Historiography and Causation in Psychoanalysis

Edwin R. Wallace, IV

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134875498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Angewandte Psychologie

What do the psychoanalyst and the historian have in common? This important question has stimulated a lively debate within the psychoanalytic profession in recent years, bearing as it does on the very nature of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Edwin Wallace, a clinician with training in the history and philosophy of science, brings a ranging scholarly perspective to the debate, mediating between rival perspectives and clarifying the issues at stake in the process of offering his own thoughtful conception of the historical nature of psychoanalysis. For Wallace, the procedures, problems, and interpretive possibilities of psychoanalysis and history are strikingly constant and mutually illuminating. He insists, further, that the fundamentally historical nature of psychoanalysis poses no threat to its scientific dignity.

In arriving at this verdict, Wallace pushes beyond his expansive treatment of the many parallels between history and psychoanalysis to a systematic consideration of the problem of causation in both disciplines. Tracing the historical background of causation in science, philosophy, history, and analysis, he offers a logical analysis of determinism and a critique of causal language in psychoanalysis while adumbrating the historical character of psychoanalytic explanation.

Historiography and Causation in Psychoanalysis is a thought-provoking work that cuts across disciplinary boundaries. It will cultivate the historical sensibilities of all its clinical readers, broadening and deepening the intellectual perspective they bring to the dialogue about the nature of psychoanalytic work. Timely and rewarding reading for analysts, psychiatrists, and clinical psychologists, it will be welcomed by historians and philosophers as well.

I Historiography

In his 1935 introduction to Zilboorg's Medical Man and the Witch in the Renaissance, Henry Sigerist, the dean of American medical historians, remarked on the striking similarities in the procedure of academic historians and dynamic psychiatrists. The historian Hughes (1964, p. 47) concurs, asserting that "Psychoanalysis is history." Similarly, the former president of the American Historical Association, William Langer (1958), the philosophers of history Meyerhoff (1962) and Walsh (1969), the philosopher of psychoanalysis Ricoeur (1970), and the psychoanalysts Schmidl (1962), Wolman (1971), Novey (1968), Schafer (1976, 1978), and Leavy (1980) have written about affinities between the two disciplines. I believe that psychoanalytic clinicians have long sensed that they are practicing what Loewald (1977) has termed the "history of the individual."

Nevertheless, none of these authors has developed his ideas and observations into the systematic and comprehensive treatment that the subject deserves. In the next two chapters I articulate and attempt to support the thesis that there are point by point parallels between the two disciplines and that the implications of these are fruitful for both. The first chapter is divided into four sections: Subject Matter, Theory and Data, Positivism versus Historicism, and Covering Laws. The second chapter is likewise divided into four sections: History and Psychoanalysis as Relationship, Idealism versus Realism, Art versus Science, and Mutual Contributions.

1 Historiography

Subject Matter

How, at first blush, can there be any kinship between the psychodynamic healer, sitting empathically with a suffering fellow being, and the academic historian, probing diligently, if dispassionately, through moldering archives? After all, the first is dealing with a living individual, in the present, to whom he relates in a collaborative mode, to the end of alleviating his discomfort and perhaps restructuring his mode of being-in-the-world. The second, in contrast, works, by and large, with the documents and monuments of those long dead; is more concerned, unless he be a biographer, with cultures and periods than personalities; and, as opposed to the therapist's pragmatic and "presentistic" passion for history, has a purely academic interest in the past for its own sake.

In actuality, both historians and analysts are concerned with the same thing—human affairs. More precisely, they take as their subject the symbolically mediated behaviors of Homo sapiens, that which must be understood in terms of ideas, affects, purposes, desires, memories, interpretations, and more or less successful attempts at adaptation, as opposed to those aspects of humanity which are sufficiently explained as biophysical happenings. These latter, as well as the manifold events of the physical environment, interest both practitioners only insofar as they enter into the individual's and society's construction of,and action upon, reality. Furthermore, because of our peculiarly human propensity to repre sentationally take our histories into us, where they consciously and unconsciously influence our present perspectives and actions, psychoanalysts and historians grasp that our symbolically mediated behaviors must be understood diachronically. They must be appreciated as they unfold over time, and not merely from within their contemporary context.

Inasmuch as their concern is with symbolically mediated behavior, both professionals are preoccupied with occurrences that are actually or potentially, explicitly or implicitly, intentionally or unintentionally, verbally or nonverbally communicative. Chronicles, documents, monuments, artifacts, and economic indices on the one hand, and fantasies, feelings, parapraxes, defensive maneuvers, and psychoneurotic symptoms on the other, are equally meaningful human activities and events. But they are intelligible, as we shall see in the next section, only to one who is prepared to understand, to ask the right questions and listen for the answers.

Such considerations move me to agree with Collingwood's (1946, p. 213) contention that a prime difference between the data of the historian and those of the physical scientist is that the former have an "inside," as it were—that is, meanings and motives that precede and accompany the observed and reported events themselves. Only the most plodding chronicler is satisfied with merely recording dates and occurrences. To know, for example, that one Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. is to possess a mere piece of external data. To understand Caesar's history and intentions, and how these fitted into the political and sociocultural ambience of ancient Rome, is to begin to appreciate its proper significance, to get "inside" it. Similarly, in dynamic psychiatry, to know that a patient's mother was hospitalized for alcoholism when he was eight, that a year later she deserted the family for her lover, and that when the child was fourteen she returned home with a terminal illness and soon died is less than half the story. To get "inside" these events one must discern the patient's interpretations of, and reactions to, them.

A second peculiarity of the field of inquiry in history and psychoanalysis, as opposed to that in the experimental sciences, is its mediate, as opposed to immediate, relationship to the "observer." In other words, the historian works with the real event no more—or even less—than does the psychoanalyst. The past event in history, as much as in dynamic psychiatry, is irrecoverable, but its meaning in the present is not. Langlois and Seignebos (1898, pp. 63-67) correctly point out that the historian's observational data are, not the "facts of the past" themselves, but their "traces" in the present. Much of their treatise on methodology is an account of the process of reasoning by which the historian infers the facts from the traces. In the case of written documents these historians were aware that the "traces" are of "psychological operations," which must themselves be constructed before one can proceed to inferences about the events they report. Collingwood (1965, p. 101), as well, asserts that "it is the past as residually preserved in the present that is alone knowable."

As the historian Becker (1958, p. 48) has aptly stated, "the historical fact is in someone's mind or it is nowhere . . . the actual occurrence and the historical fact are two different things [my italics]." Even the records with which the historian works, he points out, are not the events themselves but only a pattern of ink on paper, left by someone with an image or idea of the events. Florovsky (1969, p. 351) concurs that "The knowledge of the past is necessarily indirect and inferential. It is always an interpretation. The past can only be reconstructed."¹

It is, in other words, the "historical fact," rather than the "actual occurrence," that engages the historian. All dynamic psychiatrists grasp this important distinction when they differentiate between the patient's "actual biography" and his "analytic" one. But here the analyst, in contrast to the historian, deals with both historical facts (memories) and with approximations to the actual events ("transference"—acting out, rather than recollecting, important themes from one's history). It is the intimate connection between the two that gives the psychoanalyst a route into the past (or rather, into the reconstruction of the past) that the historian does not have. This link and the opportunity to question the matrix of his historical facts (the patient), to test his hypotheses against the subsequent responses of the patient, give the dynamic psychiatrist certain advantages. On the other hand, since the therapist limits his transactions to the patient himself and does not usually encounter his friends and family members, he lacks access to a means of cross verification—the reports of contemporary witnesses—that the historian possesses, a handicap which Freud (1909, p. 207) himself acknowledged.

A third peculiarity, implied in the second, of both specialists' data is that they are themselves interpretations. In other words, historians and clinicians work, not with historical occurrences, but with the chronicler's or patient's retrospective interpretations of them. This is of course implicit in the differentiation of psychical from actual reality, the analytic from the actual biography. The patient's or chronicler's interpretation will depend on his history and the contemporary vantage point from which he speaks. In short, historians and dynamic psychiatrists are interpreters, not of actual events or flawless reports, but of interpretations—or rather, since the original historical occurrence itself was to some degree interpreted (and not merely passively perceived or undergone) by the analysand or by the chronicler's eye witness, ^interpretations. (In this respect—and particularly as regards the analysand— it is correct to say that the original interpretation is an integral part of the historical event.) Analysts and historians select, order, and interpret interpretations that have themselves been selected, ordered, and interpreted. They are, strictly speaking, historiographers, not historians.² Freud (1909a, p. 206) himself demonstrated an appreciation of this, in a passage explicitly comparing the analysand to the historian:

If we do not wish to go astray in our judgement of their historical reality, we must above all bear in mind that people's childhood memories are only consolidated at a later period, usually at the age of puberty; and that this involves a complicated process of remodelling, analogous in every way to the process by which a nation constructs legends about its early history .. . [and] just as a real historian will view the past in the light of the present.

In other words, we are dealing with four chronological levels of interpretation—(1) the original interpretation of the event, at the time of the event, by the participant (i.e., the patient or the chronicler's eyewitness), (2) the patient's or eyewitness's subsequent conscious and unconscious elaborations upon the original interpretation, and (3) such interpretive elaboration that occurs at the time the event is retold to the chronicler or analyst. (4) The historian or analyst then engages in his own interpretive elaboration of this retelling.

A fourth distinguishing characteristic of historical and psychoanalytic data is that, unlike those in physical science, they often intentionally conceal as much as they reveal. Both chroniclers and patients consciously and unconsciously delete, disguise, and distort, to ends both known and unbeknownst to them. In the transmission and successive recopying of documents, as in the conscious and unconscious reworking of childhood memories, considerable transmutation of the autograph or original impression - interpretation may occur. This confronts psychoanalysts, as well as historians, with the need for what scholars term "diplomatics" (i.e. the study of the nature and authenticity of documents), for weighing and sifting the evidence in their attempt to reconstruct an approximately accurate version of the events and (in the case of the analyst) the fantasies of the past.

Nevertheless, the dynamic psychiatrist is generally less concerned than the historian to distinguish sharply between psychical and actual reality. The clinician appreciates the inextricable and circular relationship between one's fears and fantasies and external reality itself. Psychotherapeutically, what is important is that the patient's (like everyone's) behavior is framed in accord with his psychic reality, his view of self and world. While the patient's conception of his history will bear considerable relationship to what has actually transpired, it will also be determined by his mental set (both at the time of the event's occurrence and at the time of retelling). But historians too are aware that myths and illusions can powerfully influence the past that they study. On the other hand, there are points in every treatment where it is manifestly important, as will be demonstrated, to unravel actuality from fantasy in the patient's recollections.

Theory and Data

Methodological and epistemological considerations emerge logically from our treatment of the subject matter. We now examine a number of overlapping issues which, for convenience, are presented as antitheses: historicism versus positivism, idealism versus realism, theorization versus observation, idiographic explanations versus covering laws, subjectivity versus objectivity, participation versus detachment, verstehen versus observation, "presentism" versus antiquarianism, relativism versus psychic unity, and art versus science. When facing such dichotomies both historians and analysts are all too likely to take an either-or stand, rather than the middle way which, I shall repeatedly emphasize, does more justice to reality. Many of these dialectics are exemplified by reference to Freud himself.

In history and psychoanalysis, as in science in general, the relationship between theory and data is the issue that overarches all others. What are psychoanalytic and historical facts? Are they discovered or invented, organized or organizable? Should our approach be Kantian or Lockian?

There are those who view historians and psychoanalysts as first gathering the data, unburdened by theoretical preconceptions, and only later theorizing about them; while others act as if they imaginatively spin out what they study. Ranke (1973) in history, and Meyer (1906) in dynamic psychiatry, are the most famous exemplars of the view that data are rocklike entities which, if one only collects them, will animate and assemble themselves into coherent and accurate theories.³ For Ranke (Ibid, pp. 30-31) the two cardinal characteristics of the historian are "a feeling for and a joy in the particular in and by itself' and the absence of preconceptions; his task is to portray the past "as it actually was [ivie es eigentlich gewesen]."⁴ More recently, phenomenological and existential psychiatrists often write as if theories will spontaneously generate themselves if the patient unfolds his phenomenology in sufficient detail. Langlois and Seignobos (1898), whose handbook educated several generations of historians, were not so naive as to ignore the role of interpretation, but they drew an oversharp line between gathering and criticizing one's data on the one hand, and theorizing about it on the other. At the opposite pole, those like Beard (1934, 1935) and Collingwood (1946) in history, and Schafer (1976, 1978) and Spence (1982) in psychoanalysis, often write as if history and psychoanalysis are exercises in faith and speculative ingenuity, constructions rather than reconstructions.

An erroneous and one-sided conception of the scientific method, based on a caricatured picture of the physical scientist, has kept many historians and dynamic psychiatrists from appreciating the interactive and mutually conditioning role of theorizing and data gathering in history, psychoanalysis, and science in general. Anxiety over whether they are "scientific," in a sense that would satisfy their most hostile critics, has led historians and analysts to cleave to a simplistic "observation before theorization" model long after natural scientists have abandoned it as illusory. Fortunately, many historians and psychoanalysts are coming to an honest appreciation of the fluid line between data collecting and theorizing; it is solely by refraction through the selecting and ordering lens of theory that data are reconstituted as facts.

As the philosopher Melden (1969, p. 193) says:

Progress in empirical inquiry does not occur when minds that are freed of all prepossessions are exposed to the stimulus of fact in order that they may be led by some homing instinct to the truth. Facts do not announce their own existence and, even if they did, they do not come labelled with their varying degrees of importance. For history, as written, is no mere catalogue, arranged in chronological order, of past events. Even if such a catalogue existed, it would explain nothing because it included everything. The historian is concerned to explain; he must, if he consults the facts, be led to the facts by the hypotheses in mind, the information at hand; selecting these on the basis of his antecedent knowledge for their presumed importance and exploring in the limited manner possible for him the adequacy of his hypotheses. . .

In line with this, I believe that the distinction between "narrative" or "descriptive" histories on the one hand and "explanatory" or "interpretive" histories on the other, proposed by White (1963) and others, is an artificial one. The narrative in academic history, quite as much as that in psychoanalytic clinical history, is formed from data that have been selected and organized, not merely from an apprehension of their inherent structure or inner logic, but in accord with the theoretical presupposition...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication1
• Dedication2
• Contents
• Preface & Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Historiography
• Part II: Causation
• Conclusion
• References
• Indexes
• About the Author