The Impassable Dream

John Mowitt (bio)

Abstract

This essay approaches the theme of “impasse and democracy” through the motif of the American dream, a dream, as many have noted, unfulfilled both at home and abroad.  This lack of fulfilment is here read as a structural impasse within democracy, as a sign that democracy dreams, or is a dream, because it cannot come into its own.  Building toward a sustained reading of a typically neglected volume in the Freudian corpus, his collaborative study (with William C. Bullitt) of Woodrow Wilson, this essay teases out the theoretical and political implications of thinking the dream that America remains, ambivalently idling, from a psychoanalytical point of view.

Democracy is always an unrealizable dream.

–Wendy Brown in conversation with Robert Johnson, New Economic Thinking

This afternoon I would like to speak on the subject, “The Negro and the American Dream.” In a real sense America is essentially a dream—a dream yet unfulfilled.

–Martin Luther King in North Carolina

For the sake of argument let us entertain the possibility that there is a real relation between America and democracy. Not America as a national territory, but America as a self-designated exception, however troubled. Further, let us accept that this relation is oneiric, and that organizing this relation is what Brown calls “the unrealizable,” and what King calls “the unfulfilled,” both, I will argue, iterations of “impasse.” In the remarks that follow I will essay the concept of impasse by considering the several ways it articulates the relation between democracy and the dream; not primarily in terms of dreams dreamt by members of unsatisfying democratic regimes, or dreams voiced by those struggling against anti- democratic ones, but dream as a concept designating how democracy perennially fails to realize itself. As this might suggest, dream here assumes technical qualities attributed to it within the discourse of psychoanalysis, inviting one to consider that insofar as the latter has produced the dream as a concept, it is itself entangled in the impasse that leaves democracy unfulfilled, even unfulfillable. In this, these remarks engage a literature antagonistic to democracy, not because democracy empowers the “herd,” or because it tyrannizes minorities, or because it legitimates regime change at home (Trump) and abroad (Bush), but because even if it were to arrive from or with the future, it will have been at odds with itself. It would, in effect, remain a dream, not now in the sense of an illusion, or even a wish, but in the sense of a structure of incompletion. Impasse. Although Freud’s thought, especially what he referred to as the metapsychology, is indispensable to grasping the structural significance of the dream, its relation to his troubling of democracy (whether French, Russian or American) has not been attended to carefully enough. To that end, I will orient what follows toward a reading of Freud’s collaborative encounter with Woodrow Wilson, a text in which the place of psychoanalysis as a technique of reading is woven tightly into its articulation of the impasse that sacrificed America and the world to a future war, the very one that compelled Freud’s expatriation from Vienna. Former president Trump is only the most recent example of a statesman from whom analysis might have shielded the world, but in just this way analysis threatens to suspend or interfere with the will of the demos. In sensing this, Freud both radicalized what it means to speak of the dream of democracy and to acknowledge the role of his science in securing this radicalization. Plague indeed.

I will work to “earn” the locution of my title, but suffice it to say at this early juncture that its oddity is designed to suggest that “the impassable” might be an alternative spelling of what Jacques Derrida explores under the heading of “the impossible” and perhaps especially when thinking about whether a “democracy to come,” is any more likely to arrive than Godot.¹ Given such animating concerns it is fitting, perhaps even obligatory, to acknowledge that, on the pages of Looking Awry, Slavoj Žižek sets out what are surely some of the more recent touchstones and watchwords for a theoretical discussion of these issues. Although the text is broadly framed as a discussion of how the teachings of his mentor Jacques Lacan might actually be on offer from various popular cultural platforms, the analysis of democracy zeroes quickly in on the problem of the impassable. He writes:

What to do, then, once we are confronted with this fundamental impasse of democracy? The “modernist” procedure (the one to which Marx is attached) would be to conclude—from such an “unmasking” of formal democracy, i.e., from the disclosure of the way the democratic form always conceals an imbalance of contents—that formal democracy as such has to be abolished, replaced by a superior form of concrete democracy. The “postmodernist” approach would require us, on the contrary, to assume this constitutive paradox of democracy. We must assume a kind of “active forgetfulness” by accepting the symbolic fiction even though we know that “in reality, things are not like that.” The democratic attitude is always based on a fetishistic split: I know very well (that the democratic form is just a form spoiled by the stain of “pathological” imbalance), but just the same (I act as if democracy were possible). (168)

The impassable here refers to a deadlock between form and substance. Deadlock in the sense of antagonism: form assumes its rigor from the substance it brackets; substance takes on its texture from the form it sets itself off against. In effect, the universality of democracy, its radical fungibility, must, in principle, be empty. It must be devoid of any particulars that could compromise its cosmopolitan promise by grounding it in, for example, Europe, or as Žižek (following Arendt) has it, the nation state. Democracy must be an empty form precisely so that it can be filled with the rights and aspirations thought to be enshrined in state constitutions whether written or not.

The problem is not, whence Žižek’s invocation of impasse, that democracy is unachievable, but that even when most perfectly realized it is blank. In this democracy, precisely to the extent that it offers to name the preferred if not ideal, thus formal, reconciliation between individual and collective interests is not just another form of government. It is the just form. Although democracies and dictatorships share practical, administrative roots in oligarchy, dictatorships are filled with particulars like blood, soil, affiliation. They offer what democracies foreclose in principle. The well-known Lacanian formula, “man’s desire is the Other’s desire” (690), may be said to provide the template for the structural frustration of democracy, even if neither Lacan nor Žižek has precisely declared himself on whether psychoanalysis is thus an imaginary construct, a reflection, of democracy in all its emptiness. Be that as it may, in the context of Looking Awry this state of affairs is deployed to complicate all critiques of popular culture that bemoan its pseudo- democratization of cultural experience. Facebook is not a compromised form of community because access to it is obstructed, but because what circulates there is communication formally emptied of all substance—and this apart from the abuses of which Cambridge Analytica stands accused. At the risk of feckless hyperbole one might propose that John Cage sketches the formula for socially mediated exchange when in his “Lecture on Nothing” he states: “I have nothing to say / and I am saying it” (109).

“Democracy can never be identified with a juridico-political form. This does not mean it is indifferent to such forms. It means that the power of the people is always beneath and beyond these forms” (Rancière, Hatred 54). These lines from Jacques Rancière’s The Hatred of Democracy restate (without acknowledgement) Žižek’s critique of democratic formalism, but instead of appealing to the concept of impasse, his analysis invokes “paradox” (94). Two things would appear to be at stake in this distinction. On the one hand, Rancière is keen to hold onto a certain utopian potential in what above he calls the “power of the people.” If democracy must insistently be hated, it is because the egalitarian and anarchic excess that all states exploit must, paradoxically, be left unrealized. Anger then focuses on the deferred realization of what is as yet unrealized. Crucial here is the status of politics and Rancière has steady but quiet recourse throughout Hatred to his discussion in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (and clearly “hatred” is an acute form of disagreement), where he elaborates the concept of the “police” as the heading under which to subsume all political activity that is oriented around the struggle to control and administer a state. By contrast, “politics” designates all those forms of activity that resist this capture by refusing the reduction of “the political” to, in effect, the electoral. The obstinacy of this refusal provokes hatred among those who insist upon reducing democracy to a form of governing that is either embodied (or not . . . yet) in the state apparatus. Rancière is especially eloquent about intellectuals whose disdain for democracy concentrates precisely on its expressions that take the form of contesting the state’s subordination of civil society. If one grants Rancière’s distinction between the police and politics, then it is not difficult to see that the democracy problematized by Žižek is chiefly that of a state form. If, further, one accepts the corollary that to reduce democracy to a state form is a manifestation of hatred toward it (a demand that it provide more, or block less), then one glimpses what sort of pickle Žižek has got himself into, especially if the symmetry between democracy and desire is consistently Lacanian.

On the other hand, and somewhat less obviously, what is also at stake in the distinction between impasse and paradox is the status, perhaps even the pertinence, of psychoanalysis in thinking the structure of democracy. Although one of Lacan’s partisans, Jean-Claude Milner, figures prominently in the early pages of Hatred,and despite Rancière’s explicit recourse to the concept of aporia (80) and to the dream of overcoming what obstructs the realization of democracy (9), he insistently avoids any sort of discourse on politics that depends on a figure resembling an analytical subject for its conclusions. In fact, Milner is expressly faulted for arguing that a Jewish embrace of kinship and power derived from birth is what demands that it be scapegoated by a democracy inhibited by its failure to manage the excess that sustains it, an argument Rancière treats as far too wedded to a logic of policing and its insistent channeling of excess through sexual difference and social reproduction. Implicit here, I would argue, is the notion that psychoanalysis, precisely to the extent that it affirms a structural mode of aggressivity, not only attends to impasse, but realizes it in its own functioning. It holds us before and within an antagonism that cannot be overcome through its projection onto the aggressions of a particular other. This invites an extension and complication of the concept of impasse (or, in Greek, aporia) to which I will later turn.

In the spirit precisely of disagreement, it is appropriate to remark that Rancière, despite his hesitations regarding the pertinence of psychoanalysis to a theory of democracy, is not committed to treating hatred as devoid of an affect whose force is technically speaking unconscious. The resistance that protects politics from the police is not a resistance that, in accord with the classical formula of denial, authorizes Rancière to utterly avoid the discourse of psychoanalysis. As evidence, consider his sustained engagement with Freud in The Aesthetic Unconscious. Originally conceived as two lectures, it is clear from where the second lands that this material gives articulation to his disagreement with Jean-François Lyotard about the politics of psychoanalysis. The elaboration of this disagreement takes the form of delineating two different critiques of Freud’s understanding of aesthetics.

In an inaugural series of moves, Rancière teases out a distinction between art and aesthetics, stressing that what interests him in Freud is why psychoanalysis, otherwise so keen to secure its properly scientific credentials, had such insistent recourse to the interpretation of works of art. At bottom, the proposition is that Freud recognized an echo between the way works of art and psychoanalysis staged the encounter and tension between thought and non-thought. If aesthetics names the cognition of this relation, then the interpretation of dreams belongs to the history of aesthetics, a history that situates Freud in relation to a distribution of the sensible wherein taste, as an expression of “liberal individualism” (Rancière Aesthetic, 7), has reduced art to form and severed its relation to the enigma of unthinking thought. Although Rancière does not link liberalism and democracy explicitly, his rhetoric urges one to approach the relation between psychoanalysis and democracy as tense. Freud, despite his “conservative tastes” (a charge levelled by Lyotard among others), is precisely trying to theorize a mode of interpretation that subordinates taste to a regime of thought in which what matters is what that regime cannot think while thinking. Unconscious thought, precisely of the sort manifest (and latent) in dreams, is what is distributed beyond or outside the sensibility of individualism. Testing this is the work that consumed Freud in his thinking about literature, painting and sculpture. Although the details of their disagreement warrant more attention than I can give here, Rancière is keen to demonstrate that despite Lyotard’s impatience with Freud’s “classicism,” his insistent affirmation of form and figuration ends up paradoxically falling in line with a theory of art that Freud had properly problematized. I suppose, to invoke a well-known quip of Adorno’s, their disagreement rotates around how liberal individualism, democracy, is to be hated properly. Is it because it essentially is a dream of the sort comprehended by psychoanalysis? One of the virtues of the collaborative study of Wilson is that it suggests why one would answer in the affirmative.

But I have deferred for too long a justification of my title, “The Impassable Dream,” which evokes the song likely familiar to the audiences of high school choirs and community groups in the US as “The Impossible Dream.” Some members in any given audience will recognize the song from the mid-sixties Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha, Wasserman, Darion and Leigh’s improbable setting of Cervantes’s satiric masterwork for the stage. As a brazen re-casting of Quixote’s picaresque tenacity as an aspirational fantasy of persisting against all odds, the song, especially when sung in the context of a high school, indirectly but implicitly casts secondary education as a test those who do not or cannot dream risk failing. As a liminal institution, high school (and now even more college) marks the threshold between “life” and the preparation for it. It marks where an impossible dream and the dream of democracy converge as students anticipate entry into the actual world of unevenly distributed opportunity, dreaming that whatever obstructs their access to the fruits of democracy is not impassable. But there is more to this particular song’s relation to democracy and its history.

In the plaza of San Jose in Antique province in the Philippines one will come upon a large commemorative statue. It is of Evelio Javier, a former governor of the province, murdered in 1986 for agitating against then president Ferdinand Marcos. His death helped catalyze the People Power Revolution that brought Corazón Aquino to power later that year. Apparently, “The Impossible Dream” was at the very top of Javier’s playlist, so much so that the Darion lyrics are inscribed on a plaque mounted on the base of this public monument. “To march into hell for a heavenly cause,” indeed. If a key property of democracy is its global fungibility—a point presumed and betrayed with the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan—then its emergence in the Philippines, mediated through Broadway and Cervantes, certainly encourages political scientists to take seriously the resonance between the song and political struggles of the most principled, that is, anti-tyrannical sort. Even the Democratic candidate for the presidency, George McGovern, could see this connection although, in the end, he succumbed to the unbeatable foe.

In Man of La Mancha, “The Impossible Dream” is performed three times, ultimately narrating Quixote’s resolve as he awaits interrogation by the Inquisition. What invites my precise distortion of the title is the tension within the lyrics between lines stressing negative morphemic structures (and here is the full list): im-possible, un-beatable, un-bearable, un-rightable, and un-reachable; while other lines invoke the motif of persistence, for example, trying when one’s arms are too weary, loving purely and chastely from afar, etc. What is so striking about these lines taken together is how they hold listeners in a deadlock, an impasse structured by personal aims that can neither be abandoned nor achieved. The name given to this impasse is “the impossible dream,” a dream that has somehow happened without happening. Or is an impossible dream, especially one that inducts individuals into a life in which they are “free” to make the most of themselves, the name for a threshold that is impassable, or even unknowable?

To appreciate what might be at stake in taking the dream as such as an impasse, it is worth lingering over the notion of impasse itself. In the Western tradition it reaches back to what Plato meant, in invoking his conceptual persona Socrates, when speaking of aporia. In her remarkable tracing of this concept, Sarah Kofman, in “Beyond Aporia?,” reminds us that the Greeks (so not simply Plato) define impasse in a rather specific way, namely as being lost at sea. Poros, when linked to metis, or cunning, casts aporos or aporia as difficulty, but difficulty in the rather specific sense of eluding cleverness, of lacking a way out or ahead. In effect, Sartre’s Huis clos might also have been titled aporia. More specifically still, Kofman establishes that the risk of having no way ahead is philologically defined with reference to being unable to navigate a body of water, whether a sea, or, as she puts it, an “ocean of discourse” (11), thus making aporia as much about life as about meaning. If one recalls, to bring this digression abruptly back to the status of impasse in psychoanalysis, that the epigraph to the Interpretation of Dreams specifically compares psychoanalysis to “stirring the depths” (movebos Acharonta), then interpreting dreams is pitched as a tactic by which to navigate a sea agitated by its own movement. Freud is here citing the early German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle’s citation of Virgil, indicating that he grasped the parallel between organizing a workers’ party and analyzing the work of the unconscious. The fact that the one consistent ‘platform’ of Lassalle’s party was universal suffrage, a cornerstone of democracy with a socialist face, might well indicate that Freud was already here noting a convergence between politics and properly scientific work on dreams (Schorske 345). Although Freud demurs on drawing the relevant political conclusions, in The Interpretation of Dreams he does present what he calls “the navel of the dream” (Standard 4: 111) as the place where interpretation reaches its impasse in the tangled mycelial depths of the dream. Doubt arises. Can an impasse be surpassed and can we know?

A more recent debate over the politics of dreams will help further trace the ties between impasse/aporia and dream. I am thinking of the killjoy dispute between Derrida and Foucault over the relation between madness, a silent absence of a work, and dreaming in Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. I say “killjoy” because the sustained ferocity of this dispute (rejoined in Derrida’s late, “To Do Justice to Freud: the History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis”) immediately complicates and belies the very notion of “post-structuralism” that everyone from Terry Eagleton to Jordan Peterson brandishes in order to produce an atmosphere into which to fire their rhetorical retro-rockets. Of course, things did not start this way. They rarely do. When Derrida, at Jean Wahl’s invitation, read “Cogito and the History of Madness” in 1963 at the Collège Philosophique, Foucault was in the audience, presumably out of courtesy to his student. A week after its delivery, Foucault wrote to Derrida praising the argument, acknowledging its force and pertinence, and concluding with the sentence: “And please believe in my deepest and most faithful friendship” (Peters 132). The “trouble,” manifested in Foucault’s stinging reply, “My Body, this Paper, this Fire,” sounded like a delayed rifle report nine years later. Friendship had degenerated into enmity and a feud that had initially only manifested as a philological dispute—does Descartes exclude or merely displace madness—erupted between the teacher and his student. “O, my friends, there is no friend.”

As the details of this argument have been combed elsewhere (perhaps most notably in Said’s “Criticism Between Culture and System”), I can turn directly to what about the exchange most matters here. Two tines of Derrida’s reading deserve mention. On the one hand, as if chiding Foucault for thinking that separating oneself from Descartes is any easier than separating oneself from Hegel, Derrida tries to show that the dream is the far more threatening phenomenon for Cartesian reason to contend with. This is partly due to its commonality—many dream, few imagine that their bodies are made of glass, etc.—but also to the aporia it produces, an aporia accelerated and intensified by the hypothesis of the malin genie, that is, the incarnation of radical doubt, the possibility that one only thinks one is dreaming, a situation wherein the cogito’s intimate relation to certainty is bracketed. Perhaps I am only ever dreaming that “I think.” On the other hand, if the dream rather than madness poses the more acute philosophical problem, then Foucault’s historical appeal to the “classical age,” the event of the great confinement etc., falls prey to a shabby historicism that his evocation and later theorization of “archaeology” (not to mention “genealogy”) is precisely pitched to overcome. Taken together, Foucault’s reading is effectively stowed away on a “ship of fools” deprived of, as Kofman would say, a poros, a way across the ocean of discourse. In this sense, the dream, precisely as a figural condensation of doubt (thinking the unthought as Rancière put it), operates as an impasse, reminding us that it figures prominently in Western philosophy’s (whether political or not) struggle to think the limits of its reasoning, an incapacity that impinges upon philosophy’s ability to think, among other things, the conditions of a proper republic. From this angle, Brown’s proposition (vis. the epigraph) that democracy is always an unrealizable dream assumes a more haunting, more consequential epistemological valence. To wit, maybe the concept of a democratic republic always only arises in a dream whose specifically oneiric character vanishes in the dream’s unrealizability, the sense of its not having taken place at all. Impasse now emerges as the puzzle whether a dream is happening or not, and whether, in the dream, its limit can be made subject to action either practical or theoretical. Its structural character has extended from the challenge of representing the deadlock of form and substance, to the question of assessing whether one can know whether universal suffrage is in fact universal; whether democracy is happening to us or not.

Let us bring this relation between dream and impasse to bear more patiently, more philologically, on what Freud has to say about dreams, authority, and modes of governing. I am thinking of a letter to Maxime Leroy from 1929 where Freud briefly interprets some of Descartes’s dreams, a venture missed, and suggestively so, by both Foucault and Derrida. The precise paleographic evidence is unclear—the dream (or dreams) are reported/paraphrased by a third party from a translation, etc.—but in the printed version one finds the following material:

He [Descartes] then woke up with twinges of sharp pain in his left side. He did not know whether he was dreaming or awake. Half-awake, he told himself that an evil genius (malin genie) was trying to seduce him, and he murmured a prayer to exorcise it. He went to sleep again. A clap of thunder woke him again and filled his room with flashes. Once more he asked himself whether it was a dream or a day-dream, opening and shutting his eyes so as to reach a certainty. (Standard 5: 200)

What is staged here plainly enough is what earlier I characterized as the impasse threatened by the malin genie, namely, the challenge to clear and distinct reasoning represented by the dream’s capacity to problematize the distinction between it and wakefulness. Although the paleographic controversy about whether we are dealing with one dream or several tends to puzzle over whether there is a sequence of dreams, one might here entertain the abyssal effect of several dreams within one another. Descartes wakes up, but into a state where whether he is awake or dreaming immediately preoccupies him. This manifests within the dream(s) in a way that echoes significantly in Freud’s remarks.

The cited material continues:

With his brain on fire, excited by these rumors and vague sufferings, Descartes opened a dictionary and then a collection of poems. The intrepid traveler dreamt of this line: “Quod vitae sectabor iter.” Another journey in the land of dreams? Then suddenly there appeared a man he did not know, intending to make him read a passage from Ausonius beginning with the words, “Est et non.” But the man disappeared and another took his place. (5: 201)

Striking here—and Freud notes it in his “analysis”—is the dreamer’s effort to interpret the dream from within it,inviting one to consider that at the very end of the series of strange men handing Descartes texts (and note the principle of individuated equality) might appear another strange man handing him a copy of something called Die Traumdeutung. Less fancifully, what appears in the dream especially around the motif of the life journey and the “it is and is not” is precisely impasse, aporia. If it makes sense to say that Freud echoes this situation, thus inserting himself into the series of interpreters, it is because, after authoritatively labeling the dream an example of a “Traumen von oben” (a dream whose contents could just as well have been thought in waking life), Freud writes: “The philosopher interprets them himself and, in accordance with all the rules for the interpretation of dreams, we must accept his explanation, but it should be added that we have no path open to us which will take us any further” (5: 204, my emphasis). The impasse repeats, first as radical doubt (am I in the dream synthesizer of the malin genie?), but then again as “the navel,” the knot through which interpretation cannot pass. Impasse, via the onto-epistemological problem posed by the dream, sucks everything into its vortex, including the dream of interpretation itself, making analysis an aporetic poros. Way, no way.

What then can be said more directly about the impasse of the dream for psychoanalysis and democracy, either as formally impossible (Žižek) or a possible object of hatred (Rancière)? Readers of Freud will know that “democracy” is not a word one comes upon often in the corpus. If one is inclined, as am I, to hear Communism as expressed in the oft-repeated formula—from each according to his ability and to each according to his need—as a radical realization of the will of the demos, thus a democracy, then Freud’s comments in Civilization and its Discontents might be given a certain representative status: “The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils” (Standard 21: 112). Freud goes on to expose this path, this poros (Freud writes “Weg”) as an “untenable illusion” (perhaps an impossible dream?) from a psychological point of view. Why? Because the elimination of private property, the holding of “all wealth in common” (21: 112), cannot alter the nature of human aggression. Later in the same text, Freud turns his critical gaze on America—a more “go to” incarnation (even in the 1930s) of democracy— and denounces it for cultivating a certain psychological poverty of groups, that is, a horizontal, and thus equal, dispersion of neighborly love, that stimulates a structure of identification compared by Nietzsche to that of a herd (Herde).² In a final pass over the Russian “experiment,” Freud notes that its attention to property is however preferable to a purely moral response to inequality, reserving, in effect, special scorn for America even to the point of tempering his own rhetoric: “But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give the impression of wanting myself to employ American methods” (21: 116). In effect, he decides, as we say, not to “go there.” As stated earlier, he and Jung had already gone and brought “the plague” to America in 1909, so here Freud stops himself from thinking like an American, as if to foreground the impasse between democracy and the practice that comprehends its haunting incompletion.³ Given that the Russian (or Asiatic) Flu pandemic of 1889-90 loomed large in then recent European memory, the evocation of “plague,” however ambivalent, feels decisively more epistemological than epidemiological. To not think like an American is thus to think what constitutes its democratic way of life unrealizable. Essentially a dream.

The footnote with which chapter five of Civilization concludes transfers readers directly to the aforementioned Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. But rather than turning down this well-worn path, I propose that we take up a text routinely forgotten, in some cases disavowed, by Freudians (especially those loyal to the daughter), namely, his co- authored study of Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the self-designated prince of peace and defender of American democracy. What this text answers is the question begged above, namely, how does at least one American think? But perhaps even more importantly this text, unlike the more familiar Group Psychology, urges consideration of how analysis itself stumbles and stalls when conflating, through the concept of the Ego-Ideal, a president and a father about whom the son is aggressively ambivalent.

If the Freud/Bullitt collaboration is not included in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud it is not because it has the same status as the early book On Aphasia or the voluminous correspondence. It has been omitted because the matter of Freud’s authorship has long been a matter of controversy. In addition, there is the vexed matter of his collaborator William C. Bullitt, a wealthy East Coast cosmopolite who once worked as an editor at Paramount Studios, married the widow of John Reed (Louise Bryant) and became the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union after the war. His relation to the Communism of which Freud wrote in 1930 was through Lenin. Bullitt met Freud on the couch at 19 Bergassestrasse in 1923. Moreover, the “status” of the text is not helped, to say the least, by the fact that formulations like the following abound:

We have seen that in laying down the laws of orderly assembly for the Lightfoots [a debate club at the University of Virginia] Wilson was both obeying his father and imitating his father, he was finding outlet for both his passivity to his father and, through identification, for activity toward his father. He found satisfaction for the same desires in preparing the Covenant of the League of Nations. Wilson’s share in founding the League of Nations has been exaggerated; but in so far as he was its “father,” the League of Nations was the grandchild of the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, the Professor Extraordinary of Rhetoric, whose interests in words and the rules of speech so bored his acquaintances, and so impressed his son. (Bullitt and Freud 89)

Read without benefit of the didactic “introductory lecture” on the fundamentals of psychoanalysis and Bullitt’s obsessive biographical chapter on Wilson, this passage appears to careen from a university to an international peace conference, enabled by thin expository recourse to a perpetual desire to passively identify with one’s loquacious father. For those accustomed to Freud’s more measured and subtle exposition this is difficult to recognize and thus accept as his. Moreover, despite the disclaimer that the study is not an exercise in character assassination, more than one reader—Anna Freud in particular—felt that the assertions insistently advanced by this text did the Freudian cause little good in North America.⁴ Bullitt and Freud argued that one of the most highly regarded US presidents of either party was clinically deranged, implying that analysis might usefully be classed among the modes of expertise with which Americans need to be more patient.

That said, recent scholarly work—beginning with Paul Roazen’s “Oedipus at Versailles,” and culminating with J.F. Campbell’s “To Bury Freud on Wilson” from 2008—has rather definitively settled the matter of authorship. The cache of manuscripts examined by Campbell shows clearly that Freud was deeply involved in the writing of the text and not merely that portion of it titled, “Introduction by Sigmund Freud.” Even bits from the last-minute changes initially refused by Bullitt—for example, the startling evocation of the “compulsion to repeat” in German (Wiederholungszwang) in chapter XXXIV—appear in print. There is no justification for insisting that this “psychological” study of the leader of the Democratic Party, precisely as it turned in its modern, “liberal” direction, tells us nothing of value about how psychoanalytic practice illuminates the aporia, the impasse, that holds democracy in a dream state. On the contrary, this study uniquely helps us appreciate that democracy is “only a dream” because it is unrealizable. It is for all and for no one, simultaneously. In addition, readers more satisfied by an earlier Freud can only be heartened to discover that in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud turns directly to the collaborative study of Wilson, writing:

If the importance of the libido’s claims on this score [love of a leader/father/deity] had been better appreciated, the fantastic promises of the American President’s Fourteen Points would probably not have been believed so easily, and the splendid instrument would not have broken in the hands of the German leaders. (Standard 18: 95)

A similar formulation occurs in the “Dissection of the Psychical Personality” lecture, written although not delivered in 1933, thus two years after the collaborative project with Bullitt (Standard 22: 72-3). The question for us is whether this is where “psychoanalysis” belongs, whether it can “go there,” whether it can analyze a democratically elected president (not a pope or a general), making all textual references in the study to blocked paths and roads not taken highly resonant adumbrations, both about Wilson’s journey and about Freud’s case study itself.

Doubtless, more pressing still is the question of what the collaborative study of Wilson has to teach us about the status of democracy within psychoanalysis and the impassable dream, after all, the “via regia” to the unconscious and thus to psychoanalysis itself. This text situates psychoanalysis within the discipline of psychology, defining its constitutive difference in terms of its scientific concern “with the deeper psychic facts” (Bullitt and Freud, xiv). Like Freud’s study of other conjured analysands/artists—Christof Haizmann, Michelangelo, da Vinci etc.—this study uses the occasion of a certain therapeutic mourning to ponder the nature of analysis. With such broadly reflexive theoretical motifs in play, I turn, then, to think about the text’s evocation of the “undreamt.”

This evocation occurs in Freud’s introduction and it attracts attention both because in a psychological study that otherwise makes comparatively scant reference to dreams (I will return to consider a decisive exception) this stands out, and because it evokes, if faintly, the philosophical problem of the Cartesian dream that may or may not be a dream. The relevant passage reads:

Through a long laborious evolution we have learned to set frontiers between our psychic inner world and an outer world of reality. The latter we can understand only as we observe it, study it and collect discoveries about it. In this labor it has not been easy for us to renounce explanations which fulfilled our wishes and confirmed our illusions. But this self-conquest has repaid us. It has led us to an undreamed-of mastery over nature. (Bullitt and Freud xii)

Prudence is called for here because, plainly enough, “undreamed-of mastery” has a certain colloquial force that, if rephrased, might be simply rendered as “a mastery beyond our wildest dreams,” where dream has a more anodyne, putatively non-analytical sense. But given the framing of the formulation, a framing that repeats the terms of Descartes’s dilemma (is he awake in the outer world, or “awake” in the inner one) where among other things science is groping around for its certainty, the notion that the fixity of nature’s frontier is secured through a mastery whose semantic authority resides in being “undreamed-of” gives the colloquialism a depth it might otherwise be said to lack. It might then make sense to hear in this passage, especially if we scan slowly over the “has led us to” (xii), the motif of passage, of achieving a limit, of leading “us” to what is undreamed—in effect, to the place of the dream in our thinking the unsteady and thus radically dubious frontier between the inner and the outer, the private and the public, psychoanalysis and politics.

And this is only (in) the beginning. Throughout this study one finds near compulsive attention paid to the topic of impasse. Most typically, this takes the form of commentary like, “Graduated from Princeton in June 1879, he went in the autumn to the University of Virginia to study law, not because he wished to become a lawyer but because he considered law the ‘sure road’ to statesmanship” (89), or, in a different tonality, “his dyspepsia and headaches barred him from the path he hoped would lead to a career as a statesman until the spring of 1882. . . . The road to statesmanship seemed closed to him” (91). Given the narrative logic of all stories of Bildung, these figures are not uncommon, but such commentary also leads quickly to rather more tangled formulations of the sort we now recognize as bearing the imprint of a certain psychoanalytical reflection. The observation that his road seemed closed is followed by: “The flow of his libido through the channels of his activity toward both his father and mother was blocked” (91), a summative formulation that both stratifies the terrain over which Wilson is traveling (again, the inner and the outer; the latent and the manifest), and, through the language of flows and channels, situates the inner, as it were, at sea. Kofman’s teasing out of the aporia acquires renewed relevance as the impassable path to becoming a stateman begins to sound like the work of analysis. Although Freud spent far more time fleeing states than leading them, the drama of his leadership of the “movement” often thematized the matter of method, a drama transferred to epigones like Lacan who insistently and repeatedly entwined technique and tendency.

The reader at this juncture knows to refer the preceding invocation of “activity both toward his father and his mother” back to the early chapters of the study where the authors (although here the material seems plainly written in the same hand that was composing the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) are introducing the then fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, specifically the concepts of primary narcissism, the libido, object choice, constitutive bisexuality, repression as opposed to sublimation, among several others. With a surprising, even brash frankness, the authors insist on human bisexuality, arguing that human civilization would be impossible without it, adding, in doctrinal fashion, that by sexuality is meant behavior, namely, being active, thus masculine, or passive, thus feminine. By virtue of this transposition, bisexuality loses its provocative relation to sexual difference. Just the same, in the characterization of Wilson’s activity toward both his father and his mother being impassable, what we realize is that his behavior toward them is deprived of a distinctly “masculine” discharge. Much of what the authors go on to do is to trace how tenaciously Wilson was haunted, even incapacitated by his struggle, typically unconscious, to reconcile his desire to be both active and passive in relation to his “incomparable father” (an epic simile that studs the study). Among the many things left unspoken by Bullitt and Freud is the oft-suggested proposition that Wilson was a homosexual, “an invert,” wanting desperately to be “loved” by his father while psychically masquerading as his mother. Restated in the language of Group Psychology, Wilson here is depicted as paralyzed as to which ‘Ego-Ideal’ to identify with, a stasis that divided his own position from itself, rendering the formation of the group/family unreal.

The twin motifs of the impossible and the impassable dart in and out of the text, with the former most characteristically appearing when addressing Wilson’s Super-Ego. For example:

In many cases this exaggeration is so excessive that the father with whom the little boy identifies himself, whose image becomes his Super-Ego, expands into the Almighty Father Himself: God. Such a Super-Ego continually demands the impossible from the Ego. No matter what the Ego may actually achieve in life, the Super-Ego is never satisfied with the achievement. It admonishes incessantly: You must make the impossible possible! You can accomplish the impossible! (Bullitt and Freud 41-2)

While such expostulations certainly suggest an uncredited lyricist for “The Impossible Dream,” they also gesture toward, in the twisted topography of making the impossible possible, one of Freud’s great inventions: ambivalence. This concept appears toward the end of Freud’s introduction and it, “the fact or principle of ambivalence,” is used to designate the law that who one loves, say Wilson’s paternal Ego-Ideal, is at the same time (so not on different days, as it were) who one hates, say, the insatiable Super-Ego of the same person. Little more is said about ambivalence as such in the study, but readers of Freud will recognize “ambivalence” as a crucial theoretical operator in Totem and Taboo and, on that basis, know why this early text figures prominently in Group Psychology (see chapter X) where, as has been noted, Freud invokes the Wilson study directly, folding it into the completely incomplete Standard Edition. As if sending up a flare to illuminate the passable terrain ahead, ambivalence is what does and undoes what Wendy Brown has called the demos.⁵

A thorough and thus responsible discussion of how Freud produces the concept of ambivalence in Totem will take me far afield, but since Derrida, with his characteristically brilliant perversity, has drawn attention to what innervates me about the problem of ambivalence, I turn there instead. It occurs in the middle of Before the Law,a text ostensibly about Lyotard’s Au juste (“just gaming” [playing fairly/only playing] in the Weber translation) and delivered at a Cerisy colloquium dedicated to Lyotard’s thought. Derrida there turns to Freud to link the latter’s account of the founding of moral law in Totem, to the predicament of Kafka’s “man from the country” in his confrontation with the law, represented by an open portal and a guardian posted “before” it. Much hangs on the chronotope of Kafka’s Vor dem (in advance of, as opposed to, in front of) in the title. Ostensibly commenting on the burning issue of whether Freud believed that an actual primal hoard actually murdered an Urvater, the alignment of Freud and Kafka pivots on the matter of the impasse, the impossible. Elaborating on Freud’s account of the “ambivalence” of the murderous sons, Derrida writes:

Morality is therefore born from a pointless crime that, at bottom, kills no one, that occurs too soon or too late, that puts an end to no power, and that, in truth, inaugurates nothing since it would have been necessary for repentance, and therefore morality, to have been already possible before the crime. (Before 45)

Grafting this to Kafka’s narrative Derrida continues:

If the law is fantastical, if its original location and its taking-place partake of the fabulous, it is understandable that “das Gesetz”should remain essentially inaccessible. . . . From being a quest to reach it, to stand before it, respectfully face to face, to be introduced to it and into it, the narrative becomes the impossible narrative of the impossible. The narrative of prohibition is a prohibited narrative. (47)

The final sentence would appear to be yet another glancing riposte to Foucault who, in the mid-seventies, began to insist that law operated solely as a prohibition and could thus not serve as a general model of power. But more consequential is the way ambivalence (the sons’ love and hatred for the father) fans out into impasse, that is, the far from inconsequential matter of whether in Totem the “passage” from nature to culture is even possible. From the point of view of political philosophy, the vexed status of so-called natural law hangs in the balance here, as does Lévi-Strauss’s risky inclination, noted by Lacan, to think culture as a second nature.

Now, if one considers that ambivalence designates not only the conflicted drives of the sons, but the entire passage from horde to a social group capable of moral self-governing, then the ambivalence so relentlessly and assiduously tracked in Wilson is no small thing. It is not idiosyncratic, and may well be part of the very structure of any social group, any demos whatsoever. This puts a rather different, but not irrelevant, spin on Bullitt and Freud’s repeated assertion that Wilson’s actions (or inactions) had world historical importance. When on 2 April 1917 President Wilson addressed both houses of the US Congress to declare war on Germany, he justified this proposed course of action—one he had been assiduously trying to avoid—by insisting that war was necessary to make the “world safe for democracy.” This Orwellian twining of war and democracy was framed precisely as of consequence for “the world.” Because “the peace without victory” ineptly negotiated by Wilson committed all parties to future war (simple ambivalence radicalized and projected diachronically), Bullitt and Freud, as if succumbing to Wilson’s self-delusion, conceded the worldly character of his policies, but hinted (passim) this derived from the psychoanalytical insight that, in fact, no social group (and not merely the church or the army) can cohere without ambivalence, without some insistent iteration of the impossible. From Derrida’s “Kafkaesque” perspective, psychoanalysis, as a human science, a sub-discipline of psychology, thus becomes the fabulous narrative of prohibition that narrates this impasse and thus acquires a fundamental, if foreclosed, status within democracy as such. To invoke George McGovern a final time: his credibility as a potential leader of the “free world” was seriously weakened, if not entirely undermined, when his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, was revealed by the press to have been therapeutically treated for depression. He was in analysis and democracy would not, could not be served by that.

But I said earlier that a decisive (rare) dream in Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study deserved further comment. Now is the time. Technically, the dream is recurrent. Freud and Bullitt characterize it as one Wilson had from his days at Princeton until his death in Washington. Significantly, the dream is also only ever recounted in any detail in a letter written to his wife, Ellen Louise Axson. The letter reads:

I did not realize until I got here [Bermuda] how hard hit my nerves have been by the happenings of the past month [the struggle over the formation of a Graduate College at Princeton]. Almost at once the days began to afford me relief, but the nights distressed me. The trouble latent in my mind came out in my dreams. Not till last night did the distress—the struggle all night with college foes, the sessions of hostile trustees, the confused war of argument and insinuation—cease. (qtd. in Bullitt and Freud 138)

Aware that, in writing about Princeton (from the then British Overseas Territory of Bermuda), Wilson had asserted that “sinister influences” dominant at Princeton were manifesting as “dark forces” blocking his way, Freud and Bullitt interpret (and surely the notion of “latent” trouble attracted their attention) the adversary in the dream not simply as his colleague and former friend Andrew West, but in the guise of “the big dark man,” as Wilson’s father, the one who consistently demanded the impossible of him (121). Like Descartes’s dream populated by a series of men, each one offering to make sense of the dream, Wilson’s dream, in which figures a colleague and a father, is made sense of by two more men, Freud and Bullitt, by seeing the dark, aporetic forces as the agency in the unconscious of a “big dark man.” Significantly, this figure is, strictly speaking, a construction of analysis. It appears twice in the text and in neither instance is it attributed directly to Wilson. As this invites consideration of what Wilson’s dream occasions as a presentation of psychoanalytical practice, it deserves attention.

Those irritated by Freud and Bullitt’s collaborative text may certainly point to, among many other things (some already mentioned), its apparent self-serving justification for Bullitt’s decision to resign from Wilson’s service in the wake of his failed diplomatic mission to Moscow. Bullitt’s entire resignation letter (complete with salutation and signature) takes up much of chapter XXXI. But even more problematical and thus far more irritating is the text’s deafening silence on the figure of the “big dark man.” Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in 1856, four years prior to the Confederate raid on Fort Sumter. He was raised in Georgia by an “incomparable father” who was an ardent convert to the Confederate cause. His family owned slaves and his “Ego-Ideal” as a statesman (rather than the minister preferred by his father) was William Gladstone, Queen Victoria’s prime minster who declaimed eloquently (by the way, one of several voices captured on Edison’s phonograph)⁶ in defense of his family’s sugar interests in the “West Indies.” While attending Johns Hopkins University, Wilson befriended Thomas Dixon Jr. and, as film scholars will know, permitted David Wark Griffith to cite from Wilson’s work on the title cards in his adaptation of Dixon’s novel, The Clansman. During the early diplomatic maneuvering triggered by the German sinking of the Lusitania, Wilson even arranged to have The Birth of a Nation screened as part of the cultural events hosted by the White House. As a career diplomat and studio hack, Bullitt would almost certainly have known these “facts.”

The issue here is not whether Wilson was a white supremacist (he is known to have disliked the film), but clearly the jump cut from “big dark man” to “father” is a precipitous construct. Considering, as they write in detailing Wilson’s embrace of Gladstone, that his father “wore the face of Gladstone” (Freud and Bullitt 84), the oneiric series traced in his letter to Ellen Axson running from West, to the “big dark man,” to his father might well imply that the “big dark man,” too, wore the face of Gladstone, that is, the face of a statesmen and phono-genic orator committed to channeling “dark forces.” Put differently, where precisely is the “big dark man”: the dream, the letter, the text, the analysis? Here the work of analysis itself stands forth as a locus of ambivalence, work where “father” (whether primordial or ordinary) races to foreclose what might otherwise become an interminable analysis, a quality of analysis that specifically invites the antemetabolic pairing: interpretation of dreams/dreams of interpretation. The interminable is its own impasse not only because it equates therapy and that hotel in California from which one can never leave, but because it holds interpretation at the dubious impasse of thinking the un-thought.

The Freud and Bullitt collaboration leads us to the threshold of a problematic that suggests that the relation of analysis as a therapeutic practice to an actually existing democracy is essentially that of a dream. Democracies tend to treat the form of governmentality they embody as the dream content of all their citizens, without, however, taking very seriously what it means to treat this content as dreamed. At best they identify with the dreamers in John Lennon’s “Imagine,” forgetting that he had also publicly apologized for his domestic violence. There is a link there that analysis constructs at its peril. It foments radical doubt about living in the world as one. The moment of the Wilson study falls at the early end of a therapeutic trajectory that sees Freud’s reticence about the treatability of psychosis exploited as a justification for preferring other means, notably pharmaceutical (but not only), for protecting democracy from its “enemies” within.⁷ Perhaps then a dim anticipation of the extra-clinical fate of psychoanalytical interpretation motivates the following from the introductory material signed by Freud:

To be sure, when I was led through the influence of Bullitt to a more thorough study of the life of the President, this emotion [antipathy and distrust] did not remain unchanged. A measure of sympathy developed; but sympathy of a special sort mixed with pity, such as one feels when reading Cervantes for his hero, the naïve cavalier of La Mancha. (Bullitt and Freud xiii)

Freud is attempting to reassure readers that the collaboration with Bullitt is not motivated by uninformed hostility (“anti-Americanism”) and for that reason unworthy of their attention. Completed in the early thirties and, thus, when it was becoming increasingly obvious that the war to end all wars was rapidly precipitating others, his antipathy to Wilson is impossible to deny. But, as if anticipating the formulation about the “undreamed-of mastery” that results from a psychoanalytically guided tamping down of aggression, Freud in this passage invokes his response to the dreamer of the impossible dream: sympathy mixed with pity. Quixote emerges as Christ’s ambivalent twin. Freud and Bullitt are convinced that because Wilson insisted on being taken as the latter, Wilson the Redeemer, his love of democracy expressed itself as hatred, his willingness to sacrifice it. Perhaps even unthinkingly, but certainly as an expression of what we glibly call “his issues.” The ambivalence of Freud’s response to Quixote leaves unstated the outcome of his joust with the windmills of the mind, but the temptation is strong to read him as urging one to restate Descartes’ doubt: is this really existing democracy, or it is it a dream synthesized by the malin genie? While hesitating at this doubtful impasse Wilson’s America can ask, who or what is this malin genie obstructing “our” path to democracy and how do we think where we cannot think to think? Stated less pessimistically, what finally is a dream and why is it such a common way to name America’s vanishing present?

Footnotes

1. Many readers will be aware that I am here summoning several themes common in the work of the “late” Derrida. Each deserves, and in some cases has received, essays of their own. Having heard Derrida lecture on “forgiveness” at UC Irvine shortly before his death, it feels appropriate to tease out the motif of impossibility by way of reference to this term. If one accepts that forgiveness is more than an ordinary solicitation of compassion or empathy, that it is, in some sense, a special request, then one is obliged to acknowledge that what makes the request special is the demand it imposes on the other, the one from whom forgiveness is sought. The limit case of such a demand is the request to be forgiven for the absolutely unforgivable (e.g. the atrocities of Apartheid). Anything short of that is commonplace, perhaps even trivial, in effect, unworthy of the request. Derrida concludes that to forgive what is unforgivable, thus what is solely worthy of forgiveness is impossible. Not because it is too much to ask, but because no response, even Bartleby’s (“I would prefer not to”), is either adequate or avoidable. Such is the impossible possibility of forgiveness. See Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness.

2. The reader of Freud will recognize here an evocation of the analysis of group psychology to be found in his study from 1921, Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, a text treated by many as Freud’s most decisive statement on psychoanalysis and society. All philological matters aside, what does appear in this intertext is a homology linking America to the libidinal formations of the church and the army, a homology that brings democracy and fascism into precisely the constellation later bemoaned and interrogated by many figures affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. This, of course, is a way to think about the impasse of democracy that while not making explicit reference to the dream whether possible or impossible, recognizes in the psychic formation of groups the explicit day residues that populate dreams with “big men.” A recent issue of The European Journal of Psychoanalysis, through a commemorative reading of Die Massenpsychologie (1921 – 2021), has explored these matters in considerable detail.

3. In his seminar on the Freudian thing, Lacan invokes the locution “They don’t realize we are bringing them the plague,” attributing it directly to Jung with whom he claims to have spoken. Given the fateful significance attributed to his always having missed an encounter with Freud, we have no particular reason to doubt Lacan on the matter, even as we may demur on the question of whether the locution is verbatim. See “The Freudian Thing” in Ecrits (336).

4. In “To Bury Freud on Wilson,” Campbell goes into some detail about Anna Freud’s role in attempting to suppress information about Freud’s contribution to the project. Reporting on Anna Freud’s interactions with the editor at Houghton and Mifflin, Alick Bartholomew, Campbell quotes from a letter in which Bartholomew writes: “Miss Anna Freud feels most strongly that publication of the manuscript as it is [deemed “repetitious”] would be harmful to her father’s contribution to scientific thought” (52), adding later that she worried that the book would also appear too “un-American” (53).

5. In her 2015 study, Undoing the Demos, Brown carefully traces the emergence of neoliberalism, showing how it aggravates the liberal distinction between democracy (as a form of government) and capital (as an economic system), ultimately sacrificing democracy (undoing it) to a logic of financialization that seeks to subordinate all human activity to markets whether local or global. Here the proposition that markets are best administered through democratic polities is obliged to assert and hold the opposite, namely that markets operate most purely when all democratic encroachments (whether social, political or cultural) are undone. Strictly speaking then, the neoliberal relation between democracy and capital is ambivalent. In my epigraph, Brown summarizes by stressing that democracy becomes unrealizable. Her evocation of the “dream,” however, invites the transposition of the unrealizable as the impassable, underscoring, even faintly, the pertinence of a more analytically inflected sense democracy’s dream. Democracy is dreamed because we are blocked from living it; we are blocked from living it, because it is only (“essentially’) a dream. Although Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz can be read as a “mourning-play’ about the loss of gold as the “general equivalent,” Fleming’s film is a clear and widely popular allegory about the no-place of home (middle America) and the dream that mediates Dorothy’s relation to it. This time the malin genie, like surviving sister, turns out to be good.

6. Many of Edison’s recordings have been preserved by the National Park Service of the United States. They are held in New Jersey at the National Historical Park in West Orange. Gladstone speech is titled, “To Edison from Colonel Gourand, Introducing Mr. Gladstone—‘The Phonograph’s Salutation’.” Its object catalogue number is EDIS 39852. As this might suggest, the speech is one made for the device, not a speech recorded live by the device, a specification called for both by the relay of voices and the notion that the phonograph is conducting a greeting to the speaker.

7. Jonathan Metzl in The Protest Psychosis has traced how the psychosis of schizophrenia morphed within clinical discourse to become the means by which to understand the violent elements of the Civil Rights Movement, thus neutralizing psychoanalytic therapy in principle with regard to thinking the impasses of US democracy in the fifties and sixties.

Works Cited

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