Imaginary Anatomies. Book Reviews

Imaginary Anatomies. by Shakespeare Studies Book Summary

IN THE "Aetiology of Hysteria," the paper that he read to the Viennese Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in 1896, Freud inaugurated a system of archeological metaphors that was to subtend his subsequent elaboration of psychoanalysis: The trope functioned as a recurrent analogy for the excavation of psychic life, as well as a reference to Freud's precise and learned conversancy with the science of archeology. (2) His vivid evocation of ruins, obliterated inscriptions, and the possibility of rendering an indecipherable language intelligible depicts a relationship with past cultures--ancient and early modern--that is foundational to psychoanalysis itself, although sometimes in ways that Freud did not fully recognize. He figured the archeological site as the analysand's unconscious and the analyst as an archeologist, but the cultural past, synecdochized as ruins, is also psychoanalysis's unconscious, a prehistory to which Freud himself had only limited and intermittent access. One of Freud's most brilliant readers and critics, the French feminist philosopher, linguist, and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray recognized this oblivousness; she charged him with neglecting history, with failing "to investigate the historical factors governing the data with which he is dealing." (3) Irigaray's insight (influenced partly by Cornelius Castoriadis's idea of a radical imaginary) (4) extends the Freudian definition of the unconscious beyond the bounds of the individual to encompass a culture that is as resonant with memory as childhood is for the subject. Even as Freud continually summons the past as an analogy for the sedimentation of psychic life, the historical layering of the psychic and anatomical concepts he "discovers" is continually elided. History is at once Freud's obsession, evinced in his web of archeological metaphors and in his reference to the material civilizations that were being unearthed, and his blind spot, as Irigaray would say, the lacuna in the anatomical observations that underlie his psychoanalytic theories.

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