After Freud: Henry James and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 mur. New York: Scribner's, 1934. SF-The Sacred Fount. New York: Scribner 's, 1901. Other Works Cited Abraham, Nicholas and Maria Torok. Cryptonymie : Le verbier de l'homme aux loups. Paris: Aubier, 1976. Dällenbach, Lucien. Le Récit spéculaire: Essai sur le mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil, 1977. "Reflexivity and Reading." New Literary History ll(1980):435-50. Derrida, Jacques. "Fors: The Anglish words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok." Trans. Barbara Johnson. Georgia Review 31(1977):64-120. Edel, Leon. "An Introductory Essay." In Henry James, The Sacred Fount. New York: Grove, 1979. Gide, André. Journal 1899-1939. Paris: Pléiade, 1948. After Freud: Henry James and Psychoanalysis by John Carlos Rowe, University of California, Irvine The three papers presented in the second session of the 1983 MLA meeting of the Henry James Society ably represent the new directions in the study of James made possible by the post-Freudian approaches of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and René Girard. Contemporary theory teaches us that the continuing relevance of such major writers as Henry James depends on our abilities to bring their works into broader relation with the other disciplines by which we study cultural self-representation. Rather than committing ourselves to increasingly refined definitions and classifications of the novel or even of Uterature, we ought to realize that the crossing of different discourses , the translation of one discipline in terms of another, is already a literary mode of understanding. As such this form of understanding is as much a performance as an analytical procedure. Insofar as these three papers cross literature and psychoanalytical theory, they contribute actively to our understanding of the literary function as part of a larger cultural system for signification. The Freud who motivated the revisionary and even polemicaUy critical theories represented in these papers would not disagree with this defintion of Uterary function. Indeed, what has attracted us with renewed interest to Freud's writings is his effort to define the psychic mechanism as a sort of rhetorical machine. "Rhetorical machine" is my deliberate oxymoron, insofar as Freud's dynamical model for the psyche finds its proper form—as weU as its very medium—in the differential system of language rather than in any more structuraUy coherent and historicaUy detached mechanism. Although often treated by friends and foes as a sort of psychoanalytical formalist, Freud is less valuable as the father of a discrete discipline than as a theorist concerned with the relations between psychic and cultural representation. Thus my title, "After Freud," expresses the double sense in which we make use of Freud: we supersede Freud only to the extent that we foUow the germinal hints of his theory of psychic intertextuality. As I think these papers indicate, our supplementary reading of Freud foUow a literary mode of understanding that finds at least one strong counterpart in the writings of Henry James. The theoretical projects of these three papers share a concern with overcoming both literary and psychoanalytical formalisms by means of a strategic intertextuality . WiUiam Johnsen uses René Girard's theory of the sacrificial origins of culture to bring anthropology, sociology, and psychology to bear on James's The American. Dennis Foster's use of Lacan Volume V 226 Number 3 The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 relates libidinal and linguistic codes in an effort to demonstrate associations between the family (parentage and sexuality) and social law (the conventions for proper behavior ) in James's What Maisie Knew. Susan Winnett reads the inherently literary implications of Freud's case-study of "The Wolf-Man" by way of the formal experimentation of James's The Sacred Fount. Abraham and Torok's Cryptonomy: The Verbarium of "The Wolf-Man" serves Winnett as a theoretical means for interpreting James's literary agon in The Sacred Fount. Taken together, these readings are concerned with the participation of Uterary processes in the shaping of social reality. My brief descriptions of the methods employed by these papers stress their antiformalist aims, so I shaU address my critical remarks to the relative success of each paper in overcoming the Umitations of a literary formalism concerned with the discrete text, the independent...