The Salt-Box

This month’s PsychoSlut column is about Volume III of the Standard Edition: Early Psycho-Analytic Publications, which means it’s about the moment when Freud has, on the one hand, started to figure out repression, but, on the other hand, still subscribes to the “seduction theory” of hysteria.  Moving away from *real* childhood seduction to a focus on fantasy is the key to Freud’s theory:

What psychoanalysis can help with is the way we end up making meaning of our lives — the various reasons why sometimes we believe our own stories, even when they’re not true, and even when that belief seems to make us miserable. Why might we enjoy believing the worst about someone else, or even about ourselves? That the “worst” is occasionally, or even frequently, true doesn’t tell us anything about the role of that truth in our mental lives. In the second instance, psychoanalysis works backwards — it’s about the ways in which our minds work over memories, preserving and transforming them. It’s not good at solving problems in real time. (There’s a hilarious moment, discussed in Mark Edmundson’s The Death of Sigmund Freud, when someone asks Freud how being an analyst influenced his parenting. His answer, in effect, was that he parents as a parent, not as an analyst.) In an analysis, you’re never dealing with an actual event, but only the story that a person tells about it. That story has a meaning for the person — a meaning that’s related to, but not reducible to, whatever really happened.

The full column also has bonus material from the full interview with Christopher Lane.  Tomorrow . . . yet another Bookslut interview!

Last Thursday, “Lisa Douglas” published a Chronicle first-person narrative on “The Trailing Ex-Spouse”: The plight of the trailing spouse whose marriage subsequently dissolves and the former spouse (whom the dept. had hired first) moves on.  It’s usually difficult when a marriage ends; here, that difficulty is amplified by the fact that many colleagues assume that she’s privy to her ex-spouse’s new life.

A recurring theme in the essay is the problem of gossip: If you’re the trailing spouse, then it’s hard to get people to focus on you exclusively as a professional.  She reports that this can be claustrophobic, especially in times of marital discord.

I don’t have too much to add to that narrative.  Obviously, A & I are both in the same department, and so face some of the same challenges of individuation, of separating out family life from the college, &c.  (There’s a reason this blog is so . . . circumspect about some key issues.)  Equally obviously, I am sympathetic to “Lisa Douglas’s” plight.

But I did have 2 funny stories about gossip & the 2-body problem.  While universities can be little rumor mills, information always spreads imperfectly and somewhat inaccurately.  (Dean Dad writes about this a lot.)   Without further ado:

• The year that A was hired, after I’d been here 2 years, we both felt (naturally) a bit under the microscope.  Though people were pretty good about it, it was hard to avoid thinking that people were attending to our status, how we navigated the department, etc.  It was thus a welcome check to my ego when, less than a month after the key vote, two senior colleagues dropped by my office and asked, “Jason . . . what do you teach?”
• Another senior colleague knew that I’d moved to CT with a wife and an infant, and knew that my wife taught part-time in the department.  But he didn’t realize that A was in fact my wife.  So, when, the year after her hire, it became clear that we were a couple, he thought we were just being scandalous, considering that, from his point of view, my wife would surely find out.  Another colleague straightened it all out.

So, even when you think someone *must* know a key fact about your life . . . . frequently, they don’t.

At Bookslut this month, I have an interview with Christopher Lane about his new book, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale UP, 2007).  From the interview:

You have a great deal of fun with the psychiatrists for their penchant for wildly ahistorical diagnoses, such as Samson’s antisocial personality disorder. How does this differ from Freud’s use of figures such as Oedipus or Moses, or, on a less rarefied plane, Jones’s interpretation of Hamlet?

I’d say there are major differences and, alas, painful similarities here. First the differences: The literal-mindedness of many neuropsychiatrists today really doesn’t equate with the willingness of psychoanalysts and literary scholars to cite Oedipus, Moses, or Hamlet as analogies, to form metaphorical comparisons. When neuropsychiatrists try to diagnose a Biblical figure like Samson as suffering from ASPD, by contrast, they’re neither joking nor have much sense of irony about their assertions: they’re trying to shore up the prevalence of a disorder by saying it recedes far into antiquity, though people just didn’t have the tools to recognize it then.

But there’s definitely some similarity, too. There’s still a tendency among some psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic literary critics to treat fictional characters as if they were patients awaiting a diagnosis. I don’t personally find that approach persuasive or appealing, but I recognize it’s been a strong current of the complex, varied history of psychoanalysis, going back through Ernest Jones’s work to Freud’s own. After all, Freud’s own essays on literary criticism are very much about asserting the validity of his theories through fiction and myth. Nowadays, by contrast, psychoanalytic critics tend to be more interested in signaling how literature fails to sustain meaningful diagnoses of characters, not least because that approach is in the end far more psychoanalytic (it’s truer to a theory of the unconscious).

Read the whole thing!

Yesterday’s mail brought a welcome break from holiday catalogs: contributor’s copies of Mid-American Review.  I’ve got a review of Robert Lopez’s terrific short novel, Part of the World (Calamari Press).   Here’s the opening:

Part of the World is a gripping read, ominous, blackly hilarious, and psychologically acute.  Robert Lopez’s unnamed narrator suffers from what he charmingly calls “undo stress.”  This malapropism precisely describes the narrator’s rhetorical style: As his stories about everyday life–renting an apartment, buying a car–become more worrisome, he silently “undoes” them, beginning again with a similar, but crucially different set of facts.  Over the course of the novel, attributes–stories, identifying marks, racist epithets, housekeeping inabilities–move freely among various characters the narrator encounters or invents. At times, the narrator appears to confess murder, sexual assault, or even his own death.  Lopez has pulled off a neat trick: The narrator’s inability or unwillingness to make his narrative coherent implicates readers: whatever inference one makes about the narrator may well say more about the reader than it does about anyone in this novel.

I think this may have been my favorite contemporary novel that I read this year.

It turns out that it’s bad karma to talk smack to your mother.  In the morning, when we were all going out to “shovel” the quarter-inch of snow so we could play basketball, The Little Man was slightly irritated about something A was doing, and unleashed this (scornful verbal underlining included):

Will someone give this woman some reasons?

Poor kid doomed himself to an afternoon bout with the stomach flu, with regular vomiting.  (Spookily regular: on the 27 minute mark for several hours in a row.)  So, kids, don’t call your mom “this woman.”  It’s just not worth it.

Before all the sickness, he built an elaborate version of the Trojan War, focusing on the Horse.  Here is is under construction, and here it is in final form.

At PopMatters this morning, I have a (slightly tardy) review of Darren Wershler-Henry’s recent book, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting:

 The Iron Whim‘s thesis is that the iconography of typewriting is almost preternaturally self-deconstructing. Typewriting produces the truth, but is easily forged. Typewriting, Wershler-Henry suggests, makes visible, albeit sometimes only as a ghost, an Other voice in the scene of writing. Sometimes this Other is a speaker dictating with authority; other times it is the typist, revising that dictation on the fly. Still other times the typewriter itself is the Other, as it seems to transmogrify from instrument to muse to tyrannical master in the writerly imagination.

As a blog-historical footnote, I believe that this review is the first time I’ve used the phrase “booty call” in a published document (I almost said “in print”) to discuss The Waste Land.

Read the whole thing!   And, while you’re there, read my previous review of Wershler-Henry’s previous book, with Bill Kennedy, apostrophe.

Via Paraphernalian, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography advent calendar/contest.

Attention future students in my Brit Lit II (and perhaps The Victorian Age) courses:  When it’s time to sit the exam on the Victorian period, you can count on the following question appearing as extra credit:

 Why can’t Tennyson’s famous line about “nature red in tooth and claw” refer to Darwin’s theory of natural selection?

The answer has nothing to do with any alleged peacefulness or gradualness about Darwin’s theory.

In Memoriam was published in 1850; On the Origin of Species, 1859.  Darwin could (and did!) use the line to illustrate his theory–but, absent a time machine, Tennyson’s poem can’t refer to Darwin’s idea.

HTH.