Impossible Histories annotations on Freud

Footnotes from chapter 6

These are annotations for the sixth chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?

p. 90
•epigraph: The original epigraph was to be:

He looked on naked nature unashamed,
And saw the Sphinx, now bestial, now divine.
§James Russel Lowell, inscription for a memorial bust of Fielding.

•Martin Amis once remarked: This chapter originally had a long, discursive opening, which I was persuaded to cut. Perhaps that was the right decision, but I lament losing Lyotard. For posterity, here below is the original opener, but feel free to skip it if you just want to get more ridicule of early C20 psychoanalysts, which I assure you follows:

It’s generally a good idea to take startling, revisionist accounts of historical figures with a grain of salt. Every life is long, or long enough to include any number of contradictory facts. The novelist W. Somerset Maugham famously said, “There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror,” but this is true of anyone’s life, sexual or otherwise. Or as Robert Penn Warren wrote, “There is always something.”

In 1979 the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, as part of his summary of the “postmodern condition,” described a scenario in which one does not examine reality and then gather proof (that would be, like, the modern condition), but rather one assembles proofs in order to be permitted to view reality in a certain way. Lyotard would later dismiss this book (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) as “parody” and a bit of a fraud, which might have been true in 1979, but the text proved to be extremely prescient. As long as you can worm some proofs out of the historical record, you can be subversive. If you want to take Gandhi down a peg…well, it’s true that in 1947 Gandhi said, “If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it on the British.” He meant something like “thank goodness India was not tempted to violence by nuclear arms, but instead used peaceful methods,” but leave that context on the cutting room floor. You’re already rubbing your hands together in glee. You’ve got what you need.

Conspiracy mavens like to quote Senator Daniel Inouye, who, they say, admitted to the secret reign of sinister forces in America by speaking of “a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” True, Inouye did say that, but he didn’t mean that such a shadowy government exists: he meant that members of Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council wanted it to exist. But because a senator uttered the words, we are permitted to pretend it’s a confession. He said it, just like Gandhi! You’ll notice that most contemporary political discourse operates on the Lyotard principle.

There’s always something; just ask Somerset Maugham. You can topple any number of historical pedestals by digging up the mistresses of the great. Lord Palmerston sired a bastard at age 80; Benjamin Franklin was addicted to sex parties. But the Duke of Wellington gave the final answer to such charges: When Harriette Wilson threatened to publish details of their old affair, a blackmailed duke wrote back, “publish and be damned.” This was the great defense. Wilson or no Wilson, Wellington defeated Napoleon, won a dukedom, and became Prime Minister; he had never been in danger of going down in history for not sleeping with Harriette Wilson, and so there’s little cause for revision. (She did choose to publish, incidentally, and her claim that Wellington “looked very like a rat catcher” is nearly the most flattering thing she wrote about him.)

Wherever the historical record proves wanting of Maugham’s dictum, you can always bring in the lessons of Lyotard. Historian Robert A. Sullivan’s recent biography of Lord Macaulay takes the time to pore over Lord Macaulay’s letters to his sisters, full as they are of the affectionate language of the nineteenth-century and…it does not assert that the Macaulays were guilty of incest, but it strongly implies that the evidence being what it is we are permitted to imagine Macaulay indulging in incestuous passions. This is unpersuasive, but what can you do? It’s the postmodern condition.

But even if we roll our eyes at attempts to unseat the great, we do need to take notice of the outright frauds. If Harriette Wilson’s shocking revelation was that Wellington had been nowhere near Waterloo, this might, as they say, change things. Admiral “first to the North Pole” Byrd probably faked his flight—he may have gotten near the Pole, but in any event he fudged the records. The Brothers Grimm really did fake gathering oral traditions from the German “Volk”—actually, they collected their stories at dinner parties from middle-class Francophone friends. These are pretty serious charges against the historic record. You can’t be the first to the North Pole if you never even go there.

And then there’s Sigmund Freud.

[Here we pick up with Martin Amis.]

•Crews’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion: Looking back, I think I did myself a disservice by somehow implying I owe all my knowledge of Freud to one hatchet job of a book. (I don’t mean hatchet job pejoratively.) I’m hardly an expert, but I read eight books by Freud in preparation for this chapter—or, I mean, at some point in my life—as well as a handful about him. I guess I didn’t read any others specifically against him, though, and in any event Crews is irresistible to quote.

p. 91
•the great composer Gustav Mahler: I think I have overused the epithet great—I mean, is Krafft-Ebing really great? was I speaking ironically?—but Mahler is legit. I take nothing away from Mahler.

p. 92
•the Ptolemies notwithstanding: As mentioned on p. 54 of IH, after the Hellenistic Macedonians conquered Egypt, it took the rulers one generation to get over their squeamishness and start marrying their siblings (as was the ancient Egyptian custom). The second Hellenistic ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy II, is known as Ptolemy Philadelphos, or, roughly “the Ptolemy who loves his sister.” (Phildelphia is called “the city of brotherly love,” but the root -adelph- is gender neutral.)

So much for incest; how about parricide? Because murdering close relatives became if not common then distressingly not uncommon among the Hellenes during that same era; there’s a story about Alexander the Great’s old general Antigonus Monophthalmos (“One-Eye”), when he was in council with ambassadors from Cassander, master of Macedon: Antigonus’ son Demetrius returned from the hunt and entered his father’s tent still carrying his javelin; he sat at his father’s right side. The ambassadors were dumbfounded, for they had never seen a son who was permitted to carry weapons in the presence of his father before. This anecdote purports to highlight the filial loyalty of Antigonus’ family, but for most people trusting your children not to kill you is perhaps a virtue, but not a remarkable virtue.

But I’m not trying to cause trouble! Incest and parricide, standard taboos.

p. 96
•never successfully completed a patient’s treatment: The fraud, it just goes on like this. Freud repeatedly and falsely claimed to have invented local anesthesia. He fudged the timeline on one of his case histories, pretending he had analyzed the patient for four times as long as he really had (usually he destroyed his analysis notes when he published a case history, but this one time he forgot, and the notes betrayed him). It just goes on like this.

Even his followers tended to be fakers, charlatans, and, especially, lunatics. In the early twentieth century (1902–1938), the Viennese Psychoanalytic Association had a shocking 6% suicide rate; to write that statistic the way suicide rates are usually written, early psychologists had a suicide rate of 6000. For contrast, the suicide rate of Lithuania, the world’s highest, is 34.

Anna Freud (Freud’s daughter and intellectual heir) was admitted into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society based on a fraudulent paper: in the case study she described she was the patient, and not, as she pretended, the analyst. She had never actually analyzed anyone before, although once she got the blessing of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society she started. Her training was not in medicine, but rather to be a second grade teacher.

Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s inner circle (later purged and ostracized) wrote in 1938 that the kosher law forbidding a mixture of meat and milk was designed to prevent nursing babies, desperate to return to the womb, from gnawing their way wombward through their mother’s bosom. He probably meant this as some kind of metaphor, but it comes among so many nutty pronouncements that it’s hard to tell. The index of his book Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality includes entries for “Coitus, Freud’s conception of” and “Freud, Sigm., on coitus,” and these entries refer to completely different pages.

Freud’s most famous disciple, Carl Jung (later purged and ostracized), is also the twentieth century’s most noted occultist. It’s impossible to read Jung’s On Synchronicity without noting that the author’s problem, and perhaps the root of his occult beliefs, is that he’s just bad at math. (We probably shouldn’t have compared the small sample of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Association with the population of Lithuania, as we did above; it’s not really a valid way to present statistics; but we did it in Jung’s honor.)

Even Freud’s distinguished non-pupils couldn’t help engaging in fraud. The pioneering child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (you know him from his National Book Award-winning classic The Uses of Enchantment) simply faked his credentials, pretending he had received a doctorate in psychology in Vienna (he had actually studied art history) and that he had received Freud’s blessing there; actually they never met. He had no credentials or education in psychology. People let him treat their children.

[Anesthesia: Crews, op. cit. p. 101ff; fudged the timeline: ib. p. 639; suicide rate: ib. p. 655; kosher law : Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (Psychoanalytic Qtly., 1938) pp. 21–22; Bettelheim: This all comes from Kenneth B. Kidd’s Freud in Oz, but I don’t have the book in front of me to find a page reference.]

p.99
•pop culture:

[Jeff Keate (1963); William Von Riegen (1966); I just picked two favorites from 100k similar examples.]

p. 100
•a meeting to overthrow the government: Hippies are the easiest things in the world to parody, and it’s hard not to join in, no matter how far off-topic it may take us. Cartoonist Al Capp depicted hippies as belonging to the club Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything—or S.W.I.N.E., with the requisite filth and the flies. Dear Abby herself goes on: “‘Love!’ they cried as they pitched bricks through the dean’s window.”

Not all boomers were “wildly indignant” longhairs, of course. Some were clean cut and well dressed, such as Ted Bundy or Donald Trump.

Ha ha! I kid you, Boomers. I have to take my pot shots; I was raised by Boomers. It’s an Oedipal thing.

•Here’s a quick metric for how important music was to “youth” identity: Perhaps the following paragraph on Archie is off-topic, but it’s got the kind of cutting-edge research you can only find in IH. I’m here to drop knowledge bombs, people.

p. 101
•Music was a key part of youth culture: I know it looks like I’m just hacking on Boomers, here, and I don’t mean to, really. But let me take one more swipe. Because any hatchet piece about Boomers will, by law, always concede that whatever else people want to complain about, Boomers had the best music. And it’s true! Fifteen years to equal the amount of brilliance and innovation of 1955 to 1969 will probably never come again. Very little of this music, though, was made by Baby Boomers. Chuck Berry was of the Greatest Generation, so-called, and the rest belong to the ironically named Silent Generation (born 1928–45).

Bo Diddly 1928
Johnny Ace 1929
Lee Hazelwood 1929
Johnny Cash 1932
Petula Clark 1932
Little Richard 1932
Leonard Cohen 1934
Del Shannon 1934
Jerry Lee Lewis 1935
Elvis 1935
Buddy Holly 1936
Roy Orbison 1936
Dick Dale 1937
Sam the Sham 1937
Ben E. King 1938
Kenny Rogers 1938
Maurice Williams 1938
Gary U.S. Bonds 1939
Judy Collins 1939
Dion 1939
Marvin Gaye 1939
Phil Spector 1939
Tina Turner 1939
Manfred Mann 1940
Phil Ochs 1940
Smokey Robinson 1940
Nancy Sinatra 1940
Chip Taylor 1940
Dionne Warwick 1940
Frank Zappa 1940
Joan Baez 1941
Captain Beefheart 1941
Eric Burdon 1941
Bob Dylan 1941
Darlene Love 1941
Otis Redding 1941
David Ruffin 1941
Paul Simon 1941
Richie Valens 1941
Aretha Franklin 1942
Jerry Garcia 1942
Jimi Hendrix 1942
Janis Joplin 1943
Jim Morrison 1943
Ronnie Spector 1943
Ray Davies 1944
Gladys Knight 1944
Diana Ross 1944

Eric Clapton was bon in 1945, but it was in March, so the war was still raging.

Also from the Silent Generation: all four Beatles, all Four Tops, the Stones, the Mamas and the Papas, PP&M, and the Velvets (plus Nico), as well as 4/5 of the Beach Boys, 3/4 of the Who and 3/4 of Pink Floyd (the original Barrett lineup, or the “classic” Gilmour lineup; the ratio doesn’t change). You probably already knew that Roger Waters, at least wasn’t a Boomer, because how could he sing about his father dying in the war if he were born after it?

On the other hand, the Shaggs were all Boomers, so points for that.

•This is the music Oedipus would have played: I just picked up this 1967 curiosity about today’s teens

and one of the many teen informants quoted inside claims the function of rock and roll is to “express dissatisfaction with previous generations,” which is almost alarmingly on-point. [Savary, The Kingdom of Downtown (Paulist Press, 1967) p. 95.]

p. 102
•Tom Brokaw put out a bestselling book called The Greatest Generation: It’s probably important to note that Brokaw is neither a Greatest Gen guy not a Boomer; born 1940; another of the Silents.

•epigraph:

…old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted & and belch’d and cough'd.
§William Blake, “When Klopstock England Defied” (ca. 1799).

p. 103
“Standing water,” William Blake writes: Less famously, but just as appositely, Robert Graves wrote:
When water stinks I break the dam,
In love I break it.
[Graves, Seven Days in New Crete (Quartet, 1975) p. 117.]

p. 105
•the long, slow decay: Be sure to check out the related scientific study here.

•literal pornography: For a while, at least, Cosmo would run a contextless sex scene excerpted from a “legitimate” (i.e. non-pornographic) novel, followed by an editorial bumper that read something like: “Turned on? Get more steam in [name of novel].” In this manner, by stripping away all the surrounding narrative and revealing at the end that the whole thing had been an advertisement, Cosmo managed the astonishing feat of 1. turning texts into pornography and 2. indulging not only in a pornography of sex but also a pornography of capitalism. (Cf. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (Viking, 1973) p. 155.)

•Every generation looks like the end of the world: Somewhere around here was originally included an excursus on Charles Manson (not a Boomer). In a bootleg recording, released on the samizdat album LIE, you hear Manson singing about how it is was unnecessary for society to produce wealth or products because everything you could possibly need could be found by raiding a garbage dump (hear it here). The nonrenewable aspect of this resource did not occur to him. And this is when he was behaving well.