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VERMONT DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARIES /'

NORTHEAST REGIONAL LIBRARY

23 TILTON ROAD
ST J0HNS8URY VT 05819

TERRORS AND EXPERTS

TERRORS AND EXPERTS

ADAM PHILLIPS

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
 Copyright © 1995 by Adam Phillips
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Second printing, 1997

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1997

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phillips, Adam.
Terrors and experts / Adam Phillips,

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-87479-X (cloth)
ISBN 0-674-87480-3 (pbk.)
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939.
3. Psychoanalytic counseling. 4. Psychoanalysts.
5. Psychotherapist and patient. I. Title.

BF175.P437 1996
150.19'5 — dc20 95-38506
for Mia Rose
Some may perhaps be startled , and cry 'How comes
, this sudden
change?' To which 1 answer, 7 am a changeling.' 1 think that is

a full answer.

Andrew Marvell, The King's Speech

No reasonable man, 1 readily agree, would want space travel as

such; because he wants to know, in any proposal for travel,

whether he would go farther and fare worse. A son of my own at
about the age of twelve, keen on space travel like the rest of them,

saw the goat having kids and was enough impressed to say, 'It's

better than space travel.' It is indeed absolutely or tnetaphysi-

cally better, because it is coming out of the nowhere into here.

William Empson, 'Donne the Space Man'

1 do not know how many of you keep a list of the kinds of fool you
make of yourselves.

J. L. Austin, A Plea for Excuses

Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson, 'Not Pastoral Enough'

"
 Contents

Acknowledgements, x
Preface, xi

Terrors and Experts: An Introduction,

1. Authorities, 18
2. Symptoms, 33
3. Fears, 46
4. Dreams, 64
5. Sexes, 77
6. Minds, 93

Bibliography, 105
Index, 107
 Acknowledgements

Different versions of the chapters in this book appeared in the

London Review of Books, Raritan, Psychodynamic Counselling, Island

Review (Tasmania), The Yearbook of the Belgian Psychoanalytic Society
and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. A version of Chapter 6 was published
in The Mind Object, ed. Corrigan and Gordon (New Jersey, Aronson,
1 995>-

Once again am I particularly grateful to Mary-Kay Wilmers at the

London Review of Books, and Dick Poirier and Suzanne Hyman at
Raritan. These journals, and their editors, have made the kind of
things I write possible.
The clinical work book has been
that informs the chapters in this
sustained by conversations with Alex Coren, Glenda Fredman, Paul
van Heeswyk, Morian Roberts and Peter Wilson. Jacqueline Rose
made the writing of this book more of a pleasure. Hugh Haughton
was, as ever, a necessary reader. Conversations with Lawrence
Jacobson, Debbie Waxenberg and John Forrester have contributed
more to this book than they may realise.
 #

Preface

Murdoch once suggested that to understand any philosopher's

Iris

work we must ask ourselves what he or she is frightened of. To

understand any psychoanalyst's work - both as a clinician and as a
writer - we should ask ourselves what he or she loves: because
psychoanalysis is about the unacceptable and about love, two things
we may prefer to keep apart, and that Freud found to be inextricable.
If there is a way of talking about psychoanalysis as a scandal,

without spuriously glamorizing it, then one way of doing it is simply

to say that Freud discovered that love was compatible, though often
furtively, with all that it was meant There are, in other
to exclude.

words - and most literature is these other words - no experts on

love. And love, whatever else it is, is terror.

In Freud's view our first loves are both forbidding and forbidden.
Our parents (or the people who care for us) must protect us from the
ordinary catastrophes of childhood - hunger, the cold, the devasta-
tions of abandonment - and they must also set limits to our sexual
desire for them. By the logic of the Oedipus complex the survivor
becomes a lover through frustration. Caught between the harshness
of the world and the urgency of his or her instincts, the child is born
with a readiness for terror. Psychoanalysis affirms that there is

something unmanageable about being a person, and it is this that

makes a person who he or she is. The frenzy of a baby, the tantrum or
phobia of the older child, the panic of adolescent self-consciousness:
the demonic - possession by alien meanings - starts at home. Fear is

always familiar.

The child must learn to bear frustration, the adult must learn not
to (it has to be that way round). But from a psychoanalytic point of
view there is an inevitable complicity between desire and the
forbidden, between sexuality and the unattainable. Pleasure is its

xi
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

own punishment. Psychoanalysis starts with the story that we are

too much for ourselves; that we are, in a sense, terrorized by an
excess of feeling, by an impossibility of desire. And it is terror, of
course, that traditionally drives us into the arms of the experts; that
'Brings the priest and the doctor/in their long coats/Running over
the fields', as Philip Larkin writes in his poem 'Days'. Psychoanaly-
sis, like religion and medicine, turns panic into meaning. Itmakes
fear bearable by making it interesting. And it does this in the most
ordinary way: through conversation with another person. This,
Freud's still new remedy suggests, is what other people are for, to

make a difference. Talking changes the way things look. Freud, in

other words, never lost sight of a fundamental question: What good

are other people? And so, by implication. What does a psycho-
analyst have that someone might need, Our
or rather be able to use?
relationship to experts is a picture of the way we need. What are
people doing, what are people up to, when they consult and believe
their experts? Or, indeed, when they begin to think of themselves as
experts, with all the tangled history of that word? As the OED tells

us, 'expert' means both 'tried, proved by experience ... an auth-

ority, a specialist', and also 'having no part in devoid of, free . . .

from'. As Freud showed, such 'antithetical words' do a lot of work

for us.

This book addresses the question of what psychoanalysts are

experts on (or of) - childhood, sexuality, love, development,
dreams, art, the unconscious, unhappiness, how to live and who to
be - and what Freud's idea of the unconscious does to the idea of
expertise, of being a skilled and competent practitioner of anything,
including psychoanalysis itself. With his description of the
unconscious and the dream-work, Freud gave the expert - the
expert in any field - a new agon and a new collaborator; and, of
course, a new source of terror. If we are not, as Freud insisted,
masters in our own houses, what kinds of claims can we make for
ourselves? In what senses can we know what we are doing? From a
psychoanalytic point of view, people are not only the animals who
can make promises, but also the animals that can't help breaking
them.

Xll
 PREFACE

If everything now is increasingly subject to expertise - from

mourning to making love - with child rearing, in particular, as a
growth industry; if we are living in the age pf the specialist, then
psychoanalysis can be useful as a critique of the whole project of
wanting authorities. It can help us sort out what is, in fact, subject to

what we call expertise; and, of course, what the alternatives to it may

be. (If learning verse-forms and reading poems doesn't make you a

poet, then what does? My need for a heart-surgeon is different from

my need for a philosopher.) In this book the psychoanalyst is,

among other things, a figure for the ironies of expertise - an emblem

for the puzzles of competence. There is a useful difference, as

psychoanalysis itself can show us, between having a skill - being

admirable, or emulatable - and needing to dominate people. A
talent is not a weapon in every culture. Unusual ways of doing
things only necessitate assertions of superiority to quell doubt.
'A class of experts/ the philosopher John Dewey wrote, 'is

inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class

with private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at
all/ From a psychoanalytic point of view, there can be no private

knowledge, only knowledge that has been hidden (an esoteric

psychoanalysis is a contradiction in terms). The psychoanalyst, if he
knows anything, knows about the suffering entailed by certain
kinds of privacy; indeed, symptoms are forms of private knowledge,
expressions of private interests. Psychoanalysis can make both the
private social and the anti-social available for comment. And it can
make us wonder, by the same token, what we use ideas of privacy to
protect ourselves from.
Psychoanalysis, as each of the chapters in this book shows from a
different perspective, radically revises our versions of competence,
and our notions of a professional self (dreams are very unprofessio-
nal). And to analyse a transference, of course, is to analyse a

person's need for belief, their craving for experts. We don't celebrate
hurdlers when they fall over, or comedians when they aren't funny.

And politicians in Western democracies do not get elected on the

basis of their capacity for hesitation, or their willingness to sustain
contradictory points of view, or their ability to change their minds,

xm
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

or their impassioned support for the opposition's point of view.

Psychoanalysis gives us a language to notice this and wonder why it
is And, by the same token, it puts up for grabs the question of
so.

what makes a good analyst. It is part of the mystique of expertise,

which Freud both rumbled and cultivated, to believe that because a
person has done a recognized or legitimated official training they are
then qualified to claim something more than that they have done the
training (doing something properly is a way of not doing it

differently). Being a member of a club tells you nothing about a

person's kindness, or cunning. The transference of psychoanalysts

to Freud, to their theory, and to their training institutions, has been
stultifying; and it is now, in pre-Freudian terms, beyond a joke (to

call it an irony does not do it justice). Psychoanalysts take them-

selves, and their professionalization, too seriously, something their
make them a bit suspicious of.
theory should 'In accepting the hat',
Owen Chadwick wrote of Cardinal Newman, 'he lost nothing of his
unpomp'. The unconscious, for which no one ever receives a hat,
should be a continual (secular) reminder of unpomp.
From my point of view a psychoanalyst is anyone who uses what
were originally Freud's concepts of transference, the unconscious,
and the dream-work in paid conversations with people about how
they want to live. The fact that there are psychoanalytic trainings at
all, (there were none when psychoanalysis began and was at its most

creative), and the ways in which they choose to organize them-

selves, begs the question of what psychoanalysis is, or rather, is like

- medicine, music, friendship, initiation, meteorology, parenting,

guessing? And, of course, the question of what it is to learn
something. Psychoanalysis can make all these issues more interest-
ing, and more amusing, than they are conventionally allowed to be.
A psychoanalyst, for example, has to learn how not to know what he
is doing and how to go on doing it.

But psychoanalysis is always becoming the paradigm of

at risk of

what Wordsworth called, in a famous passage in The Prelude,

'Knowledge purchased with the
. .
. and by power, loss of power';
of course, he did not mean coercion but something more akin to
inspiration. As everyone knows, psychoanalysis is very expensive

xiv
 PREFACE

knowledge. By costing so much, in every sense, it sustains its

elitism. And elitism, and what used to be called mental health - and
should be called living a good life - are mutually exclusive.
The elitism of psychoanalysts - beginning with Freud's aspiration,
at least in the early years of his supposedly 'new science', to be allied
with the prestigious profession of medicine - was reactive, I think, to
an anxiety about assimilation. At first the question was, How did the
psychoanalysis that Freud invented fit in with the prevailing
contemporary medical specializations? And then a perhaps more
daunting question: How would psychoanalysts, fleeing from
Nazism, find a place in their newly adopted countries? Could these

emigres legitimate themselves when psychoanalysis itself patently

revealed the senses in which people were always at odds with their
culture? Freud had discovered something that very soon became
literally true: that people live under assumed names. For very
understandable reasons, it was difficult for the early analysts to

resist respectability. And yet it was clear that psychoanalysis, by

definition, clashed with the available moral vocabularies. The
unconscious, after all, describes that part of ourselves that joins in
without ever fitting in.

The language of psychoanalysis, for example, very quickly got

(and gets) snarled up with the old-fashioned language of 'will', with
which it is incompatible. In relation to the unconscious, you can't
try, or make an effort; you can't force yourself to free-associate or
aim to make a slip of the tongue, or plan a dream. But muddling
these languages turns each version of psychoanalysis into a covert
moral injunction: try to be good (Klein); try to be spontaneous
(Winnicott); try to be eccentric to yourself (Lacan). If the uncon-
scious is that which does not fit in, why has it been so difficult to

sustain non-compliant versions of psychoanalysis? It is bizarre that

the splitting of psychoanalytic groups is considered to be a problem:
the psychoanalyst, by someone with an ear for
definition, is

dissenting voices. But the risk is that he becomes someone who can
only patronize them. In so far as the psychoanlyst becomes an expert
on how people should live - becomes, that is to say, any kind of
guru, any kind of official or unofficial expert - he has complied. The

xv
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

psychoanalyst is a professional who sustains his competence by

resisting his own authority. The unconscious, at least as Freud
described it, is another word for the death of the guru.
If psychoanalysis cannot tell people how to live, it should still be
able to make people feel better, but often in unexpected ways (only
the patient is in a position to detect an improvement). It should, in
other words, be that most unlikely thing: an interesting hedonism.
But it is only just beginning kind of public scrutiny, the
to get the

intelligent hostility, it needs, and that will allow people to decide -

both the people who can afford it and the people who can't -
whether it's worth keeping. No one needs psychoanalysis but some
people might want it. Psychoanalysis, as theory and practice,
should not pretend to be important instead of keeping itself

interesting (importance is a cure for nothing). You would think,

reading the professional literature, that it was psychoanalysis that
mattered and not what it was about. It is not the future of
psychoanalysis that anyone should be concerned about, but rather
the finding of languages for what matters most to us; for what we
suffer from and for, for how and why we take our pleasures.
Sometimes, for some people, psychoanalysis can be one of these
languages. Fortunately, there are plenty of others; no one language
has a monopoly on our ignorance.
Psychoanalysis, as this book tries to show, teaches us the meaning
- the sublimity - of our ignorance; it teaches us that we don't often
know what we are saying (which is another way of describing the
demonic: my word is my bond despite me, always say more than I I

have agreed to). No amount of scientific research will diminish the

waywardness of our words; there will always be the clamour of the
incongruous. And psychoanalysts are well placed to take a strong
stand against the enemies of ambiguity. But when psychoanalysts
spend too much time with each other, they start believing in
psychoanalysis. They begin to talk knowingly, like members of a
religious cult. It is as if they have understood something. They
forget, in other words, that they are only telling stories about stories;
and that all stories are subject to an unknowable multiplicity of
interpretations. The map becomes the ground beneath their feet;

xvi
 PREFACE

and maps are always a smaller ground. Psychoanalysts need to be

attentive to the fascination of fictions, and the morals of words. But
they are always tempted to become the experts on the canon of
plausible interpretations, of what should be said when. Giving the
unconscious elocution lessons is unpromising. In so far as psycho-
analysis merely traffics in new proprieties, in fresh forms of
respectability, it betrays something of its radical legacy as a conver-
sation in which people cannot help but experiment with themselves.
When psychoanalysis loses its unusual capacity to both comfort and
unsettle - and its modern sense that you can't have one without the
other - it becomes either a form of compulsory radicalism or a new
way to learn an old obedience. It was, after all, to the subtleties of

compliance that Freud addressed himself. If psychoanalysis is not

the means to a personal style, it merely hypnotizes people with a
vocabulary.
The psychoanalyst and her so-called patient share a project. The
psychoanalyst, that is to say, must ask herself not. Am I being a
good analyst (am I wild enough, am I orthodox enough, have I said
the right thing)? But, What kind of person do want to be? There are
I

plenty of people who will answer the first question for her. Faced
with the second question, there may be terrors but there are no
experts.

XVII
 $

Terrors and Experts: An Introduction

After all, one can only say something if one has learned to talk.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Children unavoidably treat their parents as though they were

experts on life. They, and other adults, are the people from whom
the child learns what is necessary. But children make demands on
adults which the adults don't know what to do with. It is, for

example, clear to everyone concerned that adults are unable to

answer, in any satisfactory way, several of the child's questions. The

so-called facts of life are hardly a convincing answer - for anybody -
to why people have sex, where babies come from. Often, from the
or
child's point of view, answers merely interrupt questions. Whether
children are amusing, or irritating, or endearing, or even Tittle
philosophers', once they learn to talk they create, and suffer, a
certain unease about what they can do with words. Paradoxically, it
is the adult's own currency - words - that reveals to them the limits
of adult [Link] adults are not fully competent with their own
instruments, but there is nobody else for the child to appeal to.
Children go on asking, of course, but eventually they have to settle
for the adult's exhausted impatience, and the fictions of life. Their

questions, they notice, just like the answers, can be baffling. 'In the
unconscious', Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams, 'nothing
can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten.' Curiosity is

endless, as every parent knows, in a way that answers are not.

When Lacan asserted that the analyst was the one who was
supposed to know, he was referring to this fact: that children take for
granted, are obliged to take for granted, their parent's expertise, and
that the patient, therefore, is likely to do this with the analyst. There
has to be someone, somewhere, who knows and understands. That

1
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

is what dependence is at the beginning: entrusting oneself to the

unknowable (like believing in God, or like being seduced). But the
analyst, as Lacan knows, is not only the one who is supposed to
know; he is the one who knows that he is supposed to know, which
is to know something of extraordinary consequence - to know, as

every child does somewhere, the sense in which nobody knows the
answers. Childhood innocence is not naive trust, it is incredulity
(what the child has to repress is an ironic scepticism).

Adults can nurture children - there is no one else to do it - but

they do not have the answers (though they are, of course, in the
paradoxical position of deciding what constitutes an answer). What
they can do is tell children stories about the connections between
curiosity and nurture, between desire and well-being (psychoana-
lysis is one such story). Only the adults can provide the children
with languages for their lives. Language, from the child's point of
view, is always the language of experts; which is why children are
prone to feeling mad when they feel themselves falling through the
gaps in the language. Competence, growing up, can be about
learning to keep these gaps at bay. Coherent adult practitioners
must appear to know what they are saying - as though they can
know something that the language they speak doesn't. Analysts can
only do their work, and unlike parents, because they know - can
like

tell compelling stories about - what a person is, what it is to live a

life, and what a life is supposed to look like. (One of their stories may

be: no one is in a position to tell you that.) To walk into a

psychoanalyst's consulting room, like being born into a family, is to

walk into a very elaborate family of stories about who one is

supposed to be. But if analysts can help patients discern the family
stories they have inherited, who can help the patients, and the
analysts, with the analysts' stories?
It is integral to the practice of psychoanalysis that the analyst has
to fall into the trap of being treated like a parent - an authority of
sorts - and then refuse be one. Through the transference - the
to

unwitting recreation and repetition of earlier family relationships -

the analyst and the patient can reconstruct both the patient's sense
of an expert, his personal picture of someone who knows best; and,

2
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS! AN INTRODUCTION

perhaps more importantly, the questions, the requests, the surmises

that the patient was left with as a child - the personal pantheon of
demand referred to by the idea of the unconscious. By not answer-
ing the patient's questions, the analyst allows the patient both to
repeat the answers of the past, and to recover the answering voices
in himself. When refusing to answer questions is not traumatic for
the patient - at its worst, and it is often at its worst in analysis, it

merely repeats the childhood trauma of the inaccessible parent - it

can reveal how someone uses other people, or what they use them
for (to pre-empt the elaboration of own thoughts, say). In other
their

words psychoanalysis can show us how we use answers - what we

are prepared to settle for - and what we use them to do. And so, by
implication, it can show us what is not subject to what we call an
answer, or what may not be - like the question. Which sex am I? In
psychoanalysis, at least, answers are not a cure for questions.

The useful paradox underlying the so-called technique (and the

theory) is that, in a sense, only the patient has the answers; and that
the answers, in a sense, are all questions, are all requests. Know-
ledge is of desire - of what we think of as missing -
what we want, of
and desire is always in the form of a demand. To be a person is to be
asking for something. Once there is dependence - once there is
acknowledgement of another person as a source of satisfaction -
demands are always questions: 'I want' becomes 'Can I have?' 'The
subject', Lacan writes, 'has never done anything other than

demand, he could not have survived otherwise; and we just follow

on from there.' We are riddled by wishes and we can only survive by
wanting. In the process of growing up, though, our wishes can go
astray.
how do we know - and from the child's point of view that
So
means who can tell us - what we want? How do we know if someone
is in a position to say? To tell us, for example, whether wants,
supposedly like words, can be more or less true, can point us in the

direction of real things?

Children's wants, at the beginning, are constituted - responded to
and articulated by - the adults who look after them. They put the
words to things like gestures and squeaks. The child's parents, or

3
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

adult caretakers, are the arbiters of his intent, his first brush with the
authorities. A baby's cries have to be interpreted, and can misfire.
He may, for example, sometimes be fed when he is not hungry (and
if he is always fed when he is not hungry but simply troubled, he
may evolve a sense - a virtual self who believes - that what he
always really wants is food). Ideally, of course, childhood is a series

of reciprocal accommodations (or 'attunements' as they are now

often referred to in an uneasy mixing of analogies). But however
much psychoanalysts go on producing (or promoting) coercively
normative accounts of good parenting - child development is the
new Utopianism in psychoanalysis; it used to be normality - they
cannot avoid the fact that the acquisition of language is both an
innate gift and an imposition on the child. It impinges ineluctably on
the child's development, making all the difference. The child may be
inventive within it, but it is not the child's invention. It is, as it were,
something the child has to catch; from the young child's point of
view, language is what other people do; it is other people. And the
learning of it will always be a paradoxical kind of trauma for the child
(if not the paradigm of trauma itself), because the trauma can only be
processed - the child will only be able to make sense of it

retrospectively - in the currency of the trauma itself: in words. As

though what is always part of the problem is the only solution.
Language, despite its falling short, is the child's best way of
wanting. But language makes desire feel like a form of compliance.
To know what one wants one has to play the game.
A neurosis, in Freud's language, is a way of not knowing what
one wants; as though one has learnt a language and then forgotten
how to speak it. This implies, of course, that wants are knowable,
that in psychoanalysis, at least, wants can be the objects of know-
ledge. We may be unacceptable to ourselves, Freud the confident
Enlightenment scientist suggests, but we are not unintelligible to
ourselves. After all, if we were - if our own obscurity was ineluctable

- what would the analyst be doing? Pain, the psychoanalyst must

believe, can be translated, like a language. The analyst can help the
patient find the words. It is as though what is missing - as in infancy,
or trauma - is the language, the vocabulary (though we don't tend to

4
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS: AN INTRODUCTION

think, in other situations, what has been added here is the lan-
guage). Psychoanalysis recuperates what has been lost - not, by
definition, something that never existed, something beyond words.
'From what I have so far said', Freud writes in his Introductory
Lectures ,

a neurosis would seem be the result of a kind of ignorance - a not

to
knowing about mental events that one ought to know of. This would be
a close approximation to some well-known Socratic doctrines according
to which even vices are based on ignorance.

Analogies always make a difference. Psychoanalysis is unlike

Socratic dialogue in the sense that health is not necessarily akin to
virtue. In psychoanalysis the opposite of ignorance is not so much
knowledge (and therefore virtue) but desire (and therefore some-
thing unpredictable and morally equivocal). Freud is mapping
incommensurate forms of life and language on to each other to make
the kind of point that gives psychoanalysis a culturally prestigious,
and therefore reassuring, affinity with classical Athens. In Vienna in

the early twentieth century, knowledge was not necessarily know-

ledge of the good. In fact, for Freud it was the opposite. Goodness
was likely to be a form of deliberate ignorance. (Parodies are always
close approximations.)
But Freud's neurotic, like Socrates' bad, ignorant man, is deemed
to be suffering from a refusal of knowledge. There is, it is assumed,
something he is capable of knowing; he is not suffering from
something that, in any absolute sense, eludes knowing. He has a

capacity which, for good reasons of his own, he can't let himself use.
But the patient has it in him. He is his own messenger. The analyst,
like Socrates (though there must be some unconscious irony in

Freud's notion of psychoanalysis as a profession of Socrateses) has

to enable the patient to know what he already knows - to refind a

talent, as it were. After all, the patient has only forgotten himself.
And the analyst is an expert in the forms of ignorance - in the forms
ignorance can take in the service of self-protection.

Or is he, rather, an expert on the inevitability of ignorance, of how

we can't escape it? A want, for example, may not be something we

5
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

can know, but only something we can try out- an experiment and not
a fact. Psychoanalysis cannot enable the patient to know what he
wants, but only to risk finding out. sense perversions - states
(In this

of mind in which people supposedly know exactly what they want -

give knowing a bad name.) The Enlightenment Freud, like Socrates,

can help us remind ourselves of who we are, of what we once and

always knew (and wanted). But the post-Freudian Freud - the man
who was always ahead of himself, and who we are beginning to catch
up with - was the ironist of exactly this Enlightenment project.* He
was an expert on the impossibility of self-knowledge, on the limits of
expertise; and particularly on that version of self-knowledge that
plays into the hands of instrumental reason and social control.
Knowing who you are means telling people what to do.
The Enlightenment psychoanalyst knows what people need; the
post-Freudian analyst knows that needs are made with words. The
Enlightenment Freud ascribes needs - which he calls instincts - to
people and then shows us how and why we try to disown them. The
post-Freudian Freud shows us the sense in which knowing who we
are - imagining ourselves, say, as made up of the relationship
between two instincts, Eros and Thanatos - is only a tautology, and
always an old description, because to be an expert on the uncon-
scious is a contradiction in terms. In the mirror one always sees
oneself looking.
With the Freudian version of the unconscious around, the antique
injunction, know thyself, begins to beg all the questions. For how
can we believe in the part of ourselves that is doing the knowing?
What do we imagine the self is like - a horizon, a field, a triangle - if
we can know it? And who decides what constitutes real knowledge?
After the post-Freudian Freud the issue becomes not only how can
we bear our (forbidden) knowledge, but how can we bear our
inevitable ignorance?
The post-Freudian Freud, that is to say, was not promoting the

*I'm using these terms here as emblematic of a difference. The Enlightenment has
a multiplicity of often contradictory referents now; and there is a sense in which
what 1 am calling post-Freudian Freud is itself something made possible by so-
called Enlightenment thinking.

6
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS: AN INTRODUCTION

necessity or the (traditional) value of self-doubt; he was questioning

the very idea of the self as an object of knowledge (or a commodity).
If a person is not a potentially knowable set of constituents -
humours, faculties, predispositions, instincts - then how can we
know what's missing? The inevitability of infancy, the unruliness of
instinctual life, the puzzling acquisition of language and its link with
sexuality, the unconscious dream-work; all of these suggested to
Freud a radical and formative insufficiency, something that cannot
be solved by knowledge. With the post-Freudian description of the
unconscious, the idea of human completeness disappears. We are
not in search of wholeness - the satisfaction, amelioration, progress,
or self-knowledge of the Enlightenment Freud; we are in search of
good ways of bearing our incompleteness (tragedy is when we are
ruined by our insufficiency, comedy is when we can relish it). There
may, sometimes, be a cure for symptoms, but there is no cure for the
unconscious, no solution for unconscious desire. Knowledge can't
put a stop to that, only death can.
If the Enlightenment Freud instructs us in a new science of self-
knowing - of familiarizing ourselves - the post-Freudian Freud
suggests that the project of self-knowledge is itself the problem, the
symptom masquerading as the cure; as though we have turned the
self into an object (the project of the Englightenment Freud), even an
idol, and psychoanalysis can now help us to unlearn this modern
religion of selfhood. The unconscious - whatever is strange, or
seems foreign about ourselves - is exactly what makes our old habits
of self, like knowing and understanding, sound irrelevant, off-key.
An inner revisionist, it disarms our competence, like someone
suddenly pointing out to us that we have been playing chess with
the rules of draughts. The unconscious, in other words, is what
stops self-knowledge turning, as it always does, into self-caricature
(self-definition is always complicit with self-mockery). When we
make a slip of the tongue, something in us speaks out of turn. It does
not speak more truthfully, but it speaks as well. And at that moment
we don't know where came from. It gives us pause. In psycho-
it

analysis, as the critic Mark Edmundson says of poetry, 'one must

affirm invention at the expense of argument'.

7
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

The contemporary psychoanalyst - who must straddle both

projects, contain within herself the Enlightenment Freud and the
post-Freudian Freud, the knowing and the problem of knowing -
becomes a new kind of expert: an expert on the truths of uncertainty.
She has to recognize the sense in which each person revises - is
inevitably a threat to - the available descriptions of what a person is.

And psychoanalysis becomes an ironic critique, a virtual burlesque

of the ethos of technology, seeing efficiency as a form of bad faith.

From a psychoanalytic point of view our mistakes, our aberrations,

our moments of distraction define us (inspiration is interruption):
our incoherence is vital. The risk is that the contemporary psycho-
analyst becomes merely a curator of paradoxes, a master of the
absurdities of mastery, with all the glib Socratic trappings; wisdom
as the tyranny of disingenuousness.
The concept of the "unconscious" ', Ernest Gellner writes,
'devalues both the individual's autonomy and all inner rational
compulsion, and the authority of evidence.' Once we have language,
desire,dream-work in the picture - rather than, say, insight,
mastery and empiricism - psychoanalysis becomes a primer of
necessary ignorance, a reminder of the ironies of knowledge. And,
therefore, the enemy of spurious alternatives. Like learning to talk
for the first time, again and again.

II

Human beings have greater capacities for rote learning than

horses do, a feature of the situation that, coupled with the

generosity of horses, makes a lot of inadequate riding possible.

Vicki Hearne, Tracking dogs, Sensitive Horses, and the Traces of Speech

Psychoanalysis can never say more than language does; and no

language can be the key to any other language. Just as we may take
flight into inner superiority in moments of fear, we are, by the same
token, prone to using authoritative, often technical languages - like
psychoanalysis - in moments of awkwardness. Nothing (other than
sexuality) makes people more nervous than their claims to

8
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS: AN INTRODUCTION

knowledge. Special languages, like sexual techniques, are cover-

ups.
For the Enlightenment Freud psychoanalysis, with its quasi-
scientific terminology, was essentially about knowing. Indeed
Melanie Klein believed that there was an epistemophilic instinct (an

instinct to know), without believing that this was a contradiction in

terms (or a form of terminal piety). The patient, just like the analyst,
is assumed to be a proto-scientist rather than, as other parts of the
theory might lead one to believe, a lover, a comedian or a mystic. He
is described as being obsessed by knowing and not knowing, by
thinking or refusing to think, by remembering and forgetting. In
order to protect himself - to sustain a certain version of himself - he
works at his ignorance.
Oedipus is so important in psychoanalysis because he does
something that can be found out, something he can know about.
The Oedipus plays would be a very different theatrical experience if
everybody was walking round the stage completely baffled all the
time (how would it end?). The fictional Oedipus becomes the
paradigmatic seeker and avoider of truth, and therefore the
sustainer of the idea that there are truths. He is man lucky
a or
unlucky enough to have a truth to discover, the man who fails at

repression. (We know nothing, of course, about the successfully

repressed; what would psychoanalysis be if Oedipus had got away
with it?) If knowledge means evidence of a crime committed, and the
self is essentially a criminal, then both are intelligible. Once a crime

has been committed, the question 'Why is it better to know the

truth?' and the answer 'It's impossible to know whether it will be
better or not' seem merely evasive, or churlish. The value of
knowing, and the moral disgrace of concealment, at least in the

context of the plays and the law-court, seem self-evident (though

comedy can where tragedy can only punish). After all,
celebrate
what else can we do with crimes - and with people - but find them
out? The idea of truth makes us virtuous, shows us which side to be
on; it makes it possible for us to blame, to forgive and to punish.
But one of the consequences of privileging Oedipus, as Freud did,
is that the psychoanalyst then assumes that the patient's real genre

9
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS
’
\
is tragedy, and that his real project is knowledge or understanding.
It is, though, part of the patient's predicament that he is trapped in a
specific genre, that he is unable to move freely among the genres
available; his farces, say, are all experienced as tragedies. And, of
course, every child notices that there is a hunger for more than
knowledge; and hopefully every adult patient notices that the sexual
pleasures of insight are rather different from the sexual pleasures of
sex. If Oedipus is a tragedy, the analyst can help the patient to know;
if Oedipus is a black comedy - and the naivety of the main
protagonists is truly staggering - the analyst may be less sure of his
role. Knowing is not quite the same as getting the joke. And a comic,
of course, is not an expert on jokes, only at telling them. After all,

what would we need an expert on jokes for? What can we add to a

joke that will make it better? The risk is that the Enlightenment
Freud ruins the joke by explaining it. Nobody reads 'Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious' for the jokes.
Once Freud had made Oedipus the tragic hero of psychoanalysis -
not a screen-memory, not a dream still to be interpreted, not the
failed initiate of Jean-Joseph Goux's account, but a kind of absolute
referent - there was a sense in which he could know what he was
doing. He could be a detective and a doctor, the benign unraveller of
plots; a protector of the well-being of the state. Indeed, without the
Oedipus complex, without incestuous desire, the Freudian
unconscious doesn't make sense; the unacceptable has to start
somewhere, and it is incest that sets it off.

And yet, of course, that is the point about the unconscious: it

doesn't make With the unconscious you never know where

sense.
you are. For the Enlightenment Freud, paradoxically, the Oedipus
complex makes the unconscious intelligible; it gives it a discernible
function, and a master-plot to keep the story going, the story of our
forbidden life. Incestuous desire gives an origin, a source, for the
idea of forbidden knowledge (and Oedipus becomes our pioneer in
this dangerous territory). With the Oedipus story as a foundation -

Oedipus as a kind of early scientific hero - psychoanalysis could be

the science of the forbidden, of the unacceptable; and the neurotic
could be a failed scientist. With Freud's rediscovery of Oedipus, in

10
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS: AN INTRODUCTION

fact, a new version of the good life was being described. In Freud's
view - and this is one of his fundamental models for a life - the
criminal must become a scientist. Crime doesn't pay, but knowledge
does. In so far as the Oedipus complex is the truth of our being - and
it is surely impossible to imagine that it is not at least one constitutive
story for imagining ourselves - the psychoanalyst becomes a kind of
expert witness.
From criminality to science, with the artist as a go-between: this
was the drama that the psychoanalyst - not only a new professional,
but a new kind of person invented by Freud - was to contain. In so
far as he believed in development, in a myth of progress, he was to

be a scientist. And yet, as psychoanalysis itself reminds us, now

more than ever before, people were babies before they became
addicted to knowing - and before they became those hardened
(Oedipal) criminals, always guilty until proved guilty. The patient
who comes into the analyst's consulting room, always comes
because he cannot speak; he began his life without words, sur-
rounded by them. He comes not only as someone refusing know-
ledge, but as someone for whom, once, there was no such thing. It is
not common enough knowledge that everyone was originally a
baby.
So any form of expertise - and especially psychoanalysis, with its
constitutive wish to link bodies to their words - is going to recreate
that crisis of authority and knowledge that is at the heart of both
infancy and the acquisition of language (and later, of the Oedipus
complex). The act of knowing - as opposed, say, to the capacity to be
absorbed someone or something - is itself more of a problem than
in

what there is to know. (Or rather, the problem of knowing is hidden

by the vividness of its objects.) There is life before knowledge, and
somebody before words. And every life is constituted through the
generations that precede it, like an obscured inheritance ('Our
simple childhood', Wordworth writes in Book V of The Prelude, 'sits

upon a throne/That hath more power than all the elements'). The
crucial things happened to Oedipus - instigated his plot, as it were -
before his birth and when he was a baby (his parents' own history,
the oracle, his abandonment, etc.). Like everybody else, Oedipus,

11
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

even at the end of his ordeal, could not be an expert on, or the
originator of, his own life; he could only live it, only see it

proliferating (choice is also the retrospective word for chance).

Describing people as the (sole) authors of their own lives is another

way of punishing them.
It is, of course, part of the legacy of psychoanalysis to make
Oedipus seem intelligible (a psychoanalyst might say to Oedipus:
live as you would be lived by). But what can psychoanalysis bring to

the story now that would make Oedipus unfathomable, as he was to

himself? How could psychoanalysis add to his passion? At its worst
psychoanalysis seems to make the play redundant, superseded by
its interpretation (there could be as many readings of the play as
there are people). But it is the Enlightenment Freud that always
pushes for consensus, that is willing a community of more or less
shared knowledge (which might now be called a psychoanalytic
training institute, or a group of apparently like-minded people). At
the end of the Oedipus plays the audience and the protagonists
come to some shared understanding of what has happened (mean-
ing requires accomplices). By the end we are all experts, though, in a
sense, nothing has been explained. Why would someone want to
have sex with their mother? What is curiosity? Where do the
important questions come from?
The psychoanalyst is an expert on the ways in which the patient
pretends to be an expert on himself; the ways, that is, in which he
gravitates towards consensus, to fitting in. The Enlightenment
Freud wants to tell us what we have in common; the post-Freudian
Freud, his collaborative antagonist, is the connoisseur of anomalies.
He shows us the whys and wherefores of denying difference, and
particularly one's difference from oneself. Dreams are his exemplary
objects - not theories or facts - because they are at once partially
intelligible and unsharable in their original form (other people only
know the story of our dream). And dreams cannot be measured.

12
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS: AN INTRODUCTION

III

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothing shows

through.
Paul Valery, Oeuvres II

The Enlightenment Freudian has two obvious areas of expertise. He

knows the range of possible blind spots, the cultural repertoire of
unacceptable and forbidden things, like incestuous desire and
violence. And he knows how and why people create and sustain
their blind spots, how they guarantee their ignorance. All the
defences that Freud and others have described - denial, repression,
splitting, projection, turning a blind eye, and so on - are made, of
course, out of prior acknowledgements - of dangers, or muddles
registered as threats. The question for the Enlightenment psycho-
analyst - the Socratic analyst - is. How does the patient's ignorance
work, and how come it is felt to be necessary? What is it deemed
better not to know, and who has decided that (someone may have
put the patient up to it)?

One problem for the patient is that the Enlightenment psycho-

analyst has already decided, broadly speaking, what the patient
thinks it is better not to know. Indeed, each psychoanalytic theorist,

starting with Freud, describes a set of essential terrors; that which, it

is assumed, people cannot bear to remember, experience, or know.

These essential terrors define what it is to be human; or what, in

order to be human, one feels obliged to exclude. Psychoanalytic

theory is a theory of the unbearable, of what one prefers not to
know. For Freud the unbearable is the castration born of incestuous
desire; for Jones it is Aphinisis, the death of desire; for Klein, the
tyranny of the death instinct; for Winnicott impingement and being
dropped; for Bion the impossibility of making links; for Lacan,
semiotic collapse, and so on. Either we are suffering from something
supposedly intrinsic to being human - incestuous desire, a death
instinct, dependence - or our earliest environment, our formative
relationships, have made our putative nature problematic for us.

Usually, nowadays, it is construed as a melee of both: nature and

13
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

nurture as mutally disfiguring, with ambivalence as Freud's cure for

the tyrannies of perfection.
But as each theorist offers us a new redescription of the unaccept-
able - of what we are suffering from, of what we have to fear - they
become, by the same token, the masters of our suffering. By
punctuating our unhappiness, they make it legible. Like religious or

political leaders, they tell us persuasive stories about where the

misery comes from, and hence, by implication, what we might do
about it. They want to change our (and their) relationship to the fear

they have formulated for us. The expert constructs the terror, and
then the terror makes the expert. If you are part of the solution, you
are part of the problem. Experts, in other words, can give us
descriptions that allow us to be unhappy in new ways.
In so far as there is a complicity between terrors and experts - and
how could there not be? - then the Enlightenment Freud is part of
the problem. (The famine's everywhere there's UNICEF', as
Frederick Seidel writes in his poem 'Recessional'.) But the Freud that
has given us the conceptual tools to dismantle the Enlightenment
project of efficient knowledge - the unconscious, the dream-work,
the transference - has also given us, those of us who are impressed
by his words, a double message: he tells us the truth about
ourselves,and then asks us why we believe him. He tells us a story
about ourselves and then he tells us a story about how come we are
such avid listeners to stories. By showing us the childhood origins of
belief - the terrors that prompt our need, as children, for experts - he
makes us wonder about the provenance of belief As though to
itself.

be human is to be addicted not to beliefs but to believing. The post-

Freudian psychoanalyst analyses the patient's will to believe.
The infant, of course, does not believe, or believe in, his parents;
he takes their authority, their nurture, for granted. ('Belief', Freud
wrote to Fleiss in 1897, '. . . has no counterpart in the unconscious.')
The Oedipal child, who needs his parents' love and protection,
cannot have a sexual relationship with his parents, but he can do the
next best thing - he can believe them. As every fan knows, credulity
is a sexual act; faith is a form of longing. From a psychoanalytic point
of view the question is not only, What is the expert - the parent, the

14
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS: AN INTRODUCTION

psychoanalyst, the star - saying? but. Why do we believe him, what

makes us?
Belief, as Freud shows, domesticates desire/ Experts keep us on
their best behaviour.

IV

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The
madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Freud's description of the unconscious suggests that we are lost in

thought, and yet people come for psychoanalysis to find out where,
or who, they are. The Enlightenment Freudian can help them with
their orienteering, but with the post-Freudian Freud they are likely

to be at cross purposes. Adults, after all, don't tend to go out with

the intention of getting lost (though it's not obvious why they don't).
Nor do people want to pay good money to realize how clueless they
are. Being all over the place, or being seen to be, is traditionally

considered to be something of a drawback. Symptoms, like insights

- pieces of self-knowledge - at least allow one to identify oneself, to

make 'I am the kind of person who . .
.' statements. But if, as Freud
suggests, to 'have' an unconscious is to be, or to make oneself
radically odd to oneself - to be always in and out of character - what
is the analyst supposed to be doing to (or for) his patients? To make
them more knowing, or enable them to tolerate, or take pleasure
from, their clouds of unknowing? Show them that they are afloat on
their ignorance, buoyant sometimes, or help them swim for shore?
'To improve society spend/more time with people you haven't/met',
John Cage advises. You can't help but do this, Freud says, because
the person one hasn't met is also always oneself.
For Freud, to be a person is to be a stranger to oneself - quite
literally, to be continually meeting oneself as though one was
somebody else ('The foreigner', Edmond Jabes writes, 'allows you to
be yourself by making a foreigner of you'). What is surprising is how
unsurprised we are by ourselves (we comfort ourselves by simulat-

15
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

ing repetitions). 'All the acts and manifestations which 1 notice in

myself, Freud writes in The Unconscious, 'and do not know how to

link up with the rest of my mental life must be judged as if they

belonged someone else.' 'As if' because, of course, they don't
to

belong to someone else; one has had to turn oneself into a stranger,
into another apparently unrecognizable person, to make one's life
psychically viable. Self-estrangement, Freud shows, protects us
from a threatening affinity with all we have tried to disown.
Everything that seems remote or bizarre is too close for comfort.
('What is experienced as uncanny', Freud writes in his paper on the
subject, 'can be traced back without exception to something familiar
that has been repressed.') Nothing that is human is alien, but
nothing that is human can do without the idea of the alien, to protect

itself.

For the Enlightenment Freud the project is one of retranslation; of

re-acquainting patients with themselves, of humanizing their gods.
The analyst is a reminder. The repressed unconscious may be an
uninvited guest, but the patient can learn inner hospitality. The
psychoanalyst is not, then, an expert on strangers - after all, what
would it be to be an expert on strangers? - but an expert on how and
why people turn themselves into strangers (metamorphosis is

another word for being on the run). Patients, in fact, could not be
more familiar with themselves. The analyst, like a good host, just
goes on making the introductions. This is not always a pleasant task
but it is not, necessarily, an impossible one. The repressed
unconscious is at least potentially knowable, along the lines of the
Englightenment principle that what we have made - laws, con-
stitutions, the repressed - we must know and can remake. Nothing a

person makes, including his character, is fixed. It is here that

psychoanalysis joins with its precursor, the nineteenth-century
European novel (Freud's ego being a fictional character like, say,
Stendhal's Julien Sorel).
But if one source of strangeness, in Freud's view, is the unaccept-
able - made strange, defamiliarized, as a defensive measure - the
other source, less amenable to psychoanalytic (or any other) descrip-
tion, is what might be called the unintelligible: whatever in our

16
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS! AN INTRODUCTION

experience does not seem subject to our sense-making; whatever

baffles, or inspires because it baffles, our powers of representation.
This other unconscious - that which is out of bounds, but not by law
(repression), like the fact of one's infancy, or the fact of one's
forthcoming death, or the future itself - is a way of describing both
the limits of what we can know and the areas of our lives in which
knowing, and the idea of expertise, may be inappropriate. The
unacceptable, to some extent, can be known; the unintelligible can
only be acknowledged. By transgressing, we find the forbidden;
there is no equivalent way of finding the other privacies. Another
way of saying this is that the art of psychoanalysis is knowing what
not to interpret. The risk is that the psychoanalyst won't know when
to leave the patient alone.

The psychoanalyst aims for the spoken, aims, as R. P. Blackmur

said of poetry, 'to add to the stock of available reality'. The
Enlightenment Freud and his patient are accumulating cultural
capital, insuring themselves against the future with insight. The

post-Freudian Freud and his patient are making a provisional

investment, gambling on uncertainty. Heir to both projects, the
contemporary analyst, like her patient, can never know what it is
possible to say, nor the consequences of that saying. What we are
asking for can be a surprise.

’7
 1

Authorities

Remaining serious is successful repression.

Sandor Ferenczi, Laughter

There has always been a resistance, at least among psychoanalysts

themselves, to thinking of their work as mind-reading or fortune-
telling. Despite the fact that most ordinary conversation is exactly
this, or perhaps because it is, psychoanalysts have wanted to
describe what they do as different, as rational, even - dealing with
the irrational but not dealing in it. ('On waking', Ferenczi writes
mockingly to Freud, 'one wants on no account to have thought
something quite nonsensical or illogical.') It was important to Freud
that psychoanalysis should not become a cult of the irrational. The
unconscious may be disreputable, but the psychoanalyst must not
be. And yet Freud's description of the unconscious was a threat to,

and a parody of, more respectable versions of professional

the
competence. If a psychoanalyst knows what's in the unconscious, or
knows how it works, she has a specific expertise. But if the
unconscious is what cannot be anticipated, how can there be experts
of the unknown? 'The weather', as Freud puts it in an early letter to

Ferenczi, his Fiungarian disciple, 'of course never comes from the
quarter one has been carefully observing.'
Located somewhere between literature and science, psychoanaly-
sis can begin to look like a legitimate and intelligible social practice -

not so much a mystery for initiates but a skill that can be learned,
with real rules and a body of knowledge. Like the so-called neurotic,
whose project is to be extremely normal, psychoanalysis has always
struggled to distance itself from supposedly discredited things like

religion, glamour, mysticism, radical politics, the paranormal, and

all the scapegoated 'alternative' therapies. Psychoanalysis, that is to

18
 AUTHORITIES

say, has used its discovery of the unconscious to legitimate itself.

This would once have been called an irony. Psychoanalysis as a

treatment may be about reclaiming the marginalized parts of
oneself, but psychoanalysis as a profession has always been resolu-
tely committed to the mainstream, which at the moment happens to
be science and various literary theories of narrative. So it is perhaps
not entirely surprising that psychoanalysis has been especially
dissmissive of - has, indeed, pathologized - what was once referred
to as the supernatural. From the extraordinary correspondence
between Freud and Ferenczi, which radically changes the way we
read psychoanalysis - letters give us the unofficial history of
psychoanalysis - it is and the unconscious were
clear that sexuality
the new, scientifically prestigious words for the occult, for that
which is beyond our capacity for knowledge, for the weird, un-
accountable effects people have on each other. In psychoanalysis the
supernatural returns as the erotic. It was Ferenczi, and Jung in a
different way, who had to keep reminding Freud of the limits of

scientific enquiry; that to rationalize the unconscious was an aim,

but also a betrayal, of psychoanalysis. When Ferenczi wrote to Freud
in 1911 that he 'considered the fight against occultism to be
premature', he was trying to keep alive something he saw as integral
to the psychoanalytic project - something that might be called
inexplicable human powers - and which Freud, in Ferenczi's view,
was too keen to disavow.
If the aim of a system is to create an outside where you can put the
things you don't want, then we have to look at what that system
disposes of - its rubbish - to understand it, to get a picture of how it

sees itself and wants to be seen. The proscribed vocabulary in

anybody's theory is as telling as the recommended vocabulary
(insouciance and recklessness, for example, are not psychoanalytic
terms in the way that trust and integration are). Freud had appar-
ently included sex and violence in the science of psychoanalysis, but
he balked phenomena. If sexuality was
at the investigation of occult

the unacceptable in psychoanalysis, then what kind of sexuality was

the occult, proscribed by the master of the forbidden himself? (One
answer, as we shall see, is homosexuality.) Ferenczi, as Freud wrote

19
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

in a foreword to a collection of his papers, was 'familiar to an extent

that few others are with all the difficulties of psychoanalytic
problems'. In the letters, unlike the theoretical papers, it is as though
Ferenczi is Freud's repressed unconscious - the prodigal son who
keeps coming back for more - wittingly and unwittingly drawing
Freud's attention to the implications of psychoanalytic theory that
Freud preferred to forget, partly because they were, inevitably,
connected to all the difficulties of his own problems. Intimacy
between people, phenomena, is fundamentally bewilder-
like occult

ing. Freud, as Ferenczi knew, was cautious about passion in his

personal life and about mysticism in his professional life. (Mysti-

cism, after all, is knowledge that by definition exempts itself from
legitimation.) If psychoanalysis, for Ferenczi, was a way of dispel-
ling the secrecy between people, it was also a way of having an
intimate relationship with Freud (Ferenczi did, of course, have two
brief analyses with Freud). But Freud, unlike Ferenczi, was a lover of
secrets, and believed that they should not be squandered, or
allowed become some spurious currency of intimacy. For Freud,
to

that is to say, psychoanalysis was also a tribute to the unspoken.

'Don't sacrifice too many of your secrets', he warns Ferenczi, 'out of
an excess of kindness.' The sacrificing of secrets was a virtual
definition of psychoanalysis, though it was not always clear which
gods were being propitiated.

II

Is it possible (?) to make friends with the unconscious?

Sandor Ferenczi, Notes and Fragments

Freud, Ferenczi had written in one of his early papers, 'had

succeeded in surprising a process ... in taking it in the midst of its

work, in flagrante, so to speak'. Dreaming was the process in

question; Ferenczi clearly liked the idea of Freud as the man who
found things out, the transgressor of privacy. But from a psycho-
analytic point of view that Ferenczi would never quite accept,
human beings were the animals that kept secrets (this was one of the

20
 AUTHORITIES

things Freud meant by the idea of the unconscious). Ferenczi always

wanted to get to the bottom of such things, so to speak. And the
secrets of sexuality that Freud had discovered were inextricably
$

linked, for him, with the mysteries of more traditional, folkloric

forms of magic. Of course a lot of 'artists and intellectuals', not to

mention ordinary people, at the turn of the century were interested
in what was then called, to give it scientific credibility, psychical

research. Freud himself had been made an honorary member of the

Society for Psychical Research in 1911, but he was wary, as his
correspondence with Ferenczi makes clear, of psychoanalysis being
associated with the fringes of science. He preferred to think of
psychoanalysis as a medical treatment rather than a seance. But
despite Freud's misgivings, Ferenczi went to visit a medium, Frau
Seidler, after their trip to America in 1909, with Freud's full

endorsement. He went 'with the intention', the editors of their

correspondence write calmly, 'of investigating parapsychological

phenomena', as if we might be suspicious of his real motives (as in,

Ferenczi bought pornography 'with the intention of investigating

erotic phenomena'). Immediately reporting the outcome enthusi-
astically to Freud, the intrepid conquistador of the other mysteries is

'shocked'. 'Keep quiet about it for the time being', Freud counsels
Ferenczi. In his next letter, written five days later, Freud has, as it

were, changed his mind: 'let us keep absolute silence about it . . .

should one now, as a result of this experience, commit oneself to

occultism? Certainly not; it is only a matter of thought transference.'

But what, then, is thought transference, and how does it work? The
vocabulary for one mysterious form of exchange merely replaces
another. And what has happened to the honesty (a key word in this

correspondence), the spirit of open scientific enquiry that Freud and

psychoanalysis had prided itself on? The psychoanalyst could
protect himself from sexuality, but he might not be able to resist the
contamination of the paranormal.
But Ferenczi, who planned a book on thought transference which
he never wrote, was beginning to discover something in his clinical

work that the peculiar practices of psychics helped him to think

about - something that it has taken psychoanalysts virtually until

21
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

now to fully appreciate (or rather, to face). Ferenczi was finding that
sometimes his own free-associations to the patient's material
seemed to be of a piece with what the patient was saying to him, as
though the analyst might be having some of the patient's (repressed)
thoughts for him - continuing them, as it were. The analyst
therefore became a medium, in a slightly different sense of the word,
for the thoughts and feelings the patient could not bear. The patient

could evoke in the analyst, as though by thought transference, the

disowned parts of himself. (It is, in fact, a common experience in
ordinary conversation: people speak each other's disowned voices.)
Parapsychological phenomena made crudely vivid, the fact that

there was a kind of hidden exchange of psychic states going on

between people, a black market of feelings that was not subject to

conscious control. And

was obvious to Ferenczi that if this was
it

true, then it was going to be a two-way traffic: it couldn't only be the

patient doing this to the analyst; it must also be the analyst doing it
to the patient. This made psychoanalysis a rather more reciprocal

venture than Freud's resolutely scientific, quasi-medical model

could allow. When two people speak to each other, they soon
become inextricable: words are contagious. As Freud and Ferenczi
went on speaking to each other, they needed to find theories about
what happens when people speak (and listen) to each other to
manage the intensity of the experience. It was as though Freud had
invented the psychoanalytic relationship as a refuge from intimacy -
a place it could be studied, a relationship about intimacy but not
'really' intimate itself - and Ferenczi was determinedly showing him
that there was no talk without intimacy or its refusal.

It is no accident that, as their relationship evolves in the years

covered by this correspondence, Freud and Ferenczi begin to write
about the connections between homosexuality and paranoia,
(between sameness and difference). In 1911 Freud published his
Schreber case (T am Schreber, nothing but Schreber,' Freud writes to
Ferenczi); and Ferenczi published On the Part Played by Homosexuality
in the Pathogenesis of Paranoia (1912) and his remarkable paper. The
Nosology of Male Homosexuality (1914). Towards the end of the
correspondence Freud published a provisional summation of all this

22
 AUTHORITIES

in Totem and Taboo which Ferenczi praises ingenuously Freud's

, in

'new and outstanding idea of transmission by means of unconscious

understanding', an idea that Ferenczi had been 'carrying' for Freud
for several years, an idea derived from parapsychology. As the
editors of their correspondence for these years put it, hopefully with
unconscious irony, 'Freud and Ferenczi did more work together
than has sometimes been acknowledged.' Theory, as psycho-
analysis shows, is always first and foremost local emotional politics.

'If psychoanalysis is a paranoia', Ferenczi writes jokingly to Freud,

'then I have already been successful in overcoming the stage of

persecution mania and replacing it with megalomania.'
If psychoanalysis is a paranoia, then it is, in the terms of its own
theory, a love between men. 'Paranoia', as Ferenczi wrote, more or
less echoing Freud, 'is perhaps nothing else at all but disguised
homosexuality.' There is something so unbearable about love for

one's own sex that it is turned into hatred, and the hatred is then
projected into other people and comes back from outside as
persecution. In fact Ferenczi believed thatmen adored women to
protect themselves from their love for men; so the men then hated
the women because they weren't men and the women felt
inadequate, unable to satisfy their men or themselves. quite 'I

seriously believe', Ferenczi wrote in The Nosology of Male Homosexu-

ality, 'that the men of today are obsessively heterosexual as the result
of this affective displacement; in order to free themselves from men,
they become the slaves of women.' But what is it in men that men are
so much on the run from? This was the question that Ferenczi
implicitly addressed to Freud, sometimes as theory, and sometimes
as a direct appeal to Freud for a different, less careful intimacy.
Despite Freud's commitment, in theory, to bisexuality - love, hate
and rivalry with both parents - it was more or less assumed in

psychoanalysis (and still is in some quarters) that if all goes well,

heterosexuality wins the day. For example, in psychoanalytic theory
love for the parent of the opposite sex is referred to as the positive
Oedipus complex and love for the parent of the same sex is called the
negative Oedipus complex. It is, in other words, quite clear what we
are supposed to be doing. But as Ferenczi intimates in his letters and

23
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS
• \
his 'scientific' papers, heterosexuality is, among other things, a form
of self-hatred - what is so distasteful about one's own sex that one
has, so exclusively, to desire the opposite one? The interesting link
that psychoanalysis had constructed between paranoia and homo-
sexuality revealed something even more disquieting which Freud
and Ferenczi could never quite formulate: that in psychoanalysis, at
least, heterosexuality was a form of redemption from a profound,

perhaps constitutive self-fear. In theory psychoanalysis promoted

the value, indeed the necessity, of love for both sexes. Unlike Freud,
Ferenczi wanted to try to live out - or act out, as psychoanalysts
would say disparagingly - the consequences of psychoanalytic
theory, and in part with Freud himself. Or, as the editor says in his
sensible Introduction to the first volume of their correspondence,
Ferenczi 'made little clear or defensive distinction between his
professional life and his private life'. The unconscious does not have
a professional life. Except, that is, in psychoanalysis.

Ferenczi proposed the new term 'ambisexuality' instead of the

term 'bisexuality' to stress the novelty of the psychoanalytic version

of this ancient idea. In his view it better described the child's actual
predicament: 'the child's psychical capacity for bestowing his erot-
ism, originally objectless, on either the male or the female sex, or on
both'. The translator's word 'bestow' sounds quaint now, but it

accurately captures the sense of desire as something conferred. For

the child, like the adult, desire is experienced as a gift: we privilege
people with our desire for them, though they don't always recognize
quitewhat an honour they are being given. As the letters show with
amazing candour, Ferenczi bestowed his remarkable child-like
capacity for intimacy on Freud, and Freud responded with a
wariness and a generosity no less passionate, although never quite
passionate or open enough for Ferenczi. 'You actually do feel best',

Ferenczi writes to Freud, as compliment and reproach, 'when you

can be independent of the whole world.' Inevitably both of them
were confronted, as in a psychoanalysis, with the question of what
they wanted from each other, which brought with it the question
that was to haunt psychoanalysis: Should wants be understood or
met? In Freud's view, psychoanalysis was defined as a treatment in

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 AUTHORITIES

which wants could be thought about and not pre-empted by being

gratified. In Ferenczi's version of psychoanalysis, to frustrate the

patient too much was to recreate in the treatment exactly the

childhood trauma that necessitated the treatment in the first place.

This issue of whether a want is something that can be satisfied or

whether in and of itself it spells the impossibility of satisfaction - the
necessary gap between desire and its object - was one of the many
contentions that bound Freud and Ferenczi together, and set the
terms for the future of psychoanalytic debate. Does desire, at its

best, mature into thought (and theory), or is it the other way round?
Their correspondence, like the theoretical work written between
1908 and 1914 (forty works by Freud and fifty-six by Ferenczi), is a
record of the inspiring turbulence they evoked in each other from
the beginning, in which issues of truth and honesty were bound up
with the apparently theoretical question of homosexuality; a record

of the feelings two men might have for each other (in the context of
other significant relationships). It is rare to be able to read such
theoretical love letters, a genre of course, traditionally associated
with fantasies of truth-telling.

Ill

Do not force feelings of any kind , least of all the feeling of

conviction.

Sandor Ferenczi, Notes and Fragments

For Ferenczi, seventeen years younger than Freud, and more

emotionally extravagant than Freud, psychoanalysis was useful as
a way of thinking about what he called his 'ideal of honesty'. 'Not

everything that is infantile should be abhorred,' he writes to

Freud in the early years of their relationship, 'for example the
child's urge for truth, which is only dammed up by false educa-
tional influences ... I still hold firmly to the conviction that it is

not honesty but superfluous secrecy that is abnormal' - an inti-

mation of the superfluous secrecy between Freud and himself. In

Ferenczi's view, the child is an instinctive truth-teller potentially

25
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

perverted by adult conspiracies. 'Many intelligent children', he

writes in an early paper ( Transitory Symptom Constructions during
the Analysis, 1912),

at the stage of repression marked by the latency period, before they have
gone through 'the great intimidation', regard adults as dangerous fools,
to whom one cannot tell the truth without running the risk of being
punished for it: and whose inconsistencies and follies have to be taken
into consideration. In this children are not so very wrong.

From the child's point of view, parents can be occult phenomena.

Children, and the adults they will become, suffer from their parents'
inability, or unwillingness, to acknowledge their truth. Adults may
not be able to answer the child's questions, but they can take them as
warranting consideration. In Ferenczi's view, the adults cannot be
trusted. But psychoanalysis itself might make us wonder. What is

the picture we have of ourselves that makes the idea of trust so

important? Modern stories about childhood - like psychoanalysis -
are riddled with superstitions about trust: as though trust was a
ground for truth, or that what we do with our words is trust them.
For Freud, of course, it wasn't that children told the truth, it was
that they desired their parents. So is desiring, as Ferenczi implies, a
way of telling the truth? Or is this belief in truth, at least in a

psychoanalytic context, a noble and innocent - noble because

innocent - cover story for the forbidden mess of desire? Freud
believed that children lived the truth about sex; Ferenczi believed
that children spoke the truth about truth. It was as if 'original virtue'
was being smuggled back into psychoanalysis - Rousseau returning
through the back door. Because if there is a Freudian unconscious,
what exactly is this truth that the child has an 'urge' for? 'Super-
fluous secrecy' could just be away of describing the repressed
unconscious of Freudian Man. What Ferenczi never quite spells out
is what the child wants from telling the so-called truth; that would be
the Freudian question. In so far as childhood, in Ferenczi's version,
is a state of submission, the fault lies fairly and squarely with the
parents, and children are virtually robbed of their intrinsically
problematic nature.

26
 AUTHORITIES

At its best Ferenczi's work is saying something that has come to

seem very important: children grow by being listened to; adults are
frightened of listening to children because of what they might feel as
a consequence; some secrets in the family turn children into

sleepwalkers; parents are extraordinary to children. But at its worst

children are burdened with a quasi-oracular status that they cannot
make sense of, or bear responsibility for. Fantasies of truth, after all,

are adult constructions, something children learn from the adult

world. Children are not naturally anything, other than the adult's
construction of their nature. But these issues, as discussed by Freud
and Ferenczi, are part of the origins of the contemporary debate
about child sexual abuse. Ferenczi's 'ideal of honesty', which is a

recurrent theme in these letters, alerted psychoanalysts to the

senses in which interpretation can be a refusal to listen, and to the
fact that believing the patient, which means believing in the patient,

is integral to the successful process of analysis and, more impor-

tantly, is a fundamental form of kindness. 'The admission of the

analyst's error', Ferenczi noted in his essential paper of 1933,
'Confusion of Tongues', 'produced confidence in his patient'.
Concealing shame sabotages intimacy.
But in what sense does believing what people say entail agreeing
with them, and how do know if I've believed what someone says to
I

me? If I hear something they don't hear in what they say, am then I

disbelieving them? Freud, in a way that Ferenczi could not always

acknowledge, ineluctably complicated these notions of truth and
belief. In fact one of the implications of Freudian theory was that the
idea of truth, as some consensual superordinate idol - as something
around which we might all agree - could be a coercive attempt to
deny differences. Ferenczi, at various points in this correspondence,
suggests that psychoanalysis, with its promise of free speech, might
itself be a unifying force.
Freud, however, experienced his younger colleague's ideal of
honesty as the more complicated appeal that it in fact was. Charac-
teristically, Freud picked up the demand in Ferenczi's often
expressed wish for openness and honesty. 'Just think what it would
mean', Ferenczi wrote to Freud in 1910, 'if one could tell everyone the

27
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

truth, one's father, teacher, neighbour, and even the king. All
imposed authority would go to the devil - what is rightful
fabricated,
would remain natural.' Ferenczi understood like nobody else, even
Freud perhaps, the revolutionary potential of psychoanalysis. He
knew that people speaking differently to each other changes the
world (it is noticeable, though, that the people he wants to speak the
truth to, in so far as they are explicitly gendered, are men). Ferenczi
doesn't tell us why or how being able to tell everyone the truth -
whatever one conceives that to be - would destroy those forms of
oppressive authority. But it is as if Freud, in his reply to this letter,

hears this as a wish, which must also have been, for freer talk
it

between the two of them. Freud was certainly, as Ferenczi was quick
to tell him, father, teacher, and king to him. 'I feel myself to be a

match for anything', Freud replies cannily, 'and approve of the

overcoming of my homosexuality, with the result being greater
independence.' For Freud, freedom, at least consciously, was in
overcoming, silencing his homosexual self; for Ferenczi, indepen-
dence would be in its free expression. Freud sensed, I think, that
Ferenczi's fantasy of honesty, of people saying anything and
everything to each other, was also a fantasy of symbiosis, of there
being no differences between people (if we tell each other every-
thing, it is as though we never leave each other out). And yet, in

psychoanalytic treatment, one can begin to understand how speak-

ing freely has become a mortal danger for someone. Saying what-
ever comes into one's mind was something Freud believed one
should do in analysis; Ferenczi wanted the psychoanalytic relation-
ship to be the paradigm for social relations. But it would have to be a
version of psychoanalysis in which the analyst could tell the patient
whatever was on his mind as well. Mutual interpretation, and
mutual free-association. No kings.
What was homosexuality for Freud, we are obliged to wonder
now, if he needed to 'overcome' it to sustain his independence? It

often seems as though Freud experiences Ferenczi, in their corre-

spondence, at least, as both the son trying to seduce the father and
the son trying to turn the father into a mother. Unsubtly, Ferenczi
refers in a letter to Jung's wife talking of Freud's 'antipathy toward

28
 AUTHORITIES

giving completely of yourself as a friend'. Was Freud anxious about

intimacy, as Ferenczi often implies in this correspondence, or was it
that Ferenczi couldn't tolerate the differences between them -
differences of generation and temperament, different ways of
loving? And what was the self imagined to be if it could be given
completely (the self as gift is integral to modern stories about the
self)? Difference or defensiveness has always been a dilemma that

psychoanalysis has been unable to deal with. Is the patient different

from the analyst's description of him, or merely resistant to the
analyst's interpretation? And who is in a position to decide? If one
way was
of talking about these perplexing issues, albeit guardedly,
to theorize about homosexuality, the other less contentious way was

to talk about the women in their lives. Or rather, for the younger

man to talk to Freud about the women in their lives. Mrs Freud was
another of Freud's secrets.
As in all Freud's correspondence, the men tend to flex their
psychoanalytic muscles over the women.
The psychoanalytic
'movement' is always an invigoratingly fraught subject around
which they can divide and bond, but it is as though they have the
women in common, as a problem they can huddle over. Managing
the women - Freud, for example, refers in a letter to Lou Andreas-
Salome as 'a woman of dangerous intelligence' - and the so-called
heretics kept Freud's psychoanalytic group together. The drama of
Freud's and Ferenczi's relationship in their correspondence is fed by
the well-known drama of Jung's dissension, and the less notorious

drama of Ferenczi's love affair with an older woman, Gizella, his

mistress and future wife, and her daughter Elma, who was
Ferenczi's, and later Freud's, analysand. Ferenczi was briefly

engaged to Elma, who eventually married someone else. Jung, as

Freud's and Ferenczi's letters show, was clearly scapegoated as an
occultist and anti-semite; which, whether he was both those things
or not, says something about what the psychoanalytic group used
him for. And Ferenczi's professional reputation was to be
retrospectively disparaged because of his supposed emotional and
erotic instability. When it came to radically dissenting views, and

unusual ways of living, the psychoanalytic group - not for the last

29
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

time - showed itself to be expert at character assassination. The

unconscious was not allowed to be a counter-culture. It had to be
assimilated.
In their early letters, we see Ferenczi trying to cure himself of
Freud, but sustain his relationship with him. Jung, Ferenczi writes
to Freud in 1912, 'identifies confession with psychoanalysis and
evidently doesn't know that the confession of sins is the lesser task
of psychoanalytic therapy: the greater one is the demolition of the father
imago, which is completely absent in confession.' Ferenczi realized
that the future of psychoanalysis depended upon analysts under-
standing their relationship with - their transference to - Freud
himself. (People sometimes kill fathers when they can't do anything
else with them.) Freud, after all, had done a very paradoxical thing:
he had invented a form of authority, the science of psychoanalysis,
as a treatment that depended on demolishing forms of authority. It

was to be a double bind that drove people mad - either crazily

conformist or crazily bizarre. 'I had to observe not without pain',
Ferenczi writes to Freud after their holiday together in 1914, 'that my
position with respect to you, specifically, is still not completely
natural, and that your presence arouses inhibitions of various kinds
inme that influence, and at times almost paralyse, my actions and
even my thinking.' It takes two to create this kind of unease.
Freud treats Ferenczi, in their correspondence, as though Ferenczi
was someone who was always prone to over-react. And yet Freud's
Studies in Hysteria had shown the senses in which it was impossible
for a person to over-react. This, indeed, was one of the radical things
about Freud's work: it legitimated his patient's responses to their
predicaments by making them intelligible. When Freud asserted, in
his New Introductory Lectures, that the patient's symptoms were his
sexual life, he was speaking up for the inventiveness, the resource-

fulness of his patient's sexuality; that we are at our most articulate in

our sexuality, because we are at our most puzzling. Ferenczi, a bit
like one of the so-called hysterics that Freud treated, made the
difficult demands on psychoanalysis and its discoverer that would
be the source of its future what would psychoana-
vitality. (After all,

lysis do without the symptoms it can't cure?) How could two people

30
 AUTHORITIES

sit in a room together talking and go on believing that one was more
authoritative than the other? Why would a person want to under-
stand someone, or even cure them, rather than have sex with them?
In what sense are psychoanalytic techniques complicit with the
traumas they were invented to treat? ('A neglected motive for
"identification" is imitation as a contemptuous grimace', Ferenczi
notes towards the end of his life.) What happens to our aspirations
to competence - our fantasies of perfection - if we begin to live as

though there is an unconscious? How could one protect a person's

best interests by being unfriendly to them? Psychoanalytic theory,
as Ferenczi knew, made these questions unavoidable. Psychoanaly-
tic institutions tended to rule them out of court.
As Ferenczi knew, psychoanalytic trainings are always potentially
paralysed - indeed, judging by their piety, terrorized - by their
excessive regard for the older generations. Ferenczi saw clearly the

ways which psychoanalysis could be used to reinforce, to secure

in

the difference between the generations, and how it could also be

used to sabotage the mystique of that same generational difference.
Psychoanalysis must be one of the last bastions of the spurious belief
that wisdom necessarily comes with age (the most cursory contact
with any respectable psychoanalytic training institution would
quickly disabuse one of this). Psychoanalysis, as Freud's theory
suggests, is everything to do with character and little to do with
experience. Analysing a transference should spell the death of un-
critical fantasies of expertise.

Ferenczi, Jones wrote in his biography of Freud,

had bold imagination which readily carried him beyond the confines of
a
the known. His honest and candid nature was such that he was
extraordinarily prone to making slips of the tongue or other 'sympto-
matic actions' in a self-revealing fashion, which he would then gaily
analyse in public. Among us he was called on this account the 'King of
the Parapractics'.

Is a successfully analysed person - a good person, as it were -

someone, like Ferenczi, 'extraordinarily prone to making slips of the

tongue', or someone more like Freud who, by all accounts, made

relatively few of the slips he gave his name to? Jones's short-lived

31
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

paean of praise for his former analyst (he was to be only too ready to
pathologize Ferenczi when he became 'difficult') confronts us with a
question that goes to the heart of psychoanalysis and its history: is

authority a capacity formaking mistakes, or a will to concealment?

In a profession whose moralism and claims to truth are rightly under

suspicion, Ferenczi's lived life, and lived writing, offers us some-

thing too rare in psychoanalysis: the fluency of disorder, the
inspirations of error. The spirit of psychoanalysis has not been
resilient - but then, conviction often springs from the letter of the

law. We need a new pantheon of bunglers. Psychoanalysis, at least,

puts the slapstick back into our ideals.
Ferenczi exposed the defensive function of professionalism in
psychoanalysis, and, by implication, the posturings of any pro-
fessional identity unable to acknowledge (or enjoy) what it is

organized to exclude. The reason, Ferenczi writes in his Clinical

Diary, that he experimented with mutual analysis - being analysed,

in turn, by his patients - was 'an awareness of an emotional
resistance or, more accurately, of the obtuseness of the analyst'.
Ferenczi, that is to say, was interested in the fact that he was
frightened of his patients. Most psychoanalytic theory and tech-
nique conceals the simple fact that analysts are often frightened of
their patients. By taking his own distinctive risks with psycho-
analysis, Ferenczi was showing us that this was nothing to be
ashamed of. Rather, it was a shame, and therefore worth thinking
about.

32
 2 $

Symptoms
i

What is the rule that says pain has a correlation

Rachel Wetzsteon, Parables of Flight

People come for psychoanalysis - or choose someone to have a

conversation with - when they find that they can no longer keep a
secret. What was once private has become, in spite of oneself,
unbearable; has become a means of recruitment, a message. A
symptom is always the breaking of a confidence. Suffering, like

desire, is the secret we may not be able to keep. Because it has the
potential to rupture our fantasies of self-sufficiency, suffering can be
longed for, and feared, as a medium for legitimate contact and
exchange between people. Pain makes us believe that other people
have something we need. When we suffer first, as children, we seek
people out; and our wish to communicate, and our will to believe in

comfort, is urgent. But as every parent - and every child - knows,

what is being asked for is not always clear. The risk of having a need
met - which confirms one's utter dependence (and potential envy of
the person who can satisfy us) - is as great as the risk of misrecog-
nition. If there is such a thing as help - a word which has always
covered a multitude of sins, a word that is often the nice term for
sado-masochism - makes us wonder in what sense a need is
it

something that can be known; what is it to want something

(anything) from someone else? Because we can't help doing it, we
can't help not noticing what we are doing.
Suffering, like desire, turns privacy into secrecy. From a psycho-
analytic point of view a symptom way of asking for
is a (secret)

something (forbidden). This is what Freud meant when he wrote

that the patient's symptoms were his sexual life. A symptom is the
sign of a wish to make something known, but by disguising it - at

33
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS
- \

once a demand and an invitation. Or rather two demands: a demand

to be accurately translated, or recognized - the wish that the object

of one's desire gets the joke, realizes, say, that you keep blinking
because you want to look at her; and a demand for satisfaction.

Because desire is always, in part, constituted by the forbidden, every

wish is ambivalent, its own best enemy. In this psychoanalytic

picture we can't help but communicate, and we can't help but be

baffled by each other. We always know too much and too little;
we're always, in the words of the song, the first to know and the last
to find out.

So Freud presented his patients - and his readers - with two

useful paradoxes. Firstly, you can only tell yourself a secret by telling
someone else. And secondly, people are only ever as mad (unintel-
ligible) as other people are deaf (unable, or unwilling, to listen). It's

not only beauty that is the beginning of terror, it's also listening. The
psychoanalyst is paid not to talk too much, because talking is a good
way of not listening. Being listened to -making one's presence felt
through one's words, and through one's body which is making the
words - at its best, restores one's appetite to talk. Symptoms - when
the body takes over from the words - are a change of currency.
But what kind of expert, then, is the psychoanalyst? What, if
anything, does he know that the patient or his family don't know?
(Perhaps he is an expert on exchange rates.) If a family brings their
child to see me, I can make available to them my knowledge of child
development, my clinical experience of child and family therapy
(informed by an array of theory), my willingness to listen, and my
moral sense of how children and families should live. I might think
of myself as something of an expert on children, or even on life. Or I

might think of myself - mindful, in so far as I can be, of the potential

for mystification, for covert seductions - as someone enabling the
family to learn their own language. Attacks of panic, for example,
look different when seen in the context of a trans-generational
history of relationships to states of excitement in the family,
compared to how they look from a psychoanalytic point of view. The
psychoanalyst might assume that he is speaking a common langu-
age - call it, psychoanalytic interpretation - a form of Standard

34
 SYMPTOMS

English, whereas the family, like all families, has its own idiolect
(think of family jokes). Psychoanalytic theory, in other words, is

peculiarly adept at decontextualizing the lives it seems to explain (it

is worth asking of any theory. What does it need to get rid of in order
to work?). Psychoanalysts run the risk of believing that there is a
King's English of the psyche and everybody is, or should be,
speaking it. After all, why should everyone have to believe, or be
assumed to really believe, that sexuality is an essential perplexity?
(The fact that I can't imagine that it isn't is integral to the problem.)
Who has met everyone? The analyst can be useful as someone who
can say something at once odd and pertinent (which is what the
patient does all the time without noticing). Hearing things that
belong to the patient, he can suggest how they belong, which stories
they could be part of. But psychoanalysts, like everyone else, have
their favourite The psychoanalysts who have come to
stories.

believe them, or find them useful, learnt their relationship to stories

- to doing things with words - in their own families.
The psychoanalyst, in other words, has a dilemma that the
training institutions obscure by only teaching psychoanalytic texts
(psychoanalysis, as Freud acknowledged, doesn't know anything
that literature doesn't know). Either the psychoanalyst thinks he
knows the best stories, and therefore should convince his patients of
awake to the uses of fictions, he thinks of himself
their viability; or,
as an expert listener, someone who can bear and process what is
called up in him when people talk about their urgent preoccupations
and predicaments; someone who, by definition, traffics in the
provisional and doesn't need to be believed; someone for whom
coercing assent is always the problem (madness, Winnicott once
said, is the need to be believed): someone unseduced by the idea
that fanaticism is passion.

35
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS
* V

II

He must be distanced from the world if he wants to get closer to

it .. .

Maurice Blanchot, Adolphe, or the Misfortune of True Feelings

In the light of all this I want to describe from what is, broadly
speaking, an object-relations point of view, the relationship between
the use and the meaning of a symptom: the eczema of a seven-year-
old boy. This approach brings with it three questions, though others
follow on from them. What kind of person does the patient use the
symptom to construct as the recipient of its message? What kind of
relationships does this entail? And what is the project of the
symptom, what kind of world does it make?
Of course, psychosomatic symptoms such as this focus the
familiar and far-reaching dilemma of what words can do to bodies. It
is the psychoanalytic wish that words can lure bodies back to words;

we don't, for example, tend to describe psychosomatic symptoms as

simply other ways of thinking, but as failures of thought. (We could
think of certain parts of the body - the skin, the genitals and the
other orifices - as well suited to thinking specific things through.)
But there is a virtual consensus, at least in psychoanalysis, that, as
Nina Coltart has written, mind has lodged on a psychotic
'part of the

island on the body . . . we have to ask what is the unthinkable

content . . . How do we build a bridge which really holds over the
secret area of the body-mind divide?' It is always worth wondering,
as a prelude to a case-presentation such as this, what picture we
have of what words can do to someone's body, of how they work
inside [Link] conversely, what bodily symptoms - the frenzy of a
boy scratching his body - can do to our own words and bodies. Can
one body stop another body thinking and saying specific things?
Indeed, relationships are often sought out to make certain thoughts
and feelings impossible (a symptom is always a rule by which the
object must abide). Eczema gets under people's skin.
So I want to describe, in Winnicott's terms, the kind of environ-

ment - the 'nuisance-value' - the child's symptom created in the

36
 SYMPTOMS
family and in the treatment - the way his scratching punctuated the
conversation, and what kind of punctuation it was. (In retrospect I
think 'orchestrate' may be more accurate than 'punctuate'.) So from
this point of view the symptom is a mostly unconscious attempt -
exploiting a somatic predisposition - to create a certain kind of
environment. In cases of earliest onset we cannot easily say that this
is their intention so much as their consequence; though by the logic
of secondary gain - the pleasure accruing from the symptom that
masks the pain that prompted it - consequences become part of
intentions. I was told, for example, in the referral letter from the
paediatrician that his mother complained that Tom scratched excess-
ively with the result that more often than not she had to push him
out of her bedroom and make him sleep in the living room. His
symptom gets him to another place, and assumes a paternal
function (it separates him from his mother, which is not only, of
course, a paternal function); it was also significant, as I found out,
that she had also made his father leave. Through his symptom he
was in a double identification with his father: the father who
prohibits the son access to the mother, and the father who is
prohibited access to the mother. Rage, as we know, is often a solvent
for confusion. But symptoms have a lot of psychic work to do.

The referral letter from the paediatrician told me the following.

That Tom had first developed eczema as a toddler, and then again
about six months before his father left, and he had had it ever since.
Tom was being 'teased, bullied and sworn at at school, and was
beginning to stop going to school, which, previous to the eczema, he
had enjoyed'. His recent two-week hospitalization - in which his

mother had not stayed with him - 'had an excellent effect, his skin
was in extremely good condition and he seemed happier on
discharge'. The paediatrician also mentioned that Tom's mother had
asked him to support her request for rehousing because, in her view,
'the area is making him scratch'. Clearly both mother and son were
trying to get away from - to evacuate - something experienced as
debilitating. On arrival in hospital Tom had apparently been 'very
tearful and said he felt his mother did not want him'. At every stage
of separation - but not of rupture - this is both a wish and a fear. Of

37
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

course the point at which the family requests something from

outside the family is always revealing - as though it is assumed there
is something the family itself does not have the resources to process.

In the first interview Tom came with his mother and his mother's
mother. He was a neat and timid little boy with a slightly cheeky look
on his face. Mother told me that Tom's eczema was much better but

that they were all concerned with their poor housing conditions -
they only had one bedroom, it was noisy, and above all the starlings
'kept banging at the window like they want to get in'. Once Mother
started talking about the starlings Tom started frantically scratching
his arms for the up until then he had been, as say, a rather
first time; I

demure, shy but composed little boy listening to his mother's story
dutifully, as though it was an important lecture. He was, she told

me, terrified of the starlings. I asked Tom if the starlings felt left out.
He stopped scratching as though the question had concentrated
him, and said, 'No . . . they're pretending . . . they like being
outside really.' I said, 'Perhaps they are worried you'll forget about
them?' And he agreed and started furiously scratching. I asked him if

it was the question or his answer that made him scratch. He

shrugged his shoulders despondently and said, 'The answer', and I

suddenly felt a great pull of sadness. I said, 'Sometimes boys are

worried that their mums them and sometimes they wish
will forget

their mums would forget them.' He giggled, as though had told him I

a rude joke; at which point his mother, who had been listening

attentively, intervened to say that Tom was not like a child, and that,
just as her mother was her best friend, she was Tom's best friend. I

asked what Tom would have to do when he wanted to be treated like

a child. She replied by telling me that she wondered whether his
eczema was a way of 'getting attention'; that there were times when
she was talking to friends, and particularly to her boyfriend, when
he would feel left out and start scratching. (When people are
described as attention-seeking - attention is a good thing to be in
search of - it is always worth wondering what, in themselves, needs
attending to.) I asked what it felt like he was saying when he did this
and she said that he 'needed her'. I wondered whether this
sometimes suited her and she grinned in agreement.

38
 SYMPTOMS

I suggested that they might both be in a muddle; they weren't sure

whether they wanted to be together all the time or apart all the time.
Tom once again began scratching, and said in a hushed tone.
Together, together.' I suggested that the eczema made her look at
him, but made her unable to do anything for him . . . but before I

could finish my little lecture she interrupted with a kind of relish of

disgust, 'But it's revolting!' Prompted by something, I immediately
asked how Tom's dad fitted into the picture. And Mother said in a
sad, defeated, bitter kind of voice that his dad was a 'revolting' man
who she had had to 'kick out' two years ago. asked what was
I

revolting about him - at which point Tom started scratching - and

Mother want to say. I wondered whether Tom was
said she didn't
holding on to his father by making himself revolting. Tom, coming
to life, stopped scratching and shouted 'No!' and told me his dad

was a pig and he never thought about him and never would. said I

that perhaps everyone in the family felt that they had to agree that
his dad was a bad man. This was greeted with a dead silence; there

was a great deal of anxiety in the room and quite quickly we found
ourselves talking about their housing problem.
1 did, of course, take this seriously, and on their own terms. I told

them I regretted that I could do nothing about their housing, and

therefore that what 1 could do for them was limited. But once
everyone's defences had settled down, I asked by way of conclusion
- noticing that Tom was
and had had enough - whether
tired

anyone else had eczema in the family, at which point Grandmother

told me the story of Mother's eczema: she had been a very clingy
child who had got eczema just before puberty. Not surprisingly, this
story woke Tom up a bit, though understood that he had heard it
I

before on several occasions. I asked Mother how she had got rid of it.
And she said, with some pleasure, 'I cured myself when realized I I

wanted to show people my arms.' I said, 'When you wanted other

people, apart from the family, to be interested in you?' She agreed
with this and then she and her mother told me, with a good deal of

affection, what a 'wild girl' she had been as an adolescent. So I said,

'Perhaps in your family when people feel tempted to explore the

world outside the family they get eczema?' This clearly interested all

39
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

of them, and Tom was manifestly calmer. I said that I thought they
had all been doing work looking
a lot of after each other but perhaps
we needed to understand what it was that they needed to protect

each other from. (People in families look after each other with their
symptoms.) We agreed to have one more family meeting with a view
to offering Tom individual psychotherapy.
They arrived promptly for the next session and began by saying
that Tom's eczema was continuing to improve. After this there was
a pause and Mother said that there was something that she ought to
tell me that our last session had 'made her think about'; indeed she

had been 'depressed' last week and could hardly think of anything
else. This confession was in fact the history of her early relationship

with Tom. She told me that Tom was not a premature baby but had
spent the first few weeks of his life in an incubator. His mother,
who was very young (fifteen) and felt 'very inexperienced', was left
alone in the maternity ward, 'the only mother without a baby'.
After this terrible separation she had not been eager to hold Tom; it
was as though, she said, they had 'missed a stage'. She had never
felt properly close to him and once she took him home her mother

did most of the looking after. She still lived with her mother; her
father had left just before she got pregnant and the father of her
child lived nearby with his parents. He was clearly involved with
and loved his son, but the couple's relationship was always stormy.
It sounded as though Mother had brought Tom home, given him to

her mother - by whom he had been very well loved - and in

considerable confusion and distress resumed her 'wild' adoles-
cence. It was a palpably desolate story. I said, 'So you and Tom
have had to find a way of getting to know each other?' She agreed
and said that Tom had first begun to get eczema when he was a
toddler and began to 'love danger'. She described several incidents
of Tom wandering off when she was shopping or exploring things
he knew were dangerous like electric sockets. Once he started
taking risks and getting eczema, she 'couldn't stop thinking about
him'. I said, 'It sounds him when he was born and then
like you lost

when he started getting lost you found him again; but finding him
released so much love in you that he needed to protect himself a bit

40
 SYMPTOMS

with eczema.' This clearly made sense to her and she said, 'Yes, it's

like armour.' Throughout all this Tom had been drawing a house on
the floor and listening intently. This seemed to be the main work of
the session.
When Tom had discovered new bits of independence and
autonomy in himself his mother had started to bond with him as
though he were a new baby. But then his mother's delayed - or
deferred - finding of Tom made what felt like an overwhelming
demand on him. His eczemetic 'armour' functioned as a particular
kind of boundary between them at a time when Tom would have
been waking up to three-person relationships. But like all

symptoms, from a psychoanalytic perspective, was profoundly

it

over-determined (symptoms are opportunists: they do all the work

they can). His mother's extreme concern mobilized a self-protective
rage that was turned against himself. At each new stage of fresh
curiosity about the world Tom got eczema partly, perhaps, to
reassure his mother that the world was a dangerous place and
therefore he needed her and could not do without her, at a time
when she might be, as she was after his birth, feeling depleted and
redundant. The eczema mobilizes her love and concern but sets - or
repeats - the limits of her capacity to modify his pain. It is interesting
that when people have eczema they don't invite someone else to
scratch it for them.
But it is also important to remember that at a later date Tom had
actually witnessed his mother rejecting a man; she had, as the family
story went, 'kicked out' his father, soon after he had moved in with
them, because he was 'revolting'. And Mother was unable to speak
the full provenance of this crucial word (at least to me). We can,
therefore, reconstruct a possible, unavoidably tentative story. We
can imagine Tom perhaps registering a very early experience of

discontinuity - of being 'dropped' in Winnicott's language - but this

was mostly compensated for by the hospital and his grandmother,
who constituted a sufficient holding environment, to which Mother
was some kind of adjunct. But he is nevertheless left with what we
must call, for want of a better language, a 'memory-trace' that
equates separation and independence with rupture. Somewhere in

4i
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

himself he believes (which is also the wrong word) to an excessive

degree that he can neither be contained nor contain himself in his

own skin. So risks are taken, almost compulsively, to test the

environment, the environment of his skin and the world beyond his
skin. Both to find out if they are different, and to find out who or
what is there for him and what they are like. For example, can he be
torn up by his own rage? How does the immediate environment
read his eczema, what kind of invitation does his family experience it

as? What makes them disappear and what do they return for? And
he can, retrospectively, give meaning to this early rupture by
transposing the separation of his parents back on to it - reading a
pre-Oedipal experience Oedipally (which may be all anyone ever
does anyway).
For Tom, at an Oedipal level men are rejected because they are
if

revolting, then in order to be a man (like your father) you have to be

revolting; if you are revolting, your mother rejects you. By the
unconscious logic of identification, this must then suggest to the

child that what is revolting about him is his maleness. It will, I hope,
be obvious by now that Tom was in a very complicated predicament.
At the very end of what was an upsetting session, said that Tom I

was wondering what kind of man he wanted to be. And for the first
time in the session he began to scratch himself again, albeit quite
gently. I suggested that, though Tom was obviously doing well - his
skin was much improved, he was enjoying being back at school, and
he had a new best friend - we should meet for a few individual
sessions; to which Tom was very agreeable.
I would like, by way of conclusion, to say something about the

first session of individual psychotherapy. We met six times and the

therapy consolidated the work begun by the 'crisis' hospitalization.
Broadly speaking, imaginative elaboration of the father made rage
against the mother (and the father) more tolerable. was as though
It

Tom, once he could allow himself to stop propping up Mother's

version of his father, acquired more confidence in Mother's resi-

lience, her capacity to metabolize the intensity of his feelings. He

became, in Mother's words, 'more impossible', less compliant as his
eczema cleared up. And during the six weeks in which I was seeing

42
 SYMPTOMS

him. Mother found a boyfriend, and moved out of her mother's

house to live with a friend.
When Tom arrived for the first session he went eagerly to the
drawing materials and started drawing a 'knight in armour'; I

remembered with him that his mother had described his eczema as
armour. He ignored this and went on drawing, very absorbed. We
sat in silence for was
about twenty minutes while he did this and I

struck that he was drawing armour at the same time as making me

feel that I would be violating his concentration if I was to start

talking. We were definitely there together; there was a boundary

between us but not an obstacle.

On completing this striking drawing, he stared at it as though he
were looking in the mirror, with a kind of intense, blank curiosity. I

asked him what happens when the knight takes his armour off. He
said, 'People come and see him . . . and they bark.' I said, 'That

sounds like a dream,' and he told me he once had a dream in which a

man took off his armour and dogs - 'which he thought were his
friends' - came up and bit him. I said. That sounds frightening,' and
he replied, 'No, because I woke up.' I said, 'You can't eat if you don't
bite,' and he smiled and made growling lion noises. I said, 'Perhaps

when you scratch you're scratching those hungry dogs?' He said,

'Yes, and stop talking.' He then started looking round the room, as
though for something else to do, and said, 'Have you got any glue?' I

said, 'Yes, I think so.' And he said, becoming whimsical in a light-

hearted way I hadn't seen before, 'I think so, I think so,' in a kind of
half-mocking imitation of me, then he paused and said, 'What's
thinking?' I said, 'What is it for you?' and he replied very intently, 'I

asked first!' I said, 'It's trying to remember what you want.' And he
said, T want to fly' - he said it with all the relish of imagined
potency. It seems, in retrospect, an interesting transition: a demand
for glue, through a question about thinking, which intrigued and
surprised me, to a wish to fly.

43
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

III

When ive make life difficult for our parents, he said, we make
something of ourselves.
Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence

If a child has a fantasy that his mother controls his body, or a fantasy

that she doesn't, it may be reassuring to find a symptom like

eczema, that continually informs you about the limits of your

mother's words: they do not stop the scratching. Since most children
suffer from an excess of attributed meaning from parents and other
adults (including analysts), an unreachable psychosomatic
symptom can be a paradoxical area of privacy: a part of the self that

defies intrusion while keeping you in contact with the people you
need. And this fits, I think, with what is, developmentally, a central
paradox for the child (though its repetition during adolescence is

often more vivid): a good-enough environment can only be con-

stituted by putting it at risk (like a good-enough theory). A
psychosomatic symptom like eczema tests the integrity of the body
and the family. A skin is a place in which and through which risks
can be taken. The child, every so often - at points of growth - has to
test the environment; one might say, after Anzieu's description of
'the skin ego', the child has to test the skin of the self and the family
in the quest for resilience and permeability. 'It is a healthy thing',

Winnicott writes, 'for a baby to get to know the full extent of his
rage ... if a baby cries in a state of rage and feels as if he has
destroyed everyone and everything, and yet the people round him
remain calm and unhurt, this experience greatly strengthens his
ability to see what he feels to be true is not necessarily real.' If one of
the aims of psychoanalysis is to increase the repertoire of possibil-

exchange - to enable the patient to forget himself, to freely

ities for

associate - then we have to work out for each symptom (which is

always over-determined; it has more than one purpose, serves many
masters), and for each individual (whose complexity always eludes
us, and him), which forms of exchange are being averted. And what
is the catastrophe that these forms of exchange seem to invite? Or,

44
 SYMPTOMS

to put it another way, one is always analysing how a person

organizes their life around a sense of entitlement: the titles given,
that is to say, to the entitled self (greedy, selfish, ruthless, generous,

arrogant, anarchic, dependent, envious, promising, inspired, etc.).

However painful or pleasurable themselves, symptoms are always a

self-cure for terror and ecstasy, ways of dosing the intensity of what
people feel for, and want from, each other. Realizing, as psychoana-
lysis does, that symptoms are a form of cure - local anaesthetics, as it
were - might make us wonder what kind of symptom the cure of
psychoanalysis is. The aim of psychoanalysis, after all, is not to cure
people of their conflicts but to find ways of living them more keenly.
Writing of William James's pragmatism, Frank Lentricchia sug-
gests that James is always asking, in his writing, 'Does the world rise

or fall in value when any particular belief is let loose in the world?'
This is the question the patient is asking with his symptoms - which
are always beliefs, states of conviction about the self - and that we
should ask of the theories that come to meet them. It is not that the
analyst must abrogate his theories - how could he? - but he must
assume they also have a defensive function. He must be alert to
what exactly he uses them not to hear. The risk of psychoanalytic
theories, of psychoanalytic expertise, is that it won't even meet the
patient half-way. The psychoanalyst may think he is better off being
more interested in psychoanalysis than in other people. Psycho-
analysis, at least, is something one can specialize in.

45
 3
Fears

How am I supposed to acquire evidence for the universal hoax

Anthony Kenny, Faith and Reason

There is a Sufi story that Idries Shah tells - though there are
versions of it, I think, in other cultures - in which Mulla Nasrudin is

standing one morning in the yard outside his house throwing corn.
A man who is passing stops and looks at him, extremely puzzled.
'Mulla Nasrudin,' he asks, 'why are you throwing this corn
around?' 'Because it keeps the tigers away,' the Mulla replies. 'But
there aren't any tigers here.' 'Well, it works then, doesn't it?' the
mulla says. I want to appropriate this as my first psychoanalytic
parable about fear. The story raises a number of questions: had
there actually been tigers in Mulla Nasrudin's life that he had
warded off with corn, or was this more like a symbolic ritual passed
down through the generations, an integral part of a larger cosmo-
logy? Was and did he
there once a threat of tigers in the mulla's life,

then dream up this idea of the corn which, coincidentally, worked -

he threw the corn and the tigers never came back, and he deduced
his system accordingly?
Clearly, a story like this, rather like a joke, is meant to avert this

kind of tedious consideration; like the corn, it just works. The story
makes it surprisingly difficult for us to think that the mulla is wrong,
or ridiculous, or deluded. The joke might be on us if we assume that
kind of superior or enlightened position. The story ends up making
you wonder how much of your life is spent throwing corn, and
perhaps what your own, personal tigers are. Like the man who
stopped to ask the mulla what he was doing, we may end up being
rather relieved that someone else is throwing the corn for us, so we
don't even have to think of the tigers. The mulla himself is clearly

46
 FEARS

determined not to forget them. Throwing the corn is a way of

keeping them in mind.
I want to limit the resonance of this story - that is, to interpret it -
by using it something about the psychoanalytic idea of
to say

defences, or defence-mechanisms, as they are sometimes called to

convey something of their automatic or compulsive nature (the fact

that they tend to operate unconsciously). The ego's defences are

both prompted by fear, and used to regulate it; they are the ways in
which the organism prevents itself from being overwhelmed by
stimuli. We have
imagine that the ego (perhaps unconsciously)
to

already knows what the tigers are, what they represent - whatever it
is we and believe we cannot manage (though we might, as the
fear
philosopher Sartre does, want to know where it gets this knowledge
from). And we have to assume the ego - call it Mulla Nasrudin -
already has rigorous moral-cum-aesthetic criteria to rely on, though
it may 'know' that a tiger is bad before it can allow itself to know
exactly what a tiger is (the defensive ego has a kind of pre-emptive
morality born of fear, it prejudges in order not to judge, in order not
to have to think too much). What the story of the mulla tells us, in
these terms, is that fear, like desire, tells us very little about its

object. You cannot get from corn to tigers without an explanation.

Our forms of self-protection don't necessarily or obviously tell us
anything about what we are protecting ourselves from, or what we
are frightened of. Because of this, interpretation is required. We
need to explain the mulla's explanation. Indeed the definition of a

primitive defence (like Klein's concept of splitting) is that it creates

the illusion that the object of fear was never there in the first place; in

this sense we can also use corn to protect us from tigers in Britain.
Unlike the mulla's corn, certain defences not only protect us from
the supposed object of fear, but also from the knowledge that there

is such an object. But what does the way we construct our defences -
repression, splitting, projective identification, denial, etc. - tell us
about what we fear? Common sense would tell us that we can infer

the enemy from the armour; that fear is self-defeating if it is not

accurate as to its object (though Auden's question, 'Is a shield a

weapon?' complicates this). The story of the mulla tells us that fear

47
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

can be a threshold - a kind of transitional state - between knowledge

and superstition. The mulla's corn-throwing proves conclusively
either that tigers are terrified of corn, or that there are, in fact, no
tigers there; this is the kind of suspension of disbelief, the comfort-
ing uncertainty, that can make such defences so effective. The mulla
is keeping the possibility of tigers, of dangerous excitement, in the

picture; his defence keeps the possibility of tigers alive.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, the way we construct our

defences tends to suggest that we unconsciously invite, or sustain

contact with, whatever we fear. Throwing corn becomes a way of

thinking about tigers. (In the same way sadness, for example, can be
a way of reminding ourselves of what's missing in our lives.) By
constructing fear as a form of desire, by redescribing it as a particular
kind of excitement, psychoanalysis has made the object of fear - the
place where the fear is located, the tigers - a paradox: both elusive
and irresistible. Like its new-found twin, the object of desire, we
can't find it and we away from it. As in a neurosis, we are
can't get
pursuing something by running away from it. (The neurotic is
always arriving at the place he is running away from.) Once every
fear is a wish, as psychoanalysis asserts, our fears become the clue to
our desires; aversiveness always conceals a lure. Fear, like its

accomplices, disgust and shame, is psychic work; it's something we

make. What may feel like a reflex may have an elaborate invisible
history. Fear, as Freud shows, is both a recognition of pleasure (and/
or pain) in the offing, and a form of secret pleasure in itself. People
don't tend to boast about their fears, perhaps because they are
sometimes superstitious about losing them.
What psychoanalysis can show us, within the language game of
its own vocabulary, is that fear, far from being exclusively a reflex, a
natural reaction, is also constructed. And, more specifically, that

fear is constructed through the ways we protect ourselves from it.

The over-protected child wonders - fantasizes - what is out there

that he needs so much protection from ('Best safety lies in fear',
Laertes says to Ophelia, trying to out-tantalize Hamlet with an old
pun). Another way of saying this is that psychoanalysis can show
us, from developmental theory and reconstruction, how we con-

48
 FEARS

struct our fears (like precious artefacts), but it cannot always show
us, though it usually wants to, what it is that we are really frightened
of. What it can do, at its worst, is persuade someone of the source or
object of their fears. In this sense there are two kinds of psychoana-
lysis: one helps the patient to locate his fears, and then to live

accordingly; and one shows the patient what he uses his fear to do -
what kind of instrument it is. (Our relationship to our fear contains
within it our unconscious picture of fear as an object.) It is the
difference between a psychoanalysis intent on finding the enemy -
like Kleinianism, for example, with its horrified devotion to the
death instinct - and a psychoanalysis that is committed to conflict

without, paradoxically, needing the idea of an enemy. It is, of

course, a fundamental form of tyranny to coercively ascribe a fear to
someone (or to coercively describe a person, or a part of a person, as

unequivocally bad). All forms of salvation, all the redemptions,

depend upon a consensus about what there is to fear.

Psychoanalysis, in all of its versions, is a story about what there is

to fear; like the symptoms it can sometimes explain, it is grounded in

terror. The instincts, desire, aphinisis, the death instinct, castration,

impingement, separation, the experience of being dropped, intrinsic

prematurity, inauthenticity, gender trouble, the violence of the

imaginary - all these, and there are more, provide the foundation for

psychoanalytic theory and practice. However much psychoanalysis

aspires to be non-essentialist, the stories it cannot help telling about
human development are rife with intimidation. Development is

trauma, and trauma in its various forms is the subject-matter, the

material of psychoanalysis. And, by the same token, each version of
psychoanalysis sponsors a different form of hope (which may itself

turn into a tyrannical demand). But can a theory based on fear do

more than endlessly repeat itself when it takes fear as its subject?
Can it, as it were, seperate the tigers from the corn, or does it just

have to go on throwing its corn, despite the fact it doesn't always

work? What kind of future is fear - or psychoanalysis as a pheno-
menology of fear - preparing us for?

49
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

II

Fear won't always save you, but it will take some of the pressure
off your luck.

Tobias Wolff, In Pharaoh's Army

If fear is a form of anticipation, of hope inverted, then to talk about

fear is to talk about our fantasies of the future and of our relationship
to these fantasies. The target of our fear - even if its putative source
is in the past - is whatever might happen next that will involve, in

that felicitous word, unpleasure (the negation of well-being).

Grounded in terror, Freud sees the human subject developing in
something akin to a war situation - not so much open combat as the
more insidious and uneasy truces of protection rackets. Describing
the infant's first fear in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938), Freud
constructs a mafia-like scenario:

the weak and immature ego of the first period of childhood is per-
manently damaged by the stresses put upon it in its efforts to fend off
the dangers that are peculiar to that period of life. Children are protected
against the dangers that threaten them from the external world by the
solicitude of their parents; they pay for this security by a fear of loss of
love which would deliver them over helpless to the dangers of the
external world.

The dangers of that period, in Freud's view, are the internal dangers
arising from the instincts, and the more obvious threat of an
inhospitable world. Life is made viable by the protection of our
parents. And the kind of viability created by their protection
becomes something of a blueprint for later life. As Freud writes in
one of his last published notes (June 16, 1938), 'in connection with
early experiences, as contrasted with later experiences, all the
various reactions to them survive'. The way Freud puts his point
about the legacy that this earliest parental care entails is of interest.
Children, he writes, 'pay for this security by a fear of loss of love
which would deliver them over helpless to the dangers of the
external world'. Clearly we are not to assume that the parents extort
this fear as the cost of their protection; but this originary and

50
 FEARS

constitutive fear - of loss of love - is a payment; there is an exchange,

an intra-psychic deal going on. Parents give you something that you
then fear losing, their love. If you want a future, you must suffer a
fear for it, for its possible loss. This fear of loss of love is both the cost
of the future, and what keeps the future alive. This fear is the costly
consequence of the infant's somatic acknowledgement of a truth: the
infant is not self-sufficient. In this deal that Freud is describing, the
child, in some ways, registers the helplessness thatcomes with a life;
and then, as his side of the bargain, pays himself and his parents
back with this constitutive fear of loss of love. This fundamental
(quasi-Faustian) pact is then repeated, with significant modification,
in all the child's later developmental crises: weaning, castration
anxiety, primal scene fantasies are echoes of this pact, confirmations
of insufficiency. Being 'delivered over helpless' - a virtual descrip-
tion of the human from Freud's point of view - is the catastrophe
that parental love is meant to avert. Children, one could say, are
loved into a belief that life is worth living - partly because every
adult has a doubt about this (and then, some children can feel
morally obliged, as it were, to sustain their parents' hope). Life is

usually stronger than people's love for it.

For Freud, this first helplessness, which is, in his view, both the
source of the individual's fear and its target, becomes a powerful
explanatory device - a simple insight that was itself to be the source
of much more sophisticated and elaborate theory. 'The relation of
the child's helplessness to the helplessness of the adult which
continues it', he writes in The Future of an Illusion (19 27), '(are) the

motives for the formation of religion.' Fear was the founder of

religions, as of neuroses (people are not bad, they are frightened).
Fear is clearly linked in Freud's writing with dependence, and the
related question of agency; fear becomes both a recognition of its

absence, and a relative limitation: our fantasies of autonomy are

circumscribed by fear. But fear also initiates the child into the

question of agency. The evolving question for the infant and child is:

What capacity do I have to secure a future? All the child's initial

resources are in the service of sustaining parental co-operation

(Freud assumes, of course, that there is a sense in which the child
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

wishes to have a future). Every successful action, or pleasurable

experience, felt to be initiated by the child brings with it the
possibility of its loss. Each increment of future life, each achieved
pleasure, has a price; the presence of satisfaction carries with it the
terror of its future absence. Every gift is a possible future theft. Fear
constructs disappearing acts; it attempts to save the disappearances.
'Children are protected against the dangers that threaten them from
the external world by the solicitude of their parents; they pay for this
security by a fear of loss of love which would deliver them over
helpless to the dangers of the external world'. Fear, in its first

scenario - or first Freudian scenario - is a truth-telling, the way in

which absence announces itself to the individual, the absence which

can destroy the future (every suicide dispels the tyranny of hope).
The fear that is not overwhelming (or paralysing) is a prompt or a
goad to action; born of fear, individuals do what they can to redeem
the absences, to recuperate the future. They make demands. They
try to secure the love that is already contaminated by its potential
loss. Fear, in this sense, becomes the matrix for, the ground of, the
ego's illusion of agency, the impossibility of a mastery that will
always elude it. The kind of paradoxical mastery represented by the
Mulla Nasrudin: corn for tigers.

Reactive to fear - at first, the fear of loss of love - the individual is

projected into a future committed to curing the absences, all the time
undermined by the constitutive truth captured in that fear - fear
betokens our insufficiency: it points to what is missing. From a
common-sense point of view, fear of loss of love instigates a project
to secure that love. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the
implication of Freud's description is more paradoxical. Fear of loss of
love instigates a project to secure something that by definition
cannot be secured. Fear becomes the perception of a truth that
inspires tenacious denial. In that formative Freudian fear we ack-
nowledge that the future cannot be guaranteed; and then we set out
to guarantee it. Fear discloses an ineluctable potential for loss;and so
it confronts the child with desire as contradiction, the to and fro of
emptiness and plenitude; with emptiness always defined by the
shape that will fill it. Fear is the cost, what the child pays for this

52
 FEARS

recognition that inaugurates his project. Fear inspires futures that it

has already perceived to be instrinsically uncertain. In fear, and

perhaps out of fear, we make a future we also cannot afford to
believe Only megalomaniacs make promises.
in.

Fear, as I have been suggesting, is a state of mind in which the

object of knowledge is the future, but it is, of course, a knowledge
that can only be derived from the past. Whether it is literally from
birth, as Rank proposed and Freud partially endorsed, or from later

experience, there is a backdrop of loss and privation to this insistent

anticipatory knowledge. In Freud's simple account of fear, which
will also become a theory of anxiety, it is a state of mind that is the
site of an epistemological conflict - a conflict experienced and
repeated in the pain of unmet demand. In the original fear of loss of
love we have to imagine that the child is poised between (or
straddles) epistemological conviction from the past - the certainty
that presence is shadowed by absence - which is also a form of
profound scepticism - the terrifying uncertainty generated by the
fact that presence is shadowed by absence. The child 'knows' both
things, both the certainty and the uncertainty. That is to say, the

child's experience of desire or need provides him with paradoxical

knowledge that the future is not definite. (In this context belief in
repetition is a form of hope and children, of course, are passionate
about repetition). What the child is saying, in Freud's account, in
what he calls 'the to and fro between disavowal and acknowledge-
ment', what want is what makes wanting impossible; what
is this: I I

know is what makes knowing impossible. Getting what you need

has the fear of losing it built into it; as an experience from the past
and, therefore, as a possibility in the future. The cost of wanting is

the terror of losing - of not securing for the future - what you have
received. This what we know in fear.
is

The future that is known, or surmised, in states of fear is a

repertoire of possibilities from the past. The object of fear is a future
set in the past. In fear the imagined future joinsup with the
unpleasure of the past. Tell me what you fear and will tell you what I

has happened to you. But by the same token, the knowledge born of
fear closes down the future. Knowing what you fear is a way of

53
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

living in the past. By throwing corn, Mulla Nasrudin may be keeping

the tigers away, but he is also warding off the future, the future he
has no way of thinking about except in terms of tigers. The tigers

guarantee a predictable future.

Ill

New truth is always a go-between a smoother-over

,

of transitions.
William James, Pragmatism

For my second parable about fear want to modify a story Sartre

I

reports hearing from Janet, and which he uses to illustrate, in The

Transcendence of the Ego, what he calls a 'vertigo of possibility'. We
might call this, more blandly, a fear of freedom, just to make
ourselves wonder why we attach fear to certain versions of freedom
- what fear is doing there. If boredom is one of the ways we break
our habit of believing in the future, then fear is one of the ways we
keep the future going.
In this story a young and newly married couple come downstairs
each morning and have breakfast together. Then the wife helps her
husband on with his coat, and waves him off to work. The young
woman then spends the entire day sitting by the window crying
until her husband returns. This perhaps dated and rather arch tale

creates an interesting interpretative dilemma. A conventional quasi-

psychoanalytic interpretation of this woman's behaviour might
suggest that she was suffering from a separation anxiety - perhaps
an echo of more troubling separations in the past. After all, when
her husband returns, she feels better. Psychoanalysis, that is to say,
shows the patient that she is living as if something were true: as if,

for example, free time was sexual time, or as if sexual partners are
really the police. An existentialist interpretation would see this as a

theory compounding, being of a piece with, the real problem. To talk

here about separation anxiety and the distant past merely
is

complicitous - as much bad faith as the woman's 'symptom' -

because when this woman's husband leaves her in the morning she

54
 FEARS

can, within certain constraints, do what she wants. She has turned
her fear of freedom into a form of grief. If she is mourning anything,
it is the loss of her guardian, who psychically has become a kind of

prison warder, or at least an especially attentive parent. Once her

husband leaves, she is confronted with the question: What does she
want to use her time for, what is she going to do? And the answer,
given her fear, is that she is going to do nothing - or rather, she is

going to cry and wait for her husband's return. She is going to start

missing, and looking forward to, the return of the past. But in this
interpretation, which too easily disparages the woman, what does
her fear consist of? If she didn't have it, as a kind of substitute for her
husband, what would she be doing? What is she using a husband,
and, by implication, other relationships, to protect herself from?
The only accurate answers to these questions would, of course, be
the ones that she herself gave. Without those, we are in the
interesting position of having to imagine and attribute fears to her,

on her behalf, so to speak. Freedom, of course, is not a psychoanaly-

tic term; fear of freedom is not an idea that is easily compatible with

most psychoanalytic theory. So what do we have to confer on this

woman, or put into the idea of freedom to make it frightening? What
does freedom have to be, or seem to contain, in order to scare us off?
In Sartre's view, it is possibility itself; in this situation the woman is

unavoidably confronted by herself as someone with a capacity to

make What Sartre puts into the picture is agency. The idea
choices.
of agency means that there is nobody (no God or anyone else), and
no other 'things' (instincts, the putative past) controlling one's life. It

is, then, something about the solitary nature of a life - a life as

fundamentally unsanctioned or simply beyond legitimation - that in

Sartre's account frightens this woman. Her symptoms are not so

much an expression of her fear, as the way she has evolved of

concealing her fear from herself. Fear, in this context, is potentially

the route to authenticity. It would be like the medium of contact

through which this woman could rescue herself from (Sartre's) bad
[Link] aim of an existential analysis would be to introduce her to
her fear and what it portends for her. What this otherwise anti-

pathetic view shares with a psychoanalytic account is a belief that

55
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

fear signifies proximity to something of value, perhaps of ultimate

value. And so, by implication, the belief that there is something
about what we most value, or about what is most integral to our
lives, that frightens us. Fear becomes a guarantor of validity.
Whether it be instinctual life, the vagaries of our past desire, or the
unknowable future that our choices precipitate us into, fear, in its
very disarray, orientates us.
So is fear a form of knowledge, or intelligence - an acute
recognition; is there a sense in which we always know what there is

to fear? Or does fear signify the breakdown of these capacities. Does

fear start as cognition breaks down? In Sartre's example are we to

assume, as a psychoanalyst might, that the woman knows, however

unconsciously, what she wants to do with her so-called freedom,
but because it is forbidden she cries off? Or is the fear exactly the
opposite: that at the moment her husband leaves she enters an
unknown and unknowable future? In other words, a determinism,
like psychoanalysis, gives fear an object (castration, say, or the
unprotected past); without a ghost in the machine, without an
essential cause, as in Sartre's existentialism, fear loses its grip; its

object, if it can be called an object, becomes an empty category (the

unknowable, or the future). Where we locate the fear, and, second-
arily,how we go about doing so, tells us a good deal about who we
think we are. For Sartre, know what 'I I fear' is a contradiction in
terms; for Freud, it is, because of the unconscious, an absolute truth.
So instead of asking. Is there an unconscious?, we might ask. In
what sense are our lives better if we live as though there is one?
For Freud, fear returns us to what we already know; it is a

symptom of knowledge, knowledge of and from the past. The

uncanny, as he said, is where we feel at home. For Sartre, fear points
us in the direction of the unknown. It cannot return anything to us,
it can only lead us away from our supposedly familiar selves. For
Sartre, fear is the shock of the new; for Freud it is the shock of the
old, it is elegiac. If, for Freud, fear is knowledge - knowledge
disguised as shock, concealed in excitement - and for Sartre fear
indicates its absence, what, if any, family resemblance is there in
their distinctive uses of this term? Certainly for both of them fear is a

56
 FEARS

message - a reaction to a plenitude or an absence of resources - and

they articulate their own projects by deciphering it. And for both of
them fear is an ironic form of self-protection - for Freud self-

protection from the past and for Sartre (absurdly) self-protection

from the future. The potential paralysis of fear is also a kind of royal
road to those things for which they have the highest regard: a certain

kind of self-knowledge or a certain kind of impossibility of self-

knowledge. For Sartre, fear is refusal of the self-knowledge that tells

you your future selves are unknowable; they cannot be predicted,
they can only be performed. They are constituted by choice, not
inflicted by some prior agency called the past, or instincts, or the
unconscious. For Freud, fear is our acknowledgement, however
disguised, of the past: an involuntary self-knowledge. For Freud,
self-knowledge can only be knowledge of past selves, which, for
Sartre, is precisely what renders sc//-knowledge absurd. For Sartre,

knowing oneself is a form of bad faith.

If the young wife in Sartre's story goes out when her husband

leaves, what will become of her? Who might she turn into? For
Sartre, the point of the fear is that she does not and could not know.

Her fear stops an unknown future from happening: she uses it as an

Hans - another person frightened to go
obstacle. For Freud's Little
out - psychoanalysis seemed to confirm that his fear (or phobia, in
psychoanalytic language) was an attempt to stop a known future
from happening again. Of course from Sartre's point of view the
theory of repetition itself could be another piece of bad faith, an
especially suitable alibi. Indeed this misgiving might make us
wonder, as we look at the case of Little Hans, what fear, or so-called

self-knowledge, would be like if we did not believe in repetition? If

there was no such thing as repetition, what would we be using fear

to explain? If there was no repetition - if we stopped believing in

such a thing - what self would we have knowledge of?

57
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

•
IV

/ really do think that the crowning glory of the Sex Pistols is that

we've always managed to disappoint on big occasions. Vs/hen the

chips were down we never came

, through.

Johnny Rotten, Interview

Repetition is reassuring because it implies that there is a recogniz-

able something - a pattern of relationship, a scenario, an impulse, a

fear - that is being repeated. Repetition confirms our powers of
recognition, our competence at distinguishing the familiar from the
unfamiliar. The repetitions in our lives are like our personal
collection of secure referents. The knowledge that is fear, or the
knowledge fear protects us from, is born of recurrence, or its

possibility. Once unpleasure has been experienced its anticipated

repetition has to be pre-empted. It is interesting, I think, how often
the frightening experience and its possible repetition are dealt with
by a complementary form of repetition. Both the mulla and Sartre's
young wife, faced with the tigers and the husband's absence
respectively, evolve a kind of ritual to manage their fear. They do the
same thing each morning; they enact a reliability, a predictability

they know to be precarious - a certainty the future cannot guarantee.

They behave as if they know what they are frightened of; if they did
not believe they knew this, there would be no solution available:
their fear is an act of faith. It has to have - or has to construct - a
relatively stable referent, otherwise the ritual solution would be felt

to be hopelessly ineffectual. was tigers and possibly elephants

If it

and possibly wolves, the mulla would be all over the place.
In the light of Freud's descriptions, we can imagine a process: the
child has an experience of unpleasure, which is then assumed to be
repeatable; fear is the recognition of unpleasure as potential repe-
tition. But if this assumption of repetition is viable, we must identify
what there is to fear, what it is that might return - loss of love, say, or
hunger or the cold. So in fear we assume the future will be like the
past; and we believe - that is, behave as if - we know what that past

was like. Fear, in other words, makes us too clever; or at least

58
 FEARS

misleadingly knowing. Knowing becomes rather literally the pro-

cess of jumping to conclusions. In fear the wish for prediction is

immediately gratified; it is as though the certainty - the future - has

already happened.
'A face which inspires fear or delight (the object of fear or
delight)', Wittgenstein wrote in the Philosophical Investigations, 'is not
on that account its cause, but - one might say - its target.' Freud, like
Wittgenstein here from a quite different perspective, is raising a
simple question: does fear have an object or only a location? (Do we
know what we are frightened of?) Does the fear already exist,
waiting to be evoked, or inspired, repeatedly waiting to be placed?
We could say, for example, that fear does not have a cause, but fear
makes us want to ascribe causes. Perhaps the most difficult thing to
acknowledge, to bear, is that there is a feeling called fear that has
neither a cause nor an object. Certainly fear, at least from one
psychoanalytic point of view, makes us want to believe in causality
(in cure). Given the infant's helplessness, given instinctual life and
its critical culmination (or consummation) in the Oedipus complex,
fear has its definable causes. And yet with the concept of anxiety, as
used in the case of Little Hans, the question. Does fear have an
object or only a location? is provisionally complicated.
Psychoanalysis has tended to answer this question with an
assertion - a simple distinction - that has the kind of clarity that
psychoanalysis itself has made us question. Fear, in the words of the
early British analyst John Rickman, 'is occasioned by a real object,

[anxiety] is characterized by an indefinite feeling of expectation

about something but lacks an object'. So one of the aims of
psychoanalysis is to turn anxiety back into fear, to locate the object
that the ego uses anxiety to conceal from itself. Fear is the real thing
which implies a human subject secure in its capacity for knowledge;
anxiety is a terrible scepticism, an unknowing full of ominous
expectation. Fear has an object, anxiety has a vague location.
Anxiety is a defence against fear, a refusal to know what we are
frightened of.

Fear, in Freud's description of its earliest stages, is a process of

jumping to conclusions, a potentially misleading form of anticipa-

59
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

tory knowledge in the service of self-protection - fear as the

potentially false belief that the future will be like the past. And here
Rickman, along Freudian lines, offers us fear as acknowledgement
of reality, and anxiety as a defence against reality. In its 'indefinite

feeling of expectation' perhaps Rickman's anxiety is both like and

unlike what Freud called the child's fear of loss of love. It is fear, in

that it has a real object - the child's experience of loss of love - and it

turns into anxiety if it takes the form of a perpetual unease derived

from that fear but not consciously linked with it. Anxiety in this

model is the way a person hides something from himself. But this

fear 'occasioned by a real object' can lead someone to fantastic

conclusions; can turn into anxiety. In psychoanalytic terms fear is

always the first state of anxiety. So-called fear of loss of love might
turn, say, into an anxiety about finishing a piece of work because it

involves separating from it. But it will be obvious, also, that this

distinction between fear and anxiety - between having a referent,

and reference being itself what is in question - aligns psychoanalytic

practice with instrumental reason. We must locate our fears and act

As though at least at the beginning of the story we

accordingly.
know where/who we are, then out of fear we mystify our know-
ledge.
Little Hans, a boy of five treated by his father under Freud's
supervision, was frightened that a horse would bite him in the

street, and so was frightened of going out. 'Hans's anxiety', Freud

writes in this bizarre case history, 'which thus corresponded to a
repressed erotic longing was, like every infantile anxiety, without an
object to begin with; was still anxiety not yet fear.' The aim of the
it

defensive infantile ego was to turn fear into anxiety, to detach fear
from its object. The aim of psychoanalytic interpretation is to turn
anxiety into fear, to find its object. There is something rational and
intelligible and interpretable called fear that has a referent; there is

something irrational, unrealistic, like a fear of being bitten by a

horse, called anxiety that is elusive. An original and fundamental
intelligibility that is unacceptable, too painful, is concealed by
something vagrant, intent on concealing its real identity. 'When
once a state of anxiety establishes itself', Freud writes, 'the anxiety

60
 FEARS

swallows up all other feelings ... all affects are capable of being
changed into anxiety.' Anxiety is a successful defence because it

makes discrimination impossible; in fear we have the clarity of true

knowledge. It should be noted that Freud is using the idea of fear
here to describe a human subject that is fundamentally realistic -
intelligibile to itself - but driven by fear into the self-obfuscation of
anxiety. In the case of Little Hans, which, Freud insists, confirms
directly his earlier theories about infantile sexuality, we are given a
version of 'neurotic' development as the transformation of 'realistic'

fears of abandonment and castration into irrational anxieties.

Through Little Hans's strenuous psychic work, the horse, Freud
writes, 'was being exalted into the object of his anxiety'. The making
of the phobia, that is to say, was an act of devoted idealization. 'The
essence of Hans's illness', Freud writes, 'was entirely dependent
upon the nature of the instinctualcomponents that had to be
repulsed The content of his phobia was such as to impose a very
. . .

great measure of restriction upon his freedom of movement, and

that was its purpose. It was therefore a powerful reaction against the
obscure impulses to movement which were essentially directed
against his mother.' By turning his fear into anxiety, Hans, in one
sense, gets what he wants: by being frightened to go out, by being
troubled, he gets more care from his mother; and he becomes, as the
case history shows, a central preoccupation of his father. He restores
something of his place in the family before his sister was born. But
from Freud's point of view, Hans's anxiety gives him back a past; his
fear gives him a future. His anxiety - and this is part of his
underlying intention - keeps him in the family and keeps alive an
impossible project: sexual relations with his parents. His fear of
castration, according to the logic of the theory, forces him to move
on towards genuinely available objects. His fear involves him
acknowledging a loss - the hopelessness of an erotic life with his
parents - which opens up future possibilities; his anxiety keeps him
in suspended animation. The function of anxiety is to sever the

future from the past; the function of fear - of fear as a version of

realism - is to make an unknowable future out of the past.
There is a convincing logic to this; but I think the very clarity of the

61
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

distinction Freud uses to organize his case history has a doubt built
into it. We see Hans confronted by at least two immensely powerful
adults: Freud and his father. Hans has anxieties and Freud has
knowledge of fears. In Hans's father's postscript to the case, he
reports that, 'a trace of his disorder still persists . . . only in that of
the normal instinct for asking questions'. 'Once when he had tired

me out with his questions', Hans's father writes ingenuously, 'and I

had said to him, "Do you think I can answer every question you
ask?" he replied, "Well, I thought that as you knew that about the
horse, you'd know this too." Presumably,'
you can in this system, if

translate anxieties into fears, you must know everything. 'An

unsolved residue remains behind', Hans's father writes, 'for Hans
keeps cudgelling his brains to discover what a father has to do with
his child, since it is the mother who brings it into the world.' In the
few, usually patronizing, glimpses in the case history of Hans's
mother, she is seen taking Hans at his word, not translating him.
Hans's question. What has a father to do with his child? can be
answered in the context of the case history: the father is the one who
tells what he fears; he is the one who knows the difference
the child
between an anxiety and a fear. Hans's profound question is also, of
course, a question about his father's relationship to Freud.
Freud's distinction between anxiety and fear instates a difference
it appears to reveal; and it is a difference that psychoanalysis
depended on. Is fear realistic, as Freud insists, or is the concept of
fear an attempt to assert, to foist on us, a concept of the real? Or, to
put it another way: is fear the truth about anxiety, or is anxiety the
truth about fear? Is the analyst supplying persuasive referents -
abandonment, instincts, incestuous desire, castration - and turning
anxieties back into their sponsoring fears; or is he loosening the
existing referents - the most addictive ones - releasing fears into
anxieties?Does fear have a cause or only a target? In psychoanalysis
can we find what we are frightened of - something that the analyst
can have prior knowledge of - or can we only map the vagrancy of
our fears? Freud's authority, like all authority, is constituted by his
knowing what people are frightened of; by providing the most
persuasive account of our fears (by stressing the significance of

62
 FEARS

childhood experience, for example, psychoanalysis has made adults

frightened of children). Like Little Hans, we have to assent to this

repertoire of fears; without this assent, psychoanalysis has nothing

to offer us.

63
 - \

4
Dreams
i

Anyone who sleeps sleeps heroically

Keith Waldrop, 'Lullaby in January'

Freud's description of the unconscious shows us new ways of

keeping secrets, and a new rationale for doing so. A dream is

enigmatic - it invites interpretation, intrigues us - because it has

transformed something unacceptable, through what Freud calls

the dream-work, into something puzzling. It is assumed that the

unacceptable is something, once the dream has been interpreted,
that we are able to recognize and understand. And this is because
it belongs to us; we are playing hide-and-seek, but only with
ourselves. In the dream the forbidden may become merely eccen-
tric or dazzlingly banal; but only the familiar is ever in disguise.
The interpreter, paradoxically - the expert on dreams - is in

search of the ordinary. There are, Freud writes in his essay 'On
Dreams', 'certain experiences which one cannot escape in analys-

ing dreams':

I should come upon dream-thoughts which required to be kept secret in

the case of every dream with an obscure or confused content. If,
however, were to continue the analysis on my own account, without
I

any reference to other people (whom, indeed, an experience so personal

as my dream cannot possibly have been intended to reach), I should
eventually arrive at thoughts which should surprise me, whose
presence in me was unaware of, which were not only alien but also
I

disagreeable to me, and which I should therefore feel inclined to dispute

energetically, although the chain of thoughts running through the
analysis insisted upon them and that is to suppose that
remorselessly;
these thoughts really were present in my mind but that they were in. . .

a peculiar psychological situation, as a consequence of which they could

not become conscious to me Thus we are led to the concept of a 'dream-
. . .

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 DREAMS
distortion', which is the product of the dream-work and serves the
purpose of dissimulation, that is, of disguise.

Freud's method of interpretation reveals that, in actuality, no

thoughts are alien: they are only made alien because they are
disagreeable. And, more paradoxically, that only I can be an expert
on myself; in fact, I am work at being a
already an expert, but I

stranger. dissimulate because am an expert on what cannot bear.

I I I

The dream reveals the sense in which we translate ourselves: and

the irony of the fact that we are the translators. It is like pretending
not to be a double agent, by being a triple agent instead.
Freud's assumption, placed in parenthesis, that nothing as
personal as the contents of a dream could possibly be addressed to
another person - could be, in any sense, for human consumption - is
also ironic in these circumstances. His insistence is that the message
of the dream has to be kept from someone: if not oneself, then
certainly other people (as though the personal is, in some sense, the
forbidden, the indecent; and privacy is secrecy). But if the intensely
personal is not really alien to oneself, why need it be alien to other
people? And if Freud is determinedly disqualifying dreams as
currency between people - as 'intended' only for oneself - where
does this leave the practising psychoanalyst?
If Freud is intimating here that we should keep ourselves to

ourselves - that psychoanalysis is something to do on your own - he

is also complicating the idea of the psychoanalyst as expert. In so far
as we are unacceptable to ourselves - which requires at least two
versions of ourselves, the Censor and the Dissident - we have to

make secrets of ourselves (we have to find ways of telling ourselves

lies). And the first secret might have to be that there are these two
versions, sowe behave as though we more or less know who we are
(we don't like the sound of hearing voices because we usually
pretend to know where voices come from). It is as though we have to
render our desires, our perceptions, our histories, opaque - or at

least above suspicion. But in Freud's view, we are turning some-

thing essentially familiar - something obvious and ordinary and
known in some sense - into something bizarre. Something we may

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 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

need an expert, or perhaps only a method, to disclose. The task of

the therapist', Freud writes, in 'Psychoanalysis and the Establish-
ment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings', 'is the same as that of the
examining magistrate. We have to uncover the hidden psychic
material; and in order to do this we have invented a number of
detective devices, some of which it seems you gentleman of the law
are now about to copy from us.' But in Freud's view, we are at once
the criminal, the detective and the crime.
Dreams, Freud intimates, are evidence of something. But evidence
of something so dismaying, so shameful, so terrifying, that it must
not be shared. As he wrote, 'an experience so personal as my dream
cannot possibly have been intended to reach' anyone else; a dream is

like a letter without a signature or an address (a blackmail that the

victim mustn't know about?). Freud's use of the word 'possibly' as
over-emphasis here is, of course, suggestive of other possibilities. But
we may still feel fortunate that this terrible message can at least be
hidden in something as ridiculous and obscure as a dream.
The dream contains something that can be understood and
communicated to another person, but it mustn't be. Freud makes us
wonder what the worst things are that we could say to other people.
(Relationships are often constituted by what one dare not say to the
other person.) And yet in 1895, a long time before he wrote 'On
Dreams', Freud had written to his friend and collaborator Fleiss: 'Do
you really believe that some day on this house one will read on a
marble tablet: "Here revealed itself, on 24 July 1895, the secret of the
dream to Dr. Sigm. Freud"?' If the dream contains something so
shameful, then to crack the code of one's own dreams is to be the
ultimate hero of one's most personal truth; to understand dreams per
se, the dreams of others, may be perilously close to a violation, to

overexposure. After all, as Freud had discovered, dreams exist in the

first place because people don't want to know what they know. The

only legitimate rationale for revealing the truth of dreams was that
people suffered from their simulated ignorance. The truth cannot
save us, Freud knew - indeed psychoanalysis makes a mockery of
the redemptions - but ignorance can exacerbate our misery. We
work hard to keep our terrors, if only as punishment. The dream - a

66
 DREAMS
unique source of personal news, Freud believed - offers us a choice:
how can we include dreams in our lives (other than by dreaming
them - they include us whether we like it or not), and why would we
want to? Similar questions, of course, can be asked of our sexuality.
But then to talk about dreams, for Freud, was to talk about our
sexuality. Perhaps that, too, is an experience so personal that it

cannot possibly have been intended someoneto reach else? Freud

shows us, in other words, how intimacy makes us unsociable;
especially the intimacy we have with ourselves.

II

Each one is Tantalus to what he dreams . . .

Charles Madge, Delusions II

There famous parable by Kafka called 'Leopards in the Temple'

is a
whose title immediately makes you wonder what they could be
doing there. The title could be a statement, a question, or a cry of
alarm (as is often the case with Kafka's titles). The parable itself is

simply one sentence:

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the
sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally, it can be
calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony.

We have to assume that what was once a violation becomes a

transformation. We don't know from Kafka whether the leopards in

the temple enrich the ceremony or simply become something the
ceremony has to accommodate. But something unpredictable,
something as anomalous as leopards in the temple can now be
calculated in advance and even included. So what happens to
something like dreaming (or sexuality, in words) when it becomes
part of a ritual like psychoanalysis? 1 want to use this parable to say
something about two different but related processes: the eruption of
dreams into psychic life, usually at night; and the intrusion and
inclusion of dreams into a kind of conversation called psychoanaly-
sis. In each context - the intrapsychic and the interpsychic - the
dream breaks in, like the leopards, and participates in a repeated

67
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS
* V
ritual: the ritual of sleep and the ritual of analysis. The question is.

What are we doing when we include dreaming in a context other

than sleeping, where, after all, we have no choice? It is not only the
ceremony that is changed by the inclusion of the leopards; we also
begin to see the leopards differently once we calculate upon their

participation. Leopards in the temple, leopards as part of the

ceremony, are very different from the creatures we couldn't possibly
imagine inside any building, let alone a temple. The dream-like
parable, deliberately exempt from psychological explanation, makes
us wonder: Are the leopards incorporated in the ceremony out of
terror (the people making a virtue of necessity and complying), or
out of resignation, (the people taking the line of least resistance), or
out of wonder (the people being provoked into fortuitous discover-
ies)? In the terms of my reading of this parable, the question is: In
what kind do analysts include dreams in their therapeutic
of spirit
ceremonies? And, perhaps more importantly, in what spirit do their
patients include them? From the analyst's point of view, the
leopards are already in the temple; from the patient's, they aren't, or
they are part of a different ceremony, or the patient knows that to be
in the analyst's ceremony dreams are required.
It is easy, I think, for therapists embroiled in their trainings, or
their institutions, or their larger professional worlds, to forget this

question of context. If I make a Freudian slip in a group of

psychoanalysts, it has a quite different significance to a slip made
when 1 am preaching a sermon or ordering newspapers over the
phone. In a group of psychoanalysts my slip may be a piece of
unconscious mockery, a wish to make the group cohere in its

amused and shared recognition, or a reassuring confirmation of a

shared belief system. 'The use of dreams in analysis', Freud wrote,
'is something very remote from their original aim.' This significant
remark assumes either that Freud knows their original aim or that he
has an intimation that the use of dreams in analysis is different from
some other use more important. At its most minimal, this
that is

remark reminds us of two things: we do use dreams in analysis; and

dreams might have an aim or purpose that has nothing to do with
analysis, or indeed with self-knowledge.

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 DREAMS

The analyst, that is to say, has a very specific relationship to

dreams, which is both difficult to define and likely to be very
different from the would imagine that
patient's, at least initially. I

very few analysts ask their patients for their theory of dreams - what
they believe dreams are, what their function is and what kind of
relationship they have to them. To enter analysis, of whatever
persuasion, is to be initiated into, or persuaded to believe ('At the

end of reasons', Wittgenstein wrote, 'comes persuasion'), that

dreams have a very specific purpose in one's life (secular oracles,

say). By definition the analyst is likely to have a far more elaborate

and articulated set of beliefs about dreams than the patient. At the
outset of the treatment what the analyst might want from the
patient's dreams, and what the patient might want (if anything) may
be quite different - why should they be the same? When the
leopards break into the temple, who decides - who is in a position to
decide - how they should join the ceremony? 'The use of dreams in
analysis is something very remote from their original aim.' This

implies that dreams have their aims built into them, not that their
aims are constructed by us. There is no reason to believe, from a

psychoanalytic point of view, that our beliefs about dreams are any
less wishful than our dreams themselves.
This is a roundabout way of saying something simple, but which
has complicated consequences: in so far as the patient accepts the

use of dreams in analysis, he may have complied with something -

he has accepted the ceremony, leopards and all. From the analyst's
point of view, this might be called 'allowing the process'; from the
patient's point of view, it might be experienced as accommodating
or submitting to something. From the child's point of view, shit can
be wonderful and yet it gets thrown away. The child might have all

sorts of other ideas about what could be done with it, but ultimately
there's nothing else for it: it has to go. Shit, unlike some other bodily
products such as dreams, is of limited use; whatever the child's

repertoire of interpretations of it, broadly speaking only one thing

happens to it. However imaginative or permissive the parents, the
child (and the parents) submit to the parents' interpretation: shit is

something you dispense with.

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 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

Paradoxically this is the paradigm, I think, for certain elements of

the analytic ceremony (the parent decides). It is not that the patient
is obliged to accept the analyst's interpretations of his dreams. But
rather, prior to that, he is obliged to accept that dreams can be
interpreted in a certain way, and that they have a certain functional
relationship to more conscious waking life - whether it be as the
disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes, the return of the unaccept-
able, a processing of emotional life that is another way of thinking,
or whatever. The risk is that the patient's idiosyncratic relationship
to his own dreams is subsumed by the analyst's therapeutic
relationship to the dream. After all, the patient is an experienced
dreamer. I think it extremely unlikely that, aside from the available
cliches in the culture about dreams, the patient won't have his own
theory about dreams, his own use of them. Not only has the patient
noticed - if he is not too frightened, or too uncurious - that leopards
break into the temple most nights, that there are strange goings-on
in his mind that are called dreams, he has also grown up in a family

or environment from which he has learned, implicitly or explicitly,

theories about dreams. The child notices that dreams are told or not
told, responded to in certain ways and not others, perhaps talked
about as a subject or referred to in snippets of conversation.
Somebody, for example, says that something was 'like a dream' and
the child might wonder, What is it for something to be like a dream?
Or even. What is a dream like? The dream, that is to say, has existed
as a peculiar object in the environment and in the self - like and
radically unlike other objects - over a long period of time (if we take
dreams as the norm, for example, then language can begin to seem
surreal). And the child has an evolving relationship with the idea of
the dream and with the dreaming experience itself - with how
dreams punctuate or sometimes rupture the apparent continuity of
psychic life - every child has had a nightmare and so knows,
somewhere in himself, what dreams can do - and with how dreams
fit, even by their absence, into ordinary conversation.

After all, dreams are a very odd way of speaking (they don't come
in sentences, they are silent); we may understand all the words in
the description, but the scene described is often very bizarre (like

70
 DREAMS

leopards in a temple). By entering therapy, the adult, who has been

this child, enters a conversation in which the dream and its

associations, though still bizarre, are an integral part of the conver-

sation, and for some analysts the virtual precondition for a distinc-
tively psychoanalytic dialogue. Here, at least to some extent, the
dream fits, even fits in. But there is no reason to believe that

everything in a life - each thought, feeling, action, dream - can be

linked, or must fit in. It is the making coherent of a life - the forcing
of a pattern — that people often suffer from (symptoms are ways of
willing coherence). I want to stress how peculiar it is for someone to

make that transition, from leopards breaking into the temple, to

leopards becoming part of a ceremony. For the therapist this has

already happened; for the patient, however knowledgeable about
analysis, it only happens when the patient begins the treatment.
When the patient enters treatment, the leopards have already
broken into the temple, but a ceremony is about to begin with them.
Out of the dream, and the ceremony of its interpretation, a

fundamental question arises that is integral to the nature of the

treatment: Who's ceremony is this, and who decides? And these

questions generate further questions: What is the use of these
dreams? What happens to, or is the function of, the uninterpreted
dream or the unreported one? Who knows what these dreams of
mine are for turns into the question. Who's dreams are they, who do
they really belong to? Dream interpretation - so obviously essential,
so taken for granted in analytic practice - becomes the site for a crisis

of appropriation. I am often surprised how easily, indeed keenly,

patients take to working with dreams; so I have also found it useful
to listen out for their resistance not only to interpretation, but also to
the process of interpretation itself. According to the theory, in our
dreams we are, however disguised, at our least compliant; in our use
of dreams in analysis we can be at our most compliant. The therapist

can be compliant in his unquestioning acceptance and use of the

available theory; and the patient can comply by bringing dreams,
and submitting them for interpretation.

7*
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

III

People are much more eccentric than they are supposed to be.

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

In relation to this complicated issue - what kind of currency are

dreams, or have they become, in analysis? - there has been a shift of

emphasis some current thinking about dreams. Masud Khan and

in

J.-B. Pontalis, both wary of the way in which the interpretation can

usurp or steal the dream, want to return us, in theory, to the

patient's experience of the dream, rather than to its meaning. The
role of the analyst is then to help re-evoke, to elicit, the lived
experience of the dream - its affective content - rather than to

translate it into a substitute parallel text, one supposedly more

authoritative than the manifest content of the dream. The analyst,
encouraging description of the dream, ‘is in effect asking the patient
(and himself) not. What does it mean? - What are the latent dream
thoughts? - but. What was it like to be there? What was the patient
using that unique space to do? The dream becomes the place of - or
the psychic space for - different versions of self-experience, a setting
for other voices. The dream becomes an evocative object as opposed
to an informative one. (They are not, necessarily, mutually exclu-
sive.) Protecting the patient's dream from the analyst's interpreting
machine - the analyst's influencing machine - runs the risk of

idealizing the idiosyncracy of the dreamer. And by contrasting

meaning and experience - the dream as informative object versus
the dream as evocative object - Khan and Pontalis sometimes imply
that there is a real thing called experience that falls into meaning;
that interpretation is corruption. In fact, a good interpretation is not
true, it ismore or less interesting, more or less prolific in its
just

consequences. But what Pontalis and Khan are doing, think, in I

their papers 'The Use and Abuse of Dream in Psychic Experience'

and 'Dream as Object', is trying to locate what cannot be stolen from

the patient - what, in the dream, is beyond appropriation. The
meaning of a dream can be competed for; the experience of the
dream can't. We may speak in words, but we don't dream in them.

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 DREAMS

IV

Tired of the old descriptions of the world . . .

Wallace Stevens, The Latest Freed Man

Psychoanalysis is a conceptual apparatus that invites the leopards

into the temple, and makes them integral to the ceremony. But as I

have been suggesting, the question. Who are we dreaming for? is

bound up with the question. What kind of object is a dream for us?
What do we want to use dreams to do for us? As Freud shows in The
Interpretation of Dreams - and this is as essential to his argument as his

own discoveries - people have answered these questions in different

ways, at different times and in different cultures. The dream, and its

uses, have a history. If we tend to want dreams to tell us secrets

(about the past, about desire), if we treat the dream as our internal
double-agent (the artist as spy), we also have to remember that this
has not always been the case, and need not be in the future. Each of
us is involved in situating ourselves in relation to the dream - a
relationship that has both a personal and a cultural history, and an
unknowable future. What will the dream be for us tomorrow?
Is dream interpretation something we learn, once and for all, like

swimming, and then go on doing more or less well, but without

significant innovation (as psychoanalytic theory would suggest)?
After all, there is a limit to what one can do in any medium. But what
kind of limits does the dream as an object seem to impose; what are
the constraints on our use of a dream, and who could be in a position
to decide them? To ask what kind of object is a dream is to ask. What
do we think of a dream as being like? Or, In what sense is an
ordinary conversation less perplexing than a dream? Do we think of
the dream as more like a film, a prophecy or a rebus? Who we are
dreaming for, how we imagine this, will depend on the kind of
answers we find ourselves giving to these questions. In an import-
ant footnote added to the 1914 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud wrote, Tt has long been the habit to regard dreams as identical

with their manifest content; but we must now beware equally of the

mistake of confusing dreams with latent dream-thoughts.' Freud is

73
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

trying to work out something very puzzling here: What is the dream
identical to? If it is not the same as the manifest content or the latent
dream-thoughts, what, then, can it be equated to? What kind of
object is the dream? How can we know when we've got to it? What
Freud, think, was committed to was the dream as the elusive
I

object, as the paradigm for the ungraspable, an invitation to make

meaning that we can never fully accept. (Dreams are not like
machines; they do not come with people who know how they work.)
The dream is always more than, other than, what we can find to say
about it; and in this sense it confronts us with the ways in which we
are never identical with ourselves. To say that we dream is to say
that we do not know what is going on inside us, we don't
understand the language that is going on. But, by the same token,
we go on comparing it, finding likenesses - likenesses that are not
the dream, but what we might call aspects of it. Interpretations are
more or less persuasive aspects, ways of keeping the story going,
ways of moving the dream on. The interpreter is never sufficiently
competent: the dream cannot be exhausted. The dream is whatever
we can find to say about it; and whatever seems to be left out by
what we have said. In any interpretation there is always a remainder
of possibility. The material does not submit. At its most minimal, the
dream is a new description of the world; the new as the bewildering.
Dreams can be used in different ways. For example, in Pontalis's
words, they can be used to represent 'experience or as a refusal of

experiences', interpsychically (between people), and intrapsychi-

cally (despite Freud's misgivings). They can be used in as many
ways as we can think to use them. But if the uses of the dream are
various, there is a consensus about one aspect of the dream: it is a
communication, a message of whatever sort. We use the dream - or
rather, the dream uses us - to speak; to whom and about what is
contentious. But we can use this contention as a repertoire of
internal voices or points of view. Indeed, to take seriously the idea of
over-determination is to assume dream is dreamt for a
that the
multiplicity of purposes. In so far as this dream is a message to the
analyst, what is being said? In so far as it is a message to the patient,
what is being said? From a false-self point of view, what is the

74
 DREAMS
message? What is the homosexual self using this dream to do? And
so on. The dream becomes the product of an always contentious
collaboration of different parts of the self. Condensation, displace-
ment, considerations of representation - what Freud describes as
the dream-work - are all ways of incorporating what might be called
an excess of points of view (the dream-work, as Freud said in
another important footnote, is the meaning The dream
of the dream).
itself, in so far as it has not become a nightmare, has apparently, and
temporarily, conciliated rival internal claims. And the unacceptable,
in this context, is the point of view that must not be considered. If we
are Freudians, we might think of these as points of view from
childhood, disguised representations of infantile sexuality; if we are
Kleinians, we may be thinking of something more 'primitive'. As
Freudians, we have to think of the dream as deeply nostalgic; as
post-Freudians, perhaps we should also think of the dream as a
psychic sample of our irreducible complexity. And our contempor-
ary dilemmas about the dream perhaps reflect this. Our conceptual
systems - Freudian, Kleinian, Jungian, etc. - are like containers for
our inner complication, for the multiplicity of dissenting voices - a
kind of exercise in damage limitation. The leopards break into the
temple and we make them part of the ceremony, but it doesn't stop
there. It isn't only leopards that we have to contend with. There are
the creatures we know about, and the ones we have never heard of.

And none of our ceremonies lasts for ever.

'If we consider the dream as an object', Pontalis writes, 'and as

intimately related to the object of nostalgia . . . then it does not give

rise to a single relation, but to a number of "directions for use", and
it does not have the same function for each person.' If it is possible,

as Pontalis asserts, that dreaming does not have the same function
for each person, then how are we to include this in our ceremony?
What would psychoanalysis become - be like - if we were to attend

not only to the patient's personal dream idiom, but also to the
idiosyncratic function of his dreaming? We would no longer only be
asking: What do this patient's dreams mean? But, What does this

particular person use dreaming for, use dreaming to do?

The dream is not the only object of nostalgia; we may also be

75
 TERRORS A'N EXPERTS

nostalgic about - or even unable to mourn - our interpretative

procedures. If we are, in Quentin Skinner's words, 'challenging and
replacing descriptions instead of attempting to enhance them', our
theories about dreams might become as bizarre, as ample, as our
dreams are. Our methods of interpretation can be used to protect us
from the dream, but also to protect us from each individual's
interpretation of dreams. Who is the expert on the dream and of
what, exactly, does his authority consist? The dream, Freud implies,
makes a mockery of its interpreters. Dreams are there to be dreamt.
But once another person listens to them, all sorts of things can
happen; a psychoanalyst may be no more and no less than a person
one tells one's dreams to, a person one knows to be interested in
such things. If dreaming does not have the same function for each
person, though, our methods of interpreting dreams are put into
question. The leopards are different and so is the ceremony.

76
 5
Sexes

To speak of Narcissus is to speak

of conviction . . .

Stephen Dunn, 'Wanting to Get Closer'

If, as Freud suggests in The Ego and the Id, character is constituted by
identification - the ego likening itself to what it once loved - then
character is close to caricature, an imitation of an imitation. Like the
artists Plato wanted to ban, we are making copies of copies, but
unlike Plato's artists, we have no original, only an infinite succession
of likenesses to someone who. to all intents and purposes, does not
exist. Freud's notion of character is a parody of a Platonic work of art;
his theory of character formation through identification makes a

mockery of character as in any way substantive. The ego is always

dressing up for somewhere to go (the poet Jane Miller refers to
identity as a 'posture of status'). In so far as being is being like, there
can be no place for 'true' selves or core gender identities. After all,

my sense of authenticity can only come from the senses of authenti-

city in my culture. In this context my 'true self' is more accurately

described as my 'preferred self' (or selves). am the performer of my I

conscious and unconscious preferences.

Lacan's mirror-stage is a testament to the havoc wreaked by
mimetic forms of development; and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Leo
Bersani, in particular, have exposed the violence and tautology of

Freud's theory of identification, the mutual implication and compli-

city involved in being like. This critical concept of identification is the
nexus for a number of contentious issues: it invites us to wonder
what we use other people for, and how other they are. In fact it

forces us to confront the question that excercised Freud and which

object-relations and relational psychoanalysis take for granted: in

77
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

what sense do we have what we prefer to call relationships with

each other? And, perhaps more importantly, how do we go about
deciding - or who is in a position to decide - what a relationship is?
How do you know if you are not having one?
In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud proposed that
the object was merely 'soldered' on to the instinct, that our primary
commitment was to our desire and not to its target. He was implying
that we are not attached to each other in the ways we like to think. In
this book, as in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud glimpsed the ego's
potential for promiscuous mobility. Dreams, in particular, revealed

that psychic life was astonishingly mobile and adventurous, even if

lived life was not (very few people are actively bisexual yet everyone
is psychically bisexual). Freud had to explain this disparity - the fact

that we don't have the courage, as it were, of our primary process -

and also find a way, in theory, of grounding the Faustian ego,
defining its loyalties when they sometimes seemed unreliable. The
ego certainly seemed shifty in its and so it was with
allegiances,
some relief that Freud turned to mourning, which seemed to reveal
that the ego was grounded in its relationship with loved and hated
others. Mourning is immensely reassuring because it convinces us
of something we might otherwise easily doubt: our attachment to
[Link] protracted painfulness of mourning confirms something
that psychoanalysis had put into question: how intransigently
devoted we are to the people we love and hate. Despite the evidence
of our dreams, our capacity for infinite substitution is meagre. In this

sense mourning has been a ballast for the more radical possibilities
of psychoanalysis. It is the rock, so to speak, on which Prometheus
founders.
It might at first seem more accurate to say that for Freud it was the
Oedipus complex that both constituted and set limits to the exorbi-

tance of the ego. But it is, as Melanie Klein has shown, the mourning
entailed in the so-called resolution of the Oedipus complex that
consolidates the ego. Without mourning for primary objects, there is

no way out of the magic circle of the family. Indeed, partly through
the work of Klein, mourning has provided the foundation for
development in most versions of psychoanalysis; so much so, in

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 SEXES

fact, that mourning has acquired the status of a quasi-religious

concept in psychoanalysis. Analysts believe in mourning; if a patient
was to claim, as Emerson once did, that mourning was 'shallow', he
or she would be considered to be 'out of touch' with something or
other. It is as though a capacity for mourning, with all that it implies,
human community. We can no more imagine a world
constitutes the
without bereavement than we can imagine a world without punish-
ment.
mourning can sometimes feel like a punishment for our
Certainly
attachments; and from the outside, when one is not, apparently,
grieving oneself, it can seem like a waste of time, and like the waste
that time inevitably is (what, for example, is the evolutionary value
of mourning?). The stubborn fact of loss, its unspeakableness, sets
limits to invention, even if the prodigality of loss in any life, and the
necessity of our own death, also prompts our resources. Our
ingenuity lies in turning losses into gains, which Oedipus did and
Narcissus couldn't (it is possible to be undaunted by impossibility).
The good life, in psychoanalysis, seems to involve a talent for giving
things up, but with no guarantee of satisfactory replacements. The
pragmatist might want to ask - as indeed Freud does in Mourning
and Melancholia - a seemingly callous, or even nonsensical question:
how can we make mourning work for us? Or, how do we, because
our resilience itself can seem demonic? (Man, Dostoevsky famously
remarked, is the animal that can adapt himself to anything.) How
can we link loss to the sense of possibility that our lives depend
upon? How can loss keep us kind?
Somewhat along these lines, Judith Butler, in her radical essay
'Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification', is trying to use mourn-
ing to give some gravity, in both senses, to her exhilarating notion of

gender as performative, as constructed self-invention. What is

remarkable about her essay manages to do this without

is that she

the argument degenerating into the more coercive pieties that talk
about grief usually brings in its wake. Mourning makes moralists of
us all. There are only ever going to be as many gender identities as

we can invent and perform. So we should not be celebrating those

people, many of whom are psychoanalysts, who, in the name of

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 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

truth, or psychic health, or maturity, seek to limit the repertoire. We

know how many sexes there are, but we will never know how many
gender identities we are capable of.
It is now a cliche, in theory if not in practice, that all versions of
gender identity are conflictual and therefore problematic. What
Butler is proposing with her notion of a melancholic identification, a
'culture of gender melancholy in which masculinity and femininity
emerge as the traces of an ungrieved and ungrievable love', is a new
version of an old question about gender identity. Why are homo-
sexual attachments - the inappropriately named 'negative' Oedipus
complex - described aversively, even if not originally experienced as
such? Why are these manifestly passionate loves disavowed, made
unmournable, repudiated and then punished when witnessed in

others? At its most minimal, it seems clear that the culturally

pervasive hostility - both inter- and intrapsychically - to homo-

sexuality is based on envy (contempt is always disowned shame). If

some heterosexuals pre-AIDS times were explicitly envious of the

in

promiscuity of homosexuals - Why can't we cruise? - heterosexuals

now may be more likely to envy simply the intimacy some people are
free to indulge in and elaborate with people of the same sex. But if, as
Butler suggests, 'masculinity' and 'femininity' are formed and
consolidated through identifications which are composed in part of
disavowed grief, what would it be to live in a world that acknow-
ledged and sanctioned such grief, that allowed us the full course of
our bereavement of disowned or renounced gender identities? What
would have to happen in the so-called psychoanalytic community,
and in the wider community, for an ethos to be created in which
people were encouraged to mourn the loss of all their repressed
gender identities (or to consider their resurrection)? These are
questions of considerable interest, providing they don't entail the
idealization of mourning - its use as a spurious redemptive practice -
as a kind of ersatz cure for repression, or the anguishes of uncertainty
(to love mourning is to fear excitement). The convinced heterosexual
man can become, in Butler's words, 'subject to a double disavowal, a
never having loved and a never having lost' the homosexual
attachment; is it, then, to become integral to the psychoanalytic

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 SEXES

project to analyse, or engineer the undoing of, this disavowal, even if

the heterosexual man claims to be relatively untroubled by it? The

absolutely plausible logic of Butler's argument poses some telling
clinical dilemmas. Who, for example, ultimately decides what
constitutes a problem for the patient? And by what criteria? Assumed
heterosexuality is every bit as much of a 'problem' as any other
assumed position symptoms, after all, are states of fraught
(all

conviction). Certainly it's worth remembering the cost, the depri-

vation, involved in all gender identities, not to mention the terror
informing these desperate measures. 'There is', Butler writes, 'no
necessary reason for identification to oppose desire, or for desire to
be fuelled through repudiation.' But there is, of course, a necessary
reason given a certain kind of psychoanalytic logic. In Freud's view,
we become what we cannot have, and desire (and punish) what we
are compelled to disown But why are these choices - why can't we do
.

both and something else as well? - and why are they the choices?
These were the issues opened up in Judith Butler's book Gender
Trouble. The essentially performative, constructed nature of gender
identity makes all constraints of the repertoire seem factitious and
unnecessarily oppressive. But just as every performance is subsid-
ized by an inhibition elsewhere, so there is no identity, however
compelling the performance, without suffering. If the idea of per-
formance frees identity into states of (sometimes willed) possibility,

mourning refers those same identities back to their unconscious

histories,with their repetitions and their waste - those parameters
that seemingly thwart our options. Mourning and performance -
and the performances that constitute our sense of mourning - seem
usefully twinned. Without the idea of performance, mourning
becomes literalized as truth - our deepest act; without the idea of
mourning, performance becomes an excessive demand - pretend
there's no unconscious, then pretend what you like. 'I believe in all
sincerity', Valery wrote, 'that if each man were not able to live a

number of lives beside own, he would not be able to live his own
his

life.' Valery's ironic sincerity - from which of his lives is he

speaking? - invites us to multiply our versions of self as some kind of

psychic necessity, as though we might not be able to bear the loss of

81
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

not doing so. But how many lives can the analyst recognize in, or
demand of, his patient, and what are the constraints on this

recognition that so easily becomes a demand? The repertoire of

possible selves can only come from the culture, and yet the gene-
pool, so to speak, of available identities keeps mutating, keeps being
added to. The psychoanalytic situation seems potentially a good
place for the speaking of new how does the analyst
selves. But

distinguish - in herself and in the patient - between a new self and a

resistance (or a problem)? Especially as the new often begins as a
pretence or a fear.

II

(Of course, 1 now see that good behaviour is the proper posture

of the weak, of children.)

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

In analysis, of course, it is not only the patient's gender identities

that are at stake. Both the analyst and her patient are working to

sustain their desire, and desire depends upon difference. There

always has to be something else, something sufficiently (or appar-

ently) other. The spectre of Aphinisis, Ernest Jones's repressed

concept of the death of desire, haunts the process. But though desire
depends upon difference, we only like the differences we like ('Why
is difference always linked with hatred?' Coleridge asks in his
Notebooks, making us wonder how that link is made); the set of
desirable or tolerable differences, desire-sustaining difference, is

never infinite for anyone. Psychoanalysis is about where we draw

these constitutive lines.
Any clinician is only too conscious of the unconscious constraints
on possibility that are called symptoms (and from a different
perspective are called the Oedipus complex). But of course what is

possible in analysis, or anywhere else, is dictated by the analyst's

theoretical paradigms, by the languages she chooses to speak about
her practice. Despite boasts to the contrary - psychoanalysis, the
Impossible Profession, etc. - psychoanalysis is never more difficult

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 SEXES

than we make it. For example, from a clinical point of view, Judith
Butler's initial political voluntarism in Gender Trouble would have
made analysts wary. But there is no obvious reason why analysts in
their practice have to be less imaginative than Butler is asking them
to be. The analyst who believes in the unconscious can hardly set
herself up as a representative of the authentic life, though the
language she uses to talk about her job is full of the jargon of
authenticity (integrity, honesty, trust, truth, self, instinct, etc.). The
language of performance may be too easy to dismiss clinically as

evasive in a way that is blind to the theatricality of the analytic

situation (in a psychoanalysis the audience is merely invisible). The
concept of identification puts the notion of the performative back
into the analytic frame; what is more surprising is the way we can
use mourning as a way of nuancing the theatricality that is integral

to our making of identities, our making ourselves up through loss

(our capacity for sexual acts). It is fortunate that writers are
interested in psychoanalysis because, unlike analysts, they are free
to think up thoughts unconstrained by the hypnotic effect of clinical
practice. Good performers, like musicians or sportspeople or ana-
lysts, are often not that good at talking about what they do, partly
because they are the ones who do it. There is nothing more limiting
than actually doing something.
And the doing of it, like the living of any life, involves acknow-
ledging, in one way or another, that there are only two sexes. In and
of itself, this says nothing about the possible repertoire of gender
identities. The logic of Judith Butler's argument, the kind of
instructive incoherence she finds in Freud, recuperates a sense of
possibility for analytic practice. And yet her lucidity also prompts
another kind of reflection. It can sometimes seem a shame that there

are only two sexes, not least because we then use this difference as a

paradigm do so much work for us (the differences between the

to

sexes is, of course, more exciting, or more articulable, than the

differences between a live body and a dead body). There is a kind of
intellectual melancholy in this loss of a third sex that never existed
and so can never be mourned; this third irrational sex that would
break the spell (or the logic) of the two, and which is one of the

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 TERRORS' and experts
child's formative and repressed fantasies about him- or herself
(there is a link between this magical solution to the primal scene and
fantasies of synthesis and redemption). What Freud called 'primary

process' is, after all, the erasing of mutual exclusion, a logic defying
logic. This form of generosity (and radicalism) is not always
available, it seems, to our secondary-process selves.

Ill

More to the point & less composed.

Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 22 June 1940

Starting with two sexes, as we must - described as opposites or

alternatives or complements - locks us into a logic, a limiting binary
system, that often seems remote from lived, spoken experience, and
is complicit with the other binary pairs - inside/outside, primary
process/secondary process, sadism/masochism, patient/analyst, and
so on - that are such a misleading part of psychoanalytic language.
There is, as it were, always another alternative. We should be
speaking of paradoxes and spectrums, not contradictions and
mutual exclusion (and a world of paradox is a world without
revenge: retaliation is a false cure for contradiction). 'The unconscio-

us', Freud wrote in The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest,

'speaks more than one dialect'. Voice is always in the plural. And the
unconscious is a logic that dispels the illusion of minimal alterna-
tives. Psychoanalysis, in other words, turns the idea of having it

both ways upside down; it shows us that hypocrisy has been

consistently underrated. We are never one thing or another, but a
miscellany. (For how long in any given day is one homosexual or
heterosexual, and can you always tell the difference?) Relationships
constitute so-called identities, not the other way round, and this

makes selves always provisional and circumstantial, not creatures of

either/or (to suffer is often to feel a self fixed in something).
Circumstances are always changing, whether we can allow our-
selves to notice this or not. Defences are always defences against the
provisional.

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 SEXES

Every child and adolescent rightly wants to know whether there is

a position beyond exclusion (or difference, or separateness, or
identity), a world in which leaving and being left out disappears. This

idea is taken up at a different level in Utopian socialism, which aims at

a society without margins, and therefore without humiliation. These
are not silly ideas, despite their marginalization in mainstream
psychoanalysis, which can only maintain itself by fetishizing the idea
of boundaries, by knowing best (the opposite of a fetish is an
adventure). One of the contributions of British Middle Group
psychoanalysis has been to prioritize the self as private property, and
to describe both a pathology, and a necessity, of, its abolition (Milton
and Winstanley are as much the precursors of Winnicott and Marion
Milner, as are Freud and Melanie Klein)/ This version of the self,
inspired by fantasies of purity, becomes the enemy of free asso-
ciation; terrorized by exchange, its project is to define and sustain the
idea of a real thing, to keep the self true. But the resolution of the
Oedipus complex entails, among other things, the acknowledge-
ment that there is no such thing as the real thing; the idea of the real

thing is itself a fetish, complicit with all it excludes. It is the need for
and belief in the real thing that is the problem for the Oedipal child.
It seems to be extremely difficult, in describing gender - or any of
the so-called identities - to find a picture or a story that no longer
needs the idea of exclusion. There seems to be something bewitch-
ing, certainly in psychoanalytic theory, about the idea - and the
experience - of evacuation; and of the kinds of definition that the
ideas of inside and outside can give us. (In relatively recent
psychoanalytic history, Michael Balint was asking whether the fish
was in the water or the water in the fish.) Why is it so difficult to
imagine a life in which there is nothing to get rid of? In which men,
for example, did not feel the need to dispose of their female selves?

The self as expulsive is the self as exclusive. We are what we excrete.

*By the Middle Group here am thinking specifically of the British psychoana-
I

lysts Winnicott, Khan, Milner, Rycroft and Laing. There is a buried connection
between what might be called Christopher Hill's seventeenth century - the
inspired Dissenters in the 1640s - and the Middle, or Independent, Group in
British psychoanalysis.

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 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

The vocabulary of difference - the means of establishing those

intra- and interpsychic boundaries and limits that psychoanalytic

developmental theory promotes - is, by definition, far more exten-

sive than the language of sameness (the same, of course, is not only
the identical). We can talk about difference - in a sense, that's what
talk is about, that's what language seems to be - but sameness

appears to make us mute, dull or repetitive. To talk of homosexuality

exclusively in terms that disparage sameness is to compound the
muddle. Sameness, like difference, is a (motivated) fantasy not a
natural fact - a construction, and, like all constructions, of its time,
provisional. One of the reasons that we are currently addicted to
difference is that difference makes competition possible; and compe-
tition is a cure for shame.

IV

Because I alone can perfectly forge my signature.

Jan Richman, 'Why I'm the Boss'

The language of boundaries that psychoanalysts, like estate agents,

are so intent on, and that makes possible notions of identification
and mourning, inevitably promotes a specific set of assumptions
about what a person is and can be. It is a picture of a person
informed by the languages of purity and property, by what Mary
Douglas more exactly called purity and danger. It may be more
useful to talk about gradations and blurring, to use a vocabulary of
paradox, rather than contours and outlines when we plot our stories
about gender. The language of performance - of continually making
ourselves up, of trying out our parts - at least keeps definition on the
move. After all, where else could it be?
'It is the difference in amount', Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle , 'between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded
and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor
which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the

poet's words, ungebandigt immer vorwarts dringt (presses ever for-

ward unsubdued).' Satisfaction is hopeless. All the positions are

86
 SEXES

unsatisfying because there is always another position. If, as Lacan

insists, we are always in pursuit because we are in pursuit of
something that isn't there, then it is also that gap, that inevitable
disparity between desire and its object, that Freud alerts us to, that
keeps us inventive and resilient, that gives us room for our selves.
That gap is their stage. And sex is the act.
'Do not, above all', Nietzsche wrote in his preface to Ecce Homo ,

'confound me with what I am not!' In Freud's view - nowhere more

vividly confronted than in our sexuality - we are forever confounded
with what we are not. (In psychoanalysis, paradoxically, a person is

everything, both what he acknowledges and what he denies.) And,

for that matter, though it is a blessing in disguise, we are forever
unable to control people's interpretation of us. Psychoanalysis can
show us how we try to control the interpretations, and how we are at
risk when we succeed. There is a freedom - as well as a terror - in

being able to be an object for others.

V
(Ah, this plethora of metaphors! I am like everything except

myself.)
John Banville, Athena

Most psychoanalytic theory now is a contemporary version of the

etiquette book; improving our internal manners, advising us on our
best sexual behaviour (usually called maturity, or mental health, or a
decentred self). It is, indeed, dismaying how quickly psychoanalysis
has become the science of the sensible passions, as though the aim of
psychoanalysis was to make people more intelligible to themselves
rather than to realize how strange they are. When psychoanalysis
makes too much sense, or makes sense of too much, it turns into
exactly the symptom it is trying to cure: defensive knowingness. But
there is nothing like sexuality, of course, for making a mockery of

our self-knowledge. In our erotic lives, at least, our preferences do

not always accord with our standards. We are excited by the oddest
things, and sometimes people.

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 TERRORS 'A"ND EXPERTS

At its best, psychoanalysis usefully acknowledges the complexity

of sexuality - that it is intrinsically conflictual, that pain and pleasure
are versions of each other, that we don't know what we are talking
about when we talk about sex. But it is surprisingly difficult to find in
the psychoanalytic literature anything like a celebration of sexuality;
or a sense that there really are states of sexual satisfaction, that sex
can be From the abstraction of contemporary theory it can
ecstatic.

seem that people are more interested in having a sexual identity than
in having a good time, more interested in the making or breaking of

rules than in what the rules may be about. And psychoanalytic

stories about the sexual revolution usually end up with a restoration
of the monarchy. Freud's discovery of infantile sexuality and the
radical changes in sexual mores since the 1960s produced, after all,

only a brief flourish of sexual Utopianism in the inspired writings of

Norman O. Brown and the rather more academic treatises of Herbert
Marcuse (the concept of surplus repression could only have come
out of a surplus of university teaching). Very quickly the masters of
scarcity returned with their bracingly joyless languages of lack and
absence: the 'truth' of the depressive position (Klein), and the
necessity of the law of the father (Lacan); the need for 'firm
boundaries', 'autonomous egos', and recognizable gender identi-
ties. From the psychoanalytic literature it was clear that thinking was
better than stroking, and that people were in search of emotional
maturity, self-knowledge or authenticity rather than passionate sex
or affection. Spontaneity was the token virtue most psychoanalysts
tended to affirm when writing about sexuality; but spontaneity is a
delight only for conformists (as every child knows, it's the easiest
thing in the world to learn). Sex, in fact, became a form of
unhappiness; and so, as in all oppressive regimes, misery began to
seem truthful. This is one of the sadder ironies of psychoanalysis,
since Freud had showed perhaps better than anyone apart from
us,
Nietzsche, why self-punishing theories - ideologies of deprivation -
are always morally prestigious. For some people, unhappiness is a
moral obligation; and habit, Freud implied, was the modern word
for duty. In our routines we are all ascetics.

The psychoanalytic relationship itself was the perfect picture for

88
 SEXES

this new enlightened masochism: the patient pays the doctor not to
touch him. Anyone, like who questioned this was
Ferenczi or Reich,
very quickly deemed, or actually became, mad (morally frightening
and/or unintelligible). In a sense this ascetic imperative merely
makes psychoanalysis similar to the great religions (a kind of Jewish
Buddhism, say). And sustaining the Oedipal prohibition is, rightly,
integral to the treatment. But there is an issue here that cannot be
resolved either by huffy authoritarians or relaxed hedonists: from a
psychoanalytic point of view, nobody can know about sexuality, no
one is in a privileged position (because the parents have sex does not
mean they know about it. What would it be to be an expert on sex,
what would you know?). Laying down the law about sexuality
either way is, what
so to speak, the line of least resistance. After all,

do we imagine sexuality is if it requires so much management? It is

as though we have made the rules without knowing what the game
is; as though the rules are there to stop us finding out.

If psychoanalysis gives us guide-lines about how to grow up

sexually - developmental theory is a relieffrom our wayward

unconsciousness, science as a cure for the demonic - it has also
given us a language to question our sexual assumptions, and in
particular our unconscious beliefs about the nature of, and possibili-

ties for, satisfaction. (The question. Who decides what we can, or are
able, to enjoy? joins psychoanalysis ineluctably to politics.) As the
voice of glum realism, psychoanalysis has been perhaps a little too
keen - suspiciously over-eager - to tell us persuasive stories about
the necessities of frustration ('Everyone who practises renuncia-
tion', Adorno remarks, 'gives away more of his life than is given
back to him'). Indeed Freud's notion of 'the wish to frustrate oneself'

is nowhere more evident than in psychoanalytic writing about

sexuality and identity, which is usually determinedly counter-erotic.
When it comes to identity, now, more is better. When it comes to
sexuality, though, more is a difficult word.
It is, of course, relatively recently that sexuality and identity have

become inevitably twinned; the fact that we cannot imagine one

without the other has become rather a mixed blessing. Either one,
after all, is potentially a defence against - a refusal of - the other. If

89
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

the demonic has been repressed in psychoanalytic theory - patholo-

gized as the repetition compulsion, intense excitement becoming
mania and perversion - it has also returned as the 'will to diagnosis'.

Psychoanalytic writing is full of nicknames for people - borderline,

psychotic, heterosexual, narcissistic, obsessional, etc. - that in some
contexts can sound immensely authoritative (diagnosis has always
been the way psychoanalysts tell themselves who they are). To
generalize is to be a professional. But diagnosis is only part of a
wider modern technology for identity acquisition. The risk - and this
is nowhere more obvious than in the supposed need for a sexual

identity - is that the wish to be defined is complicit with the wish to

be controlled (or, more benignly, the wish to be looked after).
Wanting to be defined by our sexuality may only be symptomatic of
our wanting to be defined. But the unconscious, as Freud described
it, always has a blurring effect (you thought you knew what you

were saying and then, by making a slip or a pun, you say something
else). In other words, psychoanalysis keeps in circulation what has

become a useful cliche: that sexuality is what makes identity both

necessary and impossible. Because we get lost in it, we want to
know where we are.
The alternatives of being lost or being found are fundamental
organizers of our experience; the Judaeo-Christian religions, like
psychoanalysis itself, have always exploited the senses in which
adults are similar to children (adults are more exploitable if you can
convince them that they are really children, which is how seduction
often works). But the language of being found - being recognizable,
being the same as, having things in common, sharing - can obscure
the pleasures of being lost. Not to mention the fact that speaking,
implicitly or explicitly, in these quasi-religious terms about sexuality
- in this language of redemption - coerces the conversation. In
secular terms, being found means more or less fitting into one of the
available categories. The risk is that we end up thinking that
everyone is different but some are more different than others; or that
being found means having just the right amount of sameness and
difference. The question becomes: Do we want better generali-
zations (more theory), or should we drop the whole project of trying

90
 SEXES

to make them and write more novels and poems)? As every

(read
patient knows, and as every analyst should know, free-association is
the death of theory. To talk about sex is always to talk about what we
may or may not have in common; and this doubt about what we may
or may not have in common is one of the things we have in common.
Denial of difference is always Groups do not
a refusal of ignorance.

cohere against an external enemy; they cohere around collusive

knowledge. It is conceivable that one of the things we use sexuality
to do now is to talk about whether it is possible, or useful, or

interesting, to make generalizations at all. Our categories should

always be treated as questions - temporary groupings in which
every element is nomadic - rather than as answers; as comforters but
not as fetishes. Sexuality may be the modern cure for classification,
rather than the other way round.
The paradox of sexuality, as it is constructed now, is that it both
links us to other people, and makes us feel at odds with ourselves.
That there can be no normal loving is potentially a liberating
psychoanalytic idea; it makes room more people and for more
for

versions of more people. But it is still worth wondering what we think

understanding sexuality will do for us, and what we think it is if it can
be understood. (We might think: What else can we do but try to
understand it?) If we banned the word love, it would be interesting to
seewhat we found ourselves saying (and doing) to each other.
Because, from a psychoanalytic point of view, normality is a
symptom, we have to be careful about what gets put in its place.
Now that 'truth' has replaced sexual pleasure (in its broadest,
Freudian sense) as the psychoanalytic ambition, normality is return-
ing through the back door. No one can tell me that I'm not enjoying
myself; they can only tell me that shouldn't be. No one can tell me
I

that I'm not telling the truth; they can only tell me that should be. I

Without a passion for pleasure - without the unconscious - psycho-

analysis becomes merely another glamorous or noble killjoy. In
psychoanalysis one can see very clearly how two people can sit in a
room together and try to kill each other's pleasure: the aim of
analysis is to understand how this happens, and to restore their
pleasure in each other's company.
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

Understanding sexuality - as if such a thing were possible - is just

the beginning, if that. The difficult question is how we decide which

kinds of loving are acceptable. Understanding does not inform our
morality, our morality informs the ways we have of understanding.
The language of pleasure and the language of justice are inextric-
able. By being a new way of saying this, psychoanalysis can be

recruited either to consolidate our prejudices or to show us what our

prejudices are for.

'Human beings', the philosopher Hilary Putnam writes, 'are self-

surprising creatures.' If in our sexuality we are full of surprises, we
are also, by the same token, keen to take the edge off our desire,
eager to deaden ourselves. This is what Freud referred to as the
battlebetween Eros and Thanatos, the hot war between aliveness
and inertia. Freud showed us that there are surprises on both sides,
but that it is the surprises that matter.

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 6
Minds
i

We seem never to ask, 'Why do you know?' or, 'How do you

believe?'

j. L. Austin, Other Minds

One of the most famous, indeed constitutive, episodes in the story

of the (Western) mind is the story Descartes tells of himself, as a
character, sitting alone in a room and practising what he calls

'extensive doubt'. In his solitary quest for certainty - for that which
he can reliably depend upon to be true, to be really there - 'the
mind uses its own freedom and supposes the non-existence of all

the things about whose existence it can have even the slightest
doubt; and in so doing the mind notices that it is impossible that it

should not itself exist during this time.' This project of ruthless

doubt, this pursuit of the real, 'frees us from all our preconceived
opinions . .
.
providing the easiest route by which the mind may be
lead away from the senses'; we are led, Descartes writes, 'to

recognize that the natures of the mind and body are not only
different, but in some way opposite'. 'Opposite' meaning, here, in
opposition to each other, but also, perhaps, suggesting that the
body and the mind may be mutual saboteurs terrorizing each other.
It is not exactly, Descartes implies, that we need to get away from
the body, but that once we go in search of trustworthy foundations,
of states of conviction, the body is the first casualty. As we shall

see, the mind-object is world that has to

that figure in the internal

believe - and go on proving, usually by seeking accomplices - that

there is no such thing as body with needs. It is a fiction invented
a

to solve the problem of wanting, to make the turbulence disappear.

The body is misleading because it leads one into relationship, and
so towards the perils and ecstacies of dependence and risk; it

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 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

reminds us of the existence of other people. In this sense the mind-

object - the mind imagined as an autonomous thing-person inside
oneself - is a perverse theorist of the body.
Descartes, of course, was not the first person to think of the body
as an object of suspicion, as the enemy of truth. Finding ways of not

being bodies, the quest for something better, for an alternative to the
body, to its desires and its death, is integral to both Platonism and
Christianity. Truth, or redemption (the real), is what we are left with
once we body (as though it is the sin or error of the
are free of the
body that it is finite, and therefore needs to be transcended:
psychoanalysis brings transcendence down to earth). The need of
the body and the death of the body make us think. For Winnicott, as
we shall also see, it is a death, but a death at the beginning - a

temporary and intimidating psychic death - that prompts the

locating of an extreme version of what he calls a mind - a kind of
internal expert. If, in early development, our 'bodily aliveness', our
'going-on-being', in Winnicott's words, is ruptured; if our existence
is put under threat by an unmanageable environmental demand, we
use our minds to maintain ourselves. Where there is a mind-object at
work there is a loss, or a violation, or a terror, that cannot be
acknowledged.
Descartes makes it very clear, though in a context of philosophi-

cal enquiry, that his very existence, his belief in his existence is

under threat once he begins to doubt. Until, that is, he finds the
thinking T. 'Descartes establishes to his satisfaction', Stanley
Cavell writes, 'that I exist only while, or if and only if, I think. It is

this, it seems, which leads him to claim that the mind always
thinks . .
.'. For Descartes, thinking becomes the way people
guarantee their existence (to themselves), establish their own
presence in the world. My thoughts are inseparable from my sense
of myself; indeed, they are my sense of myself, the only medium in
which this sense can be. Like my home, they are where I live. For
Descartes, in the Meditations, thought is the revelation that grounds
him; his mind breaks his fall. 'At last', he writes in the Second
Meditation,

94
 MINDS
I have discovered - thought; this alone is inseparable from me. I am, I
it

exist - that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For
it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally

cease to exist. At present I am not admitting anything except what is

necessarily true. I am, then, in the strict sense, only a thing that thinks;
that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason - words whose
meaning I have been ignorant of until now. But for all that I am a thing
which is real and which truly exists. But what kind of thing? As I have
just said - a thinking thing.

From a psychoanalytic point of view Descartes' discovery can be

rediscovered. For example, is this not a precise formulation of some
of the essential questions of childhood? What is inseparable from
me, what is it I cannot bear to be separated from? And then, or
therefore, what kind of thing am I? (And what kind of thing I am, or
can be, depends upon that constitutive question of childhood, the
litany of 'how long?') Faced with these fundamental questions,
Descartes comes to rest in his mind, or rather, as a mind, a thinking
thing. Mind, intelligence, intellect, reason - words born of neces-
sity, insuring a future. As long as he thinks, he knows he is there, he

knows where he is. But it is as though the mind is the only place left
that he can be sure of being. One way of describing what he has
discovered is that he is, in the telling phrase of the psychotherapists
Corrigan and Gordon, sufficient unto his mind.
In terms of psychoanalysis Descartes' Meditations may seem both
uncanny and germane. There are clearly overlapping preoccu-
pations but there is also the instructive jarring (of vocabulary and
allusion: I am using, for example, an English translation of
Descartes' Latin text) that should remind us that we are in different

worlds. If a straight line cannot be drawn from Descartes' Meditations

to the psychoanalytic concept of the mind-object - and it cannot,
because to do so would be to omit such an array of contexts - useful
links can nevertheless be made (Descartes' use of the paradigm of
dreaming and waking is something of a lure). There is, of course, no
place in the Cartesian system for the unconscious; but how does one
make a place for the unconscious? If, as Gerald Bruns has written,
Descartes 'inaugurates a new era of epistemological thinking.

95
 TERRORS AfoD EXPERTS

wherein everything is thought to be determined or made intelligible

by the workings of the mind', how is this different from Freud's

psychoanalysis, or, indeed, from the concept of the mind-object?
What stops psychoanalytic theory (and practice) from becoming a
mind-object? How can you make a system, a psychic apparatus, that
includes what cannot be known? Despite the existence of the
unconscious, psychoanalysis always tends towards a covert Carte-
sianism. How can psychoanalysis keep the unknown in the picture?
How can there be a theory of the unknown, a knowledge of the
unknown, as psychoanalysis sometimes claims to be?
want to read Winnicott's extraordinary paper, 'Mind and
I its

Relation to the Psyche-Soma' (1949) as a critique - a pathologization

- of Descartes' Meditations (it is characteristically Winnicottian in

being a critique that makes no explicit reference to its object); and as

a suspicion about psychoanalysis itself.

II

There is no meaning to the term intellectual health.

D. W. Winnicott, Human Nature

Winnicott begins his paper with a quotation from Ernest Jones that
he has found quoted by Clifford Scott in his paper The Body Scheme
in Psychotherapy'. 'I venture to predict', Jones wrote, 'that . . . the
antithesis which has baffled all the philosophers will be found to be
based on an illusion. In other words, I do not think that the mind really
exists as an entity - possibly a startling thing for a psychologist to say'
(Winnicott's emphasis). With this assertion, which Winnicott will go
on to confirm, he uses Jones to refer indirectly to Descartes, among
others ('all the philosophers . .
.' seems rather blithe). If Winnicott
had read the sentence before the one quoted by Scott, he would have
found Jones in search, like Descartes, of foundations: describing
psychoanalysis as a kind of Cartesian quest for essentials, Jones
wrote, 'To ascertain what exactly comprises the irreducible mental
elements, particularly those of a dynamic nature, constitutes, in my
opinion, one of our most fascinating final aims.'

96
 MINDS

Where Descartes put the mind at the beginning of the story, Jones
and Winnicott will put the body. But what kind of body? Replacing
one term with another - dispelling the dualism of mind and body in
the search for an origin, a true beginning - runs the risk of merely
replacing one essentialism with another. The 'truth' of the body may
be just another way of getting us to believe in the truth.
Endorsing Jones's assertion with one of his own - body in the
scheme 'there is no obvious place for the mind' - Winnicott draws a
distinction:

We are quite used to seeing the two words

and 'physical' 'mental'
opposed and would not quarrel with their being opposed in daily
conversation. It is quite another matter, however, if the concepts are
opposed in scientific discussion'.

Perhaps it is paradoxical, at the outset, that the mind is to be

replaced by the body, but daily conversation is to be replaced by
scientific discussion in the search for truth. From a scientific point of

view, Winnicott writes, there is, 'the development of the individual

from the very beginning of psycho-somatic existence'; there is a

body composed of a psyche and a soma. We have to imagine the

soma as the flesh-and-blood organism, a biological entity, and the
psyche as 'the imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings,

and functions'. (It is not incidental, I think, that Winnicott does not
define the word 'soma'.) If early development has been 'satisfac-

tory', the 'mind does not exist as an entity in the individual's scheme
of things'. It is, Winnicott writes, 'a false entity and a false

localization'. The notion of a 'false entity', of course, begs a lot of

questions. Good mind, Winnicott will go on to say, is the part of the
self that will develop an understanding of its environmental deficits,

in the service of a self-reliance that can sustain contact with, and

need for, the mother. Bad mind - the 'false entity' that Corrigan and
Gordon call the mind-object - is reactive to the trauma of environ-
mental impingement, tries to abolish both the need and the object.

With good-enough maternal care, in Winnicott's particular sense of

these terms, the mind would be an ordinary participant in one's
psychic life rather than an excessive preoccupation - a continuation

97
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

of the mother one can take for granted, rather than a substitute
which one is continually rigging up. So Descartes finding himself a
'thing that thinks' becomes, from Winnicott's point of view, sympto-
matic: a description of a developmental deficit. The mind, far from
being a virtual definition, indeed a location of, the essentially
human, becomes itself a distortion in the individual's psycho-
somatic development. Despite the special language - the albeit very
different 'scientific discussion' - of Descartes and Winnicott, what is

at stake here is what we believe a person, at his or her best, to be.

Descartes' narrator writes of himself as 'a thing which is real and
which truly exists' only as 'a thinking thing'. Winnicott describes
children who have had to exploit their minds for psychic survival,

and of the consequent 'unrealness of everything to an individual

who has developed in such a way'. In Winnicott's anti-Cartesian
meditations, what he calls the mind is an attempted self-cure for a

too-problematic dependence. Descartes depends on his mind to feel

real. He is the T that thinks. Descartes' solution is Winnicott's

problem.
Of course, it is misleading, as I have said, to assume a continuity

of vocabulary here; words like 'real', 'unreal', 'true', 'false', 'think-

ing', T are born of histories and contexts (and translations). But it

may be revealing to read Winnicott as wondering, in 'Mind and its

Relation to the Psyche-Soma', What might have happened to

someone - a contemporary - to make him ask the kinds of questions
Descartes asks in his Meditations ? What could lead you to doubt your
own reality, to describe yourself, as Winnicott found some of his
patients doing, as not feeling real? And how could one's very
existence get bound up with what one knew (or remembered)? What
is one relieved of, what is one managing, by certainty, by being an

expert on oneself? Why does doubting start, and what is its terror
(Winnicott refers in an early paper to 'the child's most sacred
attribute: doubts about self')? And what kind of thing does each
person assume a mind and what kind of relationship can we
to be,

have with it? Indeed, where do we get the idea of a mind as

something - an object - with which we can have a relationship (lose
it, feel mindless, say, 'Never mind', and so on)?

98
 MINDS

In Winnicott's view, the mind is that part of the self invented to

cover for, to manage, any felt unreliability in the care-taking
environment. It is a necessary fiction, born of expedience, and
therefore potentially tainted by (unconscious) resentment. When-
ever the world is not good enough, one has a mind instead.
'Here', Winnicott writes, echoing Descartes' opposition of mind
and body,

in the overgrowth of the mental function reactive to erratic mothering,

we see that there can develop an opposition between the mind and the
psyche-soma, since in reaction to this abnormal environmental state the
thinking of the individual begins to take over and organize the caring for
the psyche-soma, whereas in health it is the function of the environment
to do this. In health the mind does not usurp the environment's
function, but makes possible an understanding and eventually a making
use of its relative failure.

In the absence of a relatively reliable environmental provision, the

mind becomes a kind of enraged bureaucrat, a master of circum-
stances. Winnicott describes the mind as 'cataloguing', exactly and
completely, unmanageable - or rather, unimaginable - emotional
experiences (in this sense the mind-object is the anti-type of the
unconscious with its dream-work and its disregard for chronology).
In states of privation thinking 'takes over', 'organizes', 'usurps'. It is

not incidental that Winnicott's language hints at political insur-

rection. He is, after all, describing an internal psychic revolution. In

'health', one might say, using Winnicott's medical language, the
mind listens to and collaborates with the body and its objects (or
rather, subjects); in 'illness' there is a military coup and a dictator is

installed called a mind-object, at once bureaucrat and terrorist. The

mind knows that it does not know, and can use objects to find what
it lacks; the mind-object cannot bear the kind of knowledge called
not-knowing. The mind thrives on ignorance; the mind-object lives

by convictions (and information: it is essentially an expert). From the

point of view of the mind-object, at its most extreme, there can be no
unconscious, because everything has already been accounted for ('a

system', as Gerald Bruns writes in relation to Descartes, 'is almost by

definition that which contains no secrets, because it allows nothing

99
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

to be set apart'). But in a dictatorship, of course, everyone is under

suspicion. As Corrigan and Gordon write, /Patients who rely on
their mind as an object, on some level, actually know all too well of
its unreliability.' A baby cannot bring itself up.
What Winnicott, and Corrigan and Gordon after him, alerts us to
with the concept of the mind-object, is the link between resource-
lessness and the need to know. The mind, in Winnicott's account, is

always making up for something, but something - sufficient mater-

nal care - for which there is no substitute (any experience you need
to know about, to understand, is a trauma). Knowing is the opposite
of, the false self-cure for, dependence: 'acceptance of not knowing',
Winnicott writes, 'produces tremendous relief . .
.' In Bion's com-
plementary language one could say: the mind-object attacks the link
between the person and his desire, and the desire and its object. So
Winnicott's concept of the mind confronts us with a paradox which
has significant consequences for the practice of psychoanalysis: we
only need to know , be mindful of, that which we cannot trust depending on.
The mind simulates reliability; knowing is a cure for the erratic (or
the contingent). What, then, of the kind of knowing that goes on in,

is prompted by, psychoanalysis?

Ill

All those attempts to bring everything in around you are part of

a naive belief that you can recreate the whole world. Well, you
can't. Where would you put it? Next to the whole world?
David Hockney, 'On Photography'

When Winnicott refers to 'the overgrowth of the mental function

reactive to erratic mothering', he gives us at least one description of
the genesis of the mind-object. Erratic, though, is an interesting
word. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary offers these definitions:
'1. Wandering; first used of the planets, and of certain diseases . . .

2. Vagrant, nomadic ... 3. Having no fixed course ... 4. Eccentric,

irregular.' Even though clinically it is easy to understand what
Winnicott means by erratic mothering, after Freud we might think of
100
 MINDS

erratic as another word for the human - or, to put it another way. Is

the unconscious an erratic mother? Certainly all the words in the

dictionary definition would apply to Freud's description of the
unconscious. Perhaps Winnicott in 'Mind and its Relation to the
Psyche-Soma' is writing not only of an inter-psychic experience -
between mother and child - but also about psychoanalysis itself? Is
Winnicott's 'mind', for example, an unconscious parody, or carica-
ture, of Freud's concept of the ego; and so is his paper a critique not
only of erratic mothering but of psychoanalysis as a treatment in
which the analyst strengthens the patient's mind? Or, to put it the
other way around, is 'mother' also one of Winnicott's words for the
unconscious? If, at best, a person should, as Winnicott says, 'live as
a psyche-soma', what kind of relationship would a person have with
their unconscious? What would a person's life be like if they lived as
a psyche-soma, relatively mindless? Would the aim of a psychoana-
lysis be to know who you are, or to tolerate and enjoy the
impossibility of such knowing? Winnicott's paper, I think, invites us
to ask these kinds of questions.
Developmentally, Winnicott suggests, there was a time before the
mind, when there was nothing to know about and no need to know.
Once there is impingement - once, as at birth, the
the trauma of
environment becomes excessively demanding - the mind appears.
But, as Winnicott implies, the mind is trying to know something that

is not subject to knowing (like trying to look at something with one's

mouth). The paradox here, which has difficult consequences for the

notion of regression, is that the mental activity of the mind-object

reinforces - secures, in a sense - the trauma it was trying to relieve;
the mind that takes over sustains, by its very activity, the discon-
tinuity of being that is the trauma. The mind turns up when it is already

too late. If the environment had been as it should have been, the
mind-object would have been unnecessary; its very existence signi-
fies insult and betrayal (this is the root of hatred of the mind, of its

very existence; for some children and adolescents, failing at school is

the only alternative to psychosomatic illness as a self-cure. To

sabotage the mind becomes a way of returning to the body). In the

light of Winnicott's developmental picture, it would make sense that

101
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS

in psychoanalysis one might aim to reconstruct the cumulative

trauma that made the mind-object necessary as a solution, but also

to enable the patient to have access to that time before the mind.
Does psychoanalysis, therefore, sponsor a more benign mind-object
- one that is capable of using insight about the genesis of its mind-
object - or does it aim to facilitate its absence, or both? Is psychoana-
lysis a way of teaching people how to get lost again (in thought)?

Winnicott's concept of the mind raises the constitutive psychoanaly-

tic question of the relationship between regression - even the
ordinary regression of free-association - and so-called insight.
Where in Winnicottian analysis does the mind come in? To this

Winnicott's paper seems to reply: the mind always comes in afterwards

(to repair, to reflect, to reconstruct, to formulate, to consider, to

fetishize, etc.). All thoughts are afterthoughts. It is as though the

project of the mind is essentially damage limitation. Why is it so
difficult to imagine an analysis that consists exclusively of free-

association?
But because the mind always comes in afterwards - after the
trauma, after the state of absorption or free-association - it always
runs the risk of being a pre-emptive presence. The mind-object has
always unconsciously identified with the traumatic agent (or rather,

events) that first prompted its existence; its function then becomes,
to impinge, to interrupt, to punctuate. The mind that attempted to
repair - to compensate for - the trauma becomes the trauma itself.

The mind, in other words, becomes the patient's cumulative - in

fact, accumulating - trauma. A trauma that the analyst might feel

some solidarity with.

IV

My intellect , or whatever one usually works with , is also on

vacation.

Freud to Ferenczi, 4 August 1911

It was Ferenczi who first suggested that the patient is not cured by
free-associating, he is cured when he can free-associate. I think it was

102
 MINDS

Ferenczi's sense that psychoanalysis was potentially a form of

mind-object - a facilitating of the mind-object - that in part led him
towards his particular kind of courageous clinical experiments. His
formative paper 'Confusion of Tongues between the Adults and the
Child' (1933) - an unacknowledged precursor of Winnicott's paper
- is about the kind of trauma that makes a child knowing (and the
kind of trauma that can turn someone into a psychoanalyst).
Psychoanalysis as a quest for reliable knowledge about the self (and
the object) is a covert continuation of the Cartesian project; psyc-

hoanalysis as the facilitation of the (psychic) time before the mind -

call it the capacity to free-associate, the capacity to be absorbed - is a
very different project. Both, of course, have their uses, their
necessary occasions.
Psychoanalysis was born, in a sense, of the relationship inside
Freud between the Cartesian and the anti-Cartesian, the psychoana-
lystand the dreamer. Both Ferenczi and Winnicott were struggling, I

think, with the Cartesian in Freud and in psychoanalysis itself: what

Gerald Bruns calls 'the Cartesian collapse of being into the logically
possible'. And the logically possible becomes that which can be
known. A psychoanalysis committed to the 'logically possible'
seems like a contradiction in terms. In different ways Winnicott and
Ferenczi confronted this irony by proposing experience - a certain
kind of emotional experience - as an alternative to insight (or self-

knowledge) as the legitimate aim of psychoanalysis. It is not

incidental that Ferenczi, and his student Balint, and Winnicott, and
his students Khan and Milner, w ere
r
pioneers of the idea of
regression in psychoanalytic treatment. The word regression is a

way of referring to those states of mind (or mindlessness), either

inarticulate or on the verges of representation, that defy or confound

the already known. A regression is a revision, what Winnicott calls a
surprise. The opposite of regression is not progress but omniscience
(there is nothing more time-consuming than omniscience). It entails
the risk of entrusting oneself - something we do every day, without
thinking, when we are momentarily lost in thought. Or in the kind
of psychoanalysis in which we can forget ourselves. The idea of
knowing oneself makes a fetish out of memory.

103
 TERRORS A>JD EXPERTS

In the absence of trauma, Winnicott implies - as if there could be

such a thing - there is nothing worth knowing. The concept of the
mind-object reminds us that we know things at our own cost; and
that knowing is not the only thing we can do. Psychoanalysis can
add to the story of the mind, the story of the mind on vacation.
Freud's account of obsessional neurosis - a foreboding of what
psychoanalysis itself might become - is a critique of knowledge as
privilege, and of the privileging of knowledge. The obsessional
exposes the violence, the narrow-mindedness, of a certain kind of
expertise about the self. If psychoanalysis doesn't also facilitate the

patients' capacity not to know themselves, it becomes merely another

way of setting limits to the self; and the analyst becomes an expert
on human possibility, something no one could ever be, despite the
posturing of our own favourite authorities. There are always too
many good reasons to be impressed by impossibility. At its best,
psychoanalysis can show us both what we have in mind, and what
we mind about, and the relationship, if any, between them. But it
cannot tell us who we can be. It can tell us, though, that prescription
begins when curiosity breaks down. Too much definition leaves too
much out.

104
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- Homos (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1995)
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105
 TERRORS ANlD EXPERTS
Ernest Gellner, Reason and Culture (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994)
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XXVII, 1946, pp. 11-12
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M. Masud R. Khan, The Privacy of the Self ( London, Hogarth Press, 1974)
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (London, Tavistock, 1977)
- The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London, Hogarth Press, 1977)
Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge, CUP, 1994)
Jane Miller, Working Time (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1992)
Marion Milner, The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (London, Tavistock, 1987)
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London, Penguin, 1979)
J. B. Pontalis, Frontiers in Psychoanalysis (London, Hogarth Press, 1981)
Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995)
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Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert
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106
 Index

Adorno, Theodor, 89 risks, 44; sexual abuse of, 27; and

Andreas-Salome, Lou, 29 sexuality, 24, 26, 61; symptoms of,
anxiety, 59-62 and terror, xi; and
33, 36-43, 44;
Aphinisis, 82 third sex, 83-4; and truth, 25-7
asceticism, 88-9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 82
attention-seeking, 38 Coltart, Nina, 36
Auden, W.H., 47 comedy, 10
Austin, J.L.: Other Minds, 93; A Plea confession, 29-30
for Excuses, vii Corrigan, 95, 97, 99-100
authority, 30-32 crime, 9, 10-11

Balint, Michael, 85, 103 death, 94

Banville, John: Athena, 87 defences, 47-8
belief, 14-15; and truth, 27 Descurtes, Rene, 93-6, 97-8, 99, 103;
bereavement: mourning, 7 8-9 Meditations, 94-5, 98; desire, xi-xii;
Bersani, Leo, 77 conferral of, 24; and identification,
Bion, Wilfred, 13, 100 81, 82; incestuous, 10; for
bisexuality, 23-4, 78 knowledge, 1-3;and secrecy, 34;
Blackmur, R.P., 17 and truth, 26; see also Oedipus
Blanchot, Maurice: Adolphe, 36 complex
body: bodily symptoms, 36-43, 44; Dewey, John, xiii
and mind, 93-4, 96-7, 99 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 79
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 77 Douglas, Mary, 86
Brown, Norman O., 88 dreams, 12, 64-76, 78
Bruns, Gerald, 95, 99, 103 Dunn, Stephen: 'Wanting to Get
Butler, Judith, 79-81, 83; Gender Closer, 77
Trouble, 8i, 83; 'Melancholy
Gender/Refused Identification',
eczema, 36-43, 44
79-81 Edmundson, Mark, 7
ego: exorbitance of, 78; and fear, 47,
Cage, John, 15 52, 59, 60
castration, fear of, 61 elitism, xiii-xvi
Cavell, Stanley, 94 Elma (Ferenczi's step-daughter), 29
character, 77 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 79
Chesterton, G.K.: Orthodoxy, 15 Empson, William: 'Donne the Space
children: and adults, xi, 1-4, 14-15, Man', vii
25-7, 33, 69; dependence of, xi, Enlightenment, 6
1-4, 11, 33; and dreams, 70; feared Enlightenment Freud, 6-12, 14, 16-17
by adults, 63; and fears, 48, 50-53, Enlightenment psychoanalysts, 13-
58, 60-63; and the mind, 101; and 1
4 /
'
5 > 49

107
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS
envy, xiv; of homosexuals, 80 neurosis, 4-5; and Oedipus
Eros and Thanatos, 6, 92 complex, 10-11; and personal
evacuation, 85 intimacy, 20, 28-9; post-Freudian
existence, 93-5, 98 Freud, 6-8, 12, 15, 17; Schreber
existentialism, 54, 35-6 case, 22; and
secrets, 33, 34; and
expert(s), xii; belief in, xiii; definition self-knowledge, 4-8; and sexuality,
of, xii; on love, xi; the mind as 23-4, 30, 87, 88, 89, 92; and
expert, 98, 99; on ourselves, 98; unconscious, xii, 6-8, 15-16, 18, 19,
parents as, 1-2, 14-15; in 20, 26, 84, 90
psychoanalysis, xii-xvi, 1-8, 11-12, writings:
13-15, 34-5/ 45/ 65-6; and terrors, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 86;
14; on unconscious, 6 The Claims of Psycho-analysis to
Scientific Interest, 84; 'On
family, 34-5; and fears, 61-2; and Dreams', 64-5; The Ego and the Id,
mourning, 78; and symptoms, 37- 77; The Future of an Illusion, 51;
43 44 /
The Interpretation of Dreams, 1,
fear(s), xi-xii, 46-63; and anxiety, 59- 73-4; Introductory Lectures, 5; Jokes
62; of children, construction of,
xi; and Their Relation to the

48-9; and defences, 47-8; of Unconscious, 10; Mourning and

freedom, 54-5, 56; of the future, Melancholia, 79; New Introductory
52-7/ 5M Lectures, 30; An Outline of
femininity, 80 Psychoanalysis, 50;
Ferenczi, Gizella, 29 .'Psychoanalysis and the
Ferenczi, Sandor, 18, 19-32, 89, 102; Establishment of the Facts in
Clinical Diary, 32; 'Confusion of Legal Proceedings', 66; Studies in
Tongues between the Adults and Hysteria, 30; Three Essays on the
the Child', 27, 103; Laughter, 18; Theory of Sexuality, 78; Totem and
Notes and Fragments, 20, 25; On the Taboo, 22; Transitory Symptom
Part Played by Homosexuality in the Constructions during the Analysis,
Pathogenesis of Paranoia, 22; The 25-6; The Unconscious, 16
Nosology of Male Homosexuality, 22, Freudian slips, 31, 68, 90
23 future, fear of, 52-7, 58-9
Fliess,WiJhelm, 66
Forrest-Thomson, Veronica: 'Not Gellner, Ernest, 8
Pastoral Enough', vii gender, 79-86, 88
found/lost, alternatives of, 90 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 10
free-association, 91, 102-3
freedom: fear of, 54-5, 56; of speech, Hearne, Vicki: Tracking Dogs, Sensitive
27-8 Horses and the Traces of Speech, 8
Freud, Martha, 29 heterosexuality, 23-4, 79-80, 84
Freud, Sigmund: and belief, 14-15; Hill,Christopher, 85
and Cartesianism, 103; and Hockney, David: 'On Photography',
character, 77; and children, 26, 50- 100
53, 60-63; and desire, 8i, 86-7; and homosexuality, 22-4, 25, 28, 84, 86;
dreams, 64-7, 68, 73-4, 76, 78; hostility to, 80
Enlightenment Freud, 6-12, 14, 16- honesty, 25-8
17; and and
essential terrors, 13-14;
experts, and fears, 48, 50-
xii, xiii; identification, 77, 83
53 56-7, 58-63; and Ferenczi, 18,
/ identity: gender identities, 79-86, 88;
19-30, i°2; homosexual self of, 28; and sexuality, 89-90
and love, xi; and mourning, 78, 79; ignorance, 4-6, 8, 13
and mysticism, 19-20, 21, 22; and incestuous desire, 10

108
 INDEX
Jabes, Edmond, 15 occult phenomena, 18-22
James, William, 45; Pragmatism, 54 Oedipus, 9-12, 79
Randall: Pictures from an
Jarrell, Oedipus complex, xi, 10-12, 59, 82,
Institution, 72 85; and mourning, 78; negative, 23,
Jones, Ernest, 13, 82, 96; Sigmund 80; and symptoms, 42
Freud, 31
Jung, Carl Gustav, 19, 29-30 paranoia: and homosexuality, 22-4
paranormal phenomena, 18-22
Kafka, Franz: 'Leopards in the parents, xi, 1-2, 25-6, 33, 69; and
Temple', 67 child sexuality, 61; as experts, 1-2,
Kenny, Anthony: and Reason, 46
Faith 14-15; and fears, 50-53, 61-2; and
Khan, Masud, 72, 85, 103 symptoms, 37-43, 44
Kincaid, Jamaica: A Small Place, 82 perversions, 6
Klein, Melanie, xv, 9, 13, 78 Plato, 77
knowledge: of crime, 9, 10-11; desire Pontalis, J.-B., 72, 74, 75
for, 1-3;and fears, 53-4, 56-7, 58- post-Freudian Freud, 6-8, 12, 15, 17
9; and the mind, 100, 101, 103-4; n i post-Freudian psychoanalysts, 14-15,
Oedipus plays, 9-12; self- 75
knowledge, 4-8, 57, 87, 103; and privacy, xiii

strangeness, 15-17 psychical research, 21-2

psychoanalysis: as authority, 30-32;
Lacan, Jacques, xv, 1-2, 3, 13, 77, 87 and Cartesianism, 95-6, 103; and
Laing, R.D., 85 child development, 4; cost of, xiv,
language, 2, 4; of being found, 90; of xv; and diagnosis, 90; and dreams,
psychoanalysis, xv, 8-9, 82-3; of 65-6, 68-71, 72, 75-6; elitism of,
sameness, 86 xiii-xvi; and expertise, xii-xvi, i-8,
Larkin, Philip: 'Days', xii 11-12, 13-15, 34-5, 45, 65-6; and
Lentricchia, Frank, 45 fears, 48^-9, 59-60, 62-3; and free
literature, 16, 18-19, 35 speech, 27-8; and gender, 80-81,
Little Hans, 57, 59, 60-63 82-3, 85; and heterosexuality, 23-4;
lost/found, alternatives of, 90 as killjoy, 91; language of, xv, 8-9,
love, 91, 92; fear of loss of, 50-53, 60 82-3; and literature, 16, 1&-19, 35;
and love, and the mind, 95-6,
xi;

Madge, Charles: Delusions II, 67 101-4; and mourning, 78-9; and

Marcuse, Herbert, 88 sexuality, 87-92; and the
Marvell, Andrew: The King's Speech, supernatural, 18-22; and terror, xi-
vii xii; training in, xiii-xiv, 31, 35; and

masculinity, 80 the wisdom of age, 31

melancholy: and gender, 78-9, 83 psychosomatic symptoms, 36, 44
Middle Group, 85 Putnam, Hilary, 92
Miller, Jane, 77
Milner, Marion, 85, 103 Rank, Otto, 53
mind, 93-104 regression, 101, 102, 103
mourning, 78-9; and gender, 79-81, Reich, Wilhelm, 89
83 relationship(s), 78, 84; with one's
Murdoch, Iris, xi mind, 98
mysticism, 18-22 repetition, 53, 57, 58
repression, 9
Narcissus, 79 Richman, Jan: 'Why I'm the Boss', 86
neurosis, 4-5, 48 Rickman, John, 59, 60
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 87, 88; Rotten, Johnny, 58
Ecce Homo, 87 Rycroft, Charles, 85

109
 TERRORS AND EXPERTS
sameness, 86; see also homosexuality Thanatos and Eros, 6, 92
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 47, 54-7; The third sex, 83-4
Transcendence of the Ego, 54 tragedy, 9-10
Scott, Clifford: The Body Scheme in training: in psychoanalysis, xiii-xiv,
Psychotherapy', 96 3T 35
secrets: of children, 25-6; of dreams, transference, 2-3
64; of ourselves, 65; sacrificing of, trust, 26;and the mind, 100
20; and symptoms, 33-4 truth, 25-8; of dreams, 66; and fear,
Seidel, Frederick: 'Recessional', 14 52; and mind/body, 94, 97
Seidler, Frau, 21
self, 85
unconscious, xii, xv, 6-8; elocution
self-knowledge, 4-8, 57, 103; and
lessons for, xvi; as erratic mother,
sexuality, 87
100-101; experts on, 6; and
sexual abuse, 27
strangeness, 15-17; and the
sexuality, xi-xii, 87-92; bisexuality,
supernatural, 18-20; and truth, 26;
23-4, 78; of children, 61; and
see also dreams
dreams, 67; heterosexuality, 23-4,
Utopian socialism, 85
79-80, 84; homosexuality, 22-4, 25,
28, 80, 84, 86; and occult
phenomena, 19, 20 Valery, Paul, 13, 81
Shah, Idries, 46
Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 48
Waldrop, Keith: 'Lullaby in January',
Skinner, Quentin, 75-6
64
slips of the tongue, 31, 68, 90
Wetzsteon, Rachel: Parables of Flight,
socialism, Utopian, 85
Society for Psychical Research, 21 33
Winnicott, D.W., xv, 13, 35, 44, 85;
Socrates, 5, 6
and the mind, 94, 96-100, 101, 102,
Sophocles, Oedipus plays of, 9-12
104; Human Nature, 96; 'Mind and
Stendhal, 16
its Relation to the Psyche-Soma',
Stevens, Wallace, 73
96-100, 101, 102
strangeness, 15-17
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 69;
supernatural phenomena, 18-22
Philosophical Investigations, 59
symptoms, xiii, 15, 33-4, 44-5, 82;
Wolff, Tobias, 50
case study of, 36-43; and fears, 55
Woolf, Virginia, 84
terror(s): of children, xi; essential, 13- Wordsworth, William: The Prelude,
14; and experts, 14; love as, xi xiv, 11

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 .

This book is a chronicle of the all-too-human terror that drives us into the
arms of experts, and of how expertise, in the lorm ol psychoanalysis, addresses

our fears — in essence, turns our terror into meaning. In a manner characteris-

engaging and challenging, charming and maddening, Adam Phillips teases

tically

out the complicity between desire and the forbidden, longing and dread.

“In Phillips’s hands, psychoanalysis becomes an instrument ot reproducible

magic, a poetics you can use at home . . Terrors and Experts has him wielding
the writerly tools he used to such good effect in his previous [books]: paradox,

aphorism, and exegesis ol the mundane.”

—-Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review
“Skillfully dovetailing criticism of psychoanalytic theory with clinical expe-

rience, Phillips wants analysis to be playful rather than dogmatic, to celebrate

ambiguity, not rigidity . . . Terrors and Experts provides ample evidence that
Phillips is one of today’s most thoughtful, as well as entertaining, writers on the
mind. [He makes] an expert case for turning psychoanalysis into a more
creative and pleasurable discipline.’

— Bill Marx, Boston Globe

“[Phillips] radically redefines the legacy of Freud as a method of sustaining the

life-giving stories that people tell themselves rather than a technological fix that

will cure them. He is our leading proponent ot the validity and vitality ol the

Freudian appeal.”

—Bryan Appleyard, Independent

Adam Phillips is the author of Winnicott; On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored ;

On Flirtation ; and Monogamy.

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cover design by Lisa Clark

Cover painting: Return from the Hunt by Ruth Bauer

,

ISBN 0-b?4-fl74fl0-3