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PARTISAN REVIEW
don the partial truths that remain in it.
In
a footnote added in 1924
to the article of 1896 in which he put forward the original seduction
theory, Freud wrote:
I attributed to the aetiological factor of seduction a significance
and universality which it does not possess. When this error had
been overcome, it became possible to obtain an insight into the
spontaneous manifestations of sexuality of children.... Never–
theless, we need not reject everything written in the text above.
Seduction retains a certain aetiological importance, and even
today I think some of these psychological comments are to the
point.
Balmary cites this passage but is entirely nonplussed by it; she sim–
ply does not know what to make of it or how to deal with it.
And no wonder. Freud was one of those figures from the old
culture who postulated in his theories an external world that was real
and an internal world that was also real. This internal world partly
depended on the external world and was partly independent of it. It
had its own regularities of development and organization as well,
which were different from, as well as sometimes analogous to, their
counterparts in the external world. As the historical pendulum of
culture swings, this kind of sustained and indeterminate complexity
seems to have become increasingly intolerable to many of our con–
temporaries. Hence the accusation that Freud denies the responsible
role played by parents in generating the neurotic and unhappy
futures of their children. But how could anyone who has read the
case histories of, say, Dora, or the Wolf Man, or the Rat Man possi–
bly believe that this could be so? One can only believe it, the answer
must be, if the argument one is putting forth is part of a cultural
polemic. And that, of course, is what Balmary, who is a disciple of
Michel Foucault as well as Lacan, is precisely part of. The villains
are the external world, our parents, and the discourses of domina–
tion forced by both (and by language itself) upon us. To free our–
selves of them, we must contrive somehow to destroy them-Freud's
theoretical discourse is itself part of that apparatus of domination
that must be annihilated if we are to find our way to the unimagin–
able freedom that such writings as Balmary's yearn for but cannot
even begin to envision .
STEVEN MARCUS
