Eli Zaretsky’s Secrets of the Soul - Is Psychoanalysis a Science or "merely" a Philosophy?

Eli Zaretsky’s “Secrets of the Soul” served as background and wallpaper as I co-taught a class this spring titled “Reading Freud”.  I found this book grounding, helpful and orienting as it and the class moved more or less chronologically through Freud’s writings.  But I was also aware that I was doing battle with Zaretsky (and perhaps the students in the class) over a central concern: was Freud merely a figure who was shaping, but also a product of the zeitgeist (which, if we leave out the merely qualifier, was surely the case, and Zaretsky documents many of the ways in which this happened with exquisite and insightful detail) or was Freud articulating something deeply and powerfully true about the human condition – something that, even if not accurate in detail and, indeed, something that is blatantly inaccurate in many ways – was an essential truth?  Zaretsky, as an historian, writes as if the former were the case.  Psychoanalysis was a fad, as it were, that blew into town, stirred things up (quite a bit – it was defined by but also defined modernism), but that disturbance is largely passing and we are moving towards the next new way (post-modernism was one stop on that train) to experiencing the human condition.  As a practicing analyst and a scientist interested in the functioning of the human mind, I am strongly tied to the latter position and so felt in continual tension with both Zarestsky and the class as we talked about the ways that Freud has influenced us.

I co-taught the course with a faculty member from the English department.  It was an intentionally cross disciplinary course, with my colleague and I demonstrating for the class different approaches to the readings that faculty from different disciplines take.  That said, there was a fair amount of overlap.  The other faculty member and I are both graduates of our local psychoanalytic institute, and he talked about how reading Freud with clinicians (he had long known Freud as a scholar before doing what is called research training – training for academic rather than applied purposes- at the institute) had lead him to think differently about reading texts; both Freud’s texts but also poetry, his area of specialty, and literature more generally.  He found himself questioning his basic tenets about reading a text that come from his discipline as he reads texts after psychoanalytic training.

In clinical work with patients, and in one’s own analysis, which is part of the training, the psychoanalytic perspective – one in which people, including authors, artists, directors and writers of films, actors in the film, but especially the people reading books, or looking at works of art, or the viewers of films – concretely demonstrates that there is an unconscious – and a conscious – mind at work and that our own unconscious and conscious minds are interacting with each other – and with the  conscious and unconscious mind of the artist as we engage with a work.  This complex configuration is one configuration – not the only one – but, I believe, an essential one – to exploring the experience of taking in what it is that someone has to offer (and the psychoanalytic description of it is based in the process of psychoanalytic listening that takes place in the consulting room).  The reading of a text, then, becomes very personal.  What does the text mean "to me".  To me, this is not a fad or a type of critical position to take with regards to works of art, or history, or even as we think in more applied areas like politics or the economy.  I experience it as something that occurs – regardless of how aware of it we are.  In my writing in blog posts, I am trying to articulate one (or more) layers of that with regard to my interaction with a particular work of art or, in some cases, lived experience.

I was reading an essay recently about Shakespeare and the author’s position was that Shakespeare’s works could be excised from all the libraries in the world, all the films of his productions erased, every future production stopped and we would not lose a great deal because his work has so thoroughly infiltrated the work of every other author since he wrote that the works would be preserved in abstentia by their presence elsewhere.  Freud has not had this pervasive an effect, though Zaretsky makes a pretty good case for the wide sweep of his ideas and the ways that authors across an amazing range of disciplines have had to incorporate his position.  But Zaretsky concludes that his influence, like that of say Descartes, or Hegel, was prominent at one time, is still somewhat relevant, but it is no longer at the forefront of what we need to consider when we think about the human condition.  I guess my position is that Freud is more like Newton, or Darwin.  These thinkers carved nature at the joints.  They didn’t always have all of the facts right – but they were generative and we cannot think usefully about physics or biology, respectively, without either of them. 

The irony in Zaretsky’s position is that he stays closely focused on Freud himself.  He is treating Freud as if he were a Descartes, or a Hegel – an historical figure who had certain views that defined his era and had an influence on culture.  That was certainly true of Freud.  And the ways in which Zaretsky artfully talks about Freud’s arguments and ties them to cultural phenomena is impressive.  So Freud’s description of the psychosexual phases of development is clarified in Zaretsky’s description of it – and even more importantly, maybe, Freud’s removing sexual object “choice” from gender – Freud’s articulation of human sexuality as essentially bisexual – which in turn opens the door to our movement towards understanding gender itself as something that is fluid rather than primary and dual – all of this is treated as a position on the human condition that was integral to the tectonic changes in thinking about sex and gender that occurred during the twentieth century and that continue to evolve.

Even more fundamentally, Zaretsky directly compares Freud to Calvin and the founders of Methodism who carved out the family – rather than the church or state – as the primary base from which to work, something that was part and parcel of the first Industrial Revolution.  Zaretsky’s thesis is that Freud’s focus on the individual supported Fordism – the second Industrial Revolution – where the individual could leave their connection to the family – or hold it as an idea – and become primarily identified with the corporation.  Zaretsky recognizes the irony of this – that Freud, the champion of pursuing the individual psyche, should contribute to the faceless front of the modern corporate monolith but I think he and I have a different understanding of the underlying currents in Freud’s thinking that end up supporting our making use of Freud in this way. 

What Zaretsky underemphasizes is that Freud was not just articulating an intellectual position or creating a series of content based inferences about human functioning, he was creating a.) a method of listening and b.) positing that the mind be studied in a certain way – with a dynamic unconscious that determines many of our actions.  So, while Zaretsky talks about others who have developed these ideas – Jung, Horney, and especially Lacan – he talks about these theorists not as developing a new branch of scientific discovery – as the those who followed in Newton’s and Darwin’s shoes did – but as people who are engaged primarily in dialogue with Freud – working within a rather narrow paradigm that is appealing during the time frame (and a little after) that it is presented.  They are not, in his mind, filling out an approach to the problem of the unconscious and how it works, but they are proposing different mechanisms – different content based approaches to – different philosophies of – the human condition.  I agree that they are, in part, doing that, and I agree that this is the way in which the different schools of psychoanalysis have been defined and these are the lines across which the great theoretical battles and wars have been fought.

If it isn’t apparent, I am not the person to be objectively evaluating the truth of Zaretsky’s position.  There is evidence for it in every modern introductory text book on Psychology where Freud is pilloried and derided as a guy who had some historically interesting ideas, but was not a true scientist and not someone who has contributed to current scientific thinking in a generative way.  But it is also the case that there is a vibrant and living engagement, both clinically and academically, with the life of the unconscious mind that is currently occurring and that Zaretsky does not connect Freud directly to.  Contemporary Psychoanalysis is comfortable with theoretical plurality.  Indeed, there are many additional theoretical positions that are likely to emerge that will enhance our ability to connect with each other and understand the human condition and they will likely be written about as contributions to an evolving variety of approaches rather than as works that are intended to compete for the mantel of being “right” or as complete descriptions.   We are trying to understand the most complex closed system in the known universe – it will take many windows to see how the thing holds together.

My own way of thinking (today – at this moment) about Freud is that he did two things: he described the hardware of the human psyche and then he spent a considerable portion of his energy tracing the software.  The irony of this is that he (and Zaretsky, I think) confused the two.  For instance, the Oedipal Complex, seen by Freud as a necessary element to be traversed by every human, and, in Totem and Taboo, as the basis of culture – all culture – is, I believe, a culturally determined developmental moment – and, ubiquitous though it may be in Western Culture – it is not “hard wired” but something that is, indeed, a product of the zeitgeist - and something that is traversed within a particularly pervasive dominant culture, so that it seems ubiquitous.  So, from this perspective, I believe that Zaretsky is right.  Freud the philosopher will be superceded, augmented, and challenged as the culture morphs, partly under Freud's influence and partly as we discover other culturally determined ways to “program” the human mind.

The part of Freud, unfortunately, that is like Shakespeare, the part of his writings that have infiltrated the culture so strongly and have determined so much of the arc of the twentieth century, are those parts that talk about how we operate.  What gets lost – and the reason we need to keep reading Freud – has to do with the process of connecting with our unconscious minds.  As I detailed in arecent post on dreams, the class – in the reading of the early Freud, learned to interpret not just the writings of authors, but also their own dreams – they discovered that they themselves have a dynamic unconscious.  They create, unbeknownst to themselves, complex and wonderfully useful commentaries on their own lives that are represented using idiosyncratic symbols that they can decode to appreciate the working of their own minds.  Their midterms, after reading Freud’s early writings, were fascinating – and sometimes wildly “wrong” – they got low scores on their speculative papers because they wandered off in directions that didn’t make much sense.

The latter half of the course focused more on the content of Freud’s thought about culture and his structural model of the mind – a very useful model, the one that is referred to in all the textbooks, and one that is relatively easily understood in a superficial way.  The students’ final exams, then, were dull – but they hewed to the “right” answer and their interpretations of works of art were narrow, but “correct”.  They knew how to apply the old, stodgy Freud to any problem, and they did that artlessly and flatly.  And, as a result, they achieved better grades across the board. 

We have learned a lot about neurology since Freud wrote.  We know more about the conscious mind and how things like cognition and memory work (indeed, my metaphor of hardware and software is stolen directly from that literature).   And I think this supports Zaretsky’s central thesis.  Psychoanalysis has had a crisis about where to house itself.  If it allies (as it has) with psychiatry, it ends up selling out the approach to the individual that is at its heart when the taxonomy of disease entities is described and we start to treat not the person – to understand them not as an individual – but as someone suffering from a collection of symptoms that is just like the person we saw last week and we concoct a treatment for them that is based on that.  Similarly, psychology, with its necessary focus, as a science, on replicable results based on observable phenomena is not a culture that supports idiosyncratic exploration.  It is, in hindsight, no accident that later Freud – the Freud of the ego, the id, and the superego – is the Freud that is taught in psychology textbooks and that leads the students and the broader public to get the “right” answer and to become good citizens of a modern world that is dominated by corporate entities – and is one in which we bind our anxieties about life and death by working for a reliable institution that will support us and our family.  We, as I have done in my association with the university, sell out.

James Cone, then, has something to say to Freud from the perspective of religion – that Christianity – intended for the marginalized as was psychoanalysis – gets perverted when it becomes the tool of the central power.  Rather than, for instance, psychoanalysis helping white empowered males recognize and struggle with their passive wishes and fears, it  has been used as a tool to subvert those fears - it has been used as a work around to distance ourselves from them - and to scape goat others - as when it was used by psychiatry and psychology in the middle of the last century to pathologize homosexuality.  And we are left on a precarious safe base – afraid, rather than empowered to explore the wonderfully complex minds that we have been equipped with.

I was tempted to end this post on this note, but I’m just not willing to do this.  I think that we will continue to struggle, as the early Freud did, with being wrong about who it is that we are and that we will continue to look for clues in our idiosyncratic and our shared histories to understand how it is that we function as individuals and as a society.  And I believe (isn’t it weird that all science is based, to a certain extent, on faith) in the intransigence of the unconscious – something that is as real as the astrophysicists' dark matter – and just as invisible to the observing eye.

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