Submitted by slewfoot on April 6, 2009 - 1:42pm
Music: Harold Budd: The White Arcades (1988)
Thomas and I would like y'all readers to have a discussion about psychoanalysis, and this in relation to rhetoric and the field of rhetorical studies. (If my comrades on The Blogora could refrain from posting so much that it crowds out this post in a day, we would be grateful). We'd be interested to learn more about what readers think on this issue, and in particular, what folks say about it in the classroom setting.
One of the graduate courses I teach here at the University of Texas is titled "Rhetoric and Psychoanalysis." It is a survey of psychoanalytic theory designed to combat what we might term a certain "father trouble": the widespread assumption that all psychoanalytic theory derives from Freud, and that every word the man said was the gospel on psychoanalysis. True, there are a number of Freudians that are just as worshipful and cultish as Burkeans, but in general I think it's safe to say that psychoanalysis has a father, he is just no longer, "our daddy." We have eaten him, but are now doubling over in indigestion (as Rickels would put it).
The course is also designed to help graduate students navigate the difficult terrain of contemporary theory by providing some of the basics to do so. It is my contention that hardly any contemporary theorist can be read without a basic, working knowledge of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. I tell our students you don't have to believe "modernity's three unexpected children" (to use Althusser's catchy phrase), but there's just no way to grapple with contemporary thinkers like Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Nancy, or Zizek without some basic knowledge Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that rhetorical theory—at least on the comm side--is hampered by a certain blind spot caused by the avoidance of psychoanalysis, and more specifically, the inadmissibility of the category of the unconscious. For example, while I appreciate the appropriations of critical theory, I'm often baffled by how folks on the communication side of rhetorical studies strip the Freudian assumptions from, say, Adorno's theories of the culture industry. I'm confused by the students who want to work with Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, but then are adamant about not reading Freud or Lacan (I mean, Felix was an analyst for gosh sakes)! Even if Lacanian notions of lack and desire are your enemy, you gotta know the enemy!
Think of it this way: do you ever have a student who refuses to read about "feminism" or to take it seriously? What sorts of arguments do you deploy to get a student to read, say, bell hooks? There is a homological argument for psychoanalysis to be made.
Nevertheless, I think recently there's a kind of new permissibility to "go there" for rhetorical studies, and I think we have Butler and Zizek to thank for that. This new permissibility for psychoanalysis, however, has been very hard won. I have heard numerous anecdotes at conferences or on email about such-and-so a distinguished professor dissin' on psychoanalytic work in the classroom. Recently, a new graduate acquaintance related a story in which some of my psychoanalytic criticism was read. After "ripping a new one for Gunn's articles," the professor implied folks in the field may be starting to take psychoanalysis seriously. The professor apparently made the following two points:
"1. Freud (and his ilk) are generally disregarded by most psychologists as being pretty much useless. After all, how can one generalize singular abnormal cases out to the larger population? So, if Freud has been rejected by his own field, how much sense does it make to employ his ideas within rhetoric?
2. With psychoanalysis concerned with the individual, much of Gunn's work is concerned with what's persuasive to him [Gunn]."
In other words, there is no reason to take psychoanalysis seriously because (apparently!) Freud has been debunked and rejected by behavioral psychology (the arbiters in interpretavism, of course), and psychoanalytic criticism does not rely on evidence, only the subjective whims of the critic. Well, golly, this is why, I think, people need to engage in reading groups and seminars on psychoanalysis. Edjamakasion is da answer!
I think both arguments are easily dismissed, but I'll do so in print somewhere else. At the moment, I think these points are illustrative of the kinds of things that are being said in classrooms. What about yours?
Two more points: in communication studies, I think psychoanalysis has been dismissed for a number of reasons. The first is historical: when the field formed in the teens and twenties of the last century, they adopted scientism as the model (of course, I don't mean to discount the Cornell school, from which I actually derive, I just mean to point out the hegemony of science). The American scientific community is, in general, behavioral in orientation and dismissive of interpretive therapeutics. We also had, I think, a bad reaction to the "mental hygiene" movement, which made affects/feelings dirty and transformed public speaking teachers into "therapists" in a sense. It was, admittedly, a horrifying moment in disciplinary history (see Pat Gehrke's forthcoming book, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century for more). Burke was a big influence, and his gradual disdain over Freud and the unconscious had to be influential in turn (you know, when you "borrow" ideas and then display public anger, you sometimes can get away with it). Finally, I think Kate Millet's Sexual Politics had such a profound influence on feminist approaches in rhetorical studies that the critique of Freud she marshaled became soul-deep in the 70s and 80s.
Second point: in composition studies, I think psychoanalysis has had much less of a difficult time being taken seriously. I think the openness to experimentation and the proximity to "the text" in composition studies is part of the reason. I think the closer proximity to the humanities is also part of the rationale. And I think the good work and influence of folks like David Metzger and Victor Vitanza (to only mention a couple) are also part of the equation. If Metzger and Vitanza don't have a problem with the other L-word, then perhaps other scholars and teachers are not quite so troubled. I don't have a good sense, however, of how psychoanalysis is regarded in rhet/comp circles today, and I'll leave that to Thomas. What's been the reaction to your most excellent book, Thomas? Positive I hope!
So, here are some discussion questions, intended for both professor types and student types (especially student types, who have the pulse the best): (1) what do you think the status of psychoanalysis is in rhetorical theory today? (2) does this status differ in comm and comp, and if so, why? (3) what historical or institutional reasons can be given for the take-up, or lack of take-up, of psychoanalytic theory; (4) are there good reasons for dismissing psychoanalysis wholesale—or at least, reasons other than the ones Longaker offered here? Thoughts?
I love this conversation; I take away from it some insights about the culture of the book and article, the resistance to Theory and the resistance to certain types of theory, and oddly enough, lessons about international understandings of the biomedicalization of the mind.
I have a humbler answer, which may or may not carry weight; it is more likely to represent those of us at second tier institutions, maybe. Or maybe not; my colleague David Gore and I disagree all the time about this.
I got a degree in rhetoric to study language. Because I am uninterested in dialect variation and am suspicious of things like "language acquisition devices," I didn't do linguistics. Because I am uninterested in pronunciation and defective speech, I avoided comm dis. Because I am interested in language as a social, rather than expressive or aesthetic, phenomenon, I avoided literature.
Rhetoric is fundamentally about the study of language: how we use language and language uses us, as one English rhetorician (Krista Ratcliffe) put it.
The discourses of theory seem to pull me away from language, in ways that bug me. Not all of it: I loved my Adorno seminar (even though I use little of it, in my teaching or thinking or writing) because Adorno thought about genre, for example. Derrida is clearly focussed on language. Foucault is, a little, but in an uninteresting abstract way. (I'd rather reread Plato's Pharmacy than 80% of Foucault's output, not because I dislike Foucault but because Derrida is focused on the language.) I can't help but think that I'd rather read Latour and Lynch and Law than Zizek because the Actor Network folks focus on the piece of writing, itself, as it circulates and does work in the world, with or without human agency.
Don't get me wrong: I understand the idea that psychoanalysis helps us understand language better. I read every article Josh had written through last year, and I am convinced that he will be remembered as the best of our generation precisely because he can make the theory pay out in a better understanding of the language. I'm also convinced that his is a rare gift. Not all of the discourse of theory in rhetorical studies takes that tenor, especially the most vitriolic of it on the conference floor.
I didn't get a degree in rhetoric to study subjectivity, agency, jouissance, and ideology; I got it to study language!
But I'm not convinced that every energetic young scholar drawn to Theory in communication studies is really interested in language. Am I just old school?
I admit I am not someone who has read a lot of Lacan, Zizek, etc. In fact, I didn't even read any of that theory until I got out a couple of years ago. Perhaps, the reason many are so reluctant to embrace it is because of it being difficult to do? Perhaps, that is a naive assumption, but if you were to ask me to write a psychoanalytical piece I need to have some kind of model that I could go off in order to do it. I know that reveals a severe weakness of mine, but when talking with others about this subject. It isn't that people don't accept the unconscious or even want to open themselves up to it. The fact is, I think for many, is that they don't know how to do it and because of it it causes paralysis for many who teach and do criticism. Maybe, I am off my rocker, but just my two cents.
i am referring not to native american and other indigenous practices. "pow-wow" is what my dad (pennsylvania "dutch") called "hex". and that's another story.
i can't speak to the validity of homeopathy in the context of many of the specific first-hand realities that drive jim's concerns, but homeopathy has as much of a "rationality" as does "traditional" "Western" AMA medicine.
if rationality is about reasons, reasonableness, and correlations of treatment with (positive) effect, homeopathy -- if not pow-wow -- is right up there with pharmaceuticals and invasive surgery.
materia medica, anyone? read it lately?
another project i keep hoping to get 'round to.
an interluud, in this wonderful conversatio-delibido-eration:
I've been reluctant to join in this discussion, partially because I do have deep reservations about psychoanalysis. As I've mentioned to you before, I remain deeply upset by the fact that, in France especially, psychoanalysis has held back the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders such as autism or Tourette's for some time (to the point where the EU commission on medicine has even condemned the backward state of French psychiatry). On the other hand, so much of classical psychoanalysis has entered into our everyday speech and theorizing that it's hard to imagine dismissing it wholesale. Certainly the system of mechanisms of defense, the idea of the ego as besieged both by the superego and the id, the fact that we have no other vocabulary for discussing "fantasy," and the process of the transference--to which I would add Jung's concept of the Shadow and, maybe, archetypes--seem relatively well-established ideas. At a more general level, though, my disagreement has to do with the locus of causality in the human sciences. Jameson, in his essay on Freud and Lacan in Shoshana Feldman, ed. Literature and Psychoanalysis, puts it this way: "What is so often problematical about psychoanalytic criticism is therefore not its insistence on the subterranean relationships between the literary text on the one hand and the 'obsessive metaphor' or the distant and inaccessible childhood on the other: it is rather the absence of any reflection on the transformational process whereby such private materials become public--a transformation which is often, to be sure, so undramatic and inconspicuous as the very act of speech itself. Yet insofar as speech is pre-eminently social, . . . we will do well to keep Durkheim's stern warning constantly before us as a standard against which to assess the various models psychoanalytic criticism has provided: 'Whenever a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false'" (p. 339). My larger frustration, which I would generalize to much importation of Theory into rhetorical studies, is the seeming refusal of devotees of Foucault, Lacan, or Deleuze ever actually to argue their positions. Invariably, when I have made statements such as the incontrovertible fact that Foucault was an absolutely incompetent historian, my younger colleagues simply look wounded or write me off as a conservative of some sort. So there's usually a dialogue of the deaf--except in the case of our current discussion, which is genuinely helpful.
I'm curious as to why the subject heading is hostilities.
We all recognize, I think (I hope) that theory requires sustained interrogation. We don't stop, suddenly, with a theory or theorist--not Freud, not Lacan, not . . . Foucault (more on Foucault below). Granted, as Josh rightfully points out, fetishization happens. In fact, given everything psychoanalysis suggests about libidinal economies, it's inevitable that fetishization would occur.
There can even be dire consequences for a theoretical perspective in the event of such fetishization. Your calling attention to French psychoanalysis blocking other forms of medical treatment is a great example--and a disturbing one. But the flipside is more common in the States, I'd point out: the fetishization of scientific medical procedures and drugs. Does this trouble you, too? Is there some deeper connection that can be made here that would allow us to put these two politically, economically, and socially troubling phenomena together in order to shed further light on the status--or unstatus--of psychoanalysis.
A further consequence of fetishization is bad theory. You point to Durkheim's warning, and Josh, again quite rightly, acknowledges how much bad psychoanalytic theory is out there. But the same can be said of any perspective, theoretical or otherwise. Do we want to get into a discussion of bad empirical work? (We can let The Onion do that, actually: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/study_93_of_people_talked_about and:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/study_finds_link_between_red_wine
But I'd like to go back to the statement about Foucault, which is illustrative of the commitments to theory and theoriticians. Again, I can't disagree that this happens, but frankly, I don't see what Foucault has to do with it. You charge that theoreticians--devotees, you call them--never actually argue their positions. I'm baffled. One could trot out any number of rhetorical theorists for whom this is even more true: Aristotle comes to mind. Where's the proof of, say, the three proofs? Who is doing rigorous work today that would call into question, based on the latest science, the way these proofs are carved up into distinct realms--ethos, pathos, logos--and treated as distinct things? Who's critiquing their presence in textbooks and classrooms? Can we really, in the wake of, say, Damasio, relegate pathos to one single, overarching category? (The answer, btw, is no.)
So, Foucault wasn't a great historian. That's certainly worthy of interrogation, but again, I ask: wasn't he a philosopher? And even if his historical research is sloppy, who reads him for that? Isn't his influence more on historiography, on the conjunctions of power/knowledge/discipline/institutionality, and the opening up of research into power relations distinct from the juridical forms such discussions formerly gravitated towards? Just to name a few.
Josh points out that psychonalysis requires its leaps of faith, as for example with the notion of the dynamic unconscious. And that's right on. We can take that insight further and add that even within psychoanalytic theory, different versions of the dynamic unconscious are available. But part of the issue is that these aren't issues that are on the table but for a fairly small number of theorist-rhetors, who, it appears, largely talk to themselves. A phenonmenon which excerbates many of the complaints you list, Jim, since it allows for the insularity that precisely allows things not to have to be defended. But, going further: doesn't every theoretical perspective require certain leaps of faith? Doesn't rhetoric, as both a practice and a body of theory?
I'm going on too long and other voices should weigh in here, but I wanted to add: in singling out "postmodern" or "French" theory we fall into another form of fetishization: criticizing what's au courant simply because it is au courant. Everything you levy at Foucault and psychoanalysis can be repackaged, reframed, and levied at every single other rhetorical theorist, including, and especially, Burke and Aristotle. But why does one get greater libidinal play and sympathy than the other? I think that starts getting at the heart of the matter.
To put this a completely different way: I agree with you wholeheartedly, Jim, but to such an extent that it reflects back on all that you write. If that makes sense.
If I can take up Josh's original query/provocation here - are there reasons to dismiss psychoanalysis outright - for me, I would say the most compelling reason is that I just don't find the idea of a dynamic unconscious to be viable. I know there's a wide range of what such dynamism can mean, depending on one's psychoanalytic flavor, but variety doesn't constitute viability.
This isn't something that I think can be simply resolved by a leap of faith. Yes, all theoretical modalities require some implicit leap of faith, but conviction is no more demonstrative of the dynamic unconscious than it is of God or the flying spaghetti monster. And there is compelling evidence that runs counter to this. There's a piece by O'Brien and Jureidini in Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology - it's 2002 or 2003, if I recall - that's called "Dispensing with the Dynamic Unconscious," and that lays out some fairly solid arguments about why the research that has been done, especially in the area of the cognitive unconscious, simply does not support a more dynamic, psychoanalytic model. And then there's Wilson's book, nearly plagiarized by Malcolm Gladwell, Strangers to Ourselves, which makes an extremely compelling, research-based argument for a series of unconscious interpretive behaviors that he dubs the "adaptive unconscious." Both of these works seem to really call into question the psychoanalytical version(s) of how the unconscious operates. We can get into specific rejoinders or arguments, if that helps, and it might be interesting to do so, perhaps in a more targeted thread.
That being said, I think there's obviously an antecedent issue to this comment, namely what counts as research. To some, the sort of case-based anecdotes that Freud used as data are compelling; others like the more conventional outcome data. I suspect both are viable methodologies, but I do think that there is, in communication scholarship as a whole, and rhetoric in particular, a certain "burden of psychology" that we don't take very seriously. I mean by this that we talk all the time as to why things can "mean" one thing or another, how they might have been understood or misunderstood, how they might have persuaded, etc., but we do this without being particularly explicit about the internal processes by which such persuasion, identification, abreaction, whatever, happens. As a result, we have situations in which our theoretical model of choice contains within it the fundamental precepts for measuring its own successes as an expository device - Burke comes to mind. I think some of the appeal of psychoanalysis is that it gets at this gap, and purports to offer some explanation of the internal process by which meaning gets attached to some external or distal object. But I think the burden of psychology should extend further than that, if I'm honest, as it's not something that I think can be resolved by simply asserting one internal model predicated upon an acknowledged leap of faith - it's the leap of faith that got Burkeans into their problems in the first place, the very problems that psychological theories are supposed to help reconcile or avoid.
So the question, for me, and it may just be for me, isn't whether or not there exists some version of the unconscious, because that seems rather undeniable, and we can all thank Freud for popularizing the idea. But that doesn't imply that Freud or his heirs had the right models or precepts or research for understanding that unconscious and its operations, anymore than Newton had the right models/precepts/research for really explaining how gravity works, or anymore than Einstein had the right precepts to explain or understand quantum entanglement. I know that the call for "proof in research" is an odd thing, especially coming from me, but there it is, at least as a potential response to Josh's post.
The leap of faith that is involved in psychoanalysis isn't the same leap of faith involved in Aristotle's argument topoi, because one is an explanation of an operation and the other is an attempt at taxonomy. It's not the same leap even in the existence of a higher or transcendental power, since that leap is actually predicated on the power being sufficiently higher at an ontological level that one assumes that understanding is impossible, and perhaps even arrogant, and thus one must leap at faith, of faith, in order to commit to the higher power. But that's not what's going on here with the idea of the dynamic unconscious, because the idea is bound to an operational explanation, which is to say an idea of a process, or an animus behind a process, that is at work in a concrete and particular interpretive event (or set of events).
Maybe it's the uncomfortable nature of this leap that explains the animosity toward psychoanalysis. I doubt it, but it's possible. I think it's more that this "burden" of psychology would point the field in uncomfortable directions and that psychoanalysis forces us to confront the issue, if not necessarily explicitly or correctly, and we'd rather just avoid the issue entirely, since we don't want (as a field) to feel compelled to read up on contemporary research in neuroscience, psychology, and so on, just to be able to say "hey, enthymemes can be really persuasive."
Oh, and I think there's a lot of people (I'm outting myself here), who just can't stand Zizek, who have played the "What Would Zizek Write" game, and who get a bad taste in the mouth for how faddish he has become and how he uses psychoanalysis. It's a shame, really, but I do know some people like that, and hell, I'm close to being one. Except, of course, that I enjoy reading psychoanalytic theory; as a possible interpretive frame, I think it's fascinating, just not right, and I agree, in the end, with Josh, that one cannot understand contemporary theory, and a lot of other things, without at least understanding the intellectual force of psychoanalytic thought. Which, of course, means that I don't think there's any reason not to read the literature; I just think there's reason to read it and think that a good portion of it is predicated on an unsustainable notion.
Thank you, Ken, for your generosity and pushing this discussion forward (I know folks don't like to post much because it is time consuming; thanks, too, for your time). In very clear language you advance a critique of the dynamic unconscious based on "viability," understood as something akin to "working successfully" or perhaps even consistency in a theoretical system.
First, Ken argues that the viability of the unconscious cannot be determined on faith. Now, to be clear, I did not say one has to either embrace the dynamic unconscious or not. What I said was that the unconscious, as a concept, functions somewhat noumenally---it's a Humean "secret power" only the effects of which we can know. To repeat myself, here's what I said: "Perhaps one problem with psychoanalysis in general is that there is fundamentally one article of faith: the dynamic unconscious. Freud has good arguments for its existence, but even so, when your most basic, fundamental category is ineffable and directly inaccessible, you do sort of have to come down to a "leap" of sorts: I went to bed with a problem, and miraculously, I awoke with a solution. There must be an 'off stage,' and ob-scene . . . ."
What Freud meant by a "dynamic unconscious" varies from one Freud to the next, and certainly among psychoanalytic folks. In general, however, I think it's fair to generalize across the board that the dynamic unconscious simply means that things are going on continuously and never stop, even though we're not aware of those goings on. The "unconscious" is an off-scene, off-screen, or as I like to call it, an ob-scene, a backstage place to resort to Hume again. That it's "dynamic" means that there are agencies back there moving stuff around (now, for ego psychologists these are like little me's moving stuff around, while for early Freud, it was a hydraulic of affective energies and signifiers).
For example, repression is not simply that I have a taboo experience or naughty idea and "put it away" for good in the cellar of the unconscious; rather, it's that the taboo experience or naughty idea refuses to lie down or remain in the cellar, so to speak (I realize there is a danger, here, with the vertical metaphor insofar as Freud seemed to imagine a sort-of horizontal plane, as many of his diagrams suggest). None of this is prima facie incompatible with the cognitive unconscious, which has been Zizek's new thing as I recall (I, too, have grown weary of Zizek, but for me it's because I simply because I cannot keep up).
This said, I would disagree that the unconscious as an article of faith is akin to believing in God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, if we take effects as our measure. Unquestionably there is an element of faith involved, but it's not so much blind as it is felt. Even so, I have yet to see a miracle. I have yet to experience meatballs from the sky. I have, however, seen people hypnotized. I have had a revealing slip in conversation before (for example, dating women named Ricca, then Erika, then Reisha created years of slappage). And I have gone to bed at night with a problem and awoke in the morning with a solution. The sort of faith in a dynamic unconscious is a leap only in the sense that what it is, exactly, is anyone's guess, but we all agree it's there and it's not static. Now, in the end of your post you admit as much, Ken (I'm not sure, however, if the procedural explanation makes the "burden of psychology" heavier--about which more below).
Second, Ken argues that work by O'Brien and Jureindi and Wilson advance good arguments against the dynamic unconscious. I have not read Wilson, but the argument that O'Brien and Jurendi make is more provocative than a death knell. Their one-two punch is that the move to appropriate the "cognitive unconscious" by psychoanalytic people is a bad one because the models are radically different, and then, that many of Freud's key mechanisms can be explained away more elegantly with the cognitive model. What's bizarre about their argument is that the model they advance---a "subpersonal system" model---looks remarkably like some later ego psychology stuff. Moreover, their reliance on Chomsky's deep structure/universal grammar is pretty Platonic (faith indeed). I think, however, Jerome Kroll's response to their essay is pretty dead on. He says:
"O'Brian and Jureidini have essentially taken data and evidence from cognitive science, issued a new vocabulary, and then asserted that their vocabulary is superior and constitutes better explanations for the phenomena and observations under question. They have failed to show any incompatibility between the two explanatory constructs. O'Brien and Jureidini agree with the basic Freudian tenant that most mental activity is unconscious, that is, out of consciousness, and that much of what is out of consciousness can be brought into consciousness with proper cueing."
Kroll continues that the "essential argument" in the discussion of model viability concerns how to best represent the "messiness of human motivation and behavior." The cognitive models reference computational metaphors (e.g., brain as computer), and with psychoanalysis we have structural ("the uncs. is structured like a language"), organic, "little person in the person," and other sorts of metaphors. I think Kroll is correct when he says that the problem for all parties is the movement from the biological to the semantic, and what vocabulary better represents that movement.
This problem (for which I think there is no solution, only better vocabularies a la Rorty) leads us to Ken's third point, that much of this discussion hinges on what counts as evidence in making arguments, clinical observation or "data." Ken then says that the appeal of psychoanalysis is that it provides a vocabulary for explaining the internal processes of persuasion (e.g., as "suggestion"), what he helpfully terms "the burden of psychology." He follows this with the suggestion that "the burden of psychology should extend further than [labeling internal processes]," which is not resolved by recourse to faith in a dynamic unconscious. I am not sure I follow this very well, Ken. Are you saying that we need to go for data in making audience conjectures (as Ed Schiappa has argued)? If so, your point is well taken. We do make claims about how a message is received and processed, based on our theoretical models, without consulting the audience of that message. Psychoanalysis in its many varieties appeals to principles that direct, say, a critic to where she should be looking. Vulgar approaches even tell her what to see.
I personally think there is room for data and for critical approaches that incorporate all kinds of evidence---one of the virtues of being in a communication studies field, I think. Also, I think a goodly number of us are reading the neurobiological and cognitive research, so some of us are going there (Damasio seems to be widely read, for example). So I think we might agree about your third point, insofar as I understand psychoanalysis as a vocabulary, developed on the basis of clinical experience, for talking about parts of the human experience that other vocabularies don't get at. It may very well be that we'll get a better vocabulary for affect than we have now . . . one day. It's just that, for me, psychoanalysis' theory of desire is resonant and helps to explain persuasion in a language that is satisfying. (Hell, it may very well be that I have to stop asking "rhetorical" questions to disengage with the psychoanalytic; they are too closely articulated in my conceptual map, as it were.)
As Kroll argues, "psychodynamic explanations may be wrong . . . in detail or even in large part, but psychodynamic theory engages thought, emotion, and action at the symbolic and personal level, and until a process explanation can make that leap to the world of worry, desire, and affection, it will fall short in its attempts to render psychodynamics superfluous." That is, psychoanalysis has a way of talking about precisely how meaning gets associated or attached to "objects" that cognitive science does not.
So, in the end, I think our disagreement comes down to, more or less, a language game and where we may (or may not) stand on the issue of faith in a certain form of pragmatism. Ken says that a belief in the unconscious does not mean "Freud or his heirs had the right models or precepts or research for understanding that unconscious and its operations, anymore than Newton had the right models/precepts/research for really explaining how gravity . . . . ." I agree with this, as does Kroll. The difference may very well be that psychodynamic vocabularies seem resonant because basic concepts have become soul deep for the western subject (e.g., the unconscious, repression, a certain way of thinking about desire as a hydraulic---which we know probably not right---and so on).
This does raise, very nicely, one of the points I hope this discussion makes clear: psychoanalysis is not reducible to Freud, nor is everything the man said the gospel (it's certainly not consistent). But, it does seem to me that the processes discussed in other brands of the unconscious (adaptive or what have you) are not incompatible with a psychoanalytic vocabulary. Where the rub is seems to be where one comes down on the "better" metaphors. Is the issue the viability of metaphor? Personally, talking about bodies without organics and bodies as desiring machines, like the mind as series of computers, seems cold and mechanical. Perhaps my disclosing that I find Paul Churchland's philosophy utterly horrifying and dispiriting better communicates my intellectual proclivities than any of what I just said. I don't like thinking about people as computers or robots or cyborgs. That's why I go for Freud and Lacan and Kristeva instead of the in vogue theory of today. (I confess, however, I'm finding Rotman's Becoming Beside Ourselves an absolutely fascinating read!). I could go on, but I'm, you know, hogging the screen.
Thanks for the generous reply. I'm not really sure there's much to add here, as I don't really want to take issue with what you're writing, as much as I just want to clarify a few things.
First, I agree with you about O'Brien and Jureidini's proposed alternative. What I think is valuable about their work is their demonstration that much of the data regarding the cognitive unconscious can be explained by vocabularies other than those found in the psychoanalytic register. I find Wilson's work regarding the adaptive unconscious to be far more interesting as a way of thinking the unconscious; like your apperceptions of psychoanalysis, Wilson's "adaptive" model seems far more intuitive to me, and that feeling is bolstered by some compelling research he cites when outlining the theory.
Second, I suspect that all we have are differences in vocabulary when it comes to these internal models, so there you and I are of course in agreement. The unconscious is all black box, we really know it only epiphenomenally, and so on. Except that just because we only understand the unconscious by way of its results, that doesn't mean that all explanations are equally viable. There are some standards or metrics that might be more productive, and these might point to an interest or use-value for certain vocabularies over others. We might ask, for example, whether the death drive is really the best explanation for some of what's been happening in that black box inside our head, and with many others, we might come to think, well, no, it really isn't. We might tend to think there are better explanations. I'm using an easy example, I think, probably because I'm facile.
I think for me the difficulty I have, if I can attempt to be more explicit, is that I find the idea that the unconscious has active drives that produce particular behaviors or interpretations to be unsustainable. I like the Lacan of the mirror stage, I like the Lacan of Seminar XX, and other places, but where I get off the bus entirely is the Lacan of Seminar XI, "The Signification of the Phallus," etc. I think the explanation for drives seems far too literary, by which I mean it seems like way too much narrative for explicating the black box. Now this all makes sense if, following Lacan, you believe the unconscious is structured like a language, but I just don't follow this at all. I've read what I think is a decent amount of Lacan and I just don't get the reason I should believe this to be true. I'm slow at times, and getting slower, but this one just escapes me. To me, Wilson's claims that the unconscious is more like an instinctual or computational adaptation to repeated stimuli seems far more compelling. It's far more fragmented, far less romantic, but it seems significantly more accurate. And I think the impulse to present a version of the unconscious that has a far more coherent backstory than does the adaptive model encourages an emphasis on power, signification, sexuality, etc., both in Freud and Lacan.
Anyway, I don't mean to pick on either of those gentlefolk. I've got some issues with the ego psychology group, and there's plenty of other psychoanalytic threads. As Josh notes, there isn't so much an incommensurability with psychoanalysis in what I'm trying to articulate regarding my own preferences or suspicions, as much as there is a preferential set of vocabularies, to which are linked certain expository functionalities. And as I've noted earlier, I think reading this stuff is valuable. I even think that the Lacanian unconscious may exist for some people, though I tend to think there's a correlation between thinking about the unconscious qua Lacan and the development of an unconscious commensurate with Lacan's description - think of it as a therapeutic and interpretive mimesis. But whatever, one should still read the stuff. The burden of psychology notwithstanding, it's a fascinating way of thinking subjectivity.
. . . speaking of subject lines! I think I need to read Wilson, and it will be read. This summer. With the rest of the stack, including Wells and Eric Fromm's The Art of Listening.
Gettin' my pot philosophy on (toke toke): To be honest, I don't know what I think; whatever appears here on the page, in a certain sense, is not "me." But it's all that I can know. And we can chain this out vis-a-vis Other, etc., and that's what I cotton to in Lacan. As for the unconscious "structured like a language," well, I'm still thinking about that.
To clarify: I only used the word "hostilities" because the term had been used by Josh earlier, so it was slightly ironic.
I'm not worried about "fetishizing" medical science and drugs because, frankly, they work. You may not know that I have two autistic children; they (and I) would not be able to function without responsible, neuroscience-based psychiatry and the remarkable medications that science has developed. Ditto with depression--what's better, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on psychoanalysis or taking antidepressants? The evidence supports the latter.
In re theory: I am also a pluralist, at least as far as philosophy or social/political theory go, but empirical refutation of a theory does happen, and one can certainly apply an immanent-critical standard of internal consistency to a theoretical position as well. So, in the case of Foucault, his larger causal claims about epistemes aren't helped by his errors in recording the history of mental illness; and, in terms of consistency, his pessimistic view of human agency totally changes in the late work on "care of the self." Perhaps you and I just don't run in the same circles--I have discovered that some people will not even speak to me if I've mildly criticized some French god at a conference.
Having said that, I'm hardly anti-theory. Derrida continues to influence my work (however obliquely). Bourdieu directly does. I just get upset when I hear people say things like "X is soooo 2002" (a real direct quote from a prominent theorist in rhetoric). The current vogue for Agamben is an example--those of us who grew up with the Frankfurt School had already read Carl Schmitt on the Exception, and Habermas's critique of him, in the 1970's, but now people act like all this is totally new and, thus, important.
But the larger question is the one we should be discussing: what is Theory for in rhetorical studies? A heuristic for generating critical readings? Is it, as Deleuze and Guattari write, the practice of actually *creating* new concepts? I am personally more interested in theories that make causal statements that can potentially be falsified--so I find myself more interested in sociological and political theory.
It's interesting what you say about medical science and the drug industry, and given what you say about your children, perfectly understandable. But we couldn't be farther apart in our views. And I think this is not just a quibble--it reflects back on our two takes on theory. Let me try to unpack that, as briefly as possible, but still productively.
You imply that we simply take the drug industry and medical science for what it is, and that it simply, evidentially, factually helps people--further implying that psychoanalysis does not and is, therefore, suspect. But really, it's not that simple. I'm sure you know this. But there may also be something generational at work here. For me, the drug industry reflects something about my generation's sense of childhood. This sense is well-captured and mythologized--no differently than the way, say, The Who mythologized a youthful generation--by bands such as Pearl Jam. The drug industry represents drugs, procedures, medicalization of problems that were, largely, precisely not *medical* issues. We're talking about the ADD-Ritalin generation. I used to see backlash billboards for this phenomenon all over the DFW metroplex in the '90s: Hugs Not Drugs. The drug industry is has consistently been among the most profitable in the world, and is often number one. We are inundated with their advertisements, which are egregiously reflective of psychedelic states.
Ask your doctor.
So, my take on the drug industry is that they are as crass, profiteering, and exploitive as anyone or any other industry. They are not purely out for my good. They generate tremendous overprescription of drugs, much of it unneeded (including overprescription of drugs for depression, which is not always a medical issue), and in fact, have now gone to lengths to produce "conditions" and "ailments" they've made up simply to hawk what their research labs have produced. I'm not denying the tremendous advances medical science has made; nor am I defending what psychoanalysis has been wrong about. But to simply take these narratives at face value doesn't seem the right path either.
Further, I wonder if this take on the drug industry isn't connected to what you say about Foucault (and Agamben). Because this is precisely, of course, an issue of theory: what it's for, how we are receptive or hospitable to it, how we are to treat it and teach it and deploy it in our work.
More specifically, your view of Foucault as having a pessimistic middle period about power and a more productive turn to technologies of the self, while well played today, seems off the mark. We would be better off seeing it as a furthering, or intensification, of the "troublesome" middle period. But of course, the narrative about the return to the self is so well played precisely because it tames Foucault, turning him into thinker of neo-liberal subjectivity. We need to put the two periods together in some way.
Doing this, for instance, might allow us insight into the drug industry. What gets medicalized, and why? What discourses does it produce? What researches, products, profits are circulated? This hits home to me, too. Were my two small children ill, I of course would seek medical help. I too have profound investments in medical science, and even the drug industry, despite my reservations and some ill will. But that too is of interest. I can connect this to Agamben, too: you discuss how Schmitt was read along with the Frankfurters, which is of great interest to me (not only in terms of how Schmitt was brought in, but whether psychonanalysis had any bearing here, since the Frankfurters knew and deployed their Freud--I would love to hear more on this if you have more to add), and now its newly fashionable because Agamben is a Hot Topic. Well, sure. But topics like the exception are hot topics also because of contemporary politics, yes? Trends and fashion have their integration into our political and cultural lifeworlds. Is this really objectionable prima facie?
This brings me back around to psychoanalysis because, again, psychoanalysis, like Foucauldian theories of power, helps me interrogate all this. And, further, in conducting such interrogation, I gain insight into how cultural and academic narratives concerning psychoanalysis gain traction to squeeze it out of practice, as it were--singling it out for especial negativity.
Ach, I have again gone on too long--but I wanted to thank you for your post, Jim, as it was very productive.
I agree with Josh that the scientific evidence points to the fact that depression is both a hardware (neurotransmitter) and software (environmentally-created negative self-messages) problem, and that it responds both to therapy and to drugs. Part of my general "resistance" to psychoanalysis also stems from the fact that the psychoanalytic explanation of autism (caused by "refrigerator mothers" who rejected their children in utero) was finally refuted by Bernard Rimland in 1965, but it took another decade or so for the final discrediting of evil psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim (who also beat the autistic children under his "care"). Part of our Quest for Theory is for new concepts, but there still has to be a minimal sort of rationality test: conformity with the best empirical evidence we have (at the moment), as well as internal consistency. Foucault fails on both tests, as does, a lot of the time, Zizek. Otherwise, we may as well call astrology or homeopathy valid alternatives to the much-maligned "Western" science and medicine. I don't really understand, Thomas, what exactly it is we're arguing about, since entering into debate here presumes the same minimal standards I have invoked. Or am I just being dense?
Jim, I just gotta ask: what is rationality?
You invoke this term, along with "empirical evidence," as cut and dried, speak-for-themselves facts. You use it, suddenly, with no nuance, to speak to the so-called failures of Foucault and Zizek. You then slip-slide into equating such theory with astrology and homeopathy?
If these are your minimal standards, I don't see how how this conversation can end in anything but a differend. (Is this the point?)
Placebos have been found to work. Is that rational? Emotional cures work. Is that rational? People make choices based on the choices of others. Is that rational? Rhetoric invokes all kinds of non-rational factor to accomplish its work. Why be a rhetorician if this, too, fails the rationality test? In what way is history rational? History, rational? I don't get it.
So, maybe you could lay out some minimal groundwork here? Because I'm not seeing how this applies to psychoanalysis.
[I wrote this two days ago and neglected to click 'save.' I was wondering why it hadn't shown up today. Somehow, clicking back on my browser several times retrieved it, so here it is...]
First off, thanks to you and Josh for getting this conversation going. This thread sets a record for the Blogora, so I really appreciate it.
There are both "thick" and "thin" notions of rationality, and I'm opting for a fairly thin one here: 1) the burden of making an internally consistent argument, 2) willingness to respond to criticism without invoking dogma or red herrings or personalizing the response, 3) providing conditions under which the factual or causal claims might potentially be verified, even if indirectly. Sometimes, as with a distinctive/important philosophical position, e.g. Spinoza's or Hegel's, one is often stuck, in a good way, simply with finding the best interpretation and exploring implications/possible inconsistencies. I think rhetoricians do in fact make causal statements a good deal of the time, even if they are probabilistic ones, e.g. organize one's points, provide evidence, anticipate objections in the presence of a skeptical or opposing position, and so on. If we're not doing some variety of these social practices, it's unclear to me why one would want to have a scholarly conversation in the first place. A "thick" standard of rationality, say Habermas's communicative ethic or Hegel's "sociality of reason," is another thing (in my heart of hearts I'm an Hegelian), but we're not exactly arguing that here. Hope this helps.
Jim, you say:
"[paraphrase: what's true is what works] Ditto with depression--what's better, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on psychoanalysis or taking antidepressants? The evidence supports the latter."
The potentially confusing thing with such a statement here is the term "better," although I'm going to assume that better = true = works. If that's the case, then I think we should alter your statement, Jim, from either/or to a both/and. Evidence supports both approaches to managing depression, and empirical evidence has born out therapy + medication is the better approach. (By therapy I mean talking stuff, not necessarily the psychoanalytic approach but any form of therapy that involves "working-through.") Depression is not simply a "mindless body" disease, it also involves interior dialogues and narratives, and it comes in "grades." Some folks have more extreme depressions, and there's different types of "mood disorders" that fall under the category. Of course, there is outright melancholia, and that demands medication and serious therapy. All I'm saying is "both/and" is the fairer statement on empircal grounds--even behavorist empirical grounds (one of our superstar psychologists here just published a study on the amazing therapeutic effects of student journaling).
In Black Sun Kristeva makes her case this way: "To mention one last time the problem of 'biological limit,' which I shall henceforth put aside, I shall posit that the register of psychic and, particularly, linguistic representation is neurologically transferred to the physiological occurrences of the brain, in the last instance through the hypothalamus' multiple networks. (The hypothalamic nuclei are connected to the cerebral cortex whose functioning underlies meaning--but how?--and also to the limbic lobe of the brain stem whose functioning underlies affects). At present we don't know how this transfer takes place, but clinical experience allows us to think that it does actually take place (for instance, one will recall the exiting or sedative, 'opiatic,' effect of certain words). Finally, numerous illnesses--and depressions--whose origins can be traced to neurophysiological disturbances triggered by symbolic breakdowns remain set in registers that cannot be effected by language. The faciliating effect of antidepressants is then required in order to reconstitute a minimal neurophysiological base upon which psychotherapeutic work can begin, analyzing symbolic deficiencies and knots and reconstituting a new symbol system."
In other words, for Kristeva some people require meds for therapy to even begin.
Now, I've seen Kristeva's grasp of brain science get torn to pieces, but her point is well taken: people are organisms, and language/symbols have biological effects, and biology has symbolic effects (e.g., symptoms, signs of arousal, etc.). Basic Burke, no? Depression is thus a "whole body" problem. Just popping a pill to solve mood issues isn't the answer (and I agree with Thomas, it's kind of scary, especially when we take the overprescription of prozac and ADD drugs into account). One also has to rework his/her symbolic network---to tell a new story, to narrate a trauma, to re-work the cathexes to change one's meaningful world (oh yeah, and that of others too).
My basic point I reckon is that psychoanalysis in general does not claim to be an alternative to medication. At least not today. You're right about empirical evidence for that. But there's a century of empirical evidence for therapy through speech and writing, too.
I ran into this statement by TS Eliot this afternoon, and it seems to fit our discussion (and what I admire about Professor Gunn's work): "[O]f course one can 'go too far' and except in directions in which we can go too far there is no interest in going at all, and only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!
If I'm tracking Jim correctly, I think the claim that folks don't defend their pet theorist with arguments is more akin the the problem of translation: how do you explain the claims of theorist X with her vocabulary into a more accepted/standard/widely assumed vocabulary? That is, we're talking about a willingness to figure common ground; arguments assume a common ground, and they cannot occur, for example, if you refuse to "switch code" to explain something.
For psychoanalysis in rhetorical studies, that argument seems to be through the figure of Burke.
One of the many lessons I learned from Ron Greene is that to do "theory" in communication studies (or any field, for that matter), one needed to "translate," say, Foucauldian terminology into something folks are familiar with.
When trying to argue for psychoanalysis, what Shaun and I tried to do is come up with an allegory and a concept that readers would like and know. So we choose ideology, which has been discussed extensively, and a zombie allegory. This was our "argument-as-translation" move. I'm not saying it was successful, I'm just saying it was very much a strategic argument from our perspective.
Thanks for chiming in; I was hoping we would get someone deeply critical to lay out a case for the sake of a discussion, and the one you drop like a lead balloon is THE BIG ONE, for which we have a litany of Freudo-Marxisms and, thanks to Zizek, Lacano-Marxism (or -materialism?). Burke led me to Fredric Jameson and Freud, in that order, and so I've always come to psychoanalysis with a wide-eyed awareness of the German Idealist tradition and its influences. Just today in a presentation by a materialist scholar we got in a discussion about the "materiality of the symbolic" that touched on similar issues. We agreed there is no end to this discussion, whether cast as the problem of "mediation" in the critical act, or the relationship of individual and group, structure and struggle, and so on. All admittedly very different frames, and some more neglectful of material history than others, but formally different shades of the pickle.
The other issue you raise gets at the "true believer" or cultish, daddy-needy crowd (what Thomas keenly connects to the scholarly transference). "Theory," especially for some reasons abstract French theory---as Vico would agree---gets fetishized too easily. We've all noticed the hankering toward the Next French Thinker (has it moved from Badiou to Ranciere, now?) and I think psychoanalysis, perhaps because its jargon, is also hooked into that fever, if you will. (Strangely, psychoanalysis to me is pretty modernist in orientation, so I don't know why folks associate with the dreaded p- word). This theory fever doesn't work well with argument, since argument requires one to depart from the bubble of a thinker's discourse and connect to another discourse bubble. (I think those of us who find psychoanalysis make the best arguments with recourse to Burke, since it's a bubble that many rhetoric types are very familiar with.)
Perhaps one problem with psychoanalysis in general is that there is fundamentally one article of faith: the dynamic unconscious. Freud has good arguments for its existence, but even so, when your most basic, fundamental category is ineffable and directly inaccessible, you do sort of have to come down to a "leap" of sorts: I went to bed with a problem, and miraculously, I awoke with a solution. There must be an "off stage," and ob-scene . . . .
I think there is a lot to be said for the resistance being based in notions of agency. Fear of not being a conscious subject in control. (And yet we drink...) My response to denials of the unconscious is based on one of Freud's definitions in his essay on the unconscious: is there stuff in your brain you aren't thinking of right now? That's the unconscious. (Simplistic, but ya know...)
This discussion also reminds me of a question asked of me by a beloved org comm scholar on my thesis committe. My master's thesis was a "schizoanalysis" with loads of Lacan. She asked "How can you be certain?" I responded that I can't, but I'm fine with that because certainty to me implies closing off possibility. What this means is that I find myself raising more questions than giving answers, and I think that is contrary to the expectations we face in the academy. This causes me much anxiety.
While I think there is growing acceptance in the field, I feel like part of the repression of psychoanalysis is in the development of communication as a "discipline" itself. I can only remember two courses in my master's program where we read a lot of primary sources. We mostly read journal articles, I think, because of the pressure to be on the cutting edge of what is going on IN the discipline. It made me wonder if it is possible to get a Ph.D. without ever actually reading a book. The problem with this is that there is so much dependence on journal articles that often times grad students find themselves using theorists they've never actually engaged with. You become dependent on other people's readings of Foucault, for example. *Cough*
In other words, we're pressured to meet the expectations of our mentors sometimes without learning to think for ourselves. Or rather we pressure ourselves. I've been lucky that my mentors have patience for my stupidity, but I have had colleagues who are desperately afraid of being found out. So they become clones.
So it becomes easy to dismiss Freud, Lacan, etc. without ever reckoning with them and still be authoritative because so much of the academy is an expert factory built on a mass production model.
mm
Ok, mm: you said it. There's a lot to say in response in terms of disciplinarity, generational transmissions of hostility, article-based vs. book based disciplines (I think the more book friendly folks in English-associated rhetoric might have a different story), and so on, but I've had my many-paged turn today, so I'll step back a bit and "yield the page."
I thought I might digest what I'm reading folks saying in a quest for false linearity (the backwards ordering of the responses and then descending ordering on different responses boggle the print-based mind a bit).
Rosa asked if we should limit the questions about up-take and resistance to psychoanalysis, because her experience with cognitive stuffs and neurofeedback has been dancing about the same territory (I'm not sure if there's an implication she's getting odd reactions from others or not). I responded that perhaps this is part of a larger resistance to "Theory," to which Thomas reiterated his earlier comment that resistance to theory in general is part of it, but only part: there is a peculiar response to psychoanalysis. He drops the provocation: "neuro-psychology fulfills expectations of The One Who Knows in ways psychoanalysis no longer does, at least for many..." Juicy! For those folks not conversant in psychobabble, Thomas is hinting at a certain daddy trouble.
Later (er, but earlier—so confusing!), Thomas had a pretty thoughtful post on the take-up of psychoanalysis. Bracketing for the moment the impossibility of generalizing, from personal experience Thomas suggests psychoanalytic work is treated as a form of tokenism. Disciplinarily, it's as if folks in rhet comp say, "ok, we got some of those people" so "been there, done that." The consequence is that psychoanalysis never makes an impact in teaching and research (something that I will stress Thomas puts an end to in his new book, so let me plug it).
Thomas continues by explaining he doesn't teach much psychoanalysis in his courses owing to the goals of his program, however, when he does there seems to be much resistance. Some of this resistance is tied, he suggests, to an implicit commitment to egoism (and I would think individualism). Fundamentally, however, Thomas (speculatively) argues, "the resistance to psychoanalysis is clearly a defensive gesture." And at the risk of being reductive, I would paraphrase Thomas' elaboration thus: psychoanalysis, especially the later varieties espoused by Lacan and Zizek, extend an ethic and politics respectively. The ethic is that you are not "master of your domain," and the politics is . . . (well, if you can explain Zizek's politics you get a cigar, which is not just a cigar). Such a challenge and way of thinking about the self produces discomfort.
Such an observation feeds right into Shaun's argument, that such resistance is a form of "psychophobia" that is only further exacerbated by vulgar psychoanalysis, or crude, reductive applications of psychoanalytic thinking (Fredrick Crewes, anyone?). Shaun suggests that, on the communication studies side of rhetoric and performance studies, this leads to throwing the baby out with the bathwater ("I don't believe in the unconscious!" she says, as she eats her Pastrami on Rye and, unaware, snorts and moans with [horseradish] relish).
From Jon and Mike, we learn the valuation of psychoanalysis still seems pretty low, if what's getting taught in rhetoric classrooms is any measure.
These discussions, I think, give us confirmation of a kind of true believership and reticence of worry. I think Sue has articulated a good rationale for reading Freud (he makes sense of trope and figure and rhetorical disturbances), as have others. I think, perhaps because we're rhetoric first, theoretical hankering second, most of us interested in psychoanalysis were led to it, not because of its fetish value, but because it helps us answer questions. Psychoanalysis is a theory of the "how?" and "why?" of change or failure to change. Those of us "true believers" hang on the latter, while others worry about giving up their center (or so us true believers think).
We haven't heard much from you naysayers out there. Are we true believers getting this right?
(I checked the site before posting and noticed Omri just posted; I've gotta jet so sorry you're not in this post, but more later!)
There are probably at least two issues here: (1) why is there aggressive hostility toward psychoanalysis in a field ostensibly devoted to methodological pluralism and (2) how does that hostility become a disciplinary token that trumps institutional and interpersonal norms?
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The second question is mostly sociological and is probably easier to trace. There's some economist - can't remember his name - who has a quip about creating new intellectual movements: all you have to do is provide young students with a slogan and a reason to dismiss the detailed work of their predecessors. The softer side of the academy has elevated this tactic to a disciplinary art: I was once in a seminar where both sides of the Miracles Debate were dismissed as equally irrelevant because the epistemological tangles of testimony where in the context of "newspapers are designed to make money."
The upshot is that there's a certain defiant pose to be struck - with all the disciplinary ethos that it ostensibly brings - via glib dismissal.
Institutionalized hostility to psychoanalysis is conveyed sociologically: affected hyperbole, sarcastic eye-rolls, and brash dismissals by powerful faculty and mentors. It becomes a kind of shibboleth – "we're on the inside because we know that we're supposed to go over the top painting psychoanalysis as absurd." That's how it becomes reasonable for a young student to aggressively mock a seminar topic to the seminar instructor. How's the student supposed to know that you don't say *that* *here* when it's treated as a sign of sophistication everywhere else?
That, at least, seems to mesh with some of these anecdotes.
But it's still strange to hear that in department halls. The speech comm tradition has never been particularly anxious about methodological cohesion and empirical validity. Quite the opposite – there are entire symposiums where those concerns are dismissed in the name of exploration; or methodological diversity; or "saying something interesting." But the entirety of psychoanalysis is supposed to be not just invalid but *absurd* – because some parts of Freud have been disproven by some methods? Not just any methods either, but methods that come from traditions that critical theory is hostile toward the rest of the time?
This isn't just silly argumentatively. That would be suspicious enough - careful people don't give a pass to poor reasoning without something else going on. They certainly don't do it when the argument that's getting run flies in the face of other disciplinary concerns like methodological pluralism.
But in this case we have bad reasoning used to justify a distasteful conclusion and the bad arguments *themselves* are in deep tension with disciplinary sensibilities.
Social psychology is often treated ipso facto invalid because it's embedded within neocolonialist regimes of race and gender – but junk science is magically transformed into level-headed analysis when it’s weighted against one of the main strains of modernity? There’s something deeper doing persuasive work. One might even suggest it's ideological. Or unconscious.
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If there's something pulling at judgment and sensibility, it's working at least on the same registers. And that brings up the first question - why hostility in the first place?
There are at least two ways that psychoanalysis is in deep tension with parts of the speech comm and rhet crit traditions. These obviously aren't exhaustive. And I'd be loathe to defend them as anything but broad brushstrokes. But something fundamental causes certain scholars to signal to younger scholars that sophistication means looking for pretexts to glibly dismiss cutting-edge psychoanalytic theory.
(1) Psychoanalysis emphasizes form in distinction to a disciplinary emphasis on organic criticism. It says "interpret texts through theory" rather than "let the text speak to you." There are reasons to disagree with this move. Not least of these reasons is that it sets up the dumbest kinds of deconstructive moves, where the text can become its opposite.
But deconstruction has a long and storied history in the field. It's not dismissed on the basis of overly obscure Francophilia. I think the difference lies in how psychoanalysis insists not just on theory but on *stable formal structures*. You can get away with banishing close reading. But questioning the *exhaustiveness* of close reading in the name of *something else* that has to be studied carefully and applied - that's a touch bold. Which brings me to...
(2) Psychoanalysis isn't just another sloppy method for untangling the persuasive work done by texts. At least, if it is a sloppy method, that can't be the reason for the disproportionate hostility that it generates. Rather it's a method that says, by virtue of emphasizing the persuasive work that happens structurally, "these other methods are chasing epiphenomenal tropological ghosts" (Epiphenomenal Tropological Ghosts, by the way, opened at SXSW this year – killer set!) To ask certain scholars within certain traditions not to push back against psychoanalysis is to ask them to tolerate disciplinary intolerance. Though their patience for such demands seems inexhaustible in the space of international politics, it seems somewhat more finite in the context of disciplinary debate.
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Now I think there is a good reason to be suspicious of the role that psychoanalysis plays. The literature is undoubtedly difficult and often obscure – and, unfortunately, not always productively. There are even people who've managed to rise to not insignificant heights publishing demonstrably nonsensical statements about Freud and Lacan.
And so writing about and through psychoanalysis makes it really easy to say really dumb things.
Epistemically the burden of creating a consensus that "this is utter nonsense" is very difficult. Disciplinarily it might be impossible – there might not be enough serious people who can reliably make those kinds of decisions.
But interpretation is always a matter of judgment, with a slippery slide that bottoms out in the "anything goes" sandbox. If the goal of criticism was detecting errors *straightforwardly* we'd all be doing social scientific work (not that they're immune either – it's just that the gray zone is a lot smaller and the "flat wrong" zone is better defined). I don’t think that's the solution, if only because there are certain questions that can't be answered that way.
Though having first year students read a history book or two – rather than imagining that the world is the way it'd be most convenient for them to criticize – probably isn't a bad idea.
And in the meantime, maybe there's something to the suggestion that people behave in ways other than how they should because they believe in things other than what they think.
Wow, Omri, this is really helpful. We want to hold on to you before you become a legal eagle!
On your second question: very. well. said. This "style" of responding to psychoanalysis seems to be particular to rhetorical studies. I can vividly recall the same snide dismissals coming from cultural studies students in my graduate seminars about communication studies. One of those seminars was on (you guessed it) Freud. To switch gears (but still evoke the unconscious): are we dealing with a kind of disciplinary habitus?
On your first question: also well put, but I have some tension with your first sub-point: "[psychoanalysis] says 'interpret texts through theory' rather than 'let the text speak to you.'" Well, yes and no. Your and my habit is to read everything backwards through Lacan, and from that vantage, theory concerns a series of psychical structures (e.g., hysteria) that have certain textual signatures. But then, there's a similarity with the basic "methodical" move between both analysis and rhetorical criticism. "Organic" textualism, a term used by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell to describe close textual criticism, is unquestionably structuralist in orientation if you think about how deeply existentialism and phenomenology informed criticism in the 60s and 70s. Speech communication rhetorical studies is pretty thick with the epoche, which is the first move of Husserlian-inspired phenomenology where you "bracket" assumptions so the structures of the text emerge. This is not so different from the interpretation of dreams a la Freud. What do you say to the dreamer? "Tell me about your dream, as if it's happening." The "dream thoughts" only emerge after long, sustained "listening" by the analyst. In other words, I think the gesture of interpretivism is homologous, emergent but suspicious. I've always thought that the shared "hermeneutics of suspicion" between (classical) psychoanalysis and close textual criticism would make them go together better than people today think. Edwin Black certainly thought so, and said so in his book and a number of essays.
I think your second sub-point is, however, right on the money: where do we locate the structures? I'm thinking something like this: rhetorical studies believes it is working between the unconscious and the preconscious, that there's nothing "deeper" that escapes the critic; the model of suspicion only goes so far until faith in the autonomous subject kicks back (got Kant?). Psychoanalysis says, to put this as Freud did, there is a "navel" beyond which "we cannot go."
Worse, when you add the idea that this blind spot is, well, "dynamic," it really gets messy. It turns out the structures tell you where to look, but not what to see.
Nevertheless, when we're operating on a model in which the "prime mover" is unknowable—and if so, only at the level of formal repetition, it's bound to invite people who claim absurd things in its name. People have been doing this with deity since forever. Vulgar psychoanalysis is cultish just like any rigidly policed system (this is why I personally am troubled by being called a "Lacanian" or a "Burkean"--I prefer "psychoanalytic critic" or something like that, since a Daddy is not what I'm after . . . except for my advisors and mentors, of course).
Regardless, very interesting comments that further our thinking about the source of hostility toward psychoanalysis.
Finally, you have a parting ponderable: "And in the meantime, maybe there's something to the suggestion that people behave in ways other than how they should because they believe in things other than what they think." Huh. Let us think on that!
If you're looking for a theory of figure that connects figure and trope with those issues of desire and affect that we're concerned with, you can do a lot worse than Freud's joke book and his dream book.
sweet reason.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookk...
would you like to weigh in more here, on these here questions? How has your book been received? This interface is a meeting place of rhetoric-English and rhetoric-Speech people, and I'm hoping this thread can work across those loci. What's your perception?
If figure is some kind of disturbance in the smooth unrolling of the discourse--transposing syllables, adding or cutting endings, establishing parallelism at the beginning or end of words, bringing in objects of comparison--then we need some way of sorting out why rhetors use figures and also why they do rhetorical work. We have a rich literature categorizing the figures, and an even richer literature talking about how individual instances function, but the remarks on why and how are sketchy--praise of comparison by Aristotle, discussions of how figures are like weapons by the author of ad Herennium (this one is like hitting somebody with a spear in the same place over and over; that one is like swinging a sword), Circero's discussions of ornament and propriety.
Freud gives us a handle on how these disturbances in the text let us talk about things that we can't bear to handle directly, how they move attention and desire around in the discourse, how they let us contain aggression. Burke took full advantage of this apparatus, but until recently work on Burke seemed to treat his investment in figure and affect as something to pass over in silence. I think there's more to be found here, although my own preference is for looking at particular historically situated texts.
Sweet Reason has had a bimodal reception: some folks love it; others wonder why I'm still running around loose. It is, as one of the readers said, a very sad book, and I don't think I'll write that way again. It has been over ten years, after all.
Thanks for raising this topic!
Thanks for popping in this discussion. I'm only a guest blogger for a month here, but I think it might be neat to organize a reading group around your book on-line, perhaps this summer? (Interested bystanders can email me and I'll try to organize it). I think your argument for the relevance and importance of Freud is awesome. Chris Lundberg has been arguing similarly for "tropology" and taking-up Lacan in Comm Studies. I also think we can include "appeals" in your argument as well, and especially if we couple it with Diane Davis' recent essay on Freud and Burke in RSQ. If I read Diane correctly, the best explanation for persuasion we have is suggestion. The more traditional rhetorical taxonomies are still sort of empty of the "why" and "how."
Boyoboy, *just* had a beloved grad school colleague, a Performo-Deleuzian, tell me straight up over pints, "I just don't believe this BS about an unconscious." My stunned reply: "What the heck do you think desiring-machines are?!" There is an honest conversation to have on this, however, and a FOX-style shouting-match that trucks in outdated stereotypes and hysterical self-interest. Josh is right, there is a history of what I refer to as 'psychophobia' in not only rhetorical studies, but in the popular imagination as well. People are either resistant or outright hostile, unless they have had success stories in therapy or counseling. War stories tend to breed the militant worst because, like the practices of medicine or yoga or art, there are those who have been burned or malpracticed. Seriously, in an age of Oprahspeak and condescending Dr. Phil pop-psychobabble, who can blame skepticism?
Thomas' addendum is honest and fair; psychoanalysis is often neglected at our traditional alters of the Great Rhetor/Agent and the rhetorical agency of Creative Genius. this is a practical and disciplinary matter, to be sure, wed as we are to the fantasy of rhetorical agency. All this 'death of the subject' stuff tends to breed reactionaries, but psychoanalysis breeds the same kind of "vulgar Marxism" (and "vulgar Postmodernism") Straw Man readings than most. My ire gets kindled when the opinion is stronger than is merited by their knowledge of the subject. For every Jodi Dean or Julia Kristeva who offer nuanced if crushing critical revision to psychoanalytic criticism, there are a dozen hatchet-jobs by assassin traditionalists who gleaned all they know from a singular work or the tainted presumptions of their pedigreed institution (likely with a historical beef).
So I guess all to say, there are some good reasons to be skeptical of 'bad' psychoanalysis, but this is a foundational conversation that the discipline of Rhetoric has largely excused itself from. Kenneth Burke had some stiff opposition invoking similar beefs back in the day, and I'm convinced that we are not only "symbol-making and symbol-using animals," but also thoroughly symbol-USED animals who are frightened by what happens to rhetoric if the agent and agency are called into account.
I should also add anecdotal confirmation of this psychophobia that most often manifests itself as snide apriori dismissal. As a student of Tom Frentz and Janice Rushing, Jungian trailblazers in CommStudies, it was not at all unusual to overhear chatter prior to convention panels or later in hotel bars that would mock, sneer, or entirely sweep aside psychoanalysis the way an MBA undergrad dismisses their prejudiced stereotypes of Marxism or Feminism. Some of these were by "giants" in the field. Even with the poststructural turns that have occurred following Foucault and Judith Butler and the like, informed or indebted as they are to post-Freudian psychodynamics, I still encounter the "its all BS" shrug in beer-fueled exchanges of honesty.
I have heard the same thing. I think there is perhaps even more of a stigma for the Rushing and Frentz's work because Jung flips sex for spirit (so, too, does Burke in some of his later work--I'm thinking of the lead essay in Chesbro's "Burkean System" collection). Spiritual frankness hasn't gone over terribly well either, but there has also been a new openness to discussing this in our journals as well. I wonder if something is articulating the permissibility of spirit and psychoanalysis. I would hazard a Nine-eleven context/exigency, but I'll have to think more.
I hope to comment more later this afternoon.
I don't know about the spiritual connection -- 9/11 might have lots to do with that -- but my sense is that the increasing permissibility/interest in psychoanalysis is somewhat generational. (Pun intended ... but no less true for the fact.)
Question: If one were going to give an "overture" to rhetoric and psychoanalysis to beginning students, what would be the 5-10 things you think they should read? I mean this as an open question, not just for Josh.
For undergraduates in rhetorical theory, I assign the comic book Freud for Beginners. It works well to set up discussion, and for reading Burke the next class. But, like Thomas, I don't assign much of this stuff to undergraduates. The largest dose of psychoanalysis I teach is in a film theory survey class I teach in the summer.
For beginning graduates, I assign more than 10, but I think for like a "day" on psychoanalysis I'd assign these:
Freud, chapters six and seven from The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud, "Dissection of the Psychical Personality"
Mitchell, the introduction to her Psychoanalysis and Feminism
Mithcell, the introduction to Melanie Klein's The Selected Melanie Klein
Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Psychoanalysis, pp. 1-71.
I think these readings would sketch a frame that helpfully deploys the key technique Freud developed, the feminist critique, the challenge to drive theory and the beginning of object relations, and then (for me) how it all comes together in the Lacanian approach. I could see a different trajectory, however, ending in either Kristeva or Irigaray, both of whom give Lacan a run for his . . . knowledge? But even then, you'd need a little Lacan.
I couldn't make up my mind, so I developed a whole course on the issue---and even think there might be enough interest to do a year-long "introduction."
As I finish up my last semester of course work, I think it is fair to say that psychoanalysis is lacking in the classroom. In my experience through two of the more theoretically-minded departments in the field (UGA and U of MN) I have scarcely been exposed to Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. My go-to theorist being Judith Butler, I have a reason to go back to Fredu and Lacan in particular, but have not done so much in my courses. I would say that Hegel and Heidegger have been the more common figures that have been taught to me as the root of contemporary rhetorical theory's main dilemmas. While I never felt pressure to steer clear of psychoanalysis, I've not been given much guidance in relating it to rhetoric, either.
Jon
Music: Arc, Blaze
It is difficult to generalize about how psychoanalysis shows up and informs work in rhet/comp. Really, I would have to start delving into the status of that slash, or the "and," that characterizes the many forms of rhet/comp, rhet and comp, comp-rhet, and etc. And I don't want to do that here.
So, I'll generalize a little bit from experience, as problematic as that may be. While we have some good work in the field that addresses, interrogates, and deploys psychoanalysis, including Metzger and Vitanza, but also Michelle Ballif, Diane Davis, Gregory Ulmer, Marshall Alcorn, Mark Bracher, Robert Samuels, and more, that work seems to be acknowledged in order to be placed away from the center. Such work remains the token "out there" stuff. It's there, we talk about it, but it seems never to impact actual practice in any meaningful way. We talk about it--"we" means graduate programs, I suppose--in order to entertain it as a possibility that never seems to want to be more than that.
I teach some of this work in my graduate courses, but not in any sustained way. Although I would like to, I have not yet been able to teach a course organized directly around psychoanalysis. There's reasons for that, and good ones, some having to do with the shape and purpose of the program I am in, and not necessarily any conspiracy or anti-psychoanalytic sentiment. At the same time, nearly every time I treat with psychoanalytic material, such as in my cultural studies course or my postmodernism and composition course, I hear anti-psych sentiments. They run the gamut Josh describes above: Freud is discounted, not even psychology deals with him anymore; there's no proof (that one always make me laugh) for what it claims about us and our world; it's difficult and/or nonsensical (this usually in reference to Lacan); and so on. Sometimes anti-psych sentiments show up in other ways as well: the implicit commitments to a certain notion of ego-centered subjectivity, the implicit need to deny for various reasons the implications of a strong notion of the unconscious, and so on.
Now, nearly all theory I teach produces various forms of resistance, but psychoanalysis, I have found, nearly always generates the most. Telling incident: a couple years ago, after teaching Marshall Alcorn, I was told that by a miffed student that most of the time there really is something wrong with people's brains, and that's why we need science and drugs, not BS like psychoanalysis! Another time, a student, upon reading Freud's Civilization and its Discontents for a cultural studies class, came armed with reams of articles disproving Freud. And that happens nearly every class, at least once: someone has to have an article or citation demonstrating Freud's doghouse status.
I've dealt with all this to such an extent that I have found myself cutting back on the amount of psychoanalysis I assign. This is unfortunate, but given what the ostensible purposes of the classes I teach are, it's become hard to, well, avoid, with all the full and consequential meaning psychoanalytic thought puts on that word.
There are, of course, exceptions, and some of my students have gone on to use psychoanalysis quite deftly in their work. But they are exceptions, by and large.
Now, this sounds like I'm moving into complaint territory, which isn't what I want to do here. So, instead, I'm going to move into something a bit more speculative, although much of what I have to say has been said or at least intimated by Josh above. But there's this: the resistance to psychoanalysis is clearly a defensive gesture. And I suspect it is aimed at the far-reaching consequences, less, perhaps, of Freud, than of Lacan and Zizek, that we threaded through the social, that we are not fully at home in the ego, that we are not fully in control of who we are and what we do.
These are big statements. They hit us where we live, as it were. And for a field that is as invested in writing, in authorship, and in teaching to the extent that comp/rhet is, hitting at the phantasmatic sense of "the agent" assumed in theories of writing, authoring, and teaching runs against everything people think they are doing. A commonsense practicality will dictate that teaching produces the edification it seeks; that students are in control of the prose they produce; that authoring entails responsibility and accountability. To call these things into question isn't just an empty theoretical enterprise: it calls everything into question. Or, less hyperbolically, it asks us to reflect on and inhabit differently who we are as a field, what we do as a practice, and how we achieve our ends.
How can this not produce discomfort and resistance? So, there's my empathy move. Common ground established, yes! Less sympathetically, I'd argue, how can anyone who has taught writing for over two weeks not have noticed that teaching is not an information transfer? And how can you not find psychoanalysis to be one of the most helpful discourses around in investigating why this is so?
And, of course, that really opens things up. It opens things up to investigating the tremendous "will of the field," as Victor Vitanza once put it, to maintaining its phantasmatic investments in teachability, accountability, and control. But, how to begin such investigation in the face of such unpreparedness and/or unwillingness to ask the questions, to pursue them with the commitments required?
And, of course, that in turn reflects back upon issues of persuasion in general. Which is to say: questions of psychoanalysis seems both questions for rhetoric and questions of rhetoric...
I'll leave it at that for now and invite responses and ruminations.
Thank you Josh and Thomas for starting this conversation. I can't offer too much in this discussion, as I'm not as familiar with psychoanalysis and rhetoric as I'd like to be. Read Alcorn (which I loved), some Vitanza, and a bit of Zizek. Thomas's book has been on my shelf for a year, but I haven't yet gotten to it (hopefully this summer!).
That said, I do get a sense, from both literature and rhetoric folks, that psychoanalysis is not valued. My guess, from my location as a graduate student, is that it's not valued in part because it's difficult. Of course, Derrida is difficult, so difficulty isn't all of it. But among the rare praise I have heard for psychoanalysis and rhetoric is when Alcorn's book was recommended to me, and it was praised for its accessibility and the way he made Lacanian theory understandable. This is, of course, good praise. But I think it also betrays a larger anxiety that Lacan is hard. This probably sounds like an indictment of laziness or something on the field. It's not meant to be (though intent! ha!). I also think there is a will toward composition (in the composed sense) that emphasizes clarity and accessibility, perhaps to the detriment of a valuing of psychoanalysis.
I also largely agree with Thomas's statement about the place of the author/agent in rhet/comp. In one of my classes, when I brought up Butler's theory (though not purely psychoanalytical?) that agency is a function of discourse, that we only recognize intent/agency after the speech act, the whole idea was too shocking for some. There is a strong attachment to the intentional agent in our field.
"...the resistance to psychoanalysis is clearly a defensive gesture. And I suspect it is aimed at the far-reaching consequences, less, perhaps, of Freud, than of Lacan and Zizek, that we threaded through the social, that we are not fully at home in the ego, that we are not fully in control of who we are and what we do."
Well put. Anyone interested in an introduction to the ontological stakes should see Lundberg & Gunn's award-winning RSQ "Ouija Board" article/exchange.
for a bit. and feel free to delete this, josh, if you wanna. i won't mind. wonderful prompt!
i wonder, tho, whether you want to limit your question to "psychoanalysis." forgive me if asking that shows i'm playing for the wrong team; don't mean to be.
in my paper in copenhagen and then in my grad seminar -- and in the book that's getting there -- i've been intiating conversations about IFS (integrated family systems), EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), and neurofeedback. would discussion about those thangs also be pert-inent in this good and important conversation you're trying to start?
as to freud and lacan's places in english/lit crit, (rhet) comp, and comm studies at different points in the last 40 or so years ... i have too much to say to say it at the start of this conversation.
thanks, josh and thomas, for bringing this here.
I did sort of want to limit the discussion to psychoanalysis, however, I think you're right to suggest that psychoanalysis is also metonymy for a larger/deeper something, something we might even simply say is "Theory"---and especially Theory that threatens, in some way, to do away with a comfortable dualism. (The bottom joke had me guffawing yesterday.)
I made a gesture toward this in my post yesterday, and it certainly has its truthiness--the age-old resistance to theory. I had a student who, upon reading Foucault, asked, in all seriousness, where's the evidence? For whatever reasons, Foucault's archival work didn't show up as evidence, perhaps because of the highly abstracted theoretical synthesis Foucault achieves.
But anyway: from my experiences teaching, there remains a difference when we get to psychoanalysis. People read the material more gingerly, perhaps afraid that something icky might rub off on them. A very different flavor of resistance than to, say, Derrida, who is perceived as just frustratingly difficult, annoyingly nitpicky, etc. Or Foucault, who, when he is critiqued/resisted, is usually picked off for robbing us of our favorite lollipops: subjective agency, normative standards for action, and freedom from power. (John Muckelbauer has a good essay on this in College English, btw. You out there, John? I'm talkin' 'bout ya'!)
Perhaps nothing illustrates this difference than when I introduce contemporary neuroscience, either straight from people like Antonio Damasio, or filtered through theorists like William Connolly (Neuroculture). Perhaps the usual problems associated with theoretical work, but a very different reception nonetheless than psychoanalysis, even though both treat with psychological matters.
I could surmise, perhaps, that this is in part an issue of the transference: neuro-psychology fulfulls expectations of The One Who Knows in ways psychoanalysis no longer does, at least for many...