You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, edited by Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch, is a collection of essays—first presented in 1998 at a Yale symposium of the same name—dealing with “the status of psychoanalysis as a discipline and discourse in contemporary culture.” The guiding questions for the editors were the present state of psychoanalysis—in what manner or form it survives in our culture—and whether there has been a wholesale displacement of psychoanalysis from the area of science into the universities. The essays are organized into six topics: (1) psychoanalysis and its discontents; (2) psychoanalysis: between therapy and hermeneutics; (3) psychoanalysis and sexual identity; (4) psychoanalysis and historiography; (5) psychoanalysis and theories of mind; and (6) psychoanalysis and truth. The twenty-three contributors, who include Judith Butler, Frederick Crews, Jonathan Lear, Robert Lifton, Robert Michels, and Juliet Mitchell, are a distinguished group, fourteen of whom hold endowed chairs at prestigious universities. All of the essays are dense, and at least some are worthy of the work of explication involved in reading them.
In “The Vortex beneath the Story,” Juliet Mitchell discusses the proposition that what she terms “the trauma and the story” are the cause and solution of psychic ill-being. To this end she posits a trauma—a breach of the protective shield around the neonate—that causes a gap in development, an “effraction” similar to Winnicott's “impingement.” When this occurs, the gap becomes filled by hallucinations—of the nourishing breast, for example—according to the need of the subject. These hallucinations become, for the subject and the respondent, “the story” that fills the gap. This perceived gap—the neediness of the baby, for example, or of an abandoned kitten—in turn becomes a suction,