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 'MURDER
IS A CRIME. Describing murder is not. Sex is not a
crime. Describing it is.'1
These words of Gershon Legman express well
something of the confusion, fear and anxiety which
have surrounded the subjects of sex and violence
for very many centuries
This
confusion clearly affects individuals at the most
intimate and private level. But it is also
significant in intellectual terms. For to think at
all about subjects which are hedged round by such
powerful taboos requires not simply lucidity of
intellect, but emotional fluency of the kind we do
not normally associate with the scientific mind. To
think clearly requires even more unusual
capacities. It also calls for a degree of
intellectual rebelliousness which is rare among
those trained in the natural sciences.
Sigmund
Freud is frequently held to have possessed all of
these qualities. The American writer Lucy Freeman
begins her popular study of Freud and the
psychoanalytic movement by observing that nearly
twenty-one centuries have passed since Plato wrote,
'the life that is unexamined is not worth living',
and advised man to 'Know thyself'. She goes on to
describe the birth of psychoanalysis in the
following terms:
For
close to two millenniums Plato's celebrated
dictum seemed to pose an impossible challenge to
mankind. Then, at the dawn of the twentieth
century, a lone doctor in Vienna, Sigmund Freud,
conducted what Alexander Pope, in 1733, called
'the proper study of mankind'. Freud made
startling discoveries that were to revolutionise
the thinking of the world about the mind of man.
Five centuries before Christ, Heraclitus had
said, 'The soul of man is a far country, which
cannot be approached or explored.' But one man,
Sigmund Freud, not only crossed the frontier of
that far country, but penetrated its heartland,
and through his writings and personal influence
made the inner landscape available to all who
dared follow.2
Lucy
Freeman's journalistic fluency, and the seemingly
naive assurance with which she disposes of more
than two millennia of intellectual history, make it
very tempting to dismiss her words as yet another
example of the myth-making which has always
surrounded the figure of Freud. Yet the most
striking feature of Freeman's brief conspectus of
Western thought is just how much truth it contains.
For one of the simplest but most startling facts of
intellectual history is that, until the beginning
of the twentieth century, European thinkers made
virtually no significant contribution to the
scientific study of human nature and human
behaviour. For at least half a century after
Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species we
possessed no systematic theory which even attempted
to explain the exceptionally violent nature of our
own species, the extraordinary range and complexity
of our non-reproductive sexual behaviour or the
depth and power of some of the most ordinary human
emotions. The fierce taboos and the atmosphere of
religious unreason which surrounded nearly every
form of intimate human relationship for centuries,
had, it would seem, triumphed over science itself.
Here, at least, the advance of human knowledge,
which in almost all other areas had proved
irresistible, had been held back.
That
Freud eventually challenged many of these ancient
taboos cannot be disputed. As the intrepid
intellectual adventurer he was, he led an assault
on the highest peak of human knowledge in a manner
which has seemed to many observers not simply
impressive, but in some respects magnificent. Yet
the view that his expedition was triumphant -- that
Freud actually succeeded in solving the enigma of
human nature -- is one which, in the last twenty
years or so, has been questioned or rejected by a
series of increasingly hostile critics.
Indeed
the sheer volume of such attacks has sometimes led
to the mistaken impression that psychoanalysis is
already a defeated force. Freud, however, has
proved more difficult to vanquish than many of his
opponents have calculated. As Walter Kendrick has
written, 'How can you simply kill the Father who
taught you that his death must be your
desire?'3
Although some psychoanalysts themselves now profess
a degree of defensive agnosticism about Freud's
theories, the movement which he founded continues
to show many signs of vigorous life. If the figure
of Freud no longer bestrides the intellectual
landscape in triumph, it seems at times that he
still lies across it like Gulliver, diminishing his
critics by the sheer scale and grandeur of his
enterprise, and shrugging off as pin-pricks the
lances which they hurl against him. 'Why,' asks
Phyllis Grosskurth in a recent study of Freud's
inner circle, 'has Sigmund Freud's life and work
commanded such undiminished interest? Today -- as
we approach the end of the century -- he appears to
have been its leading intellectual force, a far
more tenacious influence than Karl
Marx.'4
More
recently still, in a book which sets out to answer
some of Freud's critics, the American historian
Paul Robinson expressed optimism about the future
of psychoanalysis:
Unless
I am seriously mistaken ... Freud's recent
critics will do him no lasting damage. At most
they have delayed the inevitable process by
which he will settle into his rightful place in
intellectual history as a thinker of the first
magnitude. Indeed the very latest scholarly
studies of Freud suggest that the anti-Freudian
moment may already have begun to
pass.5
Robinson
goes on to quote the view of Harold Bloom that 'No
twentieth-century writer -- not even Proust or
Joyce or Kafka -- rivals Freud's position as the
central imagination of our age.'6
The fact that such views as these can still be
seriously advanced is a mark of the status
psychoanalysis continues to enjoy in at least some
quarters of intellectual culture.
One
of the reasons that psychoanalysis has proved so
resilient in the face of recent attacks is that
Freud's theories were themselves formulated in an
environment of hostility. Those who follow Freud
are thus able to account for the continuing
scepticism about his ideas by invoking the same
arguments which he deployed against his original
detractors. One of the arguments resorted to most
frequently is that which explains all criticism of
psychoanalysis as a product of 'resistance'. Like
many of Freud's ideas this notion contains an
element of truth. For there can be no doubt that
some people do reject his theories because of a
conscious or unconscious aversion to their sexual
content. But what defenders of psychoanalysis
rarely if ever acknowledge is that theories about
sexual behaviour which are wrong are just as likely
to be met with resistance as theories which are
right. The argument about unconscious resistance is
therefore a diversion from the main issue. What is
far more important about some recent criticism of
Freud is that a number of scholars who do not
regard the subject-matter of psychoanalysis as
offensive or indelicate remain genuinely doubtful
about the validity of psychoanalytic theory. They
are dissatisfied with it because it fails to do the
only thing we ultimately have a right to demand of
explanatory theories -- it fails to explain.
I
share this dissatisfaction. Psychoanalysis is, I
believe, one of the most subtle of our many
attempts to use reason in a 'magical' rather than
in a scientific manner -- to use reason, that is to
say, not in order to provide a genuine solution to
an intellectual problem, but in order to provide a
defence against the forces which we fear, and
against aspects of our own nature which arouse
anxiety. Freud saw himself as the rational foe of
religion. Significantly, however, far from setting
out radically to subvert the values of
Judaeo-Christian asceticism which were deeply
internalised in his own culture, Freud made the
Lamarckian assumption that such asceticism had
become part of our biological inheritance, so that
it now belonged to our very nature. It is for this
reason that his notion of therapy contains an
implicit endorsement of the oldest of all ascetic
ideals -- the glorification of the spirit at the
expense of the body:
We
liberate sexuality through our treatment, but
not in order that man may from now on be
dominated by sexuality, but in order to make a
suppression possible -- a rejection of the
instincts under the guidance of a higher agency
... We try to replace the pathological process
with rejection.7
Driven
by what some have construed as fierce intellectual
honesty, Freud declined to excise sexuality from
human nature completely. To some extent at least we
have benefited from his attitude. But throughout
the twentieth century, from the time of D. H.
Lawrence to the time of Gershon Legman, Nancy
Friday and their successors, there have been many
who have rebelled against Victorian primness with
far more gusto and far more enthusiasm for the
realm of the obscene than can ever be glimpsed in
the writings of any psychoanalyst. In the climate
of explicitness which these latter-day rebels have
helped to create it is now possible to see that
psychoanalysis is far less adventurous and far less
open than we once thought. Significantly, the
science of sexuality which Freud brought into being
is couched in a language purged of obscenity. Not
only this, but Freud's own attitude towards some of
the commonest forms of sexual behaviour, including
masturbation, homosexuality and many aspects of
women's sexuality, was one of distaste bordering on
disgust. This attitude is reflected in
psychoanalytic theories which are, in many
respects, a flight away from the very forms of
sexual behaviour which Freud claimed fearlessly to
confront.
Given
this cryptic conservatism it is perhaps not
surprising that some writers have regarded Freud's
doctrines as being compatible with traditional
religious beliefs. One of Freud's earliest and most
enthusiastic followers, the Protestant pastor Oskar
Pfister, saw psychoanalysis as a gospel of love
comparable with that preached by Jesus. More
recently both Erik Erikson in his portrait of
Luther, and Norman O. Brown in his Life Against
Death have pointed to the numerous similarities
between Luther's view of the human condition and
that found in psychoanalysis.8
The resemblances which Brown and Erikson found
between Lutheran Protestantism and classical
psychoanalysis can scarcely be disputed. Some of
those who are members of a Protestant church, or
who hold any form of religious belief, may take
comfort in discovering that the revealed truths
perceived by Luther are in harmony with the
analytic hypotheses produced by Freud. Those who
possess greater intellectual caution, however, or
those who hold no religious beliefs, may well feel
some scepticism in the face of such an easy
congruence of ancient faith and modern reason. They
will be prompted to ask to what extent we should
regard psychoanalysis not as a scientific approach
to human nature but as a disguised continuation of
the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
For
if psychoanalysis seems in some quarters to have
attained the weight and seriousness of orthodoxy it
is perhaps for no other reason than that it is a
form of orthodoxy itself -- a subtle reconstruction
in a challenging and modern form of some of the
most ancient religious doctrines and sexual
ideologies.
This
view of psychoanalysis has sometimes been taken by
other writers. But it has not been taken very far.
One of the reasons for this is that today, in our
sceptical materialism, we tend to be profoundly
unfamiliar with the doctrines and eschatology which
once lay at the heart of the Judaeo-Christian
tradition. So powerful has the ethos of secular
rationalism become that we rarely recognise the
fundamental role which has been played in history
by irrational fantasies -- by religious dreams of
redemption and world-purification, by miracles,
rituals and magic, by the belief in angels, demons
and witches, by visions of cosmic struggles between
the forces of light and the forces of darkness, by
the fear of Satan and the belief in the eternal
punishment of the wicked.
Such
fantasies were once the very essence of religious
orthodoxy, and it was in the white-hot religious
zeal which was associated with them up to and
beyond the time of the Reformation that our modern
rational conscience was originally forged. But one
of the effects of our internalisation of the
rational Protestant conscience has been actually to
obscure the conditions in which that conscience was
created. Out of its very severity the Protestant
mind has tended progressively to repudiate the very
supernaturalism which originally licensed its
strictness, together with all those aspects of
Christianity which no longer seem compatible with
its modern rational form. As a result, although the
doctrines of Heaven and Hell, of Original Sin and
of the Last Judgement may have some nominal
significance for us, they are no longer part either
of our imaginative or of our intellectual reality.
The fantasies which were once expressed in
Christian demonology and in Christian visions of
hell have been progressively relegated to the
thriving sub-cultures of Satanism and science
fiction, of horror comics and pornography. In the
dissociated post-religious culture which has in
this way been brought into being, Christians and
rational humanists alike are often unable to bring
themselves to believe that the very forms of
fantasy they have been conditioned to revile once
lay at the orthodox heart of the religious
tradition which our culture tends still to revere.
Our modern cultural predicament has been most
succinctly and poignantly expressed by the novelist
John Updike: 'Alas we have become, in our
Protestantism, more virtuous than the myths which
taught us virtue; we judge them
barbaric.'9
Our
culturally orthodox lack of familiarity with our
own culture has not only brought about the virtual
destruction of our historical consciousness, but it
has also profoundly affected every area of
contemporary intellectual life. Above all it has
determined our reaction to modern theories of human
nature. In considering such theories what must
always be borne in mind is that it is only in the
last century or so that secular theories of human
nature have become at all common. Before that time
intellectuals generally felt little need of such
theories. They felt no need of them for the simple
reason that they subscribed, almost without
exception, to the creationist theory of human
nature which is contained in Judaism, in
Christianity and in Islam. It was only in the early
part of the nineteenth century, as the 'truths' of
revealed religion were increasingly discredited,
that an acute need for secular theories of human
nature began to emerge.
The
confident assumption which is generally made by
modern rationalist thinkers is that the
propositions about human nature which are contained
in such theories as Marxism, psychoanalysis,
existentialism, functionalism, and structural
anthropology, are of a quite different order to the
propositions about human nature which are contained
within the Judaeo-Christian theory which they
effectively replace. Whatever judgement may be
passed on particular theories, it is at least
generally assumed that modern thinkers have
succeeded in freeing themselves from the
superstitious and theological modes of thought
which dominated those intellectuals who belonged to
an era of faith. It is, however, just this
assumption which needs to be questioned. For
although such secular theories as psychoanalysis
and structural anthropology have evidently shed the
theism of Christianity, it is not at all clear that
they have repudiated the view of human nature which
was once associated with creationist theology, and
with Judaeo-Christian doctrines of sin and
redemption. Modern theorists of human nature,
indeed, trapped as they are within a culture which
has systematically mystified its own strongest
traditions, are rather in the position of the
mariner who sets out to sea without a chart. When
he lands at a different point on the same continent
from which he originally set sail, there is always
the danger that he may fail to recognise this, and
announce instead that he has discovered a new
world.
In
the last hundred years such thinkers as Marx,
Freud, Sartre and Lévi-Strauss have, I
believe, repeatedly made just such a voyage.
Setting out from a culture alienated from its
traditional beliefs, disconsolately counting the
small change of its new spiritual poverty, they
have returned richly laden with belief and
certainty in order to announce the discovery of the
Brave New Worlds of dialectical materialism, of
psychoanalysis, of existentialism and of
structuralism. Many thinkers have greeted these
discoveries with relief and enthusiasm. But because
of their profound lack of familiarity with the
orthodoxies of their own culture, they have often
failed to recognise that the New Worlds in question
are in reality but part of the old religious
continent which was once their own, and that what
they have embraced are not fresh theories of human
nature but Judaeo-Christian orthodoxies which have
been reconstructed in a secular form, safe from the
attacks of science precisely because they are
presented as science.
Any
culture which is founded upon the internalisation
of a body of sacred doctrine, but which allows that
body of doctrine to fall into obscurity, is always
in danger of recreating old errors in new secular
forms, and of allowing unexamined forms of
irrationalism to determine its very definition of
rationality. It is to this danger that our own
culture has succumbed over and over again during
the past century.
What
I have set out to do in this book is to show in
detail how the creation of psychoanalysis in the
closing years of the nineteenth century and its
development and reception during the twentieth
century has followed just this pattern. At the same
time I have tried to use what amounts to an essay
in cultural analysis in order to untie some of the
complex intellectual knots which have been tied in
our understanding of and of human nature by Freud
and his followers.
I
have devoted a whole book to a theory I believe to
be mistaken partly because I think it is mistaken
in a particularly interesting way, and partly in
order to establish the need for an alternative
theory of human sexuality and human nature. It is
because my ultimate aim is constructive, rather
than destructive, that I have not yielded to the
temptation to dismiss the psychoanalytic movement
out of hand as being without intellectual value or
significance. In the past twenty or thirty years
there have been a number of attacks on
psychoanalysis which have taken such a view. But I
believe that one of the great dangers in any
critique of Freud is that of underestimating the
real achievements of those who have written within
the psychoanalytic tradition. For this tradition
has every claim to be regarded as richer and more
original than any other single intellectual
tradition in the twentieth century. Many of Freud's
earliest followers were themselves highly creative
and the writings of Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, Victor
Tausk and Hans Sachs still reward careful reading.
In its subsequent development the psychoanalytic
tradition has included the original and sometimes
heterodox contributions of Wilhelm Reich, Karen
Horney, Erich Fromm, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby,
Bruno Bettelheim, Anthony Storr and Nancy Chodorow.
Valuable contributions have also been made by many
other psychoanalytic writers -- I think in
particular of the American analysts Lawrence Kubie
and Joel Kovel.10
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1 Gershon Legman,
quoted in Gay Talese, Thy Neighbour's Wife,
Pan, 1980, p. 389
2 Lucy Freeman, Freud
Rediscovered, 1980, New York: Arbor House, pp.
1-2.
3 Walter Kendrick, review
of Jeffrey Masson's "Freud: The Assault on Truth",
Voice Literary Supplement, June 1984.
4 Phyllis Grosskurth,
The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the
Politics of Psychoanalysis, Jonathan Cape,
1991, p. 14.
5Paul Robinson, Freud
and His Critics, University of California
Press, 1993, p. 269
6Harold Bloom, 'Freud, the
Greatest Modern Writer', New York Times Book
Review, 23 March 1986, quoted in Robinson, p.
270.
7Freud, Minutes of the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, ed. Herman
Nunberg and Ernst Federn, vol. II, New York:
International Universities Press, 1967.
8Erik H. Erikson, Young
Man Luther, New York: W. W. Norton, 1958;
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959.
9John Updike, in his
introduction to F. J. Sheed (ed.), Soundings in
Satanism, Mowbrays, 1972, p. vii. The
best-known modern example of this attitude will be
found in Bishop John Robinson's Honest to
God (SCM Press Ltd, 1963), in which the
traditional doctrines and beliefs of Christianity
are systematically repudiated. John Robinson's
position is very close to that outlined by the
Anglican lay-theologian John Wren-Lewis, whose
words he quotes:
I
cannot emphasise too strongly that acceptance of
the Christian faith became possible for me only
because I did not have to go back on my
wholesale rejection of the superstitious beliefs
which surrounded me ... There is a misplaced
sense of loyalty which makes many Christians
feel reluctant to come out in open opposition to
anything that calls itself by the same name, or
uses words like 'God' and 'Christ'; even
Christians who in practice dislike superstition
as much as I do still often treat it as a minor
aberration to be hushed up rather than a radical
perversion to be denounced ... In fact a very
large part of what passes for religion in our
society is exactly the sort of neurotic illness
which Freud describes, and the first essential
step in convincing people that Christianity can
be true in spite of Freud is to assert outright
that belief based on the projection mechanisms
he describes is false, however much it may say
'Lord, Lord.' It is not enough to describe such
beliefs as childish or primitive, for this
implies that the truth is something like them,
even though more 'refined' and 'enlightened',
whereas in reality nothing like the 'God' and
'Christ' I was brought up to believe in can be
true. It is not merely that the Old Man in the
Sky is only a mythological symbol for the
Infinite Mind behind the scenes, nor yet that
this Being is benevolent rather than fearful;
the truth is that this whole way of thinking is
wrong, and if such a Being did exist he would be
the very devil (quoted in Honest to God, p.
43).
The
theology of John Robinson and John Wren-Lewis is by
no means as novel as might be supposed.
Historically speaking this kind of theology has its
origins in extreme Puritanism. In 1650 the Leveller
Gerrard Winstanley wrote that the traditional
Christian, who 'thinks God is in the heavens above
the skies, and so prays to that God which he
imagines to be there and everywhere ... worships
his own imagination which is the devil' (quoted in
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down,
Penguin, 1975, p. 140). It is both interesting and
significant that while Wren-Lewis and Winstanley
both decry 'superstitions' neither of them can
dispense with the concept of 'devil' and both end
by eschewing reasoned criticism of the beliefs they
oppose in favour of a kind of exasperated
demonology.
10Although I have
included in this list psychoanalytic writers who
have, in my view, made interesting contributions to
psychology, the inclusion of any particular writer
should not be construed as an unqualified
endorsement of their work. In the case of John
Bowlby, for example, it remains my impression that,
for all the immense value of his work in changing
hospital practice, his theoretical contribution
tends to be accepted uncritically by too many
writers (particularly those who are out of sympathy
with Freud), simply because it appears to have
empirical foundations and a sounder relation to
Darwinian theory than can be claimed by classical
psychoanalysis. For an interesting view of Bowlby,
see Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment
Theory, Routledge, 1993. See also Michael
Rutter's Maternal Deprivation Reassessed,
2nd edition, Penguin, 1981. Rutter's criticisms of
Bowlby, though mildly put, add up to a significant
repudiation of the lofty estimate which Bowlby
formed of his own theories.
I yoke together Lawrence Kubie and Joel Kovel
because of Kovel's White Racism: A
Psychohistory, Allen Lane, 1972, in which Kovel
acknowledges his debt to Kubie's 'The Fantasy of
Dirt', Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. VI,
1937. Kovel is one of the few psychoanalysts to
have appreciated something of the value and
profundity of Kubie's paper
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