Steven Marcus
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY AND CULTURE
To bring together psychoanalytic theory and cultural
change, as I shall set out to do, is to evoke at once certain familiar
juxtapositions and unsettled considerations. Such an undertaking
brings forward the relation, for example, of the unconscious to
history and to social change. These notions almost instantly set off in
turn ideas about the role played by the individual psyche, or the
psychology of individual persons, in history and vice versa, the
connection between historical circumstances and individual
psychology, the psychology, for example, of notable actors in one or
another historical drama. The continued growth of a subdiscipline
that calls itself psychohistory suggests something of the persistent
interest exerted by such imputed connections, correlations and
causalities. Among the many questions is one that I shall first bring
forward in its simplest interrogative form: does the psyche itself have
a history? Can we ascribe a significant historical existence to
unconscious mental structures, and can we write some parts of that
history? Does cultural change affect us in the sense that it is
registered by inferable and describable alterations in the institutions
of our unconscious minds?
If
we consult Freud, we quickly find ourselves in a familiar
bewilderment bred out of the profusion and complexity of the
relevant materials as they distribute themselves throughout his
work. As a cultivated European of the late nineteenth century,
Freud was soaked in the past. Freud's specially favored mode of
explanation was almost always historical. For Freud, the privileged
explanation of an event tended regularly to be a coherent account of
its historical existence, and the innermost meaning of a phenomenon
was likely to be inseparable from a hypothetical demonstration of
how it came to be. Like Darwin's theory of evolution, to which it
owes a good deal in a very general way, psychoanalytic theory's
explanatory powers are largely historical or retrospective, not
predictive.
At the same time, Freud's own explicit dealings on a large scale
with historical problems tended to take the form, as he himself
