Meisel the apostle

The "literary Freud" is many Freuds, says the new book that goes by that name. Here, even the notion of "many Freuds" is itself multifarious. And yet Perry Meisel wishes to defend Freud as a systematic thinker, and as a thinker of systems; and Meisel fulfills his wish quite compellingly.

The "literary Freud" is, first, the reception of Freud by literary figures (writers of literature as well as literary theorists). Meisel selects a series of these--D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom--and draws up, to borrow a phrase from the last of the men on that list, a map of misreadings of Freud. Derrida and Bloom allow Meisel to invoke the first of his major theoretical commitments: the dialectical notion that "deferred action," as chiasmus, oversees all psychical representation.



Deferred action is a term Freud employs in the Wolf Man case to explain the operation of the primal scene. Though the infant does not understand the meaning of what he is seeing as the parents copulate, the experience is repressed and retained. Then, at a later time when the child has acquired the physiological truth about sexual relations, that repressed memory is unconsciously interpreted in light of the new facts and now comes into play psychically more or less as though it had actually occurred not during infancy but during the moment of unconscious epiphany. Freud: "[The] activation of this scene (I purposely avoid the word 'recollection') had the same effect as though it were a recent experience. The effects of the scene were deferred, but meanwhile it had lost none of its freshness in the interval between the ages of one and a half and four years [. . .] At the age of one and a half the child receives an impression to which he is unable to react adequately; he is only able to understand it and be moved by it when the impression is revived in him at the age of four; and only twenty years later, during the analysis, is he able to grasp with his conscious mental process what was going on in him. The patient justifiably disregards the three periods of time, and puts his present ego into the situation which is so long past."

Even in Freud, this description applies to much more than merely the (usually fantasized rather than observed) primal scene. It applies to mental life in general; it is the chief mechanism by which any repressed returns.

Derrida takes this notion pretty far. In Meisel's paraphrase, "the past or, indeed, any object of memory or language [whether repressed or conscious], comes into being only after the fact, as a function of the place language or memory requires it to hold. And not only is the past or the linguistic object always reconstituted belatedly by the operations of memory and reading. The present, too, is always an effect of repetition, since the moment can be grasped, understood as such, only in realtion to something else as well [. . .] The early is put in place by the late." (28)

Passing through the influence of Bloom, Meisel takes the idea even further than (to my knowledge) Derrida did, by combining it with the trope of chiasmus. In a passage that adds at least two more understandings of the book's titular phrase, Meisel explains much of what he means by "chiasmus" so succinctly that there is no need for me to paraphrase: "Chiasmus is a loop or a crossing over--'the pleasure of art,' for example, and 'the art of pleasure.' We see it often in writing, as a way of noting interdepedence and, sometimes, paradox [. . .] Trilling [. . .] describes what he calls the 'reciprocal' relation between Freud and literature through the use of chiasmus: 'The effect of Freud upon literature,' he writes, 'has been no greater than the effect of literature upon Freud' [. . .] On a clinical plane, chiasmus is the structure of psychical defense. The privileged kid becomes a delinquent in order to maintain his or her sense of difference or distinction. Chiasmus is also the structure of the analytic situation. In order to proceed with life, the patient falls ill. In order to fall ill, the patient in the meantime identifies, however symptomatically, all that he or she wishes to repress by producing symptoms. Chiasmus is also key to the conversation with the reader that Freud's writing inspires. Reader and text cross over each other constantly, thereby bringing the play of psychoanalytic discourse into being. Between them, they also mimic or simulate the structure of the Freudian subject. If as a reader one is always at odds with Freud's texts [due to a variety of rhetorical strategies Meisel elsewhere demonstrates Freud to deploy], the Freudian subject is constitutively at odds with itself. According to Freud's revised, structural theory, one is also constitutively at odds with the world, as an organic precondition for hatching or nurturing the ability to be self-divided psychologically. The figure of chiasmus, in other words, structures both the phenomenology and the ontology of the Freudian subject. Chiasmus is the rhetorical structure of the principle of constancy."

This last, ingenious assertion is meant to provide a parallel to the traditional associations of Freudian condensation with metaphor; of displacement with metonymy; and of secondary revision with metalepsis. The last of these associations is complicated when Meisel writes that chiasmus too, in addition to metalepsis, drives secondary revision. Metaleptic secondary revision (the traditional interpretation of this element of the dream-work) is a psychic attempt to unite disparate elements of a dream's manifest content in a way that seems to make some sort of formal sense--any sort of sense, really, so long as it's not the sense of the logical relations among the latent dream-thoughts. It is the tenuousness of the sense of these revised connections that led to a tradition of thinking about secondary revision as metaleptic.

But Meisel asserts that secondary revision appears also as chiasmus. In this way, he claims, it is the "first condition of recall." Chiasmus is a fundamentally temporal dynamic--unlike metaphor, metonymy or metalepsis, which may be conceived (however misguidedly) as atemporal. The notion of chiasmatic secondary revision as the condition of recall means that, in order to recall a memory-thought, some tenuous formal connection must be made between that memory and other memories in such a way as to both minimally motivate that memory (i.e., concoct a minimally plausible justification for its existence) and disguise the logical relation between that memory and the others. But it also means (this is what makes the mechanism chiasmatic) that the already-secondarily-revised body of other already-conscious memories must undergo the same double process (of minimal motivation that serves to disguise logical relations) in relation to the new memory. That body of memories is no more or less than the subject, the self. The self is constantly being altered to fit newly recalled memories, just as newly recalled memories are constantly being altered to fit the self; and, having been revised into mere (and tenuous) personal identity, the logical relations between the subject of one moment and the subject of the next are inaccessible to consciousness.

Meisel has also linked chiasmus to deferred action; in this form, the trope provdes the "first consideration of representability." "Considerations of representability" is the other mechanism of the dream-work, along with condensation, displacement, and secondary revision. In the dream-work it simply means that even abstract dream-thoughts must "exclusively or predominately" [Interp. of Dreams p.545] be represented visually or acoustically. (Freud waffles between that "exclusively" and "predominately"; along with most commentators, I accept the latter.) By "representability" Meisel means much more than any mechanism so narrowly limited to the activity of dreaming. The problem of "representation" is, as Meisel directly admits, at the heart of his book. He believes Freud solved the problem by providing, for the first time, more or less the same account of psychic representation that cognitive neuroscience adheres to today.

I am not quite yet capable of evaluating that belief philosophically, and I'm nowhere near capable of evaluating it scientifically. But I can say that I think Meisel is spot-on when he writes that the dream-work "is no more and no less [. . .] than the conditions of its own representability. Its mechanisms are its readers' responses to it: condensation, displacement, secondary revision, all guided by the master trope of the 'considerations of representability,' which they both anatomize and subtend. This is not only how the dream-work acts but also what the dream-work is. There is no difference between them. Nor is there an identity. The relation between manifest and latent content is not one of difference or identity at all, but of a ratio that comes into being only after the dream's remembrance and interpretation. If the dream reflexively signifies the activity of the dream-work, it is the interpretation that retroactively signifies the activity of the dream [. . .] The dream is at once full enough to be interpreted, but lacking enough to require interpretation. The dream, in other words, is structured by--as--deferred action."

By now the reader's Hegel alarm should be blaring. Meisel readily proclaims the Hegelianism of his mode of thought. Indeed, he credits Freud with both synthesizing the Hegelian and empiricist strains of C19 thinking and with demonstrating how the two strains mutually produced one another. The notion of such a demonstration is itself profoundly Hegelian. Both the synthesis and the demonstration occured in Freud, if they occured in Freud, only implicitly. But if they did not occur in Freud, where did they occur?

For an answer, we should look at Meisel's own relation to Harold Bloom. I suspect (without being informed) that Meisel must have been Bloom's student. I hold this suspicion not due to any delusion that only a pupil of Bloom's could be influenced by him, but rather due to the peculiar ways in which Meisel's prose style seeks to emulate that critic's.

The two most revealing examples of this occur in two moments of parenthesis within a single paragraph near the end of The Literary Freud. Meisel here wants to address a hypothetical attack on Freud. This might seem to be the attack of surely no more than a straw-person, yet I can attest to such flesh-and-blood persons' contemporary existence, having sparred with a few of them: those who believe that Oedipus (as a psychical phenomenon, rather than as a psychological theory) not only cannot be universal but also cannot be anything more than an authoritarian means of installing an oppressive alienating mechanism within the very psyches of the oppressed. Here is Meisel, at length:

"From a Marxist point of view, the family romance has a familiar structure. The grant of authority to the father for the sake of protection tolls reminiscent bells. This is feudalism, although a feudalism that has, as it were, been internalized. It is a feudalism of the unconscious [. . .] For the modern subject--the subject as such--feudalism is the Imaginary mode of thought that misreads or represses the Symbolic order of capitalism. The family romance is its representative. It preserves feudalism in the bourgeois home by making every man a king. In point of fact, value or authority, in wealth or kinship, is in capitalism no more than a position in a system of exchange. The feudal unconscious masks the Symbolic in a more grounded mythology of rule. In doing so, it unmasks it. The sociality that narcissism has uncovered is radically historicizing. Most important, the family romance has a particular discursive form. Like feudalism, it is monological. It has only one tale to tell. Medieval carnivalesque is the foil of the family romance, not its repressed meaning. It augurs the world of capitalism, which is dialogical. Capitalism is a babble of tongues. Freud--modernity--structures the psyche by putting these two discursive modes at odds. Their strife provides us with a picture of the psyche's social history. The tension between them is [. . .] the tension between [. . .] epic and novel." (200-201)

There is much to discuss here, but I'll limit myself to the two parentheticals: "the modern subject--the subject as such" and "Freud--modernity." The former is, perhaps, a dodge. But if it is not, that can only be because it implicitly asserts (as, sometimes explicitly, do many of the so-called postmodern philosophers, e.g. Lyotard, Derrida) that whatever may be new about the moment of postmodernity is not so new as to alter the constitution of subjects. At this point Meisel might still be open to charges of Eurocentrism, until one reaches his second parenthesis, in which his "modernity" is named. To think of a cultural epoch as somehow identical to one of its constituents, and vice versa, would be Hegelian--both chiasmatic and metonymic. But to name that epoch for the constituent because of said constituent's intellectual potency: that is downright Bloomian. Whatever occurs in "The Literary Freud" occurs not in Freud but between Freud and Bloom. An interest in "the anxiety of influence" is crucial here, as is a focus on the dyadic structure of survival as overseeing the triadic structure of desire. If Lacan's project was to become more Freudian than Freud, Perry Meisel's admirable project, now complete, has been to become more Freud-Bloomian than Bloom-Freud. In Baby Perry's primal scene (to take a cue from Deleuze's idealized definition of his own philosophical project), Harold and Sigmund bareback to conception in such a way that both are both topping and bottoming. I mean it in the most complimentary way possible when I say that "The Literary Freud" is Meisel's steaming shit-gift to them both.