A Tragedy of Errors, A Comedy of Terrors
Our opening
The EditorsFor half a century, US psychologists and the public have largely said one thing to Sigmund Freud: drop dead. Too bad for psychologists and the public. The father of psychoanalysis knew you can’t kill the unconscious once it’s been inscribed therein. Psychology has only ever succeeded, even to this day, in killing Freud by resurrecting him and the unconscious itself—again and again, in a rogues’ gallery of baroque disguises. Each stage of progressive advance in the human sciences has been bedeviled by the intermittent and shadowy reappearance of the unconscious—in the consulting room, in data and graphs, lit up on the fMRI, in interpretations and discourses, in historical materialism, in each of our disciplines, in the common idioms of love and hate, friends and enemies, the family and beyond. The repressed returns—especially when we repress in error.
Freud has been autopsied in order to be expurgated. By trying to navigate either the psyche or the social without Freud and his followers, we have made an error and, without Freud, we could never name it. Freud was the very person who articulated a theory of how and why we make mistakes—and that mistakes are meaningful. Rather than something sorely and solely in need of correction and discipline, errors were, for Freud, compromises between a desire and a limit. Every attempt at realizing desire falls short, but these seeming failures are salutary and self-protective, even as they engender neurosis and suffering. We keep ourselves from our desires, yet the compromised desire is realized elsewhere in a distorted way—often beyond our ken.
Moreover, as psychoanalysis maintains, it is only through transference—a kind of love relation, in and through the other person—that we can understand what we could not know alone. To rid ourselves of error is folly, as is trying to rid ourselves entirely of neurosis—transference is itself a neurotic relation, after all. But, more than this, it is altogether disastrous to rid ourselves of the desire for the other person who could help name our suffering. To eradicate all sources of error—perhaps this is the most dangerous kind of errancy. Killing Freud again would end no one’s troubles, but it might make them less legible and therefore less treatable. Much as Freud persists, so do the violent, disciplining errors of psychoanalysis. By disavowal, they reappear in new configurations. They must be critically named and worked through.
“Parapraxis” is the name Freud gave to these misnomers, and it is the one we have given to our project. We ask, what would it mean if we reintroduced the errors of psychoanalysis into our collective work?
To rid ourselves of error is folly
The results might be surprising—surprises being a gift of the unconscious. A parapraxis is a mistake whose meaning absolutely eludes us: we go scrambling slapstick style to repress or cover the embarrassment. Psychoanalysis is itself a para-praxis, born out of the tragicomic compromise of making a radical science of drama and romance. The psychical life of slips, quips, errors, and bungled action is how we navigate the contradictions and praxes of self and other, the social order, and political-economic domination. As anyone could probably attest, those contradictions and compromises stir up a great deal of calamity when one tries to articulate them, but these subjective crises might not be necessary—or at least they can be addressed, if not treated—says the psychoanalyst, wryly, almost too full of naivete and hope. So far as errors are incorrigible and inevitable, psychical life is agonizing, but part of psychoanalytic work is the alchemy of working through. Sometimes a joke suffices. What would it mean, then, to uncover and treat praxis as parapraxis—one long shaggy dog joke that can’t quite catch its own tail? Is there a way to tell the joke of psychoanalysis that invites us to revisit our own errors and dead ends?
The first name Freud’s editors gave a nascent psychoanalysis was “the Project,” a gesture that laid out a collective work of describing and redescribing the psyche, while curing, holding, and provoking, knowing that it might never be completed. Long after Freud’s death, his work is ongoing. Psychoanalysis is that radical lifeline that allows us to separate what we might be from what has been projected into us, what has shaped us—the very psychical and material conditions that greeted us before and upon birth. Of course, it’s impossible to achieve this: we are always within our world-historical context, always in conversation with that which has been demanded of us. And yet, for many, analysis of this process may be our best available hope of coming to know each other a little better, getting a little more free—giving our suffering a name or names. At his most radical, Freud knew that naming was an unconscious process—and psychoanalysis that bizarre, ritualized, and half-scripted means of conversing with the nameless yet real. It is work without a map other than the byways of misnaming and misunderstanding. No name is simply given. Names must be assumed and auditioned—bravely experimented with to the point of failure, recuperation, and revision.
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The first category of parapraxis that Freud mentions in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is forgetting a proper name. The motivated forgetting of a name, even Freud’s, is just that: a meaningful event all on its own. The symptoms of repressing psychoanalytic names have been manifold and overdetermined, especially as the material pressures of conformist psychotherapy and analytic neutrality have governed therapeutic practice. In the mid-twentieth century, US psychoanalysis served as both architect and handmaiden to this project—helping to elaborate the DSM and setting the strictures that bind clinical practice to insurance approval—and it provided psychiatry with the power and means to carry out its violent cures for the most marginalized in our society. This brought about a form of practice in the United States nearly impossible to purchase, and thus largely untenable.
No doubt, psychotherapy has consciously aimed to serve people, but it has unconsciously defaulted to serving profit. In the United States, but not only, a hegemonic contemporary form of psychotherapy adapts itself to the twin gods of productive efficiency and consumer satisfaction by letting capitalist compulsion rule the consulting room as the ultimate supervisor—often to the exclusion of the psychical life of patients who suffer under capital (everyone, unevenly). Likewise, psychological research has preferred, whenever possible, to traffic in statistical and biological figments and total diagnostic systems over and above the flesh-and-blood patients petitioning for a true hearing of their total context. Meanwhile, much of psychology disavows the political-economic discipline motivating and circumscribing research and practice.
It is not uncommon to hear psychotherapists already in mourning for the death of their vocation.
We live in the aftermath of this story, but psychoanalysis persists: it remains a pervasive idiom through which we understand ourselves, one another, and social relations. The repressed doesn’t come back whole, for repression is, after all, a defense mechanism carried out by an internal or external censor, yet redaction doesn’t disappear meaning completely. In trying to protect its practice from the incursions of what it deems improper—the political, mediation, and societal change—US psychoanalysis has very nearly killed itself off. There are now only approximately ten thousand people a year in analytic treatment, and the American Psychoanalytic Association only has three thousand members.
It’s not just psychoanalysts, however, whose practice has suffered through these political-economic, social, and cultural headwinds. Many psychodynamic, humanist, and behavioral practitioners also know this story well. They have seen their field and practice suffer from the exigencies of capital and the brutal way insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and employers have chipped away at longer-term therapy, which takes time that patients often don’t have amid the exploitation of their insecure lives. Psychoanalysis is altogether more than social and behavioral control, but a patient would be forgiven for their skepticism on precisely this point. It is not uncommon to hear psychotherapists already in mourning for the death of their vocation.
Toward the beginning of this century, psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams described the bleak situation for therapists in the United States, a place Freud called “Dollarland.” She depicted the forces arrayed against traditional psychoanalytic treatment, showing how the quick fix to make citizens and workers happy, healthy, and productive has become firmly ascendant. In order to counteract these forces, she called upon therapists to become “politically proactive, to take their concerns to ordinary people.” We agree, and Parapraxis is a vehicle for clinicians to do just that. We call upon clinicians, academics in the human sciences, and psychological researchers to join us in solidarity, in order to take back the time and practiced patience necessary for patients—a role many of us play on top of whatever situational “expertise” has guided us in this life. If it does anything, psychoanalysis makes us understudies of the unconscious, of incorrigible ignorance, and in that way, all are welcome within this project.
US psychological practice, the disorders of our sociopolitical order, and the capitalist political economy form the crucible out of which Parapraxis launches its critique. But we are also in solidarity with other international sites that have not repressed Freud’s name, let alone forgotten the social forces that have compromised the ethical and political precepts of clinical work. Our writers and editors traverse these international contexts in order to surface the more radical praxis of psychoanalysis. But, as befits the practice, when we speak of psychoanalysis, we know not of what we speak, and if we speak of the errors of psychoanalysis, it is not to offer strict corrections—simple arrogance that would redouble the error—but to interpret them as symptoms of our own shortcomings and possible horizons. This, in turn, means ever returning to Freud as he returns to us, and to sound out ways of speaking and writing that bring about the future we demand and need in common. This, we believe, is the comedic and emancipatory horizon of psychoanalysis.
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At the origin of psychoanalysis, Freud made a decisive intervention in psychiatric and medical care—an origin that has been both mythologized and shrouded in incomprehension. That intervention was to listen to hysterical patients, who were otherwise treated as organisms made to perform in the medical theater. To the extent that psychological practitioners continue to shut up the wounds of patients who voice their symptoms, they close their ears to the suffering of patients in their consulting rooms and in society. Freud attempted to counteract this tendency, and his legacy is maintained in the continuation of talk therapy. But he did not go far enough. In his flagship journey, Freud made an error that has haunted psychoanalysis in its own right.
We must remember Dora’s proper name: Ida Bauer.
It’s always worth remembering that Freud’s first landmark case study of the patient we know as Dora was an abysmal failure. Freud said as much. Too keen to play a surrogate father and matchmaker, Freud missed Dora’s homosexual love object and advised his young patient to, as it were, go along to get along with the normal relations of heterosexual filiation and the capitalist compulsion of preserving the private economic household. What Dora suffered from was, to be sure, the ambivalence of sexual neurosis, but also a social form that granted only faint legibility to her desire. By counseling an adaptation to the social and familial form that was a source of her affliction, Freud enforced pathology rather than finding a way through and beyond it. In his attempt to understand the psyche, Freud underestimated the social and missed how it mediated his clinical technique. If we must not repress Freud’s proper name, we must also remember him in full. His bad treatments, his missed encounters, his misrecognitions. We must remember Dora’s proper name: Ida Bauer.
Parapraxis has set out to work through this remembrance of the psychoanalytic past and the history of struggle. This means countenancing the errancy of the psychoanalytic tradition itself. It also means confronting the tactical errancies of contemporary psychological, social, and political-economic practices, as they enfold the themes and struggles of gender and sex, racialization and colonialism, exploitation and estrangement and alienation. It’s one of the most difficult critical tasks to give equal weight to both social critique and psychoanalytic insight, and it possibly goes without saying that this is a deeply ambivalent project—one that holds its good and bad objects in mind at once. It would not be enough to offer reductive psychoanalytic readings of social and political ills, just as it would be insufficient to repeat the mistakes of disciplines that would rather be rid of the psychical life of protesting subjects, those who don’t neatly conform to the dominant political-economic order and psychological paradigms. Reflecting on precisely this impasse between the psyche and the social, Marxist theorist Stuart Hall once remarked that one must “live with the tension of the two vocabularies.” In these pages, we will attempt to effect a translation between them, but we are bound to err. Indeed, we are bound to all the errors of projects that have attempted this before us.
The only way out is through working through.
Our editors, writers, and readers are the legatees of this history, bound together in the benighted complex where the psyche meets society. It’s an inheritance we must make our own. We want to remember the names of psychoanalysis in order to forget them and to speak about our own time and lives. What is psychoanalysis but the recuperation of history through its traumas and limits toward a curative and, we hope, emancipatory end? Put differently, we believe the only way to have a psychoanalysis for the twenty-first century is to encourage a critical return to Freud and beyond in order to investigate and reconcile the uses and abuses of Freudian analysis in the twentieth century. We must also confront the present terrain of social struggle, across class, race, sexuality, sex and gender, and disability. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” must also enfold the different and highly particular vicissitudes of mutual psychical care—to what psychotherapy aspires as a praxis. As Freud once put it, “Mankind never lives entirely in the present,” so there is no way through the impasses of the present save through a return to the past. The only way out is through working through. In Parapraxis, this is our critical task, but we can only make this approach through one essay, one clinical encounter, one object, one social form, one political problem, one error at a time.
The first myth Freud sought to dismantle was that of the family; it was also where he made his first mistakes. Critical theorist Mark Poster argues that Freud failed to give birth fully to the psychoanalysis of which he was capable—the one we might need now. For just as Freud argues that the family romance was an inevitable mistake that the bourgeoise family was doomed to repeat, he inevitably made mistakes about it, relegating the symptom to private property precisely because he relegated the problem of private property to a symptom. Freud only paused to consult the medically relevant family when curing individuals, but the family form itself was not wholly in question. In these pages, M. E. O’Brien tells us that the old family—the one Freud attempted to cure—is dead and the new one is yet to be born. So, too, is a psychoanalysis equal to our moment. In our first issue, our contributors, in turn, elucidate the psychical complex of the family form from various vantages, trying to get a handle on that primary crucible that purports to make us who we are. From the clinic’s conflicts to social and political critique to literary and aesthetic criticism, we have given the family the psychoanalytic treatment, as but one step toward curing ourselves of its compromised form. There will, as always, be more forms and symptoms to treat. This is simply our beginning, one to which we will inevitably return through other issues.
We live in a century already wracked by real and ongoing crises: endless political tumult, mass death events, the uneasiness of social life, the uncertainty of the future and climate anxiety, the specter of personal immiseration and loneliness—to say nothing of the comparatively mundane difficulties of love and work. The crises of social and political reality are lived psychically; elucidating the psyche in its material contexts is a way to clarify what reality and fantasy are for all of us, collectively and alone. It’s hardly in doubt that something is wrong in the world, but the diagnosis, treatment, and care of what exactly is wrong is a decisive crisis point—a question of political strategy, mutual generosity, and even the vexed dramas of love and hate—that we must ever try not to get wrong. Instead, the question is what we will make of it collectively. Let’s recall the central transfiguration of psychoanalytic work: turning neurotic tragedy into a comedy—the strained promise that things might end well. We might yet change reality through analyzing fantasy. The psyche is an ineradicable and errant theater through which the world comes to stage and right itself. We may yet know ordinary unhappiness. While the world is in error, the psyche will be too.