Conclusion: insane people exist, everybody has met them. And the only way of effectively tending to them is by recognising that ‘they themselves are the cause of themselves’ — and that psychopathic personalities require appropriate treatment.
In all serious cases, chemotherapy proves indispensable. ‘Far from representing a “chemical straightjacket”’, writes Dr. Pélicier, ‘chemotherapy, handled with precision and method, makes for extraordinary progress which can be measured by comparing it to the previous situation’.
Perhaps there are patients that should be released from the asylums. But there are also anti-psychiatrists that should be locked up.
*
La psychiatrie compréhensible, by Yves Pélicier. Fayard, 254 pages.479
Une antipsychiatrie ?, by Harold Heyward and Mireille Varigas. Ed. Universitaires, 144 pages.480
Le fou est normal, by Silvio G. Fanti. Flammarion, 216 pages.481
Laing, by Gilbert C. Rapaille. Ed. Universitaires, 118 pages.
L’équilibre mental, le folie et la famille, by Ronald D. Laing and Aaron Esterson. Maspéro. 230 pages.482
Les degrés de la folie, by Léon Michaux. Hachette. 304 pages.483
L’antipsychiatrie, sens ou non-sens ?, essays published by Cyrille Koupernik. PUF, 240 pages.484
*
Although its success has been largely confined to politico-literary circles, the anti-psychiatric movement, since its inception, has only grown and prospered. Its leaders remain Ronald Laing (The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Penguin, 1967; The Divided Self. Penguin, 1960; Knots. Penguin, 1970; The Self and Others. Tavistock, 1961. The Politics of the Family and Other Essays. Tavistock, 1971)485 and David Cooper (Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry. Paladin, 1967; The Death of the Family. Penguin, 1971).486 But we must also cite the studies of Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness. Harper & Row. 1961; The Manufacture of Madness. Harper & Row, 1970),487 Gérard Hof (Je ne serai plus psychiatre. Stock, 1976),488 and so forth.
In his last book, Grammar of Living (Penguin, 1974),489 David Cooper again denounces medical psychiatry as the ‘CIA of the individual psyche’, and claims that experiments with drugs or ‘schizoid regression’, far from being signs of failure in the eyes of society, are on the contrary the surest index of the bankruptcy of this very society. The book is also bathed in a mixture of diffused religiosity and pre-Freudian phenomenology, interspersed with incantations of a ‘new sexual morality’ and appeals to a vaguely Buddhist ‘meditation’.
Christian Delacampagne, in Antipsychiatrie. Les voies du sacré (Grasset, 1974),490 attempts to free the ‘philosophy’ of the movement. On the other hand, Chantal Bosseur (Clefs pour antipsychiatrie)491 introduces a useful distinction between the English school of anti-psychiatry (Laing, Cooper, Esterson) and the American school, less known but ultimately more important.
This second school, of which Thomas Szasz, born in Budapest in 1920, was a founder, is centred in Palo Alto, California, and devotes itself mainly to the ‘study’ of schizophrenia. Independently of his references to Jean-Paul Sartre and Zen Buddhism (in the ‘popularised’ version of Alan Watts), it is essentially reduced to a new form of environmentalism and behaviourism. Rejecting most Freudian concepts (the unconscious, intrapsychic conflict, etc.), it attributes almost every disturbing factor to the environment (familial, social, and institutional). Mental illness thus becomes a ‘logical’ response to an ‘aggressive stimulus’ produced by society. On this Palo Alto school, see P. Watzlawick, J. Helmick-Beauvin, and D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication (Norton, 1967),492 and P. Watzlawick, J. Weakland and R. Fisch, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (Norton, 1974).493
Psychoanalysts without Complexes
‘They do not realise we are bringing them the plague’, Freud whispered on the boat that brought him to America.
It was a few months before the Second World War. Since then, the epidemic has spread. The 28th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association was held from 22–27 July 1972 at UNESCO. 1,600 participants from thirty-two countries were attending this ‘summit’, where the American delegation, emanating from the emigration of the 1930s, accounted for almost two thirds of the audience. Among the topics for discussion: ‘transference’ and hysteria.
In reality, the meeting mostly revealed contradictions. For the great Freudian church is divided into sects. And the popes excommunicate themselves by citing quotes.
In the case of France alone, there are four denominations corresponding to different stages of dissent. There is the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, born in 1926, presided over by Dr. Evelyne Kestemberg (who publishes the Revue française de psychanalyse); the Psychoanalytic Association of France, of Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, created in 1953 (which publishes the Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse through Gallimard); the Freudian School of Paris, founded in 1963 around Jacques Lacan (journal: Scilicet, published by Sueil); and the fourth group, born in 1969 (journal: Topique). In total: 265 adherents — of which 57 are not medical practitioners.
Only the first two companies are affiliated to the International Association, whose creation dates back to 1910. The other two are dominated by the personality of Jacques Lacan, a neo-Marxist theorist who became fashionable in certain circles of L’Ecole normale supérieur, and who, under the influence of Ferdinand de Saussure, undertook to re-read Freud in the light of structural linguistics.
Between the two splits, the psychoanalysts officiate behind closed doors. They recruit by co-opting.
Their clientele consists of agitated or delirious psychotics, patients with neuroses, personality disorders, phobias, obsessions, depression and, of course, the full spectrum of sexual difficulties.
The engine of psychoanalytic cure is transference, that is to say, the privileged, ‘decomplexing’ relationship which is established between the patient and the analyst. The latter combines the advantages of the priest and the doctor. We can tell him everything. He accepts everything. He erases the blame. He is the intermediary between an atrophied will and a mysterious universe, that of the unconscious, whose arcana does not hold secrets from him; he predicts the ‘drives’ and draws out their ‘true’ causes. He gives alibis and keeps on chattering. He makes it possible to talk about oneself in good conscience.
This gives psychoanalysis a surprisingly considerable success. Dr. Yves Pélicier, author of La psychiatrie compréhensible, speaks of a ‘cultural phenomenon’: a sign of the times.
Conditioned by the mass media, and especially by the women’s press, the public at large questions its complexes and frustrations with a delicious thrill.
‘The analysis of works of art and literary criticism have opened to psychoanalysis an unlimited career’, says Dr. Pélicier. ‘It is enough’, writes Raymond Ruyer, ‘to look through the weekly women’s magazines to see that popular psychoanalysis is to the feminine intelligentsia what Marxism is to the masculine intelligentsia’ (Les nuisances idéologiques. Fayard, 1972).
Little by little, psychoanalysis has infiltrated ethnology (Lévi-Strauss), anthropology (Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas), psychosociology (Kurt Lewin), pedagogy (Benjamin Spock), linguistics, marketing, and so on. Its latest avatar, anti-psychiatry, is far from having a consensus. But as Roland Jaccard acknowledges in Le Monde, ‘it is already necessary in our day for a young psychiatrist to have a distinct courage and a singular nonconformism in order to refuse psychoanalysis’.
Resentment
The paternity of concepts such as the ‘unconscious’, ‘repression’, ‘psychotherapy’, and so on are generally attributed to Freud by the public. This is a serious mistake.
‘In Freud’s doctrine, what is new is not true’, says a Parisian psychologist. ‘And what is true is not new’.
In a work of considerable erudition, The Discovery of the Unconscious (published in a French translation by the editor of the Cahiers médicales lyonnais), Professor Henri F. Ellenberger from the University of Montreal has traced, in e
ight-hundred pages, the history of ‘dynamic psychiatry’. Freud’s name only appears in the last third of the book.
The origin of ‘depth psychology’ goes back to Greek and Roman antiquity. We find certain manifestations in primitive societies. From the Middle Ages, religious ‘counselling’ contributed to its development, along with the effusive role of confession. In the eighteenth century, in France, Mesmer and Puységur laid the foundations for a true doctrine and for a therapy of the unconscious. It is this doctrine, enriched by the observations of Schopenhauer, Fechner, Bachofen, Darwin, Nietzsche, etc., which will be re-covered around 1880 by Bernheim and Charcot, and especially by Pierre Janet, whose importance and memory Ellenberger happily strives to demonstrate and rehabilitate.
In fact, Freud’s originality lies mainly in his rigid interpretation of the disorders of the unconscious, which almost exclusively emphasise sexuality and the emotional conflicts of early childhood.
For Freud, the notion of repression holds the sacred role, which in Marx, is played by alienation. It is always a matter of finding excuses for those whose ‘performance’ in the domain of social competition is mediocre. And to fuel the ideology of resentment. In the system of psychoanalysis, man is practically never able to affirm his ego completely. He endures himself, when he does not endure others. He is the plaything of inner drives and latent desires, which are realised abstractions similar to medieval allegories. Freud thus ‘modernises’ the old theory of the ‘scapegoat’ — whose practice is like the ancestor of release.
It is remarkable that at a time when the general public seems totally won over to psychoanalysis, the specialists gradually move away from it.
‘We find ourselves today in a rather curious situation’, says the English psychologist H. J. Eysenck, ‘in the sense that psychoanalysis is widely accepted by the layman and those who have no notion of what psychology is, whereas it is rejected by those who possess serious knowledge of the field’.
In the United States, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, only 2% of mental patients are treated with psychoanalysis.
‘The psychoanalytic movement is becoming an insignificant branch of psychiatry’, admits Dr. Judd Marmot, former president of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis.
‘Psychoanalysis is disappearing’, notes Dr. Thomas Szasz with sadness.
It is because the actual therapeutic bankruptcy of psychoanalysis is more and more clearly recognised.
Has psychoanalysis ever cured anyone? The question ultimately does not make much sense.
‘There is no method’, remarked Hans J. Eysenck, ‘from prayer to cold baths, from hypnosis to dental extractions, which has not obtained “good” results. In this field, suggestion, the interpersonal relationship, play a particularly important role. A patient who believes he can be cured is cured all the more easily. This is especially true in the field of mental disorders.
A study conducted by Dr. Deniker of five hundred individuals with severe neurosis, reveals that two out of three subjects recovered normally, without having received any treatment. Thus the rate of ‘healing’ obtained by psychoanalysis not only does not exceed that of other methods of treatment, it is not even better than remissions obtained spontaneously.
‘The subjects treated by psychoanalysis’, writes Professor Eysenck in the journal Nouvelle école, ‘cure rather less well and more slowly’.
He adds: ‘I will say, in weighing my words, that Freud has pushed psychiatry back more than fifty years’.
*
La science contra Freud. Science versus Freud, essays published under the direction of Quentin Debray. Special issue of Nouvelle-école (B.P. 129–07, 75326 Paris Cedex 07), 130 pages.494
A la découverte de l’inconscient, by Henri F. Ellenberger. SIMEP-Editions (47–49, rue du 4 août, 69611 Villeurbanne), 772 pages.495
Freudian Scholasticism
‘Freud was never a scientist’ declared Dr. Debray-Ritzen in a talk given in Toulouse in December 1972 under the auspices of the association G.R.E.C.E. (Group for the Research and Study of European Civilisation).496
Dr. Pierre Debray-Ritzen, 54 years of age, white coat and bow tie, leads a double professional life. He is both a child psychiatrist and an accomplished writer. He is a ‘somnambulist’, says Arthur Koestler, using the term in the sense given to it by Charcot and Janet. A hospital physician and a professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, he specialises in the problems of neuropsychology and directs the child patient unit within this discipline. As a writer, he has published (under the pseudonym of Quentin Ritzen) Les nervures d’être and Un final venetien,497 as well as essays on Chekhov, Koestler, Hemingway, and Simenon — before taking on Sigmund Freud.
In the preface to La scolastique freudienne, Arthur Koestler writes: ‘These devastating pages have the ardor and the irony of a Renan attacking holy scripture’.
The comparison is quite accurate. ‘Scholasticism’, says Dr. Debray-Ritzen, ‘is a logical and systematised reasoning that aims to penetrate minds with revealed truths, that is to say, postulates or assertions which have not received scientific verification’. This is the opposite of the experimental method, defined by Claude Bernard.
In 1938, Etienne Gilson wrote: ‘Articles of faith can be proven in theology by a rational and necessary demonstration; that is to say, they can be proven on the condition that they are first believed’. The same goes for psychoanalysis.
For Freud, ‘revealed truths’ bear names such as id and ego, the unconscious, drives, the Oedipus complex, object relations, infantile sexuality, and the interpretation of dreams.
The Role of the Sexual Function
As opposed to the overused notion of the unconscious, Dr. De bray-Ritzen prefers that of ‘non-conscious’. ‘Consciousness’, he explains, ‘is something relative. We can imagine it a little like a theater. Clear, verbalised, consciousness is centre stage, in the spotlight. And then there are the wings, and in these wings, everything unused, everything non-conscious that we have accrued. The non-conscious can come on stage if we call upon it, but it can also come by itself, depending on emotional circumstances, sensory provocations, or associations of ideas’.
Dreams are part of the unconscious. Freud took to them with delight. For him, the meaning of the dream is also the cause. This led him to announce gravely that they were ‘almost like the Vermot almanac’ but in the style of the Key to Dreams of the Babylonian diviners.498
Thus we come to the fundamental subject of the role of the sexual function. ‘Freud’, says Koestler, ‘restored Eros to his legitimate place, which the Victorians had refused’. Unfortunately, by restoring it to its place, psychoanalysis seems to have made it vicious.
Infantile sexuality, however, is not a myth. The child is not the paragon of innocence imagined by angelic parents. Nor is it a ‘perverse polymorph’. On this subject, Dr. Debray-Ritzen declares:
‘Infant sexuality is a reality that varies according to the individual. Above all, it does not explain everything. As a paediatrician, I can say that there are children, especially girls, who escape sexual curiosity right up until advanced ages, that is, until about eight or ten years old. It is therefore truly absurd to derive it from a ‘fixation’, as they say in the jargon of psychoanalysis, at one of the stages of infantile sexuality, the origin of which is called (in a far too imprecise manner) neurosis.
For his part, Professor Lhermitte states: ‘It is not impossible that an infant has an emotional life, that it is sensitive to certain situations or events, and that it can be marked. But to maintain that the personality is determined at this age or even earlier, even in the intra-uterine life, according to a process of escalation in which the various psychoanalytic schools have been engaged since Freud, is an exaggeration, no doubt even a biological impossibility — especially for those who have observed the brain of the newborn or even the small child in optical and electronic microscopy, in histoenzymology and histochemistry’ (La Revue médicale de Pica
rdie, November 1975).
Therapeutics
Doctors call medicines without any therapeutic value, but which nevertheless exercise a beneficent action because the patient believes they are real, ‘placebos’ (sugar pills, distilled water shots). The patient feels relieved because he thinks he has been relieved. On the mental plane, the ‘therapeutic value’ of psychoanalysis is about the same. The relationship upon which it is based is a kind of secular confession, an avatar of the Coué method.
‘To question the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis’, says Dr. Debray-Ritzen, ‘is ultimately to pose the problem of the interpersonal relationship, of the action that one being can exercise over another through dialogue, example, emotional ties, natural influence, and so on (…) Subjugation, sacrifice, abandonment, three or five times a week over three years on the couch are well worth the effort, regardless of the theme: Buddha, Jesus, Marx, or Oedipus. It is open to the Freudians to see in their enterprise only the distinctiveness of the transference. It is open to us to find only a kind of asceticism and the suggestion of a personal consultation’.
Neurosis is the major issue for Freudians. But in this rather vague concept, psychoanalysis coagulates disorders of a different nature: hysterical conversion, anxiety, angst, phobic and obsessional conditions, and so on. It can obtain results for the treatment of anxious and phobic neuroses, but it is almost powerless to cure hysteria, which Freud, in 1890, had made the cornerstone of his system. As Dr. Debray-Ritzen notes, ‘a well-enacted isolation more easily controls hysterical contracture than the long psychoanalytical confessions, which may ultimately exacerbate the problem’.
Of course, psychoanalysis has never cured any psychosis, adult or infantile, no addiction, no psychopathic personality, no chronic delirium, no manic-depressive psychosis, etc.
A Torrent of Logos upon the World
To the methods used by Freud, Dr. Debray-Ritzen gives the names of hyperformulation, hyperreduction, hypersynthesis, and hypersymbolisation. This ‘hyper’ consists in giving to particular observations a general scope or significance that they do not have.
Heritage and Foundations Page 39
