Excerpt
from Chapter 1: Exploring the Irrational
Sigmund Freud’s ideas had a revolutionary impact on twentieth-century thought and culture. He demonstrated the many manifestations of the unconscious; created a method of psychoanalytic treatment, and developed a wide-ranging theory that revealed the meaning found in symptoms, sexual life, dreams, fantasies, childhood, art and literature. Like Johannes Kepler in astronomy and Charles Darwin in biology, he radically altered our understanding of our place in the world, overturning the view of humans as rational, conscious beings.
Yet few people today are aware that many of the essential features of psychoanalysis were first invented by Freud’s older colleague, Josef Breuer, and can be found in the groundbreaking book they coauthored in 1895, Studies in Hysteria...
…yet in subsequent publications, when his drive for fame had become more powerful, Freud gave a sinister twist to Breuer’s work with this patient and increasingly took credit as the sole inventor of psychoanalysis. He rejected Breuer’s ideas and approach to treatment, setting the field on an unfortunate course that was only corrected many years later.
Freud’s concepts continue to have a hold on the popular imagination. Psychological treatment is frequently referred to as being “on the couch,” and numerous cartoons about psychotherapy show a patient—who may be human, dog or cat—lying down, with a bearded man behind the couch, taking notes. This image persists even though classical psychoanalysis, with its couch and Freud look-alike, has been dwindling to the point of oblivion over the last few decades. Psychotherapy is increasingly conducted face to face and is not Freudian in the traditional sense. The silent, severe psychoanalyst, who presumably knows the deepest secrets of one’s unconscious, is no longer a revered icon. Those aspects of the theory that are most captivating intellectually—Eros and Thanatos or the life and death instincts, libidinal energy, phallic and vaginal symbols, the primal scene, penis envy, latent homosexuality—are more alive in departments of literature than in the consulting rooms of therapists.
At the same time, many of Freud’s other concepts—unconscious motives; the id, ego and superego, oral and anal stages of development: the Oedipus complex; defense and repression; the Freudian slip; the couch and the fifty-minute hour—have passed into popular culture and are often used without an awareness of their origins or implications…The technical rules of analysis have also permeated the popular domain: the therapist’s relative silence and detachment; a strict schedule of fees; the fixed hour (now down to forty-five minutes); explanations focused entirely on early childhood, to the neglect of current life experiences such as discrimination, poverty, or the traumas of war; and interpretations of a wide range of diseases as “emotional,” “psychological,” or “all in your head.”Psychoanalysis has always been a mixed bag: valuable insights coexisting with overblown theories …
Our ideas about personality and psychotherapy are intertwined with our own cultural values and life experiences; we can move beyond inclinations, preconceptions, and emotional reactions—gain some degree of distance objectivity—but our personal histories exert their influence, all the more so when they are unconscious. We need to keep our minds open to alternative theories and be aware of other factors that influence our approaches…
Freud is no exception in this regard. His personal history, as well as his social background, influenced both the theories he developed and the kind of treatment he practiced…He constructed psychoanalysis from a combination of observation of patients and his understanding—and misunderstanding—of himself.His famous self-analysis, carried out just after the publication of Studies, is a clear example of this. Freud discovered many important things about himself during the self-analysis, while simultaneously pulling back from others—such as the losses he suffered as a child—that were too frightening. What he could see and not see, what he could know and not know, were the basis for the duality and contradictions that run through his work.