Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> In her Tribute to Freud the American woman poet H.D. writes of the one moment when Freud laid down the law during the brief analysis she conducted with him in 1933. This law (‘he does not lay down the law only this once only this one law”) coming from someone who still stands in the image of a patriarch with which feminism has not yet settled its accounts was in fact no law but a plea a plea that H.D. should never defend Freud and his work ‘at any time in any circumstance’. Freud goes on to explain this plea with the precision of a lesson in geometry or of a demonstration of the inevitable course of a disease once a virus has entered the system’. A law which takes the form of a plea that there should be no defence or which hovers between geometrical precision and the course of a disease these are contradictions which we might expect from any discussion which has psychoanalysis as its object or which tries to place itself within its terms. But there is something outrageous in Freud’s demand that psychoanalysis cannot be defended on the grounds that defence will ‘drive the hatred or the fear or the prejudice in deeper’ since it snatches from the opponent the very rationality by which a critique no less than a defence of psychoanalysis should take place. (LL)