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.
Michael Billig has written a book which seeks to apply to Freud's life and case histories the insight of Discursive Psychology. He makes a convincing and elegant case for the value of doing this, particularly in the final chapter which examines the case of Dora, but only if the psychoanalytic reader is prepared to make the effort to look at our usual subject matter from a different point of view. Billig maintains ‘What is required is a psychological approach which in contrast to Freud's metapsychology does not distinguish sharply between language and thought’ (p. 46). He quotes the Eleatic Stranger, in Plato's dialogue, The Sophist, who asserts that ‘thought and speech are the same: only the former which is the silent conversation of the soul with itself, has been given the special name of thought’ (p. 46). Billig locates Discursive Psychology in the tradition of Bakhtin and Wittgenstein who ‘recommend that we pay close attention to what people actually say’ (p. 6).
Billig sees repression as the key concept of psychoanalytic theory as without repression there would be no unconscious. The central question which he feels that Freud neglected is ‘how does repression take place?’ (p. 1). He argues that psychoanalytic theory has been too content to accept it as ‘a mysterious inner process regulated by an internal structure such as “the ego”’ (p. 1) and he wishes to propose what he sees as a more straightforward alternative. Repression uses the skills of language and it is in the business of everyday conversations where we can look to see its use.
Billig believes that the child learns to repress through learning how to converse with others. Repression is a mechanism that works at the social and collective level and is then internalised. Throughout the book Billig sets up his thesis in opposition to the theory of primary repression but to this reader that opposition does not seem inherently necessary to his argument. Neither is it supported by his clinical examples.
The first