Commentary on Solms’ “New Project”

Abstract

Professor Solms has kindly invited me to comment on his newest manuscript. More than this he has generously, perhaps over generously, credited me with playing some part in sparking his initial intention to take Freud’s Project seriously as a result of some of my observations long ago. Like the State, the University insists on asking who you are before you are permitted to speak. In that case who you read is who you are and, in keeping with this belief, I may be permitted a few comments about who I was reading and otherwise occupied with in 1984 when a reserved young neuropsychologist audited some of my seminars. I found myself then in a strange position of offering something of my own interests and concerns in a segregated university standing on the brink of either the last civil war of the Cold War era or at the dawn of the first Mitterrand-Blair style neoliberal utopia in Africa. Many of my listeners were preparing for immigration and took a lively interest in the style of thought and topics they felt were relevant elsewhere. There was an expectation on me to provide introductions to what was then called Continental thought. I was trying to avoid making a salad of thinkers who I knew were very different to one another. Since I was due to teach under the rubric of comparative literature I decided to use the then-underexposed comparative work of Michel Serres to underpin a curriculum. It is at this moment that Mark Solms found me. My interest then was not really in psychoanalysis, although like most of my peers I had read and profited from Freud: at first Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Interpretation of Dreams and Moses and Monotheism but beyond this assortment I had read Meltzer on transference, was intrigued by a Kleinian art writer Anton Ehrenzweig, and read whatever I could find in print by Adrian Stokes, but more for his vocabulary of the Renaissance than for his allusive treks through object relations. A chance discovery of Frank Sulloway’s large book opened a way to merge Freud with my abiding interest in scientific epistemology. Sulloway’s thesis that Freud was a crypto sociobiologist seemed a generous concession to Edward Wilson, but many great books had been written under the guidance of errors. I profited from Sulloway’s contention that two forms of explanation existed side-by-side in Freud, the distal and the proximal. This led to Sulloway’s emphasis on Freud’s unfinished “Project for a Scientific Psychology” as the outcome of his academic research career in neurology. In standard accounts, starting with Jones, this phase of Freud’s writing was retroactively packaged into a psychoanalytic sociology of ideas. In such accounts the Project came into existence but remained a torso as a consequence of its role in a relationship to a colleague and confidante Wilhelm Fliess. The potency of this view was maintained by the need to explain Freud’s self-analysis as a transferential construction, pursued in the guise of an unfinishable Helmholtzian mental automaton. Sulloway fortunately challenged this reception of Freud’s pre-psychoanalytic writing in a way that seemed to make them available to the kinds of analysis that Canguilhem had taught us applied to the life sciences and that Foucault had shown at work in the genesis of the human sciences, psychiatry and contemporary clinical pathology. Such were my actual interests but I had no wish to teach these things while I was working on them. I did have to teach an example of a genuinely comparativist and modern encyclopedist, however, and for a while I hovered between choosing Hegel or Serres as my baseline. Because I wanted an excuse to read Freud as an historical epistemologist, I chose Serres, who was the only figure in that tradition who seemed to be in a direct engagement with Freud. Foucault’s focus on sexuality seemed too broad and Lacan’s monumental reading relied little on Cavailles, Bachelard, or Canguilhem but instead on engagements with the giants; Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre and twentieth-century linguistic formalists.