On the Train(ing)

My pedagogic experiences within a psychoanalytic institute often resonate with those of my academic life; one must struggle in both sites to respect and resist students' expectation of an arrival at definitive “knowledge.” However, examining Freud's texts with analytic candidates seemed to throw this moment-to-moment negotiation into particularly sharp relief. More so than usual, I find myself deeply concerned with the potential for reinscription, because it seems especially difficult to avoid perpetuating certain discursive constructions, even in the context of their critique. In some cases, such as with writings concerning “hysteria,” it proved useful to examine how the reiteration of the very word itself creates the productive site of its meaning-making, and from this can develop other discussions of the totalizing functions of naming, in psychoanalysis and elsewhere. These same issues can certainly also be said for the evocation of “Oedipus” and its role in the framing of normative heterosexuality. I would like to continue with the oedipal construction in this essay and to make use of it to initiate another site of inquiry. Upon this well-trodden path of Freud's thematics of sexuality, I will attempt to overlay an additional mode of passage. In a strategy that might appear to join disparate narratives, Freud's configurations of infantile sexuality will be located here within his childhood experiences of migration. This turn opens a pedagogic space where future analysts can examine information that has traditionally been considered in excess of the enframement of “oedipal” meaning. The resulting discussion affords the opportunity to consider how such exclusions create and maintain canonical readings and what the implications are of such foreclosures upon clinical practice.

This is arguably an ambitious undertaking, and one that will be limited here to the examination of an early memory that Freud offered as evidence of the “awakening” of desire for his mother. Thi