A Psychohistory of Psychoanalysis

A Review Essay Based on Martin Wain, Freud’s Answer: The Social Origins of Our Psychoanalytic Century. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1998, hardcover. ISBN 1566632161, out of print, but available from Amazon.com and Abebooks.com for as little as $1.93 plus shipping.

What is the proper relationship between psychohistory and psychoanalysis? For the kind of psychohistory that takes psychoanalysis seriously, the usual relationship has been that psychoanalysis, or at least some of its conclusions about the essentials of human nature, are taken as bedrock, the fundamental building blocks from which a psychohistorical account is constructed. Questions about the why of historical or current events are answered by explaining the motives of groups or individuals in terms of the truths about the psyches of human beings as developed over the last hundred years or so by Sigmund Freud and his followers.

But what if the relationship is reversed? Instead of psychoanalytic propositions being the givens on which a psychohistorical explanation is based, suppose the realities of historical or current events are taken as the fundamentals and the task becomes to understand why psychoanalysis came to have the particular content and form that it did. The related question of why Freud and psychoanalysis came to have the enormous influence it did on so many realms of human endeavor, including psychohistory, can also be asked from the same perspective.

This is what Martin Wain attempts to do in his 1998 book Freud’s Answer: The Social Origins of Our Psychoanalytic Century. Wain is by no means the first to trace the sources of the multiple roots of psychoanalysis by exploring the influence of both earlier thinkers and social, cultural, political, scientific, and religious factors on the development of Freud’s ideas. Below are, in my opinion, some of the best selections from the truly vast literature on the precursors and influences that shaped Freud’s theory. Henri Ellenberger’s voluminous tome The Discovery of the Unconscious, published in 1970, is an important source. Philip Rieff’s two books Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966); Paul Roazen’s Freud: Political and Social Thought (1970); Paul Stepansky’s three volume set Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals (1986-1988); William McGrath’s Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis (1986); Steven Marcus’ Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis (1984); Frank Sulloway’s Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1979); Russell Jacoby’s Social Amnesia (1975) and The Repression of Psychoanalysis (1983); Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1981); and the literature on the influence of Judaism on Freud and psychoanalysis including David Bakan’s Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958), Dennis Klein’s Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1985), and Emanuel Rice’s Freud and Moses (1990).

What is original in Wain’s book is his provocative thesis that the real agenda, or latent content, to use psychoanalytic language, of Freud’s theorizing was to provide comfort and support to the troubled society of Western Europe at the turn of the century. As Martin Wain puts it: “Freud and his colleagues were social, political, and economic therapists in the broadest sense. Their patient was modern Western culture at a time of maximum danger” (p. xiv).

Wain starts by putting Freud and his early group of disciples, who he refers to as the “Psychoanalytic Pioneers” in the historical, political, economic, and intellectual context in which they were embedded. His thesis is that the era in which psychoanalysis was created, the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, was a time of turmoil and change in Central and Western Europe. The population of all of Europe more than doubled from 191 million in 1800 to 452 million in 1900. People living in the late 18^th and early 19^th century experienced the twin revolutions—the French and the Industrial. There were enormous political changes, ushered in by the American Revolution, accelerated by the French Revolution, and spread throughout Europe by the Napoleonic conquest. Then, after a pause for the Metternich-led reaction from 1815 to 1848, came the triumph of “Liberal Democracy”—a parliamentary form of government which was closely allied with the captains of industry for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, the newly empowered middle classes.

By the end of the 19^th century the days of the rule of kings, nobles, and clergy had given way to the reign of capitalists, bankers, and professionals. The seemingly fixed division of the world into patricians

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and plebeians, nobles and peasants, aristocrats and commoners—in short, those who counted and those who didn’t—was fast breaking down. From the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the notion that equality, rather than hierarchy in relations between people being the natural order of things, began to take hold. The idea that, at least in theory, everyone counted and that the individual mattered, became an accepted truth. Psychoanalysis, which proclaimed that the inner world of the individual was a matter of importance worthy of detailed investigation, fit in well with these new notions.

Wain’s thesis is that Freud and psychoanalysis offered a way of avoiding the anxieties that were generated by the external events of the times by focusing on the inner world of thoughts, feelings, and wishes. Freud’s early theory emphasized the importance of actual trauma as the cause of symptoms. Later, with the abandonment of the so-called “seduction theory” in 1897 and the increased importance of Oedipal wishes, fantasy gradually became more important than reality.

Focusing on the internal world facilitated not looking at the external world where disruptive political and social upheavals were the order of the day. At the end of the 19^th century and the early years of the 20^th, the greatest tension came from the virulent nationalism of the major European powers, culminating in the horrors of the Great War. After the war there was the devastating influenza epidemic followed by the violent battles between the left and the right, communism and fascism, which ripened into the bitter fruit of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

This was the historical epoch during which psychoanalysis was created, developed, and began to establish its hold on so many fields of human endeavor. For the most part, Freud and many, although not all, of the early psychoanalysts were able to remain magnificently indifferent to the momentous events unfolding around them.

Probably the most dramatic example of this was Freud’s steadfast refusal to pay attention to the growing threat of fascism and lethal anti-Semitism in Austria and Germany from at least 1933 until 1938 when Marie Bonaparte, Ernest Jones, and others finally persuaded him to leave Vienna. Freud had little to say about either fascism or anti-Semitism in either his publications or his correspondence, both of which were extensive, during his last six years in Vienna and his brief time in England. While it is true that Freud was aging and ill during this period, he was nevertheless still writing up to his usual high standards on many other subjects.

This reluctance to focus on the harsh realities that were swirling around him was not out of character for Freud. Two decades earlier he also had relatively little to say (compared to the amount he had to say on so many other subjects) about the events of the Great War between 1914 and 1918. Freud was hardly unique among analysts in this attitude of studied indifference toward the march of world affairs. Donald Winnicott, in talking about his work in London during WWII said: “I might say that I hardly noticed the Blitz, being all the time engaged in the analysis of psychotic patients, who are notoriously oblivious of bombs, earthquakes, and floods” (F. Robert Rodman, Winnicott: Life and Work [Philadel-phia: Perseus Publishing, 2003], p. 4). Perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon was provided by Melanie Klein who worked steadily in London through the Blitz doggedly pursuing the vicissitudes of her patients’ infantile fantasies in the face of her only son’s death, possibly by suicide, the very public vehement attacks by her only daughter the analyst Melitta Schmideberg and the bombing of the Luftwaffe.

Wain’s method of using psychoanalytic ideas and methods to analyze psychoanalysis leads to some interesting and provocative results. Making use of the psychoanalytic concept of projection, he argues that what psychoanalysis does is to project, “history and social ills onto science, the family, and the individual, deflecting light away from real events, even to the extent of making not real events but fantasy events the subject of exploration” (p. 253). Similarly, turning dream displacement on its head, Wain contends: “Displacing daytime dreams, wishes, and hopes onto fabulous, hermetic, and often exciting interpretations of nighttime dreams pointed within, away from the outside world…. The analysts assured people that meaning lay in the internal and private—sex and emotions instead of money and power” (p. 262).

Employing another of Freud’s favorite concepts, that of wish fulfillment, Wain quotes Freud’s conclusion from The Interpretation of Dreams, that dreams are the disguised fulfillment of a repressed

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wish and then adds: “just as we are justified in asserting that psychoanalysis was the fulfillment of the culture’s unadmitted but palpable wish for a satisfying, diversionary answer to exploding needs, wishes, and anxieties” (p. 263).

In the domain of therapy, the two key concepts which Freud proclaimed to be at the heart of psychoanalytic treatment, the analysis of transference and resistance, can also be interpreted as having a fundamentally conservative political function. Thus, the common practice among psychoanalysts of interpreting concerns or focus on political events as resistance to the treatment—that is, avoiding dealing with past and present personal wishes and occurrences—can be seen as serving as a resistance to acknowledging the effects of the political on the personal. Similarly, to focus on the thoughts, feelings, and wishes about the analyst, the transference (a virtually exclusive preoccupation of some analysts), can also perform the same political function, diverting attention from and devaluing the significance of political and social events.

The argument here is that any activity that turns attention away from current political realities tacitly lends support to the political status quo. It is support of the powers that be, who are always happy when they can go about their business while peoples’ concerns lie elsewhere. For most of Freud’s career this was the parliamentary forms of government which served the interests of the bourgeois elites, the liberal democracies, who ruled the nations of Western Europe in which psychoanalysis was created and developed—the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia.

According to Wain, this political function of providing support and legitimacy to the ruling powers is the main factor that accounts for the widespread acceptance and influence that psychoanalysis has had from the 1920’s until recently. As he says: “psychoanalysis was created to inculcate on a broad scale what normative middle-class Liberal Democracy wanted for the new order and the new legitimacy. Without the willingness to do that under the guise of science and objectivity, Freudianism would have lost its glamour” (p. 271).

There have always been those within psychoanalysis who have sought to understand the influence of the outer world on the inner one—those who considered political, economic, and historical realities to be important determinants of what went on within the psyche. In approximate chronological order there are Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi (with his emphasis on childhood trauma), Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, and Edith Jacobson (these last three discussed in Jacoby’s The Repression of Psychoanalysis), and later Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Erik Erikson, to name some of the more well-known analysts who tried to incorporate the effects of the external world into the body of psychoanalytic thought.

There were also a number of analysts who were quite politically active and sought to integrate their left-wing politics with psychoanalytic practice. This group formed in Berlin, and to a lesser extent in Vienna in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. It was centered on the Berlin Poliklinik, founded by Max Eitingon (who provided much of the funding) and Ernst Simmel in 1920. Many, particularly among the younger analysts, were politically active. Wilhelm and Annie Reich, Otto Fenichel, Edith Jacobson, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Franz Alexander, Paul Federn, Melanie Klein, Siegfried Bernfeld, Herman Nunberg, Martin Grotjahn, and Bruno Bettelheim all identified themselves as Marxists or Socialists (Peter and Axel Hoffer, The Berlin Poliklinik, 1999).

However, Wain’s central point is still valid: the overwhelming majority of analysts, despite their individual political preferences and activities outside the consulting room, kept their clinical practice as apolitical as they could, single-mindedly concerning themselves with the individual inner personal world of their patients.

In the political realm, from the beginning of the 20^th century up to World War II, it was the anarchists and the communists who embraced the ideals of the French Revolution and Marx’s elaborations of them. At the other end of the political spectrum the fascists and their allies sought to regress to pre-Revolutionary times to restore the authority of the father, in psychoanalytic language or, in political terms, to bring back the authoritarian regime of rule by kings, warlords, and clergy in their 20^th century reincarnations as der Fuhrer Hitler, Il Duce Mussolini, El Caudillo Franco, and the man of steel, Papa Stalin. Psychoanalysis became part of the failed bulwark of a liberal democratic center which could not hold up to the onslaught of the atavistic forces of fas-

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cism.

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