Starting from historical and taxonomical reflections on the genesis of psychoanalysis with the initial collaboration of Bertha Pappenheim, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, and the relation of this collaboration to the once influential—but now frequently overlooked—scholarship on Aristotle's Poetics by Martha Bernays' maternal uncle, Jakob Bernays, this paper proceeds to deploy Aristotle's celebrated notion of mimesis to develop a novel conceptual framework for rethinking various clinical and theoretical problems bequeathed by Freud's seminal paper on analytic technique, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (1914). It makes an argument for a reconfigured understanding of the drives, the transference-neurosis, analytic free association, and the relation these concepts stand in to clinical praxis.
Ever scrupulous in his acknowledgement that psychoanalysis was not his own discovery, Freud always insisted that the real story began offstage, in der andere Schauplatz. Freud was a young neurologist of twenty-six when he and Josef Breuer first met. Sometime in November 1882, Breuer took his junior colleague into his confidence regarding the dramatic details of his recently concluded treatment of a family acquaintance of Freud's fiancee, Martha Bernays. This was to become the case that launched a thousand analyses and the patient in question was, of course, that phenomenally gifted, melancholically beautiful ingenue, Bertha Pappenheim.1
In Bertha's continually evocative turns of phrase, the method she and Breuer discovered to address her distressing and labile complaints—aphasias, neuralgias, and paralyses, to mention only the most well known—was a hypno-cathartic ‘chimney sweeping’ or ‘talking cure’, at once pacifying and purifying. Aside from speech, Bertha's
treatment drew on a gothic array of expressive outlets: histrionic eroticism, chloral hydrate, self-inanition, hallucination and hydrophobia; to say nothing of her actual re-enactment of bygone traumas: a kaleidoscopic mise-en-scène that converged—at least in the après coup restaging that is Breuer's published account—to purge her of the grim forces strangling her body. Over the following year, and into the sweltering summer of 1883, Breuer and Freud continued to pursue the case's detail; gradually, Freud's reflections on Breuer's heady theatre of hysteria crystallised into the realisation that these medico-dramatics constituted the germ of a new treatment for hysterical illnesses. Development of this realisation was, however, far from straightforward; unlike his ambitious younger colleague, Breuer was not at all inclined to draw out the implications of the case. Furthermore, the Bernays and Pappenheim families significantly overlapped2, and Freud was in an awkward position with regard to his future wife, having been forbidden by Breuer from discussing the details of her friend's case with her before their wedding.
It would be a long thirteen years before the complex narrative of the Breuer-Pappenheim affair reached publication in 1895, in Breuer's eyebrow-arching account that is the centrepiece of the Studies on Hysteria. Whilst the founding myth of psychoanalysis is frequently identified as a collaboration, it is perhaps more accurate to say that psychoanalysis was born of the recounting, the mimesis, of a collaboration. During the genesis of the hypno-cathartic method, Bertha, Breuer and Freud all contrived towards an understanding of events centring on the circulation of a handful of key notions. Catharsis and speech were privileged terms, together distinguishing the new approach from the preceding psychiatric clinic of hypnosis. It is probable, also, that the concept of catharsis indicates the importance of the trio's connection to Martha Bernays in shaping their understanding of Bertha's treatment.
In 1857, Martha's maternal uncle Jakob—a philologist and classicist—published a novel and influential theory of Aristotle's Poetics, arguing against the then prevailing interpretation of the work's famous notion of catharsis as a religious concept. Instead, proposed that catharsis is better understood in the medico-therapeutic register as a purgative of negative affect.3 The concept of catharsis has been noted by
centuries of scholars for the intractable problems of translation it creates4, as well as for the difficulties it presents in attempts to locate its precise function within the text of the Poetics. Scholasticisms aside, what seems clear is that Aristotle links catharsis to a pair of affects—pity and fear—that, he says, are divested from the audience's experience over the course of tragic drama by the tragedy first reflexively inducing these emotions in its spectators (1996: p. 10). In other words, Aristotle regards an important aspect of tragedy as the creation of an artificial mimesis within the space of the theatre, replicating in the audience's experience the emotions conjured up in order to deliver relief from those same emotions with the performance's resolution. Put thus, it is hard not to notice how close Freud's clinical concept of the transference-neurosis sails to Aristotle's presentation of the emotive and cathartic function of tragedy; indeed, the transference-neurosis might similarly be described as an artificial mimêsis in the ‘theatre of analysis’, where the unfolding of the treatment re-induces in the patient the very symptoms in relation to the analyst for which they had originally sought treatment. Only with the skilful handling of the transference, Freud warrants, can the analyst hope to guide the patient out of this prosthetic, substitute sickness, a journey that will purge them of the symptoms suffocating their soul and, in the most favourable of cases, deliver them up to psychic health. We will return to the issue of the transference-neurosis later; for the moment however, we want merely to note that there is, within the transference-neurosis as well as within the Aristotelian account of tragedy, a play within a play or a : a hall of mirrors that multiplies affects only to subtract them.
Aristotle's notion of catharsis thus readily lends itself to a medico-therapeutic reading like Jakob's. Such a reading was ripe for extra-scholastic appropriation. Bertha and Breuer's collaboration began in 1880, the year Jakob's influential work was reissued. Given that Jakob's theory was widely disseminated amongst the artistic and intellectual circles of the time, and that Bertha was an intelligent, literate woman, Jakob's ideas must have been known to her, as well as to Breuer and Freud. During those heady days of the early 1880's, throughout Bertha's fervent chimney sweeping and amateur dramatics, the echoes of Jakob's fashionable scholarship would have rung clear. What is more, it should be observed that for Freud the medical reading of catharsis
would likely have attracted a double libidinal investment: not only did the theory originate with the uncle of his adored future wife, but Jakob is the name of Freud's father to whom, even long after his death, Freud remained at pains to prove himself a worthy son.5 What better way for a son to honour his father than to build a career on a theory bearing their name? The precise nature of the historical influence of Jakob's theories on the development of psychoanalysis must, of course, remain a moot point. At any rate, we have neither the means, nor the intention, of attempting to settle the historiographical question here; instead, we are merely underscoring the complex nexus of social, libidinal and intellectual imbrications, within which a delicate affair of conceptual translation, historical transmission, and contextual re-inscription is taking place. The aim of this paper, in contributing to Sitegeist's special edition on poetry and psychoanalysis, is to hazard an oblique thinking-through of some of the implications this nexus might have bequeathed for the theory and clinic of psychoanalysis.
Jakob's idea of catharsis qua purgative renders catharsis an artistic notion mimicking a medical concept. The still further importation, by Bertha, Breuer and Freud, of catharsis into the context of the fin de siècle treatment of hysteria, entails yet another twist, by transforming catharsis into a medical concept imitating an artistic notion aping a medical concept. There may be those who would wish to maintain that the pre-history of a concept is irrelevant to the context specific function it performs. Perhaps, even, there might be those who would insist that the appropriation of catharsis for medico-therapeutic ends, demonstrates that its competing senses gesture no further than issues of taxonomy. Perhaps all that these different senses require, is proper categorisation and designation in order to avoid the kind of unwanted category confusions these observations might entail? Such objections, however, discount the fact that the smelting and re-smelting a concept suffers over a long and tarnished history, means that no amount of burnishing ever fully disguises—to ‘coin’ a phrase—‘the mettle of forgery’. Indeed, such reservations merely beg the question at hand, positing in their denial the point in want of making: the field of psychoanalysis is always already a category mistake. These thoughts begin to gesture towards a potentially reinvigorating view of the project of the talking cure. The boundary confusions and destabilised relationship
between poetry and psychoanalysis, art and medicine, literature and science, are a veritable fount of strength for psychoanalysis — if only they can be embraced as such.
The works of Lacan, Derrida, Borch-Jacobsen and Roustang have convincingly, if very differently, affirmed the links between psychoanalysis and aspects of classical rhetorical practices.6 However none have, to my knowledge, developed the extent to which there are crucial facets of psychoanalysis whose heritage is better served by cardinal motifs associated with Aristotle's Poetics than by explanatory recourse to traditional theories of bon mot and ‘speaking well’. Nested at the heart of these motifs is mimesis. Put simply, mimesis suggests the twin senses of doubling and carrying over. Even on this slim definition, it is evident that an enormous series of analytic concepts are understandable strictly with reference to mimesis. That is, they are explicable to the extent that in each of them the implications of duplication and conveyance are heard: what, in a playful spirit—and with a nod towards Freud's fort/da—we will here call their ‘twoing and froing’. While of course it is true that mimêsis is a major critical term in the intellectual history of the West, mimêsis is unusually important for psychoanalysis. This importance begins with Bertha, Breuer and Freud's foundational appropriation of Jakob's medico-therapeutic reading of the mimêtic concept of catharsis. The idea of deliberately conjuring-up within the treatment, specific, unpleasant memories and affects for the express purpose of their divestment has never entirely lost currency amongst theories of analytic treatment. Although, anecdotally, catharsis per se has been steadily invoked less and less in analytic discussions, both its defining characteristics and the clinico-theoretical work it performs, have been absorbed into the general conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis. What this amounts to is that psychoanalysis has never fully abandoned a traumatic theory of the origins of the neuroses, i.e. the notion that neurosis is born of a subjective breach in which something foreign, something alien, is embedded inside the psyche.
Before Aristotle's Poetics, mimêsis was an important notion in Plato's ‘quarrel’ with poetry7; indeed it is likely mimesis enjoyed pre-philosophical circulation as well. In relation to the history of Western thought, mimêsis has most frequently been rendered as either ‘representation’ or ‘imitation’. Since Erich Auerbach popularised mimesis as a literary-critical
term with his widely anthologised 1945 work of comparative literature8 mimesis is most commonly transliterated; nevertheless, ‘representation’ and ‘imitation’ remain significant understandings.9 This paper will highlight the contrasts between these two senses. On the one hand, representation carries semantico-cognitive connotations: outside its celebrated role in the history of Western philosophy and aesthetics, these connotations might commonly be evoked where, for instance, a symbol ‘stands in for’ an object or another symbol, perhaps on a map, graph or diagram. On the other hand, imitation is more readily suggestive of materiality, replication or copying: perhaps, for instance, when an actor impersonates the gesture of another. The former sense is dependent on both abstraction and substitution, whereas the latter sense tends more towards concretisation and verisimilitude. But these two senses cannot be so easily demarcated; both cross-contaminate the other, and can be understood only in relation to their supposed opposite. Although imitation may seem dependent upon verisimilitude, it is precisely this likeness that so readily lends it to forgery and fakery; whereas contrariwise, although representation may indeed not demand a homology between the representation and the represented—the much touted ‘arbitrariness of the signifier’, in Lacanian and structuralist linguistics—such similarity is indeed frequently noted, for instance in the phenomenon of onomatopoeia where words closely resemble what they (are purported to) designate. In what follows, these distinctions will be used as the framework for a commentary on Freud's seminal 1914 text on analytic technique, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (‘Remembering’).
In the context of our discussion, ‘Remembering’ deserves critical attention for a number of reasons. Chief amongst these is that it is a text whose pre-eminent theme might be regarded as the shifting interrelationship of the dual senses of mimêsis as they combine and recombine textually, conceptually and clinically. Thus, each of the three terms of Freud's title can be read as mimêtic instances, with reference to the dialectic between imitation and representation.10 It should, then, be immediately clear that ‘Remembering’ opens (1914: p. 147) with a cathartic
mimêsis: the representation, the memory, of catharsis. Indeed, this rhetorical gesture offers a kind of synecdoche or performative pars pro toto, in which the principle concerns of ‘Remembering’ are compressed into the opening passage by Freud himself remembering, repeating, working-through and finally abreacting the history of analytic technique. Indeed, not only does ‘Remembering’ open with catharsis, but it closes with catharsis too (p. 156): so catharsis *frames the text, gives the text a cyclical—or, better, a helical—structure. Over the course of this un-spooling spiral, the text passes through six moments at three of which mimêsis is reworked, given a new twist complicating and enriching the sense it carries. Of these six moments three correspond to the title, although the place of remembering and repetition are inverted in the text, so the moments run: repetition — resistance — remembering — (transference) — working-through — catharsis. The moments of mimêtic reworking are, of course, the actual terms of the title: repetition — remembering — working-through. ‘Transference’ is suspended in parentheses to indicate that transference is not a ‘moment’ in the treatment but, as will shortly be seen, the function mediating the dialectical relationship between repetition and remembering, as well as the internal relationship these terms stand vis-à-vis themselves, thereby facilitating the progress of text and treatment in the direction of catharsis.
The first moment of both the text and, Freud tells us, the analytic work, is the moment of repetition (p. 150). Repetition is here understood as memory in the motor as opposed to the psychical field—thus, in mimêtic terms, analytic treatment commences on a note of imitation rather than representation. The patient cannot represent, cannot remember and say, what they are suffering from, so they act it out, imitate it instead. For instance, the patient cannot recall that as a child they were fearful of reproaches from their beloved parents; instead they act submissively towards the analyst, imitating or ‘playing at’ the analytic work but never properly engaging with it in order to avoid attracting negative comment. As matters stand however, Freud's account of the beginning of the treatment entails a contradiction; his depiction of repetition amounts to a conspicuous species of memory, albeit a species of a rather impoverished kind: repetition is simultaneously the presence and absence of memory. If repetition is a mode of memory, then Freud cannot adequately distinguish it from ‘remembering’ proper and
must allow that in some way it is serviceable for analytic purposes. However, if repetition is the absence of memory, blind imitation and mere recapitulation, then it cannot really be thought of as repetition. This contradiction requires resolution. In order to do so, it needs first to be appreciated why patients find it so difficult to begin analysis by remembering. This is due, Freud says, to resistance: resistance to the treatment prevents the patient from representing and verbalising their symptoms rather than recapitulating or acting them out in relation to the analyst (pp. 150-2). However, this answer is still wanting insofar as it leaves the contradiction untouched, merely displacing it: for the phenomena of resistance now demands accounting for. If the treatment opens with imitation-repetition, and this is either because of or tantamount to resistance, then this can only mean that resistance is itself but another avatar of repetition. How can this problem be resolved?
The solution is given with reference to transference. Transference functions as a mediator, both clinically and conceptually, of the contradiction inherent in repetition. In the transference, the patient displaces representation onto the side of the analyst, thereby stripping their repetitions of any signification for them: in this way they repeat without remembering, resist without being aware of that against which they rail. The patient opens the treatment with matters precisely the wrong way around, labouring, from the first instant, under the illusion that it is the analyst who knows whilst they are ignorant. Another way of expressing this might be in cognitive terms: the patient begins analysis with a declaration of being unable or unwilling to think about what ails them, anticipating that they will continue as before whilst the analyst thinks in their stead—for instance by supplying the meanings of their parapraxes or proffering interpretations of their dreams. Being itself a mode of repetition (p. 150), transference is at once both the vehicle of and the agent that combats repetition; whilst initially transference is mobilised for the purposes of resistance, assigning to the analyst the task of representation, this is what enables the analyst to invert the initial encounter in order to transform repetition from empty recapitulation — mimesis in the motor field of acting-out: mimêsis qua imitation—into significant reiteration—mimêsis in the psychical field of speech: mimêsis qua representation. Thus, whereas analysis frequently begins with the patient pushing representation across to the analyst—witness,
only, the oft-heard hysterical cry of ‘Tell me what I've got!’—via imitation-repetition, the analyst inverts this gesture, thereby passing back to the patient, in an inside-out fashion, what the patient began by insisting was not theirs. In this way, the analyst both steers the patient towards the work of representation-remembering, whilst concomitantly declining any position of mastery, knowingness, or narcissistic seduction: truly, the analyst knows nothing and must fight to retain the position of a privileged ignorance so the patient can better think, remember and verbalise.
Transference—straddling both the physio-motor senses of imitation instantiated in the acting-out of repetition, as well as the cognitive-symbolic senses of representation exemplified in spoken memory—conjoins repetition and remembering or imitation and representation via the work of transference-speech, as Freud and Breuer had already begun theorising in the Studies, where they famously wrote that language serves as a substitute for action' (: p. ). There should be no difficulty, then, in recognising what this conjunction amounts to; it is, of course, nothing less than the convergence of that crucial binary Freud frequently suggested was necessary for the production of therapeutic change: the union of affect [Affekt] and representation [Vorstellung], the pair severed as a consequence of repression (1915: p. 152). Where Freudian affect can be tied to mimêsis as imitation, Freudian representation can be linked—in the most predictable and least surprising move of this paper—with mimêsis as representation. The process facilitating this conjunction and the overcoming of repression is, as indicated, the traversing of repetition-resistance via the transference-neurosis (now better understood as constituted by transference-speech): the prosthetic neurosis within a neurosis or mise-en-abyme of symptoms analysis engenders only to dismember. The question of how the transference is handled to effect the development of the transference-neurosis, whilst preventing the labour of memory from tipping irretrievably back into the hollow acting-out of repetition, commands attention here. Given that transference [Übertragung] precisely translates Aristotle's metaphora11, we suggest that transference needs to be considered in linguistic and, specifically, metaphorical terms.
Given the dialectical relation in which memory and repetition stand to one another, it is difficult to see how one can ever securely escape an
infernal cycle, simultaneously at the levels of the concept, text, and clinic: this is the viscously circular economy where acting-out and recalling continually and unproductively collapse back into each other. This is exactly the difficulty Freud reported (1914: p. 155): the endless merry-go-round of repetition and remembering seems only to herald the work's stagnation. What is to be done? Nothing, Freud says. This state of affairs is perfectly satisfactory: the clinician must be contented to wait patiently until the material exhausts itself. If Freud's answer did not continue to receive such near universal approbation across the psychoanalytic spectrum and beyond, then it is likely that contemporary clinicians, reading Freud on this matter for the first time would—with good reason—find his answer to such a thorny clinical issue considerably wanting. His strategy is, after all, to acknowledge the phenomenon but deny the problem. It is hard not to worry that Freud is indulging the most flagrant kind of disavowal here, ‘I know very well that after awhile the treatment gets bogged down, but…‘. If this is the case, then the viability of analytic treatment is in serious question indeed. However, this disavowal is only apparent and in fact Freud's proposal merits a deeper reading, one that invites consideration of the third moment of the treatment and the text—the moment of working-through—as simultaneously the working-through of the text's conceptual contradictions—of the dialectical tension between the conceptual pair imitation-repetition/representation-remembering—as well as the contradictions inherent in the temporal unfolding of clinical work itself.
As indicated above, the twin notions of mimêsis can be mapped onto the great Freudian dichotomy between affect and representation; in addition, mimêsis might fruitfully be deployed in relation to psychoanalytic nosography, and in so doing could indicate a way out of the infernal circle. Freud and Breuer famously claim, in the Studies, that ‘hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (1895: p. 6), i.e. in the nomenclature of this paper, hysteria is an illness of mimêsis qua representation. Contrariwise, obsessional neurosis would be characterised as an illness of imitation: the deathly impasse that constitutes the endless repetition of the same, for instance. However, this distinction cannot be rigorously maintained, since it is both well known that hysteria ruthlessly exploits imitation—as an illness that ‘mimics’ illness, say—and that obsessional
neurosis thrives on the proliferation of representation—most notably in the over-preponderance of thought—and as such their relationship is in continual want of deconstruction. The implication is that there is something antecedent to both affect and representation which is split. This split can be theorised as a mimêsis of the drives [Triebe]; indeed, to take our argument further, the kind of mimêsis characterising the drives in question—how the drives are converted, carried over and bifurcated—is what determines their psychical presence as representation or affect. In this way both representation and affect are, ultimately, only ‘representatives’ of the drives (Freud 1915: p. 147). Furthermore then, we can freshly understand Freud's claim in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905: p. 168) that the drives are situated on the border between psyche and soma, because this precisely corresponds to mimêsis as here described as a movement or propulsion straddling both the material, physio-motor senses of imitation-repetition and the semantico-cognitive senses of representation-remembering, conjoined in clinical work via transference-speech. This is a new way of reading Freud's conclusion that the drives are never experienced or known inthemselves: the movement of the drives—which is always also the process of their conversion, and the trace designating their entry into the psyche—entails that they never manifest directly to consciousness, but only after a displaced and distorted fashion. This twoing and froing, , of the drives is situated imitation and representation insofar as it is the movement common to them; but it is also situated between them in the more far-reaching sense that it forms the interface between psyche and soma.
If we remember, once more, that it is the transference which conjoins imitation-repetition and representation-remembering during the treatment, then this is only because they are now explicable as always already conjoined at the level of the drives: the handling of the transference is, accordingly, the handling of the drives. And if we repeat that the cultivation and facilitation of the transference is a linguistic process—an affair of language—then this is, finally, to offer the possibility that in order for analytic speech to locate, gain access to and address
the drives, this can only be accomplished transferentially. Working-through this position leads to an understanding, clinically speaking, of the drives as ineluctably bound up with questions of sense, meaning, and interpretation: the mimêtic movement of the drives described above cannot, from the vantage point of the treatment, be regarded merely as the meaningless march of an endless redoubling; the forever forking force of the drives is also the motion of meaning, the transmission and communication of an ever-proliferating because self-dividing sense. Notwithstanding a brief remark towards the start (1914: p. 147) of ‘Remembering’, nowhere in his great work of analytic technique—so concerned as it is with process and diachrony—does Freud raise problems of the unfolding of meaning, the use and timing of interpretation, or questions of the nature of analytic speech and free association. Even if, in many ways, Freud regarded the counterpart to ‘Remembering’ as the Wolf Man (1918)—a case study obsessed with meaning and its reconstruction—the fact remains that if a large part of the analytic task is to continually return the patient to the working-through of representation-remembering then such matters are of central technical importance and deserve consideration in tandem to any discussion of process.
At this point we shall appeal once more to Aristotle's Poetics, in particular to his claim that the use of metaphor is foundational for the creation of poetry (1996: p. 36). Additionally, Aristotle remarks, poetry is more philosophical than other modes of language-use: the example he selects for comparison is history (p. 16). For Aristotle, poetry makes use of language in a manner that more closely approximates to the truth. Why is this? Aristotle contends that poetry is not limited to the concrete saying of what has happened, as is history; rather, poetry speaks of what might happen, what is possible and imaginable if not actual: thus poetry is concerned with the necessary and the universal, rather than the contingent and singular. Indeed, this is the etymological root of poetry: poïesis means, above all, to create and engender something new. Poetic language—language which comes closest to speaking the truth—does not, in Aristotle's conception, merely imitate or attempt to correspond to the actual; it re-presents, makes the familiar afresh by transforming ‘what is’ in the movement of conversion and reconstruction into ‘what might be’. Poetry, via metaphor, establishes the universal in the particular.
Taking our cue from Aristotle, we therefore suggest that this is where analytic free association might be located, as a unique discourse unfettered by either utilitarian purpose or teleological direction: both the nonsense ‘un-speech’ of Roustang and the symbolically pregnant ‘full-speech’ of Lacan. Drawing-out this kind of mode of speech from the patient enables the dissonance of the drives to be heard like so much static on a long distance phone call. Indeed, this amounts to the emergence of the patient qua poet, where speaking in such a manner places them in a position where they are able to universalise the singularity of their suffering, and make of the past the possibility of something new in the future. It can thus be proposed that such speech is efficacious by the manner in which it ‘mixes its metaphors’. This kind of speech muddles—inverts, obverts, displaces, misplaces, confuses, misuses—the familiar and entrenched configurations of imitation-repetition and representation-remembering and, by implication therefore, affect and representation, denuding speech to reveal the contrapuntal movements of mimêsis constitutive of the drives.
As has been suggested, this is prompted by the analyst passing back to the patient the task of representation-remembering, that which the patient tries to deny responsibility for at the beginning of the treatment. We have argued that by forswearing the labour of representation-remembering the analyst, in effect, renounces any pretence to knowledge by emphasising that questions concerning meaning, truth or validity reside with the patient; concomitantly the analyst therefore brackets-out appeals by the patient to any general prêt-a-porter prescriptions that might offer answers to such questions in advance. The analyst's task, on this reading, is to induct the patient into a highly unusual mode of dialogue, where the anticipated and expected sense and function of otherwise familiar speech acts are put in abeyance, but for all that neither deracinated nor evacuated of intelligibility. Quite the contrary: an insistence on the suspension of the usual rules and laws governing the production and transmission of meaning results in a veritable explosion of meaning where forgotten words, garbled phrases and throw-away remarks introduce the patient to another kind of sense: sense from ‘the other scene’. Or, perhaps better put, the analyst inaugurates the patient into another scene of sense, the principles governing which have to be constructed over the course of the treatment. If
knowledge is on the side of the patient, then this is because the analyst has renounced any claim to knowing in order to better be the protector of the analytic process, the guardian of mimêsis and the facilitator of the drives.
The preceding remarks, taken together, imply that psychoanalytic drive theory can be read as conjoining—and creatively confusing—poetry and science in a complementary praxis, the ‘category mistake’ we referred to earlier. Taking seriously such a category mistake as productive, rather dismissing it as contradictory, would have important implications not only for the philosophy of science underpinning how we think about and structure psychoanalytic treatment, but also how we design future academic and/or empirical research models into the treatment itself. So, for instance, this account of the mimêtic nature of drive theory bears directly on important questions we have not had space to consider, regarding the interrelationship between the unconscious, sexuality and cognition, perhaps opening a clearing for newly-orientated and Freudian inspired investigations into the connections between the three. Such research might take as a starting point the crucial function of repression and the continual tying and untying of affect and representation. Not only would the design of any putative research projects on this need to be sensitive to the kinds of taxonomical difficulties we highlighted towards the start of this paper, but they would also need to respond to the fact that the reading set out above poses difficult questions of technique regarding the ends and purpose of this ‘style’ of analytical treatment, as well as its scope, application, and suitability for use with particular patient groups or particular patient presentations. Thus it is clear that despite a presumed insistence on the importance of cultivating in the patient the ability to abandon imitation-repetition in order to suspend received meanings and sense in the work of representation-remembering, this cannot happen straight away and indeed may only be achieved—if ever—after a great deal of supportive preparatory work which may draw on a set of very different clinical techniques. Future work will have to speak to these questions; perhaps in so doing however, such work will not be shy in drawing upon the vast resources of poetry, resources that we hope this paper has been able to demonstrate has a huge amount to offer the clinic, and not only the theory, of psychoanalysis.
Biographical details are from Peter Gay's Freud: A Life For Our Time (2006), and Lisa Appignanesi's and John Forrester's Freud's Women (1992).
Bertha was to remain a friend of Martha's well into the 1890s. Indeed, the intimacy of their families is attested to by the fact that in February 1880, two months after Martha's father died, and the same year that Bertha and Breuer began working together, Martha's mother elected none other than Bertha's father to be the legal guardian of her children. See Appignanesi and Forrester (1992: pp. 81-82).
Published in the 1880 edition as Zwei Abhandlungen über die Aristotelische Theorie des Dramas. Despite this volume's importance, Bernays' complete work remains only selectively translated. See the excerpt ‘Aristotle on the effect of tragedy’ in the 2006 publication Ancient Literary Criticism.
Both Heath's introduction to the 1996 Penguin edition of the Poetics, and Lear's 1992 article on catharsis offer concise and helpful discussions of the main issues.
This aspect of Freud's relationship to his father is perhaps most famously expressed in the memory-association Freud supplies—in his analysis to the so-called ‘Count Thun’ dream in The Interpretation of Dreams (: p. 215)—of urinating in his parents' bedroom around the age of eight or nine, and his father's rebuke to the young Freud's confidence that he would ‘come to nothing’.
These authors discuss the relationship between psychoanalysis and rhetoric in many places. Representative examples of their thinking on this matter can be found in: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (2004); Derrida's Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996); Borch-Jacobsen's The Emotional Tie (1993); and Roustang's How to Make a Paranoid Laugh (1996).
Famously, contra Aristotle, Plato is severely critical of poets and poetry, portraying Socrates as declaring that poets ought to be expelled from the ideal state. Indeed, ironically, amongst the reasons for Plato's suspicion towards poetry was his concern that poetry is capable of unleashing dangerous emotions—emotions that Plato
regarded as best regulated by reason. See Plato (2007) The Republic, especially Book X.
See Auerbach, E. (2003). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.
This distinction is widely debated in the literature. Accessible accounts can be found in Walter Kauffmann's 1968 study Tragedy and Philosophy (pp. 36-41) and many of the papers in the 1992 collection, Essays on Aristotle's Poetics. Heath's introduction to the 1996 Penguin edition of the Poetics also contains a helpful discussion (pp. xii–xv).
Lest there be any confusion on this point: our argument is emphatically not that the analytical concepts that we provide a commentary for in terms of imitation and representation are etymologically linked to either of these terms or to mimêsis itself. This would, strictly speaking, be supplementary to the reading pursued in this paper.
We owe this point to Borch-Jacobsen (1993: p. 62).
We are indebted to Stephen Gee for this formulation of our argument.