The Freud that we may be at risk of forgetting, suggested by Rob Weatherill's title, is not the Freud who looms large in popular discourse or stands behind the therapeutic explosions of the last one hundred years or so. Neither is it the Freud of the so-called Freudian century who himself flirted with the emerging market appetite for therapeutic writing by nearly writing popular articles for Cosmopolitan Magazine. Indeed, some might argue that the very possibility of forgetting Freud—at least the Freud of a contemporary couch culture—has simply not yet arisen, such is the psychoanalytic cultural legacy. With his investment in the demarcation of the analytic from therapeutic, however, Weatherill contributes to a tradition of critical scholarship that puts forward the paradox that the Freudian project of psychoanalysis offers a much needed prophylactic against the tyranny of a therapy culture. As with other commentators in this field, some of who provide historical coordinates for Weatherill's account (Trilling, Rieff and Lasch for example), the Freud—or rather the Freudian project—that we should be remembering is the one that counteracts a ‘weakly therapeutic’, ‘anthropomorphic’, ‘relativistic’, ‘administered’ culture in which, for Weatherill, the market drivers of late capitalism combine with the dominant therapeutic drivers of the ‘psy’ fields to ensure that a contemporary ethics will necessarily coincide with the ‘commercial production of goodness’ (115).
Such thematic motifs of cultural decline, which have featured prominently in Weatherill's previous works (e.g. Cultural Collapse (1994), and Our Last Great Illusion: A Radical Psychoanalytic Critique of Therapy Culture (2004)), frame the two central questions that the author commits to investigating over the course of his latest book. First, ‘how can
psychoanalysis survive in its radical attempt to let the subject speak in all its hidden humanity’ (3); here, Weatherill is clear that the logic of ‘the primacy of the signifier’ that dominates Lacanian discourse and cultural theory will not, by itself, serve a contemporary psychoanalytic project well. Second, ‘what should be the relation of psychoanalysis to ethics…’ (3); here, the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas provides the main inspiration for the development of the author's thought (passim and Chapter Six especially). Through discussions of cultural evidence and artefacts (e.g. film and literature), the ten essays that comprise this work refract these two preoccupations and articulate the need for a critical psychoanalysis that can temper what the author diagnoses as the ethical nihilism of much of the contemporary theoretical landscape. Highlights from Weatherill's commitment to evaluating the state of contemporary culture include a re-reading of Nabokov's Lolita in Chapter Five, and a sustained engagement with the queer theorist Lee Edelman's recent work No Future in Chapter Ten. Throughout the book, these cultural readings are accompanied by the author's explication of psychoanalytic ideas and his presentation of the historical development of these ideas; one such example would be the ‘story’ of the development of the ego both as it is revised throughout Freud's writing and as it is re-worked in subsequent psychoanalytic schools of thought (passim and Chapter One especially). The breadth of reference in the essays is refreshing, and the reader is led adeptly amongst various competing theoretical coordinates including Freud, Lacan, Klein, Bion, Winnicott, Bollas, Meltzer, Laplanche, Levinas, Baudrillard and Steiner. There is, then, much to value in this collection of essays, most importantly, for this reader, Weatherill's critical appraisal of the state of contemporary psychoanalysis which runs throughout the book and finds its foremost expression in Chapter Eight where the argument is made for an approach based on Lacan and Klein to counteract the ‘marginalisation of affectivity’ that is identified as the prejudicial affliction of contemporary theorising (37). Here, Weatherill links the ‘too narrow linguistic definition’ of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis with ‘the universe of indifference necessary for optimal functioning in an atomistic world of isolated speaking beings…’ (24, 168). With its emphasis on the (auto)affective origins of the ego, Kleinian discourse is identified as implicitly challenging the ‘hegemony of language’ and thus having the
capacity to address ‘a whole cluster of modern maladies associated with atomistic culture’ (i.e. Klein's stress on the ‘wordless place of the inhibited, schizoid, psychotic, borderline, autistic and psychopathic’) (157). Whether or not the reader agrees wholesale with the author's presentation of a cultural world in which ethical relativism gives way to a generalised indifference, it is surely of merit to tie the possibility of a Lacan-Klein dialogue so tightly to a project of cultural analysis. Indeed, in the increasingly partisan climate that takes its toll on the ‘psy-’ disciplines in general, and the fields of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in particular, this is a welcome endeavour.
I found Weatherill's treatment of psychoanalytic theory to be authoritative and compelling, and I was receptive to a work that insists that the difficult questions of culture and ethics are also the difficult questions of psychoanalytic theory. However, I must now situate myself as a reader who does not agree wholesale with the presentation of the cultural world advanced in this book.
There is a profound cultural pessimism at the heart of Weatherill's vision which is reminiscent of the patrician voices of (largely Anglo-American) cultural criticism from the last decades of the twentieth century. For example, Weatherill concurs with the general trajectory outlined by Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism (1979), and supports the critique of a culture of ‘emotivism’ put forward by Alisdair MacIntrye in After Virtue (1981: 16). If there are readers still unfamiliar with the tenets of therapy criticism, or unreflective on the question of the relationship between the clinic and the logic of the market, then they may well be (helpfully) provoked by Weatherill's assertion that the values promoted by the psy fields—value neutrality, non-judgement, transparency, negotiation, transactional exchange—have taken root in the discourses of liberal democracy to produce a ‘radically subjectivist culture’ (Weatherill 2012: 181-183). In part, then, the question of forgetting Freud is a question for practitioners:
A psychoanalysis without, on the one hand, freedom and the transitional space of illusion and, on the other, a strong discriminatory function, alert to truth over lies, to objectivity over narcissism, to fighting for freedom, to wakefulness over dreaming, is nothing more or less than the soft option of therapeutic neutralisation and equivocation, essentially indifferent to the other while giving all the appearance of care.
(145)
As it stands—isolated and soberly expressed—there is little I disagree with here. I would, however, want to add some caution to the overall presentation of this argument. Weatherill casts the contemporary moment as one of abject cultural decline: public values are impoverished because the conditions for ethical judgement and distinction are occluded from public discourse. When Weatherill describes psychoanalysis's role in this ‘privatisation of life and the retreat from the collectivity… [which] is all of a part with the great retreat into narcissism…’ (48), it is not psychoanalysis's implication in this cultural mix that I have any qualms about, but rather the totalising presentation of this (negative) state of affairs. The theme of ‘forgetting’, mobilised in the book's title, perhaps inevitably invites the nostalgic posture of ‘lest we forget’ which is the conservative shadow of the more provocative ‘rallying call’ to remember. Accordingly, as with many ‘declinist’ writers, some of the stylistic tropes that come to the fore in Weatherill's work can create a disconcerting textual landscape: The reader is antagonised by the cultural prognosis that we're going to hell in a handcart (so to speak), and simultaneously invited to bathe in the warm reflections of long gone are the days (again, so to speak). Here are some examples of this rhetorical effect:
In a world of near total transparency, it is not by chance, then, that hysteria no longer exists, after playing on all the extreme figures of sexual mythology. Playing is done with; sexuality is done with. (34)
In the age of “info-tainment”, language has lost its deep metaphorical range becoming worn-out through over-usage and waste. (66)
The current position in the West is more than ever characterised by isolation. Discrete atoms, face down the other, out-sourcing the other, who is lonely and depressed. (68)
Cyberspace is replacing transitional space…. Now, it is all one way, the way of the (alien) world, the cyber world. (136)
We talk easily nowadays like machines about human functioning and dysfunction. What was once the private domain of the subject is now extensively and increasingly given over to instrumentality and automatism.(138)
If free association as the guiding principle of the psychoanalytic session has any currency outside, it must mean speaking against any kind of language “correctness”. One must say the forbidden thing. The free cultural space, like the smoking space, is shrinking fast. (171)
Although the author is careful not to advocate a re-enchantment thesis whereby the fractured social bonds of civilisation could simply be made whole again - in fact he expressly warns against this fantasy of ‘fundamentalism’ (22-23)—one cannot doubt the force of his lament for what he identifies as ‘the gradual erosion of the moral basis for our civilisation’ (185). Moreover, it is my suggestion that, at full force, Weatherill's polemic may in fact mitigate against the reader's critical engagement with his thesis because of the enjoyment—collectivising pleasure?—to be had in sharing the vision of the doomsayer.
Perhaps this criticism can be allowed to stand as a comment on culture—and the critical consumption of culture—more broadly. When negotiating (and writing about) the cultural world it is, I would suggest, incredibly difficult to keep faith with the appreciation of complexity upon which psychoanalytic theory is predicated: such as the thought that illusions can be both pernicious and productive; the insistence that narcissism has consequences that extend beyond a ‘negative’ survivalist culture; a resistance to the simplicities of dualistic thinking implied by categories of external/internal (or public/private); an appreciation for the overdetermined mechanisms of fantasy production that subvert the standard temporal account of cause and effect; a recognition that the fundamental principle of ambivalence underwrites all moments of psychosocial motivation, and so on. In its treatment of psychoanalytic theory, Forgetting Freud is duly attentive to these complexities. However, as a cultural commentary the work succumbs to the pleasures of provocation which, for me, narrowed the space in which to think through the possibility of a primary ethics that Weatherill rightly foregrounds as the contemporary problem for cultural criticism and psychoanalytic theory. For many, Weatherill's tone may prove to be part of the book's
appeal. This was not the case for me, precisely because I am yet to be convinced that ‘our culture’ (and the presumptions of this phrase are certainly problematic) is a culture so devastated by nihilism, or that we can't be attracted to new forms of politics which self-consciously play with the destabilisation of the public and the private spheres, or that we can't identify opportunities to resist the ‘cultural dominant’ through new modes of psychosocial relationships. This difference notwithstanding, Weatherill's trustworthy handling of psychoanalytic theory and the sense of urgency that underpins his cultural analyses will ensure that his readers are challenged as they are invited not to forget Freud.