The Freud Files Read online

  THE FREUD FILES

  How did psychoanalysis attain its prominent cultural position? How did it eclipse rival psychologies and psychotherapies, such that it became natural to bracket Freud with Copernicus and Darwin? Why did Freud ‘triumph’ to such a degree that we hardly remember his rivals? This book reconstructs the early controversies around psychoanalysis, and shows that rather than demonstrating its superiority, Freud and his followers rescripted history. This legend-making was not an incidental addition to psychoanalytic theory but formed its core. Letting the primary material speak for itself, this history demonstrates the extraordinary apparatus by which this would-be science of psychoanalysis installed itself in contemporary societies. Beyond psychoanalysis, it opens up the history of the constitution of the modern psychological sciences and psychotherapies, how they furnished the ideas which we have of ourselves, and how these became solidified into indisputable ‘facts’.

  MIKKEL BORCH-JACOBSEN is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He is the author of highly influential books on the theory and history of psychoanalysis, and co-author of the best-selling Le livre noir de la psychanalyse (The Black Book of Psychoanalysis).

  SONU SHAMDASANI is Philemon Professor of Jung History at the Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines at University College London, and is widely regarded as the leading Jung historian at work today. His numerous books have been translated into many languages, and his most recent edited work, C. G. Jung’s The Red Book. Liber Novus (2009), was awarded the Heritage Award from the New York Book Show for the best book in the last twenty-five years.

  Books by both authors have been recipients of the Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.

  The Freud Files:

  An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis

  Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani

  CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City

  Cambridge University Press

  The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

  Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

  www.cambridge.org

  Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521729789

  © Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani 2012

  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

  First published 2012

  Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

  Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel.

  The Freud files : an inquiry into the history of psychoanalysis / Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  and Sonu Shamdasani.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-521-72978-9 (pbk.)

  1. Psychoanalysis – History. 2. Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939. I. Shamdasani, Sonu,

  1962–II. Title.

  BF173.B68127 2012

  150.19′5209–dc23

  2011020724

  ISBN 978-0-521-50990-9 Hardback

  ISBN 978-0-521-72978-9 Paperback

  Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

  For Charlotte and Maggie

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: the past of an illusion

  Waiting for Darwin

  ‘The powerful, ineradicable Freud legend’

  Opening the black box

  Freud wars

  1 Privatising science

  ‘Psychoanalysis is my creation’

  The politics of self-analysis

  The politics of replication

  Freud Inc.

  The immaculate conception

  2 The interprefaction of dreams

  The immaculate induction

  The manufacture of fantasy

  Airbrushing Breuer

  3 Case histories

  ‘The famous padded door . . .’

  Narrating the unconscious

  The mind reader

  Free indirect style

  Who speaks?

  The pretty postal worker and the unscrupulous gambler

  The return of the Wolf Man

  Freud the novelist?

  4 Policing the past

  Kürzungsarbeit

  A biography in search of an author

  The Jones biography: the definitive form of the legend

  ‘Top secret’

  Coda: what was psychoanalysis?

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index of names

  Acknowledgements

  This book began in 1993 as an inquiry into Freud historians and their work. We had become aware of the upheavals that had affected Freud studies since the 1970s, which were completely transforming how one understood psychoanalysis and its origins. Intrigued by the new histories of the Freudian movement, we decided to interview the key players to gather their testimonies in a collective volume. These interviews were transcribed and annotated (we reproduce a few excerpts in the following), but the volume itself remained unfinished, for in the meantime our investigation had changed.1 Quite quickly, it became apparent that it was not possible to situate ourselves with the neutrality and ironic detachment that we had initially adopted. The stakes were too high, and too much remained to be researched and verified before one could attempt to pass judgment on the endless controversies around psychoanalysis. Instead of describing them from the outside, we became drawn in, and here put forward our own contribution to the history of the Freudian movement.

  This book is the product of this engagement, but also an attempt to regain, through historical reflection, some of the distance that we at first maintained towards our object of study. We wanted to study the history of the history of psychoanalysis and to understand better the basic issues of this fascinating and conflictual field – fascinating because of the conflict. We wanted, in the end, to draw consequences from historical criticism for the understanding of this strange movement. For any reckoning with the status of psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy in today’s societies at some point requires coming to terms with Freud and his legacy.

  We would like to thank all those who accompanied us in this task and above all the historians who agreed to be interviewed. Many became friends (when they were not already) and guides in the minefields of Freud studies: Ernst Falzeder, Didier Gille, Han Israëls, Mark S. Micale, Karin Obholzer, Paul Roazen, François Roustang, Élisabeth Roudinesco, Richard Skues, Anthony Stadlen, Isabelle Stengers, Frank J. Sulloway, Peter J. Swales. Many others deserve our gratitude for their help, hospitality, advice, support and criticisms: Vincent Barras, Bill Bynum, Henry Cohen, Frederick Crews, Todd Dufresne, Jacques Gasser, Angela Graf-Nold, Henri Grivois, Malcolm ‘Mac’ Macmillan, Patrick Mahony, George Makari, Michael Neve, Enrique Pardo, Eugene Taylor, Marvin W. Kranz, Fernando Vidal, Juliette Vieljeux and Tom Wallace. We also thank those in the public and private archives that we worked in for their assistance. We would like to thank Philippe Pignarre, editor and friend, for his immediate interest in the project and valuable advice during the final stages of its
composition. At Cambridge University Press, we would like to thank Andy Peart for taking on the project, and Hetty Marx for her patience with the endless delays.

  The French edition of this work appeared from Éditions du Seuil in 2006. This edition has been revised and rewritten. We would like to thank John Peck for his editorial suggestions and Kelly S. Walsh for providing draft translations of chapter 3, and sections of chapters 2 and 4. His work on chapter 3 was made possible by a grant from the Graduate School of the University of Washington, which is gratefully acknowledged.

  Citations from Anna Freud are reproduced with the authorisation of the heirs of Anna Freud © 2000 the estate of Anna Freud, by arrangement with Mark Patterson and Associates. Translations of citations from French and German are our own. In some places, translations from the Standard Edition of Freud’s works have been modified. Responsibility for views expressed here is our own.

  Introduction: the past of an illusion

  The history of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.

  Carlyle (1959 [1841]), 251

  Vienna, 1916. Freud decided to canonise himself. In front of the audience which had come to hear the eighteenth of his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, given at the University of Vienna, the founder of psychoanalysis undertook to indicate his place in the history of humanity.

  Sigmund Freud: But in thus emphasizing the unconscious in mental life we have conjured up the most evil spirits of criticism against psycho-analysis. Do not be surprised at this, and do not suppose that the resistance to us rests only on the understandable difficulty of the unconscious or the relative inaccessibility of the experiences which provide evidence of it. Its source, I think, lies deeper. In the course of centuries the naive self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the center of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must be content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind. We psycho-analysts were not the first and not the only ones to utter this call to introspection; but it seems to be our fate to give it its most forcible expression and to support it with empirical material which affects every individual. Hence arises the general revolt against our science, the disregard of all considerations of academic civility and the releasing of the opposition from every restraint of impartial logic.1

  Copernicus, Darwin, Freud: this genealogy of the de-centred man of modernity is by now so familiar to us that we no longer note its profoundly arbitrary character. This is not because one should necessarily be offended by the evident immodesty of the historical tableau presented by Freud. After all, Kant was not especially humble when he spoke of effecting a ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy,2 and Darwin did not hesitate to predict that his theory would provoke a ‘considerable revolution’3 in natural history. As Bernard I. Cohen and Roy Porter4 have shown, the motif of the ‘revolutions’ effected by Copernicus, Galileo and Newton is a commonplace in the history of science since Fontenelle and the encyclopédistes, and Freud was certainly not the first, nor will he be the last, to recycle it to his advantage. However, he was by no means the only figure in psychology to do this, which immediately relativises his version of the evolution of the sciences. At the end of the nineteenth century, there was a veritable plethora of candidates vying for the title of the Darwin, Galileo or Newton of psychology. But how did Freud’s audience, and indeed so many others, come to believe in Freud’s entitlement, rather than that of one of his rivals?

  Waiting for Darwin

  According to Freud, the originality of psychoanalysis lay in the fact that it had accomplished in psychology the same type of scientific revolution which Copernicus and Darwin had effected in cosmology and biology. However, this ambition was one shared by many psychologists at the end of the nineteenth century, from Wundt to Brentano, from Ebbinghaus to William James.

  Franz Brentano: We must strive to achieve here what mathematics, physics, chemistry and physiology have already accomplished . . . a nucleus of generally recognized truth to which, through the combined efforts of many forces, new crystals will adhere on all sides. In place of psychologies we must seek to create a psychology.5

  From all sides, it was maintained that psychology had to separate itself from theology, philosophy, literature and other disciplines to take its rightful place in the orchestra of the sciences. Armchair speculation would give way to the rigours of the laboratory. When the Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy obtained his chair in psychology, he insisted that it be placed in the faculty of sciences.

  Théodore Flournoy: In placing this chair in the faculty of sciences, rather than in that of letters where all the courses of philosophy are found, the Genevan government has implicitly recognized (perhaps without knowing it) the existence of psychology as a particular science, independent of all philosophical systems, with the same claims as physics, botany, astronomy . . . As for knowing up to what point contemporary psychology does justice to this declaration of the majority, and has truly succeeded in freeing itself from all metaphysical tutelage of any colour, that is another question. For here not less than elsewhere the idea should not be confounded with reality.6

  Taken together, Brentano’s imperative and Flournoy’s reservations depict the ‘will to science’ (Isabelle Stengers)7 which historically presided over the setting up of the new discipline. ‘Scientific’ psychology didn’t emerge as the fruit of a lucky discovery, a fortuitous invention, or by some ill-defined process of natural development. It was desired by its various promoters, and imagined on the model of the natural sciences. It was envisaged that psychology would complete the scientific revolution through applying the scientific method to all aspects of human life. Until then, knowledge of Man had been scattered between the stories of myth and religion, the speculations of philosophy, the maxims of morality, and the intuitions of art and literature. Psychology would replace these incomplete and partial knowledges by a true science of Man, with laws as universal as physics and methods as certain as those of chemistry.

  Freud: The intellect and mind are objects for scientific research in exactly the same way as any non-human things. Psycho-analysis has a special right to speak for the scientific Weltanschauung at this point . . . Its special contribution to science lies precisely in having extended research to the mental field. And, incidentally, without such a psychology science would be very incomplete.8

  From the very beginning, the ‘new psychology’ presented itself as an ‘imitation’ of the natural sciences (a sort of scientific version of the ‘imitation of the Ancients’). The philosopher Alasdair McIntyre remarked, ‘pre-Newtonian physicists had . . . the advantage over contemporary experimental psychologists that they did not know that they were waiting for Newton’.9 By contrast, the new self-styled psychologists inevitably simulated the science to come. The most perspicacious asked whether psychology would ever obtain the heights of its models.

  William James to James Sully, 8 July 1890: It seems to me that psychology is like physics before Galileo’s time – not a single elementary law yet caught glimpse of. A great chance for some future psychologue to make a name greater than Newton’s; but who then will read the books of this generation? Not many I trow.10

  James, 1890: When, then, we talk of ‘psychology as a natural science’
we must not assume that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on a solid ground . . . it is indeed strange to hear people talk triumphantly of ‘the New Psychology’ and write ‘Histories of Psychology’, when into the real elements and forces which the word covers not the first glimpse of clear insight exists . . . This is no science, it is only the hope of science . . . But at present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and the laws of motion, of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved in all reactions. The Galileo and the Lavoisier of psychology will be famous men indeed when they come, as come they some day surely will.11

  For James, psychology was only the ‘hope of a science’, the preparatory work for its Galileo and Newton, who were yet to come. The Berlin psychologist William Stern was of a similar view. In 1900, in an article to salute the new century, he drew up a largely negative balance sheet of the new discipline. One was far from the unity sought by figures such as Brentano. Aside from an empirical tendency and the use of experimental methods, he saw little in the way of common features. There were many laboratories with researchers working on special problems, together with many textbooks, but they were all characterised by a pervasive particularism. The psychological map of the day, Stern wrote, was as colourful and chequered as that of Germany in the epoch of small states.

  William Stern: [Psychologists] often speak different languages, and the portraits that they draw up of the psyche are painted with so many different colours and with so many differently accented special strokes that it often becomes difficult to recognize the identity of the represented object . . . In short: there are many new psychologies, but not yet the new psychology.12