Psychoanalyzing psychoanalysis. Freud and the hidden fault of the father

MARIE BALMARY, Psychoanalyzing psychoanalysis. Freud and the hidden fault of the father, trans. by Ned Lukacher, Baltimore, Md., and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, 8vo, pp. xxiv, 184, £12.00. C. BARRY CHABOT, Freud on Schreber. Psychoanalytic theory and the critical act, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1982, 8vo, pp. 174, $17.50. (Distributed in the UK by Transatlantic Book Service, 24 Red Lion Square, London WC I R 4PX.) One index of the continuing vitality of the myths of psychoanalysis is that writers concerned with its history get caught up in making claims concerning the real basis of psychoanalysis they seem unable to avoid making claims solely about its history, but must speak to the truth of psychoanalysis. Even as proudly a historical work as Frank Sulloway's Freud. Biologist of the mind ( 1979) claims that psychoanalysis really ("in reality") is that is, it is not what it appears to be a crypto-biology, a psychobiology (where cryptoand psychomean roughly the same thing), if only one can decipher its history, its texts, to discover what is hidden the real, biology. The two books under review labour under the same necessity. Yet their aims are diametrically oppposed. Balmary, working within the French psychoanalytical scene, permeated as it is with the influence of Lacan, and thus having no need to trouble itself about the epistemological status of psychoanalysis, unabashedly goes about a piece of historicalbiographical-psychoanalytic detective work. She wishes to demonstrate how Freud's distorted account of the Oedipus complex is an alibi for his refusal to come to terms with the skeletons in his own father's cupboard the second wife of Jakob Freud, only recently discovered, who appears to have disappeared some years before Sigmund was born to the third wife. Following an elegant and forceful reinterpretation of Sophocles' play and the cycle of myths, Balmary employs the Freudian methods of dream-analysis and interpretation of detail and metaphor in Freud's own writings to argue that his family secret lay at the heart of his train phobia, of his peculiar fascination (brought out here for the first time) with-the stone statue in Don Giovanni, and the final putting into place of the headstone of his theory: the Oedipus complex. Balmary points to the sins of the father (Laios and Jakob Freud) as the cause of all the trouble, rather than the unconscious guilt and repressed desires of the sons, Oedipus and Sigmund. It is the father's fault that lies hidden, festering into neurosis and psychoanalysis. Balmary thus betrays a nostalgia for Freud's early seduction theory, in which a neurotic symptom "really" was caused by the sins of the father. Childhood really is invaded by the perversities of adults. In line with other recent repudiations of the pre-emptive hegemony of the medical, Balmary implies a return to the discourses of blame (the father is guilty of a crime whose consequences the son suffers) rather than the discourse of excuses (in which the son's symptom is caused by his guilt at wishing to kill the father). An urgency permeates her argument: incriminate the family (especially the father) and restore the idea of the innocent victim, destroy the guilt-ridden edifice of psychoanalysis so as to restore a justified self-righteous sympathy with the suffering victims (amongst whom the first in line is Freud himself), whether they be victims of fathers, of Freud, or of analysis. A similar urgent appeal to the causal efficacy of real paternal crimes was voiced by Morton Schatzman in his book on the Schreber case, Soul murder (1973). Schreber was not mad on account of a repressed homosexual desire towards his doctor (Freud's explanation) but rather as a result of the malpractices, indeed tortures, he suffered at the hands of his father, whose terrifying contraptions for the disciplining and enhancement of German youth were test-run on his sons. The father's sin, seen by Schatzman as the symbol of the repressive tyranny of the nineteenthcentury family, and of families in general, was visited in the shape of a paranoia which itself now becomes eminently comprehensible, in no further need of reflection his paranoia referred to the real practices suffered in childhood, no need to go looking for them in some complicated inner world. Instead, what should demand our attention is the brutally simple child-rearing practices of the high-minded disciplinarian father. Chabot will have little to do with this attempt to uncover the "real" truth of the Schreber case. Rather, he argues that psychoanalysis is closely akin to literary studies: "All interpretation, whether of individual texts or of patients, is essentially a textual exercise" though, surprisingly enough, he goes on to argue that both hermeneutics must be founded on psychology. Sensitively written, careful and conscientious in