The Psychoanalytic Theory Of Neurosis

Otto Fenichel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134617647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.

PART I
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

A.
Introduction

CHAPTERS I–III

Chapter I

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE THEORY OF NEUROSIS

CONCERNING the origin of the young science of psychoanalysis one often hears two diametrically opposed opinions. Some people say that Freud transferred the principles of the materialistic biology of his time to the field of mental phenomena, and sometimes they even add that Freud therefore, through being limited to biology, failed to see the cultural and social determinants of mental phenomena. Others state that at a period when the natural sciences were at their height, Freud’s contribution consisted in turning against the spirit of the times and forcing the recognition of the irrational and the psychogenic in defiance of the prevalent overestimation of rationalism.

What should we think of this contradiction? Through gradual development, scientific thinking is winning out over magical thinking. The natural sciences, originating and evolving at definite periods in the development of human society (when they had become a technical necessity), have had to overcome the most violent and stubborn resistances in their attempt to describe and explain actual phenomena. This resistance affected different fields to a different degree. It increased in proportion to the approach of the subject matter of the science to the personal concern of man: physics and chemistry freed themselves earlier than biology, biology earlier than anatomy and physiology (not so long ago, the pathologist was forbidden to dissect the human body), anatomy and physiology earlier than psychology. The influence of magic is greater in medicine than in pure natural science, due to the tradition of medicine, which stems from the activities of the medicine men and priests. Within medicine, psychiatry is not only the youngest branch of this magic-imbued science but it is also the one most tainted with magic.

For centuries psychology was considered a special field of speculative philosophy, far removed from sober empiricism. If one considers the more or less metaphysical questions that used to be of paramount importance, it is easily recognized that the problems discussed continued to reflect the antithesis of “body and soul,” “human and divine,” “natural and supernatural.” Everywhere valuations influenced, unfortunately, the examination of facts.

A glance at the history of science teaches that the process of overcoming magic has not been a continuous one. There have been advances and retreats which certainly cannot be explained merely in terms of a history of ideas. The fluctuations in this struggle are dependent on complicated historical conditions. They can be understood only through the study of the society in which the struggle takes place and of the conflicting interests of its various groups. That the history of medical psychology is no exception to this rule can be seen from the interesting book by Zilboorg and Henry (1636).

Psychoanalysis represents in this struggle a definite step toward the aim of scientific thinking in psychology—away from the magical. Recently Bernfeld again stressed the completely materialistic orientation of Freud’s teachers and of Freud’s own prepsychoanalytic thinking (140).

Certainly it must be admitted that Freud was not the first to consider the field of mental manifestations from a natural-scientific point of view. There were natural-scientific psychologies before him. But compared to the “philosophical” psychologies, these natural-scientific psychologies have always been in the minority, and they have only been able to treat disparate mental functions. An understanding of the multiplicity of everyday human mental life, based on natural science, really began only with psychoanalysis.

Now the question can be answered concerning the contradictory statements of Freud’s place in the history of science. The golden days of materialistic biology and medicine simply did not regard the whole field of humanity as their universe of discourse. The neglect of the mental field indicates that the progress of scientific thinking was purchased at the price of allowing one entire realm of nature, the human mind, to remain a residue of religious and magical thinking; and the contradiction in the historic evaluation of Freud’s work is solved by recognizing that actually he did both: by opposing the idea that “mind is brain” and by emphasizing strongly the existence of the mental sphere and the inadequacy of physical-scientific methods to deal with it, he won this terrain for science. In spite of assertions that Freud by giving the “subjective factor,” the “irrational,” its just due has turned against rationalism, his procedure clearly reveals the spirit of that broad cultural trend which proclaimed as its ideal the primacy of reason over magic and the unbiased investigation of reality. What had previously been considered sacred and untouchable, now had to be touched, because the validity of the taboos was denied. Freud investigated the mental world in the same scientific spirit as his teachers had investigated the physical world, which implied the same rebellion against the prejudices that had been taught up to that time. The subject matter, not the method of psychoanalysis, is irrational.

The objection may be raised that such a statement is a one-sided presentation of psychoanalysis. Does not this science include quite a lot of mystic tradition? Did it not develop out of hypnotism and the latter from “mesmerism”? Is it not a “mental healing,” which means a sort of magic? Certainly psychoanalysis has developed directly out of magical therapeutic methods. But it has eliminated the magical background of its forerunners. Of course, in every mental development rudiments of earlier phases persist. Actually, it is not difficult to find many magical features in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. (Probably this would not be difficult in other branches of medicine either.) Psychoanalysis as it is now constituted undoubtedly contains mystic elements, the rudiments of its past, as well as natural-scientific elements toward which it is striving. It cannot help retaining some mystic elements, at least in the same sense in which the activity of a police dog in police investigations is—as Reik has recognized (1295)—a survival of the animal oracle. However, the police dog has the ability to scent out the criminal. It is the aim of psychoanalysis to reduce its magical elements at least to the same level of insignificance as that to which modern criminal investigation tries to reduce the magical elements in its detective methods.

Scientific psychology explains mental phenomena as a result of the interplay of primitive physical needs—rooted in the biological structure of man and developed in the course of biological history (and therefore changeable in the course of further biological history)—and the influences of the environment on these needs. There is no place for any third factor.

That the mind is to be explained in terms of constitution and milieu is a very old conception. What is characteristic for psychoanalysis is what it regards as biological structure, which environmental influences it recognizes as formative, and how it relates structural and environmental influences to each other.

As to the biological structure, a scientific psychology first of all must posit itself within biology. Mental phenomena occur only in living organisms; mental phenomena are a special instance of life phenomena. The general laws that are valid for life phenomena are also valid for mental phenomena; special laws that are valid only for the level of mental phenomena must be added.

Thus a scientific psychology investigates, as does any science, general laws. It is not satisfied with a mere description of individual psychic processes. An exact description of historical processes is its means, not its goal. Its subject is not the individual X but the comprehension of general laws governing mental functions.

Besides, a scientific psychology is absolutely free of moral valuation. For it, there is no good or evil, no moral or immoral, and no what ought to be at all; for a scientific psychology, good and evil, moral and immoral, and what ought to be are products of human minds and have to be investigated as such.

As to the influences of the surroundings, these must be studied in detail in their practical reality. There is no “psychology of man” in a general sense, in a vacuum, as it were, but only a psychology of man in a certain concrete society and in a certain social place within this concrete society.

Concerning the relation between biological needs and the formative environmental influences, this book will demonstrate adequately how psychoanalysis approaches the problem. At this point, only the following needs to be said. In the endeavor to investigate the relationship between biological needs and external influences, one or the other of these two forces may be overestimated. The history of psychoanalysis has seen both types of deviation. Certain authors, in their biologistic thinking have entirely overlooked the role of outwardly determined frustrations in the genesis of neuroses and character traits, and are of the opinion that neuroses and character traits might be rooted in conflicts between contradictory biological needs in an entirely endogenous manner. Such a point of view is dangerous even in therapeutic analysis; but it becomes entirely fatal if it is assumed in applications of psychoanalysis to sociological questions. Attempts of this kind have sought to understand social institutions as the outcome of conflicts between contradictory instinctual impulses within the same individuals, instead of seeking to understand the instinctual structure of empirical human beings through the social institutions in which they grew up.

But there are also certain authors at the other extreme who reproach psychoanalysis as being too biologically oriented, and who are of the opinion that the high evaluation of the instinctual impulses means that cultural influences are denied or neglected. They are even of the erroneous opinion that the demonstration of the importance of cultural influences contradicts any instinct theory. Freud’s own writings contain, essentially, descriptions of how instinctual attitudes, objects, and aims are changed under the influence of experiences. Thus it is absurd to be of the opinion that the proof of the existence of this influence contradicts Freud.

We agree with Zilboorg that it is not difficult to find in all such “culturistic” deviations a distorted return to magical thinking and to the contrast of body and soul (1637). At first glance it looks as if the stressing of cultural factors, because of their significance for mental development, expressly brought about an emphasis on reality; but actually this viewpoint denies reality by denying man’s biological basis.

Certainly not only frustrations and reactions to frustrations are socially determined; what a human being desires is also determined by his cultural environment. However, the culturally determined desires are merely variations of a few biological basic needs; changing the primitive biological values of “gratifying” and “frustrating” into the highly complicated systems of values of modern man is just the thing that can be explained by psychoanalytic study of the history of the particular man and the influences of social forces to which he has been subjected. It is the task of sociology to study these social forces, their genesis, and their function.

The application of the general principles of natural science to the special field of psychology naturally presupposes the development of new methods of research that are adequate to its subject matter. Attempts to keep the mental realm outside of causal and quantitative thinking (“theory grays the many-colored pattern of life”) thwart real insight, as does also a pseudo exactness which believes it necessary to transfer the biological methods of experiment and scientific protocol to a field where these methods are not suitable. (Astronomy also is unable to resort to experiments and nevertheless is a natural science.)

Against the statement that psychoanalysis aims at the full scientific research into mental phenomena, it might be objected that this formulation is either too narrow or too broad. Psychoanalysis-maintains that there is an unconscious mental life, and that it studies this unconscious. Since under the term “the human mind” the conscious phenomena are usually understood, it would seem that psychoanalysis is concerned with more than just human mental life. On the other hand it may be asked: is not psychoanalysis above all a psychology of neuroses, or a psychology of instincts, or a psychology “of the emotional components in mental life—whereas the more intellectual components and the individual functions, such as perception, the formation of conceptions, judgment, would have to be investigated by other psychologies?

These objections are not valid. The thesis that in investigating the unconscious, psychoanalysis is undertaking something that lies beyond psychic phenomena may be compared to an assertion that optics is investigating something other than the phenomena of light when it occupies itself with the wave lengths of light waves. The existence of the unconscious is an assumption that forced itself upon psychoanalytic research when it sought a scientific explanation and a comprehension of conscious phenomena. Without such an assumption the data of the conscious in their interrelationships remain incomprehensible; with such an assumption, that which characterizes the success of every science becomes possible: to predict the future and to exert systematic influence.

As to the argument that psychoanalysis is concerned with neuroses or with instinctual and emotional phenomena only, it must be admitted that these subjects are predominant in psychoanalytic research. This can be explained historically and practically. Psychoanalysis began as a therapeutic method and even today secures its research material principally because of the happy circumstance that its psychological research method and the medical therapeutic method coincide. What Freud observed during the treatment of his patients, however, he could apply later to an understanding of the mental phenomena of healthy persons. When psychoanalysis then went on to study the conscious phenomena and the various mental functions, it could do this in a way different from that of other psychologies, for it had previously studied the unconscious and the instincts. It conceives of all these “surface manifestations” as structures that have been formed out of deeper instinctual and emotional sources through the influence of the environment. Of course it should not be claimed that except for the Freudian findings there is no scientific psychological knowledge; but it should be asserted that all psychological knowledge gains new light when considered from the psychoanalytic point of view.

However, this book is not a textbook of psychoanalytic psychology; it limits itself to the theory of neurosis. It is true that neuroses, for the analyst, provide the most fruitful study in the realm of mental phenomena; after having studied the neuroses, it will be easier to study other mental phenomena. In this sense, this is perhaps a first volume of a textbook on psychoanalytic psychology.

The theory of neurosis has the same relation to psychoanalytic therapeutic practice as pathology has to internal medicine: inductively arrived at through practical experience, it furnishes the foundation for further practical work. It represents an attempt to ascertain that which is regular in the etiology, the manifestations, and the clinical course of neuroses, in order to furnish us with a causally directed method of therapy and prophylaxis.

Nothing should be demanded of such a theory that a medical man would not demand of pathology. The search for “regularity” permits a formulation only of that which is of general significance and so, in a sense, does violence to the uniqueness of the individual case. In compensation, however, it gives the practitioner a better orientation, even though it must be remembered that this orientation alone is not sufficient for the actual treatment of individual cases.

We shall endeavor to clarify the theory by clinical examples. But it will remain “theory,” that is, abstraction. All the examples tend only to illustrate mechanisms; thus they are illustrations but not case histories. What may be reported in a few lines as a result of psychoanalytic research, sometimes required months of work.

Thus only the typical will be presented here. Actually the psychological facts represented by the terms Oedipus complex or castration complex are infinitely varied. This book presents the framework which, in clinical reality, is filled with thousands of specific facts. Clinical experience with practical cases (supervised work with patients and case-history seminars) cannot be supplanted by a book like this; neither can it substitute for training in psychoanalytic technique. It can, however, give an impression as to why special training in technique is necessary, and why a personal analysis is an irreplaceable part of this training.

Those who have not undergone a personal analysis will probably be able to understand intellectually what is presented in this book; but probably many things will seem to them even more incredible and “far-fetched” than psychoanalytic case reports. Persons who “do not believe in psychoanalysis” will not be convinced by reading this book. They can only inform themselves about what the teachings of psychoanalysis actually are.

But even this seems very necessary. Many critics who “do not believe in psychoanalysis” do not know what psychoanalysis is about, and are in the habit of ascribing to Freud a great many things he never said or wrote.

However, the reading of case histories offers the best method for remedying deficiencies in personal experience, and is therefore the most important supplement to the reading of this book, just as attendance at clinical lectures or the reading of clinical case reports is the best supplement to the study of pathology.

It is in no way true that in discussing events of human life one has to choose between the vivid, intuitive description of an artist and the detached abstractness of a scientist thinking only quantitatively. It is not necessary and not permissible to lose feeling when feeling is investigated scientifically. Freud once stated that it was not his fault that his case histories gave the impression of a novel. To understand neuroses one would have to read such novel-like case histories as well as books like this; but it can also be promised that such case histories will be understood in quite another way after this book has been studied.

The admission that the practical art of analyzing cannot be acquired through reading this book is no cause to underestimate its value for the student of psychoanalysis. When objections, such as the claim that the essential therapeutic intuition and sensitivity cannot be taught, are hurled at a scientific pathology, it is a sign of magical thinking. Just as scientific pathology is no barrier to the intuitive medical art but an indispensable prerequisite for it, so it is with the theory of neurosis and the practice of psychoanalysis. It is true that not everything can be taught; but first one has to learn what is teachable.

We shall try to engage as little as possible in polemics, but concentrate, rather, on explaining that which already seems established. It is unavoidable that, in the choice of the material to be presented, in the decision as to w...