Rediscovering the
unconscious
Preface to the
paperback edition of
Why Freud Was Wrong
RICHARD
WEBSTER
THE
FIRST OCCURRENCE of the word ‘psychoanalysis’ was in 1896, the same year
as the death of Freud’s father. It was then (or perhaps a year earlier,
with the publication of Studies on Hysteria) that an obscure
Austrian neurologist launched what was to become the most significant
medical movement in the whole of human history. In the century which has
passed since, psychoanalysis has been so deeply absorbed into our culture
that we have almost forgotten that it was ever a medical movement in the
first place. The sheer speed with which this happened has sometimes made
it difficult to divine the reasons which lie behind the success of
psychoanalysis. All too frequently this success has itself been
interpreted as a measure of the rightness or the revolutionary profundity
of Freud’s ideas. One of the aims of this book is to suggest that the
reverse of this view may be nearer to the truth. I have tried above all to
explain why a psychological system whose language and concepts may
initially seem strange and unsettling has been experienced by so many
people as familiar and reassuring.
Precisely because
some people do find psychoanalytic ideas comforting, any work which
criticises Freud is liable to provoke passionate resentment. This book is
no exception. For although most of the responses to Why Freud Was
Wrong on its publication in 1995 were warm and enthusiastic, a
significant number were not. In some cases these followed a traditional
pattern and Freud was defended with the kind of fierce zeal which has been
customary in the psychoanalytic movement since its beginnings. Other
responses, however, were themselves tempered by a degree of scepticism
about psychoanalysis.
One of the
arguments deployed by Freud’s more moderate defenders suggested that to
portray psychoanalysis as a false science, as I do in this book, is to
misunderstand its nature. According to this view the whole point of
psychoanalysis is that it is not a science at all; it should be
judged not as a contribution to our systematic knowledge of human nature
but as a kind of poetry. Psychoanalytic theories, therefore, can never be
rejected as ‘false’ and Freud, as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips puts it,
‘can only be more or less inspiring, more or less interesting’ (The
Observer, 17 September 1995). This view of Freud is certainly
seductive. For by elegantly dissolving the truth-claims which are
everywhere apparent in psychoanalysis it makes it possible to evade the
task of evaluating Freud’s theories critically.
Those who seek to
soften and relativise psychoanalysis in this way, however, can only do so
by reinventing it. In reality it was Freud himself who triumphantly
claimed the title of ‘scientist’ and who wrote that psychoanalysis ‘has
put us in a position to establish psychology on foundations similar to
those of any other science, such, for instance, as physics’ (SE26, p.
193-7). Freud’s belief that he was creating a genuine science remains
crucial to any understanding of how psychoanalysis developed. For, as I
have tried to show in the main body of this book, it was his relentless
and reductive scientism which, harnessed to his need for fame, led him
deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of error.
It is certainly
true that Freud pointed to the poets as precursors of psychoanalysis. But
the whole point of this claim was to suggest that psychoanalysis had
succeeded in putting ‘poetic’ insights into human nature on an entirely
different footing so that a set of mere intuitions had now been
incorporated into a ‘hard’ scientific theory. If Freud had indeed
succeeded in preserving these insights, the cultural status of
psychoanalysis might be well-deserved in spite of its scientific
waywardness. But one of the most damaging of all the effects which
psychoanalysis has had upon our culture is to be found in the way in which
Freud’s pre-eminence has helped to weaken or neutralise many of these
genuine insights under the pretext of strengthening them.
To take what is
perhaps the most significant example, the idea that human behaviour is
influenced by impulses or feelings of which we sometimes remain unaware
has long been a commonplace both of vernacular and of poetic psychology.
It was in the seventeenth century that Pascal observed that ‘The heart has
its reasons of which reason knows nothing.’ It was in middle of the
nineteenth century that the Goncourt brothers recorded this confession of
Sainte-Beuve:
‘I have in my head
here, or here,’ – he tapped his cranium – ‘a drawer, a pigeonhole, that I
have always been afraid to look squarely into. All my work, all that I do,
the spate of articles that I send forth – all that is explained by my
desire not to know what is in that pigeon hole. I have stopped it up,
plugged it with books, so as not to have the leisure to think about it,
not to be free to come and go through it.’ (The Goncourt Journals,
1851-1870, Doubleday, 1953, p. 193.)
As a matter of
cultural habit we now tend to categorise such observations as ‘Freudian’.
Yet the view of unconscious motivation which has been expressed by
countless writers, including Pascal and Sainte-Beuve, was incorporated
into Freud’s ‘scientific’ psychology only after it had been both
technicalised and medicalised. The wisdom contained in a diverse
collection of fluid and metaphorical insights was thus displaced by the
scientifically spurious notion that there was actually a mental entity
called the Unconscious – a biologically circumscribed area of the mind
with pathogenic power. Freud, as has long been recognised by scholars, did
not invent the idea of ‘unconscious motivation’. He did, however, empty it
of many of the subtleties it had formerly contained in order to make it
into the basis of a theory of psychological medicine.
The belief that it
was Freud who invented the idea of ‘projection’ is similarly ill-founded.
The term itself was used in English by George Eliot in her translation of
Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity in 1854. The concept
of projection goes back much further, as may be seen from Shakespeare’s
lines in King Lear:
Thou rascal
beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash
that whore? Strip thy own back;
Thou hotly lusts
to use her in that kind
For which thou
whip’st her. (IV, vi, 157-60)
Once again,
however, although Freud invoked the idea of projection, he also
impoverished it by pinning it into his own mechanistic system. Again and
again Freud strangled in false science the very ‘poetic’ insights which he
had glimpsed in imaginative literature. The best place to look for these
insights and to encounter them in their full richness and plenitude is not
in psychoanalysis; it is in the works of the novelists, poets, and
dramatists themselves. This is not to say that such insights cannot or
should not be incorporated into systematic or scientific theories. It is
simply to suggest that Freud’s own attempt to do this failed. When it
comes to psychological insight the common wealth of our literary tradition
remains richer by far than psychoanalysis, and this should be recognised
more widely than it is.
Yet, partly
because of the way in which he used the aura of science and of medicine to
gain intellectual authority for his ideas, Freud sometimes seems to be
regarded as the only possible source for any deep insight into human
motivation. Psychoanalysis has become, in some quarters at least, a kind
of dead letter box into which any profound insight into human nature whose
origins are obscure, unknown or insufficiently ‘scientific’ is
automatically sorted. By extension any critique of psychoanalysis which
uses poetic, vernacular or empirically based insights in an attempt to
analyse the behaviour of Freud himself (as I do in this book), is seen by
some as self-contradictory or as a covert exercise in the very
psychoanalysis it seeks to repudiate.
One of the
inferences which may be drawn from such views is that many intellectuals
(including some active supporters of Freud) have managed to remain
surprisingly ill-acquainted with, or careless of, the distinctive details
of Freud’s own theories. These still tend to be characterised not by their
actual content so much as by the general impression that they deal with
aspects of human nature which are dark, hidden or complex. Psychoanalysis
comes in consequence to be seen not as the highly specific theory of
mental functioning and sexual development which it is, but as an
affirmation of human complexity.
Wherever this
attitude prevails almost any account of human nature which partakes of the
necessary complexity tends to be assimilated to psychoanalysis, and
genuine psychological insights which have no connection with Freud come to
be associated with him. As a result we tend to hide the real, historical
Freud behind a mythical figure who rules over an empire of almost infinite
psychological depth and complexity. The historical reality, as I have
tried to show in this book, was very different. It is not simply that
Freud lacked the extraordinary psychological insight he has conventionally
been credited with. It is that, in a number of his most crucial
formulations and case histories, he shows an almost complete lack of
ordinary psychological insight and sensitivity.
The fact that some
readers of the original edition of this book resisted its conclusions so
fiercely perhaps illustrates how difficult it is for us to relinquish our
intellectual heroes, and to face up to the reality of their relative
intellectual poverty. But I suspect that it also illustrates something
which is more poignant, and ultimately more tragic. It illustrates how
difficult we sometimes find it to come to terms with the reality of our
own relative intellectual and psychological wealth, and how much easier it
is to attribute that ordinary wealth to those we have been conditioned to
revere and to worship.
