Democracy and Ambivalence: Totem and Taboo Revisited

In his essay “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” Claude Lefort argues that totalitarianism is built upon the re-embodiment of democratic power at a symbolic level. At the end of the essay, imagining an interlocutor noting how his thoughts on embodiment are nourished by psychoanalysis, Lefort concurs and then adds:

But this connection is meaningful only if one asks oneself at which hearth Freud's thought was lit. For is it not true that in order to sustain the ordeal of the division of the subject, in order to dislodge the reference points of self and other, to depose the position of the possessor of power and knowledge, one must assume responsibility for an experience instituted by democracy, the indetermination that was born from the loss of the substance of the body politic? (Lefort 306)

Lefort's concluding remarks open up more questions than they answer. What is the relationship between psychoanalysis, as an inquiry into the divided nature of the psyche, and modern democratic subjectivity? How is psychoanalytic thought part of an inquiry into a problematic of the modern political subject more generally and of the modern democratic subject more specifically? Totem and Taboo, Freud's first substantial account of social, cultural, and political phenomena, provides a mythical narrative through which we can treat these questions. Totem and Taboo provides us with, I argue, an implicitly and inherently modern mythic narrative. Not only does the story of the primal crime at the core of Freud's narrative of the prehistory of civilization resonate with the modern democratic revolutions but its psychology is indebted to modern democratic political forms of society and subjectivity. In particular, Freud's story of the primal crime is an implicit story about a political revolution which revolves around the institutionalization of ambivalence in a way which helps us understand both the historical nature of psychoanalysis and the democratic unconscious.