The Freud Wars

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis

Lavinia Gomez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135449902
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Freud Wars offers a comprehensive introduction to the crucial question of the justification of psychoanalysis.

Part I examines three powerful critiques of psychoanalysis in the context of a recent controversy about its nature and legitimacy: is it a bankrupt science, an innovative science, or not a science at all but a system of interpretation? The discussion makes sense of the entrenched disagreement about the validity of psychoanalysis, and demonstrates how the disagreement is rooted in the theoretical ambiguity of the central concept of psychoanalysis, the unconscious. This ambiguity is then presented as the pathway to a new way of understanding psychoanalysis, based on a mode of thinking that precedes division into mental and physical. The reader is drawn into a lively and thought-provoking analysis of the central issues:

• what would it mean for psychoanalysis to count as a science?
• is psychoanalysis a form of hermeneutics?
• how can mental and physical explanations coincide?

Part II contains the source material for Part I: the influential critiques of psychoanalysis by Adolf Grünbaum, Thomas Nagel and Jürgen Habermas.

No specialised knowledge is assumed, and the book is clear and accessible while still conveying the complexity and richness of the subject. It provides a fascinating introduction to philosophical thinking on psychoanalysis for students and practitioners of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and philosophy.

Part I
How can psychoanalytic
thinking be justified?

Dialogue between Socrates and
Alcibiades

Soc:	The user and the thing he uses are different, are they not?
Alc:	How do you mean?
Soc:	For instance, I suppose a shoemaker uses a round tool, and a square one, and others, when he cuts.
Alc:	Yes.
Soc:	And the cutter and user is quite different from what he uses in cutting?
Alc:	Of course.
Soc:	And in the same way what the harper uses in harping will be different from the harper himself?
Alc:	Yes.
Soc:	Well, then, that is what I was asking just now - whether the user and what he uses are always, in your opinion, two different things.
Alc:	They are.
Soc:	Then what are we to say of the shoemaker? Does he cut with his tools only, or with his hands as well?
Alc:	With his hands as well.
Soc:	So he uses these also?
Alc:	Yes.
Soc:	Does he use his eyes, too, in his shoe-making?
Alc:	Yes.
Soc:	And we admit that the user and what he uses are different things?
Alc:	Yes.
Soc:	Then the shoemaker and the harper are different from the hands and eyes that they use for their work?
Alc:	Apparently.
Soc:	And man uses his whole body too?
Alc:	To be sure.
Soc:	And we said that the user and what he uses are different?
Alc:	Yes.
Soc:	So man is different from his own body?
Alc:	It seems so.
Soc:	Then whatever is man?

(Alcibiades I, quoted in Taylor 1979, p. 67)

Chapter 1
Introduction
What sort of subject might
psychoanalysis be?

This book is an introduction to the philosophy of psychoanalysis, for those with an interest or engagement in philosophy, psychotherapy, or both, as well as anyone wanting to explore this profound and overlapping field. Although this is a complex subject, no prior knowledge or experience of either philosophy or psychoanalysis is required. When specialized terms are introduced, they are explained and expressed in ordinary language, with a glossary for instant reference. Nevertheless, this is not an introduction which avoids the big questions, or leaves them to the ‘advanced’ stage. The subject matter of the book is more fundamental than either psychoanalysis itself or any particular branch of philosophy. Our concern is with the common ground of all psychoanalytic approaches, and the focus is on the divergent principles which different philosophers have used to justify or to reject psychoanalytic thinking. The aim is to work towards an understanding of psychoanalysis through its central concept, the unconscious, which recognizes and makes sense of the entrenched disagreement about what its foundational principles are.

Part I is built around a recent controversy on the nature and legitimation of psychoanalysis. It is designed to be a free-standing introduction to our subject, without the need to refer to the critiques which it discusses. However, versions of these critiques are reprinted in Part II, so that those who wish can engage directly with them and come to their own conclusions. The two appendices address details of the overall argument which do not fit within the main body of the text.

This introductory chapter is divided into three sections. The first sets the context for the enquiry as a whole. The second provides theoretical background with a brief outline of psychoanalytic theory. The third highlights the theme of the enquiry and gives an idea of its general direction and outcome.

The context of the enquiry

‘The Freud Wars’

In the mid-1990s, the New York Review of Books (NYRB) published an acrimonious exchange of reviews, responses and counter-charges on the nature and validity of psychoanalysis.¹ ‘The Freud Wars’ was launched by an uncompromising personal and theoretical attack by a professor of literature and formerly sympathetic proponent of psychoanalysis who has gone on to become its unremitting critic.² Frederick Crews’ ‘The Unknown Freud’ (Crews 1993) condemns the whole edifice of psychoanalysis as a vast confidence trick played on suggestible patients and an unwary public by an unscrupulous and self-seeking psychoanalytic establishment. The documentary evidence makes clear, he maintains, that the observations on which psychoanalysis is based are mostly fabrications, cynically constructed out of Freud’s insatiable craving for recognition as a scientific celebrity. Psychoanalysis, as Crews sees it, is at best a bankrupt science and at worst a counterfeit science, peddling uncorroborated and often ludicrous propositions which fail to meet the standards of rational discourse, let alone scientific reasoning. He concludes, in the ‘Afterword’ to his compilation of the dispute, that ‘Freud has been the most overrated figure in the entire history of science and medicine’ (Crews 1995, p. 298).³

Crews is happy to credit the details of his various criticisms to the authors whose books form a minor topic in his review. One of the most significant of these is Adolf Grünbaum’s critical study The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (Grünbaum 1984). This is widely recognized as a scholarly and influential negative assessment of psychoanalysis from the point of view of a traditionally-minded philosopher of science. Grünbaum argues that psychoanalysis is not a ‘pseudo-science’ but a genuinely scientific body of theory, which can and must be assessed on standard scientific criteria. But having built up the scientific case for psychoanalysis, Grünbaum then proceeds to knock it down, constructing ingenious tests which psychoanalysis, as he describes it, must fail. His final verdict is that psychoanalysis is scientific, but unsuccessfully so.⁴

Crews’ objections to psychoanalysis’ claim to scientific status are drawn largely from Grünbaum’s work. It is consequently Grünbaum’s views that the philosopher Thomas Nagel takes issue with, in a review published a few months later as the NYRB’s response to Crews’ accusations and the ensuing correspondence.⁵ Nagel is one of North America’s leading philosophers, a flexible and witty thinker whose philosophical writings range over the subjects of ethics and politics, science and subjectivity, knowledge and the mind. ‘Freud’s Permanent Revolution’ (Nagel 1994a) is a relaxed and sympathetic portrayal of psychoanalysis, in the form of a review of two recent defences of psychoanalysis against some of its foremost contemporary critics, including Grünbaum (Robinson 1993; Wollheim 1993). Nagel rejoins that Grünbaum takes too narrow a view of his subject matter. Psychoanalysis, he argues, introduces a new way of thinking which has triumphantly succeeded in transforming our views of what a person is, within a broader conception of empirical science.

The two philosophers’ opposing views form the centrepiece of an eighteenmonth debate, with philosophers, psychoanalysts, academic psychologists and others all joining in. Grünbaum’s and Nagel’s respective judgements jostle for position as psychoanalysis is in turn dismissed as a bogus science and supported as a pioneering and fruitful science. The two critiques give us a solid platform from which to assess the scientific credentials of psychoanalysis. By considering their arguments for and against, we can begin to clarify what it would take to justify psychoanalytic thinking on scientific grounds. The critiques are discussed in detail in the next two chapters, and are represented in the first two papers of Part II. Grünbaum’s views are represented by his ‘Critique of Psychoanalysis’ (in Erwin 2002), which includes the main points of his book and of his response to Nagel. Nagel’s review is included in full, together with an ‘Addendum’ written in answer to Grünbaum’s reply (Nagel 1994b).

One question which is never considered throughout the erupting debate is whether psychoanalysis should be categorized as a science in the first place. The possibility of classing it with the humanities is not even entertained. This is the one point on which Nagel and Grünbaum are in hearty unanimity; but it is not a foregone conclusion, nor is the scientistic bias it reflects typical of psychoanalysis as a whole.⁶ This enquiry would be incomplete without a critique which puts psychoanalysis forward as an interpretative or ‘hermeneutic’ subject. The inaugural hermeneutic critique by Jürgen Habermas (1971) seems a particularly appropriate example, as a reading which Grünbaum explicitly and Nagel implicitly rejects.

Habermas’ critique of psychoanalysis is Grünbaum’s first target. His strategy is to set up a version of Habermas’ account as a kind of sitting duck, which he then mows down, in the words of an admiring colleague, ‘with a sort of argumentative tank’ (Caws, in Grünbaum et al. 1986, p. 230). Grünbaum argues that any interpretative reconstruction of psychoanalysis is misguided. Its validity would depend entirely on scientific considerations, since interpretative forms of validation are parasitic on scientific methods. For Nagel, equally, the justification of psychoanalysis as a system of interpretation can be no substitute for scientific validation: ‘if all Freud succeeded in doing was to develop a new way of talking or seeing things, he failed’ (1994a: see p. 150 below). He would surely include Habermas’ approach to psychoanalysis as a prime example of what he sees as ‘the facile subjectivism that now blights many of the humanities and social sciences’ (ibid.: see p. 150 below).

Habermas, however, is not so easily defeated. He is probably the foremost social philosopher of recent times, a creative and resourceful critic of everything from practical political philosophy to traditional approaches to knowledge. His influence on psychoanalysis is out of all proportion to the brief attention he pays it, in the last three chapters of his general critique of knowledge, Knowledge and Human Interests (1971). Its wordy style, coupled with awkward translation from the original German, makes Habermas’ views less accessible than Nagel’s or Grünbaum’s. But Habermas’ reading continues to exert its influence as a landmark text for the flourishing hermeneutic schools of psychoanalysis. Chapter 4, ‘Self-Reflection as Science’,⁷ discusses Habermas’ hermeneutic reconception of psychoanalysis. The crucial chapter from his critique is reproduced as the final paper of Part II.

Empirical and hermeneutic principles

It will come as no surprise to hear that ‘The Freud Wars’ were neither won nor lost. Inside and outside the psychoanalytic world, psychoanalysis continues to be viewed in line with the different verdicts reached, with little discussion and scarcely a hint of resolution. Essential psychoanalytic concepts from the ‘unconscious’ to the ‘ego’ have entered into ordinary language, suggesting an informal endorsement; but adjacent disciplines such as psychiatry and psychology typically treat it as little more than old-fashioned conjecture. Even within psychoanalysis itself, where its validity is not disputed, there is no consensus on where its authority lies: practitioners and theorists are divided as to whether its ideas are scientific or interpretative by nature. There are thus two questions for this enquiry to consider. Can psychoanalysis be justified at all? And should its acceptance or rejection depend on scientific or hermeneutic principles of knowledge? In the first case, its concepts and theories would be evaluated on the ‘empirical’ standards and principles which developed through studying the measurable world of nature. In the second, they would be tested through the ‘hermeneutic’ or interpretative principles through which we further our understanding of the unquantifiable world of language, symbol and culture.

The empirical–hermeneutic distinction is a dichotomy which goes back to the very root of Western thought. It is the matter–mind divide transposed to the theoretical level. The differences between the two approaches will grow clearer as we examine the work of our three philosophers. Meanwhile, the etymology brings out their essential meaning. ‘Empirical’ derives from ‘empeiria’ – experience – referring to the sensory experience by which we come to know a world outside ourselves; ‘hermeneutics’ is related to Hermes, messenger of the gods and symbol of communication. Thus empirical science looks at phenomena from the outside. It uses the language of mechanics, going back to the physical laws and concepts through which we understand the material world. Hermeneutic approaches explain phenomena – sometimes the same phenomena – from the inside. Their explanations are couched in the subjective language of desire and belief, value and intention, emotion and experience. These terms reflect the background of personal meaning and purpose which differentiates the action of a person from the output of a system, or a state of mind from a state of matter.

A terminological note might be helpful at this point. ‘Science’, in itself, means nothing more than an organized body of theory. However, it has become overwhelmingly identified with ‘empirical science’, often with the implication that this kind of knowledge is more ‘real’ than any other kind. Hermeneutic theorists such as Habermas challenge these assumptions. They claim that the knowledge represented by developed interpretational systems is just as legitimate as that of empirical systems, and should therefore be called ‘hermeneutic science’. Although they have a valid point, qualifying the term ‘science’ whenever it is used would make for unnecessarily clumsy reading. When ‘science’ appears alone in this book, it means ‘empirical science’ in its everyday sense. ‘Hermeneutic science’ is used in full when it is intended. There is no implication, however, that either kind of knowledge is intrinsically superior to the other.

Like other investigations into ‘human’ subject matter, psychoanalysis addresses a domain which can be approached in either way: empirically, as a ‘human science’, or hermeneutically, as a humanities subject. In most disciplines it is clear from the context and purpose of the enquiry which framework should apply. In psychoanalysis, intriguingly, this remains a matter of dispute. To find out why, we must turn to psychoanalysis itself.

The theoretical background

The ‘mental’, the ‘physical’ and the ‘psychical’

The sources of the confusion in psychoanalysis go back to its point of departure. Freud developed psychoanalysis as one of a number of contemporaneous attempts to solve the most frustrating puzzle of nineteenth-century psychiatry.⁸ Some bodily symptoms seemed only to be explicable by assuming a mental rather than a physical cause. Even in cases of full-blown paralysis, they appeared to be manifestations not of any organic abnormalities but of an ‘excessively intense idea’ (Freud 1895, Standard Edition (S.E.) 1, p. 347). The symptomology matched patients’ own notions of how their bodies were constructed, in defiance of their actual anatomy. How a mere idea could have such direct and dramatic physical effects was a scientific mystery, and formulating a framework for causal chains which cross between the mental and physical categories was conceptually baffling. A physiological theory could not incorporate ideas, but it was difficult to see how ideas could be treated scientifically. Freud presents psychoanalysis as the beginnings of a response to this conundrum, in a rudimentary science of the ‘psychical’ as the zone where mental and physical explanations converge.

Freud uses the term ‘psychical’ for the special form of existence manifested in the psyche and its functioning, which he sees as the unconscious ground of mental life. In common parlance, ‘psychical’ denotes either the disregard of the physical ground of phenomena, by describing them in non-physical terms, or its suspension, as in events which appear to defy the laws of physics. In the Freudian sense, however, it refers to a ground which is both subjective and embodied. His use of the term ‘psychical’ denotes a contrast with reality conceived in either purely mental or purely physical terms. In Western modes of thought, the usual understanding of mental reality is that it is unmediated: we experience thoughts, feelings and sensations immediately rather than at one remove. Physical reality, by contrast, is mediated. It cannot be known directly, but only through its impact on our sensory system or its mechanical extensions. ‘Psychical reality’ is Freud’s third area, lying between the physical and the mental realms, but conceivable only in mental or physical terms.

This means the psychical has no language of its own. It cannot be broken down into mental and physical components, yet it can only be thought of as though it were mental, or as though it were physical. Seen in this light, the disagreement as to how psychoanalytic thinking should be vindicated comes as no surprise. Its ‘mentalisti...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART I: HOW CAN PSYCHOANALYTIC THINKING BE JUSTIFIED?
• PART II: THE THREE CRITIQUES