Freud, V. 2

Appraisals and Reappraisals

Paul E. Stepansky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780881630657
• eBook ISBN: 9781317737056
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Volume 2 of the Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals series bears out the promise of the acclaimed premier volume, a volume whose essays "breathe new life into the study of Freud," embodying research that "appears to be impeccable in every case" (International Review of Psychoanalysis).

It begins with Peter Homan's detailed reeexamination of the period 1906-1914 in Freud's life. Looking to Freud's relationahips with Jung as the central event of the period, he finds in Freud's idealization and subsequent de-idealization of Jung a psychological motif that gains recurrent expression in Freud's later writings and personal relationships. Richard Geha offers a provocative protrait of Freud as a "fictionalist." Anchoring his exegesis in Freud's famous case of the Wolf Man, he argues that the yield of Freud's clinical inquiries, epistemologically, is a species of the fictionalism of Friedrich Nietzsche and Hans Vaihinger. But, pursuing the argument, Geha goes on to advance little-noted biographical evidence that Freud understood himself to be an artist whose clinical productions were ultimately artistic. Finally, Patricia Herzog organizes and interprets Freud's seemingly conflicting remarks about philosophy and philosophers en route to the claim that the long-held belief that Freud was an "anti-philosopher" is a myth. In fact, she claims, "Freud was in no doubt as to the philosophical nature of his goal." In an introductory essay titled "Pathways to Freud's Identity," editor Paul E. Stepansky brings together the essays of Homans, Geha, and Herzog as complementary inquiries into Freud's putative self-understanding and, to that extent, as reconstructive, historical continuations of the self-analysis methodically begun by Freud in the late 1890s. "Each contributor," writes Stepansky, "in his or her own way, seeks to understand Freud better in the spirit in which Freud might have better understood himself. Together, the contributors offer vistas to an enlarged self-analytic sensibility."

Major Essays

Disappointment and the Ability to Mourn

De-Idealization as a Psychological Theme in Freud’s Life, Thought, and Social Circumstance, 1906-1914

Peter Homans

Introduction: Framing the Argument

Historical writing on the psychoanalytic movement began by centering on, and for some time continued to emphasize, the figure of Sigmund Freud in such a way that others were cast as shadows very much in the background, their significance lying chiefly in their relation to the great man—they were his acquaintances, his followers, his critics, his opponents. This understandably deferential approach coalesced in Ernest Jones’s definitive study, which appeared in the 1950s (1953, 1955, 1957). The approach is also understandable when one realizes that much of this history was written by men who were themselves, like Jones, part of the psychoanalytic movement, some “part of’ Freud in the more intimate sense either of a friendship or even of the analytic relationship itself.

Since that time, this scholarship has broadened in a number of ways so as to usher into the light of day what I call “shadow figures.” The concern now seems less with stature than with context and the webs of relationship in which various men and women found themselves embedded. A major example of this development was the publication in 1974 of the Freud-Jung Letters (McGuire, 1974). That event allowed Carl Gustav Jung to emerge from the shadows by permitting concrete reflection on the psychology of his personality and its relation to his work, while at the same time advancing still further our knowledge of Freud’s own life and thought. Scholars such as Robert Stolorow and George Atwood (1979), and John Gedo (1983) have addressed these issues, and my own (1979) book-length study of the Freud-Jung relationship and its extraordinary impact on Jung’s work and the cultural situation of “psychological man” also belongs here. Even Erik Erikson (1980) has written on the subject.

Even as the lesser known figures become more familiar, Freud’s greatness does not diminish. Still “larger than life,” only the significance of his stature shifts. As the reader sees Freud wrestling with circumstances that were both unique for him as the originator of psychoanalysis and universal for all those who study his life and work, Freud’s greatness persists—but in new and different ways. To extend this metaphor of shadow and light to the stage: whereas once the historical spotlight was on Freud alone, now smaller circles of light have gradually illuminated others (Adler, Jung, Abraham, and so forth), so that we in the audience are led to think, Yes, they were there all the time; it was just that we could not see them. It is only when all the stage lights go up that one sees that these separate figures are, in fact, a cohesive group, each playing a part to the others and to a wider web of figures, relationships, and social forces as well.

This essay explores in detail a period in Freud’s life that was populated by many such shadow figures and consequently has been badly neglected. Jones’s intense and persistent idealizations of Freud have virtually institutionalized a set of perceptions that serve as a deliberate foil for my argument. His observation that Freud’s relationship to Wilhelm Fliess was the only truly extraordinary event in Freud’s life has effectively forestalled thought about such other possibly extraordinary events as the impact of Jung on Freud. Ellenberger (1970) has proposed that Freud underwent a second creative illness during the course of this relationship. Jones’s exclusively oedipal interpretations of Freud’s relationships and conflicts have made it difficult to introduce into the study of Freud’s life the idea of earlier developmental lines, such as the persistence of maternal motifs in his intimate dealings with other men. By using the psychologically weak notion of Freud’s “circle” to describe the psychoanalytic movement, Jones has deflected attention from its psychologically intense group dynamics. Perhaps most of all, Jones’s Freud is a man unmoved by social circumstance, although German political liberalism, the question of German-Jewish loyalties, and the tension between Viennese Jewishness and Zürich Christianity all deeply affected Freud, his perceptions of others, his ongoing work, and his evolving sense of the wider historical significance of his ideas.

When these several issues in the study of Freud’s life and thought are drawn together and brought to bear upon the 1906-1914 period, they generate an understanding of those years very different from the one that has come to be taken for granted. Freud was intimately involved with Jung, both personally and intellectually, as some recent analytic studies show, and the break profoundly affected his inner world and the ideas he chose to write about at the time—as analytic studies, both older and current, do not show. Psychoanalytic writing on the psychoanalytic movement has noted only its voluntaristic qualities, treating it as a voluntary association or a gesellschaft, and has ignored its unconscious group-psychological features. A psychological theory of groups can therefore illumine the Freud-Jung relationship and explain why the two men feared their separation with such intensity. Furthermore, by understanding the psychoanalytic movement as a group, one achieves a privileged position from which to grasp Freud’s relations to the social, political, and cultural forces and ideas that surround him. The group mediated between his personal anxieties and creativity and his ambivalent attitudes toward the culture at large. Indeed, the figures and forces active in this period forced Freud to initiate what became a serious and systematic struggle to incorporate his psychoanalysis into the indifferent, even hostile, world of Western cultural values. In this way the so-called cultural texts were born. That is to say, after 1914, Freud began to historicize his ideas and this effort constitutes, I propose, a second creative phase in his life and thought.

A single psychological theme unites these many issues, permeating them all: the all too human theme of disappointment, or mourning, or disillusionment, which I prefer to conceptualize more exactly and psychologically as a specifiable narcissistic issue, the experience of de-idealization. The Freud-Jung relationship began as a mutually narcissistic merger. Breaking up that merger produced disillusionment and narcissistic rage in both participants. Freud subsequently turned in upon himself, and his writing at this time creatively explored and re-presented this aspect of his inner world. But the group comprising the psychoanalytic movement was also characterized by similar processes, such as shared idealizations, identifications, and illusions. The separate “unit selves” of the first psychoanalysts crumbled under the impact of psychoanalytic ideas and practice, and these men reorganized their mental life by forming a group self. Thus, when group cohesion was badly threatened by Jung’s defection and the great war, Freud responded to the impending sense of separateness with anxiety and weakened self-cohesion. His lifelong preoccupation with his own death was intensified, and he refused to separate the historical future of psychoanalysis from the contents of his own mental life.

Jung’s departure and the dynamics of the movement also shaped Freud’s relation to culture, understood both as an ideological force impinging on him and as a suitable object for psychoanalytic reflection. After 1914, Freud mourned his lost hopes for German political liberalism; he renounced portions of his own Judaism, which had in the past provided him with a social identity; and he sought to penetrate, psychoanalytically, the Catholicism that had dominated Western culture and that had authorized the persecution of both Jews and psychoanalysis. Writing “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914a)—a paper whose beauty and historical significance have both been woefully neglected—in Rome was the first of what became a series of psychoanalytic probes into the psychology of Western cultural and religious experience. These probes have come to be known as the cultural texts. But the composition of that paper was inseparable from the writing of “On Narcissism” (1914b), from Freud’s relation to Jung, and from his “turn” to the psychology of Western religious values. Although religion was an essential ingredient of Freud’s inner world, it has not as yet been possible to discuss this most unwelcome of all guests in the household of Freud biography. But that discussion does become possible when one understands religion not as a debate between hostile, conflicting bodies of doctrinal assertions, but as a series of diverse patterns of powerful, shared, and unconscious idealizations of esteemed cultural objects.

Although this essay does not dwell upon it, study of the 1906-1914 period also opens up an issue fundamental to all studies of Freud’s life and thought—the relation between psychoanalysis and history. Jones’s (1953, 1955, 1957) attempt to wed psychoanalytic and historical approaches was exceptional. Most studies of Freud’s life and thought have been either exclusively psychoanalytically biographical or else heavily historical and nonpsychological. Either Freud’s inner world is illumined, and historical circumstances are viewed simply as a series of stimuli periodically breaking into that world, to be understood after the fashion of the analytic situation; or else historical events are elaborated with little reference to their subjective-analytic and unconscious significance for Freud the man.

The concept of de-idealization bears as much on this methodological issue as it does on the contents of the period under scrutiny. Kohut (1976) has pointed out that those who attempt to think psychoanalytically—be they clinicians or psychoanalytic scholars—necessarily immerse themselves in Freud’s writings and, indeed, in Freud’s very mind and life. Thus is formed an invisible psychological bond composed not only of admiring and appreciative idealizations of Freud, but also of rebellious repudiations and de-idealizations. And when it happens that one’s subject matter is itself Freud’s life and thought, further stress is inevitably placed on that bond. Idealization tends to strengthen the bond; de-idealization weakens it.

It is not possible for psychoanalytic scholars to avoid this predicament, but it is possible for them to think it through, at least to some extent, by engaging its psychology. All psychoanalytic biography of Freud creates an idealized portrait of him, rendering him “larger than life.” Insofar as this pattern is recognized, however, there is thrown into motion a natural tendencv to return Freud to the realm of the ordinary; that is, a partial de-idealization takes place. And, once that occurs, Freud’s ordinary human motives, subjective intentions, and experienced meanings become apparent. As this process takes place, Freud gradually becomes a historical figure. As psychological processes are clarified, historical reality takes form.

This unavoidable blend of subject matter and method also shapes the way plausibility or validity occurs, if it does occur. I do not attempt to establish causality between, for example, Freud’s inner experiences and the thematic contents of his work, or between these and the social circumstances that surround him. Instead, I seek to show an affinity or linkage between life, thought, group/movement, cultural forces, and issues. I think of these as concentric circles rather than lines of force. To shift the metaphor, the psychology of de-idealization is the thread that stitches together many segments of historical occasion, and I call the ensuing patchwork pattern (with sincere apologies to Lévi-Strauss) the “structure” of the 1906-1914 period. In what follows I hope this pattern gradually achieves the character of wholeness through my efforts to place historical events in their psychological contexts, much as Freud sought “meaning” by filling in the gaps and missing links in his patients’ lives; except of course, that in this case the gaps and links are social and historical as well as developmental.

Literature Review: Freud’s Most Creative Phase and Its Relevance for the 1906-1914 Period

A major portion of psychoanalytic scholarship on Freud’s life and thought (Jones, 1953, 1955, 1957; Kris, 1954; Schur, 1972) concurs that the period 1897-1901 was the time when Freud discovered and set forth those ideas that compose the distinctively psychoanalytic understanding of mental life. Although these sources, of course, vary greatly in their handling of specific materials, each sets forth in its own way a similar pattern: (1) Freud, thinking intently about a research problem, (2) enters into relation with another man and the relationship becomes intense and increasingly conflicted; (3) Freud introspects about this relationship in the context of creating a significant intellectual work; (4) A psychological discovery is made, the work embodying it is completed, and the relationship with the significant figure is dissolved.

The problem was the nature of neurosis; the central figure was Fliess; the relationship was that of a regressive transference neurosis, and introspection led to self-analysis, to the exploration of childhood and the unconscious, and to the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Kris, Jones, and Schur agree that any psychoanalytic study of Freud’s life will establish a connection between an introspective struggle and the achievement of a psychological discovery. And, in their characterization of the psychological substrate of Freud’s experiences and theoretical advances, they all subscribe to what is in effect Freud’s predominately oedipal point of view.

Since these foundational efforts, a second set of studies has made some striking innovations. Whereas the first group proposed to understand Freud’s creativity in terms of his own understanding of his self-analysis (although more profoundly) the second group asserts that deeper psychological processes, for the most part entirely unknown to Freud, shaped his creative discoveries. Erikson’s (1964a) psychohistorical analysis broke down Freud’s crisis into three components (psychological discovery, innovation in work techniques, and identity formation) and argued that his discoveries resulted from complex shifts in the psychosocial world of his time. Ellenberger’s (1970) formidable history employed the idea of a “creative illness”: The creative figure invests a special problem with great emotional intensity, undergoes neurotic and even psychotic forms of suffering, but emerges with a grandiose truth, restored health, and a loyal body of followers. Ellenberger believes that the originative psychoanalysts were only the most recent instances of this experience, common also to poets and even shamans.

Kohut (1976) further undercut the first explanations by proposing that Freud’s relationship to Fliess was not a regressive transference neurosis at all and that it did not end with insight into the transference. Rather, Freud’s creative experience was a “transference of creativity,” to be understood on the model of the transferences of the narcissistic personality disorders. As the originative figure begins to evolve new constructions, the self becomes progressively enfeebled and detached from others. To support his threatened inner world, he unconsciously turns to another person, merging, idealizing, and seeking mirroring responses from him. Then, as the creative product emerges, the transference of creativity gradually dissolves, and the demands for merger and the need to idealize diminish.

Wolf (1971) clarified this line of thinking further by proposing that when Freud’s mirror transference to Fliess was interrupted, Freud filled the gap with his creative work, which he then experienced as a selfobject. But Wolf’s most interesting contribution is that the form of the work is shaped by the narcissistic line of development, whereas the work owes its content to the line of object love. Gedo (1968) has pointed to Erikson’s observation that a maternal transference characterized the Fliess relationship and has added that Freud’s unconscious pregenital identifications with his “two mothers” (Amalia Freud and his nanny) persisted into Freud’s perceptions of Fliess.

Probably the most advanced (or radical, depending on one’s point of view) attempt to introduce a narcissistic line of development into Freud’s most creative period has come from Stolorow and Atwood (1979). After analyzing Freud’s earliest experiences, his dreams, and his letters to his wife and to Fliess, they conclude that Freud drastically oversimplified the oedipal mother-son relationship when he characterized it as “altogether the most perfect, the most free of ambivalence of all human relationships” (Freud, 1933, p. 133). They assert that Freud advanced this theoretical construction in order to hide from his own self-understanding a deeper and entirely split-off current of rage toward his mother, based on an unconscious sense of loss, separation, and rejection. Again and again, they speak of the strength and persistence of Freud’s need for idealization and of the capacity of such idealization to forestall any repetition, in adult awareness, of an infantile sense of betrayal. In sum, Stolorow and Atwood think that this preoedipal and maternal blank, or gap, in Freud’s major relationships (mother, wife, mentors) was responsible for the creation of a psychological theory in which pregenital issues between mother and son were well nigh eliminated.

I shall draw upon this reservoir of early and recent psychoanalytic explanations of the most creative period ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Editor's Introduction: Pathways to Freud's Identity
• Major Essays
• Disappointment and the Ability to Mourn De-Idealization as a Psychological Theme in Freud's Life, Thought, and Social Circumstance, 1906-1914
• Freud as Fictionalist The Imaginary Worlds of Psychoanalysis
• Brief Contribution
• The Myth of Freud as Anti-philosopher1
• Index