Immaterial Facts

Freud's Discovery of Psychic Reality and Klein's Development of His Work

Robert Caper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317797920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychoanalyse

First published in 1999. Shows how Melanie Klien's studies of sexuality aggression, unconscious phantasy and identification in children extended and corrected Freud's theories of the development of the superego and early stages of the Oedipus complex.

Part I

Freud’s Discovery
of Psychic Reality

1

Immaterial Facts

Do we have a feeling of familiarity whenever we look at familiar objects? Or do we have it usually? When do we actually have it? It helps us to ask: what do we contrast the feeling of familiarity with? One thing we contrast it with is surprise. One could say: “Unfamiliarity is much more of an experience than familiarity.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

In 1833, a Canadian voyageur named Alexis St. Martin suffered an accidental gunshot wound that never healed, leaving him with a permanent hole in the left side of his abdomen leading into his stomach. Dr. William Beaumont, the United States Army surgeon who treated him, arranged to keep St. Martin in his employ for several years in order to fully utilize this splendid opportunity for observing gastric physiology directly. His observations are considered to be of great value even today. In the straight-faced language of medicine, such events are known as “experiments of nature.”

Over the years, such experiments have provided physicians and physiologists with important, and otherwise unobtainable, insights into human physiology. In other species, such knowledge may be gained in the laboratory. For example, it is relatively easy to discover what part a dog’s pancreas plays in its well being: One simply removes it, observes that the animal develops diabetes, and concludes that the pancreas had some role in preventing the disease. It is at best difficult, however, to be certain if the same is true in humans. One must wait for someone to lose his pancreas to inflammation, cancer, or, perhaps, a gunshot. Our knowledge of those human functions not paralleled in other species depends entirely on these “experiments.”

In his book Learning from Experience (1962), the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion describes a psychological equivalent of St. Martin’s gunshot wound. He writes of a patient whose thought processes lacked the qualities of depth, resonance, and evocativeness that one associates with the human mind, and so seemed to be the product not of a mind, but of a machine. From the data of the patient’s analysis, Bion draws a picture of the mental organ whose impairment resulted in this state of affairs and reconstructs circumstances that might have led to it. This reconstruction is worth recounting in some detail.

Bion begins by taking seriously the commonplace notion that, just as infants need physical care and comfort, they must also receive love.¹ From this it follows that an infant must have the capacity to perceive love — have a sense organ for love — much as it has sense organs for perceiving food and warmth.

He considers what might happen if something interfered with the infant’s ability to absorb those of its mother’s states of mind that constitute its emotional sustenance. This could occur if, for example, the infant were unable to bear the emotional strain of realizing that its well-being — and even its survival — depends on something as intangible as its mother’s love. In its horror of needing what is intangible, and therefore not possessable, the infant blinds itself to its need for love, solace, and understanding. Starved of the requirements for mental and emotional growth, but unable to grasp them, it redoubles its desperate efforts to obtain what it can still perceive: material satisfactions divorced from emotional gratification.

In consequence, the infant grows into an adult like Bion’s machinelike patient, who greedily pursued every form of material comfort in a vain effort to supply himself with the nonmaterial comfort he lacked but could not recognize. He eventually comes to live in a perceptual world composed only of material objects, and since one can identify only with what one can perceive, he inevitably becomes like a material object himself, a state of affairs reflected in his machine-like thought processes. To Bion, this represents a “breakdown in the patient’s equipment for thinking” about emotional realities, which leaves him living in a universe populated by emotionless objects that Bion calls “inanimate.”

Bion then moves beyond the immediate clinical problem to reflect on one of greater significance:

The scientist whose investigations include the stuff of life itself finds himself in a situation that has a parallel in that of the patients I am describing.… It appears that our rudimentary equipment for “thinking” thoughts is adequate when the problems are associated with the inanimate, but not when the object for investigation is the phenomena of life itself.… [This] means that the field for investigation, all investigation being ultimately scientific, is limited, by human inadequacy, to those phenomena which have the characteristics of the inanimate. We assume that the psychotic limitation is due to an illness: but that of the scientist is not. Investigation of this assumption illuminates disease on one hand and scientific method on the other.… Confronted with the complexities of the human mind the analyst must be circumspect in following even accepted scientific method; its weakness may be closer to the weakness of psychotic thinking than superficial scrutiny would admit.

[1962, p. 14]

The problem Bion has formulated is this: The scientific methods and modes of thought that are appropriate to an understanding of the inanimate world (such as those of physics or chemistry), or to an understanding of the mechanical aspects of biological or social systems (such as those of physiology and behaviorism), yield models that are mechanical and therefore inappropriate for understanding states of mind. How, then, may we arrive at a description of the mind without falling prey to the scientific version of what crippled Bion’s patient — an inability to think about emotional realities that restricts (perhaps disastrously) our thoughts and imagination to the realm of the inanimate?

Freud’s Early Model of the Mind

The pitfall implied in this question awaits anyone who ventures to construct a scientific model of the mind. It snared even Freud, whose original, prepsychoanalytic model of the mind was a mechanical one of precisely the type Bion warns us against. Freud’s development as a psychoanalyst may be viewed as a progressive and generally successful attempt to extricate himself from it.

Freud’s early model portrayed the mind simply as a network of neurons in which electrical charges were stored and transmitted. These charges arose under the physical impact of environmental stimuli — light, sound waves, the pressure of physical contact on the skin, and so on. The overriding principles that governed the apparatus were the physical laws of thermodynamics, which dictated that its internal energy level must always be kept as low as possible. This meant that the mind needed to discharge continuously the energy it acquired from environmental stimuli. Hysteria, which this model was devised to explain, was the result of the system’s failure to discharge energy in the normal, thermodynamic manner. The build-up of excess energy could be relieved, however, if the stimulus that gave rise to it in the first place (and that had been forgotten) could be recalled in a vivid fashion.

Freud believed that the forgotten, offending stimulus was a sexual trauma that the patient had been subjected to in childhood. The therapist’s job was to expose this memory by tracking it down through a chain of associated thoughts, starting with the patient’s account of his or her symptoms and working back through time to the buried memory. Freud believed that the ideas whose path he was following were connected only by virtue of their being impressions of events that had occurred close to one another in time or space. Tracing a hysterical symptom to its source therefore meant following a chain of associations whose connections were accidents of space and time, and therefore meaningless.

Freud’s model illustrates our tendency to picture our minds as some familiar type of technological apparatus. The great British neurologist Sherrington, for example, compared the mind to a telegraphic network; Leibniz likened it to a mill; and the Greeks, it is said, spoke of the mind as a kind of catapult. In Freud’s model the mind worked like a series of electrical capacitors.

Bion’s patient, insofar as he was unable to perceive or appreciate the emotional realities of himself or his world, had a mind that would be adequately modeled by such a mechanical system. The severity of his disorder is a measure of the limitations of a mechanical model of the mind.

Now, as Freud set about trying to confirm his neurological model of hysteria by retrieving from his patients the memories of the external events that he supposed had triggered the electrical derangement in the apparatus, he was confounded by the intrusion into their associations of something other than the memories he was looking for. Some of what his patients told him was undoubtedly derived from half-forgotten experiences, but their accounts of their past also contained elements derived from fantasies. Although these fantasies were themselves unconscious, they produced in the patient’s conscious mind spurious “memories” that were, as far as the patient was concerned, indistinguishable from dim memories of actual childhood events. Freud realized that he could not himself reliably distinguish in patients’ stories what was history from what was history colored by fantasy, or even what was pure fantasy. The intrusion of unconscious fantasy cast a cloud over his whole project.

Because Freud could not eliminate this influence on his search for the source of hysteria, he began to study it. He saw that his patients were unable to distinguish these fantasies from memories of actual events not because they were psychotic — which they weren’t — but because of a peculiarity of the fantasies concerned. The fantasies were all unconscious, laden with emotion, and usually contained some kernel of truth, however minuscule and distorted. They portrayed events as the patient might, for one reason or another, have desired them to be. The unconscious, in other words, contains, in addition to faithful memories of material events, fantasies that are amalgams of memory and desire, and the two kinds of idea have precisely the same effect on the mind. The methodologic obstacle that this presented to Freud’s neurological model, which rested on the accurate retrieval of unconscious memories of actual events, was insuperable.

Psychic Reality

But then, over a period of months, Freud realized that this disastrous turn of events really didn’t matter after all, because his notion that material events made a direct impact on the mind was quite irrelevant to the study of neurosis. What mattered in the unconscious, at least as far as neurotic symptoms were concerned, was not the memory of external events, but how the patient had experienced them. It was, in other words, the subjective meaning of events, not their physiologic impact on the mental apparatus, that counted.

But the unconscious, subjective meaning of events is precisely what was represented in his patients’ unconscious fantasies about their history. The obstacle to Freud’s pursuit of a neurological solution was the key to a new kind of solution based on the subjective meaning of experience. What he needed to concern himself with were not buried memories per se, but the mixture of perception and emotion-laden fantasy that was the unconscious version of memory. He named this mixture psychic reality. In neurosis, he said, psychic reality is of greater importance than material reality.

This realization opened the way to a new kind of model of the mind, built on the investigation of psychic reality, that could avoid the pitfalls of the old mechanical models. In psychic reality, experiences and ideas are infused with meaning by the subject’s fears and desires. The concept of psychic reality entails emotional significance, the necessity of which was made so dramatically obvious by its absence in Bion’s patient. This is what made the new model revolutionary. By shifting his attention away from raw historical events and toward the melding of external reality with instinct-driven wishes and fears, Freud became a psychoanalyst.

To delineate and trace the unconscious emotional significance that events had for his patients, Freud needed to develop in himself a capacity to attend to the emotionality concealed in their words. This capacity is the ability to focus on patterns of psychological phenomena that seem at first to be meaningless or obscure, but that become inescapably meaningful when carefully observed. He needed, that is, to become a phenomenologist of unconscious meanings. Freud (1893) records how impressed he was when he first encountered a careful phenomenologist at work in the person of his teacher, the great French neurologist Charcot, who

used to look again and again at things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by day, till suddenly an understanding of them dawned on him. In his mind’s eye the apparent chaos presented by the continual repetition of the same symptoms then gave way to order.… He remarked again and again on the difficulty and the value of this kind of “seeing.” He would ask why it was that in medicine people only see what they have already learned to see.

[p. 12]

Charcot was able to see what he had previously overlooked for so long by remaining in contact with doubts and mysteries — the unexplained details presented by clinical phenomena — without embarking, in Keats’s words, on “an irritable search after fact and reason.” When Freud’s attempt to verify his neurological theory of hysteria ran afoul of his patients’ unconscious fantasies, he recalled his experience with Charcot, and he began to observe his patients’ states of mind as carefully as his teacher had the disordered movements of their bodies. His respect for the phenomenologic details of his patients’ emotional realities, regardless of how little sense they made at first, allowed him eventually to recognize their patterns and thus their crucial importance in the life of the mind.

Unlike sciences that are based on the perception of material facts, psychoanalysis is based on the perception of immaterial facts: psychological states in oneself and others. Freud called the faculty that enables us to perceive these “the organ for the perception of psychical qualities.” The systematic use of this organ — the one that a “natural experiment” had destroyed in Bion’s patient — constitutes the psychoanalytic method, out of which emerges all the evidence on which psychoanalytic theories rest.

Armed with this clinical methodology, Freud explored and roughly mapped out vast reaches of the unconscious, a process he later compared to the exploits of the conquistadors. His phenomenologic investigation of psychic reality, the locus of unconscious emotional meaning, produced a new model of the mind whose elements were meaning and emotion. This model, his most fundamental innovation, permitted him to arrive at an understanding first of dreams and then of neurosis, and finally at a rational method of treatment of neurosis.

Freud did not, however, abandon his neurological viewpoint entirely when he adopted the psychoanalytic one. His subsequent work was a mixture of the new psychoanalytic model and the older neurological model, elements of which he retained like cherished relics. The work of many of his successors has been a similar mixture of psychoanalytic and mechanical perspectives on the mind.

Psychoanalysis of Children

The British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein is an outstanding exception. The most striking feature of her work is the purity of its psychoanalytic perspective: her single-minded dedication to the phenomenology of emotional meaning. She was the first to devise a means of systematically investigating the unconscious psychic reality of children, a technical development that opened the way to the psychoanalysis of children. Her work with children showed that Freud’s concept of psychic reality — and therefore psychoanalysis — had descriptive and explanatory power that exceeded even that realized by Freud himself.

This may be seen, for example, in the question of the nature of the infant’s mind — or rather, of whether infants have minds. To the end of his life, Freud believed that the infant’s mind would turn out to be the kind of electrophysiologic apparatus, free of the complexities of emotional meaning, that he had originally hoped to find in the adult neurotic. His freedom to hold this view was enhanced by an almost complete absence of psychoanalytic data on the subject.

As Klein’s analyses of children began to supply the missing data, she was led inevitably to the conclusion that the minds of even small children and infants were far too complex, and turned too much on psychologically meaningful fantasies, to be fitted into a framework devoid of emotional significance. That is, she found that the complex logic of psychic reality not only could be but had to be employed to make sense of even the comparatively “simple” mind of the small child and infant. Although this complexity seemed improbable, it was perhaps no more improbable than Freud’s discovery that certain unconscious fantasies were functionally equivalent to memories. In any event, it was what her contact with the child’s unconscious indicated, and she tailored her theories to follow the implications of her phenomenologic findings.

Among the unconscious fantasies that shape children’s experience of their world, Klein found one group i...