The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  Above all, what mattered was preserving psychoanalysis’ narrative monopoly, preventing any other accounts from entering into competition with Freud’s, and dissuading all rival interpretations. In this sense, the censorship of the Archives must be understood in relation to the concurrent promotion of the Freudian legend. If it was necessary to establish a sanitary cordon around the ‘Wolf Man’, seal the testimony of the children of ‘Cäcilie M.’ or ‘Elisabeth von R.’, and censor the patients’ names, it wasn’t necessarily because all these people had explosive secrets to reveal, but because their accounts ran the risk, first, of differing from Freud’s and, second, of making them less certain, and more open to disputation. Subjected to comparison and debate, Freud’s interprefactions would no longer be able to present themselves as the transparent and indisputable narration of ‘facts’, ‘discoveries’ and ‘observations’.

  From this point of view, the censorship of the Freud Archives is by no means an arbitrary absurdity with no wider import. Explaining it away by means of Anna Freud’s excessive filial piety or Eissler’s lovable eccentricity304 is decidedly too simple. Eissler executed the orders of Anna Freud, and Anna Freud continued a policy of dehistoricisation and narrative decontextualisation which had been her father’s – as, for example, when he burned his correspondences or destroyed his analysis notes. The important thing was to keep everyone else’s hands off the Freudian narrative and to rid it of all the parasitic ‘noises’ liable to cloud its message, in order to immunise Freud’s testimony – which is to say psychoanalytic theory – against all doubts and questions. Without this excessive dehistoricisation, psychoanalysis would never have succeeded in establishing itself as the Holy Scripture of psychotherapy, nor Freud as the Solitary Hero of the unconscious. The Archives’ censorship, so absurd at first glance, is absolutely essential to the system it and psychoanalysis’ legendary epistemology together constitute. It’s not surprising that the Freudians have considered the work of historians of their discipline among their most serious adversaries: psychoanalysis is vulnerable to its history.

  Coda: what was psychoanalysis?

  The fashion this winter is psychoanalysis.

  André Breton (1990 [1924]), 94

  Freudian psychology had flooded the field like a full rising tide and the rest of us were left submerged like clams buried in the sands at low water.

  Morton Prince (1929), ix

  I know of no other example of a system of unjustified beliefs which has propagated itself so successfully as Freudian theory. How was it done?

  Alasdair MacIntyre (1976), 35

  The censorship of Freud’s correspondences, the sequestering of documents and reminiscences in sealed boxes in the Freud Archives, the compilation of the official Freud biography and the preparation of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was a systematic and concerted enterprise, intended to consolidate and disseminate the Freudian legend. The legend was now everywhere, massive and virtually unassailable. Texts available to researchers and the general public had been carefully filtered and reformatted to present the image of Freud and psychoanalysis that the Freudian establishment wanted to promote. Thus it is no surprise that the apotheosis of psychoanalysis took place in the 1950s, and that it was from America and Britain, the new centres of the psychoanalytic family, that the Freudian wave spread through the world.

  For half a century, this artificial construction has formed the basis of our knowledge of Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis. It is striking to see how widely it was accepted, even by those who otherwise had a critical and sceptical view of psychoanalysis. Even when Freud’s works were reread and reinterpreted in heterodox ways, it was always on the basis of the sanitised and dehistoricised version propagated by Anna Freud, Ernst Kris, Ernest Jones, James Strachey and Kurt Eissler. Lacan’s famous ‘return to Freud’ was simply a return to the version of Freud that they had canonised. The same goes for all the more recent hermeneutic, structuralist, narrativist, deconstructivist, feminist and post-modern reformulations of psychoanalysis. Despite their sophistication and their refusal of Freud’s positivism, the Freud which they interpreted/deconstructed/narritivised/fictionalised was always the same legendary Freud, dressed up in the new garments of the latest intellectual fashion.

  The success of this propaganda mission rested on its invisibility, on the dissimulation of the ‘Kürzungsarbeit’: cuts in letters weren’t indicated, inconvenient facts were omitted, skeletons were hidden in closets, critics were silenced, the names of patients were disguised, recollections were sequestered, tendentious interpretations were presented as real events, calumnies and rumours were taken as facts. The mythification of the history of psychoanalysis gave it a simplicity which rendered it suitable for mass dissemination. At the same time, the formidable obstacles which confronted historians rendered a wholesale challenge of the legend impossible.

  The consequences of this state of affairs went far beyond the confines of the history of psychoanalysis and had profound effects on the way the enterprise of modern psychology as a whole was perceived. The legend effectively delegitimated the psychotherapies which psychoanalysis competed with in the mental health market place. At the same time it led to the rescripting of the history of ideas in the twentieth century, giving psychoanalysis a prominence that it never properly had. To the extent to which psychoanalysis was placed at the centre and the origin of the critical developments in depth psychology, dynamic psychiatry and psychotherapy, psychoanalysis became everything – and at the same time nothing. All clothing suited it, because it all bore the label ‘Freud’. Already in 1920, Ernest Jones noted that the public only had the vaguest ideas of what psychoanalysis really was, and what distinguished it from other approaches.

  Jones to the Secret Committee, 26 October 1920: From various recent reports I have had from America and from reading their recent literature I am sorry to say that I get a very bad impression of [the] situation there. Everything possible passes under the name of Ψα, not only Adlerism and Jungism, but any kind of popular or intuitive psychology. I doubt if there are six men in America who could tell the essential difference between Vienna and Zurich, at least at all clearly.1

  Ninety years later, the situation has hardly changed: ‘any kind of popular or intuitive psychology’ is precisely what passes for psychoanalysis, whether it be in university seminars, specialist journals and magazines, or on television or the radio. However, it is precisely this confusion and the manner in which Freudians successfully exploited it to promote ‘psychoanalysis’ that significantly contributed to the success of the brand. If it appears to be everywhere, it is because so much has been arbitrarily Freudianised, franchised by psychoanalysis: slips, dreams, sex, mental illness, neurosis, psychotherapy, memory, biography, history, language, pedagogy and teaching, marital relations, politics.

  John Burnham: In the United States Freud became the agent not so much of psychoanalysis as of other ideas current at the time. Psychoanalysis was understood as environmentalism, as sexology, as a theory of psychogenic etiology of the neuroses. Likewise when Freud’s teachings gained attention and even adherents, his followers often believed not so much in his work as in evolution, in psychotherapy, and in the modern world.2

  But if psychoanalysis is everything and nothing at the same time, what are we ultimately speaking about? Nothing – or nearly nothing: it is precisely because it has always been vague and floating, perfectly inconsistent, that psychoanalysis could propagate as it did and embed itself in a variety of ‘ecological niches’, to use Ian Hacking’s expression, in the most diverse array of environments.3 Being nothing in particular, psychoanalysis has functioned like Lévi-Strauss’ famous ‘floating signifier’:4 it is a ‘machine’, a ‘whatsit’, a ‘thingumajig’ which can serve to designate anything, an empty theory in which one can cram whatever one likes. To take an example, Freud’s unilateral insistence on the pre-eminence of sexuality was objected to from all sides. No matter, he t
hen developed his theory of narcissism and the analysis of the ego, silently borrowing from some of his critics, Adler and Jung. The traumatic neuroses of the First World War appeared to have conclusively demonstrated that one could suffer from hysterical symptoms for non-sexual reasons. Freud then came up with the theories of the repetition compulsion and the death drive from the ever ready unconscious. Such radical theoretical shifts have often been cited in praise of Freud’s conscientious empiricism, but this is to confound falsificationist rigour with damage limitation. No ‘fact’ was likely to refute Freud’s theories, as he could adapt them to objections made to him, according to the exigencies of the moment, in continual shadow-boxing with his critics.

  D. H. Lawrence, 1923: Psychoanalysis has sprung many surprises on us, performed more than one volte-face before our indignant eyes. No sooner had we got used to the psychiatric quack who vehemently demonstrated the serpent of sex coiled round the root of all our actions, no sooner had we begun to feel honestly uneasy about our lurking complexes, than lo and behold the psychoanalytic gentlemen reappeared on the stage with a theory of pure psychology. The medical faculty, which was on hot bricks over the therapeutic innovations, heaved a sigh of relief as it watched the ground warming under the feet of the professional psychologists.5

  Frank Cioffi: Sometime about 1912 Freud felt that Adler was attempting to disarm criticism of his ‘masculine protest’ by representing it as a corollary of Freud’s own apparently well-established castration complex. How did Freud deal with this embarrassment? This is how: ‘I find it impossible to base the genesis of neuroses on so narrow a foundation as the castration complex. . . I know of cases of neurosis in which the castration complex plays no pathogenic part or does not appear at all’ (1914, SE 14, pp. 974–93). And yet once Adler had been seen off the castration complex was reinstated to its position of centrality and Freud became amnesic for the fact that he had treated patients in which the ‘castration complex play[ed] no pathogenic part.’ In an essay of 1928 he assures readers with respect to the influence of the castration complex: ‘Psychoanalytic experience has put these matters in particular beyond the reach of doubt and has taught us to recognize in them the key to every neuroses’ (1928, SE 21, p. 184).6

  Jones’ statement cited earlier suggests that he believed that there was something radically distinctive about psychoanalysis that enabled it to be rigorously distinguished from Jung’s or Adler’s work and all other forms of ‘popular psychology’. But what held psychoanalysis together – both theoretically and institutionally – was a legend, and it was this that constituted its very identity. In reality, as we have seen, psychoanalysis was riven from its inception by contradictory interpretations as to what psychological analysis/psychoanalysis/psychanalysis/psychosynthesis/free psychoanalysis/individual psychology/analytical psychology were, and to wherein they differed. This situation has not ceased. Fundamentally, it has not been possible to demonstrate the properly ‘Freudian unconscious’ in a manner convincing to all. After the ruptures with Fliess, Forel, Bleuler, Adler, Stekel and Jung, there were those with Rank, Ferenczi and many others. Within the movement itself, divergent tendencies and schools multiplied, while views initially championed by dissidents and critiques of psychoanalysis were silently recuperated and presented as ‘developments’ of psychoanalysis, as progress.7 Under such conditions, how can one continue to speak of ‘psychoanalysis’, as if it were a matter of a coherent doctrine, organised around a series of clearly articulated theses, principles or methods? Psychoanalysis in the singular never existed. What is there in common between Freud’s theories and those of Rank, Ferenczi, Reich, Klein, Horney, Winnicott, Bion, Bowlby, Kohut, Kernberg, Lacan, Laplanche, Zizek or Kristeva? Even psychoanalysts have recognised that psychoanalysis has become an umbrella term covering the most diverse and mutually contradictory perspectives. In 1988, Robert Wallerstein, then president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, asked with disquiet whether there was still one psychoanalysis, after the multitude of post-Freudian developments and the failure of several initiatives to create a consensus within American psychoanalysis in the 1950s.

  Robert Wallerstein: We live in a world of increasing psychoanalytic diversity, of many (and differing) psychoanalyses, which then – with their boundaries then drawable in conceptually differing ways – of course makes more difficult any clear overall distinction of psychoanalysis from psychotherapy.8

  Whilst conceding that the theories of psychoanalytic metapsychology were finally nothing other than ‘articles of psychoanalytic faith’, Wallerstein nevertheless claimed that the Freudian field continued to present a unity at the level of clinical theory and the givens of the consulting room.9 However, his definition of the psychoanalytic clinic was so expansive and vague that it could be applied to many other forms of dynamic psychotherapy.

  To highlight this diversity is not to evaluate or criticise the plethora of diverse practices and conceptions which have been associated with the label ‘psychoanalysis’, nor is it to cast doubt on the fact that many have found something in these which have facilitated their lives (the same goes for other forms of psychotherapy). A recognition of the heterogeneity of the field signals that each form of psychoanalysis or psychodynamic therapy needs to be adequately characterised and separately evaluated. Similarly, critiquing the positivistic scientific pretensions of psychoanalysis does not invalidate it (to take this view would simply be to partake of the same positivism from the opposite side) but indicates that different forms of evaluation – philosophical, ethical, political and aesthetic – come into play. But such an undertaking is not our present brief, and would require a wider comparative historical study of the wider field of the psychotherapies and dynamic psychologies.

  The truth is that the unity of psychoanalysis was provided by the institutional allegiance to the Freudian legend, that is to say to the notion that Freud’s creation of psychoanalysis was an unprecedented event that revolutionised human understanding. Psychoanalysis maintained itself to the extent to which this legend held. Without the legend, its disciplinary identity and radical difference from other forms of psychotherapy collapse. This is precisely what we witness today: the legend is losing its hold, fraying from all sides. Despite delaying tactics, primary materials have been entering the public sphere: correspondences have been re-edited without censorship, archival collections have been declassified (even if on a drip feed), historians have identified patients, documents and recollections have resurfaced. Little by little, the puzzle is being reconstituted, forming portraits quite different from that fashioned by the censors and hagiographers. This is not to say that there is a consensus among historians – it is simply to note that the cumulative effect of their work has been to dismantle the monomyth. Today defenders of the legend have vigorously protested this, at times resorting to the old tactics which once served so well in the first Freudian wars (the pathologisation of adversaries, ad hominem attacks, etc.), but without the same success. Readers approaching Freud simply have a wealth of documentation and critical historical studies which simply wasn’t available in the 1970s and 1980s, together with an increasing number of studies which have demonstrated that Freud’s professional rivals, adversaries and former colleagues weren’t all the fools they were painted to be.

  Thus there is little point in searching to ‘kill’ Freud, as some have done, or starting another ‘Freud war’, which in all likelihood would add little to its antecedents.10 Ironically, this would only serve to continue to give life and identity to psychoanalysis, whereas one could say that psychoanalysis, in a certain sense, no longer exists – or rather, never did.11 The Freudian legend is being effaced before our eyes, and with it, psychoanalysis, to make way for other cultural fashions, other modes of therapeutic interaction, continuing and renewing the ancient ritual of patient–doctor encounter. We should hurry to study Psychoanalysis whilst we can,12 for we will soon no longer be able to discern its features – and for good reason: because it never was.
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br />   Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  1. Some extracts were published in Meyer (2005), and two interviews were reproduced in Dusfresne (2007).

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Freud (1916–17), 284–5. The same idea is more fully developed in Freud (1917a), 140.

  2. Kant (1787), 21: ‘Thus far it has been presumed that all our cognition must conform to objects . . . Let us, therefore try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition . . . The situation here is precisely the same as was that of Copernicus when he first thought of explaining the motions of celestial bodies. Having found it difficult to make progress there when he assumed that the entire host of stars revolved around the spectator, he tried to find out by experiment whether he might not be more successful if he had the spectator revolve and the stars remain at rest.’

  3. Cited by Porter (1986), 291.