The Truth About Freud's Technique. Michael Guy Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ of infantile conditions for loving, we may say that whatever fulfills that condition is idealized” (101). In other words, “What possesses the excellence which the ego lacks for making it an ideal, is loved” (101).

      Neurotics, who feel unloved and, in turn, are afraid to love, are in an impossible situation. They blame others for their impoverishment, yet long for them to relieve it. The analyst, the object of their “transferences,” becomes the ideal for this confused devotion. They hope the analyst can save them from their agony of isolation, to be their companion. The cure they envision is one that isn’t, however, the culmination of ceaseless effort, but rather a salvation at the instigation of a higher power. “This is a cure by love, which he [the neurotic] generally prefers to cure by analysis. Indeed, he cannot believe in any other mechanism of cure; he usually brings expectations of this sort with him to the treatment and directs them towards the person of the physician” (101). Inevitably, the patient’s own resistances to loving, a consequence of earlier repressions, renders his plan impossible. “Falling in love,” occasioning both erotic and idealized components, contains an unconscious plea for the other person—the analyst—to shower the patient with a love he is actually incapable of accepting. Freud conceived of idealization not only as a manifestation of erotism, but as a substitute for erotism too. In his book on group psychology, published seven years later (1921), Freud returned to the problem of determining the nature of love and whether or not it could possibly possess a realistic component. In this study he was specifically concerned with distinguishing between erotic love and its aim-inhibited derivative, affection. Now idealization is conceived as a “de-eroticizing” of one’s sexual inclinations, due to the repression that follows the Oedipus complex. If individuals subsequently fail to overcome their earlier adherence to the incest taboo in adolescence, their experience of erotism and their capacity for aim-inhibited (de-eroticized) affection may remain split off from each other and reappear in the form of a neurosis: the inability to feel both affection and sexual attraction for the same person.

      Freud finally concluded that the more repressed one’s erotic longings, the more likely the tendency to idealize others. “If the sensual impulsions are more or less effectively repressed or set aside, the illusion is produced that the object has come to be sensually loved on account of its spiritual merits, whereas on the contrary these merits may really only have been lent to it by its sensual charm. The tendency which falsifies judgement in this respect is that of idealization” (1955b, 112). But how can we reconcile the apparent contradiction that repressed sexuality supposedly leads to an increase in noneroticized idealization, on the one hand, and the contrary idea that repression should result in increased eroticized idealization, on the other? Some patients in analysis experience a powerful erotic attraction for their analysts, whereas others manifest nonsexualized, “spiritualized” feelings of adoration. Often, many patients experience both, alternately or simultaneously. The tendency to split off the two—erotic attraction and, as Freud would say, aim-inhibited affection—is a common neurotic symptom. But Freud was intrigued by those patients who idealized their analysts without any apparent interest in or experience of manifest erotic feelings. Many patients complain that their lovers are only interested in sex. They denigrate the sexual act and narrowly define love in terms of a spiritual or mystical, nonphysical relationship. This is, perhaps, idealization par excellence: to love someone and to long for this love to be returned in the form of an intangible, mysterious “power,” unreachable, yet compelling. The repressions can be so severe that love is consequently experienced as the absence of—and freedom from—erotic demands. These two forms of idealization are not mutually exclusive. One, however, can be emphasized over the other and become a favored “compromise formation.”

      Freud was still struggling to define the nature of love, its realistic and imaginary tendencies, in his paper on group psychology when he said: “Even in its caprices the usage of language remains true to some kind of reality. Thus it gives the name of ‘love’ to a great many kinds of emotional relationship which we too group together theoretically as love; but then again it feels a doubt as whether this love is real, true, actual love, and so hints at a whole scale of possibilities within the range of the phenomena of love” (1955b, 111). At bottom, the neurotic’s inability to love, inhibited by unconscious fears, leads to two alternative solutions: the tendency to idealize the other person so as to be loved, passively; or alternately, to simply repress one’s libidinal interest in others, capitulating to the anxieties that are inevitably aroused. Both of these responses become manifest in what Freud called “transference-love.”

      Freud never arrived at an unambiguous definition of real love; perhaps because even real love, according to Freud, verged on the pathological. The distinction—if there is one—emerges somewhere along the difficult transition from the so-called pleasure to reality principles. No doubt Freud was a master at recognizing the deceptions in everyday protestations of love, of the neurotic’s inability to love. What is love, if its “realness” isn’t a determining factor? Freud’s attempt to distinguish between genuine love (a love sincere in its affect and heartfelt) and real love (one that is capable of sacrifice and that is practical) says something about his views on the nature of truth and reality. The unconscious harbors truths. These truths are contained in fantastic and unrealistic wishes. Freud realized that these truths, by their nature, are concealed. The task of psychoanalysis is to disclose them. But for what purpose and to what end? What’s the point of revealing secrets if they have no practical import, if they don’t eventually gratify? Freud believed that neurotics, by harboring disturbing truths, become alienated from reality. We can see from the way he conceived of real love that Freud viewed reality, essentially, as our encounter with others. The so-called harsh and exasperating aspects of reality are due to the way that relationships arouse erotic yearnings whose object, amidst all the inherent frustrations, is another human being.

      Real love, like life itself, is interpersonal. It can’t be reduced to a feeling, however powerful and insistent that emotion may be. Transference-love, so frequently decried as merely a feeling, is more than that because, as Freud says, in terms of its efficacy it is unrivaled by any other. Whatever else we may think of it, it is a kind of love after all. Otherwise, why call it love in the first place, hyphenated or not? In his efforts to dismande love’s complexes by distinguishing the “real” from the suspect, Freud finally resigned himself to the conclusion that transference-love is only a little less real than it seems. And this conclusion tells us something about real love too, because its so-called normality even calls our notions about “normal” and “sick” into question. It isn’t so easy to tell them apart. The same can be said for reality. “Psychical” reality, “transference-love,” “neurotic” anxiety: When we try to measure them against the real thing, they befuddle as much as enlighten. Perhaps what is real isn’t so categorical. Like existence itself, we determine its efficacy by degrees. It’s more or less what it seems.

II THE TRUE AND THE REAL IN HEIDEGGER

      The road from psychoanalysis to existential thought—or, more specifically, the road from Freud to Heidegger—has never been easy, nor one well traveled. It has always been occasioned by hesitance, misunderstanding, suspicion. Why do these doubts persist when Freud’s own search for truth and his efforts to understand the human condition is obviously existential in nature? Freud condemned philosophers, but he read them seriously. Nietzsche and Spinoza were important influences, as were Kant, the Greeks, and Brentano. Freud was well educated, yet his mind was more speculative than scientific. In his condemnation of philosophers—few of whom paid Freud the courtesy of taking him seriously—he was probably referring to academics rather than philosophers in the true sense. In his essay, “The Question of a Weltanschauung” Freud suggested that philosophy “has no direct influence on the great mass of mankind; it is of interest to only a small number even of the top layer of intellectuals and is scarcely intelligible to anyone else” (1964c, 161). This dismissal of the academic who Freud believed was lost in an ivory tower, cut off from the everyday passions of “normal folk,” isn’t unlike the attitude most people today share toward the so-called academic egghead who is divorced from the practicalities of real living. In that sense, Freud could be seen as a man СКАЧАТЬ