The Freud Files

by Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel; Shamdasani, Sonu;

  Delbœuf: The existence of several schools of hypnotism thus is only natural and can be easily explained. They owe their birth to the reciprocal action of the hypnotised on their hypnotisers. Only their rivalry has no reason for being: they are all in the right.138

  Wohlgemuth: If a dream of mine were analysed by Freud he would doubtless unearth some sexual complex, whilst Jung, with the same dream, would discover some ‘prospective and teleological function,’ and Adler would find the ‘will to power, the masculine protest.’ This I think is sufficient proof that the result is due to the psychoanalyst and that the dream-interpretation is the via regia to the analyst’s unconscious.139

  Hart: It may be noted in this connexion that, while the pupils of Freud confirm by their clinical observations the findings of their master, the pupils of Jung, working with weapons forged of much the same material and in similar pattern, have no difficulty in finding ample clinical confirmation for the quite disparate tenets of Jung.140

  Judd Marmor: Depending upon the point of view of the analyst, the patients of each school seem to bring up precisely the kind of phenomenological data which confirm the theories and interpretations of their analysts! Thus each theory tends to be self-validating. Freudians elicit material about the Oedipus Complex and castration anxiety, Jungians about archetypes, Rankian about separation anxiety, Adlerians about masculine strivings and feelings of inferiority, Horneyites about idealized images, Sullivanians about disturbed relationships, etc.141

  Ellenberger: Patients under Freudian analysis dream Freudian dreams, discover their Oedipus complex, their castration anxieties, and establish strong transferences with their analysts. Patients under Jungian analysis dream Jungian dreams, discover their projections and their animas, and realize their individuations. And so on for every dynamic school and subschool. It is as if Descartes’ famous ‘evil genius’ really existed and self-confirmed all the theories of dynamic psychiatry.142

  But after all, why speak of an evil genius, as if it deceives us? It is not because the scientific legend elaborated by Freud dissimulated the artefactuality and the historicity of analytical phenomena that we are forced to conclude that they are illusory. Does one say that a legal contract is a fiction, simply because the reality which it creates did not pre-exist the contract being signed? Or that a cricket match isn’t real because the rules are purely conventional? As the participants agree to play the game and respect the rules and the contract, they make it real. At a structural level, the same holds true for psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. These consensual practices do not reflect the world, they recreate a segment of it. There is nothing wrong with that as long as protagonists do not seek to impose their world on those who never signed up for it and who don’t accept it.143 After all, as Delbœuf noted, ‘they are all in the right’. From a Freudian perspective, everyone who has ever lived and will ever live has an unconscious and an Oedipal complex. There is no possibility of regarding these as optional and opting out of them in favour of other forms of self-narration. Faced with a self-validating system of this type, the significant question is not one of knowing whether it is true or false, real or invented, historical or legendary, but rather of comprehending how it functions, how it produces effects which ‘interprefact’ inner worlds. Jastrow: Yet in all the Freudian flood of communications, as copious as unsavoury, recounting the adventures of the Freudian ‘Oedipus,’ I find no definite statement of how the incest theory arose. One may read and re-read that it was ‘discovered’ in the analysis. This, stripped to its factual content, means that the theory was found acceptable by some neurotic sufferers submitting to analysis; that incidents and relations in their childhood, including fantasies, could be described in such terms by the usual procedures of the Freudian confession in which fact, fantasy, suggestion and prepossession are intricately interactive. And once started, it was accepted eagerly by the disciples as a shibboleth of their faith.144

  Wohlgemuth: If I want to cure a man of some hysteric stigma, I must get him to accept the suggestion. If it cannot be done by telling him, whether in hypnosis or otherwise, that the stigma will disappear, or, à la Coué, by his incessant repetition that he is getting better, I may, perhaps, be more successful in making him believe that he is suffering from some ‘complex,’ and then ‘discover’ it by the psychoanalytic method. I must get him to accept the suggestion, and this is the sine qua non.145

  Airbrushing Breuer

  However, one may raise the question of what happens if people subjected to analysis do not accept the interpretation (the suggestion) which is proposed to them? Would interprefaction be legitimate in this case? The examples which we have considered so far concern cases where both parties have taken on board the constructions and interpretations of the analyst, and have remade the world and rewritten personal history on this basis. But what of cases in which one of the parties rejects the interpretations and even refuses to join in the further game of ‘transference resistance’? What of apostate disciples who propose rival interpretations which are incompatible with those of the master? Or the sceptical colleagues who demand proofs before taking psychoanalytic theory on board? In such cases, there is clearly no consensus, and one cannot count on the assent of those to whom theories are proposed to make them true and turn them into facts. On the contrary, one is back in the situation of contestation, where hypotheses and interpretations are hotly debated and the facts in question are not taken as established and hence universally accepted.

  Freud’s response to such individuals, which he was constantly confronted by, is quite clear. He applied the same treatment in the form of interpretations that he gave to his clients. This appears to have begun with his attribution in private of repressed homosexuality and paranoia to Fliess after his embarrassing dispute with him concerning priority and plagiarism.146

  Freud to Jung, 1 February 1907: My inclination is to treat those colleagues who offer resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation.147

  If colleagues did not accept his theories, it was because they repressed sexuality (Breuer, and German psychiatry as a whole), because they were perverse (Stekel), neurotic (Rank),148 paranoiac (Fliess, Adler, Ferenczi),149 on the edge of psychosis (Jung)150 or in a psychiatric condition (Rank again).151 Through attributing the ‘resistances’ which his adversaries opposed to his theories to resistances which they supposedly had to their own unconscious, Freud killed two birds with one stone. On the one hand, he very effectively delegitimated those who opposed him, through turning them into marionettes moved by forces outside of their control. On the other hand, he short-circuited all discussion on the subject of his theories and interpretations, since he presupposed what was being debated: the existence of the Freudian unconscious and the exclusive prerogative of the psychoanalyst to decipher its manifestations. We see here the familiar mechanisms of psychoanalytic interprefaction: from being a hypothesis to be confirmed, the Freudian unconscious became an established incontrovertible fact, as if Freud had already won the debate. Hence there wasn’t even much need to obtain the assent of his adversaries or take their objections into account. As the psychologist Adolf Wohlgemuth put it, ‘Heads I win, tails you lose.’152

  Freud: Thus the strongest resistances to psycho-analysis were not of an intellectual kind but arose from emotional sources. This explained their passionate character as well as their poverty in logic. The situation obeyed a simple formula: men in the mass behaved to psycho-analysis in precisely the same way as individual neurotics under treatment for their disorders . . . The position was at once alarming and consoling: alarming because it was no small thing to have the whole human race as one’s patient, and consoling because after all everything was taking place as the hypotheses of psycho-analysis declared that it was bound to.153

  This confounds two very different types of relations: that of the consensual contract between the therapist and his patients, and that of scientific and scholarly debate where there is the necessity of attempti
ng to convince one’s colleagues and rivals. It was one thing to lead patients to accept interpretations in a contractual therapeutic relation which they could terminate at any point. It was another thing to assume that such interpretations were equally applicable to peers, and indeed, to all others, despite their protestations. In deliberately blurring the boundaries between these domains, Freud unjustifiably raised the optional ontology of the psychoanalytic relation, where participants agree between themselves to define a world according to their taste for the sake of therapeutic benefit, into a general ontology, a universal science which would be applicable to all.

  It is clear that Freud would never have been satisfied to regard his theories as interprefactions, or his evidence as realities fabricated and negotiated in concert with his patients. This would have reduced psychoanalysis to simply a technique of psychological manipulation, to one form of ‘psychic treatment’ among others. Freud’s aim was to establish psychoanalysis as the only scientific psychotherapy, based on a universally valid psychology. Consequently, ‘hard’ facts were necessary. It was this will to science which Freud’s legendary interprefaction presented as already fulfilled, a ‘fait accompli’, hence short-circuiting the slow work of proof and argumentation.

  Jung: A very famous professor, whose assertions I had ventured to criticize, came out with the magisterial dictum: ‘It must be right because I have thought it.’154

  Jung, interview with Kurt Eissler, 29 August 1953: For example, I once had a discussion with him [Freud] about some theoretical topic. And I said to him: ‘In my view that is not at all the case!’ He said to me: ‘But it must be so!’ I asked: ‘Why then?’ ‘Because I have thought it!’ You know, when he had thought something, he himself was so convinced and therefore it had to be correct!155

  Jung to Ernst Hanhart, 18 February 1957: The subjective overvaluation of [Freud’s] thinking is illustrated by his dictum: ‘This must be correct because I have thought it.’156

  Jung, interview with Hugo Charteris, 21 January 1960: Imagine! He [Freud] once said to me: ‘I thought it – so it must be true.’157

  From the perspective of contemporaneous scholarly and scientific debate, this form of interprefaction which magically closed controversies before they could properly begin was quite illegitimate, as it no longer required the agreement of those to whom it was proposed. On the contrary, it did violence to them, as it transformed the negotiable performative statements of a therapist into a scientific constative, an irrefutable dictat. Statements which might be acceptable in a consenting psychotherapeutic relation through being taken up by those to whom they were proposed functioned quite differently outside of this context, when they were imposed on individuals against their will. In this way, interprefaction turned into a fallacious rescripting of history.

  Ernest Jones: Two of the members [of the Secret Committee], Rank and Ferenczi, were not able to hold out to the end. Rank in a dramatic fashion . . . and Ferenczi more gradually toward the end of his life, developed psychotic manifestations that revealed themselves in, among other ways, a turning away from Freud and his doctrines.158

  Peter Gay: In 1923, Rank went through some distressing episodes that hinted at welling-up conflicts; in August, for one, at dinner with the Committee in San Cristoforo, Anna Freud witnessed an outburst that she later described as ‘hysterical hilariousness.’ Just as ominously, Rank began to espouse techniques and theoretical positions that would move him far from the ideas he had been steeped in for two decades and had done so much to propagate.159

  Such statements are examples of the character assassination which was practised to deligitimate the technical and theoretical innovations of two of Freud’s hitherto most loyal followers. For a less obvious example, we may consider the manner in which Freud managed the controversy between himself and his old friend and collaborator Josef Breuer.

  In 1909 in his lectures at Clark University, Freud had not hesitated to attribute the paternity of psychoanalysis to Breuer.

  Freud: Ladies and Gentlemen, – It is with novel and bewildering feelings that I find myself in the New World, lecturing before an audience of expectant enquirers . . . If it is a merit to have brought psycho-analysis into being that merit is not mine. I had no share in its earliest beginnings. I was a student and working for my final examinations at the time when another Viennese physician, Dr. Josef Breuer, first (in 1880–2) made use of this procedure on a girl who was suffering from hysteria.160

  Freud followed this with a long description of the famous ‘talking cure’ of Anna O., presented as a total therapeutic success and a presentation of the cathartic method developed by Breuer and Freud. However, five years later in his ‘History of the psychoanalytic movement’, the tone had completely changed.

  Freud: Certain opponents of psycho-analysis have a habit of occasionally recollecting that after all the art of psycho-analysis was not invented by me, but by Breuer . . . I have never heard that Breuer’s great share in psycho-analysis has earned him a proportionate measure of criticism and abuse. As I have long recognized that to stir up contradiction and arouse bitterness is the inevitable fate of psycho-analysis, I have come to the conclusion that I must be the true originator of all that is particularly characteristic in it.161

  Freud now not only insisted on the disagreements between himself and Breuer on the subject of the ‘psychical mechanisms’ of hysteria (‘defence’ versus ‘hypnoid state’), but also described his former mentor as a timorous investigator, frightened by sexuality, whom he had to convince to publish the case of Anna O., almost against his will, and who had broken with Freud shortly after the publication of Studies on Hysteria. Furthermore, Freud insinuated publicly for the first time that the end of the treatment of Anna had been much more ambiguous than he and Breuer had given it to be understood up till now.

  Freud: I am quite sure, however, that this opposition between our views [on the psychical mechanisms of hysteria] had nothing to do with the breach in our relations which followed shortly after. This had deeper causes, but it came about in such a way that at first I did not understand it; it was only later that I learnt from many clear indications how to interpret it. It will be remembered that Breuer said of his famous first patient that the element of sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her and had contributed nothing to the very rich clinical picture of the case162 . . . In his treatment of her case, Breuer was able to make use of a very intense suggestive rapport with the patient,163 which may serve us as a complete prototype of what we call ‘transference’ to-day. Now I have strong reasons for suspecting that after all her symptoms had been relieved Breuer must have discovered from further indications her sexual motivation of this transference, but that the universal nature of this unexpected phenomenon escaped him, with the result that, as though confronted by an ‘untoward event,’ he broke off all further investigation. He never said this to me in so many words, but he gave me enough clues at different times to justify this conjecture of what happened.164

  What had transpired between 1909 and 1914 to justify such a striking rewriting of the founding episode of psychoanalysis? And why this volte-face on Breuer’s role in the matter? Some explanation may be found in the different contexts and moments of Freud’s accounts. In 1909, Freud was speaking in front of a very distinguished audience of American neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists, amongst others,165 who for the most part only knew him as the co-author of the Studies on Hysteria and the promoter of a new psychotherapeutic method, the ‘Breuer–Freud method’, which was often confounded with other forms of hypno-suggestive therapies derived from Janet’s ‘psychological analysis’.166 As Eugene Taylor has emphasised, for many, Freud was thought to be the junior author of the two.167 Ten years earlier, at his presentation at the tenth anniversary of Clark University, Forel had presented the work of Breuer and Freud as a variation of the hypnotic psychotherapy of which he himself was one of the great proponents in Europe.

  Forel: In an obscure but very frequent manner,
on the other hand, certain single impulses may leave behind lasting inhibitions, or stimuli, and perhaps disorders of function which may take a pathological character, and seriously tantalize the victim. Such points were used, a few years ago, by Breuer and Freud in Vienna, for the foundation of their doctrine of arrested emotions, which, unfortunately, was developed into a one-sided system, although it started from correct facts. Thus especially violent affects are apt to leave behind all sorts of nervous disorders (convulsions, paralysis, pains, dyspepsia, menstrual disorders). Breuer and Freud tried to lead the patients in a hypnotic condition to the causative, frequently forgotten, and frequently sexual moment of the trouble, to make them dream over that moment and to give them, once and forever, a counter suggestion, curing the disorder. In many cases this works; but by no means always.168

  Freud was quite aware of the American context, which Jones had been keeping him abreast of.169 Thus it was not surprising, speaking from the same podium as Forel ten years earlier, that Freud would have begun his presentation of psychoanalysis with a recapitulation of the treatment of Anna O., passing over his rupture with Breuer on the subject of the exclusive sexual aetiology of hysteria. By contrast, in 1914, as we have seen, he was writing in the context of the heated controversies around psychoanalysis, in which Breuer’s name was regularly evoked against him (notably by Forel). Thus it makes sense that Freud emphatically stressed his distance from the Breuerian heritage. It was impossible to continue to present Breuer as the absent father of Freudian psychoanalysis, as he was being frequently cited against Freud. Against the model of continuity and progress, he substituted that of theoretical rupture. In other words, it became necessary to show that the cathartic method had been a dead end, contrary to what Forel, Frank, Bezzola and others were claiming, and that only psychoanalysis (the sexual hermeneutic) could explain why and surmount the shortcomings of the cathartic method.