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CIRCULAR_FREUD
April 2, 2018
As I was saying over here:
THE_ANTI_FREUD_CREW
A piece in the "London Review of Books"
appears to be trying to make the point Paul Keegan, "From
that you can't do a biography of Freud Shtetl to Boulevard"
because Freud did not approve of LRB vol. 39 No. 19,
biography because of it's tendency to October 5, 2017
select facts to fit a coherent
narrative... but if one is not a
Freudian already, one does not actually [ref]
care whether Freud would've approved Note: partially paywalled.
of a project, so...
This is truly a remarkably bad piece,
to the point where one wonders what
the London Review was thinking by The question I would ask: is
running it. Even the paragraph breaks there any other subject on which
are peculiar. I wonder a little about the barrel would be scraped this
the sanity of the author. hard?
"Paul Keegan, for many years the
poetry editor at Faber, wrote the
introduction to the Penguin Freud
The Keegan piece leads off with edition of The Psychopathology of
a detailed summary of one of Everyday Life."
Freud's case histories which is
so mind-numbing it guarantees
only a tiny minority actually
read the rest of the piece.
The point of it, as near as I can tell is to
impress us all with Freud's scientific
approach, making a show of Freud recording all
the data without prejudice.
At the end of the second paragraph,
this point starts to emerge:
A problem for biography?
"The important things in Freud lie close Hold that thought...
to the ground, which makes his world of
particulars vulnerable in paraphrase.
And this is a problem for biography."
This is laughable: Freud
Then we charge off into the third paragraph: was not a mere neutral
data-recorder, he
"Psychoanalysis set out to show rather famously inflicted his
than tell, and to redress the immemorial interpetations on his
injury of speaking for the subject." patients; and promoted his
theories with lies when
the facts wouldn't do.
Then Keegan somewhat oddly goes into
Freud's odd statements about biography: Women tell him about sexual
abuse when they were young,
"Freud was sceptical about biography Freud concludes they must
on these grounds (as well as others: have been projecting their
its idealisation of its subject, its unconscious sexual desires.
wish-fulfilments), infamously
remarking in 1936 that biographical [ref]
truth 'is not to be had' and-- odder
still-- that even were it to be had
it could not be used."
And at the opening of the fourth paragraph:
"The opening move was Ernest Jones’s
three-decker monument (1953-57), and his
successors make us choose a Freud, as if There's still some little
to write this life without a case to questions, like did Freud
prove were impossible. If we need more really exemplify this, and
lives of Freud it is because there is even if so, why would you
safety in numbers, but the evidential care to imitate him?
burden tends to drain them of ordinary
kinds of biographical interest, as if we Maybe Freud's idea
are not allowed to read the novel of was that you can't go
Freud’s life for the story alone." to a mere biographer
for Truth, for that
you need a trained
Now we're getting down to it: psychoanalyst
Keegan is complaining about
biographers summarizing and,
oh my god, interpreting.
Nothing less than a neutral recitation
of every fact available can live up
to the standards set by the great Freud.
I thought it might be fun to keep going through
the Keegan piece picking out some rotten cherries,
but I give up:
"Freud had a lot to say about pleasure
and little to say about happiness (except
that America invented it, and could keep
it), whereas his biographers have little
to say about pleasure and too much to say (But wasn't Keegan
about the fate of happiness in his hands. arguing for even
Easily accused of digression, Roudinesco more inessentials?
nevertheless broaches these matters, and Eh... no really, I
her book is a shaken kaleidoscope of give up.)
things inessential."
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