All Freud’s Children with Hannah Zeavin
Enya Ettershank interviews scholar, editor and writer Hannah Zeavin whose work focuses on the history of psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology.
INTERVIEW BY ENYA ETTERSHANK
PHOTOS SUPPLIED BY HANNAH ZEAVIN
Hannah spoke with Enya about the book she is writing, All Freud’s Children, about being a child of analysts herself and how as inheritors of Freud we are all his children. She argues that we can look at the lost and liberating histories of psychoanalysis and to take these as our own, while critically looking at the legacy we have inherited.
Enya Ettershank: Hi Hannah, nice to chat! So, you’ve just finished writing your second book, and you also have another book in the works?
Hannah Zeavin: Lovely to speak to you, too. Yes, the third book is called All Freud's Children, and I was just working on it before you called, looking at the children of psychoanalysts.
So I already know Anna Freud and you are the children of psychoanalysts, but who else?
Sure, me and Anna Freud. [Laughter]
One thing I noticed as a child of psychoanalysts was that we, as a class, love to write memoirs. They're endless.
They're endless. There is some kind of compulsion to record something that had happened in childhood, often seated around the figure of the closed door. For Joan Wheelis, it's a blue door where her father would treat patients. For me it was an office door. I also began to notice that in every single theory of psychoanalysis, not just of children but of adults, the children of analysts play a role, and often one that has to be deleted.
To name names, in the book I have six sections: after the Freud children, there’s Melanie Klein and her daughter and two sons. Next is Wilhelm Reich, the great Marxist psychoanalyst and his three children , Eva, Laura and Peter. Then a set of francophone sections including Jacques Lacan, in Paris, with his ‘new Freud’ and his children. He had daughters born nearly at the same moment with two different women. Naturally, the daughters became embittered rivals for his legacy
That’s wild about Lacan! When I think about psychoanalysis and the idea of the door being shut, I think about how the therapist is meant to contain things. I suppose it's the same with adults and children. It's a debated thing, how much of the adult world do you hide from your child?
One thing that I noticed is that all of these children learned very early how to negotiate adult worlds and worlds of pain. There were people who needed care and children had to disappear from their very own home lives in order for this care to be provided- they had to hide away from the closed door. I think part of why children of analysts have the obsession with the closed door is that it rhymes with another closed door. As you said, what parents hold back from their children. I think that it rhymes with the primal scene, that there are zones of intimacy that children are highly aware of that they are not supposed to be granted access to all the time.
This is one of Freud's great observations and it's borne from all of his early patients. And this is again one of those things that the question is: was the primal scene a historical or universal formation? Do children still walk in on their parents having sex? Whether it's metaphorical, what does the parent hold back and the child want? That's where aggression comes from.
There's a drive to know. When you say you can't have this, this is taboo, this is forbidden, this is a secret and it's your family, then what are you supposed to do but go after it? I think that is quite honestly the impetus for my entire life's work to date.
What do you think drew you to being a historian as opposed to an analyst?
You can never say never. I've always liked stories. I wasn't initially going to be a historian. For many years, for 20 years, I was convinced I would be a poet and I was a poet. And then I was in class with a professor, Laura Wexler, and she had us look at a set of photographs and read Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud. I had gotten Freud in watered down dosages all the time as a child. But this wasn't about my parents. It was just an essay, and it's a gorgeous essay that's deceptively difficult. Like my friends who are Marx-ologists, I just felt like what I wanted to do with my life was understand this one essay. I started to learn German. I went to Berlin to learn German, I started reading all this analytic theory. I wanted to understand how the thing was written, as well as its actual meanings, and a sort of love of intellectual history was born and I left poetry behind.
Freud is rather poetic.
There's something poetic about reading Freud, how difficult it is and how he changes his mind all the time. Freud changes his mind about his fees endlessly. In his first elaboration he says he wants psychoanalysis to be as expensive as a medical doctor. Not, of course, so he can have a high fee! [Laughter] But because it will cost the patient something and it will be a reality principle. It’s important to remember analysis was much more condensed then, shorter term and periodic.
After World War I Freud completely changed his mind. He thought that we need to be really flexible about what psychoanalysis is and make a psychoanalysis for the people, all of them. What's unfortunate is that by and large people think of version one of Freud. That Freud only cared for the worried, and only the bourgeois were worried and were well-off enough to pay for securing their wellness. He thought that in 1909, but you know, the man lived 30 more years and gave birth to a second generation of psychoanalysts who were completely radical about the fee, about what psychoanalysis is. I highly recommend Elizabeth Ann Danto’s Freud’s Free Clinics.
Did they start free clinics?
Yes, for a brief period. Unfortunately, Nazification happened and psychoanalysis was put into a very difficult position on the grounds of being a ‘Jewish Science’. In that time, if you're charged with being the ‘Jewish Science’ by the Nazis, some were not also happy to be the ‘Communist Jewish Science'. And so those clinics did shatter, it really was lost, as a knock on effect of Nazification. Then those analysts scattered around the globe.
Do you think that psychoanalysis can be recontextualised in comparison to this mainstream conception of it as expensive, prejudiced and stiff?
There is a radical kernel in Freud. The question is, is Freud saying ameliorate your suffering under capital, or is he actually talking about liberation and that choice is held out for us? I believe Freud was offering us the liberatory version, but he had a limited horizon.
It actually doesn't much matter what Freud intended. Through his writings and those of many analysts who came after, we have a radical psychoanalysis if we want to inherit it.
That was the impetus behind Parapraxis (the magazine I run), which literally takes its name as ‘the error’ in Freud's own descriptor and is interested in investigating all of the ways that psychoanalysis has been used to incredibly ill ends, in service of bringing it into the 21st century and in service of continuing the tradition of inheriting its liberatory potential. We laid this out in our opening editorial note.
When we think about psychoanalysis it brings up quite individualistic associations: the associations of family as an individual, nuclear group that is contained. But you’re showing how this is really entangled. I've noticed in your writing there's a lot about groups and the public and doubles. Could you tell me a bit more about what you think of groups?
I'm fascinated by groups, of which the family form is just one. There's an anthropologist, Ernst Falzeder, who's very keen on showing how all psychoanalysts have multiple families. There's the private nuclear family and then there's the analyst who analyses them: their analytic siblings, the other patients known and unknown to us who figure in the mind, and there's who one was in supervision, with how one has treated their supervisees, and this kind of doubling of family. Often these two families are not interacting right, they're kept separate. Sometimes they interact without knowing it. Tracing these double networks as they pertain to the children of analysts consumed a lot of my early research time: who was treated by whom referred to whom and why. And then many of the children did indeed become analysts and the whole process starts again. , Of course the book is in part about this unspoken question: why don't these children get out? Why do so many of them become analysts?
Quite separately, I think that group theory is incredibly helpful for those of us who teach and those of us in movement spaces. I'm a teacher by trade. I'm interested in political groups and their function, as someone on the left I think it’s of high importance to think through. Really, if you made me say what is the best use of psychoanalysis for the left, it would be about group dynamics.
Could you tell me about your work with The Psychosocial Foundation. What would you say its aims are and what is it doing?
We offer free and sliding scale psychosocial education via Zoom and what happens there is rather profound. It's not a space of adoration or indoctrination. We typically get about 300 or so students enrolled in those seminars, two-thirds of whom pay nothing, as it should be. We've had full professors and we've had former presidents of the American Psychoanalytic Association, first year clinicians and artists and activists. It's a really dynamic group to be doing the work of reading together. And it's been a marvel, truly. We've done it four times and for now we'll keep doing it. You can join us whenever you like.
How do you feel about Freud and psychoanalysis being popular at the moment?
It's been delightful to have more company. I've had some healthy scepticism about a “return to Freud” because I think Freud has gone on and lived on in all of these different ways. He didn’t really return because he didn’t really leave us. The practice of analysis remains incredibly punishing to purchase. Capitalism doesn't make time and space for it. I couldn’t afford my own analysis and I recently had to stop. That was a concern in 1919 and we know things have gotten worse in many, many ways. But that people are interested in using and thinking with the theories on the grounds of the political and social aspects is also really exciting. But also Freud didn’t call his science Freudianism. It's called psychoanalysis– and we’re lucky not to be experiencing only a return to Freud, but to other analytic theorists, like Fanon and Tosquelles.
Hannah Zeavin is Assistant Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkely. She is the author of The Distance Cure (MIT Press) and Founding Editor of Parapraxis. In 2021, she cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation.
