Father Can’t You See . . . ? (Death)

Abstract

iran Razinsky’s Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death (Cambridge: 2014) aggressively pursues the thesis that the psychoanalytic tradition both constitutively and contingently obscures the overwhelming obviousness of death, a “metaphysical reality” to which common sense attests and in respect of which human life is fundamentally oriented, which yet is in need of theoretical and practical acknowledgment and elaboration into the service of which Razinksy seeks to recruit psychoanalytic inquiry once suitably reformed by a systematic incorporation of the sovereignty of death. Deflecting relations to death, its (anti-)human significance, into familiar hermeneutic apparati has allegedly cost psychoanalysis dearly in terms of its theoretical, cultural, and practical authority; Razinsky seeks to present the bill and offer a path to redemption of the heretofore unacknowledged debt. That death, however metaphysically and thus psychologically inescapable, is not sufficiently traumatogenic is what, ultimately, Razinsky protests against— the normalization of death. Razinsky’s pseudo-philosophical connivances at rendering the “existential” or “ontological” meaning of death are matched in juvenile bombasity by the middlebrow pseudo-sophistication of his linguistically unwieldy—overindulgent and woefully imprecise—writing and by the audacious naivete of his ambition to rectify “official” psychoanalytic theory and thereby reform practice. In light of the manifest plurality of psychoanalytic perspectives, 1 the relative mutual autonomy of psychoanalytic theorizing and practice and the perhaps originally anachronistic, i.e., mythological or polemical-projective status of “official” psychoanalytic theory, Razinsky’s presumption of an official, dominant, and unified—or unifiable—psychoanalytic theory whose rectification would