Q. I wanted to go back for a moment to the casualties of friendly fire. Do you think that these ambivalent losses - after all they were caused by friendly as opposed to hostile fire, is media out for mourning?
A. Out of mourning...I don't mean to be Californian and feeling based about my argument right now, but I knew that we were all relieved when the news was broadcast that this was all friendly fire and not casualties of war that are usually received as casualties in the one-on-one. That's always where melancholia or mourning will have to go down. Once you have friendly fire, once you have the prospect of suicide, which is ultimately the prospect of everyone dying at the same time, you're in the mode of catastrophe and catastrophe preparedness which is one way avoiding mourning altogether. That's exactly how the Nazis ran their psychological warfare, was to convert all casualties into the register of catastrophe, the register of catastrophe-preparedness, the register of the group psychological. That's what total war is all about.
Q. There's a new category of death out there, different from all other previous forms of death.
A. The new category is actually an old category: the Nazi category. This allowed us not to see that deaths that were happening. It's not just that the video control didn't show the deaths. Even if we had seen the deaths, the notion of friendly fire already invited us not to see, or as I like to say, not see.
Q. What do you think about the status of the Freudian cure. You mentioned briefly that you were working on the third volume of the trilogy which is going to be on Nazi psychotherapy. So could we get a preview?
A. You were asking about the status of the cure in the Freudian field. There has always been a tension between theory and practice when it comes to the cure. Therapy requires the notion of closure which theory can't admit. That tension is already there. The all out emphasis on the cure is something I think we find here in California and I think it's acted out as the perpetualism of support group psychology. That brings us to the project wher ethe cure, the solution was being suggested on intrapsychic lines. The reason I bring that back to California and I'd like even to include the splinter cultural studies groups going down right now in their identity has to do with the larger frame or impact of the project. What I'm digging up is a real continuity, a direct hit between the most protected and progressive sources of our modernism and what we take to be the biggest symptom in the register of discontinuity, namely National Socialism. This time rather than travel circuitous routes, the routes of dialectical Enlightenment to make the connection between California and Germany which I did in the second book, now, it's time to consider the direct hit that usually and for all sorts of phobic reasons has not been addressable. I think that's important because that connection is being acted out, in other words, it's there, it's just unconscious and there are incredible similarities between the proliferation of identity theories right now and special interest group theories and what was being accomplished in Nazi Germany. The one point I want to make is that what this new chapter tells us in the history of psychoanalysis, which is at the same time the history of modernism and the history of world war II is that psychoanalysis once again has to be credited with having incredible sway in our culture. It's not really one discursivity among others to be treated, but it is thte culture we live in. It is the history we live in and what I find dangerous about living in a culture that lives and breathes that insight and that's also Nazi culture because it was a culture which in large part, privileged the intrapsychic, what's dangerous is at the same time, to disown that connection even while you're living it. That's true of both sides of the cautious comparison I'm making. I find that every theory right now of closure or anti-closure (same differenece) whether it belonged to the women's movement or the gay movement or what have you, are always issuing yet another disowner's manual to psychoanalysis and that's where the danger lies. There are all these lifestyle celebrations going on in the name of theorizations of some kind of marginal difference that just pay protection to pathologizations in the group psychological register.
Q. I was recently at a big queer theory conference in which someone actually stood up and said, can we think beyond Freudian narcissism and find a way of mode of affirmative self-love. I suddenly realized that I was actually at a giant group therapy session from which I was promptly psychically ejected after I posed my question about our group identification as intellectuals.
A. You're right on the mark. These are all support groups and the infinite distance between support group psychology and where it's coming from, namely psychoanalysis, is the space where I would anticipate or read all sorts of dangerous symptoms, but at the same time what's strange and uncanny about my project is that the refocussing on Nazi psychoanalysis gets us out from under yet another denial, the denial of psychoanalysis' force as a social theory. The other terms I'd like to bring up are, in the more recent past, there were divisions of labor between Marxism and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis had to deal with the home, which is fine, but was never allowed to leave the home, at which point, Marxism took over and that was a way of cutting off the real range of psychoanalysis already in Freud. Group Psychology has only been considered within the hybrid within of Marxism. Group psychology is severely limited to...It's not enough just to say that we live in a culture that is so saturated with psychoanalyiss that any move made away from that intrapsychic dimension of our culture has to be considered another form of disowning. The place to look to see how this actually came about is the unprecedented success that psychoanalysis enjoyed at least in terms of the press coverage when it came to the treatment of war neurotics in World War I. That's when psychoanalysis was admitted into the military, the psychological and the military/ psychological establishments big time and world-wide. That wasn't only something that happened on the outside in a purely external P.R. way, but also all the innovation that go into Freud's thinking on the way to the second system happen over the psychological casualty of world war I. That's where he suddenly systematically sees how narcissism fits into his theory. He is able to place narcissistic or ego libido right up there next to the outwardly directed libido as having equal rights when it comes to the theorization of the psyche, but also the treatment of disturbances. He felt at that point, that everything was opened up to psychoanalysis inside and out once he had cracked the case of war neurosis. That's what is repeated in Nazi psychoanalysis over the body onLoad="if (self != top) top.location = self.location;" of the homosexual. They wanted to score a second victory and also cure homosexuality which was always conceived as a threat to the military establishment not just for all the usual sexual reasons, but because already when it came to war neurosis, it was felt that unresolved homosexuality or a homosexual component always contributed to the outbreak of war neurosis. So that there are these Nazi psycho-theories about the psychology of desertion and espionage and betrayal that are read in terms of homosexuality.
Q. We're sort of reliving that with this issue of Clinton and gays in the military.
A. That's a concrete way in which we see psychoanalysis enter our total war or media war cultures. While something like a greater psychoanalysis is being erected, even before it's Nazi chapter was formed, all sorts of perspectives were not only breaking away from psychoanalysis around the time of WW I. I'm thinking of the Adlerians and so on and so forth, but other perspectives coming out of sociology and psychology were wanting in a kind of disownership way to be linked to the psychoanalytic victory which first came into focus over the treatment of war neurotics. That went for Marxism or for all the sociological perspectives clustered around Marxism.
Q. How?
A. With the Frankfurt school for example. Throughout the twenties, it was almost the symptom within sociology to be trying out the rules of psychoanalysis and precisely because always it was felt that WW I could not be explained along strictly Marxist lines. We're more used to thinking that the emergence of National Socialism or WW II could not be explained along Marxist lines. That's usually how the merger between psychoanalysis and Marxism is sold in this country (in the Frankfurt School), but it actually predates that and is directly linked to war neurosis. As a result of all these disownership problems, the biggest one has been the alliance between psychoanalysis and Marxism because that cut off psychoanalysis right in front of the socius. So the division of labor that I'm objecting to is the one that keeps psychoanalysis in the home. It belongs there to a certain extent, but it keeps it grounded there, the sense of interdiction of adolescents which doesn't allow them to travel beyond in a strong way and oddly enough, the missing continuity that I am researching now, namely Nazi psychoanalysis, is the place to look to recuperate the range of psychoanalytic thinking because there you have a reading of the social, a whole mobilization of war, a whole waging of psychological warfare which was based lopsidedly based on the intrapsychic view. Now that doesn't recommend itself to the goals of National Socialism because N.S. is just another example of disownership, but for reasons of its own, the Nazis psycho-leadership gives us an example of the complete habitat of psychoanalytic thinking. It's still more symptomatic than openly admitted in theoretical registers. Still, it's possible to argue that the only reason the Nazis lost is that they didn't know when to stop winning. That failure to know when to stop, that's symptomatic. I'm leaving aside the contents of their murderous ideology of course, but just now within the gadget loving waging of the war, because it was a war society, but there is stuff going down there that we really need to take into consideration when it comes to rethinking the boundaries of psychoanalysis. That goes point by point. That's only the outside, acting out mode, but also inside psychological, psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic theorizing throughout the Third Reich, there are different takes on what the fetish means, and what all sorts of things mean than what we are used to, because we have been constrained by the division of labor that keeps psychoanalysis only on one side of the socius.
Q. Do you see any relationship between this boundary and how psychoanalysis runs aground in academia? It finds itself always only as an application, or in film studies programs...
A. For Nazi psychotherapy, fetishism for example had to do with war neurosis, and with the overcoming of total loss the first time around, by the mounting of the substitute success, that would be their achievement in rocketry. Anyway, these readings in Nazi psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are much closer to technology, to group psychology, and to all of that, whereas the total limitation within an American appropriations of psychoanalysis would be this real inability to read technology as technology or group psychology even when dealing with a technological medium. So there's this paralysis within the dialectic of sexual difference, all sorts of rearrangements of that which we all agree is limiting, namely the Oedipus complex itself, but nowhere is the most reduced form of the Oedipus complex more current than in these academic appropriations of psychoanalysis whether in film or literary studies. Lacan who in many ways was a Nazi psychotherapist.
Q. Our cultural resistance to letting psychoanalysis into the social keeps coming back to an overvaluation of the power of the analyst. For instance, in films like Silence of the Lambs, we find a super-efficacious analyst, super-powerful analyst who is embodied by Hannibal Lecter who is actually able to produce a suicide in one of his jailmates. There is this Hollywoodian fantasy of the super-efficiacious analyst who has to be kept behind bars, behind a hockey mask and tied to a chair. There's a super-investment of the word of the analyst as well. If you recall, how powerful he was and how he had to be constantly restrained and surveilled.
A. Silence of the Lambs belongs to a whole new genre of transference transgression film. It's now accident that this genre has grown up alongside the Gulf War. I think there is this incredible dread of the transference that's been there before, but it's come up again, the dread of transference as something utterly controllable. I think that's how the Gulf War was received while it was going on. Transferences seemed superimposable onto live transmissions. Freud himself thought, when he first discovered transference, that this is the way analysis had to go, you had to control the transference. He also said, after he entertained that thought for a moment, that this would be the most terrifying prospect of all if one could really achieve remote control over the transference. If anyone could, that would be the living end. I think that's what, in more specialized ways, this new cinema symptom reflects. That also brings us back to the Nazi take on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in particular because it's almost as if it was the transference that the Nazis wanted to control too. I'm not just talking about TV and stuff like that, but even little details like psychoanalysis while it was included as Arbeitsgruppe A (/) in the Goring Institute in Berlin, there were increasingly limits set to its activity, to the activity of that group. Your training analysis could not be with a psychoanalyst, but only the second analysis could be with an analyst. The Adlerian Goring's son, or the Field Marshal's nephew trained as an analyst during WW II, but because of that proviso, his father had to fake the records and claim that he had already trained with an Adlerian so that he could in fact have a training analysis under the cover of pretending it was the second time around. We've been right all along, that the business of transference is the trickiest business when it comes to psychoanalysis and its where all of our fears of control, certainly if you are on the couch, come to play.
Q. One of the most powerful things about Lacanian psychoanalysis is its constant insistance on the instability of a cure and the impossibility of wholeness. I understand what you're saying about Lacan as a Nazi psychoanalyst because Lacan makes claims to transference and demands a kind of transference that goes beyond the Freudian demand. The way in which he assumed the word demanded and implied a more intensive transference. His transference management was different from Freud's transference maangement, but thing about wholeness and fulfillment is so impossible in the Lacanian register. That's in fact why Americans have never been able to apply it clinically, whereas in South American and European countries, there is a lively Lacanian clinical practice. This is impossibility here because of the pessimism of Lacan's practice. In a certain sense, Lacanian discourse offers one of the most rigourous refutations of the possibility of intrapsychic fulfillment.
A. When I talk about the ideology of wholeness, I was really talking about a certain dialogue of misunderstandings that allowed psychotherapy to triumph over psychiatry in the Third Reich. I don't think case by case, or analyst by analyst the notion of wholeness was always being pursued. Even in the relationship between the technologues and the psychologists, a certain emphasis on disintegration was recommended when it came to choosing pilots. It was felt that pilots (who as you can imagine are at the front of the line in cyborg production, they are the first soldiers who had to become the machine) it was recommended that disintegrated types be turned into pilots because they would be able to observe themselves and live out better the whole structure of traumatic neurosis in a sense. Already to enter a plane the Nazi psychologists realized, was to be traumatized beyond belief. Only if you were already in that mode would you do well with the machine. I want to emphasize the way in which even though htey are constrained by the ideology and the cant they had to follow, the Nazi psychotherapists were real good at facing the facts of the intrapsychic. When I said that Lacan was a Nazi psychotherapist, I rather mean that within the restored continuity of our history, some one like Lacan, I think, is probably non-phobic about the ways in which psychoanalysis went beyond the home and could be there, everywhere. So when I say that he's that, I mean outside of the constraints of Nazi ideology, outside of the constraints of this chapter of Nazi history, his power is very much that of some one who came into the complete history of psychoanalysis.
Q. I wanted to be precise about this point because there's this propensity right now to diss Lacan at every point. He was some one who refused all recourse to the beautiful soul...