Dufresne ’06 (Todd, Professor of Philosophy @ Lakehead U., Killing Freud: Twentieth Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis, Bloomsbury Academic, September, 2006, pp. 151-152)
AG: But surely these problems are found elsewhere in the university.
TD: You’re right, of course. By definition, commentary in every field is parasitical and unavoidably requires a body of literature, a host, in which to set up shop. As such it’s easy to see how intellectuals discipline and order themselves. For without the host, the parasite dies; the insights of post-structuralism notwithstanding, ‘secondary’ activities exist because we are willing to accept, at least contingently, that some other activities are primary. For this reason parasitical intellectuals often establish cosy and conservative attitudes toward their host subject. In some cases, the intellectual even becomes an advocate on behalf of his or her field. And while this advocacy may or may not be justified given the social or political context, such advocacy has very little to do with scholarship.
But while this problem of corruption is present in all intellectual activity, it is rampant in Freud studies. To begin with, the central roles of fantasy and transference in psychoanalytic theory and practice seem to rationalize in advance the contamination of objectivity — and make it a routine cost of doing business. Thus do psychoanalysts laugh at the philosophers naive belief in reality, since for them reality is merely a stage upon which we enact our subjective desires and fantasies. What is ‘true’ for a Lacanian, for example, is quite simply this subjective appreciation of reality. So objectivity, including the problems of representation and correspondence, is left conveniently at the door of the analyst’s off-ice. Knowledge becomes a matter of conveying one’s desire to another.
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