The Truth About Freud's Technique. Michael Guy Thompson
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 of the people rather than, strictly speaking, “anti-philosophical.”
Ironically, it is just this kind of criticism of academic philosophy that is shared by modern existentialists and phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Tillich, Miguel de Unamuno, and a host of others. Although Edmund Husserl is credited as the father of phenomenology—the philosophical foundation for modern existentialism—Heidegger is credited with the “existential turn” away from the tedious abstractions of HusserPs thought. He based his philosophy of existence on a more passionate, everyday, and concerned interpretation of Husserl, borrowing heavily from the nineteenth-century philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard. Whereas Husserl—who, like Freud, was Jewish—became a devout Christian, Heidegger, an agnostic, was deeply concerned with theological questions, such as the nature of Being, revelation, and truth. Although Heidegger wasn’t a religious man, his philosophy was adapted by theologians and atheists alike due to the extraordinary power of his thinking and its applicability to everyday, and contemporary, ethical concerns. Yet, there was no kinship expressed by Freud toward the existentialists and apparently no relationship between them. Attempts have been made to link Freud’s early education to Franz Brentano, HusserPs mentor, but even the most casual reading of Brentano’s work would show a clear antipathy toward the very notion of anything akin to an “unconscious” (Spiegelberg 1972, 128). On the other hand, Freud was apparently influenced by Brentano’s lectures on Aristotle and attended several of them. Brentano’s Christian background seems to have touched Freud and for a time he was so taken with this strikingly handsome and charismatic man that he once confided to a friend, “Under Brentano’s influence I have decided to take my Ph.D. in philosophy and zoology” (Vitz 1988, 52). But mysteriously, Freud neglected to acknowledge this debt in any of his published writings. Even if Freud might have looked on Heidegger’s philosophy more favorably than he did HusserPs, a philosophy much closer to the Greeks, they were hardly contemporaries. Freud was an old man in 1927 when Heidegger published his first major work, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit).
Still, Freud’s quest throughout his life, by his own admission, was a search for truth, a philosophical quest. Freud’s professional life was concerned with establishing the universal acceptance of psychoanalysis—the “science of the unconscious”—which aimed to disclose the nature of reality. This is an unusual thing for a scientist to be concerned about. Few psychoanalysts today talk about the nature of reality. It is simply accepted as a given. We all know what it is. As far as the question of truth is concerned, there aren’t even many philosophers who are preoccupied with it; most deny that it’s knowable! But Freud’s life was devoted to unravelling the nature of truth and what it means for something to be real. Perhaps the most distinctive concern that set Heidegger apart from his contemporaries, and this is even more relevant today, was his criticism of modern philosophers whom he accused of having forgot to ask the following question: “What is the nature of truth, and what is the nature of a being who can ask this question?” Perhaps Freud and Heidegger—unlike so many of their contemporaries in psychiatry and philosophy—were asking the same question: “Who are we, what are we doing here, what do we want?”
Although Freud never openly asked about the nature of truth, he instructed his analytic patients “to be truthful” in order to obtain the most beneficial outcome of their analysis, knowing it was impossible for them to be entirely successful. His reflections on the nature of reality (see Part One) are philosophical queries, not scientific “investigations.” His use of the word real is frequently meant to convey a sense of what is inherently true rather than what is objectively factual. He wasn’t looking for accuracy but rather for what a person sincerely and genuinely believed to be so. Freud’s use of concepts such as phantasy and repression were invaluable for determining what was true about the things that were said, felt, experienced, and actually occuring in the analytic situation. What, then, is the nature of this truth, and the reality it imposes on us?
Freud’s conception of reality fostered irreversible consequences for the development of his views about psychic structure, emotions, and the nature of psychopathology. If your conception of reality, for example, were rooted in your experience of anguish, as was Freud’s, you might, in turn, conceive of phantasy as an alternate reality that you could retreat to—Freud called it a “reservation”—in order to escape from the pain of existence. These phantasies would, you might infer, be experienced as reassuring and pleasurable. Psychic structure, if it were faithful to this premise, would be conceived accordingly. If my experience of reality is frightening, then my conception of reality should be frightful. In the face of it, I might contrive to split myself into separate entities or “selves” in order to avoid my experience of un-pleasure. My ego (I), in order to cope with reality, may have to employ a subterfuge (call them defenses) to protect my secret (call them unconscious) wishes, as added security from the possible intrusions of an environment (reality) that is frequently opposed to those wishes. Freud’s conception of reality depicts it as inherently uncooperative. Whatever my wishes may be, reality is my master. Yet, my phantasies allow me to be master, in a fashion. Although they temporarily appease, reality can’t, however, be held in abeyance forever. Freud’s conception of primary and secondary thought processes is based on this view of reality. It conveys a quality of harshness and difficulty, but it isn’t inherently pessimistic, as some have supposed. In fact, a closer reading would suggest the contrary. When Freud characterized “real” love as the kind that submits to the reality principle while upholding a capacity for genuine pleasure, the seemingly irreconcilable barrier between pleasure and reality, between primary and secondary thought processes, between id and