Freud & Psychoanalysis

 

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) founded psychoanalysis. The unconscious was a concept familiar in nineteenth century thought, and there were many attempts to both to study and treat its supposed ailments by hypnosis, electrotherapy, narcotics. But Freud was the first to draw these together and devise procedures of treatment.

Freud was an ambitious man, paranoid at times, and he wavered until the 1890's between an academic career and private practice, and between psychiatry and neurology. In 1885 he studied hypnosis under the celebrated Charcot in Paris, and for twenty years was materially assisted by Josef Breuer, with whom he published a paper on hysteria in 1897. But recognition did not arrive until the 1900 publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, which represented dreams as wish-fulfillment and probably resulted from his own self-analysis and the death of his father. In 1909 he spoke at the Clark University in the USA and his fame grew steadily thereafter, though his last years were made difficult by cancer of the mouth and the Nazi invasion of Austria.

As is well-known, Freud divided the human psyche into three interactive components. Wholly unconscious and the seat of powerful, instinctive drives, many of them sexual, was the id. The largely conscious component attempting to reconcile the id to the world outside was the ego. The third, relatively independent component, was the superego, which internalized parental and social demands and acted as censor over the ego's activities. Disharmony between the three components led to mental disorders, which could be investigated in dreams, free association sessions and art.

Freud did not have a high opinion of artists. They were 'people who had no occasion to submit their inner life to the strict control of reason' — i.e. immature and narcissic individuals. Whereas adults satisfied their erotic urges in private imagination, the artist flaunted his in public fantasies. Art was sexual sublimation, and only bold technique hid the flagrant egoism from public affront. Freud did not analyze these artistic techniques as such, but suggested that four principles operated in the formation of similar dreams and jokes. First was condensation, whereby two or more elements combined into a composite image. Second was displacement, whereby an image is replaced by a psychologically more significant one. Third was representation, whereby thoughts took on the form of images. And finally, there was secondary revision, whereby the disparate elements of a dream were combined into an intelligible, coherent whole.

Charges of mendacity, plagiarism, false accounting, dogmatism and paranoia have been laid at Freud's door. And as far as therapy is concerned, the record is now clear: it doesn't work. The treatment is expensive, lengthy and usually less effective than other forms of therapy. A cure is not made permanent by analysis: however much is claimed for entrance by free association into the patient's unconscious, remissions occur. Schizophrenia and psychosis may be ameliorated by therapy in combination with drugs, but drugs are effective on their own. The less severe mental disturbances are made more bearable by both drugs and therapies, and possibly cured — though many such illnesses cure themselves spontaneously in time. There is little evidence that psychotherapies of any description — there are over one hundred competing schools in the USA — appreciably speed up recovery, and there is some evidence that psychoanalysis itself delays recovery or makes the patient worse.

But are the alternatives, in the thin, jargon-ridden, tentative rationalisms of science, any more palatable? Possibly Freud built a theory on his own paranoia, creating out of his morbid suspicions a self-sustaining drama from the everyday frailties of society: their self-deceptions, hypocrisies, resentments, posturings and furtive lusts. His emphasis on the libido perhaps reflected the sexual puritanism of Vienna, itself a reflection of the widespread prostitution that came with rapid industrialization.

A fuller account, with documentation and references, can be found on TextEtc.

 

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Freud & Psychoanalysis

 

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