Adam Phillips

The idea that literature, or any other discipline like boxing or song-writing, could modify psychoanalytic theory – that it could be a two-way street – has always been problematic for psychoanalysts. There is, of course, no reason to think a psychoanalyst’s interpretation of a boxing match would necessarily be more revealing than a boxer’s account of a psychoanalytic session. But psychoanalysts have worked on the rather misleading principle that psychoanalysis is only useful or interesting if it is in some sense right, rather than believing that it is another good way of speaking about certain things like love and loss and memory, as songs can be (and that, also like songs, it is only ever as good as it sounds). For most psychoanalysts, including Freud, Great Artists tend to provide either vivid illustration or prestigious confirmation of psychoanalytic insights. Melanie Klein, for example, found nothing she didn’t already know in the Oresteia, and even Lacan found Hamlet reassuring.’

Psychoanalysts after Freud have to acknowledge that the founder of psychoanalysis was never properly trained. He was not psychoanalysed in the conventional sense – that is, by someone else; and there was no one to tell him whether what he was doing with his patients was appropriate. That Freud, paradoxically, was the first ‘wild’ analyst is one of the difficult facts in the history of psychoanalysis. It is easy to forget that in what is still its most creative period – roughly between 1893 and 1939 – when Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, Abraham, Klein and Anna Freud herself were learning what they thought of as the ‘new science’, they had no formal training. Later generations of analysts dealt with their envy of Freud and his early followers by making their trainings increasingly rigorous, by demanding and fostering the kind of compliance – usually referred to as ‘conviction’ – that tended to stifle originality. Psychoanalytic training became a symptom from which a lot of people never recovered.’

It is a paradox of some interest that though psychoanalysis was, from the beginning, about the relationship between justice and love, there is no explicit description in Freud’s work of what constitutes a good life. And this is one of the many things that distinguish him from his followers and critics. It was also, of course, part of Freud’s disingenuous rationalism to assert that psychoanalysis could never be any kind of weltanschauung, that it was exempt from traditional moral questions like whether virtue can be taught, or whether we need to know what we are doing in order to be good. Confronted, however, with patients who claimed to have been seduced as children by parents or other adults, Freud very quickly came up against his own personal preferences – which he would later call resistances – and the normative standards of his culture. There were clearly certain things which were deemed absolutely unacceptable for adults to do to children and these could only be adequately described in terms of sexuality. Freud’s first patients, though, were mostly women who claimed to have been seduced by their fathers. It is Estela Welldon’s point in this often sympathetic book that maternal incest may be more pervasive than Freud was able to recognise.’

Psychoanalysis is a conversation that enables people to understand what stops them having the kinds of conversation they want. But as the unconscious and sexuality have gradually been replaced by developmental theory and normative standards of emotional health, the conversation has become predictable, when people’s lives, of course, are not. As psychoanalysis has become one of the helping professions, it has lost some of its original vitality. Despite Freud’s affirmation that it is not more truthful to be serious, psychoanalytic theory, at least in Britain, is not in the least bit funny. It is always sober and usually earnest. The romance of psychoanalysis has been undermined by coercive fantasies of rigour and expertise promoted by the owners of psychoanalysis.

In Fin de Siècle Vienna politics had become the least convincing of the performing arts. Life, Kraus wrote, had become an effort that deserved a better cause. By the turn of the century it was not politicians but actors, painters, writers and musicians who had captured the imagination of the upper middle classes. As the Hapsburg Empire disintegrated, it seemed to Kraus that life in Vienna was no longer imitating art: it was parodying it. And for Kraus it was the ‘mental self-mutilation of mankind through its press’ that had done most to trivialise and misrepresent what was becoming a terrifying political situation. Kraus exposed, often by imitation, the new decadent facetiousness. Journalists, he wrote, were now capable of ‘launching a premiere one day and a war the next’. They ‘write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write’. Editing and writing most of his own newspaper Die Fackel (the Torch) in Vienna from 1899 to 1936, he believed that the collapse of the Empire and the drift to world war could only be accurately documented as satire. Only the satirist was honestly suspicious. All forms of representation, advertisements, the wearing of beards, the way people strolled in the streets, had to be understood in terms of what it was they were being used to misrepresent. Events, and the reporting of events, had to be interpreted now as artistic genres concealing vested interests. In May 1916, in the middle of the war, it was still not clear to Kraus what play of Shakespeare’s was actually being performed. By October 1918 he was clear that it was Hamlet.