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PARTISAN REVIEW
And in Foucault there is nothing but language and discourse.
Foucault remains in a Cartesian tradition in which the
cogito
deter–
mines everything, a tradition that has no place for nondiscursive un–
consious life.
One might demur from Foucault's view on the ground that
there is a difference between, on the one hand, discourses of desire,
and on the other hand, cultural reality in which desire in fact pre–
vails or does not prevail. Such a distinction assumes that discourse
and reality should not be made identical or at least that there is a
reality beyond discourse . One might then argue in the spirit of the
repressive hypothesis that in articulating desire on the conscious
level one might be repressing it on the unconscious level; that in–
deed, discourse itself may be a repressive displacement of desire.
What is clear, however, is that the hypothesis of repression (as
formulated by Freud and his followers) is not intended merely as a
description of a psychological and cultural condition. It is a powerful
expression of a polemic against repression and for desire . And it has
had a substantial cultural effect.
If
it has not directly caused changes
in family and social structures, the repressive hypothesis and the
larger discourse of desire of which it is part have paralleled those
changes.
We should qualify this characterization of Freud, if not of some
of his followers. His "essentialism" may be more a matter of his leg–
acy rather than of his actual achievement. His conception of the id is
not reducible to a single term: it is divided between the sexual and
the ego instincts. His view of the self is irreducibly ambivalent. The
ego remains poised between the rival claims of the superego and id .
If
Freud did not intend to make the sexual motive the "hidden princi–
ple of meaning," he may have invited such a reading by having made
sexuality the principal area of his explorations.
In criticizing Freudian (if not Freud's) essentialism, I do not
mean, of course, to minimize the historic importance of Freud's dis–
coveries. In insisting as he did on "the sexual etiology of the neuro–
ses," Freud naturalized one of the fundamental energies of human
life. And he could accomplish this task only by concentrating on the
sexual factor. In his paper "Development and Regression ," Freud in–
sists that "psychoanalysis has never forgotten that there are instinc–
tual forces as well which are not sexual. ...
It
has simply been its
fate to begin by concerning itself with the sexual instincts because
the transference neuroses made them the most easily accessible to
examination and because it was incumbent upon it to study what
other people had neglected ."
