Cultures of Fetishism (25 page)

Finally, biography must be transformed into something more than an inventory of artifacts and relics. The biographical subject must re-enter the life it once lived (or is still living) by entering the imagination of the biographer.
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As I said earlier, “Edel struggles with archives and he struggles with transferences, never perceiving the fearful symmetry that binds them.” For the several decades that he wrote biographies and wrote about the writing of biographies, Edel would think about transferences and archives as demons. According to Edel, if a biographer wanted to write a successful biography, he had to avoid these monsters as he would avoid the perils of a plague. He was unable to see that they were both essential to the writing of a biography. They represent two phases in the complex process that Strachey described as “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of writing.”

True, archives can be a potentially deadly illness, or, as Derrida said, a
Mal d’ Archive
. In the first phase, however, the biographer has a need for archives; he is
En Mal d’Archive
and must, therefore, yield to the regressive tendency to bury himself in the detritus of the archive, risking its fevers, risking drowning in the sea of data. But, sooner or later, if he is to write a successful biography, he must emerge from the archive and, if he hasn’t already done so, try to become conscious of his transference to his subject, or that transfer- ence might also, in one way or another, immolate the biography. On the other hand, a transference to the person he is writing about is not only unavoidable, it is necessary. The biographer’s transference enables his subject to enter into his imagination and come to life.

When Edel gave his lecture to psychoanalysts in 1961, he started out by addressing the communalities in the tasks of the biographer and the psycho- analyst. He was trying to illuminate the “common ground” they shared. “Are we not all, really, biographers and historians, biographers of the human-spirit and the human soul . . .?”
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you—so to speak—write and rewrite a man’s life under his very nose. What is more, you make him write and rewrite it himself! This is doubtless one of the fascinations of your task; it is also the envy of your fellow biographers, who deal with a more silent kind of data. You talk to your subjects; you even listen to them! Our subjects neither talk nor answer back. They are as inanimate as their pocket diaries and their cheque stubs and all the personal memorabilia which they have left as record of their passage on this earth.
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Edel was right, but only up to a point. As we have learned, the subjects of biographies do talk and they do answer back, even the dead ones. And they are not inanimate. They can become as animate and confrontational as any still-living human being, that is, if they do not get buried alive under the mound of archival fragments that mark “their passage on this earth.”
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The remainder of Edel’s lecture is mostly about the differences between psychoanalysts and biographers. He felt that there had been too much “muddying of the waters,”
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by obscuring these differences. Edel was candid with the psychoanalysts—and, at times was gently critical of some of their presumptions. As he neared the conclusion of his lecture, he referred to that then-popular psychoanalytic image of the human mind—the iceberg, seven-eighths submerged beneath the icy waters, with its tip showing one- eighth above the water line. “When psychoanalysts write papers on literary subjects and describe the mass below the water-line, is it any wonder that most readers find it unbelievable and ‘far-fetched’?”
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With this keen analysis of one of the major pitfalls of psychoanalytic writing, Edel brings us to the subject of our next chapter, “Unfree Associations.” I begin by addressing the various ways that the fetishism strategy infiltrates the training of psychoanalytic candidates. As I describe how this training squelches the candidate’s creativity and independent spirit,

I am illustrating the second principle of the fetishism strategy.
Fetishism trans- forms ambiguity and uncertainty into something knowable and certain and in so doing snuffs out any sparks of creativity that might ignite the fires of rebellion
. In his lecture, Edel reprimanded psychoanalysts for enjoying “their under-water snorkling to such an extent that they never once looked up to see the great glittering exposed mass of the iceberg.”
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I replace the surface- depth iceberg image with a foreground-background image. I suggest how a knowledge of the foreground-background principle of the fetishism strategy can help analysts to keep the flame of creativity alive in themselves and in

their patients.

The “above the surface/beneath the surface model,” the so-called
topographical
* model of psychoanalysis, has been augmented by what is called the
structural
model—the dynamic relations between id-ego-superego and external world. Nevertheless, the ghost of the iceberg image above- conscious and below-unconscious, continues to haunt psychoanalysis. There are those who still cling to the notion that what lies beneath the surface is psychologically deeper and more profound than what is on the surface. “True,” argues Edel, “the submerged part does have an immense and crucial influence on the part that is visible. Nevertheless, it is the visible shape that confronts the world and the light of day, and
it is the relationship between the submerged and the exposed which is all-important
(
itals
. mine).”
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These days, there are analysts who want to banish the topographical model altogether and replace it with the more fashionable structural model. This also is a symptom of the fetishism strategy. An appreciation of the relations between the two models of the human psyche is as crucial to psychoanalytic understanding as an appreciation of the relations between surface and depth. I will be expressing these controversies in terms of the foreground- background principle of the fetishism strategy. Psychoanalysis is most creative and alive when it addresses the dynamic relations between foreground and background. Furthermore, psychoanalysis is a process of many constantly shifting surfaces, none of them essentially deeper or more profound than any

other.

That said, we go now from the archive fevers of writing lives to some mani- festations of the fetishism strategy in psychoanalysis.

*
Freud’s investigations made him aware that
accessibility to consciousness
is not a good enough criteria on which to base psychoanalytic theory. He therefore proposed (in The Ego and the Id, 1923) that his original
topographical
model
,
which divides the mind into conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, be replaced or, at least, drastically augmented by what has become known as
structural
model, the division of the mind into an instinctual part (id), a part that compriuses moral functions (superego), and a part (ego) that mediates among the first two parts and the outer world.

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S
e v e n

U
nfree
A
ssociations

T
he
T
raining of
P
sychoanalysts

L
ike Freud’s “Fetishism,” footbinding, the making of films, writing on the skin, and the writing of biographies, so also the training of psychoanalysts can be a culture that breeds and nutures the fetishism strategy. The training of psychoanalysts brings out vividly the irony that was implicit in previous chapters.

Until this point, we’ve seen how the sexual fetishist uses his fetish to tame and subdue the otherwise unpredictable erotic vitalities of his sexual partner. To the fetishist, the lifeless, or nearly lifeless body is far preferable to a desiring body that might assert its own ambiguous energies. Thus an object (the fetish) that presents itself as an emblem of erotic liberation turns out to be a servant of necrophilia. In the making of films, the vividly seductive body of a woman occupies the foreground of the visual field, so that the traumatic histories that created this icon of sexuality can be kept in the background, where they are barely visible, or only visible in the light of interpretation. Thus the body of a woman is the glaring white lie that covers over and masks the corruptions that created her. We’ve seen how writing on the skin can serve as a rebellion against the fetishism strategy or become a mirror and expression of that potentially murderous process. The writing of a biography is meant to bring to life the life story of a living or once-living subject. However, all too often the archive fevers that plague that noble enterprise succeed in squelching those vitalities. The biographical subject is crushed under the avalanche of the facts that were meant to bring him to life.

The fetishistic structure of the training of psychoanalytic candidates brings out the irony in a most dramatic way. For, if ever a cultural endeavor had been devised to augment and sustain life, and triumph over the forces of death, it is psychoanalysis. And yet, the training of psychoanalysts is conducted in an atmosphere designed to murder psychoanalytic creativity.

Rightly or wrongly, psychoanalysis is thought of as an orderly process. However, that process is also based on an ideal of free association. Can something that is meant to be free come to life in a process founded on the principles of law and order? According to the principles of the fetishism strategy, anything that threatens to be freely flowing and mobile must be bound. In addition, events and experiences that might otherwise disrupt what we pre- sume to be an orderly and predictable process must be tamed and subdued. Therefore, free associations, often thought to be the heartbeat of the psychoanalytic situation, can also be construed as a threat to the psychoana- lytic process.

How can this be so? Traditionally, a patient in psychoanalysis is encouraged to free associate, to say whatever comes to mind; to speak freely and to try not to censor her thoughts and fantasies. Admittedly, there is a mutual understanding between analyst and patient that it will not always be possible to free associate—the super-ego censor is always keeping a watchful eye, the patient’s ego defenses are always on guard, ready to leap to the fore if things seem to be getting too free for comfort. Nevertheless, despite these inevitable obstacles, and recognizing that the expression of thoughts and fantasies can never be entirely free, free association remains an ideal of the psychoanalytic therapeutic process.

Of course, a patient is not cured of her symptoms merely because she has a talent for free associations. Free associations, however, provide
one
essential key to unlocking the unconscious conflicts, defenses, wishes, memories, thoughts, and fantasies that are the source of a patient’s symptoms.

But what if the patient’s free associations contain thoughts and wishes that represent a disruption of the psychoanalytic situation?—an urge to murder the analyst, a wish to throw the analyst’s books on the floor, a need to peek into the analyst’s closets; actions that are permissible in the realm of thought, but not encouraged as actual behaviors to be enacted in the analysts, office. Then there are those uncontrollable impulses that sometimes do get enacted; coming to sessions late, not coming at all for several weeks, not paying the analytic fees, belittling the analyst for his bourgeois clothing and stuffy moral attitudes, standing up from the couch or chair and stomping up and down around the room. Even though they come to be expressed in actual behavior, these enacted impulses, wishes, and fantasies are also part of the free associa- tion process. As with any other free association, the analyst undertakes to understand the unconscious significance of these rebellious gestures that dis- rupt the law and order of the analytic process. Nevertheless, they can be experienced by some analysts as threats to his or her self-esteem and author- ity. And if the analyst is not aware of the source of his or her countertransfer- ences, he or she will respond, consciously or unconsciously, with an authoritarian attitude that effectively stifles the heartbeat of the analytic process. The message gets communicated, “Free associations can be free, but only up to a point.”

There is another irony, and this irony is the central focus of this chapter. It has to do with the training of psychoanalysts, and only indirectly on how that

training goes on to affect the psychoanalyst’s behavior with her patients. Is the analytic candidate, the young man or woman in training to be an analyst, encouraged to express his or her free associations? Well, yes. But only some- times. Only with certain qualifications and under certain conditions. How does the psychoanalytic candidate get to experience and appreciate the heartbeat of the psychoanalytic process, if the entire course of her training takes place in a psychoanalytic association that is the embodiment of an unfree association?

A prominent member of one of the training institutes I am referring to was a foremost defender of free association. However, he was frightened of modifications of already established psychoanalytic principles. “We should try to keep what we already have—cultivate the land that has been cleared and guard it against
the return of the jungle and against corrosion
.”
1
(
itals
. mine). According to this analyst, free associations are o.k., even essential to the psychoanalytic method. On the other hand, thoughts that might corrode the purity of the psychoanalytic situation should be outlawed.