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Psychoanalysis is a haunted discipline and a discipline of haunting. It is haunted by various elements of its own history – Freud’s biography, the Jewishness of most of its founders, its early involvement with the occult, the Nazi persecution of psychoanalysis, its dissensions and internecine antagonisms, and so on – some of which have been addressed, others of which keep returning in one way or another to trouble its present-day standing. More obviously, it concerns itself with a kind of restlessness in its adherents and in its clients – analysands – infected by pasts that will not leave them alone and that well up often unbidden, and sometimes outside of conscious awareness, in and outside the transference. For Freud, writing in the Little Hans case study, psychoanalysis was precisely a way of dealing with ghosts: “In an analysis … a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken” (Freud 1909, 123). In this sense, psychoanalysis can be seen as what Sadeq Rahimi, in The Hauntology of Everyday Life, calls a procedure of “exorcism,” aiming to remove the ghosts, to let them stop their wanderings and infiltrations of the present, their possessions of the innocent, and lay them to rest. A ghost is the remains of something that is unsettled because a task has not been completed; specifically, as Avery Gordon (1997) notes in her classic text on the topic, an injustice has
been done that has not been made good. Psychoanalysis is in large part a matter of articulating that injustice and where possible remedying it so the ghost need no longer stay where it is not wanted.
According to Rahimi, for “hauntology,” which derives largely from Jacques Derrida but has become a significant feature in the humanities literature of the last three decades, the more important task is not to exorcise ghosts but to acknowledge their irredeemable presence. The book begins with a clear sta