Boris Walkiw

Boris Walkiw studied Literary Theory & Comparative Literature and Philosophy at LMU Munich.

Thesis topic:"Fixations to the ancient history of the family": Freud’s Constructions between Determinism, Hermeneutics, and Anti-Hermeneutics.

"Heads I win, tails you lose." If one follows the quip that Sigmund Freud took up for discussion in a late paper
published in 1937, psychoanalysis owes its success to a simple rule: the exclusion of failure. Insofar as its
explanatory models already mark out in advance what is to be heard in the analytic situation, nothing other than
the confirmation of the rule can be expected from its interpretations. Regardless of the patient's agreement or
disagreement, the narratives produced by the analyst are supposed to run schematically along the same plot
lines. Conceived as a narrative text genre, the 'constructions in analysis' in question here — in the case studies as
well as in cultural theory — form the object of my doctoral project.
Located in the border area between historiography and fiction, the concept of construction marks the place in
psychoanalytic theory and treatment where narration becomes method. With the aim to tell stories of repression
and thus to substitute coherence for experienced incoherence, Freud's constructions from the 1890s on were
initially intended to trace the biographical causation of his patients' neurotic symptoms. Particularly during the
course of the 1910s they increasingly turned towards that 'psychic reality' whose core complexes were gathered
around Freud's own myth — the ‚ancient history of the family' of patricide in the primordial horde, as first
elaborated in Totem and Taboo (1912-13).
As can be shown by examining the history of the constructions, the myth of the 'ancient history of the family' at
the same time staged a conflict within the theory itself: Freud's incessant vacillation as to which significance
(life-)historical events, general structures, and asymmetrical relationships between adults and children were to
be assigned in each case in the genesis of the infantile unconscious was reflected in a competition of
methodological approaches and thus also of different narrative strategies. The tendencies tentatively
distinguished on the basis of Jean Laplanche's work — determinism, hermeneutics, and anti-hermeneutics —
will therefore serve as the starting point for a narratological study that spots the problems of theory negotiated in
the form of narratives.
If the concepts of Freudian metapsychology are not simply (re-)presented in the constructions, but are
narratively designed, tested, and played off against each other, this raises the question of the specifically
narrative character of analytic understanding. Therefore, on the basis of the different strategies of interpretation
and narration, as well as their reception in the succession of Freud, not only the competing implications of the
'fixations to the ancient history of the family' will be contrasted in a comparative reading, but, proceeding from
the familial myths that form crucial nodes in both the theory and the object of the analyses, the modes of
appropriation of history and structure in their narratives will be examined.