Difference and Disavowal

July 19, 2003. Arnold Goldberg begins his review of Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (JAPA 51/2) by expecting me to be displeased with him. He is right, I am, but not for the reason he thinks. It has nothing to do with his focus on my parochialism.

Nowhere does Goldberg convey the book's central thesis, squarely stated on page 9: “The idea of unconscious registration of reality has to change our conventional sense of reality as much as the theory of repression changed our conventional sense of mind. This is my most general theme.” He does allude to my pursuit of “a new idea of the processing of reality,” but does not indicate what that is. In fact, it is not a “way of processing reality,” but a way of understanding the psychodynamics of what I call “processive reality.” This is the reality of all differentiating processes, which cannot fit into the conceptions of reality that have dominated psychoanalytic thought.

A detail is telling. Goldberg correctly states that the clinical problem treated throughout the book, resistance to interpretation, has been widely noted, and that resistive patients are not necessarily “denigrated” as “concrete.” I certainly use the word “concrete” throughout, but why does he claim that I “denigrate” these patients? Again, Goldberg simply does not present two other major theses of my book: (1) Freud was beginning to change his entire theory of defense at the end of his life, basing his revision on the disavowal and splitting he first studied in fetishism. (I am not alone in this thought, and cite other authors who have reached the same conclusion.) Goldberg does say that I argue for the “greater generality” of a model of mind based on disavowal, but omits the central point, namely that in Freud's account fetishism then becomes the model of compromise formation. (2) I base my understanding of concreteness on my own revision of Freud's theory of fetishism. Freud contradicts himself when he says that disavowal is the “registration