PSYCHOANALYSIS TODAY
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and conflates it with the need to keep the critical faculty torpid.
In
any case the more radical cultural writings of Freud are largely
treated as curios by psychoanalytic institutes, and most American
analysts are surprised to learn that their calling has any socially
subversi ve aspects.
The result has been the development of a bureaucratic mentality
at the heart of psychoanalytic institutions, theories and–
inevitably-practices. The "Information Manual on Parliamentary
Procedures" of the International Psychoanalytic Association, for
example, runs sixty-eight pages and looks as though it could have
been drafted either by representatives of the Internal Revenue Service
or-one can only hope-by a latter-day Lewis Carroll. What makes a
form of activity bureaucratic, in my opinion, is not merely its effort
to introduce rationality as such but rather to adopt a peculiar form of
rationalization. Here the semblance of rational discourse is used to
conceal fundamental social contradictions under the guise of resolv–
ing them. Inevitably under these conditions the rationalization
becomes a fresh source of contradiction and engenders further-and
more alienated-forms of reasoning until the original and dynamic
source of the problem becomes obliterated, and the game is played
out in terms of reified abstractions. Such is the pathway to sterile
academicism taken by a scientific group that uncritically aligns itself
with dominant social interests. Analysts are familiar with this kind
of rationalization as it manifests itself in an individual neurosis but
have much more trouble recognizing their participation in it as
subjects in their own work. To achieve such recognition is to revivify
the spirit of critique within psychoanalysis.
Were the critical sense to be restored to psychoanalysis, some
new vistas would open. The "timelessness" of the unconscious
would appear, not as some mysterious emanation from the beyond,
but as the subjective moment in a historical dialectic. For time is not
simply a physical category or even a narrowly psychological one. Of
equal importance, time is a function of historical development.
Specifically the binding of time, by which we mean a socially
imposed parcelling and quantification, is basic to the accumulation
of capital, which is to say, to the entire development of our society.
In
this respect the "timelessness" of the unconscious is nothing less
than the manifestation within the individual of his resistance to
time's historical binding. The unconscious is what is left behind the
rest of history, the one part of us that adamantly refuses the
commodity form.
