Encountering Freud

The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis

Paul Roazen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780887382956
• eBook ISBN: 9781351317061
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this volume Paul Roazen examines different national responses to Freud and the beginnings of psychoanalysis. He examines Freud's work in the contexts of law, society, and class, as well as other forms of psychology.

Encountering Freud includes a brilliant essay on Freud and the question of psychoanalysis' contribution to radical thought, in contrast to the conservative tradition. Roazen takes up the extravagant claims of Marcuse and Reich, and sees the risks of then overglamorization of the beginnings of psychoanalysis as a profession. Roazen views the legacies of Harry Stack Sullivan, Helene Deutsch, and Erik H. Erikson as less rich because their work conformed to the social status quo. He sees Freud's inability to avoid an ambiguous outcome as a lack of concern with normality and a refusal to own up to the wide variety of psychological solutions he found both therapeutically tolerable and humanly desirable.

Roazen concludes with a series of explorations on the dichotomies Freud left behind: clinical discoveries versus philosophical standpoints; the relationship of normality to nihilism; and a defense of a therapeutic setting based on trained specialists versus a therapeutic approach encouraging self-expression. This is a volume that utilizes a sharp focus on Freud and his followers and dissenters to explore the question of political psychology at one end and psych-history at the other end of analysis.

1

The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis

Freud studies have entered a new phase. At least from the perspective of one who has been following the subject for the last twenty-five years, the current scholarly output on the founder of psychoanalysis has several distinctive features. Formerly, books on Freud tended to be written by self-directed individuals driven by a passionate if sometimes idiosyncratic interest in the material. Of course there has been a steady stream of orthodox psychoanalytic embellishments to the portrait of Freud that Ernest Jones tried to establish. But in addition to such relatively unadventurous and professionally self-serving research, there has been a long line of independent efforts to document and appraise Freud’s life.

William McGrath’s Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria (1986) is a sign that professional historians have entered the field in strength and with a determination to link Freud’s work to its social and cultural surroundings. Professor McGrath is especially interested in the period of the 1890s, but explores whatever evidence is available about the intellectual origins of Freud’s ideas.

In general, McGrath is following the inspiration of the eminent historian Carl Schorske. McGrath argues: “Freud, the most political of adolescents, turned in the wake of his political disillusionment to the philosophical, scientific realm to express his radical impulses.”¹ Schorske had been the first professional historian to emphasize Freud’s political frustrations being transformed into psychoanalytic insights. It is welcome that the study of the early Freud should now be in the hands of responsible academic scholarship; as long as research on Freud is distinct from the sectarian partisanship associated with the ideological wars that have marked the history of psychoanalysis, we can be most grateful.

Yet McGrath’s book, sound as far as it goes, has drawbacks that deserve pointing out. It is curious that he ignores, both in his bibliography and in his text, so many of his predecessors. I do not understand how he cannot mention, for instance, books such as David Bakan’s Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958), Martin Freud’s Glory Reflected (1957), Erich Fromm’s Sigmund Freud’s Mission (1959). Helen Puner’s Freud (1947), Hanns Sachs’ Freud (1945), and Fritz Wittels’ Freud (1924). (None of my own books gets cited either.) Of course the Freud industry is immense, and no writer can credit everyone. But in McGrath’s case, it is not just those sources that he neglects to mention that is troubling; equally striking is the excessive attention he pays to authorities who are highly suspect. There is every reason to believe, for example, that Max Schur’s book on Freud was filled with partisanship both in terms of what Schur wrote as well as in what he chose to leave out, yet McGrath does not seem to be on his toes here or regarding other orthodox psychoanalytic books and articles on Freud.

McGrath’s book is fine for what it does. But the problem is that he approaches his subject with too narrow a frame of reference. Like others before him, he has been unduly taken in by Freud’s own point of view. For example, he devotes altogether too much attention to Freud’s relationship to his father, while excluding any attention at all to Freud’s conflicted ties to his mother. Even when it comes to Freud’s father, McGrath is too credulous in accepting Freud’s version of the impact on his life of the death of Jakob Freud. Otto Rank long ago suggested that Freud’s account of his father’s death was mixed up with, if not a defense against, Freud’s feelings about the loss of his friendship with his mentor, Josef Breuer. In any event, McGrath not only fails to explore Freud’s relationship with Breuer, but also does not go into any discussion of Freud’s marriage to his wife Martha. McGrath’s bare mention of Freud’s sister-in-law Minna will not do, because Freud is reliably said to have declared that she was as much a support to him in the 1890s as his now famous intimate friend Wilhelm Fliess.

As Carl G. Jung pointed out long ago, childhood memories can be reconstructed for purposes of serving adult conflicts; therefore, Freud’s accounts of his earliest years need to be approached with the skepticism bred by psychoanalytic teachings. It is surprising that McGrath takes so seriously Freud’s idea about the significance of the death of his one-year-younger brother Julius in infancy. Although other writers have recently blown Freud’s interest in cocaine out of proportion, McGrath scarcely mentions it here.

He does devote many pages to ingenious interpretations of Freud’s account of his dreams. Yet such exercises have a scholastic air, not just due to Freud’s being capable of disguising his dream material, but because, after all, we lack the dreamer’s genuine free associations, which Freud considered essential to dream interpretations. Moreover, given the restricted range of McGrath’s outlook, it hardly seems that this minute attention to details succeeds in focusing on the forest rather than the individual trees.

Strangely enough, McGrath does not seem to appreciate adequately the uniqueness of Freud’s genius. It reads flatfootedly to be told that Freud’s “disillusionment was deeply significant and constituted a substantial barrier to the normal process of maturation. Having lost faith in the example of manhood presented by his father, Freud had no adequate model to follow and had difficulty completing the process of growing up.”² Such psychologizing smacks of the historical sin of presentism, looking at the past through the spectacles of the most pedestrian of contemporary outlooks; it should instead be the job of the historian to put us into a world wholly unlike our own rather than to view Freud as a garden-variety 1980s’ neurotic.

In general, McGrath would have done well to keep in mind Freud’s later career as well; in that way he could not possibly have written that “there is no reason to believe” that Freud in the 1890s was “then a more active or talkative analyst than later.”³ On the contrary, all the evidence indicates that after Freud contracted cancer in 1923 he did indeed change his practices as an analyst.

It is a welcome relief that McGrath’s book indicates that the study of Freud is now an accepted part of the academic historical profession. I hope, in light of what I have already written here, that it does not sound patronizing if I say now that McGrath’s book is wholly serious and lacking in partisanship. The limitations of his work only serve to remind us how little we still know about Freud’s early struggles and the history of psychoanalysis’s beginnings despite all the available literature.

Marianne Krüll’s Freud and His Father (1986) first appeared in German in 1979 and influenced McGrath’s Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis; both books consequently share some of the same problems. Freud and His Father was, however, written by a sociologist inspired by a clinical concern with family therapy and focuses on the problem of Freud’s theory of seduction; its appearance in an English translation had to be delayed temporarily due to the sensationalism associated with Jeffrey M. Masson’s The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1984). The New York publisher of Freud and His Father reasonably feared that any apparent similarity between Krüll’s thesis and that of Masson would damage Freud and His Father, yet in contrast to Masson’s baffling success in seducing the interest of the media, little attention has been paid to Krüll’s book.

Krüll, like Masson, is fascinated by the Freud of the 1890s and she too regrets Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory, but her reasons are entirely different and lead in another theoretical direction. Her objection to Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex sounds similar to Masson’s, since it is couched in terms of a preference for the earlier seduction hypothesis. But for Masson childhood sexual abuse is the be-all and end-all of existence; he literally defines reality by that perversion. In contrast, Krüll regrets that Freud failed to rid the seduction theory of an unnecessary fixation on sexuality.

Krüll’s central idea is that Freud’s self-analysis was blunted by feelings of guilt associated with the 1896 death of his father; according to Krüll Freud yielded to a taboo not to delve into Jakob’s conflicts and therefore Freud “never reached his own real childhood experiences.”⁴ She regards it as a guilt-laden mistake for Freud to have extended his early emphasis on instinct; he had originally proposed that sexual frustration lay behind the so-called actual (current) neuroses, and after 1896 he went on to argue that sexuality, in the form of fantasy, encompassed all the psychological suffering of the psychoneuroses (hysteria and obsessionality). In Krüll’s view a true psychoanalytic theory would not have seen neurosis as caused by forbidden desires. Freud’s elaboration of his theory of libido and his concern with phylogenetic inheritance meant that he did not have to look “to the experiential context for the explanation of human behavior.”⁵

Although Krüll does not mention Alfred Adler in any way as a precursor in this connection, she has in mind that Freud should have “expanded his seduction theory into a ‘misguidance’ theory: the child is misguided by his or her parents or primary caretakers and hence develops neurotic aberrations.”⁶ Such an approach could “at one and the same time … have been a theory of ‘guidance’ toward socially acceptable behavior.”⁷ The preface to Freud and His Father by Helm Stierlin hails “the new paradigm of family therapy,”⁸ and Krüll’s book constitutes a biographical explanation of the reasons Freud missed out on insights that seem important to therapists today.

Krüll’s book is full of hard work, but I cannot agree with her general thesis, which suffers from the historiographic mistake of thinking that what we now hold to be true must have somehow been missed by Freud. Nobody but God can know everything. The study of the history of ideas ought to expand the limits of our toleration and show us how different writers in past eras tried to come to terms with enduring human dilemmas. I find the notion of progress in intellectual history mistaken and repellent; I do not believe, for example, that Freud knew more than Jean-Jacques Rousseau or even that the most brilliant of contemporary family therapists, like Helm Stierlin, could be somehow superior to Freud. Certainly many others long before now have objected, both as feminists as well as humanists, to the patriarchalism of Oedipal thinking.

Concentrating more narrowly on Krüll’s argument: I think she is absolutely right in thinking that Freud’s theory of the “actual” neurosis was based on Freud’s own sexual difficulties. In the early 1890s Freud gave an account of both neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis that demonstrably sounds like a self-confession. Freud left us so much evidence in the way of correspondence, and it has been possible to reconstruct enough about his sexuality that his public denunciation of masturbation, as well as his cardiac neurosis, can each be readily linked to his unsatisfactory sexual practices. Freud accepted his situation of the 1890s, bowed to his fate, and lived with his neurosis. Long ago Wilhelm Reich criticized both Freud and his followers for not being as emancipated in life as their theories might have justified. One of Freud’s former patients from the 1930s that I interviewed in the mid-1960s stressed Freud’s continued belief in the toxic effects of “abnormal” sexual practices, whatever the alterations in some of Freud’s other theoretical views.

Krüll does convincingly establish that Freud dropped the whole subject of the actual neurosis because he “believed he had solved it once and for all.”⁹ His theory did, as she says, help Freud “explain his own neurotic symptoms, albeit not holding out the promise of a cure.”¹⁰ Krüll however, then proposes that it was the death of Freud’s father in 1896 that propelled him to think that the Oedipus theory, with its emphasis on the role of fantasy, could account for psychoneuroses. Freud thought that these neuroses of defense, in contrast to actual neuroses, were to be accounted for by past sexual experiences. Krüll proposes that when Freud talked about the pathogenicity of the sexual strivings of children, rather than the seduction by adults, he went wrong; she knows of course most historians take the view that instead of it being an error to have replaced the seduction theory with the Oedipus complex, that is when psychoanalysis proper began.

But it seems to me that, like McGrath, Krüll is naively wrongheaded in believing that Jakob Freud’s death was in any way as momentous to Freud as he himself claimed. Freud often chose to escape from the threatening present into the safety of the distant past. Krüll does write, in connection with Freud’s conflict with Carl G. Jung, that Freud “once again invented a theory that shifted the cause of his anxiety back into a legendary past.”¹¹ It would have been helpful to highlight that Jung was the first to emphasize that it is a neurotic characteristic to use the past defensively.

One would have thought that scholarly thinking meant not taking Freud at his every word. It is all very well and good, and no doubt clinically sound, to highlight the significance of family dynamics and the limitations of mechanistic instinctualist reasoning. But why on earth insist that Freud must be like us? It is too rationalistic to propose that if we see something as important that Freud did not, then he must have been hiding from it, and that an adequate explanation can be found in any solitary trauma such as that associated with the death of his father.

Freud did indeed give up the notion that his own father was perverted, a sexual seducer of at least some of his children. But if Freud abandoned his no doubt nutty idea, it may have been this bizarre reproach of Jakob, not to mention the errors Freud imposed on patients by alleging that they too had been sexually abused in childhood, that helped Freud to some self analysis in the 1890s. Krüll, however, thinks that Jakob’s death put an end to Freud’s efforts at se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis
• 2 The Old World
• 3 America
• 4 Letter Writing
• 5 Insanity and the Law
• 6 The Tausk Problem
• 7 Marxism
• 8 Ego Psychology
• 9 Biography
• 10 Brief Lives
• 11 Heretics
• 12 Loyalism
• 13 Political Psychology
• 14 Psychohistory
• 15 Sages
• Conclusion
• A Bibliography of Paul Roazen
• Index