My aim in this paper is to use historical analysis as a way of
reflecting on the deepest philosophical assumptions of psychoanalysis. In preparing it, I
have been very influenced by its venue, reflecting what I hope is an interest in the study
of life, human nature and society. I have a certain sense of occasion about the growth of
interest in the history of the human sciences. In fact it is a quarter of a century since
I embarked on a doctoral dissertation in this area. It was, I don't mind saying, lonely
work, and I cannot sufficiently convey my pleasure that there now appears to be a real
interest in this country in humanistic scholarship about the history of the disciplines
which seek to understand our humanity. I wish it well and I will do all I can to help it
on its way.
When I became a professional historian of psychology, it was considered
sufficiently noteworthy that the main entrepreneur in the field, Robert I. Watson, dubbed
me the 'first person ever to receive a doctorate in the history of psychology in the
Anglo-Saxon world'. (I have never known if that was true or not, but it felt nice at the
time.) I have moved on more than once, but I have remained preoccupied with human nature,
the constraints on it, what can be hoped for and perhaps achieved, in a variety of guises:
researching, teaching, supervising, editing, agitating a bit, making films about it,
writing and publishing.
I came to Britain to look into the issues lying conceptually beneath
and historically behind Freud's metapsychology, in particular his first book On Aphasia (1891), and the philosophical assumptions conceptual confusions underlying
psychoanalytic metapsychology. The doctoral dissertation I did was on the history of
cerebral localization from the first empirical work, that of Gall and phrenology, to the
first experimental work of Fritsch and Hitzig and of David Ferrier. Note that I make no
mention of Freud whatsoever. The reason is that I was strongly advised by my doctoral
supervisor not to go into psychoanalysis at all and by my department head not to mention
any interest in the history of medical or psychiatric topics. The first because
psychoanalysis wasn't psychology, and the second because medicine wasn't knowledge.
Psychoanalysts were charlatans and medics were plumbers, I was told.
Neither was respectable, nor was taking up an appointment in the
history and philosophy of science, said my psychology supervisor, Professor Oliver
Zangwill. Better to return to medicine he said. No, find something respectable in the
history of science, said Gerd Buchdahl, my department head in the history and philosophy
of science. So I was at an impasse. Then what about Darwin? This seemed eminently
respectable, especially in Cambridge. Hence a decade's research on nineteenth-century
debate on man's place in nature, the fruits of which have appeared as Darwin's
Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture.
I am sure all this sounds rather self-preoccupied and nostalgic, but
there is, if you will bear with me, a historiographic point creeping up on us. It is this:
I am by now an old pro in the field that these seminars are promoting, and what I have to
tell you is that objects of study are very elusive, overdetermined, subject to fashion,
and above all scary, if you are at all serious about historical scholarship and not merely
an antiquarian or looking for cultural ornaments or whether or not A is buried in B's
grave. I have never stopped being concerned with psychoanalysis, and I have returned to
Freud and psychoanalysis as my main preoccupation because I have run out of alternative
bases for human hope. I will not bore you with more odyssey, though various disciplines
and forms of intellectual and political practice intervened in the years I am not spelling
out.
Suffice it to say that I am now editing a journal on these matters,
with the subtitle Psychoanalysis, Groups, Politics, Culture, working in the
Psychotherapy Unit of Britain's oldest snake pit, St Bernard's in London, training as a
psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and have for some years been an analytic patient. I say
this because, as will become clear, the relations between abstract theory on the one hand
and personal experience and clinical practice on the other are at the heart of what I want
to convey. Put in another way, I want to juxtapose scholarship with that which it is
putatively in aid of.
Now, for all of you who may have felt impatient with the foregoing,
comes the academic part. I want to assess certain historical, historiographic and
philosophical issues concerning Freud and psychoanalysis by means of reflections on two
books: Frank J. Sulloway's Freud, Biologist of the Mind:.. Beyond the
Psychoanalytic Legend and Bruno Bettelheim's Freud and Man's Soul. Each in its
way makes an epoch. The contexts which evoked them and into which they are inserted are
very different indeed from the ones I described in Cambridge in the mid 1960s.
In the United States psychoanalysis is in rapid decline within a
medical framework, while psychotherapists of various other - including instant - kinds are
waxing and prospering. There were no, repeat no, candidates at the Los Angeles
Psychoanalytical Institute in some recent years, or so I am told. Meanwhile, gossip about
psychoanalysis fills the pages of The New Yorker, and the work of Jeffrey
Masson, claiming that Freud lied throughout his mature years about what he really
believed, has become a bestseller. Masson has cried foul and found a forum in the pages of Mother Jones, the main surviving radical magazine on the West Coast, and a
controversy raged about these matters in the New York Review of Books. That
is, the higher gossip has taken over. I happen to think gossip is the highest form of
truth, but it should not stand alone. It has, however, taken over the way psychoanalysis
is perceived in the United States. There is also a whole tradition of psychoanalytic
hagiography and an attempt is being made by American psychoanalytic theoreticians to
appropriate some British theories I shall speak about, as a way of propping up the dotage
of ego psychology, which is the main American appropriation of psychoanalysis.
In Britain, by contrast, there is a real renaissance of interest in
psychoanalysis and related, relatively orthodox, therapies. There are new constituencies,
new practitioners and a growing number of scholars who write about it. I am thinking, in
particular, of the work of David Ingleby, Nick Isbister, John Forrester, Janet Sayers,
Barry Richards, Karl Figlio.
Many, if not most, members of the 'class of '68' are in therapy or
analysis, including many of the ex-members of the editorial board of Spare Rib and
other radical and feminist periodicals. The History Workshop has mounted a series of
workshops on psychoanalysis. There are also many repentant Lacanians now in orthodox
analysis. Juliet Mitchell is a psychoanalyst, and a number of feminists are
psychotherapists. There are also several reputable trainings: British Association of
Psychotherapists, London Centre for Psychotherapy, Guild of Psychotherapists, Lincoln
Centre, Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy, Philadelphia Association,
Arbours Association and other, in addition to the more orthodox centres - Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, Tavistock Clinic, Hampstead Clinic.
In the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, there is a thriving tripartite
sectarianism:the Freudians, the Kleinians and the Independent or Middle Group. The
Freudians are followers of Anna Freud, tend toward scientism and are closer to American
ego psychology. The followers of Melanie Klein, the Kleinians, are concerned with very
primitive intrapsychic mechanisms and a novel theory of thinking. The Middle Group define
themselves by not having an eponymous hero or heroine to worship. They are much more
humanistic but are still stuck in a language, which I shall speak about, of so-called
'object relations'. Sulloway and Bettelheim, I suggest, define the limits or the
boundaries of this renaissance, and I should like to try and show how.
Put simply - too simply, but I shall complicate the model below -
Bettelheim wishes to free Freud from a desiccated scientism which he attributes to the
influence of medicalization, primarily in America, and to Anna Freud and (although he is
not explicit about this) the orthodox Freudians, as opposed to Kleinians and Middle or
Independent Groups and the perspectives of lay analysts. That is, he is opposing the
orthodox Freudian tendency in the US, UK and elsewhere. The frame of reference which he is
opposing is the one which set the terms of reference, the mental set, for the translation
of the Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud edited
by James Strachey, Alan Tyson, supervised by Anna Freud, etc. Bettelheim's is a book about
the terms and tenor of the twenty-four volumes of the Standard Edition, and a very good
book it is. It is worth adding that a complete new translation of Freud is under active
discussion.
In addition to the influence of Anna Freud, who moved to London in
1938, the leading lights of ego psychology in America were all German émigrés: a trio
called Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein (which seemed to me to run together as a hyphenated
single name over the years). Their main systematist was David Rapaport, a Hungarian
émigré who worked collaboratively with Merton Gill. What Bettelheim wants to do is to
reclaim Freud from the adjustive, scientistic model of human nature which characterized
the work of the émigrés in America as they tried to integrate psychoanalysis with
biology, medicine and sociology. What he wants to reclaim Freud for is culture,
humanism, knowledge in the broader German sense as opposed to natural scientific knowledge
and (please don't misread this word) the human soul, by which he means nothing
transcendent or religious, but he also does not mean 'the mental apparatus'. He wants to
reinstate 'the self, we would say in English. He is attempting this in the face of a
psychoanalytic orthodoxy which has for decades been trying to gain legitimacy by tracing
roots to biology especially physiological analogies - and medicine.
I shall return to Bettelheim's case below, but I want you to note very
carefully that the historical object he is fighting over is the main corpus of public work
which, for by far the largest fraction of people interested in these matters, constitutes what Freud said. The Standard Edition is the empirical domain of studies in
these matters. So, for anyone (practitioner, teacher, scholar) who is not utterly at
home in German (and many people who work on German matters are certainly not utterly at
home in the language), the empirical domain of Freudianism is at issue - what might be
called by a philosopher of science the 'neutral observation language'. At the other pole,
Sulloway is claiming Freud for the history of science, and in particular for the history
of biology. Here are quotations from the book jacket:
This is, quite simply, a stunning book that completely revolutionizes
one's understanding of the subject ... I conclude that virtually the whole of the existing
literature on Freud has been rendered obsolete.
Really outstanding ... in the plethora of materials on Freud, Sulloway
really has something new to say. He blends the history of science with real scientific
insight.
Edward O. Wilson
Frank B. Baird Professor of Science, Harvard University, author of Sociobiology: The
New Synthesis
Sulloway's aim is to bring Freud into the domain and field of the
history of science. Freud is not, as it happens, currently on the agenda of historians of
science in the way that Darwin, Newton, Copernicus and Galileo are, yet these are people
who could lay claim to bringing about the sort of change in humanity's view of itself that
people attribute to Freud. I find Sulloway's strategy for achieving his aim crass and
transparent, but after 503 pages of text and another 100 of bibliography and appendices I
admit to feeling a bit worn down. Add to this the effect of the accolades quoted above.
Sulloway has also had a distinguished series of appointments. He went from being a member
of the Harvard Society of Fellows to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, to a
comparable institute at Berkeley to a post at University College London, where he held the
most prestigious personal award there is - a McArthur Fellowship. Impressive credentials.
I found Bettelheim's slim, elegant, eminently civilized essay a welcome
respite after Sulloway's tome. I also confess to finding Sulloway a zealot bordering on
paranoia and Bettelheim a gent, though a romantic one. So, we have Freud the humanist
versus Freud the biologist - actually 'cryptobiologist', it turns out, since Sulloway does
admit that Freud repeatedly expresses relief at ceasing to write in narrow physiological
and biological terms and repeatedly explained his breaks with his own colleagues and
apostates or previous followers in terms of their having been seduced by biology.
If one thinks of Stekel, Adler, Reich, etc., all of whom in one way or another lay claims
to something innate, Freud said he had to break with them because they had oversimplified
the problem, i.e. they were indulging in some form of biological reductionism. Sulloway,
of course, has to explain this away, just as Jeffrey Masson has to explain why Freud,
having supposedly suppressed the seduction theory for prudential reasons, then said
something equally outrageous about infantile sexuality. Odd, if Freud was trying to be a
conformist and avoid opprobrium.
In my view Sulloway does not succeed. At the end of his book there is a
section called 'Catalogue of Major Freud Myths'. That is probably where the term paranoia
crept into my sense of his approach, since about twenty-three of the myths are said to
have the function of 'nihilating' the role of biological assumptions in psychoanalysis. If
I had written a book that destroyed twenty-six myths, twenty-three of which had the
function of denying something, I would begin to wonder about my thesis. Again and again
there is 'nihilation of the biological processes , a way of avoiding facing the
evolutionary basis as a way of. . .' The myth says that psychoanalysis is X, and the
function of the myth almost always turns out to be denying what Sulloway is asserting. His
thesis is therefore, to put it mildly, counter-inductive. His list of myths becomes very
shrill. Most seem designed to avoid acknowledging the role of biology, without giving us
any ideas why it should occur to anybody to have avoided biology and to have kept silent
about this matter. It begins to feel a little bit like a conspiracy to hide things for
Sulloway.
Having said that, I now want to revert to my main argument. What is
going on? How can we move to a less simplistic picture? Having mentioned the barest
co-ordinates, I should like to put some terms of reference on this map of the sociology of
psychoanalytic knowledge - some other cities, as it were. I shall quote the conclusion to
a paper on 'The points of view and assumptions of metapsychology' in which David Rapaport
and Merton Gill attempt a succinct expression - which Rapaport considerably extended in a
longer essay (Rapaport, 1960) - of the natural scientific heritage in psychoanalysis. The
five points of view are partially overlapping and are spelled out in such a way as to
achieve maximum resonance with physics, chemistry and biology:
In this paper we have stated and discussed the points of view which guide
metapsychological analysis and the assumptions which constitute metapsychology proper.
We repeat the definitions and assumptions here in synoptic form.
The dynamic point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any
psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning the psychological forces involved
in the phenomenon.
(a) There are psychological forces.
(b) Psychological forces are defined by their direction and magnitude.
(c) The effect of simultaneously acting psychological forces may be the simple
resultant of the work of each of these forces.
(d) The effect of simultaneously acting psychological forces may not be the simple
resultant of the work of each of these forces.
The economic point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any
psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning the psychological energy involved
in the phenomenon.
(a) There are psychological energies.
(b) Psychological energies follow a law of conservation.
(c) Psychological energies are subject to a law of entropy.
(d) Psychological energies are subject to transformations, which increase or decrease
their entropic tendency.
The structural point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any
psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning the abiding psychological
configurations (structures) involved in the phenomenon.
(a) There are psychological structures.
(b) Structures are configurations of a slow rate of change.
(c) Structures are configurations within which, between which, and by means of which
mental processes take place.
(d) Structures are hierarchically ordered.
The genetic point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any
psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning its psychological origin and
development.
(a) All psychological phenomena have a psychological origin and development.
(b) All psychological phenomena originate in innate givens, which mature according to
an epigenetic groundplan.
(c) The earlier forms of a psychological phenomenon, though superseded by later forms,
remain potentially active.
(d) At each point of psychological history the totality of potentially active earlier
forms co-determines all subsequent psychological phenomena.
The adaptive point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explananon of any
psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning its relationship to the
environment.
(a) There exist psychological states of adaptedness and processes of adaptation at
every point of life.
(b) The processes of (autoplastic and/or alloplastic) adaptation maintain, restore, and
improve the existing states of adaptedness and thereby ensure survival.
(c) Man adapts to his society - both to the physical and human environments which are
its products.
(d) Adaptation relationships are mutual: man and environment adapt to each other ...
The future development of psychoanalysis as a systematic science may well depend on
such continuing efforts to establish the assumptions on which psychoanalytic theory rests.
(Rapaport and Gill, 1959, pp. 8-9).
There are a number of scientific terms in use in this formulation which are derived
from the tradition in which Freud worked as a student, i.e., physicalist physiology - the
so-called Helmholtz School of Physiology, involving Brücke, du Bois-Reymond, and others.
It is completely uncontroversial in Freud scholarship that Freud studied and did
physiological research in this framework for many years. He stopped doing it only because
he had to earn a living. Most of his metapsychological concepts are seen to have derived
indirectly or metaphorically from their physicalist approach to how the body works. This
is the origin of the use of physical concepts of force, energy, structure.
The nineteenth-century physicalists were a crusading group with a
commitment to the proposition that no forces other than those physical and chemical ones
studied by physics and chemistry are at work in human or other organisms: no vital forces.
Their research was dedicated to interpreting the nervous system in these terms. When Freud
turned to the mind in On Aphasia and in the 'Project for a scientific psychology'
(1895), he strove to express mental phenomena in neurological terms and postulated
metaphorical neurology-like concepts where the strictly neurophysiological concepts were -
as they patently were - inadequate. As is well known, the 'project' proved too much for
him, and he moved from a metaphorical physiology to a fully psychological way of writing
about human nature and human distress.
This is not surprising. The problem about the mind, of course, is that
since a part of its Cartesian definition is that it is 'that which does not pertain to
matter', it is defined negatively by contrast to physics. Therefore modern philosophy and
science are really stuck for a language in which to speak about it, and people come up
with all sorts of languages, some of which I will be considering below. If you are going
to talk about the mind as mind, you need to borrow a vocabulary from somewhere.
The above concepts are important if one wants to think at all about
psychoanalysis as a scholar or as a student of scientific theories. But it is very easy to
be taken over by all this and to get oneself engaged in the activity of searching out
where these concepts come from, their intellectual and historical roots, and how the five
points of view interrelate. Freud never really put one model aside in favour of a later
model. They all continue to be used. Thinking and writing about these concepts and their
interrelations implies that we are engaged in an exercise rather like working out a new
periodic table of elements or fundamental particles on the model of physics and chemistry.
It has that feel about it, and not accidentally: that is the kind of respectability one
tradition in psychoanalysis has been looking for. I do not wish to be thought to be
seeking to ignore this aspect of Freud's thinking: it is there.
Yet, as I have said, it is very easy to get taken over by all this
unless one listens for the silences or has an antidote, in this case Bettelheim. He wants
to heave all this language overboard or wear it very lightly, and to point out how
evocative Freud's own prose was and how it resonates with the dialectic of experience. The
list of concepts you get from Bettelheim is very short and not all that hard to remember:
metaphor, symbol, ambiguity, contradiction, dream and myth, perhaps myth above all. Even
Freud, when he thought about a science of dreams, finally said that we really cannot have
a science of dreams, since each process of symbolization is unique, and the only person
who knows the meaning of a dream is the person who has it (aided by his or her analyst).
Once alerted to this contrast, one begins to wonder why such a onesided
story is being told by Sulloway. For example, Sulloway stresses ontogeny and phylogeny.
Ontogeny is the development of the individual; phylogeny is the development or evolution
of the species. There is a very, very partial truth (Stephen Gould has written a book on
how partial a truth it is) that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the development of the
individual recapitulates the development of the race, of the species and its precursors. I
am sure you have all seen pictures of human embryos. At one stage, an embryo looks a
little bit like a fish.
Sulloway stresses ontogeny and phylogeny and other biological concepts,
but he is practically silent about Freud's most pervasive use of the classics - the Bible,
literature, prehistory, archaeology (there were some classical and preclassical figurines
on his desk that were so precious to him that he was not prepared to leave Vienna even
after the German occupation until he was assured that he could take them with him). His
trips to see Italian churches and museums, and the problems he had getting to Rome, are
well known. If you think about what he wrote about totemism and Michelangelo and Moses and
taboos and jokes and civilization and dreams and myths and the vicissitudes of everyday
life and, above all, Oedipus, you begin to wonder how on earth we can put this Freud
together with Sulloway's Freud. We have two very, very different accounts.
One way would be to distinguish the early from the late. Bettelheim
does a little of that when he writes:
The English translations cleave to an early stage of Freud's thought, in which he
inclined toward science and medicine, and disregard the mature Freud, whose orientation
was humanistic, and who was concerned mostly with broadly conceived cultural and human
problems and with matters of the soul. Freud himself stated that he considered the
cultural and human significance of psychoanalysis more important than its medical
significance. (p. 32)
What it is about is the human essence. Now, Bettelheim actually will not settle for
that. He wants to claim much more - that the humanism is of the essence of psychoanalysis.
He writes about this very well:
How Freud conceived of psychology can be seen from the way he spoke about it in The
Question of Lay Analysis: 'In psychology we can describe only with the help of
comparisons. This is nothing special, it is the same elsewhere. But we are forced to
change these comparisons over and over again, for none of them can serve us for any length
of time.' There are several reasons for Freud's frequent use of metaphors in explaining
the nature of psychoanalysis. One is that psychoanalysis, though it is confronted with
hard, objective facts, does not deal with them as such but devotes itself to the
imaginative interpretation and explanation of hidden causes, which can only be inferred.
The metaphors that Freud used were intended to bridge the rift that exists between the
hard facts to which psychoanalysis refers and the imaginative manner in which it explains
them. A second reason is even more closely related to the nature of psychoanalysis.
Because of repression, or the influence of censorship, the unconscious reveals itself in
symbols or metaphors, and psychoanalysis, in its concern with the unconscious, tries to
speak about it in its own metaphoric language. Finally, metaphors are more
likely than a purely intellectual statement to touch a human chord and arouse our
emotions, and thus give us a feeling for what is meant. A true comprehension of
psychoanalysis requires not only an intellectual realization but a simultaneous emotional
response; neither alone will do. A well-chosen metaphor will permit both. (pp. 37-8)
The examples he goes into most persuasively show what happened in the
Strachey translation. They are the concepts of id, ego and superego which, he points out,
are very classicized terms. In fact it is the 'it', the kind of primitive 'it-ness' of
infantility; it is I, not ego; and it is that which is over I - over me -
superego. If you actually read Freud's prose in that way, it feels very different from id,
Ego and Superego. It is less arcane and touches one more. One can get in the habit of
having some sense of these matters. The other issue Bettelheim goes into concerns the
levels of subtlety and the resonances of the Oedipus complex.
The meaning of the term 'Oedipus complex' is symbolic. Like all the
metaphors Freud used in his writings, this term is valuable primarily for its
suggestiveness and referential richness. It is a metaphor operating on many levels, since
it alludes to other metaphors by its overt and covert references to the myth and the
drama. Freud chose it to illumine and vivify a concept that defies more concise expression
... (p. 2 1)
Oedipus, in fleeing Corinth, paid no attention to the admonitory temple
inscription 'Know thyself'. The inscription implicitly warned that anyone who did not know
himself would misunderstand the sayings of the oracle. Because Oedipus was unaware of his
innermost feelings, he fulfilled the prophecy. Because he was unknowing of himself, he
believed that he could murder the father who had raised him well, and marry the mother who
loved him as a son. Oedipus acted out his metaphorical blindness - his blindness to what
the oracle had meant, based on his lack of knowledge of himself - by depriving himself of
his eyesight. In doing so, he may have been inspired by the example of Teiresias, the
blind seer who reveals to Oedipus the truth about Laius's murder. We encounter in
Teiresias the idea that having ones sight turned away from the external world and
directed inward - toward the inner nature of things - gives true knowledge and permits
understanding of what is hidden and needs to be known. (pp. 23-4)
I want to stop at Teiresias, return to Sulloway's assumptions and focus on the concept
of language and the languages in which we speak about the inner life. What Bettelheim
alludes to as metaphors, symbols and myths are avowedly metaphors, symbols and myths. All
would agree about this, but Sulloway wishes to take Freud's use of ontogeny, phylogeny,
Lamarckianism, sexuality and treat them not as resonant metaphors to help illuminate human
biographies, but as scientific laws on the model of physico-chemical sciences. The titles
of his sections are a dead giveaway in this respect. For example, Part Two is entitled
'Psychoanalysis: the Birth of a Genetic Psychobiology'.
Sulloway's overall strategy has three moments. The first is to build up
Freud's interlocutor in his most creative years, Wilhelm Fliess, whom most people dismiss
as a man beneath Freud. Fliess is known for his theories of periodicity based on the
numbers 28 and 23, his conceptions of human bisexuality and, in particular, his ideas
about the nose and olfactory sensations (which, ironically, are very fashionable at the
moment because of the role of die so-called nose-brain or rhinencephalon in emotional
functions and the discovery of pherenomes, subliminal smells which we convey to one
another and which have important sexual functions).
What Sulloway does is to build Fliess up, far beyond what any other
biographer or historian has said about him, and to call Fliess's concepts about human
sexuality 'human biology'. There are some quite extreme claims made on Fliess's behalf:
He was, in fact, a largely unrecognized source of inspiration for much
of Sigmund Freud's whole psychosexual perspective on human development. (p. 235)
Above all, a belief in Fliess's scientific vision required
rationalization of his various theories in terms of their largely unspoken, but none the
less manifestly evolutionary, perspective on human sexuality. Nose and sex, vital
periodicity, bisexuality, and the existence of a childhood sexual instinct - all these
subjects had their logical roots deep in late-nineteenth-century evolutionary doctrine. In
other words, Fliess played his Helmholtzian and bioenergetic tunes to a largely Darwinian
score.
In this sense, the long-misunderstood role of Fliess in Freud's
intellectual life reflects, in microcosm, the cryptobiological nature of Freud's entire
psychoanalytic legacy to the twentieth century, (p. 237)
The second moment of Sulloway's strategy is to build up the
significance of evolutionary thinking, including the pervasiveness of Darwin, seeing
psychology and sexology in this disciplinary matrix. Psychology and sexuality were
certainly being thought of within an overall evolutionary framework. This is why they
became so important in the late nineteenth century. Sulloway says:
It is certainly fitting that the influence of Charles Darwin, the man
whose evolutionary writings did so much to encourage young Freud in the study of biology
and medicine (Chapter 1), should have been so instrumental in turning psychoanalysis into
a dynamic, and especially a genetic, psychobiology of mind. Indeed, perhaps nowhere was
the impact of Darwin, direct and indirect, more exemplary or fruitful outside of biology
proper than within Freudian psychoanalysis. (p. 275)
Biology absolutely solves everything. By this point you may think I am
caricaturing, so I will quote the title of Chapter Ten: 'Evolutionary Biology Resolves
Freud's Three Psychoanalytic Problems (1905-39)'. (There is rather a lot of 'two problems
solved', three mysteries' and 'four misunderstandings' in this book.) The three
problems were the nature of repression, of sexuality and the choice of neurosis. In
effect, the Oedipus myth then becomes 'biologicized', which is the polar opposite of the
approach in the passage about the Oedipus myth I quoted from Bettelheim. In Bettelheim,
the Oedipus myth is a rich source of understanding of layers of interrelations among
persons. Here it is made much less subtle; it is fixed:
It is therefore no accident that Freud, in his mature years (1905-39),
wrote four separate books and the major part of a fifth on the intimate and antagonistic
relationship that he perceived between civilization and sexual life. (p. 391)
Sexual life is biology; therefore, Freud is a biologist.
Sulloway then turns to why Freud was a 'cryptobiologist'. This leads to
the third moment of his strategy: to denigrate Freud's originality. I found this aspect of
the book most informative, in a curious sort of way, but not at all enlightening. That is,
it taught me a lot about contemporary sexology, contemporary dream theory, and the
reception of Freud. Sulloway counts the reviews and tells us the number of words in each.
He reviews the priority disputes and shows how isolated and embattled Freud was (e.g., Was
he or was he not persecuted for being a Jew?). But this prodigious effort of research in
citation - and it is very impressive - seems to me beside the point. The point is that
everything has been said by somebody who did not discover it. And the question is what
deeper emphasis Freud brings to the human heart, not whether you can take each and every
element and dissolve it into its prior mentions. Anybody who knows anything about the
history of ideas knows that this is what third-, fourth-, and fifth-rate historians do for
a living. We get a steady drip, drip, including the insertion of the words 'biological' or
evolutionary' in square brackets in any place where it might be implicit and we
might be likely to miss it (I could cite 30-40 examples of that), lest we fail to hear the
litany.
For example, biology gives us the dream theory - not the other way
round:
In short, the discovery of the id, and the impact of that discovery
upon the theories of neurosis and psychosexual development, largely made possible Freud's
mature theory of dreaming, not vice versa, as is so often erroneously maintained. (p. 329)
Yet there are many, many quotations (which Sulloway provides) where
Freud says to Adler or Jung that he will no longer work with him because he was treating
things in biological, not psychological, terms. Curiously, Wilhelm Reich is not discussed,
although he is the most striking example of someone who attributed to biological forces
everything which he wanted to be innate in humanity.
Now, what is all this in aid of? I have read reviews, and a rebuttal by
Sulloway in the paperback edition, that link criticisms of his thesis to political and
historiographic axes that people might grind. I believe there is something in this, and I
believe it from my own experience as a Darwin scholar. The book is dedicated to Ernst
Mayr, and the influence of Ernst Mayr on the history of biology is one of the more baleful
episodes in the last decades. He has had an admirable effect on a number of Ph.D
biologists and has inspired them to become historians. Some have become extremely diligent
scholars, but they are very busy disconnecting Darwin and Darwinism from culture, history,
ideology, etc. I am very glad to report that there has been a big debate about this among
historians of science in which the Mayr faction has lost out. That is, there were senior
scientists, in particular Sir Gavin de Beer and Mayr, who wanted to disconnect Darwin from
other issues, especially politics and political economy in the nineteenth century. Their
commendable interest in history of science is vitiated by their approaching the past of
science in a narrow, positivist spirit - to keep it pure and worthy of our esteem. They
seek to guard it against pollution by ideology.
This is simply not on. Sulloway's book is dedicated to Mayr; Mayr is
alluded to as an intellectual mentor, as is Edward O. Wilson. Wilson has recently been
beaten up by humanists and enlightened scientists for founding sociobiology and including
in it the attempt to hand ethics and sociology over to biology, at least for a period.
This went down very badly. Wilson had published his book, Sociobiology, when
Sulloway's came out, but the controversy over Wilson's excessive biological reductionism
had not got going. Sulloway got caught with his mentors showing.
The aim being pursued by Sulloway et al. to take the history of
biology out of political, cultural and ideological contexts is worrying. It diverts our
gaze so that we will not ask what forces in a society evoke a theory and into what
cultural, political and ideological debate these scientific theories enter and what role
they play. Anyone who lives in Thatcher's Britain or Reagan's America must know that this
is a live issue. One of the things that Sulloway is doing - however tacitly - is taking
degrees of freedom, hope, flexibility, and biologizing these matters. One wakes up and
realizes that all the experience and individuality and individual biographies disappear -
they are no longer seen as efficacious. Biological analogies have been rampant at Harvard,
and especially in the Harvard Society of Fellows, for decades. The Harvard Pareto Circle
increased the role of functionalism and biological analogies and organismic thinking in
American social theory. Sulloway's research is a part of that tradition, a profoundly
conservative and antihumanistic one.
That completes my critique. I now want to offer a grain of hope. I
think that Sulloway's book is wrong-headed in more interesting ways than have so far
emerged from the polemical way I have addressed it. In fact, I agree with Solloway that
evolutionary thinking is extremely important in Freud. I would even use some of the
quotations he uses, but in a very different and, I hope, more searching way. In his book On Aphasia Freud draws all sorts of concepts from neurology - from the neurology of
John Hughlings Jackson which, in turn, is based on the thinking of the evolutionary
psychologist Herbert Spencer. He learns to think functionally through this influence,
which led Freud away from the sort of thinking he did in his neuroanatomical work, where
everything was related to structures in a rather narrow physiological sense. He learns to
think in metaphorically functional ways even though he is still doing so in rather
somaticist terms. He also adopts a doctrine which plays practically no part in Sulloway's
book, and this is where I think it is wrong-headed at a scholarly level.
If you work in a period long enough, you have a sense of the conceptual
spaces occupied by certain concepts. (This is the analogy in scholarship to the fruits of
long 'clinical experience' in the work of a therapist.) You have a sense of the resonances
of concepts and terms. In the late nineteenth century, the terms 'mind' and 'brain' have
certain resonances which cannot be conflated with biology in this period. lt just was not
like that. There is a chapter on the brain in The Descent of Man, but Darwin did
not have the faintest idea what to write and got T. H. Huxley to write it for him. He did
not think about the brain in biological terms in the way that we would now do. (Huxley
did, by the way. One of his most famous controversies was about this: see his Man's
Place in Nature.) Mind and brain were not important to Darwin's mature
work, although they loomed quite large in one of his early notebooks and in some of his
speculations. In another area of psychology, some of his child observation was certainly
evolutionary.
There is a sleight of hand going on in Sulloway's book whereby the
category of biology is used as a solvent in a way that is appropriate to the present, but
was not current when Darwin and Freud wrote. On the other hand, the category of brain does
not loom for Sulloway, whereas it loomed quite large for people other than Darwin who
thought hard about psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What I
am trying to convey - and it would take a long argument to spell out (although I am
certain of it) - is that Sulloway's book is wrong-headed about the nuances of the meanings
of the terms 'mind', 'brain , and 'biology'.
Freud thought about these matters in rather special and precise terms.
He was a convinced psychophysical parallelist. This may seem an abstruse thing to be, but
what it means is that he believed that you could speak about mind (psycho), you could
speak about brain (physical), you could say that they worked in parallel, but you had no
obligation to explain the relationship between the two. You could go through your whole
life without speaking of anything but parallels. I could cite quotations through all
Freud's major works in which he says this, one way or another, from the earliest book and
papers to An Outline of Psychoanalysis, published posthumously in 1940.
It is because his basic metaphysical position was psychophysical
parallelism that he did not think organismicahy and did draw, throughout his life, on a
physicalist vocabulary when speaking of mind. The reason is that he had no language of
persons for his metapsychology. He had a language of mind and a language of brain, but he
had no theoretical language of persons at the most abstract level of his thought. Nor did
he have a sense of the concept of a human being considered fully biologically. He wrote
many, many humanistic things about literature and biography and mythology and clothed his
writings in a rich metaphorical language. But there was no conceptual space in
psychoanalytic ontology for persons or persons as organisms. This is true for reasons I
gave earlier and is based on Descartes's definition of mind as having no language of its
own: it is that which does not pertain to matter. For Descartes mind is the realm of free
will, the sphere of soul, of the Church. There were a lot of philosophical and theological
- i.e. cultural - reasons in the seventeenth century why it was defined in that way.
In Individuals P. F. Strawson shows, I think utterly
persuasively, that you can think about minds only in a language which connects
material objects to persons. Strawson maintains that we cannot individuate individuals in
terms of 'consciousness as such', and that 'nothing can be a subject of predicates
implying consciousness, unless it is, in that sense of the word which implies also the
possession of corporeal attributes, a person, or at least a former person' (p. 121).
According to Strawson's analysis, the concept of person comes first; it is ontologically
prior to the concept of mind or of the human body.
The relevance of this is that neither Darwin nor Freud thought in such
terms. Theirs was a dualistic world. One might consider, as Darwin did, reducing mind to
matter or the mental to the biologically innate. Or one might, as Freud did, keep the two
categories - the mental and the physical - in tension and hold to a doctrine of
concomitance.
As Alfred North Whitehead has so eloquently argued, this framework was
and has remained disastrous. It was developed in the seventeenth century for certain
philosophical and mathematical purposes, but it left us no way of speaking about people
which could integrate the material aspects with feelings. As Whitehead says:
Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a
complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind
as on equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter and
those who put matter . inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome
the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to
the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century. (1925, p. 82)
A student of the history of psychology would find in the work of
the pioneer of psychological associationism, David Hartley (1749), an attempt to speak in
terms of particles and vibrations and what he called 'vibratuncles'. His was a physidst's
language spoken of in mental terms. That approach to psychology was the most influential
one in the empiricist tradition up to the work of Alexander Bain, whose The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859) were
the standard pre-evolutionary texts.
One attempt to shoehorn personal concepts into bodily language was
phrenology, which combined a faculty psychology of personal attributes and traits (love of
offspring, various kinds of memory, acquisitiveness, etc.) with particular portions of the
brain. The result was a one-to-one correlation between mental terms and portions of the
brain. I mention these two examples because Freud's first book, On Aphasia, was in
this tradition of mind-brain correlation (one which I have examined at length elsewhere),
just as psychoanalysis remained a fundamentally associationist psychology.
I think it is extremely important to see Freud within this
philosophical framework. He wrote as a humanist, and he wrote as a physiologist. He was
also importantly influenced by biology. However, he nowhere integrated his ways of writing
about people and their minds with biology. The ontological gap between mind and body
remained. His stopgap measure was psychophysical parallelism. Sulloway seems blissfully
unaware of this set of constraints on how Freud thought. He fails to see the most basic
ontological assumptions on which Freud based his thinking, whether in physiology,
neurology, or psychoanalysis.
In the ontological gap between mind and body, Sulloway is a would-be
ideological conquistador on behalf of twentieth-century biological reductionism, which
brings with it cultural and political fatalism. Speaking as a historian of biology,
psychology and neurology in this period, I claim that his analysis does not resonate with
the terms of reference of the debates of the period, much less with the terms of reference
of Freud's world-view.
Just as significantly, I find that his way of writing about Freud has
no resonances in my experience of clinical work as an analysand or as a psychotherapist.
There is no space at all for experience in his presentation of Freud. There are only
categories in the history of ideas. Far from being biological, however, in real life and
in real psychoanalysis everything is relentlessly biographical. Therefore, without wishing
to withhold due historical homage to the role of the Helmholtz school, physicalist
physiology and neurology in Freud's thinking, it is worth recalling again that having
written the 'Project for a scientific psychology', Freud put it aside and wanted it to be
destroyed. It is true that he continued to use - in a metaphorical sense - some of the
terms of neurology, physiology and physics in his writings, for example in the model of
the mind in Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams. But I think that it is too
radical a reduction to try to capture Freud for the history of biology in the way Sulloway
has.
In summary, I would make two points - one about Bettelheim and the
Strachey translation, the other about Sulloway's approach. When Freud is writing as a
humanist - the moving passages about Oedipus, for example - he escapes the impoverishment
of the Cartesian ontology and communicates in personally evocative and resonant ways. But, pace Sulloway, even when he is writing as a scientist within his psychophysical
parallelist version of Cartesian dualism, he is not a reductionist. His metapsychological
language is richer than the translators convey - I rather than ego, it rather than id.
Beyond that, his language is far richer than it would be if we saw it through the lens of
Sulloway's conception of biology. Like his mentors, Mayr and Wilson, Sulloway would
contextualize Freud in twentieth-century reductionist terms, remove him from the
contemporary sense of Spencer and Jackson on the concomitance of mind and body and
parachute him (anachronistically) into a biology rooted in genetics, sociobiology, pure
materialism. Freud was a humanist with his soul and a dualist with his mind; never
organismic, much less a modern desiccated biologist.
Therefore , I incline to Bettelheim's rendition. The lesson to be
learned here is, of course, that psychoanalytic metapsychology should begin to address
itself to the metaphysical problem as presented by Freud and as exemplified by Sulloway's
failure to understand the philosophical terms of reference of Freud's thinking. What are
we to put in place of what one student of psychosomatic phenomena called the Mysterious
Leap from the Mind to the Body? (see Deutsch, 1959). What can we do to think
organismic and personal terms so that we are not stuck with such barbaric phrases as
'somatic compliance'? Why are we reduced to writing of the most intimate personal
phenomena in terms of object relations', thereby repeating the traditional
subject-object distinction which has been bequeathed to us by Western epistemology as the
twin bugbear with 'mind-body' dualism? The language of object relations is an advance on
physicalist concepts, but remains a scientistic rendering of human intimacy. Why must we
continue to write in terms of object relations, mental apparatuses, the anatomy of the
mental personality?
My,own inclination is to return to Teiresias, a person who was blind to
the external object world but who saw deeply within. What happens in psychoanalysis is
that people tell stories with meanings, metaphors and symbols. They tell them again and
again, in search of insight, and they are helped to achieve this by someone who is also
listening very carefully to what is heard and what is evoked in himself or herself.
It seems to me that psychology is prose, that human nature is personal
and that it is historical. As Marx said, 'we know only one science, the science of
history'. From this point of view, theory should be worn lightly, and theoretical concepts
should be seen as heuristic devices. Of course one should attempt to explore the relations
between concepts, but one should not try to do so on the model of a theory of the periodic
table of elements or fundamental physical particles. It should be possible to think about
the container and the contained, the psychic skin, paranoid-schizoid and depressive
positions, projective identification, alpha and beta elements, envy, hope, splitting,
transitional objects and phenomena, and a number of other useful theoretical insights -
without having to reduce them to too much order. These need not be elements in a would-be
periodic table of mental elements. Rather, they should be seen as useful tools for a
craft, lying loosely in a bag of insights available to the people who try to help others
become themselves.
The key is in the method and the process, in the transference and,
above an, its relation with the countertransference - i.e., the human dialectic.
I am sure that many of the terms I have just listed will not be
familiar to a non-specialist audience, although they would be to psychoanalysts or
psychoanalytic psychotherapists. In giving this paper to a group of human scientists I
feel hopeful, since the name of the group itself breaks away from various reductionisms
implied in 'behavioural science, social science', and other question-begging
designations about how we think about people. I would argue that the basic discipline for
a truly human science is biography and that Freud has given us the best insight there is
into the understanding of biography.
I hope you will not think I am making very heavy weather of Freud.
Philip Rieff has called his work 'the most important body of thought committed to paper in
the twentieth century'. Peter Medawar (to whom we owe much alleviation of human suffering
in burn therapy and transplant surgery) has said the opposite:
The opinion is gaining ground that doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory is
the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century: and a terminal
product as well - something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a
vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity. (quoted in Sulloway, p.
499)
In the face of this modern scientistic bigotry, it is gratifying that
Medawar's daughter is a clinical psychologist, training to become a psychoanalyst.
Freud is cited more often in introductory psychology texts than anyone
else in Britain, Canada and the United States, according to Bettelheim (p. 19n). What is
made of him is therefore of more than passing interest. It is also important to note that
it is inescapable that something will be made of him. Throughout my years of
research as a philosopher and historian of science, one of the things which has become
most powerfully borne in upon me is that there is no neutral observation language in
science or history or therapy. There is no such thing as the Freud. There are, of
course, important constraints on what we can say about him if we are being serious and
attempting to tell the truth as best we can.
In case you are wondering what I would like you to take away from all
this, it is that psychoanalysis just is not like that - it is not like a theory in natural
or biological science. The ontology within which Freud lived was one of mind and brain,
with a 'holding action' theory of their relations in psychophysical parallelism or the
doctrine of concomitance. 'Biology' was not brain, nor was it a category that filled the
Cartesian space. Least of all did it connect with a psychology of persons - of persons,
selves and souls. Into the Cartesian space Freud and his followers, apostates and current
sectarians have poured a variety of languages and concepts, beginning with those borrowed
from physicalist physiology and extending to ego psychology, cybernetics, systems theory
and Wilfred Bion's principled use of empty categories.
I am suggesting that we take stock and move from objects to persons,
not only wearing theory lightly but treating it heuristically, wearing system lightly;
and, above all, that we should stop trying to assimilate psychoanalysis to other
disciplines - especially neurophysiology, biology, ethology and sociobiology. In
attempting to be the broker of such a wedding, Sulloway is still clinging to natural
science as the paradigm discourse for ontologically and epistemologically insecure human
science. But he is doing this at a time when philosophers and philosophers of science are
turning away from that idealization, partly because natural science, shorn of purposes and
values, has turned out to be a false guide and partly because it is a will-o'-the-wisp - a
fruitless, barren marriage.
Can we not let go of the urge which leads us to seek to have human
projects and human understanding underwritten by nonhuman authority? If we could let go of
the naturalization of value systems, perhaps we could explore and contest the competing
value systems on offer as potential ego ideals for our cultural - including our
psychoanalytic - visions. If we could once accept psychoanalysis as a full-blooded
humanism, we could then begin to challenge the false neutrality and scientificity of its
practices and institutions and ask ourselves what kind of humanity we wish to create, in
full knowledge of the biological and ideological constraints on our visions and our
attempts to make them real. Only then, it seems to me, can we safely begin to build a
theory and practice of human nature which brings together the concepts of organism and
person, shorn of the reductionism which the former usually brings in tow and the idealism
associated with the latter. That is, we must try for a human nature which is not in danger
of falling back into the extremes of impoverished body and disembodied mind bequeathed by
Cartesian dualism.
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