20th Century Mistranslation, the 'uncanny' event and history as the Freudian father-figure

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© Byron Taylor ‘Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society’ Conference, June 2015

20th Century mistranslation,

the 'uncanny' event, and History as

the Freudian father-figure by Byron Taylor

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Introduction

History is the study of change; at times, we are struck by its ideas, at others by its actions – and perhaps most deeply when we see a gulf emerge between the two. In his essay 'The Uncanny', Sigmund Freud elaborates the word 'unheimeliche' by listing its appearances and defining its definitions; compared with the rest of the essay it can seem a slightly laborious passage, but it demonstrates that he was aware of translation as a careful and serious task – he was less aware of how the century ahead would produce some of the most catastrophic misreading in history. In the following paper, we will see how Freud and Marx's key ideas were mistranslated, examine how the Oedipus complex can be applied in regards to mid-century Communist Russia and China, and how the 'uncanny' event became an institutionalized normality.

It makes life easier to view Freud as a dominant influence on the West in the 20th century, while Marx as integral to the East: the reality is far more complex. Many young Western-European intellectuals, collectivized and groups developed what could best be described as a fetishism for the Communist ideals, while the USSR established the first (and only) state-funded Freudian therapy unit. i

Freud famously portrayed his view of the Oedipus complex, from the Greek myth, as a universal condition. That sons would love their Mothers and want to destroy their Fathers to attain and satisfy that love – is a dynamic I would like to apply (even more) universally, as follows:

The Subject:

Humanity under Communism, exerted to seek the future through destroying the past.

Father-figure: Mother-figure:

History, both remembered Idealised futurity,

And repressed the object of desire.

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The Subject: Humanity under Communism

Is this triangle proposed (and visible in the handout) not a little simplistic? you may be wondering. Doesn’t fitting ‘humanity’ into a single component on a diagram overlook a thousand variables, a host of contexts, personalities and livelihoods, to the point where humanity is, more or less, dehumanized?

You would be correct – and it is exactly this ultra-materialist outlook that lay at the foundation of the movement discussed. ‘Darwin is at the heart of Chinese Socialism’ said Mao ii, and we should not underestimate his sincerity, or the misreading that propelled it. Darwinism, in the eyes of his Chinese translators, reduced the human to an animalised entity, a species that progressed and evolved through conflict. One can detect undertones of Hegel here, but in its crudest execution there is the little-known fact that Lenin visited and consulted Professor Pavlov in October 1919, asking him how best to psychologically condition the masses. "Do you mean that you would like to standardize the population of Russia? Make them all behave in the same way?" [Pavlov] asked. "Exactly," replied Lenin. "Man can be corrected. Man can be made what we want him to be." iii

Similarly, at the age of only 24, Mao wrote privately: ‘I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s actions has to be benefiting others…. Long-lasting peace is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace (TUS, 15-17). Pusey writes that he ‘saw reactionaries as evolutionary throwbacks, who deserved extinction. The people's enemies were non-people, and they did not deserve to be treated as people.’ ivKnowing these ideological (and arguably pathological) roots, we can justify this dehumanising and systematic agenda in the Oedipus formation, however little we may agree with it ourselves.

If we are to look at Mao and Stalin biographically, their upbringings bear unmistakable similarities. Both grew up with aggressive, bullying and violent Fathers, while their Mothers were religious women who spoiled them emotionally. With this as their primary dynamic then, it is little coincidence that the oedipal complex of Communism managed to extend, maintain and perpetuate this situation, with unfathomable impact on the lives of millions.

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The Father Figure of History

In the pragmatic pursuit of the power they established, both grew to distance themselves from the cultures each inherited, whose personification they perceived in the gaze of their Fathers. Mao rejected outright his expectation to follow in the family lineage of manual labour, and criticized the traditional arranged marriages in China as ‘not at all compatible with the will of the children. This is a kind of “indirect rape.” Chinese parents are all the time indirectly raping their children.’ Did a politician ever make such a Freudian statement?

Both went to excruciating lengths to produce a society of systematic inertia, extensive surveillance and censorious anti-traditionalism, whereby the proletariat was supposed to be the ‘mere foil for the onward march of History.’ v Like Hitler’s reading of Nietzche’s uber-mensch, the translation of theory to action was a hideous spectacle, and it is here where we see the leaders differ. Most historians argue that there is little, if any, evidence that Mao was actually committed to Marxist ideology. There is no mention of peasant conditions, or economic unfairness in his journals, articles or private writings. His biographers point out that, for the young Mao Tse-tung, phrases like ‘proletariat’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ were ‘part of an obligatory vocabulary,’ one that was commensurate with his environment – and this obligatory language is a topic we will come back to.

Meanwhile, Stalin’s state was adept at ‘cultivating the myth of a secret parallel power, invisible and for that reason all-powerful… that compensated for the blatant inefficiency of the public, legal power and thus assured the smooth operation of the social machine.’ vi Repression creates revolt, and in the absence of a knowable past, the Real becomes a presence of omnipotent and uncanny importance.

And so both rallied their regimes against history, against the Father-figure, Freud writes in ‘The Uncanny, at whose hands 'castration is expected' vii. Neither leader, by all first-hand accounts, batted an eyelid when their own Fathers died, or visited their deathbeds. Yet as their story goes on, the Real of the past and the deathbed of both nation’s traditions – despite the repressions enacted on them – proved more endurable than the systems they produced.

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The Mother-Figure: The Future, the Object of Desire

How, put simply, does totalitarianism happen? Is it an organic process, or achieved by design? How does Utopia operate, and how does the striving for perfection create such disaster instead? ‘Totalitarianism is not only hell,’ said Kundera, ‘but also the dream of paradise – the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony…. Here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side on Eden.’ Over time, the prisons grow, while the ‘paradise gets even smaller.’ viii

In this evocative image we see the divisions begin to form within the superstructure. It seems that the Real begins to threaten the regime’s Symbolic form of communication, until dissent and forms of the past becomes synonymous in the eyes of the State. History becomes the enemy. During a speech in 1966, Mao said that the rich were “still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do just the opposite: It must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas…” Notice how he uses the phrase ‘comeback,’ as if the forces of the past, and the historical attitudes of humanity are physically hiding in the shadows beyond the social environment, waiting to pounce.

But the past never made a ‘comeback,’ and the future ever arrived. It was a pathological mistake to assume that, after periods of misery and toil, society could be uplifted with the same ‘intensity’ and for a matching ‘duration.’ix Communism existed in a paradox that was archaic as it was utopian, finally weakening under Gorbachev as soon as he deemed it acceptable for its inner substance to be questioned. As Timofeeva notes, for all its grand statements, ‘Communism is humanity’s memory of what has not yet happened.’ x

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Mistranslation

The Soviet subject inhabited an environment in which words carried enough significance as to cause death or imprisonment – yet the language that was proscribed, had been designed to translate the world in such a simple way that it held a painfully narrow space for real human expression. Slogans carried a strange, ambivalent signifier above the lives of the subject, mockingly proclaiming a greatness that was always in store, in the idealised future, beyond the next agenda of industrial planning, after the next conflict. How can one psychoanalytically comprehend a situation when the subject can perfectly see the disjunction between the signifier and what it means to signify, but must refuse to express it?

Subject Ideology/Fear Signifier

The subject becomes dwarfed by language.

Or rather, situated in the space between the gaze and the signifier (be it a news report, a billboard, a political announcement) lies the ambivalence of the ideological apparatus, and the anxiety it entails if one is to register with any degree of cynicism what it has provided on display. As Lacan succinctly notes in ‘Ecrits,’ ‘It is the irony of revolutions that they engender a power all the more absolute in its exercise, not because it is more anonymous, as people say, but because it is more reduced to the words that signify it.’xi

The closest we can come to these events today, is by me asking you now to look to the person to the left of you. Imagine that person is possibly sitting there only to keep an eye on you, but you’re not yet sure. You wish to speak your mind today, but on this stage, as you walk up, you will feel their eyes on you, and may think better of it. You may listen to the words I produce, and those of your colleagues, without your inner-self being committed to the truth of any of them. The words on the screen may herald a fiction, but you will have no choice but to nod along. Language itself became an uncanny process of stabilising consistency amongst this moral chaos.

Voloshinov argued that we are mistaken to locate ideology in human consciousness. ‘Its real place in existence’ he said, ‘is in the special, social material of signs… Everything ideological possesses a semiotic value.’ xii He goes on to insist that ‘the study of ideologies does not depend on psychology,’ but rather ‘objective psychology must be grounded in the study of ideologies.’ (V, 149)

Let’s entertain this idea for a second. Let’s take Voloshinov’s advice and frame psychoanalysis as an ideological institution: because, to begin with, if the semiotic currency of psychoanalysis, the language it uses, is ideological, then was Freud, Adler, Lacan, Jung, Klein and all the rest just as guilty of having an ‘obligational vocabulary’ as Chairman Mao? For instance, Freud took Schopenhauer’s idea of ‘triebe’ – drive – as the engine of his patient’s actions. Likewise, Lacan re-inscribed simple words like Real, Symbolic, Need and Demand with new meanings that gave them wholly new roles on the stage of his context. We are still on this stage, many of

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us using them today. The justification Lacan draws, however, is that ‘analysis can have for its goal only the advent of true speech and the realization by the subject of his history in his relation to a future’ (L, 88). True Speech, past, and future: none of these were permitted, as the Oedipal dynamic has demonstrated. Where Voloshinov and Lacan meet, is in reflecting language’s power over man:

‘Symbols in fact envelop the life of a man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, so total that they bring… the shape of his destiny; so total that they give the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him… even beyond his death; and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgement, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it.’ (L, 68)

Condemnation was something familiar in the time of the show trials, which we will shortly move on to. All that was needed was language, the past ‘crimes’ were an imaginary history, one the subject had to rehearse to remember. But the language of this period, its ‘obligatory vocabulary’ tells us more through what it conceals. As Lacan says, the Word can ‘absolve his being or condemns it’ – and it was this implicit property that the signifier really possessed throughout Socialism. Saussure’s simple distinction became redundant, and dangerously so. The signifier - the slogan, the propaganda piece - did not really have something to signify: rather, the subject had the choice to be absolved, or be condemned, depending on their interpretation. To absolve oneself was merely to accept the signifier, however opposed it may be to one’s empirical reality.

If language has such strength over the ontological life of the subject, what happens when the power is wielded to mistranslate that language, and hence that reality? While for Heidegger language was the house of Being, if he had lived through Communism he may well have submitted to Voloshinov’s conclusion that our minds and our ‘Individual consciousness is not the architect of the ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs.’ (V, 149)

One tenant, living amongst many, learns to stay quiet.

How can history be constructed without the availability of an ungoverned language? Without a past, the Communist subject was lost in a network of unknown and uncanny apparitions, where truth, myth and falsity intermingled, where only the events of the revolution are plucked from the past and eternalized. All other histories became redundant if they did not fit its overarching narrative. The distinction between past and present was not the only binary to collapse, however. The collapse I have in mind is between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the ordinary and the strange, which brings us to:

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The Uncanny Event

Freud claims it is easier for the uncanny to occur in fiction than in fact, and here I disagree with him. Was there ever a stranger point in history? Can any source truly convey the experience historically or psychologically, or are we destined as time passes to rely on insufficient analytic models? Do we really have any answers to this period, even now?

Simply, to look for the uncanny event in this period, one does not have to look too far. There are the Stalinist show trials, a Kafkaesque nightmare in which one practices and rehearses one’s own destruction; there are the Chinese news reports of 1957, in which millionaires were made to leap and jump for joy in front of the cameras in mock-celebration for having all their money and property stolen from them. One can see in their eyes a chilling, scattershot desperation, a confusion between reality and fantasy, a nervousness of what is to come. xiii

Most bizarrely of all is an event that became commonplace: disappearance. Men and women, individuals, children, whole families, could disappear without any explanation in the middle of the night. In the morning, their neighbours were forced to act as if their absence was unnoticed, as if their very presence had been a dream, a product of their subconscious. Such an unimaginable circumstance became the norm, and it is here we see the tenuous line between reality and fantasy at its most unstable. The presence of the uncanny, thought Freud, ‘altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality.’ He insisted that literature was the site for the uncanny to triumph, and maybe I am being unfair to doubt his sincerity at the time of writing. Perhaps in 1909, he had no idea how deeply leaders could control their environment and be, as it were, the author of so many fates.

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In conclusion, then, we can see how pursuing this line of inquiry raises many questions: ethically, is it right to turn a point in history, the gestation of whatever movement, to whatever degree of suffering, into something we can analyse as we would a piece of art? Is it realistic, for an investigation into a subject as vast as the USSR and the Cultural Revolution, to cover all bases, to deliver a comprehensive conclusion? Most presciently, what right do we have to use criticism and theory to turn other's suffering into a subject of psychoanalytic aesthetics?

Such questions offer no easy answer - but if the process of following such inquiry can lead to a greater understanding of the truth of a situation, then it deserves a degree of validity. If we were to demarcate ourselves from such potentialities as this, would we not be, ourselves, committing the same act of repression on history that these movements inflicted? Finally, in his private writings, the young Mao wrote that in history, ‘we adore the times of war when dramas happen one after another… when we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored.’ (TUC 17). While he may have been wrong on many accounts, unfortunately, on this, he was correct.

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Bibliography

i Martin Allen Miller, “Psychoanalysis and Soviet History,” ‘Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union,’ (USA: Yale University Press, 1998), 165. ii Dr. Henry M. Morris & Dr. John D. Morris, ‘The Modern Creation Trilogy’, (USA: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 106. iii Orlando Figes, “Engineers of the Human Soul,” ‘A People's Tragedy, A History of the Russian Revolution’ (UK: Penguin Books, 1998), 734. iv James Reeve Pusey, “When All Was Said And Done,” ‘China and Charles Darwin,’ (USA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1983), 455. v Slavoj Zizek, ‘Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? Four Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion’ (UK: Verso Books, 2001), 48. vi Slavoj Zizek, “I Hear You with My Eyes,” ‘Voice and Gaze as Love Objects’, (USA: Duke University Press, 1996), 97. vii Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”, ‘The Uncanny and Other Essays’ trans: David McLintock & Hugh Haughton, (UK: Penguin Books, 2003), 62. viii Milan Kundera, “A Talk with the Author by Phillip Roth,” ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,’ trans. Michael Henry Heim, (London: Penguin Group, 1980), 233. ix Friedrich Nietzche, 222, ‘Human, All Too Human,’ trans: Marion Faber& Stephen Lehmann, (London: Penguin Group, 1984), 222. He goes on, similarly to Mao’s words at this paper’s conclusion: ‘the destiny of man is designed for happy moments (every life has those), but not for happy eras.’ x Oxana Timofeeva, ‘Unconscious Desire for Communism,’ (St. Petersburg: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 11: The Future of the Idea of the Left, 2015), 33.

xi Jacques Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis,” ‘Ecrits’, trans: Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), 72. Here forth: L. xii V. N. Voloshinov, “The study of ideologies and philosophy of language,” ‘Culture, Ideology and Social Practice: A Reader,’ ed. Tony Bennett, Graham Martin, Colin Mercer, Janet Woollacott, (UK: ‘The Open University,’ Billing & Sons Ltd., 1981), 68. Here forth: V. xiii https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY0pOB3Wcg0

https://www.google.co.uk/search?sa=X&biw=1366&bih=667&tbm=bks&tbm=bks&q=inauthor:%22Dr.+Henry+M.+Morris%22&ei=wLaGVaS4HYjfUfX7gugO&ved=0CCIQ9AgwAA

https://www.google.co.uk/search?sa=X&biw=1366&bih=667&tbm=bks&tbm=bks&q=inauthor:%22Dr.+John+D.+Morris%22&ei=wLaGVaS4HYjfUfX7gugO&ved=0CCMQ9AgwAA

20th Century Mistranslation, the 'uncanny' event and history as the Freudian father-figure

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