Françoise Meltzer
         Editor's Introduction: Partitive Plays, Pipe Dreams
         There is the famous anecdote about Freud: upon being reminded by a
            disciple that to smoke cigars is clearly a phallic activity, Freud,
            cigar in hand, is said to have responded, "Sometimes a good
            cigar is just a good cigar." The anecdote demonstrates, it
            seems to me, a problematic central to psychoanalysis: the
            discipline which insists on transference and, perhaps even more
            significantly, on displacement as fundamental principles,
            ultimately must insist in turn on seeing everything as being
            "really" something else. Such an ideology of
            metamorphosis is so much taken for granted that unlike the rest of
            the world, which generally has difficulty in being convinced that a
            pipe, for example, is not necessarily a pipe at all, psychoanalysis
            needs at times to remind itself, in a type of return to an
            adaequatio, that it is possible for a cigar really to be a cigar.
            Psychoanalysis, in other words, has not only an economy which is
            hydraulic (mirroring the nineteenth-century physics from which it
            springs), but has as well an economy of seepage: each apparent
            object, whether in dream, literature, or psychic narrative,
            splashes over onto at least one "something else." Not
            only is there always a remainder, but the remainder generally
            proliferates, multiplies, from more than one quotient, such that
            the original "thing" in question becomes merely the
            agent for production. Its status as thing-in-the-world is easily
            lost.
            Such seepage has, of course, appeared almost everywhere.
            Psychoanalysis has infiltrated such diverse areas as literature (to
            which it owes its myths), linguistics, philosophy, anthropology,
            history, feminism, psychology, archeology, neurology, to name some.
            And it is in the notion of "some," perhaps, that lies
            the crux of the problem. For there is in psychoanalysis an overt
            conviction that it exists as the ultimate totality, of which
            everything else is a part. Not content to see itself as one in a
            number of enterprises, the psychoanalytic project has at its
            foundation a vision of itself as the meaning which will always lie
            in wait; the truth which lies covered by "the rest."
            Jacques Derrida has, of course, pointed to this tendency.
            Psychoanalysis, he noted, wishes a peculiar logic for itself, one
            in which "the species would include the genus."1
            Moreover, says Derrida in the same essay, once psychoanalysis has
            discovered itself, what it then again proceeds to discover around
            it is always itself.2 What happens, then, is that psychoanalysis
            becomes a ubiquitous subject, assimilating every object into
            itself. But it is also a Subject which sees itself as omnipresent,
            omniscient, and without a center precisely the terms in which
            God has been described. It is not then by chance that the
            unconscious is likened to a divinity: always present but revealing
            itself only obliquely and at privileged moments, the unconscious
            takes the place of the Judeo-Christian God. It is within every
            being, but inaccessible unless it "chooses" to manifest
            itself. And in a peculiar reversal of the notion of the partitive,
            psychoanalysis would have the unconscious reveal itself in fleeting
            moments and fragments, thereby suggesting its fullness and
            totality; and it would have "other" intellectual
            enterprises be only apparent totalities which are revealed through
            psychoanalysis alone to be "really" incomplete because
            they exist without recognizing the unconscious and its mother,
            psychoanalysis itself.
             
            1. Jacques Derrida, "Graphesis," "The Purveyor of
            Truth," trans. Willis Dominggo et al., Yale French Studies52
            (1975): 32.
            2. See the syllogism with which Derrida opens his "Purveyor
            of Truth," p. 31. Part of what I am calling the
            "syllogism" appears at the beginning of Stephen
            Melville's article in the present issue.
Dominick LaCapra
         History and Psychoanalysis
         The focus of this essay will be on Freud, although my approach is
            informed by certain aspects of "post-Freudian"
            analysis. In the works of Freud, however, history in the ordinary
            sense often seems lost in the shuffle between ontogeny and
            phylogeny. When Freud, in the latter part of his life, turned to
            cultural history, he was primarily concerned with showing how the
            evolution of civilization on a macrological level might be
            understood through or even seen as an enactment
            of psychoanalytic principles and processes. And he openly
            acknowledged the speculative nature of his inquiry into prehistory,
            "archaic" society, and their putative relation to the
            civilizing process.
            One might nonetheless argue that throughout Freud's work
            there are theoretical bases and fruitful leads for a more delimited
            investigation of specific historical processes for which
            documentation is, to a greater or lesser extent, available. This
            kind of investigation is, moreover, required to test the pertinence
            of Freud's speculative and at times quasi-mythological
            initiatives. At present one can perhaps do little more than
            tentatively suggest how such an investigation might proceed and the
            sorts of issues it might conceivably illuminate. For its
            elaboration has been relatively underdeveloped in the research of
            those who looks to Freud for guidance.
             
            Dominick LaCapra is GGoldwin Smith Professor of European
            Intellectual History at Cornell University. His most recent books
            are "Madame Bovary" on Trial(1982), Rethinking
            Intellectual History (1983), and History and Criticism (1985). He
            has just completed a book-length manuscript entitled
            "History, Politics, and the Novel."
Arnold I. Davidson
         How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A_Reading_of_Freud's_Three
            Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
         I have two primary aims in the following paper, aims that are
            inextricably intertwined. First, I want to raise some
            historiographical and epistemological issues about how to write the
            history of psychoanalysis. Although they arise quite generally in
            the history of science, these issues have a special status and
            urgency when the domain is the history of psychoanalysis. Second,
            in light of the epistemological and methodological orientation that
            I am going to advocate, I want to begin a reading of Freud's
            Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,one whose specificity is a
            function of my attachment to this orientation, to a particular way
            of doing the history of psychoanalysis. Despite the enormous number
            of pages that have been written on Freud's Three Essays,it is
            very easy to underestimate the density of this book, a density at
            once historical, rhetorical, and conceptual. This underestimation
            stems in part from historiographical presumptions that quite
            quickly misdirect us away from the fundamental issues.
            In raising question about the historiography of the history of
            science, I obviously cannot begin at the beginning. So let me begin
            much further along, with the writings of Michel Foucault. I think
            of the works of Foucault, in conjunction with that of Gaston
            Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, as exemplifying a very
            distinctive perspective about how to write the history of science.
            In the English-speaking world, perhaps only the work of Ian Hacking
            both shares this perspective and ranks with its French counterparts
            in terms of originality and quality. No brief summary can avoid
            eliding the differences between Bachelard, Canguilhem, Hacking, and
            Foucault; indeed, the summary I am going to produce does not even
            fully capture Foucault's perspective, which he called
            "archaeology."1 But this sketch will have to do for the
            purposes I have in mind here, whose ultimate aim is to reorient our
            approach to the history of psychoanalysis.
             
            1. The sketch that follows reproduces, with some omissions and
            additions, the beginning of my "Archeology, Genealogy,
            Ethics," in Michel Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Hoy
            (London, 1986), pp. 221-34.
             
            Arnold I. Davidsonis assistant professor in the department of
            philosophy, the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science,
            and the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the
            University of Chicago. He is currently writing a book on the
            history and epistemology of nineteenth-century psychiatric theories
            of sexuality.
Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok
         The Secret of Psychoanalysis: History Reads Theory
         All disciplines have their histories in addition to their theories.
            In general, the history of a set of problems is treated separately
            from the nature of the problems themselves. The axioms of a given
            discipline may be the object of external inquiry but are not
            usually subject to historical examination. In this way,
            psychoanalysis has been investigated, even challenged, by a variety
            of other disciplines: biology, linguistics, history, philosophy,
            literature, and so forth. One may ask whether psychoanalysis can
            also become its own object, effectively distancing itself from
            itself. Will historical scrutiny provide criticism from within and
            thereby alter the nature of psychoanalysis?
            It has been our observation that the history of the creation of
            psychoanalysis and of the psychoanalytic movement suggests
            deficiencies and omissions within psychoanalytic theory. This
            implies something far beyond the simple idea that no serious
            examination of theoretical problems can occur without an
            understanding of their history. Not only the past but the future of
            psychoanalysis, both as a theory and as a clinical practice, may
            well depend on the conscious assessment and assimilation of its own
            history. "The Secret of Psychoanalysis: History Reads
            Theory" is intended in part as an introduction to Nicolas
            Abraham's "Notes on the Phantom" which will, in
            turn, illuminate the theoretical and practical scope of this essay.
            A history of Freudian psychoanalysis could be written based on the
            voices of dissenting insiders, without including schismatics such
            as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, and others who
            eventually developed independent systems of thought. The detailed
            interpretation of such firsts is already a consecrated approach to
            psychoanalytic history. But much remains to be learned from the
            internal criticism of those who have participated in Freud's
            movement or have sought sympathetically to understand the birth and
            progress of Freudian psychoanalysis. Most of the disagreements
            concern theoretical and clinical issues or the clocked access to
            documents that are essential to the history assessment of
            psychoanalysis. This is Ludwig Marcuse's case as he writes to
            Ernest Jones on 10 October 1957.1
             
            1. Ludwig Marcuse is the author of Freud und sein Bild vom Menschen
            [Freud and his image of man] (Frankfurt, 1956).
             
            Nicholas Rand, assistant professor of French at the University of
            Wisconsin Madison, is completing a book on the notion of
            hiding in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Maria Torok
            is the author (with Nicholas Abraham) of The Wolf Man's Magic
            Word (Le Verbier de L'Homme aux loups),recently published in
            translation. "The Secret of Psychoanalysis" is part of
            a book-length study Rand and Torok are writing on Freud and
            psychoanalytic theory.
Nicolas Abraham
         Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud's_Metapsychology
         The belief that the spirits of the dead can return to haunt the
            living exists either as a tenet or as a marginal conviction in all
            civilizations, whether ancient or modern. More often than not, the
            dead do not return to reunite the living with their loved ones but
            rather to lead them into some dreadful snare, entrapping them with
            disastrous consequences. To be sure, all the departed may return,
            but some are predestined to haunt: the dead who have been shamed
            during their lifetime or those who took unspeakable secrets to the
            grave. From the brucolacs, the errant sprits of outcasts in ancient
            Greece, to the ghost of Hamlet's vengeful father, and on down
            to the rapping spirits of modern times, the theme of the
            dead who, having suffered repression by their family or
            society, cannot enjoy, even in death, a state of
            authenticity appears to be omnipresent (whether overtly
            expressed or disguised) on the fringes of religions and, failing
            that, in rational systems. It is a fact that the
            "phantom," whatever its form, is nothing but an
            invention of the living. Yes, an invention in the sense that the
            phantom is meant to objectify, even if under the guise of
            individual or collective hallucinations, the gap that the
            concealment of some part of a loved one's life produced in
            us. The phantom is, therefore, also a metapsychological fact.
            Consequently, what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left
            within us by the secrets of others.
            Because the phantom is not related to the loss of a loved one, it
            cannot be considered the effect of unsuccessful mourning, as is the
            case of melancholics or of all those who carry a tomb within
            themselves. It is the children's or descendants' lot to
            objectify these buried tombs through diverse species of ghosts.
            What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others. The phantoms of
            folklore merely objectify a metaphor active within the unconscious:
            the burial of an unspeakable fact within the loved one.
            Here we are in the midst of clinical psychoanalysis and still
            shrouded in obscurity, an obscurity, however, that the nocturnal
            being of phantoms (if only in the metapsychological sense) can,
            paradoxically, be called upon to clarify.
             
            The most recently published book of essays by Nicolas Abraham(1919-
            75) is Rythmes de l'oeuvre, de la traduction et de la
            psychanalyse (1985). "Notes on the Phantom" is the
            preliminary statement of his theory of transgenerational haunting.
            Nicholas Rand,assistant professor of French at the University of
            Wisconsin Madison, is the English-language editor of
            Abraham's works.
Sander L. Gilman
         The Struggle of Psychiatry with Psychoanalysis: Who Won?
         What if Wittgenstein and Popper were right after all? What is
            psychoanalysis is not "scientific," not scientific by
            any contemporary definition including Adolf
            Grünbaum's but what if it works all the same?1 What if
            psychoanalysis is all right in practice, but the theory isn't
            scientific? Indeed, what if "science" is defined
            ideologically rather than philosophically? If we so redefine
            "science," it is not to dismiss psychoanalysis but to
            understand its origin and impact, to follow the ideological
            dialectic between the history of psychiatry, its developing as a
            medical "science," and the evolving self-definition of
            psychoanalysis which parallels this history.
             
            We know that Freud divided psychoanalysis into three quite discrete
            areas first, a theory, a "scientific structure";
            second, a method of inquiry, a means of exploring and ordering
            information; and last, but certainly not least, a mode of
            treatment. Let us, for the moment, follow the actual course of
            history, at least the course of a history which can be described by
            sorting out the interrelationship between psychoanalysis and
            psychiatry, and assume that we can heuristically view the mode of
            treatment as relatively independent of the other two aspects of
            psychoanalysis. What if the very claims for a
            "scientific" basis for psychoanalytic treatment and by
            extension the role of the psychoanalyst as promulgated by Freud and
            his early followers were rooted in an ideologically charged
            historical interpretation of the positivistic nature of science and
            the definition of the social role of the scientist? This may seem
            an odd premise to begin an essay on the mutual influence of
            psychoanalysis and psychiatry, but it is not stranger than the
            actual historical practice.
             
            Psychoanalysis originated not in the psychiatric clinic but in the
            laboratories of neurology in Vienna and Paris.2 Its point of origin
            was not nineteenth-century psychiatry but rather nineteenth-century
            neurology. That origin points to a major difference between the
            traditional practice of nineteenth-century psychiatry and modern
            clinical psychiatry in our post-positivistic age. Psychiatry in
            nineteenth-century Europe, in Vienna as well as in Paris, was an
            adjunct to the world of the asylum. Indeed, the second great battle
            (after Pinel's restructuring of the asylum) which nineteenth-
            century psychiatry waged was the creation of the
            "alienist" as a new medical specialty. The alienist was
            the medical doctor in administrative charge of the asylum, rather
            than a medical adjunct to the lay asylum director as had earlier,
            in the age of "moral treatment," been the practice.
             
            Sander L. Gilman is professor of human studies in the departments
            of German literature and Near Eastern studies, Cornell University,
            and professor of psychiatry (history) at the Cornell Medical
            College. He is the author of numerous books on intellectual and
            literary history. His most recent study is Jewish Self-Hatred
            (1986). Forthcoming is his study Oscar Wilde's London and the
            English edition of his Conversations with Nietzsche.His previous
            contribution to  is "Black Bodies, White
            Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late
            Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature" (Autumn
            1985).
Jane Gallop
         Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism
         In the early seventies, American feminist literary criticism had
            little patience for psychoanalytic interpretation, dismissing it
            along with other forms of what Mary Ellmann called "phallic
            criticism."1 Not that psychoanalytic literary criticism was a
            specific target of feminist critics, but Freud and his science were
            viewed by feminism in general as prime perpetrators of patriarchy.
            If we take Kate Millett's Sexual Politics2 as the first book
            of modern feminist criticism, let us remark that she devotes ample
            space and energy to attacking Freud, not of course as the
            forerunner of any school of literary criticism, but as a master
            discourse of our, which it to say masculinist, culture. But,
            although Freud may generally have been a target for feminism,
            feminist literary critics of the early seventies expended more of
            their energy in the attack on New Criticism. The era was, after
            all, hardly a heyday for American psychoanalytic criticism;
            formalist modes of reading enjoyed a hegemony in the literary
            academy in contrast with which psychoanalytic interpretation was a
            rather weak arm of patriarchy.
            Since then, there have been two changes in this picture. In the
            last decade, psychoanalytic criticism has grown in prestige and
            influence, and a phenomenon we can call psychoanalytic feminist
            criticism has arisen.3 I would venture that two major factors have
            contributed to this boom in American psychoanalytic criticism.
            First, the rise of feminist criticism, in its revolt against
            formalism, has rehabilitated thematic and psychological criticism,
            the traditional mainstays of psychoanalytic interpretation. Because
            feminism has assured the link between psychosexuality and the
            socio-historical realm, psychoanalysis now linked to major
            political and cultural questions. Glistening on the horizon of
            sociopolitical connection, feminism promises to save psychoanalysis
            from its ahistorical and apolitical doldrums.
            The second factor that makes psychoanalytic reading a growth
            industry in the United States is certainly more widely recognized:
            it is the impact of French post-structuralist thought on the
            American literary academy. There is, of course, the direct
            influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis which promotes language to a
            principal role in the psychoanalytic drama and so naturally offers
            fertile ground for crossing psychoanalytic and literary concerns.
            Yet I think, in fact, the wider effect in this country has come
            from Derridean deconstruction. Although deconstruction is not
            strictly psychoanalytic, Freud's prominent place in Derridean
            associative networks promises a criticism that is, finally,
            respectably textual and still, in some recognizable way, Freudian.
            Although this second, foreign factor in the growth of American
            psychoanalytic criticism seems far away from the realm of homespun
            feminist criticism, I would content that there is a powerful if
            indirect connection between the two. I would speculate that the
            phenomenal spread of deconstruction in American departments of
            English is in actuality a response to the growth of feminist
            criticism. At a moment when it was no longer possible to ignore
            feminist criticism's challenge to the critical establishment,
            deconstruction appeared offering a perspective that was not in
            opposition to but rather beyond feminism, offering to sublate
            feminism into something supposedly "more radical."
             
            Jane Gallop,professor of humanities at Rice University, is the
            author of Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot,
            and Klossowski (1981), The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and
            Psychoanalysis(1982), and Reading Lacan (1985). She wrote the
            present essay while awaiting the birth of her first child.
Ernesto Laclau
         Psychoanalysis and Marxism
         To think the relationships which exist between Marxism and
            psychoanalysis obliges one to reflect upon the intersections
            between two theoretical fields, each composed independently of the
            other and whose possible forms of mutual reference do not merge
            into any obvious system of translation. For example, it is
            impossible to affirm though it has often been done that
            psychoanalysis adds a theory of subjectivity to the field of
            historical materialism, given that the latter has been constituted,
            by and large, as a negation of the validity and the pertinence of
            any theory of subjectivity (although certainly not of the category
            of "subject"). Thus, no simple model of supplement or
            articulations is of the slightest use. The problem is rather that
            of finding an index of comparison between two different theoretical
            fields, but that, in turn, implies the construction of a new field,
            within which the comparison would make sense.
            This new field is one which may be characterized as "post-
            Marxist" and is the result of a multitude of theoretico-
            political interventions whose cumulative effect in relation to the
            categories of classical Marxism is similar to what Heidegger called
            a "de-struction of the history of ontology." For
            Heidegger, this "de-struction" did not signify the
            purely negative operation of rejecting a tradition, but exactly the
            opposite: it is by means of a radical questioning which is situated
            beyond this tradition but which is only possible in relation
            to it that the originary meaning of the categories of this
            tradition (which have long since become stale and trivialized) may
            be recovered. In this sense, effecting a "de-struction"
            of the history of Marxism implies going beyond the deceptive
            evidence of concepts such as "class,"
            "capital," and so on, and re-creating the meaning of
            the originary synthesis that such concepts aspired to establish,
            the total system of theoretical alternatives in regard to which
            they represented only limited options, and the ambiguities inherent
            in their constitution itself the "hymen" in the
            Derridean sense which, although violently repressed, rise up
            here and there in diverse discursive surfaces. It is the systematic
            and genealogical outline of these nuclei of ambiguity which
            initially allows for a destruction of the history of Marxism and
            which constitutes post-Marxism as the field of our current
            political reflection. But it is precisely in these surfaces of
            discursive ambiguity that it is possible to detect the presence of
            logics of the political which allows for the establishment of a
            true dialogue, without complacent metaphorization, between Marxism
            and psychoanalytic theory. I would like to highlight two points,
            which I consider fundamental, concerning these discursive surfaces.
             
            Ernesto Laclau is a lecturer in the Department of Government and
            director of the Graduate Program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis
            at the University of Essex. He is the author of Politics and
            Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) and, with Chantal Mouffe,
            Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
            Politics (1985). Amy G. Reiter-McIntoshis a lecturer and Ph.D.
            candidate at the University of Chicago.
Peter Brooks
         The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
         Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an
            embarrassment. One resists labeling as a "psychoanalytic
            critic" because the kind of criticism evoked by the term
            mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself. Thus I
            have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of
            psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find
            dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of
            structuralist and semiotic narratology. And in general, I think we
            need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis
            may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If
            versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least
            since 1908, when Freud published his essay on "Creative
            Writers and Day-dreaming," and if the enterprise has recently
            been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of
            reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of
            their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched
            bedfellows or perhaps I should say playmates.
            The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis
            in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of
            analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced
            tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of
            literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic criticism tends to fall
            into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis:
            the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text. The
            first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic
            interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also
            perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance
            of the author has been repeatedly announced, authorial mutants
            ceaselessly reappear, as, for instance, in Harold Bloom's
            psychomachia of literary history. Like the author, the fictive
            character has been deconstructed into an effect of textual codes, a
            kind of thematic mirage, and the psychoanalytic study of the
            putative unconscious of characters in fiction has also fallen into
            disrepute. Here again, however, the impulse resurfaces, for
            instance in some of the moves of a feminist criticism that needs to
            show how the represented female psyche (particularly of course as
            created by women authors) refuses and problematizes the dominant
            concepts of male psychological doctrine. Feminist criticism has in
            fact largely contributed to a new variant of the psychoanalytic
            study of fictive characters, a variant one might label the
            "situational-thematic": studies of Oedipal triangles in
            fiction, their permutations and evolution, of the roles of mothers
            and daughters, of situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth.
            It is work often full of interest, but nonetheless methodologically
            disquieting in its use of Freudian analytic tools in a wholly
            thematic way, as if the identification and labeling of human
            relations in a psychoanalytic vocabulary were the task of
            criticism. The third traditional field of psychoanalytic literary
            study, the reader, continues to flourish in ever-renewed versions,
            since the role of the reader in the creation of textual meaning is
            very much on our minds at present, and since the psychoanalytic
            study of readers' responses willingly brackets the impossible
            notion of author in favor of the acceptable and also verifiable
            notion of reader. The psychoanalytic study of the reader may
            concern real readers (as in Norman Holland's Five Readers
            Reading) or the reader as psychological everyman (as in Simon O.
            Lesser's Fiction and the Unconscious). But like the other
            traditional psychoanalytic approaches, it displaces the object of
            analysis from the text to some person, some other psychodynamic
            structure a displacement I wish to avoid since, as I hope to
            make clear as I go along, I think psychoanalytic criticism can and
            should be textual and rhetorical.
             
            Peter Brooks is the Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Yale
            University, where he is also director of the Whitney Humanities
            Center and chairman of the French department. His most recent book
            is Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative,which
            has recently been reissued in paperback. His work in progress
            concerns psychoanalysis and story-telling.
Stephen Melville
         Psychoanalysis and the Place of Jouissance
         Psychoanalysis has, in the very nature of its object, an interest
            in and difficulty with the concept of place as well as an interest
            in and difficulty with the logic of place, topology. The
            Unconscious can thus seem to give rise to a certain prospect of
            mathesis or formalization; and such formalization, achieved, would
            offer a ground for the psychoanalytic claim to scientific knowledge
            relatively independent of empirical questions and approaching the
            condition of mathematics. This might then seem to have been
            Lacan's wager in organizing the researches of his écolearound
            works of theoretical elaboration rather than clinical study;
            certainly some such notion must underlie Miller's claim to be
            "axiomatic."1
            In this paper I want to explore some of Lacan's
            formalizations as they are unfolded in the seminar Encore.(I will
            also draw some material from the interview transcript Télévision
            and Lacan's appearances at Yale University in 1975.)2 I will
            in effect be looking at the place of place or places in
            psychoanalysis in particular, I will be looking at the place
            of jouissance in Lacan's psychoanalysis and at the places of
            what Lacan punningly calls jouis-sens. The joint problematic here
            might be called one of "enjoymeant," combining the
            logic of pleasure with the pleasure of logic. For Lacan, questions
            of jouissance,however punned, are questions of unity and selfhood,
            so in examining the reciprocal play of pleasure and sense I will be
            examining how Lacanian psychoanalysis secures itself in place. This
            last topic touches implicitly in Encoreon questions of legacy and
            inheritance, so in the end I will also have something to say about
            the limits Lacan's formalizations would impose on our
            enjoyment of Freud. I should note in advance that
            Encore,Lacan's seminar of 1972-73, is an extraordinarily
            compact and involuted text, even by his standards, and of a
            corresponding richness, weaving sustained meditations on such
            figures as Georges Bataille, Roman Jakobson, Kierkegaard, and
            Aquinas with "mathemystical" digressions on sexuality,
            discourse, Borromean knots, and the like. The reading offered here
            is perforce schematic.
             
            1. By and large the evidences of the Lacanian clinic are closed to
            us in consequence of Lacan's insistence on theoretical
            elaboration. But it should not go unremarked that much of the work
            of Lacan's school seems to have focused on areas
            traditionally recalcitrant to psychoanalytic
            treatment alcoholism, retardation, and psychosis and
            that such an emphasis is responsive to traditional empirically
            minded critiques of the limits of psychoanalysis.
            2. It should perhaps be noted in this context that the project of a
            genuinely public presentation of Lacan's seminars seems to
            have been abandoned in favor of the more circumscribed circulation
            of texts through the Lacanian journal Ornicar?
             
            Stephen Melvilleis assistant professor of English at Syracuse
            University. He is the author of Philosophy Beside Itself: On
            Deconstruction and Modernism (1986) and is currently completing a
            series of essays on postmodern art and criticism.
Michael Riffaterre
         The Intertextual Unconscious
         Literature is open to psychoanalysis as is any other form of
            expression this much is obvious. Less so is the relevancy of
            analysis to the specificity of literary texts, to what
            differentiates them from other linguistic utterances; in short, the
            literariness of literature.
            The analyst cannot avoid this problem of focus. If he did, he would
            treat verbal art as a document for purposes other than an
            understanding of its defining difference. He would simply be
            seeking one more set of clues to the workings of the human mind, as
            the sociologist or historian exploits literature to explore periods
            or societies through their reflection in its mirror.
            The only approach to the proper focus must be consistent both with
            the analyst's method and with the natural reader's
            practice. The analyst requires free association on the part of the
            analysand, and he matches this free flow of information with an
            attention equally open to all that is said. It is only after a
            passive stage of "evenly-hovering attention," or, as
            the French nicely call it, écoute flottante,that he seizes upon
            clues to build a model of interpretation. These clues are revealed
            to him by anomalies such as parapraxes and repetitions or deviant
            representations, as well as formal coincidences between what he
            hears and the corpus of observations on linguistic behavior
            accumulated since Freud. The reader, on the other hand, is faced
            with a text that is strongly organized, overdetermined by
            aesthetic, generic, and teleological constraints, and in which
            whatever survives of free association is marshaled toward certain
            effects. The reader himself is far from passive, since he starts
            reacting to the text as soon as his own way of thinking, and of
            conceiving representation, is either confirmed or challenged. The
            text tends therefore not to be interpreted for what it is, but for
            what is selected from it by the reader's individual
            reactions. A segmentation of the text into units of significance
            thus occurs, and it is the task of the critic to verify the
            validity of this process. In pursuing this goal he must restrict
            himself to a segmentation that can be proven as being dictated by
            textual features rather than by the reader's idiosyncrasies,
            by those elements the perceptions of which does not depend on the
            latter and that resist erasure when they are in conflict with such
            individual quirks. The analyst's advantage in identifying
            such features is that he is trained to recognize the above-
            mentioned anomalies and to explain them by repression and
            displacement, that is, by the traces left in the surface of the
            text by the conflict between its descriptive and narrative
            structures and the lexicon and grammar that we call the
            unconscious.
             
            Michael Riffaterre,University Professor at Columbia University and
            a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, is the
            editor of Romantic Review.His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "Syllepsis" (Summer 1980) and
            "Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive
            Discourse" (September 1984).
Stanley Cavell
         Freud and Philosophy: A Fragment
         Other of my intellectual debts remain fully outstanding, that to
            Freud's work before all. A beholdenness to Sigmund
            Freud's intervention in Western culture is hardly something
            for concealment, but I have until now left my commitment to it
            fairly implicit. This has been not merely out of intellectual
            terror at Freud's achievement but in service of an idea and
            in compensation for a dissatisfaction I might formulate as follows:
            psychoanalytic interpretations of the arts in American culture
            have, until quite recently, on the whole been content to permit the
            texts under analysis not to challenge the concepts of analysis
            being applied to them, and this seemed to me to do injustice both
            to psychoanalysis and to literature (the art that has attracted
            most psychoanalytic criticism). My response was to make a virtue of
            this defect by trying, in my readings of film as well as of
            literature and of philosophy, to recapitulate what I understood by
            Freud's saying that he had been preceded in his insights by
            the creative writes of his tradition; that is, I tried to arrive at
            a sense for each text I encountered (it was my private touchstone
            for when an interpretation had gone far enough to leave for the
            moment) that psychoanalysis had become called for, as if called for
            in the history of knowledge, as if each psychoanalytic reading were
            charged with rediscovering the reality of psychoanalysis. This
            still does not seem to me an irrelevant ambition, but it is also no
            longer a sufficient response in our altered environment. Some of
            the most interesting and useful criticism and literary theory
            currently being produced is decisively psychoanalytic in
            inspiration, an alteration initiated for us most prominently by the
            past two or so decades of work in Paris and represented in this
            country by to pick examples from which I have profited in
            recent months Neil Hertz on the Dora case, Shoshana Felman on
            Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," and Eve
            Kosofsky Sedgwick on homophobia in Our Mutual Friend.1 And now my
            problem has become that I am unsure whether I understand the
            constitution of the discourses in which this material is presented
            in relation to what I take philosophy to be, a constitution to
            which, such as it is, I am also committed. So some siting of this
            relation is no longer mine to postpone.
             
            1. See Neil Hertz, "Dora's Secrets, Freud's
            Techniques," in In Dora's Case:
            Freud Hysteria Feminism,ed. Charles Bernheimer and
            Claire Kahane (New York, 1985), pp. 221-42; Shoshana Felman,
            "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," Yale French
            Studies 55/56 (1977): 94-207; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
            "Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual
            Friend," Raritan2 (Winter 1983): 126-51.
             
            Stanley Cavell,professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is
            the author of many works, including Must We Mean What We Say?, The
            Senses of "Walden," The Claim of Reason,and, most
            recently, Themes Out of School.He spent last spring at Hebrew
            University in Jerusalem as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced
            Studies. His most recent contributions to  are
            "Politics as Opposed to What?" (September 1982) and
            "The Division of Talent" (June 1985).
Jean Starobinski
         Acheronta Movebo
         It is doubtless appropriate to read The Interpretation of Dreams
            according to the image of the journey which Sigmund Freud describes
            in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess:
            The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. First
            comes the dark wood of the authorities (who cannot see the trees),
            where there is no clear view and it is easy to go astray. Then
            there is a cavernous defile through which I lead my
            readers my specimen dream with its peculiarities, its
            details, its indiscretions and its bad jokes and then, all at
            once, the high ground and the open prospect and the question:
            "Which way do you want to go?"1
            This walk has nothing of the nonchalant about it. Rather, it is
            strewn with tests and trials, as is usually the case in the
            "myth of the hero" or of the
            "conquistador," which we know played a major role in
            Freud's thought and in that of his disciples. The progress,
            in epic poetry, moves toward a discovery, the founding of a city,
            by means of difficult stages and combats. Every
            "discourse" capable of attaining a goal distant from
            its prolegomena finds its appropriate metaphor in the hero's
            progress, or in the voyage of initiation. Discursivity then becomes
            the intellectual equivalent of the epic's trajectory. At the
            time of its publication, Freud found his book insufficiently
            probing, and imperfect in its discursivity. He criticized himself
            for having failed to link properly his arguments (Beweisführung).
            Doubt was momentarily cast on the achievement of the main goal….
            But such severity was not to persist.
            But one can also read the work by discerning its framing devices.
            Several authors mentioned in the first chapter reappear at the
            work's conclusion. Such a return is far from fortuitous; it
            is the result of an extremely well-calculated strategy. Another
            framing system which has been noticed by many readers is the one,
            shortly before the end of the book, which returns to a line from
            Virgil that Freud had placed as an epigraph on the title page:
            Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.This line, because of
            its repetition at two crucial points in the book, traces its
            message in the form of an emblem. When it breaks in, it makes
            explicit that the dream mechanism is the return of the repressed:
            In waking life the suppressed material in the mind is prevented
            from finding expression and is cut off from internal perception
            owing to the fact that the contradictions present in it are
            eliminated one side being disposed of in favor of the other;
            but during the night, under the sway of an impetus towards the
            construction of compromises, this suppressed material finds methods
            and means of forcing its way into consciousness.
                      Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.2
             
            1. Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 6 Aug. 1899, Freud, The Origins
            of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes,
            1887-1902,ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, trans.
            James Strachey (New York, 1954), p. 290.
            2. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,ed. and trans. Strachey (New
            York, 1965), p. 647; my emphasis. The Latin is translated in n. 1
            on that page of Freud's text: "If I cannot bend the
            High Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions." All further
            references to this work, abbreviated I,will be included in the
            text. Another framing device is created by the theme of the
            prophetic dream, discussed at the outset of the first chapters and
            taken up again, with the ambivalence of denial and concession, in
            the final paragraph of the book.
             
            Jean Starobinski,professor emeritus at the University of Geneva,
            has devoted studies to Montaigne, Diderot, Rousseau, Saussure, and
            modern French poets. As an M.D., he is familiar with psychoanalysis
            and participates in the editorial board of La Nouvelle Revue de
            Psychanalyse (Paris). Some of his recent research deals with the
            history of melancholia; his most recent books are Montaigne in
            Motion (1985) and Rousseau (forthcoming). He was awarded the Balzan
            Prize in 1984.
