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.
An inventory of what was lost when psychoanalysis was forced into exile from its Central European birthplace remains uncompleted, but amongst that which was left behind certainly ranks its speculative tradition. The reverence shown Freud might have been enough to ensure that Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle continued to
be read, though the radical hypothesis of the death drive would quickly be reduced to the mere fact of instinctive aggression, and Moses read as a parable for its historical moment. Other authors fared still more poorly. Ferenczi’s foray into psychocatastrophism is largely passed over in embarrassed silence by even his most ardent contemporary partisans, and the metapsychological novels of Georg Groddeck are today all but forgotten.
The reasons for this abandonment belong to the postwar push to invent for psychoanalysis a certain scientific respectability. This entailed the disavowal, motivated by an adherence to the Darwinian Synthesis, of the idea that acquired traumatic experiences could be inherited biologically. But such Lamarckian assumptions were by no means essential to the speculative genre of psychoanalysis. Still more consequential would be the drawing of a hard distinction between the domains of analytic theory and practice. Theory would henceforth assume the role of a secondary account of the ostensibly hard data of the clinic. Operating within such a framework, which continues to underwrite contemporary controversies while itself remaining unexamined, there would be no place for ein historischer Roman, such as Freud dubbed Moses and Monotheism, nor for the scientific fantasies of phylogenetic processes, nor indeed for Groddeck’s comic presentation of psychoanalytic theory itself as a species of Witz. The inadmissibility of these works rest upon their deliberate and knowing transgression of the division drawn between fantasy as an object of clinical attention and the theory that gives an account