Читать книгу The Truth About Freud's Technique - Michael Guy Thompson - Страница 15

In a paper read before the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society in 1949, Hans Loewald addressed a central aspect of Freud’s conception of reality, focusing on Freud’s insistence that “external” reality—that is, the world—is essentially hostile and antagonistic.

In psychoanalytic theory we are accustomed to think of the relationship between ego and reality as one of adjustment or adaptation. The so-called mature ego has renounced the pleasure principle and has substituted for it the reality principle. It does not follow the direct path of instinctual gratification, without regard to consequences, to the demands of reality, does not indulge in hallucinatory wish fulfillment, but tests external reality . . . adapting its thoughts and actions to the demands of reality. This conception of the relationship between ego and reality presupposes a fundamental antagonism that has to be bridged or overcome in order to make life in this reality possible. (1980, 3)

Two years after he delivered “Ego and Reality,” Loewald returned to this theme again in “The Problem of Defense and the Neurotic Interpretation of Reality.”

The relationship between organism and environment, between individual and reality, in general has been understood in psychoanalytic theory as basically antagonistic. It is Freud’s “biological assumption” that a stimulus is something hostile to the organism and to the nervous system. Ultimately, instinct itself is understood as a need or compulsion to abolish stimuli. Any stimulus, as stimulus, represents a threat, a disturbance. On the psychological level, Freud comes to the conclusion that at the stage of the original reality ego, “at the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical.” (1980, 28)

Yet, what is this “reality” that poses such a threat to us? Is this a reality of our own making, as Freud hypothesized so enigmatically as “psychical reality”, or is it a reality completely independent of ourselves, impervious to our whims and indifferent to our needs—unheeding, barren, cold? Even Marshall Edelson, no friend of philosophical or hermeneutical interpretations of psychoanalysis, had to admit Freud’s problems with this concept.

We have seen that Freud had trouble with “psychic reality.” But judging from the variety of adjectives preceding “reality”—external, factual, material, practical—we may conclude that the conceptual status of “external reality” offered as much difficulty. Freud avoided philosophical questions as much as possible in his work in the interest of creating an empirical science, but here an ontological specter seems impossible to evade. (1988, 7)

Freud was too subtle and complex a thinker to be accused of adopting a superficial attitude toward the nature of reality, especially because it plays such an important role in his theories of psychopathology and psychoanalysis. Edelson points out that Freud “thought about such questions. That he knew and admired the work of Kant and was aware that our knowledge of external reality was shaped by the character of our minds is evident from Jones’ biography” (7). Freud explicidy refers to Kant in his paper “The Unconscious”:

Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object. Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to be. We shall be glad to learn, however, that the correction of internal perception will turn out not to offer such great difficulties as the correction of external perception—that internal objects are less unknowable than the external world. (1957e, 171; emphasis added)

What an amazing thing to say. As difficult and imperfect as our knowledge of our own minds is—and Freud is alluding to unconscious mental processes when he refers to “internal perception”—he says that “external” reality is even more unknowable than that! What is the ego’s relationship with this unknowable and hostile reality like? How does that relationship generate anxiety and what, in turn, does that tell us about the nature of reality, as Freud conceived it?

It was due to anxiety, in Freud’s view, that the ego developed out of the id in the first place, what Freud once referred to as “a frontier creature”, whose purpose was to “mediate between the world and the id . . . and to make the world fall in with the wishes of the id” (196 Id, 56). As I argued in The Death of Desire (Thompson 1985, 1–23), Freud’s initial conception of the ego was that of a defensive, repressive agency. Even when he modified this view to include a synthetic function, the synthetic function itself continued to be perceived in terms of defense. Freud never abandoned his conception of Das Ich as basically defensive, partially because he never entirely abandoned his view of reality as predominandy hostile. Freud viewed the individual as essentially opposed to the world and culture. Culture and reality are repressive, thus they present a threat to every human being. But isn’t this how neurotics typically perceive reality, as essentially hostile, ungratifying, threatening? Isn’t the nature of “transference” such that the patient in psychoanalysis anticipates—and, indeed, experiences—the analytic relationship in such terms? Loewald proposes that

on three levels, then, the biological, psychological, and cultural, psychoanalysis has taken for granted the neurotically distorted experience of reality. It has taken for granted the concept of a reality as it is experienced in a predominantiy defensive integration of it. Stimulus, external world, and culture, all three, on different levels of scientific approach, representative of what is called, reality, have been understood unquestioningly as they are thought, felt, experienced within the framework of a hostile-defensive (that is, regressive-reactive) ego-reality integration. It is a concept of reality as it is most typically encountered in the obsessive character neurosis, a neurosis so common in our culture that it has been called the normal neurosis. (1980, 30)

Loewald concludes that “psychoanalytic theory has unwittingly taken over much of the obsessive neurotic’s experience and conception of reality and has taken it for granted as the ‘objective reality’” (30). Of course, Loewald is referring to Freud’s conception of reality, and that conception, generally accepted by contemporary analysts, is based on Freud’s understanding of anxiety and fear. Freud discussed anxiety throughout his lifetime and revised his thoughts about it periodically. He returned to the subject in 1933 in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in his lecture “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” (1964c, 81–111). Here Freud reviews his earlier paper on anxiety in the Introductory Lectures, while incorporating more recent thoughts from his “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” (1959a).

Freud initially believed that anxiety was the consequence of sexual repression. Accordingly, when an idea is repressed, “it’s quota of affect is regularly transformed into anxiety” (1964c, 83). Anxiety was conceived in terms of a transformation of libido and, so, served an unconscious purpose. The symptom of anxiety was a displacement of the repressed wish that was incapable of being fulfilled. Anxiety was thus unconsciously exciting. Freud eventually came to the conclusion, however, that this theory was untenable. Certain symptoms and conditions, such as phobias, showed that neurotics went to great lengths to avoid anxiety, so the view that anxiety was unconsciously experienced as pleasure wasn’t necessarily universal. Freud conjectured that at least some “symptoms are created in order to avoid the outbreak of the anxiety state. This is confirmed too by the fact that the first neuroses of childhood are phobias” (84). Earlier, Freud had defined real anxiety as a signal elicited from an external threat or danger. Neurotic anxiety, on the other hand, was a derivative of the economics of sexual life. This suggested there was an ulterior motive in the neurotic experience of anxiety, similar, for example, to conversion hysteria. But Freud began to suspect that there was a real fear in neurotic anxiety as well. Yet, this fear was presumably located on the “inside” rather than “outside.” In other words, “what he is afraid of is evidendy his own libido. The difference between this situation and that of realistic anxiety lies in two points: that the danger is an internal instead of an external one and that it is not consciously recognized” (84). Freud concludes that “anxiety, it seems, in so far as it is an affective state, is the reproduction of an old event which brought a threat of danger; anxiety serves the purposes of self-preservation and is a signal of a new danger; it arises from libido that has in some way become unemployable and . . . is replaced by the formation of a symptom” (84).

Freud subsequently incorporated his formulation of the structural model into his new conception of anxiety. The ego is increasingly conceived as the seat of anxiety, whereas the id is the source of passion (85). Freud concluded that “it was not the repression that created anxiety; the anxiety was there earlier; it was the anxiety that made the repression” (86). Whereas neurotic anxiety was previously interpreted in terms of the (id’s) unconscious demand for pleasure, it is now understood—in the same way as normal anxiety—as a response to “a threatening external danger.” Freud resolves his apparent dilemma by proposing “castration” as the external danger, the inevitable consequence of the boy’s lust for his mother.

But we have not made any mention at all so far of what the real danger is that the child is afraid of as a result of being in love with his mother. “The danger is the punishment of being castrated, of losing his genital organ. You will of course object that after all that is not a real danger. Our boys are not castrated because they are in love with their mothers during the phase of the Oedipus complex. But the matter cannot be dismissed so simply. Above all, it is not a question of whether castration is really carried out; what is decisive is that the danger is one that threatens from outside and that the child believes in it” (86; emphasis added).

Castration—which is to say, the threat of castration—now becomes the source of all our (male) neurotic fears. This threat is “perceived” as a real danger, coming from outside. Yet, as Freud acknowledges, castration doesn’t ever really occur, so in what sense is it real? Keep in mind that what we’re talking about—the threat of castration—is a concept, not an event. Yet, children are said to experience, in phantasy, the possibility of danger, not because they perceive it, but because they believe it. But isn’t this how Freud characterized “internal” (i.e., hallucinatory) reality, as something we believe is so, in contrast to something that is actually the case? This presumably external, real threat is, fundamentally, a belief that is apparently derived from (a) noticing that girls lack a penis and (b) threats from adults to cut off one’s hands or penis for playing with oneself. In what sense, however, are threats and discoveries of this kind real, rather than a product of the imagination?

What about the situation with girls? Freud observes that “fear of castration is not, of course, the only motive for repression: indeed, it finds no place in women, for though they have a castration complex they cannot have a fear of being castrated. Its place is taken in their sex by a fear of loss of love, which is evidendy a later prolongation of the infant’s anxiety if it finds the mother absent. You will realize how real a situation of danger is indicated by this anxiety (87; emphasis added). We can see what these two forms of “castration” share in common: loss of penis for the boy; loss of mother for the girl. The penis and the mother are real, and their loss would truly prove catastrophic. But these losses are anticipated, not actually experienced, so in what sense can they be said to be real, unless we employ the “real” in a purely subjective, impressionistic way of speaking? In spite of this theoretical ambiguity, Freud insisted that reality was an outside, hostile force, represented by the father’s interference in his child’s libidinal strivings toward his (or her?) mother. Yet this position apparently conflicts with Freud’s observation in Civilization and Its Discontents that “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection” (1961a, 72). Loewald said that this apparently positive view of the father “harks back to Totem and Taboo where the longing for the father is described as ‘the root of every religion’” (1980, 8). Also, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud suggested that “the origins of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness” (1961a, 72). Loewald concludes that “religious feelings, thus, are understood as originating in an attempt to cope with hostile reality forces. . . . The longing for the father, seeking his help and protection, is a defensive compromise in order to come to terms with this superior, hostile power” (9; emphasis added).

Understand that “castration”—a concept—is supposed to symbolize in some concrete way the child’s encounter with reality, implemented by the fear of a threatening father. According to Freud, the ego was initially formed out of the infant’s experience of frustration. The ego is supposed to protect the infant from (a) its own wishes and (b) the reality of the world’s potential opposition. After Freud’s adoption of the structural model, the ego was conceived as the seat of identity that comes under assault from three sides: (a) the id (that is, the ego’s libidinal yearnings), (b) the superego (its—that is, its parents’—morality, right and wrong, conscience and ideals) and (c) the outside world, in other words—other people—what Freud calls “external reality.” Where is the rest or sanctuary for an existence so essentially at sea, at war with its environment and with itself, when even a son’s longing and positive regard for his father is merely a way of protecting himself from that very father? Freud was so confident that anxiety is always provoked by an external threat that he came to view our wishes as “external” also. In The Ego and the Id, he observed that “all the experiences of life that originate from without enrich the ego; the id, however, is its second external world, which it strives to bring into subjection to itself” (196Id, 55; emphasis added). And again, “Psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id” (56; emphasis added). But, in what way can the id be conceived as real unless (a) reality is not objective or external, but rather experienced as such; and (b) reality is a metaphor? And why was Freud so insistent that (a) reality is always external; (b) that this reality, external or no, is always dangerous; and (c) that the prototypical embodiment of this reality is the father? Loewald summarizes Freud’s view:

Reality, then, is represented by the father who as an alien, hostile, jealous force interferes with the intimate ties between mother and child, forces the child into submission, so that he seeks the father’s protection. The threat of the hostile reality is met by unavoidable, if temporary, submission to its demands, namely to renounce the mother as a libidinal object, and to acknowledge and submit to paternal authority. (1980, 7)

How did Freud become convinced that reality accounts for neurotic conflict? What did he actually mean by reality? Remember the impact, the near-crippling effect, on Freud when he discovered that his patients’ accounts of seduction weren’t “real,” after all. Yet, when Freud, years later, was continuing his search for the cause of repression, he was still looking for something that really happens, something that concretely threatens the child in an actual way. Freud’s conception of castration, in its specifically anatomical context, is insupportable, and every psychoanalyst knows that. It becomes even more untenable as a universal symbol of anxiety when we search for castration fears in girls, who, after all, haven’t a penis to lose. Sometimes Freud characterizes her anxiety as essentially envious; and sometimes he attributes her anxiety to the “loss of her mother.” In fact, Freud could never finally determine the nature of anxiety in girls because he never determined its source in boys, the standard by which he continued to compare and contrast the nature of feminine anxiety.

What is it about castration anxiety that can be said to be real? Does the father actually threaten to cut off his son’s penis because he covets his mother? Does the father ever, directly and unequivocally, confront his son about their “rivalry”? Freud says the answer to these questions is “no.” The boy, he suggests, more or less puts it together. He takes this piece of evidence (“Don’t play with your penis”) and that (“That’s naughty!”), and another (“Why don’t girls have penises?”) and interprets these (presumed) experiences and (possible) observations and, in his imagination, concludes he is at risk because the world, his father, forbids him from enacting his sexual phantasies. But if the experience of this prohibition isn’t actually conveyed to him, then on what is the child’s intuition founded?

Freud hoped to couch his theories in scientific terms, seeking to prove his “findings” through a scientific—in the main empirical—definition of reality. We can see the problem he faced when trying to define his notion of reality logistically, as though situating it “outside” settles the matter.

The distinction between “internal” and “external” may be valid in scientific experiments concerned with physics or mechanics, or even chemistry. But it falls short when applied to a specifically human reality, because for us there is no way of existing “outside,” strictly speaking. That which exists beyond our imagination is social, not “external.” They aren’t the same thing. Although there is an inside and outside to a house, there is no inside and outside to a person. This is only apt in terms of anatomy or physiology, but not in terms of experience. The social world isn’t “outside” of me. In fact, I am in a social world. I inhabit that world. Freud’s depiction of an external reality that presumably causes castration anxiety in boys is actually the social world to which boys belong. It isn’t dangerous because it poses an “external threat”—it’s threatening because boys are involved in a setting that includes fathers, a situation that interferes with—and to that degree endangers—what they want to be to their mothers, that is, the object of unrealizable phantasy. Trying to distinguish between internal and external aspects of reality only confuses the actual sources of anxiety: the world to which one belongs.

Reality, in essence, is social. It is life. This conceptual problem eluded Freud because he insisted on couching his observations about human nature in scientific terms. This problem was only compounded later by object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein (1937), who based her conception of anxiety on the notion of internal and external “objects.” How is one to reconcile the difference if the one is always “invading” the other? When human experience is conceived as a mere reflection of “internal” phantasies, is it any wonder that some analysts reject the concept of reality entirely, replaced with “operations” that purportedly determine our experiences for us? These developments are a far cry from Freud’s efforts to determine what is real and why we’re so afraid of it.

The world to which we belong includes our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about it. When Freud finally traced the source of castration anxieties to the beliefs that children have about their fathers, he was describing a social—actually, an existential—conception of reality, not a “scientific” one. This is a conception of reality that science has no access to. It has to be thought, experienced, and eventually realized. What threatens children most are the limitations society imposes on them. Transformed into phantasies, their unbridled wishes become treasures they are afraid they’ll lose if discovered. The reality they encounter doesn’t merely conflict with their desires—it threatens to displace them. Reality challenges them to accept the limits to what is obtainable through their experience of frustration. Reality isn’t inherently ominous; it entices and threatens at the same time. Its blows can be harsh, but they also transform. Freud discovered that children haphazardly experience these disappointments through anticipation and belief. If his term for this experience—castration—seems so literal, we should remember that our most tangible experience of reality is contained in that moment of knowing that something precious—however much we may want it—eludes us.