Books. Psychoanalysis and History 10(2), 2008 The author 237

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1 Books Le Dossier Freud. Enquête sur l histoire de la psychanalyse by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/seuil, 2006; 507 pp; 20 euros); reviewed by Forbes Morlock Psychoanalysis and history it is easy to imagine that we know what these are. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani want to bring the identity of at least the former into question. Their recent book ends in the future perfect by asking: what will psychoanalysis have been? Writing as if from a post-psychoanalytic age, they wonder in (premature?) retrospect what could possibly have held the immense variety of talking cures together, and what the theories of Rank, Ferenczi, Reich, Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Imre Hermann, Winnicott, Bion, Bowlby, Kohut, Lacan, Jean Laplanche, André Green, Slavoj Zizek, Julia Kristeva, Juliet Mitchell could have had in common (p. 438)? Their conviction is that psychoanalysis will turn out to have cohered around a legend, the myth that an unprecedented event (something like the discovery of psychoanalysis) occurred on the cusp of the twentieth century, and that that event has ever since been confused with the person of Sigmund Freud. Le Dossier Freud is a book about what the authors, after Ellenberger and Sulloway (though curiously not Samuel Weber), call the legend of Freud, the irrational kernel at the core of the manifold manifestations of psychoanalysis. For them, it would be a history of the legend of Freud. And it would be a history, because it has been the history rather than, say, the philosophy, epistemology, or politics of psychoanalysis that has been most contested. Psychoanalysis is strangely allergic to history because in truth it is most vulnerable to history (p. 53). Such is Borch-Jacobsen s and Shamdasani s central assertion and it is an assertion that bears sometimes compelling and occasionally damning results. If the authors conclude that we will not have known what psychoanalysis is, they are certain we know what constitutes history. By preference and profession, the historian attempts to reconstitute past events as they occurred, not as we see them or want them to be today (p. 31). Again and again the writers represent the challenge of history to psychoanalysis s or, FORBES MORLOCK is an academic, writer, and member of the Institute for Creative Reading. Address for correspondence: Syracuse University London, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AE. [f.morlock@syracuse-u.ac.uk] Psychoanalysis and History 10(2), 2008 The author 237

2 238 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2008) 10(2) as they prefer, Freudism s construction of its own past, as if it were agreed (even by psychoanalysis or Freudism) what history is. What, though, constitutes an event, a past event, for the discipline that devotes itself to the unconscious, and what is the time of such an event for the field that theorizes Nachträglichkeit? The answers are hardly automatic. If the authors are shocked in their own polemical history of psychoanalysis by the polemical nature of the first history of psychoanalysis (it still seems excessive in the light of the almost contemporary assassination of Franz Ferdinand to refer to Freud s 1914 essay, On the history of the psychoanalytic movement, as terrorist writing (p. 142)), they could have pursued Freud s own thinking in the name of history further. Their critique of Freud s failure to follow the protocols of empirical science (which, they acknowledge, may be a failure shared by all psychology) seems to presume that history itself is scientific and empirical. Freud and psychoanalysis would disagree. In quoting Donald Spence s understanding of Freud s case histories as reflecting narrative truth at the expense of historical truth, the authors seem to neglect that historical truth is, in fact, Freud s term and one he uses in and around Moses and Monotheism to denote a truth almost diametrically opposed to the evidentiary material truth they are invoking. History is strange in Freud s hands. Certainly the semantic range of the French histoire is wide, encompassing not just history but also story and even joke as in histoire juive, the Jewish joke beloved of Freud and central to his Jokes book. (Freud there distinguishes the Judenwitz from the Judengeschichte, the derogatory, anti- Semitic joke told by Gentiles.) This is not just a matter of lexicon or the play of signifiers. Moses and Monotheism an histoire, a Jewish histoire, if ever there was one challenges not just the stories of Moses told to date but also the disciplines that have governed their telling. History may just be vulnerable to psychoanalysis. Freud s last book is a series of constructions in the precise psychoanalytic sense which his essay Constructions in analysis theorizes in parallel. Histories may, in that psychoanalytic sense, be constructions, stories that work in the place of memories above all, stories that work. The histories developed within analyses and returned to analysands are constructions. The broader histories Freud at least tells (Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, for example) are constructions. But it could also be argued that the contribution of psychoanalysis to historiography is the theory of the construction. This possibility is intolerable to Borch- Jacobsen and Shamdasani, who deploy the term interprefaction to designate Freud s clinical, epistemological, and historiographical abuse: We propose calling this characteristically psychoanalytic transmutation of interpretations and constructions [the terms are no more distinguished here than legend, myth, fable, and fiction are elsewhere] into positive facts

3 BOOKS 239 interprefaction. Interprefaction is the procedure at the base of Freud s scientistic rhetoric and the various historical legends he wove around his so-called discoveries (p. 211). As their rhetoric makes clear, Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani want to have nothing to do with the theory of construction or what Freud understands by historical truth. And yet their extensive encounters with psychoanalysis and analytic psychology have made them sensitive to the power of rhetoric and the impotence of their history. They admit from their opening page that they are actors, rather than observers, in the controversies that surround the history of psychoanalysis. Among partis pris, they distinguish themselves from colleagues like Grunbaum, Cioffi and Swales. Where these others criticize the very construction of analytic facts, Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani highlight the dissimulation of this construction, Freud s denial of the artefactuality of his material (a denial which is hard to imagine in the terms, say, of Constructions in analysis ). In a curious riff on the terms of Freud s story and its close in Moses and Monotheism, they close by insisting there is no need to kill Freud or launch another Freud war : to do so will only give psychoanalysis a new life and identity when it already no longer exists and in a certain sense never has (p. 440). Psychoanalysis no longer exists, or, rather, it will never have existed. Angry but not murderous, Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani s fascination with Freud has something to do with the impotence of criticism. Both have learned firsthand the effective limits of critical history or demystification. To tell one s story too quickly, Borch-Jacobsen s last English book, Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification, gathered together all available documentation about the celebrated case of Bertha Pappenheim in order to demystify the cathartic method (and with it all subsequent talking cures) by demonstrating the therapeutic failure of Josef Breuer s treatment and the (self-)deceit in Freud s subsequent representations of it. If the cathartic method eliminated the neurotic symptom by tracing it back to its first occurrence, Borch-Jacobsen s project sought to eliminate the symptom of psychoanalysis by returning it to the scene of its initial appearance. History, though, didn t cross the fact belief barrier. The book told a powerful story, but it failed to dispense with psychoanalysis, apparently convincing only those who were already convinced. All of which leads the latest book to conclude in the future perfect. If they do not quite understand why they cannot make psychoanalysis go away, its authors live happily in the faith that it will one day have gone away. Psychoanalysis will have turned out to have been nothing or nothing more than Freudism. Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani are betting on the future not least of the archives which are slowly but irreversibly opening their doors. Instead of trying to prove that Freud could not prove

4 240 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2008) 10(2) (verify, test, validate) what he advanced which, as we all know, never stopped anybody from being convinced by the rhetorical force of his narratives historical criticism tries rather to shatter the rhetorical pact linking Freud and his readers by rendering his texts definitively suspect. How can anyone continue to take Freud at his word [le croire sur parole] in the face of the accumulation of half-lies, dubious assertions, stylistic equivocations and interested silences which historians have brought to light? (p. 334). Despite the tone, the last question is not entirely rhetorical. What continues to fascinate its authors is the question they cannot answer but which psychoanalysis can in theory and in the clinic namely, how can one still believe in Freud/psychoanalysis/the unconscious? Because people do, and they continue to. Moses and Monotheism is one model of an unbeliever s history of belief. It is hardly an exemplary text for Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani. Their own rhetorical excesses seem differently symptomatic which is not to suggest that their book is not without considerable value. While it appeared as part of the recent wave of French critiques of psychoanalysis, it is to be hoped that this context will not keep it from appearing in English in some form. If its gamble on the power of the archive may never pay out in the future, its present value lies in its interesting and able use of that archive. Although many of the stories it recounts have been told before, in most cases the authors introduce a new twist, or at the very least new material, to the narrative. If they routinely refuse to engage with Freud s texts as texts rather than as documents or self-evident statements (no reading required, despite the obvious skill demonstrated by Borch-Jacobsen as a reader in his first book, The Freudian Subject and indeed the etymology of legend ), their extensive use of quotations brings back to life a whole range of forgotten positions and materials. Not least it reminds us how little criticism of psychoanalysis has changed. The authors sustained research in American and European libraries and in interviewing some of the key figures in revisionist psychoanalytic historiography represents the project s strength. Most successful in their terms is the chapter detailing the posthumous construction of an official Freud by the Freudian family, including of course Anna, but also Siegfried Bernfeld, Ernest Jones and James Strachey. Unpublished correspondence among the principals involved in the publication of the Fliess letters, an authorized biography, and the Standard Edition makes clear just how much these different works formed part of a single, collective project to represent (and even create) the figure of a Freud we have lived with (and departed from) ever since. It is easy to see these three key post-war publications as the workshop in which the Freudian legend was created. Of course, Freud was earlier intimately involved in the construction of this legend, and it is with his participation in his own mythologizing that

5 BOOKS 241 most of the book is occupied. The mythologizing it focuses on is not of the scale of the riddle-solver Oedipus, or the epic poet at the end of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, or indeed Totem and Taboo s primal father under threat from a reunion of his rejected sons. Freud never ceased to mythologize himself and his own struggles, engaging with the power of myth-making and teaching his readers a great deal about myth. This, though, is not the legend central to Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani and the reader may ask in vain for an organizing presentation of legend (which can range in sense from the story of the life of a saint to the words or letters impressed upon a coin ) comparable to Freud s own understanding of myth. Other chapters deal with Freud s case histories and the period of his selfanalysis (perhaps less successfully for their departure from the authors own historical grounds for the fields of epistemology and the philosophy of science). However, the element of the Freudian legend that comes in for the most thorough examination and revision is the splendid isolation in which Freud worked for many years before gathering about him the small band of followers who would form the core of the IPA. Following both correspondences and contemporary scientific journals, Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani make clear how widely Freud s ideas were discussed in academic psychiatry and clinical psychology in the first years of the twentieth century. Their reception may not have been wholly positive, but the work of a relatively young researcher was hardly ignored. Indeed, it seems to have been Freud who shied from engagement with academic psychiatry rather than the reverse. The years after 1910 then brought not just the celebrated breaks with Adler, Stekel and Jung, but also as importantly the departure of psychoanalysis from scientific psychology. In working widely through the literature of the period, Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani demonstrate that the institutionalization of psychoanalysis outside the research laboratory and the university seems automatic (and perhaps regrettable) only in retrospect it was hardly a given at the time. Significantly they remind us that psychoanalysis had to be constructed and that the past of psychoanalysis remains still to be constructed. And they show the contingencies of these processes playing themselves out on a number of levels, including improbably orthography (and the presence (or not) of the o in psychoanalysis ). Even Freudism the term by which they would stigmatize psychoanalysis they remind us is the name that psychoanalysis had originally to supplant. Through it all, the authors of Le Dossier Freud keep open (and in a very different way, say, from Jacques Derrida) the question of the relation between the proper names Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. They get at and are got at by what is strange in psychoanalysis. Something cannot be laid to rest, call it the unconscious or the legend of Freud, a legend which

6 242 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2008) 10(2) survives the most critical history, and is likely to persist beyond the throwing open of the last archive. This particular articulation of and engagement with that legend is fascinating, frustrating, and ultimately productive, no matter how much its reader may want to disagree with its disagreements with psychoanalysis. Its discoveries are to be valued and enjoyed, even as its critical history singularly fails to shatter (now or in the future perfect) the pact between Freud and his readers. L histoire de Freud... à suivre. DOI: /E