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...)