The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  Ilse Grubrich-Simitis: It can be asserted with some justification that the book [Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria] so to speak ushered in the century of psychotherapy.49

  Jacques Lacan: I have come here [in Vienna] – not unfittingly, I think – to evoke the fact that this chosen city will remain, this time forever more, associated with a revolution in knowledge of Copernican proportions. I am referring to the fact that Vienna is the eternal site of Freud’s discovery and that, owing to this discovery, the veritable center of human beings is no longer at the place ascribed to it by an entire humanist tradition.50

  Lacan: Indeed, Freud himself compared his discovery to the so-called Copernican revolution, emphasizing that what was at stake was once again the place man assigns himself at the center of a universe. Is the place that I occupy as subject of the signifier concentric or eccentric in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified? That is the question.51

  Paul Ricoeur: In an essay written in 1917 Freud speaks of psychoanalysis as a wound and humiliation to narcissism analogous to the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin when in their own way they decentered the world and life with respect to the claims of consciousness. Psychoanalysis decenters in the same way the constitution of the world of fantasy with respect to consciousness.52

  Thomas S. Kuhn: In the nineteenth century, Darwin’s theory of evolution raised similar extrascientific questions. In our own century, Einstein’s relativity theories and Freud’s psychoanalytic theories provide centers for controversies from which may emerge further radical reorientations of western thought. Freud himself emphasised the parallel effects of Copernicus’ discovery that the earth was merely a planet and his own discovery that the unconscious controlled much of human behaviour . . . we are the intellectual heirs of men like Copernicus and Darwin. Our fundamental thought processes have been reshaped by them, just as the thought of our children will have been reshaped by the work of Einstein and Freud.53

  That even a philosopher of science of the caliber of Kuhn repeats the Freud–Copernicus comparison illustrates the extraordinary cultural success of the Freudian legend – in other words, of psychoanalysis itself. Psychoanalysis attempted to impose itself in the twentieth century as the only psychological theory worthy of the name and the only psychotherapy capable of theorising its own practice. In many circles, calling into question the existence of the unconscious, the Oedipus complex or infantile sexuality could provoke the same response as to creationists or members of the Flat Earth Society. In such locations, psychoanalysis became indisputable and incontrovertible. It was ‘blackboxed’, to use the language of sociologists of science, that is to say, it was accepted as a given that it would be simply futile to question.54 The Freud legend and its acceptance are the expression of this successful blackboxing, of this supposed victory of psychoanalysis over rival theories. Better still, they are this blackboxing itself, which protects the contents of the black box from inquiry. Indeed, why would one want to reopen it? Why would one want, for example, to stir up the old controversies that accompanied the elaboration of Freudian theory, when everyone knows it triumphed once and for all over the ‘resistances to psychoanalysis’, just as Copernicus and Darwin won out over the irrational prejudices that prevented man from seeing the truth? Harold P. Blum and Bernard L. Pacella: At this time, Freud’s initial propositions, first findings and landmark case reports are no longer vital for the validation of psychoanalytic formulation . . . Freud is part of our culture, our way of comprehending personality development and disorder. All rational psychotherapy is based upon psychoanalytic principles. Psychoanalysis provides a fundamental mode of exploring and understanding art and literature, biography and history, etc. Concepts of repression, regression, denial, projection, and ‘Freudian slip’ have become part of our language.55

  Opening the black box

  The success of the theory is explained by its truth, and its truth in turn is legitimated by its success. What we have here is an example of what the sociologist of science David Bloor56 calls an ‘asymmetrical’ explanation, that is, one that argues from the victory in a scientific controversy to beat the vanquished hollow and refuses to listen to their arguments. Who would give a ‘symmetric’ attention to points of view which have already been condemned by the tribunal of history?

  It is precisely this which historians, critics and scholars of psychoanalysis have been attempting for several decades now. They have been reopening the black box of psychoanalysis, and have attempted to understand how psychoanalysis triumphed over its adversaries, how for many it succeeded in establishing itself as the science of the psyche, without awarding the title in advance. Despite decades of relativising and contextual studies, the history of science today still continues to be dominated by the study of the prestigious hard sciences, which have comparatively secure societal positions. The contestations of psychoanalysis provide a unique window onto how certain ideas about the mind and human relations came to be regarded as established knowledge, and formed the received ideas of several generations.

  Good historical practice is characterised by close attention to contexts, the eschewal of hindsight and all forms of presentism. In this regard, contemporary historians are necessarily in conflict with ‘Whig history’, that is to say, history written from the perspective of the victor. This is particularly critical in the history of science, where there is always a strong temptation to read the past from the perspective of the current state of scientific research, conceived as the progressive unveiling of an essentially atemporal truth of nature. For quite a while, the history of science was written by scientists, with all the partiality which this supposes, or by philosophers attempting to award retrospectively the title of scientificity to the victors. Thus it is essential that historians resist this epistemocentrism to be able finally to speak historically of the sciences, at the risk of colliding with the certitudes of scientists themselves, or rather, with scientism. From this perspective, Bloor’s ‘principle of symmetry’ is nothing but the application to the sciences of a methodological principle which is common in good historical practice.57

  One finds the same problem and the same evolution in the history of psychoanalysis. This was started by Freud himself in 1914, in the heat of the dissensions and controversies which threatened to shipwreck the movement, and with obvious polemical intent. It was subsequently taken up by followers and fellow travellers such as Fritz Wittels, Siegfried Bernfeld, Ernest Jones, Marthe Robert, Max Schur, Ola Anderson and, closer to us, figures such as Peter Gay, Élisabeth Roudinesco and Joseph Schwartz. Whatever the respective merits and the sometimes considerable erudition of their works, it is not unfair to remark that their historiography remains profoundly Freudian, and does not put into question the general schema of the narrative proposed by the founder, even when their research forces them to abandon or revise this or that element of the legend. Even though these revisions have accumulated over the course of the years, they have too often been treated as simple retouchings of detail which do not modify the basic legend, and not as invitations to reconsider Freudian theory. On the contrary, the validity of the latter continues to be presupposed, even when it is contradicted by history. Thus one had to wait for historians who were independent of psychoanalytic institutions for Freudian theory to be envisaged for the first time as a problematic construction, in need of explication, rather than an intangible a priori.

  Admittedly, the Freudian legend had been criticised before, sometimes ferociously. Freud’s adversaries at the time did not fail to stress the inaccuracy and tendentiousness of his historical self-presentations,58 and there were a number of alternative histories of psychology and psychotherapy, such as Pierre Janet’s admirable three-volume Psychological Medications.59 But such rival versions by psychologists in their turn defended particular theoretical positions, and, at the end of the day, were no less partisan and asymmetric than Freud’s.60 Only historians not party to a particular psychological school could attempt to give
non-partisan accounts of these controversies, without prejudging the results and the respective validity of the theories in question.

  The first who set out to correct this situation was the historian of dynamic psychiatry Henri Ellenberger.

  Henri Ellenberger: In Switzerland I knew two pioneers of psychoanalysis: the clergyman Oskar Pfister, a long-time friend of Freud, and Alphonse Maeder, who had been closely linked to the history of psychoanalysis. Both of these men told me of many events that they had either fathered or witnessed. Later, when Ernest Jones published his official biography of Freud, I was struck by the disparity with the two pioneers’ accounts . . . In the second volume of his biography, there is a famous chapter enumerating the so-called persecutions that befell certain psychoanalysts. I drew up a list of the incidents, and checked each one of them with primary sources. Among the cases on which I was able to gather dependable information, I found 80 percent of Jones’ facts to be either completely false or greatly exaggerated.61

  Instructed by this episode, Ellenberger realised that Jones’ biography was not an isolated occurrence, and that it illustrated, in a much more general fashion, the striking absence of a history of psychiatry worthy of the name. Written by the protagonists themselves, the history of psychiatry was often only a string of personal anecdotes and partisan rumours designed to promote this school or that theory. (Ellenberger gave the example of the legend constructed around Pinel by his disciples and elevated to the rank of the founding narrative of psychiatry.62)

  To remedy this situation, Ellenberger followed several simple methodological rules which he enumerated at the beginning of his monumental work of 1970, The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. On the one hand, never take anything as given; verify everything (even if Rorschach’s sister swears that his eyes are blue, ask for his passport). Always use original documents and, whenever possible, first-hand witnesses; read texts in their original language; identify the patients in this observation or that case history; establish the facts through mercilessly separating them from interpretations, rumours and legends; on the other hand, resist the theoreticism and spontaneous iatrocentrism of psychiatrists by replacing their theories in their multiple biographical, professional, intellectual, economic, social and political contexts, and by taking account of the role played in their elaboration by the patients themselves.63

  From this perspective, demythologising critique, which is the aspect which one most often recalls of Ellenberger’s work, cannot be separated from the symmetrical gesture of contextualisation, insofar as it is the nature of psychiatric legends to efface historical contexts. In his unpublished notes on the problem of psychiatric legends, Ellenberger repeatedly stressed the link between these two aspects of his work.

  Ellenberger: The legend becomes the property of a closed group, of a school, a family (Nietzsche), of a corporation and a family (Pinel). A closed school (cf. the Epicurians). Continual selection of documents: destruction, guarding, diffusion. Role of publishers, editors, readers. Later, relative deformations, through the change of perspective, through the disappearance of the context, which render the works of the author unintelligible.64

  Ellenberger noted that the Freudian legend, which is clearly the major target of The Discovery of the Unconscious, essentially turns around two themes: that of the solitary hero surmounting the obstacles placed across his route by malicious adversaries and that of the absolute originality of the founder – two ways of negating the friendships, the networks, influences, legacies, readings and intellectual debts – in short, everything which would link Freud to his historical epoch. Ellenberger’s book, with its 932 pages and 2,611 footnotes, is by itself a striking demonstration of the absurdity of this presentation of psychoanalysis. Ellenberger unearthed a century and a half of researches conducted by hundreds of magnetisers, hypnotisers, philosophers, novelists, psychologists and psychiatrists, without which psychoanalysis would have been unthinkable. And for good measure, he flanked his chapter on Freud by three others dedicated to his great rivals, Janet (placed first), Jung and Adler, so as to stress that this history of dynamic psychiatry neither commenced nor terminated with psychoanalysis, contrary to what the contemporaneous teleologically inclined histories of Gregory Zilboorg, Dieter Wyss or Ilza Veith contended.65

  Ellenberger: The current legend . . . attributes to Freud much of what belongs, notably, to Herbart, Fechner, Nietzsche, Meynert, Benedikt, and Janet, and overlooks the work of previous explorers of the unconscious, dreams, and sexual pathology. Much of what is credited to Freud was diffuse current lore, and his role was to crystallize these ideas and give them an original shape.66

  It is clear from the unpublished notebooks left by him after his death that in the course of his research Ellenberger became extremely critical with regard to psychoanalysis – more so than one would suspect from his published writings.

  Ellenberger: Psychoanalysis, is it a science? It does not meet the criteria (unified science, defined domain and methodology). It corresponds to the traits of a philosophical sect (closed organisation, highly personal initiation, a doctrine which is changeable but defined by its official adoption, cult and legend of the founder).67

  One finds this same project of contextualising psychoanalysis in the work of Frank Sulloway, the second historian after Ellenberger to have radically changed the manner in which we perceive psychoanalysis. Freud claimed to be a new Darwin, a ‘Darwin of the mind’. Sulloway proposed to take this slogan as literally as possible. In his book with an Ellenbergian subtitle, Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend,68 he showed in a very convincing manner how the principal ‘discoveries’ were actually deeply rooted in the biological hypotheses and speculations of his Darwinian era. Behind libido, infantile sexuality, polymorphous perversity, erotogenous zones, bisexuality, regression, primary repression, the murder of the primary father, originary fantasies and the death drive, Sulloway unearthed the forgotten ‘sexual theories’ of Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll and Havelock Ellis, Haeckel’s vast biogenetic frescoes, Wilhelm Fliess and Darwin’s speculations on biorhythms, or again the theory of the transmission of acquired characteristics of Lamarck. In so doing, Sulloway intellectually rehabilitated Freud’s friend, confidant and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess, generally presented in Freud biographies as a dangerous paranoiac and crank with grandiose and extravagant theories. Not only were Fliess’ theories perfectly plausible in the context of the biogenetic speculations then in vogue, but they were favourably received by a not inconsiderable number of his contemporaries (beginning with Breuer). Thus there is no need, as some have proposed, to imagine an irrational transference on the part of Freud towards his friend to explain how he could have chosen him as a privileged interlocuter for so many years: they simply shared the same colleagues, the same ideas and the same readings.

  Sulloway: I am not saying that Fliess was a great scientist, I’m just saying that what he was doing was reasonably plausible and radical at the same time, and therefore appealed to Freud’s own radical sensibilities. Obviously, Freud and Fliess intellectually stimulated each other a great deal and to discover that this relationship could be placed in a nineteenth century context in which it all made sense and took on respectability was a very fun thing to do in terms of the research involved.69

  Just as with Ellenberger, Sulloway’s historical contextualisation clashes head on with the Freudian legend and notably with the idea that psychoanalysis was born when Freud abandoned the neurophysiological and biological theories of his time to the benefit of a purely psychological science, founded on clinical observation and the self-analysis of its founder.

  Sulloway: How is it possible, in a self analysis, not to be conditioned by all the scientific knowledge, reading and diverse evidence that you have gathered from half a dozen other disciplines? How could you prevent those relevant sources of information from steering your self analysis in a certain direction? If you begin to read in the literature that
the infant is much more sexually spontaneous than you had ever thought, how could you not probe that issue in your own self analysis? So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise if you then uncover a memory of having seen your mother naked at age two. If every book you are reading is telling you that and you then discover it in your own life, well, big news! It is obvious, not even profound.

  The self analysis has been made into a causal agent of Freud’s originality in traditional Freud scholarship, but that simply is not true. It is like an uncontrolled experiment: things that are going on in self analysis get credited for all of Freud’s intellectual changes, but those things themselves are coming in from somewhere else. The self analysis is one of the great legendary stories in the history of science and although Freud himself really didn’t spawn that aspect of the myth, he did nothing to prevent it from spreading.70

  For Sulloway, the ‘legend of the hero’ (following Joseph Campbell)71 elaborated by Freud and his disciples essentially served two purposes. On the one hand, through presenting the image of an isolated Freud, it allowed one to assert the radicality of the new science of the mind whilst clandestinely recuperating the contributions of Darwin, Haeckel, Fliess, Krafft-Ebing, the sexologists, and other figures. On the other hand, and more profoundly, it effectively protected psychoanalysis against the vicissitudes of scientific research. Once transmuted into psychological discoveries, the evolutionary hypotheses which underlay psychoanalytic theory could be maintained in spite of everything, even when they were refuted in their original fields. Deracinated, psychoanalysis became a discipline apart, cordoned off and protected from the refutation of some of its founding presuppositions.