The immortal life of Ida Bauer
19 July 2024
[NOTE: This is the twelfth in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]
The previous article in this series discussed the apparent failure of Freud’s treatment of Ida Bauer, whom Freud calls Dora in his first case-study. I described this failure as merely apparent because beneath it there lies a deeper success. It may not be immediately obvious, but careful reflection reveals a heroic achievement on Ida’s part and — since this achievement was only possible thanks to the conditions established by Freud — a poetic achievement on the part of Freud himself.
Ida’s heroic achievement does not lie in standing up to Freud’s sexism — in giving him a metaphorical slap in the face that mirrors the real one she gave to Herr K. — but in something altogether greater and more fundamental. It lies in disclosing herself in speech, and thereby becoming the hero of her story — which Freud immortalised by writing it up for publication just as Homer immortalised the story of Achilles.
If the comparison with Homer seems overblown, consider what the Illiad made possible: the presentation of the words and deeds of those who fought at Troy to those who were not there to witness them directly. In presenting Ida’s story to generations of readers, Freud gave her passing existence and fleeting greatness the enduring reality that comes from being seen and heard — from appearing, that is, before an audience of fellow human beings.
As Arendt reminds us, “action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere” (The Human Conditon, p.198). This is the space of human freedom, of heroism, and of psychoanalysis:
It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly. This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them — like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the labourer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world — do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; “for what appears to all, this we call Being,” and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality. (The Human Conditon, pp.198–199; the quotation is from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 1172b36 ff.)
Seen from this point of view, the “premature” termination of Ida’s treatment is irrelevant. Sure, if she had continued the analysis, it might, as Lacan argues, “have led her to the object of her real interest” (Écrits, p.225) — that is to say, to her homosexual love for Frau K. But that would not necessarily constitute the right moment to stop the analysis either. Is there ever, in fact, such a thing as “the right moment to stop,” when it comes to telling one’s story in psychoanalysis?
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Freud addresses this question in a 1937 essay entitled “Analysis terminable and interminable” (Standard Ed., 23, 216–253), but his answers are unsatisfactory because they remain mired within the framework of means and ends. He still presents psychoanalytic treatment, in other words, as a means to an end, whether that end be thought of as a complete and permanent cure or — more ambitiously — as exhausting the possibilities of future illness and bringing about a deep-going alteration of the patient’s personality (op. cit., p.224). From such a perspective, it is indeed possible to speak, at least in principle, of “a natural end to an analysis” (op. cit., p.219) in the sense that “no further change could be expected to take place in [the patient] if his analysis were continued” (ibid).
But this is to situate psychoanalysis in completely the wrong domain for, as Arendt reminds us, free speech and genuine action are never merely a means to an end. Even when they are employed in the service of some practical objective, speech and action always transcend such practical purposes. It is for this very reason that the Ancient Greeks insisted on “the living deed and the spoken word as the greatest achievements of which human beings are capable.” Aristotle identifies the essence of these achievements in his notion of energeia (“actuality”), “with which he designated all activities that do not pursue an end (are ateleis) and leave no work behind (no par’ autas erga), but exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p.206, emphasis added).
It is from the experience of this full actuality that the paradoxical “end in itself” derives its original meaning; for in these instances of action and speech the end (telos) is not pursued but lies in the activity itself which therefore becomes an entelecheia, and the work is not what follows and extinguishes the process but is imbedded in it; the performance is the work, is energeia. Aristotle, in his political philosophy, is still well aware of what is at stake in politics, namely, no less than the ergon tou anthropou (the “work of man” qua man), and if he defined this “work” as “to live well” (eu zen), he clearly meant that “work” here is no work product but exists only in sheer actuality. This specifically human achievement lies altogether outside the category of means and ends; the “work of man” is no end because the means to achieve it — the virtues, or aretai — are not qualities which may or may not be actualised, but are themselves “actualities.” In other words, the means to achieve the end would already be the end; and this “end,” conversely, cannot be considered a means in some other respect, because there is nothing higher to attain than this actuality itself. (The Human Conditon, pp.206–7)
Even Lacan, with his more sophisticated understanding of the end of analysis, falls into the same error as Freud: that is, of conjuring up the illusion of some logical end-point to the interminable process of psychoanalysis. If psychoanalysis involves, not just the telling of one’s own story, but the unravelling of its meaning, it is clear that it must by its very nature be incomplete for as long as the analysand lives, and that only the analyst can complete it, and only then if she outlives the analysand. Even after many years of the most searching analysis, no analysand ever quite knows what she is doing or what she has done, for the train of events that each of her actions sets in motion “is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event,” and the meaning of her performance “never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who himself does not act” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p.233) — or, we might add, to the backward glance of the psychoanalyst when he writes up the analysand’s performance as a case-study.
The trouble is that whatever the character and content of the subsequent story may be, whether it is played in private or public life, whether it involves many or few actors, its full meaning can reveal itself only when it has ended. In contradistinction to fabrication, where the light by which to judge the finished product is provided by the image or model perceived beforehand by the craftsman’s eye, the light that illuminates processes of action, and therefore all historical processes, appears only at their end, frequently when all the participants are dead. Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants. All accounts told by the actors themselves, though they may in rare cases give an entirely trustworthy statement of intentions, aims, and motives, become mere useful source material in the historian’s hands and can never match his story in significance and truthfulness. What the storyteller narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself, at least as long as he is in the act or caught in its consequences, because to him the meaningfulness of his act is not in the story that follows. Even though stories are the inevitable results of action, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and “makes” the story. (The Human Conditon, p.192)
Even if Ida had continued her analysis to a point at which she came to see in her story the meaning that Freud was later to give it, this would not constitute a logical endpoint for her analysis, since in the meantime she would have continued to act, and to speak about her actions to Freud, thereby giving rise to other meanings that would always run ahead of her, so to speak. But that certainly does not render her analysis meaningless, since, to use Arendt’s expression, to the analysand, the meaningfulness of her act is not in the story that follows, but in the act of disclosure itself. By disclosing her story to Freud in the para-private space of his consulting room, Ida succeeds, for perhaps the first time in her life, in speaking freely. And this is what Freud, despite all his nineteenth century sexist prejudices, enables her to do, not by reason of any particular genius on his part, but primarily by the mere fact of creating a kind of pseudo-public space, which is not a perfect substitute for that properly public space provided by the Athenian agora, but is not a mere simulacrum either. It is a space where Ida can both speak freely and achieve a heroic distinction — which are “the greatest achievements of which human beings are capable” (The Human Condition, p.206).
It is for this reason that psychoanalysis, like politics in the original Greek sense of the term, can never be reduced to a technique, a technë, like medicine or navigation. Unlike these arts, in which the product (health, arriving safely at one’s destination) is distinct from the process, in psychoanalysis and politics, as in the performance of the dancer or play-actor, the “product” is identical with the performing act itself. And even though her analysis was very brief by most standards, it was long enough for Ida to give the performance of a lifetime — one which Freud rightly regarded as suitable material for his first “full-length” case study, a modern epic poem.
