The Promise of Psychoanalysis Harry Guntrip
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Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder. Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentli- chungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers. The Promise of Psychoanalysis Harry Guntrip "The Promise of Psychoanalysis," in: B. Landis and E. S. Tauber (Eds.), In the Name of Life. Essays in Honor of Erich Fromm, New York (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) 1971, pp. 44-56. A psychotherapist and researcher in long-term psychotherapy at the University of Leeds Medical School in England, Dr. Harry Guntrip experienced a training analysis both with Dr. W. R. D. Fair- bairn and Dr. D. W. Winnicott. Among his books are Personality Structure and Human Interaction; and Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations and the Self. Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy is in press. What is life about? Any response is difficult to patients dedicated to the task." This is a repre- formulate because we are so inextricably bound sentative obituary on the demise of psycho- up in the bundle of life that we cannot achieve analysis which is usually attributed to its lack of the answer by our separate selves. It is easier to relevance, its costly and time-consuming de- state what life is not about. Certainly life should mands, and its [045] leged frequent lack of suc- not be living as a secretly lonely millionaire, a cess. In this essay I would like to examine the hate-filled nationalist, or a power-hungry racist. pessimism that informs this position and also to Nor being a never-satisfied, avant-garde searcher contrast the following point of view: a psycho- after change for change's sake, or a tense execu- analysis which is closely related to the realities of tive on his way to a coronary thrombosis. And everyday living, that penetrates to the depths of life is not about ignoring social evils and unmet suffering human beings, has nothing to fear for community and world needs while safeguarding the future and will nourish. the luxury of private oases. Such a therapy, in fact, has become indis- What life is about is the urge to develop pensable not only for individuals in personal our creative potentials for love and work, with need of it, but also for the contribution it makes and for each other. This arises in human re- to those professions concerned with the fate of sponse to the genuine security and valuation human beings in their struggles to maintain others have provided for us and permits and en- themselves as viable persons in stressful situa- courages us to pass on to others these priceless tions. However, psychoanalysis will hold the at- conditions of enjoyable and meaningful living. A tention of the public only insofar as it speaks psychoanalyst should be someone who can use truly to the human condition, and insofar as his training, experience, and humanity to do this people realize that the psychoanalyst should not for those in dire need; his real reward is to grow be just a professional man with a theory—a psy- with his patients. This is what life is about, in chotechnician—but a human being with a de- various ways, for all of us. veloping experience of understanding, able to Surprisingly, within the field of psychother- help others with their struggles to be real per- apy, this idea is by no means generally accepted, sons living meaningful lives with their fellow- a factor that contributes substantially to the con- men. temporary doubts and questions that currently This kind of psychoanalysis has been in the limit the status and influence of psychoanalysis. making but it still requires a certain evolution in A recent letter from America said: "Psycho- theory and practice, an evolution that was actu- analysis is on the decline with fewer analysts and ally implicit in Freud's own development. For page 1 of 7 Guntrip, H., 1971 The Promise of Psychoanalysis Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder. Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentli- chungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers. beginning as a physician seeking to cure an ill- this evolution when he defined psychoanalysis ness, he started a process that is now carrying mainly in terms of transference and resistance psychoanalysis far beyond the narrow medical when he wrote that "Any line of investigation, model of a doctor treating a patient toward a no matter what its direction, which recognizes relationship in which both participants explore transference and resistance, and takes them as together the meaning and value of living. the starting point of its work may call itself psy- (Freud's almost compulsive interest in religion choanalysis, though it arrives at results other and culture was not a sign of a simply specula- than my own" (On the History of the Psycho- tive bent but was the inevitable development of Analytic Movement, 1914); thus his model of his inquiry into human living, its mysteries and man changed in time from a biological machine ultimate implications.) toward that of a person engaged in relating with These issues were central in my own devel- others and with himself. However, the intellec- opment as an analyst. I began with a very thor- tual outlook and the philosophy of science in ough philosophical and theological education, Freud's era did not make possible the formula- which I would not have missed, but then de- tion of a thoroughly psycho-dynamic science; cided to lay these subjects aside until I had a Jones, Kris, and Erikson to the contrary, I do not more adequate knowledge of "human nature," think that Freud ever resolved the conflict be- of what it means to be a "person" possessing in- tween physicalistic and psychological constructs tellectual curiosity, moral values, and the spiri- in his thinking. In fact it still persists in the think- tual aspiration that life should be meaningful. ing of many of his followers and is implicit in Accordingly I studied with Professor J. C. Flugel, Anna Freud's recent description of psychoanaly- one of Britain's finest psychoanalysts, and Pro- sis as relating to man's struggle against himself fessor J. Macmurray, a penetrating "personal re- (i.e., biological Id versus mental Ego). lations" philosopher. I had sensed the tension This concept, however, is already changing between these two points of view throughout in contemporary psychoanalysis, with emphasis the 1930s. Psychoanalysis was exploring the being placed on man's struggle to be himself. right approach to the study of personality but it The argument is now likely to be raised that this was burdened by the weight of a physicalistic is not the business of science. Why not? Science (instinctual) bias; Macmurray was unburdened is knowledge, all knowledge, and the real ques- by an instinctively based theory but lacked the tion is not "Is psychoanalysis a science?" but dynamic grasp that psychoanalysis could supply. "What kind of science is it?" I had sought to unite these two streams of The views of many scientists have changed thought, for the more I [046] delved into psy- since Freud's time when Brucke's dictum, that chotherapy the more I felt that classical Freudian "there are no other energies in the organism theory was insufficient to understand aspects of than physical and chemical ones" gave Freud no human suffering that went far deeper than the standing ground for the creation of what his vicissitudes of instinctual drives and straightfor- own genius led him to: a fully psychodynamic ward Oedipal phenomena. In the immediate science which could take man's physiological postwar years I became familiar with the works substrata for granted and devote its energies to of Sullivan, Horney, and Fromm, which greatly the study of interpersonal relationships. Such a broadened my vista. A little later the work of science would focus on our experiences of our- Fairbairn further widened my scope of psycho- selves as persons emerging out of a social [047] analysis and I saw it could continue, not as a field, beginning with the crucial mother-infant mechanistic late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- relationship. Even today Freudian theory implies century psychobiology dealing with the two too limited and too pessimistic a view of human mighty, turbulent drives of sex and aggression, nature, like those views expressed so clearly by but as a fully psychological study of the pro- St. Paul and Plato (views that are still important found intrapsychic and interpersonal problems because they affect how we treat sex, aggres- of human beings living together. sion, and social violence). Freud's concepts of Freud himself prepared the groundwork for Ego and Id parallel St. Paul's concepts of the page 2 of 7 Guntrip, H., 1971 The Promise of Psychoanalysis Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder. Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentli- chungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers. "Law of the Mind" and "Law of the Members," temporary psychoanalysis is also outgrowing the the lusts of the flesh which "are not subject to pessimistic Ego-Id dualism. [048] the law ... neither indeed can they be." Thus However, this does not mean that one may Freud believed that men are hostile to culture not look at certain phenomena from different because it demands the renunciation of instinc- points of view.