BOOKS
457
sociobiological perspective raises the questions that Fliess's the–
ory of genetic bisexuality only implied: that gender must be dif–
ferent from sexuality as such; that genetically keyed regression
cannot account for the technicalities of individual desire; that,
above all, the assumption of innate developmental timetables is
prescriptive. This liberal critique of genetics is reaffirmed and
extended in its analogy in poetics-a realm Sulloway dismisses
from both Freud's speculations and his own, ignoring Burke's
and Trilling's insistence that Freud maps the mind as a receptacle
of social symbols rather than as a physiological reflex. By impli–
cation, then, Freud's apparently scientific texts are themselves
elaborate symbolic documents that are to be read figuratively,
just as the mind itself is to be read as an apparatus designed by
the symbolic laws of culture and its history.
The biogenetic Sulloway, however, announces that Freud
meant his biological metaphors "literally," thereby linking his
own methodological commitment to the physiological with
what he takes to be a crude referentiality in Freud himself.
Sulloway reduces even the allegorical
Totem and Taboo
by tak–
ing it at its word, as though the events Freud purports to describe
there-the killing of the father by the fraternal horde , Freud's
orginary myth for the hirth of civilization-actually took place.
" Freud fully believed," says Sulloway, "that some such prehis–
toric drama had to have occurred if his various psychoanalytic
claims about repression, sexuality, and neurosis were to possess
universal truth."
But these assumptions about the epistemological status of
both texts and people have political consequences. Does lan–
guage, for instance, whether in Freud's text or in the world at
large, refer simply to natural facts, to a world of natural law
beyond culture? Or does it refer instead to the symbolic machinery
of culture itself, which produces and situates the mind in its web,
just as the symbolic machinery of language produces and situates
Freud's writing? The implausibility of Sulloway's alternative
becomes especially apparent when we see that by taking
Totem
and Taboo
literally-by assuming it simply names things–
Sulloway reconstitutes the mistake of the original seduction
theory: that something had really happened in the past to set
later events in motion. Indeed, if the "repressed impulses" that
"generate phantasy"-for example, of seduction as an infant–
are really the "spontaneous" recapitulation in the individual of
