Introducing the Freud Wars E-Book

Stephen Wilson

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 98

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Compact INTRODUCING guide on the debates surrounding psychoanalysis's most contested figure. Freud is universally recognised as a pivotal figure in modern culture. Yet the man and his work continually attract scandal, outrage and scientific suspicion. Was he a psychological genius or a peddler of humbug? Despite his atheism, did he invent a new religious cult? Is he to blame for disguising the prevalence of sexual abuse? Is there an Oedipus Complex? Was he a drug addict? A wittily illustrated glimpse behind the demonised myths to the heart of a red-hot debate.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP Email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-178578-011-0

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Freud’s Origins

A 20th-Century Landmark

Contradictory Accusations

The Death of Psychoanalysis

Did Freud Invent the Unconscious?

Strange Friendship

The Genital Nose

The Case of Emma Eckstein

A Surgical Botch

Bleeding From Hysteria

Did Freud Attempt Murder?

Was Freud a Drug Addict?

The Heavy Smoker

Problems with the Libido Theory

The Conflict with Jung

Is There a Death Instinct?

The Anxiety of Play

Our Own Worst Enemies

Life in Co-operation with Death

Is it True Biology?

Freud’s Idea of Aggression

Criticism of Freud’s Views

A Diagnosis of Hysteria

Anything But Hysteria

What is Truthful Science?

Science or Religion?

Scientific Empiricism, Realism, Determinism

Fairy Tales and Scientific Theories

Symbol Formation

Arbitrary or Motivated?

Freud’s Theory of Symbolism

A Universal Pool of Symbols

An Unscientific Theory of Symbolism

Dream Interpretation

Wish-Fulfilment in Dreams

Irma’s Injection: Recorded 23/24 July 1895

Sexual Undertones

Truth or Self-Deception?

A Scientific Theory of Symbolism

Objections to “Dream Meaning”

Identifying the Dream-Work

Is Meaning Imposed on Dream?

What is “Transference Love”?

The Dora Case

Dora Sees Clearly…

Dora’s Dream

Fire and Smoke

Does it “All Fit”?

Transference and Unconscious Conflict

The Common Fact of Transference

Anatomist of Love

At the Wheel…

Psychoanalytic Knowledge Today

How to Discredit Psychoanalysis?

What Unconscious?

Why is Psychoanalysis Controversial?

The “Seduction Theory”

The Return to Memory

True or False Memories?

Infantile Sexual Fantasy

All Pervert Fathers?

The Fantasy Factor

Did Freud Suppress Evidence?

Did Freud Cover Up For Abusive Fathers?

Beyond Sexual Abuse

Self-Analysis and Sexual Fantasy

In the Looking-Glass

Freud’s Dream

Freud’s Analysis of His Dream

Early Sexual Trauma

The Process of Internalization

Identification and Fantasy

Against the Oedipus Complex

Valentine’s Experiments

Experiment in Simple Curiosity

Evidence of the Oedipus Complex

Stevenson’s Dream

Oedipus in the Trobriand Islands

Complexity of the Oedipus Complex

The Problem of Gender Identity

The Making of Masculinity

Castration Anxiety

The Super-Ego

And Femininity… ?

What is Femininity?

The Female Response to Castration Anxiety

A Prejudicial View of Women

Breast-Envy

Early Origin of the Super-Ego

Freud’s Views on Homosexuality

Homophobia and Latent Homosexuality

Freud’s Support For Homosexuals

Freud and God

A Form of Worship

Further Reading

Index

Freud’s Origins

Sigmund Freud was born into an unprosperous Jewish family in 1856. His place of birth was above a blacksmith’s forge in Freiberg, N. Moravia, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was talented, ambitious and wanted to become famous.

JEWS HAD ACHIEVED POLITICAL EMANCIPATION… BUT ANTI-SEMITISM REINFORCED BY THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH WAS ENDEMIC. AUSTRIA WOULD BE PARTICULARLY RECEPTIVE TO NAZI IDEOLOGY IN LATER YEARS.

Freud’s childhood hero was Hannibal, the (Semitic) Carthaginian general who fought the Romans.

A 20th-Century Landmark

Freud longed to become a successful medical researcher and make important discoveries. But academic medicine did not pay a living wage and he lacked private means, so he reluctantly trained in Vienna as a physician and neurologist. Later, he turned his attention to psychology and became the founder of psychoanalysis.

THIS IS A METHOD OF TREATMENT FOR MENTAL PROBLEMS BASED ON MY THEORY OF THEIR ORIGIN IN UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL CONFLICT.

By the time of his death, 23 September 1939, in London, where he had sought asylum from the Nazi persecution of the Jews, his name was a landmark in 20th-century cultural history. In the words of the poet W.H. Auden (1907-73)…

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives…

(“In Memory of Sigmund Freud”, 1939)

Contradictory Accusations

Freud’s life and work have been subject to extraordinary investigation and attracted enduring, often contradictory, criticism.

HE HAS BEEN CHARGED WITH TELLING LIES ABOUT HIS CLINICAL PRACTICE, MORAL COWARDICE IN HIS THEORIZING, COLLUSION IN MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE AND OVERWEENING AMBITION. … ACCUSED OF DRUG ADDICTION AND THE DEMONIZATION OF CHILDREN. … REPROACHED FOR BOTH UNORIGINALITY AND MYTH-MAKING, STATING THE OBVIOUS AND MYSTIFYING US WITH THE OBSCURE. … HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR DELAYING OUR RECOGNITION OF INFANTILE SEXUAL ABUSE AND FOR THE INVENTION OF FALSE MEMORIES OF INFANTILE SEXUAL ABUSE. … TO HAVE ENCOURAGED BOTH LIBERTINISM AND PURITANISM, MISOGYNY AND HOMOPHOBIA. … HARBOURED INCESTUOUS CURIOSITY ABOUT HIS DAUGHTER, TO HAVE COMMITTED ADULTERY WITH HIS SISTER-IN-LAW AND TO HAVE PLANNED THE MURDER OF HIS FORMER FRIEND, WILHELM FLIESS.

Freud has been described as “an evil genius” and “one of the world’s great hypocrites”. And if all this were not enough, his theories have been blamed for alienating us from ourselves and undermining the very values upon which the whole of Western civilization is based.

The Death of Psychoanalysis

Opponents of psychoanalysis have anticipated its impending death from the moment it was born. Alfred Hoche, Professor of Psychiatry at Freiburg, took that view in a 1910 paper read at Baden-Baden. “On observing this movement, one can take comfort from one thing, namely the certainty… that it will abate before long.”

“… A PSYCHICAL EPIDEMIC IN THE ANNALS OF MEDICINE”, SAYS HOCHE. ECHOED BY BORIS SIDIS, A PSYCHOPATHOLOGIST IN AMERICA – THE “MAD EPIDEMIC OF FREUDISM WHICH TAKES US BACK TO THE MIDDLE AGES…”

Again, in 1910, at a Congress of Neurologists and Psychiatrists in Hamburg, Professor Wilhelm Weygandt pounded the table with his fist: “This is not a topic for discussion at a scientific meeting; it is a matter for the police!” In 1911, David Eder presented the first paper on psychoanalysis to a meeting of the British Medical Association: “A Case of Obsession and Hysteria Treated by the Freud Psychoanalytic Method”…

THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE EXPRESSED ITS OUTRAGE BY TROOPING OUT OF THE ROOM WHEN HE’D FINISHED SPEAKING…

In 1925, psychoanalysis was once more dismissed by another American psychologist J. McKeen Cattell as “not so much a question of science as a matter of taste, Dr Freud being an artist who lives in the fairyland of dreams among the ogres of perverted sex”. Karl Kraus (1874-1936), the Viennese satirist, summed up the hostility to psychoanalysis in his magazine Die Fackel (The Torch): “Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.” But he went further…

IF MANKIND, WITH ALL ITS REPULSIVE FAULTS, IS AN ORGANISM, THEN THE PSYCHOANALYST IS ITS EXCREMENT!

This extreme vilification of psychoanalysis in the early 1900s has been sustained to our day. Compare what Kraus said then with the definition of “psychoanalyst” in Professor Stuart Sutherland’s Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology (1989)…

THEY PICK OUR DREAMS AS IF THEY WERE OUR POCKETS… … A PERSON WHO TAKES MONEY FROM ANOTHER ON THE PRETENCE THAT IT IS FOR THE OTHER’S OWN GOOD.

More recently, the British philosopher Roger Scruton condemned Freud in a BBC radio broadcast of May 2001.

FREUD’S THOUGHTS ON INFANTILE SEXUALITY ARE THE THOUGHTS OF A PAEDOPHILE… I DIED OVER 60 YEARS AGO, BUT THEY STILL GO ON HATING PSYCHOANALYSIS!

Psychoanalysis has grown beyond what can be solely identified with Freud and his writings. Modern psychoanalytic theory and practice have evolved out of a hundred years of clinical experience accumulated on a worldwide basis. But a politicized movement against it continues to grow. A group in Britain calling itself Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility was formed in 1995 to speak out against racist, sexist and homophobic practices in psychoanalysis.

In 1996, the New York Times reported the postponement of a major exhibition on Sigmund Freud by the Library of Congress following protests by scholars. Nevertheless, even its most dedicated detractors today, such as Richard Webster in Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (1995), must concede that psychoanalysis “has every claim to be regarded as richer and more original than any other single intellectual tradition in the 20th century”. We should recall what Freud himself said to his colleagues at the second Psycho-Analytical Congress in 1910…

THE HARSHEST TRUTHS ARE HEARD AND RECOGNIZED AT LAST, AFTER THE INTERESTS THEY HAVE INJURED AND THE EMOTIONS THEY HAVE ROUSED HAVE EXHAUSTED THEIR FURY.

The continuing “Freud Wars” have deflected attention from the serious questions posed by psychoanalysis. Let’s begin by seeing what these are…

Did Freud Invent the Unconscious?

Freud did not invent the notion of unconscious mental processes. In 1896, when he coined the term “psycho-analysis”, the unconscious mind was already a fashionable idea among many 19th-century poets and philosophers of the “Romantic School”, such as William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in England and J.W. von Goethe (1749-1832) in Germany.

THERE IS A PART OF THE MIND INACCESSIBLE, EVEN ALIEN, TO ORDINARY CONSCIOUSNESS… YET IT IS OVERRIDINGLY IMPORTANT IN SHAPING OUR EVERYDAY LIVES. THE NATURAL SCIENCES HAVE SUCCEEDED TO UNDERSTAND THE PHYSICAL WORLD. I WANT TO APPLY THAT SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS TO THE INNER WORLD OF SUBJECTIVE REALITY.

Freud gave the notion of unconscious mental processes a new twist by claiming that they could be usefully investigated and modified.

Freud saw the mind as subject to the “dynamic forces” of instincts, urges, feelings, emotions and ideas. These were transformed or displaced from one object to another as they moved across the boundary of consciousness. Such “displacements” help us to bear unpleasant truths.

THERE IS A FORM OF UNIVERSAL SELF-DECEPTION IN THE FACE OF PAINFUL, UNACCEPTABLE TRUTHS. NEUROTIC SYMPTOMS ARE A KIND OF LIE.

In this way, Freud justified a new way of treating these symptoms – a way of helping people face the truth about themselves – based upon a prolonged and uniquely intimate dialogue between patient and doctor.

Strange Friendship

In 1887, a young ear, nose and throat specialist named Wilhelm Fliess (1858-1928) attended lectures given by Freud in Vienna. Fliess was about the same age as Freud and came from a similar background. Like Freud, he had a wide range of intellectual interests and both men were uninhibited by convention. They became firm friends.

FOR TEN YEARS, BETWEEN AUGUST 1890 AND SEPTEMBER 1900, WE CORRESPONDED REGULARLY. WE ALSO MET FOR LONG WEEKEND ”CONGRESSES” TO DISCUSS OUR IDEAS AND GIVE EACH OTHER MUTUAL SUPPORT.

Freud felt rejected by the medical establishment, but in his eyes Fliess was “the Kepler of biology” and his praise was “nectar and ambrosia”.

Freud was then working on a general theory of psychology based on his notion of instinctual drive and its expression in psychic energy – to which he gave the name libido, from the Latin “lust” or “desire”.

FLIESS WAS INTERESTED IN “BIO-RHYTHMS” WHICH HE THOUGHT WERE SOMEHOW DETERMINED BY SPECIAL NUMBERS IN A QUASI-MYSTICAL WAY. I ALSO HAVE A THEORY WHICH CONNECTS THE MUCOUS MEMBRANES OF THE NOSE TO THE FUNCTIONING OF THE GENITAL APPARATUS.

The Genital Nose

Freud marked the following passage in his copy of Fliess’s 1902 book, On the Causal Connection Between the Nose and the Sexual Organ:

WOMEN WHO MASTURBATE ARE GENERALLY DYSMENORRHOEAL [HAVING PAINFUL OR DIFFICULT MENSTRUATION]. THEY CAN ONLY BE FINALLY CURED THROUGH AN OPERATION ON THE NOSE IF THEY TRULY GIVE UP THIS BAD PRACTICE.

Freud was so taken by Fliess’s cranky ideas that he allowed him to operate twice on his own nose and called on him regularly to advise on the benefits of nasal surgery for his patients.

The Case of Emma Eckstein

Emma Eckstein was one of Freud’s earliest analytic patients. She was 27 and, among other complaints, suffered from stomach ailments and menstrual problems. As the Freud critic Jeffrey Masson says in his 1984 book, The Assault on Truth, these complaints would undoubtedly have been attributed by both Freud and Fliess to masturbation. And probably Emma herself concurred in this view. Freud, and at his instigation Emma, underwent surgery with Fliess in early 1895. Freud was pleased with the results of his own operation.