The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  Freud: Besides all this I have another reproach to make against this method [the ‘hypnotic procedure by suggestion’], namely, that it conceals from us all insight into the play of mental forces; it does not permit us, for example, to recognize the resistance with which the patient clings to his disease and thus even fights against his own recovery.54

  Freud: In these hypnotic treatments the process of remembering took a very simple form. The patient put himself back into an earlier situation, which he seemed never to confuse with the present one . . . Under the new technique very little, and often nothing, is left of this delightfully smooth course of events . . . This working-through of the resistances may in practice turn out to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience for the analyst. Nevertheless it is a part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of suggestive influence.55

  Freud: But you will now tell me that, no matter whether we call the motive force of our analysis transference or suggestion, there is a risk that the influencing of our patient may make the objective certainty of our findings doubtful. What is advantageous to our therapy is damaging to our researches. This is the objection that is most often raised against psycho-analysis, and it must be admitted that, though it is groundless, it cannot be rejected as unreasonable. If it were justified, psycho-analysis would be nothing more than a particularly well-disguised and particularly effective form of suggestive treatment and we should have to attach little weight to all that it tells us about what influences our lives, the dynamics of the mind or the unconscious. That is what our opponents believe; and in especial they think that we have ‘talked’ the patients into everything relating to the importance of sexual experiences – or even into those experiences themselves – after such notions have grown up in our own depraved imagination. These accusations are contradicted more easily by an appeal to experience than by the help of theory. Anyone who has himself carried out psycho-analyses will have been able to convince himself on countless occasions that it is impossible to make suggestions to a patient in that way . . . After all, [the patient’s] conflicts will only be successfully solved and his resistances overcome if the anticipatory ideas he is given tally with what is real in him. Whatever in the doctor’s conjectures is inaccurate drops out in the course of the analysis; it has to be withdrawn and replaced by something more correct.56

  This last argument, which Adolf Grünbaum has proposed to call the ‘tally argument’,57 consists in postulating that ‘psychic reality’ resists the theory exactly like ‘material reality’. Psychic reality, in other words, was objective, indifferent to the wishes, expectations and suppositions of psychologists or psychoanalysts. The patient could only be truly cured if the theory corresponded to reality, hence the cure provided a criterion to judge the validity of the analyst’s interpretations and constructions.

  Freud never accepted the idea that his theories could create or modify the phenomena which he described, as his peers objected. In his view, his theories were quite independent of the reality which they described. From an epistemological perspective, Freud was a classical positivist, for whom the fundamental basis of knowledge was observation – the perception and description of phenomena. Like all good positivists, such as Ernst Mach, who seems to have been his principal reference in epistemological matters,58 he firmly distinguished between observation and theory. In general, positivists were wary of theories, which brought with them the risk of mistaking the idea for the thing and tipping over into fruitless metaphysical speculation. Thus they attempted to delimit the sphere of theory, clearly demarcating it from observation. For the most part, they knew that science wasn’t only a matter of inductive generalisation from observations, and that one could not avoid heuristic hypotheses. But they insisted that such hypotheses be perceived as such, i.e., as nothing other than theories. In a paradoxical and yet logical manner, the accent which positivists placed on observation often led to conventionalism or ludic theories: one could speculate, imagine and play with ideas, as long as it was clear that these were only ideas which could ultimately be corrected by experience. For positivists, concepts were disposable. As Mach explained, they were ‘provisional fictions’ which were necessary as one had to begin somewhere, but one shouldn’t hesitate to dispense with them when one came up with better ones. For Freud, the ‘basic concepts’59 of his metapsychology were only ‘fictions’,60 ‘mythical entities’,61 ‘speculative superstructure[s]’,62 ‘scientific constructions’63 or ‘working hypothes[es]’64 destined to be replaced if they came into conflict with observation.

  Ernst Mach: It lies in the nature of hypotheses to be changed in the course of enquiry, becoming adapted to new experiences or even dropped and replaced by a new one or simply by complete knowledge of the facts. Enquirers who keep this in mind will not be too timid in framing hypotheses: on the contrary, a measure of daring is quite beneficial. Huygens’ wave hypothesis was not a perfect fit and its justification left much to be desired, causing not a little trouble even to much later followers; but had he dropped it, much of the ground would have been unprepared for Young and Fresnel who would probably have had to confine themselves to the preliminary run-up. The hypothesis of the emission was adapted little by little to the new experiences . . . Hence experience worked continually to transform and complete our representations, enabling a better fit with our hypotheses.65

  Freud: We can only say: ‘We must call the Witch to our help after all’ [Goethe, Faust, I, 6] – the Witch Metapsychology. Without metapsychological speculation and theorizing – I had almost said ‘phantasising’ – we shall not get another step forward. Unfortunately, here as elsewhere, what our Witch reveals is neither very clear nor very detailed.66

  Freud: It is perfectly legitimate to reject remorselessly theories which are contradicted by the very first steps in the analysis of observed facts, while yet being aware at the same time that the validity of one’s own theory is only a provisional one. We need not feel greatly disturbed in judging our speculation upon the life and death instincts by the fact that so many bewildering and obscure processes occur in it – such as one instinct being driven out by another or an instinct turning from the ego to an object, and so on. This is merely due to our being obliged to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say with the figurative language, peculiar to psychology (or, more precisely, to depth psychology). We could not otherwise describe the processes in question at all, and indeed we could not have become aware of them.67

  Mach: By elimination of what it is senseless to explore, what the special sciences can really explore emerges all the more clearly: the complex interdependence of the elements. While groups of such elements may be called things or bodies, it turns out that there are strictly speaking no isolated objects: they are only fictions for a preliminary enquiry, in which we consider strong and obvious links but neglect weaker and less noticeable ones. The same distinction of degree gives rise also to the opposition of world to ego: an isolated ego exists no more than an isolated object: both are provisional fictions of the same kind.68

  Freud: The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the new observations alone. Such ideas which will later become the basic concepts of the science are still more indispensable as the material is further worked over. They must at first necessarily possess some degree of indefiniteness; there can be no question of any clear delimitation of their content. So long as they remain in this condition, we come to an understanding about their meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to have been derived, but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed. Thus, strictly speaking, they are in the nature of conventions – althoug
h everything depends on their not being arbitrarily chosen but determined by their having significant relations to the empirical material, relations that we seem to sense before we can clearly recognize and demonstrate them.69

  Mach: However, for the scientist it is quite a secondary matter whether his ideas fit into some given philosophic system or not, so long as he can use them with profit as a starting point for research. For the scientist is not so fortunate as to possess unshakeable principles, he has been accustomed to regarding even his safest and best-founded views and principles as provisional and liable to modification through experience.70

  Freud: Psycho-analysis an Empirical Science. – Psycho-analysis is not, like philosophies, a system starting out from a few sharply defined basic concepts, seeking to grasp the whole universe with the help of these and, once it is completed, having no room for fresh discoveries or better understanding. On the contrary, it keeps close to the facts in its field of study, seeks to solve the immediate problems of observation, gropes its way forward by the help of experience, is always incomplete and always ready to correct or modify its theories. There is no incongruity (any more than in the case of physics or chemistry) if its most general concepts lack clarity and if its postulates are provisional; it leaves their more precise definition to the results of future work.71

  Freud: I am of opinion that that is just the difference between a speculative theory and a science erected on empirical interpretation. The latter will not envy speculation its privilege of having a smooth, logically unassailable foundation, but will gladly content itself with nebulous, scarcely imaginable basic concepts, which it hopes to apprehend more clearly in the course of its development, or which it is even prepared to replace by others. For these ideas are not the foundation of science, upon which everything rests: that foundation is observation alone. They are not the bottom but the top of the whole structure, and they can be replaced and discarded without damaging it.72

  The Freudian theme of theoretical fiction, which has often been seen as an oppositional counterpoint to ‘positivism and to the substantialisation of metaphysical and metapsychological instances’, is in fact a typically positivist trait.73 Far from leading, as the philosopher Rodolphe Gasché (1997) claims, to ‘a dislocation of the exclusive and fundamental value of observation, of the status of objective fact and of the logic proper to theoretical discursivity’, speculative fiction was tolerated and encouraged by Freud because it didn’t at any moment affect the bare non-theoretical observation of phenomena. The latter continued to furnish the ultimate foundation of science, thanks to its capacity to resist speculations and erroneous hypotheses. Facts are hard, stubborn and intractable and only the theories which can adapt to them survive. Mach, as a good evolutionist, called this the ‘adaptation of thoughts to facts’.

  Mach: Adaptation of thoughts to facts, as we should put it more accurately, we call observation; and mutual adaptation of thoughts, theory.74

  However, such an outlook quickly runs aground in psychology and psychopathology, where the ‘facts’ are the behaviours and actions of pliable human subjects and patients, acutely aware of what is expected of them, and able to adapt themselves to ‘thoughts’. By no means can one count upon their resistance to correct the vagaries of metapsychological speculation. This was the constant objection of Freud’s peers: by itself, observation in psychology does not prove anything, because it does not provide any ‘indication of reality’75 which allows one to distinguish it from theoretical fictions. Not only is it always theory-laden (which Freud, following Mach, would have been ready to accept, within certain limits),76 but one cannot separate it from the theory.

  John T. MacCurdy: Everyone knows that preconceptions determine observations very largely in all scientific work. We see what we are on the look-out for, and are blind to the unexpected. In psychoanalysis, however, this danger is augmented by the plasticity of the material which is largely produced in accordance with the theory of the analyst.77

  Jastrow: Psychoanalysis belongs to the equally typical group of therapies in which practice is entirely a derivative of theory . . . Here the pertinent psychological principle reads: Create a belief in the theory, and the facts will create themselves.78

  Here, observation is the realisation of the theory. Consequently, one cannot differentiate between objective confirmation and circular self-confirmation, resistance and conformity, fact and speculation, ‘truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect’.79 Hence there is nothing to guarantee that psychoanalysis is not an a priori system, a celibate theoretical machine which produces its own evidence – a positivist’s nightmare.

  Freud never responded to such objections, always referring to the ‘psychic reality’ and the ‘objective certitude’ of the unconscious in a circular manner, rather providing the evidence for this which was requested of him.

  Freud, concerning the abandonment of the ‘seduction theory’: When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them, I was for some time completely at a loss . . . 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, and that as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material reality. I do not believe even now that I forced the seduction-phantasies on my patients, that I ‘suggested’ them.80

  In his polemic with Popper on the subject of the falsifiablity of psychoanalysis, Adolf Grünbaum reproached Popper with ignoring that Freud had in fact attempted to reply to the objection of suggestion with his ‘tally argument’ which ‘make[s] him a sophisticated scientific methodologist, far superior than is allowed by the appraisals of [his] critics’.81 It is hard to see what justifies this, for what is striking is Freud’s refusal to address this issue, as the ‘tally argument’ presupposes the non-suggestibility rather than proving it.

  Woodworth: Nor can the success of the treatment – regarding which I do not pretend to judge – be used as weighty evidence in favor of the theory. The ‘pragmatic argument’ will not work in this case. We have a number of other treatments, all more or less successful in treating neurotic cases, and each one purporting to be based on a different theory.82

  Hart: This argument has little weight. In the history of medicine many structures have been built upon the fallacy of post hoc propter hoc . . . It is of course true that satisfactory results are achieved by psychoanalysis, but it is equally true that satisfactory results are achieved by many, indeed by all, other methods of psychotherapy, and by a multitude of methods which lie altogether outside the walls of medicine . . . We must hence conclude that the argument from therapeutic results cannot provide the independent confirmation of psychoanalytic validity of which we are in search.83

  Wohlgemuth: I will now proceed to examine more closely the claim of the psycho-analysts that the numerous cures which have been effected by means of psycho-analysis constitute an undeniable proof of the correctness of their doctrine . . . If a cystitis is due to a calculus, no internal antiseptic or lavages will end the cystitis; the calculus itself must be removed first, and only the removal of the ‘complex,’ and nothing else, can end neurotic symptoms. But neurotic symptoms have been cured before Freud was ever thought of, and are still being cured by other means. Hence it follows that Freud’s theory as to the cause of the hysteric symptoms is wrong . . . Thus it appears rational to assume that a common factor is active in the various methods of procedure, psychoanalytic or otherwise. And this common factor I hold to be SUGGESTION, pure and simple, and nothing else.84

  Aldous Huxley: Psycho-analysts defend their theory by pointing to its practical therapeutic successes. People are cured by psycho-analysis, they say; therefore psycho-analysis must be correct as a theory. This argument would be more convincing than it is, if it could be show
n: first, that people have been cured by psycho-analysis after all methods had failed; and secondly, that they have really been cured by psycho-analysis and not by suggestion somewhat circuitously applied through psycho-analytic ritual.85

  Hollingworth: Among other things, Freud fails to show why other methods of therapy than his own also succeed. If his own theories are demonstrated by his own therapy, what shall we say of the reported success of the [suggestive] therapy of Babinski, Hurst and Rosanoff?86

  Confronted by the objection of suggestion, Freud could have responded by trying to elaborate procedures aimed at eliminating artefacts of the psychological equation (control groups, double blind experiments, etc.), as have been widely employed. He could have multiplied his observations, trusted in statistical studies in ‘the American manner’,87 or attempted to quantify the results obtained by psychoanalysis and compare them to other psychotherapies, as is done in contemporary outcome studies. He could have encouraged follow-up studies, permitting independent researchers to interview his patients and have access to his analytic notes. Such attempts at statistical and experimental verification were by no means unknown at that time, and figures such as Gattel and Jung attempted to apply them.88 At the same time, such attempts would not have resolved the fundamental problems posed by the inevitable interaction between the observer and the subject, which continues to haunt the most rigorously controlled studies.89 But Freud would have at least been true to the positivistic spirit, in trying to test his theories and to separate fact from artefact in the most rigorous manner. By contrast, he refused to take such objections seriously, and continually appealed to the ‘observations’ and ‘facts’ produced by his method, when the reliability of the latter was at issue.