Psychoanalytic Thinking

A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice

Donald L. Carveth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351360531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychoanalyse

Avideo of Don Carveth discussingthe book and its subject matter can be accessed using thefollowing webURL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7tGq0uEtU

Since the classical Freudian and ego psychology paradigms lost their position of dominance in the late 1950s, psychoanalysis became a multi-paradigm science with those working in the different frameworks increasingly engaging only with those in the same or related intellectual "silos." Beginning with Freud's theory of human nature and civilization, Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice proceeds to review and critically evaluate a series of major post-Freudian contributions to psychoanalytic thought.

In response to the defects, blind spots and biases in Freud's work, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan, Erich Fromm, Donald Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, Heinrich Racker, Ernest Becker amongst others offered useful correctives and innovations that are, nevertheless, themselves in need of remediation for their own forms of one-sidedness. Through Carveth's comparative exploration, readers will acquire a sense of what is enduringly valuable in these diverse psychoanalytic contributions, as well as exposure to the dialectically deconstructive method of critique that Carveth sees as central to psychoanalytic thinking at its best. Carveth violates the taboo against speaking of the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real unless one is a Lacanian, or the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions unless one is a Kleinian, or id, ego, superego, ego-ideal and conscience unless one is a Freudian ego psychologist, and so on.

Out of dialogue and mutual critique, psychoanalysis can over time separate the wheat from the chaff, collect the wheat, and approach an ever-evolving synthesis. Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists and, more broadly, to readers in philosophy, social science and critical social theory.

Chapter 1

Civilization and Its Discontents

A Kleinian re-view

As early as his 1908 essay on “Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness, Freud was preoccupied with what he saw as the conflict between socialization pressures and our sexuality and aggression. But whereas in this early essay he places the term “civilized” in quotation marks to indicate ironic distance and goes on to offer a critique of an excessively repressive civilization, some two decades later, in Civilization and Its Discontents, the aging Freud (1930) has pretty much switched sides. Now civilization is a “thin veneer” protecting us from our own and others’ barbarous drives. While a few people of exceptional strength of character may be able to inhibit their antisocial drives without deceiving themselves about them, and a few may have the talent to redirect or “sublimate” them in prosocial directions, the majority are forced to resort to repression, setting up the inevitable disguised return of the repressed in neurosis, the price of civilized order.

Civilization, Freud concluded, requires inhibition, especially of what he had come to view as our innate aggressive drive, which though exacerbated by frustration was, for him, ultimately a biologically-given, asocial or antisocial element of our human nature:

men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.

(p. 111)

To support his view he quotes the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus: Homo homini lupus est—man is a wolf to man. But this comparison is deeply unfair … to the wolves, a highly prosocial species that, to my knowledge, has never been guilty of designing death camps, or dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations, or videotaping the rape, torture and murder of their victims for future enjoyment of their humiliation and pain. Freud’s thinking often transcends common sense, but here he succumbs to it, projecting the perverse destructiveness unique to humans onto animals, claiming all this “reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien” (p. 111).

In the face of the devastation of Europe brought about by the First World War, together with the masochistic self-destructiveness he had come to recognize in so many patients, Freud (1920) finally overcame his long-standing resistance to acknowledging aggression as an equally fundamental part of human nature as sexuality and announced his final dual-drive theory of Eros and Thanatos. He then proceeded to misattribute (project) the naive optimism he had earlier shared with Enlightenment thought onto the Bible:

Why have we ourselves needed such a long time before we decided to recognize an aggressive instinct? … We should probably have met with little resistance if we had wanted to ascribe an instinct with such an aim to animals. But to include it in the human constitution appears sacrilegious; it contradicts too many religious presumptions and social conventions. No, man must be naturally good or at least good-natured. If he occasionally shows himself brutal, violent or cruel, these are only passing disturbances of his emotional life, for the most part provoked, or perhaps only the consequences of the inexpedient social regulations which he has hitherto imposed on himself.

(Freud, 1933, p. 103)

In this passage, Freud seems entirely unaware of the fact that the optimism of his own earlier thought that he now mocks belongs not to the Bible, but to elements of Enlightenment thought and the social sciences stemming from it. It was his own loyalty to the anti-religious Enlightenment and his estrangement from the Bible (and the father who beseeched him to return to it) that prevented him from overcoming his own naiveté until the First World War and his own clinical experience finally made him see what the Bible had recognized all along. In its vision of human beings as fallen, perverse and broken sinners, even after salvation or redemption, the Bible is far more congruent with Freud’s late, much darker view of human nature than he was ever prepared to acknowledge. Unlike Freud, however, the Bible does not naturalize or biologize human destructiveness, instead recognizing it as a misuse of our uniquely human freedom and self-awareness—that is, it maintains an essentially existentialist, rather than a biologically and/or environmentally determinist view (Fromm, 1941, 1973; Herberg, 1957; Niebuhr, 1957).

Naturally, I am in no way disputing the fact of the human aggressiveness, destructiveness and sadism to which Freud calls our attention, only his characterization of it as bestial or animalistic. Like Freud, we commonly project onto animals the dark, uniquely human traits we do not wish to acknowledge in ourselves. In The Uniqueness of Man, the distinguished biologist Sir Julian Huxley (1943) argued that now that the battle waged on behalf of Darwin by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, had been won, we could afford to turn our attention to what a unique and truly bizarre kind of animal we are, both biologically and psychologically. It is my experience that, today, any mention of this line of thought, any stress on the discontinuity between humanity and the rest of nature, any emphasis upon our uniquely symbolic consciousness, is likely to bring down on one’s head a chorus of criticism of the supposed arrogant anthropocentrism entailed in any such claim and its blindness toward humanity’s ecological destructiveness. Such critics generally fail to realize they themselves are now making the case for “the uniqueness of man”: the uniquely destructive consequences for both human beings and their ecosystems that follow from our relative freedom from the instinctual controls and biological determinants governing the behavior of other species.

We seem reluctant to recognize the uniqueness of our destructiveness. We like to think of it as “inhuman” when, regrettably, it is one of the things most human about us. We engage in massive projection of this uniquely human destructiveness on to animals that, unlike us, mostly fight and kill to survive and protect their young, not to impose their favored abstract ideologies upon one another, nor to amass great wealth while impoverishing others, nor to enjoy sadistic pleasure. The latter requires the uniquely human capacity for empathy, by which I do not mean sympathy, but the purely cognitive capacity for what George Mead (1934) called “taking the role of the other”—imagining oneself in the other’s shoes, as it were. Without this capacity the sadist would be unable to enjoy the other’s pain or humiliation, or the con man to find the words needed to manipulate his mark. Empathy and sympathy are two quite different things. Empathy informs me you are in pain; sympathy enables me to care and wish to help. A student will occasionally counter the idea of sadism as a uniquely human trait, protesting: “My cat is sadistic! Look at how it tortures and toys with the mouse it captured!” I point out that if you take away the mouse and substitute a crumpled bit of paper, the cat will do the same thing. It enjoys batting around the mouse or the ball of paper, but not because it attributes suffering to either. Sadism is a human capacity we prefer to think of as “inhuman.”

Look at our everyday language.

“He’s a real animal!”

“She’s a parasite.”

“He’s a leech.”

“She’s a bitch.”

“He’s a snake in the grass.”

“She’s a bloodsucker.”

“His behavior was beastly.”

“She’s a cow.”

“He’s a dirty dog.”

“She’s a vulture.”

“He’s a total rat.”

“She’s a vixen.”

“He’s a pig.”

“She’s a Black Widow.”

“He’s a cockroach.”

Then there are the famous human “monsters” we “bestialize”:

“Julius Streicher: the Beast of Franconia.”

“Ilse Koch: the Beast (Witch, Bitch) of Buchenwald.”

“Clifford Olsen: the Beast of British Columbia.”

“Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS.”

Recent research on the moral behavior of animals (De Wall, 1997, 2009) tends to indicate that, for the most part, they are not “beastly,” at least not in the ways humans often are. Only human beings capable of empathy can invent diabolical forms of torment.

As Erikson (1950) pointed out, Freud offers us a “centaur model of man” that conceives our fundamental conflict as between mind and body, culture and nature, the uniquely human vs. the animal in man. While body, nature and animal are conceived as the source of our antisocial inclinations (id), reason (ego) and culture (superego) are viewed as prosocial. Freud viewed human sexuality and aggression as arising from biological, somatic sources, by which he did not mean the brain, but bodily zones. He resorted to a biological rather than a psychological or existential conception of human passion. It is true he chose not to use the German term instinkt referring to animal instinct, but the term triebe referring to human drives, which differ from animal instincts in being far more open to learning and social influences in their aims and objects, which can be displaced, reversed, etc., and are to a considerable extent acquired rather than biologically fixed or pre-programmed. It is true that the conception of Freud as a biologically reductionist instinct theorist was made worse by James Strachey’s mistranslation of triebe as instinct instead of drive. But in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, Freud (1915a) writes:

If now we apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an “instinct” appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body.

(pp. 121–122)

He insists the triebe arise from somatic sources—despite his admission that he could never specify the somatic source of the aggressive drive. The result is Freud’s (1923) mind/body dualism in which, adapting Plato’s metaphor, reason (ego) is the human rider attempting to guide the beast (appetite, id) upon which it is precariously perched:

The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own.

(p. 24)

While the image is vivid and evocative of our profound sense of conflict, it is ultimately misleading. For our sexual and aggressive passions do not in fact “bubble up” from our animal bodies but “trickle down” from our uniquely human minds. Whereas for Freud friendship and a host of other social goods are transformations of sexuality, we know clinically that sexuality may itself at times be a transformation of something else; it may be driven by aggression, for example, or a need to ward off depression or an unbearable state of fragmentation of the self.

Freud (1920) began to recognize the inadequacy of his drive theory when, after the devastation of the First World War, he finally (implicitly if not explicitly) broke with Darwin and re-situated psychoanalytic theory on the basis of a new Greek dualism that echoed the work of his pre-Socratic precursor Empedocles for whom all of reality reflects the struggle between philia (love) and neikos (strife). The fact that Freud chose to give capitalized Greek names to his two new forces, Eros and Thanatos, is an indication that he was moving far beyond his earlier biological reductionism, subsuming the earlier sexual drive in a far wider “principle” of life, integration and connectedness, while counterposing this to the utterly un-Darwinian notion of a “drive” toward death. While biological reductionism was not transcended, for he insisted the death drive had an organic foundation, his thinking was clearly tending in a more psychological, philosophical and existential direction.

This is not the place to trace Freud’s own and his followers’ struggles to interpret in shifting ways the meaning of Thanatos, nor to explore the pessimistic consequences for social theory entailed in his biologizing of human passion. Instead, some three decades ago, both I myself (Carveth, 1984a) and Eli Sagan (1988) raised a psychoanalytic question: What latent content, what unconscious phantasy, may lie behind the manifest content of Freud’s sociological theory? Since Freud himself was not loath to psychoanalyze philosophy, it would be unfair to privilege psychoanalytic theory and forebear from the psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis. Beneath the narrative of a frustrating civilization, one demanding instinctual renunciation and engendering resentment and discontent, do we detect the presence of the projected castrating father-imago and, possibly beneath that, the preoedipal mother, both our first nurturer and first tyrant and oppressor? Is Civilization and Its Discontents more a projection of an almost universal castration phantasy than a contribution to social theory? Certainly most sociologists, having a profound sense of what society gives us rather than what it is imagined to take away, have for the most part not been inclined to accept this aspect of Freud’s thinking.

In recent decades it has become clear that in blaming the alleged animal in man and valorizing reason and culture, Freud got it backward: that much or most of the evil humans do—their racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, etc.—is learned or acquired from culture (superego), while our prosocial inclinations appear to have a biological basis. In associating the id with our allegedly natural destructiveness we have been blinded to the loving, caring and sympathetic inclinations grounded in the innate, unlearned attachment systems we share with other primates. At the same time, through a series of ingenious experiments, recent infant research shows that children as young as three months of age distinguish right from wrong, good from bad, and prefer the former (Bloom, 2010, 2013). This is not evidence of an entirely “innate” morality, for even three-month-old infants have had considerable opportunity to identify with the loving nurturance of their caretakers. However it does demonstrate that the roots of conscience arise in early attachment, long before the internalizations of cultural ideology at five or six years of age that Freud described as forming the superego. It is high time that psychoanalysts deconstruct the false equations of the id with immoral nature (when much of what is truly moral in us stems from innate attachment tendencies and early identifications with the nurturer), and the superego with moral nurture (when a great deal of our immorality is culturally acquired).

Today it is the fashion among liberal-minded psychoanalysts to advance the wishful illusion that due to his support for free clinics (Danto, 2005) and some degree of income redistribution grounded in his experience of poverty as a child (Freud, 1933, Lecture 35), Freud was at the very least a liberal, if not a social democrat (Richards, 2016). Anyone interested in scholarly objectivity, however, will be forced to take note of such contrary facts as the inscription he wrote in presenting one of his books to Mussolini: “Benito Mussolini with the respectful greetings of an old man who recognizes in the ruler the cultural hero” (Roazen, 2005, p. 33). In its stress upon the dangerously regressive and irrational proclivities of groups. Freud’s (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, like the works of LeBon, Tarde and others, contributes to the literature on “mob psychology” produced by bourgeois thinkers fearful of the power of the masses to make revolution, as they had in 1789 and again in 1917. Given the central emphasis in his group psychology on the need for strong leadership to prevent “regression,” his obliviousness to groups organized instead by democratically instituted charters of rights and responsibilities, his disparaging remarks about the proletariat as lazy, stupid and oversexed, his view of America, including its democracy, as “a mistake; a gigantic mistake” (Jones, 1955, p. 67), and his organization of the IPA along authoritarian, top-down lines with secret committees dedicated to the preservation of the faith, and so on, Freud’s gesture of respect toward the Great Leader becomes intelligible. His view of the superego as the source of law and order and a bulwark against barbarism formed a central element of his increasingly reactionary sociopolitical vision—a perspective that may well have inclined readers such as Henry Kissinger (Pound, 2014) to view Western or, more accurately, American power as the superego defending civilization against the unruly, primitive id forces threatening from the East. Despite the importance Lacan gives to le-nom-du-père, he was quick to recognize the cultural conformism of the adaptationist Freudian ego psychology dominant in America for decades.

The valorization of the superego as the preserver of law and order never sat well with Freud’s clinical insight into its destructiveness and its central role in psychopathology. The superego, he explained, is formed by repressing aggression and turning it back against the ego through the process Anna Freud (1936) described as “identification with the aggressor.” Instead of attacking hated others, we identify with them and aggress against or punish ourselves. It is easy to forget that suicides are self-murderers. Among Freud’s greatest and enduring contributions is his discovery of the unconscious need for punishment in a wide range of conditions that, on the surface, appear to have nothing whatever to do with moral issues—with wrongdoing, sin, guilt, the need to be punished or to punish oneself. In the first century CE, the Roman Stoic Philosopher ...