The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [145]
In 1937, long after the publication of his landmark Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote an essay that speaks even more directly to the question of closure. The essay’s title, translated into English, was “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” and it is one of the few papers on technique that Freud published this late in his career (he died two years later, putting closure of a different kind on a remarkable lifetime of work). Freud was seeing few clinical patients then; almost all the analytic sessions he conducted were training analyses—that is, the analysis of other analysts.
What would be meant by the end of an analysis? Freud asked rhetorically, and he then proceeded to offer a range of possible answers. An analysis could be ended because the patient felt he was no longer experiencing symptoms, or because the analyst felt that “so much repressed material has been made conscious, so much that was unintelligible has been explained, that there is no need to fear a repetition of the pathological processes concerned.”20 But there was also what Freud called a more “ambitious” meaning to the end of the “end” of an analysis. “In this sense of it, what we are asking is whether the analyst has had such a far-reaching influence on the patient that no further change could be expected to take place in him if his analysis were continued. It is as though it were possible by means of analysis to attain to a level of absolute psychical normality—a level, moreover, which we could feel confident would be able to remain stable, as though, perhaps, we had succeeded in resolving every one of the patient’s repressions and in filling all the gaps in his memory.”21
There are so many differences between the psychoanalyst-patient relationship and the literary analyst–literary work relationship that it is easy to jettison the analogy completely. For one thing, why not imagine that the literary work is the analyst, rather than the patient? Surely it reads us as much as we read it. And even if we were to agree with the suggestion that there is something called “normality” attached to the psychic health of human beings, there seems no possible equivalent in the realm of literature, where works are, like Tolstoy’s famous families, each, happily, unhappy in its own way. But the idea of repressed material and things that seem unintelligible does seem related to the kind of questions we ask of literary works.
Freud may help us out a little by proceeding, in his argument, to draw a textual analogy of his own as a way of describing what he means by repression. The analogy he offers (“though I know that in these matters analogies never carry us very far”)22 is one that may strike a modern readership with an uncanny familiarity, since it is the image of a book, a historical record, that has been defaced and blotted out like a security file. I will quote his long passage, which reads rather like a dream narrative:
Let us imagine what might have happened to a book, at a time when books were not printed in editions but were written out individually. We will suppose that a book of this kind contained statements which in later times we regarded as undesirable—as, for instance, according to Robert Eisler (1929), the writings of Flavius Josephus must have contained passages about Jesus Christ which were offensive to later Christendom. At the present day, the only defensive mechanism to which the official censorship could resort would be to confiscate and destroy every copy of the whole edition. At that time, however,