On difficulty: psychoanalysis or deconstruction

In his excellent book Troubling Confessions and elsewhere, Peter Brooks explains psychoanalysis as a method or technology for producing "difficult" truth. That is, it is a technique for producing confessional statements of truth but which gain their status of truth by way of the technique's placing a stamp of complexity on them: what emerges from the analysand in psychoanalysis is not simple, is not something that is taken at face value--or even if one attends to the face value of the statements, its truth lies on another, more substantial and complex plane of meaning than it would appear at first sight.
Now, I don't want to get into the hermeneutical issues at work here (i.e. whether what this describes is a hermeneutics of suspicion or something similar), precisely because I think Brooks is trying to avoid these issues too by recasting the problem (not unlike Eve Sedgwick with her "paranoid reading") in a different way. For indeed, "difficulty" is something in terms of which we interpret: not only because we approach words and phrases to give them a certain literary merit or not based on their difficulty--the classic debates over highbrow and lowbrow that people interested in modernism have to deal with: i.e. Joyce is good because his difficulty is a sign of richness--but because difficulty is something that intrinsicly affects our reading experience at the most basic level of how we receive or interpret the particular truth claims a phrase makes. (Now, I don't mean to say that the highbrow/lowbrow issues aren't precisely about this truth-aspect--I just want to isolate this particular issue and look at it). In other words, "difficulty" often provokes a different set of interpretive practices on our part as readers: considering a statement's truth claim as a complex one, rather than something simpler, will tend to make one interpret what is said differently, often in a manner that reproduces the difficulty that is perceived to be at work.
Thus, Brooks' point: you can't so quickly blame psychoanalysis' interpretations of a particular case (Dora would be the heated example), because you have to understand that it itself is concerned with inscribing the statements that make up this case in a particular logic of truth. In other words, you can't counter psychoanalysis by a different regime of truth without undoing the work that psychoanalysis does--which means taking up its claims to truth on some level. In Brooks' case, this other regime is the law--and this is what motivates Brooks to be hesitant about the law's increasing admission of data gathered from therapy into trial, or, in an even more extreme manner, in the turning of a trial into therapy, as victims' rights advocates risk doing. But this could also be extended to philosophy or literary interpretation or even just popular discourse: in order to analyze the truth-claim of a statement that takes place in psychoanalysis, whether you are writing on Freud as a philosopher or just talking about Freud in the street ("He doesn't have anything repressed--that's psycho-babble--he just needs to get over it..."), in order to analyze it legitimately, you can't just reject Freud outright. Psychoanalysis has to take over your discourse and make it "difficult."
Now, I have not yet really outlined what "difficulty" here means, but before I do, I want to note something else: we'll sketch out this something else and then return, with perhaps an even richer perspective, to what difficulty actually is. What I want to note is the following: what I've just said about the truth-claim of psychoanalysis might sound a lot like the status of the trace, and what I've just said about legitimately negotiating it, the work of deconstruction. (Or, rather, since the trace can be said to provoke deconstruction--deconstruction is what it brings about, as if deconstruction will have been its consequence, I might just say that I sound like I am talking about deconstruction.) Now, it wouldn't totally be wrong to hear what I've said in this way: both deconstruction and psychoanalysis, because of the status of their truth-claims, infect, as it were, other discourses. No doubt Derrida would like to say that it is the deconstructive aspect of psychoanalysis that does this (as he does with Marxism in Specters of Marx, for example), and not the other way around. But I think on some level he might also be amenable to suggesting that this is the psychoanalytic aspect of deconstruction.
Now I immediately have to hesitate when I say this, because it really doesn't say anything at all, since deconstruction isn't exactly presumed to exist like psychoanalysis is, and therefore can't be psychoanalytic any more than it can be anything whatsoever. (The phrase, then, really only says its converse, and this is why Derrida always says it the other way.) But, if we understand that it is a sort of wrong-headed phrase that tries to sketch out a texture of deconstruction in terms of what we know about psychoanalysis, it remains an interesting formulation, so I'll leave it. This is at least what Alan Bass does in a sort of autobiographical essay of his, "The Double Game," in the amazing little volume Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature.
He does so not only in just trying to see deconstruction (as his various books have also done) in terms of what it does to psychoanalysis, but because it is here that the sort of infection we see as the pivot or hinge between these two discourses appears as the infection of difficulty that Brooks is talking about--and that we are calling similar (at least) to deconstruction. It is the difficulty of what Derrida is up to that makes Bass take up the monumental task of translating Derrida, he claims:

[Upon reaching France in the junior year of college], I immersed myself in "structuralism," studied music, wrote plays, worked for a theater troupe, made friends. Daniel, the normalien in whose apartment I was living, helped by recommending books to read, and indicated that his teacher at the Ecole Normale, Jacques Derrida, was also someone to know about. Daniel passed along his copy of the acts of a colloquium on Genesis and Structure that contained Derrida's small essay on Husserl entitled "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology." I will never forget my first attempts to read it: compared to this Lévi-Strauss and Foucault were writing popular novels. All I got from this first attempt was a vivid memory of the red circles on the book cover... I still think that for anyone not familiar with Husserl the essay is mainly impenetrable, and its first paragraph is monstrous.
-"The Double Game: An Introduction," 68

This is quite honest in its sort of arrogant naivete. Or rather, this is an instance of arrogance and naivete being honest: "Compared to this Lévi-Strauss and Foucault were writing popular novels." The first reaction to this is one of revulsion: why would a comparison such as this matter at all? Unless you were just out to appear the smartest, why would this difficulty of Derrida even be something that comes up as a thought? Even Bass seems to recoil in front of what he has just said (even though he was ventriloquizing!): he takes up this difficulty that so trumps the work of Foucault and Lévi-Strauss and recasts it in terms of how much one would need to know about Husserl.
But instead of doing this--though we will return to it in a minute--I want to stay with the sentence and look at what is so distressing, almost shameful about it for us. For this is, I think, the locus of its honesty...

(More to come...)

"I always wanted to be a literary critic."

I was talking to a literature professor the other day who told me that, once, when she was having a conversation with Derrida, he confessed to her that he always wanted to be a literary critic.
It's not a totally surprising confession, and I've heard similar things before. But what was new to me, what I'd never really heard before, was the "always." It's almost colloquial, of course: "I always wanted to do that..." But it also hit home to me the sort of constancy of this desire, a sort of perpetuation of it despite everything that happened. In other words, it hit home the fact that if this was true, it was a sort of longing that years and years couldn't kill off, a sort of need, more fundamental to his whole sense of self, that ranged all throughout his very long life.
I should have asked more about the circumstances of the conversation, but all this was hitting home so much that I remained silent and kept thinking. Because what was becoming interesting to me was that if this all was true--and in fact even if it wasn't, it at least was a fabrication, a story, and therefore a concern that must have been kept up for so very long that it almost would be true by virtue of that--the question would not be Why did he always want this? but, Why didn't he just become one? If he always wanted to do this, what kept him from it? So I asked this--it seems like the professor had similar thoughts and asked it too--and the response he gave was that he felt he didn't have the training.
Now, again, I've heard this before. One can find similar sentiments in "Ulysses Gramophone" all over the place, where Derrida is anxious about talking to literature professors about Joyce. And because I have heard him say this, I protested--trying to talk to Derrida, as it were, through my professor, trying to get a little more response out of her/him. This is the way one deals with him now, through his incorporations and introjections, which survive. You don't need any better proof than this of how inscription for Derrida is not merely something that happens with pencil and paper (writing in the narrow sense), but can happen precisely as oral transmission of someone's still open history, as memories that, almost completely without sadness or drama, in the routine act of conversing, write what can still be called an elegy, perform what can still be called a mourning. I said, speaking to her/him, "But that's preposterous! He must have read I.A. Richards or something!"
What I meant was that our training as literary critics can be picked up elsewhere than in our departments. This is so much the case that I was sure that he had actually already picked it up, some time still in the 50's, perhaps, over the course of a week or so while classes at the École Normale were not so demanding and other little interests could be pursued, helped by an upper or two. Or, more likely, prompted by this week or so which I imagine (and which probably happened even earlier, at Louis-le-Grand, as he has a couple papers on Shakespeare dating from this period which you can find at the Irvine archives), the interest consolidated itself and actually became training as he sat in a class or two at Harvard in '57. Regardless, I wanted to press her/him on what more "training" could possibly have meant so that he could consider himself not somehow already qualified to engage in criticism. Doubtless, it probably functioned (without being said in an ironic, sneering tone--it is of course a humble remark) as an ironic way of saying that he did not have the affiliations with an literature department that he would need so that he could be confined, as it were, to writing merely literary criticism. In other words, he always wanted to be a literary critic, but also, because of the necessities of his project, of his writing, didn't want to in a way. What he wrote necessitated that he couldn't work merely on that register--and this has its benefits as he gets to say, sometimes, more important things than we normally say.
Or maybe I cast this irony in the wrong way. It isn't a matter of him also not really wanting to do what he says he always wanted to do. It is that he perhaps indeed really wanted to do this, but that his project dictated that necessity, the necessity of being outside the discourse of literary criticism, be conceived in a different way--precisely as a necessity that one can be subject to while also wanting to do precisely the opposite of what it dictates. Derrida can want to be a literary critic, then, precisely because his writing must fall outside the register of literary criticism--and in such a way that this doesn't mean that he also thanks his stars on some level that he is not confined to our puny discourse, mere literary criticism. What he wants just cannot be in conflict with necessity, so when he says he always wanted to be a literary critic, this doesn't mean that because he wasn't one, he in truth wanted to be something different. We don't have to get him to lie to make it seem like this is why he didn't pursue this desire of his. As you can see, to do this is to begin to consider necessity as necessity, and wants as wants.
Regardless, she/he answered by saying that well, perhaps he got this training from his friend Paul de Man. And, because the tone in which she/he said this was not just matter of fact, I take this to mean something other than that he could have also had a sort of scene of initiation to the tricks of what we do, similar to the one I imagined in the '50's, in the '60's in cafes in Paris with de Man talking about Rousseau. I take it more to mean instead that his friendship with Paul de Man, as it developed more and more then and in the years to come at Yale, was perhaps the area in which this training did maybe occur. That is, if he was lying about his lack of training, it could only be here, in this friendship, that this training did indeed really happen. That means that where he was, indeed, a literary critic was not in his essays and books during the period he associated with de Man, but in the friendship with de Man itself. It is here that he did not follow the necessity that fell upon him and remained alongside his wants. Which means that it was, indeed, a real friendship, a friendship he wanted. But--and this is where I both want to leave off and must leave off--we begin to feel that what he wanted here was also, because it was really a want qua want, necessitated (which means also that the necessities too, as necessities, were wants)...

"Anticipated normal path of development"

So, in my Freud class we've been using the phrase "anticipated normal path of development," usually to describe some sort of normative aspect of what Freud is thinking: that is, he posits some normal developmental path of the psyche and reads the diseases or problems as deviations from that path. Or at least that's what I've been hearing in our usage of this phrase.
But I was rereading the Schreber case, and it looks as if this phrase can be read in a different way. I just thought I'd outline how this other reading may be possible, just in case anyone else was confused like I was.
The phrase comes up in the rather schematic (but actually very, very delicately handled--just note the work quotes are doing) summary of repression which occurs in the third part of the case ("The Mechanisms of Paranoia"). This is where Freud splits repression into three phases, which we went over in class. Our phrase, though, occurs in the first of these--the fixation of the instincts (or drives). Freud says the following:

The first phase consists in fixation, which is the precursor and necessary condition of every "repression." Fixation can be described in this way. One instinct or instinctual component fails to accompany the rest along the anticipated normal path of development, and, in consequence of this inhibition in its development, it is left behind at a more infantile stage. The libidinal current in question then behaves in regard to later psychological structures as though it belonged to the system of the unconscious, as though it were repressed.
-Three Case Histories, 170

The original translation here doesn't really help in all the ways it should. Here's the German, to which I'll return:

Die erste Phase besteht in der Fixierung, dem Vorläufer und der Bedingung einer jeden "Verdrängung." Die Tatsache der Fixierung kann dahin ausgesprochen werden, daß ein Treib oder Treibanteil die also normal vorhergesehene Entwicklung nicht mitmacht und infolge dieser Entwicklungshemmung in einem infantileren Stadium verbleibt. Die betreffende libidnöse Strömung verhält sich zu den späteren psychischen Bildungen wie eine dem System des Unbewußten angehörige, wie eine verdrängte.
-Studienausgabe, Werke aus den Jahren 1909-1913, 303-4.

So, here are the two ways to read the phrase. First, as we've summarized above, one could read it like this:

Fixation goes like this: One instinct fails to become more sophisticated along with the rest of the instincts as the psyche is becoming an adult. As a consequence, the instinct is left behind in its child-like state: it is inhibited, it can't mature like the others. So the fixation is a point in the psyche where the instincts haven't taken on more adult aims. They keep perpetuating, abnormally, what normally only occurs in the child.

Though it might have ways it is correct, this might be a case of misreading, in the end. Perhaps Freud is relying less on normativity as he does here. And perhaps--here is the other way to read it--he is talking not about the development of the instincts of the child into the instincts of an adult, but about the development of the instinct itself, that is, the process of its seeking out of an object and trying to satisfy itself that he describes, for example, in "Instincts and their Vicissitudes." One would then read the phrase in this other way:

Fixation goes like this: One instinct fails to undergo the same process that we can expect of most instincts--welling up in the psyche from some point of origin in the body, choosing an object, directing itself towards the object or taking up an aim, and satisfying itself in the object (see "Instincts"). Instead, along the way towards satisfying itself, along this process or development of itself, its movement gets regularly inhibited. This repeatedly leaves the instinct at the stage of unfulfillment, where it just keeps trying to prepare itself for fulfillment. This stage, then, behaves towards other psychological structures which appear as time passes (the formation of other instincts, perhaps), in the same way as it did at the time it formed--it just keeps trying to fulfill itself as it did. So the fixation is where the instinct doesn't get satisfied, and so stays at a stage that is more infantile than the rest of the psyche.

Now, reading it this way doesn't get rid of the normative: in saying that Freud perhaps relies less on normativity as he did in our first reading, what I meant was that Freud perhaps relies on normativity differently. And here, we see what this difference could be: Freud in this second reading sees abnormality as an effect of the instinct's repeated frustration. When he uses the word "normal," in other words, he is not talking about normativity. He is talking about what we reasonably expect about instincts: that they will progress in a certain way and cultivate the tendency to do so. Now, you can call this normative, but that's much more of a reach than it was before, because Freud is really saying that the normative comes in as a result of all this--in the way the frustrated or inhibited instinct ends up acting in the same way towards its object, while other instincts keep getting formed. It is left at an infantile stage because it still can't find the right way to repeatedly satisfy itself--not because it doesn't follow some preset schema that just constitutes the "normal." So what Freud is saying in the phrase "anticipated normal path of development" is really "the regular tendency towards fulfillment we can generally expect from instincts"--though again, the normative is still an effect of the frustration of this process, or its becoming fixated. To put it another way, one can read the passage in the first, normative way I outlined only if we read it, before this, in this second way.
Does this make the difference clear? While I could give support for the second reading in some other works, like the Three Essays, "Instincts," or "Repression," I'd rather stick with this passage, which makes this much clearer in the German. Before we turn to that, however, we can see two aspects already in the English that provide evidence. Both turn on the understanding of "development," which in the above I have been trying to call "process" or "tendency towards fulfillment" to bring it away from the notion of child development or maturation.
Now, I haven't been doing this because "development" is the wrong word but because considering it in the sense of "child development" makes it sound like it is not the development of the instinct that is at issue. The psyche in general comes into focus instead. And--this is the crucial part--this is what makes the "anticipated normal path" sound normative. For if what is normally anticipated is not the sort of cultivation of a way to go about repeatedly satisfying a sexual instinct, say, but the progression of instincts along the paths that are laid down in normal children as they become adults--well, what is presupposed is some general notion of what the normal mind's maturation should look like. And while Freud has this notion, it only forms itself as a result of seeing instincts repeatedly find certain ways of satisfying themselves.
So, here is evidence for regarding "development" as the development of the instinct and not of the mind in general.
1) "In consequence of this inhibition in its development..." Freud is clearly saying that the "development" here is not the development of the psyche but the development or unfolding of the instinct. That is, the inhibition here is not an inhibition of development in general, but is an inhibition of the instinct's development.
2) The reference to "later psychological structures." If one wants to talk about maturation in general, and thus of normativity, this is where it gets done. The later psychological structures are the mature ones towards which the fixated development of instinct behaves in an infantile manner.
But now I can turn to the German. There is, first and foremost, the minor problem of "Entwicklung" being translated as "path of development" rather than just as "development"--I think this was an effort to try and avoid the precise problem we're looking at. Modifying the phrase will produce, then, "anticipated normal development." This will help us in a minute. In the meantime, we encounter more significant problems with "anticipation." I think this might be better understood in the sense of "expected." This would make the phrase under consideration something like "expected normal development." Finally, of course, there is "normal." Now, in the English, the placing of it makes it crucially appear to modify "development" without being connected in any way with "anticipated" or "expected," so what we hear is not something like "development that normally occurs, the development that we can expect" almost as if the two were interchangable. Instead, we get something like "the development of the normal is what we are expecting." Obviously I'm stretching a bit here, but I just want to make the difference clear. So I'd suggest moving things around to be "the normal, expected development," letting the "expected" sort of qualify "normal." There's probably better, other ways to do this, but let's move on and finish this up.
The other really problematic word is "accompany," to which is added the really unnecessary "the rest." To say that what is at issue is the instincts "failing to accompany the rest" makes it sound as if all the instincts get together in a group and don't have different, individual paths of their own. That is, to put it this way makes it sound as if what is at issue is the instincts getting together with the rest of the normal instincts, rather than each instinct taking an individual course of one's own that, normally, in a regular way we can expect, other instincts undergo. So when Freud says "daß ein Treib ... die Entwicklung ... nicht mitmacht," he is saying that an instinct doesn't participate in its development, not that one instinct doesn't somehow group itself together with the development of others, which the English rendering admits.