Page 168 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes substitution (though carried to the tenth degree by their particular complexity - diagrams of them
are sometimes provided by Freud by way of illustration); these are the formulas we give to the
signifier in its function that the term Ubertragung, or transference, is introduced, which later gives
its name to the mainspring of the intersubjective link between analyst and analysand.
Such diagrams are not only constitutive of each of the symptoms in a neurosis, but they alone
make possible the understanding of the thematic of its course and resolution. The great case-
histories provided by Freud demonstrate this admirably. To fall back on a more limited incident,
let me cite the article on fetishism of 1927, and the case Freud reports there of a pianist who, to
achieve sexual satisfaction, needed a certain shine on the nose (Glanz auf der Nase); analysis
showed that his early, English-speaking years had seen the displacement of the burning curiosity
that he felt for the phallus of his mother, that is to say, for the eminent manqué-a-etre, for that
lack-of-being, whose privileged signifier Freud revealed for us, into a glance at the nose in the
forgotten language of his childhood, rather than a shine on the nose.
It is the abyss opened up at the thought that a thought should make itself heard in the abyss that
provoked resistance to psychoanalysis from the outset. And not, as is commonly said, the emphasis
on man's sexuality. This latter has after all been the dominant object in literature throughout the
ages. And in fact the more recent evolution of psychoanalysis has succeeded by a bit of comical
legerdemain in turning it into a quite moral affair, the cradle and trysting-place of oblativity and
attraction. The Platonic setting of the soul, blessed and illuminated, rises straight to paradise.
The intolerable scandal in the time before Freudian sexuality was sanctified was that it was so
"intellectual." It was precisely in that that it showed itself to be the worthy ally of all those
terrorists whose plottings were going to ruin society.
At a time when psychoanalysts are busy remodeling psychoanalysis into a right-thinking movement
whose crowning expression is the sociological poem of the autonomous ego, I would like to say,
to all those who are listening to me, how they can recognize bad psychoanalysis; this is by the
word they use to deprecate all technical or theoretical research that carried forward the Freudian
experience along its authentic lines. That word is "intellectualization" - execrable to all those who,
living in fear of being tried and found wanting by the wine of truth, spit on the bread of men,
although their slaver can no longer have any effect other than that leavening. …
The end that Freud's discovery proposes for man was defined by him at the apex of his thought in
these moving terms: We es war, soll Ich warden. Es refers to the id or the unconscious, so this
means "where the unconscious was, consciousness shall go." I must come to the place where that
was. This is one of reintegration and harmony, I could even say of reconciliation (Versohnung).
But if we ignore the self's radical excentricity to itself with which man is confronted, in other
words, the truth discovered by Freud, we shall falsify both the order and methods of psychoanalytic
mediation.
The answer is that the slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier, in this
case in the procedures of exegesis, changes the whole course of history by modifying the lines
which anchor his being. It is in precisely this way that Freudianism, however misunderstood it
has been, and confused the consequences, to anyone capable of perceiving the changeswe have
lived through in our own lives, is seen to have founded an intangible but radical revolution. No
need to collect witnesses to the fact: everything involving not just the human sciences, but the
destiny of man, politics, metaphysics, literature, art, advertising, propaganda, and through these
even the economy, everything has been affected.
Is all this anything more than the unharmonized effect of an immense truth in which Freud traced
for us a clear path? What must be said, however, is that any technique which bases its claim on the
mere psychological categorization of itsobject is not following this path, and this is the case of
psychoanalysis today except insofar as we return to the Freudian discovery. Likewise the vulgarity
of the concepts by which it recommends itself to us, the embroidery of Freudery which is no
longer anything but decoration, as well asthe bad repute in which it seems to prosper, all bear
witness to its fundamental denial of its founder. Freud, by his discovery, brought within the circle
of science the boundary between being and the object which seemed before to mark its outer

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