Speak for Your Self: Psychoanalysis, Autotheory, and The Plural Self

Abstract

Speak for Your Self:Psychoanalysis, Autotheory, and The Plural Self Carolyn Laubender (bio) "How can a book be both a free expression and a negotiation?" Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts despite his steadfast commitment to being a "man of science," Sigmund Freud had a knack for autobiographical writing. In prefaces, in footnotes, and in parenthetical asides, Freud freely employed allusions to his personal life to help explicate his theories of mind. While some texts like Totem and Taboo and Instincts and Their Vicissitudes contain sly references to Freud's rivalrous friendships and feuds, others like Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle smuggle in narratives from his personal life to substantiate his theoretical excursions. As students of Freud's work learn early on, such autobiographical inclusions litter his writing and provide useful landmarks for making sense of some of his most significant concepts. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine ambivalence be without Eugen Bleuler; the Oedipus complex without Jacob Freud; bisexuality without Wilhelm Fleiss; or the death instinct without Sophie Freud. Freud frequently acknowledged, in letters and in published texts, that self-narration was his own point of entry to what would become psychoanalysis. As Freud realized, The Interpretation of Dreams—that founding ur-text of the field—was essentially a form of experimental, autobiographical writing. However, this was hardly a comfortable recognition for Freud. In the original preface to The Interpretation of Dreams, he anxiously justifies his autobiographical mode, explaining that The difficulties of presentation have been further increased by the peculiarities of the material which I have had to use to [End Page 39] illustrate the interpreting of dreams. … The only dreams open to my choice were my own. … But if I was to report my own dreams, it inevitably followed that I should have to reveal to the public gaze more of the intimacies of my mental life than I liked, or than is normally necessary for any writer who is a man of science and not a poet. Such was the painful but unavoidable necessity; and I have submitted to it rather than totally abandon the possibility of giving the evidence for my psychological findings. (xxiii–xxiv) In this founding moment of psychoanalysis, Freud confronts the features of his work that seem to destabilize the divide between literature and science, requiring (as his work did) narrative methods far more common to poets and storytellers than to scientists. But rather than "totally abandon" his psychological discoveries when the requisite methods challenged the conventional notions of objectivity, Freud dug into the "peculiarities" of his work and embarked on a thoroughgoing analysis of own his dreams. He described this work as an "auto-analysis" and, in doing so, he proleptically joined the autobiographical to what would become the psychoanalytic. Using the technique of free association developed in clinical work with his patients, Freud picked apart accounts of his life and of his dreams, ultimately arriving at his revolutionary theory of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis is, in other words, a modern science born of Freud's deconstruction of self-narration; it is a generalizable theory of mind catalyzed by Freud's experiment with autobiography. Such experimentation with self-narration provides one early example of the multiple ways that critical theory has, in the decades since, reconfigured the relationship between the person of the author and her written texts. Recently, this impulse has (re)emerged in the genre of critical self-narration that Paul B. Preciado has called "autotheory." A supposedly distinct, "genre defying" form of contemporary writing popularized by Maggie Nelson in the mid-2010s, autotheory has been hailed as an alternative to both autobiography and critical theory because of its delivery of a unique style of self-narration in which twentieth-century critical theory melds with representations of personal experience.1 Yet, as Freud's writing shows, some of [End Page 40] the twentieth-century's most important intellectual traditions—from cultural studies to queer theory, psychoanalysis to feminist standpoint epistemology, Audre Lorde to Roland Barthes—have emerged from similar re-narrativizations of the self. Freud's retooling of autobiography in The Interpretation of Dreams constitutes one...