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Richard Wollheim's Freud, and Philip Rieff's Freud: the Mind of the Moralist

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Richard Wollheim's Freud, and Philip Rieff's Freud: the Mind of the Moralist Notes PREFACE 1. Two other books on Freud have provided continual stimulation: Richard Wollheim's Freud, and Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. 2. Very similar ground to that covered in the latter part of Chapter 2 is covered in Laffal (1964) and Marshall (1974). There are a large number of commentaries that discuss the last section in Freud's paper on 'The Unconscious' ( 1915e) where he linked consciousness to word-presentations and unconsciousness to thing-presentations. Some of these are cited in the bibliography. A number of papers by Otto Marx have proved invaluable, especially his paper on aphasia and linguistic theory in the nineteenth century, discussed in Chapter 5. Litowitz and Litowitz (1977) attempt to relate Freudian theory to contemporary (Chomskyean) linguistics; they also include a very useful review of the historical relations between psychoanalysis and linguistics, although their interests do not overlap very much with my own. 3. The most significant contributions to the history of psychoanalysis in recent years have come from the pen of Michel Foucault, despite the fact that, as he admits, he has never directly addressed the question of its history, all the illuminating remarks he has made appearing as asides within works that have other concerns. But it is clear that, from his earliest writings on- in particular the 'Introduction' to the French translation of Ludwig Binswanger's Le reve et /'existence (1954) esp. pp. 20-7, 75-80- he has been concerned with the 'historico-conceptual' place of psychoanalysis. Despite this concern, he has never dealt with psychoanalysis face on. But, in a series of works, L 'Histoire de Ia Folie, Les Mots et les Choses, arrd the more recent La volonte de savoir, his 'contributions' to the history of psychoanaly­ sis have nothing less than revolutionary implications. These implications are of wider significance than can be dealt with here, and I refer the reader to my article, 'Michel Foucault and the History of Psychoanalysis', forthcoming in History of Science. But let us just note briefly two implications ofFoucault's work: firstly, that the possibility of psychoanaly­ sis was intimately related to the employment of the model derived from the philological sciences in the nineteenth century. We will discuss and expand upon this notion at some length in Chapter 5. Secondly, Foucault points out that the 'discourse on sexuality' is not peculiar to psychoanalysis. Rather, it should be seen as part of a more broad-ranging compulsion to confess the secret of secrets, a compulsion that has its roots in the religious tradition of spiritual regulation and the bourgeois system of social control via the construction of fields of technical expertise, fields of esoteric know!- 213 214 Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis edge. What these two difl"erent arguments lead one to ponder are the follow­ ing: (i) The techniques of interpretation and of hermeneutic analysis are not original or specific to psychoanalysis, whose main claim to 'originality' might reside in a purification of these philological techniques and their generalization to new areas, in particular to the areas previously under the domination of a medico-biological model of disease; in other words the originality of psychoanalysis must be seen in its application to the expressive, significative or semantic modes of the body. (ii) If the idea that sexuality is somehow hidden, unspoken, crying out to be spoken, if this idea is found to have a history that stretches back to the mid eighteenth century, then the key feature of the interpretative machine that psychoanalysis sets in motion, namely, the discovery of the meaningful that is also sexual, and in some sense primary, this feature is revealed to be simply a crystallization of tendencies that doctors, teachers and moral leaders of one sort or another had been working towards for the century that precedes the moment when Freud found himself confronted by the sexual pantomime-show for which Charcot was the impresario. To put the arguments somewhat differently, Foucault's first argument, from The Order of Things, will make of The Interpretation of Dreams an original synthesis of the categories of possible knowledge available to the human sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, without finding there anything more than an inversion of concepts that had served to furnish out the sciences of ethnology, philology and mythology throughout the nineteenth century. Foucault's second argument, from La volonte de savoir, will make of the Three Essays on Sexuality nothing more than a codification - and perhaps a neutralization- of the discourses on perverse and abnormal sexuality that the institutions of organized and scientific sexual confession had progressively revealed and created from the eighteenth century on. The cogency and validity of these historical theses is still in question and require much further debate and research. But it is clear that these are the most challenging historical hypotheses on the history of psychoanalysis since Freud wrote 'On the history of the psychoanalytical movement'. (See also the debate between members of the Ecole Freudienne and Foucault, which took place shortly after the publication of La volonte de savoir in Ornicar?, 10, 1977, esp. pp. 76fT.) CHAPTER I I. One of the names that Anna 0., Breuer's first patient, gave to the method she had created (Breuer and Freud (1895d) SE II 30). She employed the English words, since, at that point in the course of her neurosis, she could not speak German. 2. From the beginning of his psychoanalytic work, Freud detached himself from two doctrines, obviously related to each other, that we can call Notes 215 'physicalism' and 'organicism'. The first had a more philosophical sense, namely, the prescription that all possible medically explanatory entities had a physical reference, a scientific examination of the other side of the implicit dualism being either fruitless, impossible or, allowing of a complete translation into scientific languages which included no reference to 'mind'. In 1890, Freud had noted the finding that 'in some at least of these (nervous) patients the signs of their illness originate from nothing other than a change in the action of their minds upon their bodies and that the immediate cause of their disorder is to be looked for in their minds. What may be the remoter causes of the disturbance which affects their minds is another question, with which we need not now concern ourselves'. ((1890a) SE VII 286), and the continual postponement of any approach to a physicalist reduction of 'the action of the mind' throughout psychoanalytic writings is a witness to the irrelevance of recourse to physical explanations. Apart from a short flirtation with psychophysical parallelism, Freud was an unrepentant and rather old-fashioned dualist in his theory and in his practice, if not on every occasion when pressed to give an opinion concerning the final causes of the phenomena that psychoanalysis discovered. As to organicism, this doctrine had a more specifically medical flavour, being the general term to cover those theories of 'disease' that presumed to find the explanatory entities in the bodily organs. There was thus an emphasis on the spatial locality of the causes. We might, indeed, contrast physicalism and organicism on this point: physicalist theories were not necessarily concerned with the actual locus of a disease. For many physicalists, to speak of 'nervous fibres' or even Jackson's 'nervous arrangements' would qualify a theory as physicalist. But an organicist would search for specific loci: the search for the specific cerebral artery whose anaemia or hyperaemia had caused a certain disturbance of the mental faculties would be a typically organicist project. In this sense, Freud had renounced organicism in psychology by the time he published On Aphasia but was still prepared to embark upon a physicalist programme in the Project, even if the units of'matter in motion' soon got squeezed out of what became an essentially non-reductionist account. 3. See, for instance, Freud(l900a) SE IV 18ln; SE V 553, 562-4,594-6,604- 5. Cf. Steinbach (1953). 4. The best general account of the history of physiology touching on the reductionism of the late nineteenth century is Rothschuh (1953, 1973), although the classic Lange, vol. III (1865, 1925) and the unsurpassed Merz (1904-12) are more thought-provoking. More specifically, the works of Amacher, Bernfeld, Cranefield, Gode-von-Aesch, Riese, Stengel, Young give the background to what Bernfeld called the 'school of Helmholtz', which Cranefield renamed 'the biophysics movement'. Jones, vol. I is accurate, although limited by the form of the biography. On Vienna in particular, see Lesky ( 1965), and Hoff and Seitelberger ( 1952). For the place ofmedicinein Austrian culture the best source is Johnston (all cited in full in bibliography). 5. For Breuer's early work, see Cranefield (1958, 1972). For Freud's early work as a pathologist, Amacher (1965), Andersson (1962), Brautigam (1960) Brun (1936), Dorer (1932), Ellenberger (1970), Galdston (1956), 216 Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis Jones (1953), Konig (1962), Lebzeltern (1973), Levin (1974), Rosen (1972), Spehlman (1953), Stewart (1969). 6. For instance, the 'cure' achieved by Zoe in Jensen's Gradiva consisted in her helping Hanold to recognize that he had displaced his love from Zoe Bertgang to the Pompeian Gradiva. '[The analyst] brings about something like what Norbert Hanold grasped at the end of the story when he translated back the name "Gradiva" into "Bertgang" [both mean 'who steps along brilliantly']. The disorder vanishes while being traced back to its origin; analysis, too, brings simultaneous cure.' (Freud (1907a) SE IX 89). 7. There is no comprehensive account of theories of nervous diseases in the nineteenth century. My work is drawn from those partial accounts that do exist, mainly focused on theories of hysteria, such as Abricossoff(l897-8), Ellenberger (1970, p.
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