Psychoanalysis reached its apex of influence as an explanation and a cure for psychological ailments in the Fifties and Sixties. The usual explanations for this fact is that the psychoanalytic quest for childhood sexual traumas as the cause of later psychological pathologies had been replaced by the psychotropic drugs that became available in the Sixties and the development of cognitive therapy in the Seventies, that form of therapy replacing the analysis of feelings with practical advice of how to manage feelings. So addictions of one sort or another were no longer addressed by plumbing for the causes of an addictive personality but by advising cigarette smokers to tie their cigarette packages in rubber bands so that a cigarette was less accessible. The new therapies might have been less profound but they seemed to work better.
I have an alternative proposition that does not contradict this theory that more effective therapies for psychological ailments had been found but further explains why psychoanalysis fell by the wayside when, after all, it could have rehabilitated itself by redefining very carefully the parameters under which it was effective. My proposition, as that was articulated in a recent post on the Civil Rights Movement, is that there are three strands of development inherent in the paradox that lies behind any social movement. A good way to illustrate that proposition is to turn to an intellectual or cultural movement, such as psychoanalysis, because these types of movements tend to produce a literature that is not only polemical and political but examines the convolutions of its own paradox and how that paradox can be rationalized into one or another of the three ideological strands. Intellectual movements, such as Darwinism or Keynesian economics or Modern Art, entertain a paradox that revolves around an issue of illusion and reality. They posit that the world is different from what it appears to be and therefore must consider how it is that people remain confused and how it might be possible for the elite, as intellectuals, to lead people from illusion to reality. That is different from the Civil Rights Movement, for example, which might regard the inherent inferiority of Blacks as an illusion, but did not think that caste inferiority was illusory. Rather, the question was how to replace one reality with another, more inclusive, reality.
It should be remembered, however, that an intellectual movement is a subspecies of social movement, and so all of what could be said of any social movement applies to an intellectual movement. In particular, psychoanalysis is subject to the organizational formats that evolve from the rationalization of its paradox, and those formats are keyed to the role that the psychoanalytic elite will play in the liberation of its followers from the chains of illusion, just as other movements release people from the chains of oppression..
The paradox that holds together the three strands of psychoanalysis is defined by the distinctive subject matter and method of psychoanalysis. The subject matter is the intimate details of a person's life, the stories and information one would find it difficult to tell even to a close friend. These data may be but need not be sexual. They can include fears about money or self-esteem and are most significant when they occur earlier rather than later in life. The general method of psychoanalysis is to provide interpretations of these stories. Such interpretations will liberate the person from the shameful emotions that are associated with the stories. The interpretations are literary in the sense that the details of a particular case are plundered until they can be assembled into a coherent narrative that provides a motivation for the person to act the way the person does in the visible or public world. That person can't talk back to his boss because his mother did not breastfeed him. Sex, bathroom habits, and the smell of a mother's nightgown bear on one's occupation, the choice of a mate, and whether one will be stiff or yielding during confrontations. This conflict between the private and the public can be expressed in any number of oppositions, such as secrecy versus openness or emotion versus structure, but they all amount to the same thing: what is very private gets expressed in what is very public.
A number of supplementary paradoxes associated with psychoanalytic theory are generated from this essential psychoanalytic paradox. One of these has to do with the relation of a theory that describes how people behave to a morality about how people should behave. These become unraveled from one another in the course of the history of psychoanalysis. Freud, in his late essay, “Analysis: Terminable and Interminable” thinks he is going beyond morality into a Nietzsche-like world where one can only assess whether people are strong enough to deal with the difficulties they encounter in life. Ego psychologists such as Erikson, in his 1950 book “Childhood and Society”, think that the time honored ideas of morality that stress integrity and justice are consistent with and grow out of a natural morality that can be abstracted from the ways people develop their selves over the course of their lives. And modern friends of psychoanalysis such as Woody Allen see the good orgasm as the sign of good character, and are quick to note, as Charles Kadushin pointed out in 1969, that the moral shortcomings of others are to be taken as signs of neurosis. So psychoanalysis is a kind of morality as well as an answer to moralists.
A second supplementary paradox concerns the unconscious. Freud thought that the unconscious was an inventory of desires, always just poking their way into consciousness through symptoms and dreams and jokes and slips of the tongue. Eriksonians treat the unconscious as a state of feeling subject to interpretation but nonetheless experienced as such by the vast majority of humanity. You sense what you are before you can explain it or defend it, and you lever yourself into becoming a better person because the prior state feels wrong even if you can't explain why you want to abandon it, which was the view of Robert Coles, a follower of Erikson’s. Some commentators on Freud wonder, for their part, whether there is any such thing as the unconscious at all. Either it is so recondite that it cannot speak its mind and so one takes for the unconscious the thoughts and desires that have been placed there by therapists, that the view of Frederick Crews, or else think, like Jeffery Masson did, that the unconscious is a more or less accurate record of what happened to a person rather than of what a person wanted to happen.
The most important supplementary paradox-- the one most elaborated in psychoanalytic theory-- has to do with the nature of sex. Freud thought, most certainly in his early work, that sex meant lust in the ordinary sense of that word. Male children felt sexual feelings that were of the same sort as feelings that adults had. Moreover, male children wanted to possess their mothers sexually and were put off that idea only by the fear of their fathers. You could see what had happened to those who had felt the rage of their fathers. They had turned into little girls. Both social taboos and universal fears contributed to the suppression and repression of lust. People become enraged and/or helpless and/or symptomatic as a result of this socially imposed condition.
The division within psychoanalysis over the centrality of lust, as that is commonly understood, was dramatically played out on the boat bringing Freud and Jung to Massachusetts from New York in 1907. They had stayed up all night discussing the case of Dora. They could not agree that a sexual wish lay behind the patient's latest dream. That was crucial, since the dream was the doorway into the unconscious. If the dream was not a clue to a repressed sexual desire, then there might be some other unconscious motivation that was inspiring the patient's symptoms. Freud insisted that, on further analysis, he had been able to describe the sexual nature of the dream, and so there was no need for Jung to posit a separate set of issues that could dominate dreams and the unconscious. Freud claims this issue as the one which led Jung to break with the psychoanalytic movement.
The development of ego psychology in the later Freud as well as in the work of Anna Freud can be seen as a way to fudge the issue of the sexual etiology of all psychoneurosis. If the ego has a separate course of development and is not just the resultant of the conflicting forces of the id and the superego, then the ego has its own needs that have to be served, and those can overwhelm the requirements of the id. The road is open for Erik Erikson and others to posit identity as the main psychological structure which is served by other psychological structures and needs.
The road becomes broad enough to allow substitutes for the trinity of the id, the ego and the superego as the generative force of human behavior, the three regarded by more orthodox Freudians as engaged in a battle with one another that will be there as long as human beings are around, however much individuals may accomplish more or less of a resolution of the three. There are neo-Freudians such as Erich Fromm who reduce psychoanalysis to a social psychology in that human emotions are a response to the social circumstances of their lives. Germans may not have had to choose between freedom and authority, those antipodes of human existence, but they did, and what followed was what followed. And there is the emergence of some very un-sex like aspects of the human condition that can serve as the basis of all intra-personal conflict. Ludwig Binswanger, in his “Being-in-the-World” sees at the core of humainty a sense of existential angst, a dread of one's own materiality, that replacing sex as the main issue in the formation of a self.
These three supplementary paradoxes reduce to the same essential paradox of the relation of private to public life. Are the conscious and the unconscious life, or morality and emotion, or sex and other needs, independent of one another, mutually interdependent, or pretty much the same thing? Any logically coherent view of one or another of these matters makes sense in the light of the primary Freudian insight that we are alive to ourselves and our desires when we dream.
Whether one cares to give priority to the question of sex, morality, or the unconscious as the root of the phenomena to be explained is merely a matter of how one cares to systematize the theory. Repression is still real if you regard it as yielding a Martin Luther who never can come to terms with his bowel habits rather than because it led to an ambivalent view of celibacy, as was the case with Gandhi, and it is still real if you regard it, as Binswanger does, as leading to personal loathing. Moreover, the various sub-movements within psychoanalysis each adopt a consistent view on all three questions of sex, morality and the unconscious, Freud most clearly dichotomizing his analysis of each, while Erikson finds all three to be plausible and reasonable compromises between what is underneath and what is on the surface, while what might be called post-Freudians remove the battleground to someplace else, whether between being and action, as in Binswanger, or history and fantasy, as in Masson.
For their part, the previous generation of Freudian heretics, such as Adler and Horney, simply replaced the central role of sex with a generalized idea of power: who has the will to power or, negatively, who feels helpless in the face of others. But the idea of power does not conjure up the power of sex to convey queasiness, intimacy and personal history, and so may be a generalization too far, however much such a redefinition makes a psychoanalytically oriented psychology more acceptable as a way to move from the private to the public. All of that suggests that the various doctrines of psychoanalysis are best organized and better understood, and so properly named, as the three distinct strands into which psychoanalysis, like any other social movement, can be rationalized.
Sociologists are familiar with these three strands as the three standard ways of conceptualizing social problems. The first strand (or school) of social problems analysis focuses on the inevitable conflict of interests between major segments of society, these usually conceived of as social classes, but sometimes as races or genders. Every social problem can be understood as an expression of the warfare between the essential groups. Drug addiction, for example, is the result of capitalism poisoning its workers to make them docile and cheap to hire; prostitution is the result of women who become sex workers because sex is objectified in a male dominated society. Half measures will not deal with these problems because they will come back in another or combined guise. The opiate of the masses can become pornography. The only way to deal with these problems is to restructure the underlying system, and that requires an intensification of the conflict so that political and cultural control can be wrested away from those in control of the system.
What might be called the oppositional school of psychoanalysis holds the same point of view. It focuses on the inevitable disharmony between the psyche and the world. Only in some few cases of extended psychoanalysis will a person be brought into some begrudged adjustment to the social world. For the most part, people are caught up in the web of their own neuroses. And, indeed, so it has been since the beginning of the world, people very gradually and slowly collectively improving their mental health: the way they raise their children, the way they conduct their sex lives-- to the point where they can be rational enough to create, among other things, capitalism and secularism.
This pessimism is found in the cultural works of Freud, who therefore can be understood in his later work as a sectarian in the movement he founded. Exposure to the barbarism of World War I is enough to precipitate the fall of mankind to a much lower level of social evolution. Bad examples are enough to penetrate the armor of civilization. This view is also espoused by those cultural thinkers, from D.H. Lawrence to Lionel Trilling, who emphasize the warfare between the life of the daytime with its engagement in striving and getting and public pretense, and the life of the nighttime, with its engagement in lust and the complexities of family life. The oppositional point of view is structuralist in that social life is essentially organized in such a way that provides for both the fact of a division between the psyche and the social and the fact that this division cannot be seriously breached. Jacques Lacan, a favorite among cultural Freudians, which are those who think of psychoanalysis as a form of literary criticism more than as a form of science, thinks of therapy as no more than a way to weave together the strands of a person's psychic life for its own sake. Psychic life runs parallel to overt life, but the power of talk to leverage a reduction of psychic induced disabilities is weak.
The second school of social problems is the school of conflict control. In this view, social problems are the result of conflicts of interest that can be mediated in that some of the needs of each side of the conflict can be met. The adversaries need not be locked in combat to the death. So drug abuse, while partly the pastime of an underclass, can be alleviated through providing jobs, which offer a way of life that creates less stress, as well as by providing some socially acceptable form of stress reduction, such as cigarettes. Prostitution can be controlled by the creation of red light districts and health checkups and other improvements in the working conditions of sex workers.
Ego psychology is the version of psychoanalysis that provides a version of conflict control. People are not locked in their psyches. They wish to communicate not only inevitably private sexual urges, but also motives and feelings that have to do with the construction of identity and other matters such as the search for satisfaction in work and personal relations. These desires can be expressed in the social world because the social world has room for such desires. These ego pursuits usually do find their voice, especially to those with the ear to listen for motives that people do not know they are expressing. Navahos knew they were resisting the competitive model of education that violated their values, but it took sensitive cultural analysts by the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhorn to express that point clearly.
More recondite matters can also yield up their meanings. Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, noted Erik Erikson, held fast to a way of life that gave them integrity even if they were quick to express their dissatisfaction with work at the mill, a point that holds true, I might add, for ex-coal miners now unemployed in West Virginia who pine for the days, so they say, when they went down into the mines.. According to Erikson, Martin Luther, a notably articulate man, did not know how to say that his rebellion against the Church was a way of "holding in" the coal miner's sense that what is valuable is what is hidden underground. This second school, whether sited in social problems or seriously ill patients can learn to gain control of the selfish emotions that interfere with the ability to live at peace with work and family.
The third school of social problems is the school of conflict resolution. There is no need to merely pick away at social problems. They can be eliminated if the proper social program is put into place. That is no pipe dream. Various standard childhood illnesses were eliminated through vaccination and public health measures. Racial prejudice can be reduced through legislation and education to the point that the object of racial resentment is moved away from one group to another, so that nowadays Southern and Southwestern politicians feel free to rant about Latinos even as they are aware that it is no longer acceptable to rant about African Americans. That doesn’t abolish the idea or feeling of prejudice; it only shows that it can be resolved for some peoples. Jews are now considered whites while seventy years ago they were a distinct race.
Other social problems that have been by and large abolished rather than simply reduced include the problem of the elderly as a poverty ridden community. That was abolished through raising Social Security payments. Medical care for the poor and the elderly was provided through Medicaid and Medicare. It seems to be the case that social problems are abolished but only gradually through providing mechanisms to do so for one part of a problem population and then expanding them. Medical care, by law, now has to be provided for anyone who shows up at a hospital, regardless of their ability to pay. The only question is whether outlays by the government or by private health insurance providers are what pay for their care.
An alternative to the piecemeal approach to abolishing social problems is the approach of Emile Durkheim. He regards social problems as forms of deviance that can be abolished through education or psychiatry. That, at one time, was the approach taken towards homosexuals. They are deviants and, as such, are capable of cure. It is only a question of devising the tools to cure them. Another alternative is to allow social processes to proceed along their way. The housing foreclosure crisis that occured in the Great Recession of the Twenty-Aughts was abolished and not just alleviated when the market wass allowed to settle and so the last of the housing bubble was washed out of the economic system. Destitute farmers dependent on price supports or payments not to raise crops are no longer a problem when small family farms are finally all gobbled up by agribusiness, as has by and large happened, the remaining family farmers making a go at being hands on museums of what life used to be like.
The psychoanalytic movement also has its version of conflict resolution. People do not need to be at odds between their ids and their egos because the id can be accommodated in a society that has a more “mature” view of sexual relations, one in which there is not such a great discrepancy between private needs and public approval. That happens when sexual life becomes considered a normal part of a healthy life, people starting off on their sexual careers just as they do on their occupational careers, everyone having scars to show about both of these, whether in terms of busted relationships or having to switch occupations because there has been a turndown in the occupation one trained for. People of both sexes have to deal with reminders of past relationships when developing new ones and people teaching high school have to wonder if they might have made a go of a collegiate teaching career if they had applied themselves. These are not social problems, just aspects of the human condition which even a Marxist utopia would not have abolished. Most of what has been described as the third strand of psychoanalysis fits here. People move on from sex to the deeper existential and historical issues. Bad sex is only a symptom of something deeper. And so the paradoxes of psychoanalysis are eliminated-- or are they?