In fact, however, though each has been celebrated, none of these works
presents a cogent argument that goes to the heart of psychoanalysis and
stands up to careful scrutiny.  Sulloway's book is replete with
quotations from, and references to, historical sources in nineteenth
century biology and medicine. But this scholarly superstructure does not
conceal the essential unsoundness of his argument, which is that Freud
tried to hide the biological influences on his thinking and created only
a "crypto-biology".  Grunbaum's work is that of a philosopher of physics
and comes heavy with logical and technical-sounding jargon.  But again,
the substance of his argument is not persuasive, amounting essentially
to the claim that psychoanalytic hypotheses are on a logical par with
those in particle physics and should be assessed accordingly. Webster's
work, more so than that of Sulloway and much more so than that of
Grunbaum, was a carefully marketed product, skilfully tailored for a
semi-popular, educated audience. Whereas Sulloway and Grunbaum, however
misguidedly, were each trying to say something new, Webster's book was
geared to capitalise on an already existing fashionable mood of
scepticism about psychoanalysis.  The book was a critical success
because it deals in a breezy way with large issues of culture, science
and religion without making serious intellectual demands on its readers.
Purporting to describe the place of psychoanalysis in what Webster with
smooth vagueness refers to as "Judaeo-Christian" culture, the book in
substance is little more than a mosaic of old charges against
psychoanalysis, chief among them being that it is a secular religion.
Webster insists that Freud's willingness to take seriously the idea of
the soul is essentially theological and unscientific. He calls for a
Darwinian psychology to replace psychoanalysis. How this might be
achieved, however, he gives no indication.

Webster, like his two critical predecessors, misses the real
significance of psychoanalysis in modern thought and experience.   The
significance of psychoanalysis is that it represents an evolution both
in the idea of natural science and in the idea of the soul.  The idea of
natural science evolves so that it can encompass ethical problems and
dilemmas, which prior to this had been regarded as the delimiting point
of science. The idea of the soul evolves from being an expression of our
relation with  transcendent God to being an expression of our inherently
divided animal nature and of our need to achieve coherence and identity
in spite of that divided nature.

The failure of each of these three critics to understand the significance of psychoanalysis is typified in a failure, by each, to
understand the significance of the first work of psychoanalysis, Studies
On Hysteria (1895).  The importance of Studies On Hysteria is that it
marks one of the points in modern thought at which the old traditional
borderline between natural science and moral thought gives way to a new
view in which ethical conflicts are viewed in a rational, scientific
way.  At this point, our view both of science and of moral conflict
necessarily undergoes an evolution. Science is no longer confined to the
world of material processes, and ethical conflict no longer belongs to
the realm of moral rules and principles derived independently of
nature.  Studies On Hysteria, however, stands at the threshold of this
transition and is, in certain respects, undecided between the old and
the new.  The old is represented by the theory of catharsis and
"hypnoid" states of dissociated consciousness.  This is old, because it
attributes disease purely to the forcibly forgotten memory of traumatic
experiences and to the emotions associated with those experiences which
have never been "abreacted." This theory does not look at the ethical
life of the patient, that is, the values and loyalties that govern her
and constitute her sense of identity. The theory of catharsis is
encapsulated in the famous quotation from the first chapter of the book,
the only one written jointly by Breuer and Freud:  "The hysteric suffers
mainly from reminiscences."  The new, on the other hand, is represented
by the theory of defence. This is new, because it views the
manifestations of disease as symbols of an ethical conflict or dilemma
that the patient is unable to resolve.  Here, there is no necessary
assumption of forgotten memory, or "unabreacted" emotions or, even, of
trauma. The theory of defence looks at disease in the context of a
conflict of identity in the patient, a conflict of loyalties between
self and family, between self and a sexual partner, and so on.  In
Studies On Hysteria Freud actually says that he has never come across a
case of hypnoid, that is, cathartic, hysteria.  Every case of hysteria
he has investigated, he says, has been an instance of hysteria caused by
defence.  Looking back at the 1890s in later works like the History of
the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), and his Autobiographical Study
(1924), he unequivocally identifies the theory of catharsis with Breuer
and attributes of defence to himself.

Now, to be sure, the situation in Studies On Hysteria as a whole is by
no means so clear-cut as this. Throughout his contributions to the book,
Freud maintains an uneasy compromise between the cathartic viewpoint and
the defence viewpoint. This becomes most pronounced in the most
important case in the book, that of Elizabeth von R.  In simple outline,
Elizabeth is torn between caring for her family, which has a long
history of serious illness, and establishing her own sexual identity in
marriage.  This is the defensive conflict she is caught in. At a certain
point, however, one of her sisters dies, opening the possibility for
Elizabeth to marry her brother-in-law to whom she is, nominally,
attracted. Freud makes much - too much -  of the scene at her sister's
deathbed where Elizabeth, supposedly, represses the traitorous thought,
"Now he can be mine."  Freud insists that this thought was repressed by
Elizabeth and consequently helped to maintain her illness. By the same
token, to be cured of her illness, she has to be free to "abreact" this
emotion. Freud places great emphasis on this traumatic memory, clearly
with the intention of making Elizabeth von R cohere with Breuer's
presentation of Anna O and the general theory of catharsis of memory. In
fact, however, what Freud illustrates mainly in Elizabeth von R is the
theory which roots Elizabeth's symptoms in the conflicting personal
attachments of her life. What makes his account of Elizabeth interesting
and persuasive is not the story of the deathbed scene. It is, rather,
the details of her close attachment to her father, her care for him
during his terminal illness, the young man she gave up in order to look
after her father, her concern for her mother, who is also seriously ill,
and the sense of emotional support she got from both her sisters'
husbands, both of whom she felt subsequently abandoned her.
Nevertheless, throughout the case Freud cannot make up his mind whether
to illustrate the cathartic theory of hysteria, which focuses on a
forcibly forgotten traumatic moment and its attendant emotion, or to
illustrate the defence theory of hysteria, which focuses much more
broadly on all the aspects of Elizabeth's attachments and loyalties.
There is a sense in which Freud is never wholly to make up his mind on
these two possible ways of looking at the unconscious.  In the years
immediately following Studies On Hysteria he plunges into the morass of
the "seduction theory", which is, of course, a full-scale reversion to
the cathartic theory, in that it supposes hysteria to be caused by
particular traumatic events.  Around 1900, in the case of Dora, he is
still seduced by the idea of "abreacting" particular traumatic emotions
- i.e. sexual emotions - and loses sight, at least at the therapeutic
level, of the much wider context of unresolved identity which is
tormenting Dora.  In a case as late as that of the Wolf Man, in 1914, a
work spoilt by polemics with Jung, Freud again gets carried away with
the details of a particular traumatic memory (of parental intercourse),
and loses sight of the divisions within the patient. Later aspects of
his metapsychology developed during the First World War, and some of his
views on wider cultural processes, developed in the 1920s and 1930s are
also certainly "cathartic" in general orientation. It must also be said,
of course, that the general cathartic viewpoint which stresses the role
in psychopathology of traumatic experiences and the need to deal with
them emotionally is a valuable one, provided it is handled in an
intelligent manner and with a sense of proportion. Nevertheless, this is
not where Freud's most central contribution to modern thought is to be
found.  The reason Freud has had such an impact on modern thought is not
to be found in the theory of catharsis and repressed memories but rather
in his development of the theory of defence. The theory of defence has,
essentially, nothing to say about the forgetting of traumatic
experiences. As such, it is not a theory about memory at all. The theory
of defence is the theory of conflict of identity, the conflict of
loyalties and values that marks the human condition.

Freud's contribution to medicine and to psychotherapy was to see that at
the root of all neurotic illness there is a conflict of loyalties and
identity; there is, in other words, an ethical dilemma.  He did not
always see this clearly, because theoretical interests of one sort or
another often distracted his attention. And in cases like those of
Elizabeth von R and Dora, one feels that he saw it almost in spite of
himself. Nevertheless, this was his crucial insight.  The theory of
defence, ultimately, is about the very nature of human intention
itself.  There is a fissuring in the kernel of our intentions, a
constant, silent, bifurcating in everything we intend.   And this
generates, all the time, conflicts about what we should do, and dilemmas
about who we are. We "defend" ourselves against these conflicts and
dilemmas because they always contain aspects that we cannot, in
practice, resolve. That is to say, we are continually forced to
interpret ourselves as being simpler in our intentions than we actually
are. And yet, though we have little choice but to defend ourselves
against the divisions in our intentions, ultimately they generally
impact upon us.  In the final analysis, the theory of defence is about
the way we shy from the necessity, as Nietzsche puts it, of becoming who
we are. Nature within us pushes us on, compelling us to abandon old
loyalties and identities. But we are often frightened by this, and the
conflicts this fear generates create our psychopathology.  Many of
Freud's richest studies of defensive conflict are studies of himself.
This is because when he is looking at himself he does not oversimplify
human motivation in the way he tends to do in his case histories.
(Though these oversimplifications are often indispensable as
clarifications.) In Freud's observations of himself we see defence in
the context in which it should always be seen, as the problem of human
identity. For instance, in the emotions that are expressed in the dream
of Irma's Injection, we see all Freud's own doubts about his identity as
a doctor. The dream asks, Am I really motivated in the way a doctor
should be motivated? Do I really belong among all these doctors?  Am I
motivated by the wish to cure, or by the wish to possess truth?  Freud's
other dreams document other aspects of his search to clarify who he is
and what is his vocation in life. Similar problems of identity are
revealed in his accounts of his everyday slips and mistakes, for
instance, in the complex thoughts provoked in him by the Signorelli
slip. 

In all defensive conflict there is a fundamental question being
posed and that question is, Who am I?  This fissuring and splitting
within our intentions has been the subject of the great tragic
dramatists, and the great poets and novelists.  Freud's addition to
their work was to show how much of human illness and disease is
illuminated when we view it in this context of divided intention. No
illness is of course without physiological conditions, but many
illnesses cannot be properly understood unless we also understand their
symbolic role in intolerable conflict of identity.  Freud's contribution
to European thought was to show us how to do this. This is why he is
important.  If Freud had done nothing but give us further articulations
of how Anna O forgot painful scenes and denied the emotions associated
with them, he would long have ceased to be of more than historical
interest to us. This, however, is precisely what Sulloway, Grunbaum and
Webster all assert that he did. All, in effect, subsume the theory of
defence under the theory of catharsis and treat the two as one.
Sulloway, for instance, fails to comprehend the distinction between
catharsis and defence and attributes to Breuer and Freud what he calls a
"joint theory" of hysteria, that is, the cathartic theory that
"hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences".  (1979, p. 61)  He
recognizes that Freud does make a distinction between catharsis and
defence. (p. 75) But although Sulloway states this, he does not clarify
the conceptual distinction involved. Given the fact that, for Sulloway,
Freud is a biologist, there is no way he can do so. With the theory of
defence, Freud extends our concept of natural science so that it now
includes ethical and moral conflict. It is precisely this extension of
science beyond the realms of pure biology that Sulloway refuses to
acknowledge has taken place in psychoanalysis.  However, at least
Sulloway recognizes that psychoanalysis is a science of life. Grunbaum
insists on taking us right back to the realms of inert matter.
Accordingly, he is even more unequivocal than Sulloway in treating
Breuer and Freud as holding a single theory. He goes so far as to
describe Freud as "Breuer's junior collaborator". (1993, p. 27)  He
writes, "The central causal and explanatory significance enjoyed by
unconscious ideation in the entire clinical theory rests ... on
inductive inferences drawn by Breuer and Freud."  That inference,
according to Grunbaum, is that, "for each distinct symptom S afflicting
... a neurotic, the victim had repressed the memory of a trauma." (1993,
pp. 20-21)  "All Freudians," Grunbaum continues, "champion this causal
inference: Let a causal chain of the analysand's free associations be
initiated by his neurotic symptoms and issue in the emergence of
previously repressed memories; then, we are told, this emergence
qualifies as good evidence that the prior ongoing repression of these
memories was actually the 'pathogen' of the given neurosis." (1993, p.
26 Emphasis in original.  

For a more complete treatment of Grunbaum and
the philosophy of science generally see my "On the Idea of Natural
Science as a Resistance to Psychoanalysis", Psychoanalysis &
Contemporary Thought, 19, 1996, pp. 371-402)  Webster too is unequivocal
in attributing a single theory to Breuer and Freud, the theory of
catharsis and repressed memories. "It should be emphasized above all
that Breuer and Freud themselves never understood their book as a
contribution to psychotherapy. ... They offered it as a contribution to
'medicine'. ... Whereas the claim that repressed emotions could
engender psychological distress would have been traditional and in some
cases perhaps true, the claim made by Freud and Breuer was of a quite
different order.   For what they believed they had discovered was an
aetiological theory which could explain the origins of a particular   
'disease' and cure this disease by uncovering repressed 'memories'."
(1995, pp. 108-109. Emphases in original)  Webster's absurd claim that
Studies On Hysteria was not intended as a contribution to psychotherapy
is, like Sulloway's insistence that psychoanalysis is "crypto-biology",
a way of denying the fundamental change this book represents in our
understanding of the limits of science.  The realm of medicine and
biology is now no longer sealed off from that of emotional and ethical
conflict, and spiritual healing.  The two are now interlinked.  Webster,
like Grunbaum and Sulloway, displaces the emphasis in Studies On
Hysteria in such a way that its real importance, which is that of
introducing the idea that some diseases have roots in ethical dilemmas,
vanishes. Like them, he then proceeds to a study of psychoanalysis as if
this theme, which is the theme that defines it, did not exist in it at
all.  

These three critics offer us only caricatures of Freud.  To be
sure, like all caricatures, they rely on some genuine features of their
subject. The problem, however, is that precisely the essential thing is
left out, namely the focus on the inherent ambivalence in our
intentions.  The interesting problem this raises is, Why then do they
miss precisely the essential thing?   And why does just this missing of
the essential thing find still such a receptive readership?

Psychoanalysis represents an evolution in our idea of natural science,
and in our understanding of its relation to the ethical world. Focusing
on the theory of catharsis is a way of denying this development has
happened. It is a reflection of a wish to go back to a time when
science, as yet, was silent on our ethical dilemmas. This wish to go
back is a powerful one because, before science began to meddle in this
way, we could still believe in the existence of actions that were
unconditionally right and wrong, and ways of life that were
unconditionally healthy or unhealthy.  The answer to the problem of how
to live, in other words, was ‘outside’ ourselves, ultimately, in the
authority of God and the teachings of morality and faith.
Psychoanalysis, by shifting the limits of scientific rationality, has
placed the answer to the problem of how to live ‘within’ ourselves. 
Each of us now has to find this answer inside himself. Each must now be
governed by his own conscience.  This is the real burden that the
scientific discovery of our ambivalence has placed on us.  The mood of
hostility to Freud we have seen over the last twenty years is, in an
important sense, not about Freud at all. It is, rather, an indirect
expression of this wish to go back to a time when we did not have to
bear this burden of responsibility for our own divisions.  All the time,
cultural conditions are becoming more complex and fragmented and the
task of self-mastery becomes more intricate and difficult.  In large
measure, Freud is nothing more than a lightning rod, a kind of popular
totem, for the anxiety and anger this generates.  The observation of our
own divided intentions is never a neutral observing, as sciences of the
rest of nature can in a certain sense be. Confronting one's own
intentions has an impact immediately on the question of how one is to
live, which is the classical question of moral philosophy.   

To acknowledge that one's intentions are never simple requires  willingness
to take some responsibility for this ambivalence. One must be prepared
in some measure to define what is the good life for oneself. To be able
to do this without falling into the self-punitive habits of the neurotic
is what it means to be healthy in human terms.  However, those who are
weak in this respect, those who feel they are not able to take
responsibility for their own ambivalences are, necessarily, unable to
see those ambivalences. (Though they are, of course, notoriously ready
to attribute ambivalence to others.) And being unable to see them, they
are, inevitably, unable to conceive clearly a science whose task is
precisely to explore those ambivalences.  This is the situation both
with the Freud critics and, unfortunately, with too many misguided
therapists. In their caricatures, psychoanalysis ceases to be a study of
identity and becomes instead an exploration of traumatic memories - it
becomes, absurdly, an exercise in 'proving' causal links between
particular traumatic experiences and particular symptoms. This, of
course, gives rise to the famous problem of the analyst "suggesting"
particular memories to the client.  

For the critics who misconstrue analysis in these terms, the main thing is
to find defences against this
danger; for instance, by turning psychoanalysis into physics, as
Grunbaum proposes, or into a branch of Darwinian biology, as Sulloway
and Webster propose. In all this, however, in the work both of the Freud
critics and of unenlightened therapists, the proper purpose of the
psychoanalytic enterprise disappears behind an edifice of
self-justifying misinterpretation.  Those, like Sulloway and Webster,
who want to go back to Darwin are, unconsciously, expressing a nostalgia
for a time when science did not yet explore the ethical dilemmas we all
live with.  They truly do "suffer from reminiscences".  The appeal of
Darwin in this context is that he was the last great scientist to work
before the moral world and the natural world merged one with another,
to give birth to the difficult world of uncertainty and ambivalence we
now live in. But the appeal to Darwin is always of course rationalized
on the grounds of some great flaw or failing in psychoanalysis.  For
Webster, this flaw is its "theological" nature. (1995, p. 466, et
passim) He believes that Freud's use of the concept of soul is "occult"
(e.g. p. 177 & p. 466). He charges Freud with being blind to the
theological presuppositions of his teachers (p. 178) and with
perpetuating the idea of original sin. (p. 319, et passim)  Thus,
according to Webster, "although Freud set out to defeat this enemy [i.e.
religion], he failed.  He failed because, like other campaigning
rationalists, he was unable to grasp that the very rationalism which, in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, militantly opposed itself to
religion, was itself born out of the superstitions it sought to sweep
away." (1995, p. 506)  However, what Webster interprets as "theological"
is only the recognition by psychoanalytic theory of the inherently
conflictual nature of human intentions. Webster does not understand the
evolution in the idea of science that psychoanalysis represents.
Webster does not recognize that it is possible to examine the
conflictual nature of the human animal without adopting a moral
viewpoint.  

The old morality of "good and evil" is gone, and so is the
concept of sin, in the sense that these notions are no longer coherent
with the level to which our science and reason have evolved.  This does
not mean, however, that the inherently conflictual nature of the human
animal, which originally created theology and moral values in order to
deal with its own divisions, is gone. Quite the contrary, this still has
to be addressed and dealt with in a rational way.  Like all the Freud
critics, Webster attributes to Freud his own fixations. In Webster's
case this is "theology".  His book is permeated with the anxious sense
of theology as something we can never really escape from. Ostensibly, he
looks forward to a Darwinian psychology that will be properly scientific
in a way that psychoanalysis is not. At the same time, however, he
writes in a despairing way of how the whole of "Judaeo-Christian"
rationalism is ensnared in theological assumptions.  This is silly.  To
be sure, we are all children of a culture that has deep religious roots.
We also, however, have the capacity to outgrow that culture. This
capacity to use what we have inherited in a fruitful way is what good
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy cultivate. This involves both a coming
to terms with what we have inherited, and developing the strength and
coherence to fashion
something new out of it for ourselves.  Webster's inability to grasp
this principle, his mixture of anxiety over what is in the past and at
the same time his wish to go back to it, is wholly characteristic of the
Freud criticism of the last twenty years.  All of it is marked by an
intellectual style that is unable to use the past to make something new
and valuable. At the theoretical level, this comes out in the displaced
form of a wish to return to earlier manifestations of the scientific
spirit, namely Darwinism, or physics. If only we could go back to these
"real" sciences, things would be so much simpler. Except that they
wouldn't, and we can't.  Freud goes beyond the old distinction between
the material world of nature, on the one hand, and the spiritual world
of God, on the other.  He supersedes the traditional distinction
philosophers have drawn between the ‘Naturwissenschaften’, the sciences
of the natural world, and the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, the sciences of
the moral world. In short, he does not fit into the ancient dichotomy,
identified by Kant, between Physics and Ethics. This is why
psychoanalysis does not fit into either the "positivist" or
"hermeneutic" categories.  He develops our idea of both science and
ethics and the relation between them. Like Nietzsche, he insists on the
reality of the soul, but insists also on looking at it in rational and
secular terms.  However, his use of the idea of soul no more makes him a
theologian than it did Nietzsche, or, for that matter than it did
Aristotle, who also wrote extensively on the theory of the soul and
thought of it in natural terms.  To retain the idea of the soul and yet
to think about it in secular terms has always been an unfashionable
position.  Why?  Because to look at the conditions of one's own
ambivalences - one's soul - is difficult, both intellectually and
emotionally.  Faced with this, it often feels tempting to abolish the
soul altogether and throw in one's lot with a science that does not
bother with the messy ambivalences of life. This is what positivists
long before Webster have always advocated. 

Alternatively, there is the perennial appeal of throwing over the
constraints of rational thought
altogether and plunging into the morass of unlimited polysemy, like
Lacan, for instance, which of course is a way of partly recovering
old-fashioned religious emotions.  Because Freud deliberately refrains
from both these popular options, he has always come under fire from both
sides of the equation.  The psychoanalytic framework emphasizes the
inherently fissured nature of human intention. It is because of this
fissuring that emotional dilemmas, and conflicts of identity and
allegiance, are an essential part of being human.  This is why, as
Nietzsche memorably put it, we are the "sick" animal.   This is why, in
past ages, human beings have experienced themselves as being guilty, as
being in a state of sin. It is why, still, they are often torn by a
sense of guilt, or self-dislike.  To explore this central feature of
human psychology, however, and to try to help those caught in its
pathological manifestations is not, ‘pace’ Webster, to endorse any idea
of sin, original or otherwise.  Intelligent psychotherapy (and there is,
I always hope, a little bit of it still around) enables us to confront
the divisions within our own nature. In an age of faith these divisions
were contained and governed by codes of morality and conduct which were
widely accepted in a way that is not now the case.   

Science, and the general ‘Entzauberung der Welt’, have left us unprotected against our
own divisions.  For some, those who have suffered major injuries because
of their own divisions, psychoanalytic insights can provide the basis
for highly effective, supportive psychotherapy. For others, less deeply
injured, it is more appropriate to think of psychoanalysis as a catalyst
of education and maturation.  Psychoanalysis is a response to the way
science has changed our perception of moral and ethical conflicts within
ourselves. This does not make it a pseudo-science. Nor is it a
pseudo-religion.  These charges are facile an unthinking. It is much
simpler, and much more prosaic than this. It is a confrontation with the
essentially divided nature of the human animal, now that the animal has
thrown off the religious clothing that once helped conceal those
divisions and discarded the moral doctrines that once helped regulate
them.

Copyright © 2000 British Psychoanalytical Society & Institute of Psychoanalysis.

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