The Truth About Freud's Technique. Michael Guy Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ in his “scientific” papers on the other. In fact, Freud’s writings reveal a relentless effort to explore the nature of reality, including his remarkable conception of a so-called psychical reality. Even phantasy enjoyed the status of reality in Freud’s depiction of it. The manner in which Freud explored the nature of reality shows varied meanings in multiple contexts—only occasionally explicidy acknowledged—many of which bear little, if any, resemblance to science. In spite of Freud’s insistence on making his new science appear scientific, he never compromised his avowed endeavor of searching for truth—not fact.

      When Freud proposed that psychoanalysis deserved to be accepted as a science, the science that he specifically favored was psychology, one of the most dubious branches of science. The psychological school of behaviorism is probably the only one that has succeeded in gaining at least some amount of credence from the scientific community. Psychology as a whole, because it is increasingly influenced by behaviorism, claims for itself a capacity to engage in scientific research and the ability to interpret the data from its “findings” into general “laws” of behavior. Yet, what relevance can such an endeavor possibly have for a method of investigation—psychoanalysis—that is only minimally concerned with behavior?

      Freud’s principal concern throughout his writings revolved around the problem of determining what was real in the world and in oneself, and distinguishing what was real from what, unbeknownst to us, wasn’t. This is a philosophical proposition and not, strictly speaking, psychological. This question only becomes psychological when it begins to concern the ways in which self-deception may occasion states of confusion that we bring on ourselves in order to avoid a reality we don’t wish to accept. Yet, the degree of anguish that prompts us to deceive ourselves in the first place isn’t strictly psychological either. Aristotle examined these questions in his book on ethics. There he explored the nature of pleasure, happiness, misery, deception, and honesty—all major themes in Freud’s work.

      Historically, questions concerning the nature of reality have always been associated with metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that seeks to determine what is real in the world and in the universe. Metaphysics looks at the nature of a “thing,” whether it actually exists, whether it’s tangible or consists of matter. If it lacks those qualities we’re probably imagining it. It becomes an “idea.” It isn’t real. But the reality or realness of something can’t always be equated with its actuality. One of the questions that has always preoccupied metaphysics is the scope and nature of the universe. Another is the existence of God. Proofs of God’s existence have been offered, but none of them has ever been based on His actuality. These “proofs,” however elegant, never led to any certainty that He exists, though many believe that He does. Consequently, certainty has never been an essential criterion for determining whether something is real (Leavy 1990).

      Questions concerning what is or isn’t real are ultimately existential in nature. A thing’s existence always presupposes, in one way or another, something tangible. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can necessarily touch it. Some philosophers—rationalists like Descartes and idealists such as Berkeley—doubted tangible existence and suggested the only thing we could know for sure are mental phenomena. The reality of the world can’t, in their minds, be proven, so we can’t really know that it’s real. Fortunately, philosophers today don’t tend to depend on proofs in order to determine if something exists. Generally speaking, we all share a degree of confidence—based essentially on faith—that the world is real and does, indeed, exist in a commonsense sort of way. Freud wasn’t especially concerned with such abstract questions. He was deeply preoccupied with the problems that many of his neurotic patients had with what was going on in their lives, in the world around them, and in their thoughts and feelings. They couldn’t seem to determine what was going on. They didn’t know. Knowledge about something—what is and isn’t so—isn’t specifically metaphysical. It concerns epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge.

      Many of Freud’s questions concerned the nature of knowing. How do we know, for example, what is true or false? Freud said this was the question that guided his entire life. What it means to know something—whether or not such and such a thing is true—isn’t exactly the same thing as determining whether something is real. But obviously the two are related and at a certain point overlap. Questions about what we can know for sure tend to rely on statements we make about the thing we’re questioning. “Is it true that I’m feeling sad?”, for example, is a statement that may lead to the nature of sadness, or it may suggest how out of touch I am with my feelings. This is why false statements can be construed as lies if the person says them knowingly, or error if the person says them unknowingly. Freud believed that people who make false statements could do so unknowingly while having a purposeful, ulterior motive for doing so. He referred to this as an unconscious act, but he was raising epistemological, not psychological questions: How can I know what I deny and not know that I deny it? Knowledge always implies a truth about whatever it is I’m supposed to know. This is what epistemology is concerned with: How do I know what I know?

      Freud wasn’t formally schooled in philosophy in the academic sense, but he was concerned with philosophical questions. He tried to couch them in the terminology of science and psychology. This has led to accusations that he reduced some of these questions to “psychologistic” and “scientistic” explanations. For example, psychologism assumes that all philosophical questions can be reduced to mental criteria. This borders on the rationalist idea that the totality of existence is based on rational constructs. But it’s obvious that Freud didn’t really believe this. He was a profoundly practical person who insisted that neurotics weren’t sufficiently practical themselves. The accusations of “scientism” follow a similar fate. Scientism insists anything that doesn’t conform to empirical or rational rules of evidence isn’t valid. In other words, it has no truth value. Freud’s theory of the unconscious defies scientific norms to such a degree that psychoanalysis is still rejected by the scientific community as anything remotely scientific.

      Despite Freud’s identification with science, it isn’t true that he ignored philosophers or that he rejected philosophy out of hand. One of the problems in recognizing the pervasive philosophical concerns in Freud’s thinking is that the philosophers who influenced him weren’t conventional, modern philosophers. He was principally influenced by the Greeks—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He was profoundly indebted to Greek myths, to such a degree that he adopted the Greek attitude about human emotion as universally valid. His ideas about passion, tragedy, and deception reveal a predominandy Greek view of life. It permeates everything he came to believe about the origins and nature of psychopathology, a psychological term that fails to grasp the devious and melodramatic underpinnings of human passion.

      Freud alluded to the problem of truth and reality in both literal and philosophical contexts. He used these two concepts interchangeably and often metaphorically. But when he tried to modernize these ancient questions by insisting they were psychological in nature, he obscured the inherently ethical principles that underpinned what eventually became psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis—to the degree that it’s used to help people get well—is an ethic, in Aristotle’s sense. This form of ethic, however, goes further than the “Hippocratic Code” because it is essentially concerned with our manner of living and what’s wrong—or right—with it. This is what every person who enters analysis comes to explore. It concerns the matter that troubles our souls, the tangible, concrete preoccupations that psychoanalysis was invented to address.

      Freud held that the aim of psychoanalysis was to make the unconscious conscious. The nature of the psychoanalytic cure—how to define and how to effect it—was, nonetheless, problematical. Is the process of expanding one’s consciousness over and above the unconscious repressions the necessary path to cure? Or is it cure itself? What’s more, what does the expression, “making the unconscious conscious,” really mean? Psychoanalysis, as Freud conceived it, is essentially concerned with helping us determine what is going on in our lives. It tries to disclose the secrets we hide from awareness, secrets we deny exist. Paradoxically, it’s these secrets that evoke our deepest fears about reality, whatever we imagine reality СКАЧАТЬ