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My aim in this paper is to use historical analysis as a way of reflecting on the deepest philosophical assumptions of psychoanalysis. In preparing it, I have been very influenced by its venue, reflecting what I hope is an interest in the study of life, human nature and society. I have a certain sense of occasion about the growth of interest in the history of the human sciences. In fact it is a quarter of a century since I embarked on a doctoral dissertation in this area. It was, I don't mind saying, lonely work, and I cannot sufficiently convey my pleasure that there now appears to be a real interest in this country in humanistic scholarship about the history of the disciplines which seek to understand our humanity. I wish it well and I will do all I can to help it on its way.
When I became a professional historian of psychology, it was considered sufficiently noteworthy that the main entrepreneur in the field, Robert I. Watson, dubbed me the 'first person ever to receive a doctorate in the history of psychology in the Anglo-Saxon world'. (I have never known if that was true or not, but it felt nice at the time. ) I have moved on more than once, but I have remained preoccupied with human nature, the constraints on it, what can be hoped for and perhaps achieved, in a variety of guises: researching, teaching, supervising, editing, agitating a bit, making films about it, writing and publishing. I came to Britain to look into the issues lying conceptually beneath and historically behind Freud's metapsychology, in particular his first book On Aphasia (1891), and the philosophical assumptions conceptual confusions underlying psychoanalytic metapsychology. The doctoral dissertation I did was on the history of cerebral localization from the first empirical work, that of Gall and phrenology, to the first experimental work of Fritsch and Hitzig and of David Ferrier. Note that I make no mention of Freud whatsoever. The reason is that I was strongly advised by my doctoral supervisor not to go into psychoanalysis at all and by my department head not to mention any interest in the history of medical or psychiatric topics.
The first because psychoanalysis wasn't psychology, and the second because medicine wasn't knowledge. Psychoanalysts were charlatans and medics were plumbers, I was told. Neither was respectable, nor was taking up an appointment in the history and philosophy of science, said my psychology supervisor, Professor Oliver Zangwill. Better to return to medicine he said.
No, find something respectable in the history of science, said Gerd Buchdahl, my department head in the history and philosophy of science. So I was at an impasse. Then what about Darwin? This seemed eminently respectable, especially in Cambridge.
Hence a decade's research on nineteenth-century debate on man's place in nature, the fruits of which have appeared as Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture. I am sure all this sounds rather self-preoccupied and nostalgic, but there is, if you will bear with me, a historiographic point creeping up on us. It is this: I am by now an old pro in the field that these seminars are promoting, and what I have to tell you is that objects of study are very elusive, overdetermined, subject to fashion, and above all scary, if you are at all serious about historical scholarship and not merely an antiquarian or looking for cultural ornaments or whether or not A is buried in B's grave. I have never stopped being concerned with psychoanalysis, and I have returned to Freud and psychoanalysis as my main preoccupation because I have run out of alternative bases for human hope. I will not bore you with more odyssey, though various disciplines and forms of intellectual and political practice intervened in the years I am not spelling out. Suffice it to say that I am now editing a journal on these matters, with the subtitle Psychoanalysis, Groups, Politics, Culture, working in the Psychotherapy Unit of Britain's oldest snake pit, St Bernard's in London, training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and have for some years been an analytic patient.
I say this because, as will become clear, the relations between abstract theory on the one hand and personal experience and clinical practice on the other are at the heart of what I want to convey. Put in another way, I want to juxtapose scholarship with that which it is putatively in aid of. Now, for all of you who may have felt impatient with the foregoing, comes the academic part. I want to assess certain historical, historiographic and philosophical issues concerning Freud and psychoanalysis by means of reflections on two books: Frank J. Sulloway's Freud, Biologist of the Mind: ...
Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend and Bruno Bettelheim's Freud and Man's Soul. Each in its way makes an epoch. The contexts which evoked them and into which they are inserted are very different indeed from the ones I described in Cambridge in the mid 1960 s. In the United States psychoanalysis is in rapid decline within a medical framework, while psychotherapists of various other - including instant - kinds are waxing and prospering. There were no, repeat no, candidates at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytical Institute in some recent years, or so I am told. Meanwhile, gossip about psychoanalysis fills the pages of The New Yorker, and the work of Jeffrey Masson, claiming that Freud lied throughout his mature years about what he really believed, has become a bestseller.
Masson has cried foul and found a forum in the pages of Mother Jones, the main surviving radical magazine on the West Coast, and a controversy raged about these matters in the New York Review of Books. That is, the higher gossip has taken over. I happen to think gossip is the highest form of truth, but it should not stand alone. It has, however, taken over the way psychoanalysis is perceived in the United States. There is also a whole tradition of psychoanalytic hagiography and an attempt is being made by American psychoanalytic theoreticians to appropriate some British theories I shall speak about, as a way of propping up the dotage of ego psychology, which is the main American appropriation of psychoanalysis.
In Britain, by contrast, there is a real renaissance of interest in psychoanalysis and related, relatively orthodox, therapies. There are new constituencies, new practitioners and a growing number of scholars who write about it. I am thinking, in particular, of the work of David Ingleby, Nick Is bister, John Forrester, Janet Sayers, Barry Richards, Karl Figlio. Many, if not most, members of the 'class of ' 68 ' are in therapy or analysis, including many of the ex-members of the editorial board of Spare Rib and other radical and feminist periodicals. The History Workshop has mounted a series of workshops on psychoanalysis. There are also many repentant Lacanians now in orthodox analysis.
Juliet Mitchell is a psychoanalyst, and a number of feminists are psychotherapists. There are also several reputable trainings: British Association of Psychotherapists, London Centre for Psychotherapy, Guild of Psychotherapists, Lincoln Centre, Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy, Philadelphia Association, Arbours Association and other, in addition to the more orthodox centres - Institute of Psycho-Analysis, Tavistock Clinic, Hampstead Clinic. In the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, there is a thriving tripartite sectarianism: the Freudians, the Kleinians and the Independent or Middle Group. The Freudians are followers of Anna Freud, tend toward scientism and are closer to American ego psychology. The followers of Melanie Klein, the Kleinians, are concerned with very primitive intra psychic mechanisms and a novel theory of thinking. The Middle Group define themselves by not having an eponymous hero or heroine to worship.
They are much more humanistic but are still stuck in a language, which I shall speak about, of so-called 'object relations'. Sulloway and Bettelheim, I suggest, define the limits or the boundaries of this renaissance, and I should like to try and show how. Put simply - too simply, but I shall complicate the model below - Bettelheim wishes to free Freud from a desiccated scientism which he attributes to the influence of medical ization, primarily in America, and to Anna Freud and (although he is not explicit about this) the orthodox Freudians, as opposed to Kleinians and Middle or Independent Groups and the perspectives of lay analysts. That is, he is opposing the orthodox Freudian tendency in the US, UK and elsewhere.
The frame of reference which he is opposing is the one which set the terms of reference, the mental set, for the translation of the Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud edited by James Strachey, Alan Tyson, supervised by Anna Freud, etc. Bettelheim's is a book about the terms and tenor of the twenty-four volumes of the Standard Edition, and a very good book it is. It is worth adding that a complete new translation of Freud is under active discussion. In addition to the influence of Anna Freud, who moved to London in 1938, the leading lights of ego psychology in America were all German might: a trio called Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein (which seemed to me to run together as a hyphenated single name over the years).
Their main systematist was David Rapaport, a Hungarian might who worked collaboratively with Merton Gill. What Bettelheim wants to do is to reclaim Freud from the adjusting, scientistic model of human nature which characterized the work of the might in America as they tried to integrate psychoanalysis with biology, medicine and sociology. What he wants to reclaim Freud for is culture, humanism, knowledge in the broader German sense as opposed to natural scientific knowledge and (please don't misread this word) the human soul, by which he means nothing transcendent or religious, but he also does not mean 'the mental apparatus'. He wants to reinstate 'the self, we would say in English. He is attempting this in the face of a psychoanalytic orthodoxy which has for decades been trying to gain legitimacy by tracing roots to biology especially physiological analogies - and medicine. I shall return to Bettelheim's case below, but I want you to note very carefully that the historical object he is fighting over is the main corpus of public work which, for by far the largest fraction of people interested in these matters, constitutes what Freud said.
The Standard Edition is the empirical domain of studies in these matters. So, for anyone (practitioner, teacher, scholar) who is not utterly at home in German (and many people who work on German matters are certainly not utterly at home in the language), the empirical domain of Freudianism is at issue - what might be called by a philosopher of science the 'neutral observation language'. At the other pole, Sulloway is claiming Freud for the history of science, and in particular for the history of biology. Here are quotations from the book jacket: This is, quite simply, a stunning book that completely revolutionizes one's understanding of the subject... I conclude that virtually the whole of the existing literature on Freud has been rendered obsolete. Donald Fleming, Professor of Anicrican History, Harvard University I found...
that I almost literally could not put [the book] down... It is not only fascinating as a kind of scientific detective story but an extraordinarily significant piece of work. It is easily the most important single contribution to Freudian studies since Jones's biography, [and] an excellent complement and corrective to the latter... A work of monumental scholarship, it will at once advance its unknown author into the front ranks of intellectual historians... I am frankly envious of his achievement. Robert R.
Holt Director, Research Center for Mental Health, New York University Really outstanding... in the plethora of materials on Freud, Sulloway really has something new to say. He blends the history of science with real scientific insight. Edward O.
Wilson Frank B. Baird Professor of Science, Harvard University, author of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis Sulloway's aim is to bring Freud into the domain and field of the history of science. Freud is not, as it happens, currently on the agenda of historians of science in the way that Darwin, Newton, Copernicus and Galileo are, yet these are people who could lay claim to bringing about the sort of change in humanity's view of itself that people attribute to Freud. I find Sulloway's strategy for achieving his aim crass and transparent, but after 503 pages of text and another 100 of bibliography and appendices I admit to feeling a bit worn down.
Add to this the effect of the accolades quoted above. Sulloway has also had a distinguished series of appointments. He went from being a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, to a comparable institute at Berkeley to a post at University College London, where he held the most prestigious personal award there is - a McArthur Fellowship. Impressive credentials.
I found Bettelheim's slim, elegant, eminently civilized essay a welcome respite after Sulloway's tome. I also confess to finding Sulloway a zealot bordering on paranoia and Bettelheim a gent, though a romantic one. So, we have Freud the humanist versus Freud the biologist - actually 'crypto biologist', it turns out, since Sulloway does admit that Freud repeatedly expresses relief at ceasing to write in narrow physiological and biological terms and repeatedly explained his breaks with his own colleagues and apostates or previous followers in terms of their having been seduced by biology. If one thinks of Steel, Adler, Reich, etc. , all of whom in one way or another lay claims to something innate, Freud said he had to break with them because they had oversimplified the problem, i.
e. they were indulging in some form of biological reductionism. Sulloway, of course, has to explain this away, just as Jeffrey Masson has to explain why Freud, having supposed...
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