Eli Zaretsky, PhD

Freud in the 21st Century

I would like to thank the Austrian Embassy for the honor of this invitation, and also for the inventiveness of their title: “Freud in the Twenty First Century.” This title suggests a question: is Freud’s thought essentially of historical interest, or is it relevant to our lives today? Is Freud, in some sense, our contemporary, and if he is not, can he and should he become one again? To address this question, I propose first to consider why Freud was such an extraordinarily present contemporary throughout nearly the whole of the twentieth century and why that changed.

To understand why psychoanalysis was once so compelling, it helps to think of it as an uneasy synthesis of three different projects: a therapy or medical practice, a theory of culture, and an ethical current in everyday life. Let me take these up in turn.

While history records many treatments for maladies of the soul, psychoanalysis was different in that it was based on an innovative psychological theory which viewed the human being was an arena of internal conflict. Individuals, in Freud’s conception, did not come to therapy simply to solve their problems. They also came to satisfy infantile wishes, wishes that they struggled to suppress. According to Freudian theory, the drive to satisfy these wishes, along with the imperative of keeping them covert, was displaced onto a struggle with the doctor or analyst. Only when that struggle subsided, and when the patient accepted a certain defeat, could the real gain of the treatment reveal itself, namely access to one’s inner life and, perhaps, a certain intimacy with the doctor. This was obviously a very ambitious project. Even at the highpoint of its influence, it was clear that other treatments could relieve symptoms better than analysis. It was rather the open-ended, non-instrumental, even “free” character of analysis that gave it its privileged place.

The therapeutic project rested on an extensive scientific basis. Psychoanalysis arose by bringing together British empiricism, which gave Freud the concept of the association of ideas, French medicine, which gave him the theory of transference, and German philosophy, which gave him the idea of the unconscious. Above all, it was based on the Darwinian vision of the human being as an organism driven by internal needs that it sought to satisfy in specific environmental niches. The therapeutic project also reflected the influence of such sources as the Hebrew Bible or the Greek tragedians, as well as of everyday or “folk” understandings of psychology. Freud fused all of these currents into a powerful synthesis, neither wholly scientific nor wholly humanistic. This synthesis centered on the moral struggle of the human being, a struggle that arose in relation to the parents and that ended in the confrontation with death.

Grasping the connections between the scientific and the humanistic dimensions of analytic therapy helps us appreciate the second great project of psychoanalysis, its role as a cultural hermeneutic. Like an individual, a culture has an unconscious, at least in the Freudian perspective. Just as in individual psychology, consciousness is a sideshow, and the main activity goes on backstage, so novels, films, clothing, religious rituals, advertisements, table manners and the like are screens, expressions of defensive conflicts, efforts to keep order where no real order exists. The model for this approach to culture, which worked its way into anthropology, literary criticism, cultural history and even artistic practice—think of the surrealists-- was Freud’s interpretations of dreams. Like dreams, the rituals and artifacts of culture reveal slippages, fractures, inconsistencies, and distortions. Like a dream, a culture is a palimpsest; it has to be decoded. The prototype for all culture is what Freud called secondary revision, the working over of a dream so that it is made acceptable to consciousness, as when we say to ourselves upon awakening “this is only a dream.” Given that psychoanalysis developed amid an extraordinary explosion of new media, such as film, advertisements, radio and TV, this unmasking aspect of psychoanalysis also made it extraordinarily relevant.

The third element explaining the compelling power of psychoanalysis was its contribution to an ethical project especially important to young people and to the new middle-classes of the twentieth century, a project of honesty and directness in personal life, as well as clarity and simplicity in such areas as architecture, design, and philosophical work. This ethic was based on the assumption that a meaningful life necessitated self-reflection in depth. Sometimes the ethic was imbued with the passion of a calling, as when Floyd Dell called himself a “missionary” on the subject of psychoanalysis, or when Max Eastman said that he had become a kind of “amateur specialist.” Underlying this ethic was a new conception of the human subject. No longer the locus of universal reason, morality, and self-control as the Victorians pretended to believe, nor defined by a collectivity, as the socialists claimed, the twentieth century subject was a contingent, idiosyncratic mortal. Alienated from large-scale bureaucratic structures, he or she was typically intensely involved with a few love-objects or rivals leading to a rich, meaning-saturated, morally-inflected inner life. Analysis supplied the ethic for this life. Although sometimes attacked for immorality, psychoanalysis extended the pre-Freudian sense of personal responsibility to cover not only deliberate, conscious decisions but unconscious actions. Encouraging the capacity to look at oneself objectively-- “analytically”-- and to enter empathically into other person’s inner worlds, analysis discouraged moralism but promoted the expansion of the moral capacity.

This third project-- the psychoanalytic ethic, if one may speak that way-- was never directly political, but neither could it be described as apolitical. To begin with, Freud was typically read and discussed in the new milieus associated with artistic modernism, bohemia and cultural revolution. Consider Lincoln Steffens’ recollection of the first time—1910—that, in his words, he was introduced to the idea that “the minds of men were distorted by unconscious suppressions.” “There were no warmer, quieter, more intensely thoughtful conversations at Mabel Dodge’s [Greenwich Village salon],” he wrote, “than those on Freud and his implications.” In Europe, especially central Europe but also England and even Russia, analysis was linked to socialist as well as Zionist politics through polyclinics, sex-education and low-cost or free analysis, as brought out recently in Elizabeth Danto’s important book “Freud’s Free Clinics.” Even in the periods of greatest alienation, analysis was never separated from political awareness. Christopher Lasch recalled of the 1950s, “My generation invested personal relations with an intensity they could hardly support… but our passionate interest in each other’s lives cannot … be described as a form of emotional retreat. [Rather] we tried to re-create in the circle of our friends the intensity of a common purpose, which could no longer be found in politics or the workplace.”

The striking fact about these three projects-- the therapeutic, the hermeneutic and the ethical-- is that they were ever connected at all. Three different practices, operating in different terrains, pursuing different aims, and facing different obstacles: this labyrinth of different impulses nonetheless cohered, and it cohered arround a conception of the human psyche or mind. We will return to this crucial point, but for now, let us address the question of what happened to the daunting psychoanalytic synthesis that ran through the twentieth century. In essence, since the 1970s the three projects parted ways. The therapeutic project gave way to neuroscience, brain research, and psychopharmacology. The cultural hermeneutic was absorbed into popular culture as well as into cultural studies, feminist theory, “queer” theory, and the like. And the ethic of self-reflection fell away entirely. Let us briefly trace these three divergent paths.

American analysts themselves sowed the seeds for the transformation of psychoanalysis into neuroscience and pharmacology when they described what they did in terms of the medical model. The medical model diagnoses illness on the basis of symptoms or tests and specifies treatment accordingly. It therefore assumes a sharp distinction between the illness, for example cancer, and the patient, a person. Some psychological symptoms do conform to this model, but most do not. Most have to do with the kind of inner division or conflict about which I spoke earlier. Accordingly, analysis should never have been described in such depersonalized, objectified and, in the case of mental health, often derogatory terms. If analysis conformed to the medical model, how could it resist the quantitative, comparative outcome studies, behavioral techniques, and psychopharmacology favored by managed care? How could it resist legal tests of its scientific standing, as in the landmark case of Rafael Osheroff, the internist who was treated by analysts without success but who claimed to have been cured by drugs? How could it not defer to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), which made it possible to observe the brain while mental operations were on-going? Today, almost all psychiatrists concur that the Freudian turn away from the study of the brain to the study of the unconscious mind was a huge, wasteful detour, and they have returned to the pre-Freudian brain science of Charcot, Kraepelin and Bleuler.

If psychoanalysis has not fared well as a scientifically-grounded medical practice, it might seem to have done better as a cultural hermeneutic. After the sixties, the application of analytic concepts to cultural phenomena such as gender, nationality and sexual identity proliferated in almost every area of the humanities. Cultural politics replaced the Freudian cultural hermeneutic. But there was a big difference. During the Freudian epoch, the “unmasking” of culture reflected Freud’s core belief that there was a tension between culture (or civilization) and the individual’s “discontents.” By contrast, the 1960s generation redefined the individual as always already cultural, cultural from the word go. The feminist movement of the 1970s supplied the paradigm. Against the analytic focus on intrapsychic reality, it called for an attack on the social and political structures of male oppression. In “consciousness-raising” groups “individual explanations” were officially discouraged while what had been forbidden or suspended within psychoanalysis-- “acting out”—became privileged. The Oedipus complex was reinterpreted as a “power psychology.” Penis envy was actually “power envy.” There were good reasons for these changes, but overall the effect was to transform psychoanalysis into a “recognition “or “other-directed” paradigm that was unpsychological and anti-psychological. In some cases, psychological concepts were restated in behavioral terms, as when the meaning of bisexuality shifted from inclinations within the individual to the question of which sex the individual slept with. In other cases, the destabilization of identity was taken as the harbinger of a more progressive society, as in much postmodern literature and thought. Thus, as one great slope of the psychoanalytic edifice disappeared into psychopharmacology, the other slid into identity politics. Where did this leave the third great project associated with psychoanalysis, namely the ethical project of honesty, directness and self-knowledge? Simply put, a great deal of the energy once devoted to self-knowledge was given over to empowerment, sociability and group participation.

Let us return to our initial topic: Freud in the twenty first century. I have said enough to indicate that I believe that for most people Freud is no longer a living force in their lives. So the question we must ask now is whether that matters. After all, change is normal and every thinker becomes part of history, at least when they are lucky. As to the scientific standing of psychoanalysis, any empirical scientist expects, and even hopes, to become outmoded, the sooner the better. Why should we worry if the very complicated psychoanalytic picture of the mind, essentially the creation of one highly imaginative, dangerously charismatic, overly enthusiastic individual, has given way to a slow, steady collective effort to locate the mechanisms of memory, thought and emotion in the genes, amino acids, proteins and neurons of the brain? As for the project of cultural hermeneutics, our current understanding of the role that race, gender, sexual-orientation and ethnicity play in human life certainly corrects a political misunderstanding, or deliberate obfuscation, to which psychoanalysis sometimes lent itself.

Finally, what is there to say about the high value placed on self-exploration during the Freudian epoch? The long, pointless analyses, the hopeless pursuit of ever-receding insights, the turning of individuals into life-long patients, never quite submissive enough: this all suggests that analytic self-knowledge was at the very least oversold. Why shouldn’t empowerment, sociability and group identity replace self-knowledge, at least in part? The inward, self-reflective turn represented by psychoanalysis should occur only occasionally in life, for example, in adolescence, during traumatic interruptions such as object-loss, and perhaps in old age. The normal direction of the mind is outward, toward desired objects, with the aim of thwarting rivals and outmaneuvering obstacles. Whereas introspection did once define an epoch of social and cultural history—the Freudian epoch—there were specific historical reasons for this, and it was bound to pass.

These are powerful arguments. I could believe them myself if it were not for a single reservation with which I will conclude. The threefold analytic project had a critical dimension. It was linked to a notion of emancipation and to the understanding that present-day society served the interests of the few rather than the many. Thus, the therapeutic project rested on the Kantian idea of Wissenschaft, that is the idea that the unfolding of scientific knowledge should be accompanied by collective gains in self-knowledge, rather than on the Baconian idea that the purpose of science was to satisfy unreflective human wishes. The idea that culture was a mask or screen encouraged a critical perspective on the then-new mass consumption, mass culture and mass politics. It deeply informed the rethinking concerning the psychological, familial and cultural prerequisites of democracy that occurred before, during and after World War Two. As to the ethic of directness and honesty, I cannot do better than cite the ever-more-relevant words of Kurt Tucholsky, the editor of Die Weltbühne, the left-wing Weimar journal of the 1920s, who wrote that reforms “are of no use if a basic honesty (Redlichkeit) does not permeate the country.” Above all, the fact that three such diverse projects had been fused into a unity was itself critical, because it pointed to the extent to which all aspects of society were interconnected so that simply looking at a single individual, as the great Austrian writer Robert Musil noted, was “like a loose end of a thread hanging out, and if one pulls at it, the whole tightly knit fabric of society begins to come undone.”

The successors to psychoanalysis, by contrast, are not critical. Psychotherapy, like medicine and other service industries, has been reduced to the technical solution of specific problems. Science produces new technologies all the time without anyone even imagining that these should be associated with a moral or ethical change. As to the idea that culture is a screen or rationalization, it has become part of “cynical reason”; since everyone knows how false our media-saturated world of celebrity, confession and life-stories is, what does it matter? While today’s focus on gender, race, sexual orientation and ethnic identity does have a critical content, that content is weak because it is partial. It lacks what was so powerful in psychoanalysis, the aspiration toward universality, the conviction—to quote another great Austrian writer, Rudolf Carnap-- that while “the fabric of life can never quite be comprehended … we must nonetheless always seek “the great lines which run through the whole.” In sum, the dispersion of the analytic synthesis, its transformation into a series of separate, unrelated projects, exemplifies the destruction of its critical dimension.

Let me conclude with a final observation. The way in which Freud became “part of history” can help us answer the question with which we began. Freud’s image—his imago, to use an analytic term-- did not succumb to the slow processes of deidealization and mourning that normally characterize the passing on of a major figure. Rather, much of Freud’s true identity, and much of the actual contribution of psychoanalysis, was suppressed through explosive, demagogic and profoundly misleading attacks. Paradoxically, Freud became an historical figure to those who respected and even revered him, while to his enemies he remains a vital, intensely cathected contemporary. This observation, if correct, suggests that we still do not know what Freud’s place will be in the twenty first century. Thank you.