The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  Robert Boyle: For, though the testimony of a single witness shall not suffice to prove the accused party guilty of murder; yet the testimony of two witnesses, though but of equal credit . . . shall ordinarily suffice to prove a man guilty; because it is thought reasonable to suppose, that, though each testimony single be but probable, yet a concurrence of such probabilities (which ought in reason to be attributed to the truth of what they jointly tend to prove) may well amount to a moral certainty, i.e. such a certainty as may warrant the judge to proceed to the sentence of death against the indicted party.49

  As judges and historians know quite well, the narrated event is a (re)construction, fabrication and interpretation of an event, whose meaning is determined by the plot or storyline in which it is embedded – it is not a naked event that could satisfy us by simply being recorded. From the outset, then, psychoanalysis’s official epistemology runs into all the well-known problems that prevent us from dreaming of any objectivity in history or criminal law. This is all the more true in that Freud’s case studies are long, complex and, above all, well written. While the ‘observations’ of a Bernheim or even a Janet limit themselves to transmitting events in a quasi-telegraphic style, Freud tells us actual stories, using all the narrative resources available to the fiction writer (some of which we will take a look at later on).

  Freud: It still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science . . . A detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that affection. Case histories of this kind are intended to be judged like psychiatric ones; they have, however, one advantage over the latter, namely an intimate connection between the story of the patient’s sufferings and the symptoms of his illness – a connection for which we still search in vain in the biographies of other psychoses.50

  But is this truly an advantage? After all, how can we be sure that the Freudian novelist hasn’t discarded a certain element and unduly insisted upon another? Or established arbitrary links to better form his rough material into a coherent storyline, with ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’?51 In short, what proof do we have that he didn’t sacrifice ‘observation’ – always untidy and disorganised – to the impeccable narrative demonstration of his theories? Nothing, once again, but the assurances of Freud himself.

  Freud: The case history itself was only committed to writing from memory after the treatment was at an end, but while my recollection of the case was still fresh and was heightened by my interest in its publication. Thus the record is not absolutely – phonographically – exact, but it can claim to possess a high degree of trustworthiness. Nothing of any importance has been altered in it except in some places the order in which the explanations are given; and this has been done for the sake of presenting the case in a more connected form.52

  Freud: Taking notes during the session with the patient might be justified by an intention of publishing a scientific study of the case. On general grounds this can scarcely be denied. Nevertheless it must be borne in mind that exact reports of analytic case histories are of less value than might be expected. Strictly speaking, they only possess the ostensible exactness of which ‘modern’ psychiatry affords us some striking examples. They are, as a rule, fatiguing to the reader and yet do not succeed in being a substitute for his actual presence at an analysis. Experience invariably shows that if readers are willing to believe an analyst they will have confidence in any slight revision to which he has submitted his material.53

  In a moment we shall consider what to think of this ‘slight revision’, and if readers are indeed justified in placing their faith in the narrative accuracy of analysis’s Arch-Witness. For the moment, let’s read, as a forewarning, the more sober assessments of James Strachey – esteemed expert on Freud’s writings, if ever there was one.

  Strachey to Jones, date unknown: Freud was quite extraordinarily inaccurate about details. He seems to have had a delusion that he possessed a ‘photographic memory’.54 Actually . . . he constantly contradicts himself over details of fact. When we did the case histories [for the Collected Papers] we sent him a long list of these – most of which he then put right in the Ges.[ammelte] Schriften and later editions.55

  Strachey to Jones, 9 November 1955: I enclose two extracts from the original report of the ‘dritte Fall’56 . . . It also shows how utterly incapable of accuracy over details the Professor was. He’d actually got the correct facts in front of him, and simply couldn’t copy them out.57

  But there is something more serious than this carelessness of Freud, the sole eyewitness. Beyond the inevitable distortions introduced by the narrative presentation of observed clinical data, we need to understand that Freud’s reports don’t merely describe, with more or less precision, what has taken place in his office. They also relate ‘events’ (real or fantastical: it matters little here) that he himself reconstructed: Elisabeth von R.’s love for her brother-in-law, Dora’s love for Mr K., the Wolf Man’s ‘primal scene’. These psychical events share the distinction of having never been observed in the analyst’s office. They are, Freud tells us, unconscious, repressed beyond his patients’ consciousness. Patients have no memory of these events – they never even mentioned them – although they may find these memories as a result of accepting the analyst’s construction (which, we should remark in passing, was not the case with Elizabeth von R., Dora or the Wolf Man). In reality, it’s the analyst who puts these psychical events in their mouth (or in their unconscious); he’s the one who, in their place, says to them what they can’t say themselves. In this sense, Freud’s case histories are anything but an objective report of clinical data that the analyst merely records through the method of passive listening and attentiveness known as ‘free-floating attention’.

  Freud: [The analyst] must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone.58

  Contrary to what Freud’s positivistic rhetoric would have us think, there is not, nor can there be, any ‘observation’ of the unconscious, since, by its very definition, the unconscious never appears or presents itself as such to consciousness (this, clearly, is why Freud, in the passage cited above, appeals to the analyst’s unconscious, without telling us how this unconscious gets to his consciousness). As his 1915 article on ‘The unconscious’ succinctly explains, the unconscious only becomes phenomenal in becoming conscious, thus disappearing in the same moment as it appears.

  Freud: How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious? It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious.59

  How, then, does this ‘transformation or translation into something conscious’ operate; this process by which the ‘thing-in-itself’ of the unconscious is transformed into observable phenomenon? How do we know, for example, that the sensation of pressure Dora felt on her chest represents the pressure of Mr K.’s erect member against her clitoris, or that the Wolf Man’s anxiety, experienced during his famous dream, expresses in an inverted form his desire to be sexually satisfied by his father? Better yet, how do we know that Dora and the Wolf Man even have an unconscious? How do we know that there actually is a Freudian unconscious? The key reason is that the analyst’s interpretations tell us so: making use of the grammatical rules of transformation called displacement, condensation, projection, identification, reversal into the opposite, symbolism, etc., he translates his patients’ symptoms and dreams into ‘unconscious thoughts’ unknown to them. The following passage, again from ‘The unconscious’, explains all of this very clearly.

  Freud: Psycho-analytic work shows us every day that translation of this kind is possible. In
order that this should come about, the person under analysis must overcome certain resistances – the same resistances as those which, earlier, made the material concerned into something repressed by rejecting it from the conscious.60

  The unconscious thus appears in the interpretations of the analyst who says that there is something to be translated – the concerned parties know nothing about it, and consequently some are quite sceptical. Here we arrive at a difficulty or ambiguity which is absolutely essential for psychoanalysis, and which Freud’s positivistic epistemology (his legendary epistemology) functioned to dissimulate: ultimately, this theory has no facts, no observations to get one’s teeth into. It is a theory supported by itself: a celibate speculative machine producing, with its hypotheses and ‘constructions’, its own reality. Whatever he might claim, Freud never ‘observed’ the unconscious or repression anymore than he ‘discovered’ the Oedipus complex, infantile sexuality or the meaning of dreams. He only wagered that they existed, acting ‘as if’ these conjectures were real and then asking his patients to confirm them.

  Binswanger, report of his visit to Vienna, 15–26 January 1910: On one occasion I referred to the statement he [Freud] had made during a Wednesday meeting that ‘the . . . unconscious is metaphysic, we simply posit it as real,’ meaning, of course, that we acted as if the unconscious were something real, like the conscious. Being a true scientist, Freud said nothing about the nature of the unconscious, precisely because we know nothing certain about it; rather, we merely deduce it from the conscious. He thought that just as Kant postulated the thing in itself behind the phenomenal world, so he himself postulated the unconscious behind the conscious that is accessible to our experience, but that can never be directly experienced.61

  The ambiguity of this ‘as if’ confided to Binswanger is rather remarkable. On the one hand, Freud seemed anxious to maintain the hypothetical character of his theoretical ‘simulations’, insisting on the impossibility of revealing the Thing Itself of the unconscious. But on the other hand, and in the same motion, he asks us to act ‘as if the unconscious were something real’, while transgressing the limit he had just demarcated between speculation and possible experience, hypothesis and observation, theory and empiricism. Instead of presenting his interpretations as interpretations (and nothing else), he immediately transforms them into psychical events attributed to his patients. Instead of presenting us with his ‘constructions’ as constructions (and nothing else), he makes of them reconstructions, reconstitutions of the past. Suddenly, we no longer have an ‘as-if unconscious’, but the unconscious pure and simple – without the precautionary quotation marks – whose topography and vicissitudes are described to us with the utmost seriousness and gravity.

  Freud: [The] work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice. The two processes are in fact identical, except that the analyst works under better conditions and has more material at his command to assist him, since what he is dealing with is not something destroyed but something that is still alive . . . All of the essentials are preserved; even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and made inaccessible to the subject. Indeed, it may, as we know, be doubted whether any psychical structure can really be the victim of total destruction. It depends only upon analytic technique whether we shall succeed in bringing what is concealed completely to light.62

  It is this second action, that of reifying interprefaction, which defines psychoanalysis, while ultimately providing the material (the legendary material) of clinical observations and Freudian case histories. Despite appearances, these case histories don’t recount what happened or was said in the analyst’s office. Instead, they provide a narrative presentation of that which the patient is not in any way aware of having experienced, thus systematically obfuscating the borders between the material supplied by the patient and the highly speculative conjectures the analyst injects into this material. Without this narrative interference – which places the data observed on the same plane as the interpretation of this data – psychoanalysis would never have been able to present itself as an empirical discipline, or establish its theories as indisputable facts. It is, therefore, worthwhile to study in greater detail this work of narrative interprefaction, to which we owe so many astonishing ‘discoveries’.

  The mind reader

  Let’s first take some examples in which the narrative transformation of hypotheses into positive facts is particularly evident.

  Example 1: Ida Bauer (‘Dora’, in Freud’s case history) bitterly complains of her father encouraging Mr K.’s advances towards her to better pursue his own liaison with Mrs K. Over the years, however, she had done everything to encourage this very same liaison.

  Freud: The same inference was to be drawn . . . namely, that she had all these years been in love with Herr K. When I informed her of this conclusion she did not assent to it.63

  Some nineteen pages later, we are informed that Ida Bauer had been very close to Mrs K. and that Mrs K. had taken her as an ally and confidant in her conjugal difficulties with her husband. How, then, do we reconcile this with the love of the young woman for Mr K.?

  Freud: How Dora managed to fall in love with the man about whom her beloved friend had so many bad things to say is an interesting psychological problem. We shall not be far from solving it when we realize that thoughts in the unconscious live very comfortably side by side, and even contraries get on together without disputes – a state of things which persists often enough even in the conscious.64

  All of a sudden, the ‘inference’ from nineteen pages before has become a reality, eliciting all sorts of contradictions and problems. However, who ever said that Ida loved Mr K.? Only Freud. It is obvious that Freud’s interesting ‘psychological problem’ would instantly vanish if he consented to abandon his hypothesis instead of projecting it onto Ida’s unconscious – in spite of her protests. (This reveals, incidentally, that the indifference to the contradictions he attributes to the unconscious could be said to be Freud’s own.)

  Example 2:65 Ida had developed asthma (dyspnoea) at the age of eight, after a hike in the mountains. Freud, who at this period (1899–1900) has a complete theory of hysteria – which he attributes to the repression of infantile masturbation accompanied by incestuous fantasies66 – seeks to learn more about her condition.

  Freud: Now the only light she was able to throw upon this first attack was that at the time of its occurrence Daddy (Papa) was away from home for the first time since his health had improved. In this small recollection there must be a trace of an allusion to the aetiology of the dyspnoea. Dora’s symptomatic acts and certain other signs gave me good reasons for supposing that the child, whose bedroom had been next door to her parents’, had overheard her father in his wife’s room at night and had heard him (for he was always short of breath) breathing hard while they had intercourse.67

  To this point, the interpretation is only a ‘supposition’ based on ‘signs’ about which Freud tells us very little. But just a few lines later, this supposition has already become a certainty providing the foundation for a long case history.

  Freud: A little while later, when her father was away and the child, devotedly in love with him, was wishing him back, she must have reproduced in the form of an attack of asthma the impression she had received. She had preserved in her memory the event which had occasioned the first onset of the symptom, and we can conjecture from it the nature of the train of thought, charged with anxiety, which had accompanied the attack. The first attack had come on after she had over-exerted herself on an expedition in the mountains, so that she had probably been really a little out of breath. To this was added the thought that her father was forbidden to climb mountains and was not allowed to over-exert himself, because he suffered from shortness of breath; then came the recollection of how much
he had exerted himself with Mummy (Mama) that night, and the question whether it might not have done him harm; next came concern whether she might not have over-exerted herself in masturbating – an act which, like the other, led to a sexual orgasm accompanied by slight dyspnoea – and finally came a return of the dyspnoea in an intensified form as a symptom. Part of this material I was able to obtain directly from the analysis, but the rest required supplementing.68

  It is important to note the great pains taken by Freud not to specify the extent to which he has ‘supplemented’ the material provided by Ida – and for good reason: not only is the ‘primal scene’ his own supposition, but furthermore Ida ‘denied flatly’69 having the slightest memory of masturbating before the age of eight, or having been in love with her father.70 Even if we keep her memories of the mountain excursion in mind, we are nonetheless led to the conclusion that Ida’s contribution to Freud’s case history was quite minimal. The rest is pure speculation on Freud’s part; however, he narrates all of this as if the events had actually occurred in Ida’s mind. So how, under these conditions, is the reader to know the difference?