CHAPTER I. Analysis of Freud’s Dynamic and Individualistic Conception of the

ANALYSIS OF FREUD’S DYNAMIC AND INDIVIDUALISTIC CONCEPTION OF THE NEUROSES

The following pages are an endeavour to determine the conditions, social and individual, that constitute the health of the mental organism. What the health of the mental organism is, has not as yet been adequately described. On the somatic side, of course, one defines health as the harmonious functioning of the parts comprising the organism as a whole. But, as regards the constitution of the mental life in its totality, we have no such inclusive interpretation of the condition requisite to harmonious functioning. Although the psychopathologist is constantly engaged in efforts to restore the distorted mind to a condition of harmony and health, one finds nowhere a satisfactory statement as to just what constitutes the state of harmony which it is his avowed purpose to establish. Health, of course, is synonymous with the harmony of the whole. But from the point of view of consciousness we have not even determined as yet what is the organism as a whole or what are the parts constitutive of it. The psychiatrist is habitually preoccupied with the outer features of mental disharmony which the method of extrinsic observation has brought to his personal notice. It is evident, therefore, that his conception of consciousness is automatically withheld from a subjective inclusion of the organism in its entirety, and that it compasses only the particular aspect that falls within the limits of his own particular observation. It is this discrepancy which I should like, if possible, to isolate from its present personal involvement, with a view to the possibility of a clearer understanding of our mental problems. To this end my recourse can only be such an objective inquiry as may be the more hospitable because of its subjective inclusiveness.

In pre-Freudian days, as is well known, the psychopathologist who had to do with a nervous disorder turned quite automatically in the direction to which the patient pointed, or to the symptom indicated. Whether a paralysis, an obsession, a phobia or what not, this symptom or sign constituted for the physician no less than for the patient the exclusive focus of interest. Thus in the domain of nervous and mental disharmonies the entire field of inquiry occupied itself in earlier times with a mere obvious index of disease rather than with the disease itself.

With the advent of Freud the situation became wholly changed. Through his discovery that the disturbance was neither what nor where it appeared to be from the clinical point of view, Freud came to explain it upon grounds which led to a fundamentally altered conception of the hysterias and their kindred manifestations. Viewing the situation as a dynamic one, Freud regarded the symptom in question in the light of an unruly element within the central personality, whence, in his view, this central personality became, as it were, the controlling seat of government. It was Freud’s position that this presiding principle must be held amenable for fostering within its domain so discordant an element as that whereof the symptom gave notice, and accordingly, it was to this central principle that Freud henceforth addressed his investigations.

This position of Freud’s, in which he regards the essential mechanism of the neurosis as a symptom-substitution representing in substance a psychic transposition or a shift of affect from intrinsic source to arbitrary aspect, embodies the whole significance of psychoanalysis. It is a significance that marks the outset of our understanding of the real nature of the neuroses. For it was this conception that first posited as the background of consciousness an integral personality, from which, as a basis, it was sought to discover the factors operative in causing the division within it represented by the neurosis. But just as the enduring distinction of Freud’s work lies in this conception of a central totality of personality constituting the substrate of the conscious life, so its limitation consists precisely in the erroneous position to which Freud assigned this totality of consciousness. I believe that the many inconsistencies and half-baked deductions of psychoanalysis, with the consequent deadlock to a truly comprehensive interpretation of the neuroses, are due precisely to this limitation of the conception of the neurosis within the bounds of the individual consciousness. When we have realized that this conception of a totality of personality is biologically tenable only from the point of view of an inclusive societal consciousness and not of the circumscribed individual consciousness, we shall, I believe, have taken the essential step toward dispelling the confusion and lack of coherence within the psychoanalytic system as it now stands.

As one looks back, it is not difficult to see how Freud’s necessarily conventional, clinical point of view--the outgrowth of personal inclination and tradition--unconsciously bound him to a conceptual outlook that was necessarily circumscribed and limited, and how he was thus unwittingly led into a contradiction of the ultimate significance of the very conception which he had himself originated.

In the nature of Freud’s postulate that a psychic transposition is the basis of the neurosis, his thesis assumes a breach in the integrity of consciousness. This breach within consciousness is due to the effort of a delimited area within it to establish itself as a separate, self-governing unit. His position envisages a conflict entailing a dissociation of the personality due to the secession of one or more of its integral constituents. Hence the real crux of Freud’s thesis was the determination of the essential incompatibility between an independent part (dissociation) and the coherent whole (unification) within the sphere of consciousness--a conception which seems to me as beautiful as it is true. But in the bias of Freud’s own individualistically circumscribed consciousness, with the inevitable separation or dissociation it entailed, Freud failed to recognize the implication of his own thesis. He did not see that he was himself unconsciously held within a position bearing the essential feature of the very disorder which presumably he was regarding from a non-partisan, unified point of view. He did not see that his own position was precisely that of a separate, delimited unit, within the totality of consciousness, represented in the dissociation of his own personal bias. There is here a consideration which Freud, and the rest of us along with Freud, have permitted to pass by completely unnoticed, due to our own unconscious embroilment within the limitations of our circumscribed individual consciousness. While theoretically advocating unification as the basis of consciousness, Freud was himself actually seeking unconsciously to reconcile with it a dissociation within himself. It is this self-circumventing illusion of the restricted individualistic consciousness which, if one may judge from the degree to which it has underlain my own work and that of others, is the essential fallacy of psychoanalysis.

In reality, then, Freud set out to account for the seemingly actual upon grounds of the seemingly actual. He did not see that the very medium of human experience, as seemingly actual and as commonly accepted by us to be actual, is in truth already biased by impressions that are only virtual. In short, Freud did not realize that our own so-called consciousness is unconsciousness. He assumed that the analysis or self-examination to which he subjected himself and his patients was disinterested and authentic in its inclusiveness of the personality as a whole. And all the while he failed to realize that the personality as a whole, as embodied in the self-limited consciousness of the individual, is itself imbued with all the prejudice of self-interest and with all the bias of dissociation constitutive of the habitual medium of our collective unconscious. As this habitual medium is actuated by individual tradition and separativeness, it is necessarily based throughout upon motives of personal preference. With an outlook distorted by personal preference (the unconscious wish), it is not possible to view the processes of life and its disharmonies with freedom and clarity. From a standpoint of private prejudice it is not possible to envisage private prejudice. Unconsciousness cannot compass unconsciousness. The wish cannot assail the wish. In our present mode of personalism and unconsciousness the attainment of consciousness is of its nature an impossible task. Thus the bias of Freud renders untenable the position of Freud when he assumes the abrogation of bias, since his position has itself arisen from the unsuspected bias of his own habituated or preferential mode.

It is this unconsciousness within ourselves which we psychoanalysts have let escape us and which necessarily gives to our work, for all its impressiveness, the conventional curtailment of the vicarious and unreal. As an illustration of what I mean, there is somewhere in the “Traumdeutung” an amusingly acute psychoanalytic touch in Freud’s interpretation of the dream of a patient. This patient had on one day stoutly protested that dreams were not invariable wish-fulfilments, and on the following day she brought to Freud a dream in which she was represented planning a summer outing with her mother-in-law whom she cordially disliked. Here, she said, was proof that dreams were not necessarily wish-fulfilments, and a superficial glance would seem to give her the decisive score. But Freud was alert. “Quite the contrary,” he replied with analytic acuity, “you have only furnished additional proof that dreams are wish-fulfilments, for it is precisely in your wish to prove to me that dreams are not wish-fulfilments that you have dreamed that you are going summering with your detested mother-in-law--a dream which could not more amply satisfy your wish to prove the incorrectness of my theory.” So speaks Freud with triumphant naïveté, and, with a complacency that is no less naïve, we who are Freudians are still applauding with unstinted assent the subjective fallacy of his objective logic.

Like Freud, we have not seen that every dream of our own contains no less the identical wish to prove ourselves right. Like Freud, we have not seen that it is our wish that the dream shall contain the element of a basic and invariable sexual factor in substantiation of the thesis of us Freudians. It is the fallacy of the dreamer in the foregoing incident that she sets out with the absolutism of the personal premise; but so do we--the premise, namely, of personal “rightness.” Thus we are in no different case from the patient whom Freud cites as manufacturing a dream to prove her position right. But while the wish of this dreamer--in its purpose in direct opposition to our own--stands out in sharp, unmistakable outline before us, our own wish--in its nature identical with hers, namely, the wish to prove ourselves right--remains enveloped still in the obfuscating mists of our own unconscious. There is here the organic inaccessibility of the wish to the wisher, of the dream to the dreamer. There is here the blindness of the unconscious preference with its basis in the personal absolute, and it is the need of us Freudians to recognize that the blight of its inconsistency is upon us all.

How dominant is Freud’s own individuating wish or personal preference one may realize who reads his essay on “The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” and witnesses the bitterness of his feeling toward any who gainsay him. How strongly we share with Freud the influence of personal bias may be seen in our own bitterness when others would gainsay us. It is so with us all. It is the morbid compulsion of self-vindication that underlies all “rightness.” It is the habitual illusion of our own self-centralization, a less wieldy but more explicit term for what we have come to know theoretically--that is, in other people and as in no way touching our own personal feeling--as the unconscious wish-motive. For self-vindication and the unconscious wish are one.

And so, objectively, Freud is quite “right” in asserting that a basic sexual factor underlies the dream. Do not his own and his patients’ dreams prove him so? And Jung is, objectively, no less “right” in claiming that Freud is mistaken--that dreams are not primarily motivated by a sexual wish. Do not his dreams and those of his patients equally corroborate his view? And so with Adler and his theory, and so with any of us and his theory. For notwithstanding that the theories of all of us are severally opposed one to another, yet all of us are equally “right,” as may be equally substantiated by the dreams of each. The explanation is simple. The “rightness” of each is the wish of each and the wish is father to the dream!