Detestable Residue: From Psychoanalysis to Blanchot and Lyotard

This chapter traces Freud’s interest in yet apparent aversion to phobia, from his earliest writings on the topic in the 1890s through to his reinterpretation of the 1909 Little Hans case study in the 1920s. Here, it is possible to detect something like a phobic reaction to phobia itself: what might be called Freud’s phobophobia. It is also be possible to find, in the subsequent literature on the case of Little Hans, traces of this phobic reaction contaminating sometimes sharply critical readings: in Deleuze’s markedly hostile attitude to this Freudian text, we find an aversion to what is in fact most ‘phobic’ about it. Through exploring the Lacanian idea that phobia prevents the onset of psychosis in the event of a certain lapse of the paternal metaphor, phobia seems to operate precisely through a certain resistance to itself, a doubleness that renders Freud’s phobophobia not just a psychological curiosity but perhaps a feature of the very structure of phobia from the outset. Psychoanalytic approaches to phobia with are contrasted with other ways to think about its subject-matter, notably in the writings of Blanchot and Lyotard.