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the history of the race as a whole, Sulloway has only succeeded in
asking us to believe in the reality of something even more remote
than what Freud's patients had reported in their own lives.
Sulloway's assertion that Freud saw a difference between what he
ca ll s "truth" and
"charg~d
fiction" in the original seduction
theory already shows how unaware Sulloway is of the real
change: Freud's acceptance of "charged fiction" as itself the
"truth" of a psychic, not an objective, reality. Thus Sulloway 's
attempt to biologize Freud is largely antipathetic to the very fac–
tor that distinguishes psychoanalysis from the start: its convic–
tion that soma is a consequence of psyche, not, as Sulloway pro–
poses, its cause. "Freud," wrote Philip Rieff more than twenty
years ago, " puts language before body. "
To be sure, objections will inevitably arise that state the
case for real reference even apart from genetics. One example is
Freud's Schreber, whose hallucinations Morton Schatzman 's
Soul Murder
has shown to have the "real" referents that a Laing–
ian epistemology requires. But what we witness in such argu–
mentation is less a real debate than an active demonstration of
the bifurcated possibilities that Freud's work has always pos–
sessed. It is in fact the generative dissonance in Freud himself
that allows Sulloway, like his ironic bedfellow jung, to find as
much evidence for his position as he does, and that also allows
the sociological Freudians to find the rival evidence that posi–
tions them against the literal-minded reductionists.
It
is, however,
precisely the overdetermined structure of both Freud and his leg–
acy that Sulloway does not wish to see despite his duties as a cu l–
tural historian. Like dreams and neurotic symptoms, Freud's
writings can hardly be said to be irreducible in their sources or
their meanings whatever a given researcher's skill or perseverance.
The overdeterminations that allow symptoms to develop in
Freud's view of the mind are akin in structure to' the overdeter–
minations that situate Freud's work within the honeycomb of in–
tellectual history, and that make it available to a variety of per–
suasive readings at once, depending on the selective key-biology,
linguistics, romanticism, modernism-by which the historian
organizes it. Sulloway so little understands overdetermination
that the influences his scholarship has unearthed make him
wonder aloud (recalling Norman Fruman and the case of
Coleridge) whether Freud shou ld be ca lled a plagiarist. That any
