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The Metaphysical Aspects of Psychology—II
Psychoanalysis—History
The Revolution of Psychoanalysis
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
"The more I became interested in psychoanalysis, the more I saw it
as a road to the same kind of broad and deep understanding of human
nature that writers possess." Anna Freud
Towards the end of the 19th century, the new discipline of
psychology became entrenched in both Europe and America. The study
of the human mind, hitherto a preserve of philosophers and
theologians, became a legitimate subject of scientific (some would
say, pseudo-scientific) scrutiny.
The Structuralists - Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Bradford Titchener -
embarked on a fashionable search for the "atoms" of consciousness:
physical sensations, affections or feelings, and images (in both
memories and dreams). Functionalists, headed by William James and,
later, James Angell and John Dewey - derided the idea of a "pure",
elemental sensation. They introduced the concept of mental
association. Experience uses associations to alter the nervous
system, they hypothesized.
Freud revolutionized the field (though, at first, his reputation was
limited to the German-speaking parts of the dying Habsburg Empire).
He dispensed with the unitary nature of the psyche and proposed
instead a trichotomy, a tripartite or trilateral model (the id, ego,
and superego). He suggested that our natural state is conflict, that
anxiety and tension are more prevalent than harmony. Equilibrium
(compromise formation) is achieved by constantly investing mental
energy. Hence "psychodynamics".
Most of our existence is unconscious, Freud theorized. The conscious
is but the tip of an ever-increasing iceberg. He introduced the
concepts of libido and Thanatos (the life and death forces),
instincts (Triebe, or "drives", in German) or drives, the somatic-
erotogenic phases of psychic (personality) development, trauma and
fixation, manifest and latent content (in dreams). Even his
intellectual adversaries used this vocabulary, often infused with
new meanings.
The psychotherapy he invented, based on his insights, was less
formidable. Many of its tenets and procedures have been discarded
early on, even by its own proponents and practitioners. The rule of
abstinence (the therapist as a blank and hidden screen upon which
the patient projects or transfers his repressed emotions), free
association as the exclusive technique used to gain access to and
unlock the unconscious, dream interpretation with the mandatory
latent and forbidden content symbolically transformed into the
manifest - have all literally vanished within the first decades of
practice.
Other postulates - most notably transference and counter-
transference, ambivalence, resistance, regression, anxiety, and
conversion symptoms - have survived to become cornerstones of modern
therapeutic modalities, whatever their origin. So did, in various
disguises, the idea that there is a clear path leading from
unconscious (or conscious) conflict to signal anxiety, to
repression, and to symptom formation (be it neuroses, rooted in
current deprivation, or psychoneuroses, the outcomes of childhood
conflicts). The existence of anxiety-preventing defense mechanisms
is also widely accepted.
Freud's initial obsession with sex as the sole driver of psychic
exchange and evolution has earned him derision and diatribe aplenty.
Clearly, a child of the repressed sexuality of Victorian times and
the Viennese middle-class, he was fascinated with perversions and
fantasies. The Oedipus and Electra complexes are reflections of
these fixations. But their origin in Freud's own psychopathologies
does not render them less revolutionary. Even a century later, child
sexuality and incest fantasies are more or less taboo topics of
serious study and discussion.
Ernst Kris said in 1947 that Psychoanalysis is:
"...(N)othing but human behavior considered from the standpoint of
conflict. It is the picture of the mind divided against itself with
attendant anxiety and other dysphoric effects, with adaptive and
maladaptive defensive and coping strategies, and with symptomatic
behaviors when the defense fail."
But Psychoanalysis is more than a theory of the mind. It is also a
theory of the body and of the personality and of society. It is a
Social Sciences Theory of Everything. It is a bold - and highly
literate - attempt to tackle the psychophysical problem and the
Cartesian body versus mind conundrum. Freud himself noted that the
unconscious has both physiological (instinct) and mental (drive)
aspects. He wrote:
"(The unconscious is) a concept on the frontier between the mental
and the somatic, as the physical representative of the stimuli
originating from within the organism and reaching the mind"
(Standard Edition Volume XIV).
Psychoanalysis is, in many ways, the application of Darwin's theory
of evolution in psychology and sociology. Survival is transformed
into narcissism and the reproductive instincts assume the garb of
the Freudian sex drive. But Freud went a daring step forward by
suggesting that social structures and strictures (internalized as
the superego) are concerned mainly with the repression and
redirection of natural instincts. Signs and symbols replace reality
and all manner of substitutes (such as money) stand in for primary
objects in our early formative years.
To experience our true selves and to fulfill our wishes, we resort
to Phantasies (e.g., dreams, "screen memories") where imagery and
irrational narratives - displaced, condensed, rendered visually,
revised to produce coherence, and censored to protect us from sleep
disturbances - represent our suppressed desires. Current
neuroscience tends to refute this "dreamwork" conjecture but its
value is not to be found in its veracity (or lack thereof).
These musings about dreams, slips of tongue, forgetfulness, the
psychopathology of everyday life, and associations were important
because they were the first attempt at deconstruction, the first in-
depth insight into human activities such as art, myth-making,
propaganda, politics, business, and warfare, and the first coherent
explanation of the convergence of the aesthetic with the "ethic"
(i.e., the socially acceptable and condoned). Ironically, Freud's
contributions to cultural studies may far outlast
his "scientific" "theory" of the mind.
It is ironic that Freud, a medical doctor (neurologist), the author
of a "Project for a Scientific Psychology", should be so chastised
by scientists in general and neuroscientists in particular.
Psychoanalysis used to be practiced only by psychiatrists. But we
live at an age when mental disorders are thought to have
physiological-chemical-genetic origins. All psychological theories
and talk therapies are disparaged by "hard" scientists.
Still, the pendulum had swung both ways many times before.
Hippocrates ascribed mental afflictions to a balance of bodily
humors (blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile) that is out of kilt.
So did Galen, Bartholomeus Anglicus, Johan Weyer (1515-88).
Paracelsus (1491-1541), and Thomas Willis, who attributed
psychological disorders to a functional "fault of the brain".
The tide turned with Robert Burton who wrote "Anatomy of Melancholy"
and published it in 1621. He forcefully propounded the theory that
psychic problems are the sad outcomes of poverty, fear, and
solitude.
A century later, Francis Gall (1758-1828) and Spurzheim (1776-1832)
traced mental disorders to lesions of specific areas of the brain,
the forerunner of the now-discredited discipline of phrenology. The
logical chain was simple: the brain is the organ of the mind, thus,
various faculties can be traced to its parts.
Morel, in 1809, proposed a compromise which has since ruled the
discourse. The propensities for psychological dysfunctions, he
suggested, are inherited but triggered by adverse environmental
conditions. A Lamarckist, he was convinced that acquired mental
illnesses are handed down the generations. Esquirol concurred in
1845 as did Henry Maudsley in 1879 and Adolf Meyer soon thereafter.
Heredity predisposes one to suffer from psychic malaise but
psychological and "moral" (social) causes precipitate it.
And, yet, the debate was and is far from over. Wilhelm Greisinger
published "The Pathology and Therapy of Mental Disorders" in 1845.
In it he traced their etiology to "neuropathologies", physical
disorders of the brain. He allowed for heredity and the environment
to play their parts, though. He was also the first to point out the
importance of one's experiences in one's first years of life.
Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist by training, claimed to have
cured hysteria with hypnosis. But despite this demonstration of non-
physiological intervention, he insisted that hysteroid symptoms were
manifestations of brain dysfunction. Weir Mitchell coined the
term "neurasthenia" to describe an exhaustion of the nervous system
(depression). Pierre Janet discussed the variations in the strength
of the nervous activity and said that they explained the narrowing
field of consciousness (whatever that meant).
None of these "nervous" speculations was supported by scientific,
experimental evidence. Both sides of the debate confined themselves
to philosophizing and ruminating. Freud was actually among the first
to base a theory on actual clinical observations. Gradually, though,
his work - buttressed by the concept of sublimation - became
increasingly metaphysical. Its conceptual pillars came to resemble
Bergson's élan vital and Schopenhauer's Will. French philosopher
Paul Ricoeur called Psychoanalysis (depth psychology) "the
hermeneutics of suspicion".
---------------------------------------------
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review,
PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International
(UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health
and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia. Visit Sam's Web site at
http://samvak.tripod.com
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