PSYCHOANALYSIS TODAY
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These processes are not automatic but occur in the course of a
continued struggle in which each mode of temporality is subjected to
continued pressures from its counterpart. From the one side, the
sphere of productive time is a perpetual battleground between the
forces of capital, which attempts to introduce ever more rationaliza–
tion and control, and those of labor, which rebels against work itself
and sets desire against the inroads of rational compulsion. And from
the other, the sphere of unbound time is no less a battleground, since
it is within this domain that socialization is carried out, desire is
given shape, and loyalty
to
the order of things is secured.
It
is within
such a juncture that psychoanalysis and other therapies need to be
seen as social formations.
Psychoanalysis made its appearance when the separate develop–
ments of desire and rationality had reached a stage of critical
opposition, in other words, when psychoanalytic subjectivity could
emerge as a social type. The structures of infantile sexuality and ego–
control seen within this type of subjectivity are therefore not to be
regarded as immemorial-although they do have what one could call
a transhistorical aspect.
In
their entirety, however, they are specific
historical formations dependent upon the overall development of the
institutions of everyday life. As these are in a more or less constant
state of crisis owing to the contradictions of capitalist society, we are
in a position
to
understand how particular patterns of neurosis and
therapeutic remediation arise at different historical points. Freud's
genius from this angle was to discover a kind of inspired mediation
between the two movements of cultural development; and this is
what has accounted for the endless fertility of his paradigms. The
praxis of self-reflection he devised drew on a portion of Western
rationality that had not succumbed to domination and unfreedom
and so remained capable of conjugation with the secret desires of the
bourgeois world.
I am not here to engage in any ritual adulation of Freud, who is
best honored, as are all thinkers, through a critique of what is
backward, or at least ambivalent in his work. I am asserting however
that his creative power-and that of psychoanalysis-lay in the spirit
of negativity and opposition which infuses his thought. Through
Freud's sensitivity
to
the act of refusal embedded in the unconscious
he broke out of the narrow and static mold which hampered then
and still hampers the prevailing medicalized conception of human
neurosis. And this is a spirit which psychoanalysis needs to nurture
if it is
to
remain historically alive.
For just as a certain juncture of forces created a psychoanalytic
