Freud and Said: Elective Affinities

An International Online Conference at the Freud Museum London on January 29th.

Freud and Said: Elective Affinities

Twenty years ago Edward Said delivered his important lecture for the Freud Museum London, entitled, ‘Freud and the Non-European’. Taking it’s point of departure from Freud’s late, troubling text ‘Moses and Monotheism’, Said’s reading was both daring and idiosyncratic; indeed, his description of Freud’s ‘late style’, as ‘intransigent, irascible and transgressive’, deliberately alienating the reader and denying the comfort of closure, was recognised by Jacqueline Rose, in her response to Said’s lecture, as ‘a wonderful description of what many of us love most about Said himself’.

As Rose argues elsewhere, Said’s lifelong engagement with psychoanalysis, and particularly with its founder was both ‘vexed’ and ‘passionate’, Freud was perhaps not so much a ‘teacher’ for Said, but a loved object, with all the ambivalence that that relation entails. That libido lies at the heart of knowledge, the linking of desire to the search for meaning, is one of the fundamental tenets of Freudian theory, and it is a notion that also animates the thinking of Goethe, whose novel ‘Elective Affinities’ lends its title to our discussions on January 29th. Our aim will be to explore certain ways of thinking ‘Freud and Said’ together or uncovering certain affinities between their work, which seem to gravitate towards, or ‘elect’ each other. We will, of course also ‘elect’ our own affinities with the work of these two profoundly influential thinkers, remembering that every reading is not simply a return, but also a re-imagining of the text being read.

‘Affinities’

The first ‘affinity’ that I would like to ‘elect’ is that represented by the figure of Goethe himself. It was the essay ‘On Nature’, that was falsely attributed to Goethe (but in fact written by G. C. Tobler) that first sparked Freud’s desire to study medicine as a student. We also know that Freud found Goethe’s ‘Faust’ an enduring source of inspiration and wonder.

If ‘On Nature’ and ‘Faust’ helped to propel Freud towards his psychoanalytic discoveries, were a central part of his ‘Beginnings’, it was towards the end of his life that Said and his friend and collaborator Daniel Barenboim borrowed the name of Goethe’s ‘extraordinary and unique’ (in Said’s words) collection of poems, the ‘West-Eastern Divan’ for their new orchestra, comprising of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians. Two very different affinities, both in terms of temporality and orientation perhaps, but both motivated by an enduring (although often questioned) belief in the transformative power of cultural engagement and exchange.

A second ‘affinity’ that I would like to ‘elect’ is on a theoretical level. Said’s notion of the contrapuntal, which he developed by analogy to the rules of counterpoint in music is a manner of reading which treats a text as a melodic line, which, if it is of a certain quality (by an ‘extraordinary’ writer) engenders its own history, ‘travelling across temporal, cultural and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways’. Thus, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, for example, is not ‘inertly of its time’ but, in the very tension that it creates between ‘what is intolerably there and a symmetrical compulsion to escape from it’ prepares the ground for such varying responses as Tayib Salih’s ‘Mawsim al Hijra illal Shimal’ and V.S. Naipaul’s ‘A Bend in the River’. But the most exciting outcome of the concept is that not only do Salih and Naipaul depend on Conrad’s text, but Conrad’s text itself is ‘further actualised and animated by emphases and inflections that he was obviously unaware of, but that his writing admits’. They become the ‘other voices’ that allow the polyphony of the original to be more clearly heard.

Remembering, Repeating and Working Through

What emerges from the contrapuntal then is a temporality that works both proleptically, and in the manner of deferred action (‘Heart of Darkness’ is ‘further actualised’ by later texts). In this sense, the contrapuntal shares an affinity with two temporalities that Freud unearths in his psychoanalytic work. In ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’ he stressed that psychoanalysis distinguishes itself from other therapeutic endeavours such a hypnotism, because it allowed the patient to ‘work through’ her symptoms, rather than being subject to their ‘repetitions’. As Darian Leader has argued, an aspect of working through that sadly becomes lost in the translation of Strachey (from the original ‘Durcharbeitung’) is the ‘musical’ associciation of this process (‘Durchfuehrung’- or ‘working over’ which takes place between the introduction and conclusion of a sonata).

If the work of psychoanalysis seeks to allow the ‘proleptic’ development of the symptom, its variation if you will, then the work of trauma operates in the opposite direction, in that a traumatic event ‘becomes traumatic’ after the event has taken place, at a later date, perhaps under similar circumstances. As Freud writes in ‘Studies in Hysteria’, ‘hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’.

The work of the critic in enabling a text to accept and elaborate its own repressed traumatic unconscious, seems then, to mirror the work of the psychoanalyst helping the analysand to work through their own symptoms.

Travelling Theory

Theory, as Said tells us, can travel, across continents, across time periods and indeed across disciplines, and there can be a danger that theory can lose its ‘emancipatory and explosive’ potential, can become ‘domesticated’ when it is incorporated into a different system from which it originated. However, ‘travelling theory’ can also help to challenge, upset and reinvigorate new areas of study, just as Said’s ‘contrapuntal reading’ of Freud’s late, difficult text has shown. In our International Conference, ‘Freud and Said: Elective Affinities’, we will be taking inspiration from Said’s approach to Freud, and electing our ‘affinities’, from our prospective areas of specialisation in the hope that we will develop new and exciting connections.

 


International Conference

Freud and Said: Elective Affinities – An International Online Conference at the Freud Museum London on January 29th. More information and registration >>

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‘Freud and the Non-European’ by Edward W. Said is available from the Freud Museum Shop. Worldwide shipping available. Pick up your copy now >>

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