—on the occasion of the creation of a Sigmund Freud Professorship at Hebrew University and of the first International Psychoanalytic Association congress held in Israel— Anna Freud, who herself was unable to attend the meeting, had a proxy read her prepared statement to commemorate the institutionalization of a new relationship between psychoanalysis, the academy, and Israel. Like her father in 1925, she conceived of this relationship as founded in a history of resistances, of indeed heroic resistances that now and here took on the mantle of a badge of honor: During the era of its existence, psychoanalysis has entered into connexion with various academic institutions, not always with satisfactory results. . . . It has also, repeatedly, experienced rejection by them, been criticized for its methods being imprecise, its findings not open to

19. Ibid., 222; my emphases. Freud speaks of such a solitary opposition also in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” 20. Stone, Freud in Italy, n.p. 21. Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 375.

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proof by experiment, for being unscientific, even for being a “Jewish science. However the other derogatory comments may be evaluated, it is, I believe, the last-mentioned connotation which, under present circumstances, can serve as a title of honour.22 Anna’s address has received some distinguished glossing. Yerushalmi, for one, in his own address to “Professor Freud,” refers to her as “your Antigone” and wonders what Anna-Antigone could have meant by these remarks: What, for instance, did she mean by “present circumstances”? Did she imply that only in Jerusalem is the title of “Jewish science” an honorary one? Or did she mean to say that after all that had happened, it was finally time to tell the truth? But why, I ask Yerushalmi, the invocation here of Anna as Antigone? Above all—and this lies at the center of Yerushalmi’s concerns—was Anna speaking in her father’s name?23 Jacques Derrida, in his own comments on Anna’s address, as well as on Yerushalmi’s anxieties, cannot help but be amazed by the extent to which one may still remain skeptical whether a daughter is capable of speaking in her own name; whether what she writes can also be signed in her name.24 “Your Antigone,” says Yerushalmi in passing, Yerushalmi, who, clearly thus identifying Freud, his specter, with Oedipus, thinks perhaps— perhaps—that this will suffice to de-oedipalize his own relationship with Freud, as if there were no possibility of ever becoming Oedipus’s Oedipus. . . . Secretly but visibly, sheltered by a secret he is anxious to make public,Yerushalmi wishes that Anna-Antigone had only been the living spokesperson, the faithful interpreter, the voice bearer come to support her dead father and to represent his word, his name, his belonging, his thesis, and even his faith. What, according to Yerushalmi, did she say, then? That in spite of all Freud’s strategic denials, in spite of all the political precautions he expressed throughout his life concerning the universal (non-Jewish) essence of psychoanalysis, it ought to honor

22. Anna Freud, “Inaugural Lecture for the Sigmund Freud Chair at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 59 (1978): 148. 23. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 99–100. 24. Richard Armstrong, in his own interrogation of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Jewish identity, claims that psychoanalysis is not so much a symptom of the state but more of patriarchy: “The distinctly Jewish trajectory we are tracing involves the self-awareness of belonging ‘to an alien race’ . . . a certain crisis in the transmission of masculine ideals, and a failure to achieve a nationalist solution to the problem of secular identity . . . the historical alienation of the Jews, the need for an aggressive male life plan, and a critical appraisal of nationalist ideologies are woven into the tapestry of Freud’s engagement with antiquity, an engagement deeply implicated in his scientific improvisation of psychoanalysis” (Compulsion for Antiquity, 224).

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itself for being Jewish, for being a fundamentally, essentially, radically Jewish science.25 I will return to these rather bizarre connections between the taboo against a certain speech, the taboo against incest, the legacy and the institutionalization of psychoanalysis, the defense against Oedipalization, and the fact that the carrier of this knot of questions is a figure identified as “Anna-Antigone.” Indeed, it is this knot of questions that stands at the center of the following pages.

Group Scenario I: The International Psychoanalytic Association Elisabeth Roudinesco has made some rather arresting remarks in her book dedicated to the history of French psychoanalysis in the wake of the Lacanian revolution provoked by his thought in both psychoanalytic theory and practice.26 In 1907, so Roudinesco narrates these events, Sigmund Freud dissolved the famous Viennese group and founded a psychoanalytic society and precisely not an association of psychoanalysts. Roudinesco argues that instead of building an association of professionals geared to the guild protection of its members’ interests, Freud organized analysts around the protection of a common cause, around the defense of the theory of the unconscious, and this at the expense of addressing the “imaginary relations among members of the group” (223). Hence the institution’s function was not “to facilitate a lateral recognition among members of a clan in order to better guarantee the exercise of their ego” (224; my emphasis); instead it was to construct a vertical organization centered on the defense of the theory of the unconscious. Roudinesco admits that the results of such a choice were ultimately disastrous, particularly because Freud himself did not step up to the plate in his position of founding father, but instead refused the position of political leader.27 According to Roudinesco, Freud placed himself in the position of

25. Derrida, Archive Fever, 43–44. Archive Fever is one of Derrida’s last and most extended meditations on the relationship between psychoanalysis and his own intellectual project. Truly striking in this text is not just the extent to which this (agonized) relationship is displaced onto the voice of Yerushalmi, but the fact that through this displacement he implicitly asks whether deconstruction itself is not also a “Jewish science.” At least, this is how I read the text’s fundamental affective import. 26. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). All page numbers appear in the text. 27. As I argued in the previous chapter, Freud’s position here is entirely in line with his understanding of liberalism, that is, with his idea that the position of the (primal) father must be left vacant in order for the liberal social contract to ensue.

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a “master without command,” a position where he was master solely on the basis of his charismatic qualities (169—70), thereby ultimately leaving the management of “the empire” to his disciples. This is why, in the words of Roudinesco, the history of psychoanalytic societies brought forth something that was “entirely unprecedented” (224): The more one favors the emergence of a democratic power founded on a respect for the ideas of individuals, the more one tends to eradicate the work of the unconscious. One ends up supporting a guarantee for the ego, that is, an associative guild mentality, to the detriment of a theoretical struggle intent on decentering the position of the subject. In point of fact, democracy is bound to a concept of freedom in eminent contradiction with Freud’s discovery, which maintains that men are subject to a destiny that eludes them and which therapy allows them only partially to uncover. If one restricts oneself to that theory, it is impossible to create an association of psychoanalysts, respectful of the ego’s “freedom,” without simultaneously liquidating the doctrine it is supposed to be defending. (224) These are, needless to say, remarks that are profoundly disturbing for anyone who (like myself ) is committed to engaging the fantasmatic workings of the unconscious, while striving for a notion of a subjectivity that is capable—in the face of its own fantasmatic foundations—of energizing and sustaining new forms of democracy and freedom.28 Such a subjectivity would most certainly involve a decenteredness in Said’s sense, but would also have to be weary of an all-too-quick transferential investment in a decentered subject who may be traumatized. Transferential desires are notably unstable and cannot, for that reason, even be securely placed—as Roudinesco apparently wishes—on the side of the theory of the unconscious, as against the defense of democracy or of the ego. In other words, the democratic project itself is

28. Ona Nierenberg has made a similar point, though, I believe, with somewhat different implications from Roudinesco’s argument. Nierenberg’s target is the 2005 New York State law that regulates who in the state may call himself or herself a psychoanalyst. She argues that American institutional psychoanalysis endlessly debates “who is or is not eligible to practice” and therefore “functions as a resistance to what Freud defended as lay [nonmedical therapy defined as separate from the health-professional complex] analysis. That is why, rather than considering state regulation as a function of external resistances, the situation in New York invites us to assess the internal resistances to psychoanalysis—resistances that Freud, in fact, felt were by far the more threatening of the two” (66). The question of who may practice thus acts as a defense against the question of what is practiced in the name of psychoanalysis; medicalization or professionalization more broadly conceived, is “one of the names of the repression of psychoanalysis” and forms a constitutive part of psychoanalysis as a group formation. Nierenberg, “The Lay and the Law,” 72.

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and always has been a project of desire, and the binary that Roudinesco seeks to establish between a lateral democracy and a vertical, desiring (Oedipal) unconscious may not be quite so easily fixed. Indeed, the complications multiply in her text, for the defense of the ego (and therefore also of democracy) furthermore strangely implicates “Jewishness.” Her defense of Lacan, who himself in his “return to Freud” seeks to defend the unconscious against the incursions of Anna Freud’s “ego psychology,” is filtered through the need to claim that psychoanalysis is not a “Jewish science” (an idea shared, of course, by Freud himself ). “Ego psychology,” Roudinesco states, “was not a ‘Jewish science,’ for such a science does not exist, but it reflected the ideals of the great victims of the East, forced to plant the flag of their ego on the finally conquered soil of a promised land” (168; my emphasis). Ego psychology—that faction within the psychoanalytic movement supported by Anna Freud and vilified by Lacan—was, according to Roudinesco, dedicated to a democratic vision, not only for the group members of the psychoanalytic movement itself, but for all members of any democratic society. Ego psychology was therefore dedicated to ego autonomy, to an autonomy that, quite bizarrely in Roudinesco’s text, comes from the “East.” The main proponents of ego psychology “belonged to that central European tribe [sic!] of Jews that had been forced to flee pogroms and change languages, diplomas, and cultures numerous times” (168). While ego psychologists should not be reduced to “a mere ideology for adapting to capitalist society” (168), nevertheless these “Easterners” were dedicated to “planting their flag” in a promised land, informed as they were by “the dreams of a certain Diaspora intent on ending its wanderings. From this perspective there was a link between the theory of ego autonomy and the private history of each of its founders” (168). Whether the promised land refers here to Israel or America is left open. Roudinesco’s comment does however quite plainly point to some deep connection, in her mind, between ego psychology and Jewish identity, whether this takes place as a national identity or not. Due to “a singular lack of narcissistic mastery” (168), Sigmund Freud apparently escaped these demands made by the ego—and this despite the fact that he was another one of those Jews that hailed from the “East.” He sought to extricate himself from the ghetto and thereby “avoid the stupid rubric ‘Jewish science’ ” (168), precisely because he posited himself as a “master without command”: For years, he had refused to leave Austria and abandon Vienna, the motherland of new ideas. He preferred internal exile to migration, the

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Diaspora to the promised land, a loss of self to effective command, the division of being to its reunification and, ultimately, knowing how to die to any immortality. (168) “Ego psychology” took a different route. It was invented by “immigrant Jews” from the East who left the ghetto in a quest to replace “the division of being” with a “sovereign conquest of man’s unity” (168)—at the expense, however, of internal exile. And here Roudinesco furnishes the reader with a biography of all those founders of ego psychology deriving from the so-called tribes of the East: Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and David Rapaport, the latter a traveler of a “tumultuous route”: Hungarian Jew, Zionist who spent two years in Palestine, and the provider, furthermore, of a “fable” to “illustrate the notion of ego autonomy” with a Jewish anecdote about that other founder of Jewish identity, Moses: A king of the Orient, contemplating a portrait of Moses, asked his astrologers their opinion. In their opinion, the man was vain, cruel, venal, and a glutton. In his dissatisfaction, the king paid Moses a visit and found him to have numerous qualities. He was preparing to denounce the incompetence of his wise men, but the prophet prevented him: “Your astrologers are right,” he said. “They know who I was without understanding who I have become.” (168–69) While it is unclear who is imparting the fable’s lesson here—Roudinesco or Rapaport—nevertheless, it apparently teaches us that the ego-subject gains autonomy by controlling his or her drives and by asserting autonomy visà-vis external reality. As Freud had already remarked in 1925, such an autonomy is always relative because it is hemmed in between the dual pressures of the id and of reality. This double-constraint ego psychology resolves by means of a “golden mean” (169) that underwrites the existence of free, democratic life. For this reason, and in the name of life, ego psychology rejects both the death instinct and upholds a “recentering of the unconscious on consciousness” (169).

Group Scenario II: The Kibbutz in Israel The work of David Rapaport provides me with a move to my other concerns. He happens to be the author of a study that was fundamental to Bruno Bettelheim’s 1969 book entitled The Children of the Dream. Here Bettelheim is heavily indebted to Rapaport’s 1958 article entitled “The Study of Kibbutz

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Education and its Bearing on the Theory of Development.”29 Bettelheim conceived his text as an investigation into an experiment in group upbringing, that of kibbutz children in Israel. (“Kibbutz” is the Hebrew word for “group.”) Bettelheim’s monograph is a broad survey of the extensive literature, written largely during the early 1950s, dedicated to the question of educating Jewish children after 1945. As Bettelheim notes in the first chapter of his book, a chapter significantly entitled “An Experiment in Nature,” the radical group upbringing of kibbutz children—to wit, their removal from the nuclear family immediately after birth—constitutes a concerted effort on the part of certain sectors of Israeli society to undo middle-class (and American) values that posit the mental health of children as deriving from an intimate and continuous Oedipal (and therefore vertical) relationship between the infant and its parent(s).30 Bettelheim provides three basic explanations for such a radical critique of the nuclear family and of American middle-class values. First, after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Israeli society needed to create a national ethos “in a hurry” (16), one that also had important military dimensions. Israel required rapid industrialization and a sense of communal belonging. During the Six-Day War, so we are told, only 4 percent of the Israeli army lived on a kibbutz, but 25 percent of the casualties of the war were borne by the kibbutz population, speaking thereby to the “true measure of their heroism, courage, and devotion to duty” (17). Second, this experiment in group upbringing was dedicated to the creation of the “new Jew,” one who was “free” and above all “manly,” a Jew untainted by the presumably feminizing experience of “exile.” Bettelheim does not mention the victimization and extermination of European Jewry in his discussion of either the experiment itself or its analysis by pedagogues, psychologists, or psychoanalysts after the war. This is a curious omission,31 particularly since in its stead he claims that the kibbutz movement was seeking distance from the claustrophobic atmosphere that apparently described the family of the ghetto and the shtetl.32 Third, and as a consequence, Bettelheim’s concern centers

29. David Rapaport, “The Study of Kibbutz Education and its Bearing on the Theory of Development,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 28 (1958): 587–97. 30. Bruno Bettelheim, Children of the Dream: Communal Child-Rearing and American Education. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 31. Such an omission has been the object of study of Idith Zertal’s wonderful book, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Zertal argues that, despite the fact that between 1945 and 1955 almost 300,000 Holocaust survivors came to Israel and thereby changed the very fabric of Israeli society, these survivors were viewed as the “absent presentees” of the new nation. As she remarks: “It was heroes’, not victims’ time” (94). 32. Himself imprisoned between 1938 and 1939 in the camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim had in fact authored an important essay entitled “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme

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on the ultimately stereotypical vision of the Jewish mother, who, it appears, once freed from her shtetl limits by the kibbutz, contests her “biological tragedy” and even takes the “philosophy of sexual equality” to “extremes” (23). Kibbutz mothers simply refused the ( Jewish) maternal ideal, and this too in response to the old “ghetto mentality.”33 Bettelheim’s reactions to this experiment in Israel are rather mixed: indeed, the whole text constructs a compilation of pluses and minuses in a ledger built around the binary of Israeli sociality and American middle-class intimacy. Situations” as early as 1943. Bettelheim’s is an essay based on his firsthand observations of the Nazi camps. Here he explicitly referred to the camps as “an experimental laboratory” in order for the Gestapo “to study the effective means for breaking civilian resistance, the minimum food, hygienic, and medical requirement needed to keep prisoners alive and able to perform hard labor when the threat of punishment takes the place of all normal incentives, and the influence on performance if no time is allowed for anything but hard labor and if the prisoners are separated from their families.” While Primo Levi had famously described the camps’ violence as “useless” (The Drowned and the Saved, trans, Raymond Rosenthal [New York: Vintage Books, 1988]), Bettelheim interprets this violence “as a means of producing changes in the prisoners which will make them more useful subjects of the Nazi state.” Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 38, no. 4 (October 1943): 418–19. Giorgio Agamben, for whom Bettelheim’s essay was crucial to the composition of his own influential text on Auschwitz, has pointed out that Bettelheim’s analysis of how human beings are transformed into Muselmänner in the camps eventually became the basis for Bettelheim’s postwar work with schizophrenic children in the United States. Bettelheim’s “Orthogenic School,” so Agamben, “thus had the form of a kind of counter-camp, in which he undertook to teach Muselmänner to become men again.” Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 46. I think it entirely legitimate to view Bettelheim’s analysis of Jewish children in Israeli kibbutzim in a similar light. While I appreciate Agamben’s finely tuned sense of how diverging discourses get translated from one historical context to another, without thereby an author necessarily being in conscious command of such a transfer or transference, I am more doubtful about Agamben’s own transpositions from historical to broader, more ontological categories. If it may be entirely legitimate to argue that the Muselmann “marked the moving threshold in which man passed into non-man and in which clinical diagnosis passed into anthropological analysis” (47), then the translation of Bettelheim’s “extreme situation” into more philosophically conceived juridical “states of exception” (Carl Schmitt’s perhaps more empirically conceived category, but now elevated by postmodern philosophy into the status of concept), this transposition strikes me as more worrisome. If the Nazi camps constitute a social experiment in order to bring about, in the words of Goebbels, an “art of making possible what seems impossible,” then one may question whether this is not simply a form of madness. Or does it instead thereby becomes legitimate to derive from this experiment the ontological assertion that “humans bear within themselves the mark of the inhuman, . . . their spirit contains at its very center the wound of non-spirit, non-human chaos atrociously consigned to its own being capable of everything” (77). It is, in other words, difficult to see how the Nazi Befehlsnotstand is simply another incarnation of tragic Oedipal guilt (96–97), or why the “human being is thus always beyond or before the human” (135), or why “contingency is possibility put to the test of a subject” (146), or why the language of the witness is the language of the poet who finds his or her language “as what remains, as what actually survives the possibility, or impossibility, of speaking” (161). 33. A note of caution needs to be introduced here. The kibbutz experiment had of course predated the existence of the state of Israel, a fact that Bettelheim somewhat elides in his analysis. In other words, the escape from a so-called ghetto mentality was already in place in Palestine and made to work beyond or separate from the boundaries of the nation-state.

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Not surprisingly he concludes, as a consequence of his experiences as a participant observer, that kibbutz children score high, once they are adults, on the issue of group loyalty, and extremely low when it is a question of intimate relationships with a singular other. This is so because from a very early age, the kibbutz child’s identification “is with society’s ‘cultural carrier,’ not the parent. . . . The child wishes less to become like a particular, unique person . . . than to become a good comrade” (310). In the kibbutz, the superego is therefore not Oedipal or “personalized” but radically collective and lateral, leading to weak internalization but to strong institutionalization, therefore to a tendency to act and defend the country, rather than “to sit and think and feel” (311).

Group Scenario III: Bulldog Banks Farm On October 15, 1945, six children between the ages of three and not yet four years arrived at Bulldog Banks, a farm in southern England. All six children were survivors of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and arrived at the farm after their liberation by the Soviet Army and an eight-month journey via a series of reception centers in Eastern Europe and England. Their transfer to England and subsequent one-year stay at Bulldog Banks had been made possible by efforts on the part of the British Jewish community, as well as by the financial support of the Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children in New York. The Bulldog Banks children were, as far as could be determined in the spring of 1945, six of approximately one thousand child survivors of the Nazi extermination camps to travel to England during the last months of 1945. The goal of the Jewish relief efforts was to nurse all these children back to health and eventually make arrangements for their adoption in those cases where the parents could not be located. What separated the Bulldog Banks children from the other children survivors was their extremely young age and the near certainty that their parents had been murdered either in the ghettos or the camps when the children were at most of only a few months of age. All six children had been deported—as far as could be determined—to Theresienstadt before their first birthday, in two of the cases when they were only a few months old. In the camp itself, they were the youngest inmates of the Ward for Motherless Children, where they were fed and clothed—to the best of their abilities under the extreme circumstances—by the inmates themselves. All six children passed the first three years of their lives without an affective bond to a parental figure, without play or toys and within an environment where death was a daily event. They arrived in England speaking a mixture of Czech and German. These

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children did not become orphans; they were—so to speak—born as orphans. One need hardly remark on the extraordinary fact that they survived at all. The Bulldog Banks children have become a part of psychoanalytic history because one of the guardians assigned to their care was Anna Freud. While her engagement with the children’s daily activities at the farm was relatively limited, she nevertheless has left a record of her impressions and observations of the six children in an essay that was written together with Sister Sophie Dann, one the primary caregivers at Bulldog Banks. The essay, bearing the title “An Experiment in Group Upbringing,” was first published in English in 1951; in 1961–2 it was published in German as “Gemeinschaftleben im frühen Kindesalter.”34 Both the English and the German titles are in themselves rather striking, given the material that the essay treats. Whether, for instance, the “experiment” referred to in the English title addresses the children’s experiences at Theresienstadt or at Bulldog Banks Farm remains uncertain, beyond Freud’s remark that she meant by “experiment” not “an artificial or deliberate setup,” but rather “a combination of fateful outside circumstances” (163).35 One of the child survivors from Theresienstadt interviewed by Sarah Moskovitz in 1977 remarked in this regard to his interviewer: “I came across a reference in a child development textbook to something called An Experiment in Group Upbringing by Anna Freud. It upset me. Did they keep us together as an experiment? Hadn’t the Germans experimented on us enough?”36 And the German title is equally unsettling: “Gemeinschaftleben im frühen Kindesalter” [Communal life in early childhood] seems a rather benign description of the fate of three-year-old survivors of the Shoah. 34. I will be referring to the English-language version of the essay that appears in The Writings of Anna Freud, 4:163–229. 35. We may recall here, along with Bettelheim’s essay on the camps, Primo Levi’s famous comment that “the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment”; it was an experiment that Levi not only seeks to understand, but also replicates in his own text. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone 1996), 87. It must be noted, however, that there is a mistranslation in play here. In the Italian, Levi does not describe the situation as an “experiment” but as an “experience.” Perhaps, however, it is precisely this slippage between experiment and experience that is important: How is experimentation after 1945 to be understood as and in terms of experience? And in turn: to what extent is all experience now only ever experimental, to the degree that it must be filtered through and processed by the dictates of scientific experimentation—beyond which no experience can exist? As both a survivor of Auschwitz and a chemist, Levi is anything but impervious to such questions. 36. Sarah Moskovitz, Love despite Hate: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Adult Lives (New York: Schocken, 1983), 99. Moskovitz has traced the fate of the six Bulldog Banks children, along with other child survivors who had come to England and then eventually been adopted. Despite the somewhat uplifting title of her book, the stories told are hardly tales of redemption. In most of the cases, the adult Bulldog Banks children were leading joyless and even tragic lives.

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Group Scenario IV: The Orphanage What interests Anna Freud is, however, just this experiment in the question of Gemeinschaftsleben, one that raises the possibility of a delimitation of the social sphere as a constituent factor in the creation of a subjectivity that has been cut loose from all kinship relations. I propose to explore here Anna Freud’s investigations into just this domain, a domain that, as I understand it, is circumscribed by a double possibility: that the unconscious is an orphan, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have suggested, and that the orphanage itself may have the structure of the unconscious. These two possibilities coexist at two very different levels. To say that the unconscious is an orphan constitutes an address to psychoanalysis (hence Deleuze and Guattari’s challenge to the psychoanalytic project in the form of a theory of an “antiOedipus”), whereby what is challenged is the “naturalness” or “universality” of desire to flow in the direction of the Oedipal triangle of father, mother, and child. At stake is precisely the question of constitutiveness itself, one that at a structural level is certainly traumatic and that gives rise to a subject whose entry into the symbolic is circumscribed by a loss that cannot be avoided for subjectivity to take its place. On the other hand, and this may very well be an address by or from within psychoanalysis itself, to propose that the orphanage may be another space from which to think the unconscious catapults us into a rather different domain. It too takes its place as a traumatic experience, but one that pertains to an actual, historical loss.37 In the most immediate but nevertheless ambiguous sense—one circumscribed by the passage from subject-position to the idea that the institution is itself the site of a radical parental loss—this doubly conceived historical trauma, produced by the war, the Holocaust, and the demands of institutionalization is of course closer to the concerns elaborated on in Anna Freud’s essay.38 Here, in the very facticity

37. This distinction between structural and historical trauma is here informed by Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 43–85. 38. Lyndsey Stonebridge has quite admirably traced the connection between the advent of World War II, the Holocaust, and the turn to child analysis in Great Britain—a country where, due to exile, the two major theorists of child analysis, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, would find their home. Anna Freud explicitly referred to the connection between the war and the child as a “war raging in the nursery.” Stonebridge detects such as connection as stemming from a sustained engagement in Britain with psychoanalytic investigations into the problem of anxiety. While for Klein, according to Stonebridge, anxiety derives from the structures of interior phantasy, for Anna Freud they stem from the exterior environment; while Klein wants to make the child anxious so as to enable him or her to work through this affect, Freud makes it her goal to educate anxiety, to make the child capable of dealing with a threatening outside world. What makes Stonebridge’s analysis so arresting is that she links, in the imagination of British psychoanalysis, the “spilling out” of children from various means

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but also in the experimentality she addresses, of subjects whose constitution comes into being in a “different” way—due, as she says, to “a combination of fateful outside circumstances”—this experiment, that in its very “abundance of community” (224) speaks to a historical subject who no longer has the certainty of desire in and for kinship: this subject is constituted by the historical trauma of Oedipal loss and thereby reorganizes his or her desire within a new sociality that defines a post-Holocaust world. Derrida’s question: What if the orphanage—that is, institutional living itself—were a structure of the unconscious? places the problem at a liminal point between structure and contingency that stands at the intersection of a structural constitutiveness and an empirical historical situation. He does this in a two-fold context, the first chronologically posterior, one that interrogates that space wherein which a psychoanalytically conceived democratic and nonpatriarchal subjectivity may find its founding forms. The first space belongs to that of the Freudian archive, that is, to that space that “illuminates” the patriarchal principle standing behind an original archive defined by law, institution, domiciliation, and filiation. What Freud demonstrates better than anyone else, according to Derrida, is the fact that the archive is the repository of the repressed murdered father. The archive establishes the equality and the liberty of brothers, and therefore it desires democracy. And yet the archive leaves a remnant, another repository of another repressed.39 It is this other repressed remnant that undoes Elisabeth Roudinesco’s too simple binary between unconscious desires and democratic identities, for it introduces not only the desire of and for democracy but also the possibility that such a desire is both gendered and geared to a certain experiential/ experimental stability. Derrida names this remnant the institutionalizing principle, a remnant that wonders whether the institution can speak in its own name, whether in fact in the pact of brothers, a sister may not arise. And this question is the import of Derrida’s second question, one that takes place as a reading of Hegel’s own reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. At stake is Antigone’s claim that she must do what she does (bury her brother and thereby contravene the laws of the polis) because she senses that her brother is irreplaceable. All others—children, husbands, even parents—can be replaced, but since she

of transportation in concerted moves of evacuation (a historical trauma), with anxieties of separation, now loaded with a “historical signifier” that would inform and transform “the social and political standing of psychoanalysis in Britain.” Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 46. 39. Derrida therefore makes the connection here between the archive, the orphanage, and the nursery, the latter the original space for democracy that I discussed in the previous chapter.

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is an orphan no one can give her another brother.40 And yet, Derrida notes, this brother is irreplaceable only because of a specific historical situation, that is, because of the factual death of Antigone’s parents. The transformation in Hegel’s text of empirical contingency into a structural, paradigmatic legality occurs, so Derrida, by way of a reduction of contingency itself. It is here, then, that he asks his question whether the orphanage may not be a structure of the unconscious. And he continues: Antigone’s parents are not some parents among others. She is the daughter of Oedipus and . . . of Jocasta, of her incestuous grandmother. Hegel never speaks of this generation . . . as if it were foreign to the elementary structures of kinship. The model he interrogates is perhaps not as empiric as might be imagined. It does not yet have the universal clarity he ascribes to it. It holds itself . . . between the two. Like the orphanage. Proof, moreover, if there were any need for it, that nothing is less anoedipal, verily anti-oedipal than an orphan unconscious.41 Anna Freud is, in the fateful combination of outside forces that made her the daughter of the discoverer of the Oedipus complex and therefore by a genealogy (whose own paths of desire I am seeking here to uncover), the Antigone of just this complex—a name given to her by her own father. Anna-Antigone, the inheritor of the psychoanalytic movement is Sigmund Freud’s daughter/son, as I argued in the previous chapter, but also by virtue of Oedipus’s crime against the incest taboo, the sister/brother to that same father. That just this name should be strangely implicated, as the epigraph to this chapter indicates, by Freud-père’s own feelings of brotherly rivalry in the form of “envious participation” only aggravates the matter. Anna bears the burden of this name of Antigone throughout her life and work. She thus straddles a double subject-position, marked already by the hyphenated name itself: Anna-Antigone lives a double loss, structurally and historically, as a subject who inhabits and also puts into motion a desire that is entirely circumscribed by the space of an orphanage where empirical contingency and structural necessity are placed into a kind of holding pattern. She also thereby stands for the passage from an orphaned subject to that

40. “Had I been a mother of children, and my husband been dead and rotten, I would not have taken this weary task upon me against the will of the city. What law backs me when I say this? I will tell you: If my husband were dead, I might have had another, and child from another man, if I lost the first. But when father and mother both were hidden in death no brother’s life would bloom for me again. This is the law under which I gave you precedence, dearest brother” (Sophocles, Antigone, trans. David Grene [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991]; lines 187–94). 41. Derrida, Glas, 165–66.

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subject’s institutionalization. In this sense, she functions as the very embodiment of Derrida’s “archive fever,” as the site where traumatic subjects and institutions meet. Hence the singular importance of the Bulldog Banks Farm children as a crossing point of desire, loss, and the making of subjects; and hence also Anna-Antigone’s profound interest in the idea of losing and being lost.42 Anna Freud interrogates these children’s double loss, as she herself must come to terms with the loss of her own father (and mother, who died in 1951, the same year as the publication of her essay about the Bulldog Banks children) and—as an orphan—shoulder the burdens of an institution that is itself now orphaned. How could she not think of the institution itself, of sociality, as anything but an orphanage? How, in the words of Judith Butler, could she not wonder what would happen to the psychoanalytic movement, if one took Antigone as its point of departure rather than Oedipus?43

Social Death/The Death of the Social Anna-Antigone is poised in her life and work, then, in a holding pattern between the conflictual needs of a double loss, circumscribed, that is, by structural and historical trauma. In the remainder of this chapter, I seek to trace the consequences of this double loss, one that symptomatically returns in the institutionalization of psychoanalysis after the death of Sigmund-Oedipus and after the extermination of European Jewry. At stake therefore is this double death and, in its wake, the potential for survival: the survival of Oedipal subjectivity (as articulated by Freud-père) and of sociality, of the life of the institution—in particular that of the institution of psychoanalysis itself. Institutionalization is of course to guarantee the survival of a belief, ideology, or theory after the death of its founding father. In the case of psychoanalysis such a survival opens up a force field of multiple determinations. This is why Anna Freud is so intensely interested in this particular (institutional) group of children. She interrogates in “Experiment in Group Upbringing” this double death as also a kind of duplicity that engages the subject of a post-Shoah world from the point of view also of a double survival: on the one hand, that of the Oedipal subject and therefore of an ego dedicated to the democratic project and, on the other hand, that of a humanistic project geared to a social conviviality guaranteeing the survival of the social itself.44

42. Anna Freud, “On Losing and Being Lost,” Writings of Anna Freud, 4:302–16. 43. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 57. 44. Might this not be the reason why liberal political theory after 1945 would prove itself so resistant to, indeed defensive against, psychoanalysis? I try to address this question in chapter 4.

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It is entirely unclear whether she views these two demands as harmonious or mutually contradictory. That Antigone, in a powerful reading by Lacan of her destiny, undergoes a double death is hardly fortuitous. I will address Antigone’s double death later in this chapter, one that Lacan signals as the very possibility of an ethics for psychoanalysis, conceived as both an intellectual project and as a therapeutic practice, and as an ethics that he views as an antidote to the pernicious impact on psychoanalysis exacted in fact by Anna-Antigone herself. Before returning to the Lacanian response to psychoanalysis’s ethical claims, I note here that Antigone’s double death is circumscribed, for Anna Freud, by not only a social death of the subject, but also by the possibility that the social itself is threatened by a death of its own. Furthermore, such a double death also addresses the confluence, indeed the crisis, of forces centered on a traumatic subject whose determination by a fateful combination of circumstances speaks to a collapse, in the constitution of the subject, of desires and determinations that are structural and yet also historical. Antigone’s, so Judith Butler claims in a text entitled precisely Antigone’s Claim, is the language of catachresis,45 a language that no longer knows or never knew its proper usage because catachresis designates both that which is designated falsely and that for which there exists no proper name. This claim implies, of course, that any claim rendered becomes fundamentally unstable. Nevertheless, the instability of ethical claims does not release us from the demands made by a text, most concretely those claims made by the Bulldog Banks children as they have come to be known to us through Anna Freud’s relayed transmission of what it means to be a post-Shoah subject. These are claims transmitted by Anna Freud in the sound of children’s voices that take their place somewhere in a space delimited by the facticity of children’s suffering and the suffering of theory, at the interstices therefore of historical and structural trauma (the first the domain of historical victims, the second that of responsive and responsible thought). And hence their gross, improper, and yet deep cohabitation with catachresis: for the children speak necessarily the language of catachresis, here quite concretely a language that is a mixture of German, Czech, and eventually also English (there is no translation of such a language) and a language radically disjoined from the symbolic language of the father or any other occupant of the Oedipal triangle. The Father is both falsely designated and that for which—according to the Bulldog Banks children—there is no proper name. Theirs is an orphanage living to the extent that this life moves toward and engages the social death of the subject and

45. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 39.

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the death of the social itself.46 And hence also the cohabitation of empirical facticity with what points to utopian desires beyond that which is. Does, so Judith Butler in a related manner asks, does utopian desire, the as yet unwritten law, have the power to rewrite, indeed rewrite for the first time, the not yet written? Or is the never to be written a constitutive factor that exists as an invariable incommensurability between two tragically separated spheres?47 The children of Bulldog Banks Farm live social life as an orphanage. The fact of their existence as beings who are dead (as Oedipal subjects) and yet alive (as occupants and makers of the orphanage) turns them first into siblings who survived both their own death and that of their parents, and yet makes them move within death’s realm—unconsciously; they constitute an orphanage as the new delimitation of what now configures the social. Lyndsey Stonebridge points out that since the six children have never had a mother to lose in the first place, since separation anxiety plays no role in their emotional lives, the anxiety they might in fact demonstrate is one that leads to a “new kind of narrative: as if the group itself is the ‘mother,’ and its threatened dissolution the signal of anxiety. . . . What all these war children share . . . is a powerful unconscious drive to make new histories emerge out of the debris of their times; to turn anxiety, as it were, into a form of possibility.”48 The children have, so Anna Freud tells us, no memory of something prior to or beyond the orphanage: they retain, so it appears, not even a memory of life in the camps—or, at least, they cannot distinguish between different spaces and times, between a before and an after. Do the children perceive Bulldog Banks Farm as nothing but a continuation of their previous experiences? Or does it stand for something else? Do the children not “remember” because

46. I take the idea of “social death”—and prompted so by Judith Butler—from Orlando Patterson. Patterson develops this concept in relation to slavery, distinguishing here between an “intrusive” mode, in which the slave was conceived as someone who did not belong because an outsider, and an “extrusive” mode, in which the slave became an outsider because he did not or no longer belonged. In the first case, the slave was an external exile, an intruder; in the second, he or she was an internal exile and was therefore deprived of all claims of community. Crucial for Patterson is that “social death” nevertheless requires a certain form of incorporation into the society that yet excludes. Such incorporation requires then the need of that society to establish a relationship with the dead who are yet still alive. Whatever the specific solutions proposed, it is the problem of the undead dead among the living that constitutes the central concern of a social sphere that must incorporate the necessary non-social within the realm of the social itself. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 44–45. In a somewhat different register, but concerned with similar issues, is Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the Muselmann in Nazi concentration camps as a figure who occupies a space between life and death. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 47. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 39. 48. Stonebridge, Writing of Anxiety, 30.

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of traumatic repression, or because nothing has actually changed and because therefore memory would be in any case a futile operation? Yet, something new, different is introduced into their lives in England: food and Oedipal desire, both generating affective ties to the adult world. At the cost, it seems, of a democratic bond to the social itself: what the children lose, eventually, in their stay at Bulldog Banks, when they apparently learn to love adults (thereby ceasing to be orphans) and are eventually adopted, is the bond between siblings—between those Antigonal and irreplaceable brothers and sisters. When the children arrive at the farm, their lives have been nothing but social life, devoid of familial relations, devoid therefore of Oedipal affect and its subtending conflicts. The children exist as a democratic community that Anna Freud understands as a radical orphanage. All those doubly determined social bonds constituted by Sigmund Freud’s identificatory mechanisms established on the basis of a shared transferential desire for a father/leader are absent,49 in a structure that, despite the presence of a Nazi politics predicated on an absolute father, has thrown the children of Bulldog Banks into a space where Oedipal desire does not and did not exist from the very beginning. Indeed, these children, whose encounter with one of the most extreme forms of modern totalitarian power can only be named as “Blöder Ochs [stupid ox]” or “Blöde Tante [stupid aunt]”—in itself a radical confutation of kinship relations through an appellation of the leader as either an animal or an aunt—these children enact something radically new: a society without kinship relations—an orphanage, a non-Oedipal desire that fuels and structures their own particular building of a society without fathers (and mothers). Indeed, these children enact or embody the radical paradigm, mentioned already in the previous chapter and to be pursued later, of John Rawls’s “original position”—a blank slate upon which the subject writes, devoid of all those affects generated by the hothouse environment of the nuclear family, a different history of sociality. This is the society that fascinates Anna Freud, who cannot speak of such communal existence but as one infused with an “abundance” of community feeling, as a kind of influence that makes good on other deficiencies. And indeed may do so all too well. Six children, whose lives were at best imperfect if not miserable,50 are invested with utopian desires through which Anna-Antigone finds her place 49. Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” For the relationship between love and identification, see the previous chapter. 50. I say “miserable” here because the temptation in any way to idealize their existence remains profound, not just because of the message communicated by Anna Freud herself, but also because an empathic engagement with their existence—one that is absolutely necessary—also carries with it the dangers of an uncritical and therefore disrespectful transference into the domain of communitarian desires.

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in the very moment of the discovery of her nonplace. In the first place: that such a desire is propelled by a logic of identification—that of the survivor with other survivors—seems obvious and difficult to discount. For Anna is herself a survivor, like the children orphaned, and she must think of sociality, of the institution, in light of these new terms: as taking place in the complex intersection, now necessitated in a post-Holocaust world, between Oedipal desires for the father and the possibility that sociality may come into being without the father. As Lyndsey Stonebridge writes: At Bulldog Banks Farm Anna Freud “discovers the contours of a rudimentary socialism in a narrative about the overcoming of anxiety: the most creative possible response under the circumstances, one might think, to a cruelly enforced ‘experiment’ . . . in anti-Oedipalism.”51 Nothing in the biographical details of the children—so Anna Freud tells us—was changed for the purposes of publication, nothing except their names: in her essay they appear as John, Ruth, Leah, Paul, Miriam, and Peter. And she immediately adds, curiously and as if there were no meaning to the act of naming, that since according to Nazi policy all Jewish children had to bear the names of figures from the “Old Testament,” which must then have been the children’s names at some point, these latter were replaced by herself with “another set of Biblical names” (165–67, note 3). A strange repetition this of Nazi policy, with one equally strange difference: the three boys all bear in her text the names of major figures—indeed, apostolic founding fathers—of the New Testament: John, Paul, and Peter. Little of concrete could be determined of the children’s lives prior to their arrival at Bulldog Banks Farm. One knew the dates and places of their births. Furthermore: that four of the children had lost their mothers immediately at birth, one at the age of a year, one at an unspecified date; that the children had “wandered” for some time from place to place, with multiple complete changes of adult environment (Freud describes the place changes as “stations in life” [167]); that none of the children had lived in anything but a group setting, and therefore none knew the meaning of “family”; and, finally, that none of the children had any experience of normal life beyond that of the camps or of a “big institution.” These last two “facts” are strangely doubled, constituting a kind of emphatic reiteration of a central point: the children are group creatures, institutional beings, but still institutional beings as invented by the camps. Yet Freud seems to distinguish here between “the meaning of family” and “normal life”—an interesting distinction, leaving open the possibility that “family” and “norm”

51. Stonebridge, Writing of Anxiety, 31.

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could possibly signify not quite the same thing. This conflict was, as we already saw, also Bettelheim’s dilemma as he was faced with the conflict between Israeli communitarianism and American individualism.52

52. In Anna Freud’s 1954 essay “The Widening Scope of Indications for Psychoanalysis: Discussion,”—this a title that very much reflects her dedication to a “widening” capable of thinking the “social” or “political”—she returns to her experience with child survivors of the Holocaust in the context of a discussion about “Hörigkeit,” a term that she herself translates as “complete emotional surrender” (362). It is just such a surrender that “leads” her to the consideration of “another type of case where the difficulty of establishing full transference originates not from narcissistic withdrawal caused by regression, but from certain basic defects in emotional development which date back to the patients’ earliest years” (362). Anna Freud is referring here to her experience with the Bulldog Banks children and all those other children with whom she worked right after the war. She describes the children as “individuals whose relationship to their mothers was interrupted traumatically during their first year of life, or soon thereafter, either by the death or removal of the mother, or by the disruption of the whole family, the child being cared for afterward by repeatedly changing mother substitutes or in institutions” (362). Again, the analysis of these children evinced “no hidden fund of archaic object love or hate on which transference can draw” (363), and therefore relations to the analyst remained “superficial and insecure . . . since libido [had] never been concentrated on any one object.” This meant that the “concentration” of material in order to develop a transference neurosis could not be produced (363; my emphasis). It is precisely the collapse of transference that affords Freud the possibility of a “widening” move: the children survivors of the Holocaust provide for her a “striking illustration” of “the close connection between variations of technique and variations in the patient’s ego structure” (364; my emphases). And in the example of such a widening that she supplies immediately—this an adolescent girl who also had been a victim of the Nazi regime—this girl, and here Anna Freud replicates much of the language that she had used to describe the Bulldog Banks children, “had been handed on from person to person in an endless series of ‘rescues,’ from one station in life to another, always cutting her ties, including those of her possessions. There was no single figure, or even toy or other material object, in her life which dated back to her past. There were, before the treatment, also no memories or cover memories. (Incidentally, this raises the interesting question how far our childhood memories are usually structured and kept alive by their intimate connection with the image of cathected and stable objects.)” (364). At this point in the text, the editor inserts a long footnote, recalling another paper written by Anna Freud, a paper that had, however, not been included in this volume of her collected works. It was in this paper, apparently, that she wrote that she had learned from concentration camp children an “interesting fact” concerning the memory of children. I quote here from the unfortunately excluded essay: “These concentration camp children appeared to have no . . . pictures of their past. . . . It seems that when there is no one adult figure accompanying the child through the early childhood years, there is a more complete break with the past than is usual. . . . The upbringing of these uprooted and emotionally deprived children presents many difficulties, one of which is that the older among them, near adolescence, have in their minds images of parents of their past which have literally no relation to real parents [and here, Freud is speaking of the difference in experience between the child’s biological and adoptive parents]. . . . Such children have two sets of parents: the substitute parents of later life who, whenever there is a conflict, appear to them as bad, depriving, and prohibiting, and another set of parents who are ideal. The bad and the ideal sets of parents do not combine, so that the usual mixture of positive and negative feelings of children towards their parents becomes split into positive feelings for the dead parents and negative feelings for their present substitutes. . . . The emotional conflicts of adolescence, after all, consists of resolving the parent relationships, positive and negative; but these children have finished with their parent relationship on another basis and long ago” (“The Widening Scope of Indications for Psychoanalysis: Discussion,” Writings of Anna Freud, 4:365; my emphasis).

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Such a past dictates the children’s behavior in their present in England. On their arrival in Sussex, they destroy toys and furniture, shout, spit, and bite; they refer to all adults as “blöde Tante” or “blöder Ochs”, as a mere “Tante” when they need something. As I have already suggested, such referencing already carries us into the catachrestic language of the orphanage, into a language and a space that is a radically new one and whose relationship between the institution and its forms of expression Anna Freud seeks to determine. Yet the children do take in: they eat, since food is their central concern and care; and this is why, in the face of such concerns, eating habits and table manners will play a central role in the essay. What strikes Freud, however, in particular—and it is this that provides the essay with its own kind of food for thought—is not so much the fact that the children refuse another externality. Given their traumatic experiences with the adult world, their “cold indifference” or “active hostility” toward all the adult caregivers is hardly surprising. The children, as she states, “had lacked the normal incentives for imitating the adults and for identifying with them” (206; my emphasis). Subjecthood comes about here without models. The key for Freud is that the children do indeed exhibit positive feelings, exclusive positive feelings, but only toward each other: “The children’s positive feelings were centered exclusively in their own group. It was evident that they cared greatly for each other and not at all for anybody or anything else” (169).53 Despite the presence of food and care providers, their only wish is to be together; they cannot bear to be separated, “even for short moments” (169). All this “clinging to the group”—in contrast to motherly clinging—makes it impossible to treat the children as individuals, to tend to their special needs. Ruth, for instance, did not like going for walks, while the others greatly preferred walks to indoor play. But it was very difficult to induce the others to go out and let Ruth stay home. One day, they actually left without her, but kept asking for her until . . . John could bear it no longer and turned to fetch her. The others joined him, they all returned home, greeted Ruth as if they had been separated for a long time, and then took her for a walk, paying a great deal of special attention to her. (169)

53. Sarah Moskovitz tells us that once the children were adopted into nuclear families, they did not form strong attachments to their new parents. They also never again contacted each other, indeed, expressed a vivid desire not to do so. Such an attitude raised therefore the possibility that their original group attachments were indeed irreplaceable—just like Antigone’s sibling love—but also now buried.

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Illnesses cannot be controlled by isolation, nor can enticements for “special treats”: all the children need to share everyone else’s fate, good or bad. As much as any of the adults may try, the children’s group spirit dictates equal status and the refusal of leadership by either adults or any one of the children: no child ever assumed leadership for any length of time; each one exerted “a strong influence on the others by virtue of individual qualities, peculiarities, or by the mere fact of belonging” (171). While the provenance of “individual qualities” is never spelled out in the text, the mere fact of belonging creates a perfect democracy, born, it seems, from within the center of Nazi extermination. This is a democracy where strengths, weaknesses, and needs provide the basis for only a temporary, and hence jointly mandated, leadership. Freud’s text is replete with instances of almost lyrical descriptions of such democratic attitudes that derive from group bonding.54 The central issue for her is that the children exhibit no jealousy, rivalry, or competition among themselves: they seem utterly oblivious to Freudian nursery wars. If resistance to psychoanalysis is in some way connected to a resistance to the outside social world, as Sigmund Freud had stated in “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” then these children seem remarkably free of such defenses. And if envy fuels the social contract, as he had insisted, “such as normally develop between brothers and sisters or in a group of contemporaries who come from normal families” (173), then this essential component is completely absent in this particular orphanage. Instead, Anna’s orphanage group proposes, or so at least she wishes, the possibility of radically different foundations for the social contract and for democratic sociality more generally. The exception appears to be Ruth. Ruth, that Biblical figure of loyalty and first recorded “Jew by choice” in history, is an emblem of a crossing and hence of a double determination. She is “moved by feelings of envy, jealousy, and competition . . . her actions stand out as isolated instances of maliciousness or spitefulness” (181). She is the only child among the six who has “a recorded history of passionate attachment to a mother substitute” (182). Ruth is a crossing figure between the absolute space of group desires and the structure of radical possessive individualism: “Alle für Ruth; ich find viele,

54. While the children are deeply attached to each other, Stonebridge comments, “these were, as Anna Freud puts it, ‘children for whom the object-world had proved disappointing’ (only a psychoanalyst, perhaps, would describe early infancy in a Nazi concentration camp in those terms).” Writing of Anxiety, 30. To which one may add that perhaps in order to ward off her own anxiety and push the object-world as far as possible from her own experiment in group upbringing, Anna Freud’s language throughout the essay is noticeably devoid of not just trauma but any affect whatsoever. I will return to this affectlessness later.

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viele, ganz, ganz alleine [All for Ruth; I find many, many, all by myself]”—all this recited in her multiple conflicts with John, Paul, and Peter (183). Ruth, it would appear, says no to the apostolic males of her group, and this because of a passionate attachment to a mother substitute. Group feelings are then here predicated quite unusually on an absence of feelings toward a leader, in flagrant defiance of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the democratic group. While the children may experience aggressive feelings toward the adult world of leaders, this aggression is nevertheless always confoundedly “impersonal in its character, not directed against any individual, and not to be taken as a sign of interest in the adult world” (185; my emphases). The psychoanalytic project is derailed here, for negative feelings, that is, aggression cannot be interpreted back to feelings of love or even ambivalence.55 And therefore all possibilities of transference equally fail. This is why the children’s “aggressive expression” does not live up to expressions of anger that could be determined as “normal for their age” (185). Freud faces here, in her encounter with these children, both a radical limit of psychoanalysis itself and also, paradoxically, the ultimate confirmation of her own theory—against Melanie Klein—that children cannot be analyzed because they are incapable of developing a transference relationship, which in turn is dictated by the fact that they lack a developed parental superego. Whether another kind of superego is in place—a collective one, for instance—is a question not addressed by Freud, but done so with a certain amount of assurance by Bettelheim, who had insisted that the superego was “clearly” a “cultural carrier” of Israeli society. The Bulldog Banks children, on the other hand, bite or simply say “blöder Ochs/blöde Tante.” Biting, eating, and saying are fundamentally the same: words take on the status of things, as Sigmund Freud knew, only in the world of the unconscious and of dreams. Nevertheless, whatever the nature of this “group experiment” may be, its goal is to make the children available for adoption, for family life. Available, and therefore open to positive relations with adults—which means essentially one thing. The remainder of Freud’s essay is geared to a description of this fundamental necessity, as it comes to be instilled in the children in the course of their stay at Bulldog Banks Farm: affective bonds to the adult world and

55. Unless, of course, this is a community held together by the death drive. This is a question that I address later in this chapter as well as in the next, a question that largely hinges on whether Roudinesco is right in claiming that “ego psychology” rescinds on the death drive. The key character is here provided by Ruth, that little girl who is both a fundamental player in the group of six and yet also not quite a good player, thereby ruining Anna Freud’s utopian dreams by virtue of her attachment to a mother substitute.

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socialization, understood as the inculcation of a language of manners, not to say of the language also of English. This complex requirement finds its center in the need to disrupt a certain narcissism of the group, that is, its oral erotism and its masturbation; in the need to instill table manners and toilet habits; and in the need to get them up to par in ego development. Such needs precede the requirements of addressing their traumatic past, which are dealt with, but sandwiched between table manners and what Freud refers to as “language problems”. It is these concerns, so outlined, that constitute the second part of Freud’s essay. A first step in the goal of redirecting attention away from the group toward the existence of the world of adults occurs already in the “first phase” of the children’s stay at Bulldog Banks Farm. Freud describes this as a “sensitiveness to adults,” which initially takes the form of identification (190), that is, as an absorption of the adult into the group itself. This particular phase, and in a perfect reenactment by the text of the process of identification, is signaled in the essay by the disappearance of Freud’s own interpretative language, signaled, that is, by her own absorption into the realm of the children. Only two “examples” are given, in the form of a diary entry. The process of identification is therefore not of an exemplary norm to be obeyed, of an authoritative language, but instead a language that disperses itself into the contingency of the singular example. Here is one of such examples: March, 1946: Ruth and John lag far behind on a walk. When they finally reach the others, Peter calls to them: “You naughty boys, you dragging behind; Sophie [Sister Sophie Dann, one of the primary caregivers and coauthor of the essay] calling and calling and calling. You not coming, Sophie cross and sad!” Then he turns to Sister Sophie and says in a low voice: “You still cross and sad?” When she nods, he repeats his speech. (190) The “example” of crossness, of adult aggression—and one that seemingly needs to be repeated—makes for identification. (Sister Sophie’s own aggression is also the center of the second example.) Being “cross” constitutes a source of identification and yet also that border or limit that initiates the children’s trajectory into love for something that is both within and beyond the group itself. Identificatory sensitiveness to adults stages the “second phase” of the children’s experimental living at Bulldog Banks Farm. While their ties to adults “in no way reached the strength of their ties to each other” (191), the children nonetheless develop positive relations to adults. Again, these relations are given by Freud only in the form of examples, in the form of a kind of

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radical contingency. In this sense, they do not seem exemplary of the process of child development, but rather retain the status of singular, disconnected events. Indeed, this is the overwhelming impression left by Freud’s essay regarding the implantation of anything beyond the group’s own dynamics: a kind of futility or randomness. “The children,” she states, “went, as it were, through the motions and attitudes of mother relationships, but without the full libidinal cathexis of the objects whom they had chosen for their purpose” (191). While “the example” furnishes the individual section headings that punctuate the timing of the essay and of the children’s development, it nevertheless does not at any point turn into anything resembling exemplary, normative, or “good” behavior. May one understand this very singularity of the event, I wonder, as a failure or as a need to uphold singularity as a rhetorical strategy in order to protect the “group experiment” as a space beyond Oedipal, that is, universal desires? Given that this question remains unanswered by the text itself, the second phase, that of the development of personal relations to adults is described by Freud in the language of random and ultimately unconvincing five “examples”: the example of “Owning and Being Owned,” the example of “Conflicting Relationships,” that of “Resentment of Separation,” that of “Full Cathexis of a Mother Substitute,” and—the culmination of the process—that of a “Passionate Father Relationship.” Owning and being owned: Miriam says “Meine Sophie, my Sophie; Ruth says “Is bin [I am] Mrs. Clark’s Ruth.” Conflicting relationships: Miriam cannot make up her mind whether to love Sister Sophie or Sister Gertrud. Resentment of separations: the temporary absence/departure of caregivers is lived by the children as a double process of anger and identification—as, on the one hand “You go in London?” and on the other hand, in the face of Maureen’s departure: “My Maureen.” This is Peter as he “pulled his curls into his face as Maureen used to do sometimes” (194), leading him the following day to hurt the other children by means of violent attacks with a stick. The “example of full cathexis of a mother substitute”: Ruth, whose behavior is “easily explainable” (194) because of an attachment to a woman at Theresienstadt, expresses her insecurity with regard to Sister Gertrud in “the constantly repeated phrase: “ ‘And Ruth? And Ruth?’ ” (194). Example of a passionate attachment to a father: only one child, only one example. One cannot presume of Miriam, because her father was killed when she was six months old, “that what she went through was a past father relationship transferred to a new object” (195); nevertheless Miriam shows signs of a need for a father (Sigmund Freud’s Vatersehnsucht)—but in this case nontransferentially. Still, she blushes whenever she sees a male neighbor; a true paternal metaphor because Miriam “did not seem to resent

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his leaving or to experience it as rejection” (196). She does however carry his postcard “inside her vest or knickers” (195). Whether one carries the Father’s word in one’s underwear or any other place, or not at all for that matter, the children nevertheless demonstrate a “diminished capacity” (196) to form object relations beyond the group. Oral-erotic gratifications, indeed some form of “compulsive masturbation” (196), describes a group dynamic that is exclusionary of the world of adults and stubbornly narcissistic: “Sucking [thumb sucking in particular] was such an integral and indispensable part of their libidinal life that they had not developed any guilt feelings or conflicting attitudes concerning it” (197). Given Anna Freud’s own relationship to masturbation and autoerotic pleasure, as we saw in the previous chapter, she must feel thoroughly locked out here from a community that seemingly gets its double pleasure from sucking and social feeling. And therefore compulsive sucking and masturbation are “inaccessible symptoms” (197). Of course, this is a strange symptomatology: it keeps the group intact, rids the group of an outside world, and yet also undermines the group itself. “When [Paul] went through one of his phases of compulsive sucking or masturbating, the whole environment, including the other children, lost their significance for him. He ceased to care about them, just as he ceased to eat or play himself ” (197). Eating or playing, a choice, mutually exclusive, that introduces the children into the domain of habit. The cohabitation, not the mutual exclusion of eating and playing, leads to masturbation, for the pleasure of eating and the eating of pleasure can only lead to a kind of autoerotism that founds a certain community but, in turn, destroys another. This is a community built then on masturbation—“in full force” (201). Now, in the matter of food, things are—not surprisingly—quite complicated, a complication driven by the children’s doubly unsatisfied oral desires:56 that of the oral drive per se and that of the traumatically experienced absence of food while in the camps, in other words, by a past experienced as hunger or near starvation. The children are, therefore, quite simply “bad eaters” (201). Foods that are good for the children were “picked out by them and thrown on the ground” (201), because they had been used to a bad diet. Such habits nevertheless transcend the problem of what is biologically “good”: “the most

56. Food, according to Young-Bruehl, is central to Anna Freud’s entire psychoanalytic and educational project. The question for Anna was: “Would an active attitude towards food—rather than a passive one—increase the desire to eat? [She was] concerned with the conditions of pleasure.” Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 223.

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passionate interest at mealtimes was attached to the spoons” (202).57 Indeed, the spoon plays, according to Freud, a double function: it either symbolizes or replaces the children’s forgotten past at Theresienstadt (the spoons “were for the children symbols of their otherwise forgotten past” [203]), and it displaces internal drives. (“It is well known from other observations of children’s eating habits and difficulties that, where the initial oral pleasure in food and in the gratification of hunger is disturbed, interests and conflicts are displaced to the subsidiary outward arrangements of the meal” [204].) Quite remarkably, such a double determination of the children’s psychic life—a determination that comes both from the outside world and from within their inner selves—is strangely absent when it comes to the subject of fears and anxieties. One of the last sections of Freud’s paper—and I find its late placement in the essay curious, given the children’s traumatic past—is dedicated to the fact that the six children “had grown up in an atmosphere laden with fear and anxiety” (214). While they appear to have no conscious memories of the terrors of camp life, nevertheless “some of their attitudes seemed to bear witness to the impressions made on them at the time” (215). All six children are terrified of dogs, a fear that “resembled” dog phobias of many children of that age, but where, nonetheless, this is a fear only demonstrated in the actual presence of the dreaded object. Dogs therefore are in this sense not objects of phantasy, but stand for “an external source of anxiety in all of them, or in one of them from whom it might have spread by emotional infection to the others” (216).58 The fear of vans can be explained in a similar manner. More inexplicable is the common fear of feathers, and though “it was not possible in this instance to fill the gap in memory” (217), Freud has no doubt that it had its origin in the external world. In other words, the children demonstrate—given their past—real and rational fears.

57. Primo Levi has described the economy of the spoon in a chapter of Survival in Auschwitz entitled “This Side of Good and Evil.” Here are Levi’s words: “The Lager does not provide the new arrivals with spoons, although the semi-liquid soup cannot be consumed without them. The spoons are manufactured at Buna, secretly and in their spare moments, by Häftlinge who work as specialists in the iron and tin-smith Kommandos: they are rough and clumsy tools, shaped from iron-plate worked by hammer, often with a sharp handle-edge to serve at the same time as a knife to cut the bread. The manufacturers themselves sell them directly to the new arrivals: an ordinary spoon is worth half a ration, a knife-spoon three quarters of a ration of bread” (Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 85). 58. When Sarah Moskovitz interviewed one of the Bulldog Banks children (and note, in this connection, the rather eerie name of this farm!) in New Jersey in 1979, on pulling up to his suburban ranch house, she noted a “German shepherd dog [who] barked ferociously behind a chain fence as a rotund, dark-haired man in his sixties, Berl’s uncle Adolphe [!], pleaded with it in German to be quiet” (Love despite Hate, 63).

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In the matter of anxieties, however, the situation appears quite strange. While on the one hand all six children “showed the usual variety of transient individual anxieties which are the manifest expression of the underlying conflicts and difficulties normal for their ages” (218), Freud finds it quite surprising that they do not demonstrate more of them than normally raised children. In fact, they were “less in evidence” (218; my emphasis). It remains for Freud “an unanswered question why the atmosphere of anxiety and terror in which the children had spent their first years had not predisposed them to more violent anxiety states of their own” (219). She provides three possible hypotheses for this strange situation. Perhaps the fact that the children had not had in their past an intimate emotional contact with their care providers protected them from “the path for the contagion of feeling between mother and child” (219); or the fact that they had never known a peaceful environment rendered them more indifferent to the surrounding horrors; alternatively, it was also possible that the children had defended themselves against anxiety through their close relationships with each other. The absence of Oedipal structural conflicts seems, so Anna Freud proposes, to protect against historical trauma. Finally, while all the children demonstrate rather primitive modes of thought immediately on their arrival in England, they acquire at varying rates a new language (English), learned through direct contact with the world of adults. Because of this latter fact, the children both grow apart from each other and make “a further decisive step toward the break with their past, which now disappeared completely from their consciousness” (224).59 Anna Freud concludes the essay with thoughts on the relationship between, on the one hand, “the abundance of community feeling,” and hence the absence of a mother or parent relationship and the paucity of all sorts of instinctual gratifications, and, on the other hand, the imperfections of the experiment in group upbringing that itself stands at the center of an essay geared to an experiment that, as I have suggested, addresses the creation of

59. Sarah Moskovitz cites another one of the Bulldog Banks children who, quite revealingly, links his guilt of survival to the fact of having done so by virtue of his institutionalization: “I’ve been secretive about my life, my background. On the one hand I am proud of it because I think the upbringing I’ve had is a lot better than what some people, even in family circumstances, have had. On the other hand, I feel ashamed of it, because of its being an institution. And this leads to another thing. I feel an irrational guilt about the loss of my family. I still feel somehow that I’m partly responsible for their extermination, in some way. Perhaps I feel guilty because I survived, and they didn’t. And this is why, perhaps, I feel ashamed, because of that, and because of the Victorian attitude towards institutionalization and also my background, my parents having died in very unusual circumstances. Not just because they were ill or old, but simply because they were murdered. As I say, it is irrational because obviously I know perfectly well that I wasn’t responsible but somehow there’s something that makes me feel a part of the whole thing” (Love despite Hate, 95–96).

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the “new Jew.” Central to Freud is that in normal circumstances siblings are “accessories” (225) to their parents; their relations are governed by rivalry, envy, and competition, and their Oedipal desires for their parents are transformed into aggression toward each other: the “underlying relationship with siblings is thus a negative one” (215). Positive group feelings normally come about only through a common identification with parents. In the case of the Bulldog Banks children, however, the situation was “totally different” (226). They provided for each other “their real love objects and their libidinal relations with them of a direct nature, not merely the products of laborious reaction formation and defenses against hostility” (226; my emphasis). The six children directly loved each other; in other words, they therefore demonstrated a group mentality “in excess” (227). In attaching their libido directly to each other, they were able to bypass “the parent relationship which is the normal way to social attitudes” (227–8), thereby undermining the (psychoanalytic) theory of the importance of the early infant-mother relationship as much as the Freudian patriarchal theory of group psychology. Therefore: “Grave defects in ego development, lack or loss of speech in the first years, withdrawnness, apathy, self-destructive attitudes, psychotic manifestations, have all been ascribed to the so-called ‘rejection’ by the mother, a comprehensive term which includes every disturbance within the mother relationship from loss of the mother through death, permanent or temporary separation, cruel or neglectful treatment, down to lack of understanding, ambivalence, preoccupation or lack of warmth on the mother’s part” (228). While the Bulldog Banks children seemed to qualify for this entire spectrum, while indeed they were frequently “hypersensitive, restless, aggressive, difficult to handle” (229), nevertheless they were “neither deficient, delinquent, nor psychotic” (229). They had successfully mastered their fears and anxieties, learned a new language, and developed social attitudes: all this bearing witness to “a basically unharmed contact with their environment” (229). Whether or not one accepts Anna Freud’s assessment of “a basically unharmed contact” with the world on the part of children who lived the first years of their lives in a Nazi concentration camp—and, indeed, reports on how these children fared later in life speak to the contrary—I am here more interested in another set of questions, questions that pertain both to Anna Freud’s own transferential desires invested in these children and to what is here becoming an increasingly vexed question about the actual contents and contours of a problem called the “resistance to psychoanalysis.” If for Sigmund Freud such a resistance was grounded in the simultaneous rejection of the outside world and of the unconscious, may one make similar claims for the life and work of his daughter Anna? Does Anna sign, as both Yerushalmi

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and Derrida wonder, in her father’s name, or does she speak in a new or different voice? One may suspect that, independently from whether the answer to this question is negative or positive, she must in any case take the heat, needing, as she does, to straddle an impossible position between loyalty and disloyalty to the psychoanalytic cause. Which turns her indeed into the Antigone of psychoanalysis. For Anna both must be true: on the one hand, I would note her considerably ambivalent stance on the role of the “rejecting mother” in a child’s psychic development, one circumscribed by both a perhaps daughterly, and therefore Oedipal, rejection on her own part of the mother and, on the other hand, her equal advocacy of a position that lets the mother “off the hook” as the primary source of all evil, and therefore her insistence on the determination of the “social” as a factor in the constitution of an orphaned subjectivity in a post-Shoah world. The question is: Does Anna negate then the power and centrality of the unconscious? Does she buy into “ego psychology” in the manner described by Roudinesco, an ego psychology that may support democracy after World War II but at the expense of a more indeterminate, migrant subjectivity that celebrates its own uprootedness in the name of her own father’s “internal exile”? Does she speak in her father’s name, and if so, what is the message? And what does such a speaking signify if she must be her father’s Antigone— left, as it were, not only to speak in her father’s voice but also to bury her brothers after Auschwitz?60 But another factor is in play here. In Anna’s engagements with children’s group upbringing, this is an issue that is intricately intertwined with, but also placed beyond the gendered question of the role of the mother, to wit, the very much German-Jewish response to how one lives one’s life as a survivor, a response that has become identified with a “Jäcke/Yekke,”61 a “pull yourself

60. As I will have occasion to discuss later, it is precisely the “property” and “propriety” of the voice that is at stake also in the Sophoclean play. An eerie resonance exists here between Anna Freud’s position and that of Antigone. The witness of Antigone’s deed reports to Creon: “. . . until in the midst of the sky the sun’s bright circle stood still; the heat was burning. Suddenly a squall lifted out of the earth a storm of dust, a trouble in the sky. It filled the plain, ruining all the foliage of the wood that was around it. The great empty air was filled with it. We closed our eyes, enduring this plague sent by the gods. When at long last we were quit it, why, then we saw the girl. She was crying out with the shrill cry of an embittered bird that sees its nest robbed of its nestlings and the bed empty. So, too, when she saw the body stripped of its cover, she burst out in groans, calling terrible curses on those that had done the deed; and with her hands immediately brought thirsty dust to the body; from a shapely brazen urn, held high over it, poured a triple stream of funeral offerings; and crowned the corpse” (Sophocles, Antigone, lines 416–32). 61. “The word Yekke . . . was coined by Russian and other Eastern European Jewish émigrés mostly in Israel but also in the United States to describe the cultural style of the German Jewish

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up by your own bootstraps in the face of all adversity” position, typifying one of the most important responses to the trauma of the Holocaust on the part of German-speaking Jewry.62 This is a position that strikes me as important in any response to Anna Freud’s essay on the Bulldog Banks children more specifically, but also to all of her work after 1939 (the year of her father’s death) and, even more so, after 1945. On the surface of things, the claim that the Bulldog Banks children simply put the past behind them by virtue of their group upbringing is both Anna’s demand and her fantasy. It is a demand because, while it does not quite deny the traumatic nature of survival, it does require that survival be lived simultaneously as self-making and self-denial. It is a fantasy because it belies the reality of the children’s actual later lives and because, in a more complicated manner, social life for Anna Freud is always not just lived but constituted at the level of fantasy. In this sense, I believe that she is both acutely aware of Jacqueline Rose’s “states of fantasy,” but only so to the extent that it exacts the demand of being put elsewhere. And while her demand is a defense against the unconscious in the name of personal and institutional survival or autonomy, her fantasy of the social brings back the unconscious as the constitutive force in the construction of both subjectivity and sociality in a world that she experiences and understands as radically orphaned. This is anything but a simple or simplistic position to take. Anna Freud’s fantastic demand or demanding fantasy, her Yekke/Jäcke stance is close here to her father’s notion of “Selbstüberwindung”—translated by Strachey as selfdiscipline—but a word that has far more complicated connotations and con-

émigré. . . . So stiff and pompous, so self-imbued with the personal responsibility of carrying high culture into the wilderness, the Yekke never permitted himself to take off his jacket, even in Tel Aviv, even in New York in August. He became known by his jacket, by his cloak of formality, as professional; the Yekke is therefore largely a male sobriquet. Indeed, in an aspect of émigré social history that remains unexplored, the melancholy men, the former lawyers and business men, had a hard time adjusting to émigré life and needs, while their wives, many of whom had never worked outside or inside the home, put prestige aside and found work as caterers, seamstresses, and housecleaners. German Jewish men and women came quickly to refer to themselves with the word Yekke, but when they had occasion to write it down (which happened rarely), they spelled it Jäcke” (Michael Steinberg, Judaism Musical and Unmusical [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007], 36). Now, of course, all this becomes rather more messy when the female Yekke/Jäcke is neither a caterer, seamstress, or housecleaner but a psychoanalyst, and not just any psychoanalyst but the daughter of Sigmund Freud and the inheritor of the international psychoanalytic movement. Sigmund used to tell, quite appositely, one of his favorite jokes about Anna: “If the day comes when there is no more psychoanalysis, you can be a seamstress in Tel Aviv” (cited in Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 193). 62. Perhaps one of the best “Jäcke/Yekke” jokes runs like this: Two Jäcke/Yekke women are walking along the beach in Israel. Suddenly they hear a drowning man screaming in the water: “Hatzilu, hatzilui! [Help, help!]. One woman turns to the other and says (in German): “He learned Hebrew! He should of have learned how to swim!”

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sequences. Freud uses the term in connection with the difficulties of dream interpretation: “It must not be forgotten that in interpreting a dream we are opposed by the psychical forces which were responsible for its distortion. It is thus a question of relative strength whether our intellectual interest, our capacity for Selbstüberwindung, our psychological knowledge and our practice in interpreting dreams enable us to master our internal resistances.”63 Samuel Weber, in his commentary on this passage, remarks that Selbstüberwindung describes here not just a deliberate or voluntary act of consciousness in order to control an unruly unconscious, that is, an overcoming by the self; more paradoxically, it is also an overcoming of the self, “which, qua conscious, deliberate volition, is inevitably an agent of dream-censorship. The same paradox is indicated by the notion of ‘free association,’ designating the consciously initiated endeavor to circumvent the constraints enforced by consciousness in its efforts to control the tensions of unconscious desires and conflicts.”64

Anna-Antigone For indeed because of piety I was called impious. —Sophocles, Antigone

When Charcot achieved fame and international recognition for his scientific research in the lecture theaters of Paris’s Salpêtrière, this model of institutionalization exemplified, so Sarah Winter proposes, a form of institutionalization “that psychoanalysis would have taken if it had been like most other successful late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific and disciplinary research projects.” Instead, the psychoanalytic movement became associated not with a theater, but first with a private address—Berggasse 19—and then to a broad cultural discourse that pertains to the language of modernity. Freudian psychoanalysis seems “simultaneously to inhabit domestic and public spaces: the couch, the middle-class household, the psychotherapist’s office, the city, the world. Freud’s name has become a catchword. . . . And some of Freud’s ideas . . . have gone beyond the possessions of his ‘school’ or entries in textbooks of medical history to become attitudes and ‘complex’ explanations that people rely on to make sense of their lives.”65 According to Winter, among other strategies for the institutionalization of psychoanalytic knowledge was

63. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition, 5:524–25. 64. Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 79–80. 65. Sarah Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 7. See also Armstrong, Compulsion for Antiquity.

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Freud’s reliance on Greek tragedy, in order to derive from it psychoanalysis’s own universality of concerns: its “embodiment of ‘Necessity’ to psychoanalytic principles of unconscious determination and Oedipal sexuality,”66 and the identification on the part of psychoanalysis with the respectability of the classical curriculum that stood behind the training of the professional classes throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. At the center of this classical curriculum was of course the Sophoclean figure of Oedipus, as well as Aristotle’s later formulation of the function of tragedy in his Poetics. One of the fundamental mechanisms of the “tragic effect” for Aristotle is anagnorisis, that is, recognition: the characters of the play arrive at recognition, thereby passing from ignorance to knowledge. Freud, according to Winter, in his own reading of the Oedipus plays, displaced this moment of recognition from the characters of the play to its spectators: what the spectators experience, through their identification with Oedipus, is a recognition of their own repressed Oedipal desires. Therefore, “Freud’s association of Oedipal identifications and recognition with the effects of tragedy constructs Oedipal subjectivity, and particularly masculinity, as both ‘heroic’ and ‘tragic.’ ”67 It is this heroic and tragic Oedipal subjectivity that, for Winter, also supports the scientific validity of psychoanalysis itself: “Freud translated Oedipus’s tragic recognition not only into the spectator’s, patient’s, and reader’s unconscious recognition of Oedipal desires, but also into a conscious and public recognition of the ‘truth’ of psychoanalysis—a ‘truth’ that retains tragedy’s generic effect of demonstrating the workings of ‘destiny,’ but also offers a ‘safe distance’ from tragedy by promising a professional psychotherapeutic means to avert the potentially disastrous consequences of self-knowledge.”68 Anna Freud by no means stepped out of the world of tragedy; nor did she remain blind to this world’s effects. In this sense she remained the pious, loyal Anna-Antigone to her father’s movement, tirelessly working for the public recognition of its truth. Antigone, Lacan states at his seminars on the play that form part of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, “is a tragedy, and tragedy is in the forefront of our experiences as analysts. . . . [Freud] was attracted by his need of the material he found in [tragedy’s] mythical content. And if he himself didn’t expressly discuss Antigone as tragedy, that doesn’t mean to say it cannot be done at this crossroads to which I have brought you.”69 For Lacan,

66. Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalysis, 8. 67. Ibid., 31. 68. Ibid., 37. 69. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 243.

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the crossroads invoked is not only the site where the father is murdered but also where he is resurrected. This resurrection takes the form of Lacan’s own faithful “return to Freud,” a return that is, for him, nevertheless linked to a direct encounter with “hell’s eternal torture” (251), with, as he will call it in this series of seminars and for which Antigone seems the emblem, “the subject of the second death” (251). For this reason, “why we are always missing the opportunity of pointing to the limits and the crossing-points of the paths we follow is because we are unwilling to come to grips with the texts, preferring to remain within the realm of what is considered acceptable or, in other words, the realm of prejudices” (251). Antigone provides, for Lacan, a way out of this ultimately false opposition between text and prejudice, since the play opens for the attentive, nonduped reader “the line of sight that defines desire”: This line of sight focuses on an image that possesses a mystery which up till now has never been articulated, since it forces you to close your eyes at the very moment you look at it. Yet that image is at the center of tragedy, since it is the fascinating image of Antigone herself. . . . It is Antigone herself who fascinates us, Antigone in her unbearable splendor. She has a quality that both attracts us and startles us, in the sense of intimidates us; this terrible, self-willed victim disturbs us. (247) If for Lacan the true meaning of tragedy lies in such a power of attraction, then for him this is not a power that can be reduced to communal spectacle, that is, to choral feelings or to an identificatory movement on the part of a community of spectators, for: “What is he a spectator of ? What is the image represented by Antigone? That is the question” (252).70 This is indeed the question, one that raises the possibility that Lacan himself has been blinded by

70. Sarah Winter offers the following commentary to Sigmund Freud’s own confrontation with feminine sexuality in his 1933 lecture “Femininity,” in which he remarks that a thirty-yearold woman “often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further development; it is as though the whole process had already run its course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influence—as though, indeed, the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned” (New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Standard Edition 22:131). For Winter, such a confrontation on the part of the analyst repeats the myth, also addressed in a 1922 essay by Freud, of the figure of Medusa. The petrifying effect of Medusa on the male gaze is repeated in Freud’s essay with the psychoanalytic encounter with femininity, to the extent that woman’s sexual fate seems to embody the “necessity” of castration, a necessity that she then exhibits to the frightened male. “All the analyst can do, like the tragic chorus, is to ‘lament’ the spectacle of biological determinism that she represents. But the terms of Freud’s diagnosis reinforce the cultural categories of gender that psychoanalysis both naturalizes and figures as ‘tragic.’

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the image of a daughter as heir to the psychoanalytic movement. Lacan rejects a reading of the play as structured along the simple or common-sensical opposition between the laws of the polis and some other law—whether that be the law of the gods or fate, or of an unwritten and indeed unwriteable law of ethics, between two rights; he quite correctly places the problem as one of a wrong that cannot find its oppositional category (254), except as in a more radical crime or ruination (Atè) that, similar to Sade’s universe, takes on the semblance of beauty. Which places Antigone beyond the human, makes her inhuman. It also places her into the realm of the living dead (into a sort of orphanage), into a living entombment that, for Lacan, is the structure of all desire. Desire is thus the limit zone between life and death, a passion that constructs the image of passion and is evoked, as Lacan has it, in the phrase “Father, why has thou abandoned me?” (273). Antigone, as the figure of Atè, “concerns the Other, the field of the Other, and it doesn’t belong to Creon. It is, on the other hand, the place where Antigone is situated” (277). While Antigone may invoke the law, her invocation cannot be subsumed under “any signifying chain or anything else” (278). Nevertheless, it is for Lacan precisely the placement of Antigone at the liminal point between life and death that is to guarantee the possibility of the universal language of her father’s discourse. Antigone’s “second death” can guarantee that “man, that is to say a living being, [has] access to knowledge of the death instinct” by virtue of “the signifier in its most radical form. It is in the signifier and insofar as the subject articulates a signifying chain that he comes up against the fact that he may disappear from the chain of what he is” (295). It is the function of Antigone, of the beautiful, “to reveal to us the site of man’s relationship to his own death, and to reveal it to us only in a blinding flash” (295). While Lacan returns us here to the dictates of a universality of the structure of desire, he is nevertheless also careful to specify that the “ethics of psychoanalysis has nothing to do with speculation about prescriptions for, or the regulation of goods. Properly speaking, that ethics implies the dimension that is expressed in what we call the tragic sense of life” (313). The space of tragedy is, for Lacan, the triumph of death, or more accurately, the “triumph of being-for-death”—which is where the fundamental characteristic of all tragic action must be situated (313). The regulation or service of goods, the term Lacan uses in order to describe a

The woman herself is not really ‘petrified’ or ‘rigid’—she is a site for medical, psychotherapeutic, and larger social and cultural definitions that attempt to determine her ‘nature’ ” (Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, 77).

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blind obedience to the normativity of the rules of the polis, is then challenged by the tragedy of Antigone, a challenge to which psychoanalysis rises by its uncovering of unconscious desire. There’s absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream. A little more rigor and firmness are required in our confrontation of the human condition. That is why I reminded you . . . that the service of goods or the shift of the demand for happiness onto the political stage has its consequences. The movement that the world we live in is caught up in, of wanting to establish the universal spread of the service of goods as far as conceivably possible, implies an amputation, sacrifices, indeed a kind of Puritanism in the relationship to desire that has occurred historically. The establishment of the service of goods at a universal level does not in itself resolve the problem of the present relationship of each individual man to his desire in the short period of time between his birth and his death. The happiness of future generations is not at issue here. (303) Much can and should be made of this statement. Lacan is definitely right in insisting that the kind of happiness offered by the seductions of “the service of goods” is neither desirable nor in fact capable of delivering on “happiness” beyond its possible fetishistic substitutions. In this sense, of course, psychoanalysis clearly should not make itself the guarantor of the “bourgeois dream,” but should indeed invite rigor and firmness in its confrontation with the human condition. Of more concern is Lacan’s somewhat problematic transposition of the service of goods to an “or,” to an opposition that translates the demand for happiness to the political stage, a transposition that invites the idea that all such political demands can and must be reduced to the goods industry. Indeed, it renders to the goods industry a flatness and also an elitism that most of us cannot afford. It turns in fact all demands, whether in their fallen and consumerist versions or in their pure and more sublime ones, into a universalism of their own. And thereby Lacan returns demand to the status of a myth, to the position of a desire that takes place at some indeterminate level between “man’s” time he has between his birth and his death. To say that the happiness of future generations is not an issue here is what Anna Freud may very well have contested. This is another way of saying that she may have wondered whether the political stage and the sociality that it implies must inevitably be exhausted by “the service of goods.” I also wonder whether or how often she did not also ask her father why he had abandoned her, and what her answer and consequent action may have been in the face of his silence. I would argue that, while Anna-Antigone holds on to the tragic

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and therefore unconscious dimensions of psychoanalytic insight or recognition, she nevertheless also undermines its structural necessity and therefore universality. Anna Freud’s piousness, her fidelity to the psychoanalytic cause, has indeed the structure of a fundamental impiety, insofar as she transforms structural necessity into an empirical contingency, thereby reversing Hegel’s reading of the tragic text and also, simultaneously, making herself—as Hegel famously called Antigone—into the “irony of the (psychoanalytic) community.” Anna Freud effects a double reversal. On the one hand, she returns structural necessity back to its contingent origins; on the other hand, she returns to psychoanalysis the (ethical) centrality of sibling relations against their identificatory relations with the father—and, possibly, she can do this by virtue of the fact that she is both the daughter and the brother to the founder of the Oedipus complex. In this sense, she holds good to “another” reading of Greek tragedy, one that in fact had held sway until her own father changed all things. This is a reading that had placed Antigone at the center of what the classical world could but did not hand down to the moderns. Between the 1790s [during the postrevolutionary period, when the idea of fraternity constituted the mainspring of all democratic rule] and the start of the twentieth century [after the collapse of liberal solutions to the organization of power], the radical lines of kinship run horizontally, as between brothers and sisters. In the Freudian construct they run vertically, as between children and parents. The Oedipus complex is one of inescapable verticality. The shift is momentous; with it Oedipus replaces Antigone. . . . It can be dated c. 1905.71 The return to a prior state is, as psychoanalysis has taught us, never a direct return but always a repetition with a difference. Anna Freud does not return to a position that takes no account of the unconscious in her renewed focus on the horizontal relations of siblings and community: she infuses this community with its own lateral but unconscious desires and, therefore, desires that may very well also exist before and beyond the Oedipal principle. I am not sure whether Anna Freud as the modern or new embodiment of Antigone is the same figure developed by Judith Butler in her reading of

71. George Steiner, Antigones (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 18. I would like to recall here Elisabeth Roudinesco’s description of the International Psychoanalytic Association: the Association was founded along a vertical axis, not a lateral one. It protected the (vertical) theory of the unconscious against the (lateral) defense of the democratic, autonomous ego. Anna Freud, or so I am suggesting, constructs her own sort of crossroads, an axial meeting point between horizontal and vertical conceptions of democracy.

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Antigone: the figure of a site both beyond Lacanian universal laws and also beyond structures of normativity. Butler is certainly right in challenging Lacan’s (and along with him, a long tradition of Antigone readers’) opposition between universal law and the affective dictates of kinship relations, a reading that seeks to create a prepolitical space representing “kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it.”72 If, for Lacan, symbolic law may not be reduced to social norms (the order of the regulation of goods), whereby the symbolic order is that which regulates the desires of the Oedipus complex and therefore prohibits incestuous desires, it is nevertheless also the case that such desires are ultimately socially defined, and therefore the distinction between symbolic and social is not as firm as Lacan may claim (19). The figure of Antigone is read by Butler as the one who stands not only at the limits of intelligibility of kinship, but of the very readability of kinship. If Antigone is said to embody the rights of kinship, it is equally true that she also constitutes its fatal aberration. Antigone, who is both daughter and sister of Oedipus, renders all symbolic positions incoherent and most certainly wreaks havoc with the Oedipus complex. Can we assume, Butler asks, that Antigone has no confusions about her brother-father? (18). Similar to Derrida, she challenges Hegel’s absorption of the historically contingent into universal necessity; she also argues that Lacan has made a similar move: Norms do not unilaterally act upon the psyche; rather, they become condensed as the figure of the law to which the psyche returns. The psychic relation to social norms can, under certain conditions, posit those norms as intractable, punitive, and eternal, but that figuration of norms already takes place within what Freud called ‘the culture of the death drive.’ In other words, the very description of the symbolic as intractable law takes place within a fantasy of law as insuperable authority. . . . Lacan at once analyzes and symptomatizes this fantasy.73

72. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 2. Antigone, so Butler, has been viewed as a liminal figure between kinship and the ethical order, between the imaginary and the symbolic orders. Butler challenges precisely this opposition between kinship and the state in her text, wondering whether kinship relations can ever be thought and instantiated without the support of the state, and whether the state could ever come into being without the family as its mediation and support (5). Instead, she insists that state and kinship presuppose each other, that acts performed in the name of one principle take place in the idiom of the other, a presupposition that confounds such distinctions at a rhetorical level and bring them into crisis (11). 73. Ibid., 30.

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Butler therefore invites a reading of Antigone that demands a rearticulation of the relationship between symbolic law and social norm as one of contingency. To the extent that Antigone’s is a post-Oedipal fate, this fate can only speak itself in the language of catachresis. Such a language is already announced and signified by her name. Etymologically, Antigone means “against but also in the place of the mother, of womb, of family, of generation.” Antigone challenges the relationship between symbolic structure and subject who occupies that structure, asserts Butler, since precisely she occupies all these positions—except that of the mother (72). And one may point out, in this connection, that the Sophoclean text also refers to Antigone as a man. If “she cannot reduce the nomenclature of kinship to nominalism” (77), then Antigone’s language must always be promiscuous, catachrestic. What, Butler wonders, is the “contemporary voice” that disrupts the symbolic order’s univocal functioning? Consider that in the situation of blended families, a child says “mother” and might expect more than one individual to respond to the call. Or that, in the case of adoption, a child might say “father” and might mean both the absent phantasm she never knew as well as the one who assumes the place in living memory. The child might mean that at once, or sequentially, or in ways that are not always clearly disarticulated from one another. Or when a young girl comes to be fond of her stepbrother, what dilemma of kinship is she in? For a woman who is a single mother and has a child without a man, is the father still there, a spectral “position” or “place” that remains unfulfilled, or is there no such “place” or “position”? Is the father absent, or does this child have no father, no position, and no inhabitant? Is this a loss, which assumes the unfulfilled norm, or is it another configuration of primary attachment whose primary loss is not to have a language in which to articulate its terms? And when there are two men or two women who parent, are we to assume that some primary division of gendered roles organizes their psychic places within the scene, so that the empirical contingency of two same-gendered parents is nevertheless straightened out by the presocial psychic place of the Mother and Father into which they enter? Does it make sense on these occasions to insist that there are symbolic positions of Mother and Father that every psyche must accept regardless of the social form that kinship takes? Or is that a way of reinstating a heterosexual organization of parenting at the psychic level that can accommodate all manner of gender variations at the social level? Here it seems that the very division between the psychic and

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the symbolic, on the one hand, and the social, on the other, occasions this preemptory normalization of the social field. (69) I have been suggesting throughout this chapter that it is precisely these questions that Anna Freud tends to when she must confront both experiments in the group upbringing of children and the viability of psychoanalysis as a knowledge, a practice and an institution after 1945. What all these questions signify for the idea of the so-called Jewish science may very well lie in the domain of taboos. I have also suggested that these concerns are deeply implicated in those subtending the construction of personal and social ( Jewish) identity, as well as the viability of democratic relations of power in a world traumatized by war, mass exterminations, and totalitarian regimes. That the latter constituted a rupture in any ideas of progress or destiny seems obvious. In the face of such rupture, survival—for Anna Freud—spoke instead the language of a radical contingency, a language of catachresis that no longer could rely on what Butler calls a nominalist relation between structure and subject. Anna Freud’s turn to the social in the form of lateral relationships and her consequent retreat from Oedipal sexuality must, most certainly, be understood as a defense of the ego’s autonomy. It cannot for that be understood, as Roudinesco would have it, as a rejection of unconscious processes. Anna Freud merely insists, I believe, that Oedipal sexuality has its own sociohistorical origins and that a time may arise when it is no longer a determining factor in how individuals come to be constituted as subjects. The Bulldog Banks children, as well as all those other “infants without families” she worked with during the war, were examples of just this kind of new configuration.74 These children belong to that same list of children as evoked by Judith Butler, those who may or may not constitute themselves within or beyond what psychoanalysis has defined as the symbolic and normative order. Anna Freud thought of this space as an unconscious one, but also as one that was now orphaned. That she also thought of this space as an “experiment” may very well be one way for her to recall both its tragically contingent status (in the wake of mass destruction) and, in the face of such contingency, the possibility that it may also provide the basis for new forms of identity. I would like to offer some final thoughts on the connection between the orphaned unconscious, the experimental, contingent nature of “group upbringing,” and the possibilities for democratic citizenship after 1945. It is no

74. See Anna Freud (with Dorothy T. Burlingham), Infants without Families: The Case For and Against Residential Nurseries (New York: International Universities Press, 1944).

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coincidence, I believe, that some of the most important political theorists in the postwar period have sought either to revitalize the liberal social contract or to rethink the contours of communal social existence in ways that almost obsessively hover around the same terms raised and addressed by Anna Freud. From a spectrum that spans from—let us say—Isaiah Berlin’s important 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (in which Berlin invokes J. S. Mill’s phrase of “experiments in living” as the foundational basis for a renewed liberal society, as well as John Dewey’s description of American democracy as an “experiment”); to John Rawls’s thought experiment of an original position from and by which subjects contract themselves out into a reformulated and reorganized liberal society on the basis of a radical orphaned position; to Richard Rorty’s construction of a liberal community founded on contingency and irony (again, Antigone’s claim); to Jean-Luc Nancy’s more Bataillian “inoperative community” that posits a community as founded in an “ecstatic consciousness”; to Butler’s Antigonal claims—the list is indeed a long one: one must wonder the extent to which these shared concerns draw their affective impetus from precisely those same forces discovered by (Anna)-Freudian psychoanalysis, forces that have been incorporated but perhaps also against which a defense has been mounted—by Anna Freud herself as much as by her detractors.75 It is the nature of such a doubly conceived defense that is the subject of the next chapter.

75. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 191–242; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and JeanLuc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

 Ch ap ter 4 The Defense of Psychoanalysis/The Anxiety of Politics The ego is an organization. —Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety

The defense of psychoanalysis and of the social justice that it propounds lives in close proximity to attacks upon it. Such attacks are at once theoretical, historical, and political. In this sense, they challenge not only the identity of psychoanalysis but set in motion a reflection from within psychoanalysis itself on the stakes of any identity, whether this identity be personal, social, or disciplinary. I propose that psychoanalysis’s Auseinandersetzung, its simultaneous engagement with and distancing from identity, its own and that of others, is to be understood as one of its greatest defense(s). Already in Freud’s lifetime and in the wake of a growing movement that was emerging from isolation and was yet threatened from all sides, psychoanalysis needed to throw up protective barriers to defend against assaults on its own specific nature; it had, in Samuel Weber’s words, to go its own way, in order to remain viable as a theory and a practice and in order to set itself apart from other investigations into the human psyche.“Going one’s own way” and “setting oneself apart” required multiple ruptures: in the very early days from Wilhelm Fließ and Josef Breuer, later from Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel, and later again and more dramatically from Carl Jung and Otto Rank.1 As early as 1914, in On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement—a

1. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 35–39.

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text that in essence is nothing but a history of and an Auseinandersetzung (literally a setting, a placing apart or away) with all of these ruptures, Freud had this to say about the need for such a self-definition and self-defense:2 What I had in mind was to organize the psychoanalytic movement, to transfer its centre to Zurich and to give it a chief who would look after its future career. . . . I judged that the new movement’s association with Vienna was no recommendation but rather a handicap to it. . . . I also took it that a second handicap lay in my own person, opinion about which was too much confused by the liking or hatred of the different sides. . . . I wished, therefore, to withdraw into the background myself and the city where psychoanalysis first saw the light. Moreover, I was no longer young; I felt that there was a long road ahead, and I felt oppressed by the thought that the duty of being a leader should fall to me so late in life. . . . I felt the need of transferring . . . authority to a younger man. . . . This man could only be C. G. Jung. . . . I had no inkling at that time that . . . the choice was a most unfortunate one, that I had lighted upon a person who was incapable of tolerating the authority of another, but who was still less capable of wielding it himself. . . . I considered it necessary to form an official association because I feared abuses to which psychoanalysis would be subjected as soon as it became popular. There should be some headquarters whose business it would be to declare: ‘All this nonsense is nothing to do with analysis; this is not psychoanalysis.’ ”3 Freud’s need to organize the psychoanalytic movement in such a way as to place himself—like a woman—in the “background” against a struggle of brothers, a struggle out of which emerged victorious his daughter Anna, has been the subject of the previous three chapters. Here I am concerned with

2. Freud’s words address here precisely the problem of succession: What kind of successor may psychoanalysis produce—a successor who is both the same as the father and yet an Other? This question is indeed the dilemma, according to Freud, set before all sons and in which they are inevitably caught. The double command, as he stated in “The Ego and the Id,” is to be like the father and yet different: “The super-ego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices. Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept:‘You ought to be like this’ (like your father). It also comprises the prohibition: ‘You may not be like this (your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.’ This double aspect of the ego ideal derives from the fact that the ego ideal had the task of repressing the Oedipus complex; indeed, it is to that revolutionary event that it owes its existence.” “The Ego and the Id,” Standard Edition, 19:34. 3. Sigmund Freud, “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” Standard Edition, 14:42–43; my emphasis.

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the consequences of those uses and abuses that result from psychoanalysis’s popularization and with the perceived need to establish headquarters whose business it is to declare what constitutes legitimate psychoanalysis. As the quote makes clear, it most certainly requires a transfer of centers: from Freud himself to some other person who can both tolerate and yet hold authority, from Vienna to some other city, from old age to youth: in other words, to some “official association” capable of maintaining order—a headquarters that is up to the task of defending itself against hostile forces as much as against psychoanalysis’s very appeal. If Anna Freud was historically the first inheritor of her father’s desired association, then theoretically it was the ego and all its defenses that furnished the grounds for psychoanalysis’s viability in the future. Such a theoretical uprooting was in fact signaled by a transference from the analysis of repression to the analysis of defenses, and it is not coincidental that, for Freud, any form of defense would come to have the status, precisely, of a signal, of what he would call Angstbereitschaft—a preparedness for anxiety. In other words and for these reasons, the headquarters whose business it was to pronounce on what constituted real psychoanalysis would in the future be the main transmitter of this signal message of anxiety: the ego.

Going One’s Own Way Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense is widely known as her most important work. She wrote it in 1936, when she was thirty years old and it was her birthday present to her father who in that very same year turned eighty. This was also three years after the seizure of Nazi power in Germany and the burning of her father’s books in Berlin, and two years before the Anschluß in Austria, her own brief arrest by the Gestapo, and her eventual exile as Anna-Antigone to London: these historical-political coordinates should be kept in mind when speaking of Anna’s commitments to the ego’s defenses. As with so many of her other writings, this text too is a direct engagement with Sigmund Freud’s own theories of the human psyche, in this instance with his Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, written exactly a decade earlier. In the meanings of such an engagement then, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense should be read as an anxious text, as a mounted defense against anxieties of influence and inadequacy vis-à-vis her father and of his own engagement with anxiety, as also against a political climate that spells the death of the ego in all its forms hitherto known. As always, Anna Freud’s text stages a subtle maneuver. If both her father’s text and her own explicitly treated the problem of anxiety and the defenses mounted against that anxiety by the ego, then a reading of each text one against the other also makes clear that such anxiety

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is very much connected with problems of inheritance, of succession, and of the submission that the latter may dictate—of problems that Harold Bloom has called “anxiety of influence.”4 Both Bloom and Michel Serres describe the act of a subtle rewriting, the repetition of one text after another with a difference (this in itself a repetition of the Freudian repetition compulsion) as a clinamen—that ever so slight swerving, produced within a fall, that lands a text somewhere else, in another Schauplatz. While Bloom connects the clinamen to what he calls a strong reading of a text’s predecessors, Serres places the clinamen within a parasitical chain, wherein the new text feeds off its host text in a unidirectional relation of taking without giving.5 It is no coincidence, I would think, that at the center of the father’s text stands the problem of the birth trauma, a theory propounded by Otto Rank and whose 1924 The Trauma of Birth was yet another birthday present, one given to Freud in 1923 and one against which its recipient was all too eager to defend himself in his own Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.6 Anna Freud’s own treatise on the defense mechanisms at the ego’s disposal was nevertheless to be—within this bizarre economy of giving and uncertain, even parasitical taking—a birthday present different from all others, to be distinguished, that is, from those given by her fraternal followers of the movement and even from those given by herself in the past. “In many of her adult years,” so Elisabeth Young-Bruehl writes, “she had come forward on May 6 [Sigmund’s birthday] with jokes or pieces of self-mockery, viewing herself as a kind of clownish Cordelia among euphemizers.”7 Anna’s important text was thus a birthday gift, one that wanted to take itself seriously, both in comparison to others and to herself. The very possibility that she could be occupying the position of the Third (and is this still an Oedipal triangle or the Third so crucial to her father’s theory of jokes?) and of potentially being the butt of her own joke, Anna Freud’s text was indeed compelled to find its own space within the circulation of other birthdays and other circles of gift-giving, her father’s

4. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 5. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 6. Rank’s dedication was inscribed to “The Explorer of the Unconscious,” to which Freud replied in December 1923: “I gladly accept your dedication with the assurance of my most cordial thanks. If you could put it more moderately, it would be all right with me. Handicapped as I am, I enjoy enormously your admirable productivity. That means for me too: ‘Non monis morior!’ [I shall not wholly die].” Cited in Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 139. 7. Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 216; my emphases. Along with Antigone, Cordelia furnished another tragic heroine-daughter with whom Anna was saddled throughout her life.

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eightieth and, as well, Romain Rolland’s seventieth, to whom Sigmund Freud dedicated an essay of his own in 1936, entitled “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.” This is a text centered—significantly—on the problems of filial devotion, a devotion that is here nevertheless strangely both given and withheld—this giving and withholding and taking precisely describing this strange circulation of texts. The “disturbance” in question provides a good point of departure in a discussion about the defenses that psychoanalysis counters but also mounts. Freud’s own somewhat reluctant and anxious departure from Vienna in order to travel in the company of his brother to Athens and for the first time visit the Acropolis, furnishes the grounds for what lies at the crux of filial devotion and of the rituals that so seemingly and inevitably subtend such devotion: the anxieties and the consequent celebrations around the event of birth(day)s. I would therefore propose that a constellation of texts, Sigmund Freud’s two essays from 1926 and 1936, along with Anna Freud’s own crucial intervention from 1936, constitute a conjuncture of analyses that have at their center the problem of the ego’s birth and its ritual commemorations, as well as all the anxieties or disturbances such textual ritual offerings may afford for the possibility or impossibility of psychoanalytic foundations. Sigmund Freud’s “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” brings together many of the themes I addressed in the previous chapter. It is, first of all, a text that claims to need forbearance; at the same time it also views itself as an effort towards self- or ego-control. It constitutes, furthermore, a plea for an indulgence toward the nonenforcement of a (paternal) right; it defines itself, that is, as the very gift that it seeks to be and bring within a circuit of the (auto)biographical, and as such it is poised between filial piety and old age. In this sense, it furnishes another example of a late “contrapuntal” style, in the manner as intended by Edward Said.8 We are here invited by Freud not to wonder that “the recollections of this incident on the Acropolis should have troubled me so often since I myself have grown old and stand in need of forbearance and can travel no more.”9 A “certain amount of reserve” between the two brothers surrounds “the whole episode” (243), a reserve somehow related to the question of filial piety, but acknowledgeable as such

8. Michel Serres states: “Communication theory is in charge of the system; it can break it down or let it function, depending on the signal. A parasite, physical, acoustic, informational, belonging to order and disorder, a new voice, an important one, in the contrapuntal matrix” (Serres, The Parasite, 6; my emphases). I cite this passage as an initial indication of the connection between the existence of a system, a signal, and the potentially parasitical, contrapuntal presence of an entity that makes both the ego and all its dangers evident. 9. Sigmund Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” Standard Edition, 22:248.

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only because it is psychoanalysis’s goal to “throw light” on those aspects of the mind that are understood to be “unusual, abnormal or pathological.” The starting point for such an analysis is the home, the self, and by extension the autobiographical narrative, in order then boldly to travel beyond domestic borders: “I began by attempting [such an investigation] upon myself and then went on to apply it to other people and finally, by a bold extension, to the human race as a whole” (239). And yet, as Freud’s text will show, the transgression of these domestic borders and the travels that they imply transport the (psychoanalytic) ego into a space that both supports its own borders and yet undermines its very consistency. Freud’s concern with Greek classicism, with the mythic origins of both the subject and psychoanalysis, with travels either guiltily lived or outlived culminate in the idea of a mounted defense (here standing on the mount of the Acropolis) both as and against feelings of what in the text he calls derealization [Entfremdungsgefühl]. The feeling of being a stranger or of being alienated from one’s surroundings is what assails Freud while he stands on the Acropolis. All is at stake here, the self as well as the object (the Acropolis) that the self encounters: I will start from the presumption that the original factor must have been a sense of some feeling of the unbelievable and the unreal in the situation at the moment. The situation included myself, the Acropolis and my perception of it. . . . I did not simply recollect that in my early years I had doubted whether I myself would ever see the Acropolis, but I asserted that at that time I had disbelieved in the reality of the Acropolis itself. . . . I made an attempt to ward that feeling off, and I succeeded, at the cost of making a false pronouncement about the past. (244) The feeling of derealization is a “remarkable” phenomenon, a sensation that is little understood but apparently attached to “particular mental contents and bound up with decisions made about these contents” (244). This sense of detachment serves the purposes of defense, of keeping something away from the ego: it is an operation on the part of the ego that “kills the messenger” in order for it to reassert its absolute power (246). Derealization also serves a second function: since it depends on the past, that is, on the ego’s “store of memories and upon earlier distressing experiences which have since perhaps fallen victim to repression” (246), these same repressed memories—in light of their repression and hence of their refusal and falsification of the past—now claim precisely a renewed connection to reality. Freud’s own connection is in fact produced by the sense of having traveled “so far”: “It is not true that in my schooldays I ever doubted the real existence

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of Athens. I only doubted whether I should ever see Athens. It seemed to me beyond the realms of possibility that I should travel so far—that I should ‘go such a long way’ ” (246). Derealization is here directly connected to filial piety to the extent that “going a long way”—while perhaps more generally founded in the adolescent desire to escape pressure and therefore run away from home—is for Freud more specifically linked to a sense of guilt, to a forbidden desire that “has something to do with a child’s criticism of his father, with the undervaluation which took the place of the overvaluation of earlier childhood” (247). This desire is, of course, also bound to the perceived need for psychoanalysis to “go its own way,” to travel in order to defend itself. Standing on the Acropolis is a standing in for a criticism of the father; it is a sign of the son’s superiority: “Our father had been in business, he had had no secondary education, and Athens could not have meant much to him. Thus what interfered with our enjoyment of the journey to Athens was a feeling of filial piety” (247–48). The meaning, therefore, of the “disturbance” on the Acropolis is to be placed precisely in a displacement, that of the cultured son who has traveled far from the business-minded father. The father who does not travel, who stays put in his place: such are the anxieties that stand at the basis of Freud’s text. Travels here seem to require some form of delegate, an other to go to some place and from which the psychoanalytic subject is born. In fact, the one who now travels for the father, substitutes him, and also writes was quite coincidentally just then at work interrogating those same methods of defense that are discharged by the ego against the sense of derealization, against the deadly threats to the ego’s integrity: “an investigation is this moment being carried on close at hand which is devoted to the study of these methods of defense: my daughter, the child analyst, is writing a book upon them” (245; my emphases). I will leave to the side here the ambiguous valences of the “child analyst”— does the child Anna, in her father’s opinion, analyze children or parents?—in order to wonder about Freud’s own investments in “filial piety,” investments that appear all too close at hand. The memory disturbance that Freud experiences on the Acropolis and that generates within him such a sense of derealization is intimately linked to an encounter with mythic origins, with the place where civilization and by extension psychoanalysis had sought its origins: “When I was a schoolboy I had thought I was convinced of the historical reality of the city of Athens and its history”; but the feeling of a certain disconnectedness, once he was standing on the famous mount, produces in Freud a sense that “in my unconscious I had not believed in it, and that I was only now acquiring a conviction that ‘reached down to the unconscious’ ” (241). And yet the difficult alignment between historical and mythic truth

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is perhaps not the most pressing problem here for Freud: “Incredulity of this kind is obviously an attempt to repudiate a piece of reality; but there is something strange about it” (242). The experience of strangeness, of uncanniness even, has something to do with a “paradoxical situation,” one that Freud goes on to evoke as something already known to him as a phenomenon he had earlier called “being wrecked by success”: “As a rule people fall ill as a result of frustration, of the non-fulfilment of some vital necessity or desire. But with [those wrecked by success] the opposite is the case; they fall ill, or even go entirely to pieces, because an overwhelming powerful wish of theirs has been fulfilled” (242). But Freud right away explains this bizarre, paradoxical situation: “The contrast between the two situations is not so great as it seems at first. What happens in the paradoxical case is merely that the place of the external frustration is taken by an internal one. The sufferer does not permit himself happiness: the internal frustration commands him to cling to the external one. But why?” (242; my emphasis). Another replacement or rather displacement, then: external frustration (which Freud symbolizes as the fateful “Too good to be true”) stands in for an internal one (“I’m not worthy of such happiness; I don’t deserve it”). Both of these motives are, so Freud concludes, essentially the same, “for one is only a projection of the other” (242–43). One must wonder about the extent to which the strangeness of this paradoxical situation is in fact resolved, for the relationship between an external frustration and an internal one in the matter of “some vital necessity or desire” is anything but clear. Freud passes from the idea that an external frustration is replaced by an internal one; then to the proposition that an internal frustration commands a clinging to an external one; and finally that internal and external frustrations are identical because one is the projection of the other. We move then, in Freud’s negotiation between external reality and internal drive, from the action of displacement to a command exacted by the psyche on reality, to identity and projection. All of this clinging is of course already familiar: it constitutes the fundamental attitude on the part of the mother/woman toward civilization. And this, in the very act of the mother’s withdrawal, returns us to the limits of psychoanalysis.

Birth Anxieties Sigmund Freud both desired and hated the idea of a successor to his project, which he named psychoanalysis. Therefore potential successors were continuously put forward and then quickly withdrawn. The first was Carl Jung, who went his own way relatively early in the game. Quite strangely, however, those who stuck loyally to the cause—Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Max

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Eitingon, Ernest (very earnest) Jones, all those protagonists that made up the inner circle of the first generation of psychoanalytic crown princes and all of whom wore the promissory insignium, the secret ring on their finger, none of them was destined permanently to occupy the throne. The famous photograph that captured this “secret ring” includes seven protagonists: the five already mentioned, Freud himself, and Otto Rank. The photograph does not, of course, include Anna Freud. Anna Freud eventually won the contest, and this without either a commemorative photograph or even a ring—she was, for that matter, never to marry. But Otto Rank was, for a while at least, the potential Prince of Wales—the contemplated crown price and, by extension, another potential husband for the princess bride Anna. Except that he married someone else and then went his own way, and did so in two senses. He wrote The Trauma of Birth, and he traveled, in his case, to Freud’s “dollar country,” the United States. There Rank was able to charge (and this in Freud’s name) astronomical fees—compared to the going rates in Vienna—for his services in analyzing rich patients and training future American analysts.10 Sigmund Freud never forgave him for either of these moves—and, indeed, it is possible that it was Rank’s American travels and connections more than his theories about birth that influenced Freud’s own eventual negative reading of The Trauma of Birth, here associated also with the birth of psychoanalysis in the New World. While the story about when exactly Freud turned against Rank’s theory of the birth trauma is unclear (initially, at least, he seems to have given it his approval), Rank’s relocation to the United States seems to have sealed Rank’s fate: except, of course, no one knows with precision the vector of this pushand-pull movement enacted between Freud and Rank. Was Rank pushed out or was he in fact going his own way?11 Rank was known for his “tireless work for the cause”—a quality that endeared him to Freud and elevated him to his “adopted son,” a quality that Rank also shared with Freud’s daughter Anna-Antigone. François Roustang describes such a quality as a necessary one for discipleship: discipleship requires “a harassing amount of work and tireless vigilance.” This is so because the disciple must anticipate the master’s every word, fill in his gaps, and understand the master’s principles that

10. For the history of American psychoanalysis, see Nathan G. Hale, The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 11. This is the question that directs the reading of Freud’s relationship to Rank in both Phyllis Grosskurth’s The Secret Ring and Paul Roazen’s Freud and His Followers (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1975). In all probability, Rank was caught in the father’s impossible command: “Be me, don’t be me!”

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on principal may in fact elude him: he is a disciple “basically because he is afraid of bearing his own name, of speaking in his own name, of thinking about his fantasies and dreams or, in other words, of flying on a trapeze without a net.”12 Net or no net, what Rank proposed was that psychoanalytic treatment should allow a patient to repeat or relive the traumatic experience of being born. This claim was supported by two further, more fundamental propositions: first, that the prototype of all anxiety is the trauma of birth; and second, that psychoanalytic technique must rest upon the transferential reliving of this remote past. Such claims furnished a significant challenge to classic Freudian theory: they brought the mother out of her psychoanalytically asserted withdrawal and gave her a primary role in psychic development. In this regard Rank stated: “Not all authoritative persons or figures . . . have a father significance, not even ultimately. For one patient the mother may have been the first authority, indeed perhaps she was for most human beings.”13 As a consequence of this new emphasis on the mother’s role, Rank was also implicitly challenging the centrality of the Oedipus complex by focusing on a period in the child’s development that predated the presence of the father. Furthermore, Rank’s clinical conclusions, that is, his emphasis on reliving rather than understanding, on “the therapeutic uses of acting out as part of an analysis that should involve an emotional reliving of the past instead of just intellectualized knowledge”;14 this position too was in conflict with contemporary wisdom of psychoanalytic practice, which tended to stress intellectual insight as the central curative agent.15 That Rank was posing a threat to psychoanalysis was understood by all the involved players. The band of brothers, in the grips of rivalry and envy against the favored son, fell upon Rank and turned him into the sacrificial victim so seemingly necessary for the institution’s survival. It all got reduced to Rank’s “behavior”: Jones invoked Rank’s Vaterablehnung [rejection of the father], as opposed to what should have been his more proper Vatersehnsucht [longing for the father]—a concept that Freud had placed at the foundation of his Civilization and Its Discontents. Rank was also accused of a “flight

12. François Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleship From Freud to Lacan, trans. Ned Lukacher. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 33. 13. Cited in Grosskurth, Secret Ring, 185. 14. Roazen, Freud and His Followers, 401. 15. It is interesting to note that such positions would be replicated, as I have already indicated, in Freud’s later Moses and Monotheism as the distinction that he there would draw between maternal certainty and paternal intellectuality.

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from the Oedipus complex,” of his dubious secrecy in which he published his book; furthermore, “of evasion of the Committee’s questions; . . . his refusal to take part in the Symposium on the theories and techniques he and Ferenczi had developed; and ‘his Jung-like decision to go to America without letting any of us know.’ ”16 Anna Freud, in turn, who, according to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “detested” Rank’s book (in the name, one must presume, of her own Vatersehnsucht), wrote to Max Eitingon at the height of the Rank affair: I no longer believe that Rank will suddenly wake up and be the old Rank; maybe he never was at all the Rank we took him to be these many years? . . . How can one know anything at all about people, if they can be either way? And why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness. . . . The most incomprehensible thing about [Rank’s letter to her father in which he sought to defend his theory] is that even though there is so much said openly, he is still full of hidden, cheap malice—this becomes clear if you know that the psychoanalyzed patients he speaks of are all former patients of Papa’s. . . . Rank is very advanced compared to all of us in his understanding that human relations exist for the sole purpose of being ruined. When one knows this with a certainty like his, then one does not need to initiate any relations at all.17 Sigmund Freud was not long in providing a response to Rank. In 1924, in a lengthy personal meeting behind closed doors with the wayward disciple, he convinced Rank to write an open letter to the rest of the Central Committee in which Rank admitted to unresolved neurotic conflicts and indeed to moral turpitude. As Phyllis Grosskurth describes the event: “Freud seems to have acted as the Grand Inquisitor, and Rank’s groveling ‘confession’ could have served as a model for the Russian show trials of the 1930s. Did Rank ever mutter, ‘eppur si muove’? He believed with all his heart in his theory, but managed to avoid discussing it in the letter. The emphasis is placed completely on his state of mind.”18 Among all of Rank’s confessions to psychological and moral weakness, the central one was probably the fol-

16. Grosskurth, Secret Ring, 154. 17. Cited in Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 148–49. 18. Grosskurth, Secret Ring, 167. These are very odd comments: Rank is accused here of a certain cynicism about “human relations,” a cynicism that Anna Freud herself directly espouses in her remarks about friendship always and ever being nothing but “hate and ugliness.”

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lowing: “From a state which I now recognize as neurotic, I have suddenly returned to myself. Not only have I recognized the actual cause of the crisis in the trauma occasioned by the dangerous illness of the Professor [not, then, the birth trauma occasioned by the mother but the death trauma occasioned by the father!], but I was able also to understand the type of reaction and its mechanism from my childhood and family history—the Oedipus and brother complexes.”19 Freud’s second response arrived two years later in 1926 with the publication of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, a text that left absolutely no room for reconciliation with Rank. Several problems plague Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, a text that—as James Strachey describes it—ranges over a wide field and where Freud struggles to turn the work into a coherent whole. This is evinced already by the title of the essay itself and by the fact that Freud finds it necessary to attach a series of addenda to the text.20 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety raises three major problems: the continued need to provide a properly psychoanalytic definition of anxiety; the problem of the relationship between internal and external reality, that is, of the delimitation of a specifically psychic space; and the seeming relegation of repression to some other place.

19. Cited in Grosskurth, Secret Ring, 166. 20. By virtue of Freud’s need to demarcate clear boundaries, his essay is ruled by a kind of terminological mania, by a drive toward sorting out terms, marking their proper delimitations and giving them stable meaning. Signaled already by the essay’s title, a string of three terms, Freud nevertheless struggles a great deal to keep things apart. “In the description of pathological phenomena, linguistic usage”—so read the first two sentences of Freud’s text—“enables us to distinguish between symptoms from inhibitions, without, however, attaching much importance to the distinction. Indeed, we might hardly think it worth while to differentiate exactly between the two, were it not for the fact that we meet with illnesses in which we observe the presence of inhibitions but not of symptoms and are curious to know the reason for this” (87). And at the end of the essay Freud is still trying to make coherent distinctions. For one, he distinguishes between anxiety [Angst] and fear [Furcht]. Anxiety always involves an expectation, it is always an anxiety about something, but the object is either unknown or indefinite. Fear, on the other hand, has an object, though it may also take place without its expectation—in which case it is closer to a fright [Schreck]. Anxiety, in turn, may be broken down between normal anxiety and neurotic anxiety: “Real danger is a danger that is known, and realistic anxiety is anxiety about a known danger of this sort. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an unknown danger. Neurotic danger is thus a danger that has still to be discovered. Analysis has shown that it is an instinctual danger” (165). Finally, Freud ends with the distinction between external and internal danger. If an external danger derives from a real object, then an internal danger results from an instinctual demand. Nevertheless, an instinctual demand is equally real, and for that reason must be defended against in the same manner as one would defend against an external danger. In addition, an instinctual demand may at times only be a danger because, if satisfied, it would bring on an external danger (as, for instance, in the threat of castration): “the internal danger represents an external one” (168). The external danger, in turn, can only be significant for the ego if it is internalized, that is, recognized as being related to some situation of helplessness that has been experienced.

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It is commonly noted—and indeed repeatedly emphasized by Freud himself—that he here, in 1926, radically rethought his earlier theory of anxiety. As early as 1895, in “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia as ‘Anxiety-Neurosis,’ ” Freud had defined anxiety as the transformation of libido into anxiety as the result of repression. In other words, anxiety was here nothing but repressed libido. In this sense, it came about as a consequence of a certain blockage, an inhibited flow within the psychic economy. As a kind of constipation or coitus interruptus, it signified a dysfunction and an inability on the part of the psyche to translate drive into representations, and it was this inability to construct representations that Freud ultimately challenged in his new theory. But certainly in its older version, and as Samuel Weber has pointed out, anxiety challenged the very operation of psychic cathexes. And Weber, who is one of the most refined readers of Freudian anxiety, continues: “The specific problem posed by anxiety, then, is that of the relation of the psychic to the nonpsychic, or in other words, the delimitation of the psychic as such.”21 Weber quotes here from Freud’s 1895 essay and comments that these sentences may very well provide the essence of the problem or threat posed by anxiety to psychoanalytic theory itself: The psyche arrives at the affect of anxiety when it feels itself incapable of fulfilling, through the appropriate reaction, a task (danger) emanating from without; it develops anxiety-neurosis when it notes its incapacity of alleviating (sexual) excitation that has arisen endogenically. It acts, therefore, as though it had projected this excitation outwards.22 In this earlier formulation anxiety is both the psyche’s reaction to an external danger and the projection of an internal danger beyond the psyche’s own borders—it generates, in other words, that feeling of Entfremdungsgefühl addressed by Freud in his thoughts about standing on the Acropolis. As a result—for the anxious ego and its theorist alike—it becomes difficult to ever know from where the danger actually originates, since its effects are identical and therefore unreadable. As Weber states, “Freud’s efforts to render anxiety intelligible . . . will hinge upon the manner in which he determines the external danger to which anxiety reacts, the process, that is, in which the extrapsychic imposes itself upon the intrapsychic.”23 How, Weber asks, does the psyche note (the German word Freud uses is “merkt,” which means

21. Weber, Legend of Freud, 50. 22. Sigmund Freud, “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia as ‘Anxiety-Neurosis,’ ” Standard Edition, 3:112. 23. Weber, Legend of Freud, 51

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both “take notice” and “remember”) that danger that originates within but operates from without? And there exists an additional problem, one linked to anxiety’s double nature: on the one hand, [anxiety] entails a psychic reaction that is often expedient and functional in the face of ‘real’ danger; on the other, it can become a reaction that reproduces, as it were, the very danger it strives to react against. An adequate theory of anxiety must therefore be able to explain the phenomenon both as a normal, necessary, and useful defense, and as a neurotic, dysfunctional threat.24 It is here, then, within and yet also between such double demands exacted from within and without, and in the form of both a normal defense and a neurotic threat, that Freud in 1926 placed the ego, which now, famously, became the new site of anxiety—and of psychoanalytic theory itself. Anxiety then describes both the breakdown of all representation (and this also in its political meanings) and as well that affect capable of mounting the proper defenses in order to protect these representations. Anxiety, Freud claims in 1926, is a signal whose stakes involve nothing less than the protection of psychoanalytic politics tout court. First and foremost, and as already noted, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety was to provide a defense against Rank’s theory of the birth trauma, a theory that he nevertheless also claimed “was originally [his] own” and that obliged him to revisit the problem of anxiety once more (161). It is worth noting that such a revisitation precisely stages anxiety: it reproduces, through a displacement of Rank, the text’s trauma in mitigated form. It is, as Weber writes, “of some importance to note that [Freud’s] treatment of anxiety is itself provoked by the challenge—or should we say ‘real danger’?—posed to psychoanalysis by the development of one of its followers. In readdressing the question of ‘danger,’ then, Freud is also striving to defend psychoanalysis itself from a threat that, although originating ‘internally’, is now projected as emanating from without.” And hence the necessity for Rank’s radical expulsion or else radical submission to an internal/external but also inquisitorial dynamic. Weber continues: “What is at stake, in short, both for the conception of the psyche and for psychoanalysis itself, is the integrity and coherence of a certain ‘within’ in its relations to the ‘outside’; and that integrity can only be defended by redrawing and reinforcing the lines that set apart inside from outside, psychoanalysis from birth trauma, Freud from Rank.”25

24. Ibid., 51. 25. Ibid., 52.

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Rank’s theory stated that people become neurotic when the experience of the trauma of birth has been so overwhelming that they are unable to completely abreact this experience. Freud does not disagree with Rank that behind anxiety stands a real situation of danger, and that this danger has something to do with being overwhelmed or helpless. His objections to Rank are two. First, Rank’s conception of reality is not sufficiently psychical, since the danger of birth cannot as of yet carry any psychical content for the infant. Nevertheless, Freud also insists that this real danger situation is indeed external, for otherwise he cannot provide an independent explanatory basis for his own theory. Reality must therefore be both external and objective and internal and psychic. Second, and this point is related to the first, anxiety cannot be reduced to a single trauma, precisely because it has “two modes of origin” (two parents, if you will: the first external, deriving from the real threat of castration; the second internal, stemming from the helplessness of birth) and two historically distinct events that bring it about: “Either the state of anxiety reproduced itself automatically in situations analogous to the original situation and was thus an inexpedient form of reaction instead of an expedient one as it had been in the first situation of danger; or the ego acquired power over this affect, reproduced it on its own initiative, and employed it as a warning of danger and as a means of setting the pleasureunpleasure mechanism in motion.” Either anxiety is “involuntary, automatic” and the immediate repetition of an original trauma, or it is “produced by the ego” when a repetition of the danger threatens to recur (162). It is this double nature of anxiety that, paradoxically, provides Freud with a unified, that is, proper theory of anxiety, one that is psychological in nature and takes into account the differentiation of the mental apparatus between id and ego, an apparatus that in turn must not only take danger into account but that, in fact, comes into being by virtue of this recognition: The ego is obliged to guard against certain instinctual impulses in the id and to treat them as dangers. But it cannot protect itself from internal instinctual dangers as effectively as it can from some piece of reality that is not part of itself. . . . It can only fend off an instinctual danger by restricting its own organization and by acquiescing in the formation of symptoms in exchange for having impaired the instincts. (155–56) While Rank had hypostasized the ego and had relied on an overly simplistic notion of reality and trauma, Freud insists that it is precisely the ego’s inability to cathect energy arising from the traumatic experience—an experience that he consistently names both a situation of helplessness and a real fear—that constitutes the trauma. Anxiety results as a consequence of the ego’s missed

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encounter with objective reality, with the situation of real danger. For this reason, Freud states that anxiety is a displacement—and it will be just such a displacement that will guide the entirety of Freud’s theory: “What is decisive,” he claims, “is the first displacement of the anxiety-reaction from its origin in the situation of helplessness to an expectation of that situation—that is, to the danger situation” (167). This displacement Freud names a signal: It is in this situation that the signal of anxiety is given. The signal announces: ‘I am expecting a situation of helplessness to set in’, or: ‘The present situation reminds me of one of the traumatic experiences I have had before. Therefore I will anticipate the trauma and behave as though it had already come, while there is yet time to turn it aside.’ Anxiety is therefore on the one hand an expectation of a trauma, and on the other a repetition of it in mitigated form. Thus the two features of anxiety which we have noted have a different origin. Its connection with expectation belongs to the danger-situation, whereas its indefiniteness and lack of object belong to the traumatic situation of helplessness— the situation which is anticipated in the danger-situation. (166) The management of helplessness through its expectation and active repetition on the part of the ego “in a weakened version” (167) constitutes an important step in the direction of the ego’s self-preservation. In fact, it is constitutive of the ego as such, through an act, as Samuel Weber describes it, that sets the ego apart from the indifferentiation of the primary process. According to Weber, if the primary process consists in the incessant alteration of ever-different cathexes . . . anxiety entails the alteration of that alterity through a process of repetition that organizes space and time in terms of a dyadic opposition: that of inner/outer and past/future. In so organizing space and time, anxiety situates the ego as the dividing-line between two opposing poles. . . . Anxiety thus emerges as the conflictual, contradictory process by which the ego seeks to represent the unrepresentable, to alter alteration and thereby organize itself. (91–92) The ego creates a signal, and in that move it makes itself by projecting the trauma outward; it “seeks to appropriate the ‘economic’ disturbance of incessant displacement by displacing it outwards and forwards, by making it into a Vorstellung: a re-presentation, to be sure, but also, literally, something that is placed-out-in-front, spatially as well as temporally.”26 Anxiety, in other words, transforms the ego into an organization. 26. Weber, Legend of Freud, 54–55.

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Weber bases almost his entire reading of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety on Freud’s addendum to the text, a supplement that itself constitutes a form of displacement of the main body of the essay. Undoubtedly, the displacement of trauma and the representational forms that such a displacement may take is itself a central operation of Freud’s theory of anxiety. Nevertheless, I think that there exists also a second displacement, one that is crucial for Freud’s new interest in the ego’s organization and one that is very much interested in the “economic disturbance” evoked by Weber. This displacement concerns Freud’s theory of repression and the reformulation of his theory of the ego’s defenses. A central problem dominating Freud’s analysis is the relationship between anxiety and the formation of symptoms: Is anxiety a symptom of neurosis or are symptoms formed in order to avoid anxiety? Symptoms are formed, Freud states, in order to remove the ego from a situation of danger; if such symptoms cannot be formed, then the ego is exposed to a situation “analogous to birth . . . in which the ego is helpless in the face of constantly increasing demand” (144). Symptom-formation therefore belongs to the defensive processes of the ego, processes that are then “analogous to the flight by means of which the ego removes itself from a danger that threatens it from outside” (145). Defensive processes are just like the ego when it takes flight from an external danger, but they have the additional task of harnessing instinctual demands by “somehow” suppressing, deflecting, or rendering them innocuous. Why then, Freud wonders, are some people able to manage anxiety in a normal fashion, that is, use anxiety purely as an expedient signal, while others become paralyzed by its impact? It all depends, apparently, on the relative strength of the ego. A symptom “is a sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance; it is a consequence of the process of repression. Repression proceeds from the ego when the latter—it may be at the behest of the superego—refuses to associate itself with an instinctual cathexis which has been aroused in the id” (91). Repression brings about a “transformation of affect,” for what was originally pleasure has now, via the ego’s ability to inhibit or deflect pleasure, been transformed into unpleasure. This implies “a concession to the ego that it can exert a very extensive influence over the processes of the id” (91–92): the ego in fact has “surprising powers” (92) if and when it can displace the economic disturbances deriving from the id. But from where does the ego get these surprising powers? “We are apt to think of the ego as powerless against the id; but when it is opposed to an instinctual process in the id it has only to give a ‘signal of unpleasure’ in order to attain its object with the aid of that almost omnipotent institution, the

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pleasure principle.” All this can be illustrated by “another field”: Let us imagine a country in which a certain small faction objects to a proposed measure the passage of which would have the support of the masses. This minority obtains command of the press and by its help manipulates the supreme arbiter, ‘public opinion’, and so succeeds in preventing the measure from being passed” (92). It would appear, then, that the ego gets its powers or authority by an action akin to the workings of ideology: by the manipulation or even creation of public opinion. Nevertheless, and as Freud immediately concedes, his political simile does not fully address the question of the sources of the ego’s energy or power. Additionally—and this is quite strange—this power stems from the ego’s modeling capacities, from its ability, precisely, to make different things similar or identical. The ego responds to an external danger situation by taking flight, by withdrawing its cathexes and eventually by performing a muscular activity and thus removing itself from the object of danger. The ego performs an action vis-à-vis an internal danger “along identical lines”: “a defense against an unwelcome internal process will be modeled upon [my emphasis] the defense adopted against an external stimulus,” and it does this through repression, which is therefore “an equivalent of this attempt at flight.” It is this action that provides the ego with its necessary energy: “The ego withdraws its (preconscious) cathexis from the instinctual representative that is to be repressed and uses that cathexis for the purpose of releasing unpleasure (anxiety)” (92–93). For this reason, Freud asserts that the “actual seat of anxiety” is the ego, and that it is no longer correct to maintain that anxiety is produced—automatically—by a transformation of repressed impulses. As he states toward the end of the essay: “Anxiety is an affective state and as such can, of course, only be felt by the ego. The id cannot have anxiety as the ego can; for it is not an organization and cannot make a judgement about situations of danger” (140; my emphases). It seems, therefore, that anxiety now belongs to the language of topography and no longer to an economic system of blocked energy flows. But are these two conceptions of anxiety in fact in conflict with each other? Or do they find a meeting point in Freud’s idea of the signal? Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety announces itself as a return to “the problem of the ego,” an announcement that is a complicated state of affairs because “apparent” contradictions in its assessment are “due to our having taken abstractions too rigidly” (97). Everything is at stake here, in these abstractions and distinctions that subtend them, for the ego is both distinct from the id and yet identical to it. When the id and the ego are thought of as distinct entities, “the weakness of the ego becomes apparent. But if the

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ego remains bound up with the id and indistinguishable from it, then it displays its strength. The same is true of the relation between the ego and the super-ego. In many situations the two are merged; and as a rule we can only distinguish one from the other when there is a tension or conflict between them. . . . The ego is . . . the organized portion of the id” (97; my emphasis). Ultimately, whether the ego and the id are in conflict or not all depends on the ego’s capacity to manage the id, that is, on whether the ego can respond to the id’s demands in an organizationally, institutionally effective, because elastic, manner. Therefore: The ego is an organization. It is based on the maintenance of free intercourse and of the possibility of reciprocal influence between all its parts. . . . [Its] necessity to synthesize grows stronger in proportion as the strength of the ego increases. It is therefore only natural that the ego should try to prevent symptoms from remaining isolated and alien by using every possible method to bind them to itself in one way or another, and to incorporate them into its organization by means of these bonds. . . . Symptoms participate in the ego from the very beginning, since they fulfil a requirement of the super-ego, while on the other hand they represent positions occupied by the repressed and points at which an irruption has been made by it into the ego-organization. They are a kind of frontier-station with a mixed garrison. (98–99) These are quite extraordinary sentences. For one, there is a kind of bleeding between the organization of the ego and its theoretical comprehension or Vorstellung (imaginative idea or representation): how one thinks about the ego seems to impact on the structure of the ego itself. A similar Vorstellung will also guide Anna Freud’s analysis of the ego. Thus, the ego is strong when its theorization can keep a watchful eye on the activities of the id and the superego—all in one glance. But Freud is here also, in the multiple political metaphors that he employs, remarkably close to post-Marxist sophisticated theories of ideology, for he conceives of the syntonic capacities of the ego as directly related to the ego’s ability to hegemonize contradictory forces into the service of its own demands. It is in this sense that, I believe, one must understand his profoundly political language in these passages. And here it may also be useful to recall Elisabeth Roudinesco’s sentences that I cited in the first chapter regarding the two options that were open to psychoanalysis after Freud’s 1920 revision of his theory of the psyche. There Roudinesco claimed that psychoanalysis could either “pull the ego free of the id and turn it into an instrument of the individual’s adaptation to external reality” or it

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could draw “the ego back towards the id so as to demonstrate how it was structured in stages as a function of imagos borrowed from the other.”27 I would propose that these two options are not for Freud oppositional ones, for what he is in fact arguing is both that the ego gains its strength from “free intercourse” with the id and also that it is precisely such an intercourse that allows the ego to effectively make its adaptations to reality, in other words, to be an organization. And this means that the ego can, when strong, hegemonize even its own symptoms. As Freud states: “The symptom gradually comes to be the representative of important interests; it is found to be useful in asserting the position of the self and becomes more and more closely merged with the ego and more and more indispensable to it” (99). The symptom is here, in other words, closely bound up with the operation of ideology, the understanding of which I see as closely related to Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Freud’s analysis of the symptom is both a political strategy and the basis of political-ideological critique. The symptom is therefore both neurotic and a rational strategy of self-defense. It is for this reason that more recent theories of ideology insist on a symptomatic reading of political reality.28 The Freudian ego adopts two lines of behavior toward the symptom that are “directly opposed to each other” (100). The ego and the symptom are both conciliatory and yet “less friendly in character” to the degree that repression may be in play. “The symptom, being the true substitute for and derivative of the repressed impulse, carries on the role of the latter; it continually renews its demands for satisfaction and thus obliges the ego in its turn to give the signal of unpleasure and put itself in a posture of defense” (100). This double nature of the symptom and the defensive struggle that it imports necessarily means that it catapults the ego into a struggle both for social adaptation and into the requirement to engage its own unconscious. For this reason, the ego fights its battles “on different [and indeed wider] fields and makes use of a variety of methods” (100). The battles fought by the ego are directly related to its management of anxiety—a “realistic anxiety,” as we have already seen. This realistic fear Freud names, in the main body of the text, the fear of castration and therefore the real fear of the father—a further displacement, then, from the certainty

27. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 111. 28. See, for instance, Louis Althusser, “Ideology and The Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001); Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1979); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001); and Slavoj Zˆizˆek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).

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of the mother to the theory of the father. Freud returns here, in fact, to one of his famous case histories from 1909—that of “Little Hans” and his animal phobias—and a case that was, significantly, managed entirely by the patient’s father. Which part of Hans’s horse phobia, Freud asks, “constituted the symptom? Was it his fear? Was his choice of an object the fear? Was it more than one of these combined? What was the satisfaction that he renounced? And why did he have to renounce it?” (101). At a first glance, things seem fairly clear: the child’s fear of horses is the symptom, and his refusal to go outdoors the inhibition imposed by the ego in order to avoid the anxietysymptom. Furthermore, underneath Hans’s symptom was a repressed, hostile wish against his father. Yet his Oedipal hatred was in reality quite comprehensible; it was indeed a realistic fear. What in Hans’s case was constitutive of the neurosis was the replacement of the father by a horse, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fact that the psychical representative was furthermore replaced by a regressive form of expression (i.e., by the return to orality as symptomatized through his fear of the horse’s bite). Therefore, Freud may conclude that “repression is not the only means which the ego can employ for the purpose of defense against an unwelcome instinctual impulse. If it succeeds in making an instinct regress, it will actually have done it more injury than it could have by repressing it” (105; my emphasis). From whence our unexpected finding: . . . the motive force was fear of castration. . . . The affect of anxiety, which was the essence of the phobia, came, not from the process of repression, not from the libidinal cathexes of the repressed impulses, but from the repressing agency itself. The anxiety belonging to the animal phobias was an untransformed fear of castration. It was therefore a realistic fear [Realangst], a fear of the danger which was actually impending or was judged to be a real one. It was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety. (108–9; my emphases) How then confront these two contradictory views on anxiety: the first positing anxiety as the transformation of repression into anxiety, the second as situated in the ego and the instigator of repression? And how interpret Freud’s “or”—that is, the possibility of either an actual impending danger or the ego’s judgment that there exists such a danger? It will not be easy, so Freud concludes, to reduce the two sources of anxiety to a single one (110). Freud’s first strategy for such a reduction is to return to the relationship between anxiety and symptom-formation, the latter in particular through a general symptomatology of the obsessional neurotic. Symptoms can either be negative in character—that is, show themselves as prohibitions, precau-

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tions, or expiations—or they can function as substitutive satisfactions usually appearing in symbolic disguise. A symptom will prove itself particularly successful, however, if it can combine a prohibition with a substitutive satisfaction, when, in other words, it can make prohibition pleasurable, desirable. It is in this context that Freud posits the centrality of the ego’s defense mechanisms and the relegation of repression to one of the forms that such defenses may take: “It is of advantage to distinguish the more general notion of ‘defense’ from ‘repression.’ Repression is only one of the mechanisms which defenses make use of” (114; my emphasis). Freud—“in the course of [his] struggles”—meets multiple defensive activities on the part of the ego that are “obviously surrogates [my emphasis] of repression.” He calls these activities “auxiliary,” “substitutive techniques” on the part of the ego, and finally also “variations”: The fact that such auxiliary and substitutive techniques emerge may argue that true repression has met with difficulties in its functioning. If one considers how much more the ego is the scene of action of symptomformation in obsessional neurosis than it is in hysteria and with what tenacity the ego clings to its relations to reality and to consciousness, employing all its intellectual faculties to that end—and indeed how the very process of thinking becomes hypercathected and erotized—then one may perhaps come to a better understanding of these variations of repression. (119; my emphasis) It is only at this point—with repression both sidelined and yet maintained as central, to the degree that other defenses are substitutes, auxiliaries, or variations—that Freud turns to the problem of anxiety. Freud in fact turns again to Little Hans’s animal phobia, reiterating here that the ego recognizes the danger of castration, gives the signal of anxiety and thereby “inhibits through the pleasure-unpleasure agency (in a way which we cannot yet understand) the impending cathectic process in the id” (125). But Freud introduces here also two further points. First, such an anxiety is no different from any other form of realistic anxiety that the ego would experience in a situation of danger; the only difference with animal phobias is that the true content of the danger is unconscious and experienced as a distortion. Second, phobias have the character of projection to the extent that “they replace an internal, instinctual danger by an external, perceptual one. The advantage of this is that the subject can protect himself against an external danger by fleeing from it and avoiding the perception of it, whereas it is useless to flee from dangers that arise from within” (126; my emphasis). Freud may therefore formulate some first conclusions about anxiety. It is a reaction to a situation of danger: when

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this danger comes from without, the ego may take flight, but when it derives from impulses from within, then the ego generates a defense in order to avoid the dangerous situation. The ego accomplishes such a defense by projecting the danger outward and developing a substitutive symptom that represents the internal danger as an external one; finally, the situation is signaled by the ego inasmuch as the ego generates a feeling of anxiety. Freud introduces however another fundamental point, one that “places the question of anxiety in a new light” (130). If anxiety can be linked to the danger or threat of castration, then it can also—and by extension—be linked to object-loss more generally. Thus, “castration can be pictured on the basis of the daily experience of the faeces being separated from the body or on the basis of losing the mother’s breast at weaning” (129–30; my emphasis). If anxiety is an affective signal of danger, then this danger may perhaps stand for a generalized loss. Now, while Freud raises such a possibility, he immediately also rejects such a proposition, the one in fact put forward by Rank. The first experience of anxiety which an individual goes through . . . is birth, and, objectively speaking, birth is a separation from the mother. It could be compared to a castration of the mother (by equating the child with a penis). Now it would be very satisfactory if anxiety, as a symbol of a separation, were to be repeated on every subsequent occasion on which a separation took place. But unfortunately we are prevented from making use of this correlation by the fact that birth is not experienced subjectively as a separation from the mother. (130–31; my emphases) Now, this is a strange passage, as we pass from the first sentence, whose subject is the baby to the second, where the subject is the castrated mother. The first anxiety is that which compares to or resembles the mother’s castration, a comparison or resemblance made, nevertheless, by the equation of the child and the penis. But this equation is nonetheless a function of a certain separation or withdrawal. And, indeed, Freud needs to pause and take a breath—and in that very act reproduce but also counter the main physiological symptoms associated with anxiety: shortness of breath, heart palpitations, and sweating. He also needs to think—and in that very move engage in another one of the ego’s defenses: isolation and concentration. He above all needs to make some distinctions—first and foremost to separate “true statements about [anxiety] from false ones.” That this is not easy is due to the fact that anxiety “is not so simple a matter” (132), precisely because it breaches all borders, undoes concentration, and produces the physiological signs of anxiety. In the face of his own anxiety, he therefore proposes to as-

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semble “quite impartially, all the facts that we know about anxiety without expecting to arrive at a fresh synthesis” (132). Anxiety is, first and foremost, something that is felt; it is an affective state, even though we do not really know what an affect is or what constitutes its relationship to reality and the drives. Furthermore, anxiety is distinctly unpleasurable; it is a form of discharge of emotions and also a form of perception of that discharge. While the act of discharge is a purely physiological affair, something else intervenes, something that Freud links to a historical factor, in other words, to the reproduction of some experience that contained “the necessary conditions for such an increase of excitation and a discharge along particular paths” (133). What then is the function of anxiety and on what occasions is it reproduced? Freud’s “obvious and convincing” answer is: “Anxiety arose originally as a reaction to a state of danger and it is reproduced whenever a state of that kind is reproduced” (134). Anxiety is quite fundamentally a modeling activity, even though it is unclear “what recalls the event and what it is that is recalled” (135), what, in other words, is being modeled. While it may appear, then, that anxiety results from some original longing for the lost object of the mother, “a moment’s reflection” proves instead that the situation of danger is produced by nonsatisfaction, by a “growing tension due to need, against which it is helpless” (137). The real essence of need is to be attributed to an economic factor, in other words to a disturbance within the psychic economy. And it is just such a need that constitutes “the real essence of ‘danger’ ” (137). The economic disturbance caused by need is, it would appear, absolutely primary. It is only later—“after the infant has found out by experience” (137)—that “the content of the danger . . . is displaced from the economic situation on to the condition which determined that situation, viz., the loss of the object” (137–38; my emphasis).29 The absence or withdrawal of the mother comes later and in displaced form as a perceptual experience, as an affect and as a signal; she functions as the content of the danger situation, produces a signal and in that manner averts the dreaded economic situation. “This change constitutes a first great step forward in the provision made by the infant for its self-preservation, and at the same time represents a transition from the automatic and involuntary fresh appearance of anxiety to the intentional reproduction of anxiety as a signal of danger” (138).

29. Freud will state a few pages later that it is not so much the loss of the object itself that is feared but the loss of the object’s love (143).

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In an ideal situation, that is, with the presence of a strong ego, the economic factor is not just left behind, but the lost object both replaces and displaces drives, because this object is allowed to undergo elaboration and modification. The loss of the mother is replaced by castration anxiety, and subsequently by the installation of the superego, the substitutive and depersonalized parental agency that had been the source of the threat of castration. “Castration anxiety develops into moral anxiety—social anxiety—and it is not so easy to know what the anxiety is about (139). It is therefore by the act of this substitution that repression is displaced and that anxiety as a signal can come into being. Anxiety (and its theory) displaces repression (and its theory) and brings back the mother from her position of withdrawal—the place in fact where Freud had wanted once again to confine her. All of Freud’s efforts in Inhibition, Symptoms and Anxiety are geared to this displacement; and yet—and this is the fundamental paradox that runs through the entire text—this energy is employed in order anxiously to defend the central theory of psychoanalysis (its theory of the drives, of the unconscious and of repression, and the centrality of the paternal function) from those very theories that make the traumatic anxiety produced by birth into the central event of the human psyche. If Freud projected Rank outward and turned him into an external danger that threatened the borders of psychoanalysis proper, then he could only achieve this expulsion by reinstating anxiety within its own borders. Freud’s need to displace repression in favor of the ego relegates his old theory of anxiety to another place (the unconscious, perhaps?) and his discussion of repression, quite symptomatically, to a long footnote and to the addendum attached to the main text. Freud therefore proposes to rethink the place of repression in psychoanalytic theory. As he states in one of the addenda, one that will also be cited later by his daughter: In the course of discussion of the problem of anxiety I have revived a concept . . . of which I made exclusive use thirty years ago . . . which I later abandoned. I refer to the term ‘defensive process’. I afterwards replaced it by the word ‘repression’, but the relation between the two remained uncertain. It will be an undoubted advantage . . . to revert to the old concept of ‘defense’, provided we employ it explicitly as a general designation for all the techniques which the ego makes use of in conflicts which may lead to a neurosis, while we retain the word ‘repression’ for the special method. (163; my emphases) What then is the impact of these multiple displacements, of what Weber calls Freud’s renunciation of his older “economic” model of anxiety in favor

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of “the more ‘realistic’ topical explanation of anxiety as a function of the ego”—to which I would add also, not just function but defensive function?30 What are the consequences of a theory of anxiety that encompasses both its recognition as an automatic, unreflexive transformation of energy and as the constitutive move made by the ego in order to provide an expedient, mitigated control of external danger? What, finally, is the meaning of Freud’s substitution or displacement of repression with egoic defense as the central mechanism by which the ego institutes and sustains itself as an organization and thereby turns itself into the headquarters of psychoanalysis? Freud reproduces in mitigated form a mode of thinking that itself reproduces one of the ego’s defenses against danger: what Freud in this essay calls isolation. When an event or idea is not repressed it may be separated, made distinct from its affect—that is, from anxiety itself. Isolation—or in its nonneurotic form: concentration—keeps away “not only what is irrelevant or unimportant, but above all, what is unsuitable because it is contradictory. [The theorist] is most disturbed by what once belonged together but has been torn apart in the course of his development. . . . Thus, in the normal course of things, the ego has a great deal of isolating work to do in its function of directing the current of thought” (121). Anxiety provokes then a disturbance to theory—and to psychoanalytic theory in particular. “What Freud is therefore constrained to do is to separate anxiety from its affect, which is also its effect”—and which is how Freud seeks to put anxiety in its proper place, to the extent that he ultimately recognizes (or so Weber reads the situation of danger) that anxiety does not have a proper place. The reality that Freud seeks to place but always ever only displaces—outward and as a representation— can never be fully grasped or occupied: “Any attempt to identify it, situate it, name it—for instance as ‘trauma’—must be regarded as the signal of a danger that can be apprehended, but never recognized as such.”31 And yet I would also insist that in the act of Freud’s multiple displacements and their consequent representational and signaling capacities, a certain recognition is in fact made possible. Freudian anxiety and its theory are the albeit uncertain foundation upon which an ego comes into being, an ego that now must contend not simply with its own drives or “economic disturbances,” but also with a reality that is apprehended as increasingly traumatic. In other words, I must disagree with Weber that Freud’s new theory of anxiety leaves the ego utterly destitute. On the contrary, it is this same theory that allows him to build multiple defenses for the ego against a reality that Freud in 1926 30. Weber, Legend of Freud, 57. 31. Ibid., 59.

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conceives not only as traumatic but also as a real, growing impingement on the contours of the ego. What I am therefore arguing is that Freud’s theory of the ego changes because historical reality and the political forms by which this reality chooses to present itself have themselves changed. Freud may very well have learned this lesson from his own daughter, who—in her seminal The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense—made it clear that taking account of a dangerous reality simply represented, in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s words, “a necessary truth in a mendacious, brutal time” and that no one could escape “the big aggression in the outside world.”32 Anna Freud’s notion, claimed in 1936, that “fear of the external could, at any time of life, cause similar results as the fear of internal agencies” and that this “was a more or less heretical revolutionary idea”—so Anna Freud mused many years later, and within the context of a return to democracy, on the contents of her book on the ego’s defenses—was the central argument she made for egoic defenses.33 The ego’s adaptation to reality cannot therefore be understood as “adaptational” in the worst of senses, that is, as a blind adherence to norms. Instead, it constitutes a defense against reality, a defensive signal, a representation that knows all too well that it does not reproduce reality but modifies it in mitigated form—and thereby saves the ego against the incursions of its “big aggressor.”34 In this sense, Freud’s theory of anxiety—and this through the very separation of its affective impact from a dangerous reality—seeks to

32. Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 214. 33. Joseph Sandler with Anna Freud, Analysis of Defense: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense Revisited (New York: International Universities Press, 1985), 264. This book is a chapter by chapter discussion with Anna Freud of The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, mostly between Joseph Sandler and Anna Freud, though a large number of other analysts were also present. These discussions were held over a year from 1972 to 1973, and to a significant degree they constituted Anna’s or “Miss Freud’s” (as she is referred to here) defense of her theory of defense. At the end of the discussion of her first chapter she indeed exclaimed: “I feel as if I have been trying to justify my own past!” (24). All future references will appear in the text but be indicated as Sandler, in order to distinguish it from Anna Freud’s 1936 text. 34. The term “big aggressor” is Anna Freud’s own, one she used to Sandler in the context of a discussion of the impact of World War II on children. ”Anna Freud: You know, in wartime, when we discussed the Hampstead Nursery children, we had the question very often in mind of how we could teach them to control their aggression when they saw everyone around them being aggressive. The soldiers and the pilots were aggressive. Ilse Hellman: And got medals for it. Anna Freud: Yes, aggression was, so to say, the order of the day, and children don’t really differentiate between the big aggression in the outside world and the small aggression in themselves. I remember one of our children passing a house in one of the streets that had been completely bombed. He looked at the bombed house and said ‘naughty, naughty.’ There was no difference for him between what he broke to pieces and what they broke. Ilse Hellman: I remember one of the little boys saying about the Marie Curie Hospital, which was bombed, ‘Me not done it.’

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construct a new or alternative political space, a social imaginary that is predicated on protecting or defending the ego against the incursions of a reality that is understood as massively aggressive or traumatic and in comparison to which the economic disturbances afforded by the drives are at best relative. Except, of course—and this constitutes the essence of psychoanalytic theory—what is properly internal and properly external is always uncertain, precisely because the ego defends itself by projecting what is internal outward and by integrating or incorporating—and this because the ego is, after all, an organization or institution—what is external into its own structure. The question that remains outstanding is whether the defense of the ego in this new theory of anxiety constitutes a repression of the theory of psychoanalysis itself, whether, in other words, the ego—by virtue of its signaling, representational capacities and therefore of its existence as a political subject—must cease being a psychoanalytic subject. And another question also remains in the theoretical recognition that inside and outside cannot so easily be held apart: Can the ego mount effective defenses against an increasingly totalitarian reality that itself wrecks havoc with just these distinctions, that is predicated on a notion of politics that gets right inside of the ego’s head, indeed right inside the headquarters of psychoanalysis? What if—and this is Anna Freud’s most original contribution in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense—one of the ego’s central defenses is identification with the aggressor? What if the ego defends itself against brutal reality, but in that very same move relinquishes the democratic project and turns itself into a fascist?

How Anxiety is Transmitted It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language was obscene. —Sylvia Plath, Daddy

Nothing could be further away from Anna Freud’s psychological and political universe than that of Sylvia Plath’s poem. Plath’s was a language that expressed the kind of politics against which Anna Freud struggled and fought all of her life. And yet, in the resonance of Plath’s invocations—the repeated Anna Freud: Probably in all these cases there is really insufficient distinction between the child’s own aggression and the aggression in the outside world. Joseph Sandler: Nor, perhaps, enough development of the superego to enable the child to allocate guilt sufficiently to the enemies in the war” (Sandler 400–401).

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“Ich,” the German father, and the barb wire in which the ego, the Ich, is ensnared—she may have felt a sense of her own ensnarement, but attempted to find a language by which to extricate herself from this language and—by extension—from the obscene language of the father. Perhaps this is why she wrote Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen—The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense: as an act of self-defense and as one of her greatest impious fidelities. What strikes at least this reader immediately about Anna Freud’s 1936 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense are three characteristics. First, and as I have already mentioned, it constitutes a direct engagement with her father’s text on anxiety from ten years earlier. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl also suggests that Anna’s book may have been a complementary text to Sigmund’s Moses and Monotheism, which he was writing at the same time that his daughter was working on her defense mechanisms.35 Second, the book has a very odd structure: divided into four parts and into twelve chapters, only the first part (chapters 1–5) explicitly attempts to construct a theory of the socalled mechanisms of defense; the second and third parts are dedicated to “examples,” part 2 to defense mechanism in the face of a danger stemming from “objective reality” (whose contours are, however—and this despite their objectivity—quite indeterminate) and part 3 to two additional types of defense; part 4 treats the “phenomenon of puberty.” The two mechanisms of defense discussed in part 3—“Identification with the Aggressor” and “A Form of Altruism”—are considered Anna Freud’s most original contribution, and it is these two chapters that are still read today and that have become part of standard psychoanalytic vocabulary. Anna Freud proceeds here then in a—for her—very typical manner, one I already noted in the previous chapter: by the enumeration and accumulation of examples, rather than by a systematic theoretical analysis of the problems at hand. The book could therefore be summarized as a compilation of all the mechanisms available to the ego in order to defend itself against “unpleasure and anxiety” and of the means at its disposal to control “impulsive behavior, affects, and instinctual urges.”36 While Freud thought of her book, as she wrote to Max Eitingon in October 1934, as the theoretical grounding for her work with adolescent children, and while Young-Bruehl considers a key hypothesis of the book “the order in which a small child has developed various defenses” as “the order in which that child recapitulates the early defenses in puberty and adolescence,”37

35. Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 214. 36. Anna Freud, The Writings of Anna Freud, vol. 2, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1966), v. All further references appear in the text. 37. Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 176.

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it is in reality difficult to read this work as a systematic whole. I may also point out that, similar to Anna Freud’s earlier “Beating Fantasies” essay, here too both the defense mechanisms and the case histories discussed have a distinctively autobiographical coloring. While, of course, any theory is the result of its author’s transferential relations and own personal defense mechanisms, the question of Anna’s own investments seems always particularly acute: hers seems to be a deeply personal theory, indeed a theory of the personal and therefore of the ego, so that her theories continuously raise the question of what Ernest Jones had called “unanalyzed resistances” and many of her other critics pointed to as her unresolved father complex. According to Young-Bruehl, the question is less whether Anna Freud did or did not adhere to her father’s theories, remained loyal or disloyal to the cause (which ultimately is a tedious question), but more whether her work “reflected limitations in her own selfknowledge.”38 While I would agree with Young-Bruehl in such an overall assessment, that is, with her relativization of the problem of Anna Freud’s loyalty or not to psychoanalytic orthodoxy, I am more inclined to read her so-called personal “limitations” through a distinctly political lens, that is, as a desire on her part to translate the personal into the political and back. Third, and this follows directly from the previous point, the language in which the text is written is very much political. The ego, but also the id and the superego, are invariably referred to as “institutions”; the relations between these institutions are described as “peaceful,” “at war,” or as “collaborators”; the ego, id, and superego are “neighboring powers”; and then there are, of course, repressions, defenses, “altruistic surrender,” and “identification with the aggressor.”39 The last two terms, in particular and as I will try to show in the following pages, make up the central aspect of her theory of politics.

38. Ibid., 185. 39. In point of fact, the question of terminology is more complicated, since Anna Freud wrote and originally published the work in German as Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen. In other words, this is a work written very much in a transitional space, that is, from the perspective of the exilic, one that, in a certain sense, has no translation, as we already discovered through the catachrestic language of the children of the camps. While the analysis of children was of course central to Anna Freud’s entire theoretical and therapeutic project, and while indeed her own identificatory mechanisms were centered on the traumatized and orphaned child, my own sense is that such a child is reclaimed in this book—and this not so much in her investigations into puberty, but more centrally in her theoretical elaborations of “objective anxiety.” In regard to the transitional or transnational nature of her text, she told Sandler, “The English is not mine . . . because at the time the book was written I did not yet write in English, and the book had to be translated. I never corrected the translation later, nor did I make it more personal, so in certain respects the German version is much closer to the original [and therefore more personal?] meaning than the English one” (Sandler viii–ix). And therefore: “I want to say that what is translated here as “institutions” was Instanzen [instances] in German. I never corrected the translation” (Sandler 48).

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For Anna Freud, the story of how the ego comes into being is also a political narrative, indeed a war narrative. Under the impact of the war on the outside, she effects a displacement of her father’s wars between the drives. Thus Adam Phillips asks: What now can’t be explained by the war between Eros and Thanatos, and the drive to repeat? If the unconscious becomes intelligible—a source of coherent narratives—it also begins to be usurped by a new figure called the child. For some psychoanalysts . . . describing the child replaced describing the unconscious, or the dream work. Or rather, in their view, describing the child was to describe the unconscious. The child was, as it were, the unconscious live: you could see it in action.40 “This book is about the relations between ego and id on the one hand, and the defense mechanisms on the other. The defenses are described as possibilities the child has for dealing with something that has already been influenced by imitation, internalization, conflict or agreement with the parents, admiration of them, and so on”—so Anna Freud summarized her 1936 book in the early 1970s (Sandler 373). Since what interests me in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense is what I see as Anna Freud’s central thesis on politics, I will leave to the side the last pages of the text that deal with her work on puberty, as well as all those aspects of the work that seek to construct what Young-Bruehl calls a “rough map” of psychic development through the correlation of stages of development with the specific defense mechanisms that she describes. The chapter on the identification with the aggressor is of particular importance, and indeed it is highlighted by Anna Freud herself, both in the book and in her later discussions with Joseph Sandler. Therefore, I will focus, first, on what she describes as the passage from id-analysis to ego-analysis in psychoanalytic theory and on her understanding of the meaning and function of the defenses as a response both to a real situation of danger and to anxiety as a signal, the combination of which she calls objective anxiety. Ego analysis, I argue here, constructs the possibility of a new headquarters for the ego and for psychoanalysis. Second, I will analyze her list or examples of the various defense mechanisms, with special attention paid precisely to the defenses’ “exemplary” nature, to their existence as items on a list and to the question whether they can be conceived of as “items” in the first place. I will claim that the defense’s status as an example forms the basis of Anna Freud’s particular mode of thinking, that it indeed grounds her 40. Adam Phillips, “Bombs Away,” in Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 42.

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theoretical apparatus more generally and her theory of politics more specifically. Finally, I will turn to her two very own defenses, “identification with the aggressor” and “altruistic surrender,” and will propose that they both construct a political ego for Anna Freud and allow for her pious infidelity vis-à-vis her father. In 1966 Anna Freud wrote a brief forward for the new and revised edition of The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense in preparation for its inclusion in her collected writings. There she stated that the book “deals exclusively with one particular problem, i.e., with the ways and means by which the ego wards off unpleasure and anxiety, and exercises control over impulsive behavior, affects, and instinctual urges.” She immediately continues by pointing out that, while today such a theoretical focus has become “a legitimate object of psychoanalytic study,” in 1936 the investigations into “an activity of the ego in this painstaking manner” and the treatment of it “on a par with the processes in the unconscious id was a comparatively novel venture” (v). What may constitute “a legitimate object of psychoanalytic study” is therefore the central political stake of her contribution. The passage to be made from an analysis of “deeper” strata to “the more superficial psychic strata” was inevitably perceived as “a beginning of an apostasy from psychoanalysis as a whole. The view held was that the term psychoanalysis should be reserved for the new discoveries relating to the unconscious psychic life, i.e., the study of repressed sexual impulses, affects, and fantasies” (3). Now, the question that must be asked immediately is: Who exactly was making these claims for psychoanalytic orthodoxy and—by extension—who was making these accusations against her in the first place? The father of psychoanalysis? Apparently not, for that father seemed hard at work in giving all the necessary defenses to his daughter’s investigations into the analysis of the defenses. Indeed, she immediately states that her father’s “fresh directions” and focus on the “ego institutions” after 1920 had been geared to “the fullest possible knowledge of all of the three institutions of which we believe the psychic personality to be constituted and to learn what are their relations to one another and to the outside world” (4–5).41 Or was it her psychoanalytic brothers—rivals for sure, but also, as dutiful sons of the secret ring, quite effectively muscled to

41. Anna Freud told Sandler: “What I had in mind when I wrote the book was what we would now call the wish, as well as the other psychological ways in which derivatives of the drive can appear in consciousness. It is perhaps not quite easy for those who read the book today to grasp the atmosphere in which it was written. One might well ask, when one reads the first chapter, Why does the further content of the book need something which is almost an apology? . . . There was quite a big body of opinion very much hostile to any attempt to deal with the ego or with ego activity as such. This was never the case in my father’s writings” (Sandler 6–7).

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the cause by their father?42 Why then this defensiveness and this insistently made claim that her text was so revolutionary and heretical? And in regard to whom? Are such heretical claims made because Anna wants precisely to stake a claim of her own, deviate, be different, perhaps even prove herself as not like all those other women patients who brought their own hysterical id problems to her father, while she, on the other hand, could guarantee that she would offer him only her ego-problems? Quite possibly, it is all a matter of the point of view from which one makes one’s observations; not from below as her father had done—who quite famously in his epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams desired to move the underworld if he could not move the heavens.43 This need to change perspective, one already noted by Sigmund Freud in his essay about his “disturbance” while standing on the Acropolis as he engaged his own father’s business-minded view of the world, may very well be the fraught place of any generation that is destined to follow: if the grandfather had been in the money business and if the father had raised hell by being in the id business, must the daughter and inheritor of the psychoanalytic movement necessarily go into the ego business? In fact, Anna Freud explicitly claims to move the heavens, the higher faculties of the psyche. In this, she makes herself into nothing less than an observer of the ego and—like the ego—she must be concerned with its and her own intactness: “The idea I put forward wasn’t popular at all at the time—I mean the idea of the ego’s concern for its own intactness. And what wasn’t popular either was the idea that the ego as such is hostile territory to the impulses and drives” (Sandler 277; my emphasis). The ego strives for its intactness and therefore to be somebody, indeed, to be a “self ”—and this in the face of a hostile (possibly paternal) territory. Sandler remarks to “Miss Freud”: “In your book there are times when you use ‘ego’ where I think that you quite clearly mean ‘self.’ This double meaning must have caused a lot of problems at the time. So many complications arose in the past because the word ‘ego’ was used for oneself as an object.” Sandler quite correctly wonders about the extent to which the ego in question is not in fact grounded in a personal or self-reflexive analysis. To which she answers: “And of course there is no word for the noun ‘self ’ in German” (114; emphasis mine). And much later in these conversations, she again states: “At the time

42. Perhaps it was not her brothers but rather her sisters who constituted the disturbance: “I remember Helene Deutsch, who was at that time half in America [?], saying that I will finish myself with analysts forever with that book because I dealt with the ego and not with the id” (Sandler 7). And of course there was also Melanie Klein who, however, was not in America but in London. 43. “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo [If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell].”

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the term ego was used very much as a synonym for the self, and what I really have in mind here is that the shifts between the ego activities create different kinds of personalities, different kinds of selves” (Sandler 367; my emphases). Anna Freud quite simply identifies with the ego. As already mentioned, she thought that she had found herself in her father’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, the text that in fact had been his most systematic analysis of the concept of identification. Quite symptomatically, Anna Freud’s own list of the ego’s mechanisms of defense does not include identification. It does however make its appearance—and this again in symptomatic form—in her addition to her father’s “aristocratic” list of egoic defenses: as, in fact, “identification with the aggressor.” All this makes, of course, the integrity or intactness of the ego extremely problematic, if indeed it is dependent on an identification with, not only the political powers that be, but also on a tradition of thought—psychoanalysis—that she herself had inherited. The theoretical and therapeutic observation of the ego—in both senses that the genitive “of ” here permits—produces for Anna Freud not only the therapeutic defense and protection of such an ego but guarantees those some qualities for the observer herself.44 Not coincidentally, the first chapter of her book is entitled “The Ego as the Seat of Observation.” The ego is in this chapter quite importantly not simply enthroned as an observer but is also the seat of observation, a seat that it nevertheless shares with anxiety. This latter claim is the central import, as we will remember, of her father’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, and it is this claim, or so I would argue, that Anna Freud uses in order to solder the ego to its defenses. Hence she may in this chapter move without apparent difficulties from the statement that “the proper field for our observation is always the ego. It is . . . the medium through which we try to get a picture of the other two institutions [the id and the superego]” (6; my emphasis) to the statement that the ego provides “a picture of these processes transmitted to us by means of the ego’s faculty of observation” (7). The transmitter for these pictures, of these representations or Vorstellungen, is the signal, one that in times of peace functions silently, but in times of war with a great deal of noise. Peace has no language: “If the id is quiescent,” so Sandler summarizes the point, “then it will not intrude upon the ego, it will not create tension, and we cannot observe it. . . . The ego knows nothing of its own defensive measures” (Sandler 4–5). We cannot

44. “The ego is always the central point for noticing the conflict [between itself and the demands of the id and of the superego]. I have treated it [the ego or the conflict?] in the book as it might be seen from the outside” (Sandler 15; my emphases). From the outside but also from within, in an identificatory manner, I would add.

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observe it because in fact the ego is doing all the work: “When the relations between the two neighboring powers—ego and id—are peaceful, the former fulfills to admiration its role of observing the latter” (6). Owing to the ego’s tendency to synthesis or intactness, analytic observation often “lasts only for a few moments at a time” (9)—precisely because in peace the ego produces no signal. It is only conflict and war, that is, the breakdown of the ego’s observational capacities that provides a message for the “outside observer” and therefore for psychoanalysis: The passing of instinctual impulses from one institution to the other may be the signal for all manner of conflicts, with the inevitable result that [the ego’s] observation of the id is interrupted. On their way to gratification the id impulses must pass through the territory of the ego and here they are in alien atmosphere. . . . They are exposed to criticism and rejection and have to submit to every kind of modification. Peaceful relations between the neighboring powers are at an end. (6–7) It is because the seat of observation shifts, depending on whether there is peace or war, and because this seat may either produce or not produce signals, the picture “transmitted to us by means of the ego’s faculty of observation is more confused but at the same time much more valuable. It shows us two psychic institutions in action at the same moment” (7; my emphases). Analytic observation and theory thus find themselves poised between silence and noise, between defenses that are successful and therefore silent and defenses that are unsuccessful and noisily signal their presence, give witness to their existence: “All the defensive measures of the ego against the id are carried out silently and invisibly. The most we can ever do is to reconstruct them in retrospect: we can never really witness them in operation. . . . The [successfully observing] ego [paradoxically] knows nothing of it; we [analysts] are aware of it only subsequently, when it becomes apparent that something is missing” (8; my emphasis). These passages constitute the essence of Anna Freud’s theory of defense. Psychoanalytically speaking, that is, from the point of view of the observing analyst, defenses can never be silent—they must produce a certain noise or interference with the ego’s own observing defensive measures. The analyst, in this context, must therefore take upon herself the ego’s observing functions, because she is the stand-in or substitute for what is missing. The analyst thus functions as a kind of proxy ego. “Defense analysis,” she tells Sandler, “did not exist as a technical term at that time.” And, therefore, “What I battled with in the first chapter of my book [was this]. I was saying: ‘Look at it, the

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ego has always been included in the analytic work, the whole analytic work is undertaken for its sake’ ” (Sandler 7; my emphasis). It is by virtue of just this takeover that Anna Freud may not only shift id-analysis to ego-analysis but also relegate repression to some other place—in fact, to a list, to a decalogue of psychic prohibitions. Silence is particular above all to successful repression: “The ego knows nothing of it. . . . I mean by this that, when we try to form an objective judgment about a particular individual, we realize that certain id impulses are absent which we should expect to make their appearance in the ego in pursuit of gratification. If they never emerge at all, we can only assume that access to the ego is permanently denied to them, i.e., that they have succumbed to repression.” And this means that we cannot know a whole lot about “the process of repression itself ” (8; my emphasis). This leads Sandler to wonder: “The question that then comes to mind is how the ego knows what to repress. Does it not first sample the instinctual wish by allowing it some entry, and then because of the anxiety signal say no? Doesn’t this process have to occur over and over again, because the repressed wish has to be recognized in order to be defended against?” (Sandler 237–39). How, Sandler is essentially asking, can we make repression both singularly silent and yet also just one of the mechanisms of defense and therefore quite noisy? How does the ego repress the operations of repression, while also tending to its noise? How can we, in other words, effectively integrate id-analysis with ego-analysis? An answer to these questions Anna Freud in fact had already provided much earlier in these dialogues, when she claimed—somewhat disarmingly but also impiously—that her “bad habit” of straddling these two domains “is much to be recommended because it simplifies thinking enormously and simplifies description when necessary” (32–33). This simplification of thought and of description guides not only Anna Freud’s definition of the defenses, but also furnishes the means by which “our analytic technique . . . has accommodated itself ” to a new theoretical focus (11). Now, an unambiguous definition of the defense is, as Sandler states, “practically impossible” (Sandler 101). It has something to do with the resolution of a conflict—between father and daughter, for example—though this resolution can be either successful or not. In the case of a successful defense, where there is no war and therefore the defenses are, if not superfluous, then less necessary, we know now that the defenses fall silent and that this is so because the ego is in the position of an observer. It is also connected to the management of reality, even though this management does not thereby signify simple adaptation: some have thought, so Anna Freud claims, that by successful defense she had meant successful “in terms of the external world. Of course, I meant nothing of the kind. When I speak of successful defense

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I look at it from the point of the ego”—which of course means that the defense was precisely unsuccessful; otherwise it would not be observable by the analyst. She continues: “If the ego defends itself successfully, it means that it achieves the aim of not allowing the forbidden impulse to enter into consciousness and that it does away with the anxiety connected with it and escapes unpleasure of any kind.” A defense must then quite fundamentally fail, lest it cease to exist as an analyzable object. And, therefore, “a wholly successful defense is always something dangerous. Either it restricts the area of consciousness or the competence of the ego too much, or it falsifies reality” (Sandler 194–95). All of this proposes that when defense mechanisms are successful, they in fact are no longer defense mechanisms—to the extent that contrary impulses have been either repressed or the ego has become a “collaborator” (Sandler 21) with these same impulses. When defense mechanisms are ego syntonic, they fall silent and therefore cease to be defense mechanisms: they emit no signal. They also change character when they get too close to the id itself: Joseph Sandler: . . . such mechanisms also play a part in normal development. For example, introjection has been seen as the mental counterpart of oral ‘taking in,’ an essential element in building up the child’s inner world. It seems that we have a whole group of mechanisms that may at times be used for defensive purposes, but need not always function as defense mechanisms. Anna Freud: . . . When they are close to the primary process they are not defensive. (Sandler 111; my emphases) It is ultimately the very indeterminacy of these mechanisms that at times are defensive and at other times are not, that shapes Anna Freud’s psychoanalytic lens, her capacity as an observer, and a theoretical apparatus that she explicitly calls “gross” and “extreme”: “I have made only very gross distinctions,” she tells Sandler (Sandler 17). And: “In an account of the sort which I give in my book, each little section in each chapter is there in order to show some possibility in an extreme form” (Sandler 39). Much later in the discussion, we find the following exchange: Joseph Sandler: When we begin to look microscopically at the concept [of sublimation], then, as with many other concepts, our theory may break down. Anna Freud: You know, that applies to all the defense mechanisms. If you look at them microscopically, they all merge into each other. You will find repression anywhere you look. You will find bits of re-

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action formation or identification. . . . The point is that one should not look at them microscopically, but macroscopically, as big and separate mechanisms, structures, events, whatever you want to call them. Then they will stand out from each other, and the problems of separating them theoretically become negligible. You have to take off your glasses to look at them, not put them on.45 And finally: “I really wanted to show certain things very clearly. And to do that one had to exclude many of the details. . . . Even at the time people used to complain at my trying to give a very clear, extreme picture. For instance, I remember Otto Fenichel saying that I always stopped talking about things when they began to be really interesting” (Sandler 40). Taking the lead from her father’s comments in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety about the need to make repression simply one of the mechanisms employed by the ego to ward off danger, Anna Freud dedicates her fourth chapter to a compilation of a list of defenses.46 She enumerates nine such methods of defense: regression, repression, reaction formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, and reversal; to these nine, “we must add a tenth, which pertains rather to the study of the normal than to that of neurosis: sublimation, or displacement of instinctual aims” (44). She will eventually in a later part of her book add two more defense mechanisms—her own—to the Freudian “aristocracy” of defense mechanisms: identification with the aggressor and altruistic surrender. Much of the discussions held between Sandler and Freud in the early 1970s turns around this problem of the list. Sandler presses Anna Freud to explain what had made her include certain mechanisms and exclude others. At a certain point, she remarks: “I remember that I was very reluctant to say there were nine mechanisms, because I had the feeling that if I said there were nine there might then be ten. One should never count these things” (Sandler 113). The entire discussion about this list sounds oddly like a discussion about the Ten Commandments and whether in fact the list should be considered definitive or whether “it is appropriate to keep adding to the list” (Sandler 104). It all turns on the question of the distinction between the normal and the 45. Joseph Sandler with Anna Freud, Analysis of Defense, 176. There was a very long discussion between Anna Freud and all the analysts present about the question whether sublimation should in fact be included as a defensive mechanism, when in reality sublimation seemed so obviously to constitute a healthy behavior on the part of the ego vis-à-vis the real world. 46. While Sigmund Freud put repression on his own list of defenses, repression nonetheless always remained exemplary for him because constitutive of the subject. I propose that for Anna Freud, the exemplary defense mechanism is that of identification—precisely the one defense mechanism that does not appear on her list—which she precisely repressed.

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pathological, whether, in other words, defense mechanisms should be considered “normal” or not. In other words, it all depends on whether we are dealing with defense mechanisms and therefore with neurosis, or with activities on the part of the ego that are character building, or perhaps more accurately, with activities that are constitutive of the ego as such. Indeed, in chapter 3 of her book, Anna Freud cites Wilhelm Reich’s term “Charakterpanzerung”— translated as “character armor” but where it should be noted that the Panzer is the German Wehrmacht’s tank—in order to invoke a form of security for the ego that is so effective, such that it no longer requires defenses, precisely because they have turned into “character.” As Sandler quite perceptively remarks: “Certain modes of functioning which were originally defensive have, in a sense, become autonomous. . . . [They] have become part of what we would call the person’s ‘style’ ” (Sandler 86). To which Anna Freud replies: “I felt that the character trait had to be reached in a completely different way. It is not material for analysis, unless something happens which revives it. I probably would not have discussed things in this particular way in the book if there hadn’t been such a lively battle at the time” (Sandler 87; my emphasis). It appears all to be a matter of a threshold,47 one that in the context of these discussions is articulated as the distinction between defensive mechanisms “proper” and so-called defensive maneuvers or measures. It is also a question of a certain literalism or nominalism against the transference of words, objects, and events into other, more metaphorical usages. The exchange on this matter is fascinating: Joseph Sandler: Identification is one component of the reaction formation, but the reaction formation is nevertheless identifiable as something with its own characteristics. Why do we label that compound reaction as a mechanism of defense, whereas such things as clowning or joking might be categorized as defensive maneuvers or measures and not defense mechanisms proper? Anna Freud: I suppose you are right that the reason is historical. But there is a close connection between the defense mechanism and the neurosis proper, whereas what we call defensive maneuvers are nearer to the normal and nearer also to character formation. . . . I don’t remember when the distinction between defense mechanisms and defense maneuvers was introduced. I don’t think it existed in German at all.

47. When we speak of the defenses, Anna Freud states, “It is a question of the threshold” (Sandler 17).

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Maria Berger: You introduced it, Miss Freud, some years ago. .... Anna Freud: Take, for example, falling asleep. Falling asleep is certainly not a defensive mechanism, but it can be used [that is, metaphorically transferred] to defend against aggression, to ward it off. . . . Joseph Sandler: We still have the problem of where to draw the line between the mechanism and the measure, and I don’t think we can do this except on an historical and clinical basis. . . . We have had the difficult task of trying to decide whether to include new ones, which were not mentioned by you, or whether we should consider them automatically as defensive measures. Anna Freud: You have mentioned clowning, which is certainly important as a defensive measure, and you could name character types that are based on it, but can you name illnesses that are based on it?. . . . When I explain the difference between defense mechanisms and defensive measures, I compare the defenses to weapons which exist only as weapons, things such as guns and spears, and so on. There are other things you use for a weapon only at a certain moment. There is a young man before the courts at present, accused of killing his mother with a frying pan. Now is the frying pan a weapon or a measure?. . . . This means that repression or projection would always be defense mechanisms, but clowning or many other activities would be picked up only for momentary use; they are defensive measures. (Sandler 102–6; my emphases) In the best of circumstances, then, a frying pan is just a frying pan—just as when a cigar is just a cigar, but by a certain clowning around it can become a defensive measure against one’s own mother, that traditional wielder of frying pans. Clowning around seemingly changes the frying pan into a weapon, indeed into a defensive mechanism and therefore its nominal, indeed domestic existence into a borderline space that catapults it into the space of the political. We need then to maintain a tight grip on that frying pan, and therefore on the discrete, independent, and itemizable nature of all those defense mechanisms that are caught between silence and noise, between the normal and the pathological, between literality and transference.48 In addition, the nature of defense is also caught by the problem of the lie: 48. It is no coincidence, I think, that Freud expends a great deal of energy on the problem of transference in her book, and here in particular on what she calls the “transference of defense”: the transference extends not only to id impulses but equally to the ego’s defensive measures. For this reason, the “more correct method is to change the focus of attention in the analysis, shifting it in the

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Anna Freud: We know that the little child, when he has done something wrong, habitually says ‘the cat has done it.’ This is an immediate throwing out of the activity from the self and attributing the forbidden wish or action to someone else. Well, what would you call that defense? Is it a projection or an externalization? Joseph Sandler: It would be a defense of either sort if the child were unconscious of what he is doing. But if, in this particular case, what we see is downright lying, I do not think that we should speak of a mechanism of defense. Anna Freud: It is an immediate warding off of a feeling of responsibility, of guilt, of a punishable action. . . . It is an attempt to say, “I am a good girl.” (Sandler 58–59) This is an interesting and revealing exchange, insofar as Sandler is clearly trying to preserve the idea of defense for its psychoanalytic use, that is, as an operation on the part of the unconscious—in this case, the unconscious portion of the ego. Anna Freud, on the other hand, has no apparent difficulties in viewing lying as a perfectly legitimate defense on the part of an albeit young ego, a defense that displaces responsibilities elsewhere and therefore makes itself into a good girl. And she makes this claim despite stating elsewhere that “conscious withholding” is never in itself either a resistance or a defense (Sandler 8). It is for this reason—that is, because it is the moral ego that is always at stake—that Freud’s understanding of defense is so deeply implicated in the notion of prohibition, and it is this implication that moves her list of the ten plus defenses so strangely near to a kind of biblical decalogue. All this is a matter of restrictions. Prohibitions are for her behaviors as much as itemizable defenses on a list: prohibitions in analysis, she states to Sandler, “have very much gone out of fashion. . . . The use of the word ‘prohibition’ can easily be misunderstood. What I meant was rather restrictions—attempts to restrict the material to whatever can be handled within the analytic hour” (Sandler 50).49 And later in these sessions: first place from the instinct to the specific mechanisms of defense, i.e., from the id to the ego. . . . The interpretation of [this] transference is more fruitful than that of the first type, but it is responsible for most of the technical difficulties which arise between analyst and patient. . . . When the transference reactions take this form, we cannot count on the patient’s willing cooperation, as we can when they are of the first type described. Whenever the interpretation touches on the unknown elements of the ego, its activities in the past, that ego is wholly opposed to the work of analysis (20–21). 49. Freud makes some revealing comments about “free association,” whereby the patient “in those days” was forced to be free or he would be kicked out of therapy: “At that time there was much more insistence on free association then there is now, because it was really the task of the patient to

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Joseph Sandler: I am rather puzzled, Miss Freud, when you speak of what people should really do. Anna Freud: When I say things like ‘what they should really do’ I always speak from the point of view, not of the outside observer, but of the internal conflict.” (Sandler 210; last two emphases my own) This statement of course contradicts her earlier claim that the analyst must take the position of an outside observer. In the matter of prohibitions and morality, the lines seem to get somewhat blurred. Anxiety belongs for Anna Freud—and this is a crucial point—to the language of war. Insofar as it is a signal, it is the central factor to set the defenses in motion. Anxiety has three possible sources: the superego, outside or objective reality, and the id impulses. These three sources of anxiety constitute the primary motive for the ego’s need to defend itself. In addition, she also claims that the ego defends itself against any affect associated with the drives. One final motive for mechanisms of defense is provided by “the ego’s need for synthesis,” for “some sort of harmony between its impulses” such as conflicts between “opposite tendencies, such as homosexuality and heterosexuality, passivity and activity,” and so on (60). Superego anxiety is the form of anxiety most typically associated with classical psychoanalysis. An instinctual wish seeks to enter consciousness and with the help of the ego attain gratification. The superego protests, since the impulse is in some manner contrary to prevailing social norms, and the ego submits to the demands of the “higher institution”: “The characteristic point about this process is that the ego itself does not regard the impulse which it is fighting as in the least dangerous. . . . Its defense is motivated by superego anxiety” (55). Indeed, the ego lacks independence here and is “reduced to the status of an instrument” at the superego’s behest. While Anna Freud acknowledges the reality of this form of anxiety and views is as an important source of adult neurosis, she is also convinced that on its own it cannot explain much nor provide an adequate theory of politics. Here, for instance, she points to the obvious failure to bring about social and psychic change on the part of those advocates who want to liberalize society and thereby combat the excessive strictness of the superego. New educational

free associate. Nowadays, for many analysts, to ask the patient to undertake free association represents an undue interference with his rights as a citizen, with his right to say what he wants to say, and to retain what he does not want to say. But at that time an analyst was entitled to give up a patient if he did not agree to free associate” (Sandler 8).

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practices—and here she cites Wilhelm Reich—have not brought about a softer superego, nor have they reduced anxiety. Therefore, “the hope of extirpating neurosis from human life is found by educators to be illusory, while from the theoretical point of view it is shattered as soon as we take our next step in analytic research” (56). The superego is in fact not an indispensable factor in the creation of neuroses. This is the case because, when we turn to infantile neurosis, we find that the child “fears the instincts because it fears the outside world” (57; my emphasis). In other words, the child combats the drives only to the extent that its dread is motivated by objective anxiety. This latter term is perhaps one of the most controversial in Anna Freud’s repertory. It most certainly signifies a downgrading of the superego: When we discover that objective anxiety causes the infantile ego to develop the same [neurotic symptoms] as occur in adults in consequence of their superego anxiety, the power of that institution naturally sinks in our estimation. We realize that what we ascribed to it should really have been put down simply to the anxiety itself. In the formation of neurosis it seems to be a matter of indifference to what that anxiety relates. The crucial point is that, whether it be dread of the outside world or dread of the superego, it is the anxiety that sets the defensive process going. (57) If the child’s dread of objective reality is quite unnecessary and could be easily alleviated, would this change of reality and the child’s taught relationship to it—say, in the form of less violence in pedagogy, fewer threats, more sexual indulgence, and the like—not be the obvious political platform upon which to bring about change? But here again, “psychoanalytic experience destroys the prospect of an effective prophylaxis” (58). This is so because the ego, for its own reasons, resists the drives, since they—like the external world for that matter—are “alien territory.” [The ego’s] mistrust of their demands is always present but, under normal conditions, hardly noticeable. It is lost sight of in the much more tumultuous warfare waged within its domain by the superego and the outside world against the impulses of the id. However, if the ego feels itself abandoned by these protective higher powers or if the demands of the instinctual impulses become excessive, its mute hostility to instinct is intensified to the point of anxiety. (59) Even if—as Sigmund Freud had already stated in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety—one cannot quite give a content to the ego’s anxiety, it appears

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to be “the danger that the ego’s whole organization may be destroyed or submerged” (59), in other words, that it may be exposed to a state of helplessness. Both threaten the ego’s integrity as they pound at its borders from the inside and out. Finally, since this threat translates into an anxiety signal, it is precisely this affect against which the ego seeks to defend itself, and not against the drives per se. All of this leads to a complicated, even puzzling picture. In her discussions with Sandler, Anna Freud does indeed have much defending to do. For one, what is the difference between a defense that is normal, one dictated by the ego’s need to maintain its synthetic autonomy, and a defensive behavior that results in neurosis? And when “objective reality” is the actual pathological factor, can the ego’s defensive response be ever considered anything but normal? “I imagine,” so Sandler remarks to her in the context of a discussion about what would constitutes “normal” behavior, “that at the time of your writing this chapter the whole notion of adaptation was not in people’s minds as much as in the period after the Second World War” (Sandler 164). What, furthermore, is the difference between the defense against drives and the defense against affect? What indeed is the relation between drive and affect? Anna Freud’s answer here is that while in the “climate back then” the defense against affect “was not really talked about,” and while it was taken for granted that the defense “was directed against the drive and not the affect,” the defense against the latter is in reality “much easier to demonstrate to the patient” (Sandler 82). It is much easier to demonstrate, in fact, because anxiety signals unpleasure or trauma, a trauma that seems to derive from the external world. At this point, another one of the participants intervenes in this discussion: Maria Berger: It seems to me that we are dealing with two issues. One is the question of what the motive for defense is, and it has been said that it is basically to avoid unpleasant feelings, to avoid anxiety. But the other issue has to do with what it is that we manipulate in the defensive process. What do we act on when we defend? (Sandler 84) In defense, Anna Freud would state, we act on anxiety, an anxiety that is such precisely because it signals an “elsewhere.” For this reason, its source is not only “objective,” but indeed produces the category of the “objective” as such. For this reason, it is always “justified.” Objective anxiety [Realangst] is a fear of the external world. In this sense it is a “justified fear” (Sandler 269). Such a claim provokes a rather lively discussion: Joseph Sandler: The increasing emphasis on the experiential world of the child, as opposed to the real world which exists outside his expe-

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rience, and our better knowledge about how perception is distorted by memory and fantasy, puts us on shaky ground nowadays when we talk about real anxiety, so we have to be careful. . . . Is this anxiety objective? Do you mean by objective anxiety that the source of the anxiety is understood by the child as being the external world? If so, we might get into trouble when we consider phobic anxieties, or other anxieties imputed by the child to the external world, which then seem to him objective? Anna Freud: I was really thinking of the fear of loss of love or of the fear of the loss of the object, or of castration fear. (270; my emphasis) But Sandler presses the point further. Objective anxiety appears to be an anxiety that the child feels to have its source in the external world: the child has externalized his castration anxiety or his fear of the loss of love. In reply: Anna Freud: “If you think of the way the child feels it to be, it is for him a danger which threatens from the environment. He believes that somebody will come and do something to him. . . . Maria Berger: So you broaden the idea of objective anxiety to include not only what is objective to the onlooker, but what seems like an objective source of anxiety to the child. Anna Freud: Yes, it’s a fear seen as coming from outside. . . . If you stretch a point you could say the child is afraid of the father. The father is there in reality. So far as the oedipus complex is concerned, the father is in real possession of the mother, which means that he is the real rival. (318–19; my emphases) Both Sandler and Berger wonder at this point whether the concept of objective anxiety is not being stretched too much, since it appears also to include a subjective idea of objective anxiety—in other words, an idea of reality as entirely fantasized by the child. Joseph Sandler: We do have to be careful when we speak of the child’s castration anxiety in the oedipal phase, because that is now anxiety which was originally objective, and has then had added to it externalizations in consequence of the child’s defenses against his own aggressive wishes. In some way we should differentiate between anxiety attributed to the outside world and anxiety which has its actual source in the external world. . . . From the point of view of the child’s primitive thinking the talion principle would certainly make castration fears objective anxiety. But from the point of view of the child’s own projected sadistic aggressive wishes, it would not

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be objective anxiety. I think we would give less weight nowadays to the child’s idea that there must be a retaliation as the dominant or only feature in castration anxiety. . . . Anna Freud: I like that formulation. We know the father wouldn’t have done it, but the child didn’t know. The child took it as a reality, and that element in the castration anxiety was objective anxiety. (Sandler 318–19, 321) These are, to say the least, very complex questions being raised. While Sandler and Berger are certainly right in arguing that Anna Freud is in some sense collapsing the distinction between reality and fantasy, an insistence on this distinction is of course predicated on the assumption that objective reality without the operation of fantasy is possible in the first place. My own sense is that it is just this assumption that Anna Freud is contesting. For Sandler, the existence of objective reality and therefore objective anxiety both hinge on the possibility of an equal exchange, even a kind of tautology, one embodied in the talion principle of “an eye for an eye” or “a phallus for a phallus.” It is for this reason that Freud “likes” Sandler’s proposal that reality is that which is fantasmatically constructed, that is, based on a fundamental disavowal: “I know but nevertheless . . . ” One is here also reminded of her own father’s claim about the reality of the father, when he concluded Totem and Taboo with the famous claim that “in the beginning was the deed” (the murder of the primal father), a claim made despite his simultaneous insistence that whether the father was murdered or not is not so important: it is the belief in this event that really counts. For Freud, it all comes down to the question of what Maria Berger refers to as the “onlooker.” For Berger, objective reality finds its guarantee in this other nonchildish onlooker, in a pair of eyes that are not the child’s own. According to Freud, it is just these two positions that cannot be held apart. The onlooker or observer is constituted by a kind of seesaw position of perspectives between the child and the adult, the patient and the analyst, the defenses and the ego. This is what, ultimately, transference means for her: the perspective of the child analyst. Furthermore, the question of the onlooker should alert us also to her earliest psychoanalytic paper, her essay on beating fantasies. There, too, we must remember, in the phrase “a child is being beaten” (by the father, by the fantasizer, by girls who are boys), it was such a seeing and being seen that was constitutive of social reality itself. The constitution of the ego in and by its defenses is deeply implicated in a certain violence—the “big aggression” of reality. This is a violence founded

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in but also superseding what Sandler refers to as the law of the talion, a set of prohibitions or beatings, for sure, but also the pleasures afforded by this violence and aggression. The center of such pleasures in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense are named “Identification with the Aggressor” and “Altruistic Surrender.”

Identification with the Aggressor Identification per se does not appear on Anna Freud’s list of defensive mechanisms. This is the case because on its own it constitutes “an enrichment of the ego” (Sandler 148). As a defensive mechanism it exists only as “identification with the aggressor.” She also distinguishes identification from introjection, defining the latter as a defensive mechanism “against feelings of helplessness, of smallness, of impotence in the child, who then appropriates qualities of the adult in order to bolster up the self ” (Sandler 149). Identification with the aggressor is all concerned with what you do when you meet a biting dog: “If the boy is frightened of the dog, identifying with the dog doesn’t mean he will bite the dog. It means he is also a dog, so no dog will bite him” (Sandler 387). Dogs don’t bite other dogs, apparently, and identifying with a dog does not mean identifying with its predicates, its biting—but again, only apparently so. Identification with the aggressor is a form of assimilation to power, as we will see, and such an assimilation is extremely complex because in Anna Freud’s text it is productive of a series of conflicting meanings that turn precisely on the question of predication. Anna Freud introduces identification with the aggressor by a series of examples. The first case is that of a boy who was brought to therapy because he had the habit of “making faces” at school, thereby making the other children laugh and disrupting class. It turned out that the boy’s grimaces “were simply a caricature of the angry expression of the teacher and that, when he had to face a scolding by the latter, he tried to master his anxiety by involuntarily imitating him. The boy identified himself with the teacher’s anger and copied his expression as he spoke, though the imitation was not recognized. Through his grimaces he was assimilating himself to or identifying himself with the dreaded external object” (110; my emphasis). The German word for “assimilation” used here by Anna Freud is “Angleichung,” which means assimilation in the sense of adaptation: Angleichung is in fact close in meaning to Anpassung—the act of assimilating oneself through an act of “passing.” The question here is: With whom or what is the boy identifying or to whom or what is he assimilating? The teacher or the teacher’s anger? The dog or the biting dog? What in fact was the dreaded external object for the grimacing

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boy? And furthermore, why were the boy’s “gestures” not a caricature, an ironic comment on the teacher’s authority, a clowning around? And if all this was not simply a joke, why did it make the children laugh? And with whose aggression was he identifying, his own or that of the teacher?50 Why finally, did the boy identify with “the master” in order to avert the latter’s anger, when “in reality” his imitation produced the teacher’s anger—and eventually, of course, also the boy’s therapeutic sessions with August Aichhorn, the tireless worker with delinquent children?51 Second example. This is the case of a little girl who tried “by means of magic gestures” to get over her bouts of penis envy. This girl—significantly different from the grimacing boy who performed his defenses “involuntarily”— made use of her defense “purposively and consciously.” She was afraid to pass through the hall of the house in the dark because she feared there an encounter with ghosts. While Anna Freud does not explain to us the connection between penis envy and the vision of ghosts, one must presume that they simply functioned as an embodiment of her anxiety: “Suddenly,” it appears (and just like a ghost), the girl “hit on a device which enabled her to [cross the hall]: she would run across the hall, making all sorts of peculiar gestures as she went.” Tellingly—and again Freud does not elaborate—the girl’s little brother and maybe her real little ghost, the one who perhaps was the source of her penis envy, was pulled into the little girl’s passage à l’acte. She told him all about her secret defense mechanisms against anxiety—and since no one was present at this communication, we must wonder about this language that whispered the meanings of sexual difference: Was it, for instance a function of the id, the ego, or of an objective danger? This is what nevertheless got communicated: “ ‘There’s no need to be afraid in the hall . . . you just have to pretend that you’re the ghost who might meet you.’ This shows that her magic gestures represented the movements which she imagined ghosts would make” (110–11; my emphasis). In other words, the secret transmitted is all

50. ”Joseph Sandler: Whose aggression is it? Are we talking of a reserve of aggression at the disposal of the ego? Do we see a mobilization of an aggressive drive? Anna Freud: No, it isn’t drive aggression. . . . The child is not an aggressive child really, but an anxious child who can mobilize aggression when he is anxious, and it serves him well in mastering anxiety. . . . He appropriates it, I would say. He uses it but it isn’t really his own. Joseph Sandler: You mean he appropriates the idea, but he must be using his own aggression. Anna Freud: Well, if he had no aggression at his disposal he couldn’t use it” (Sandler 398–99). 51. If someone, states Sandler, constantly exposes himself to a danger situation in order to master anxiety, then is this not “quite different from the child who responds to a danger situation with identification with the aggressor?” Anna Freud responds: “If it becomes habitual one would probably identify it as counterphobic.” To which Joseph Sandler replies: “What has always struck me about counterphobic behavior is that the person seeks out the anxiety situation” (Sandler 396).

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about a certain pretense: all you have to do in order to counter the objective dangers of the world is pretend that you are just like them—assimilate, in other words. All of this leads us to Freud’s third example. The exemplary little boy in question arrived at his session with Freud after a different session at his dentist’s office with a lip that was bleeding and a tear-stained face. He tried “to conceal both facts by putting up his hand as a screen” (112). The following day he appeared before his therapist in full armor, donning a military cap and an assortment of weapons. He too identified with another of his aggressors: “The weapons and armor, being manly attributes, evidently symbolized the teacher’s strength and, like the attributes of the father in the animal fantasies, helped the child to identify himself with the masculinity of the adult and so to defend himself against narcissistic mortification or actual mishaps” (113). It is in connection with this little dentist-teacher-warrior that Freud introduces a further dimension of the identification with the aggressor. This is the element of costumes, of dressing-up. The mechanism of identification “is combined with a second important mechanism. By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat” (113; my emphasis). Three elements come together at this moment: first, the idea that assimilation, which here in the German appears as Verarbeitung or working-through, may in fact represent a healthy management on the part of the ego of dental anxieties—Freud’s father in fact claimed that such anxieties were always to be read as a displacement of masturbatory anxieties.52 Second, impersonation may also be a part of identification with the aggressor even when the child only takes on some of the aggressor’s attributes: at the dentist, she tells Sandler, “it would not help you at all to pretend that you are the dentist, whereas with the dog . . . it evidently helps on the spot” (387). Third, this mechanism of defense may be combined with another defensive mechanism, that is, with the reversal into its opposite—here passivity into activity. Anna Freud cites in this regard her father’s words from Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and this way revenges himself on a substitute” (cited 113).

52. Of masturbatory anxieties as well as castration anxieties: “If one looks at the unconscious fantasy of what the dentist would do to him,” Sandler remarks, “we are not very far from an identification with the castrating aggressor.” To which Anna Freud replies: “Yes, only he doesn’t do it to the dentist. That’s all I wanted to emphasize” (Sandler 395).

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Freud is clearly referring here to her father’s discovery of the repetition compulsion and also to his grandson’s Fort/Da game, wherein the loss of the object (the child’s mother and Anna’s sister) was staged or enacted as a means to gain mastery over the loss (and return) of the mother. The Fort/Da game is an attempt at changing passivity into activity: “There is no doubt,” she tells Sandler, “that identification with the aggressor and turning passive into active are very near each other, and still they don’t coincide” (Sandler 389; my emphasis). The child does not need “to go as far”: he becomes the aggressor “in order to protect himself, but doesn’t necessarily now direct his aggression towards the former aggressor. That is why identification with the aggressor remains different” (Sandler 388). Identification with the aggressor is in fact a fundamental aspect of morality. This is why all this leads straight to the creation of the superego. As Anna Freud tells Sandler: “If you want to make a very sweeping statement, you could say, ‘What else is the superego than identification with the aggressor?’ ” (Sandler 404). One of the other analysts present during the discussions in the 1970s suggests that superego development all depends on the internalization of both the mother’s love and the threatened withdrawal of that love. To this Sandler immediately replies: “I think that at the time Miss Freud was writing, the supporting, loving aspects of the superego were not stressed. Freud had introduced the superego concept after World War I, and the aggressive side was very much in mind.” To which Anna Freud answers: “They were, so far as the defensive operations were concerned, of course. They were motivated by fear of what the superego might do. But where the child does not criticize itself, and is not concerned about losing love, then the whole process of building up an inner criticism may be delayed” (Sandler 404). Now, it is just this delay that is central to identification with the aggressor. Hyperbolically but also politically speaking, identification with the aggressor is identical to the superego, as Anna Freud herself asserts. On the other hand, it is also a not “uncommon stage in the normal development of the superego” (Freud 116; my emphasis). It is an entirely normal mechanism employed by the ego “in its conflicts with authority, i.e., in its efforts to deal with anxiety objects” (12). While identification with the aggressor compels the child to internalize “other people’s criticism of their behavior,” it does not compel the child to completely acknowledge “that institution.” This is so because the internalized criticism “is not yet immediately transformed into self-criticism.” Instead, it is “dissociated from the child’s own reprehensible activity and turned back on the outside world” (116). As Anna Freud puts it later, the moment the criticism is internalized, the offense is externalized” (118). And hence identification with the aggressor requires a

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supplement: it is “supplemented by another defense measure, namely, the projection of guilt” (119). This is a preliminary stage of morality and can only become real morality once the internalized criticisms coincide with the ego’s perception of its own faults. From “that moment” on, the severity of the superego is turned inward and “the subject becomes less intolerant of other people” (119). In adults, identification with the aggressor is a form of arrested development of the superego; it is a hypocritical morality. In response to Sandler’s question about the failed coincidence between internalized criticisms and the ego’s awareness of its own faults, Anna Freud replies: “Yes, there are very moral people—I refer here to hypocritical morality—who are indignant about what other people do and ignore the fact that they do it themselves. . . . It is the next step that creates the true morality (Sandler 412). And further: “there are very many moral young children. I would even say moral toddlers, but their indignation is always about what somebody else does. There are no guilty toddlers, I think. Not in the true sense of the term” (Sandler 412). All this leads back to the question of early morality and dogs: Joseph Sandler: I recall when I was a first-year student at the Institute . . . and I asked you about a dog I had who liked to get onto the bed, but when he heard someone coming he would get off the bed . . . I asked you then whether the dog did not feel guilty. And you said that he didn’t feel guilty, but he felt a consciousness of having done wrong. Anna Freud: The crux of the matter would be—how would the dog feel if no one came in? I think he would feel very comfortable. Which means if there is not the fear of discovery, if there is the certainty that no one has seen what you have done wrong, before there has been full internalization, the child doesn’t feel guilty. . . . Joseph Sandler:. . . . The three-year-old who has a guilty look when caught . . . [experiences] the same affect as the later one we later call guilt. Anna Freud: But don’t we call it a guilty look because an adult in the same situation would feel guilty? (Sandler 413–14)53

53. This, I would say, is where the child identifies with the dog: the child and the dog share this point of “early morality.” Earlier in these discussions, W. Ernst Freud remarked: “It happens all the time when one is driving. One only observes the speed limit when one sees a patrolling policeman.” Anna Freud replied: “But all you need to do is to put up a dummy policeman from time to time. People will know it’s a dummy, but it will remind them of the real police. . . . It should be in one’s superego. . . . With the law-abiding person it is in the superego, with others not” (Sandler 154).

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In all this talk about guilty dogs and looks, what Sandler does not understand is how the criticism of others could possibly be transformed into personal guilt, and why such a transformation should be accepted on either political or psychoanalytic grounds. “The problems lie,” he states, “in regard to the way in which the feeling of being criticized is transformed into self-criticism” (Sandler 402). When Anna Freud replies, she is simply at her very best. “Well, you know,” she replies to a man who has been pounding her with questions for almost a year, “you must not take it too literally.” Sandler’s questions had in fact been terrific; he had pinpointed all the problems with her theory of the defenses, and yet he did not—in the end—quite get it. “This is not the whole story,” she adds, “because what is turned back from being directed to the outside world is then added to the outside world. But I don’t deal with that question here.” Yet she does deal with “that question,” and this may in fact constitute one her most refined reflections on the “big aggressor”: What I say is that the process of dealing with the aggression or criticism from the outside may—and you see, I don’t put it too definitely here—collect, so to say, the material which the superego uses in its building operations. It’s like the birds who collect little bits of straw for their nests. It’s not more than that. But when this goes on for a long time, quite a lot collects within the child, and then the next step is that, while it’s there already, it’s not yet effective, because it does not yet really criticize what the child does himself. This is another step that is a very gradual one, and it is a rather painful task to turn the inner institution or agency, which is being built up, truly against the inner processes, rather than towards the outside world. (Sandler 402–3) Identification with the aggressor is a stage for the child that, when transcended, is painful and the result of a slow process of collection. It does not always work. There are many adults, so Anna Freud claims, that remain stuck in what she calls not just a primitive morality but indeed a “sphincter morality,” as she describes it to Sandler. Sandler comments in this regard: “It seems to be almost an ‘as if ’ morality before the child becomes fully identified with the parent’s morality.” To which Anna Freud replies: “Ferenczi added something very interesting which always impressed me. He said that all morality begins as hypocrisy, which is certainly true. He illustrated it in the anal sphere with the child’s first liking the smell of its own excrement, and being quite uninterested in the smell of a flower. But then the child learns to imitate and later to identify with the adults.” (Sandler 224–25). Primitive or sphincter morality hovers, then, in Anna Freud’s thought as both a developmentally necessary element in the construction of a viable ego that can defend itself

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against the incursions of the “big aggressor” and as that element that undoes all possibilities of a viable democratic subject. It will only be, as I conclude, a certain conjuncture of forces that will save the ego against these incursions. First and foremost, it will require the recognition and reutilization of aggressions. In this sense, a theory of democracy must take affect into account. Second, it will have to take this into account in fictional, that is, fantasmatic terms: it will have to think of a renewed sociality as an order constructed on the basis of an imaginary sociality. Anna Freud will ultimately summarize this imaginary sociality in terms of what for her is the ultimate ego defense: altruistic surrender.

Conclusion Ego Politics

Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. . . . I owe that almost monstrous variety to an institution—the Lottery— which is unknown in other nations, or at work in them imperfectly or secretly. . . . Every free citizen automatically took part in the sacred drawings, which were held in the labyrinths of the god every sixty nights and determined each citizen’s destiny until the next drawing. —Jorge Luis Borges, The Lottery in Babylon

These concluding reflections address the randomness, indeterminacy, and perhaps even chaos of the political contract in the aftermath of World War II. Borges conceived of these political arrangements in his 1941 short story as a kind of lottery system. So also did John Rawls thirty years later in his monumental A Theory of Justice.1 With one and perhaps crucial difference: Borges explicitly placed such randomness and indeterminacy within the realm of fiction and thereby within the work of language. Rawls remained committed—anxiously—to eliminating just this linguistic element from his own lottery system of the political contract, thereby purifying his theory of any of those disturbances that may arise as a result of passionate drives. In these concluding pages I would like to place Anna Freud’s defense of the ego, and in particular what she called “altruistic surrender,” alongside Rawls’s canonical text. I have no desire to compare one text favorably against the other; instead I wonder what happens when these two, in some ways similar, engagements with a postmodern and posttraumatic, even orphan, subjectivity meet. This is, I concede, an unusual juxtaposition: while Rawls constructs his theory of justice on the basis of an exclusion of all affect and of the vicissitudes of language, Anna Freud tries to think of justice in pre1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1999.

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cisely affective and fictional terms.2 While Rawls founds this exclusion on the explicit elimination of one affect in particular, that of envy, Anna Freud makes envy—as we have already seen—central to her model of the political ego. What they nevertheless share is a commitment to the ego, an ego that they construct and defend not on ontological grounds—grounds that they both view as in any case lost—but on epistemological, that is, theoretical, indeed hypothetical and therefore risky grounds. In this sense, they share also a theory that is founded in the experimental gesture of hypothesizing an orphan subject who is cut loose from all Oedipal structures. The defense of democracy is for John Rawls and Anna Freud a question of a certain ethical decision, of a wager or lottery made in the face of and against profound historical uncertainties. This wager, I propose, hinges on the problem of desire. Should desire be excluded from politics, and, if so, how? Can it be excluded, and if it is, what are the consequences of this exclusion? What kind of commitments do we make in the face of the pressures of desire? Does desire help, resist, or undo us? Does it strain or constrain?

The Strains of Commitment The parties have a capacity for justice in a purely formal sense: . . . They are rational in that they will not enter into agreements they know they cannot keep, or can do so only with great difficulty. . . . They count the strains of commitment. —John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

The goal of John Rawls’s monumental 1971 A Theory of Justice was to work out a moral conception of justice appropriate for a democratic society in the face of severe constraints. I read these constraints symptomatically, that is, in terms of a crisis that required not just an intervention but a defense. I therefore propose to read Rawls’s text as a crisis or posttraumatic text—and this in spite of his goal to find a “purely formal sense” of justice. Rawls sought to provide an alternative or answer to the recognized death of an earlier political tradition, one that had been founded in the liberal social contract and the calculation of utilitarian interests. In this, he abolished neither the contract nor the idea that interests and rational decisions are the fundamental categories of politics—indeed, it is these very categories that he sought to uphold, save, and defend. Paradoxically, he accomplished this rescue opera2. Psychoanalysis, so Adam Phillips writes, depends on the workings of language. It is poised “not simply between Science and poetry, but between poetry and epistemology.” Phillips, “Poetry and Psychoanalysis,” in Promises, Promises, 34.

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tion by founding rational choice in the radical irrationality of personal desire, by evoking the latter in order to exclude it. This simultaneous evocation and then exclusion of irrational desires Rawls names the “original position of ignorance,” a position that has interesting affinities to the Freudian nursery. Indeed, he explicitly invokes this nursery in his own text, but only then to take his distance from it. The gesture is, to a certain degree, a replication of Sigmund Freud’s own turning from the certainty of the mother to the hypothesis of the father. Rawls proceeds by first establishing his two fundamental principles of “justice as fairness,” then to prove that individuals, insofar as they are rational and moral beings and when placed within “the original position,” will indeed choose these two principles; and finally he lays out the institutional and political consequences of such a choice. Rawls names the first principle of justice the principle of equal basic liberties (freedom of conscience and thought, of association, movement, occupation, etc., and the equal right of participation in politics). The equality of basic liberties both creates and guarantees the moral autonomy of the individual to the extent that it makes possible a conception of this individual as capable of justice and therefore capable of conceiving the morally good. The second principle of justice is distributive in nature. Since for Rawls the economic rights of property and contract are institutional and since he therefore rejects the idea of natural right, he “refers instead to an ideal of social cooperation where institutions are designed to benefit everyone on a basis of reciprocity. . . . The institution of property is justly ordered when it is part of a social and economic system that specifies property relations so as to make the worst-off class better off than they would be under the institutions of any feasible alternative economic system.”3 The two principles of justice as fairness may thus be summarized as attempting to achieve a society founded on freedom and equality, where all citizens cooperate with one another on the basis of reciprocity and respect. His principles are to guarantee a social order founded in the stable political relations of a welfare state. Rawls’s entire theoretical apparatus depends on the “original position,” because it is here that his principles of justice are freely conceived and confirmed. In his view, there is nothing imaginary, metaphorical, or even ironic about this position. Rawls’s argument aims in fact “to be strictly deductive.” For this reason, he insists “the persons in the original position have a certain psychology, since various assumptions are made about their beliefs and interests. . . . [In this sense] we should strive for a kind of moral geometry 3. Samuel Freeman, ed., introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7.

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with all the rigor which this name connotes.” Unhappily, so Rawls adds, his reasoning “will fall far short of this, since it is highly intuitive throughout. Yet it is essential to have in mind the ideal one would like to achieve.”4 While Rawls’s goal concerns the construction of a fair notion of justice in a (post-) contractarian world, it also concerns the possibility of knowledge and the limits imposed on that knowledge. In this sense—or so I understand his argument—his project constitutes an epistemology rather than an ontology. And within the very limits that Rawls imposes at all points on the activity of knowing, I would argue that he proposes and yet also represses the existence of an unconscious in the affairs of human political existence, even while making psychological assumptions and invoking intuitive ideals. A certain passion drives Rawls’s work, one geared to intellectual rigor if not cleanliness in his attempt at saving democratic theory, and one that is extremely reassuring and even seductive. That this seduction has proved itself immensely successful in the context of a great messiness of politics and political theory after 1945 is evidenced by the fact that Rawls’s Theory of Justice has become the canonical text for a renewed elaboration of an entire discipline (political theory) and therefore for a comforting reassurance that messy feelings and an equally messy past can and should be eliminated in favor of a purely intellectual, procedural, and rational exercise of theory in the realm of politics. In other words, so Rawls insists, the “personal” and therefore the “contingent” must be radically exorcised from political arrangements. Rawls’s vision of politics therefore relies not only on an ego that has all its defenses well in place, but on an ego that is capable of thinking itself out of the conflicts of diverging ethical claims and out of a past that raises alternative political and cultural descriptions of the ego’s existence in the world. The very calm of his prose is predicated on “steer[ing] clear of side issues while at the same time not losing sight of the special assumptions of the argument” (126); it is predicated on the assumption that a theory of justice “is not conditioned by arbitrary contingencies or the relative balance of social forces” (120). Arbitrary contingencies inevitably lead to bias, and such arbitrariness in the world “must be corrected by adjusting the circumstances of the initial contractual situation” (141; my emphases); and finally and most important, simplifications must be made “if one is to have any theory at all” (139).5

4. John Rawls, Theory of Justice, 121; my emphases. All future references will appear in the text. 5. Anna Freud would agree. She repeatedly insists that any good theory is a simple theory. Like Rawls, she also insists that such a theory is always a theory of and by (rational) adults; it requires that one remove one’s spectacles in order to construct a vision from afar.

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I will not, and indeed cannot, take on Rawls’s monumental and canonical theory of justice as a whole. My goals are considerably more modest. I am interested in that specific moment in his text that describes the radical elimination of all affects and knowledges—or so it initially seems—from the individual, an elimination that thereby makes possible this individual’s insertion into the political domain as a subject. Rawls invokes and yet also disposes here of an entire modern tradition of political thought, one that had relied since the nineteenth century on utilitarian calculations and prior to that on a contractarian model of politics and consequently on a notion of an original state of nature. What Rawls effects in his extraordinary book is a preservation of the idea of the contract together with a refutation of the state of nature. He rejects such a state of nature because of its “fictional” status and because such fiction inevitably dictates its outcomes in the sociopolitical domain as always already given before the game even starts. For Rawls fiction and any other cultural products and aspirations are always dangerous. That these desires are conceived in terms of familial metaphors is interesting and worth mentioning. It is all for him then a matter of finding ways by which to exclude what he would perceive as those other possibilities that always carry the weight of a certain fictionality and of a certain burden of a familiar and familial past. It would be easy to formulate a family of conceptions each designed to apply only if special circumstances obtain, these various conditions being exhaustive and mutually exclusive. For example one conception might hold at one stage of culture, a different conception at another. Such a family could be counted as itself a conception of justice; it would consist of a set of ordered pairs, each pair being a conception of justice matched with the circumstances in which it applies. But if conceptions of this kind were added to the list, our problem would become very complicated if not unmanageable. Moreover, there is a reason for excluding alternatives of this kind, for it is natural to ask what underlying principle determines the ordered pairs. Here I assume that some recognizable ethical conception specifies the appropriate principles given in each of the conditions. It is really this unconditional principle that defines the conception expressed by the ordered pairs. Thus to allow such families on the list is to include alternatives that conceal their proper basis. So for this reason as well I shall exclude them. (125; my emphases) The “unmanageability” of problems hardly warrants such a quick exclusion but should furnish instead a point of entry into a text and into all the

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problems that the text proposes. Recent literary practices, and in particular deconstruction and feminist theory, thus emphasize a certain disorder, and this in particular, if an asserted order appears in pairs or binary oppositions. Psychoanalysis furthermore alerts us to the problem of binaries within the family—that hothouse environment where any form of exclusion contributes precisely to that same environment. Nevertheless, Rawls seeks here to perform a kind of surgical operation on the human psyche in order to radically void the category of the human in the name of the human; to instantiate the social contract on purely procedural grounds within a position that is utterly devoid of affect and that therefore is, in the procedural quality of justice on which he insists, rational but nevertheless profoundly ignorant. In this sense, he stands at the opposite pole from Lacan, for whom ethics has nothing to do with the regulation of goods and everything to do with the uncovering of unconscious desire. Rawls insists on an unconscious (what he calls “ignorance”) while also repressing it from all political considerations. Therefore, according to him, subjects—when they think about real justice—both have moral knowledge and are yet draped in a “thick veil of ignorance.” These subjects in fact repeat—or choose, as he would say—the very theory and language that Rawls himself proposes: they inevitably opt for his principles of justice. In other words, and this despite the randomness on which he insists, the dice are loaded from the start, precisely because a shared desire or fantasy is both insisted on and yet also at stake. The basis of his theory of justice is what he calls the “original position.” This position precedes the social contract but does not in itself constitute a “state of nature” to the extent that it seemingly makes no claims about human nature of the kind that would predispose a certain social arrangement. “We may conjecture,” he states, “that for each traditional conception of justice there exists an interpretation of the initial situation in which its principles are the preferred solution” (121; my emphasis). Traditional contract theorists, in other words, had argued backwards and thereby stretched the fantasy too far (139): first, they conceived of a social arrangement and then moved into an unspecified past in order to elaborate its supporting fiction (the state of nature). Rawls, on the other hand, proposes to move in the opposite direction, away from fiction but nevertheless toward a certain intuition, one that displaces fantasy and yet embraces a certain randomness. [The original position] is not a gathering of all actual or possible persons. To conceive of the original position in either of these ways is to stretch the fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. In any case, it is important that the original position be

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interpreted so that one can at any time adopt its perspective. It must make no difference when one takes up this viewpoint, or who does so: the restrictions must be such that the same principles are always chosen. . . . Therefore, we can view the choice of the original position from the standpoint of one person selected at random. If anyone after due reflection prefers a conception of justice to another, then they all do, and a unanimous agreement can be reached. (139; my emphases) The original position is then a “purely hypothetical situation” (120); in fact, it does not have to take place at all in order for Rawls’s theory of justice to be correct. Furthermore, it does not seek to explain human motivation, nor does it provide a theory of human motivation (130). It only “tries to account for our moral judgments and helps to explain our having a sense of justice” (120). A sense of justice is then founded in a radical lack of foundations, on a mere hypothesis that yet evokes a form of intuition. Twenty years after the publication of his canonical text Rawls expanded on his use of this hypothetical original position. In Political Liberalism he states that the original position—to the extent precisely that it is hypothetical and nonhistorical—is to be understood as a device of representation.6 By this he implies that it “models what we regard—here and now—as fair conditions under which the representatives of free and equal citizens are to specify the terms of social cooperation in the case of the basic structure of society. . . . The idea is to use the original position to model both freedom and equality and restrictions on reasons in such a way that it becomes perfectly evident which agreement would be made by the parties as citizens’ representatives” (25–26; my emphases). The device of representation is then to be understood as a “means for public reflection and self-clarification.” And again: “The original position serves as a mediating idea by which all our considered convictions . . . can be brought to bear on one another” (26; my emphasis). As a device of representation, Rawls nevertheless concedes, the very abstractness of the original position may invite misunderstanding: first and foremost, it may seem to suggest “a particular metaphysical conception of the person . . . [an] essential nature of persons . . . independent of and prior to their contingent attributes” (27). Rawls absolutely denies any such attribution, precisely because—and this is an essential paradox of his theory—the original position is actually fictional: “We simulate being in the original position, our reasoning no more commits us to a particular metaphysical doctrine about the nature of the self than our acting a part in a play, say of Macbeth or Lady Macbeth, 6. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

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commits us to thinking that we are really a king or queen engaged in a desperate struggle for political power. Much the same holds for role playing generally” (27; my emphasis). Rawls concludes these later thoughts on the original position with an insistence on what he calls the test of “reflective equilibrium.” Such an equilibrium requires the distinction between three points of view: “that of the parties in the original position, that of citizens in a well-ordered society, and finally, that of ourselves—of you and me who are elaborating justice as fairness and examining it as a political conception of justice.” Rawls unquestionably gives priority to this third point of view: the first two points of view “are merely the artificial creatures inhabiting our device of representation. Justice as fairness is badly understood if the deliberations of the parties, and the motives we attribute to them, are mistaken for an account of moral psychology, either of actual persons or of citizens in a well-ordered society. Rational autonomy must not be confused with full autonomy. . . . Rational autonomy is not, as such, an ideal at all, but a way to model the idea of the rational” (28; my emphases). Rawls desires to make a strictly deductive, though also intuitive, passage from his original position to a just and fair sociality. As he describes such a passage: “The intuitive idea of justice as fairness is to think of the first principles as themselves the object of an original agreement in a suitably defined initial situation. These principles are those which rational persons concerned to advance their interests would accept in this position of equality to settle the basic terms of their association” (118–19). Now, what may constitute “an intuitive idea of justice as fairness” in the absence of human motivations is obviously a significant question, one to which I shall return. I would propose here, however, that such intuition belongs neither to the players in the original position nor to the participants in a “well-ordered society.” It describes indeed the “you-and-me” theorist of the political. Second, one must ask where justice is actually located: in the original position or in sociality itself ? Can the two in fact be held apart and, if not, then what happens to Rawls’s deductive reasoning? Are we not here perhaps dealing with what Ž iž ek calls a “forced choice”? The constitutive character of the subject, so Ž iž ek asserts, means that the ‘social contract,’ the inclusion of the subject in the symbolic community, has the structure of a forced choice: the subject supposed to choose freely his community (since only a free choice is morally binding) does not exist prior to this choice, since he is constituted by means of it. The choice of community, the ‘social contract,’ is a paradoxical choice where I maintain the freedom of choice only

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if I ‘make the right choice’: if I choose the ‘other’ of the community, I stand to lose the very freedom, the very possibility of choice (in clinical terms: I choose psychosis). What is sacrificed in the act of choice is of course the Thing, the incestuous Object that embodies impossible enjoyment—the paradox consisting in the fact that the incestuous Object comes to be through being lost, i.e., that it is not given prior to its loss. For that reason the choice is forced: its terms are incomparable: what I cede in order to gain inclusion in the community of symbolic exchange and distribution of goods is in one sense ‘all’ (the Object of desire) and in another sense ‘nothing at all’ (since it is in itself impossible, i.e., since, in the case of its choice, I lose all).7 In order for individuals to “choose” principles of justice on which all can agree, Rawls stipulates that the original position is one that is draped in a veil of ignorance. He assumes that no individual knows his place in society, his class position, social status, or beliefs. Nor does this individual know anything about his natural talents, abilities, physical strength, and so on. This individual furthermore knows nothing about his conceptions of what is good or about his particular psychological constitution. Quite significantly, Rawls does not mention gender or sexual orientation in his list of absent characteristics. As we will see, this elision will prove important for his theory. Finally, Rawls assumes that “the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is, they do not know its economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in the original position have no information as to which generation they belong” (137). As far as possible, then, the original position describes a condition that is rigorously antihistorical, anticultural, and antipsychological. In this sense, it is above all devoid of particularity, contingency, and predication—all of this in order “to avoid complications” (142). The veil of ignorance guarantees that all predication is to be eliminated from the original position. All it stipulates is a generic “I am”: to be eliminated are the “proper name, or pronoun, or a rigged definite description.” Such exclusions do not, however, lead to the exclusion of a certain kind of egoism, and this limitation on Rawls’s exclusionary strategies will also prove significant.

7. Slavoj Ž iž ek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 74–75. Ž iž ek continues by remarking that the recognition of this forced choice constitutes “the specificity of psychoanalysis: all other theories conceive the incest prohibition as a term in an act of exchange which ultimately ‘pays,’ whereby the subject gets something in return (cultural progress, other women, and so forth), whereas psychoanalysis insists that the subject gets nothing in exchange (and also gives nothing).”

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The veil of ignorance does not stipulate that individuals in the original position are idiots. Some kind of knowledge is in fact required, and it is this knowledge and the implied limits on ignorance that generate a certain messiness in Rawls’s theory. If individuals in the original position are oblivious to particularity and the proper, they certainly know about generality and propriety. They in fact know about laws, indeed, appear to be well-trained political scientists: “It is taken for granted, however, that they know the general facts about human society. They understand political affairs and the principles of economic theory; they know the basis of social organization and the laws of human psychology. Indeed, the parties are presumed to know whatever general facts affect the choice of the principles of justice” (137; my emphasis). The veil of ignorance does not then signify complete ignorance, but provides instead access to generality, classification, and distinction: “The veil of ignorance is a key condition in meeting [the requirement of a certain restriction of knowledge]. It insures not only that the information available is relevant, but that it at all times is the same” (139; my emphasis). If a critic were to interject that it would be better to make decisions on the basis of all available knowledge (including the particular, the contingent, the historical, the cultural, etc.), Rawls would respond by asserting that the veil of ignorance simplifies things and therefore makes theory possible (139). Ignorance excludes bargaining “in the usual sense” (139); it also excludes the formation of coalitions, because no one knows their “real” or “actual” interests to the degree precisely that individuals “cannot identify themselves either by name or description” (140). What constitutes the knowledge of general laws over and against particular and proper names and descriptions is a difficult distinction to make— How can an individual without name and description be an individual in the first place?8 Another problem is raised by Rawls’s veil of ignorance. “The one

8. It would be very difficult, Rawls asserts, “to classify and to grade for complexity the various sorts of general facts. I shall make no attempt to do this. We do however recognize an intricate theoretical construction when we meet one. Thus it seems reasonable to say that other things being equal one conception of justice is to be preferred to another when it is founded upon markedly simpler general facts, and its choice does not depend upon elaborate calculations in the light of a vast array of theoretically defined possibilities. It is desirable that the grounds for a public conception of justice should be evident to everyone when circumstances permit” (142). This is an extraordinary passage. It does not propose a kind of antitheoretical positivist view of the world. On the contrary, it strenuously advocates the possibility and autonomy of theory in the face of a reductionist and sterile empiricism. Rawls clearly desires to formulate an “intricate theoretical construction.” More difficult is the status precisely of this desire and all the ambiguities, complexities, and misunderstandings that such a theory may and inevitably does produce.

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case,” he states, where his assumption fails is “that of saving” (140). By saving he quite explicitly means the ultimately ecological care of the next generation: What, in other words, does the original position do with the problem of succession, if and when the persons in the original position “favor their [own] generation by refusing to make any sacrifices at all for their successors”? (140). Here, it appears, the original position cannot guarantee justice as fairness: it cannot take care of its children; it cannot in fact conceive of children at all. “A conception of justice,” he had stated earlier in his text, “should not presuppose . . . extensive ties of natural sentiment. At the basis of the theory, one tries to assume as little as possible” (129). Rawls “resolves” the generational problem of justice toward the child by simply “altering” the “motivation assumption”: The question arises, however, whether the persons in the original position have the obligations and duties to third parties, for example, to their immediate descendants. To say that they do would be one way of handling questions of justice between generations. However, the aim of justice as fairness is to derive all duties and obligations from other conditions; so this way out should be avoided. Instead, I shall make a motivational assumption. The parties are thought of as representing continuing lines of claims, as being, so to speak, deputies for a kind of everlasting moral agent or institution . . . their goodwill stretches over at least two generations. . . . Thus the interests of all are looked after and, given the veil of ignorance, the whole strand is tied together. (128–29; my emphases) The veil of ignorance is therefore predicated on a set of conditions that Rawls names the circumstances of justice. Such circumstances are avowedly “normal” and dependent on the possible and necessary cooperation between individuals. Society is by definition—and this is the import of his second principle of justice—a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage” (126), marked therefore by both conflict and identity. All this is a matter of a distribution not only of resources but also of personal identity and social cooperation: justice, for Rawls, is both a distributive justice and a justice that claims its own “background”: “principles are needed for choosing among the various social arrangements which determine the divisions of advantages and for underwriting an agreement on the proper distributive shares. These requirements define the role of justice. The background conditions that give rise to these necessities are the circumstances of justice” (126; my emphases). These circumstances rely on a series of assumptions: first, that the parties involved take no interest in one another’s interests, that, in other words, they are benign egoists; second, that individuals suffer from various “shortcom-

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ings of knowledge, thought and judgment” (127), that is to say, that they have an unconscious—though Rawls obviously does not put it in these terms. “Their knowledge is necessarily incomplete, their powers of reasoning, memory, and attention are always limited, and their judgment is likely to be distorted by anxiety, bias, and a preoccupation with their own affairs. Some of these defects spring from moral faults, from selfishness and negligence; but to a large degree, they are simply part of man’s natural situation. As a consequence individuals not only have different plans of life but there exists a diversity of philosophical and religious beliefs, and of political and social doctrines” (127; my emphasis). A combination of egoism and unconscious or unaccounted for desires then furnishes the grounds of Rawls’s “circumstances of justice.” For the sake of simplicity—as Rawls always insists—they can be reduced to the following propositions: objectively speaking, to the condition of moderate scarcity and, subjectively speaking, to the condition of mutual disinterest. And therefore in brief: “The circumstances of justice obtain whenever mutually disinterested persons put forward conflicting claims to the division of social advantages under conditions of moderate scarcity” (128).9 According to Rawls, egoism may be either benign or not. In its nonbenign forms, egoism, while “logically consistent and in this sense not irrational” (136), is incompatible with “the moral point of view” because grounded in unconscious desires. Rawls does not, because of this, want to dispense with the ego altogether. But how one is to distinguish between benign egoism and its aberrations is not made clear: When, for instance, is egoism healthy, moral, and rational? When aberrant and therefore contrary to Rawlsian constraints? When is it to be understood as pathological and therefore bound to dangerous forms of narcissism? All these questions bring us to Rawls’s fundamental stipulation that individuals in the original position are always rational. But since individuals are

9. By moderate scarcity, Rawls always means relative scarcity. This is a condition that places the problem out of a zero-sum game of power and out of “peasant societies” into the space of modernity: in premodern societies “the social system is interpreted . . . as a naturally established and unchangeable zero-sum game. Now actually, if this belief were widespread and the stock of goods were generally thought to be given, then a strict opposition of interests would be assumed to obtain. Social wealth is not viewed as the outcome of mutually advantageous cooperation and so there is no basis for an unequal division of advantages” (539). Rawls makes these comments in connection to the problem of envy—a problem to which I will return. Here it may suffice merely to point out that it is entirely unclear—given the veil of ignorance in the original position—why individuals would presume the presence of modern economic relations, a situation, in other words, where wealth is productive of more wealth, where, as Marx famously stated, value produces surplus value and thereby breaks out of the (vicious) circle of finite resources.

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both presumed to be rational and yet not know their own conception of the good, he needs to make yet another assumption: Rawls postulates that these individuals “would prefer more primary social goods rather than less” (142). It is this stipulation, that is the stipulation of a desire for objects, that allows them to make rational decisions—as if desire is somehow connected to objects in a natural manner, and as if these objects were actually clearly known. Rawls insists that it is standard procedure in social theory to assume the stability of desire. This is a conception of desire, then, that functions on the basis of calculations of a more or less, not on the basis of having or not having, or on the absolute desire of total possession. There is but one exception, one that is rather significant, precisely because it undermines Rawls’s rational economy of desire and catapults it into the domain of the drive for total and exclusive possession of the object. In the usual way, a rational person is thought to have a coherent set of preferences between options open to him. He ranks these options according to how well they further his purposes. . . . The special assumption I make is that a rational individual does not suffer from envy. He is not ready to accept a loss for himself if only others have less as well. He is not downcast by the knowledge or perception that others have a larger index of primary social goods. Or at least this is true as long as the differences between himself and others do not exceed certain limits, and he does not believe that the existing inequalities are founded on injustice or are the result of letting chance work itself out for no compensating social purposes. (143; my emphases) Rawls then posits a rigorous distinction between justice and envy in particular, and between justice and “psychological propensities” (530) in general. The reason for such a focus on envy is first, that it serves “as an illustration of the way in which the special psychologies enter into the theory of justice” (531; my emphasis); second, envy quite simply ruins his original position, it rips the veil of ignorance and therefore tears down his entire edifice of justice as fairness. And this because “envy is generally regarded as something to be avoided and feared, at least when it becomes intense, it seems desirable that, if possible, the choice of principles should not be influenced by this trait. Therefore, for reasons both of simplicity and moral theory, I have assumed an absence of envy and a lack of knowledge of the special psychologies” (530; my emphases). How does Rawls exclude envy when, as he concedes, such “inclinations do exist and in some way they must be reckoned with” (530)? Why does envy constitute such a danger to his theory of justice? Rawls in fact expends a great deal of energy on the management of envy in his text. He first distinguishes

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between general envy and particular envy, general envy being that (normal) affect felt by those who have fewer social goods. Particular envy, by contrast, is typical of rivalry and competition; it is the emotion experienced by the sore loser. It is general envy that interests Rawls, though in fact he has a hard time actually defining it and keeping it separate from other categories (for instance, from rivalry and competition), whether these be moral or not.10 Envy is that “propensity to view with hostility the greater good of others even though their being more fortunate than we does not detract from our advantages. We envy persons whose situation is superior to ours . . . and we are willing to deprive them of their greater benefits even if it is necessary to give something up ourselves” (532). Envy is always antisocial, full of hatred and therefore destabilizing. It is destabilizing also for Rawls’s categories. For this reason, he establishes a whole set of distinctions in order to ward off its destructive effects. There exists, for instance, a form of benign envy, one which Rawls calls “emulative envy”—the desire to achieve what others have: it is close to what Freud had called the ego ideal, a term that he significantly classified as a form of narcissism.11 According to Rawls, envy “proper” is a form of rancor that tends to hurt both its object and its subject. Envy is furthermore to be distinguished from resentment. The reverse of envy among the nonmoral sentiments is jealousy or grudgingness, an affect that seeks to protect what one already possesses. Finally, Rawls also mentions “excusable envy,” that affective reaction that is a blow to one’s self-esteem or selfconfidence. It is precisely this general and excusable envy that interests Rawls, since he wants to know whether his theory of justice is reasonable in view of “the propensities of human beings, in particular their aversion to disparities in objective goods.” “Excusable envy” is here perilously close to resistance (in its political and psychoanalytic meanings): it signifies both a resistance to unjust socioeconomic relations (a resistance to the outside) and a resistance against unacceptable, immoral internal demands (a resistance against the unconscious). Rawls seems to recognize this duality of claims not only through his invocation of “objective goods,” but also because he views the claims to objects of desire as a psychological phenomenon: he assumes that “the main psychological root of the liability to envy is a lack of self-confidence in our worth combined with a sense of impotence” (535). In this sense, he detects three main conditions for the hostile outbreak of envy:

10. In fact, envy’s particular characteristic is that it inevitably bleeds into the general: not just general envy but all of psychology, and does so to the extent that it focuses on that “particular” singular object who seemingly has what one desires. 11. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Standard Edition, 14:90.

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The first of these is the psychological condition [wherein] persons lack a sure confidence in their own value and in their ability to do anything worthwhile. Second . . . many occasions arise when this psychological condition is experienced as painful and humiliating. The discrepancy between oneself and others is made visible by the social structure and style of life of one’s society. . . . And third, [the less fortunate] see their social position as allowing no constructive alternative to opposing the favored circumstances of the more advantaged. . . . [From these conditions it becomes clear] that, although it is a psychological state, social institutions are a basic instigating cause (535–56; my emphases). Given Rawls’s multiple connections established between the outbreak of envy and the act of seeing, he is clearly aware that envy as invidia is a disease of the gaze. The gaze and the visibility that it implies harm both the subject and the object. How then do his principles of justice constitute an antidote to such a gaze? In response to the first condition of envy, he reasserts that his principles of justice acknowledge all persons as having the same basic rights: therefore the psychological tendency toward a lack of self-confidence and self-worth is, if not eliminated, at least significantly mitigated. Rawls’s well-ordered society responds to the second condition by a kind of updated version of sumptuary laws: The plurality of associations in a well-ordered society, each with its secure internal life, tends to reduce the visibility, or at least the painful visibility, of variations in men’s prospects. . . . And this ignoring of differences in wealth and circumstance is made easier by the fact that when citizens do meet one another, as they must in public affairs at least, the principles of equal justice are acknowledged. Moreover in everyday life the natural duties are honored so that the more advantaged do not make an ostentatious display of their higher estate calculated to demean the condition of those who have less. (536–37)12 And regarding the final condition, Rawls states that the problem of general envy does not force us to reconsider the principles of justice—precisely and to the extent that they themselves do not depend for their existence on envy. It is this final claim that is not only the most problematic but constitutes the very core of Rawls’s theory. It also of course leads us straight back to

12. Rousseau makes very similar claims about the connection between justice, representation, and a kind of politics of (in)visibility in Politics and the Arts: Letter to D’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960).

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Freud’s theory of justice, a theory that has its origins in the nursery wars and in the envy aroused between siblings over their father’s equal love. For Freud, as we recall, justice is a reaction-formation against the hostile and aggressive feelings caused by envy: what originally was envy is transformed into a positive social tie through identificatory love for the father/leader. For Freud, envy and its consequent reaction-formation constitutes not only the foundation of justice, but of the very possibility of universality and generality and, therefore, of theory (political, psychoanalytic, or otherwise) more generally. For Rawls, in contrast, universal categories are haunted by the return of specific, particular objects of desire. As John Forrester writes: Freud is claiming that the very concepts of universality and generality are derived from the sequence of defenses against the original envy and hostility. . . . Rawls overlooks Freud’s specific challenge to his basic assumption that the formal constraints on the concept of right are formulated without reference to envy. Freud would argue that assenting to universalizable and generalizable principles of any sort is already a reaction-formation to the passion of envy, albeit a formal one. . . . Freud’s usage points to the possibility not considered by Rawls, that the formal constraint of universalization may itself be defensive in character, and cannot simply be considered a formal characteristic.13 Rawls nevertheless ends his thoughts on envy with a discussion of the Freudian model, signaling thereby a certain anxiety and doing so in the context of a discussion about the relationship between envy and equality. He concedes, for instance, that “strict egalitarianism” may indeed spring from envy (538); he also admits that “the appeal to justice is often a mask for envy” (540). Nevertheless, and he asserts this somewhat by fiat, his own principles of justice are so defined as “not to give voice to envy” (538; my emphasis). It all comes down to Rawls’s original position and in particular to the veil of ignorance, that is, to the fact that “the conception of justice is chosen under conditions where by hypothesis no one is moved by rancor and spite.” Here moral principles are “a suitably general and public way of ordering claims” (538). If envy is the disease of looking and seeing, then Rawls’s metaphor of the veil is hardly an innocent one. The power of the gaze is in fact the greatest danger to the Rawlsian system; it is, as John Forrester remarks, “a plausible candidate as the original form of the evil eye.” This is why envy generates so much trouble in Rawls’s system and must therefore be excluded. 13. John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 31–32.

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If his well-ordered society is to create a certain invisibility of objects, then the gesture of excluding the envious gaze repeats, as Forrester states, “the founding gesture of his argument: the positing of an original position in which subjects have a veil of ignorance drawn between them” and the social world, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, between these subjects and their own characteristics as individuals. “Rawls has one basic strategy to save the principles of justice: place a veil between oneself and the primordial object of envy.”14 The veil of ignorance must also make the individual blind to his own desires. Social arrangements must then not only replicate the veil of ignorance that describes the original position; the original position itself replicates these social arrangements. The veil of ignorance as the central mechanism to combat envy does not make social relations possible but presupposes them. The relation to the Other is already present from the start, but present only to the degree that this Other, this object is precisely invisible. Furthermore, the veil of ignorance stipulates a second blindness: that of the subject who takes himself or herself as its object. In other words, the person in the original position cannot know of his or her own desires or dispositions. Such a subject is then split from the beginning between rational and social choices and unconscious desire or fantasy. This subject is also internally divided from its own internal and fantasmatic object to the extent that envy is the response to a narcissistic wound. All of this explains why Freud constitutes such a formidable opponent for Rawls. Forrester puts their differences down partially to a difference in perspective: “Rawls adopts the parent’s-eye view of the competition for love and attention, whereas Freud adopts the child’s-eye view, whose starting point is a desire to eliminate the other.”15 This is undoubtedly true, and the Rawlsian perspective will also and ironically be the one adopted by Freud’s daughter Anna. But as Forrester also argues, it is precisely this perspective “from above” that generates a clash between, on the one hand, Rawls’s theory of envy and, on the other hand, his “just savings principle,” that is, the problem of generational succession. “What if,” Forrester writes, “we take our cue from Freud’s well-known equation of feces = penis = baby? Feces fit very well with the just savings principle—as the accumulated results of past production and consumption, but also as money, that sediment of exchange which, as Rawls hopes, continually effaces its own history. The penis . . . is . . . the very emblem of generativity . . . the baby is itself what we mean by future 14. Forrester, Dispatches, 28–29. 15. Ibid., 41n.

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generativity. Thus we have, in the series feces = penis = baby, the past, present, and future of the object which connects the generations together and thus demands special treatment beyond the principles of justice.”16 These are indeed the strains of commitment that the rational individual must count, discount, and also account for. “What if,” Forrester asks, “instead of a neutered individual subject with a self-sufficient life plan, the Rawlsian subject behind the veil of ignorance is a son who envies the primal father his possession of all the women, or a girl who envies her brother’s penis, or the mother of a dead baby?”—and Forrester is in this last instance referring to Freud’s Solomonic mothers.17 What if, in other words, Rawls’s subject tucked behind the veil of ignorance is always already a desiring and therefore envious subject, a subject who therefore pierces the veil of ignorance in his or her desire to see the object (of desire) on the other side of the veil? Rawls’s answer to these questions is that “persons” in the original position do not in fact pierce the veil at all: That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the good is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy. . . . If children compete for the attention and affection of their parents, to which one might say they justly have an equal claim, one cannot assert that their sense of justice springs from jealousy and envy. . . . We could equally well say that their social feeling arises from resentment [a moral feeling, according to Rawls], from a sense that they are being unfairly treated. (540) In other words, envy may not be envy at all, but just resentment against a certain reality and against which the subject has all right to defend himself or herself. In the end, however, Rawls is unable to take envy into account; as he states at the end of his chapter on envy, the constraints on commitment are twofold: What a social system must not do clearly is to encourage propensities and aspirations that it is bound to repress and disappoint. So long as the pattern of special psychologies elicited by society either supports its arrangements or can be reasonably accommodated by them, there is no need to reconsider the choice of a conception of justice. I believe, though I have not shown, that the principles of justice as fairness pass this test. (541)

16. Ibid., Dispatches, 41. 17. Ibid.

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This is a humble and humbling statement indeed. It most certainly sounds the tone of defeat, a defeat that knows that it cannot account for the simultaneous aspiration of desire and its repression. Unquestionably, Rawls cannot account for desire in the original position and he cannot account for such a desire as always already constitutive of a basic difference—the difference of sexuality and gender. And he cannot account for that differential desire precisely because it is always a function of the unconscious. Desire always breaches the veil of ignorance and therefore the very contours of the rational self. Envy deconstructs the rational person and thereby places him or her into an economy of differences, into a relation to an object that, qua object, always lives by definition on the other side of the veil. “Intuitively,” what Rawls knows is that his theory of justice both requires the exclusion of the unconscious (for him, synonymous with envious desire), while yet he recognizes that it is the power of unconscious desire and fantasy that has the capacity to address power in such a way as to encourage those same “propensities and aspirations” that an unjust society is “bound to repress and disappoint.” Choice, in order to be rational, must always be a forced choice. Anna Freud shares with Rawls a sense that democracy can only be defended if such a politics is predicated on the view of the adult and therefore and by extension on a certain exclusion of the unconscious. She differs from Rawls insofar as she “finds herself ” in her father’s model of politics, one that has the envious desire for power at its very foundation. In other words and tellingly, she translates Rawls’s “strains of commitment,” which are constitutive of his benign egoism, into altruism; she also thinks of such strains of commitment as an act of surrender and therefore as a very different kind of strain: a pleasurable one.

Altruistic Surrender One likes the wish, but one doesn’t dare fulfill it oneself. That is the reason one externalizes it. —Anna Freud, Analysis of Defense

Altruistic surrender (altruistische Abtretung) is the final defense mechanism discussed by Anna Freud in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.18 Abtretung undoubtedly carries the meaning of surrender. But in the composite “ab” [away from] and “treten” [to step], it also signifies a “stepping out,” a “walking away from.” Such stepping out also comports certain theatrical qualities,

18. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. All future references appear in the text.

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that is, the meaning of a theatrical exit. This theatrical quality must be emphasized in order to highlight the peculiar mixture, in Anna Freud’s use of the term, between the passively received command of a banishment and the active gesture of a leaving. And it is this peculiar mixture that also invites the possibility of an ironical stance in the face of surrender. In this sense, altruistic surrender may well represent Anna Freud’s most dramatic enactment of an impious fidelity in relation to her father. This central defense mechanism in her work has furthermore everything to do with Rawls’s “strains of commitment,” and like them, it attempts to give new meaning to the political contract. Where she differs from Rawls is her having no difficulty in thinking about the strains of commitment as a language of pleasure. Altruistic surrender is perhaps the most autobiographical of her ego defenses, and many of its features recall her early essay on beating fantasies. She bases her discovery of the mechanism’s main features almost entirely on the analysis of a “young governess” (most probably herself) at the beginning of the chapter on this defense in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense and on a reading of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac at its end.19 That an artistic theatrical representation of altruistic surrender should be of such import is not fortuitous, for—as we will see—her theory depends precisely on the question of how desire may be externalized and therefore represented, that is, accounted for in the realm of fiction, fantasy, and daydreaming, that is, within the realm of desire. The democratic ego comes into being, for Anna Freud, because of a passionate desire for representation or what she will also call the loving desire for and of a proxy. And insofar as that surrender is the issue, she recognizes that her “choice” defense is always a forced choice. The young governess in question told in analysis that two ideas governed her childhood: she wanted to have beautiful clothes and many children. A great deal of her fantasy life was dedicated to picturing the fulfillment of these wishes. Furthermore, she was also quite ambitious: she wanted to be more accomplished and clever than her playmates and be continuously admired for these qualities. When, however, she came to therapy “she was unmarried and childless and her dress was rather shabby and inconspicuous. She showed little sign of envy or ambition and would compete with other people only if forced to do so by external circumstances” (124). While this governess appeared to embody the perfect Rawlsian subject who inhabits the original position, a psychoanalyst would expect that what had happened was something entirely different: that the woman had repressed her sexual wishes

19. She told Sandler that she could recite the entire play by heart (Sandler 454).

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and developed a reaction-formation, that is, developed in exactly the opposite direction from the one indicated by her original fantasies. We are told, however, that the real picture proved otherwise—and this other picture may well be the point where Anna departs from her father’s theory of sociality and where she aligns herself with a Rawlsian position of justice that is something other than a reaction-formation. Apart from the choice of the governess’s profession (the care of children), she displayed “an unusual degree of concern about her friends’ having pretty clothes, being admired, and having children.” She was also an active matchmaker. Similarly, “in spite of her own retiring behavior, she was ambitious for the men whom she loved and followed their careers with the utmost interest. . . . She lived in the lives of other people, instead of having any experience of her own” (125; my emphasis).20 The governess’s analysis revealed that the early repression of her instinctual impulses had resulted in an extremely harsh superego, and this had made it impossible for her to fulfill her desires. Such desires were not—and this is the central point—repressed. Instead, “she found some proxy in the outside world to serve as a repository for each of them” (125; my emphasis). Similar to cases of identification with the aggressor, the governess projected her prohibited impulses onto others. But different from identification with the aggressor, this patient did not “dissociate herself from her proxies but identified herself with them.” Her superego, which condemned a particular instinctual impulse when it related to her own ego, was surprisingly tolerant of it in other people. She gratified her instincts by sharing in the gratification of others, employing for this purpose the mechanisms of projection and identification. . . . The surrender of her instinctual impulses in favor of other people had thus an egoistic significance, but in her efforts to gratify the impulses of others her behavior could only be called altruistic. (126; my emphases) Anna Freud detects a similar mechanism in Rostand’s Cyrano. Cyrano is a seventeenth century poet and officer, known for his intelligence and valor but also for his physical ugliness. When he falls in love with the beautiful Roxane, he surrenders his love aspirations in favor of Christian, who is better looking. Cyrano does all he can to help his rival, including writing love letters and, at the climax of the story, taking “the other’s place in the dark and

20. Though he never articulates it as such, the imaginative “living the lives of others” is in fact the central import of Rawls’s original position.

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[speaking] for him, forgetting in the ardor of his wooing that he himself is not the wooer and only at the last moment falling back into his attitude of surrender” (132). Anna Freud concludes: That the poet is depicting in Cyrano’s “altruism” something more than a strange love adventure is clear from the parallel which he draws between Cyrano’s love life and his [own] fate as a poet. Just as Christian woos Roxane with the help of Cyrano’s poems and letters, writers like Corneille, Molière, and Swift borrowed whole scenes from his unknown works. . . . In the play Cyrano accepts his fate. He is ready to lend his words to Christian, who is handsomer than himself, as to Molière, who is a greater genius. (133) Cyrano’s altruistic surrender is thus constituted by the fact that he “helps the handsome man who represents him get to the woman he loves.”21 One may hypothesize that this story is also about Anna Freud’s relationship with her father: like Rostand vis-à-vis Molière, she cedes to him all the fame, but also dedicates herself in her act of altruistic surrender to acting as his proxy, to representing him in the world. This is the essence of Anna Freud’s politics. Altruistic surrender may be detected in all sorts of types: in the public benefactor, who with “utmost aggressiveness and energy demands money from one set of people in order to give it to another” (130); in the assassin, who “in the name of the oppressed murders the oppressor” (130); in the dutiful wife, who chooses a man to “represent her—to the detriment of any true object relation” (131); or in parents, who “delegate to their children their projects for their own lives, in a manner at once altruistic and egoistic” (131). In other words, this altruism that Anna Freud describes is never entirely devoid of aggression, nor can it be separated from what Rawls would describe as “benign egoism.” Several other features should be mentioned about this phenomenon. Altruistic surrender bears a certain affinity with but also difference from other psychic defense mechanisms or psychological tendencies. For instance, Anna Freud distinguishes it from masochism: “The altruistic person escapes the masochistic position, because he cannot fulfill his own wishes because of internal conflict. But this does not lead to the enjoyment of his suffering or deprivation. He looks for a substitute and finds the substitute in helping others fulfill their wishes. So it’s a turning away from the masochism” (San21. Joseph Sandler with Anna Freud, Analysis of Defense, 454; my emphasis. All future references will appear in the text but be indicated as Sandler, in order to distinguish from Anna Freud’s 1936 text.

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dler 454). Nor is altruistic surrender a reaction-formation. While, as Sandler points out, “concern and anxiety about others” is often interpreted as a reaction-formation for aggressive feelings against these others, Anna Freud stresses that what she is describing is “a sort of identification with the other person on the basis of shared instinctual wishes. Identification is not even the right word” (Sandler 453). This returns us to the Freudian nursery and to Sigmund Freud’s theory of sociality in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego—a text, as we must remember, in which Anna “found” herself. Yet there is a difference. Altruistic surrender merely resembles what her father had determined as the essence of the social bond: the perception of a shared instinctual wish (the love of the father) on the part of the band of brothers and their consequent identification, but also their renunciation of desire in order to construct social justice for all. It is interesting that Anna Freud contemplates the fact that identification may not even be the right word; it may only be a resemblance, may in fact itself function only as a proxy term for the process she is describing. She for instance states that this “sort of identification” is not hysterical identification (something that Sigmund had at various points asserted, particularly in the context of his continuous references to girl schools and fan clubs for famous musicians): altruistic surrender is not hysterical since it requires “quite a level of ego and superego development to take that particular course.” Joseph Sandler:. . . . Here we see a reduction in instinctual pressure through a substitute representation, and the implications for our theory of drive gratifications are tremendous. Anna Freud: What we see in altruistic surrender is a very refined form of drive gratification. I mean refined in the sense that ego and superego have a great deal to do with it. On the other hand, if you look at the aggressive side there isn’t much refinement, because the aggression is the same, and it can be rather crude aggression, only in the service of someone else. (Sandler 455; my emphases) If altruistic surrender is neither masochism nor a reaction-formation nor homosexuality,22 it is also not simply sublimation—even if it is quite refined. “The idea of the substitute or symbolic gratification ties in with sublimation,” Sandler states. Surely, so Anna Freud, but “in altruistic surrender the original wish remains the same. It’s not deflected, it’s not torn down. It’s ex22. “There is an obvious similarity between the situation in altruistic surrender and the conditions which determine male homosexuality. The male homosexual makes over his claim on his mother’s love to a younger brother whom he had previously envied” (134n4; my emphasis).

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actly the same as you see, for instance, in the Cyrano de Bergerac example. The wish is to be loved by that woman. And that remains the same for him and his proxy.” If sublimation must be understood either as a transformation of libidinal impulses into higher social aims or as a vicarious gratification, one that takes on symbolic gratification, Anna Freud insists: “In altruism we are not dealing with anything symbolic. It is only that someone else has the nonsymbolic pleasure” (Sandler 456–57; my emphases). I will return to this idea of a nonsymbolic proxy pleasure later. Meanwhile, however, it is important to point out that Anna Freud refuses here two moves. On the one hand, she disputes Rawls’s notion that subjects, in order to conceive of just relations, must stay behind the veil of ignorance and therefore refuse to see the desired object on the other side of the veil. On the other hand, she also insists that nothing is “torn down,” that altruistic desire keeps the veil intact, which is, as we will remember, her greatest concern for and on behalf of the ego: its intactness. Democracy, for Freud, has the structure of the hymen, of that feminine border circumscribing a relation between inner and outer world and yet questioning, through the very problem of intactness, what such borders may actually signify. Anna Freud’s democratic ego is both an intact ego and an ego capable of piercing the veil of ignorance. In this she evokes Jacques Derrida’s use of the hymen as one of those concepts that Sigmund Freud understood as functional because based in (unconscious) antithetical meanings. The hymen, as Derrida describes it, is “an operation that both sows confusion between opposites and stands between the opposites, ‘at once.’ ” It takes place “in the spacing between desire and fulfillment, between perpetration and its recollection.” The hymen then is a relation to the object of desire, conceived as both a separation or difference and as a fusion or identification. The hymen, the consummation of differends, the continuity and confusion of the coitus, merges with what it seems to be derived from: the hymen as protective screen, the jewel box of virginity, the vaginal partition, the fine, invisible veil which, in front of the hystera, stands between the inside and the outside of a woman, and consequently between desire and fulfillment. It is neither desire nor pleasure but in between the two. It is the hymen that desire dreams of piercing, of bursting, in an act of violence that is (at the same time or somewhere between) love and murder. If either one did take place, there would be no hymen. But neither would there simply be a hymen in (case events go) no place. With all the undecidability of its meaning, the hymen only takes place when it doesn’t take place, when nothing really happens, when there is an all-consuming consummation without violence, or a violence with-

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out blows, or a blow without marks, a mark without a mark (a margin), etc., when the veil is, without being, torn.23 Such is altruistic surrender; it bears therefore a peculiar relationship to aggression and especially to identification with the aggressor; it is, in a certain sense, its obverse. But only in a certain sense, because—while such surrender provides an answer to and a way out of a totalitarian logic—it nevertheless also does so only to the degree that it absorbs aggressive identification. Altruistic surrender functions as the necessary supplement (this, another FreudianDerridean term that dislodges rational logic), a supplement of identification with the aggressor. One becomes an altruist, she states at the outset of her discussions with Sandler about this defense mechanism, neither because one is born that way, nor because it is grounded in the heart: one becomes an altruist because of the badness or transgressiveness of one’s heart (Sandler 429). It is the very proximity to aggression and the distinctions that altruistic surrender imply that so fascinate Anna Freud, for this proximity returns us to the gaze, to envy and to Anna Freud’s beating fantasies: Hansi Kennedy: There are children who like watching, and there are others who get bored by just having to watch an older child or parents do something, and really want to do it themselves. Anna Freud: A third alternative would be to become the sort of person who helps others fulfill what they have set out to do. That would be an altruistic stage. I must say I was fascinated at the time I wrote this by all these distinctions. (Sandler 446) Freud may be proposing here then a way out of the beating fantasies of her earliest work, suggesting that neither watching nor doing makes for altruism: altruism comes about only as the result of a certain delegation, as the consequence of the creation of a proxy. Altruism lives in an inevitably close proximity to aggression: “Altruism is always by proxy,” she states. For this reason, it is also a character trait, directed therefore not just to one person but constitutive of the altruist’s relationship to the world. This relationship remains aggressive, but again only by proxy: Altruists are bossy, because the urge that is usually behind the fulfillment of one’s own wishes is now placed behind the fulfillment of the wishes of the other person. And the wishes have to be fulfilled in a certain way, namely in the way the altruist would like to fulfill them 23. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 212–13.

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for himself or herself. . . . The bossiness of so-called do-gooders is proverbial, and we get all the gradations there right up to those insupportable people who dictate to others just what they should do to be happy. (Sandler 443–44) What Anna Freud finds so interesting is that “the whole thing can turn into the opposite, namely into the negative direction” (Sandler 442), into identification with the aggressor. Altruistic surrender therefore sets into motion a double process, and in this sense it constitutes a necessary supplement to identification with the aggressor. It “serves two purposes.” On the one hand, it “enables the subject to take a friendly interest in the gratification of other people’s instincts and so, indirectly and in spite of the superego’s prohibition, to gratify his own.” On the other hand, “it liberates the inhibited activity and aggression primarily designed to secure the fulfillment of the instinctual wishes in their original relation to himself ” (129; my emphasis). She continues: The process [of altruistic surrender] liberates, or creates an outlet for, the aggression. What I meant was that originally the individual wants to pursue his or her instinctual aims aggressively. ‘I want it, I’ll have it, I’ll fight anybody who won’t give it to me.’ . . . With the altruism, you can fight for somebody else’s fulfillment of the wish with the same aggression, with the same energy. So you have both your libidinal vicarious pleasure, and you have the outlet for your aggression. It’s surprising that not more people are altruists! . . . I think it has always been obvious that aggression can be in the service of libidinal fulfillment. (Sandler 450–51) Both the question of what altruistic surrender is and is not, as well as its complicated relationship with aggression brings us to the altruist’s choice of object, that object upon which the altruist bestows her efforts and with whom she also identifies—sort of but not quite. This appears to be an object that is first of all “better qualified” (131). Such better qualifications have clearly to do with some sense of “narcissistic mortification [narzissitische Kränkung] and with Rawls’s problem of self-worth. Different from Rawls, however, Anna Freud takes into account the subject’s realization that others may be better equipped to fulfill one’s own personal desires; here—and this is the import of altruistic surrender—the object of desire can achieve justice only with the help of the altruist herself, or so, at least, she fantasizes. In other words, the choice of the object of the altruist’s beneficence must be one where the “perception of the prohibited impulse [in that other] is sufficient

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to suggest to the ego that there is an opportunity for projection” (130; my emphasis). In most of these cases, she adds, the opportunity for projection was supplied by the fact that “the substitute has once been the object of envy” (130; my emphasis). In the case of the governess, for example, her more beautiful sister had caused this patient to project “her own desire for love and her craving for admiration onto a rival and, having identified herself with the object of her envy, she enjoyed the fulfillment of her desire” (127). Benign egoism is a form of altruism; it is a concern with the object that therefore must take envy into account because it always looks beyond the veil. Does altruism in the face of a Rawlsian lack of self-confidence, so Anna Freud wonders in her discussions with Joseph Sandler, circumvent envy altogether, or does it instead defensively ward it off? (Sandler 445) Does in fact a lack of self-confidence not constitute the essence of the ego? Altruistic surrender seems entirely based on the problem of envy and on the question of why “one should be so good if one gets nothing out of it. I mean, there has to be a reward for this enormous renunciation!” (457) And yet Anna Freud adds that the altruist may say: “ ‘If I can’t have any beautiful clothes, no one should have them.’ My altruist feels that everybody, or especially some particular person (or probably more than one person) should be dressed beautifully, and enjoy it. . . . So you could say it’s not an escape from envy. But I don’t think . . . that it begins with envy and is a warding off of envy. I think it’s another way of solving the situation in which somebody has what one hasn’t got oneself ” (Sandler 443; my emphases). It is, in other words, another way of solving the dilemmas placed before individuals in the original position, who however, in Anna Freud’s fantasy, see through the veil that for her has a certain transparency. It is such transparency that generates “the vicarious pleasure, the masochistic surrender of one’s own wishes to others, and particularly the feeling ‘I’m not good enough, I don’t deserve it, others do deserve it.’ ” The invocation here of her own father’s doubts on the Acropolis whether he deserved a better fate than his own father, is significant. And yet there is a difference. While her father may have been struggling with anxieties about castration and self-worth in the face of his own business-minded father, Anna struggles not with an anxious or theoretical threat, but with a real threat or dilemma. And for this reason, the threat has little to do with a sister’s pretty clothes—or, at least, not quite. We can follow [this sense of inadequacy] back to two solutions to the penis envy of girls. One is that of the girl who becomes someone who can’t stand not having the masculinity she is striving for, really hates men for it, and verbally castrates and destroys the man. But another is

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that type of woman who fulfills her own ambitions via the masculinity of man, which is very different. You can see this very clearly in the different types of women in public life. (445; my emphasis) Pace Rawls, then, the gendered subject matters and cannot be discounted as a factor in the original position, to the extent—and we already encountered this idea in Anna Freud’s rewriting of her father’s theory of beating fantasies in daughters—that democratic subjects come into being when envy is truly mastered because the daughter has fulfilled her ambitions in and through the masculinity of the father, when, that is, girls not simply become boys but when masculinity itself is defined as this transformation through altruistic surrender. There is no question that these statements are autobiographical, not just in the sense that Anna Freud is communicating here something about her own analysis but, more important, about the problem of woman’s representation in public life. In a certain sense, Anna Freud reverses the process of representation. If in the classical scenario of representational politics the individual delegates the representation of his or her interests to someone else who then acts on that individual’s behalf in the realm of politics, has therefore his or her interests made present by proxy, she is in fact claiming that woman, when she becomes a proxy in public life, becomes so because she has projected and identified with some other individual’s desires. Her own idea of politics is projected downward, so to speak—which is why such an act is neither sublimation, nor a symbolic way of doing politics. Nor is it grounded in repression. For this reason, the entire process of Anna Freud’s representational politics is grounded in a fundamental rupture (one to which Rawls would in fact be sympathetic), one that forms the basis of her theory of the altruistic proxy: “The effect of the mechanism of projection is to break the connection between the ideational representatives of dangerous instinctual impulses and the ego. In this it resembles most closely the process of repression. . . . In repression the objectionable idea is thrust back into the id, while in projection it is displaced into the outside world” (122; my emphases). Projection, she states, may do two things; it may disturb “our human relations when we project our own jealousy and attribute to other people our own aggressive acts. [Such is identification with the aggressor.] But it may work in another way as well, enabling us to form valuable positive attachments and so to consolidate our relations with one another” (123): and this would describe altruistic surrender. It is just the status of this rupture within the process of projection, along with the altruist’s creation of a proxy of desire that is contested in Anna

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Freud’s debates with Sandler and company. “What you describe here, Miss Freud, is a particular form of activity which is the result, the outcome of a set of transformations”—so Sandler begins his interrogation (Sandler 429; my emphasis). Everything hinges on this set of transformations, in fact on the problem of representation in the direction of the proxy and his or her relationship to the unconscious, on the problem of how the unconscious may find some political form of representation. Sandler is absolutely right to wonder about the “break” between the ideational contents of instinctual desire and the ego. “I suppose,” he states, “one can assume that by ‘ego’ here you are referring to consciousness, but I wonder whether there are not many other mechanisms that also break the connection between the idea and the wish behind it.” Anna Freud insists in reply that in repression or projection the instinctual process is not changed; what does change is the perception or feeling “that it belongs to the self ” (Sandler 430). She claims here, I think, that both hold true: nothing changes—libidinal and aggressive drives remain in place—and yet everything changes, precisely because the entire process occurs within the conscious ego and therefore already within the realm of ethics and politics. The question of “belonging to the self ” then becomes the occasion for a rather spirited and interesting debate. Would for instance, Sandler asks, isolation of affect not also constitute a break? (Anna Freud replies: “there we get the division between ideation and emotion”.) Sandler’s greatest difficulty stems from the fact that Anna is “using ego in the sense of self-representation, and referring to identification of oneself with the impulse. Anna Freud: What I really had in mind was projection. The person says, ‘I don’t mind aggression as long as it is not I who am aggressive. Somebody else can be aggressive.’ The impulse doesn’t change. Joseph Sandler: It’s a dissociation of oneself from the wish. . . . If we think of dissociation of something from one’s self-representation, we have to think of the confusion that exists about the concept of inner world as opposed to outer world. (Sandler 431; my emphases) The discussion now focuses on the relationship between projection and representation and therefore on the construction of a distinction between inner and outer world, a discussion that replicates Rawls’s dilemmas regarding the status of the individual in the original position, who must, as we recall, construct a veil of ignorance both toward the social world and his or her internal drives. Joseph Sandler: What this means in projection is that the unwanted content is displaced from one’s representation of oneself to the rep-

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resentation of the outside, of a person outside. In that sense, projection is a form of displacement. Anna Freud: Doesn’t that make it more complicated than it needs to be? The feeling of the individual is, “This is no longer I, it is the person who is out there in the outside world.” The feeling is not “It’s a representation of that person,” but “It’s that person.” Joseph Sander: Yes, that is of course the person’s belief. I am sorry for my pedantic tendencies . . . Anna Freud: And my simplifying tendencies . . . Joseph Sandler: It might be better to say simply that in projection the content is felt as belonging to the outside world rather than to oneself. Anna Freud: I know what you mean. You know what I mean. It’s only a different way of expressing it. And I think the way I express it actually corresponds to the feeling of the person in whom the process is going on, who doesn’t feel that he has ascribed something to an object representation in himself. The feeling is, “It’s you, and not me.” (Sandler 432) Sandler does not give up. He continues to insist that the distinction between inside and outside is always already a matter of representation and that therefore reality is always “hypothetical.” All that he is in fact arguing for is Sigmund Freud’s own hypothesis, but he concedes that perhaps “we should not have an argument about this.” Anna Freud remains placid and ironic in response to Sandler’s frustrations: Anna Freud: “To me it sounds like what the German philosopher said: ‘How lucky it is that in cats the slit in the fur is just in the place where the eyes are.’ Joseph Sandler: I get your point, Miss Freud. Anna Freud: Luckily the inner representation coincides with the object in the outer world, if our reality testing is in order. If the reality testing is affected, it is not so. (Sandler 433) Sandler concedes that when we cannot think in representational terms, this may lead us straight to psychosis. But in his own defense against both psychosis and the implacable Anna, it “also forces us to look at things a little more developmentally” (Sandler 433–34). He wants to know where the distinction between inner and outer world originates in the first place. He follows up his query with the proposition that “the English school started in a very unEnglish way with Melanie Klein.” In the name of a developmental approach

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(Anna Freud’s), he hits her with a kind of sting ray, with his own aggression, in order to defend the order of representation as traditionally conceived: “I wonder if you could say something about the chronological development of projection, Miss Freud. Would it coincide with the development of boundaries, possibly being something which grows out of fluctuating confusion that the child feels, so that perhaps projection and its correction becomes part of boundary formation?” (Sandler 435). Sandler is intent on proving to Miss Freud that the (Kleinian) infant child may be involved in acts of projection in order to construct the boundaries between inner and outer worlds. Anna Freud has no truck with this hypothesis: if the child cannot speak, she declares, there exists no proof of this theory. And in this she is a Rawlsian: such distinctions are the province of adult theory makers. Sandler is of course not at all wrong to wonder about the rupture between impulses and ideational content, that is, about the distinction between drives and their representation. The problem in all of this is Anna Freud’s proxy, the altruist who somehow projects and yet also identifies, and therefore gains gratification. The “most important questions in all of this” pertain just to the question of this proxy: How does an instinctual wish get its gratification via a proxy; how does the unconscious find an adequate, just representation? There must, he hypothesizes, “be an unconscious fantasy in which the object is equated with the self, and this must happen in a way in which there can actually be adequate gratification. This must mean that the perception of something happening gives the gratification. This is very different from the basic model of instinctual gratification tied to zonal stimulation and discharge, and it raises fascinating questions” (Sandler 455). To this, and it essentially ends the discussion about altruistic surrender, Anna Freud rather enigmatically replies: “There are so many shades in all these things” (458). The shades are indeed many. There is first of all Anna Freud’s fundamental rivalry or controversy with the other great child analyst of the early twentieth century, Melanie Klein. It is possible that Anna’s own defense against Melanie was precisely that of altruistic surrender as a way to deal with her own envy vis-à-vis her rival. To Sandler she stated that she had tried in 1936 to keep her book nonpolemical and that only “a few points” touched on the famous controversies. The mechanism of altruistic surrender was one of those points, insofar as here she insisted that “projection does not come into being until the division between outer and inner world is established [and when the child already speaks]. Whereas with the Kleinians, it is thought to be one of the earliest mechanisms, and when I tried to make a chronology, I put it rather late” (Sandler 434). Sandler wonders whether all the recent talk about projective identification and empathy may not aid us in understanding “nor-

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mal” development, that is, the proposition by which projection could “apply also to things other than aggressive wishes, and thus help us to understand how other people function on the basis of how we function” (438). Altruistic surrender is ultimately a “vicarious pleasure,” and quite rightly Sandler wants to know how such vicarious pleasure differs from altruism by proxy (Sandler 443). The whole question of Anna Freud’s politics is placed precisely here, in the difference between or identity with vicarious pleasure and its consequent altruism by proxy. If Sandler wants to keep the two apart in the name of his own intactness, Anna Freud attempts to think of an ego position where both are in fact the same. “What appears first,” she states, “is the criticism of the other [identification with the aggressor]. . . . Selfcriticism is put out onto others. So we do not get empathy. It can be empathy only if we externalize [project] onto others what we like in ourselves” (Sandler 439). When another interlocutor wonders why one would want to externalize something that is acceptable to the self—does one not normally project the bad from oneself ?—Anna Freud responds: What I really saw was the contrast between those people who deal with the prohibition of their own wishes by a strict superego in this particular way [altruistic surrender], and others who use the opposite way of condemning all the people in the outside world who have similar wishes, because they can’t stand seeing the forbidden wish being fulfilled. . . . But in the type of altruism I described the person seeks out the wishes in the outside world to represent his own wishes, and instead of blaming, fulfills it there. This is to me the most important thing. . . . From that comes vicarious pleasure. (Sandler 441–42) The vicarious pleasure that stems from not blaming others for what is “bad” or aggressive in oneself: such is altruistic surrender. Altruistic surrender is a mechanism of defense on the part of the ego; ultimately it is its greatest defense. Neither repression nor sublimation, it is that mechanism that makes the ego into a political subject, a subject who furthermore accounts for her own pleasures while yet advocating that same subject’s intactness. I began this book with Hannah Arendt’s worry that grounding political thought in a nursery model of relations between rulers and ruled can only lead to a crisis in authority and in political theory. At some level, then, Arendt rejects psychoanalysis as a useful paradigm in and through which to think about politics and political theory. In this sense, her theory (as also John Rawls’s) of the political subject is always and emphatically an adult subject. Anna Freud would certainly agree that the political subject is an adult. Nevertheless, she does not of course reject psychoanalysis; she also does not dis-

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card the child as a legitimate object of analysis. Like her father, she grounds social existence in the affective relations that have their origins in the nursery. Nonetheless, while loyal to her father’s project, she brings about subtle shifts in those nursery relations. Hers is a double perspective, encompassing both that of the daughter embroiled in the envious sibling wars and of the leader of psychoanalysis as a political institution. I have named this double perspective Anna Freud’s impious fidelity, a perspective most dramatically expressed through her idea of altruistic surrender. Altruistic surrender is that defense mechanism put into place by a daughter in order to live her ambitions in public life through the masculinity of the father. As such, it not only constitutes vicarious pleasure but allows the daughter to live in a kind of proxy relation to herself. Living in a proxy relationship to oneself requires a certain Antigonal irony about oneself and of the community one represents. An yet, Anna Freud took seriously her father’s concern that psychoanalysis required defending, that it required this defense both because it had to guarantee its survival in the face of the founding father’s death and because it needed its borders firmly established in the face of an increasingly hostile and aggressive world. Father and daughter also agreed that the seat for such a defense would be not only an association or institution of psychoanalysis but also a strong ego. If Anna was an “ego psychologist,” then so also was her father. As I have argued, Sigmund Freud too shifted his focus of analysis between the two wars from a theory of repression to a theory of egoic defenses. For this reason, it strikes me as too simplistic to assert that there exists some fundamental contradiction between a theory of the unconscious and a theory of the ego’s defenses. The Freudian “wider social stage” is emphatically not in conflict with, nor a simple reflection of, other intrapsychic conflicts; politics and psyche are instead related to each other in a supplementary manner. The ego, the political subject comes into being, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy argue, at psychoanalysis’s borders and—in that same move—constitute the psychoanalytic field as such. There are, of course, differences between the two projects. These differences are subtle but important, describing the daughter’s swerving into another place, one that does not leave behind the Oedipal framework but certainly reworks it in light of other, Antigonal, concerns. A first difference is a rather straightforward one. While Sigmund Freud was politically a liberal and while Anna Freud certainly “found herself ” in her father’s political imaginary, the daughter also found her political roots in the Austrian socialist movement, one that advocated not just a communal concern for the more helpless victims of border control but also a vision of social arrangements that

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would be able to dispense with leadership altogether. In this straddling of two positions—the liberal and the socialist one—she was a Rawlsian, in that she insisted on a welfare notion of social arrangements while yet adhering to the intactness of the liberal ego. It is certainly the case that Anna Freud replaced describing the unconscious with a description of the child, as Adam Phillips has argued. In this sense, her perspective is placed in those nursery wars that for Sigmund were only ever viewed from the perspective of the father. For the daughter, the child is a group creature and for this reason always already a political subject. The child in her reading is (or so at least Anna thought of herself) a foot soldier in a cause by and for which the father may be loved, but only insofar as this love is displaced to a love for institutional existence. Again, however, this different perspective is a subtle one, for the child of Anna Freud’s analysis is also an adult from the very beginning, and this because radically orphaned and therefore beyond Oedipal conflicts. Significantly, Anna’s love for the father only comes about by countering his theory that justice is established because children identify with each other and therefore love the father. Anna muddles this theory. She argues that justice is born from the daughter’s identification with the father and the love between siblings. For Anna Freud, identification exists only as identification with the aggressor: there is quite simply no other form of identification possible for her. She translates her father’s idea of identification into a relation of love, one theorized in her work with groups of children and put into writing in essays such as “Experiments in Group Upbringing.” Institutional life, the political subject or ego come into being on the basis of a relationship between father and daughter, not between father and son; and they are held in place because children love each other, and they do so without any regard for the Oedipal parent. While this may seem a narrative belonging to one of Anna Freud’s “nice stories,” this is not the case: when reading her work attentively, it is hard to miss her rather deadly irony. Democracy is founded in the eroticization of violence, as she consistently argued in her early essay on beating fantasies and later with her concept of altruistic surrender. This eroticization is, furthermore, not a sublimating move: first of all, because she insists that desire is not dispensed with; and second, because it depends on a considerable amount of gender trouble. It depends in fact on the transformation of the little girl into a man. For this reason, also, Anna Freud considerably complicates a tradition of contract theories, as well as their feminist critiques because she is working with a model of political relations that refuses binary gender oppositions or arguments about gender that rely on a logic of exclusion.

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Anna Freud’s insistence on the daughter’s identification with the fatherly leader allows her to engage the problem of political violence in new ways. If her father had insisted that group psychology must be founded in a love for the leader and that identification with the leader undoes the Oedipal structure of power and therefore leads to endless envious violence; then she counters this theory by laying bare the limits of such an analysis when she demonstrates that everything changes when it is the daughter who sets things in motion. And despite the fact that she seemed deeply invested in her masturbatory “nice stories,” whether these were stories about youths and knights or small children living in experimental group settings, Anna Freud was always cognizant of the fact that niceness and altruistic surrender were inevitably grounded in an undercurrent of violence and war. And yet this is a strange and peculiar relationship to violence, one that fuels both what she called her ambition and her surrender. In some very fundamental sense, Anna Freud wants it both ways, and in this reside both her greatest strengths and her greatest weaknesses. Strengths and weaknesses crisscross in ambivalent paths with filial devotion and a project of “going one’s own way.” Such crossroads set considerable traps for Oedipal sons; they construct perhaps even greater ones for Antigonal daughters. Like that hymenal structure described by Derrida, the daughter/sister of Oedipus desires both: she wants to keep in place a virginal veiling screen and to call forth its violent piercing; she seeks desire and fulfillment, love and murder. She desires both a Rawlsian veil of ignorance and the full recognition that this veil only exists because it has already been torn down by a desiring, envious gaze. Ernest Jones was certainly onto a fundamental truth about Anna Freud when he wrote in an already cited letter in 1952: “You have inherited [your father’s] depth of feeling together with [your mother’s] firmness and intactness. Now I understand more fully your father’s remark to me in 1938 in Vienna—‘Anna ist stärker wie ich.’ ” Anna’s obsession with an intact ego, together with her same but greater strength in relation to her father allows and yet also prohibits her own signature, her speaking in her own name. Anna Freud passes through the legacy of the father, takes it on and yet displaces it in an act of impious fidelity.

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 Index

Agamben, Giorgio, 111n32, 119n46 aggression, 125 – 126, 131, 170 – 171, 183, 189 – 196, 218 – 227. See also identification: with the aggressor Althusser, Louis, 17n8; ideological state apparatuses, 17n8; interpellation, 17 altruism, 215, 217 – 218, 220 – 224, 228. See also altruistic surrender altruistic surrender, 20 – 21n14, 46 – 47, 69, 91, 173 – 175, 181, 190, 196, 215 – 231. See also impious fidelity anagnorisis, 135 analysis: child, 4, 34, 69, 114n38; defense, 146, 178; didactic (training), 37 – 45; lay, 33 – 35 anatomical distinction. See sexual difference Angstbereitschaft. See signal Antigone, 3 – 4, 116 – 118, 132, 135 – 141 anti-Semitism, 101, 104 anxiety, 114n38, 119, 121, 129 – 130, 146, 153, 155 – 181, 185 – 193; neurotic, 155n20; objective, 173n39, 174, 186 – 189; superego, 185 – 186 Arendt, Hannah, 1, 8, 10 – 11, 47n53, 228 Armstrong, Richard, 105n24 authority, 1, 10, 20 – 22, 35, 38, 56, 66, 70, 87, 95, 145 – 146, 228; charismatic, 23n16, 32, 97; paternal, 18 – 21, 60, 62, 70, 81, 94; political, 1, 8 – 10 autobiographical, the, 8 – 9, 12, 15, 30n27 Berlin, Isaiah, 143 Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, 28, 38 Bernfeld, Siegfried, 36 – 42 Bettelheim, Bruno, 109 – 113, 122, 125 biological difference. See sexual difference Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 78 – 79, 93 Borges, Jorge Luis, 197 Brill, A. A., 46 Brown, Wendy, 30 – 31, 71n31

Bulldog Banks children, 112 – 113, 117 – 133, 142 Butler, Judith, 3 – 4, 60, 117 – 119, 139 – 143 castration anxiety, 23n17, 35, 70, 73 – 76, 80, 155n20, 158, 163 – 168, 188 – 189, 192n52, 223 castration complex. See castration anxiety conscience. See superego Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand, Edmond), 216 – 217, 220 Dann, Sister Sophie, 113, 126 – 127 daydreams, 51, 62 – 69, 216 death drive, 5, 28, 125n55, 140 defense mechanism, 27, 43, 46, 146 – 147, 165, 170 – 185, 190 – 192, 215 – 218, 221 – 222, 229. See also ego: defense of Deleuze, Gilles, 97, 114 democracy, 5 – 6, 11, 13, 29 – 31, 48, 53 – 55, 76, 83, 198, 215, 220, 230; affective conditions of, 98; democratic institutions, 5; democratic politics, 3, 6, 30; democratic project, 5, 107 – 108, 117, 171; democratic society, 29, 198 – 215; democratic subject, 12, 53, 55 – 56, 95, 115, 196, 224; democratic theory, 5, 200, 196; and the ego, 3, 5 – 6, 27, 29, 98, 107 – 109, 216, 220; liberal, 10 (see also liberalism; social contract: liberal) derealization, 149 – 150 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 32n30, 97, 101n13, 105 – 106, 115 – 117, 220 – 221; archive, 101n13, 115, 117; differance, 16 disavowal, 17, 82, 189 displacement, 151, 159 – 160, 168 – 169, 226 drives, theory of, 5, 17n7, 20n14, 28, 156, 175n41, 197, 219

241

242

INDEX

ego, 4 – 6, 17, 21 – 22, 27 – 30, 62, 157 – 166, 168 – 182, 184 – 190; defense of, 3 – 6, 13, 20 – 21n14, 33, 108, 142, 146, 157, 160, 166, 169 – 184, 187, 189, 196 – 197, 200, 228 – 229 (see also defense mechanism) ego ideal, 21n15, 47, 145n2, 210 ego psychology, 4, 28 – 29, 108 – 109, 125n55, 132 Eifermann, Rivka, 57n15, 59n18, 69 Eitingon, Max, 45, 47, 63, 68n25, 151 – 152, 154, 172 envy, 48, 52 – 56, 59, 69 – 78, 82 – 85, 90 – 95, 124, 198, 208n9, 209 – 215, 221 – 224 fantasy, 44 – 45, 57 – 71, 73, 94, 97 – 98, 133 – 134, 189, 202, 215 – 216, 227 fascism, 27, 100 father, 18 – 25, 35, 52 – 53, 56 – 63, 66, 69 – 70, 74, 77 – 84, 90 – 95, 118, 120 – 121, 141, 230 – 231; killing of, 23 – 24, 83 – 84, 115. See also paternity Felman, Shoshana, 6 – 7 Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress, 25 Forrester, John, 53n6, 72, 212 – 214 Fort/Da, 193 Foucault, Michel, 10, 54n9, 71n31 Freud, Anna: Austrian Socialist movement, 34, 46, 229; exile to London, 28, 146; father’s death, 12; Gestapo arrest, 47, 146; mother’s death, 12; Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 49 Freud, Anna, works of: “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams,” 63, 65; “The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense,” 5 – 6, 13, 28, 91, 146, 170 – 172, 174 – 175, 215 – 216; “An Experiment in Group Upbringing,” 113, 117; “Inaugural Lecture for the Sigmund Freud Chair at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem,” 104 – 105; “Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis,” 34, 50 – 51n2; “The Problem of Training Analysis,” 42 Freud, Sigmund: cancer diagnosis, 28, 39; exile to London, 28; Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress, address to, 25; wider stage, 15 – 16, 79 Freud, Sigmund, works of: “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 54 – 55; “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 28, 192; “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 49, 56 – 59, 63, 70 – 73, 85n49; “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 20, 53, 70, 82,

84, 153; “Constructions in Analysis,” 61n22; “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” 148; “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” 20 – 21n14; “The Ego and the Id,” 21n15, 28, 70, 145n2; “Female Sexuality,” 70; “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” 17n7, 24n20, 45, 58n16, 70 – 71, 120n49, 177, 219; “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” 13, 28, 144, 146 – 147, 155, 157, 160 – 161, 177, 181, 186; “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” 20 – 21n14; “The Interpretation of Dreams,” 134, 176; “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” 94 – 95; “Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy,” 25; “Moses and Monotheism,” 18, 28, 100, 153n15, 172; “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” 93, 136 – 137n70; “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” 144 – 145; “An Outline of Psychoanalysis,” 55n10; “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” 85, 90n53; “The Question of Lay Analysis,” 33, 35; “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” 103; “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” 56, 59n18, 73, 76; “Totem and Taboo,” 39 – 41, 70, 81 – 82, 84, 189 Friedman, John, 76 Fuss, Diana, 85n49, 86 gender crossing, 67 gender difference, 53 – 56, 60 – 63, 68, 70 – 77, 80 – 85, 90n53, 94 – 95, 215. See also sexual difference Girard, Rene, 78 Grosskurth, Phyllis, 154 group identification, 12, 71 – 72, 77 – 83, 112, 131 group psychology, 71, 77 – 83, 131, 231 group upbringing, 99, 109 – 113, 117 – 133, 142, 230 Guattari, Felix, 97, 114 guilt, 21 – 22, 58 – 61, 65 – 66, 130n59, 150, 194 – 195 Hartmann, Heinz, 109 hegemony, 162 – 163 heteronormativity, 4, 61 Holocaust, 5, 12, 97, 102, 114, 122n52, 133

INDEX homosexuality, 80, 85 – 95, 219 hymen, 220 – 221 id, 29, 160 – 163, 177 – 178, 185 – 186 identification, 21n15, 28 – 29, 70 – 74, 76 – 84, 90 – 92, 95, 98, 126 – 127, 219; with the aggressor, 46, 171 – 175, 177, 181, 190 – 196, 217, 221 – 222, 230; structures of, 28. See also group identification identity, 7 – 9, 11, 76, 95, 98 – 103, 207. See also Jewish identity ideology, 17n8, 161, 162 – 163 Illouz, Eva, 54n9 impious fidelity, 3 – 4, 7, 13, 49, 216, 229, 231. See also altruistic surrender incest taboo, 103, 106, 116 inhibition, 164 institutionalization, 7, 10, 30, 93, 98, 114, 116 – 117; of identities, 98; of pleasure, 58, 65; of psychoanalysis, 2 – 3, 5, 16, 31 – 33, 35 – 42, 52, 96 – 97, 102, 106, 134 – 135 International Psychoanalytic Association, 35, 97, 104, 106 – 107 introjection, 180 – 181, 190 Israel, state of, 12, 97, 99, 100, 104, 109 – 111, 122, 125; creation of national ethos, 110 – 112; First International Psychoanalytic Congress in Israel, 104 Jacobus, Mary, 90n53 jealousy. See envy Jewish identity, 28, 35n37, 97, 99, 102 – 103, 105n24, 108 – 109; rebuilding of, 99; redemption of, 99. See also identity Jones, Ernest, 4, 33 – 34, 47, 50 – 51n2, 102, 104, 152 – 153, 173, 231 Judaism, 99 – 106; European Jewry, 12, 96, 99, 110, 117; and psychoanalysis, 99 – 106 Jung, Carl, 51, 102, 144 – 145, 151 justice, 48, 53, 55, 72 – 73, 76 – 77, 88, 222, 230; social, 72, 85, 144, 219. See also Rawls, John kibbutz, 109 – 112 kinship relations, 2, 19, 114 – 116, 139 – 141 Klein, Melanie, 3 – 4, 34, 114n38, 226 – 227 Kris, Ernst, 109 Lacan, Jacques, 3 – 4, 36n40, 72, 90n53, 108, 118, 135 – 140 LaCapra, Dominick, 12, 114n37 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 15 – 20, 23, 25, 77 – 79, 100n12, 229

243

Levi, Primo, 110 – 111n32, 113n35, 129n57 liberalism, 6, 13, 71n31, 106n27 libido, 77, 91, 156 loss, 12, 21 – 22, 75, 114 – 117, 166 – 168, 188, 193 masculinity complex, 62, 68, 74 – 76, 83 – 84, 91 – 94 masochism, 20 – 21n14, 61, 218 – 219 masturbation, 51 – 52, 58 – 62, 64 – 65, 71 – 75, 88, 92, 95, 128, 192, 231 maternity, 18 – 21, 49, 74n40. See also mother memory, 119 – 120, 150 Morselli, Enrico, 102 Moskovitz, Sarah, 113, 123n53, 129n58, 130n59 mother, 19 – 21, 24 – 25, 62, 72 – 77, 79 – 87, 90 – 92, 119 – 120, 131 – 132, 141, 151, 153, 155, 166 – 168 motherhood, 86, 88 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 15 – 20, 23, 25, 77 – 79, 100n12, 143, 229 narcissism, 23, 71, 77, 79, 81, 91, 126, 208, 210, 213, 222 Nazism, 5, 12, 104, 110 – 111n32, 120 – 121, 124 Nierenberg, Ona, 40, 42, 107n28 non-subject, 18 – 19 nursery, 8, 10 – 12, 46, 48, 60 – 61, 71, 73, 76 – 77, 82, 199; model of, 1, 11, 48, 228; nursery relations, 8, 229; war in, 60, 73, 85, 88, 92 – 93, 114n38, 124, 212, 229 – 230 object-choice, 60 – 61, 71, 80, 83, 86 – 87, 89 – 90, 92 – 93, 145n2 Oedipal triangle, 80 – 83, 94, 114, 118, 147 Oedipus complex, 2, 35, 49, 62, 66, 69 – 84, 90, 93 – 94, 105, 110, 116, 120, 131, 135, 139 – 142, 145n2, 153 – 155, 188, 229 – 231 Pateman, Carol, 53 – 55 paternity, 18 – 21, 24, 66, 74n40, 101n13, 168, 176. See also father patriarchy, 7, 18, 53, 97n4, 101n13, 105n24, 115. See also authority: paternal penis envy, 54, 73 – 76, 83, 91, 191, 223. See also envy perversion, 56 Pfister, Oscar, 35 – 36 phobia, 164 – 165

244

INDEX

Plath, Sylvia, 171 – 172 pleasure principle, 5, 68, 160 – 161 political, the, 8 – 9, 11, 16, 18, 53, 55, 70, 78 – 79, 100 – 101n12, 183. See also subject, the: political political contract, 8, 53, 197, 216 political domain, 1, 11, 14 – 15, 27, 30, 201 political theory, 11, 13, 19 – 20, 53 – 55, 96, 117n44, 200, 228 politics of psychoanalysis, 14, 30, 32 – 33n30, 96 prohibition, 65, 73, 84, 165, 184, 205n7, 222 projection, 156, 165, 181, 217, 223 – 228 psychoanalysis: American, 4, 152n10; French, 106; “Jewish Science,” 99 – 101, 104 – 108, 142 psychoanalytic knowledge, 3, 27, 33, 41 – 43. See also psychoanalytic theory psychoanalytic politics, 14, 36n40, 96, 157 psychoanalytic theory, 17, 39, 84 – 85, 94, 96, 156 – 157, 168 – 169, 171. See also psychoanalytic knowledge; unconscious, the: theory of psychoanalytic training, 27 – 28, 31 – 45 Rapaport, David, 109 – 110 Rank, Otto, 97n4, 147, 152 – 158, 166, 168; “The Trauma of Birth,” 147, 152 Rawls, John, 13, 53, 197 – 220, 222 – 225; circumstances of justice, 207 – 208; justice as fairness, 199, 204, 207, 209, 214; original position, 13, 53, 143, 199, 202 – 209, 212 – 216, 223 – 225; A Theory of Justice, 13, 197, 198, 200; veil of ignorance, 13, 202, 205 – 207, 209, 212 – 215, 220, 225, 231; visibility, 211. See also justice reaction formation, 72, 76, 181 – 182 reality principle, 67 regression, 24 – 25, 46, 91, 122, 181 renunciation, 22, 84, 89, 219, 223 repetition compulsion, 147, 193 repression, 5, 43, 61, 100, 149, 155 – 156, 160 – 165, 168 – 169, 173, 179 – 183, 224 – 225, 229 resistance, 6, 25 – 27, 30 – 31, 42 – 44, 50 – 51n2, 69, 124, 131, 134, 173, 210 resisting reading, 6 – 7 Rorty, Richard, 143 Rose, Jacqueline, 14, 28 – 33, 35 – 36, 69, 97 – 100, 133 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 29, 106 – 109, 125n55, 132, 139n71, 162 – 163

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19n12, 50 Roustang, François, 152 – 153 Sachs, Hanns, 38 Safouan, Moustapha, 36 – 42 Sandler, Joseph, 170 – 171nn33 – 34, 173n39, 174 – 185, 187 – 195, 218 – 223, 225 – 228 San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, 36 Said, Edward, 98 – 101 self-reflexivity, 20, 64, 176 sexual difference, 7 – 9, 54 – 60, 64, 68, 73, 76, 80, 191. See also gender difference Shengold, Leonard, 58 – 59n17 signal, 119, 146, 148n8, 157 – 168, 174, 177, 185 simulacrum, 10 social contract, 13, 77 – 78, 93; Freudian, 19, 24n20, 48 – 49, 51, 55 – 56, 70, 124; liberal, 106n27, 143, 198 – 204 (see also democracy: liberal) sociality, theory of, 17, 48 – 49, 77 – 78, 96, 117 – 124, 138, 196, 204, 217 Sophocles, 3, 115, 116n40, 132n60, 134 Steiner, George, 139n71 Stonebridge, Lyndsey, 114 – 115n38, 119, 121, 124n54 subject, the, 3 – 5, 9, 41 – 42, 57, 60, 64, 76, 90n53, 107, 114, 120, 143, 194, 201 – 204, 220 – 222; democratic (see democracy: democratic subject); emergence of, 12, 18 – 20; gendered, 69 – 71, 76 – 78, 224; orphan, 97, 132, 97 – 98; political, 9, 17, 70, 171, 228 – 230; psychoanalytic (Freudian), 9, 17 – 18, 20 – 21n14, 29, 67, 72, 79, 84, 119, 135, 150, 171, 181n46; traumatized, 5, 115 – 118, 142 (see also trauma) sublimation, 67 – 69, 76, 87, 94 – 95, 180 – 181, 219 – 220, 224, 228, 230 submission, 17, 20 – 21n14, 89 – 92 superego, 20 – 22, 57, 62, 70, 76, 112, 125, 168, 173, 185 – 186, 193 – 195 symptom, 160, 162 – 166 Toews, John, 84 totalitarianism, 5, 13, 79, 96 – 97, 120, 142, 171, 221 transference, 34 – 35, 41 – 45, 87, 122n52, 125, 146, 183, 184n48, 189; neurosis, 45 trauma, 12, 26 – 27, 98 – 99, 114 – 118, 123, 126, 129 – 130, 133, 158 – 160, 168 – 171; birth trauma, 20, 147,

INDEX 152 – 158; historical, 12, 99, 114 – 118, 130; structural, 12, 114 – 118; traumatic loss, 12, 114, 117, 141, 166. See also loss; subject, the: traumatized uncanny, the, 56 unconscious, the, 4, 11, 16, 59n18, 97 – 98, 107, 114, 132, 174, 215, 225; defense of, 106 – 108; gendered, 9; theory of, 4 – 6, 9, 96, 100 – 101, 104, 139n71, 229 (see also psychoanalytic theory) Vaterablehnung, 153 Vatersehnsucht, 127, 153 – 154 Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 36, 38 – 39, 46, 52, 63 – 64, 88

245

war neurosis, 26 – 27 Weber, Max, 10, 23n16, 42n45 Weber, Samuel, 134, 144, 156 – 157, 159 – 160, 168 – 169 Weiss, Edoardo, 50 Winter, Sarah, 134 – 135, 136 – 137n70 withdrawal, 20, 29, 122n52, 166; of love, 21 – 25, 79, 193; of mother, 25, 79 – 80, 151, 153, 168 Yerushalmi, Yosef, 101 – 103, 105 – 106 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, 1 – 2, 33 – 34, 45 – 47, 51, 56n13, 104, 128n56, 147, 154, 170, 172 – 174 Zertal, Idith, 110n31