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Freud and The Problem of God by Hans Küng (1979)

Hans Küng (1928 to 2021) was a Swiss Catholic priest, theologian, and author. These are notes on his 1979 book, ‘Freud and the Problem of God.’

1. The genesis of Freud’s atheism

For the German tradition, ‘theology has been dissolved in the nitric acid of the natural sciences’, so said the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Medicine and physiology were at the centre of German materialism, a movement which aimed to show that the activity of the mind was entirely the result of physiological changes in the brain.

Freud’s father, Jacob Freud, was an orthodox Jew who never converted to Christianity (unlike Marx’s father). Freud was taught Jewish doctrine by his mother and a schoolteacher. In his autobiography, Freud says that early Bible classes had ‘an enduring effect on the direction of my interest.’

Jacob and his first wife had two sons; by his third wife, Amalia, he had eight offspring! Freud was the eldest. A childhood aversion to his distant, forbidding father and the young beauty of his mother led to Freud’s recognition of the Oedipus Complex in himself.

Freud’s early religious experiences:

The Catholic nanny who took Freud to Mass and explained Heaven and Hell to him. Freud used to come home and parody the arm-waving of the priests to his family’s amusement (laying the basis of his later paper Obsessive Actions and Religious Rituals)
Antisemitism: from schooldays onwards Freud suffered persecution by antisemitic Catholics. A founding moment in his life was when, age 12, his father admitted to him how he had acquiesced in his hat being knocked into the mud by racist hoodlums.

When Freud entered university in 1873 there had just been a stock market crash and many in politics and the press explicitly blamed ‘the Jews’.

Freud entered university (aged 17) to study medicine with the aim of seeking answers to the riddles of life rather than merely curing people.

Student Freud fell under the influence of Ernst Brucke, head of the Institute of Physiology, a follower of Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz was a genius who, aged 26, helped secure recognition for the First Law of Thermodynamics (the sum total of energy remains constant in an isolated system). Together with the law of Entropy (energy cannot be turned back into mass without some loss – the Second Law of Thermodynamics) these form the most fundamental of all laws of nature.

Helmholtz later went on to do pioneering work in eye-surgery, optics and physiology. A school grew around him committed to the positivist creed, confident that science would one day be able to explain all the activity in the universe, including all activities of the human mind, on the basis of purely physical and chemical laws.

Brucke was a founder-member of this school in Berlin. When Brucke came to Vienna to head up the Institute of Physiology, he brought this powerful materialistic ideology with him. Freud studied under Brucke for 6 years, years he later recalled as the happiest of his life.

Physicalist physiology got rid of the idealist philosophy of Nature and eliminated the vitalism of the Aristotelian and Scholastic tradition i.e. the belief that God created organisms with forms and purposes, higher goals and objectives of their own. No, said physicalist physiology: all life can be explained in terms of the purely causal, deterministic forces described by biochemistry.

Freud applied these metaphors to clinical psychological observation: he saw the psyche as a machine reacting to the increase and release of tension (the unpleasure-pleasure principle) as a result of the demands of internal instincts on the one hand and external stimuli on the other (the basic argument of An Outline of Psychoanalysis).

For Küng, Freud made the mistake of turning science – a method of investigation – into a worldview – an Idol, in the Baconian sense.

Freud set up his private practice in nervous diseases in 1886, aged 30, on Easter Sunday. His wife, Martha Bernays, came from an eminent orthodox Jewish family in Hamburg. Freud suppressed her religious practices ruthlessly (she later said nothing upset her so much in her life as Freud forbidding her to light the holy candles on the first Friday of their marriage).

They had three sons (Ernst, named after Brucke; Martin, named after Jean-Martin Charcot, the French pioneer of nervous diseases; and Oliver, named after Oliver Cromwell) and two daughters, Sophie and Anna (born in 1895).

In Küng’s opinion, Freud made two great breakthroughs:

a) A theory of the unconscious

Freud’s achievement was to differentiate between the Primary Process of the Unconscious, the vast majority of mental life – and the preconscious and conscious mind, very much the Secondary Process; and to devise a method for examining the workings of the Unconscious.

Freud’s theory that unacceptable wishes are repressed only to return as symptoms. These are expressed in free association so the patient comes to know himself to his depths. All this occurs through transference i.e. replaying the repressed feelings in the privileged arena of ‘the therapeutic alliance’.

Through transference the patient is led to a lasting restructuring of his mental processes, the abolition of morbid symptoms, and restored to the ability to love and work. Interpretation is also carried out on dreams and parapraxes.

b) A theory of libido

Freud’s theory of libido hugely widened the concept of sexuality, extending it far beyond the specifics of genital sexuality in the present, and extending it back in time to cover all of human existence from the earliest part of life i.e. the invention of the concept of childhood sexuality.

Doing this enabled explanations of almost all sexual activity, perversions, love, affection etc to be brought under the rubric of one theory, rather than simply being rejected as extrinsic to human nature, ‘degenerate’ or ‘immoral’, as previously.

The progression of Freud’s medical-scientific investigations can be summarised: cerebral physiology > psychopathology > depth psychology > theory of everything.

2. Freud on the origin and nature of religion

Freud’s critique of religion is twofold:

he tries to explain away the history of religion
he tries to undermine the psychological basis of religion

1. The history

There are two broad theological movements:

Degenerationist: pagan religions are distorted versions of the original pristine version of the True Religion clearly understood by Adam and Eve; then came the Fall, the Tower of Babel and it’s been downhill ever since.
Meliorist: religion is evolving into higher and purer spiritual forms from its early primitive, half-savage forms.

The 18th century Enlightenment philosophers were degenerationists. For them denominational religion was a distortion of the original clear light of Reason which God had given to Mankind, which had been distorted by popular custom and the inventions of priests.

The nineteenth century saw Enlightenment Nature-theism transmuted into a Science of Religion. Simultaneously, colonial discoveries and the improvement of philology and textual criticism, provided a number of tools for paring away the ‘nonsense’ which had accumulated around the pure creed. The high point of this tradition is the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, who sought to remove the superstitions and legends accumulated over time in order to get back to the original pure creed of Christ.

Darwin turned the theory of degeneration – religion starting from the divine heights – on its head. Evolution implied a struggle upwards of intellect and reason from the savage swamp. This prompted a revolution in the ‘Science of Religion’; instead of hypothesising about what the early and purest creed must have been, scholars now examined earliest religions to ‘get at the heart’ of belief.

It is as a result of this new model that specialists devised a developmental model of religions, speculating that all religions start with primitive animism – then proceed to pagan polytheism – and then evolve to an intellectual and spiritual climax in monotheism (with a possible pre-animistic stage of belief in a world-soul, or mana).

An ethnologist called W. Robertson Smith thought the key parameter was not spirits and gods but the development of ancient rites and rituals: totemism, always accompanied by systems of taboos (‘Thou shalt not kill the totem animal’, ‘Thou shalt not marry thy sister’ (exogamy) and so on). (Taboo is Polynesian for untouchable). Thus civilisations pass through a series of stages: Magic, Religion, Science. These kinds of theories were backed up by the tremendous encyclopedic systematisation of Sir James Frazer (whose masterwork, ‘The Golden Bough’, Freud was such a big fan of – see his own annotated copy included in the exhibition at the Freud Museum).

This was the background Freud drew on when writing Totem and Taboo (1912) – at the suggestion of Carl Jung (still in the Movement at the point).

In Totem and Taboo Freud tries to assimilate the underlying fear of incest expressed in so many taboos (i.e. primitive morality) with the developmental model of religions, and with the ubiquity of totemism based round a holy animal who is eaten in an annual festival. Freud tries to draw a parallel between the religious practice of ‘primitive’ man and the behaviour of modern, urban obsessional neurotics, and between the savage’s reverence for the totem animal, representing the Father, with the explicit rise of the Father to pre-eminence in monotheistic religions.

In explaining the rise of totem animals Freud points to the suggestive way that young children initially like animals but then develop fears of them as they unconsciously project their Oedipal feelings (feelings of rage and of reciprocal anger) onto them.

The classic example in Freud’s writings is the case study of Little Hans, who was petrified of horses. This irrational phobia analyses out into fear they will bite him; and soon enough it is discovered that the horses in fact stand for the father who Han is afraid will chop his penis off.

To revere a totem all the year round and then kill it and eat it in a festive meal is, for Freud, a beautiful demonstration of Oedipal ambivalence, love/hate, revere/kill.

For Freud the Oedipus Complex is at the centre of all religions. The difference with Christianity is that it is a Son-religion. We identify with the Son crucified to appease the guilt we all feel at the communal assassination of the primal Father. To identify with Christ is to be relieved of the guilt of the primal parricide which Freud posits as the basis of human society in Totem and Taboo. It is to become free, rather as the neurotic, after analysis, is freed from his irrational obsessions and becomes free and autonomous to work and love.

2. The essence

Religious belief is an illusion, the fulfilment of the oldest deepest wishes of Mankind, childish wishes for:

protection from an uncaring world
universal justice (recognition of our own deserts, punishment of those who have wronged us)
eternal life

Freud’s diachronic history of religion – comparing early religion with childhood stages of thought – is complemented by his synchronic analysis – comparing contemporary, modern religious belief and practice with the behaviour and motivation of neurotics.

Freud doesn’t really say this fulfilment of deep wishes makes religion wrong – only that all aspects of it can be explained away in other, more scientific terms. Now, he says, as we acquire more knowledge about its origins and nature, religion is gradually dying (just as their as neurosis disappears from a gradually enlightened patient).

By contrast with religion, which fosters and encourages illusions about reality, Freud sees Science as providing an education for reality, in order to abolish childish reliance on religion and rebuild morality and social institutions on a clearer, unillusioned understanding of human nature.

We must grow up, master our own resources for real life, concentrate on this earthly life, prepare to build the New Jerusalem here on earth.

3. Critiques of Freud

In his 1927 pamphlet, The Future of An Illusion, Freud said that attacking religion may do psychoanalysis harm and the book proceeded to do just that by rousing the wrath of churchmen and moralists against him and his movement.

So Freud tried to emphasise that psychoanalysis is a neutral scientific tool, like infinitesimal calculus, a specialised tool for examining the human psyche. It could equally well be used by the defenders of religion.

Eugene Bleuler

Eugene Bleuler was one of the first to take issue with Freud. Bleuler, head of the Bergholzli mental institute in Zurich, Jung’s boss and man who gave us the terms ‘depth psychology’, ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘ambivalence’ was an early convert to psychoanalysis, but he could not go the whole way with Freud.

He granted the discovery of the unconscious but asked, Is it right to consider it only negatively, as a reservoir of repressed wishes, of the dark side? Is it right to regard the psyche as a simple machine, a mechanism within which psychic forces trigger each other and energy is circulated as in a sophisticated steam engine? Is it right to see the human animal motivated only by sexuality (even in the special widened sense Freud gave the word)? Is it right to see the mind as entirely determined by events in the distant past and not as a creative, proactive organism capable of creating new meanings and goals?

Alfred Adler

In 1911 Adler published his Critique of the Freudian Sexual Theory of Mental Life and was expelled from the Psychoanalytic Movement as a result.

A convinced socialist and, later, friend of Trostsky, Adler believed in looking at the individual as a whole in relation to the social world and all his relations with it. The aim of therapy is to build up the individual’s integrity and wholeness. Neuroses start in inferiority (the inferiority complex) and maladjusted attempts to overcome it (“the Masculine Protest”). The patient must abandon these ‘egocentric’ positions and get involved with the group. Happiness is community-based (you can clearly see Adler’s socialist bias).

(Although he powerfully denied Adler’s views once he’d been booted out of the movement, Freud later accepted some of his ideas about aggression. Some critics say Freud’s 1922 revision of instinct-theory dividing instinct into two drives, Eros and the death drive, are indebted to Adler.)

Jung

In 1913 Jung left the Movement and refined his own theories into what became Analytic Psychology. Jung redefined the libido as undifferentiated psychic energy (effectively denying its sexual nature) and claimed that it produces four processes – thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Each of these is governed by a dialectic, thus:

thinking – the rational evaluation of right and wrong
feeling – you divide feelings into pleasurable and unpleasurable
sensation – you divide into external and internal stimuli
intuition – according as it is effective or ineffective

The individual is governed by two modes of approach to these four processes:

extravert – influenced by objective factors
introvert – influenced by external factors

The two modes apply to each of the four processes thus giving you eight character types. Whenever the one mode of each process dominates, the opposite mode rules the unconscious, and you have to get to grips with this dark side of the soul, ‘the shadow’.

The psyche is also defined by whether it is dominated by anima (female) or animus (male). Whichever dominates, you have to accept the opposite into your life. And you have to reconcile the ‘persona’, the face we make to meet the outside world, with the demands of the ego.

The aim of Jungian therapy is to bring all these facets of the personality into alignment into one integrated personality. (This brief account leaves out all Jung’s theories of the individual and the collective unconscious, archetypes, myths and symbols etc.)

For Adler, religion is the expression of the will-to-overcome humanity’s perceived inferiority in the face of implacable reality: religion works towards an ideal future perfection. For Adler, God is the perfection of a thoroughly human ideal of overcoming. Adler sees a place for religion in the perfect human society since it reflects a thoroughly human wish – but he doesn’t believe in it.

Jung blamed Freud’s thoroughgoing rejection of religion on his being a child of the late-Victorian rationalist materialist worldview (as described above). For Jung, religion is true insofar as it is believed. Jung wanted to remain a Christian but thought denominational Christianity was chaotic and confused and stood in need of further clarifying about the human soul: and this is what his depth psychology could provide.

Neither Jung nor Adler answer the big question set by Freud: Is religion nothing more than a fulfilment of mankind’s oldest deepest wishes?

Küng’s critique

Freud’s developmental history of religion (animism >pantheism > monotheism > science) is nowhere now taken seriously. All these belief systems exist in various places in the world but have nowhere been found to follow this pattern. Sometimes they’ve gone ‘backwards’. In many places aspects of the supposed different levels of development exist happily alongside each other. Nowhere is there proof of development from one stage to the next.

Nowadays Freud’s optimistic scientism has been replaced by a belief that science may have reached its limits in explaining the origins of the human mind. We even consider that primitive peoples know better than us how to live in sympathy with their environment and that – far from leading us to a utopia cleansed of irrationalism – there may be something inherently destructive in scientific enquiry.

In 1912, the same year as Totem and Taboo was published, Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology, refuted Freud’s idea of primitive religions as slavishly superstitious, but said that they contained a hard core of reality, in laying down codes of practice which had their origins in relationships in primitive society, the clan.

Durkheim was followed by most modern anthropologists and sociologists in looking no further for meaning than the internal rules of each individual tribe and culture. (Compare the anthropological structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss.)

Thus neither the degenerative or the evolutionary theory of religion can be proved or disproved. Modern ‘primitive’ peoples aren’t photographs of the early days of humanity, as Freud and his sources thought. They themselves are the result of immense histories and traditions, albeit unwritten.

(One modern theory to explain their lack of development is to assign a crucial role to writing; whoever learns to write can leave histories; histories can be compared with modern practice and so enable the beginnings of a rational critique of social practices.)

Today there is less historical speculation, less moral-drawing, more studying of patterns of culture in situ using the functionalist approach pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski.

At the other end of the scale modern research shows that religion has always existed. 100,000 years ago Neanderthal Man made grave furnishings; 150,000 years ago Heidelberg Man apparently offered the first fruits to his gods. The question has become not to explain away the existence of religion but to understand that for primitive man everything was religious. The more modern challenge is to explain away the rise of the secular, the scientific worldview.

Even Freud’s facts are largely wrong: totemism is not found among the beginnings of religion; among hundreds of totemic tribes discovered and documented only four knew of a rite which even vaguely resembled killing and eating the father. For anthropologist Mircea Eliade, the triumph of Freud’s views for a while was due to fashion: he established a fashionable doctrine which explains nothing in history or the rest of the world but does help explain the western intellectual’s own sense of dissatisfaction with established religion but obscure sense of guilt at the prospect of overthrowing it.

Freud claimed that psychoanalysis was a neutral tool for the cure of souls, practicable by lay and pious alike.

All Freud’s actual arguments for atheism are old, taken from Feuerbach et al but given new impetus by being underpinned by this new method of exploring the psyche. For example, all ‘projection theories’ of God as fictional answer to suffering humanity’s wishes and fantasies stem back to Feuerbach.

But Feuerbach’s, Marx’s and Freud’s atheisms are hypotheses which have not been proved. Against the reality of experience they set theory; and in the end, for all the subtlety of their critique of the social, economic or psychological determinants of the formation of religious belief in individuals and societies, no conclusion can be drawn from their theories about the existence or non-existence of God.

All human believing, hoping, loving contain elements of projection. But its object need not therefore be merely a projection. (page 77)

From the psychological point of view, faith is always going to look like the projection of early father-figures but this does not mean that God does not exist. That’s to say, the mere existence of a wish for God does not throw doubt on the actual existence of God. Perhaps it’s true:

Perhaps this being of our longings and dreams does actually exist. (page 79)

Thus Freud’s atheism (which he professed long before the discovery of psychoanalysis) turns out to ‘a pure speculation, an unproved postulate, a dogmatic claim’, just as dogmatic as anything laid down by his hated Church.

Freud’s scientism

Nowadays it is Freud’s belief in the ability of science to tell us the truth about the world, and to tell us how to behave in the light of this truth, which seems dogmatic and irrational.

Oskar Pfister, prophetically enough, criticised Freud’s position as itself an illusion before the Second World War; and since the experience of National Socialism, communist totalitarianism and the forces unleashed by the Western development of atomic bombs, the promises of atheistic science have themselves come to look deeply compromised.

The nineteenth century positivistic tradition of science delivering a utopian future now seem ludicrous. (To be fair, Freud towards the end of his life became increasingly pessimistic about this). The ideology of total planning based on rational analyses of human nature and human needs now lies in ruins: we are resigned to living with our imperfections.

For many people it is godless technocratic progress which has become the monster from which we must free ourselves. Cannot religion in fact help here, by providing a morality, a synthesis with science to create a humanistic morality?

Or will society create a new space of total disillusion with both modes of thought, neither militantly atheist nor evangelistically believing – simply drifting from belief to belief in a vast supermarket of the soul?

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish science?

Yes, says Kung. Freud was a stern Jewish moralist in a long tradition of stern Jewish moralists. He taught that all decent human life, all civilisation, rests on the suppression of sexuality, instinct and childhood gratification.

Everywhere in Freud you sense the return of the repressed legalism of the Jewish tradition which he ostentatiously rejected. There is little talk of joy or pleasure in Freud (this is what the French brought to it in the ‘jouissance’ of Barthes et al, bringing actual sex into all Freud’s talk about sex).

No, Freud’s psychology is deeply indebted to the repressed heritage of ancient Mosaic legalism. And this helps explain his lifelong obsession with Moses and his embarrassing attempts to explain away, to master, to over-write the mystery of Moses and Monotheism in his last work.

4. Critique of the critique

From Freud onwards every sphere of human knowledge has had to take account of the vast new terrain of the unconscious which Freud uncovered, and its impact on our lives. What Feuerbach wanted to achieve by a ‘cleansed’ philosophy, what Marx wanted to achieve by a science of social relations, Freud wanted to achieve through depth-psychology: an emancipation, a revaluation of the humanity of Man.

Kung concedes Freud’s criticisms of the failings of denominational religion and agrees that psychoanalysis can help in counselling etc. Psychoanalysis can liberate us from neurotic guilt feelings and help the neurotic subject return to autonomy. But it can’t relieve us of the fact of sin.

It can eliminate illness but it cannot answer ultimate questions about meaning and meaninglessness, life and death. Its aim is to bring things into consciousness, not to forgive; it is healing not salvation.

Küng’s advice to therapists is to be more religious.

Küng’s advice to theologians is to take more account of depth psychology.

Freud thought all neuroses were the result of repressed sexuality. On the contrary, Jung thought all neuroses were the result of what used to be called religion; the lack in people’s lives of a system to give their lives meaning or purpose. Jung criticises psychoanalysis for thinking the ego can stand up to the ‘dark side’ of the soul without the help of some revealed superhuman agency. In Jungian analysis this actually becomes the therapist and the therapeutic alliance.

Erich Fromm in Psychoanalysis and Religion sees two kinds of therapist:

the adjustment advisers
the doctors of the soul, committed to the optimum development of the self

For Fromm psychoanalysis is adaptable to humanitarian religion. ‘Wonder, rapture, becoming one with the world,’ all these feelings are generated in analysis, in the proper acknowledgement of the power of the id and the assent to life with all its imperfections. Fromm is an assimilationist. There should be no enmity between psychoanalysis and religion.

One of Freud’s problems was that he concentrated on an Old Testament punitive, superego-led religion; he completely failed to understand the quality of rational assent to the New Dispensation. For example, Freud tends to see Jesus only in terms of a revision of Judaism – Jesus as the sacrifice of the Son to the Father which ends the thousand years of Jewish guilt. Despite railing against it all his life, Freud showed surprisingly little understanding Christianity and its new creed of Love, of salvation through Love. (This was Pfister’s complaint also).

In pre-War Vienna Victorian sexual repression led to sex, instincts and the id being at the centre of investigations of psychic life. But, Küng argues, since the middle of the twentieth century there has been a steady growth in indulgence of all these instincts. Nowadays (when he was writing, in the 1970s) Küng thought that our biggest problems were caused by the opposite of repression, but by the overindulgence of the instincts and all the addictions and moral anarchy they lead to.

Since repression is no longer the problem it was in Freud’s day (1880s to 1910s) modern psychology has become more ego-orientated: how to give people a meaning and purpose, existential questions. The problem nowadays is one of spiritual emptiness. Technology may be daily triumphing over every aspect of our existence but it cannot finally give that existence a meaning. Küng (like Pfister before him) argues for a rational religion to cure the ill, prevent regression, channel grief and fear, help control the unbridled pleasure principle and contribute to healthy individuation.

Very late in the day, in 1933, when Hitler took power, Freud and Einstein exchanged letters on how to prevent another war. Freud seems in this late exchange to have suddenly grasped the reason behind, and the need for, a socially approved creed of Love.

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by Simon on July 17, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged Alfred Adler, Amalia Freud, ambivalence, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Analytic Psychology, anima, animism, animus, anthropological structuralism, Antisemitism, archetypes, atheism, atom bomb, Barthes, Bergholzli mental institute, Berlin, Bible, biochemistry, Bronislaw Malinowski, Catholicism, childhood sexuality, Christ, Christianity, Claude Levi-Strauss, Communism, critique of the Freudian Sexual Theory of Mental Life, Crucifixion, Darwin, denominational religion, depth psychology, determinism, diachronic history, Einstein, Emile Durkheim, Enlightenment, Erich Fromm, Ernst Brucke, Eros, eternal life, Eugene Bleuler, Evolution, exogamy, extravert, Faith, father-figure, feeling, Feud, Feuerbach, First Law of Thermodynamics, free association, Freud, Freud and the Problem of God, functionalist anthropology, German materialism, God, Hans Küng, Heidelberg Man, Helmholtz, Hermann von Helmholtz, history of religion, Hitler, humanistic morality, incest, inferiority complex, instinct-theory, instincts, Institute of Physiology, introvert, intuition, irrationalism, Jacob Freud, Jean-Martin Charcot, Jewish moralist, Jewish science, jouissance, Judaism, Jung, Jungian therapy, libido, Little Hans, love, Ludwig Feuerbach, magic, mana, Martha Bernays, Marx, Mircea Eliade, monotheism, morality, Mosaic legalism, Moses and Monotheism, myths, National Socialism, Nature-theism, Neanderthal Man, neurosis, New Jerusalem, Obsessive Actions and Religious Rituals, Oedipal ambivalence, Oedipus Complex, Oliver Cromwell, origin of religion, Oskar Pfister, pagan religion, pantheism, parapraxes, persona, perversions, philology, polytheism, primal parricide, primary process, Psyche, Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and Religion, psychological basis of religion, Psychology, psychopathology, religion, repressed sexuality, schizophrenia, Science, Science of Religion, scientism, Second Law of Thermodynamics, Second World War, secondary process, Sensation, sex, sexuality, sin, Sir James Frazer, Sociology, spiritual emptiness, symbols, synchronic history, taboo, textual criticism, the collective unconscious, the Death Drive, The Future of An Illusion, The Golden Bough, the id, the Masculine Protest, the psyche, the Psychoanalytic Movement, the Shadow, the therapeutic alliance, the unconscious, Theology, theory of libido, theory of the unconscious, Thinking, totalitarianism, Totem and Taboo, totemism, Trostsky, Utopia, Vienna, W. Robertson Smith, world-soul, Zurich

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Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen (1975)

Paul Roazen (1936 to 2005) was a political scientist who became a leading historian of psychoanalysis. I first read this history of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement back in the early 1990s when it was only 15 or so years old. Now it’s getting on for 50 years old and, as I set off to read it again, I wondered about its value and relevance. Hasn’t it been superseded by more recent accounts with more modern perspectives?

Interviews

But, as I read on I discovered that this book has one really unique and enduring selling point which keeps it relevant. In 1964 Roazen set out to interview as many people as possible who had had direct experience and knowledge of Sigmund Freud. He managed to interview over 70 people who knew Freud personally; 40 or so who had taken part in the early movement or had a professional interest in its history; 25 of Freud’s actual patients; Freud’s sister-in-law, two daughters-in-law and three of Freud’s children.

(Roazen gives a full list of all those interviewed in an appendix. He also gives an extensive account of his interviewing methodology in the opening chapter.)

So even though this book is almost 50 years old, and the project itself began almost 60 years ago, the number and range of people he interviewed makes the book itself a unique historical record. While he was doing his research a steady stream of the interviewees, many in their 70s or 80s, passed away, slowly converting the book into a unique source of opinions from people who were patients of, trained under, or were directly related to Freud.

Having established his methodology, Roazen goes on to compare himself with the leading Freud biography of his day. From 1953 to 1957 Freud’s most loyal English disciple, Ernest Jones, wrote his epic three-volume biography of Freud. In this, as in all his other assessments and judgements, Roazen gives the impression of being thorough and balanced and fair. His view is that Jones was immensely thorough but, at many points, erred on the side of caution and discretion, not least to please Freud’s daughter Anna who, as early as the 1920s, had emerged as Freud’s heir and keeper of the flame and was to live on, protecting her father’s archive and reputation, until 1982.

So Roazen’s aim was to go beyond Jones, not by doing more work in the Freud archives (although he did gain unique access to the archive, as well as to the papers Jones acquired in researching his biography); but by using the method outlined above, by undertaking the most comprehensive possible set of interviews with people who knew Freud.

Context

This means that the book has much more context than a straight biography, in at least three distinct ways.

1. The followers

The most obvious way is indicated in the title of the book, which declares that it will treat Freud’s followers as thoroughly as the master. Hence, after spending 200 pages retelling the story of Freud’s early life, family, student days, tentative steps as a medical researcher, then covering the breakthrough into the invention of psychoanalysis and his development of it up to about 1910 – Roazen then devotes the remainder of this long book to a series of lengthy, in-depth chapters about ‘the followers’. These are:

Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel (pages 187 to 233)
Jung (pages 235 to 300)
the followers who remained ‘loyal’, being Victor Tausk, Lou-Andreas-Salomé, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, JJ Putnam, HW Frink, AA Brill (pages 304 to 386)
another rebel, Otto Rank (pages 389 to 413)
a chapter devoted to women followers: Ruth Mack Brunswick, Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein (pages 415 to 478)
a short section about Erikson and Hartmann (pages 499 to 505)

All this before finally returning to the man himself in the final chapter to describe Freud’s decline, flight to England, and death. Well over half the book’s 520 or so pages of text are devoted to ‘the followers’.

2. Using the interview material

Early on, when dealing with Freud’s parents and birth and boyhood and so on, all the interview material Roazen goes to some trouble to explain right at the start of the book, isn’t used very much. Even when we get to the time Freud spent in Paris studying under Jean-Martin Charcot (October 1885 to January 1886), or his ten-year collaboration studying the origins of neuroses with Josef Breuer (1890 to 1900), or his intense correspondence with sounding board Wilhelm Fliess (1887 to 1904) – Roazen gives some quotes and opinions from his interview material but not enough to change the already established stories.

The benefit of the interview project really kicks in when Roazen starts to explain the theory and practice of psychoanalytical therapy itself, the famous talking cure. This is because he now quotes extensively from many of the actual patients Freud treated, and so you he starts to depart from all the official, stiff and often pompous descriptions which Freud and his followers gave in their writings, and depicts actual practice which is far more irregular, ad hoc, unpredictable than you would have imagined. Suddenly the narrative becomes really gripping, and really human. Roazen’s interviewees’ testimonies build up a vivid picture of a flawed and deeply complicated person.

This account feeds off in two directions. It links up with the idea of the ‘followers’ because many of the patients not only describe their therapy with Freud himself, but were farmed out to what, by the 1920s, had become a sizeable number of disciples in what was now an international Psychoanalytical Movement. My point being you don’t have to wait till the later chapters to hear about the followers, you begin to get a sense of which patients Freud assigned to which of his followers, and why, and how they fared, and sometimes the conversations which went on between, say Ferenczi or Deutsch, about a patient he’d given them.

There’s a fascinating section about how long an analysis should last, with a wild variation, from one or two months to 3 or 4 or 5 years, with some patients requiring top-ups for the rest of their lives (p.145). He even admitted, on a rare occasion, that analysis could in fact, last a lifetime (p.146).

It’s here, about page 140, that the book suddenly opens up and starts giving you all kinds of insights and information you don’t get from a standard biography.

If Freud allowed himself privileges which were not for younger and more inexperienced analysts, it was because he was above all an investigator and would try almost anything once. (p.139)

Suddenly, you start seeing Freud in the wider context of the broad Psychoanalytic Movement, at first regarding treatment of patients, then other issues, and this prepares you for what’s coming up, which is the major disagreements which caused the schisms.

3. The American context

Lastly, Roazen is an American academic living on the East Coast familiar with New York and New York psychoanalysts. So a thread running through the book (once it gets warmed up about page 140) is continual comparisons between Freud’s official writings and the (sometimes wild variation in his actual) therapeutic practice on the one hand – and the staid, dull, conformist practice of the American psychoanalysts Roazen appears to know or writes confidently about.

In a nutshell, the early psychoanalytic movement included quite a few madly inventive, not to say screwed-up, individuals who rang all possible changes on Freud’s original ideas, from modifying them, to introducing new concepts, to rejecting the entire thing and walking away to set up their own movements (Adler, Jung, Rank).

But when the founding fathers and mothers fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis and then the Second World War, they found themselves in a completely different culture, far less anarchic and individualistic, far more intensely capitalist and professionalised than the old world. And so the next generation of analysts, American-born, tended to be much more professional and regular and strict and boring.

Psychoanalysis grew so fast as a movement that it has sometimes oversold itself as therapy; Americans in particular have been guilty of this. (p.186)

This decline was part of the general disappointment which came to characterise the movement, and which Roazen mentions again and again:

Psychoanalysis began with the bold hope of freeing us from mental conflicts. Its history, however, records a series of retreats in its claims for therapeutic efficacy. Originally Freud proposed to apply depth psychology to all the human sciences. But by now psychoanalysts are largely content to restrict their profession to a medical specialty. Whereas Freud and his immediate followers were radical in their expectations and their promises, and considered themselves at odds with conventional society, success has now bred a very different group of psychoanalysts … Psychoanalysis as a field is now incapable of attracting people as original and, it should be said, as undisciplined as those who joined it half a century ago. (p.32)

Compare with the repeated criticism of contemporary (1975) New York analysts for being cold and distant (p.147). But the real criticism of American psychoanalysis is that it lost its theoretical energy, its radical charge, and became just one depth therapy among many others (p.388).

(Compare with Helene Deutsch’s disappointment, in later life, at the relative failure of analysis as a therapy, p.465.)

A lot later, Roazen summarises that the trend in American psychoanalysis has been towards emphasising the ego and the healthy-minded aspects of Freud’s work. It ‘hinges on Heinz Hartmann’s concept of the “autonomous” ego to resist regressions’ (p.473)

Recap

To recap, then, this is far superior to a standard biography because it a) quite quickly places Freud amid the burgeoning, squabbling world of his followers; b) Roazen’s unique interview material provides amazing insights into the actual practice of therapy in the 1920s and 30s, as well as the complex network of therapists and patients which surrounded the great man; and c) Roazen is viewing the whole thing from 30 or so years later, when the initial, explosive creativity of the movement has fizzled out (in America, anyway) into professional conformity. It went from being a radical revolution to a conservative profession. Freud unhappily anticipated this and tried to prevent it:

‘Because of the rarity of such a combination of qualities as are needed to form the true master of mental healing by the psychoanalytic method, psychoanalysis should always remain a vocation, a mission, and should never become (as unhappily it often does today) a mere occupation or business.’ (Freud quoted on page 143)

Topics

Rather than summarise the whole book, I’ll highlight interesting topics.

The roles of Charcot and Breuer

Charcot discovered that by implanting an idea into the unconscious mind, via hypnotism, he could trigger hysterical symptoms in a patient.

Breuer discovered that if you extracted a pathological idea from the unconscious by making it conscious, then a pathological symptom disappeared.

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish invention or profession?

Personally, I think it’s obvious that psychoanalysis was a Jewish invention, something to do with:

close scrutiny of the self
a Talmudic attention to texts and words for hidden meanings
the outsiderness of Jews in antisemitic central Europe made it easier for them to take unorthodox risks
a certain type of neurotic intensity which seems to be part of Jewish culture (this may be wrong, but my views are based on the novels of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and the movies of Woody Allen, all of which tend to ridicule goyim for being so much simpler, cruder and less obsessively reflective than Jews)

But because its founder and earliest adherents were all Jewish doesn’t make it a ‘Jewish science’. Obviously, its teachings have been taken up and developed by plenty of non-Jews and it works as a therapy for all kinds of people. In the same way that soul music is indisputably the invention of Black people, comes out of black social and musical culture, but can be enjoyed by anyone and has led plenty of white people to develop their own variations.

For what it’s worth, here are some of Roazen’s references to Jews and Jewishness in the book:

Freud could be suspicious of non-Jews. (p.36)
A Viennese Jewish analyst, Hanns Sachs, on moving to America and treating more gentile patients than he had in Europe, was worried how he could continue to analyse without Jewish stories. (p.42)
Freud remained sensitive to antisemitism and wary of all gentiles. He believed that basically there was no-one who was not antisemitic. (p.49)
To accomplish a great intellectual (rather than military) achievement was not only far more in accord with Jewish culture but was also in itself enough to establish the superiority of the Jewish spirit over the philistine Gentile world. (p.55)
Freud founded a great movement by which, in a sense, he sought to undermine Gentile values. (p.55)
As a Jew, Freud felt keenly the need for the help of the Gentile Jung. The Viennese psychoanalytic group was made up almost entirely of Jews, and Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be something more than a Jewish sect. (p.238)
‘It is really easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas, for in the first place you are completely independent, and then you are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship, while he as a Christian and a pastor’s son finds his way to me only against great inner resistances. His association with us is the more valuable for that. I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair.’ Freud writing to Abraham (quoted page 239)
As a Jew trying to subvert and overcome Christian standards of morality, Freud had to break out of the constricting confines of Jewish circles in Vienna. (p.239)
Others in the movement regarded Freud’s reliance on Jung as currying favour with the Gentile world. (p.259)
Freud as a Jew sought Jung for the sake of breaking out of the constricting milieu of Viennese Jewry. (p.261)
In Freud’s movement Ernest Jones stood out as one of the few notable Gentiles. (p.347)
[Freud was] a master of Jewish anecdotes. (p.405)
Like Jung, [Heinz] Hartmann represented the world of academic psychiatry and was the Gentile Freud could rely on to keep analysis from being a completely Jewish affair. (p.505)

Why did psychoanalysis take off so quickly in America?

Roazen lists possible reasons:

core aspects of American culture – optimism and belief in individualism – chimed with a therapy which promised that the individual can cure themselves, through their own efforts
a child-centred culture liked the idea that all problems can be traced to childhood traumas or, to put it another way, we can develop new types of education to prevent those traumas ever taking place
a childish culture took to the idea of idealising child-like spontaneity over stifling ‘society’
America contained many rich people, specially in New York where the fleeing analysts arrived; before they knew it, they were treating the neuroses of the very, very rich
the rich like fashions and fads; psychoanalysis became steadily more and more fashionable in the 1920s and 30s
America, as a young nation, had a young unformed, malleable culture which this ‘radical’ new therapy could penetrate more easily than in hidebound European societies
America is a nation of immigrants who must carve out their own identities – psychoanalysis promises to help you do that, get in touch with your inner child, work through your problems, become successful etc
America, unlike France, Germany, Britain, lacked a psychiatric tradition of their own, so they, in effect, imported one and adopted it

In 1921 Freud had nine patients in analysis: 6 were new, of which 5 were Americans (p.145). By 1928 the majority of Freud’s patients were Americans (p.137).

American analysts in particular tended to be more orthodox than Freud, since European analysts were likely to have more regular contact with him. (p.142)

Later, discussing the influence of Putnam, Frink and Brill in America, Roazen suggests the US has an odd schizophrenia because its public rhetoric is all about individualism and self expression and yet in many ways it’s a deeply conformist society (shaped, although he doesn’t say this, by the all-pervasive effect of consumer capitalism).

American psychoanalysis quickly became professionalised, and well paid, talking among themselves the rhetoric of rebellion and radicalism, but in practice helping the mentally ill fit better into their society’s needs.

Although Freud loathed America…

Freud visited America along with Jung in 1909. He was quietly appalled at the lack of manners and ceremony surrounding, for example, barbecues, the lack of culture, the frenetic pace of life. Throughout the 1910s and 20s Freud’s dislike of America steadily grew. He called America ‘a gigantic mistake’. He denied ‘hating’ America, merely ‘regretted’ it.

America offended Freud ‘by its deference to numerical superiority, its belief in statistics, and its worship of brash wealth’. He called Americans ‘savages (p.406).

Roazen shrewdly points out this was partly due to Freud’s aversion to feeling dependent and, by the later 1920s, most of his patients were American i.e. he had become financially dependent on the Yankee dollar (p.382 ff.) Well into the 1930s his American patients paid Freud $20 an hour (p.419).

Is psychoanalysis based around Freud’s own personality?

Yes and no. If you’re not expecting it, it comes as a surprise to read Freud and discover just how much he refers to his own experiences and dreams and intuitions on every page. His collected writings are more like literary works than scientific papers, and literary works which are, moreover, continually, insistently autobiographical. As he himself wrote in his Autobiographical Study:

Two themes run through these pages: the story of my life and the history of psychoanalysis. They are intimately interwoven. (quoted p.507)

Or as Roazen puts it:

It would be impossible to overestimate how much of himself Freud put into his work. (p.103)

His founding text, the Interpretation of Dreams, is one of the most autobiographical works ever written, the general principles he writes about being extrapolated from an apparently endless stream of Freud’s own dreams – many, many dreams from other sources, historical, from literature, from patients or friends; buy many of Freud’s own personal ones, too. And this feels like a fundamentally literary strategy:

As with other great writers, it required a rich self to enable him to recreate a version of human experience out of his autobiography. (p.44)

Freud was aware this was a very weak spot for his theory, and touchy about suggestions that the entire theory was a huge extrapolation of his personal neuroses (p.150), so there’s weight to the attack.

But you can’t dismiss psychoanalysis as being the extrapolation of one man’s personality for two obvious reasons: one, Freud developed and evolved his ideas, quite drastically, over the 40 years he wrote on the subject; sure, these were based on his own changing beliefs, but they also reflected changes in the evidence: some the result of long analyses over decades with scores or patients; some from the evidence of other analysts in the growing movement; but the biggest change coming as a result of the First World War and the epidemic of shell shock it created.

And the second rebuttal is the way psychoanalysis was taken up and developed and fine-tuned by plenty of other people, initially in the shadow of Freud (from which some rebelled), but then, in the next generation, among analysts who’d never met him and took his teachings in whole new directions.

Especially the women analysts. Yes, you can critique some aspects of the original teachings as reflecting his personality and obsession, for example, his persistent denigration of women:

He thought that shame was a specifically feminine trait (p.49)
Freud tended in an old-fashioned manner to idealise and yet also denigrate women…In Freud’s world women are treated as objects, rarely as subjects. (p.67)

And the way his entire model of the mind privileged the experience and development of boys and men, and placed the son’s alleged struggle with his father (the Oedipus complex, p.119) dead centre of his first model of the mind. Yes, his theory had far less to say about girls and women, and when it did, was of a consistently insulting nature:

Freud’s resistance to religious ideas as akin to his more general rejection of dependence and passivity, which he associated with femininity. (p.260)

But his followers a) included leading women figures, such as Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein and b) they developed, rejected, improved and changed his teachings in all sorts of ways, especially regarding the role of mothers in the child’s development (see below).

Above all, psychoanalysis survived, as a theory and a practice, down to the present day, which it could never have done if it had just been an elaboration of just one man’s idiosyncrasies.

Psychoanalysis eventually became something quite different from Freud personally. As the movement expanded, changes were introduced into psychoanalytic thinking which would have been utterly alien to Freud himself. Working with the method he gave them, later investigators revised some of his most cherished positions. (p.46)

Prophet of doom

An interesting aspect which ties together the issues of Freud personality and success in America was his strong personal sense that civilisation was doomed (p.53). He was a pessimistic old so-and-so. He took a ‘characteristically harsh view of human nature’ (p.162).

Freud was inclined to think that not much could help improve mankind. (p.311)

Personally, I find his gloomy pessimism about human nature appealing about his work – as opposed to the happy, smiley, religiosity of Jung, which I find off-putting.

But there are two points: in his gloomy sense that civilisation was going down the tubes, Freud was very much of his time and place. Central European thinkers had been lamenting The End of Western Civilisation since the 1890s, a process crystallised in Oswald Spengler’s famous book, ‘The Decline of the West’ (1918). Freud’s own, late work, ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, published in 1930, took its place in this tradition of hand-wringing lament.

But it goes to show how little his personal opinions were stamped onto psychoanalysis that, in America, this gloomy old European defeatism was completely rejected in favour of the shiny can-do positivism mentioned above.

How important was the practice of psychotherapy to Freud?

The answer which emerges very clearly is ‘not very much’. Roazen’s account quotes sometimes shocking passages from Freud’s own letters to highlight two running themes:

1. Freud quite frequently refers to his patients as scum and riff-raff.

‘I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash…’ (quoted p.161)
‘In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.’ (quoted p.161)

2. Freud thought psychoanalysis could only really work with patients who were a) mature and b) well educated enough for the ego to be able to make sense of the revelations therapy throws up (p.152); he preferred patients from ‘the more educated classes’ (p.153). In fact he went so far as stating that the ‘optimum conditions for psychoanalysis exist where it is not needed – among the healthy’ (p.175). He hoped for far more than palliating the anxieties of the well-off.

He had in mind something more cultured and more elevated than the treatment of psychotics; he wanted people to be higher and better. (p.158)
He demanded that people grow up; he expected more of mankind. (p.178)

And anyway: ‘No one has ever been fully satisfied with therapeutic results, analytic or otherwise’ (p.363).

3. He increasingly thought the hard labour of spending years trying to help people with obstinate mental problems was for ‘the theoretical yield’. In other words, he thought treating patients was only really justified by the new theoretical insights it could give you.

Freud the wordsmith

It’s extremely obvious that Freud was one of the great writers of the 20th century, that he based his theory and practice on a very close attention to words (in free association, slips of the tongue, as they transmuted into images in dreams, the acting out of transference in the analytical situation) and spread his teachings very successfully through his charming and persuasive writings.

An interesting light is shed by the fact that he didn’t like music because there are no words for the rational mind to latch onto.

Of all the arts music is perhaps closest to the id, and without a guide from the more rational part of his mind Freud felt uneasy. Unable to analyse the effects of music on himself, Freud could not enjoy it. (p.57)
‘Music did not interest him because he regarded it as an unintelligible language.’ (Edward Hitschmann, quoted p.270)
‘I feel no need for a higher moral synthesis in the same way that I have no ear for music.’ (Freud, quoted p.377)

The limits of psychoanalysis

Among the most interesting passages in the book is Roazen’s discussion of whether psychoanalysis can help mental illness beyond mild neurosis. Can it help with the more severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic-depression, multiple personality disorder? Short answer: No.

Tellingly, Roazen digresses from Freud to point out that psychiatry as a profession still (well, in 1975) had no hard and fast method of distinguishing between neurosis and psychosis, and only a poor understanding of the combined organic and psychological causes of severe mental illness; and a limited range of treatments, which often don’t really work.

That is the biggest context of all. Psychoanalysis evolved into a system of hermeneutics or interpretation – of signs, symbols, literature, art, film etc – in the essentially well. That’s where it has ended up having the longest life and biggest significance.

In the real world of psychology, it takes its place among a range of other talking therapies, strategies and medical treatment, of mild disorders such as neuroses and depression. It has turned out not to be the complete revolution in psychiatry which Freud and the early disciples hoped for.

Transference

The key criterion for deciding whether a patient was treatable was whether they could establish transference to the analyst. Yes, and the patient can project stifled feelings and act out smothered wishes onto the figure of the analyst and both can use these to dig down and unearth the roots of the neurosis. But if no transference can be established, no treatment is possible (p.165).

Darwin

Paul Robinson implies that describing Freud’s theory as an outcrop of Darwin’s theory of evolution was errant or scandalous, but that’s how I’ve always approached Freud. If there is no God, no plan, no teleology, if we have evolved by accident through a vast series of untold contingencies, if we are just another type of animal, but admittedly with this astonishing ability of reflection and thought – how would this ‘thought’ develop in the infant, how would its developmental stages linger in adult thinking; what is thinking? I like Freud because he situates us firmly in the animal kingdom where we belong, with no special dispensation.

It may be difficult for many of us to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I…cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. (p.261)

Its main legacy

Psychoanalysis has left a legacy too pervasive on twentieth century culture to be measured. But Roazen has a very simple paragraph which says that Freud’s greatest and indisputable discovery in psychology is the persistence of infantile remnants in the adult mind, to a greater extent and of a vastly more complex nature than anyone had ever realised before. (Mind you, he has Erik Erikson saying a sentence later that Freud’s ‘greatest contribution’ was the importance of psychosexuality, p.200).

Looked at another way, Freud’s main legacy is the widespread availability of depth psychological therapy in every country in the world. The basic idea that psychological problems and symptoms in any of us may have their roots in early infant experiences and that these can be recovered, remembered and resolved, may not be the universally recommended treatment of mental ailments, but is universally accepted as at least one of the main therapeutic strategies.

Titbits

Height

Freud was only just about five foot seven in height, whereas Jung, 19 years younger, was a strapping six foot two. If we adopt a heightist theory of history, trouble was inevitable.

The schism with Jung

After seven years of correspondence, during which Freud had adopted Jung as the Crown Prince of psychoanalysis, their relationship ended. On a lecture tour of America in 1912 Jung made his differences from Freud quite clear and throughout 1913 they argued, leading up to the Psychoanalytic Congress of September 1913 where battle lines were decisively drawn. Jung rejected the primacy of sexuality. He rejected the notion that children were in any sense sexual. He had the insight that the fact that so many patients in analysis brought up infantile sexual memories was in fact a screening device, a projection back into earliest memory, of problems the patient was facing in the present. That psychoanalysis presented many patients with the easy option of dwelling endlessly on the past rather than confront the difficult future. According to Roazen this insight is now generally accepted among contemporary psychoanalysts. In 1913 Jung delivered his paper announcing his concepts of introversion and extroversion, with Freudian psychoanalysis seen as merely a subset of the former.

He was, in short, developing an entirely different model of the psyche and Freud felt he had to make an absolute break in order to protect the integrity of his model and his movement.

Jung thought he was making common-sense adaptations to the evidence continually being thrown up by actual treatment of patient. But Freud thought the sexuality of children was the absolute bedrock of his theory and saw in Jung the same pattern he’d seen in Adler and, indeed, in most western medicine and psychiatry, which was inability to face the fact of childhood sexuality which was itself based on repression among the deniers. In a typically Freudian manoeuvre, he thought the more everyone around him denied the existence of childhood sexuality, the more true it must be.

Jung resigned his editorship of the movement’s magazine in late 1913 but hung on until April 1914 before resigning as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Freud had to see things in embattled oppositions, a dialectic; at first the conflict between conscious and unconscious, after the Great War the conflict between the Life Drive and the Death Drive. Above all Freud had a strict requirement to make everything rational and clear and understandable; anything which couldn’t be clearly explained was a neurosis which had to be brought into the light of explanation.

Jung had a different temperament: he saw unity in the human mind, which could incorporate these other elements. He thought the mystical and unexplained needed to be experienced and healing, wholing properties. Freud thought only the unhappy neurotic man has fantasies. Jung saw fantasy as an aspect of creativity, as a positive component in a healthy mind.

Freud was obsessed with the impact of the earliest infant and childhood experiences on the adult. Jung became increasingly interested in the problems of the elderly. Older people are less concerned about the vicissitudes of sexuality, but by a search for meaning in life.

Jung had much more clinical experience working with the seriously mentally ill. This opened him up to a far greater range of ideas of what therapy could consist of and what ‘well’ looked like. Freud had a far narrower view and thought therapy could only work with neuroses and obsessions, in other words with relatively minor mental illness. This was because Freud’s model relied on the patient’s ego or rational self being relatively intact. Once the repressed traumas of childhood sexuality were dragged into the light of day and accepted, the patient could be relied on to integrate these insights and get on with life.

Whereas Jung treated patients whose egos were splintered and needed help just getting out of bed or getting dressed. So his model of therapy was far more interventionist. Freud advocated an aloof detachment, giving rise to a tradition of cold and antiseptic therapists. Jung thought therapy should more like a collaboration and a journey.

‘The therapist is no longer the agent of treatment but a fellow participant in a process of individual development.’ (p.282)
‘The psychotherapist should be absolutely clear in his own mind that the psychological treatment of the sick is a relationship in which the doctor is involved quite as much as the patient.’ (p.283)

Mind you Jung was a bigot, too. He was notoriously intolerant of male homosexuality. And he thought university education had a disastrous impact on women’s personalities (p.278).

Science

It was very characteristic of Freud not to define ‘science’ in terms of methodology, hypotheses, experiments and data, but solely in terms of his own model of the mind. Thus:

To Freud, the essence of science was that it represented ‘the most complete renunciation of the pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable.’ (p.245)

But Roazen points out that this metaphor is immensely autobiographical. It simply described Freud’s personality – tight-lipped, stoical, immensely self-contained, aloof. An entirely subjective autobiographical model which every other analyst and therapist has been free to ignore, not least Jung with his emphasis on a more humane therapeutic engagement.

According to Roazen, it was in the 1920s that Freud moved away the often literary basis of his writings in a bid to emphasise the scientific nature of psychoanalysis.

Superstition

Superstition derives from suppressed hostile and cruel impulses. Superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble; and a person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without. (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901.)

Totem and Taboo

Roazen rubbishes Totem and Taboo as do all modern commentators. Freud projected his fairy tale ‘discovery’ of the Oedipus Complex back onto ‘primitive’ societies claiming that every society passed through the same developmental phase (just as he insisted all toddlers do), namely when the horde is dominated by a great Father who hogs all the nubile women, the young generation of men (all his sons) band together to kill and eat him, then are overcome with guilt and so institute a new religion around a great sacrificed god alongside complex taboos regarding incest and exogamy.

No anthropologist has ever found any evidence to support this story which amounts to a fairy tale, a projection by Freud of his pet developmental theory back into an invented prehistory. Totem and Taboo is Freud’s silliest book, though it has steep competition in the equally ludicrous Moses and Monotheism (Freud had the grace to describe Totem as a ‘novel’, though it is really the fantastical farrago of a very old man working out his obsessions in public) (p.301).

Famous analysands

‘Analysand’ means ‘someone undergoing psychoanalysis’. The most famous analysands would include composer Gustav Mahler, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and novelist Herman Broch.

Ego psychology

Freud’s emphasis was on decoding the repressed wishes of the unconscious via dreams, slips and free association. His focus was on the unconscious and repressed drives. From the 1930s the younger generation of analysts began to switch the focus to the conscious mind, the ego, specifically to understand the mechanisms of coping and defence which the ego deployed.

In 1936 Freud’s daughter, Anna, who had followed him into analysis, published ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, a study of the ‘ways and means by which the ego wards off depression, displeasure and anxiety’. It became a founding work of ego psychology. By the 1950s this focus on ego psychology had become the main stream of psychoanalysis.

Two paradoxes

Calvinism, Marxism and Psychoanalysis are all deterministic ideologies, propounding iron laws of causation, and yet all relied very heavily on the achievements of zealous and energetic individuals (p.350).

Marx loathed Russia, its backwardness and brutality, and yet it was in Russia, of all the European countries, that his followers seized power and he was set up as a god. Similarly, Freud came to deeply loathe America and all it stood for (fake egalitarianism, lack of culture, surplus money) and yet it was in the single nation he hated most that Freud’s invention became most successful and lucrative (p.384).

A fine figure

Ernest Jones, the only Gentile in Freud’s close circle, a feisty defender of the Master, and very energetic organiser, the man who wrote the magisterial three-volume biography of Freud – was also an excellent figure skater and actually wrote a book about figure skating. (p.353)

Freud’s followers

Paul Federn (1871 to 1950)
Edward Hitschmann (1871 to 1957)
Victor Tausk (1879 to 1919) suicide after Freud told Helene Deutsch to stop analysing him
Lou Andreas-Salome (1861 to 1937)
Hanns Sachs (1881 to 1947)
Theodor Reik (1888 to 1969)
Herman Nunberg (1883 to 1970)
Karl Abraham (1877 to 1925) solid, reliable
Max Eitingon (1881 to 1943) Russian with enough private fortune to fund the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute; analysed by Freud on evening strolls
Georg Groddeck (1866 to 1934) disorganised, Freud stole the word das Es for the unconscious, Groddeck believed organic illnesses were the product of thwarted desires, he specialised in applying psychoanalysis to organically sick patients
Paul Schilder (1886 to 1940) as professor of psychiatry at University of Vienna did more than any other man to promote psychoanalysis
Herbert Silberer (1882 to 1923) suicide
Ernest Jones (1879 to 1958)
Sandor Ferenczi (1873 to 1933) delightful, popular; Freud wrote more letters to Ferenczi than anyone else (2,500); diverged from Freud in later years by thinking patients needed the parenting and motherly love they often lacked in childhood
James Jackson Putnam (1846 to 1918) a Gentile, professor at Harvard and early American adopter of psychoanalysis; disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on conflict and the dark side of the unconscious
Horace W. Frink (1883 to 1935) a Gentile, had 2 analyses with Freud but then suffered a complete mental breakdown
Abraham A. Brill (1884 to 1948) by end of the Great War the acknowledged head of psychoanalysis in America (p.380)
Sandor Rado (1890 to 1972) brilliant pupil who was sent to direct training at the New York Institute but the faithful felt he had deviated in some of his books and led attacks which ended in him being expelled
Franz Alexander (1891 to 1964)
Erich Fromm (1900 to 1980) politically committed (Marxist) Fromm tried to integrate psychoanalysis with contemporary social thought. Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought which is outside the scope of Roazen’s book
Erik Erikson (1902 to 1994) an intuitive child analyst with no medical or university training, Erikson was spotted and encouraged to become an analyst by Anna Freud. He found the atmosphere of the Vienna group stifling; after he fled the Nazis to America, Erikson worked on the formation of identity, postulating a sequence of identities which the developing must create in order to achieve ‘ego strength. Erikson coined the term ‘identity crisis’

Otto Rank

Otto Rank (1884 to 1939) from a very lowly background, was mentored and supported by Freud, became his indispensable secretary, expert on mythology, wrote The Myth of the Birth of the Hero which, in offering psychoanalytic interpretations of literature, was right up Freud’s street.

When the breach came it was about the role of the mother, and the aims of therapy. Up till the 1920s Freud’s theory focused almost entirely on the role of the father, specifically the boy child’s resentment and efforts to overthrow him, named the Oedipus complex. Mothers existed, but as the source of the succouring breasts or as objects of infantile sexual fantasy, rarely for themselves.

Rank greatly expanded the importance of the mother, the closeness of the mother-infant bond, and the importance of separation anxiety. Rank then sought the deep origin of that anxiety in the experience of the trauma of being born, a horrifying experience laid down in the unconscious and triggered by all kinds of later experiences. Therefore, he developed the idea that the patient relive the experience of being born; or at least act out the anxieties and terrors it gave rise to.

This was in flat contradiction to Freud’s notion that therapy be an entirely rational process whereby infantile issues were dragged into the light of day and calmly examined by the detached, clinical adult. Freud’s therapy was all about intellectual insight. Rank was suggesting emotional release. Insight was not enough; the patient needed active emotional support (something Jung had suggested before the war). All this was expressed in his 1924 book, The Trauma of Birth.

Wilhelm Reich (1897 to 1957)

Reich was one of the most extreme and radical analysts and Freud disliked him from the start. Where Freud thought therapy was predominantly about memory i.e. dredging up specific repressed memories which lay behind specific neurotic symptoms, Reich (like Jung and Adler) thought therapy should address the whole person.

He took a literalistic definition of sexuality as genital gratification, which Freud thought a massive step backwards to the traditional view of sex which his theory of libido was meant to expand and deepen. Reich thought mental illness was caused by sexual repression and therefore he promoted free expression of sexuality. In the 1960s this fed into the notion of ‘free love’ i.e. having sex whenever you wanted with whoever you fancied, leaving no sexual urge unexpressed.

Reich thought the family was the institution whereby each generation’s sexuality was defined, controlled, monitored and repressed and so he recommended abolishing the nuclear family, and having children raised by communities of adults (as later practiced in Israeli kibbutzim).

Finally, he was a Marxist, a rare political radical among the bourgeois analysts, who linked the overthrow of bourgeois society and taking ownership of the means of production, as cognate with overthrowing the nuclear family so that every individual could take ownership of their own sexuality.

In the late 1920s Reich went on a lecture tour of Bolshevik Russia where he claimed that without a full sexual revolution the Soviet state would degenerate into a repressive bureaucracy, the net effect of which was, amusingly, to prompt the Soviet authorities to shut down the until-then thriving Russian Psychoanalytic Society (p.493).

Reich was kicked out of the International Psychoanalytical Society in 1934. Reich moved to Norway where he carried out investigations into the nature of the orgasm (trying to measure electrical activity in the brain during sex). With the outbreak of war he fled to America.

Shortly after he arrived in New York in 1939 that Reich first said he had discovered a biological or cosmic energy, an extension of Freud’s idea of the libido. He called it ‘orgone energy’ or ‘orgone radiation’, and the study of it ‘orgonomy. (Wikipedia)

His increasingly wild experiments with orgone and erratic behaviour drew the attention of the authorities and, after a sequence of legal problems, he was sent to prison in Pennsylvania where he died of heart failure in 1957.

Women psychoanalysts

The penultimate chapter, chapter 9, (pages 415 to 478), is devoted to the key women in the movement, namely:

Ruth Mack Brunswick née Blumgart (1897 to 1946)

Brunswick worked closely with Freud to flesh out his theories, subtly bringing out the importance of the mother in the development of the child, and the importance of the pre-oedipal period, especially in women, which Freud admitted he had been unable to get at because his women patients always projected memories of their fathers onto him (p.424). Brilliant theorist but Roazen depicts her as working too closely with Freud, her extended analysis with him (1922 to 1938) turning into a psychological addiction. She became addicted to painkillers and died miserably.

Anna Freud (1895 to 1982)

Freud’s youngest child, an unwanted pregnancy, ended up becoming his primary carer after he was diagnosed with jaw cancer in 1923, and then jealous protector of the family archive, letters and so on. Nowhere near as intellectually brilliant or as good a writer as her father, she nonetheless developed into a leading figure in the next generation of the movement for her pioneering work with children. For five years before she thought about becoming an analyst, she worked as a schoolteacher with small children, and this experience fed into her therapeutic practice and then theoretical writing (p.433). She set up the Anna Freud Clinic which continues to this day.

Anna said that children couldn’t be directly analysed because their chief transference remained onto their parents. Therefore the analyst had to a) develop an educative relationship with the child i.e. stand in the relationship of teacher but also b) work through the parents. Often, changing the family situation was enough to cure a child’s symptoms (p.438).

But her key theoretical work was to pioneer the new focus from the 1930s onwards on ego psychology (see above). Her most famous book, ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, listed these mechanisms: regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, denial, identification with the aggressor – all strategies to help the ego cope, manage, survive.

With Dorothy Burlingham she set up a hostel for parentless children during the Second World War and noticed that if one of the women carers succeeded in forming a mothering bond with a child, the child’s halted development could resume. The importance of mothering. During the 1950s and 60s it became more obvious that relationships with the good or bad mother played as much or a greater role in child development as with the threatening father depicted in Freud’s version of analysis.

Helene Deutsch (1884 to 1982)

Pioneer of female psychology. Published The Psychology of Women (1945). Despite her emphasis on the importance of the mother in the child’s development, many of Deutsch’s views were, echoing Freud’s sexism, surprisingly conservative, and she has come in for criticism from feminists. For example, Deutsch’s belief that a woman only becomes fully a woman by transferring her agency onto a strong man to whom she willingly becomes a dependent. She must leave the initiative to the man; she must renounce her originality, etc. Roazen cites a critique by Germaine Greer. (Roazen gives a jaw-dropping compilation of Freud’s sexist assumptions, pages 462 to 465).

She was Freud’s golden girl in the early 1920s but they had a falling out and she never regained his trust, which hurt her for the rest of the life. She played a key role in setting up and running the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but spotted the looming threat of the Nazis and emigrated to America in 1935, where she continued practicing and was held in high esteem.

Melanie Klein (1882 to 1960)

Klein was one of the next generation of women who emphasised the importance of the Mother in a child’s development, in Freudian terms focusing on ‘pre-oedipal’ layers of child development.

Freud, in his rationalist patriarchal way, had emphasised the importance of words and reason: the repressed material has to be dragged into the light of day in the form of words. The female psychoanalysts highlighted the pre-verbal communication of the really young infant.

Klein caused a lot of controversy because she moved a lot of Freud’s developmental schema much earlier, into the life of the pre-verbal baby. She sees the baby as seething with the rage and jealousies which Freud had attributed to the Oedipus complex about age 5.

Klein was a zealot. She believed that children responded to the same therapeutic environment as adults. She thought the child playing with toys as the exact equivalent of the adult’s free association with words, and both as direct channels into the unconscious. She thought every child without exception should be given analytic therapy as a prophylactic against later neurosis. Roazen calls Klein’s approach ‘crusading’ and ‘utopian’ (p.478).

In this stern inflexibility she was the opposite of Anna Freud’s more nurturing, mothering supportiveness. The differences between the two women were made explicit when they both gave papers on child psychoanalysis at a psychoanalytical congress in 1927, and remained the source of sometimes bitter enmity. Freud was prepared to leave a patient with some neuroses if they helped him or her cope. Klein was ferocious to pursue every single neurosis in order to effect a complete ‘cure’.

Freud came to disapprove of Klein as the 1920s went on but was wanted to avoid an open break as he had with the big male schismatics: partly because the big three schisms were with men he had overloaded with oedipal significance and seen as his ‘son and heir’, Crown Prince etc, whereas he never gave any female analyst the same significance; partly because Klein’s theory came from a place doubly removed from his own experience, analysing children and deep consideration of the female psyche, neither of which Freud had a feel for.

When, in 1926, Ernest Jones offered Klein a job at the British Psychoanalytic Institute in London in a bid to beef up its intellectual level, she accepted the offer, moved to London and lived there for the rest of her life. Her fierce character and intense convictions strongly influenced British psychoanalysis and Roazen speculates that the British wing might, eventually have been forced to secede from the international movement if it hadn’t been for the Nazis.

The advent of the Second World War brought a wave of Viennese analysts to London along, of course, with the Master himself and her daughter. The newcomers thought Klein’s focus on pre-oedipal experiences was yet another denial of and resistance to the centrality of the Oedipus Complex – the same crux which had forced out Jung, Adler and Rank.

This town ain’t big enough for the both of us describes the daggers drawn atmosphere that developed between the well-established Kleinians and the newly arrived, orthodox Freudians.

Reading about the way Freudian psychoanalysis developed, evolved and splintered, creating divergent heretics and sects, gives exactly the same pleasure as reading about the first few hundred years of Christian history. There are multiple levels of pleasure. One is watching the way a fundamental idea can be reinterpreted, expanded, followed to its logical conclusions in ways its founders never dreamed of – like watching a game of chess unfold, like watching the plot of a good novel develop in ways you never expected but seem logical as soon as they’re explained.

And the other pleasure is a soap opera-level enjoyment of watching very clever people fight like ferrets in a sack. Roazen’s descriptions of Ernest Jones’s political manoeuvrings are entertaining, but not as funny as his account of the way Jones’s number two in London, Edward Glover, was conducting an analysis on Klein’s daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, and used material thrown up by this to attack Klein in the name of orthodoxy and Anna.

In a phrase, these very clever, very subtle people, who liked to imagine they held the key to solving all the psychological problems of mankind, turn out to be just as underhand, devious, manipulative and vicious as a cellarful of rats.

Thus Roazen speculates the way Melanie Klein’s writings emphasise the goodness of the mother but the child’s vicious, negative emotions, its possessiveness and anger, can plausibly be mapped onto the way her own daughter, Melitta, attacked her, in writing and in public forums.

The war of words really broke out at the end of the bigger world war, in 1944 and 45. A compromise was proposed whereby two groups would have separate facilities, the B group (Anna and followers) and the B group (everyone else). Some members joined the A group, some the B group, but at least half rejected the idea of a split, and wanted peace.

These became known as the Middle Group or Independents, and it’s from their number that the most influential British theorists emerged, namely John Bowlby, Michael Balint and Donald Winnicott.

Other notable women in the movement included:

Dorothy Burlingham, American who left her disturbed husband to move to Vienna with her four children; worked closely with Anna
Marianne Kris
Jeanne Lampl-de Groot
Eva Rosenfeld
Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth
Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882 to 1962)

Thoughts – the widest impact

Reading this book through to the bitter end (Roazen’s apparently never-ending list of Freud’s followers eventually becomes quite exhausting) makes you realise it’s getting on for pointless to try and assess ‘the legacy of Freud’ because his biggest legacy was that he created an entire new field of human enquiry and medical practice, which has spawned scores, maybe hundreds, of followers, acolytes and heretics who have themselves gone on to develop or invent whole new sub-domains and new channels of investigation.

Without Freud an Adler, Jung, Rank or Erikson and some of his umpteen other followers might have gone into psychiatry, but many wouldn’t have because they didn’t have the strict medical training required. So Roazen’s book teaches us that alongside a consideration of Freud’s achievement in terms of his writings and theory, must go the obvious fact that just as important was his creation of such a league of followers.

And that it is often through the followers that major ideas have emerged which have percolated into popular consciousness and popular culture. The concepts of the inferiority complex, identity crisis, separation anxiety, are all products of the intellectual framework Freud created.

*****

Great men

The most dated thing about the book is that Roazen comes from a time and place where he still believes in ‘Great Men’ and ‘Great Thinkers’. Although he critiques multiple aspects of Freud’s character and theory, nonetheless his basic instinct is to place Freud firmly in the pantheon of Great Men.

‘Freud’s genius’ (p.13)
‘a revolutionary in the world of ideas’ (p.29)
‘Freud deserves to be a hero of our time’ (p.40)
Jones interpreted Freud’s credulity as part of the receptivity and open-mindedness that accompanies genius. (p.108)

He carries a 1940s/50s mental model of Great Men who Made the Modern World and are Heroes of Thought, Intellectual Giants etc. I don’t know exactly when this model died off – sometime in the 1980s? – giving way to a far more complex model which, for a start, includes lots more women, but more generally opened up the world of the mind to thousands more creative thinkers, across the full range of the arts and humanities and sciences, and also opened the doors to non-white people beyond the Anglosphere – till you arrive at the jostling, thronged, progressive and often dangerous, sometimes bewildering, multicultural intellectual world we live in today.

Americanisation

The second aspect I found odd was how conventional and conservative his view of psychoanalysis is. This might partly be because he’s American. Americans are (or were) notorious for their positive, upbeat, can-do attitude. Businesslike, have-nice-a-day consumer capitalism. It’s fairly well known that most of the first generation psychoanalysts, being Jewish, fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis and settled in America, especially in New York with its large Jewish population.

In America the questing, experimental, tentative, the Middle European and often quite bleak, pessimistic tone of Freud and his first followers, refugees from the land of Kafka and Musil, was converted into a positive, upbeat, we-can-fix-you procedure for the land of Walt Disney and Oprah Winfrey. You can achieve your dreams! You can be happy and healthy! You can have it all! Just sign up here for your starter course of psychotherapy at the very reasonable price of 25 bucks an hour and we’ll have you back on your feet and back in the office in no time.

So although Roazen pays lip service to Freud as discoverer of the unconscious blah blah, along with all the other stuff about libido, repression, transference and so on, it doesn’t really worry him. He doesn’t seem to take on board what is truly revolutionary about Freud which is that he destroyed the rationale of two and a half thousand years of philosophy, theology, legal and political theory which were all based on the notion that human beings have a capacity for objective reason.

No they don’t. We are terrified animals which, in the course of our infant development, develop a set of psychic defence mechanisms to mediate between the inner world of our raging drives/desires and the cold, brutal outside world which doesn’t give a damn about us. No wonder so many people are damaged and betray odd compulsions, obsessions and anxieties. It’s a very anxious position to be in!

But deeper and more subversive than that, Freud asserts that the rational mind isn’t a shining Greek god, isn’t a gleaming repository of reason and morality, but is made out of the same dark chaotic stuff as the unconscious. The so-called ego is just bits of the unconscious which are split off by the human organism, which can’t help itself developing strategies to try and cope with the ongoing frustration of nearly all its instinctual drives and fantasies.

This is a complete, radical and devastating break with the age-old tradition that all humans contain a fragment of the divine reason in their minds, are mostly capable of rational self-interest (as the economists ridiculously claim), of rational debate and political decisions (as political theorists absurdly claim). No. We are petrified animals subject to a bewildering variety of psychic mechanisms and strategies designed first and foremost to allow us to fulfil psychic wishes and desires, albeit often sublimated into socially acceptable forms.

Thus all the social labels and categories dished out by traditional psychology, ‘neurotic’, ‘obsessive’, ‘degenerate’ and so on, are all relative. We are all on the spectrums of weird behaviour. People don’t just have quirks and anomalies which are basically additions to a reliable core of common sense and reason. There is no common sense and reason. We are all made entirely out of quirks and weirdness. Freud hoped his therapy might, a little, ameliorate and lessen the quirks and weirdnesses which afflict all of us, which humans are, in fact, made of.

Credit

Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen was published by Alfred Knopf in the USA in 1975, and by Allen Lane in the UK in 1976. References are to the 1979 Peregrine paperback edition.

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by Simon on July 14, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in America, Biography, Psychoanalysis

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An Outline of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud (1940)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Background

Freud was allowed to leave Austria by the newly installed Nazi authorities in early June 1938. The unfinished manuscript of ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ bears the date July 1938, so scholars think that he began to write it either while waiting for permission to leave Austria or soon after his arrival in England. By early September he had written 63 sheets of notepaper but broke off to undergo a serious operation for the spreading cancer of his jaw and he never resumed work on it.

The manuscript was discovered among his papers after his death in September 1939. The editors of the Pelican Freud Library point out that although it might be unfinished, it is not incomplete. The final chapter is shorter than the others but appears to complete the prospectus laid out in the preface.

Almost all Freud’s previous works (for example, the Introductory and New Introductory Lectures) were aimed at the general public. The Outline, the editors explain, is not. It is more like a refresher course for established students of psychoanalysis with the result that the style is clipped and many matters alluded to only briefly, on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with sometimes quite detailed aspects of the theory.

The work is in three parts. Part one describes the structure of the mind, its division into id, ego and superego, and the pressure of the external world. It lays out the nature of the two great categories of primal drive – the sexual urge to procreate (Eros) and the organism’s wish to cease stimuli and excitation (the death drive or Thanatos).

In part two, Freud discusses the technique of psychoanalysis, what its aims are, how it works.

In part three, Freud (briefly) situates psychoanalysis within the broader realms of philosophy and psychology, before recapping the theory.

Preface

The teachings of psychoanalysis are based on an incalculable number of observations and experiences and only someone who has repeated these observations on himself and on others is in a position to arrive at a judgement of his own upon it.

Part 1. The mind and its workings

Chapter 1. The psychical apparatus

The oldest part of the psyche is the id. It contains everything inherited at birth, which means the instincts. The id develops an outer layer to mediate with the external world, the ego. The ego has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events it does this:

by storing up stimuli in the memory
by avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight)
dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation)
learning to bring about change in the external world to its own advantage (activity)

As regards the internal world the ego performs its task of self-preservation by gaining mastery of the instincts, deciding which ones will gain satisfaction and when, or vetoing them altogether.

It is guided in these decisions by tensions caused by (internal and external) stimuli: raised tension is experienced as unpleasure, lowered tension is experienced as pleasure. The ego strives after pleasure and to avoid displeasure. A foreseeable increase in unpleasure leads to anxiety. From time to time the ego retires from its job of mediation into sleep, which appears to be necessary to rest the body and brain.

The long period of human childhood leaves behind a precipitate of parental strictures, the superego. The ego has to satisfy the demands of 1) the superego, 2) the id and 3) external reality. The superego is formed not only from the strictures of the specific parents but from the family, national and racial demands, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu; and then, along the way, incorporates material from teachers and other authority figures.

The id is the forces of nature, of heredity; the superego, the broad forces of culture and environment; the ego is formed as a result of the accidental experiences of the individual.

Chapter 2. The theory of the instincts

The general theory of instincts is not well understood. Insofar as instincts replace each other and displace energy onto each other there may be thousands of instincts. To be simple, psychoanalysis discriminates two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct, elsewhere referred to as Thanatos. (Contrasting instincts of self-preservation and preservation of the species, between ego-love and object-love, fall within the realm of Eros).

Eros sets out to bind things together and preserve them; Thanatos seeks to tear things apart and destroy them. Thanatos tends ultimately to an inorganic state, hence it is also known as the Death Drive.

The two instincts can combine or oppose. Thus eating is an act of killing something for our satisfaction; sex incorporates aggression with reproduction. A surplus of the destructive instinct turns the lover into Jack the Ripper; a deficit, into a peeping Tom.

The two instincts exist alongside each other in the childish ego-id. The death instinct is easily detected when directed outwards in aggression; when the superego is constructed, the death instinct is attached to it and can operate self-destructively against the organism itself. Holding back aggressiveness can be just as detrimental as restraining sexual desire.

The libido is detectable in the primary infant state of pure narcissism when the ego takes itself as object. As the child develops it projects libido onto external objects. Throughout life the ego remains the reservoir of the libido from which libido is sent out to cathect (or charge) objects and to which it returns. Only when the subject is completely in love is the majority of the libido cathected onto the object which takes the place of the ego.

The nature of the libido has been deduced from its behaviour in the form of the sex instinct. This aspect of the libido develops out of the contributions of a succession of component instincts which are variously attached to different erotogenic zones.

Chapter 3. The development of the sexual function

The traditional view has it that human sexual life consists in bringing your genitals into contact with the genitals of someone of the opposite sex, with accompanying phenomena such as like kissing and touching. This activity is supposed to start at puberty. How does the traditional view then deal with the fact that:

a) some people are attracted to people of their own sex with similar genitals?
b) some people seek sexual satisfaction but ignore the genitals or other people altogether (called ‘perverts’)?
c) some children take an early interest in their own genitals (called ‘degenerate’)?

In contrast to the evident failure of the traditional theory, psychoanalysis has discovered that:

a) sexual life doesn’t begin at puberty but soon after birth
b) it is necessary to distinguish between sexuality and genitality, the former vastly outcompassing the latter
c) sexual pleasure can be obtained from many zones of the body and that these often only imperfectly overlap with the organs of reproduction

Childhood sexuality develops to a peak in the fifth year and thereafter falls into a lull during which much is forgotten: the latency period.

The onset of sexuality in man is therefore diphasic, first occurring in infancy, falling into latency, and re-efflorescing in puberty. The latency period seems to play a vital role in the process of acculturation unique to man, the passing on of traditional wisdom and knowledge to the next generation.

The first stage of childish development is the oral phase of suckling; the continuation of sucking after the baby is fed is evidence of the separation of pleasure-seeking and physiological need. This – the separation of strict physical need from the enjoyment of physical pleasure – is the justification for describing the baby as ‘sexual’.

Elements of sadism are present in the baby biting the nipple. This sadism is expanded in the next stage, the anal-sadistic phase, where biting and defecation become sources of pleasure.

Finally comes the phallic period when the child detaches sexual pleasure from bodily functions altogether and associates it with playing with its penis or clitoris. The little boy playing with his penis obscurely associates this pleasure with his mother; he wants to be the sole object of its mother’s attention and to do away with the father who keeps taking her away. This is the Oedipus Complex. The little girl, as and when she comes to see or hear about a boy’s genitalia, perceives the absence of a penis as a loss and conceives penis envy. The childish turning away from sexuality which this produces in women often lasts a lifetime.

These developmental phases do not develop in a simple pattern but overlap, often becoming fixated at particular levels. With the onset of puberty these earlier patterns return to influence sexual behaviour. Some early pleasures become focussed on traditional genital activity; some remain in residue as types of foreplay; some become the object of perverted sexual practice; some are repressed, or employed by the ego in forming character traits, and the energy of still others are sublimated into higher and socially acceptable cultural activity.

These discoveries mean that:

a) the phenomenology of the subject has to be examined from a dynamic or economic point of view
b) the aetiology of later mental illness is to be found in the patient’s early life

Chapter 4. Psychical qualities

What is the psyche? Behaviourism says there isn’t one, that we observe and quantify each other like machines.

Traditional psychology says there is a psyche and that it is synonymous with consciousness. Consciousness is hard to define but we all know what we mean by it. A psychology which confines itself to consciousness studies the difference between perceptions, feelings, thought-processes and wishes. But it is clear to self-reflection that these processes are not as continual, as transparent or sequential as earlier philosophers, for example John Locke, thought.

What are we to make of the gaps, the blanks, the dysjunctions in attempts to describe our mental life which trouble the ‘continuous consciousness’ model of the old view?

Psychoanalysis shifts the whole playing field by saying that the overwhelming bulk of psychic life is unconscious. It cannot be known (as the workings of chemistry or physics in the brain cannot be experienced) but its activity can be deduced and general laws governing its behaviour worked out by observation.

Some things out of consciousness become conscious easily; they originate in the pre-conscious, a kind of ante-chamber to consciousness and can be readily accessed. But the lion’s share of mental activity is unconscious and therefore can only ever be inferred or deduced from other evidence

Preconscious material makes its way into our conscious mind with little effort, but unconscious material can only be reclaimed for consciousness by a great effort. One is aware of resistance to its extraction. Sometimes unconscious material forces its way into consciousness and dominates it – as in psychotic illness. Sometimes preconscious material can be subject to repression and become inaccessible – as when we lose our memory.

Animals may well function with just an ego-unconscious. In men this happy state is complicated by the existence of speech which links perceptions to mnemic images and residues of perception, or memory. We don’t operate in a permanent present; we accumulate a huge weight of experiences.

In human beings, since the invention of language, internal events, thanks to being verbalised, can acquire a kind of reality which rivals outer perceptions. To test which is coming from where the ego develops methods for reality-testing. Errors which easily arise due to the new situation – where we mistake internal psychic experiences for ‘reality’ – are called hallucinations or dreams.

The inside of the ego is largely preconscious, with a thin layer of consciousness monitoring outside perceptions and an inner stream of consciousness. The id is entirely unconscious. What the nature of the physical processes are which make the biochemical changes which the mind is capable of perceiving remain a mystery.

Chapter 5. Dream interpretation as an illustration

A model mind is one in which the frontiers of the ego are safeguarded from the encroachments of the id by effective repression, and in which the superego and the ego work together as one. To find out how these forces work together we should see them malfunctioning and an easy way to begin is with dreams.

Everyone dreams. In dreams our experiences are hallucinatory, surreal, bizarre, nonsensical – everything we believe the unconscious to be. Dream interpretation distinguishes between the manifest content, what we remember of the dream upon waking, and the latent content, the real message of the dreams.

In a dram unconscious material has forced its way past the slumbering defences of repression into the preconscious; here it is scrambled by the Censor in such a way as not to disturb the sleep which the human organism requires. In other words, dreams enable refreshing sleep to occur because, although we are more vulnerable to raids from the unconscious, the censor steps in to distort the latent content of the impulse.

Dreams can originate from either suppressed wishes deep in the unconscious or from preconscious traces of the day’s activities to which deeper unconscious urges attach themselves.

Evidence that dreams are indeed the irruption of the repressed are:

a) dreams contain a high degree of material forgotten or inaccessible to waking consciousness
b) dreams partake of linguistic symbols derived from earlier stages in the subject’s development
c) dreams often repeat scenes from childhood which are repressed in waking life
d) dreams incorporate memories not accessible to the individual, possibly memories from the origins of the race

But Freud has called dream interpretation ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ because dreams make accessible to us the bizarre laws to which unconscious life is subject. These include processes of distortion called condensation and displacement.

The deduction from dreams is that the unconscious is desirous of expending its energy regardless of object. The dream is the guardian of sleep because it fulfils this rude instinct, this pressing unconscious wish, in the shape of a fantasy.

Anxiety dreams, which seem to disprove the thesis that dreams are fulfilments of wishes, happen when the instinct overpowers the Censor and is threatening to storm the ego in the full ugliness of its naked lust. The only option open to the ego is to wake up, switch defences up to full, and stuff the repressed material back into oblivion – but at the cost of an all too palpable effort (sweats, adrenalin, anxiety etc).

Part 2. The practical task

Chapter 6. The technique of psychoanalysis

A dream, then, is a psychosis which remains under our control. By contrast other mental illnesses are less controllable. They may come about when the urgings of the id unbalance the ego, or when the superego makes impossible demands, or when both gang up on the poor ego.

In analysis the analyst comes to the ego’s aid with a promise to reinforce his mechanism of defence in return for the subject giving us the complete honesty and candour we need to examine the unconscious. [N.B. it is this bolstering of defences which was pursued in the work of ego psychology developed by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud].

Psychotics who have completely abandoned contact with reality are beyond the terms of this pact and cannot be treated by psychoanalysis. But there is another class of psychiatric patient who still has enough contact with reality to undertake the pact required to carry out therapy – ‘the vast number of people suffering severely from neuroses.’

The therapeutic pact If the neurotic gives us his full story in full candour we will help rebuild his ego. Sounds like the role of the master-confessor from the olden days of religion? Yes, except for the all-important distinction that a psychoanalyst can learn from the patient what he does not know himself, which Christian confession can never do.

In order to do this the psychoanalyst must extract everything whatever that comes to the patient’s mind, no matter how trivial. It is from this material that the analyst deduces the unconscious urges which are dominating the patient.

But the analyst will meet resistance. And after resistance, transference. The patient will begin to project onto the analyst all the feelings evoked by their memories of childhood, for example, the ambivalent love-hate feelings which every child projects onto its first authority figure, the Father.

Transference has the advantage that the analyst can then act with the authority of the father and the patient may make great efforts to please Daddy. Plus, the analyst has the advantage of seeing a key period from the patient’s life acted out in front of them rather than inconclusively reported by a confused patient.

Unfortunately, transference has a negative side as the repressed anger and defiance of the patient, also, can be projected onto the analyst. Worse, the repressed erotic wish for the parent of the opposite sex can emerge in the shape of the patient falling in love with the analyst.

If the patient thinks these are real experiences, it’s tricky; the analyst has to disabuse them and make them see that these are just repetitions of childhood feelings. Once transference is acknowledged, the patient can begin the process of rebuilding, of broadening the area of control of, the ego.

The second part of the cure is the overcoming of resistances. The ego, threatened from within and without, expends a lot of energy clinging to certain anti-cathexes, resistances to repressed material. It is the job of analysis to embolden the ego, to give it the power to regain mastery over its whole domain and not to feel threatened and embattled (anxious, hysterical, neurotic or obsessive).

As resistances to the expression of forbidden material are overcome, welcome mental energy is liberated for the ego to redeploy across its kingdom. When the analysis has progressed this far, two factors now become evident. The first is Guilt, which is the shape taken by resistance in the superego, which expends energy punishing the ego. The superego insists that:

The patient must not become well but must remain ill because they deserve no better.

The analyst has to make the unreasonableness of this self-punishment clear to the patient. The second factor is a complete takeover of the ego by the will to destruction, the death wish, which often leads to suicide.

Chapter 7. An example of psychoanalytic work

One fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis has been that neurotics have the same pathology as normal people, they have the same innate disposition as normal people, the same experiences, the same problems to solve. They are simply people who find this framework of requirements too much, resulting in misery, anxiety, symptoms.

On closer investigation, it appears that almost all these neuroses have their origin in childhood. Hardly surprising when you consider the primal power of the id and the vulnerability of the still-developing ego, feeble, immature and incapable of resistance.

The ego copes with excess stimuli from the external world with flight; with excess stimuli from the internal world with repression, attempts at mental flight, denial and rejection. It later turns out that these have been paid for at the cost of full development, and that the libidinal energy devoted to holding these instincts back, permanently cripples and disables the ego; stunts its proper development.

Why has evolution permitted such an apparently costly mechanism to afflict the young animal? Because it’s a small price to pay compared to the epic task which the ego has to achieve in its first five years:

In the space of a few years the little primitive creature must turn into a civilized human being; he must pass through an immensely long stretch of human cultural development in an almost uncannily abbreviated form. This is made possible by hereditary disposition; but it can never be achieved without the additional help of upbringing, of parental influence which, as a precursor to the superego, restricts the ego’s activities by prohibitions and punishments and encourages the setting-up of repressions.

Thus, the influence of civilisation is among the determinants of neurosis. It is easy for a barbarian to be happy – he gives way to all his basest desires, represses nothing and so has no neuroses. For a civilised man it is a long strenuous journey, with many pitfalls.

The central role of sexuality in this developmental journey has been proved by psychoanalysis time after time:

The symptoms of neuroses are either a substitutive satisfaction of some sexual urge or measures to prevent such a satisfaction; usually some kind of compromise between the two.

Why should this be so surprising? The one essential role of every organism is to reproduce; preparation for reproduction is crucial; and yet in the rise of civilisation no instinct is more thoroughly repressed than sexuality. Given such strong opposing forces why be surprised that so many people fall victim in one way or another to illness caused by the repression of their innermost desires?

Central to the child’s experience is the Oedipus Complex. Freud approaches it via a developmental history of the child.

The child’s first erotic experience is sucking at the breast, the primary model of gratification (‘Love and hunger meet at a woman’s breast’, The Interpretation of Dreams, page 295). Initially breast and baby are one polymorphously perverse substance.

Soon the breast is differentiated and becomes cathected (i.e. charged) with conflicting feelings of love and hate (tiny aggression is shown by biting the nipple) in the oral phase. Soon the breast forms itself into the whole of the mother who pampers and plays with the child, prompting a galaxy of feelings, gratifications and frustrations, pleasures and rages.

Thus the mother is the first seducer, the prototype of all later love-relations.

At three and four, in the phallic stage, the baby boy is aware of the pleasure given by playing with his penis and shows it off proudly to his mother. He associates this pleasure with her and wants to possess her, according to the prompting of obscure feelings. If the child shares the Mother’s bed and then Daddy comes home and he is returned to his cot, the feelings of little Oedipus can be imagined. Rage and hatred and lust and desire seethe in the toddler mind. Eventually the mother or father tell little Johnny to stop playing with himself or being so stubborn or bad tempered and all these injunctions are accompanied by the explicit or implicit threat to deprive the boy of the source of his greatest pride and pleasure, his penis.

This is the castration complex and is the most terrifying experience of a small boy’s life. It echoes down the ages in the Greek myths where successive gods castrate their father, and in the age-old practice of circumcision by which pubescent boys submit to authority, in both Judaism and Islam.

In response to this terrifying fear the child suppresses its masturbatory activities and sublimates them into fantasies. It fosters resentment, defiance and fear of the father and practices a total renunciation of the mother or slavish identification with her, in order to be spared by the Father.

It is precisely because this ‘nuclear complex’ paves the way for so many strategies of defence that psychoanalysis calls it the founding moment in the development of human character. All these seething feelings are repressed in childhood, go underground during the latent phase. But then they return in new guises at puberty that explosive period of sexual and egoistic efflorescence, with the arrival of full-blown sexual awareness. The revival of repressed material with the onset of puberty plays a large role in determining character.

On this model girls are born inferior. Their lack of a penis leads to penis envy. Their attempts at masturbation are failures, hence a general turning away from sexual life in girls and women.

They may try to introject the masculinity they lack and become lesbians. They may turn to hatred of the mother who brought them into the world without a penis and so turn their love toward the father. In this narrative the girl’s attempt to be like their father and to incorporate his penis-authority is finally sublimated into the wish to take the mother’s place, to bear Daddy a baby. Once formulated, this wish may, like the boy’s forbidden fantasies, be repressed into the unconscious but, with the onset of puberty, the wish is revived but directed outwards, so that the young woman goes off to attach herself to the first suitable male who reminds her of Daddy.

Part 3. The theoretical yield

Chapter 8. The psychical apparatus and the external world

Ultimate reality is itself unknowable. All we can know is reality as mediated by our sense perceptions and ‘known’ as it is perceived by our organ of knowledge, the mind.

Thus, in describing the workings of the mind most psychology, and most ordinary people, have to work with concepts which are largely metaphorical, concepts like height, depth, width or more advanced concepts like time, like cause and effect, which have no physical, tangible ‘reality’. We have imposed them on ‘reality’ because they provide us with a working model, a way of getting on with the real world.

Psychoanalysis is no different. It invokes metaphorical concepts like the unconscious, the repressed, the libido and so on. We can never know exactly what these things ‘are’. Possibly, we will one day be able to correlate them to specific physical, biochemical changes in the brain. In the meantime we use them because they provide a workable explanation of the many other phenomena we observe in the mind.

To recapitulate: the id is the realm of unconscious drives; it is ruled by two broad instincts 1) the desire to fulfil every instinctual wish 2) the equal and opposite drive to reduce tension. Ultimately, the second wish is pushing for the cessation of all tension and stimuli (‘Nirvana’). The two broad streams of instincts are assigned to two broad categories: the desire for pleasure, of which sexual pleasure is a subset, fall under the heading of Eros; and the wishes for all stimuli to cease fall under the death instinct.

Mediating between the id and external reality is the ego. The ego attempts to control the instincts of the id such that they can be fulfilled at the most propitious moments in the external world. Sometimes desires which threaten the ego’s function have to be entirely repressed and the ego has to expend energy doing this. The id is driven exclusively by desire for pleasure, the Pleasure Principle, while the ego is driven by a desire for safety, the Reality Principle.

Most of the ego is preconscious. Occasional strands of association, images and verbal residues, drift across the part of the psyche which is capable of self-reflection, often puzzling or even bewildering us.

The ego develops and separates itself off from the primal id at a price. Its autonomy is always contingent and subject to disruptive incursions from ‘below’, from the unconscious, and to a constant stream of punitive demands from ‘above’, from the superego. And the ego is constantly under attack from the terrifying forces of external reality.

No wonder the ego often cracks under the strain and has a ‘breakdown’. It is at this stage that psychoanalysis sets out to trace the fissures, the cracks of the breakdown, back to their earliest origins in childhood. And, once the repressed material has been dragged into the light of consciousness, the patient can acknowledge the long buried childhood experiences which are at the root of the problem and begin rebuilding new, better ego defences with which to face the world.

Chapter 9. The external world

Guilt is the punitive action of the superego upon the ego. The superego is the concentrate of injunctions laid upon us by our first objects, the parents. Thus the psyche has three parts:

the deep inner world – the id
a special part of the outside world introjected or brought inside – the superego
a bit that mediates between outer and inner – the ego

The superego is the heir to the Oedipus Complex. Its intensity has nothing to do with the actual strictness of the real-life parents, but is a function of the intensity of the Oedipal feelings which the child had to repress.

It is a dim perception of this sense of a planting-from-outside which has led theologians to account for conscience as being implanted in us by a higher cause, God.

The superego is initially based on the residue of the Oedipus Complex, but attracts to itself all the teachings of the parents, of teachers and authority figures, general social morality and the accumulated wisdom of the past…

[Here the manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence. The editors of the Pelican edition end the text with ellipses…Quite poignant.]

Comment

This is Freud’s most concentrated theoretical exposition of psychoanalysis, rich in new insights and cross-connections and very persuasive, especially where he gives a bit of wider context, mentioning (albeit briefly) psychoanalysis’s position vis-a-vis philosophy and other psychological theories i.e. it goes deeper than both, far, far deeper.

The passage describing the actual process of psychotherapy is the clearest, most persuasive summary of how the analytic therapy works which I have read.

Possibly it is so effective because he largely eschews the florid metaphors he is so prone to in the rest of his work (analysis as archaeology etc) and also because he doesn’t waste time going off on one of his rants against religion or into a long digression on a literary text (Gradiva, Hamlet etc).

Instead, he bases the theory on the basis of a materialist, biological interpretation of the human organism and human mind, stopping to consider what the evolutionary reason or advantage for this or that mental strategy might be – and this gives it more scientific weight and authority than almost anything else I’ve read by him.

If you were going to read one work by Freud, maybe this is the one; it’s barely 70 pages long in the Pelican Freud Library paperback.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1986.

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by Simon on July 12, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged aetiology, ambivalence, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Anna Freud, anti-cathexes, anxiety dreams, Austria, authority figure, castration complex, cathexis, childhood, childhood sexuality, Christianity, confession, death drive, denial, dream interpretation, dream-work, dreams, drives, ego psychology, ego-love, Eros, erotic wish, erotogenic zones, Evolution, family romance, Fantasy, flight into illness, Freud, genitality, Greek myths, guilt, hallucinations, instincts, introjection, lesbianism, libidinal energy, libido, love-hate, love-relations, masculinity, mental illness, narcissism, Nazis, Nirvana principle, nuclear complex, object-love, penis, penis envy, perception, perversion, polymorphous perversity, preconscious, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, psychosis, psychotherapy, Puberty, rejection, repressions, Resistance, sadism, Science, sexual desire, Sigmund Freud, suicide, Thanatos, the anal-sadistic phase, the Censor, the death instinct, the death wish, the ego, the id, the latency period, the Oedipus Complex, the oral phase, the Pleasure Principle, the psyche, the psychical apparatus, the Reality Principle, the royal road to the unconscious, the superego, the unconscious, the will to destruction, transference, unconscious drives

Posted by Simon on July 12, 2023

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Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Introduction and overview

Freud’s aim was to show the ubiquity and the strangeness of sex and use the sex instinct, massively expanded and redefined, as the basis of an entire new theory of human psychology.

According to historian of psychoanalysis Frank Sulloway, Freud found the sex instinct most suitable as the central vehicle or basis for the new and emphatically physiological type of psychology he wanted to devise, because it is a) so strong and b) so flexible.

In these three ground-breaking essays on sexuality, Freud set out to widen the concepts of sexuality, the sex instinct, libido, so as to encompass a much broader sphere of activity than ever previously imagined in order to make them underpin almost every aspect of human nature.

In Freud’s psychology people’s characters are like complicated family trees, all descended from the same one huge fountain of libido which is channelled and rechannelled into ever-smaller rivers and streams.

It is these rechannellings, the repressions and redirections and reaction-formations and sublimations and so on which come to make up your character – a collection of habits based on infantile pleasures, of disgust or shame (reaction-formations) or heroic ambition (sublimation) or guilts and anxieties (the neuroses).

Thus the Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality (1905) is Freud’s second most important book after The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Essay 1 begins with a detailed look at the state of Victorian knowledge about homosexuality and perversions, because they reveal:

the infinite malleability of the sex instinct
how easily the sex instinct can be rerouted away from its ‘proper’ channel of ‘normal’ sexuality
how even ‘normal’ sexuality is in fact built up of a network of pretty weird behaviour (Freud’s most striking example is kissing, which doesn’t make any sense the more you look at it)

In Essay 2 Freud shows that sexuality is not only present but vitally important in the life of infants and children. This idea was the biggest single cause of opposition to Freud’s theories in his lifetime, from Church and State, from commentators and populist politicians, and from decent people everywhere. It still is.

Freud is not very much interested in ‘love’. Love is the psychological effect of the ‘overvaluation of the sexual object common to almost all manifestations of the libido’:

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

For Freud sex and love are interchangeable terms. He contrasts the overvaluation of the love-object found in the Western tradition with the more relaxed approach of the ancient world:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The Greeks held Bacchic orgies and had a god, Priapus, dedicated to the male organ; by contrast we in our time appear to fear the penis more than ever and instead reverence the idealised object of libido, the dream partner of the opposite sex (or the same sex), and the institution of Marriage.

And despite all the rhetoric from feminists and LGBTQ+ activists about interrogating and subverting this, that or the other stereotype and convention, we still appear to be in thrall to the narrow concept of finding ‘love’ in a faithful, monogamous, committed relationship, every bit as much as our Victorian forebears – very narrow and limited compared to the polymorphous, open and pluralistic attitudes of the 30 or so ancient Roman authors I read last year.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

This long work sets out to show the importance of sexuality in all human achievements, to establish a wider-than-usual definition of sexuality, and to prove the existence of infantile sexuality.

Freud’s recurring tactic is to make the ordinary, the everyday, look strange; to look again without conventional blinkers at things we think we know, and to show that our attitudes are complacent, superficial and contradictory.

1. The sexual aberrations

Popular opinion credits two universal instincts, Hunger and Sexuality. Sex is supposed to set in at the time of puberty and manifest itself in irresistible attractions between adults of the opposite sex with the ultimate end of genital sex, itself with the purpose of reproduction (as taught in Christianity and most of the other world religions).

Let us call the desired one the sexual object, the act towards which the instinct tends, the sexual aim.

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

If popular opinion is true and God made sex solely for reproduction, how do we account for homosexuals?

(A) Inversion

Behaviour of ‘inverts’. For a start there are different types:

a) absolute inverts, totally repelled by the opposite sex
b) amphigenic inverts i.e. bisexuals
c) contingent inverts, depending on circumstances

Some inverts accept their condition as natural; others feel it a torment. Some were gay as far back as they remember; for others, homosexuality cropped up at puberty; others only ‘come out’ as adults, sometimes after they’ve followed a straight career with wife and kids.

Nature of Inversion

The first observers thought inversion the result of nervous degeneracy because it was first found among mental patients studied in asylums.

Degeneracy

But then it was late-Victorian fashion to blame anything you didn’t understand on ‘degeneracy’: criminals are degenerate, the working class is degenerate, Africans are degenerate etc.

Freud defines degeneracy in rigorous Darwinian terms as the actual impairment of an organism’s efficiency and survival probability. In these, practical, terms inversion is not degenerate. Not only is it found in people otherwise perfectly normal, but it is found in people ‘who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture.’

Innate character

Some gays insist homosexuality is absolutely innate. But the existence of the late-developers or of contingent homosexuals argues against this. Far from being innate, much evidence suggests that homosexuality is acquired:

the case of many ‘inverts’ in whom an early impression left a permanent gay after-effect
later influences and life experiences which have fixed contingent gayness e.g. the army, prison, monastery etc

Almost all ‘inverts’ will be found to have been subjected to some experience like this (for example, public school). But on the other hand, so were many people who went on to be perfectly hetero. So it remains hard to say whether homosexuality is acquired or innate.

Bisexuality

Havelock Ellis says a clue might be that homosexuality is a form of psychical hermaphroditism, a mental equivalent of having the organs of both sexes.

Richard von Kraft-Ebing says that the brain contains female and male brain centres which are activated by a ‘sex gland’. (It wasn’t only Freud who was having batty, speculative ideas at this time.)

Whoever is right, it seems that most authorities accept the idea of an innate bisexuality in everyone, and that ‘inversion’ owes something to early disruption of development.

Later, Freud would write:

It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are, human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either sex without the one trend interfering with the other. We call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without wondering much at it … But we [psychoanalysts] have come to know that all human beings are bisexual in this sense and their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.

Sexual object of inverts

Popular opinion holds that ‘inverts’ simply desire the qualities of the opposite sex. An inverted man is like a woman in desiring the qualities of the opposite sex, of masculinity, in his sex object.

But what about gays who love pretty boys, boys who demonstrate all the qualities of a girl, being beautiful, hairless, young and coquettish?

What about transvestites who do a good trade dressing up as women for gay clients? In ancient Greece older men regularly looked after shy, young, girlish boys.

So the sex object is a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one for a woman (in the same way that a symptom is a compromise between a wish and reality).

Psychoanalysis’s explanation is thus: in his childhood the future ‘invert’ passes through a brief but intense attachment to a woman (normally his mother). After leaving this behind he identifies himself with this woman and take himself as his sexual object. Invoking infantile narcissism, ‘inverts’ identify themselves with a woman and set out to find a boy whom they can mother and love as their mother loved them.

The situation will be exacerbated by the absence of a strong father. Think of Oscar Wilde and his imperious mother; of W.H. Auden’s father away at the Front while his mother dressed him in girl’s clothing; of the plays of Joe Orton.

So, says Freud, being gay is being in endless flight from women.

But, Freud emphasises, this isn’t weird. Psychoanalysis has established that everyone makes homosexual object choices in their unconscious mind; that the freedom to range wide over male or female objects is found in childhood, in primitive societies, in early history and in the ancient world, and is the original basis of sexuality.

It is only as a result of later, Victorian social restrictions that people are forced into one fixed, standardised and regimented mould, heterosexual or homosexual, or their modern equivalent which demands that people be in monogamous committed couple relationships.

In reality a person’s final sexual orientation is not decided until after puberty, and then only as the result of innumerable obscure influences. That there is a multiplicity of determining factors is indicated by the extraordinary range of sexual practices and attitudes to be found in mankind.

Thus psychoanalysis regards so-called ‘normal’ sexuality as achieved only under intense pressure and great restriction of the original wider options for pleasure. In fact it’s so-called ‘normal’ sexuality, the genital attraction between man and woman, which is historically problematic and just as much in need of explanation as any other form.

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

No one single aim can be laid down for the sexuality of ‘inverts’, as it can for the ‘normal’ behaviour of straights; there is too great a variety.

Conclusion

We have been in the habit of regarding the link between the sexual aim and the sexual object as more solid than it is. In fact the object appears to be no more than soldered onto the instinct, and which aim takes which object is a great deal more problematical than previously thought, because the sexual instinct is more free-flowing and independent than we previously suspected.

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

Light is thrown on the sexual instinct by the fact that it permits of so much variation in its objects and such a cheapening of them.

That children can be the objects of sex, or even animals, tells us about the vicissitudes of the sex instinct (along with rapes, sexual assaults and perverse murders). It seems as if the sex instinct will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction.

The impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind… In the process of human cultural development, sexuality is the weak spot.

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

Popular opinion says the sexual aim is the union of the genitals in copulation which leads to the release of sexual tension. But a moment’s reflection tells you that, even in ‘normal’ sexuality, people kiss – bringing together two parts of the digestive system – for pleasure. And most people linger to some extent over intermediate stages, such as looking and touching. So the seeds of ‘perversity’ are all around us.

Perversions are sexual activities which either:

extend in an anatomical sense beyond the parts of the body designed for sexual union
linger or halt at the intermediate stages on the path to sexual union

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

The first and prime perversion of sex from its object is the overvaluation of the object i.e. ‘love’. For all practical purposes ‘love’, for Freud, is this (potentially pathological) overvaluation of the love object.

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated with (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot easily be reconciled with [society’s] restriction of the sexual aim to union of the actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with other parts of the body into sexual aims.

Once a sexual object has been chosen, the ordinarily effective higher activities of the mind – judgment and civilised restraint – all too often go out of the window. In most people this results in crushes, infatuations, sometimes in grands amours: once the libido sees an opening, it tends to pour forth like a flood.

How the subject (carried away by powerful libido) and the (perhaps reluctant) object cope with the situation is the theme of most of Western literature from Hero and Leander to Madame Bovary.

(I can see an evolutionary explanation for all this which Freud doesn’t mention, which is that: having made a sexual choice, overvaluation follows from a) opening the floodgates of an instinct otherwise fiercely repressed b) to ensure a strong libidinal attachment to the woman who you’re planning to impregnate – so it is a blind Darwinian instinct designed to make the impregnator bond with their mate and remain to look after their offspring; but, as all of human history tells us, this often clashes with the other biological imperative affecting men which is impregnating as many women as possible, hence the many men who eat, shoot and leave.)

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Freud proceeds with his agenda of making everything about sex and love look strange and uncanny.

The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together.

Why do people find kissing acceptable and cunnilingus or fellatio disgusting? Freud here points to the purely conventional, culturally-determined nature of our feelings.

Has ‘disgust’ (a powerful reaction-formation) played a large part in forming our cultural conventions – or is it simply a product of the increasing self-repression which characterises us in the West (unlike other contemporary civilisations, primitive cultures and the cultures of the ancient world, which were and are much more liberal in their sexual practices)?

Freud seems to think the ancients were more honest in this, as in so much else.

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The progress of civilisation seems to require a steadily increasing restriction of the sexual instinct, bought at the price of a growing sense of disgust. Hence the genitals of men and women, worshipped by the Greeks as holy, are now banned as dangerously corrupting.

There is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics.

One thinks of John Ruskin (allegedly) driven into paroxysms by the discovery on his wedding night that, unlike the Greek statues which he adored, his wife had pubic hair. Or, more up to date:

Indecent exposure, sometimes known as ‘flashing’, is a serious sexual criminal offence, which carries a custodial sentence of up to 2-years at its most severe. (Old Bailey solicitors)

Does ‘disgust’ drive the repression of sexuality i.e. is disgust natural, a ‘God-given’ reaction of the ‘God-given’ conscience to the spectacle of fallen sexuality? A question related to: is conscience ‘God-given’ and so universal? Or is ‘conscience’ created by culture and therefore morally relative across different cultures? Morality and disgust on the one side, pragmatism and sexual libertarianism on the other.

Or is disgust an entirely material, biological reaction-formation to the compulsory repression of sexuality enforced by a coercive society, no God or morality required?

Sexual use of the anal orifice

People who think sodomy is disgusting because we defecate through the anus are as correct as women who say the penis is disgusting because men urinate through it or men who think the vulva is disgusting because women menstruate through it.

Which is to say, all these opinions are correct in their own terms, but missing the point. These organs can (clearly) be put to various uses. Should they be? Or should they be restricted to their ‘God-given’ purposes? But then who is to say what their correct usage is? A bunch of old men wearing purple dresses in the House of Lords? Imams and rabbis? Agony aunts? TV shows. Gender studies lecturers? Where is the authority for this?

Significance of other regions of the body

What seems to be common to all human sexuality is:

overvaluation of the sexual object
a versatile ability on the part of the sexual aim to use any part of the body as the sexual object for gratification

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

In fetishism the sexual instinct replaces the primary object (the genitals) and the overvalued secondary object (the person attached to the genitals) with unlikely tertiary objects – parts of the body, locks of hair, feet – or linked objects, such as underwear or other items of clothing.

A certain amount of fetishism is habitually present in normal love, especially of those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented.

A lock of your true love’s hair. Or as Goethe put it in Faust:

‘Get me a kerchief from her breast,
A garter that her knee has pressed.’

These objects can justifiably be likened to the fetishes of primitive peoples. Inscribed in fetishes is a primitive symbology, comparable with the symbolism of dreams. For example, the foot is an age-old symbol for the penis. Fur is linked to the hair of the mons Veneris. The shoe or slipper is a symbol of the female genitals (as in Cinderella) into which the male foot neatly slips, and so on.

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

External factors (danger, unavailability of a sexual object, risk of disease) tend to fix libido at the preparatory activities. Truly, every normal aspect of ‘love’ carries the seeds of a perversion.

Touching and looking

Seeing is an evolutionary derivative of touching. A look can be as exciting as a touch.

Both seeing and touching are ‘ordinary’ parts of ‘normal’ sexual activity – unless lingered over, or unless they become ends in themselves, in which case we have voyeurism/exhibitionism and various types of masturbation.

Freud thought exhibitionism the result of either wishing for a reciprocal showing of the other person’s genitals; or a triumphant assertion against the Castration Complex: ‘Look, I’ve still got my willy!’

He doesn’t seem to take into account the sadistic urge to offend or scare women, a kind of sublimated form of rape, visual rather than physical rape.

The power of vision is shown by just how upset some women can feel, how physically defiled, just because a strange man showed them his penis. I’m not downplaying the offence or upset caused.

The concealment and revelation of the sexual parts of the body go hand in hand with the rise of civilisation and progressive sexual repression. It is unlikely that the Greeks had strip clubs; instead they had orgies, the real thing. We have strip clubs because of the immense repression to which our sexuality has been subjected.

For Freud the concept of ‘beauty’ itself originates in sexual excitement but is sublimated away from the genitals onto the body as a whole, which is perceived as ‘beautiful’, a concept or feeling which can then be transferred onto other types of object, and then onto objects created and enjoyed for their ‘beauty’ alone i.e. works of art.

This explains why women are more often the object of art than men – even in women painter’s paintings – because men are more sexually predatory than women. And why the sight of the genitals themselves is rarely ‘beautiful’; all pleasure has been sublimated out of them leaving only the reaction-formation of ‘disgust’.

Sadism and masochism

These were given their names by Richard von Kraft-Ebing (Viennese) in the 1890s, after the Marquis de Sade (French) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Viennese) As with the other perversions, a moderate amount of sado-masochism is generally regarded as ‘normal’:

The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness – a desire to subjugate. The biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.

Many types of sexual relationship which are regarded as ‘normal’ contain a high amount of aggression; sadism becomes an actual perversion when pleasure is derived from violence alone.

Masochism is sexual excitement aroused purely by receiving pain or humiliation. Later in his career, after he’d outlined the new theory of the superego, Freud distinguished between purely physical masochism and moral masochism, the desire to be found guilty of sins, to be punished for them and so on, an internal submission of the ego to the overbearing superego which plays such a large part in religious life.

Freud thinks masochism is secondary, a deflection of primary sadism – which the subject is too weak to inflict onto others – back onto the self. Masochism is for weaklings; or for the weakling part of even strong people.

The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.

But nobody really knows why. Some people think aggression is a development of the primal desire to eat, to master objects by putting them in the mouth – an instinct seen in children and in the holy meals at the centre of many religions. Others think there is some intimate biochemical link between pleasure and pain.

Suggestive for Freud’s bisexual thesis – the mingling of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in all of us – is Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing’s agreement that masochism and sadism are often found in the same person.

(3) The perversions in general

Variation and disease

Medical men first identified perversions in the insane and perversion was blamed (like homosexuality) on ‘degeneracy’. What Freud has shown is that the perversions are implicit in even ‘normal’ love.

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘perversion’ as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble problems as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

On one side the liberal Freud, on the other a vast army of censorious Christians, trying to draw precisely that line, trying to tell people exactly just which type and forms of ‘love’ are permissible and which aren’t, from the Pope to Mary Whitehouse.

For the Moral Majority it is always other people who are degenerate, other people who are the helpless prey of, for example, homosexual men in the homosexual age of consent debate.

Freud is saying, if you only look at the acts themselves you may be tempted to define them as unchristian or degenerate, pathological or perverted etc. But if you look at the instinct which carries so many people to such lengths, it is the same instinct and it is in all of us – it is what our minds are made of.

The mental factor in perversions

Despite the sometimes disgusting ends to which the love instinct is put, all these behaviours are to some extent idealisations of the libido, in the sense of abstractions of it away from its normal role.

The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality.

Two conclusions

Every individual plays a double existential role:

to reproduce, to pass on its genes and preserve the species
to preserve itself while it does this

Sometimes the two purposes clash and this is the basis of Freud’s psychology, the clash between the unconscious libidinal drive to have sex, all the time, with everyone and everything; and the rational ego’s struggle to redirect this blind drive into socially acceptable forms which help the individual survive and help it be at peace with itself. So the origins of any person’s sexuality must be looked for in two places: in the history of the species and the accidents of the individual.

Our study of the perversions has shown us that the sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop within the individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full strength, no doubt they then determine the course of its development.

These forces, which act like dams upon sexual development – disgust, shame and morality – must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the signal.

In the second place we have found that some of the perversions are only made intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces. If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself is no simple thing but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.

(4) The sexual instincts in neurotics

Psychoanalysis

Here Freud reiterates his belief that all the psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces and that the psychoneuroses can only be investigated using the method perfected by Josef Breuer and himself – psychoanalysis. He gives a useful summary of the famous cathartic method:

By this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that contribution is the most important and only constant source of energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of the persons in question is expressed in these symptoms. The symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient!

The removal of the symptoms of hysterical patients by psychoanalysis proceeds on the supposition that those symptoms are substitutes – transcriptions, as it were – for a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression) have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness.

These mental processes, being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance – to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process called conversion) in somatic or bodily phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms [cf Anna O’s inability to drink water, choking sensation etc].

By systematically turning those symptoms back (with the help of psychoanalysis) into emotionally cathected ideas – ideas that can now become conscious – it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.

Findings of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has shown that:

Symptoms represent a substitute for impulses the source of whose strength is derived from the sexual instinct… The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess of the normal quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on their part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

In the case of someone predisposed to hysteria, the onset of his illness is precipitated when, either as a result of his own progressive maturity or of the external circumstances of his life, he finds himself faced by the demands of a real sexual situations. Between the pressure of the instinct and his antagonism to sexuality, illness offers him a way of escape. It does not solve his conflict but seeks to evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms.

(See Jensen’s Gradiva, written two years later, which is a textbook example of hysteria as the self-deluding flight into illness. The archaeologist Norbert’s escape from the reality of an emotionally demanding sexual situation – his awakening love for Zoe – into delusions about the light-tripping woman on the antique frieze whom he names ‘Gradiva’, and then Norbert’s actual fleeing to Italy, to Pompeii, to escape the sexual situation, only to meet Zoe magically transformed into the woman in the frieze –– from the heart of the reaction-formation returns the repressed. In the novel Norbert is then cured through love, by the redirecting of his libido – unhealthily cathected onto the Gradiva-delusion – back to the reality of his flesh-and-blood love, Zoe, by the love object herself.)

Neurosis and perversion

Moreover, neurotics’ symptoms, upon psychoanalysis, often turn out to be conversions not just of ‘normal’ sexuality, but to include what are called the perversions i.e. neurotics’ unconsciousnesses are often raging with perverse wishes deflected into symptoms. Hence Dora’s persistent cough is a (transmuted) wish for oral sex with Herr K.

a) The unconscious life of all neurotics shows inverted impulses, fixation of the libido on persons of their own sex.

b) The unconsciouses of neurotics show tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity, particularly oral and anal.

c) An especially prominent part is played by the fact that the instincts involved are component instincts. Thus the perversions often come in opposing pairs: exhibitionism and voyeurism; the active and passive forms of the instinct for cruelty.

It is through such an opposition, a component tying together of libido and cruelty, that the transformation from love into hate takes place, the transformation from affectionate into hostile impulses.

(You can see here the embryonic shape of Freud’s later division of all the instincts into Sex instincts and Death instincts, Eros and Thanatos which would formulate nearly 20 years late, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.)

(5) Component instincts and erotogenic zones

If we trace back the positive and negative aspects of the perversions (masochism/sadism, voyeurism/exhibitionism) they appear to derive from component instincts which themselves admit of further analysis.

When sexual excitement derives from a particular organ or area of the body we refer to that as the erotogenic zone.

Thus, under the right circumstances, the anus or the mouth can become an erotogenic zone. Or the surface of the skin in touching. Or the eye itself in voyeurism where, through the eye alone is felt excitement comparable to that of sex in a ‘normal’ person.

(6) Reasons for the apparent preponderance of perverse sexuality in the psychoneuroses

But just because neurotic symptoms often contain a perverse wish doesn’t mean that neurotics are closer to perverts than to ‘normal’ people. Neurotics are normal people whose libido, either because of innate predisposition or due to accident, has been dammed up.

Most psychoneurotics fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty.

Where the constitution is predisposed to illness maybe no external factor will be required. On the other hand, a great shock in real life may tip a robust constitution into neurotic illness.

Might there be a link between the perversions wished for by the neurotic’s unconscious, between the erotogenic zone it highlights, and innate constitution?

In a word, can you define personality types by predisposition to a particular perversion/erotogenic zone? (This is what Freud does in the following essay, about childhood sexuality, defining and describing the oral, anal types and so on.)

(7) Intimations of the infantile character of sexuality

“By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and ‘normality’….

Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the ‘normal’ constitution…

There is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to attract a considerable portion of sexual energy to themselves as neurotic symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and other kinds of modification bring about what is known as ‘normal’ sexual life.

Thus the germs of our character, the way our sexual instincts will be channelled, are probably laid down in childhood. In the next essay Freud looks at the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality until its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

Essay 2. Infantile sexuality

Neglect of the infantile factor

In Essay 2 Freud sets out to smash the popular opinion that children have no sexual feelings; that sexual feelings only set in with puberty. On the contrary, all the literature, and a chat with any nurse, will tell you that many babies play with their willies or fannies and suck various bits of themselves, but these stories are generally only mentioned as exceptions and monstrosities.

Why do we not remember our sexual feelings from our own childhood years?

Infantile amnesia

We definitely behave lively in every respect during childhood, giving every evidence of feeling joy, love, rage, delight. Why do we forget so much of this? Freud says that under analysis patients often remember events from their earliest years. Therefore the memories are stored somewhere – but are repressed from everyday access. Why? Nobody knows.

(1) The period of sexual latency in childhood and its interruptions

Based on a) scattered reports of the so-called exceptional behaviour of infants in the literature and b) the memories of neurotics revealed by psychoanalysis, Freud will sketch out a theory of infantile sexuality.

Freud thinks of the sex instinct as being innate in the child; that it grows as the child grows; that it is overtaken by suppression at the age of 5 or 6; then it revives and develops further at puberty, developing in a pattern of fits and starts. Childhood sexuality only emerges into the light of observable day in the third or fourth year of life.

Sexual inhibitions

It is during this same period that the mental forces are built up which are later to impede and block the flow of the sexual instinct – feelings of disgust (at an object), feelings of shame (at oneself) and moral and aesthetic ideals (as it were, objective guidelines we build for ourselves).

Reaction formation and sublimation

These are the two methods by which these dams are erected to prevent the return of repressed material into the conscious mind.

Sublimation is a widely reported phenomenon, the diverting of instinctual sexual energies into ‘higher’, more socially acceptable ones.

A reaction formation is:

a defence mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency

Freud thinks that reaction formations are the result of a series of unpleasurable experiences, either of internal unpleasure (excessive playing with the genitals leads to unpleasure) or external tellings-off, which create, as it were, a psychological allergic reaction to the erotogenic zone and experiences in question. Told off for touching his winkle enough times and the small boy genuinely come to believe it is dirty and disgusting.

[A digression on Freud’s final theory of sexual development

A lot later, Freud was to elaborate and fine-tune the notion that the human infants evolve through a set number of stages, namely:

polymorphous perversity – undifferentiated pleasure in the whole body
oral phase (0 to 1 year) – the infant gets most of their pleasure from their mouth, for example eating and thumb-sucking: if an infant’s oral needs aren’t met it can develop an develop oral fixation which continues into adult life
anal phase (1 to 3 years) – controlling bladder and bowel movements, potty training, when successfully accomplished leads to praise from parents and a sense of achievement and independence; but if parents take an approach that is too lenient, Freud suggested that an ‘anal-expulsive personality‘ – could develop whereby the adult has a messy, wasteful, or destructive personality, while if parents are too strict, he believed this could lead to an ‘anal-retentive‘ personality which is over-strict, rigid, and obsessive.
phallic stage (3 to 5 years) – focus of the libido is on the genitals and children begin to discover the difference between boys and girls
- in boys this gives rise to the Oedipus complex as boys view their fathers as a rival for the mother’s affections: the Oedipus complex describes these feelings of wanting to possess the mother and replace the father. But at the same time the little boy worries that his father will punish him for having these feelings, a fear Freud termed castration anxiety
- other Freudians suggested the term Electra complex to describe a similar but mirror set of feelings experienced by small girls, namely the wish to be possessed by their father and rid of their mother, accompanied by parallel feelings of guilt and anxiety
- Freud, however, believed that instead of the Electra complex, girls experience what he notoriously called penis envy i.e. the wish to be a boy, the lack of a penis forever leaving girls feeling inadequate. Even in Freud’s own day female psychoanalysts deplored this idea, and female followers have denied it and overwritten it ever since]
latency phase (6 to puberty) – the superego or conscience gains in power, the libido and memories of all those early physical pleasures are suppressed; instead boys or girls enter school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests; a time of exploration in which the sexual energy repressed or dormant, still present but sublimated into other areas such as intellectual pursuits and social interactions
genital stage (11, 12, 13 onwards) – at puberty the libido becomes active again and teens develop a strong sexual interest in the opposite sex: if all the previous stages have been successfully navigated, the person becomes a rounded, balanced individual]

Freud therefore thinks that the development through the oral, anal and phallic stages is partly achieved by the erection of these reaction formations which act as ‘dams’ or road blocks saying ‘No Going Back’.

That this may be the origin of feelings of ‘shame’ and ‘disgust’ is an interesting theory to ponder; that this process is the basis of all civilised morality, as Freud claims, was clearly a provocative thing to say, and which sparked much outraged opposition to him and his theories.

Interruptions of the latency period

Not all children’s sexuality goes underground at about five years old. There may be all sorts of exceptions, single strands of sexual pleasure continuing into the latent period.

(2) The manifestations of infantile sexuality

Thumb-sucking

This emerges early and often persists into adolescence. Sometimes accompanied by the rubbing of an erotogenic zone it can act as an introduction to masturbation. Because it is accompanied by pleasurable rubbing, and sometimes even by orgasm-type physical reactions, Freud makes thumb-sucking the prototype of infantile sexuality.

Auto-erotism (coined by Havelock Ellis in 1898)

Infants initially derive pleasure from their own bodies. Sucking thumbs or lips or any other part of the body is a repetition of the initial oral activity, sucking at the breast.

No-one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as the prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

As the child grows it experiments with enacting the sexual pleasure of sucking when the breast is absent: sucking any part of its own body, taking itself as a source of pleasure. In later life the pleasures of lingering kissing re-enact this primal sexual experience. In some children there is a constitutional intensification of the labial region (lips):

If that significance persists, these same children will grow up to become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. If, however, repression ensues, they will feel disgust at food and will produce hysterical vomiting.

Thus, for Freud, entire character types and types of adult behaviour can be traced right back to earliest childhood behaviour.

(3) The sexual aim of infantile sexuality

Characteristics of erotogenic zones

Erotogenic zones are a moveable feast. Particular parts of the body seem predisposed to resonate with sexual pleasure (the genitals, lips, nipples, anus, the surface of the skin generally) and if an infant, in its auto-erotic stage, chances on one of these to suck or play with, that part easily becomes the model of sexual pleasure, of reassurance etc in later life.

Any part of the body can acquire the same susceptibility to stimulation as is possessed by the genitals and can become an erotogenic zone.

It is hard to think of a view more contrary to the popular, conventional view that a) infants have no sex life and that b) sex appears only at puberty and is exclusively confined to the genitals.

The infantile sexual aim

Although all the body is susceptible to sexualisation, certain zones seem predisposed to be especially erotogenic, generally zones which are physiologically designed for other activities and pleasures which the child can then repeat by auto-erotic stimulation: the lips for eating, the penis for peeing, the anus for defecating can all be co-opted by the libido.

(4) Masturbatory sexual manifestations

Activity of the anal zone

Psychoanalysis of patients has revealed the surprising extent to which the anus is not only a source of pleasure in infancy but retains its pleasurable power throughout life.

Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but highly pleasurable sensations.

One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty its bowels when he is put on the pot and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defecating.

Faeces come to have another important meaning for the child.

They are clearly treated as part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience…

The retention of the faecal mass, which is thus carried out by the child intentionally to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed as a weapon in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths.

Activity of the genital zone

The glans of the penis in boys and the clitoris in girls:

The anatomical situation of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation, make it inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its repetition.

Girls often masturbate simply by rubbing their thighs together. Boys tend to use hands.

The preference for the hand which is shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine sexual activity.

Second phase of infantile masturbation

In this early essay Freud posits three periods of sexual activity: a first phase of infantile sexuality; a second phase flourishing around the fourth year; then the eruptions of puberty.

The second phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest unconscious impressions in the subject’s memory, determine the development of his later character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty.

Return of early infantile masturbation

The return of infantile sexuality at around 4 and 5 years is determined by all sorts of factors, internal and external. But Freud is careful to mention the external factor of infantile seduction (or child abuse, as we would say) as a way many of his patients recall being jolted, as it were, into sexual life, and made aware of the erotogenicity of the genitals.

Polymorphously perverse disposition

In and as a result of sexual abuse, children can be induced to all manner of perversions thus revealing, for Freud, an innate disposition to polymorphous perversion.

The same, he asserts, is true of many women, as witness the large number of prostitutes who can accommodate any type of sexual taste for their clients.

It becomes impossible not to recognise that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.

[At one and the same time this notion is typical of Freud’s throwaway sexism, but also of the immense tolerance and acceptance of a huge variety of sexual predilections implicit in his theory.]

Component instincts

Exhibitionism, voyeurism and cruelty are all apparent as perversions in potentia in children. Small boys proudly display the thing which gives them so much pleasure and which they pee through, their penis, which thus symbolises at least two types of infantile ‘mastery’.

Looking is the child’s earliest way of relating to the world. Once it has established its own erotogenic zones it is curious to see them in others: voyeurism.

Cruelty comes relatively easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at other people’s pain – namely a capacity for pity – is developed relatively late…

It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role…

Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones…

The absence of the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions show that early beating on the buttocks can easily be linked with erotogenic pleasure and form the basis of a fusion of the instincts of sex and cruelty in later life.

(5) The sexual researches of childhood

The instinct for knowledge

At the same time as children reach an early peak of sexuality (3 to 5 years) they display an instinct for knowledge. For Freud this is a sublimated form of the instincts for mastery and of seeing, voyeurism.

Psychoanalysis has shown that the first problem to awaken the childish thirst for knowledge are sexual problems, where do I come from? why does my wee-wee make give me pleasure?

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Freud gave this typically grandiose title to the core question of infancy: where do babies come from?

Sex differences aren’t important at this stage since boys assume all babies have penises.

Castration complex and penis envy [this section was added in 1915]

Only painfully do boys realise there’s a whole category of person who doesn’t have a penis and become petrified that they too might lose their mighty weapon. This he calls the castration complex.

The discovery that girls don’t have one gives many boys an enduringly low opinion of girls. For girls, the discovery that boys have this toy which they can play with induces in them penis envy and an enduring sense of being second-rate. Penis envy culminates in the girl’s wish to be a boy.

[The whole concept of ‘penis envy’ is probably the single most outrageous example of Freud, despite being a revolutionary on one level, nonetheless often reinscribing the sexist prejudices of his Victorian times in a new language.]

Theories of birth

All children speculate about where babies come from, especially if their mother is pregnant again. The central feature of most theories is that the baby is got by eating something (as in many fairy tales) and delivered through the anus.

Sadistic view of sexual intercourse

Many children see or overhear their parents making love. Children feel intense curiosity about it. It seems to have to do with some joint activity involving peeing or defecating. But many children pick up on the apparent violence involved (hard physical movements, screaming) and this is another way in which cruelty may attach itself to a child’s fantasy world and resurface in a person’s adult attitudes to sex.

Typical failure of infantile sexual researches

No matter how subtle the sexual theories of children they are invariably wrong; for how could they know about semen and ovaries? But the whole attempt is important to Freud as a symbol of the growing independence of the child. These researches:

constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude in the world, and they imply a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence.

(6) The phases of development of the sexual organisation

Infantile sexual pleasure is the opposite in every way of ‘normal’ adult sexuality. It is essentially auto-erotic, and its component instincts are generally disconnected and scattered over all manner of activities: this is the meaning of polymorphous perversity.

Compare and contrast with adult sexuality aims at genital contact with some external object.

Pregenital organisations

I.e. sexual patterns before the instinct settles on the genitals:

1. The oral or cannibalistic phase: the aim is the incorporation of the sexual object, to eat it, to master it by ingesting it and stimulating the mucous membranes of the lips at the same time.

This is the origin of cannibalism in primitive peoples; of the primitive relic of a holy meal found in most religions; and of the higher intellectual activity of identification with a hero figure.

The primitive and intellectual functions are brought together in the Eucharist where we eat the body of Christ at the same time as we acknowledge Him lord and master.

2. The sadistic-anal phase: it is at this early stage that the sex instinct can be seen dividing into the active-passive division which characterises all later sexuality: the masculine drive to mastery, of defecating at our own time and pleasure; and the feminine pleasure derived from the anus; a sadistic and a passive pleasure intermingle.

Ambivalence

This duality is the basis of later ambivalence, a word coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler (Bleuler was a prolific coiner of neologisms; he also invented the terms ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoid’ and ‘autism’).

Ambivalence became central to Freudian theory. It describes the holding of contradictory feelings, classically love and hate, towards the same object. Thus the child can both love but be terrified by their father.

Phallic phase

Freud distinguishes one last phase of infantile sexuality, where a love-object has emerged but the instinct in both boys and girls focuses on the penis alone, when boys develop pride in their penis and girls develop a painful sense of lack of penis, giving rise to penis envy (see comments above).

Diphasic choice of object

To summarise, Freud can claim that, completely contrary to the popular view, the distinctive thing about human sexuality is:

that it is present, in various forms, in infants from the earliest time
that it develops through a series of stages
that each of these stages carries the risk of arrest or error which deforms the child’s feelings and emotions around libido
that infantile sexual choices and activity are progressively repressed by reaction-formations (guilt, shame) by the age of about 5
that the entire set of experiences goes underground during the latency period (5 or 6 to puberty), is repressed and forgotten
that it resurfaces in a more explicitly sexual mode at puberty but with shapes and flavours conditioned by those earliest experiences

These infantile longings become the basis of later ‘affectionate’ feelings:

Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the ‘affectionate current’ of sexual life. Only psychoanalytic investigation can show that behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable.

(7) The sources of infantile sexuality

These conclusions have been reached by the psychoanalysis of adult patients and the observation of children. Sexual excitation in children seems to arise from:

a) repetition of satisfaction achieved in normal organic processes (sucking, defecating)
b) through external stimulation of erotogenic zones
c) as the expression of fundamental instincts

Mechanical excitations

Children love swinging and being thrown and caught. Psychoanalysis has shown the recurrence of these sensations in adult dreams i.e. that they lay down patterns of the earliest pleasures, for example, fantasies of flying, air blowing against the skin and genitals.

It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver.

It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways and, at the age at which the production of fantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.

In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey.

Muscular activity

Many patients report their first memories of sexual excitation when romping, fighting and playing with playmates. Organised games are done at school to keep the body healthy and divert adolescent attention away from sexuality: Freud says what this is doing is channel sexuality back into one of its specific components.

Affective process

Powerful emotions have sexual effects. Terrified or anxious children may touch their genitals for reassurance. The erotic aspect of terror, fright and so on may become intimately associated with sexuality so that adults find fear and terror thrilling; either in real life, in fantasies of rape or masochistic punishment; or in imaginary worlds of books or the cinema.

Pathways of mutual influence

If the taking in of food gives rise to sexual pleasure then the reverse may be true. If healthy sexuality accompanies healthy eating, then disturbance of sexuality may lead to disturbance of nourishment. Thus a sexually disturbed hysteric may cease eating.

We can speculate about a whole network of pathways by which sexual instincts may be channeled both towards basic organic functions (for example, eating) and also rerouted towards higher functions (that is, sublimated, into thinking, planning, deciding).

Essay 3. The transformations of puberty

Infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse and auto-erotic, finding pleasure as it learns to control and play with its own body.

The latency period sees the repression of sexuality in the name of various reaction-formations and sexuality’s sublimation into all kinds of games and fantasies.

With puberty the genitals become active and the subject actively seeks a love object outside itself. The new sexual aim of genital union appears and all the scattered erotogenic zones with their sex impulses become focused on, and subordinate to, genital union. Hopefully.

‘Normal’ sexuality consists of the uniting of the affectionate current (the sublimated remains of childhood sexuality) and the sensual current (mainstream libido).

So proper human sexual development is the coming together of affection/love and sex/pleasure, focussed on the genitals, to produce the ‘normal’ healthy adult. But, as always, there can be all kinds of hiccups along the way.

(1) The primacy of the genital zones and fore-pleasure

At puberty the sex organs grow and become ready for use. They can be excited in three ways:

excitation of the erotogenic zones from outside
from the organic interior
from mental life, the storehouse of impressions and ideas

Sexual excitement is felt in two ways:

perception of a mental tension of an extremely compelling type
physical preparation: erection of the penis, lubrication of the vagina

Sexual tension

How come sexual excitation is perceived as both pleasurable but also as an unpleasurable tension?

The mechanism of fore-pleasure

Touching or seeing clearly give rise to a) pleasure in themselves b) a perceived raising of sexual tension.

It is as if the fore-pleasure derived from stimulating the erotogenic zones is designed to increase the incentive to move onto the act of sexual union.

Initial pleasure thus disguises increasing tension (unpleasure) so you are led relentlessly on towards copulation, the aim of the entire organism.

The whole pattern leads up to orgasm and the release of the appropriate sexual substances. It would seem that orgasms are designed to extinguish libido, if only temporarily. They are the height of pleasure, the abrupt release of tension by the blood thronging the penis or clitoris rushing back into the body as the scrotum or vagina undergoes a series of muscular contractions perceived as pleasurable.

And this release of tension takes you right the way back to square one i.e. normal bodily function; the overwhelming compulsion towards sex evaporates, the rational mind returns to full control.

Freud divides the two stages into fore-pleasure and end-pleasure.

A distinction similar to the fore-pleasure offered by the telling of jokes which prepare you for the greater release of libidinal pressure (laughing).

[He uses the same division in his essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming to describe the fore-pleasure afforded by aesthetic or formal literary techniques which prepare the way for the deeper pleasure of sharing unconscious fantasies (tales of damnation and salvation, risk and adventure, Ian Fleming and Barbara Cartland).]

Dangers of fore-pleasure

But fore-pleasures are clearly yet another balancing act; the incentive of pleasure must be balanced by an increase of tension which successfully propels you towards sex. If the yield of orgasmic pleasure doesn’t live up to the growth in tension, you may become stuck at the fore-pleasure stage.

Obviously enough, you may be predisposed to this through any number of accidents which emerge in infancy. Extreme attachment to various types of fore-pleasure, to a particular erotogenic zone or to the mental equivalents of them (stimulation of the anus – masochism/inversion) may develop into full-blown perversion.

But these very complex combinations will have some influence over the shape of even the most healthy adult sexuality.

Not only the deviations from normal sexual life but its normal form as well are determined by the infantile manifestations of sexuality.

Again, if this is an accurate account of the growth of sexuality, it shows that it will be very hard to police, to draw a hard and fast line between ‘normal’ and perverse.

Freud is making the controversial claim that ‘the normal’ is built on ‘the perverse’ and most of its activities contain the seeds of perversity.

(2) The problem of sexual excitation

Part played by the sexual substances

Maybe sexual tension is produced, in men, by the accumulation of semen in the testicles? Kraft-Ebing thought so. But if so, how can this account for sexual excitation in children and women?

Importance of the internal sexual organs

Arguing against that theory, observation of castrated men shows that sexual excitement continues to operate with no semen at all.

Chemical theory

Freud speculates that the key role is played by substances released by the sex glands. In his day there was no convincing biological theory of sex.

The discovery of the class of chemicals called ‘hormones’ (at around this time, 1905, in England) paved the way to our present understanding of how sex works.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that even today one of the great mysteries is: Why Sex? And, as Steve Jones says, If Sex, why only two sexes?

(3) The libido theory

Libido is:

a quantitively variable force which serves as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation

A kind of electricity. Freud imagines that libido is distinguished from the other main instinct, hunger, chemically. Libido is a chemically unique force. Psychoanalysis has shown that libido is derived not just from the genitals but from all sorts of organs, including the skin.

We thus reach the idea of a quantity of libido, to the mental representation of which we give the name of ego-libido, and whose production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed.

Psychoanalysis can only observe ego-libido as it becomes attached to objects i.e. becomes object-libido, as it is attached to, detached from, swapped around various objects (for example, images, fixations, words and ideas) directing the subject’s activity towards sex. For the act of sex, in particular orgasm, results in the temporary extinction of libido.

Psychoanalysis observes the outflowing of libido from the ego and its return thereto.

The ego acts as a psychic reservoir for libido.

In the earliest phases every ego is narcissistic, that is, focusses libido on itself (during the auro-erotic stages of infantile sexuality). Only later does the ego develop the ability to project energy onto external objects and Freud (or his English translators) label these object-cathexes.

The slightest damage to the organism (for example, illness) results in a return to infantile narcissism, as do psychic wounds.

Narcissism is also evoked by particularly self-contained objects, by aloof women, by cats, and by babies (see Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism).

In later editions of the Three Essays Freud attacks Jung for watering down libido to make it mean psychical instinctive forces in general.

But the whole point of having a distinct sexual instinct, chemically differentiated from all other instincts, whose special operations can be studied through observation and analysis, in fact all Freud’s efforts and theories, are destroyed if you thus throw out the distinguishing sexual element of libido theory.

(4) The differentiation between men and women

Libido is masculine i.e. active, in character.

In levels of autoerotism and masturbation boys and girls are similar, though girls develop the reaction-formations of shame and disgust more easily than boys (i.e. mental forces which damp down their libido).

Freud suggests three meanings of masculine and feminine:

passive versus active personalities
biological i.e. defined by sex organs
sociological i.e. observing the actual behaviour of men and women

Freud uses masculine and feminine to denote active and passive. To say libido is masculine means it is, in this value system, always active. As to the sociological aspect:

Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense. Every individual, on the contrary, displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to their own and to the opposite sex and shows a combination of activity and passivity…

Without the fundamental idea of innate bisexuality I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

Leading zones in men and women

The clitoris is what little girls masturbate, as boys the penis. Both become erect i.e. engorged with blood during excitation. But Freud thinks that at puberty, whereas boys receive a fresh wave of sexual excitement, girls undergo a profound sexual repression; this takes the form of moving their chief erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina.

The ‘normal’ woman has thus repressed her masculine active organ (the clitoris) in the name of vaginal excitation designed for sex and procreation:

The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty which, as it were, puts away their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria.

[This is, of course, complete rubbish. Women retain their chief sexual excitation through the clitoris. The rediscovery and widespread publicisation of clitoridal sexuality was one of the great achievements of the feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was well aware that many women cannot orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone but need clitoral stimulation as well and I think (I hope) this has now become common knowledge. Thus Freud’s theorising away of the clitoris, along with all his theories about the inevitable inferiority of women, are the grossest example of his simply recasting the patriarchal prejudices of his time in a new language.]

(5) The finding of an object

[Expanded in the 1915 essay On Narcissism.]

A person may love:

1. according to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

the woman who feeds him
the man who protects him

2. according to the narcissistic type:

what he himself is
what he himself was
what he himself would like to be i.e. an idol
someone who was once part of themselves i.e. a baby

Suckling at the breast is the prototype of all pleasure and love.

From 1915 Freud introduces the idea of narcissism into his theory. The physical pleasure of suckling at the breast is now accompanied by the psychic pleasure of self-love, the earliest attachment of libido to the ego, the ego to itself, as it grows and comes to consciousness.

After puberty all love objects will partake of these two earliest loves; all love objects will have an element of narcissism and of attachment (cupboard) love.

The finding of a love-object is always a refinding of this original pleasure. A recapturing of what we once had. Falling in love is always a return to lost happiness.

The sexual object during early infancy

Everyone’s first love is for their mother. Freud goes further to say everyone’s first sexual object is their mother. Mothers stroke and kiss and caress babies, thus awaking the erotogenic zones and sex instincts. There is nothing perverse in this. The mother is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child how to love. Later in life, the former baby will itself stroke and kiss and caress a love object. How else does it learn to do this except by unconscious recall of its own childhood caresses?

Infantile anxiety

Infantile anxiety is caused by the loss of the person the infant loves. They are afraid of the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love. An infant who turns his love/libido into anxiety when it cannot be satisfied is behaving exactly like an adult neurotic.

The barrier against incest

‘Normal’ development means the transmutation of the early sexual attachment to the mother into ‘affection’ i.e. aim-inhibited libido. One of life’s great tasks is overcoming this love and learning to reattach it to socially acceptable objects.

This happens partly due to internal psychic development but is hugely reinforced by social and moral pressures. In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud writes about the fundamental taboo against incest which is, in his view, the beginnings of society and morality.

Nonetheless, incest remains a possibility in the unconscious mind, in dreams and fantasies.

Puberty is particularly rich in fantasies as the adolescent tries out various combinations of object and experiments with its new strong feelings obsessively in the mind, before attempting to put them into practice.

Some fantasies are particularly common: the adolescent’s fantasies of overhearing his parents having sex; of having been seduced in infancy; of having been threatened with castration; fantasies of life in the womb; and the so-called Family Romance, the fantasy of being the abandoned child of rich beautiful parents – a rationalisation of infantile perception of parental omnipotence.

In overcoming renewed childhood sexual fantasies about his parents the adolescent also has to make the crucial break with them; to rebel against parental authority, particularly the father.

Some people never make it and remain in thrall to their parents. Many women never properly escape and remain as loving and passive as they were in childhood. Girls have a tendency to rebel against their sexual destiny, against sexuality itself and to flee into exaggerated affection for siblings or parents. To become virgin carers.

It falls to some men to become the complete rebels against authority which are required by the furtherance of the race.

After-effects of infantile object-choice

These powerful loves of childhood cast a pall over the rest of our lives. Women often look for older, more mature, authoritative husbands who are quite obviously father-substitutes. Men, even more often, are looking for the unconditional love of their mothers.

Prevention of inversion

It seems that the presence in our childhood of the same sex parent as a figure of a) resented authority and b) sexual rivalry, contributes to our early love for the opposite sex parent, all of which is motivated by the hormones at puberty.

But if the family unit is disturbed, if one of the parents is lacking, this is a powerful accidental stimulus to homosexuality (innate predispositions aside).

SUMMARY

* Neuroses are the mirror image of perversions: both represent aberrations from normal sexuality. Neurotic symptoms are generally a reinvoking of infantile perversions, at least in fantasy and transferred symptoms, as libido flees an unbearable sexual situation.

* Perversions are the fixation of the libido onto particular components of sexuality at the expense of normal heterosexual genital union.

A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.

* Any departure from established sexuality is therefore an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism, a regression.

* The sexual instinct is put together from various factors and, in the perversions, these components fall apart.

* ‘Normal’ sexuality integrates these instincts and submits them to socially-condoned genital aims.

* Children bring sexuality into the world with them. After an efflorescence of sexuality from ages 2 to 5 the sex instinct undergoes a repression, entering the latency period. Sexual feelings continue during this period but rerouted:

a) to develop secondary characteristics such as affection and friendship (aim-inhibited libido)
b) into ‘reaction-formations’ to sexual activities, which are now perceived as dirty, shameful, disgusting and so on, into a predisposition to receive moral education. These reaction-formations will be critical in establishing the channels along which libido can flow after puberty; too strong and they will react badly to the arrival of puberty and real sexual situations, causing all sorts of havoc, not least the flight into illness which characterises neurosis.

* Children develop through three phases: oral (breastfeeding), anal-sadistic in which ambivalence emerges, and phallic, part of which is the Oedipus complex. Then it is all buried in the latency period.

* The diphasic onset of sexuality i.e. in two stages, allowing for a latency period during which the socialising process can get going, seems to be a precondition for humanity’s civilised achievements. But, being so long and precarious, the latency period also explains mankind’s predisposition to neurosis and mental illness, and to the various failures and perversions of the sex instinct.

* The perversions of infancy, the finding of pleasure in erotogenic zones, returns with puberty but subordinated, as fore-pleasures, to the great act of copulation itself.

* Children find their first sex object in the opposite sex parent but this lust is repressed and redirected by the primeval psychological taboo against incest.

Factors interfering with development:

Every step on this long path of development can become a point of fixation, every juncture in this involved combination can be an occasion for a dissociation of the sexual instinct.

Constitution and heredity

Nature/nurture, which comes first? Imponderable. Except to say that in families with a predisposition to sexual failure, the men will tend to be perverts, the women, “true to the tendency of their sex to repression”, will become negative perverts i.e. hysterics.

Further modification

Whatever the hereditary predisposition, it is clear the sex instincts undergo further modifications:

Perversion: at puberty the libido may find the genital zone too weak for the tasks asked of it, and so revert to fixation on earlier infantile perverse zones.

Repression: the instincts in question are repressed and travel underground until they can find their expression disguised as hysterical symptoms. They can have perfectly normal sex lives but accompanied by psychological problems.

Sublimation: excessive sexual dispositions can be redirected into socially acceptable fields, thus yielding greater psychic efficiency and providing a strong evolutionary advantage. Maybe this is the reason why sublimation is the basis of much human mental life.

Reaction-formation: the building up during the latency period of strong counter-forces to perverse instincts, abetted by education which is designed to channel sexuality into ‘normal’ ends.

What we describe as a person’s character is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognised as unutilisable.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1977 as part of ‘On Sexuality’, Volume 7 of the Pelican Freud Library.

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by Simon on June 19, 2023 • Permalink

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The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1900)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘Tell me some of your dreams and I will tell you about your inner self.’
(E. R. Pfaff, quoted on page 134 of The Interpretation of Dreams)

Long

The Interpretation of Dreams may be an epoch-making book but it is far too long, running to 871 pages in the Pelican Freud Library (783 of actual text, 86 of appendix, bibliographies, index of dreams, and general index).

The first quarter or so is a vast review of the many, many theories of dreams held by people throughout Western history (seers and prophets and oneiromancers, historical philosophers and writers, right up to present-day psychologists such as Havelock Ellis), with Freud’s own commentary designed to itemise and categorise all aspects of dreams (their confused illogical nature, how we forget them soon after waking and so on).

Only about page 200 does there come the decisive insight delivered via his own dream about a patient he names Irma, namely that every dream has meaning because every dream is a wish-fulfilment. This is followed from page 200 onwards by an equally extensive series of actual dreams derived from his patients, described in great detail each with a painstaking decipherment.

The literary focus

It isn’t till page 363 that Freud takes the further step of asserting that almost all the dreams of most of his patients ultimately derive from fantasies about their parents. Here he stop for three pages to describe the legend of Oedipus and then to assert that something like Oedipal feelings occur in all his patients.

No sooner has he finished making the shocking claim that all of us, to some extent or other, go through a phase of loving the parent of the opposite sex and hating the parent of the same sex, than he moves on to a similar version of the same story, retold thousands of years later, and culturally rearranged and overlaid, to become Hamlet, then going on to mention other Shakespeare plays, Goethe, German literary critics and so on. (Goethe and Shakespeare are both mentioned about 20 times in the text, along with writers as diverse as Schiller, Heine and Zola, Jonathan Swift and Rider Haggard, the Bible, poetry in general, the music of Wagner 3 times, Mozart 4 times, Offenbach and so on.)

In other words, right from the start Freud’s conceptions of the mind were heavily conditioned and shaped by literature and by cultural forms (myths, legends, religion, folk tales) as much as, or more than, by ‘science’.

It is entirely characteristic of Freud’s focus on culture as source and subject to be investigated that, in the preface to the Third Edition, he speculates that new material for the book will not be generated by, for example, widening the types of patients he treats or the fast-expanding number of analyses being carried out by his followers i.e. scientific evidence based on patient data. No, he says the next edition will have to:

afford a closer contact with the copious material presented in imaginative writing, in myths, in linguistic usage and in folklore.

Autobiographical

Also, it is astonishingly autobiographical. Freud shares with the reader a surprising number of the most important experiences from his life, starting with the place and date of his birth followed by quite a few poignant memories from his childhood and youth. More than that he shares, and analyses at length, upwards of 30 of his own dreams, many of which show him in a less than flattering light, many of which are embarrassingly candid about his ambitions, his delusions of grandeur, his sense of failure, and so on and so on. As Paul Roazen puts it:

‘The Interpretation of Dreams is one of the great autobiographical studies in the history of mankind; in it Freud drew freely on his inner life in an effort to construct a psychological system relevant for all of us.’ (Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen, page 35)

For Roazen this over-sharing was a heroic achievement and sacrifice the great man made on our behalves. But many critics have pointed out the weakness of a theory which relies so very heavily on just one person’s life and experiences and feelings, and on his own interpretation of them, and the fragile basis of the claim to extrapolate them into universal principles underpinning all of human nature.

Introduction of key concepts

The book is important because it represents Freud’s first full-length description of the unconscious and the vast role it plays in the mental life of human beings. His theories about the unconscious would be elaborated and developed right up to his death 40 years later, but this is the first, primal statement of its central role.

Freud wrote to his colleague and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who played a vital role as sounding board for his developing ideas in the 1890s, that the Interpretation of Dreams was substantially finished by 1896. It was published in 1899 but Freud was careful to ensure that it had ‘1900’ on the title page; he was very aware of his image and reputation and that the arrival of a new century heralded the dawn of a new age. All these considerations were in the mind of this very ambitious man.

And yet, after all this careful planning, only 351 copies were sold in the first six years.

Freud began writing this immense book while on holiday in the summer of 1985 at the Schloss BelleVue near Grinzing in Austria. Later he jokingly wrote to Fliess suggesting that a plaque be put on the wall of this castle reading: ‘In this house on July 24 1895 the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr Sigmund Freud’. (Mentioned in a note by the editors on page 199.)

Early days

Personally, I find Freud’s theory of dreams, his confidence that every dream represents a wish and that virtually all dreams can be decoded into various kinds of libidinal fantasy, optimistic and implausible. There feels to be a lot of pseudo-science in it. It feels very dated. For Freud, though, his ‘discovery’ that dreams have meaning, that they were suppressed and distorted wishes, was his big intellectual breakthrough, and the existence of the unconscious was always tied up for him with the breakthrough of dream interpretation.

When I came to Freud it was through the later metapsychological works and the second theory initiated by Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). By comparison with the sophistication of the second theory, with the greater role it assigns to the Death Drive, the Nirvana Principle, the greater account taken of violence and aggression (prompted by the catastrophe of the First World War), the sociological theorisation of the psychology of groups and crowds – compared with all this, going back to his early dream theory seems a little embarrassing, almost childish.

Nonetheless, the final 50 or 60 pages of the Interpretation take us deep, deep into what is in effect a new theory of human nature and existence, which is visionary and strange. But the hundreds and hundreds of pages of sometimes clunky dream interpretation which precede them are often cringe-inducing. Specially when he makes his stock sexist comments about women and their innate inferiority to men…

Executive summary

The Interpretation is important because it introduces several central ideas of Freud’s theory, namely the unconscious as a reservoir of instinctual wishes and desires which have been repressed from the conscious mind by censorship. These repressed urges try to re-enter the mind when the censorship is relaxed during sleep, but even then can only do so in garbled and distorted form.

So all dreams have two layers or levels which Freud defines as manifest content and latent content (p.381).

The manifest content is the narrative or series of images which we remember on waking, maybe write down or recount to a therapist. The latent content refers to the underlying ‘meaning’ of the dream.

The work of psychotherapy is to dig below the surface or manifest content to try and establish the meaning of the latent content i.e. to discover the wish lying behind the dream.

Freud then categorises the ways in which the ‘censorship’ garbles the latent content of the dream. It does this through distinct processes which he labels as:

Condensation – can happen in many ways, for example many ideas or wishes may be represented in one dream, or two or more people or ideas may be combined in one representation
Displacement – the fundamental notion that latent content, the expression of the wish underlying all dreams, is distorted and ‘displaced’
Representation – a great variety of ways in which images, words, sounds, word and phrases can represent the dream-wish
Secondary revision – not part of the process of censorship, this is what happens as the mind returns to consciousness and, half-asleep, tries to ‘make sense’ of the half-remembered dream by rearranging its elements into something closer to a coherent narrative

The comprehensive nature of this rewriting of the repressed wish explains why people can often make no sense at all of their dreams, so completely censored and disguised have they been.

Using the talking cure, free association and dream interpretation, the therapist can analyse a patient’s dreams, uncovering the secret wish which lies behind them and find a way into the reservoir of all our drives and urges and the words and images and behaviours which have become attached to them. Hence Freud’s famous declaration:

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

The text is immensely schematic, divided and sub-divided and sub-sub-divided into numbered parts, sections, sub-sections, sub-sub-sections, as if to conceal the relative simplicity of what Freud was proposing under a mountain of academic apparatus. He recognised the work’s unmanageable length and published a much shorter version On Dreams in 1901, revised and expanded in 1911. The fact that the abbreviation is a mere slip of a thing at 53 pages in the English translation strongly hints at the redundancy of most of the material in the longer work. It’s there to bludgeon the reader into submission with the sheer quantity of ‘evidence’.

Part 1. The scientific literature dealing with the problems of dreams

The ancients had two theories: dreams as helpful messages from the supernatural or diabolical fantasy. These were said to emanate from gates of horn and of ivory, respectively.

A) The relation of dreams to waking life

Dreams seem at the same time totally removed from waking life yet continue many of the concerns of waking life.

B) The material of dreams: memory in dreams

Dreams often preserve memories much more clearly than waking life and yet what is remembered is often trivial.

C) The stimuli and sources of dreams

1. External sensory stimuli

For example, alarm clock prompts dreams of church bells etc. But why do the same external source prompts different dream-imagery?

2. Internal (subjective) sensory excitations

3. Internal organic somatic stimuli

News from internal organs, often warning of disease. But how are these messages conveyed?

4. Psychical sources of stimulation

Present definitions of psychical stimulation do not suffice.

D) Why dreams are forgotten after waking

It is natural that the intensity of daytime experiences blots out dreams. More importantly, everyone proceeds to reconstruct partially remembered dreams, stringing together half-memories in usually very misleading ways.

E) The distinguishing psychological characteristics of dreams

Dreams perceived as immediate experience. Lack of critical self-consciousness. In dreams we don’t think, we experience.

Crazy chains of association. Logic and causation which we (mostly) demand in conscious life are conspicuous by their absence.

Regression to earlier impulses. The tremendous virtuoso intensity of dream experiences. Freud reviews a wide range of views about dreams, from total disparagement to hymns to dreams’ poetic intensity.

F) The moral sense in dreams

Some say people lose all moral sense in dreams and behave with shocking amorality; others say you act in dreams according to your character. Dreams often show us insight into our deeper feelings, unknown to our conscious selves. Dreams reveal illicit desires, as in saints’ confessions of being miserable sinners. In dreams our instinctual life is exposed. We acquiesce in desires we spend our waking lives controlling and resisting.

G) Theories of dreaming and its function

The ancients thought dreams are sent from the gods as a guidance to action. More recently three schools have emerged:

Rational. The dream-mind works just like the conscious mind but deprived of the sense-data of consciousness
Mechanistic. Sleep relaxes the conscious control and dreams are responses of different parts of the mind to the passing sensory stimulants of the night. Or dreams are the excrescence of all the semi-cogitated impressions and thoughts of the day.
Dreams are a holiday for the mind. Rest and recuperation.

H) The relations between dreams and mental diseases

Patients sometimes cured during the day continue their pathological behaviour in dreams or while asleep. ‘The madman is a waking dreamer’ etc. Dreams and psychoses are both fulfilment of wishes.

2. The method of interpreting dreams: analysis of a specimen dream

The aim which I have set before myself is to show that dreams are capable of being interpreted. (p.167)

Lay interpretation confined to symbolic reading (for example, pharaoh’s seven fat and seven lean kine; also mentioned p.448) and decoding (treating dream-language as a code).

Outline of the technique of free association.

An extended analysis of Freud’s own dream, the ‘dream of Irma’s injection’ interpreted to show how it conflates evidence to justify Freud’s treatment of her, i.e. a wish to be impregnated (pages 180 to 199).

3. A dream is a fulfilment of a wish

Elaboration of Freud’s fundamental insight, that every dream is the symbolic fulfilment of an unconscious wish. Examples of children’s dreams. The point is dreams may express wishes, but so comprehensibly distorted and garbled as to usually be unrecognisable to the dreamer.

4. Distortions in dreams

If all dreams are wish-fulfilments, why do some present as the opposite – wishing the death of a loved-one, anxiety dreams etc?

Because the wish is distorted. There are thus at least two aspects to a dream, the manifest content (the coherent narrative we make from the dream imagery) and the latent content (the real concern), and there is always an element of repression or censorship. This is the dream-work, which translates latent content into the manifest content we experience and remember.

The similarity of distortion in dreams and the hallucinations or obsessions of neurotics.

5. The material and sources of dreams

A) Recent and indifferent material in dreams

Frequent occurrence of material from the day before, the ‘dream-day’; but radically disguised or itself masking other meanings. Thus the concept of displacement.

B) Infantile material as a source of dreams

The deeper one carries the analysis of a dream, the more often one comes upon the track of experiences from childhood which have played a part among the sources of that dream’s latent content.

C) The somatic sources of dreams

All dreams are in a sense dreams of convenience. They serve the purpose of managing the processing of unconscious content in such a way as to preserve sleep. Dreams are the guardians of sleep.

If dreams are prompted by internal somatic stimulation, why do we not dream continuously of flying (the working of the lungs) etc? Because somatic stimulation is brought into the formation of a dream only when it fits with the ideational content derived from the dream’s psychic sources; only when it’s needed.

D) Typical dreams

He reviews:

1. Embarrassing dreams of being naked

2. Dreams of the death of persons whom the dreamer likes (childhood rivalries)

It is in this section that Freud describes the fierce emotions and rivalries attributable to children, which can spill over into hostility against their parents:

Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed [n childhood] (p.362)

He starts to invoke the Greek myths and this leads up to page 363 on which he posits the central role of the Oedipus legend.

It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. (p.364)

3. Other typical dreams

4. Examination dreams

6. The dream-work

Freud reviews the different mental processes he claims are at work in dreams, which collectively he calls the ‘dream-work’:

A) The work of condensation

Seen at its clearest when it handles words and names. In dreams words are often treated like things, chopped up, compressed etc.

B) The work of displacement

A dream is often differently centred from the dream-thought which lies behind it. The work of displacement as well as condensation are the result of the censorship imposed on the unconscious wish material.

The kernel of my theory of dreams lies in my derivation of dream-distortion from the censorship. (p.418)

C) The means of representation in dreams

Dreams do not have any of the methods with which we construct narratives or logical arguments at their disposal.

The most striking example of absence of logic is the absence of the negative, meaning that no means yes, that something can be represented by its exact opposite: the process of reversal (p.429) This can apply to causality where normal cause and effect are reversed.

Or dream images can appear by a process of similarity or consonance of even a tiny part of it with something else (p.431).

The common sensation of running but never getting anywhere.

Dreams are completely egoistic. They deal with the dreamer and only the dreamer (p.434).

D) Considerations of representability

Some dreams make use of ‘primeval’ imagery, being similes reaching back to remote antiquity (p.462).

Wherever neuroses make use of such disguises they are following paths along which all humanity passed in the earliest days of civilisation. (p.463).

E) Symbols in dreams: some further typical examples

Tempting to think that recurrent symbols in dreams may be universal symbols, specially when they recur in ‘popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes’ (which gives you a good sense of Freud’s evidence base).

Freud proceeds to give a lexicon or handbook of symbols, starting with the King and Queen who are, of course, the dreamer’s parents, moving on to how playing with a little child, especially beating it, betokens masturbation, and so on.

a hat is symbolic of a man, or the male genitals
a little one is the penis
being run over is coitus
buildings, stairs and shafts represent the genitals
female genitals represented by a landscape
castration dreams
urinary symbolism
staircase dreams
flowers represent the genitals (p.496)
dreams of flying or floating have a very varied meaning

He makes the ‘shocking’ claim that psychoanalysis makes no qualitative distinction between normal and neurotic life i.e. there is no ‘normality’ i.e. we are all on a spectrum (p.493).

And the centrality of sex in all these hundreds and hundreds of examples:

The more one is concerned with the solution of dreams, the more one is driven to recognise that the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes. (p.520)

F) Some examples: calculations and speeches in dreams

The special significance of numbers in dreams.

Speech rarely makes sense in dreams, being recombinations of words or phrases taken from other sources.

G) Absurd dreams: intellectual activity in dreams

Obviously many dreams are absurd or absurdist in content, but Freud tries to identify different reasons for this, often to do with negative or contradictory elements in the motivating dream content.

The dream-work produces absurd dreams and dreams containing individual absurd elements if it is faced with the necessity of representing any criticism, ridicule or derision which may be present in the dream-thoughts. (p.576)

H) Affects in dreams

It is commonly observed that the mood induced by a dream lingers longer than most of the details into the waking day.

I) Secondary revision

This occurs at the end of the process of dream-construction and is the application of conscious thought processes to the dream material. Just before waking the renascent ego tries to gloss over inconsistencies in the dream narrative, trying to create sense out of absurdity.

So it’s not part of the censor’s work, not part of displacement and condensation; it comes after that and re-arranges elements of the dream, but has the practical effect of scrambling it even more, making dream interpretation even harder (pages 641 and 642).

7. The psychology of the dream process

The dream-work is not simply more careless, more irrational, more forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is completely different from it qualitatively and for that reason not directly comparable with it. (p.650)

A) The forgetting of dreams

Forgetting details of a dream is a common experience. But Freud is convinced that more is retained than we commonly think and that in the therapeutic situation more can be reclaimed than you’d expect. And often the so-called ‘forgetting’ of a dream is really only the work of the censor and repression; with sensitive work it can be recalled.

Can we interpret every detail of a dream, or every dream? No. Because the power of repression and resistance is so severe. But you can interpret much more than you’d initially believe.

B) Regression

Freud works through a series of diagrams meant to convey the relationship between dream wishes, memories, the preconscious, the unconscious and so on. By ‘regression’ Freud means that, with the motor system i.e. active use of the body, shut down in sleep, wishes express their outcomes not in (sleeping) body but by bouncing back into the psyche. Regression refers to internally generated images which are fed backwards into the cortex as if they were coming from the outside. He goes on to distinguish three types of regression:

topographical regression
temporal regression, the harking back to earlier psychic structures
formal regression, where primitive methods of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones (p.699)

He concludes by making the picturesque but now discredited claim that some element of dreams also connects us with primeval memories of our ancestors.

We may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man’s archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him. Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we would have imagined possible; so that psychoanalysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race. (p.700)

C) Wish-fulfilment

It may be intuitively agreed that a dream expresses a wish, albeit heavily disguised by the censorship, but Freud goes on to address the paradox that anxiety and negative dreams can also express wishes. He devotes 2 pages to explaining the definition of a ‘wish’ as it first comes to be experienced by the screaming baby, considered as an inchoate organism seeking the most basic physical satisfactions.

During which he makes the kind of comment that I like, namely that ‘thought is after all nothing but a substitute for the basic physical wish’.

D) Arousal by dreams: the function of dreams: anxiety dreams

Further clarification of why anxiety dreams and other dreams with acutely negative affect are, nonetheless, expressions of a wish. The anxiety is an index of the force of the repression needed to keep the unacceptable wish material under wraps.

E) The primary and secondary processes: repression

In technical and difficult phraseology, Freud repeats the basic idea that the primary system (the unconscious) is concerned with securing the free discharge of the quantities of excitation which are troubling it, while the second system, attempts to inhibit this discharge (p.759).

The primary process endeavours to bring about a discharge of excitation in order that, with the help of the amount of excitation thus accumulated, it may establish a ‘perceptual identity’ with the experience of satisfaction. The secondary process, however, has abandoned this intention and taken on another in its place – the establishment of a ‘thought identity’ with that experience.

All thinking is no more than a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction (a memory which has been adopted as a purposive idea) to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more through an intermediate stage of motor experiences. (pages 761 to 762)

These final pages take us deep, deep into Freud’s most theoretical musings about the nature of the mind and of thought, which tend to undermine the possibility of ‘reason’ at all, because he makes all the activities of the mind arise from a really primeval stratum of primitive needs, as transmuted into wishes, as repressed and distorted into a thousand and one memories, behaviour patterns, obsessions and so on. Nobody can think rationally, because this unconscious swamp is the basis of all human thought.

I’m not sure it’s worth reading the preceding 750 pages to get here, but they are in a sense the preface to a deep dive into a truly other vision of human nature, the human mind, human existence. All thinking is, in a sense, repeated attempts to recapture the primeval, primitive physical satisfactions of the baby which have been so thoroughly repressed that they can never be achieved. All humans are, in a sense, condemned to search endlessly for the unfindable. Hence [Freud doesn’t say this, I’m saying this] the universal notion of The Quest found across all human cultures.

F) The unconscious and consciousness: reality

The unconscious is vast and the basis of the psyche. The conscious mind is a small, fragile blip floating on the great unknown ocean of the unconscious.

The unconscious must be assumed to be the general basis of psychical life. The unconscious is the larger sphere which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious….The unconscious is the true psychic reality. (p.773)

Typically, Freud immediately goes on to say that this explains a lot of creative process too, with numerous poets and composers describing how their great works ‘came to them’ without planning, unexpectedly, whole and complete. Well…the unconscious!

The conscious mind is like a kind of sense organ for the perception of psychic qualities. It is entirely typical of Freud that this dense and difficult conceptualising gives way, on the page before last, to yet another reference to Greek mythology, and to the story of Zeus castrating his father, Kronos. Literature and myth are never far away in Freud’s writings. And are often a welcome respite from the more difficult technical passages.

And one of the oldest traditions of dreams, which he mentioned right at the start, 780 pages earlier, widely believed in the ancient world that they predict the future. Do they? No, not in a literal sense, no. And yet, in another sense:

By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are, after all, leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past. (last sentences, page 783)

Criticism

The same period (1895 to 1900) saw the zenith of detectivehood in the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes. Very widespread was the idea human personality as a mystery, a puzzle to be solved.

And the idea of psychic division into two opposing parts, light and dark, good and bad: the döppelgänger or split personality abounds in the stories of the time: Jeckyll and Hyde and The Secret Sharer and Dorian Gray and all the characters in Holmes leading respectable lives while concealing depths of vice and criminality.

After the long dull review of existing dream literature, Freud’s exposition his new theory of the interpretation of dreams contains steadily more and more personal material, including candid stories of antisemitism. He shares with us his identification with Hannibal; he describes himself as a conquistador; the narrative of the dream of Irma’s injection is above all a wish to be justified.

Surprisingly, maybe, there is no mention of the Oedipus Complex and little mention of childhood sexuality. He added notes about these to all the later editions, but reading the text as first published makes you realise how very bare of all his theories it is, or to put it another way, what a huge edifice of complex psychological theory it was to grow into.

Throughout the book you can see Freud extending the mechanisms revealed by his own dream analysis in order to derive a psychology of all stages of life; in particular pushing the source of almost all dreams back into childhood. The nature of childhood fantasy and its connection with childhood sexual feelings were to become central to the development of his theory over the next five years.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Interpretation of Dreams was first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1976 as Volume 4 of the Pelican Freud Library.

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by Simon on June 16, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged Antisemitism, anxiety dreams, Austria, autobiography, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, castration, cathexis, censorship, childhood sexuality, condensation, consciousness, döppelgänger, displacement, Dorian Gray, Dr Jeckyll and Hyde, dream interpretation, dream of Irma’s injection, dream symbolism, dream theory, dreams, E. R. Pfaff, First World War, folk tales, forgetting, formal regression, Freud, gate of horn, gate of ivory, Goethe, Greek myths, Hamlet, Hannibal, Havelock Ellis, instinctual wishes, Kronos, latent content, legends, Literature, manifest content, memory, mythology, Oedipus, Oedipus Complex, On Dreams, Pelican Freud Library, primary process, psychic energy, psychical life, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, psychoses, psychotherapy, regression, religion, representation, Rider Haggard, Schloss BelleVue, Science, secondary process, Secondary revision, sensory excitations, sex, sexual instinct, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud, somatic stimuli, split personality, temporal regression, The Bible, the Death Drive, The Interpretation of Dreams, the Nirvana Principle, The Secret Sharer, the unconscious, topographical regression, transference, types of dream, Western history, Wilhelm Fliess, wish-fulfilment, Zeus

Posted by Simon on June 16, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/16/the-interpretation-of-dreams-sigmund-freud/

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Freud and The Problem of God by Hans Küng (1979)

1. The genesis of Freud’s atheism

a) A theory of the unconscious

b) A theory of libido

2. Freud on the origin and nature of religion

1. The history

2. The essence

3. Critiques of Freud

Eugene Bleuler

Alfred Adler

Jung

Küng’s critique

Freud’s scientism

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish science?

4. Critique of the critique

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Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen (1975)

Interviews

Context

1. The followers

2. Using the interview material

3. The American context

Recap

Topics

The roles of Charcot and Breuer

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish invention or profession?

Why did psychoanalysis take off so quickly in America?

Although Freud loathed America…

Is psychoanalysis based around Freud’s own personality?

Prophet of doom

How important was the practice of psychotherapy to Freud?

Freud the wordsmith

The limits of psychoanalysis

Transference

Darwin

Its main legacy

Titbits

Height

The schism with Jung

Science

Superstition

Totem and Taboo

Famous analysands

Ego psychology

Two paradoxes

A fine figure

Freud’s followers

Otto Rank

Wilhelm Reich (1897 to 1957)

Women psychoanalysts

Ruth Mack Brunswick née Blumgart (1897 to 1946)

Anna Freud (1895 to 1982)

Helene Deutsch (1884 to 1982)

Melanie Klein (1882 to 1960)

Thoughts – the widest impact

Great men

Americanisation

Credit

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An Outline of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud (1940)

Background

Preface

Part 1. The mind and its workings

Chapter 1. The psychical apparatus

Chapter 2. The theory of the instincts

Chapter 3. The development of the sexual function

Chapter 4. Psychical qualities

Chapter 5. Dream interpretation as an illustration

Part 2. The practical task

Chapter 6. The technique of psychoanalysis

Chapter 7. An example of psychoanalytic work

Part 3. The theoretical yield

Chapter 8. The psychical apparatus and the external world

Chapter 9. The external world

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