The Freud Files

by Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel; Shamdasani, Sonu;

  Taken in the narrow sense of systematic therapeutic analysis, centred on the recollection of childhood memories, the self-analysis appears to have been extremely brief, and, in Freud’s own view, disappointing (a point rarely mentioned by his biographers). Actively pursued from the beginning of October 1897 (two weeks after the abandonment of the seduction theory),40 it was finished six weeks later in a lucid assessment of failure.

  Freud to Fliess, 14 November 1897: My self-analysis remains interrupted. I have realized why I can analyze myself only with the knowledge obtained objectively (like an outsider). True self-analysis is impossible; otherwise there would be no [neurotic] illness. Since I am still contending with some kind of puzzle in my patients, this is bound to hold me up in my self-analysis as well.41

  Freud to Fliess, 9 February 1898: As for the rest, everything is still in a state of latency. My self-analysis is at rest in favor of the dream book.42

  Taken in the larger sense of self-observation, however, the self-analysis began much earlier, with Freud’s interpretation of his dreams which he routinely noted on waking,43 and continued with his analysis of his childhood memories (the so-called screen memories), as well as forgettings, lapses and failed acts. It is in this sense that Freud mentions in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life that, at the age of 43, he began to be interested in ‘what was left of my memory of my own childhood’.44 This coupling of an analysis of one’s dreams and childhood memories was not without precedent, as one already finds it in Delbœuf’s Sleep and Dreams, where one of the major themes is the capacity of dreams to recall forgotten memories. In this regard, Delbœuf’s analysis of the ‘dream of lizards and of the asplenium ruta muraria’45 seems to have served as the model of the analysis of the ‘dream of Irma’s injection in The Interpretation of Dreams’.46 Further, as Andreas Mayer has justly noted,47 this self-observation should also be situated in the continuation of the ‘introspective hypnotism’ practised at that time by figures such as August Forel, Eugen Bleuler48 and Oskar Vogt, who had all published first-person accounts of the hypnotic state.49 The idea of the introspective study of subliminal or unconscious psychic states was definitely in the air.

  August Forel: The object of psychology is the study of so-called psychic functions of our brain by direct introspection . . . Those cerebral functions which do not fall into the ordinary field of attention of our consciousness in a waking state or its memories escape direct introspective psychology. But modern studies have made us increasingly aware that a large part of the cerebral functions called unconscious possess an introspective shimmering which we can surprise in certain circumstances and one designates this fact by the term ‘subconscious,’ a term which for good reason is being increasingly adopted.50

  Freud: I have noticed in my psycho-analytical work that the whole frame of mind of a man who is reflecting is totally different from that of a man who is observing his own psychical processes . . . In both cases attention must be concentrated, but the man who is reflecting is also exercising his critical faculty . . . The self-observer on the other hand need only take the trouble to suppress his critical faculty. If he succeeds in doing that, innumerable ideas come into his consciousness of which he could otherwise never have got hold . . . What is in question, evidently, is the establishment of a psychical state which, in its distribution of psychical energy (that is, of mobile attention), bears some analogy to the state before falling asleep – and no doubt also to hypnosis.51

  Freud himself did not seem to have accorded a special status to his self-analysis, at least at the beginning. In the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, as Peter Gay has noted, the term ‘self-analysis’ hardly signifies more than ‘self-observation’.52 Freud spoke of ‘self-analyses’ (in the plural) regarding his interpretation of his dreams, and he utilised the term to designate the ensemble of his work of self-inspection in The Interpretation of Dreams, which demonstrates that he did not understand it in the strict sense of analytic work upon oneself.

  Freud: Thus it comes about that I am led to my own dreams, which offer a copious and convenient material . . . No doubt I shall be met by doubts of the trustworthiness of ‘self-analyses’ of this kind . . . In my judgment the situation is in fact more favourable in the case of self-observation than in that of other people; at all events we may make the experiment and see how far self-analysis takes us with the interpretation of dreams.53

  Freud: [In] the dream about the strange task set me by old Brücke of making a dissection of my own pelvis . . . the dissection meant the self-analysis which I was carrying out, as it were, in the publication of this present book about dreams.54

  Freud’s self-analysis only gradually acquired the more technical – that is to say, properly Freudian – meaning that it now has in psychoanalytic vocabulary. Indeed, it was only in the preface of the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams that Freud made the first public allusion to his psychoanalysis of himself.

  Freud: For this book has a further subjective significance for me personally – a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death – that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life.55

  Suddenly, the public learned that the book on dreams was only a fragment of a self-analysis, the full content of which was simultaneously withheld. This clearly completely resignified the work, as well as that on the psychopathology of everyday life. Behind the published, public science, there was now the private, secret ‘science’ of Freud. Behind the manifest content of the books on dreams and on the psychopathology of everyday life, there was also their latent, ‘Oedipal’ content. Psychoanalysis itself became a riddle, with only Freud possessing its key. Furthermore, the self-analysis not only furnished the esoteric meaning of psychoanalysis, it now emerged as something very different from other introspective practices, insofar as self-observation was merged with self-therapy. To observe oneself was no longer sufficient: one had to cure oneself of the blindness with regard to the unconscious, as Freud had done. The upshot of this was that not anyone could practise psychoanalysis – contrary to the case with hypnosis, suggestion, and other medical and psychological therapeutic techniques. To be a psychoanalyst, one had to cure oneself, or in other words, psychoanalyse oneself. In 1909, to the question of how one became a psychoanalyst, Freud replied: ‘by studying one’s own dreams’.56 The following year, he noted that would-be psychoanalysts had to devote themselves to a self-analysis in order to overcome their resistances.

  Freud: Now that a considerable number of people are practising psycho-analysis and exchanging their observations with one another, we have noticed that no psycho-analyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit; and we consequently require that he shall begin his activity with a self-analysis57 and continually carry it deeper while he is making his observations on his patients. Anyone who fails to produce results in a self-analysis of this kind may at once give up any idea of being able to treat patients by analysis.58

  On the surface, nothing could be more democratic: anyone could – and should – repeat Freud’s self-analysis. The problem was that this directive wasn’t accompanied with any instructions, as no one except Freud himself knew what this self-analysis consisted in (one should bear in mind that his letters to Fliess were only published decades later). Consequently, what could be more natural than to turn to the expert on self-analysis to ask his advice? A number of figures duly did. Ernest Jones and Sándor Ferenczi, for example, sent detailed accounts of their self-analyses to Freud, who responded with interpretations, suggestions and directives. These mimetic ‘self’-analyses could with much justice be regarded simply as analyses by correspondence. Furthermore, they were hardly examples of open-ended inquiry, as what was to be found was already known in advance, and scripted by psychoanalytic theory.

  In other cases, however, the practice of self-analysis dangerously slipped out
of Freud’s control. Each analyst could appeal to the findings of their own self-analysis, thus resulting in a cacophony of divergent interpretations. There where Freud found Oedipus, others found Electra. Where he insisted on the paternal complex, others insisted on the maternal complex. Where he ‘discovered’ infantile sexuality, others discovered ‘organ inferiority’. Where he saw the workings of the ‘libido’, others saw the ‘aggressive drive’. It is not a coincidence that the epoch when Freud placed his trust in the practice of self-analysis was also that of the monumental disputes between Freud, Adler, Stekel and Jung. Insofar as the ultimate criterion for the validity of psychoanalytic interpretations was self-analysis, each could invoke his own to delegitimate the interpretations and theories of others and accuse them of projecting their own unanalysed complexes into their theories or of having succumbed to neurotic resistances. Nothing enabled one to settle the symmetric conflicts of interpretations which were tearing apart the psychoanalytic community.

  Freud to Ernest Jones, 9 August 1911: As for the internal dissension with Adler, it was likely to come and I have ripened the crisis. It is the revolt of an abnormal individual driven mad by ambition, his influence upon others depending on his strong terrorism and sadismus.59

  Alfred Adler: Freud had a bad time with my verbal remarks . . . my gentle rejection: ‘Standing in his shadow is no fun’ – that is, being blamed for all the inconsistencies of Freudianism simply because of cooperating in the psychology of neurosis. Without delay, he interpreted it as a confession of my rebellious vanity, so that he could deliver it up to the unsuspecting readers.60

  Wilhelm Stekel: In one session that took place after Adler had seceded, [Freud] claimed that Adler suffered from paranoia. That was one of Freud’s favorite diagnoses; he had applied it to another important friend of his from whom he had separated.61 Immediately in his slavish choir, voices resounded which enthusiastically confirmed this ridiculous diagnosis.62

  It was precisely to remedy this situation, which threatened to shatter the psychoanalytic movement, that Jung proposed in 1912 that every prospective analyst had to be analysed by another analyst – i.e., had to submit to a training analysis. This was quickly seconded by Freud in the same year.

  Jung: There are analysts who believe that they can get along with a self-analysis. This is Münchhausen63 psychology, and they will certainly remain stuck. They forget that one of the most important therapeutically effective factors is subjecting yourself to the objective judgment of another. As regards ourselves we remain blind, despite everything and everybody.64

  Freud: It is not enough . . . that [the physician] himself should be an approximately normal person. It may be insisted, rather, that he should have undergone a psycho-analytic purification and have become aware of those complexes of his own which would be apt to interfere with his grasp of what the patient tells him . . . I count it as one of the many merits of the Zurich school of analysis that they have laid increased emphasis on this requirement, and have embodied it in the demand that everyone who wishes to carry out analyses on other people shall first himself undergo an analysis by someone with expert knowledge . . . But anyone who has scorned to take the precaution of being analysed himself . . . will easily fall into the temptation of projecting outwards some of the peculiarities of his own personality, which he has dimly perceived, into the field of science, as a theory having universal validity; he will bring the psycho-analytic method into discredit, and lead the inexperienced astray.65

  It is important to realise that training analysis was a striking departure from current practices in medicine and psychiatry. Whilst self-experimentation was still common, it would have been unthinkable to require that a would-be practitioner of hypnosis undergo hypnosis, or a would-be surgeon undergo surgery. After attending the psychoanalytic congress in Weimar in 1911, James Jackson Putnam commented on this in a talk.

  James Jackson Putnam: Then I learned, to my surprise and interest, that a large part of these investigators had subjected themselves, more or less systematically, to the same sort of searching character-analysis to which their patients were being subjected at their hands. It is fast getting to be felt that an initiation of this sort is an indispensable condition of good work.66

  In theory at least, training analysis was supposed to guarantee that the theories and interpretations of analysts were not deformed by their ‘neurosis’. As we have seen, this had also been the aim of the self-analyses which had previously been undertaken. In practice, it guaranteed that everyone interpreted in a manner authorised by Freud or those of his disciples whom he had analysed. Henceforth, analysts would no longer be free to decide the meanings of their dreams by themselves. Better still, they were no longer free to decide whether they were neurotic or not, or even if they had been fully analysed. All of this would be determined by their analyst, in an infinite regress going back to Freud himself. Thus the ‘psychoanalytic purification’ coincided with an institutional purging and a hermeneutical standardisation. Gone was the anarchy of uncontrolled and uncontrollable self-analyses, and the infernal cycle of diagnoses and counter-diagnoses. The recapturing of the psychoanalytic movement had begun. From now on, Freud and his lieutenants would have the final word.

  The decisive role of training analysis in the institutionalisation and propagation of the psychoanalytic movement has often been noted, as well as the rigidly hierarchical and centralised power relations between analysts which it set up.67 It is less often noted that it was instituted as a response to an inescapable difficulty of psychoanalytic theory. Indeed, who could adjudicate the validity of psychoanalytic interpretations since the unconscious, by definition, gives no response to this question (being only accessible through being ‘translated’68 – that is to say interpreted)? And how could one arrive at a consensus in a case of disagreement? If a patient rejected an analyst’s interpretations, the latter could always claim that he knew more because he had submitted to a personal analysis. But what if it was another analyst who objected to his interpretation? What if the patient refused the asymmetry of the analytic situation and set out to analyse the analyst? Whatever way one looks at the question, nothing authorises the analyst to declare that his interpretation is necessarily superior to that of his colleague or of his patient except the institutional arrangement which underwrote his interpretation. The vehicle of training analysis which Jung proposed was an institutional response to an aporia which could not be resolved on a theoretical level.

  However, this ‘solution’ immediately raised another difficulty: what of Freud? If every analyst derived their authority from their training analysis, from where did Freud derive his? As long as psychoanalysts trained themselves through self-analysis, Freud’s self-analysis did not pose any problems (on the contrary, it was regarded as the prototype). But now the rules of the game had changed, and the status of Freud’s self-analysis was exposed. Who could guarantee that Freud’s analysis had been complete? On the one hand, Jung’s proposition enabled the closure of the controversy with Adler and Stekel, and on the other, it opened a new one, this time between Freud and himself. For how could Freud impose his interpretations on Jung if he had, by his own terms, not been analysed?

  Jung to Jones, 15 November 1912: Freud is convinced that I am thinking under the domination of a father complex against him and then all is complex-nonsense . . . Against this insinuation I am completely helpless . . . If Freud understands each attempt to think in a new way about the problems of psychoanalysis as a personal resistance, things become impossible.69

  Jung to Freud, 3 December 1912: May I draw your attention to the fact that you open The Interpretation of Dreams with the mournful admission of your own neurosis – the dream of Irma’s injection – identification with the neurotic in need of treatment. Very significant. Our analysis, you may remember, came to a stop with your remark that you ‘could not submit to analysis without losing your authority.’ These words are engraved on my memory as a symbol of everything to come.70

&nbs
p; Jones to Freud, 5 December 1912: I enclose a curious letter from Jung . . . Did Brill tell you that he maintains that you have a severe neurosis? Another beautiful projection.71

  Jung to Freud, c. 11–14 December 1912: Even Adler’s cronies do not regard me as one of yours [Ihrigen, instead of ihrigen, ‘theirs’].72

  Freud to Jung, 16 December 1912: But are you ‘objective’ enough to consider the following slip without anger? ‘Even Adler’s cronies do not regard me as one of yours.’73

  Jung to Freud, 18 December 1912: You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard and inquire for once what you would say to a patient with a tendency to analyse the analyst instead of himself. You would certainly ask him: ‘Who’s got the neurosis?’ . . .I am namely not in the least neurotic – touch wood! I have namely lege artis et tout humblement let myself be analysed, which has been very good for me. You know, of course, how far a patient gets with self-analysis: not out of his neurosis – just like you.74

  Freud to Ferenczi, 23 December 1912: The embarrassing sensation of the moment is the enclosed letter from Jung, which Rank and Sachs also know about . . . I must say he is really impudent . . . With deference to my neurosis, I hope I will master it all right. But he is behaving like a florid fool and the brutal fellow that he is. The master who analyzed him could only have been Fräulein Moltzer, and he is so foolish to be proud of this work of a woman with whom he is having an affair.75