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This paper sets out to correct several of the central shibboleths of the post-modern appropriation of Freud. For the new cultural critics, who follow Lacan and others, it has become almost automatic to assert that Freud was a proponent of the decentered and split subject and that he opposed the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous individual.
Through a detailed examination of the arguments, especially those pertaining to the narcissistic genesis of the ego, this paper seeks to show that this is an extremely one-sided interpretation of Freud. Which is to say, despite their much-heralded return to Freud and close reading of the texts, the post-modern critics lift one admittedly important tendency in his thinking out of context and elevate it into the whole story. The current paper attempts to give a much more nuanced and differentiated account of the same topics.
This is not to assert, however, that Freud defends the fully centered, transparent and integrated ego of the idealist tradition. Such an assertion would be patently incorrect and would violate the entire experience of psychoanalysis. It is only to argue that
Dr. Whitebook is a practicing psychoanalyst and a member of the New York Freudian Society and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is also on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program of the New School for Social Research.
unless one posits at least a “a scrap of independence” for the ego, one cannot make sense out of the whole project of psychoanalysis, in either its theoretical or clinical aspects. Without postulating a sufficient degree of freedom for the ego, we could neither claim to know anything nor to have anything to offer our patients.