The Death of Freud: What Is to Be Preferred, Death or Obsolescence?

Abstract

The Death of FreudWhat Is to Be Preferred, Death or Obsolescence? Jean-Michel Rabaté (bio) The Schadchen has assured the suitor that the girl's father is no longer living. After the engagement, it emerges that the father is still alive—and serving a term in prison. The suitor then accuses the Schadchen. "So? says the Schadchen. 'What did I tell you? That you call living?" Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious If the rhetorical question of my subtitle merely rephrases Achilles' choice, I would like to argue, however, that the question is not only a rhetorical one. It is not a rhetorical question for Freud and those who call themselves "Freudian." As we know, the goddess Thetis would have wished that her son lived a long and uneventful life; instead, Achilles opted for a short but illustrious life. Even though this was not exactly Freud's problem, since he lived a long and eventful life, it may have become our problem today, especially when we are confronted with what has been announced more than once either as "the death of Freud" or as the "death of psychoanalysis." My main argument here leads to the contention that it is a mistake to speak of the "death of psychoanalysis," since what is at stake is its obsolescence and the various forms it has taken. In such a mythological or classical context, death keeps its heroic [End Page 37] aura, whereas obsolescence calls up images of slow degradation, of sporadic decay and increasing technical malfunction. Indeed, since I have referred to Thetis and Achilles, I am reminded that Western culture is full of hapless people who obtained immortality but forgot to request eternal youth as well. The best-known figure is the Sybil, a character who was added at the last minute to provide a neat neoclassical Greco-Latin epigraph to Eliot's Waste Land. Given a voice via Petronius, the Sybil only repeats "apothanein thelô," I want to die. Closer to us, we find Jonathan Swift's horrifying Struldbruggs, those undying beings who appear in book 3 of Gulliver's Travels. Having contemplated the utterly monstrous physical degradation of those whose fate is endless senility, Gulliver notes wryly that the sight of these unfortunate creatures made him change his mind about survival: after such a vision, his "keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated." The two thinkers who sense the threat of looming senility in the very discourse of psychoanalysis after Freud had passed away in 1939 were Theodor Adorno and Jacques Lacan. Adorno was the first, as he reacted early to the "Californization" of psychoanalysis that he had experienced firsthand during his American stay from 1938 to 1949. In a lecture given in English in 1946 at the psychoanalytic society of San Francisco, Adorno attacked frontally Freudian revisionism. The two theoreticians he chose for his attack were Erich Fromm and Karen Horney. They were guilty of erasing what they considered Freud's "pessimism" and "pansexualism" and of replacing his metapsychology with weak culturalism. "Revised Psychoanalysis," a text that takes up most of the 1946 lecture, begins by taking issue with the way in which Horney aimed at getting rid of Freud's theory of the drive and transforming it into a theory of character and of human environment, ultimately leading to strategies of social adaptation.1 A typical title was Horney's 1937 The Neurotic Personality of our Times, in which Horney assumes that the root of neurosis is not a sexual determination but a tough social context marked by intense competition. Her culturalist optimism clashes with the "darker" side of Freud, whose philosophy should be placed, Adorno avers, next to that of Mandeville or Sade (this is an association that Lacan would always make). Freud's grandeur, [End Page 38] Adorno concludes, lies in his radical ambivalence facing culture and civilization and in his effort to show that social harmony cannot be postulated as a norm but must be questioned relentlessly. Lacan followed in the 1950s when he addressed in his own way what Herbert Marcuse had called the "obsolescence" of psychoanalysis. For Lacan, this obsolescence was undeniable as soon as psychoanalysis...