Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1996 00:09:33 -0500 (EST)
From: Santiago Colas <scolas-AT-umich.edu>
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
cc: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: Abuse of children (was: Cockburn?)


Here here Doug!  To your concise defense of the rebelliousness of Freud's 
theory of infant sexuality, I would add that the recognition of fantasies 
and desires, as well as Freud's elaboration of a theory of their 
interpretation, not to mention numerous brilliant individual analyses 
(e.g. Jensen's Gradiva) offers a rich vein to mine for interpreters of 
culture.  Let me also note that Fredric Jameson, in _The Political 
Unconscious_, has offered a very provocative account of Freud and 
psychoanalysis (pp. 61-68), of which I'll happy to offer snippets/summary 
if anyone's interested.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Santiago Colas					e-mail:	scolas-AT-umich.edu
Asst. Professor					phone:	(313) 763-4352
Latin American and Comparative Literature	fax:	(313) 764-8163
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1275
USA

On Mon, 18 Mar 1996, Doug Henwood wrote:
 (a propos of Hans Ehrbar on Alice Miller's critique of Freud)

> Explaining Naziism through recourse to Hitler's childhood is a parody of
> psychoanalysis. Links between psyche and culture - or, as the rebel
> bourgeois Freud put it, how one comes to an ego ideal appropriate to one's
> family, class, and nation - are an insufficently explored area. But lots
> more work needs to be done than what Miller did, at least in the passages
> of hers I read.
> 
> To say that Freud turned away from his initial belief in the stories of
> incest to a "blaming the victim" approach is to banalize psychoanalysis
> completely. What people turn away from is Freud's discovery of infantile
> sexuality, the plasticity of the human psyche, and the powerful role of
> fantasy. Children have wild desires and fantasies, though we (especially
> Americans) love to pretend they're pure & innocent. The revival of literal
> incest theories, thanks in part to Jeff Masson and his current squeeze,
> Catherine MacKinnon, has had disastrous consquences of persecution; a whole
> industry of abuse professionals, who coach children into giving
> preposterous accounts of torment at their hands of teachers and child care
> providers, has led to the indictment and jailing of scores of innocent
> people.
> 
> Freud's separation of psychoanalysis from biology and literal biography is
> intellectually important and full of liberatory potential. His Three Essays
> on Sex show that there's no "normal" human personality, no inevitable
> heterosexuality, and that we're all quite kinked under our often placid
> exteriors. Someone more ambitious than I might want to join this to Engels'
> analysis of the family to produce a radical Freudo-Marxist critique of both
> property and propriety.
> 
> 
> Doug
> 
> --
> 
> Doug Henwood
> Left Business Observer
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> 
> 
> 
> 
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