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Jeffrey Jackson Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, 2013, 188pp., $80.00, ISBN-13: 978-0739182840
Jackson’s stimulating and important book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, cultural theorists and philosophers. It adds significantly to the already provocative Freudian theory that culture is a compromise formation between sexuality and aggression by showing that the basic structure of this dialectic is manic-depression, which Jackson analyzes as a defense against loss. Culture, in its manic-depressive form, is the rejection of separation, while culture in its mournful form is conceived as working-through, that is, the struggle to acknowledge separateness and hence also the self’s authority over its own destiny. This approach raises a number of important questions for psychoanalysis and social and political philosophy more generally, which I will explore after outlining Jackson’s main claims.
In pursuing his general thesis, Jackson makes three important contributions to the understanding of modern culture from a psychoanalytic point of view. The first is to show that Freud’s metapsychology, generally understood to be a neutral structure from which pathologies deviate, is itself essentially a diagnosis of a pathological reaction to loss, which Jackson terms a manic-depressive response. His second point is to show that the philosophical idea of a pure or transcendental ego (as in Kant and Husserl, for example), far from being a neutral structure akin to metapsychology, is also a defense against loss and originates in the same manic-depressive culture. Finally, Jackson addresses the possibility of overcoming manic-depressive culture through what he understands to be Freud’s (and Adorno’s) conceptions of working through the past, that is, acknowledging the relation of separation between self and other.
The key elements of Jackson’s reading of Freud’s metapsychology are given in chapter 1 and at the beginning of chapter 2. These two chapters are particularly fascinating for anyo