Queering Freud in Freiburg

Tamise Van Pelt

Idaho State University
vantamis@fs.isu.edu

 

The Twelfth Annual Conference in Literature and Psychology. June 21-24, 1995, Freiburg, Germany.

 

queer v. 1. To bring out the difference that is forced to pass under the sign of the same. 2. To require to speak from the position of the Other.

 

Postcards mailed from Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany’s Black Forest during the week of June 18, 1995 bore the apt cancellation: FREIBURG HAT WAS ALLE SUCHEN (Freiburg has what everyone is looking for). Appropriately, then, eighty desiring subjects from four continents came to Freiburg to map the territory of Freudian and post-Freudian studies at the Twelfth Annual Conference in Literature and Psychology. The four-day conference was sponsored by Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat (once home to Erasmus, Husserl, and Heidegger), the Universities of Paris X (Nanterre) and VII (Jussieu), the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie litteraire (Paris), and the Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada (Lisbon). United States sponsor was The Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts at the University of Florida, conference coordinated by Andrew Gordon. Papers in English and French were delivered at the conference location, the Kolpinghaus, while papers in German were delivered at the nearby Akademie. Several clear themes emerged from the collective theoretical effort; gender binary as the foundational construct of psychological analysis proves inadequate to the demands of contemporary theorizing; psychological theories reveal their limits and internal contradictions when read against literary implications; and the postmodern’s dystopian and utopian impulses push psychoanalysis for a response.

 

Linguistic constructions and gender issues were quite literally on the table when a translation of the first day’s menu announced that lunch was to be “bird in estrogen sauce.” At this point, conference participants had already hear Bernard Paris’s (Florida) plenary address on Karen Horney’s “one great love” — not for the men in her life but rather for her actress/daughter Brigitte. Later, they would gaze at the martial codpieced statuary women adorning Freiburg’s Kaufhaus. Consequently, the bird positioned itself amid a chain of signifiers of gender slippage, a slippage thematically relevant to several conference panels. William Spurlin (Columbia) reviewed the work done by heterosexuality in traditional Freudian theory, interrogating Freudianism’s insufficient critical attention to it’s own position vis-à-vis the heteronormative thinking of the social and cultural institutions of which it is a part, but also interrogating queer theory’s tendency to “[reduce] Freud’s theories of homosexuality to the homophobic ideologies of his time.” Another alternative view of psychoanalytic gender — a view of gender as space — was provided by Virginia Blum (Kentucky) who drew on feminist geography to critique Lacan’s “parable of the train station where gender is ‘entered’ via the doors marked ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’,” reading Lacan’s story in connetion with Klein’s case study of Little Dick’s train therapy and Freud’s writings on Hans’s traumatic childhood train ride.

 

A unique human gargoyle clings to the first-story gutter of Freiburg’s Munster U L Frau. With its head and hands gripping the cathedral facade and its fanny facing the cobblestone street, a strategically placed drainpipe seems to invite the most literal of anal readings. In fact, the irreverent aperture points from the cathedral toward Freiburg’s government offices, a perptual Gothic mooning of secular authority. Similar obeisance to Freudian authority was continually evidenced by conference participants seeking to honor Freud as much in the breech as in the observance. Kathleen Woodward (Center for Twentieth Century Studies, Wisconsin-Milwaukee) initiated the reevaluations with her critique of Freud’s developmental notion that mature guilt replaces immature shame, shame being merely a primitive emotional response to the disapproving gaze of another. Shame takes on a performative dimension in recent gay and lesbian theory, Woodward argued, and shame takes on differing “temporal dimensions” relative to cultural locations themselves inseparable from gender, race, and sexual preference. In the spirit of Woodward’s critique, Claire Kahane (SUNY, Buffalo) paid similar respects to Freud’s construction of mourning as an obsessional involvement with the lost object. Kahane posed the difficult questions that pushed Freud’s object-dependent definition beyond its ability to answer: “What if the mourned object was missing in the past?” “What if there was no object to mourn?” The Holocause demands the response to just such questions, Kahane pointed out, since the Holocaust dead signify holes in their families’ history, absences in the “genealogy of the subject.”

 

Freud was not the only analyst whose work found itself reexamined. Ulrike Kistner (Univeristy of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa) examined Deleuze’s use of a “World Without Other” to separate the concept of perversion from its moral entanglements. Kistner challenged the “slippage between structure-Other, others, and literary characters” evident in Deleuze’s deployment of Friday, or the Other Island to reread perversion. She pointed out that Tournier’s narrativity itself defines new relations between neurosis/repression and perversion/defense, relations that exceed Deleuze’s analysis. Shuli Barzilai (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) interrogated the political/personal involvements displayed in Lacan’s critique of Sandor Ferenczi’s 1913 essay “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality,” suggesting that Lacan’s debate with Ferenczi sometimes overstepped “the bounds of polemical decorum.” Nancy Blake (Illinois, Urbana) found Lacan’s mirror stage essay limited in its capacity to theorize the bodily constructions in Anne Sexton’s poetry, Sexton tending to locate the womb “outside the bodies of women” in a scramble of layers that exceeds the Lacanian imaginary. Indeed, the very practice of psychoanalytic reading was itself reexamined when Norman Holland (Florida) reread his own 1963 Freudian analysis of Fellini’s 8 1/2, positioning himself as a reader response critic “who believes that spectators construct their experience of a film,” and finding his own prior reading inadequate. Clearly, the Twelfth International Conference was no mere reiteration of Our Fathers’ Psychoanalysis.

 

Freud’s intellectual influences were evident, however, and some speakers chose to emphasize Freud as source. In a visual alchemy, Robert Silhol (Paris VII) literally drew for his audience the transformation of Freud’s models of the ego presented in “On Narcissism,” Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and “The Ego and the Id” into Lacan’s model of the subject, Schema Z. All told, Freud fared best with his Hungarian readers. Laszlo Halasz (Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) found in Freud’s archaeological interpretation of Jensen’s Gradiva the model for history. Halasz’s Freudian view of history as a “series of regressions, fixations, and repetitions” culminating in refamiliarization seemed particularly poignant in light of the contemporary bloodshed in Eastern Europe, where refamiliarization is a culmination devoutly to be wished. Similarly, Antal Bokay (Janus Pannonius University) found in early Freudian hermeneutics the models for postmodern praxis, linking past to present affirmatively. (The Hungarians’ willingness to mine Freud’s contributions rather than his limitations recalled for me a position articulated by another Eastern European scholar, at Catherine Belsey’s seminar on Shakespeare and the Sexual Relation at the University of Virginia in 1993. The concept of the decentered subject whose instabilities were so readily embraced by Belsey’s largely American audience had far less romantic appeal in Romania than in the U.S., the Romanian scholar pointed out.) Thus the Freiburg conference’s many perceived theoretical conjunctions and disjunctions served as reminders of the radically contextual, historically contingent nature of critical values. There, as elsewhere, the reception of theory was contingent upon the socio-political in/stabilities framing each participant’s intervention into psychoanalysis.

 

The statue of an elegantly dressed young man faces the main entry of Freiburg’s Gothic cathedral. It stands farthest from the door, even farther from salvation than the statues my tour guide insisted on referring to as the “stupid virgins.” The young man’s elegance fools no one; his back crawls with the creatures of nature’s dark underbelly, with snakes and spiders and loathsome grotesques. He is a clear signal to the illiterate faithful, a graphic incarnation of the end times the doorway depicts, a demand for the examination of spirit. A visual blitz, centuries before the postmodern, yet oddly consonant with it. Aptly, then, postmodernism was as significant an area of inquiry as gender studies for Freiburg’s visiting theorists. James Sey (Vista University, South Africa) asserted that the millennial tendency of postmodern techno-culture to view the body as obsolete cannot be separated from the cultural pathology of serial killings and mass murders so frequently on media display. In a similar end times mood, Jerry Fleiger (Rutgers) used Zizek’s discussion of Lacanian anamorphosis to read three works by Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Zizek himself from an avowedly “paranoid” slant, noting that all three works share a concern with the dehumanizing apects of technology characteristic of postmodern life. Art, Fleiger argued, makes us see that we can’t see everything, that we ourselves occupy a paranoid position from which art looks back at us.

 

The dystopic visions of postmodern technology were extended by Marlene Barr’s (VPI) exploration of the “dystopian gaze” directed at the objectified prostitutes in Amsterdam’s red light district. Barr contrasted Dutch window culture with an alternative utopianism offered by the paintings of Bill Copley and Claes Oldenburg in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. This utopian contrast to the bleakness of postmodern techno-vision sounded a note echoed in several presentations. Angelika Rauch (Cornell) found in the Freudian dream image a heiroglyphic desire for the better that paralleled similar desires in the Romantic historicism of Novalis and Schlegel. Henk Hillenaar (University of Groningen, Netherlands) offered a psychoanalytic rereading of the dismissive attitudes toward mysticism that have colored the interpretation of the relationship between the French preceptor Fenelon and the mystic madame Guyon. Only Sarah Goodwin (Skidmore) emphasized the darker side of the romantic vision, exploring a Romantic uncanny that “subtly associates the pressures of the marketplace with a bodily uneasiness,” both in Freud and in the dancer’s performance of the ballet based on Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann.”

 

All in all, the Twelfth Annual Conference in Literature and Psychology was a successful and substantive production. The Thirteenth Annual Conference is tentatively scheduled for July 1996 in Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, contact Andrew Gordon, The Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts, Department of English, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA, agordon@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu. The Institute list, PSYART, can be subscribed to by sending the message: subscribe psyart [1st name] [last name] to listserv@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu; bibliographies of the 1993 and 1994 conferences are available online. Proceedings from the 1995 Freiburg conference will be published, forthcoming 1996. The volume can be obtained from Prof. Doutor Frederico Pereira, Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, Rua Jardim do Tabaco, 44, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal, dir@dir.ispa.email400.marconi-sva.pt.