Curiously, for two enormous works of history, I was left wondering less about the past and more than ever about the future of psychoanalysis. How much longer can psychoanalysis survive as both a theory and a therapeutic practice? If the rise of psychoanalysis was in fact bound to the rise of liberal social and political sentiments and institutions, as Forrester argues, and we in our own age are living through a sustained challenge to the great liberal shibboleths, we might surely wonder about the form the subsistence of psychoanalysis might take, if it subsists at all. I have a sense that the submerged histories of an age can only be written when there is no longer a need to keep them submerged – that is, when an age is waning or has already waned. Earlier, I suggested that borrowing from Tansley the de-centred metaphor of the ecosystem to describe the history and spread of psychoanalysis, was better suited than the standard top-down metaphor, we have become accustomed to. But the ecosystem was Tansley’s dream, as the top-down model was Jones’ life-long project and death-bed reverie. Do we not need our own dream about psychoanalysis? As the quintessentially hackneyed ‘postmodern’ metaphor, the idea of an ecosystem arrives to us as already quaintly dated, extensively well-worn in the postmodern ‘literature’. Perhaps, as some weary cynics say, we have exhausted all metaphors. Or perhaps, as other weary cynics say, metaphors only occur to us once they are already spent and past their sell-by-date.
Either way, it is time to take the risk of dreaming again. Neither Jones’ ‘egosystem’ dream of unending fidelity to the proper name above, which we hope will elevate us beyond ourselves, nor Tansley’s ‘ecosystem’ dream of the web-of-life, where the periphery is the centre and all members are laterally arranged in mutual co-dependence. A new dream. A dream for our times. Freud in Cambridge and Psychoanalysis in Britain arrive not to set the past straight, but to jolt us out of the complacency of the present to ponder the uncertainty of the future. Because the authors have done their job right, they return us to the task of dreaming anew a fresh therapeutic theory and practice, embodied in institutions freed from structures belonging to the past. It is our task, in our moment, to dream institutions, practices and theories that speak to those forms of human suffering and disenfranchisement we see emerging in our consulting rooms, amidst the dark times dawning around us.
References.
Forrester, J. and Cameron, L. (2017). Freud in Cambridge. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Forrester, J. and Zaretsky, E. (2016). ‘Totalitarianism and the talking cure: a conversation’, in ffytche, M. and Pick, D. (Eds.). Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism, Routledge: Oxford and New York.
Glover, E. (1945). ‘Eder as psycho-analyst’, in Hobman, J.B., David Eder: Memoirs of a Modern Pioneer, Gollancz: London.
Hinshelwood, R.D. (1995). ‘Psychoanalysis in Britain: points of cultural access, 1893-1918’, Int. J. Psychoanalysis, 76:1, 135-51.
Jones, M. (1987) Chances, Verso: London.
Kuhn, P. (2017). Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1893-1913: Histories and Historiography. Lexington Books: London and New York.