Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan

Rating:
Summary: Freud: the long and looming shadow of the Founder
Review: Roustang writes a fascinating account of the birth of the Psychoanalytic Movement and Freud's attempts to both grow and control the movement he founded. Freud had created something new, something that had the potential to free people up. To spread his discovery, he felt he needed disciples - people who would take Psychoanalytic theory beyond where he could take it himself. The kind of people he needed for that - smart, creative, determined and powerful people - were also precisely the kind of people who would chafe at the control he insisted on imposing on them. Roustang describes vividly, at chapter length, the various flavors of relationships that existed between him and Jung, him and Tausk, him and Groddeck, and gives shorter accounts of Abraham, Rank, Ferenczi, Andreas-Salome, Deutsch, and Fliess. The wide variety of strategies these folks employed to protect themselves against Freud astounds. Jung had his distancing superiority, Tausk an obedient stance ending in his suicide, and Groddeck his resignation that his own highly original work could only be heard as derivative of Freud's work.

I like the book as a case study on launching a new kind of conversation into a world that's not exactly waiting with baited breath for this new conversation: the pitfalls and the traps to avoid. I don't claim that this is Roustang's entire purpose. He is interested in exposing what the book's cover calls "fundamental conflict among the basic tenets of Freudian theory", thus "psychoanalysis can never be effectively administered through the means of a psychoanalytic association or any sort of collective body". This is supposed to pave the way to his own new theory of psychosis.

The original (French) title of the book is "Un destin si funeste", which translates to something like "So disastrous a fate". From Roustang's account, I'm rather more struck by the sudden emergence of all these thinkers, all within a train ride of Vienna, all with similar new conceptions of Man, representing such a clear break with the past, as if they were listening to currents on the same wind.