Freud (RLE: Freud)

A Critical Re-evaluation of his Theories

Reuben Fine

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317976127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book, originally published in 1963, Dr Fine sets out to describe what Freud said, and to re-evaluate his views critically in the light of the best knowledge of the time.

Freud's numerous changes of view, his constant searching for the truth wherever it might lead him, as well as his resolute adherence to certain hard-won positions once he had achieved them, are all skilfully traced. Freud's intellectual Odyssey is divided into four periods. From 1886 to 1895 he was a neurologist investigating hysteria and other 'nervous' disorders. Then came his self-analysis, from 1896 to 1899, the real matrix from which psycho-analysis grew. The first psycho-analytic system of psychology was developed in the period from 1900 to 1914. The remainder of his life, from 1914 to 1939, was devoted to the elaboration of ego psychology, and heart of contemporary psycho-analysis.

Dr Fine undertook, in writing this book, the formidable task of examining the whole body of Freud's thought, to clarify what he said, and to review his ideas critically in the light of the best available existing knowledge. As he says 'In this process of criticism I have tried to specify which aspects of Freud have stood the test of time and which have not.'

'So far as I can see no one has ever before taken the trouble to ask: "What did Freud actually say? How does what Freud said stand up in terms of what we now know?"'

In answering these questions, Dr Fine develops a major thesis that all modern psycho-analysis derives from Freud, though it has moved far in many different directions. The contention is that emphasis on schools is misleading and has obscured the actual historical growth of the science.

As he states in his Preface to this volume, Dr Fine's conviction is: 'By building on Freud's fundamental insights, we can move on most readily to empirical research and thus construct a more satisfactory science of psychology.'

PART I

The Beginnings of
Psycho-analysis
1886–1900

Chapter I

Historical Antecedents

SIGMUND FREUD was born in Freiberg, in what is now Czechoslovakia, on May 6, 1856. The street on which he was born was later renamed Freudova Ulice in his honour. At the age of four he and his family moved to Vienna, where he remained until 1938 when the Nazi persecution forced him to flee to England, a year before his death.

Freud was the son of a poor Jewish merchant. To his Jewish background he himself attributed his ability to cling to an unpopular position in the face of enormous calumny.

Outwardly there is relatively little to relate about Freud’s life. He was always a very bright student and from an early age seemed destined for an academic or intellectual career. He studied at the University of Vienna in the Faculty of Sciences and eventually did research under the famous physiologist, Briicke. Because the financial rewards for pure research were so limited that he was unable to support himself, he turned to medicine and took his M.D. degree in 1881.

For several years thereafter he served as a physician in various hospital departments. In 1885 he received a travelling grant to go to Paris for several months’ study with the Frenchman, Jean Charcot, the most famous neurologist of his time.

In 1886 he set himself up in private practice as a neurologist in Vienna. That same year he married Martha Bernays, by whom he had six children. The youngest, Anna Freud, is today one of the world’s leading figures in psycho-analysis.

In 1885 he was appointed Privatdocent (roughly Lecturer) in Neuropathology at the University of Vienna. Some twenty years later he was made a Professor extraordinarius (Associate Professor), and in 1920 he became a full Professor. All these honours came to him as a result of his work in neurology. His psycho-analytic labours received no official recognition from the university until long after his death.

In 1923 he contracted a cancer of the jaw, which after many operations and much suffering ultimately proved fatal in 1939.

Such, in brief outline, are the details of his life. The reader who looks for more excitement in Freud’s biography finds none because there was none. His epic lay in his intellectual adventure, the founding of psycho-analysis.

The dominant influence in Freud’s thought, as in that of most scholars of his day, was the implicit faith in the scientific method and the scientific spirit. Let science attack the problems that beset mankind, and they will disappear, was the virtually universal belief. Even towards the end of his life, in 1932, when he considered the relationship of psycho-analysis to philosophy, Freud maintained that psycho-analysis had no need of any special Weltanschauung, since it was a part of science. And science alone is sufficient, without any metaphysical speculation.

In physiology, where Freud began, the two major forces that shaped thought in that day were, first, the reduction of physiology to physics and chemistry and, second, the extraordinary explanatory value of evolution. Brücke, Freud’s first master, was an outstanding member of the far-reaching movement known as Helmholtz’s School of Medicine. Du Bois, another member of that school, wrote in 1842:

Brücke and I pledged a solemn oath to put into effect this truth: ‘No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism. In those cases which cannot at the time be explained by these forces one had either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical-mathematical method or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical-physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion.’¹

The science of physics, in the 1870’s and 1880’s, was much simpler than it is today. It was still dominated by the brash certainty of the Newtonian world system, which led some scientists of the day to proclaim that in principle all problems had been solved, only the details had still to be worked out. In this view material particles affected one another in a determinable way, which could be summed up in various laws, in a closed system. The Einsteinian revolution, which revealed the much greater complexity of nature and led to statistical predictions and open systems, was still more than a quarter of a century away. In the type of thinking that Freud adopted he remained closer to Newton than to Einstein, though he by no means ignored the later developments in science.

By now the impact of Darwin and the theory of evolution on science has been so thoroughly assimilated that we can scarcely conceive how world-shaking it seemed to the young intellectuals of Freud’s day. Finally man could be included within the scope of the cosmic process and be studied just like any other natural phenomenon. The social sciences, which up to then had relied on physical models, turned to evolution for the explanatory principles that could clarify all the problems related to man.

These two ideas—the scientific method, especially as exemplified in Newtonian physics, and the explanatory power of evolution— were the major formative influences in Freud’s thought. They remained fundamental to him to the end.

Nevertheless, it must be remembered that psycho-analysis, like evolution and relativity, is an essentially novel idea in human history, although it has many antecedents. In Freud’s writings, as will be seen, there is often manifest a conflict between his realization that he had created something entirely new and his wish to reconcile it in some way with what the revered teachers of his youth had taught him.

Freud’s work can be divided into four major periods:

1. The period of the exploration of neurosis, from the inception of his practice (1886) until the publication of the Studies on Hysteria (1895);

2. The period of self-analysis, 1895–1899;

3. The period of the elaboration of the psycho-analytic system of psychology, based primarily on The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), which lasted roughly until 1914;

4. The final period involving a considerable extension and elaboration of the earlier ideas, lasting from 1914 until his death in 1939. While there is naturally a great deal of overlap among these stages in the development of Freud’s thought, it is helpful to get a bird’s-eye view of his life’s work and to fit individual ideas into this broad schcme.

NOTES ON CHAPTER I

The only adequate biography of Freud in any lauguage is the monumental three-volume work by Ernest Jones: The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1953–1957; London, Hogarth). A one-volume abridgment by Trilling and Marcus was issued in 1961. Other biographies, such as H. W. Puner: Freud: His Life and Mind (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1947), are poorly informed and badly documented. Much of the literature on Freud’s life rests upon unsubstantiated speculations and statements which have led to the grossest misunderstandings.

For the general intellectual background a number of excellent texts are available. The most scholarly is J. H. Randall: The Making of the Modern Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940; London, Allen & Unwin). A stimulating intellectual history of ideas from Leonardo to Hegel is J. Bronowski and B. Mazlish: The Western Intellectual Tradition (New York: Harper and Bros., 1960; London, Hutchinson). A personal interpretation by one of the leading philosophers of our time is Bertrand Russell: A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945; London, Allen & Unwin). Unfortunately no standard historical work displays any real understanding of the full significance in the history of thought of Freud and psychoanalysis. For a reflective psycho-analytical appraisal of the historical process, see especially two books by Franz Alexander: Our Age of Unreason (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1942) and The Western Mind in Transition: An eye-witness Story (New York: Random House, 1960).

For the psychological material the standard text is G. Murphy: Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949). For the psychiatric history, see G. Zilboorg: A History of Medical Psychology (New York: Norton, 1941; London, Allen & Unwin).

Chapter II

The Exploration of Neurosis 1886–1895

LEGEND has it that Archimedes discovered the principle of specific gravity when he was taking a hot bath, and that the idea of universal gravitation occurred to Newton when he saw an apple fall from a tree. No such good fortune attended the birth of psycho-analysis. It was rather a groping, fumbling, testing process, extending over many years.

The field of the neuroses, which Freud entered as soon as he began his private practice in 1886, was at that time a virtual terra incognita. Various symptoms had been described by different authors, but there was no systematic knowledge and no treatment that was other than a hit-or-miss affair.

Only two of Freud’s predecessors provided anything from which he could learn. One of them was the Frenchman, Jean Martin Charcot, then the leading neurologist of Europe; the other was the Viennese physician, Josef Breuer.

During Freud’s stay in Paris in the winter of 1885–1886 he was particularly impressed by two of Charcot’s ideas: that hysteria was a demonstrable disease, and that hypnotism had valid uses. Both of these ideas were bitterly fought by the majority of the medical profession at the time, and both encountered severe opposition when Freud attempted to bring them back with him to Vienna. Charcot, who was primarily a brain anatomist and neurologist, and not a psychologist, did not go any further; he did not try to determine any of the psychological factors operative in hysteria, nor was he especially interested in doing so, and his use of hypnotism was quite limited.

The second influence on Freud, Josef Breuer, has come to assume a somewhat exaggerated role in the history of psycho-analysis because Freud, out of excessive modesty, attributed too much to him in the early days. As time goes on, Breuer’s role seems less and less important. Nevertheless, he did make several fundamental observations. In the period from 1880 to 1882 he treated Anna O., a young girl suffering from hysteria, and obtained a considerable improvement in her symptoms. He communicated his experiences and theories to Freud, who urged him to go on with them; but Breuer was a general practitioner and did not care to delve more deeply into the problems of the neuroses. It was not until 1893 that, under the persistent urging of his younger colleague, Breuer finally published his findings, although even then only in conjunction with Freud.

Breuer treated his young patient, Anna, by placing her under hypnosis and then inquiring into the circumstances under which her symptoms had arisen. In the course of this so-called cathartic method, he discovered that the girl’s symptoms disappeared when she had related the nature of their origin. He was, however, not a scientist in the sense that Freud was, as he himself said later:

My merit lay essentially in my having recognized what an uncommonly instructive and scientifically important case chance had brought me for investigation, in my having persevered in observing it attentively and accurately, and my not having allowed any preconceived opinions to interfere with the simple observation of the important data.²

Freud learned certain essential facts about hysteria from Breuer. He learned that both the release of repressed emotion, which was called abreaction, and the making conscious of what was unconscious had therapeutic effects. Apparently Breuer never again treated a case at such depth; in fact, he vowed that he would not again go through such an ordeal as he had had with Anna O. Thus it was not at all clear whether the findings of Breuer and Freud were peculiar to this one patient or were, in general, characteristic of hysteria. It remained for Freud alone to investigate the matter on a much wider scale.

When he began, Freud’s therapeutic arsenal consisted of only two weapons—electrotherapy and hypnotism. Electrotherapy (which is different from the severe electric shocks of electroshock therapy as practised today) he soon discovered to be a total waste. He says in his Autobiography:

My knowledge of electrotherapy was derived from W. Erb’s textbook, which provided detailed instructions for the treatment of all the symptoms of nervous diseases. Unluckily I was soon driven to see that following these instructions was of no help whatever and that what I had taken for an epitome of exact observations was merely the construction of fantasy. The realization that the work of the greatest name in German neuropathology had no more relation to reality than some Egyptian dream book, such as is sold in cheap bookshops, was painful, but it helped to rid me of another shred of the innocent fa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Part I. The Beginnings of Psycho-Analysis—1886–1900
• Part II. ID PSYCHOLOGY: THE FIRST PSYCHO-ANALYTIC SYSTEM—1900–1914
• Part III. EGO PSYCHOLOGY : THE TOTAL PERSONALITY—1914–1939
• Part IV. RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT
• Footnotes
• Bibliography
• Chronological Listing of Freud’s Writings on Psycho-analysis
• Selected List of Commentaries on Freud
• Index