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estimation of the proximity of physical and psychic reality, unconscious
and conscious.
Psychoanalysis really began when Freud rejected hypnotism and
replaced it with the technique of free association,
in
which the patient
is no longer a passive figure manipulated by a Prosperine analyst. In–
stead he transforms his doctor (who, Freud wrote, was "to surrender
himself to his own unconscious mental activity") into the masked
characters that ply his dreams, Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Teacher,
Friend - stock antagonists of his own melodrama. The present becomes
the past, the distance between knowledge and experience is erased, and
history is destroyed. Acting out (lately, touch therapy) takes the place
of words. And instead of ending, the performance (lately, a marathon
or an institutional retreat) becomes interminable. We are back in the
realm of methectic ritual. Most important, Freud came to understand
that his patients had been seduced in their imaginations not in their
cribs, and that the distinction between the two was a false one: "Hence,"
he wrote, "psychic reality deserves to be given a place next to actual
reality."
Are we to assume that Freud discovered the flaws in the cathartic
technique and, within a decade, corrected them, when it has taken our
culture millenia to decide that anything was amiss? Because psycho–
analysis moved from illusionary drama to methectic ritual does not, by
itself, mean that it also shifted from a ritual of desacralization to one of
communion. To the end of his life Freud's vision was unremittingly
tragic. No man remained so sensitive to division, separation, antinomy,
conflict, as he. Civilization presupposes discontent, and while he once
allowed himself to say that "I have endeavoured to guard myself against
the enthusiastic partiality which believes our civilization to be the most
precious thing we possess," the consistency of imagery with which he
spoke of the relations between intellect and instinct - consciousness,
the busy engineer, reclaiming the unconscious, Zuider Zee; ego in the
saddle, atop the stallion, id - indicates that when push came to shove
he favored a more perfect repression ("common human unhappiness")
to the joy of liberation.
Insofar as psychoanalysis remained dedicated - and while Freud
lived it did - to the separation of ego and id, and the protection of,
the inviolability of, the discrete personality from the demands of the
group (itself almost a metaphor in Freud's terminology for the uncon–
scious or the id), it could claim to be a cathartic technique. But re–
cently there has been a transformation, no more acutely described than
in
this passage from Claude Levi-Strauss:
