Edith Kurzweil, PhD

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he might begin, “after three score and four years, I am eager to hear about the novelties and improvements you have introduced into psychoanalysis since I last revised my Introductory Lectures.”

He might well go on to state that he was delighted to find out that his creation, psychoanalysis, had been thriving, and had spread throughout Western civilization, although he might add that he was annoyed at being misquoted by people who hadn’t bothered to read his works, and was being blamed for things he never had said or thought. But I assume that he would highly approve of the many advances in theory and therapy—by those who have preserved “the gold of psychoanalysis,” the unconscious—and would look askance at simplifications. His prediction that psychoanalytic thought would conquer the world had come true. But he might be as concerned about the movement—its organizations and endless splits—as he had been when Alfred Adler left in 1911, and Carl Jung soon thereafter.

As a sociologist, who is looking at the place of psychoanalysis and its importance in the culture, I have found that people take off from those portions of Freud’s oevre that best suit their requirements—in line with their own culture’s history and belief systems. For instance, German and Austrian therapists, sooner or later, are dealing with patients who are trying to come to terms with their own and/or their family’s pasts during the Nazi period, and are likely to model some of their clinical work on Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlichs’ The Ability to Mourn (1967). Their French colleagues, even those not in the footsteps of Jacques Lacan, are more concerned with the language of psychoanalysis than either their German or English speaking brethren. In America, psychotherapists are bound to live up to our cultural values of fairness—to women, homosexuals, minorities, and so on. Whether or not these issues are being introduced in therapeutic sessions, they are givens for both therapists and their patients. (I am using that term, because only potential candidates tend to undergo a classical psychoanalysis of four or five weekly sessions.)

Given that I have only five minutes to talk, I will limit myself to two of Freud’s points about culture.

1. his Weltanschauung

2. his insistence that psychoanalysis is a science

ONE

Freud’s Weltanschauung derived not only from his medical training and from his neurological research, but from his broad background in Greek and Western philosophy, from having read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer as well as the German and English classics by the time he left his gymnasium. And from his fluency in English, as well as in Greek and Latin. The persons who joined his circle—whether physicians or not—shared these experiences or soon caught up. I dare say that today’s therapists do not dispose over such an intellectual range.

Freud criticized all Weltanschauungen from this broad perspective, as “intellectual constructions that solve all problems of our existence on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, that leaves no question unanswered, and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.”

Thus he stated, in 1917, that believing in the future of Marxism, or in religion—whether Christianity, Judaism, or Islam—“can make one feel secure in life, know what to strive for, and how to deal with one’s emotions and interests.” And he maintained that “psychoanalysis, [unlike Marx’s writings that have taken the place of the Bible and the Koran as a source of revelation], is incapable of creating a Weltanschuung of its own, but that it does not need one, because it is part of science and can adhere to the scientific Weltanschuung. [1]

We have come a long way since then. Now that the Marxist experiment has failed, are we reverting to believing in the Bible and the Koran? And are American therapists able to avoid approaching all issues from the perspective of diversity—in which psychoanalysts themselves believe? Does that mean that they must they support the current cultural values by dichotomizing—one religion against another, one political party against another, or one candidate against another, and so on? Freud, I believe, managed to avoid such traps by emphasizing that psychoanalysis was a science. He managed to rise above the cultural illusions of his time by searching for the truth underlying the prevalent assumptions.

This is more difficult now that psychoanalysis is ubiquitous, and that its institutes are integrated; that an elaborate system of reimbursement has been put in place with much difficulty; that an egalitarian ethos was established after the famous lawsuit of a few years ago. So, now that well-regarded psychoanalytic institutes have been recognized, could their members really afford to rock the boat?

Freud, who came upon the importance of the unconscious in the course of his neurological research, always insisted on its scientism, and, in 1915, postulated that: “for the present . . . [psychology must] proceed according to its own requirements,” and went on to add that: “after we have completed our psychoanalytic work we shall have to find a point of contact with biology.”

By 1920, he stated that biology was “the land of unlimited possibilities,” and that in a few dozen years its answers may well “blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses.” [2] Up to a point this already is happening. Many persons now seek help from pharmacologists rather than therapists. And every Tuesday, we read about new medications in The New York Times. This week, for instance, we learned that a pill to relive stuttering is in the works.

In 1932, Freud noted that “no reader of an account of astronomy will feel disappointed and contemptuous of the science if he is shown the frontiers at which our knowledge of the universe melts into haziness. Only in psychology is it otherwise. . . . What people seem to demand of psychology is not progress in knowledge, but satisfactions of some other sort.” [3]

In the interim, this search for satisfaction has multiplied exponentially, —as modern culture continues to offer more and more consumer goods, and promises not just the conditions for happiness but happiness itself.

Although it probably will be a long time before neuroscientists such as Mark Solms have pinpointed the exact locations of patients’ emotions they may experience in therapeutic sessions, this indicates that the current focus of psychoanalysis is shifting. As you know, a number of neuroscientists already are cooperating with psychoanalysts who are becoming knowledgeable in the neurosciences, in biology and physiology.

If this is to be the way of the future, I think that medically trained therapists will have an easier time than those with a background in psychology and social work. This is bound to go against the grain of our culture’s belief in fairness—by inadvertently creating a new elite. Will that bring us full circle back to earlier times? If so, you may well want to contemplate training aspiring therapists both more broadly and more scientifically. This is a difficult question you may well want to address at some point.

In any event, I congratulate you for having been able to get together in organizing this first of a broad-based meeting. And I want to thank Ambassador Eva Nowotny and her staff for having sponsored it.

[1] Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Anaslysis, New York: Norton, 1965, p.

[2] Mark Solms & Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World. New York: Other Press. 2002, p. 298.

[3] Op, cit., Preface.