“It is philosophers who
have the task of exploring what matters to us most—what is freedom? What is it
genuinely for us to be happy? What is worth valuing and why?—but it is
psychoanalysis that teaches us how we regularly get in the way of our own
freedom, systematically make ourselves unhappy and use values for covert and
malign purposes. Philosophy cannot live up to its task unless it takes these
psychoanalytic challenges seriously.”—Jonathan Lear
“[Psychoanalysis] offers
us an inclusive vision, model, or paradigm of human nature. One advantage of
this model is that it acknowledges the importance of the mind’s connections
both with the body (as do neurophysiology and biology) and with specific social
milieus (as do the social sciences). As Freud first pointed out, a person’s
behavior is influenced not only by his or her psycho-sexual development tracked
through its various vicissitudes by psychoanalysis, but also by the various
chemical-hormonal happenings occurring within his or her body. Behavior is also
influenced significantly by the social institutions within which the individual
develops from early childhood to adulthood and to which he remains vulnerable
at every stage of life. Psychoanalysis’s portrait of human nature thus
encourages interdisciplinary bridge building among the several disciplines
concerned with the study of human nature and behavior, including several of the
humanities that deal with unconscious meanings, like literary criticism and
aesthetics, at the same time that it challenges most traditional views of human
nature with its findings regarding unavowed impulses and processes, the
persistence of infantile patterns in adult life, and unacknowledged defensive
strategies.”—Ernest Wallwork
“The parts of Freud’s
writings that suggest some level of causal determination in fact coexist with
his explicit view that one of the chief goals of psychoanalysis is to increase
the patient’s ‘freedom’ (Freiheit),
‘autonomy’ (Selbstandigkeit), and
‘initiative’ (Initiative). Thus the aim of psychoanalysis is to ‘free’ (befrein) the patient from intrapsychic
‘chains’ (die Fesseln), which
normally increases the patient’s ‘self-control’ (Selbstbeherrschung) and gives ‘the patient’s ego freedom to decide
one way or the other’ between conflicting motives. For Freud, it is the mark of
a relatively healthy ego to be able to deliberate and exercise self-control and
willpower in choosing and pursuing goals. [….] Freud’s claim that the developed
ego is guided by qualitative hedonism helps to bring out just how in his late
writings ‘the programme of the pleasure principle’ is compatible with non-egoistic,
and hence, moral behavior. This compatibility is largely a consequence of the
fact that happiness as Freud uses the term for the goal of life is a different
kind of end then the quantitative one of maximizing a single kind of agreeable
feeling. ‘Happiness’ in life is an ‘inclusive end’ rather than a single
‘dominant end.’ That is to say, the activities through which it is sought are
not means in an instrumental or neutral sense, but parts of a whole. To pursue
happiness as an inclusive goal through such activities as artistic creativity,
intellectual work, sensuality, love, and aesthetic appreciation is to enjoy
each of these activities as contributing something qualitatively unique to a
life plan. Insofar as these activities are means, it is in the sense of being
constitutive of the comprehensive end of happiness in life as a whole. It is
only through such activities that genuine happiness in the sense of ‘positive
fulfillment’ is possible. [....] Freud does not construe narrowly, then, the
happiness at which the ego aims as always involving a self-interested goal. To
the contrary, persons are observed to find pleasure in a whole range of
activities, including fulfilling the needs of others, and even in moral
conscientiousness. For there is ‘satisfaction’ to be obtained in acting
benevolently in accordance with one’s ‘ego ideal’ and ‘a feeling of triumph
when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal.’”—Ernest Wallwork
* * *
Introduction & Apologia
A New York Times piece by Patricia Cohen, “Freud Is Widely
Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department,” summarizes a recent study
in The Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association:
“Psychoanalysis and its ideas about the
unconscious mind have spread to every nook and cranny of the culture from
Salinger to ‘South Park,’ from Fellini to foreign policy. Yet if you want to
learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last
places to look may be the psychology department. A new report by the American
Psychoanalytic Association has found that while psychoanalysis—or what purports
to be psychoanalysis—is alive and well in literature, film, history and just
about every other subject in the humanities, psychology departments and
textbooks treat it as ‘desiccated and dead,’ a historical artifact instead of ‘an
ongoing movement and a living, evolving process.’”
One reason that looms large in accounting for
this state of affairs is the extent to which academic psychology in this
country conceives itself as a “scientific” enterprise. And inasmuch as this
putative psychological science is linked to an experimental and clinical
science of health care, it fancies itself grounded in “empirical rigor and
testing,” beholden, that is, to what falls under the allegedly rigorous rubric
of “evidence-based medicine” (EBM). This conception strives to place psychology
on par with other natural sciences and further explains the recent overweening infatuation
with neuroscience and the extravagant claims often made on behalf of
evolutionary psychology.[1] An ancillary reason
involves sceptical disenchantment with the so-called folk theory of mind or
folk psychology from not a few quarters in the philosophy of mind (e.g.,
eliminative materialism).[2] This is not to insinuate
that this folk theory is immune to philosophical revision or extension, but
only that any plausible psychological model has compelling reasons for assuming
at least some of the key premises that animate this model. Nor is this to imply
that psychology can or should ignore science, rather, it may be the case that
psychology, insofar as it deals with (a narrative sense of) “the self” and with
the nature of mental life, may be better construed as a “science of
subjectivity,” wherein science is best understood in an analogical or
metaphorical sense, or used simply to refer to a systematic and thus coherent
system of inquiry and knowledge (cf.
the ‘Islamic sciences’) rather than simply or solely as an objectivist and
naturalistic—and frequently positivist—endeavor. Freudian psychology in general
and psychoanalysis in particular resist the post-positivist (hence scientistic)
“penchant for quantities” and the “fetish for measurement” that infect the
natural and social sciences, symptomatic evidence for which is seen in the inordinate
fondness for and explanatory and normative privilege accorded to, game theory,
cost-benefit calculations, and Bayesian probability estimates (its paradigm of
statistical inference serving as the epitome of empirical argument), for
example (in saying this, I am not being dismissive of such tools). In other words,
and in the end, Freudian psychology shares with Pragmatism broadly conceived what
Hilary Putnam calls the “revolt against formalism:” “This revolt against
formalism is not a denial of the utility of formal models in certain contexts;
but it manifests itself in a sustained critique of the idea that formal models,
in particular, systems of symbolic logic, rule books of inductive logic,
formalizations of scientific theories, etc.—describe a condition to which
rational thought can or should aspire.” In this case, a condition to which our
psychology can or should aspire. To paraphrase and quote again from Putnam, our
conceptions of rationality cast a net far wider than all that can be
scientized, logicized, mathematized, in short, formalized: “The horror of what
cannot be methodized is nothing but method fetishism.”
“Freud bashing” remains commonplace in the
culture wars, although not usually in the vociferous tone that prevailed a few
years back. Even today, one finds precious few articulate defenders of this or
that aspect of Freudian psychology from within psychology proper. A handful of courageous
philosophers, however, have engaged in sympathetic and sophisticated critiques
of the Freudian oeuvre, among them: Ilham Dilman, Richard Wollheim, Donald Levy,
Jonathan Lear, Sebastian Gardner, John Cottingham, Marcia Cavell, J. David
Velleman, and Ernest Wallwork. Their work is essential to a judicious
assessment of what is living and dead in Freudian psychology. In support of
that endeavor, I’ve assembled this particular installment in the Directed
Reading series: “Freudian and
Post-Freudian Psychology: A Selected Bibliography of Secondary Literature.” What follows is more or
less an apologia (in the classical
sense) and is intended to entice you, dear reader, into a sustained study (and
thereby appreciation) of Freudian and Post-Freudian psychology.
Freudian psychology resists classification as a
conventional natural science and is instead perhaps best defined as an emergent
“science of subjectivity” (a new science, if you will), even if Freud, at least
in the beginning of psychoanalysis, had dreams of it conforming to a model of
the science of his day. The principal phenomena and phenomenology
of psychology, be they consciousness, the unconscious, memory, the emotions, or
the mind itself, are clearly not amenable to scientific reduction (in the
naturalist sense), hence the futility or silliness of attempts to “scientize”
psychoanalysis or subject it to the strictures of a putatively “naturalized”
experimental psychology incapable of comprehending the meaning of a “science of
subjectivity.” While the precise
criteria for therapeutic achievement or “success” may vary and could rightly be
deemed elusive, such success as thought to exist is only one kind of evidence
in the generation and confirmation of psychoanalysis’s etiological hypotheses.
In brief, and thus minimally speaking, psychoanalytic
theory provides us with
a) a theory
of irrationality (not identical to existing from other forms of
irrationality, psychologically based or otherwise) that involves both
propositional and non-propositional mental states or primary and secondary
process thinking;[3]
b) a philosophically
sophisticated psychology, a metapsychology,
and a therapeutic model of psychology;
c) a method of scientific investigation as a “science of subjectivity” (at once
intra-clinical and extra-clinical, psychoanalysis being the ‘first great theory
and practice of personal life’), psychoanalytic explanation involving both
causal relations and relations of meaning, with the analysis of symbolism
depending upon their mutual inextricability (we might plausibly imagine a ‘grammar,
semantics, pragmatics’ of psychoanalysis);
d) a dyadic
model of therapeutic treatment involving the analyst and analysand;
e) a triune psyche consisting of the id, ego, and super-ego as a subset of “the person;”
f) the postulation of a notion of repression as a mechanism that explains
the inaccessibility of mental states sans
the imputation of intention;
g) and related to repression, sophisticated
concepts of suppression,
wish-fulfillment, phantasy, and sublimation
implicating “unconscious” as well as sub-conscious and conscious states of
awareness;
h) the building blocks for models of self-deception and states of denial;
i) the postulation of somewhat opaque and
elusive psychological dynamics such as introjection,
identification, and projection,
as well as more routine or common psychological processes of remembering, repeating, free-association,
working-through, and play (or playing);[4] and
j) specific and explicit value commitments, including a commitment to the ideal of truth, which treat in both
philosophical and psychological terms, the questions, possibility, and
normative importance of moral autonomy, (retrospective and prospective)
self-responsibility, happiness or contentment (in the sense of eudaimonia), existential freedom, rationality,
and the notion of “worthwhile” life in general.[5]
