The Freud Files

by Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel; Shamdasani, Sonu;

  Freud to Saul Rosenzweig, 28 February 1934: I have examined your experimental studies for the verification of psychoanalytic propositions with interest. I cannot put much value on such confirmation because the abundance of reliable observations on which these propositions rest makes them independent of experimental verification.90

  Freud, 1933: Only quite a short while ago the medical faculty in an American University refused to allow psychoanalysis the status of a science, on the ground that it did not admit of any experimental proof. They might have raised the same objection to astronomy; indeed, experimentation with the heavenly bodies is particularly difficult. There one has to fall back on observation.91

  In this regard Freud’s adversaries, who for the most part shared his positivistic convictions, were justified in reproaching him for betraying his own principles.

  Wohlgemuth: Experimental psychologists have been trained to walk warily; they know that in their science the pitfalls are far more numerous than in any other of the natural sciences; every experiment has to be carefully scrutinized and the conditions closely watched. The greatest and most insidious enemy is ‘suggestion,’ and to eliminate this is never easy . . . ‘Suggestion’ is to the psychologist what bacteria are to the surgeon. The psychologist aims, as it were, at an aseptic treatment, whilst the psychoanalyst indulges in deliberate infection. After having waded through the psycho-analysis of little Hans, which is reeking and teeming with suggestion, to read Freud’s remarks upon it and upon its critics simply takes one’s breath away.92

  Hart: [The] constant testing by an appeal to objective facts is a sine qua non in the development of any scientific theory, and we have seen that it is just this test which is lacking in the growth of psychoanalytical theory, because objective facts will not serve its purpose, but only those facts after they have been prepared by the method of psychoanalysis.93

  It is exactly here that the legend of the immaculate conception of psychoanalysis came in. Since Freud was not willing to allow the method, which enabled him to obtain the ‘facts’ which he invoked, to be tested, he had to find another means of dealing with the objection that he had been influenced by his hypotheses or speculations. Hence the claim that he had been completely free of any theoretical preconception whatsoever.

  Freud: Apart from emotional resistances . . . it seemed to me that the main obstacle to agreement lay in the fact that my opponents regarded psycho-analysis as a product of my speculative imagination and were unwilling to believe in the long, patient and unbiased work which had gone into its making.94

  Metapsychological speculation, in other words, was quite apart from pure observation. It is this absence of presupposition to which the legend gave credence. If Freud had to fight against the prejudices of his teachers and colleagues, if they supposedly refused to grant the least importance to the role of sexuality in the neuroses, if he had to overcome his own resistances, one could hardly accuse him of seeing sexuality everywhere under the influence of a preconceived sexual theory.

  Freud: The singling out of the sexual factor in the aetiology of hysteria springs at least from no preconceived opinion of my part. The two investigators as whose pupil I began my studies of hysteria, Charcot and Breuer, were far from having any such presupposition; in fact they had a personal disinclination to it which I originally shared.95

  Freud: I now learned from my rapidly increasing experience that it was not any kind of emotional excitation that was in action behind the phenomena of neurosis but habitually one of a sexual nature . . . I was not prepared for this conclusion and my expectations played no part in it, for I had begun my investigation of neurotics quite unsuspectingly.96

  Similarly, if Freud worked in total isolation, if he never read what Schopenhauer or Nietzsche had written about active forgetting or the significance of drives, one could not accuse him of having projected preconceptions onto the clinical material. Peter Gay cites a letter from Freud to Lothar Bickel in which he once again insists on his ‘lack of talent’ for philosophy, affirming that he had ‘made a virtue out of necessity’ through presenting ‘the facts which revealed themselves’ to him in an ‘undisguised’ form, ‘without bias and without preparation’.

  Freud to Lothar Bickel, 28 June 1938: Hence I have rejected the study of Nietzsche although – no, because – it was plain to me that I would find insights in him very similar to psychoanalytic ones.97

  Freud: I should not like to create an impression that during this last period of my work I have turned my back upon patient observation and have abandoned myself entirely to speculation. I have on the contrary always remained in the closest touch with the analytic material and have never ceased working at detailed points of clinical or technical importance. Even when I have moved away from observation, I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper.98

  Freud: If anyone sought to place the theory of repression and resistance among the presuppositions instead of the findings of psycho-analysis, I should oppose him most emphatically. Such premises of a general psychological and biological nature do exist, and it would be useful to consider them on some other occasion; but the theory of repression is a product of psycho-analytic work, a theoretical inference legitimately drawn from innumerable experiences.99

  The same goes for what Sulloway calls Freud’s ‘crypto-biology’: if Freud so frequently denied having been influenced by the biology of his time, this wasn’t, as Sulloway claims, an attempt artificially to disguise psychoanalysis as a ‘pure’ psychology (which would make little sense of his attempts to point to convergences between his theories and biology’100). Rather, this enabled him to deny that his theories on the drives, infantile sexuality or bisexuality preceded and hence shaped the impartial observation of the clinical material. According to Freud, such ideas belonged to the ‘clinical postulates of psycho-analysis’,101 rather than to the biogenetic speculations of his ex-collaborator, Wilhelm Fliess.

  Freud to Karl Abraham, 6 April 1914: The subjection of our Ψα to a Fliessian sexual biology would be no less a disaster than its subjection to any system of ethics, metaphysics, or anything of the sort.102

  Freud: I must, however, emphasize that the present work [The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality] is characterized not only by being completely based upon psycho-analytic research, but also by being deliberately independent of the findings of biology. I have carefully avoided introducing my scientific expectations, whether derived from general sexual biology or from that of particular animal species, into this study – a study which is concerned with the sexual functions of human beings and which is made possible through the technique of psycho-analysis. Indeed, my aim has rather been to discover how far psychological investigation can throw light upon the biology of the sexual life of man.103

  Freud: We have found it necessary to hold aloof from biological considerations during our psycho-analytic work and to refrain from using them for heuristic purposes, so that we may not be misled in our impartial judgement of the psycho-analytic facts before us.104

  Infantile sexuality, repression, the unconscious and the theory of dreams were thus presented as authentic ‘discoveries’, products of ‘observation’ and ‘experiences’ which arose independently of any heuristic hypotheses, anticipatory interpretations, theoretical contaminations or involuntary suggestions on the part of their discoverer. The myth of the immaculate conception of psychoanalysis corresponds rigorously to what one could call the myth of the immaculate induction of Freudian theory: Freud was not influenced by anyone, hence he couldn’t have contaminated the clinical material. The rewriting of history had the effect of transforming Freud’s hypotheses and speculations into hard, positive and incontrovertible facts. It legitimated them epistemologically, simply short-circuiting the objection of suggestion.

  Whilst difficult to explain in psychological terms, the function of the myth of the immaculate conception becomes clarified when one resituates it within the context of Freud’s positivistic rhetoric and the controve
rsies in which he was engaged. To those who criticised the arbitrariness of his hypotheses, Freud opposed the image of the patient collector of empirical facts. To those who suspected him of projecting theories drawn from elsewhere onto clinical material, he replied that he was much too uncultivated to be capable of doing so. To those who accused him of imposing his ideas onto patients, he retorted that he only listened to what they had told him. The Freudian legend was a very effective means of returning critiques to their sender and of inverting the order of research. Hence what was subjective suddenly became objective. What was contingent and historical became atemporal. Interpretation became ‘psychic reality’. Constructions became ‘historical truth’ which emerged from a black box to which only the analyst had the key.

  Wohlgemuth: [Freud] makes an assertion, defends it on the grounds of its plausibility, and then on the next page he refers to the assertion as a ‘fact,’ or, ‘as I have shown or demonstrated, etc.’.105

  Huxley: All the other great ‘facts’ of psycho-analysis are found on examination to be mere assumptions . . . No proofs of any of these assumptions are adduced. But they are all treated as facts.106

  Jastrow: One . . . fallacy permeates pages and volumes of psychoanalysis: the fallacy of attributism. It consists in accepting as a reality an abstract concept devised by the thinker for the convenience of his thinking . . . The fallacy of attributism subtly, insidiously, comprehensively invades every phase and phrase of the psychoanalyst’s technique. He has forgotten the realities and put in their place a mythology of forces – Ucs., Id, Ego, Super-ego, Oedipus, libido in many guises, and other animated concepts – which he then uses to account for the clinical data which suggested them. As a consequence the sense of hypothesis is lost, and the assurance of reality substituted; that is the essence of delusion.107

  We propose to call this process of the transmutation of interpretations and constructions into positive facts interprefaction. Interprefaction forms the basic element of Freud’s scientistic rhetoric and the diverse historical legends which he wove around his so-called ‘discoveries’. It makes things and events from words, it fabricates facts from suppositions, conjectures and hypotheses. Interprefaction represents what Freud was actually doing whilst denying he was doing so.

  One can legitimately critique this unwarranted reification in drawing attention to the rhetorical, suggested character of so-called analytic ‘facts’. As we have seen, this is precisely what most of Freud’s critics did, and still do today: ‘Your facts aren’t facts, they are artefacts which you have fabricated.’ However, in many respects, such critiques remain close to Freud’s positivistic outlook, in suggesting that one can clearly separate out fact from artefact in the domain of psychology. Thus many of Freud’s initial critics, such as Aschaffenburg, Kraepelin, Hoche, Janet and Morton Prince were by no means free of such reification when they proposed their own rival theories: the divide between what was considered fact and artefact was simply drawn up differently.

  But one can also reproach Freud, not so much for having created new facts, but for having denied that this was what he was doing. Rather than view analytic interprefaction as having given rise to false facts, one can see it as having led to true artefacts presented as facts. Rather than viewing the Freudian legend as a pure and simple fiction, one can see it as a fabrication which denies that it is a fabrication. What is at issue here then is the dissimulation of the construction of analytic facts, rather than their construction per se.

  The interprefaction of psychoanalysis can thus be read in these two senses. Either one underscores its fictive and illusory character, or one highlights its productive aspects. In the first, one denounces the voluntary or involuntary manipulation of facts by the analyst. In the second, one denounces the veiling of this manipulation. One either considers Freud to have been insufficiently positivist, or to have been too much so. These two critiques diverge profoundly as to their respective implications. At bottom, the issue comes down to how one considers the psychological enterprise, and the status of its constructs. However, before attempting to evaluate this, one needs to follow Freud’s procedures more closely.

  The manufacture of fantasy

  First, let’s consider Freud’s seduction theory and its abandonment, which was so decisive for the history of psychoanalysis. In his historical recapitulations, Freud repeatedly recounted how he had initially believed the striking accounts of sexual abuse and incestuous perversions which his patients reported to him, before realising that these accounts were really fantasies which expressed infantile ‘oedipal’ unconscious desires. For a long time, this reversal came to be seen as the inaugural gesture of the Freudian ‘break’: first, hysterical deceit, then the magisterial reversal which with one stroke revealed the truth of the lie, the reality of fiction and the logic of the fantasy.

  Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis: It is traditional to look upon Freud’s dropping of the seduction theory in 1897 as a decisive step in the foundation of psycho-analytic theory, and in the bringing to the fore of such conceptions as unconscious phantasy, psychical reality, spontaneous infantile sexuality and so on.108

  Freud: Influenced by Charcot’s view of the traumatic origin of hysteria, one was readily inclined to accept as true and aetiologically significant the reports made by patients in which they ascribed their symptoms to passive sexual experiences in the first years of childhood – to put it bluntly, to seduction. When this aetiology broke down under the weight of its own improbability and contradiction in definitely ascertainable circumstances, the result at first was helpless bewilderment . . . If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in phantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. This reflection was soon followed by the discovery that these phantasies were intended to cover up the auto-erotic activity of the first years of childhood . . . And now, from behind the phantasies, the whole range of a child’s sexual life came to light.109

  Freud: Under the influence of the technical procedure which I used at that time, the majority of my patients reproduced from their childhood scenes in which they were sexually seduced by some grown-up person. With female patients the part of seducer was almost always assigned to their father. I believed these communications, and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the subsequent neurosis in these experiences of sexual seduction in childhood . . . When I had pulled myself together, I was able to draw the right conclusions from my discovery: namely, that the neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful phantasies . . . I had in fact stumbled for the first time upon the Oedipus complex, which was later to assume such an overwhelming importance, but which I did not recognize as yet in its disguise of phantasy.110

  Freud: In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize in the end that these communications were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences.111

  The impression given by such passages is that it was Freud’s patients (or their incestuous unconscious desires) who were responsible for Freud’s initial error. However, one need only look at Freud’s 1896 articles where he presented his theory to see that his retrospective account does not accord with what he wrote at the time, and is in fact quite tendentious. This was noted in 1966 by the psychiatrist Paul Chodoff,112 soon followed by the philosopher Frank Cioffi.113 In these articles, in stark contrast to his subsequent accounts, Freud insisted on the extraordinary difficulty which he had in enabling these ‘scenes of seduction’ to emerge. According to what he wrote, far from his patients having spontaneously confided that they had been the victims of sexual abuse, they were indignant when Freud proposed this as a hypothesis. He had to fight against their resi
stances inch by inch and extract the memory of the sexual scene piece by piece.

  Freud: the fact is that these patients never repeat these stories spontaneously, nor do they ever in the course of a treatment suddenly present the physician with the complete recollection of a scene of this kind. One only succeeds in awakening the psychical trace of a precocious sexual event under the most energetic pressure of the analytic procedure, and against an enormous resistance. Moreover, the memory must be extracted from them piece by piece, and while it is being awakened in their consciousness they become the prey to an emotion which it would be hard to counterfeit.114

  Freud: Before they come for analysis the patients know nothing about these scenes. They are indignant as a rule if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge. Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them.115

  Freud’s letters to Fliess at this time confirm this point. For example, there is the description of the case of ‘Miss G. de B.’, a cousin of Fliess whom Freud tried to persuade that the eczema around her mouth and her trouble speaking stemmed from the fact that she had been forced as a child to suck her father’s penis. Apparently, she wasn’t convinced.

  Freud to Fliess, 3 January 1897: When I thrust the explanation at her, she was at first won over; then she committed the folly of questioning the old man himself, who at the very first intimation exclaimed indignantly, ‘Are you implying that I was the one?’ and swore a holy oath to his innocence. She is now in the throes of the most vehement resistance, claims to believe him, but attests to her identification with him by having become dishonest and swearing false oaths. I have threatened to send her away and in the process convinced myself that she has already gained a good deal of certainty which she is reluctant to acknowledge.116