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PARTISAN REVIEW
emotional help is needed is another matter which we cannot explore
here. But insofar as psychoanalysis comprises something unique or
valuable-and this would have to include its capacity to encounter
the unconscious-its praxis must entail an attitude toward time
which is radically contrary to everyday standards. And as with time,
so with money, such being the dictum of capitalist relations. Along
with love, the unconscious cannot be bought. All that can be
purchased-and this is indeed dear-is the real-world time of an
individual who is more or less enabled
to
engage his unconscious in
a process of self-reflection.
From the above; then, it might be said that the analyst's
predicament is not so much a simple fidelity to upper bourgeois class
values as it is the contradiction between this fidelity and a praxis lhat
precisely reverses the main historical movement of the society which
generates the bourgeois as its dominant social type. And if this is
true, then the failure to grapple with such a contradiction might help
us
to
account for the cultural stagnation of psychoanalysis today.
What we do and what we know we reciprocally relate
to
each
other. Freud's discovery of the unconscious was predicated more
than anything else on his development of the method of free
association. This remains the touchstone of psychoanalytic work.
Yet if psychoanalysis is unable
to
recognize the historical dimension
revealed by this method or praxis, then it will be unable
to
complete
its theory, will need to remain circumscribed in its practice, and, in
short, will languish as a vital cultural force. And such a failure of
recognition is the real consequence of a class loyalty to the dominant
social type, for the well-known but oft forgotten reason that a
historically dominant class has an interest in obliterating a sense of
the history by which it came to be and could pass away.
To achieve a real recognition of history means, then, at the very
least that psychoanalysis has to adopt a critical position toward
society. Freud left a legacy of ambivalence on this theme, as he
vacillated between radical culture-critique, e.g., in "Civilized Sexual
Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" or "Fulure of an Illusion,"
and a concurrence, as Adorno put it, "with the bourgeois contempt
of instinct which is itself a product of precisely the rationalization
that he dismantled." By and large, later generations of analysts–
particularly in the United States-have repressed the negativity out
of Freud's ambivalence and have settled instead for a narrow and
conforming professionalism. The guild status of psychoanalysis
takes the legitimate function of safeguarding quality patient care
