Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind

by Anthony Storr

  In fact, it is perfectly natural that patients should genuinely value the psychoanalyst in a special way, however much their picture of him or her may be distorted by past experience. Many patients in analysis have never experienced the kind of long-term concern that a psychoanalyst gives them. There is no other situation in life in which one can count upon a devoted listener for so many hours. In June 1910, Freud wrote to Pfister, “As for the transference, it is altogether a curse.”9 One can understand why Freud felt this. Instead of his patients accepting him merely as a trained and skilled operator who could, by means of his technique, expose the origins and abolish the symptoms of their neuroses, they made him into a savior, an idealized lover, or a father figure. What they wanted was not his science but his love.

  Freud’s recognition of the phenomena of transference, however interpreted or explained, once again deflected interest from neurotic symptoms as such, and steered it in the direction of interpersonal relationships. Moreover, it soon became obvious that the psychoanalyst was not and could not be the kind of detached observer who was no more affected by his patient than if the latter were a chemical solution. Jung was the first of the early psychoanalysts to insist that the analyst must himself be analyzed. Analysts, ideally, were supposed to be freed from their own emotional blocks and prejudices if they were to be able to treat their patients satisfactorily. However, Jung insisted, they must always remain open to influence and to change themselves. The analyst must allow himself to be affected by his patient if he was to be able to help him. He must monitor his own emotional responses by means of introspection, since his own, subjective response to what the patient was saying was a vital means toward understanding him.

  This is a far cry from the mental set demanded of a scientist. In conducting an experiment, the scientist must take pains to ensure that his own emotions do not in any way affect the objectivity of his observations. Perhaps his hopes and fears are deeply aroused by a particular experiment. Perhaps a Nobel Prize depends upon whether a solution turns red or blue. But the scientist’s hopes and fears must not be allowed to influence the detachment with which he notes his results; nor does his own knowledge of himself affect his understanding of the interacting chemicals.

  In psychoanalysis, the analyst must, to some extent, regard his patient objectively. But, if he is to understand the patient, he must at the same time take into account his own feelings and his own reactions to the patient’s feelings. If he treats the patient in the way in which a scientist treats a chemical solution, the psychoanalyst cuts himself off from the sources of information which we all habitually use in understanding one another.

  So, in the various ways expounded, it came to pass that psychoanalysis became less and less concerned with a direct attack upon neurotic symptoms, and more and more concentrated upon understanding persons and interpersonal relationships. Neurotic symptoms have become an entry ticket for embarking upon psychoanalysis, and are often largely disregarded once the analysis is under way. Not long ago, I was talking to a senior member of the staff of London’s Tavistock Clinic, which is entirely staffed by psychoanalysts. He told me that they were thinking of appointing a behavior therapist to the staff. I was at first surprised that so apparently alien a figure should be introduced into a Freudian stronghold. Then the light dawned. “You want the behavior therapist to get rid of the symptoms,” I said. “Then you can get on with what really matters—the analysis.”

  If one is to understand persons, one is compelled to try to understand their interpersonal relationships. For what we call a person is defined by comparison with, and interaction with, other persons. As John Macmurray put it: “Persons, therefore, are constituted by their mutual relation to one another. ‘I’ exists only as one element in the complex ‘You and I.’”10

  The growth of what is now known as the “object-relations” school of psychoanalysis bears witness to the change from regarding the patient as a closed system whose difficulties are explained in terms of repression and instinctual fixation to looking upon him as someone whose interpersonal relationships have gone awry at an early stage in his development. This change in emphasis has reached its zenith in the work of John Bowlby, whose massive three-volume work, Attachment and Loss, was completed in 1980.11 Bowlby’s conception of neurosis is couched entirely in terms of disturbed relationships with significant others rather than in terms of instinctual fixation.

  Treating symptoms and treating persons are two different exercises. It is possible to sustain an objective, scientific approach to neurotic symptoms, but it is not possible to do so in understanding persons. Because Freud tried to maintain the notion that psychoanalysis was a science and that he was a scientist, this difference has not been made as clear as it should have been, and this has given rise to unnecessary misunderstanding. Eysenck was perfectly right in asserting that psychoanalysis is unscientific, but his attack would never have been made if Freud and his followers had not tried to claim that psychoanalysis was a science. Their efforts to do so sprang partly from Freud’s original training, and partly from a general overvaluation of the exact sciences which we are only now beginning to correct. Other forms of human endeavor, like history and literature, are equally valuable in an entirely different way. One can hardly imagine that Eysenck would attack poetry for being unscientific, since no one supposes that poetry has anything to do with science.

  Why is it that the objective, scientific approach to human beings is insufficient? The behaviorists, of whom B. F. Skinner is the most famous modern example, argue that this is not the case. The original behaviorists tried to adopt a purely determinist, objective approach to human beings, and therefore discarded anything derived from introspection, confining themselves to examining only overt behavior. This approach demands that human beings be studied as if their behavior was entirely determined by external forces; as if they were billiard balls possessing no inner life, neither will nor intention. Skinner’s view of man is precisely that. His notion of Utopia is one in which the environment is so controlled that appropriate “contingencies of reinforcement” will automatically produce socially desirable behavior and general happiness. Skinner writes:

  What is being abolished is autonomous man—the inner man … the man defended by the literature of freedom and dignity.… A scientific analysis of behavior dispossesses autonomous man and turns the control he has been said to exercise over to the environment.… What is needed is more control, not less.… The problem is to design a world which will be liked not by people as they now are but by those who live in it.… It is science or nothing.12

  Is it? I do hope not. Someone, presumably Skinner, has to decide what kind of world is wanted, and has to design the contingencies of reinforcement which will bring this world into being. I have met Skinner, and I reviewed the first volume of his autobiography. Although he is an agreeable enough person to meet, I would not want to live in a world designed by him. It is because the behaviorists have taken this strictly deterministic attitude toward human beings that what they have been able to tell us about ourselves has proved to be of so remarkably little interest.

  As already indicated, it is just possible to sustain a more or less deterministic attitude toward neurotic symptoms, but the philosophers have always realized that such an attitude cannot be sustained when there is any question of day-to-day interpersonal relationships. For example, P. F. Strawson points out that the psychoanalyst may temporarily or partially adopt an objective, impersonal stance toward those parts of his patient’s behavior which are at first incomprehensible or which the patient cannot control. But, once those parts have been understood and brought into relation with the rest of the patient’s behavior, such an attitude is no longer appropriate. Strawson takes as his example the kind of psychoanalyst which Freud originally attempted to be. Strawson writes:

  His objectivity of attitude, his suspension of ordinary moral reactive attitudes, is profoundly modified by the fact that the aim of the enterprise is to make such suspe
nsion unnecessary or at least less necessary. Here we may and do naturally speak of restoring the agent’s freedom. But here the restoring of freedom means bringing it about that the agent’s behaviour shall be intelligible in terms of conscious purposes rather than in terms only of unconscious purposes. This is the object of the enterprise; and it is in so far as this object is attained that the suspension, or half suspension of ordinary moral attitudes is deemed no longer necessary.13

  In other words, once the psychoanalyst has traced the origin of the symptoms and brought their meaning and the affects connected with them into consciousness, he is bound to revert to treating the cured patient as possessing will and intention; as a being who has the power of choice; not as a being whose behavior is determined either by factors of which he is unconscious, or by factors external to him, “contingencies of reinforcement,” as Skinner would call them.

  In his introduction to a collection of essays on psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft has charted his own progress from considering psychoanalysis as a causal theory to regarding it as a semantic theory. That is, he no longer sees the main task of psychoanalysis as uncovering the causes of symptoms, but rather as a means of understanding and making sense of the communications and personalities of his patients. If a patient’s symptoms are entirely the consequence of unconscious wishes or repressed traumatic incidents, then making the patient conscious of these determinants should, and sometimes does, result in the disappearance of these symptoms, as in the early cases Freud describes. But, as Rycroft points out:

  Firstly, symptoms are not solely an individual matter, they have a social nexus and function and change in one person may be contingent on change in others. Secondly, in patients other than straightforward psychoneurotics, analysis involves consideration of the whole personality including his conscious values. And thirdly, conscious as well as unconscious motives play a part in the maintenance of neuroses.14

  Modern psychoanalysts, therefore, are not merely concerned with making what is unconscious conscious, but with understanding persons. If we are to understand persons, we must assume that which Skinner and his followers try to eliminate, an inner life which is only revealed through introspection; a life concerned with conscious intention, will, motives, beliefs, and values.

  There really is a sense in which understanding a person is a different enterprise from understanding a disease, an animal, a tree, or even a neurotic symptom. Isaiah Berlin puts it clearly:

  Understanding other men’s motives or acts, however imperfect or corrigible, is a state of mind or activity in principle different from learning about, or knowledge of, the external world.…

  Just as we can say with assurance that we ourselves are not only bodies in space, acted upon by measurable natural forces, but that we think, choose, follow rules, make decisions, in other words possess an inner life of which we are aware and which we can describe, so we take it for granted—and, if questioned say that we are certain—that others possess a similar inner life, without which the notion of communication, or language, or of human society, as opposed to an aggregate of human bodies, becomes unintelligible.15

  This kind of understanding, as Isaiah Berlin implies, is a refinement and deepening of the kind of understanding which, every day, we employ in our social lives. To adopt an impersonal, scientific attitude toward human beings tells us only about their behavior. It is to treat others as not possessing an inner life; more particularly, as not possessing will or intention. D. C. Dennett, in one of his essays, refers to “intentional explanations” which “cite thoughts, desires, beliefs, intentions, rather than chemical reactions, explosions, electric impulses, in explaining the occurrence of human motions.”16

  The impersonal stance, referred to by Dennett as “mechanistic,” can only inform us about another person’s behavior. Although, by adopting this attitude, we may be able to discern causes for this behavior, our explanation cannot be in terms of intention, nor can we determine what this behavior means to the individual concerned.

  In our ordinary day-to-day encounters with individuals, we are bound to adopt the intentional stance. I cannot but assume that I myself have feelings, thoughts, desires, beliefs, and intentions; and I must, in the ordinary way, assume that others are similarly constituted. The mechanistic stance is the exception; the intentional stance must be the rule. Anatol Rapoport has pointed out that, when playing a game, we are bound to make what he calls “the assumption of similarity” about our opponent. Playing a game is impossible unless one can assume that one’s opponent intends to win if he can, and that, in trying to achieve this, he will be influenced by the same kind of considerations, and have in mind the same kinds of strategy, as one does oneself.17

  Adopting the objective, mechanistic stance toward human beings actually deprives the observer of an important source of understanding. In our exchanges with others, we are bound to rely upon our own subjective experience if we wish to grasp what others are thinking and feeling. We observe behavior; the signals which others give us. But we interpret those signals, at least in part, in terms of what we ourselves feel or have felt in the past. This is why it is often difficult to understand patients or others who come from different cultures. It is easy to misinterpret the signals with which we are presented.

  In contrast, persons who are particularly close to one another, like husband and wife, often develop sensitive antennae which tell each what the other is feeling, not just because the other provides evidence of happiness, sorrow, fatigue, or zest, but because the emotional state of the other has an immediate influence. We care about how those who are close to us are feeling, in some degree because we possess a measure of altruism, but more especially because their happiness or unhappiness has a direct effect upon our own. Psychoanalysts need to be affected by their patients if they are to understand them, which is one reason why psychoanalysis is an emotionally demanding profession.

  Although psychoanalysis which goes beyond a concern with isolated neurotic symptoms is not, and can never be, scientific in the sense in which the “hard” sciences are scientific, this does not mean that it should be dismissed as hopelessly subjective. Psychoanalysis is a professional discipline: a skill which ought only to be practiced by people who have been properly trained. The potential psychoanalyst must use his own emotional reactions in understanding his patient, but he must also learn to control those emotional reactions and not permit them to interfere with the patient’s discourse. Psychoanalysis is a long way removed from ordinary social interaction. Although the skills used by the psychoanalyst are refinements of those which we all employ in understanding others, the analyst must learn to be self-effacing. He must not respond to his patient in the same way that he would in ordinary social intercourse, but must suppress all responses of his own that do not further the patient’s understanding of himself. Psychoanalysis is bound to be one-way traffic, in that the enterprise is designed to benefit the patient without providing any gratification for the analyst other than that of exercising, and being paid for, a professional skill. But the practice of psychoanalysis demands of the analyst all the intuitive, empathic understanding which he can muster. Because such understanding must be derived from his own subjective, human experience, the analyst can never employ the detached, cold objectivity which is a mandatory requirement of the experimental scientist, and psychoanalysis itself can never become an exact science.

  NOTES

  1. Quoted in Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 14.

  2. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–64), 2:6.

  3. Freud, Standard Edition, 3:77.

  4. Ibid., 3:199.

  5. Ibid., 3:203.

  6. Roger Brown and Richard J. Herrnstein, Psychology (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), p. 583.

  7. Thomas S. Szasz, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books,
1965), p. 71.

  8. Freud, Standard Edition, 11:51.

  9. Quoted in Ernest Jones, The Years of Maturity, 1901–19, vol. 2 of Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 497.

  10. John Macmurray, Persons in Relation, vol. 2 of The Form of the Personal (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 24.

  11. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 3 vols. (London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1969, 1973, 1980).

  12. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Knopf, 1971), pp. 200, 205, 177, 164, 160.

  13. P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 19–20.

  14. Charles Rycroft, ed., Psychoanalysis Observed (New York: Coward-McCann, 1967), p. 11.

  15. Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), pp. 28, 23.

  16. D. C. Dennett, “Mechanism and Responsibility,” in Essays on Freedom of Action, ed. Ted Honderich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 161.

  17. Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 306ff.

  11

  The Psychology of Symbols: Symbols of Unity and Integration

  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF symbols is a vast subject. I have therefore given this chapter a subtitle, to indicate the part of the subject upon which I chiefly wish to comment.

  A symbol may be defined as “whatever stands for something, or has representative function.” A banal example is a national flag. When planted on a particular piece of land, it serves to indicate or symbolize possession of that piece of land by the country it represents. The Cross is the central symbol of the Christian religion. Everyone seeing the Cross knows that it stands for, or symbolizes, Christianity, just as the crooked cross or swastika, personally selected by Hitler, became the symbol of Nazi Germany.