The Freud Files Read online

  Freud: My position, no doubt, is made more difficult by the present attitude of biological science, which refuses to hear of the inheritance of acquired characteristics by succeeding generations. I must, however, in all modesty confess that nevertheless I cannot do without this factor in biological evolution.72

  Following Sulloway, the Freudian legend is not an anecdotal or propagandist supplement to psychoanalytic theory (which it remains to some extent for Ellenberger). On the contrary, it is the theory itself. Questioning the Freudian legend leads to questioning the status of psychoanalysis itself. Ellenberger, with Swiss prudence, characterised psychoanalysis as a half-science (‘demi-science’).73 Sulloway, on the other hand, does not hesitate to describe psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience immunised against criticism by a very efficient propaganda machine and by historical disinformation. Sulloway: Since I wrote this book on Freud, I have come to see psychoanalysis as something of a tragedy, as a discipline that evolved from a very promising science into a very disappointing pseudoscience . . . When I began the book, I approached Freud as most people do, as one of the great minds of the twentieth century, somebody on a par with Copernicus and Darwin, as he himself indicated. But the more I looked into the development of psychoanalysis, the more I discovered that it was based on outmoded 19th century assumptions that were clearly refuted by the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws in genetics, by the refutation of Lamarckian theory in evolutionary biology and by the discarding of the various sort of Helmholtzian physiological assumptions that were crucial to Freud’s thinking about hysteria. So when I got to the end of this book, I found myself somewhat reluctantly having to admit that Freud was not the great discoverer I – and others – had thought. I became in spite of myself a critic not only of psychoanalytic theory, but also of what I increasingly saw as the act of construction of a historical legend to prevent this view of Freud from being widely understood.74

  Freud wars

  The appearance of works by Ellenberger and Sulloway was followed by a veritable avalanche of ‘revisionist’ works,75 each more critical than the last of the Freudian legend. Whilst, in the main, the works of Ellenberger and Sulloway were focused on intellectual history, Paul Roazen launched a social history of the psychoanalytic movement, through conducting oral histories, not unlike the anthropologists of science, who have attempted to study and distinguish what scientists actually do in contrast to their public statements about their work. Roazen’s interviewees presented recollections of Freud which were radically discrepant from the image of Freud prepared by his biographer-disciple, Ernest Jones. Likewise, Peter Swales embarked upon a vast and meticulous archival investigation, only partially published, which reconstructed Freud’s social and intellectual world in turn of the century Vienna, and presented a comprehensive account of the origins of psychoanalysis which was completely at variance with the Freudian legend. The philosopher Frank Cioffi showed how the key episode of the ‘seduction theory’, proposed in public and then abandoned in private by Freud between 1896 and 1897, did not unfold according to Freud’s subsequent accounts, effectively deconstructing the official version of the discovery of the Oedipus complex and unconscious infantile sexual fantasies.76

  Such studies have shown to what extent Freud’s ‘observations’ and case histories were at times selective, tendentious and even dishonest. Freud, one learns, did not hesitate to modify or to conceal this or that biographical element to fit his theory,77 to take liberties with chronology78 and translation,79 to present self-analytical accounts as objective cases supposedly interpreted through brilliant detective work,80 or to present imaginary therapeutic results whilst proclaiming the therapeutic superiority of psychoanalysis to other forms of psychotherapy. For example, there is no evidence that ‘Anna O.’ was ever cured by Breuer,81 any more than ‘Emmy von N.’,82 ‘Cäcilie M.’,83 ‘Elisabeth von R.’84 or the ‘Wolf Man’85 were by Freud. Other patients, passed over in silence or mentioned anonymously, were hardly better off after their analyses, such as Emma Eckstein,86 Elise Gomperz,87 Elfriede Hirschfeld,88 Anna Freud,89 ‘A. B.’90 or the unfortunate Horace Frink.91 Conversely, some scholars have conjectured that ‘Katharina’ and ‘Dora’ may never have been ill in the first place.92

  The most immediate effect of this new Freud scholarship has been to reopen the controversy around psychoanalysis, which the domination of the Freudian legend in certain quarters had frozen for more than half a century. The unconscious, infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, repression, transference, all these notions which had been taken for granted became hot topics which were bitterly disputed. The ‘Freud wars’ raged. Journal covers were titled ‘Is Freud dead?’93 Works were published with titles such as Why Freud Was Wrong,94 The Freud Case. The Birth of Psychoanalysis from the Lie,95 Despatches from the Freud Wars96 or again The Black Book of Psychoanalysis,97 and articles on Freud in magazines regularly sparked off an avalanche of indignant letters of protestation from the adversarial camp, followed by responses.98

  Freudians resorted to dusting off the old arguments which had once worked so well (the pathologisation of adversaries, the imputation of ‘resistance to psychoanalysis’, of puritanism, of antisemitism) and they invented new ones, which were better adapted to the new situation: claims to the so-called ‘progress’ of psychoanalysis since Freud to render all criticism out of date, critiques of the supposed ‘scientism’ and ‘positivistic credulity’ of Freud historians, without forgetting the unanswerable retort: ‘The never-ending backlash against Freud confirms the potency of his theories.’99

  Janet Malcolm: Roazen’s book [Brother Animal] is trivial and slight. Its scholarship, like that of many other works of pop history, does not hold up under any sort of close scrutiny.100

  Kurt Eissler: When Roazen writes . . . then I find myself forced to refer the reader to Freud’s comments on Daniel Paul Schreber’s self-revelations.101

  René Major (concerning Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen): If he sticks to the archive and believes that it has no exteriority which permits it to be read or stops it from being ‘anarchived’ itself, he is prey to spasmodic convulsions worthy of Grand Mal. The Grand Mal of the archive. This illness is also of a sexual nature.102

  Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: The offensives against psychoanalysis have become confounded with attacks against the personal integrity of Freud which have attained a degree of defamation without precedent.103

  As for the new historians, they denounced Freudian dominance of the media, the press campaigns waged against dissidents, and the restriction of Freudian archives. How did it come about that so many documents deposited in public institutions such as the Library of Congress in Washington were officially inaccessible to researchers, and some documents until 2113 (or now indefinitely)? And why were these access restrictions, implacably applied when it came to independent researchers, suddenly lifted when it came to insiders of the psychoanalytic movement?

  In 1994, a large international exhibition under the auspices of the Freud Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington was announced. None of the new Freud scholars figured in the organising committee. In protest, forty-two of them (including the authors of this book) sent an open letter to the Library of Congress to express their wish that the exhibition reflect ‘the present state of Freud research’ and requested that someone representing their views be added to the organising committee.104 The request was not considered. Then, for apparently completely independent reasons, the Library of Congress announced that the exhibition would be postponed to enable the organisers to raise the necessary funds. This inflamed the controversy. The letter, which would otherwise have sunk without a trace, was taken to be responsible for the postponement. The organisers attributed the Library of Congress’ decision to the petitioners’ political and media pressure and protested, claiming that they were defending ‘freedom of expression’. The news was immediately reported in the international press: once more, Freud was the butt of censure! A counter-petition was organised in France by Élisabeth
Roudinesco and Philippe Garnier. This gathered together more than 180 signatures, some of them prestigious, to denounce the ‘blackmail to fear’, the ‘puritan manifestations’, the ‘witch hunt’ and the ‘dictatorship of several intellectuals turned into inquisitors’. The so-called inquisitors retorted by a press release, read by practically no one, in which they protested against the manipulation of the media by their adversaries.105 At that point, the Library of Congress announced that the organisers had found the necessary funds to mount the exhibition and that it could take place as initially intended. In the meantime, the latest Freud war had taken place.106 Once more, historians and critics had been misrepresented and slandered, and the media manipulated to present a heroic image of an embattled revolutionary science of psychoanalysis.107

  This book is about the Freud wars, old and new. It reopens the controversies which surrounded the inception of psychoanalysis and shows what we may learn from them about the fate of a once fashionable would-be science. It is striking to see the extent to which contemporary polemics around psychoanalysis repeat, in a quasi-somnambular manner, those which took place at the beginning of the century. It is well known that, from 1906, Freud’s theories were the subject of a fierce international controversy, in which the leading contemporary figures of psychiatry and psychology participated: Pierre Janet, Emil Kraepelin, William Stern, Eugen Bleuler, Gustav Aschaffenburg, Alfred Hoche, Morton Prince and many others. What is less known is the fact that this controversy came to a close with the defeat of psychoanalysis at the congress of the German psychiatric association, held in Breslau in 1913, where speaker after speaker rose up to denounce psychoanalysis in an unequivocal manner. The reason for this ‘induced amnesia’ is the fact that Freud and his followers acted as if the controversy ended in their favour. The apologue of the three blows with which we began perfectly illustrates this: what is widely known about Freud’s adversaries is that they were motivated by irrational resistances as well as sexual repression and that they were definitively relegated to the scrapheap of the prehistory of science, just like the adversaries of Darwin and Copernicus. Consequently, we know little of the objections which they addressed to psychoanalysis nor do we know how Freud surmounted them. As we shall see, this was for a good reason, as one may question whether they were ever surmounted. When one places Freud’s ‘victory’ over his adversaries in its historical context, one sees that it was imaginary, and that it rests on a negative hallucination concerning the critiques of psychoanalysis.

  We propose, therefore, to reopen the files of these critiques and old controversies, consigned for too long in the ‘prepsychoanalytic’ attic, and restage the debates. Once the dust has been shaken off them, these files prove to be strikingly at variance with received opinion, which explains why some of them were so carefully censured, or classed as ‘top secret’ by the guardians of the Freud archives. Given how hard to retrieve much of this material is, we have deliberately chosen to cite excerpts in extenso, letting the historical actors speak in their own voices and creating a polyphonic text, rather than filter through paraphrases. Taken together, they show a history which has very little in common with that which one finds in the works of Freud and his biographers, and which was taken at face value for so long. This history, as we shall see, 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, and how they furnished the ideas which we have of ourselves, and how these became solidified into incontrovertible ‘facts’.

  1 Privatising science

  I find that one of the greatest bonds between us is our feeling for science and for what science really means. I hardly think that Freud always had a completely clear grasp of that.

  Ernest Jones to Marie Bonaparte, 2 July 19541

  Why do the current controversies revolve around the history of psychoanalysis and the manner in which it has been written? Why such vehemence on both sides, why a ‘war’? After all, the philosophical, epistemological and political critiques of psychoanalysis never aroused such passion. Psychoanalysis was reproached by Karl Jaspers for mixing up hermeneutic understanding (Verstehen) and the explanation (Erklären) of the natural sciences, by Jean-Paul Sartre for confounding repression and ‘bad faith’, by Ludwig Wittgenstein for confusing causes and reasons, by Karl Popper for avoiding all scientific falsification, by Adolf Grünbaum for proposing an epistemically inconsistent clinical validation and by Michel Foucault for producing sexuality under the cover of unmasking it. None of this affected psychoanalysts. Even the provocations and magnificent rhetorical violence of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus did not lead them to lose their composure. On the contrary, it is as if advocates of psychoanalysis were not perturbed by these debates because they legitimate their discipline, letting the adherents invariably escape unharmed, entrenched in the private sphere of the psychoanalytic clinic. The more Freud is debated, it is often said, the more it confirms his significance.

  Why then such sudden susceptibility concerning historical details, some of which on first sight appear to be quite trivial? Why is it so important for psychoanalysts to maintain the version of events given by Freud and his authorised biographers? Is it simply a question of a dispute between experts, a controversy between historians such as we often see? Not in this case, because the dispute here is not simply one between factions of historians, or of ways of interpreting the historical record. More deeply, it pits historians against a radically dehistoricised version of psychoanalysis, disguised as a ‘history of psychoanalysis’. From this perspective, similarities abound between the ‘Freud wars’ and the ‘science wars’, which rage elsewhere between historians, sociologists and anthropologists of science on the one side and scientistic ideologues on the other. In both cases, what is at stake is the historicisation, and correspondingly the relativisation, of ‘facts’, ‘discoveries’ and ‘truths’ ordinarily presented as atemporal and universal and shielded from the variations and contingencies of history (it is of little importance here whether psychoanalysis styles itself as a science or not, as it still nevertheless presents itself as a universal theory, a general ontology valid for all). These debates are not external to the science or the theory, because they bear on this demarcation itself: can one or should one separate the science or the theory from its history? To take up the famous Mertonian distinction, can one separate what is ‘internal’ from what is ‘external’?2 Can one, as Reichenbach would have it, trace a limit between the context of discovery (the anecdotal account of the emergence of concepts) and the context of justification (the properly scientific work of proof)? It is the refusal of these demarcations by the new historians of science and of psychoanalysis which has generated such scandal, because it puts into question the pretensions of this or that discipline to scientificity and to theoretical hegemony.

  However, the comparison between the ‘Freud wars’ and the ‘science wars’ stops right here. Even if some scientists feel attacked in their most intimate convictions by the historicisation of science practised by ‘science studies’, those who are really threatened by this are rare. On the contrary, many scientists don’t mind opening their notebooks and laboratories to historians and anthropologists when asked, and some do not hesitate to recognise how they are portrayed, even if they draw different conclusions from those of their observers.3 This is a sign that they feel themselves sufficiently strong to bear the test of historical and anthropological inquiry. The same is not the case for psychoanalysis, where intrusions of historians into the Freudian ‘laboratory’ are generally perceived as unacceptable transgressions which should be denounced. For a discipline concerned with the past, psychoanalysis is strangely allergic to its own history, and for good reason: for it is precisely here that it is vulnerable. Isabelle Stengers: [Psychoanalytic circles] have tried – with great success up to now – to occupy the domain o
f the present indefinitely and stop historians from having access to documents and archives. Everything takes place as if what happened to Freud one hundred years ago is still so confidential and private that it justifies sequestering archives, censoring correspondences and obstructing the pursuits of historians doing their work. It is to be believed that the secrets of psychoanalysis are weightier than those of diplomacy or international history. One knows today that Churchill decided to let Coventry be bombed rather than reveal to the Germans that the British had deciphered their code. But one can still not have access to this or that correspondence with Freud which could inform us about this or that detail of his private life! It seems that there is something there that is too explosive for one to dream of divulging. This is perfectly absurd. In terms of what concerns me, I see here the sign that psychoanalysis has failed to adopt the normal regime of scientific production. In contrast to the sciences, psychoanalysis is vulnerable to its past.4

  ‘Psychoanalysis is my creation’

  The exact sense of this vulnerability remains to be understood. Is it simply a question of ‘all too human’ secrets of the founder’s biography, which would simply be factors external to the theory? Freud, as his biographers invariably note, did not like biographers and did everything to make their task more difficult.5 At least on two instances, in 1885 and in 1907, he destroyed most of his notes, intimate diaries and personal papers, veritable holocausts in which correspondences as precious for the comprehension of the origins of psychoanalysis as those with Bernheim, Breuer, Fliess, August Forel, Havelock Ellis and Leopold Löwenfeld probably perished. The same thing happened in 19386 and again in 1939,7 and one knows that he would have destroyed his letters to Wilhelm Fliess were it not for the refusal of Marie Bonaparte, who had acquired this correspondence on the express condition that he could not regain possession of them.