Freud and Theory

James Woods perceptively notes that the triumph of theory in literary studies is less the triumph of Marx than the triumph of Freud: “One of the decisive changes that theory effected was to introduce the idea that texts do not know themselves. It is the critic’s business to reveal their repressed anxieties and incoherences. There are no moments of pure innocence anymore. The deconstructionist will use these moments of undecidability, these ‘aporias,’ to demonstrate how the text unconsciously undermines itself. The feminist, the cultural materialist, and the New Historicist will see such fractures as the text’s unwilling revelation of political anxiety. Hiddenness is what has changed, after Freud: that which is hidden for Freud and Derrida is hidden only at the cost of that which does the hiding; its absence marks the concealment . . . . after Freud will will always itchingly suspect that omission is really repression.” To push the point: To the extent that theory is about the death of the author (Barthes and Foucault’s “death of the author”) or the detachment of the author from the text, theory is about the text’s Oedipal hostility to its “father.” It has been said that there are no more Marxists in economics or political science departments, much less parliaments and administrations; they’ve all found a home in literature departments. Likewise, while Freudian theory may be passe among psychiatrists, literature departments are brimming with them. This is hardly a surprise. I’ve long believed that Freud was always more the critic than the scientist, whatever his pretensions.