STEVEN MARCUS
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acknowledged, of mythologies , of "scientific myths," to be sure, but
myths nonetheless .· Moreover, Freud regarded the unconscious in
its more distant regions and in its primal workings as outside of
time.
There is one context, of course, in which Freud does attend to
history in more familiar or what may be thought of as more
normative senses of the term . This has to do with his manner of
conceiving of the life of each individual person, or each individual
representative of the human species or race, for that is how he thinks
of us. The lives of each of us comprise a history, whether that history
be articulated in a full narrative account or array of accounts or
remain fragmentary, incomplete , or latent. Beginning before birth
and ending in early childhood, each life has a prehistory, which is
relatively recoverable or reconstructable. Each life's history,
furthermore, is punctuated with what appear to be suprahistorical,
or perhaps cultural, episodes and elements. The experience of each
separate individual, Freud often remarks, generally recapitulates the
processes undergone by larger cultural entities. Freud writes this
history many times and in a variety of forms . Sometimes he
composes stories, as in his case histories. On other occasions he
writes institutional history, as when, for example, he deals with the
growth across time of the ego.
These circumstances are in some important parts biologically
programmed , but they are also open to modifications, arrestments,
and diversions at many points along the way. The theory strongly
implies a telos - a designated goal or end that for want of any other
terms one calls
normal maturiry.
The theory in its evolving versions
undertakes to illuminate both how this development is attained and
the uncountable ways in which it may miscarry.
It
also undertakes to
explain the disadvantages and deficits that regularly attach to
developmental processes that have gone astray, and it undertakes as
well to explain the occasional immense value that may accompany
abnormal, incomplete , or aberrant development-most notably, of
course, in figures of singular creative cultural powers. And psycho–
analytic therapy is itself founded in part upon such considerations.
To the question , then, of whether or not the psyche itself has a
history , we have answered yes. But this affirmative response is so
generalized and inclusive that it is almost useless . I propose
'It
does not help matters terribly much that he also suggested that "every science
comes in the end to a kind of mythology."
