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“The abnormal day of this world”: this bizarre phrase reverberates in the nature of today, speaking at a conference titled “Psychoanalysis on Ice,” on the 10th anniversary of the death of Jacques Derrida. I think of these words as lying inhumed, in memory and to come.1 They appear in W. H. Auden's “Journey to Iceland” (1936/1979). Auden's poetry does remarkable, meddlesome things with the distinction that Freud makes, between “learn[ing] something about psychoanalysis and something from it” (1918/1955). As he writes in the magnificent poem of November 1939 “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” Freud changed the world “[s]imply by looking back with no false regrets.” Having the power “to remember / Like the old and be honest like children,” Freud cast “his undiscouraged shining” everywhere. Whether we read him or not, whether we agree or disagree with things he has said (it little matters, Auden suggests, “[i]f often he was wrong and at times absurd”), Freud nonetheless “quietly surrounds all our habits of growth”: his thinking, writing, and teaching inform and inflect how we grow (up or down, regressing or progressing). And at the same time, Auden suggests, there is something irreducibly poetic about Freud's work: psychoanalysis is itself “[l]ike a poetry lesson” (Auden, 1939).
It's a wonderful title, “Psychoanalysis on Ice.” The “on ice” conjures the thought of a conference in Iceland, but goes in numerous other directions. Psychoanalysis on ice would be psychoanalysis that is waiting: it's imminent, a psychoanalysis that is not yet here but could be, as if it might be a matter of just calling for it. Psychoanalysis on ice would also be psychoanalysis in abeyance, suspended, postponed, deferred. And in accordance with US prison slang we might also construe it as psychoanalysis in solitary confinement, like Bradley Manning. In all of these cases, too, there is a suggestion of death-with ice, death is never far away. It might be a cocktail-a drink to remember. And then, final