[Marxism] A Marxist history of psychoanalysis

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Book Review, September 5, 2004
'Secrets of the Soul': Is Psychoanalysis Science or Is It Toast?
By DAPHNE MERKIN

SECRETS OF THE SOUL
A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis.
By Eli Zaretsky.
Illustrated. 429 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

Almost from the moment of its inception in the opening decades of the 20th
century, when its cigar-addicted founder -- the son of a wool salesman from
Galicia in Poland -- published his preposterous-sounding, sex-fixated
theories about the baroque motives that lie behind observable human
behavior, the mongrel of a discipline known as psychoanalysis was in a
struggle for its life. A mixture of science, angst and imaginative
reconstruction based on the often exotic symptomatology (including
inexplicable paralyses and arcane fetishes) that plagued the patients who
presented themselves at Sigmund Freud's gemutlich office at 19 Berggasse in
Vienna, ''the talking cure'' was always the object of derision as much as
of excitement. Karl Kraus, the scathing Viennese wit, was early to the
name-calling, describing psychoanalysis as the disease it purports to cure.
Sartre consigned to the dustbin of bad faith Freud's ''double-dealing''
division of the psychic whole into the ego and id. And Nabokov wrote off
the whole business -- especially its erotic reductionism -- as
''mumbo-jumbo''; we must remember, Humbert Humbert sardonically points out,
''that a pistol is the Freudian symbol for the Ur-father's central forelimb.''

The real blows to this hybrid enterprise, however, would come less from
writers or cultural observers than from the relatively new academic
disciplines of the philosophy and history of science. (As Frank Sulloway
has noted with some dismay, ''to humanists, Freud is an epic poet and a
hero of literature.'') Perhaps the most devastating assault was mounted in
the 1960's by Karl Popper's gold standard for empirical verifiability. He
posited that for a theory to be scientifically valid it had to be capable
of being falsified. Since psychoanalysis depended for its lifeblood on
inference from the patient's own subjective recounting of dreams, fantasies
and childhood memories rather than empirical data, this criterion left a
gaping hole in its very center. In other words, if no one could effectively
disprove the Oedipal complex, then no one could effectively prove it. Or,
as another critic, Frank Cioffi, saw it, the core problem was the field's
underlying apriorism: ''What a psychoanalytic explanation tells us is
itself.''

In truth, the cultural status of psychoanalysis -- notwithstanding W. H.
Auden's declaration in his 1939 poem, ''In Memory of Sigmund Freud,'' that
the doctor's views, however faulty at times, had become ''a whole climate
of opinion''- has always been shaky outside a coterie of true believers. So
too have its vulnerabilities always been glaringly evident: For one thing,
what, exactly, would a psychoanalytic cure look like? What signposts
indicate that, as Freud famously put it, neurotic misery has been converted
to ordinary unhappiness? Partly in response to external hostility and
partly as a result of the paranoid, kingmaking tendencies of Freud himself,
who in 1923 established a ''Secret Committee'' of the elect, complete with
talismanic rings, zealous gatekeepers have vigilantly patrolled the
property. All of this has presented difficulties to anyone wishing to
document the movement's vertiginous, embattled history, though many have
tried. Biographies of Freud and his circle abound, with a shelfload just on
the women around him, including his sister-in-law and confidante, Minna
Bernays (whose relationship with Freud has been subject to intense scrutiny
by those convinced they were lovers), and his mother, whose death her
''goldener Sigi,'' by his own account, failed to grieve. Among the more
specialized analyses are various attempts to take up the vexed issue of
Freud's Jewish heritage, a subject that has found its most skewed
presentation in a small book by Edward Said, ''Freud and the
Non-European.'' Based on his reading of ''Moses and Monotheism,'' in which
Freud ventured his belief that Moses was an Egyptian, Said argues that
Freud would have been innately sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians.

''Secrets of the Soul'' offers itself as a comprehensive, nonpartisan
corrective to this situation. A professor of history at the New School
University, Zaretsky is the founder of the journal Socialist Review and has
written a previous book on the effects of capitalism on private life. He
has divided ''Secrets of the Soul'' -- the title derives from a 1926 film
made by G. W. Pabst (the year before, Sam Goldwyn had offered Freud
$100,000 to help think up ''a really great love story'') -- into three
broadly thematic parts charting the rise and fall of the Freudian empire.
These analyze, respectively, the ''charismatic origins'' of psychoanalysis;
the global reach of the movement's influence as it took up increasingly
charged social issues like homosexuality and feminism, and underwent
changes through exposure to two world wars; and, finally, its heyday during
the 50's, followed by the gradual fragmentation of its introspective ethos
as it met up with 60's feel-goodism and the effort in the United States to
legitimize the profession by medicalizing it.

Zaretsky's structure intentionally ''mirrors the trajectory of the second
industrial revolution'' (the first being the transition from an
agricultural to a factory-based society), in its heyday in the 1860's and
70's, the years of Freud's childhood and youth. The second industrial
revolution began with the ''Fordist'' (after Henry Ford) era -- a term
Zaretsky confusingly invokes to describe both a mass-production economy and
the human changes it brought about. It appeared, he writes, as a liberating
force against the ''petty spite and brutal tyranny'' of the Victorian
workplace, ushering in a rise in literacy, economic growth, political
reform and technological innovation -- as well as new pressures exerted by
a shift from the ideals of thrift and self-control toward the ''sexualized
dream worlds'' of mass consumption.

Similarly, the Freudian weltanschauung (which, as Zaretsky points out,
refined and particularized the idea of an unconscious that had been
floating around in amorphous form since medieval times, rather than
discovering it) was a release from a moral definition of autonomy to a
personal one. As such it was perfectly attuned to the tenor of the times,
which was leading away from a 19th-century identification with the
collective public sphere to a modernist focus on the private self.
Fin-de-siecle Vienna was electric with the shock of the new
post-Enlightenment thinking, much of it concerned with recasting hidebound
notions of character, gender and sexuality. The groundwork for Freud's
audacious theories had been laid by theorists like Havelock Ellis,
Krafft-Ebing and especially Freud's mentor and eventual rival, the
neurologist Wilhelm Fliess, whose ''Relations Between the Nose and Women's
Sex Organs'' was published in 1897, two years before Freud's
''Interpretation of Dreams.'' But it was Freud, with his astonishing
energy, shrewd instincts and imperial vision, who forged the scattered (and
often scattershot) theories of like-minded colleagues into a radical
movement. It offered secular salvation to the lost and credulous
20th-century traveler by suggesting that the way out of the existential
woods was to retrace one's steps through the royal road of the unconscious
and from there to a liberating self-discovery. Of course, in our age the
triumph of the pharmaceutic has overtaken the triumph of the therapeutic;
for all but a select few the cost-effective discussion of dosages has
replaced the expensive discussions of dreams. And so the convictions of one
era become the spurned beliefs of another.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/books/review/05MERKINL.html

first chapter:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/books/chapters/0905-1st-zaret.html


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