Freud, Alder, and Jung

Discovering the Mind

Walter Kaufmann, Walter Kaufmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351519069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Walter Kaufmann completed this, the third and final volume of his landmark trilogy, shortly before his death in 1980. The trilogy is the crowning achievement of a lifetime of study, writing, and teaching. This final volume contains Kaufmann's tribute to Sigmund Freud, the man he thought had done as much as anyone to discover and illuminate the human mind. Kaufmann's own analytical brilliance seems a fitting reflection of Freud's, and his acute commentary affords fitting company to Freud's own thought.

Kaufmann traces the intellectual tradition that culminated in Freud's blending of analytic scientific thinking with humanistic insight to create "a poetic science of the mind." He argues that despite Freud's great achievement and celebrity, his work and person have often been misunderstood and unfairly maligned, the victim of poor translations and hostile critics. Kaufmann dispels some of the myths that have surrounded Freud and damaged his reputation. He takes pains to show how undogmatic, how open to discussion, and how modest Freud actually was.

Kaufmann endeavors to defend Freud against the attacks of his two most prominent apostate disciples, Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung. Adler is revealed as having been jealous, hostile, and an ingrate, a muddled thinker and unskilled writer, and remarkably lacking in self-understanding. Jung emerges in Kaufmann's depiction as an unattractive, petty, and envious human being, an anti-Semite, an obscure and obscurantist thinker, and, like Adler, lacking insight into himself. Freud, on the contrary, is argued to have displayed great nobility and great insight into himself and his wayward disciples in the course of their famous fallings-out.

PART▸I

Freud and His Poetic Science▸▸▸

5▸▸▸

I know that it was the recitation of Goethe’s beautiful essay “Nature” in a popular lecture shortly before my graduation that decided me to study medicine.

Thus ends the paragraph that begins with Freud’s birth, in a short autobiography he wrote in 1925.¹ Much earlier, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud had referred to “the incomparably beautiful essay by Goethe, for it was the recitation of this essay in a popular lecture that pushed me into the study of natural science when I was irresolute as I faced graduation.”²

Recently scholarship has come to the conclusion that the essay was not really by Goethe but by Georg Christoph Tobler.³ But when Goethe himself was shown this essay in his old age and asked whether he had written it, he said that he did not remember for sure but that he could have written it (his exact words will be considered in Section 11); and so it was included in his collected works. One of Goethe’s biographers says that the young Goethe expressed his view of nature “poetically in verse and prose, as well as in conversation. A young Swiss visitor to Weimar, Tobler, noted down a fragment of such a conversation—,‘On nature’ . . . .”⁴ In Freud’s time “Nature” was quite generally credited to Goethe, and it is noteworthy that he himself felt that he was following Goethe’s direction when he choose his profession. Not only that, but he wanted his readers to know this. Goethe had been a scientist as well as a poet, he had made a biological discovery (the intermaxillary bone), and he had written about the metamorphosis of plants. Beyond that he had championed a distinctive, non-Newtonian conception of science.⁵

Freud in 1891.

That Freud loved Goethe and was steeped in his writings should be obvious to all who study Freud. Goethe is cited and quoted constantly—on about two dozen pages of The Interpretation of Dreams alone, and on more than a hundred in the collected works. Kant, Goethe’s great antipode, and Newton, who was for Kant and ever so many others the quintessential scientist, meant nothing to Freud. Kant is mentioned a few times, Newton only once in passing.

Freud’s extraordinary style should be seen in this perspective. It cannot be praised too highly. No other man of science was such a great writer. Freud was not always pleased when people praised his style because the compliment was often two-edged—a way of putting him down as a scientist and a form of resistance to his psychology. It was very much like praise of Nietzsche as, of course, a great stylist. It was felt that anyone who wrote that well could not be a serious philosopher or scientist.

Freud’s style, like Nietzsche’s, breathed defiance of the German academic establishment. It was experienced as a provocation though it was born of love of literature and a clarity of thought not equaled by any major German philosopher, except for Nietzsche. Yet Freud’s prose was much more rational and patient than Nietzsche’s and hence clearer in the long run. Nietzsche could formulate a thought as lucidly as possible but then delighted in sudden reversals, in startling us by not staying with a train of thought and asking us instead to reconsider not only our own position but also his. And Nietzsche’s wit was unruly and refused to stay in harness, while Freud was always able to employ his sense of humor to his purpose.

I shall quote Freud a great deal in this chapter, not so much to illustrate his style, which is bound to suffer in translation, but simply because I cannot sum up what he said better than he did. With other writers who are known for their good style it is usually possible at least to tighten the argument and state some points more briefly. What is impressive about Freud’s writing is not ornamentation; he was about as far from the art nouveau of fin-de-siècle Vienna as a writer could be. Rather he did not waste words but managed to state and explain even the most outrageous ideas tersely, clearly, and persuasively.

Asked about his style, Freud once said: “My conscious and deliberate model was Lessing.”⁶ In an extremely informative study of Freud’s style, Walter Schô-nau has explained this statement very plausibly: “It will have been above all the clarity, honesty, and sobriety of his polemical scholarly treatises that Freud felt to be exemplary”; also the fact “that Lessing presents his thoughts not as the finished products of an act of thought but instead presents the process of thinking itself.”⁷

Freud also loved Heine, of whom Nietzsche had said in Ecce Homo; “It will be said one day that Heine and I have been by far the foremost artists of the German language.”⁸ In 1908, when Ecce Homo was published posthumously, Thomas Mann did say in “A Note on Heine”⁹ that Heine’s polemic against Ludwig Borne “contains the most inspired [genialste] German prose before Nietzsche.” It would be pointless to argue at length about who wrote the best German prose after Luther, but the following list of six writers may at least point to a very un-Kantian, antiacademic tradition in German thought: Lessing and Goethe, Heine and Nietzsche, Freud and Kafka. What these writers share is a profound feeling for human suffering coupled with extraordinary lucidity and wit—qualities that have not distinguished the mainstream of German prose. But there is this tradition, too, and it is important to see how Freud stands in it.

6▸▸▸

Awareness of both traditions helps us to understand Freud’s otherwise puzzling attitude toward philosophy. When he was almost forty, he wrote his friend Wilhelm Fliess, on January 1, 1896:

I see how, via the detour of being a physician, you are reaching your first ideal of understanding human beings as a physiologist, even as I most secretly nourish the hope of arriving on these same paths at my original goal of philosophy. For that is what I originally wanted when it was not yet at all clear to me for what I might be in the world.

The letter of April 2 is even more explicit:

If both of us are still granted a few years for quiet work, we shall surely leave behind something that can justify our existence. In this consciousness I feel strong against all daily cares and troubles. As a young person I knew no other longing than that for philosophical knowledge [!], and now I am about to fulfill it as I move from medicine to psychology. I became a therapist against my will . . .

From Freud’s books one occasionally gains the impression that he did not care for philosophy. Perhaps an unpublished letter of November 4, 1937, contains the most extreme formulation:

Dear Sir,

Unfortunately you have sent your, no doubt, valuable work to a man to whom nature has denied not only all understanding of music but also all philosophical talent. Hence I am really in no position to follow your thoughts, not to speak of judging them. What, then, is to be done with your manuscript? In case you want it back I request a clearly written address as I am not sure I can read it.¹⁰

Of course, it was generous of Freud to even acknowledge this unsolicited manuscript, and one might suppose that any excuse for not reading it would have served him. But he was a man of extraordinary honesty and would not have said what he believed to be wrong. Surely he felt that he really lacked all talent—and patience—for the kind of philosophy that was cultivated at the universities; and that feeling was shared by Goethe and Nietzsche, as well as Lessing, Heine, and Kafka.

Specifically, we can distinguish at least three characteristics that Freud associated with academic philosophy and disliked. First, its abstractness, which had repelled Goethe, too. Freud had no mind to stray that far from real life.

The second point is subtle but profound and important. We find it in the chapter on misspeaking in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. While Freud did not mention philosophy in this connection, the passage is wonderfully applicable to Kant and Hegel, not to speak of the philosophers who were teaching at the German and Austrian universities in Freud’s time:

A clear and unambiguous way of writing shows us that the author is here at one with himself, and where we find forced and tortuous expressions that, as an ¡Austrian] idiom puts it very well, squint in more than one direction, we recognize either an insufficiently worked out and complicated thought or the stifled voice of the author’s self-criticism.¹¹

Elsewhere he noted his admiration for two epigrams he found in Ludwig Borne:¹² “What most authors would need to become better than they are is not spirit but character,” and “Honesty is the source of all genius, and men would be more ingenious [geistreicher] if they were more ethical.” Similar sentiments have been voiced by other rebels. Einstein said: “Scientific greatness is essentially a question of character. The main thing is to refuse to make rotten compromises.”¹³ And Nietzsche: “Error is cowardice.”¹⁴

Freud’s third objection to the kind of philosophy for which he did not care was formulated by Heine in a poem that Freud admired. He liked to cite the last two lines,¹⁵ but the whole is worth quoting:

Too fragmentary are world and life—

But the German professor produces a knife

And knows how to patch up life till it turns

Into an intelligible system one learns;

With his bathrobe rags and long nightcaps

He mends the world and plugs all the gaps.¹⁶

Kant actually wrote his books “in his bathrobe and slippers, wearing a nightcap,”¹⁷ and there is a well-known lithograph by L. Sebbers showing Hegel in his study, in 1828, in similar attire.¹⁸ This critique of the German professor of philosophy is widely associated with Kierkegaard and existentialism, but Heine wrote this poem before Kierkegaard was ten years old, and Kierkegaard, who admired Heine, may have known it. The German existentialist professors, Jaspers and Heidegger, were far from pressing any such criticism against Kant and Hegel. Not only did it remain for Freud to quote Heine, but in many ways Freud stayed far closer to the problems of human existence than any of the major existentialists. Much of what many readers look for in vain in the philosophical works of the existentialists is actually to be found in Freud’s books. Jaspers and Heidegger and even Kierkegaard and Sartre made “rotten compromises” with academic philosophy, while Freud aligned himself with Lessing, Goethe, and Nietzsche.

In the last lecture of what Freud himself considered his last major work (1933), the Heine quotation appears in the following context:

Of the three powers that can challenge the territory of science, religion is the only serious enemy. Art is almost always harmless and beneficent; it does not wish to be anything but illusion. . . . Philosophy is not opposed to science; it gives itself the airs of a science, works partly with the same methods, but parts company with it by clinging to the illusion that it can offer a gapless and coherent world picture which, however, must collapse every time our knowledge makes some new progress. In its method it is mistaken insofar as it overestimates the cognitive value of our logical operations and sometimes also acknowledges other sources of knowledge, like the intuition. And often enough one feels that the mockery of a poet (H. Heine ) was not unjustified when he said of the philosopher:

With his bathrobe rags and long nightcaps

He mends the world and plugs all the gaps.

But philosophy has no influence on the vast majority of people; it is of interest only to a small number even in the thin upper crust of the intellectuals, and scarcely comprehensible for all others. Religion, however, is a tremendous power . . ,¹⁹

What Freud here calls philosophy is the kind of philosophy that had kept him from approaching his “original goal” more directly, and he did not choose to call the fulfillment of his early aspirations his “philosophy.” That name, he felt, had been preempted by others, and he wanted no part of it. Moreover, he considered religion a serious enemy, and philosophy, as practiced by the professors, inconsequential. He was eager to reach a much wider audience than they did. Insofar as he eventually arrived at his “original goal of philosophy,” it was not philosophy à la Kant but philosophy in another, more literary tradition.

7▸▸▸

It follows that Freud is not at all easy to translate. About scientific theories one may be able to write good books on the basis of translations, but not about Goethe or Heine. Their greatness is too closely tied to their language. Freud represents an intermediate case.

Since the Nazis proscribed psychoanalysis and Freud himself emigrated to England, most of the literature on him has been written in English, not in German. Gradually it has come to be considered quite respectable to write about him without checking the original German texts to find out what he actually said.

On the whole, the English-speaking world has done remarkably well by him. I remember how on arriving in the United States from Germany in 1939 I discovered the Modern Library Giant The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (1938), which contained six of his books in a single volume and cost only $1.25—and at Macy’s was sold for 89 cents. Nothing remotely comparable had ever been available in Germany or Austria. But on closer inspection it turned out that the dreams, the “Freudian slips,” and the jokes were not always those reported by Freud; they were often contributed by the translator because they depended on words that were similar in one language but not in the other. This practice had the master’s approval. Thus he wrote Edoardo Weiss, who translated him into Italian:

The way you translate dreams and mischievements by substituting your own examples for mine is obviously the only right way to do it. Unfortunately I have no guarantee that this is also done in other translations, most of which are not made by analysts.²⁰

What mattered to Freud was that his readers in other countries should find psychoanalysis plausible, and he did not want them to feel that it all depended on oddities of the German language that had to be explained in footnotes. Up to a point, of course, psychoanalysis could be understood and discussed on the basis of Dr. Abraham A. Brill’s English v...