ABSTRACT
This argument, and the set of assumptions it rests on concerning the ethics and ideological underpinnings of the psychoanalytic project are both familiar. Powered by the insights of feminist interpretations concerning the structure of women’s exploitation, Judith Herman, in her recent book Trauma and Recovery (Herman 1992) denounces the Freudian tradition of prioritizing the internal world of impulses, desires and fantasy, to turn her attention to the actual events and experiences that shape women’s lives. Herman’s stance emerges in the context of a broader critique of psychoanalysis on the grounds of its indifference to history in favour of an already given psychic structure, operating under the aegis of the Oedipus complex. In the terms of this critique, the usefulness of psychoanalysis for the study of sociocultural formations is easily cancelled the moment the negotiation between the psychic and the social is translated as an ethical choice between fantasy and experience. The further translation of experience as endurance of atrocity and systematic sexual abuse confirms the alleged indifference of psychoanalysis-as a set of knowledges about the selfto the role of history in the production of that self. Psychoanalysis neglects the unspeakable horror of specific experiences, not simply as a result of individual analysts’ bad faith, but rather as a structural occultation, necessary for the operation of its principles in the first place. Such neglect finds its (dis)reputable origin in Freud’s early dismissal of his theory on the traumatic aetiology of the neuroses, marked in the famous 1897 letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, in which he confesses that he no longer believes that hysteria can be traced back to an actual traumatic occurrence.
