For and Against Psychoanalysis

Stephen Frosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781135448295
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychoanalyse

Psychoanalysis has always been a source of controversy throughout academic and popular culture. This controversy relates to questions of its true value, its scientific status, its politics and its therapeutic effectiveness. Psychoanalysis' defenders regard it as a body of knowledge built on careful and painstaking exploration of complex clinical encounters, offering more detailed and valid insights than can be obtained from other sources. Psychoanalysis is also a building block for considerations of human subjectivity in a wide range of academic disciplines and practical areas of work, from social theory to feminist studies, to counselling and psychotherapy.

In this thoroughly revised and updated second edition of For and Against Psychoanalysis, Stephen Frosh examines the arguments surrounding psychoanalysis at some key points: its standing as a scientific theory, its value as a method of therapy, its potency as a contributor to debates around identity construction, gender, homosexuality and racism. At each of these points, there is something to be said 'for and against' psychoanalysis, with the balance depending on whether it deepens our understanding of human functioning, whether it is consistent with its own perceptions and theories or seems subservient to social pressures and norms, and whether it is coherent or muddled, evocative or sterile.

For and Against Psychoanalysis provides an accessible introduction and critical guide to the current standing of psychoanalysis. It is essential reading for students of psychoanalysis, counselling, psychotherapy and psychology, and for social researchers and social theorists, as well as for those who are simply interested in what place psychoanalysis has in the modern world.

Part I

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Knowledge

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Chapter 2

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Science, mysticism and subjectivity

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Throughout the history of psychoanalysis there have been acrimonious debates about its evidential standing. How does one evaluate the claims made by a body of theory that is heterogeneous, often vague, enormous in its scope (dealing with issues ranging from slips of the tongue to the history of civilisation) and requires of its practitioners immersion into structures and institutions of intense belief? What criteria can be employed to assess an approach that suggests that all theories and claims to knowledge (i.e. all rational activities) are under the sway of unconscious forces that cannot be known in any direct way yet can be employed as explanations for almost any eventuality? Psychoanalysis, it might be argued, possesses some of the most versatile explanatory concepts in intellectual history, so versatile that they are immune to appraisal by rational means: they do not stay still for long enough.

Much of the debate about the standing of psychoanalysis as theory has revolved around the question of whether it can be considered to be, in any meaningful sense, a scientific pursuit. Freud’s view on this, expressed most firmly in his New Introductory ‘Lecture’ on The Question of a Weltanschauung, was unequivocal:

Psychoanalysis, in my opinion, is incapable of creating a Weltanschauung of its own. It does not need one; it is a part of science and can adhere to the scientific Weltanschauung.¹

Psychoanalysis is ‘a specialist science, a branch of psychology’,² unfit to create its own attitude towards or view of the world. The fact that it deals with subjective issues – what Freud calls the ‘mental field’ – makes no difference, ‘since the intellect and the mind are objects for scientific research in exactly the same way as any non-human things’.³ In fact, if ‘the investigation of the intellectual and emotional functions of men (and of animals) is included in science, then it will be seen that nothing is altered in the attitude of science as a whole, that no new sources of knowledge or methods of research have come into being’.⁴ What psychoanalysis contributes is an application of the scientific method and point of view to wishes and other unconscious mental events, but this does not mean that it can proceed in a wish-fulfilling way itself. Psychoanalysis can neither adopt the ways of art nor of religion, although it can be used to analyse these; it cannot even allow that these might be alternative ways of expressing human truths. Science, and with it psychoanalysis, must contest the ground of explanation, and triumph.

It is simply a fact that the truth cannot be tolerant, that it admits of no compromises or limitations, that research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and that it must be relentlessly critical if any other power tries to take over any part of it.⁵

Freud’s espousal of the values and perceptions of science could hardly be more categorical, and his claim that it is in the scientific sphere that psychoanalysis is properly placed is strongly stated and tenaciously defended. Others, of course, have not always been so sure. Hans Eysenck, an irrepressible prophet of psychoanalysis’ demise, pronounces of Freud:

He was, without doubt, a genius, not of science, but of propaganda, not of rigorous proof, but of persuasion, not of the design of experiments, but of literary art. His place is not, as he claimed, with Copernicus and Darwin, but with Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, tellers of fairy tales.⁶

Psychoanalysis is a series of tall tales, for some reason taken seriously – perhaps because of their excitement and literary merit, or because of what another critical commentator calls ‘the attraction of the irrational, which appeals in and of itself’.⁷ As will be seen, some defenders of psychoanalysis adopt a position rather similar to this, but without Eysenck’s acerbic attitude towards psychoanalysis’ truth-claims: they simply argue, pace Freud, that the genre of novels and fairy tales – of narratives – has a considerable amount to offer in the pursuit of human understanding.

From a more sophisticated critical perspective, Ernest Gellner has something similar to say. Psychoanalysis is a ‘mystical experience’; where it differs from other forms of mysticism is not in its scientific standing, but in its use of mystical means to attain knowledge of the natural rather than the spiritual world.

Psychoanalysis does indeed consist of the penetration of a Special Realm, discontinuous from the ordinary world though dominating it, and accessible only to forms of exploration distinct from those prevalent in the ordinary world: success is heralded by intense emotion, and a deep transformation of the knower himself. All this it shares with older forms of mysticism. But: this Other Realm is part of Nature. This is mysticism with a naturalistic face.⁸

Gellner is pointing here to an aspect of psychoanalytic knowledge that was dwelt upon in the previous chapter: its transformative capacity. One unusual feature of psychoanalysis is that knowledge is given the status both of ‘scientific’ advancement – pursuing understanding of the general functioning of human subjects, of the unconscious, of psychopathology and so on – and also as the route to personal change. It is through a particular kind of psychoanalytic knowledge – ‘insight’ – that the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis has its effect. In principle, it might be argued that this latter facet of psychoanalytic knowledge need not contaminate its scientific aspect: therapy might be seen as the application of general discoveries to the individual case. In this way, it could be equivalent to other attempts to derive scientific ‘laws’ through one mode of investigation and then to apply them to practical problems. However, what complicates the position of psychoanalysis is that the transformative capacity of psychoanalytic knowledge is held to be integral to the theory itself. Studying a mental phenomenon ‘from the outside’ will not produce the kind of knowledge that counts as genuinely psychoanalytic, just as reading about psychoanalysis in books is held never to produce a true understanding of it.

A brief example to clarify this point can be given from the field of observational studies of children.⁹ Amongst developmental psychologists working within an empirical tradition, the task of an observer is to systematically record children’s behaviour, reducing as far as possible distortions caused by the various biases that might enter into the observational process. Amongst these biases, or sources of ‘error’, are included particular attributes of the observer; one way to check on this is to use additional observers whose observations can be compared with one another’s. As Jerry Wiggins, in a classic text on the subject,¹⁰ points out, this ‘problem’ of inter-observer reliability is best understood as an empirical question concerning the extent to which the findings made by one observer can be generalised to those that would have been made by another. Nevertheless, the central point is that psychology strives to make sources of variation in observational studies explicit so as to approach as near as possible to an account of the child’s behaviour that is not mediated by subjective aspects of the observer’s own functioning.

Several psychoanalytically oriented developmental psychologists have used a similar observational framework with the goal of investigating children’s emergent subjectivities, hence producing data congruent with psychoanalytic understanding. They are thus working within the ‘scientific’ frame of empirical psychology, but applying it to psychoanalytically relevant phenomena. Amongst the most influential of these researchers is Daniel Stern,¹¹ whose painstaking work on the fine detail of interactions between mothers and infants has been received with considerable interest both by developmental psychologists and by psychotherapists. Interestingly, however, the relationship between psychoanalytic knowledge and the kind of knowledge produced by observational studies of this kind, even with a psychodynamic gloss, remains controversial. Writing about Stern’s work, Roszika Parker notes,

Many writers have commented that this is a world of interpersonal rather than intrapsychic events. Stern’s baby does not develop images of the mother mediated by its unconscious phantasy, or archetypal imagery. It seems that Stern’s view is that as unconscious conflicts cannot be observed in babies, they cannot be taken into account.¹²

The problem here, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is almost exactly the opposite of that which would be the concern of empirical psychology. Because Stern relies on observation of behaviour without mediating it through the observer’s own subjectivity, he cannot produce an account of the infant’s emerging selfhood from the point of view of its psycho-dynamic (i.e. at root, its unconscious) determinants. This is because, as Gellner suggests in the quotations given above, psychoanalysis suggests that the only reliable route into the unconscious of another is through the unconscious of the self, through what Parker calls ‘unconscious to unconscious communication’.¹³ This is why the main British tradition of infant observation – nowadays an important component in all psychoanalytic psychotherapy training courses – requires the observer to record not just the child’s behaviour, but the feelings evoked in the observer as well. This is not, as might be the case from an empirical position, just in order to take into account the ‘distorting’ impact of these feelings on the observer’s objectivity; rather, it is because the observer’s emotional responses are taken to be the most useful – the most ‘valid’ – indices of what is going on for the child her or himself. Margot Waddell describes this approach to infant observation as follows.

It is a method with no claims to impartiality or objectivity. Rather the reverse, it is one rooted in subjectivity of a particular kind – with the capacity to look inward and outward simultaneously …; one that struggles to prevent observation being clouded and distorted through preconception. It is a method which requires the observer to be as minutely cognisant of his or her internal processes as of those of the subject of observation.¹⁴

Although there is an element here of the observer becoming aware of her or his internal processes in order to reduce their impact (the method is ‘one that struggles to prevent observation being clouded and distorted through preconception’), the capacity to understand the child is seen as dependent on the ability to register the unavoidable, in fact the essential, subjective responses of the observer in the child’s presence. Comprehending a (here, preverbal) child’s state of mind, the focus of psychoanalytic work, can only be achieved through comprehension of one’s own unconscious response.

From Gellner’s point of view, this indeed looks like a variety of mysticism: full psychoanalytic understanding, whether of oneself or of others, can only be achieved when something extra-cognitive takes place, some unconscious responsiveness. If one does not believe in the possibility of ‘unconscious to unconscious communication’, then not only is it impossible to carry out psychoanalytic therapy, but it is also impossible to do psychoanalytic science. Knowledge of this kind is personally transformative, hence full of personal investments, subjective resonance, wishes, conflicts and ambivalence. In most canons, this would rule it out of science.

But is this necessarily so? All the claims and considerations outlined here warrant considerable discussion, for they bear not just on the very specific but well-worn question of whether psychoanalysis can reasonably claim to be a science, but also on the wider issue of what kind of knowledge of subjectivity is possible and legitimate. However, it might be worth making a preliminary point here, concerning the narrowness of the view of science that dominates in discussions surrounding psychoanalysis. It seems fair to say that the scientific standing of psychoanalysis has generally been explored using a ‘positivist’ image of science, containing a number of assumptions that themselves have been brought into question in the social sciences in recent years. Principal amongst these assumptions is the notion of realism, that is, the position that there exists a domain of objective ‘truth’, of actual reality, which with the right methods can be identified and explored directly, even if this is a very difficult task. So, to follow up the example of child observation procedures given above, there is an actual ‘truth’ of the child’s behaviour that can be described accurately, given robust enough measures and the taking of forceful enough steps to reduce error due to sampling and observer bias. Following from this assumption, positivism assumes a dualist or objectivist epistemology, in which findings are taken as having an objective existence of their own, independently of the researcher, and reliance is therefore upon methodologies (usually quantitative ones) emphasising the neutrality of the researcher and the manipulation o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Knowledge
• Part II Psychotherapy
• Part III Society
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index