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Review
ArticleThe
Troubles with Psychoanalysis
SAGE Publications, Inc.200510.1191/0967550705ab031ra
ShelleyDay Sclater
University of East London, UK, S.D.Sclater@uel.ac.uk
Kalu
Singh, 2000: Guilt. Cambridge: Icon Books; ISBN 184046190X, 80 pp. £3.99.
Estela V. Welldon, 2002: Sadomasochism. Cambridge: Icon Books, ISBN 1840463783,
79 pp. £3.99. Julia Segal, 2000: Phantasy. Cambridge: Icon Books. ISBN 1840461896,
78 pp. £3.99. David Bell, 2003: Paranoia. Cambridge: Icon Books. ISBN 1840463775,
78 pp. £3.99. Priscilla Roth, 2001: The superego. Cambridge: Icon Books.
ISBN 1840462469, 80 pp. £3.99. Nicola Abel-Hirsch, 2001: Eros. Cambridge:
Icon Books. ISBN 1840462760, 80 pp. £3.99. Robert M. Young, 2001: Oedipus
complex. Cambridge: Icon Books. ISBN 1840462744, 80 pp. £3.99. Jeremy Holmes,
2001: Narcissism. Cambridge: Icon Books. ISBN 1840462450, 77 pp. £3.99. Graham
Music, 2001; Affect and emotion. Cambridge: Icon Books. ISBN 1840462434,
79 pp. £3.99. Ivan Ward, 2003: Castration. Cambridge: Icon Books. ISBN 1840464429,
80 pp. £3.99.
Address
for correspondence: Shelley Day Sclater, School of Social Sciences, Cultural
and Media Studies, University of East London, Docklands Campus, Docklands,
London E16 2RD, UK; Email: S.D.Sclater@uel.ac.uk
This paper reviews a series
of short books on ideas in psychoanalysis. Its main focus is the relevance
of psychoanalytic ideas to auto/biographical practices. It discusses some
common ambivalences about psychoanalysis and its applications to understanding
life stories. Does psychoanalytic thinking give us unique access to hidden
truths about human lives and human nature? Or is psychoanalysis just a useful
language for exploring the vicissitudes of stories? Or could it be a novel
language that we can use to invent new stories, or new dimensions to stories?
The paper concludes that, for many auto/biographers, the great value of psychoanalysis
lies, not in enabling us to reveal the `real' selves of our subjects, but
as a tool to create new spaces for thinking about both selves and stories.
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If we
look at our lives, we shall probably find that we spend most of our time neither
in behaviour nor in contemplation, but somewhere else. I ask: where? (Donald
Winnicott, 1971: 105) When my children were young they took great delight
in goading me about the way their psychologist-mother made sense of the world.
My apparent propensity to see deep psychological motives anywhere and everywhere,
they found hilarious. They even went as far as inventing for themselves quasi-psychological
excuses for things they didn't want to do. `Eat your greens,' I said, `they're
good for you.' `Yuk! They're horrible' came the defiant retort. And then my
nine-year-old daughter gleefully pointed out, in a voice that parodied mine,
`If the midwife who was there when I was born hadn't had such horrible green
eyes, I wouldn't hate sprouts.' Having offered this insight, she and her brother
then pushed their sprouts to one side and collapsed into an extended fit of
the giggles. They had grasped the idea that a psychoanalytic language can
be used to undo the traditional narrative of authority and replace it with
a new kind of final word. This encapsulates, quite neatly, the potentials
and the troubles that psychoanalysis poses for auto/biographers. For many,
psychoanalysis offers a set of fundamental truths about human nature, revealing
previously hidden dimensions of persons. The books in this series are mostly
written by practising therapists, so it was of no surprise to find that they
tend towards this view. Auto/biographers who have some sympathy with that
perspective will find tools to dig into the deepest recesses of their subjects,
equipped at last to get at the real meaning of the life. Others who are more
sceptical about such implicit truth claims will regard the relevance of psychoanalysis
to auto/biography as dubious at best. Both would be mistaken. Preoccupation
with the `truth' or otherwise of psychoanalysis may well stand in the way
of creative thinking about the possibilities as well as the limits of life
writing. I once had a first-year student who wrote an essay on Freud. The
great master's name was misspelt throughout the essay as `Fraud'. The student
assured me that it was a genuine mistake and, having some ambivalence towards
psychoanalysis myself, I was inclined to believe him. For this student, psychoanalysis
painted a picture of the world that was so far removed from common sense that
it was difficult to imagine how it could be of any use at all. His hostility
to psychoanalytic discourse is there for all to see. Yet, the systematic `slip'
that he made itself revealed the possibility that a psychoanalytic reading
could produce a potent counter-narrative that challenges dominant representations
of `reality'. Psychoanalysis certainly disrupts the shaky boundaries between
`truth' and `fiction' that auto/ biographers routinely grapple with. My little
stories point to the possibility
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that
psychoanalysis and life writing can trouble each other in intriguing ways.
Many of my students have trouble coming to terms with the whole idea that
things may not always be as they appear to be. I remember only too well my
own first encounters with Freud. I found his ideas both riveting and uncomfortable.
I looked for myself in his case studies, as my students do now, and I found
it difficult, as they do, to see myself as comprised of a chaos of conflicting
life and death instincts, wild passions and strange pleasures, denials and
repressions, often of a `sexual' origin. But as well as being unsettling,
psychoanalysis is also compelling. Like life writing, it seduces us into its
narrative, tempting us to suspend reason as we enter its story. And it seems
to promise those precious insights about the `real' person that auto/biographers
dream of being able to discover or convey in our reading and writing. This
series of books is not explicitly concerned with life writing, which may seem
a little odd when you think that the entire edifice of psycho- analysis is
built on the telling and interpretation of life histories. It indi- cates,
I think, the extent to which a dominant narrative of psychoanalysis itself
has evolved, in which the theories and the therapies have acquired a truth
status that can only be challenged in their own terms. That is alien- ating
for a lot of people, and it can be disempowering to find one's healthy scepticism
apparently `explained away' as a defensive and motivated attempt to avoid
the truth at all costs. The reader will almost certainly encounter those kinds
of frustrations. These books introduce some of the main ideas of psychoanalysis
to a general readership. But readers may then do what they will with those
ideas and insights. Freud or Fraud, or somewhere in between, the choice is
yours. One of the most interesting things about reading and writing auto/
biography is discovering the different ways we make sense of the world. Through
producing and consuming life writing, we enter a kaleidoscope of meaning making
that can transform our lives and our worlds. We see the world as others see
it, and it changes our own. Psychoanalysis is a form of life writing. The
theory, since the days of its founding father Freud, has been built on the
life stories of ordinary people, and although there have been many revisions
to the theory, and developments in the practice, personal narratives of lives
continue to be the very stuff of psychodynamic therapies. It might be expected,
therefore, that auto/biographers would be keen to embrace the ideas and the
insights, if not the practices, of psychoanalysis as essential tools of their
trade. But such has not been the case. On the contrary, auto/biographers have
tended to remain deeply sceptical. Psycho-biography as a genre, for example,
has attracted more criticism than appreciation or praise.
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It is
certainly paradoxical that Freud, himself a notorious plotter of other people's
lives, was deeply sceptical about the projects of auto/ biographers. As Adam
Phillips (1999) reminds us, Freud took active steps to thwart the attempts
of his future biographers when he destroyed many of his early papers, manuscripts
and letters, and he looked forward to his biographers floundering as a result.
It is as though he wanted to keep the `truth' about himself to himself. Interestingly,
his own autobiographical writings focus more on psychoanalysis, and we are
left wondering about Freud the man. This points to a central enigma of psychoanalysis – our deep ambivalences about knowing and being known. These ambivalences are
evident, for example, in what has been called the `narrative turn' in contemporary
life. We are increasingly surrounded by personal stories – often of
an intimate kind – which have become the currency by which to know
ourselves and others. If the nineteenth century brought our storied secrets
from the confessional box onto the couch (Foucault, 1979), the late twentieth
century – what Dunant and Porter (1996) have called `the age of anxiety' – has witnessed an even more pro- found shift. Glib talk about the `Oprahfication'
of culture probably masks the seriousness of the transformation in the storying
of lives and identities (see, for example, McAdams, 1993; Eakin, 1999) that
daily takes place before our eyes. Followers of Trisha and other talk shows,
fans of Big Brother, or Wife Swap and `reality TV' more generally, as well
as the new generation of `bloggers' are regularly treated to a kind of narrative
striptease where anything goes and apparently nothing is spared. Formerly
`private' tragedies, reflections, musings and anxieties that once were safely
contained behind closed doors, or tucked away in the pages of a private diary,
or which found expression in letters marked `confidential', have become public
property, to do with what we will. But we remain ambivalent about what all
this means, and about whether or not all this exposure and self-exposure is
a `good thing'. How `real' is `reality TV'? Are those people really like that,
or are they just `acting up'? Does `reality TV' provide new opportunities
to make visible the complexities of real lives, or does it contribute to a
culture of superfi- ciality? Between these opposite poles, the only thing
that can be said with any certainty is that this `narrative turn' is troubling
the boundaries between the public and the private, and between fact and fantasy.
Speaking optimistically, it seems that new forms of public confessionals are
providing spaces in which consumers can grapple with what is and is not real
for themselves. But psychoanalysis can further trouble the debate. It has
deep implications for how we formulate questions of agency, responsibility
and autonomy. Controlling our own life story is one of the ways in which we
try to keep control over our lives, and manage our anxieties about their
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inevitable
finitude. Adam Phillips (1999) argues that it was Freud's under- standing
of the `death instinct' – the force that pushes us to spoil, and ulti-
mately to destroy our lives – that underlay his view that auto/biographical
narrative coherence was both undesirable and impossible. For Freud, self-
destructive behaviour – and the narrative undoing of lives – was integral to the unconscious logic of life. Auto/biographical claims to
reveal real lives and real persons were bogus because the logic of life necessarily
escapes us. It is `unformulateable' – a `riddle without a Sphinx',
as Phillips (1999) puts it. Freud, in a letter to Zweig in 1836 declared,
`Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy,
flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical
truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it' (quoted in Phillips,
1999: 85). The late Ian Craib was explicit about his ambivalence towards the
`narrative turn' (Craib, 2000), regarding the apparent intimacy of auto/ biography
as spurious at best. For him, selves are always more than sto- ries can express.
Stories that claim otherwise are `bad faith' narratives. He worried that there
was a banalization going on, that we habitually sanitize and idealize life
stories, leaving out uncomfortable psychic realities. On this view, we should
be wary of the apparent coherence and plausibility of life stories, since
they are designed as much to conceal as to reveal. Similarly, Stephen Frosh
(2002) worries that the `turn to narrative' is in danger of reducing the self
to an effect of language. He wants to explore what happens if we turn our
attention to that which is internal to the psyche – the stuff of psychoanalysis – and therefore outside discourse. Both Craib and Frosh want to be able to talk
about aspects of the self that necessarily evade narrative formulations.
Hollway and Jefferson (2000a; 2000b) similarly problematize the narrative
subject. They posit a `defended' subject, one whose emotions and defences
colour their experi- ences and fashion the stories they tell to make sense
of the world. In these examples, an engagement with psychoanalysis produces
a deep scepticism about `the real' in narrative accounting. For these writers,
new levels and kinds of realities emerge when personal stories are interrogated
by psychoanalytic language. But these writers are going further than just
suggesting that there are aspects of selfhood that lie `beyond' the text,
or that selves necessarily spill out over the edges of the stories we tell
about them. Rather, what is being suggested is that the storied selves we
habit- ually present are but superficial covers for something that is deeper,
more complex and much more threatening. Frosh (1999: 382), for example, sees
identities as `important protective devices against something worse'. So,
far from encapsulating or articulating the self, the storied self is, on this
view, something that defends against it. In telling one story of our life,
we are simultaneously – and systematically – avoiding telling
other
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possible
stories. Phantasy, denial, repression, displacement, projection, transferences
and so on are all common – though not immediately obvi- ous – features of life stories according to psychoanalytic thinking. Thus we might
advocate reading life narratives through a psychoanalytic lens, uncovering
the concealed parts of the stories – or the internal conflicts of their
narrators – by `reading between the lines'. But, equally, we might
read psychoanalysis itself as a story with a plot and an axe to grind. The
central issue for auto/biographers may be summarized thus: does psychoanalytic
thinking give us unique access to hidden truths about human lives and human
nature? Or is psychoanalysis just a useful language for exploring the vicissitudes
of stories? Or could it be a novel language that we can use to invent new
stories, or new dimensions to stories? The books in this series do not address,
let alone answer, these sorts of questions. But they do provide auto/biographers
with at least the possibility of raising such questions. Psychoanalysis clearly
troubles auto/biography, but can auto/biography also trouble psychoanalysis?
Life stories can point, not to the logic of life – conscious or otherwise – but to the ways in which chance and discontinu- ities conspire to disrupt
our struggles for coherence and plausibility. A life story, well-written,
enables us to identify the ambivalences that chip away at our attempts at
wholeness and authenticity. Psychoanalysis is a tool that helps us to probe
between the cracks, and to scratch among the debris, if not of our lives,
then of the stories we tell about them. The legacy of Freud that is of use
to auto/biographers is the language of psychoanalysis, a language we can
use to talk about the multiple and contradictory dimensions of our lives and
our culture. Love it or loathe it – and psychoanalysis does have a
propensity to provoke very particular passions – it is the only language
we have to talk about the ways in which both perceptions and real experiences
are immediately invested with, and continually reworked through, psychic fantasies.
These books provide, to an interested but non-specialist audience, a discussion
of the main ideas that comprise the body of psychoanalytic theory from Freud
to date. There's a whole series of small books, reason- ably priced, each
on a single topic. Some explain the central concepts of psychoanalysis – the Oedipus complex, for example, or Eros, Narcissism, Paranoia and the Superego.
Others offer a psychoanalytic take on issues of broader concern – Phantasy,
for example, and Sado-masochism, Affect and Emotion, and Guilt. Each book
is written by a different author – all specialists in their field – and so content, scope, tone and quality, as might be expected, are highly
variable. The theories deployed in the quest for explanation, the examples
given by way of illustrations – including clini- cal and case-study
materials, drama, poetry and occasionally contemporary cultural phenomena – vary according to the interests and expertise of each
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author.
As a series, the books amount to a reasonably comprehensive coverage of many
of the main ideas that psychoanalysis has to offer. I would like to have seen
some more evident editorial input to enable the books to hold together more
coherently as a series and to provide, especially for students and others
new to the area, some contextualization of the individual topics within the
body of that troublesome entity we call psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis comprises
such a range of theoretical frameworks and analytic `schools' and practices,
I felt sure that newcom- ers at least would need rather more signposts than
appear in each individ- ual volume. In particular, some broader discussion
of the nature of psychoanalysis – as an individual therapy, as a critical
idiom, as a part of social theory, for example – would have greatly
enhanced the appeal of these books to a wide range of readers. Nevertheless,
many readers will find in these books things to contemplate, now or in the
future. Others will encounter, possibly against their better judgement, compelling
insights that change their lives or their work. The books in this series that
use a broad range of illustrations, includ- ing, but not confined to, `clinical
material', and including also ordinary vignettes of everyday situations, are
the most successful. Two books in this series stand out in this regard – Priscilla Roth's on the Superego and Julia Segal's on Phantasy. The latter
is a good place to start our discus- sion, since phantasy (spelt with a ph
to distinguish it from its conscious counterpart, fantasy) is a concept that
can help the reader negotiate a path through the ideas in the other books.
The idea of unconscious phantasy describes how we unwittingly transform the
world by mixing up our own emotional baggage with our everyday perceptions
of `reality'. To our ordi- nary perceptions, we all add powerfully emotive
elements belonging else- where, so translating them into something else may
leave long-term traces that annoy or distress or comfort us. Phantasies may
not be `real', but their influences and effects can be all too real. For example,
at a personal level, we may have trouble getting on with our boss at work
because of an underlying phantasy about authority, deriving from our relationship
with a parent, that we carry around with us. Or, at a broader level, the idea
of phantasy can be useful for thinking about puzzling aspects of our culture – the surprising mass mourning for the late Princess Diana would be a case in
point. Advertising routinely exploits our unconscious phantasies. Adverts
manipulate the meanings associated with particular goods, and implicitly invite
us to consume not only the goods themselves, but also their symbolic qualities.
Ian MacRury (1997) argues that the appeal of adverts depends primarily upon
our unconscious engagement with the product and the routes to identity that
it offers. Ads play a significant role in the modulation of our emotional
rela- tions towards the world of symbolic goods. They address our unconscious
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needs
and wishes. In short, advertising plays with our narcissism, trans- porting
us into a kind of transitional space where the ambiguities of self and product
are `held' in creative tension, and narcissistic phantasies of wholeness,
omnipotence and perfection are played out. And phantasies – increasingly
global ones – operate in politics too. An immediately pressing example,
as I write this, is the preoccupation of the overdeveloped world with the
threat from `terrorism' in the wake of the tragedy of 11 September. We have
a set of well-developed phantasies that daily masquerade as `reality', expressed
in George W. Bush's now infa- mous dictum that `you're either with us or against
us'. The underlying message is that `we' are good and `they' are bad and,
further, that `they' are a threat, and that it is incumbent upon `us' to stamp
out the threat with all the force we can muster. In this phantasy, the world
is split into two opposing camps. In this `splitting' we unconsciously imagine
that our enemy represents everything that is evil and so must be destroyed.
The emotional work of the phantasy is to deny the aspects of ourselves that
are bad and destructive by projecting them onto the other, the enemy. In the
ongoing `war on terror', powerful political rhetoric embodies this kind of
split thinking, making the possibility of a negotiated solution that much
more difficult. In this example, phantasy combines with political rhetoric
on a global scale. Phantasies have real effects when we act on them unaware
of the level of unreality we have defensively introduced into the situation.
Psychoanalysis, as we see here, has something important to say about the workings
of groups, institutions, cultures and whole societies as well as individuals.
The work of groups, Isobel Menzies-Lyth (1989) on anxiety in institutions
and of Mike Rustin (2001) on society and politics are good places where the
reader will find more detailed discussion of these sorts of issues. Through
these brief examples of the various workings of phantasy at individual, social
and cultural levels, we have some sense of what psycho- analysis can offer.
In discussing phantasy, we have necessarily touched on other psychoanalytic
ideas – splitting, projection, narcissism, reparation and so on, that
are discussed in more detail in this series of books. Some of the books I
found disappointing. A potentially very interesting contri- bution to understanding
`guilt' is compromised by a largely inaccessible writing style. Or perhaps
I just had too many defences in play when I was reading it! The book on `Eros',
I found disjointed and difficult to follow. David Bell's text on `paranoia'
is well worth a read. He places paranoid thinking in a social as well as a
developmental context, and his discussion of paranoia as a defence against
an awareness of vulnerability is particularly timely. Bob Young's essay on
the Oedipus complex is a bit too theoretical for the uninitiated, and there
are few examples to bring the text alive. It reads
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like
a lecture to a group of undergraduates who share Young's own enthu- siasm
for the topic. It is intelligent and informative, but it does assume quite
a lot of prior knowledge. Unlike many of the other books in this series, this
one does include a pronounced critical dimension, as we might expect from
a writer like Bob Young, though I am aware that some will not find it quite
critical enough. I did think that there was not sufficient detailed consideration
of the social and cultural ordering of gendered inequalities and how these
impact on the Oedipal situation. Feminists will find that their approaches
to Oedipus insufficiently represented. Priscilla Roth's discussion of the
`superego' is well written and inform- ative. Even complete beginners will
find it easily accessible. It includes many easily recognisable examples,
linked with a clear explanation of psychoanalytic ideas and principles. Roth
makes a very interesting point in this book, which is rather too often overlooked,
especially in `popular- ized' accounts of psychoanalysis. It is this: the
severity of the superego seems in no way to correspond to the severity of
treatment a particular individual has actually received at the hands of their
parents, or other- wise. This brings us back to the work of phantasy and reminds
us of the complexity of unconscious processes which often gets lost. It is
in the nature of the unconscious that it deftly slips away the moment we think
we might have grasped it. Sometimes, it all but disap- pears from psychoanalytic
writing, even though the word `unconscious' is there in the text. Object relations
theory, partly because it has most often been popularized, seems particularly
prone to this kind of slippage. But perhaps there are more sinister forces
at work. As well as being a set of, often divergent, theories, psychoanalysis
is a therapeutic practice, and it has spawned a diverse array of therapies,
each with its own internal logic. These practices necessarily position themselves
in various ways in rela- tion to broader discourses and practices of `welfare'
in contemporary British society. As such, some are more infused than others
with more or less dominant ideologies – I am reminded here of what
Furedi (2004) calls `therapy culture' – about what constitutes a `problem'
requiring `treatment' and the best ways of achieving social and political
aims. The `taming' of the unconscious in some therapies and in accounts that
derive from those therapies is, in Foucauldian terms, part and parcel of a
disciplinary power that functions to produce docile and complicit subjects.
Of course, no one expects psychoanalytic writers – let alone therapists – to engage with this kind of critical social theory every time they open their
mouths. But to shy away from the rich complexities of uncon- scious processes
can position psychoanalysis too much as the servant of disciplinary power.
Roth negotiates these dilemmas well. She never loses sight of the unconscious
in all its contradictory complexity. The superego, she
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reminds
us, is established as the child internalizes not its parents, but the parents
as viewed through the child's phantasy world and, in particular, the child's
own unconscious (and projected) aggression against them. The father and the
mother are introjected by the child, not as they are, but as the child imagines
them to be. This is a highly significant point. It reminds us that people
are active agents, continually involved in making our selves and our worlds
as we struggle to make sense of them. It reminds us too that we are not the
passive victims of others' treatment of us, nor of circumstances, but are
actively engaged in constructing and reconstructing our lives, often employing
the building blocks of uncon- scious phantasy that we did not even know we
were using. Popularizations of psychoanalysis are particularly prone to oversimplify-
ing, but Roth's discussion of the superego is a timely reminder that there
is something very nasty in the woodshed, and we ignore it at our peril. By
contrast, in Estela Welldon's book on `sadomasochism' the com- plexities of
the unconscious all but disappear, and dominant ideologies, and accompanying
moralities, move in to occupy centre stage. This book illustrates how a tendency
to moralize can stand in the way of thinking about things that are inherently
difficult to think about. This book makes simplistic connections between a
person's (often assumed) past `abuse' and their present enjoyment (seen as
`acting out') of S & M. Child murder (such as carried out by the Wests
and by Brady and Hindley, and Beverly Allitt) as well as `child abuse' are
brought into the same general `cycle of violence' framework. Moreover, the
apparent failure of people who enjoy S & M to recognize the problem and
to acknowledge the formative influence of the past is explained away as defensiveness
and denial: `One could assume, but of course, without any firm evidence, that
their strong denial was the only tolerable defence mechanism available to
them because of very early and severe disturbances' (p. 8). This is the kind
of analytic arrogance that puts many people off psychoanalysis. More worrying,
though, are the social, moral and even legal implications of this kind of
writing. It lends itself to calls for more interventions of the `therapeutic
state' – in this case, more surveillance and assessment, utilizing
profiling of female abusers and concepts of female perversion – to
be brought into play to address the unrecognized problem of abusive mothers – `mothers as creators of sadomasochism' (p. 57) – and parents whose
relationships demonstrate `malignant bonding' (p. 53). The concept of narcissism
is of great contemporary relevance (see, for example, Lasch, 1979) and is
explored by Jeremy Holmes. He sets out a number of theories of narcissism,
but the text is best when he discusses his own `attachment theory' perspective.
Holmes maps `healthy' and `unhealthy' narcissism onto different attachment
strategies, and empha- sizes the continuities between a `secure base' outside
the self (in the
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infant's
early relationships) and that inside the self. The relationship with a secure
base is necessarily narcissistic (healthily so), and is a precondition for
seeing the `other' as separate and for establishing functional relationships.
By contrast, insecure attachments lead to attempts to use the self as a secure
base surrogate, and to a reliance on coercion and power to maintain relationships.
Attachment theory, however, is not everyone's cup of tea, and again some
readers will be frustrated by the foregrounding of relational issues at the
expense of unconscious processes. Graham Music's Affect and emotion is a good
general introduction to the inner world of feelings, with lots of accessible
examples. But again there is a tendency to gloss over the real complexities
and deep contradic- tions that are features of the emotional lives of all
humans. The series editor, Ivan Ward, writes about castration in an intelligent
and informa- tive way. Of particular interest to auto/biographers are his
sections on cre- ativity and sublimation, which he discusses with reference
to contemporary examples, such as the comedy of John Cleese, the art of Damien
Hirst, and the protest activities of the Greenham women. He shows how the
castration complex is implicated in both the horrors and the highest ideals
of humanity. It is not possible to make an overall assessment of the usefulness
of this series of books in bringing psychoanalytic ideas to the popular imagina-
tion precisely because they are so variable in content and quality. There
is a real danger in some that they deal rather too much in knowing and not
enough in the kind of questioning that encourages real understanding. Some
implicitly borrow from the `medical model' in warranting the supreme authority
of, and giving the last word to, the author/therapist by invoking `clinical
material' that masks the extent to which ideas and argu- ments are suffused
by dominant ideologies. Ideally, books like these would facilitate a better
understanding of self, others, lives and worlds and so enhance readers' relationships
and enrich their lives. But, set against introductory texts that have been
tried and tested with my students – including, for example, Ian Craib's
Psychoanalysis: a critical introduc- tion (Craib, 2001), Anthony Elliott's
Psychoanalytic theory: an introduc- tion (Elliott, 1994), Stephen Frosh's
For and against psychoanalysis (Frosh, 1997) and Mike Rustin's The good society
and the inner world (Rustin, 1991), this series of books is a bit of a poor
relation. For me, and I suspect for many other auto/biographers, the great
value of psychoanalysis lies, not in enabling us to reveal the `real' selves
of our subjects, but as a tool to create new spaces for thinking about both
selves and stories. Ian Craib (2000) makes a very useful distinction between
psychoanalysis as a means of `understanding', which it can be, and as a form
of `explanation', which it cannot. For me, psychoanalysis provides a language
for exploring the creative and transformative potentials of
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auto/biography.
Life writing becomes a kind of Winnicottian `transitional space', where the
possibilities for creative writing and reading are limited only by our willingness
to let the imagination run. In that space, we can embrace new kinds of truths
that do not depend on factually accurate accounts, but are important truths
nevertheless. If the books in this series encourage us to open up those kinds
of spaces, in our lives and in our work, they will have done their job.
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NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR SHELLEY DAY SCLATER is Professor of Psychosocial Studies at
the University of East London, an Associate Member of the Centre for Family
Research, University of Cambridge, and a freelance researcher and writer.
She has a particular interest in relationships and families and has published
extensively in this area.