Freud’s Idols

Letters

Vol. 12 No. 21 · 8 November 1990

From Paul Ries

Much though I enjoyed Adam Phillips’s excellent discourse on the possible role of Freud’s ‘idols’ (LRB, 27 September), I was disappointed to see that, by equating a diffuse notion of religious belief indistinguishable from superstition with an incorrect and exaggerated assessment of the usefulness of psychoanalysis as something not very different from some kinds of idolatry, he could be seen to be giving possible renewed support to one of the more common misunderstandings about the scope and purpose of psycho-analysis as developed by Freud and practised by his followers today. As Adam Phillips knows very well, Freud’s writings are peppered with warnings against seeing psycho-analysis as a panacea against all ills, and it would therefore in my view have made his article even more interesting and helpful if his last sentence had read: ‘And that is a problem for those who have not recently read or reread e.g. Freud’s papers on “The Question of Lay Analysis” (1926) and “Analysis, Terminable and Interminable” (1937).’

Such a reference would not only prevent those still hostile to psychoanalysis from seeing Adam Phillips’s conclusion as lending support to Karl Kraus’s old chestnut about psychoanalysis as a disease proposing itself as its cure; more importantly, it could help those trying to assess and make use of the real values of psychoanalysis to appreciate the difference between the kinds of analysis of the human predicament which proffer solutions by ‘making man fall down and worship the work of his own hands as though it came from heaven’ or any other abstract or mystical location outside himself, and those kinds of analysis of that predicament which endeavour to assist man in understanding the predicament as fully as possible and in acting as adequately as possible within it.

Or, as Freud put it, modestly, realistically and succinctly, ‘the business of the analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego; with that it has discharged its task.’ As is plain, this ‘business’ is nothing whatever to do with either idolatry or religion or any other system which claims to have found a solution to the challenges facing us as human beings. All psycho-analysis claims to be is a process from which a real possibility arises for a choice to be made between continuing within the constraints of uniformity and, as Kafka puts it in the quotation opening Adam Phillips’s article, ‘mixing profoundly enough with the diversity of the world’.

Paul Ries
Cambridge

From Robert Wilcocks

It is no doubt a mark of your journal’s remarkable openness to divergent approaches to the various intellectual disciplines that your issue of 27 September includes a sensitive appreciation of the late Sir Peter Medawar and several pages later an extensive essay ‘Freud’s Idols’ by Adam Phillips, ‘the principal child psychotherapist at the Charing Cross Hospital’. Lacan, who is brought in as a trendy sayer of analytic sooths, also remarked: La psychoanalyse est un remède contre l’ignorance. Elle est sans effet contre la connerie. However genuinely helpful much dynamic (non-Freudian) psychotherapy may indeed be, I would suggest that this help has little to do with anything Freud ever actually wrote. A close examination of his texts, including the complete Freud-Fliess correspondence, will, on the other hand, give many instances of scientific and medical connerie.

Phillips’s article is filled with a great deal of forelock-tugging to the myth of Freud as a great man, innovator and, yes – even in 1990! – scientist. I am dismayed to see, after all that has been written on the subject, that in England one can still pull this skein of wool over the reader’s eyes. It is as if Karl Popper had never existed, or as if Adolf Grünbaum had never written The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984). In The Freudian Slip ( 1976), the eminent textual critic Sebastiano Timpanaro describes Freud’s methods as not merely unscientific but anti-scientific. The director of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at Harvard Medical School, J. Allan Hobson, does the same in his recent The Dreaming Brain (1988). Living, like K.R. Eissler, within those confines where only ‘Freudian Paradigms’ count, Phillips has perhaps not read these works.

Among the many philosophical, biographical and medical infelicities that litter this piece of would-be belletrism, one in particular struck me for its highly dangerous implications and (possible) consequences. It reminded me of a trenchant book review by Peter Medawar in which he castigated psychoanalysis as ‘the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century’. Medawar was favourably reviewing the book by the distinguished American neuro-surgeon I.S. Cooper called The victim is always the same. The medically inept and morally grotesque treatment handed out by psychoanalysts to young victims of the neuromuscular disease, dystonia musculorum deformans (DMD), prior to their fortunate meeting with a ‘real’ doctor makes for horrifying reading.

Phillips first demonstrates his philosophical incompetence with the remark: ‘In therapy it is always interesting to ask someone in a state of conviction: what kind of person would you be if you no longer believed that?’ He then concludes: ‘A symptom, of course, is always a state of conviction.’ The insouciant reinforcement of the statement by the addition of ‘of course’ is certainly in line with the grandiose and foolish certitudes so frequently occurring in the Freud-Fliess correspondence: migraine is the consequence of a fantasy of defloration displaced upwards; ‘Dora’ drags a leg because ‘she has made a false step’; women who masturbate suffer ‘gastric pains’ which only the removal of the left middle nasal concha can alleviate.

A reading of the neuro-surgeon Cooper’s work, or even merely of Medawar’s excellent review, should alert the reader to the dangers inherent in Phillips’s phrase. The danger is double-edged. Not only the assumption that some psychological or personality distress is ‘always a state of conviction’ but equally the assumption that what Phillips calls ‘a symptom’ really is one. He must mean by ‘symptom’ some manifestion of conduct or speech seen as the key to the underlying neurosis. Furthermore, he must mean ‘symptom’ as described by the handbooks of Freudian psychoanalysis. Back to the paradigms!

Phillips ends his piece: ‘But the one thing that psychoanalysis cannot cure, when it works, is the belief in psychoanalysis. And that is a problem.’ This attempt at skittish irony is quite unavailing – no more than a pirouette, and a particularly daft one at that. Orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis, using the paradigms established by the Maestro concerning supposedly repressed and supposedly inaccessible (except via analysis) infantile sexual and/or toilet problems, has never worked on anybody anywhere ever.

Robert Wilcocks
Edmonton, Alberta