Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions PDF
Preview Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions
Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions StudiesinthePsychosocial Edited by Peter Redman, The Open University, UK, Stephen Frosh, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, and Wendy Hollway, The Open University,UK Titlesinclude: StephenFrosh HAUNTINGS:PSYCHOANALYSISANDGHOSTLYTRANSMISSIONS StudiesinthePsychosocialSeries SeriesStandingOrder978–0–230–30858–9(hardback) 978–0–230–30859–6(paperback) (outsideNorthAmericaonly) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to usattheaddressbelowwithyournameandaddress,thetitleoftheseriesand theISBNquotedabove. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,HampshireRG216XS,England Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions Stephen Frosh ProfessorofPsychologyandPro-Vice-Master,DepartmentofPsychosocialStudies, BirkbeckCollege,UniversityofLondon,UK StephenFrosh©2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-03124-2 Allrightsreserved.Noreproduction,copyortransmissionofthis publicationmaybemadewithoutwrittenpermission. Noportionofthispublicationmaybereproduced,copiedortransmitted savewithwrittenpermissionorinaccordancewiththeprovisionsofthe Copyright,DesignsandPatentsAct1988,orunderthetermsofanylicence permittinglimitedcopyingissuedbytheCopyrightLicensingAgency, SaffronHouse,6–10KirbyStreet,LondonEC1N8TS. Anypersonwhodoesanyunauthorizedactinrelationtothispublication maybeliabletocriminalprosecutionandcivilclaimsfordamages. Theauthorhasassertedhisrightstobeidentifiedastheauthorofthiswork inaccordancewiththeCopyright,DesignsandPatentsAct1988. Firstpublished2013by PALGRAVEMACMILLAN PalgraveMacmillanintheUKisanimprintofMacmillanPublishersLimited, registeredinEngland,companynumber785998,ofHoundmills,Basingstoke, HampshireRG216XS. PalgraveMacmillanintheUSisadivisionofStMartin’sPressLLC, 175FifthAvenue,NewYork,NY10010. PalgraveMacmillanistheglobalacademicimprintoftheabovecompanies andhascompaniesandrepresentativesthroughouttheworld. Palgrave®andMacmillan®areregisteredtrademarksintheUnitedStates, theUnitedKingdom,Europeandothercountries. ISBN 978-1-137-03127-3 ISBN 978-1-137-03125-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137031259 Thisbookisprintedonpapersuitableforrecyclingandmadefromfully managedandsustainedforestsources.Logging,pulpingandmanufacturing processesareexpectedtoconformtotheenvironmentalregulationsofthe countryoforigin. AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary. AcatalogrecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheLibraryofCongress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 In memory of my father, Sidney Frosh, 1923–2012. May his memory be for a blessing. Contents Acknowledgements viii 1 Introduction:PsychoanalysisasaGhostlySystem 1 2 FacingtheTruthaboutOurselves 15 3 GhostlyPsychoanalysis 38 4 TheEvilEye 66 5 Telepathy 92 6 Transmission 117 7 Forgiveness 141 Conclusion 166 References 171 Index 177 vii Acknowledgements The starting point for this book was an article called ‘Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmission’, © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press, that first appeared in American Imago, 69, 2 (2012): 241–64. PartofthediscussionoftheAkedahinChapter6wasfirstpublishedas ‘PsychosocialTextuality:ReligiousIdentitiesandTextualConstructions’, Subjectivity,3,4(2010):426–41. Translations of the commentary on Genesis by Rashi are from M.RosenbaumandA.Silbermann,PentateuchwithRashi’sCommentary: Genesis (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, published during the 1930s). I would like to thank Derek Hook for his very helpful review of the first draft of this book. Thanks too to Angelina Baydala, Dov Lerner, Kate Loewenthal, Roger Luckhurst, Belinda Mandelbaum, Enrique Mandelbaum,AndrewMargolis,RabbiDavidMason,JeremySchonfield andReinavanderWielforvarioustextualpointers.Iwouldalsoliketo thankthestudentsoftheBirkbeckInstitutefortheHumanitiesCritical TheorySummerSchoolfortheirenthusiasticresponsetomyideas. IamgratefultoBirkbeckCollegeforthegiftofaperiodofstudyleave in2011–12,duringwhichthisbookwaswritten. viii 1 Introduction: Psychoanalysis as a Ghostly System Smokegetsinyoureyes Perhapseverygenerationhassomethingthathauntsit.BorninEngland within a decade of the end of the Second World War, my privileged generation of Jews was infected by the fragility of the times, by what had been lived through without enough opportunity for reflection, by awarenessnotonlyofimmenseloss,butalsooftheinsecurityofbeing. If that happened there, what was the guarantee that it could not hap- penhere?Thepostwarconsensusontheunacceptabilityofantisemitism was never solid and has not proven durable, which meant that the optimistic view that the ‘oldest hatred’ had finally run its course was adopted more as a defence against the alternative belief that nothing everchangesthanasacompellingconsolation.Andthethingsthatpeo- ple had gone through – what they had directly experienced, or heard about, or imagined or feared – were not fully known. Either they were hiddenortheywerespokenaboutinawaythatwasdifficulttohear;or perhapstheywerebidingtheirtime,wonderingwhenalanguagewould be invented in which they could be properly articulated. The ‘people’ thattheyaffectedwerenotabstractentities:theyweretheparentsand auntsandunclesofthenextgeneration;theteachersandwriters.They allcommunicatedthatsomethinghadhappened,butitwasdifficultever togetagriponwhatthatsomethingwas. Thiswholeexperiencewasnotnecessarilyadramaticone;itdidnot evenhave togive risetotheanxiety-ladenexplorativeurgethatDavid Grossman (1989) examines through his character Momik in See Under: Love.Formanyofus,itjustmeantthattherewasalwayssomethingin the background that haunted the present, something not quite name- ableevenifwecouldgiveitanapproximatename(‘theWar’,‘theNazis’ or–later–‘theHolocaust’),somethinglikeamistthatslightlyobscured 1 2 Hauntings:PsychoanalysisandGhostlyTransmissions the details of everyday life, fading the colours a little, infiltrating the small nooks and crannies of our imagination. It keeps coming back, too, and it is very difficult to deal with: after all, we did not experi- encethetrauma,sohowcanwelayclaimtoit?Thosemanyofuswho were not even ‘second generation victims’, the children of survivors, how could we speak of the Holocaust without falsifying it, without demandinganinheritancethatwasnotactuallyourown?Whatkindof inauthenticity were we playing with there? Yet, something keeps crop- ping up, something that hovers a little in the background and cannot be put to rest, but that cannot be expressed without embarrassment, self-dramatisation,insufficiencyandinaccuracy. Theimageryofghostsandhauntingisinescapableincontextssuchas this, and is writ large not only in Jewish experience, but also in much of the cultural consciousness of the contemporary era. Indeed, it is startingtobecomeacliché,whichpresentsdifficultiesforattemptslike this one to mine it for new and productive insights. Its fullest explo- ration in the recent academic social science literature is that by Avery Gordon (1997), who has a clear idea that haunting is a social phe- nomenon, an index of oppression. She writes (p. xvi), ‘I used the term hauntingtodescribethosesingularyetrepetitiveinstanceswhenhome becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, andthefuture.’Thetemporaldisturbanceproducedbyhauntingispos- sibly its key feature, and one of the claims it has to critical usefulness: somethingthatissupposedtobe‘past’isexperiencedinthepresentas ifitisbothfantasticandreal.Thisisespeciallythecasewithsuffering. OneofthethingsthatHolocaustscholarshiphasdemonstratedishow strongly a trauma lived through in one generation continues to have effects in later ones. Indeed, the question of how suffering is transmit- tedtothosewho‘come after’pervadesdiscussions ofmemorialisation. In some respects it is no mystery: how surprising is it, after all, that people who live through terrible times should communicate to their children their own anxieties and grief? But like most apparently easily explicablephenomena,somethingelseoperatesinthemixaswell,mak- ingtheresponse‘excessive’inthesensethatitdoesnotreduceeasilyto what might have been seen and heard. To be haunted is more than to beaffectedbywhatotherstellusdirectlyordotousopenly;itistobe influencedbyakindofinnervoicethatwillnotstopspeakingandcan- not be excised, that keeps cropping up to trouble us and stop us going
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