Willner’s paper examines the biological speculation that Sigmund Freud and his Hungarian disciple Sándor Ferenczi jointly developed between 1913 and 1924 and referred to as “bioanalysis.” During the years surrounding the First World War, they inscribed trauma, regression, death, neurosis, hysteria, Nachträglichkeit, and repetition compulsion into a broad spectrum of biological concepts that had been shaped by the long nineteenth century and its faith in the paradigm of progress. This at once marginal and expansive project left traces in their correspondence, in writings published only posthumously, as well as in Ferenczi’s Thalassa (1915/1924) and Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
How does this unfinished undertaking intervene in biological discourse. When Freud and Ferenczi engage with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, they bracket his central assumption of a tendency toward perfection operating within the organic. When they read Ernst Haeckel, they appropriate his biological concepts against the grain of his confidence in both a visually graspable morphology and a general tendency toward progress in nature. They also read August Weismann—famous for refuting Lamarckism—but show little interest in the reproductive futurism of his claim about the immortality of the germ line. Instead, bioanalysis is concerned with the demise of parental cells at the moment of their fusion: this is what the life drives truly aim at. Fertilization would then be, at best, a contingent side effect, and at worst another catastrophe in the chain we are accustomed to calling “development.”
At the centre of bioanalysis lies a thought experiment, half in jest and half in earnest: perhaps evolution is structured like a neurosis; perhaps development fundamentally proceeds in the mode of a hysterical attack. While Freud and Ferenczi never commented on the political implications of these speculations, it is striking that their bioanalytic fragments run counter to both the politicized biology and the biologized politics of their time. Bioanalysis is consistently incompatible with degeneration theory and eugenic approaches to evolutionary biology. It brings to the centre of the life sciences precisely what degenerationist projection cast as a threat to natural development. For this reason, the unfinished project of bioanalysis provides an ideal starting point for examining the politics of psychoanalysis in the age of eugenics.
