Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that just when he was coming to the conclusion that psychology is nonsense, he read Freud and underwent a revelation. Thereafter he called himself Freud's disciple and described him as "one of the few authors worth reading." At the same time he was severely critical of psychoanalysis, calling it "fanciful pseudo-explanation." He warned a friend who was studying Freud's theories, "psychoanalysis is a dangerous and foul practice, it has done no end of harm and comparatively little good."
Wittgenstein's ambivalence is easily explained. He admired Freud the artist, but found his theories confused and misleading. In so saying Wittgenstein presages the conclusion to which-so it would seem-sober opinion is coming at the end of a century dominated by Freud's ideas. Is this conclusion right? Should we see Freud as a gifted artist, a philosophical visionary who re-imagined human nature and helped us confront taboos, but whose theories, offered as science, fail under scrutiny? There are those-his critics and his devotees-who see the answer lying at opposite extremes, having him all magician or all messiah. If he was neither, the real question is: which does he most closely resemble?
Criticism of psychoanalytic theory takes different forms. In its early years it met strong opposition from the medical establishment. Later it became fashionable, at least for a committed minority (the number of Freudian analysts in Britain has never risen above 500), and the better insights were absorbed by mainstream psychotherapy. More recently, it has met renewed opposition, not least from feminists. The eloquent and often angry voices of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer have objected to the misogyny and patriarchalism they find in Freudian views, and to the spurious scientific authority accorded the idea that women are inferior because they are hommes manqu?s, castrated-and therefore lesser-versions of men. Defenders of Freud respond by attributing feminist attacks to "resistance" and sublimated penis envy.
Criticism from science and philosophy is not so readily deflected by appeal to technicalities, however, because what they question is the very basis of the theory. Karl Popper, Frederick Crews and Adolf Gr?nbaum figure largely in this attack. They charge that the empirical basis of psychoanalysis is inadequate, that its central concepts are untestable, and that its aim-to give a complete theory of human nature -is overambitious. Its methodology is inadequate, they argue, because it rests on speculation and subjective insights, not on objective examination of public and repeatable phenomena. It depends on generalisation from single cases or very small samples -much of Freud's data is provided by a few Viennese women together with his own "self-analysis"-and its reasoning relies on analogies, subjective associations, memories real or supposed, puns, and ("unconsciously intentional") mistakes and coincidences.
In all this a central role is assigned to the "unconscious mind." At base Freud's theory rests on a claim, which, expressed unadorned and without preamble, looks frankly absurd: that an infant sexually desires its parent of the opposite sex, and is therefore hostile towards, because jealous of, its parent of the same sex; and that because neither the desire nor the hostility is acceptable, these feelings are repressed into the unconscious, as a result of which internal conflicts arise; and that this-the Oedipus complex-is the key to human nature. It is not, note, the key only to pathological human nature: but to human nature as such.
Freud did not invent the notion of the unconscious. By the close of the 19th century it had become a fixture of psychology, accorded prime clinical significance by such practitioners as Jean-Martin Charcot and Josef Breuer. The theory stated that many perceptual and cognitive processes occur below the level of consciousness, and that what is consciously learned can become automatic and remain non-consciously effective. It also held that memories, perceptions and beliefs can be stored in the unconscious without the knowledge of its possessor, and that these can be recovered, for example by hypnosis. Yet further, it held that the unconscious has a creative, mythopoeic capacity responsible for dreams, stories, symbols and ideas, which when pathological is responsible for delusions and hysterical symptoms. And it held that it is the source of psychic energy, which can be inhibited, sublimated or transferred from one application to another, and that within it can coexist split-off subpersonalities which manifest themselves in dreams or trances.
Freud's predecessors had relied on hypnosis to gain access to the unconscious, but under the influence of Breuer's experience with "Anna O" Freud adopted instead the "talking cure," the process of eliciting, by the technique of "free association," experience which had been repressed into the unconscious. The idea was to release the patient from neurosis, conceived as the baleful product of repressed and unacknowledged trauma, by effecting a discharge or catharsis of the emotions involved. Freud was struck by the fact that most of his patients seemed to have real or imaginary sexual trauma at the root of their difficulties. When he found them reluctant to tell him about their early sexual experiences and masturbatory fantasies, he diagnosed "resistance." Notoriously, he first thought that his patients had indeed been sexually abused as children; later he decided that these were fantasies, expressing "infantile wishes" as described in the Oedipus theory.
A dispassionate evaluator of these views is bound to question the concept of an "unconscious mind." Today's cognitive and neurological science agrees that much information is processed in the central nervous system non-consciously, and that learned routines can be performed in the absence of self-awareness, without needing a notion of an "unconscious mind" to explain either phenomenon. The idea of non-conscious processes is very different from that of an "unconscious mind" conceived as a source of psychological motivation. Ideas of repressed trauma, subpersonalities, psychic energies, mythopoeic functions and mental life unknown to its possessor, constitute a speculative and highly questionable mixture. But it is precisely on these concepts that Freudian theory depends.
There are two reasons for scepticism about the unconscious. The first, conceptual, reason is that the very idea of mental life-of motives, emotions, reasons and intentions-seems essentially conscious. It is true that we need a distinction between what philosophers call "occurrent" and "dispositional" mental states, meaning by the former those that are currently at the centre of attention, and by the latter those that are not but which, on appropriate occasions, can become so. But the Freudian unconscious is a very different thing, a realm where decisions, emotions, beliefs and motives are in lively play, just as they would be in conscious mental activity, with the difference that if we ever come to know of them, it is only by their indirect effects. To some critics this is like saying that we suffer unfelt pains.
The second, empirical, difficulty is that evidence for unconscious mental activity is at best diffuse and anecdotal. The objection is not that unconscious phenomena are by definition unobservable, for science admits many unobservable entities, whose existence and properties can only be determined by indirect means. In these cases, however, there is a correspondence between the indirect evidence and the entities, which is repeatable, testable and predictable. In contrast, in the analyst's consulting room, where free association of ideas is the means of enquiry, and where "suggestion" by the analyst is an ever present danger, no such empirical control is possible.
To doubts about the reliability of Freud's methods have to be added doubts about his style of reasoning, exemplified by his analyses of dreams and his claims to be able to recognise intuitively what something "truly means." For example, he reports that during self-analysis he recalled a childhood incident in which he snatched flowers from a girl. "To take flowers from a girl," he states, "means to deflower her." In another case he diagnoses a patient's impulse to go for a run after each meal as a wish to kill a man whom he sees as a rival for his fianc?e's affections. The rival's name is Richard; running after meals is a way of losing weight; dick is German for "fat"; Dick is a diminutive of Richard; the runner wishes to get rid of dick/Dick; QED. Why should one accept that these speculative leaps have landed on the right place, or even that there is a right place to land? Why might the runner not be wishing to kill himself by burning more calories than he eats? Or make himself more athletic and therefore more attractive than his rival? Or find that running after meals soothes his anxieties about his fianc?e's loyalty? In the flower story, would the young Freud not have snatched what was in the girl's hand if it had not been a bouquet? What if it had been a stick, or an ice cream? If he had snatched either, what would it have "meant"? Why is it not the object rather than the snatching that directs the interpretation?
In a letter to Jung, Freud spoke of his "serene confidence" in his methods; few critics can share it. One has only to remember the dreadful case of Emma Eckstein. Freud had discovered a "nasal reflex neurosis" and linked it to excessive masturbation. He diagnosed Emma as a sufferer and got his colleague Wilhelm Fliess to remove the turbinate bone from her nose. After her nose had bled for many days, another surgeon found a mass of surgical gauze left in the wound. Its removal caused a near-fatal haemorrhage. The bleeding continued intermittently for months; Freud meditated on the problem, and concluded that Emma's bleeding was "hysterical," caused by her wish to bring him to her bedside.
That psychoanalysis is not science is suggested by an important difference between giving a systematic account of it, and doing the same for any of the physical sciences. To explain Freudian theory one has to recount its origins and growth. The standard history traces Freud's thought from his early days as a neurologist, through his associations with Charcot, Breuer and Fliess, to his rejection of the "seduction theory" (which postulated widespread child sex abuse) and its replacement by theories of the Oedipus complex and dreams (his Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, is regarded as his greatest book)-and thence to the later development of the theory to include, for example, the ego-id distinction. The various developments in Freudian theory carried out by gifted followers after his death, command extra volumes. But it is only in recent years that a better understanding of Freud's intellectual journey has been gained, showing among other things its extraordinary dependence on his women patients and collaborators.
Freud's earliest women patients effectively invented psychoanalysis, and the psychoanalytic profession owed its rise, spread and some of its most decisive transformations, to women who began as his patients and later became analysts. The two women who should be central in his life, his mother and his wife, are dim presences; Freud hid the former behind a screen of sincere but conventional filial respect, and the latter behind an embargo on his papers which seals them for another century. But the shadowiness of these two is compensated by other women, who are responsible for transforming psychoanalysis from an oddity on the medical fringe to an explosive force in 20th century consciousness.
Freud admitted that psychoanalysis was invented by his colleague Josef Breuer while treating a wealthy and beautiful young hysteric. This was Bertha Pappenheim, "Anna O," who created her own therapy in the form of the "talking cure." (Later research shows that she was not cured by this means; and that her symptoms in all likelihood stemmed from a physical complaint that was first misdiagnosed and then mistreated: shades of Emma Eckstein.) Freud's experience with the woman he called his "teacher," Anna von Lieben, confirmed for him that the route to a new theory of human psychology-an aim more important than therapy-lay this way. Anna was his patient for six years, and taught him that it takes a talented patient to make a talented analyst.
These early patients helped establish the technique of analysis. The theory emerged more slowly. Its painful growth is reflected in the different paths from Freud's couch taken by women as variously brilliant as Helene Deutsch and Lou Andreas-Salom? when they became analysts in their own right. A salient example is Princess Marie Bonaparte, who established Freud's theories in France. Great-grand-niece of Napoleon, and very rich, Marie engaged in famous battles with Jacques Lacan over Freud's legacy. Troubled by the question of vaginal versus clitoral orgasm, Marie had two surgical operations to move her clitoris closer to her vagina. When she was contemplating sex with her son she wrote to Freud for advice. Although hostile to incest ("in my private life I am a bourgeois"), Freud diplomatically replied that incest is not always harmful. Marie was, after all, a very wealthy follower.
Freud sometimes likened himself to King Lear. In one respect the comparison is apt, for his youngest daughter Anna proved crucial both to him and his cause. Although her disputes with Melanie Klein later split the British analytic movement, Anna's tireless loyalty was central to the later flourishing of Freudian orthodoxy. It is ironic, in view of Freud's views, that women played such a central role in establishing psychoanalysis. According to Freud, girls are dismayed to discovery their genital inferiority to boys, and long to acquire a penis, first by sexually desiring their fathers and then by wishing for children, especially sons, who bring the coveted penis with them. He identified the "phallic phase" in girls as an infantile stage involving external genital pleasure; so any woman who does not develop a capacity for internal, that is vaginal, orgasm has remained immature. In responding to these latter claims critics have powerful ammunition; empirical research (for example, by Masters and Johnson) decisively refutes Freud, showing not only that the clitoris is the chief sensory focus in the female pelvis, but that women are capable by its means of indefinitely many orgasms in sequence.
The theory of infantile sexuality and female "penis envy" are incredible enough on the basis of human biography, but standard knowledge of endocrinology and mammalian reproductive behaviour makes Freud's view appear fantastical. If one were to compare the frequency and intensity of pre-pubertal interest in sex and ice-cream in the normal child, one could confidently bet that although the former might not be absent, it is beaten hands down by the latter.
Freudian theory thus fares ill under scrutiny. What explains its power? When Auden described Freud as "not a person but a whole climate of opinion," and Harold Bloom nominated him "the central imagination of our age," there is little hyperbole in the claims. Freudian theory indeed took western 20th century civilisation by storm. How so? The answer lies in four factors. One is Freud's genius as author and ideologue. Another is the immense attraction of any theory that offers to each individual an explanation of his own hidden secrets. A third is the promise that science has at last delivered a proper theory of human nature. And finally there is the fact that at the centre of the package lay the most delicious, anxious, and titillating of all taboos: sex.
Of Freud's powers as a writer, as an immensely fertile system builder, and as a possessor of an extraordinary ability to weave together medical knowledge, genuine insights into the human condition and a powerful imagination, there can be no question. To read him is to be spellbound. It is a characteristic of highly speculative enquiries that the thinkers who most influence them are those who find the most compelling vocabulary-a vocabulary which offers a new way of articulating its subject. Freud himself once wrote, in commenting on a book by Jung, "In it many things are so well expressed that they seem to have taken on definitive form." This describes Freud's own talent. He had a genius for analogy and metaphor, and his marvellous powers of imagination fed on both, and annexed the austere terminologies of scientific medicine and psychology to them. This gave them authority. His case studies are highly organised narratives constructed from true-life gossip based on voyeurism-irresistible to human curiosity!-and yet they go further: they add the deeply satisfying denouement of the kind one has in detective stories, where mystery is unravelled by clever and striking juxtapositions of clues.
The second attraction-that Freud offers each individual a revelation of secrets about himself that he does not himself know-is equally irresistible. The same compound of insecurity and curiosity that makes so many resort against their better judgement to fortune-tellers, is at work here, except that the imprimatur of science makes the proceedings respectable, which is why people will spend far more on their analysts than on their astrologers.
The third attraction is the promised theory of human nature. Religious accounts of fallen man, of humanity as midway between beast and angel, of imperishable souls trapped in disgusting matter and therefore sinful from birth, had lost their grip with many, while at the same time Darwinian views offered no account of why evolution had made man as he is. In identifying sexual and aggressive impulses as the fundamental human drives, and in specifying their causes, Freud offered an inclusive philosophical psychology. Once again, the authority of the white coat and Latinate terminology helped. Humans struggle with conceptual bewilderments about themselves and their complex natures; one can see why the appearance of Freud's magisterial new insights seemed as welcome as rain in drought.
Finally there is the fact that sex lies at the core of the story. Freud performed a great service by liberating debate on the matter, but it is questionable whether the importance he assigns it is correct. Hungry men think of food; fed men do not. The accidents of social history are easily mistaken for the essentials of human nature; this surely explains Freud's choice of sexuality as the well-spring of human nature. The surprise is that people do not see how, at most, sex can only be part of a far more complicated story.
Philosophies that capture the imagination never wholly fade. From animism to Zoroastrianism, every view known to man retains at least a few devotees. There might always be Freudians, and there will always be admirers of Freud's great imaginative and literary powers; these two are intimately linked. But as to Freud's claims upon truth, the judgement of time seems to be inclining Wittgenstein's way.
