Table Of ContentHauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions
StudiesinthePsychosocial
Edited by Peter Redman, The Open University, UK, Stephen Frosh, Birkbeck
College, University of London, UK, and Wendy Hollway, The Open
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StephenFrosh
HAUNTINGS:PSYCHOANALYSISANDGHOSTLYTRANSMISSIONS
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Hauntings: Psychoanalysis
and Ghostly Transmissions
Stephen Frosh
ProfessorofPsychologyandPro-Vice-Master,DepartmentofPsychosocialStudies,
BirkbeckCollege,UniversityofLondon,UK
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In memory of my father, Sidney Frosh, 1923–2012.
May his memory be for a blessing.
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 Introduction:PsychoanalysisasaGhostlySystem 1
2 FacingtheTruthaboutOurselves 15
3 GhostlyPsychoanalysis 38
4 TheEvilEye 66
5 Telepathy 92
6 Transmission 117
7 Forgiveness 141
Conclusion 166
References 171
Index 177
vii
Acknowledgements
The starting point for this book was an article called ‘Hauntings:
Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmission’, © 2012 The Johns Hopkins
University Press, that first appeared in American Imago, 69, 2 (2012):
241–64.
PartofthediscussionoftheAkedahinChapter6wasfirstpublishedas
‘PsychosocialTextuality:ReligiousIdentitiesandTextualConstructions’,
Subjectivity,3,4(2010):426–41.
Translations of the commentary on Genesis by Rashi are from
M.RosenbaumandA.Silbermann,PentateuchwithRashi’sCommentary:
Genesis (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, published during the
1930s).
I would like to thank Derek Hook for his very helpful review of the
first draft of this book. Thanks too to Angelina Baydala, Dov Lerner,
Kate Loewenthal, Roger Luckhurst, Belinda Mandelbaum, Enrique
Mandelbaum,AndrewMargolis,RabbiDavidMason,JeremySchonfield
andReinavanderWielforvarioustextualpointers.Iwouldalsoliketo
thankthestudentsoftheBirkbeckInstitutefortheHumanitiesCritical
TheorySummerSchoolfortheirenthusiasticresponsetomyideas.
IamgratefultoBirkbeckCollegeforthegiftofaperiodofstudyleave
in2011–12,duringwhichthisbookwaswritten.
viii
1
Introduction: Psychoanalysis
as a Ghostly System
Smokegetsinyoureyes
Perhapseverygenerationhassomethingthathauntsit.BorninEngland
within a decade of the end of the Second World War, my privileged
generation of Jews was infected by the fragility of the times, by what
had been lived through without enough opportunity for reflection, by
awarenessnotonlyofimmenseloss,butalsooftheinsecurityofbeing.
If that happened there, what was the guarantee that it could not hap-
penhere?Thepostwarconsensusontheunacceptabilityofantisemitism
was never solid and has not proven durable, which meant that the
optimistic view that the ‘oldest hatred’ had finally run its course was
adopted more as a defence against the alternative belief that nothing
everchangesthanasacompellingconsolation.Andthethingsthatpeo-
ple had gone through – what they had directly experienced, or heard
about, or imagined or feared – were not fully known. Either they were
hiddenortheywerespokenaboutinawaythatwasdifficulttohear;or
perhapstheywerebidingtheirtime,wonderingwhenalanguagewould
be invented in which they could be properly articulated. The ‘people’
thattheyaffectedwerenotabstractentities:theyweretheparentsand
auntsandunclesofthenextgeneration;theteachersandwriters.They
allcommunicatedthatsomethinghadhappened,butitwasdifficultever
togetagriponwhatthatsomethingwas.
Thiswholeexperiencewasnotnecessarilyadramaticone;itdidnot
evenhave togive risetotheanxiety-ladenexplorativeurgethatDavid
Grossman (1989) examines through his character Momik in See Under:
Love.Formanyofus,itjustmeantthattherewasalwayssomethingin
the background that haunted the present, something not quite name-
ableevenifwecouldgiveitanapproximatename(‘theWar’,‘theNazis’
or–later–‘theHolocaust’),somethinglikeamistthatslightlyobscured
1
2 Hauntings:PsychoanalysisandGhostlyTransmissions
the details of everyday life, fading the colours a little, infiltrating the
small nooks and crannies of our imagination. It keeps coming back,
too, and it is very difficult to deal with: after all, we did not experi-
encethetrauma,sohowcanwelayclaimtoit?Thosemanyofuswho
were not even ‘second generation victims’, the children of survivors,
how could we speak of the Holocaust without falsifying it, without
demandinganinheritancethatwasnotactuallyourown?Whatkindof
inauthenticity were we playing with there? Yet, something keeps crop-
ping up, something that hovers a little in the background and cannot
be put to rest, but that cannot be expressed without embarrassment,
self-dramatisation,insufficiencyandinaccuracy.
Theimageryofghostsandhauntingisinescapableincontextssuchas
this, and is writ large not only in Jewish experience, but also in much
of the cultural consciousness of the contemporary era. Indeed, it is
startingtobecomeacliché,whichpresentsdifficultiesforattemptslike
this one to mine it for new and productive insights. Its fullest explo-
ration in the recent academic social science literature is that by Avery
Gordon (1997), who has a clear idea that haunting is a social phe-
nomenon, an index of oppression. She writes (p. xvi), ‘I used the term
hauntingtodescribethosesingularyetrepetitiveinstanceswhenhome
becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction,
when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your
blind spot comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the
experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present,
andthefuture.’Thetemporaldisturbanceproducedbyhauntingispos-
sibly its key feature, and one of the claims it has to critical usefulness:
somethingthatissupposedtobe‘past’isexperiencedinthepresentas
ifitisbothfantasticandreal.Thisisespeciallythecasewithsuffering.
OneofthethingsthatHolocaustscholarshiphasdemonstratedishow
strongly a trauma lived through in one generation continues to have
effects in later ones. Indeed, the question of how suffering is transmit-
tedtothosewho‘come after’pervadesdiscussions ofmemorialisation.
In some respects it is no mystery: how surprising is it, after all, that
people who live through terrible times should communicate to their
children their own anxieties and grief? But like most apparently easily
explicablephenomena,somethingelseoperatesinthemixaswell,mak-
ingtheresponse‘excessive’inthesensethatitdoesnotreduceeasilyto
what might have been seen and heard. To be haunted is more than to
beaffectedbywhatotherstellusdirectlyordotousopenly;itistobe
influencedbyakindofinnervoicethatwillnotstopspeakingandcan-
not be excised, that keeps cropping up to trouble us and stop us going
