by Robert M. Young
In the investigation of mental processes and intellectual functions, psychoanalysis pursues a specific method of its own. The application of this method is by no means confined to the field of psychological disorders, but extends also to the solution of problems in art, philosophy, and religion. In this direction it has already yielded several new points of view and thrown valuable light on such subjects as the history of literature, on mythology, on the history of civilizations and on the philosophy of religion. Thus the general psycho-analytic course should be thrown open to the students of these branches of learning as well. The fertilizing effects of psycho-analytic thought on these other disciplines would certainly contribute greatly towards forging a closer link, in the sense of a universitas literatum, between medical science and the branches of learning which lie within the sphere of philosophy and the arts.
— Sigmund Freud ’On the Teaching of Psycho-analysis in Universities’ (1919)
I have written this because I was asked to give a lecture in a series under this title to the MA students in the Tavistock/University of East London Psychoanalytic Studies programme. Here is the rubric I was given:
1. To give an outline of the development and contemporary state of the field of psychoanalytic studies.
2. To present a number of different views about the content and boundaries of the field.
3. To identify key issues in the use of psychoanalytic ideas in non-clinical settings.
4. To provide an opportunity for students to compare and explore their reasons for doing the course.
For reasons I will explain I should have found this an easy assignment, but it wasn’t — for reasons I shall also explore.
The short answer is simple. Psychoanalytic Studies is the academic discipline which is concerned with teaching and research about psychoanalytic theory and practice. As a discrete discipline it began quite precisely at the University of Kent at Canterbury , where the first course was taught in 1985, and the first Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies was established in 1986. The onlie begetter of this discipline was Dr Martin Stanton, who founded the course and the centre and did much to foster the growth of the discipline in Britain and abroad. He was, for example, one of the main influences in the establishment of it professional organization, the Universities Association for Psychoanalytic Studies (UAPS) which has a journal, entitled PS, published by Rebus Press, the first issue of which appeared in April of this year. He was also co-founder with Bernard Burgoyne of THERIP, the Higher Education Research and Information Network in Psychoanalysis. THERIP is nominally a broad public forum, while UAPS is exclusively concerned with the university subject.
Dr Stanton’s centre and MA were the direct inspiration for about a dozen other programmes — at Middlesex, Sheffield, Essex, East London/Tavistock, Brunel, Manchester Metropolitan, Leeds Metropolitan, University College London, Goldsmiths, Hertfordshire, LBS Dublin, Trinity Dublin, Belfast. Programmes are in the process if being launched in Bristol and at the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside. The growth of these MAs has inspired sympathetic scholars in other countries to launch similar programmes, for example, in Australia at LaTrobe and Melbourne Universities (the latter of which has not survived), at the New School for Social Research in New York and the New England Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies in Vermont, which also intends to offer a distance learning programme. I am told that there are still others at Emory (in Atlanta), Chicago, Berkeley, Florida-Gainsville, SUNY Buffalo, Columbia, and UCLA. Yale and Cornell are thinking of starting something up following Emory's model. There are also undergraduate programmes at LSB Dublin and at Leeds Metropolitan.
In January another journal will be launched, Psychoanalytic Studies, with a distinguished international editorial board including scholars from a wide variety of points of view within psychoanalysis and analytic psychotherapy (i.e., Jungianism), broadly conceived. The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, published from Antioch in the US, is now in its third volume. For many years until he was unfairly deposed, Helmut Dahmer, a trained scholar, edited Psyche, which was a haven for scholarly work on psychoanalysis in Germany. All of this has occurred at a time when psychoanalysis as a theory and as a clinical practice has been subjected to withering criticisms from a number of quarters, so much so that the combined criticisms have been called ‘The Freud Wars’, a subject to which I will revert in my concluding remarks.
I am extremely proud of all this and can take some personal satisfaction from it. When he was setting up his programme, Martin Stanton came to Karl Figlio (now head of the Essex centre for Psychoanalytic Studies) and me and said that our work and the journal Free Associations, which we then edited together, were the main inspiration and model for what he was trying to do. I worked with him as a visiting lecturer and then Visiting Professor in the subject at Kent for a number of years, and Stanton was for a time Managing Editor of Free Associations. I chose to move on and now hold the only chair in Psychoanalytic Studies. He, too, has moved on and has just taken up a post at the Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies, and the Kent centre and programme have been, I am sorry to say, completely closed down.
There were, of course, other people who played an important part in the development of the subject, in particular, Barry Richards and Michael Rustin, who have together set up a broad and multi-faceted programme in human relations at UEL, based on the psychoanalytic point of view. I dare say that it is the broadest programme of its kind. The Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies at Sheffield, created and until recently directed by Dr Tim Kendall, which offers a psychotherapy training and related MA programmes (including distance learning) and doctoral research in Psychiatry, Philosophy & Society and in Disability Studies, is, I believe, the largest psychoanalytic centre in Europe. We are also involved in an ambitious outreach programme. In addition to our distance learning MAs, we have set up a series of email discussion forums embracing a wide spectrum — one in psychoanalytic studies and one for each of our other MAs. I and my colleague Ian Pitchford have set up affiliated ones on Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere, Object Relations, European Psychotherapy, Darwin-and Darwinism, Evolution and Science as Culture. Each of these has an associated web site, and extensive archives of information, including an vast Dictionary of Mental Health and extensive Guides to the Internet. The Sheffield centre’s site gets over a thousand visits per day, the one where my writings are gets between one and three thousand (that’s over four hundred thousand per year for each site) and the new Human-Nature.com site is growing fast and has received over a hundred thousand hits in the short time since it was set up. The email forums with which we are associated have from a hundred to over five hundred subscribers, and the InterPsych consortium of over fifty forums in mental health founded by Pitchford has well in excess of ten thousand subscribers.
The multi-faceted programme at Essex has four part-time professors — two psychoanalysts, Bob Hinshelwood and Joan Raphael-Leff and two Jungian analysts, Andrew Samuels and Renos Papadapolous. They offer a growing variety of MAs, visiting fellowships and doctoral research. There is also a large (and largely Lacanian) programme at Middlesex, inspired and maintained by Bernard Burgoyne. A related development is the MA in Group Relations, based on the work of Wilfred Bion and other psychoanalytically-oriented people concerned with groups and institutions and founded by Professor Paul Hoggett at the University of the West of England in Bristol. A similar programme is being developed by Professors Toma Tomov and Gordon Lawrence, David Armstrong and me at the Bulgarian Institute of Human Relations at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia.
I wonder if you are finding this recitation informative but less than inspiring. Well, I was asked to speak about the development, content and boundaries of the discipline, and I am not yet done. I think it is narrow-minded and historically churlish to define the discipline strictly in terms of developments explicitly under the heading of psychoanalytic studies in the wake of Martin Stanton’s initiative, admirable though the things I have so far described are. Psychoanalytic Studies is now an academic discipline, but scholarly research about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis has a long and distinguished history. I cannot say where it began. Perhaps, like so much else, it started with Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams contained a scholarly review of the literature, and his ‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement’ certainly qualifies as psychoanalytic studies. My own list of admirable contributors to the subsequent history of intellectually distinguished research is a long one. I first came to it in Ernest Jones’ The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, which appeared while I was an undergraduate, In this same period there were helpful historical and conceptual studies by David Rapaport, Peter Amacher and Walther Riese. My own role models for academic distinction are John Burnham’s detailed studies of American psychoanalysis, Judith Hughes’s studies of recent theory and of Freud’s practice and Peter Gay’s biography of Freud, which has superseded Jones’, while his multi-volume psychoanalytic exploration of Victorian sensibilities is truly awesome. The best psychoanalytic biography is Victor Wolfenstein’s The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution, while his theoretical treatise on Psychoanalytic Marxism is stunning. I have reservations about the frame of reference of the writings of John Forrester — for example, his placing psychoanalysis as fundamentally a part of popular culture and his writing rather too much to entertain— but there is no doubt that his output is extensive and his researches are probing and thought-provoking. His trajectory was through Lacanianism, and I believe he may have come out the other side. There are many who remain within this framework, and they write prolifically and, in my view, too often inaccessibly, about literature, film, sexuality, culture and all sorts of things.
I could and should go on at length. Writings by psychoanalysts who are not also trained scholars suffer from an almost unavoidable whiggism (the belief that history leads inexorably to me and my subject), and this taints the volume of Psychoanalytic Pioneers and Ellenberger’s research, even his admirable The Discovery of the Unconscious.. People who are scholars first and concerned with psychoanalysis second or simultaneously do not have this problem so worringly. Paul Robinson’s book on The Freudian Left and his more recent studies on Freud and His Critics are both in this scholarly genre.
.Phyllis Grosskurth’s biography of Melanie Klein and her book on the early circle around him are, in my opinion, also good examples. Indeed, there are many admirable biographies — of Fromm, Rank, Reich, Winnicott, Hugg-Helmuth, Adler, Ferenczi, Jung, Deutsch, Jones, Guntrip, Laing and Lacan, among them. Complementing these, we have a goodly number of sets of scholarly editions of letters. Then there is the debatable but growing genre of psychobiography, e.g., of Isaac Newton, Henry James, Richard Nixon, Gough Whitlam. Alongside these, there is a growing critical literature, much of it psychoanalytic, about biography and autobiography.
There are also a number of dictionaries which are works of scholarship and far from mere compilations: Laplanche and Pontalis’ The Language of Psychoanalysis, Hinshelwood’s A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, Newman’s Winnicott’s Words, Abram’s The Language of Winnicott, Evan’s Lacan, Elizabeth Wright’s Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary.
I greatly admire certain works of critical history, especially Roudinesco’s volumes on the history of French psychoanalysis, Russell Jacoby’s critique of conformist psychology, Social Amnesia, and his account of what happened to the left wing of the first generation of analysts, especially Fenichel, in The Repression of Psychoanalysis. Joel Kovel’s White Racism: A Psychohistory, is in this radical tradition. In the sphere of the psychoanalytic study of the arts, there is so much going on that Norman Holland, also a leading contributor, complies a extensive annual bibliography, runs an email forum and edits an ejournal in this sphere.
We have recently had dissertations on Winnicottian film theory, Kleinian aesthetics, Kleinian feminist epistemology, Irigarayian film theory, psychoanalytic supervision, the case study, Bakhtin and psychoanalysis, Proust and psychoanalysis. I am currently supervising eight dissertations, and colleagues in Sheffield are supervising a total of about a dozen more. I cannot say what doctoral research is in progress elsewhere, but I am sure the numbers are growing, e.g., at the Tavistock, at Essex and in Cambridge, places where I know a little about what is going on.
Where does one stop listing scholars? With Psychoanalysis and Feminism, published in 1974, Juliet Mitchell almost single-handedly brought Freud back into the frame for feminists, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Jacqueline Rose, among many others, have pursued this path. John Fletcher, Jonathan Dolomore, Beverly Burch, Noreen O’Connor and Joanna Ryan and others have explored sexual identity and sexual orientation. A number of recent scholars have stood back and reflected psychoanalytically on culture, including aspects of psychoanalytic culture: Christopher Lasch, Paul Roazen, Sander Gilman, Michael and Margaret Rustin, Barry Richards, Karl Figlio, Meg Harris Williams, Margot Waddell, Stephen Frosh, Janet Sayers, Marike Finlay, Donald Carveth, Andrew Samuels, Michael Adams, Judith Kurzweil, David Tacey, Anthony Elliott, Ian Parker, Rozika Parker, Rosalind Mirsky, Parveen Adams, Barnaby Barrett, Peter Swales, Peter Rudnytsky, Sonu Shamdasani, Fred Alford, Barry Richards and colleagues and Jonathan Lear (of whom more anon). My own favourite among all of these writings (because it speaks directly to my own history and current condition) is Paul Hoggett’s essay on the psychoanalysis of commitment, entitled Partisans in an Uncertain World.
I do not want to fail to mention practising psychoanalysts who have done historical and/or conceptual research, some of it useful, some profound. I have in mind, for example, the work Humberto Nagera, Joseph Sandler and others did in compiling texts with respect to basic concepts in psychoanalytic theory. Something similar can be said of the writings of Ricardo Steiner on the history of psychoanalysis, especially in Britain, and his and Pearl King’s editing work on The Controversial Discussions between Kleinians and Freudians in London in the 1940s. Or Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel’s historical and conceptual essay, The Ego Ideal. Or Horacio Etchegoyen’s monumental tome on The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique. Some psychoanalysts and psychotherapists who have not had the benefit of a scholarly training in history have written historical essays, mounted historical conferences and, and some have launched journals, one in Europe and a new one in Britain, Psychoanalysis and History.
My idea of a properly scholarly and thorough piece of research is a forthcoming book by Douglas Kirsner, an Australian scholar who spent a decade interviewing psychoanalysts in America. He then spent a long time transcribing and analysing his interviews. He has come up with a very impressive historical and political analysis of the inner dynamics of four of the main American psychoanalytic institutes — New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. Each has its distinctive problems and resolutions. Each provides a riveting story. For example, senior people on the staff of the Chicago benefited financially from trust funds of patients or ex-patients. In Los Angeles there was an ongoing row over the role of Kleinian ideas and practice, and the American Psychoanalytic Association threatened over a period of years to close down the institute unless they got rid of the influence of Kleinian ideas which were challenging what they called ‘traditional American psychoanalysis’, which was code for ego psychology imported from Germany. In New York and Boston there were ongoing conflicts over that perennial bugbear of psychoanalytic organisations: how to decide who gets to be a training analyst. The Continental émigrés who went to American as a haven from Nazi persecution were very slow to let native Americans have power, though their own wives seemed to be meritorious. This is a searching study of institutional dynamics and the vicissitudes of power. Each institution made progress in solving its conflicts, but some split and, as I see it, all would have benefited from operating within the accountability of a university affiliation, something psychoanalysts have tended to avoid. The text of his book, Unfeee Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes, is at the human-nature.com web site, and it will be published I hard copy in the new year.
So much for lists. I turn now to issues. What is Psychoanalytic Studies for? I suppose I cannot address that without saying something about what psychoanalysis is for. It is obviously for treating neurotics, borderlines and some psychotics - as Freud put it, helping them to move, if we can, from intolerable distress to ordinary human unhappiness. Freud was a neuroscientist, a clinician, a psychologist and so on. Beyond that, however, he was a philosopher of human nature, society, culture and was profoundly concerned with the origins and prospects of humankind. Many consider him a pessimist. I am not one of them. I consider him realistic though rather more stoical than I am. I suppose I should acknowledge that I am rather more stoical that I was. The Roman Stoics taught the proper attitude of integrity, endurance and in the last instance, opting out to adopt toward historical situations which could not, at least for the forseeable future, be changed. Freud wrote eloquently about the origins of law from the incest taboo and the origins of civilization in the sublimation of polymorphously perverse sexuality in the primal horde. He held the view that sanctions and guilt are essential to prevent people from acting from urgent selfish motives and that as a consequence, neurosis was the price we pay for the degree of civilization we do manage to maintain. He believed that at bottom our creative and destructive instincts are always and everywhere in conflict and that we live our lives in a perpetually fraught space between the two great instincts of Eros and Thanatos.
It is worth remembering that Freud was at the height of his powers at the time of the First World War, during which he and his family suffered great deprivation (he was 58 in 1914). He also suffered from an increasingly debilitating cancer of the pharynx for the last sixteen years of his life, necessitating numerous painful operations and the wearing of an uncomfortable prosthesis. He had to flee from Austria in the wake of the Nazi takeover of Austria and died in exile not many months later a few hundred yards from here at three in the morning on 23 September 1939.
A revealing anecdote was told by his biographer and devoted adjutant, Ernest Jones. In August 1919 Jones and a companion were the first foreign civilians to reach Vienna after the war. He had not seen Freud for six years. Jones recalls that 'there were, of course, comments on the vast changes in the European situation, and Freud surprised me by saying he had recently had an interview with an ardent communist and had been half converted to Bolshevism, as it was then called. He had been informed that the advent of Bolshevism would result in some years of misery and chaos and that these would be followed by universal peace, prosperity and happiness. Freud added: "I told him I believed the first half"'. (Jones, Freud , III: 16).
This is my way of introducing my own view that all of thought, including scientific thought, is inescapably about values and occurs within an ideological framework. Freud and psychoanalysis are no exceptions, and it is part of our task to think about the moral and ideological aspects of psychoanalysis. Freud is often thought of as someone who did not hold overtly political views, although he is always considered a liberal. I want to spend a few minutes shattering this illusion. Near the end of his life, he wrote a set of New Introductory Lectures (Freud, 1933) which were designed to help the publishing house with which he was associated to get out of a situation (which I know too well) of not quite being able to break even. In the last lecture he addressed himself to the whole question of psychoanalysis in relation to world views. He says that the abolition of private property sprang from a misguided illusion about human nature. He did not himself take a view on the economic consequences of the Soviet attempt to build communism but said, 'I can recognise it's psychological presuppositions as an untenable illusion' (quoted in Gay, 1988, p. 549). He argued that aggression was not created by property but, rather, was a source of pleasure (Ibid.). Freud's theory of civilisation 'views life in society as an imposed compromise and hence as an essentially insoluble predicament' (Gay, 1988, p. 547). He says that we can neither live without civilisation nor live happily within it, but at best we can achieve a truce between desire and control' (p. 548). Freud wrote,
I recognise ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development, and the precipitants of primeval experiences (as whose representative religion pushes to the fore) are only the reflection of the dynamic conflicts among the id, ego, and superego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual the same events repeated on a wider stage. (quoted in Gay, 1988, p. 547)'
His recent biographer, Peter Gay, comments: 'He could not have stated the essential unity of his thought any more forcefully' (Ibid.).
I want to dwell on Freud's most extensive comments on Marxism. He thought socialism and Marxism pursued forlorn hopes. It is important to have a sense of context for this passage. He is reflecting on ideology as world view — Weltanschauung, — something of which he believed himself to be free. The first world view on which he comments, albeit briefly, is anti-scientistic anarchism, which he deftly caricatures and reduces to relativistic sophistry. He continues,
The other opposition has to be taken far more seriously and, in this instance I feel the liveliest regret at the inadequacy of my information. I suspect that you [he is referring to the imaginary audience for his lectures] know more about this business than I do and that you took up your position long ago in favour of Marxism or against it. Karl Marx's investigations into the economic structure of society and into the influence of different systems upon every department of human life have in our days acquired an undeniable authority. How far his views in detail are correct or go astray, I cannot of course tell. I understand that this is not an easy matter for others better instructed than I am. (Freud, 1933, pp 176-77)
Having begun in a disarmingly diffident way, he moves onto the attack:
There are assertions contained in Marx's theory which have struck me as strange: such as that development of forms of society as a process of natural history, or that the changes in social stratification arise from one another in the manner of a dialectical process. I am far from sure that I understand these assertions aright; nor do they sound to me ”materialistic” but, rather, like a precipitate of the obscure Hegelian philosophy in whose school Marx graduated. I do not how I can shake off my lay opinion that the class structure of society goes back to the struggles which, from the beginning of history, took place between human hordes only slightly differing from each other. Social distinctions, so I thought, were originally distinctions between clans or races. Victory was decided by psychological factors, such as the amount of constitutional aggressiveness, but also by the firmness of the organisation within the horde, and by material factors, such as the possession of superior weapons. Living together in the same area, the victorious became the masters and the vanquished the slaves. There is no sign to be seen in this of a natural law or of a conceptual [dialectical] evolution. (p. 177).
He goes on to assert that 'men always put their newly acquired instruments of power at the service of their aggressiveness and use them against one another'.
Moving on, Freud indulges in a bit of potted history of military technology in a rather technological determinist way and continues with what has become a familiar rebuttal of the base-superstructure model in which economic forces determine cultural manifestations. He reiterates a position which, in fact, Marx and Engels also held and which every enlightened Marxist has also held, that is, that superstructure influences base just as much as base influences superstructure. He tells us that 'the relation of mankind to their control over nature, from which they derive their weapons for fighting their fellow-men, must necessarily also effect their economic arrangements.' (p 178). He then appears to offer us a sense of mediation:
But it cannot be assumed that economics motives are the only ones that determine the behaviour of human beings in society. The undoubted fact that different individuals, races and nations behave differently under the same economic conditions is alone enough to show that economic motives are not the sole dominating factor. It is altogether incomprehensible how psychological factors can be overlooked when what is in question are the reactions of living human beings...' (Ibid.).
Freud next brings instincts into play and says,
If anyone were in a position to show and detail the ways in which these different factors — the general inherited human disposition, its racial variations and its cultural transformations — inhibit and promote one another under the conditions of social rank, profession and earning capacity — if anyone were able to do this, he would have supplemented Marxism so that it was made into a genuine social science. For sociology too, dealing as it does with the behaviour of people in society, cannot be anything but applied psychology. Strictly speaking there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and natural science (p 179).
We have here, again, Freud's own swingeing reductionism, at least as simplistic as anything of which he accuses Marxists. There is natural science, and there is psychology. There are, therefore, fundamentally no intellectual niches for what Durkheim called social facts. There is no sense of the relative autonomy of the social. There are, finally and fundamentally, no mediations. No economics, no social psychology, no anthropology, not even — finally — history.
I will offer two more paragraphs to make clear both his commitment to reductionism and his deep scepticism about Marxism.
And although practical Marxism has mercilessly cleared away all idealistic systems and illusions, it has itself developed illusions which are no less questionable and unprovable than the earlier ones. It hopes in the course of a few generations so to alter human nature that people will live together almost without friction in the new order of society, and that they will undertake the duties of work without any compulsion. Meanwhile it shifts elsewhere the instinctual restrictions which are essential in society; it diverts the aggressive tendencies which threaten all human communities to the outside and finds support in the hostility of the poor against the rich and of the hitherto powerless against the former rulers. A transformation of human nature such as this is highly improbable (p. 180).
In conclusion, he says,
Unluckily neither our scepticism nor the fanatical faith of the other side gives a hint of how the experiment will turn out. The future will tell us; perhaps it will show that the experiment was undertaken prematurely, that a sweeping alteration of the social order has little prospect of success until new discoveries have increased our control over the forces of nature and so made easy the satisfaction of our needs. Only then perhaps may it become possible for a new social order not only to put an end to the material need of the masses but also to give a hearing to the cultural demands of the individual. Even then, to be sure, we shall still have to struggle for an incalculable time with the difficulties which the untameable character of human nature presents to every kind of social community.' (p 181)
Reverting to Freud's claim that all social phenomena are really id, ego, and super-ego writ large, my aim in what follows is to canvas on behalf of the future of Psychoanalytic Studies a crucial dimension of the problem — how we grant all that is appropriate to id, ego, and super-ego and to the family dynamic as prototype, as well as other, more primitive mechanisms, while giving due weight to the relative autonomy of the social. We somehow have to find our way between the extreme form of theories of nature and human nature which says that truth and human nature are made and not found (Rorty, 1989), on the one hand, and utterly fatalistic and pessimistic views, whether socially fatalistic or biologistically so, on the other.
I want to begin this part of my remarks by granting a lot to Freud. If he is right, and I regret to say that many events in the twentieth century support his pessimism — extending from the baleful consequences of the Soviet Revolution and the Great Cultural Revolution which began in 1929, to the Chinese events under the same name in the 1960s and beyond to the events of Kampuchea and other draconian and genocidal movements in several metropolitan and Third World countries right up to the threshold of the millennium. Even so, in the spirit of Sisyphus, I think that we must try again to push the stone up the hill, knowing that the chances of its rolling back over us are quite large. The problem, I suggest, is one of levels. The need is not to get away from the primitive but to work with it — not as fixed but as deucedly hard to shift.
Indeed, the key might lie in Freud's own motto: 'If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will stir up the lower depths' (Freud, 1900, p. ix). Herbert Marcuse offers us the beginnings of a compromise. He accepts the necessity of repression for civilisation. Here he is with Freud. But he distinguishes between socially necessary repression on the one hand, and what he calls 'surplus repression' on the other (Marcuse, 1966, pp. 37-8). The second characterises a specific epoch and is available for attempts to modify it. For Marcuse, Freud's biologism is petrified or frozen history — second nature (Jacoby, 1981, p.31).
You will recall that some minutes ago I turned to the question of what Psychoanalytic Studies is for and immediately went into a long digression about what psychoanalysis is for, in which I canvassed Freud’s views on civilization and politics. Toward the end of this digression I began to address our own version of this question and to touch on some potential modifications of Freudian orthodoxy. Putting the matter quite bluntly, I am satisfied that Philip Rieff was right when he said that the writings of Freud are the most important body of thought put to paper in the twentieth century. I would, however, supplement his view by saying that a way must be found to synthesize Freud with Darwin and Marx, i.e., to arrive at a comprehensive synthesis of views on human nature which gives due weight, as we have seen that Freud did not, to the socio-economic and ideological aspects of human nature, thought and society. Moreover, we have to bring these into the appropriate relationship with more recent developments deriving from the Darwinian tradition. Biology, the socio-economic and the unconscious must each be seen, each in its due measure, as constitutive of human nature. At present, for the most part, the grand narratives of Marx and Freud are out of fashion, yet I am sure we cannot generate a rich enough view of humankind without them. This is part of the task of Psychoanalytic Studies — to look after this part of the Ark of the Covenant during the current diaspora. By diaspora I mean the dumbing down of how it is fashionable to think of human nature. Just because genetic explanations are — to the extent that they are — true, does not mean that other levels of understanding our natures are invalidated or that we must always go for the genetic or instinctual explanation when another level of causation and explanation is more appropriate. Sophisticated Darwinian psychologists grant this, while reductionist ones do not. Unconscious motivation has fundamental roots in biology — by which I mean genetics, instincts and the kinds of motivations Darwinian psychologists write about — but experience of significant figures, especially in infancy, and the context in which we grow up modulate the biologically given. The whole weight of the most important theoretical development in psychoanalysis since Freud — object relations theory — is found in the pan of the scale marked ’human relations’. In the central triangle posited by Freud, the emphasis has shifted fundamentally from the aim of the instinct to its object. We must mine the insights of Fairbairn, Klein, Winnicott and Guntrip, the originators of object relations theory, to more fully understand this approach and its consequences for how we view ourselves as individuals and in groups and institutions and cultures. Moreover, as Bion showed, the true causes of group behaviour are not sufficiently understood, pace Freud quoted above, in terms of the Oedipal triangle and the interrelations among id, ego and superego. There is a deeper level of understanding and explanation which takes account of the role of primitive processes, in particular, the psychotic anxieties which invade the lives of individuals and undermine the work of groups and institutions, leading them to panic actions and to the kinds of rigid procedures and structures investigated by Isabel Menzies Lyth and others. This is an important theoretical task.
Of course, clinical work, group relations settings and consultancy will contribute fundamentally to this work, but Psychoanalytic Studies has a conceptual and historical task all its own. I’ll give you a striking example. If you read the literature on object relations, all of the object relations theorists tend to get lumped together. There are some good reasons for this, but there are differences which need to be looked at very carefully and which are seldom mentioned. Fairbairn believed that if you sorted out your psychoanalytic difficulties, you would have no internal objects, while Klein believed that the unconscious and perpetual conjuring with internal objects was the sine qua non of having a mind and of thinking. What are we to make of this apparent utter incompatibility?
Conceptual research has not been a forte of practising psychoanalysts and psychotherapists; indeed, many are intolerant of it. There is a widespread belief that if you are not citing clinical cases, your work is suspect. For example, I once set out to write historical and theoretical clarifications of the concepts of projective identification and of countertransference, and, if I say so myself, the result was thought by many to be helpful. However word got back to me that some clinicians whose views I would value simply said they could not make head nor tail of what I was saying. One said it was just social theory (whatever ‘just’ social theory may be!), while another had simply found it impenetrable. I argue that conceptual research is as important in psychoanalysis as it is in philosophy and in the natural and human sciences. Psychoanalysts are insecure about their respectability, so they cling to the clinical so that they can claim that they are safely grounded in the empirical domain. Unfortunately, our empirical domain is the unconscious.
This is perhaps the place for me to address an issue which is commonly raised about Psychoanalytic Studies. I shall make short work of it. It is sometimes said that it is dangerous, inappropriate or something else bad to teach psychoanalytic theory divorced from clinical work. I think it is desirable for serious people to be at some point in their lives in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, but it’s not essential to do so while studying Psychoanalytic Studies. More controversially, I would advocate that students on a Psychoanalytic Studies course should take part in an experiential group and/or work as volunteers for, say, half a day a week, in a mental health setting, a hospital or a community mental health resource centre. Having made these suggestions, however, I want to defend the legitimacy and academic autonomy of Psychoanalytic Studies apart from clinical training or clinical experience. Nobody says you cannot learn psychology, sociology, physics, etc. as abstract theory. I know psychoanalysis is particularly reflexive, but so is religion, but we don’t make church attendance or even being a believer a prerequisite of religious studies.
Coming back to my agenda for the discipline I want to put its basis even more forcibly. I say that there is no alternative to psychoanalysis if we want to understand human nature on the hoof in a way which includes our most baffling, distressing and moving dimensions. That is why applied psychoanalysis exists. It has been found helpful by people writing about music, art, literature, film, culture (including popular culture), aesthetics, ethics, penology and much else. Tell me how much behaviourism, cognitive psychology, sociobiology, Darwinian psychology and other branches of so-called ‘scientific psychology’ have contributed to the illumination of our troubled and our cultural and our aspiring selves. Their explanations have their place, but when applied to the areas where psychoanalysis has been helpful, they are usually pitiful and offer explanatory factors which will not cut it, e.g., kin selection, birth order, competition for mates, reciprocal altruism. Some of their explanations are ingenious and some are promising, but they do not resonate with the dialectic of experience. Moreover, some of those who put them forward most assertively give off more than a hint of philistines and reductionism. Don’t get me wrong, as I said, I advocate the integration of explanations drawn from bringing together the perspectives of the legacies of Darwin, Marx and Freud, but I want a sophisticated integration, not one constructed from elements which often rob culture of its richness. I have friends who do not mind about this and do not insist on being moved by scientific explanations if they will fix, for example, mental disorders. I say I want the biological and ideological explanation — and even the pill — to leave room for making sense of the subjective experience of neurotics and psychotics, as well. Peter Barham has made this point eloquently in his writings on the subjective worlds of mental patients, as have Ronald Laing (though sometimes overstated) and Harold Searles (never in my experience overstated; I am giving a day school on his work this coming Saturday).
It has been pointed out to me that the popular and self-help psychologies which provide the basis for much popular writing is psychology does touch on emotions and everyday experience. Of course I grant this, but I presume to say that they routinely do so superficially.
To be even blunter, I don’t think there is much hope for humankind unless we come up with an understanding of human nature which pays due respect to the dark side of our natures. According to a recent study conducted by the National Statistical Office, seventy per cent of prisoners in England and Wales have two or more mental illnesses, including substance abuse. About half are considered to be sociopaths. The personalities of both leaders and followers in the grotesque events which make too many of our headlines are shockingly disturbed. I am thinking about various bombers, mass executions, hate wars, gangs, cults, .e.g., in Japan, American militias, Ku Klux Clan, in the Middle East, in South America. Each of these has its historical, geopolitical and socio-economic causes, but each also has its developmental and psychoanalytic dimension. Who is predisposed to sign up to death squads? The same can be said of children who abuse and sometimes kill other children and of those who are abused and, in their turn, grow up to abuse. This is true, for example, of over three quarters of Indians in Manitoba, In some communities every person has been abused, grownups and children alike. Tell me that psychotherapy and altered child-rearing practices are not relevant there. I have been asked to give a lecture in January on what, if anything, psychoanalysis has to say to this situation in Manitoba, and I believe that because of my work in Psychoanalytic Studies, I can perhaps say something potentially helpful.
Ideology is to society, culture and to belief systems what unconscious motivation is to individuals. Indeed, it is by unconscious means that we acquire our values and beliefs. To be a member of a group or subculture is to acquire its projective identifications, and this occurs largely by unconscious processes. One of the places where this is clearest is in racial prejudice, as Wolfenstein shows in his study of the work and personality of Malcolm X. Wolfenstein is that rare combination, of which there are a few others, a trained scholar who is also psychoanalytically trained. He holds a chair in political science and is also a psychoanalyst. He shows how we acquire the beliefs which we hold without thinking about them and through which we actually have experiences. Freud says that we distort experience to the point of hallucination in the very process of having experience. This is where beliefs and the unconscious are forged together and why it behoves us to conduct research in applied psychoanalysis, especially where bad behaviour is concerned.
I want to say a word about the perverse. We must not conflate the perverse with perversion. Indeed, a question which is exercising me at the moment is whether perversion is perverse. This is both a theoretical and a clinical question. Its answer was once thought obvious; indeed, Freud, for all the tolerance in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, thought the answer was obvious, since he thought that if we lingered too long over any form of foreplay on the path to what he had no doubt was the natural outcome of sex, intercourse to orgasm, we were in the domain of perversion.
But nowadays our norms of sexual behaviour and orientation are more plastic, though how plastic they should be is an as-yet unanswered question, one to which the answer will probably continue to change as a function of changing mores in the wider society. The answer cannot be found exclusively in the consulting room, since there are other dimensions — social and moral — to explore.
The perverse is a potentially overlapping but not perfectly congruent domain. It is the mental orientation where fair is foul and foul is fair, as in ‘Macbeth’, where the moral order is inverted. Gianna Williams and Margot Waddell have shown that a person can be perverse at pre-school age. They argue that in looking at whether or nor a person’s sexual activities are perverse, you have to evaluate the unconscious phantasy during intercourse or other sexual practices, whether homoerotic or hetroerotic. The answer cannot be know in advance or in the abstract. Looking at the concept of the perverse more broadly, for example, in the Jeremy Bulger case, it is clear that the boys who murdered him were perverse. It is also clear that such people can benefit from psychoanalytic therapy, as can children who abuse other children. However, the chance of being helped diminishes with age, and this has implications for child welfare, child care facilities, secure units and prisons.
I want, just before closing, to say something more about why psychoanalysis is important and to suggest some reasons why it is under such fierce attack. Freud is said to be a liar and to have falsified his case studies and to be a coward who drew back from the seduction theory. Psychoanalysis is said to be methodologically unsatisfactory and all sorts of other things, among them that it is said not to work. I grant that full analysis is increasingly unrealistic for economic reasons, but I also claim that outcome research shows that psychodynamic therapies are at least as good as any other and maintain that it is better for the inner self. I suggest that the attacks Freud and psychoanalysis (and on Jung, Bettleheim and many others) have a deeper source. I believe that they are part of the dumbing down I mentioned earlier. I believe that the attackers wish to turn a blind eye to the fact that we have inner worlds, since they want to abrogate the concepts which go with it — integrity, character, anguish, depressive (as opposed to persecutory) guilt. We are living in times when it is very tempting to seek external answers, to search for truths which are merely truths of the surface, to go for technologies and quick fixes and, as Jonathan Lear (a scholar and analyst in Chicago) puts it in an eloquent defence of psychoanalysis, ’to ignore the complexity, depth and darkness of human life’ (Lear, 1998, p. 27). Lear goes on to say,
It is difficult to make this point without sounding like a Luddite; so let me say explicitly that psycho-pharmacology and neuro-psychiatry have made, and will continue to make, valuable contributions in reducing human suffering. But it is a fantasy to suppose that a chemical or neurological intervention can solve the problems posed in and by human life. That is why it is a mistake to think of psychoanalysis and Prozac as two different means to the same end. The point of psychoanalysis is to help us develop a clearer, yet more flexible and creative, sense of what our ends might be. "How shall we live?" is, for Socrates, the fundamental question of human existence — and the attempt to answer that question is, for him, what makes human life worthwhile. And it is Plato and Shakespeare, Proust, Nietzsche and, most recently, Freud who complicated the issue by insisting that there are deep currents of meaning, often crosscurrents, running through the human soul which can at best be glimpsed through a glass darkly. This, if anything, is the Western tradition: not a specific set of values, but a belief that the human soul is too deep for there to be any easy answer to the question of how to live (Lear, 1998, p. 28).
I heartily commend Lear’s entire article to you. He wrote it some years ago on the occasion of the cancellation of an exhibit on Freud in Washington, one which was reinstated and has recently opened.
Here is another take on why Freud is under attack now: I think that the period since 1989 has been horribly sobering. Take away the Cold War and what do you get? Peace? Fraternal Love? Generosity of Spirit? No, you get, as Freud observed, the return of the (literally and militarily) repressed. We are now having to face in more complex forms the destructive, envious, ungenerous and murderous side of human nature. The desiccation of compassion is apparent in the escalation of drug-related killings, mass, gratuitous and serial murders, the annihilation of children on the streets of Brazil, Dahmer, Frederick and Rosemary West, the Soviet Mafia, Muslim fundamentalists, Yardies, American militias whose members recently dragged an innocent man to dismemberment and death near where I was raised in Texas and so on. Remove the evil empire as a convenient scapegoat in which to locate everything negative and you have to face up to the destructive impulses of your own country, your region, your city, your neighbourhood, your ethnicity, your kids' school, your self. I think this leads to a hatred of the way of thinking which has most to say about these things — psychoanalysis. So let's get Freud. He brought up all this stuff. He said that civilization was a veneer over polymorphous perversity, incest, rapaciousness, ’man’ as ’a wolf to other men’. He said that discontent to the point of neurosis was the price of civilization, goddam him. He must be a cheat, a liar, and anyway all his followers fuck their patients, don't they? And get them to tell lies. And turn them against their wives and husbands. The analysts and therapists are held responsible for evoking all these things that I cannot bear to know about my friends, my family and myself.
I am coming to the end. I want here to say something about agendas. I have been sketching mine, but I freely admit that there are others, which is why it is good to have many sites where Psychoanalytic Studies are conducted. I obviously think my preoccupations are important, but I know well that others are, too. All are legitimate as long as their practitioners follow Freud’s motto which I have already quoted and which appears at the front of his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams: 'If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will stir up the lower depths' (Freud, 1900, p. ix). That’s the main thing — to keep stirring.
This is the text of a talk in a series on ’What Is Psychoanalytic Studies?’ given to the students on the joint Tavistock/University of East London MA in Psychoanalytic Studies 10 November 1998.
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Criticisms of and Changes in Freudian Psychoanalysis
Criticisms of and Changes in Freudian Psychoanalysis Orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis was challenged in the 1920s by Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi, and Wilhelm Reich; later, in the 1930s, by Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan. These critics of Freud stressed the interpersonal aspect of the analyst-patient relationship (transference), and placed more emphasis on the processes of the ego. Despite a number of detractors and a lack of controlled research, Freudian psychoanalysis remained the most widely used method of psychotherapy until at least the 1950s. Today, Freud's method is only one among many types of psychotherapy used in psychiatry . Many objections have been leveled against traditional psychoanalysis, both for its methodological rigidity and for its lack of theoretical rigor. A number of modern psychologists have pointed out that traditional psychoanalysis relies too much on ambiguities for its data, such as dreams and free associations. Without empirical evidence, Freudian theories often seem weak, and ultimately fail to initiate standards for treatment. Critics have also pointed out that Freud's theoretical models arise from a homogeneous sample group—almost exclusively upper-class Austrian women living in the sexually repressed society of the late 19th cent. Such a sample, many psychologists contend, made Freud's focus on sex as a determinant of personality too emphatic. Other problems with traditional psychoanalysis are related to Freud's method of analysis. For Freudian analysis to reach its intended conclusions, the psychoanalyst required frequent sessions with a client over a period of years: today, the prohibitive costs of such methods compels most to seek other forms of psychiatric care. Traditional psychoanalysis involved a distancing between therapist and client—the two did not even face each other during the sessions. In recent years, many clients have preferred a more interactive experience with the therapist. The subject matter of Freudian analysis has also fallen into disuse, even among those who still practice psychoanalysis: early childhood receives much less emphasis, and there is generally more focus on problems the client is currently experiencing. Bibliography See the works of Freud; A. Bernstein and G. Warner, An Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis (1981); J. Reppen, ed., Beyond Freud (1984); C. G. Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis (tr. 1985); S. Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis (1984, repr. 1987); O. A. Olsen and S. Koppe, The Psychoanalysis of Freud (1988); C. Badcock, Essential Freud (1988); E. Kurzweil, The Freudian Establishments (1989).Author not available, PSYCHOANALYSIS., The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2008
Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory
Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory
The basic postulate of psychoanalysis, the concept of a dynamic unconscious mind, grew out of Freud's observation that the physical symptoms of hysterical patients tended to disappear after apparently forgotten material was made conscious (see hysteria ). He saw the unconscious as an area of great psychic activity, which influenced personality and behavior but operated with material not subject to recall through normal mental processes. Freud postulated that there were a number of defense mechanisms —including repression, reaction-formation, regression, displacement, and rationalization—that protect the conscious mind from those aspects of reality it may find difficult to accept. The major defense mechanism is repression, which induced a "forgetfulness" for harsh realities. Observing the relationship between psychoneurosis and repressed memories, Freud made conscious recognition of these forgotten experiences the foundation of psychoanalytic therapy. Hypnosis was the earliest method used to probe the unconscious, but due to its limited effectiveness, it was soon discarded in favor of free association (see also hypnotism ). Dreams , which Freud interpreted as symbolic wish fulfillments, were considered a primary key to the unconscious, and their analysis was an important part of Freudian therapy.
To clarify the operation of the human psyche, Freud and his followers introduced a vast body of psychoanalytic theory. In considering the human personality as a whole, Freud divided it into three functional parts: id, ego, and superego. He saw the id as the deepest level of the unconscious, dominated by the pleasure principle, with its object the immediate gratification of instinctual drives. The superego, originating in the child through an identification with parents, and in response to social pressures, functions as an internal censor to repress the urges of the id. The ego, on the other hand, is seen as a part of the id modified by contact with the external world. It is a mental agent mediating among three contending forces: the outside demands of social pressure or reality, libidinal demands for immediate satisfaction arising from the id, and the moral demands of the superego. Although considered only partly conscious, the ego constitutes the major part of what is commonly referred to as consciousness . Freud asserted that conflicts between these often-opposing components of the human mind are crucial factors in the development of neurosis.
Psychoanalysis focused on early childhood, postulating that many of the conflicts which arise in the human mind develop in the first years of a person's life. Freud demonstrated this in his theory of psychosexuality, in which the libido (sexual energy) of the infant progressively seeks outlet through different body zones (oral, anal, phallic, and genital) during the first five to six years of life.
The basic postulate of psychoanalysis, the concept of a dynamic unconscious mind, grew out of Freud's observation that the physical symptoms of hysterical patients tended to disappear after apparently forgotten material was made conscious (see hysteria ). He saw the unconscious as an area of great psychic activity, which influenced personality and behavior but operated with material not subject to recall through normal mental processes. Freud postulated that there were a number of defense mechanisms —including repression, reaction-formation, regression, displacement, and rationalization—that protect the conscious mind from those aspects of reality it may find difficult to accept. The major defense mechanism is repression, which induced a "forgetfulness" for harsh realities. Observing the relationship between psychoneurosis and repressed memories, Freud made conscious recognition of these forgotten experiences the foundation of psychoanalytic therapy. Hypnosis was the earliest method used to probe the unconscious, but due to its limited effectiveness, it was soon discarded in favor of free association (see also hypnotism ). Dreams , which Freud interpreted as symbolic wish fulfillments, were considered a primary key to the unconscious, and their analysis was an important part of Freudian therapy.
To clarify the operation of the human psyche, Freud and his followers introduced a vast body of psychoanalytic theory. In considering the human personality as a whole, Freud divided it into three functional parts: id, ego, and superego. He saw the id as the deepest level of the unconscious, dominated by the pleasure principle, with its object the immediate gratification of instinctual drives. The superego, originating in the child through an identification with parents, and in response to social pressures, functions as an internal censor to repress the urges of the id. The ego, on the other hand, is seen as a part of the id modified by contact with the external world. It is a mental agent mediating among three contending forces: the outside demands of social pressure or reality, libidinal demands for immediate satisfaction arising from the id, and the moral demands of the superego. Although considered only partly conscious, the ego constitutes the major part of what is commonly referred to as consciousness . Freud asserted that conflicts between these often-opposing components of the human mind are crucial factors in the development of neurosis.
Psychoanalysis focused on early childhood, postulating that many of the conflicts which arise in the human mind develop in the first years of a person's life. Freud demonstrated this in his theory of psychosexuality, in which the libido (sexual energy) of the infant progressively seeks outlet through different body zones (oral, anal, phallic, and genital) during the first five to six years of life.
Indic Influences on Modern Psychology
by Don Salmon, PhD
Indic Influences on Modern Psychology
This is only the beginning of an outline which I hope others on the YogaPsychology list will help to flesh out. I am basing the information here primarily on two sources: J.J,. Clarke's "Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought" and Eugene Taylor's introduction to "The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation: A Review of Contemporary Research with a Comprehensive Bibliography, 1931 - 1996. The outline begins with some distinctions between psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry. Then there is a quick and extremely brief overview of the basic historical trends in psychology. Finally, there is a list with brief descriptions of some of the major individuals who have brought Indic influences to bear on psychology. (If you are interested in a much more detailed history of psychology along with an investigation of the role of introspection in psychological research, I wrote an essay on these topics which can be found at http://www.jps.net/virtreal/introspect.html)
I. Psychology, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry "Psychology", as taught in universities throughout the world, refers to an academic discipline, and a science which was established in the late 19th century. Several times on the YogaPsychology list, there has been reference to "science" as if the only real science is that which deals with physics and the brain. However, the research methodology of psychology has been dealing with human experience for over 120 years, even if often or mostly in a reductionist fashion. Psychological science includes a wide variety of disciplines, including developmental psychology, personality psychology, social psychology, comparative or evolutionary psychology, and among the applied psychological disciplines, educational, sports and neuropsychology. Typically, at least in the United States, a psychologist has a Ph.D. (Doctorate)
"Psychiatry" is a subspecialty of the medical profession. A practicing psychiatrist usually has at least an M.D., though sometimes a Ph.D. as well. Psychiatrists are primarily focused on psychopathology, treating mental illness. Historically (until approximately 50 years ago) this meant serious mental illness - the psychoses, manic-depression, major depression, obsessive- compulsive disorder, etc. With the increasing monetarization of the profession, there has been an widening array of so-called disorders which have increased to the extent that virtually nobody may be said to be free of mental illness.
"Psychotherapy" refers to a healing practice whose beginnings are associated for the most part with the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, who was by training a neurologist, not a psychologist. For the first 50 years of the 20th century, most practitioners of psychotherapy were psychiatrists, which means their training was in the field of medicine. By the 1970s, psychoanalysis had begun to fall out of favor, and the biological approach (drugs, essentially, though electro-convulsive therapy has had a resurgence as well) has gradually come to predominate, not in a small way because of the influence of the pharmaceutical companies. Psychiatrists receive very little training in psychology. Psychologists make use of psychoanalytic ideas and practices, though there are uniquely psychological contributions to therapy such as behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy and humanistic therapy, to name the most widely used approaches.
II. Historical Overview The psychologist Cyril Burtt once summarized the modern history of psychological science in this way: "Psychology first lost its soul, then it lost its mind, until it was finally in danger of losing consciousness altogether". The official beginning of the science of psychology is 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. The first formal school of psychology was the introspectionist school. Previously, psychology had been the domain of the philosophers. In an attempt to separate philosophy and science, psychologists no longer referred to the "soul". The "introspection" of this early school of psychology was an extremely superficial and reductionist cataloguing of sensory experience. There was little progress made during the 30 or 40 years this school was in existence. (Though William James wrote his famous "Principles of Psychology" during this period, he failed to establish a separate school or approach to psychology).
The second psychological school represented a radical break from the Introspectionists, and was initiated in 1913 by John Watson, the first behaviorist. He called for the elimination of all references to internal experience (this is what Burtt was referring to as psychology "losing its mind"). B. F. Skinner, several decades later, took this a step further, referring to the brain as a "black box", and refusing acknowledgment of any sort of consciousness at all.
In the late 1950s, the cognitive "revolution" was initiated, often considered to be officially begun with George Miller's article, "The Magic Number 7, plus or minus 2" (this refers to the amount of "bits of information" which the average human being can carry in their memory - the reference to the ancient magic number "7" was made consciously, though the idea that mystical associations were to be taken seriously was strenuously avoided. You might say that psychological science was finally beginning to regain consciousness at this time!
Since the 1950s, there have no longer been separate competing "schools' of psychology, a problem which has plagued the field of psychotherapy, which has over 400 separate and non- integrated theories of how therapy works. The above-mentioned divisions of psychology - developmental, personality, social, etc - are considered specialty areas of one discipline, not competing schools of thought, much like nuclear physics and astrophysics, as opposed to the conflicting theories of cognitive therapy and psychoanalysis.
Generally speaking, university departments of psychology hold the purely scientific disciplines in much higher esteem than the applied disciplines of psychotherapy, educational psychology, etc. The names "Freud" and "Jung" are rarely even mentioned past the introductory courses of psychology. Many people who are familiar with popular versions of psychology have heard of the "four forces of psychology" (psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, humanistic therapy, transpersonal therapy). Technically, these are 4 divisions of psychotherapy, and have little connection with the world of scientific psychology. Even within the world of mainstream psychotherapy, the field of transpersonal psychotherapy is considered a fringe discipline . This should be kept in mind for the rest of this outline, as it is in the area of transpersonal theory that the Indic traditions have had the most direct influence. III. Indic Influences on Modern Psychology Gustav Fechner:
(I'm writing this partly from memory, and will try to find more in the future. I invite anyone who has more knowledge of Fechner's work to send corrections and additional information).
Fechnier was a physiologist with interests in mystical traditions. I believe his interests included Indian philosophy, but I'm not positive. Here is an interesting quotation which shows a surprisingly modern - or even post-modern - approach to science:
"That gravitation extends throughout the whole world is a matter of faith; that laws which are traceable in our limited realm extend limitlessly in space and time is a matter of faith; that there are atoms and lightwaves is a matter of faith; the beginning and the goal of history are matters of faith; even in geometry there are things we take upon faith, such as the number of the dimensions of space and the definition of parallel lines. Indeed, strictly speaking everything is a matter of faith which is not directly experienced... Ultimately the best faith is that which is least contradictory in itself and to all knowledge and to our practical interest.
Franz Brentano:
Brentano was a philosopher among whose students was Sigmund Freud. Brentano's student Carl Stumpf, was a psycholgoist who taught Brentano's ideas to the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl. (Again, I'm stating this from memory, so please if you are interested or know more about this, send me information.) I believe that Brentano was familiar with Indian philosophy, though I'm not positive. Certainly, he must have been familiar with the Romantic ideas of the "Unconscious", which according to J.J.Clarke were definitely inspired by readings of various Indian texts. It is extremely important, I believe, in revising our understanding of the history of psychotherapy, to recognize the extent to which the idea of the Unconscious, popularized by Freud, can be traced by to its Indic roots. Clarke notes that Carus and von Hartmann, two pre-Freudian popularizers of the notion of the Unconscious, were influenced by Vedanta.
Brentano was a phenomenologist, and believed that observation rather than experimentation should be the method of scientific psychology. "The proper subject of psychology is mental activity, for example, the mental act of seeing rather than the mental content (that which is seen)" (cited in Schultz' "History of Psychology", 1987, p. 102).
William James:
James was familiar with Vedanta and other branches of Indian philosophy. According to Clarke, he had something of a 'love/hate" relationship with Vedantic ideas, though he accorded them a partially sympathetic hearing in brief sections of his famous "Varieties of Religious Experience". Members of the forum with more knowledge of Indic influences on James are encouraged to send in this information.
Roberto Assagioli:
Assagioli, a psychiatrist an the founder of the psychotherapeutic technique known as "Psychosynthesis", made an assiduous study of the Upanisads, the Yoga Sutras, and various Buddhist texts. He openly acknowledges his debt to these writings. Although a contemporary of Freud and Jung, he did not attain widespread recognition until the 1960s. This recognition came primiarily from the fringes of the psychotherapy world, particularly among those already interested in Indian religion and philosophy.
In the 1920s, J.H.Schultz, a psychiatrist, developed his "Autogenic training", a fairly widely used system of visualization and relaxation. Although it is largely derived from Yogic practices, most contemporary practitioners are unaware of its Indic roots. This would be an especially fruitful area to bring out, as Autogenic training is an accepted practice among mainstream therapists.
1914: Caroline Rhys Davids: published Buddhist Psychology, declaring that "Buddhist thought is very largely an inquiry into mind and its activities" and has much to teach the West.
1918: Friedrich Heiler, an: orientalist said that Zen meditation should be seen as a mental health te hnique
Carl Jung:
There are many studies of Eastern influences on Jung, among the most notable are Coward's "Jung and Eastern Thought". Jung engaged in extensive studies of Taoism, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, as well as Vedanta and the Yoga-Sutras. His ambivalence toward these teachings is well-known. He emphatically denied the possibility of experiencing a "universal consciousness", or anything resembling what is known in Vedanta as "the Self". This was not from a sophisticated Buddhist position, but rather from the perspective of European philosophy.
D.T. Suzuki is an interesting example of influences from the other direction According to Clarke, he was influenced by William James' pragmatism, emphasis on experience and phenomenololgical analysis of mysticism
1930s - 1940s: Gordon Allport, a personality psychologist at Harvard, met regularly with Swami Akhilananda of the Vedanta Society of Boston to discuss the Upanishads, Yoga Sutras and other Indian texts.
1950s: Michael Murphy visits the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, is deeply inspired, and returns to California to start Esalen, where many of the ideas for the humanistic and transpersonal psychology movements were developed. It was also during the 1950s that D.T. Suzsuki came from Japan to California, which led to a dramatic increase in American interest in Zen Buddhism.
1951: Christman Humphreys, the leader of the Buddhist Society of England (I'm not sure that name is correct) said that "the West has more to learn from Buddhism on psychology than it yet knows".
1955: Hubert Benoit, a French psychiatrist, wrote on psychoanalysis and Zen.
The 1960s: Due in no small part to the influence of "mind-expanding" drugs, many individuals became interested in Asian spirituality. A significant number of them traveled East and later brought the fruits of their searches back to the United States. At the same time, a large number of Asian teachers were becoming popular in the West, including Swami Satchitananda, Kirpal Singh, Nahanaponika Thera, Swami Rama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Chogyam Trungpa, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Swami Muktananda, Pir Vilayat Kahn, the Karmapa, and many others. Of course, it was Richard Alpert, now known as Ram Das, who along with Timothy Leary was responsible for the widespread use of LSD. Alpert, a psychologist teaching at Harvard, studied with Neem Karoli Baba, a North Indian Guru, along with Jeffrey Miller, who is now known as Surya Das, a widely-respected teacher of the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Some of the other American individuals who are now recognized as qualified roshis, swamis and tulkus include Sivananda Radha, Jiyu Kennett Roshi, Jack Kornfield, Robert Frager, Richard Baker Roshi, and others.
1960: Erich Fromm writes on psychoanalysis and Zen
1965: Medard Boss, a psychiatrist interested in phenomenological and existential thought, visits India to study Yoga, is deeply impressed, and on his return to Europe writes on Yoga and psychotherapy
Karen Horney: a psychiatrist who was a leading psychoanalyst had with personal interest in Zen, and visited Japan near the end of her life to study with a teacher, but didn't incorporate it in her psychotherapy practice
Leaders of humanistic psychology in 1960s:
Carl Rogers, Rollo May and Abraham Maslow - All were indirectly influenced by Eastern thought and practices: According to Rollo May: "Eastern thought never suffered the radical split between subject and object that has characterized Western thought". Maslow referred often to Vedanta in his writings on "Being" vs doing. Rogers was influenced by Taoism in the development of his notion of a natural, "organism" process of self-actualization.
1969: The beginning of the transpersonal psychology movement
Although there had been Indic influences on psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy since the late 1800s, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a virtual explosion of interest in meditation and Eastern spirituality in general. This was true in the popular culture (sorry for being Americo-centric here, but it is the area I know best - if you have information regarding other countries, please send it in) but spread into the sciences as well. Many young people who went to India, Burma, Thailand and other Asian countries in the 1960s returned in the 1970s to receive first-rate scientific training in psychology. One of the major sources of scientific research was the Maharishi Mahesh International University (MIU) founded by individuals who had studied Transcendental Meditation (TM) with the Maharishi. Over 508 research studies have been conducted on Tm over 2 decades. Some of the more well-known researchers include David Orme Johnson, Richard Wallace, and Charles Alexander. They have done excellent work, and have received over $2,500,000 in research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
I should mention that there is a strong Buddhist influence in transpersonal psychology. Several years ago, I took a quick look at the major authors who have appeared in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and I would estimate that close to 65% are students of Buddhist meditation (some names include Jack Kornfield, Ken Wilber, Daniel Goleman, John Welwood, Claudio Naranjo, Jack Engler, Roger Walsh, Deane Shapiro, Mark Epstein, all students of Zen, Vipassana or Tibetan Buddhism).
Some of the other major figures in transpersonal psychology include:
Charles Tart, an academic psychologist, who published "Altered States of Consciousness" in 1969, which contained an attempt to bring together systems thinking and ideas from teachings on Hindu and Buddhist meditation.
Claudio Naranjo, a psychistrist, began writing in the late 1960s on: Gestalt therapy and Buddhist meditation.
Robert Ornstein, a psychologist, in 1971 published "The Psychology of Consciousness", which incorporates ideas from Sufism, Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism.
Allan Weinstock, a psychologist, (named "Swami Ajaya by the Indian Yoga teacher Swami Rama) wrote in 1976 "The Evolution of Consciousness and Psychotherapy". This book is particularl notable as it was published before Ken Wilber's first book, and includes the idea, derived independently from Wilber, of a spectrum of consciousness. However, the ideas in the book are much more closely drawn from Yoga and Vedanta, with the latter being fully acknowledged. Indian "psychology" is depicted as far more subtle and sophisticated than the work of Freud or Jung. Also, unusual in transpersonal writings, Indian psychology is taken to deal with virtually all of the areas which many modern writings feel are better handled by Freud and Jung.
Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and former chief editor of the periodical "Psychology Today", wrote "The Varieties of Meditative Experience" in 1977. Goleman is worth dwelling on for a bit. A friend of Richard Alpert, he went to India to study Hindu and Buddist meditation. He returned to study psychology at Harvard. He wrote his dissertation studying under Herbert Benson. I'm not absolutely sure of this, but if my memory is correct, it was Goleman who, in what I think was a spark of inspiration with decidedly mixed results, suggested that meditation could be presented in a palatable form to modern secularized individuals as a form of "stress management". He took ideas developed in the 1920s by the physiologist Walter Cannon and later refined by Hans Selye in the 1950s as the "stress cycle" (dealing with the continual arousal of the autonomic nervous system leading to nervous exhaustion). He then suggested that the technique of meditation primarily served to deactivate this stress cycle. At the time, I thought this was a brilliant way of bringing meditation into the mainstream. However, over the years, I've come to see that the result is that meditation has been reduced to something negligible compared to its original purpose. Goleman, for example, defines meditation in "Varieties" as "an attitude of attentional manipulation". Anyone with any meditative experience knows that bringing this sort of attitude to the practice of meditation is likely to lead to headaches and irritability rather than a transformation of consciousness! In any case, the whole development of stress management and the wider disciplines of health psychology, behavioral medicine and complementary medicine, needs a whole study. Each of these fields has been deeply impacted by Indian practices and ideas, and many of the new centers for alternative and complementary medicine are making big efforts to hide this connection.
One notable exception to this trend is Jon Kabat Zinn. He has been using Buddhist meditation to treat pain patients for over 20 years at the Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester Massachusetts. He has seen over 10,000 individuals, most of who were referred because conventional medical treatments had been ineffective. He has published several excellent research studies in top-rated journals.
Ken Wilber published his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, in 1977. An overview of his work can be found on the ECIT website (Infinityfoundation.com/ECIT).
In 1977, biofeedback pioneers Elmer and Alyce Green published "Beyond Biofeedback", in which they described their ground-breaking studies of Swami Rama's ability to control parts of his nervous system which physiologists had previously believed to be beyond the control of the mind. Though they considered themselves Christians, the Greens quite openly acknowledged their life-long interest in and debt-of-gratitude to Indian philosophy and meditative practices.
Kenneth Pelletier, who in 1983 published an excellent book entitled "Toward a Science of Consciousness". I don't know if the Tucson conferences took their name from this book, but it remains a good collection of ideas that have yet to be worked out regarding the integration of Indian ideas and modern science, including not just psychology, but neuroscience, quantum physics, and other disciplines.
Jeremy Hayward, now the president of the late Chogyam Trungpa's "Naropa Institute", published an 1983 an excellent book called "Perceiving Ordinary Magic". A brilliant scientist who trained as a nuclear physicsts and worked in molecular biology research with arch-materialist Francis Crick, he brings together ideas from Tibetan Buddhism, phenomenology and Whitehead's process philosophy to propose truly original and inspired solutions to dilemmas in the fields of physics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience and psychology, with some particularly interesting ideas for the psychology of perception.
In 1986, Guy Claxton, a British psychologist, publishes a book (sorry, i don't have the title available) on the impact of spiritual traditions of the East on psychology and psychotherapy. Claxton is one of the minority of writers on East/West psychology, along with Charles Tart, who incorporates ideas from cognitive science with meditation.
In 1990, Crook and Fontana published an excellent book on Buddhsit influences on modern psychology.
In 1991, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch publish "The Embodied Mind". Varela is a cognitive scientist, as well versed in neuroscience as in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and practice. Evan Thompson, the son of William Irwin Thompson, is a philosopher, and Eleanor Rosch is a cognitive scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. "The Embddied Mind", a highly original book, brings together phenomenological philosophy, cognitive science and Tibetan Buddhism.
1991: Robert Thurman, along with the Dalai Lama and scientists from several disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, biology, among others, convene the first of several "MindScience" conferences at Harvard.
I'd like to close with a few quotations that point out the limitations, and to some extent the dangers, of the current largely secularized approach to the integration of meditative practices and psychology. First, this lovely passage from the philosopher Jacob Needleman:
"What part of the mind then is being activated when one is thinking from these particular concepts? ["new paradigm concepts such as are found in quantum physics]... What would be the role of an idea, like a holographic idea, in actually activating a different way of life? When Buddha came with the idea, or Christ came with the Christian formulation of the idea that the personality or the ego is not ultimately real, it didn't seem that more than a few people were able to bring that idea into their own tissues, their own blood, their feelings, and their life. [underlining added; D.S.] The problem is not having the right idea...but how to incarnate that idea in my actual life so that I am transformed in the light of that idea...We have never lacked great theory. What we suffer from, as the traditions tell us, is that the good, that I would, that I do not; and that which I do, that I would not... Simply holding a new paradigm is far from being that which can help me. It sometimes is the most dangerous of all things because this is where the danger of the mind is approached. It's not that the mind is wrong; it's just that all the power of attention gets sucked into the mind. Then one is under the illusion that because something is understood with the mind, one can be what is understood." (J. Needleman, cited in Welwood, 1978, p. 101).
Here is an excerpt from a letter of Sri Aurobindo on the limitations of the attitude of modern science:
The more you go inward or upward, the more the view of things changes and the outer knowledge science organizes takes its real and very limited place. Science, like most mental and external knowledge, gives you only truth of process. I would add that it cannot give you even the whole truth of process; for you seize some of the ponderables, but miss the all-important imponderables; you get, hardly even the how, but the conditions under which things happen in Nature. After all the triumphs and marvels of Science, the explaining principle, the rationale, the significance of the whole is left as dark, as mysterious and even more mysterious than ever. The scheme it has built up of the evolution not only of this rich and vast variegated material world, but of life and consciousness and mind and their workings out of a brute mass of electrons, identical and varied only in arrangement and number is an irrational magic more baffling than any the most mystic imagination could conceive. Science in the end lands us in a paradox effectuated, an organized and rigidly determined accident, an impossibility that has somehow happened; it has shown us a new, a material Maya.... very clever at bringing about the impossible, a miracle that cannot logically be and yet somehow is there - actual, irresistibly organized, but still irrational and inexplicable. And this is evidently because science has missed something essential: it has seen and scrutinised what has happened and, in a way, how it has happened, but it has shut its eyes to something that made this impossible possible, something it is there to express. There is no fundamental significance in things if you miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a huge surface crust, of manageable and utilizable appearance. It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyze, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, significance of the Lila (Divine Play). I say "begin" because, as you suggest, the Divine Reality is not so simple that at the first touch you can know all of it or put it into a single formula; it is Infinite and opens before you an infinite knowledge to which all science put together is a bagatelle. But still you do touch the essential, the eternal behind things and in the light of That all begins to be profoundly luminous, intimately intelligible...
And finally, a positive note from Sri Aurobindo's "The Human Cycle" - This passage provides a spiritual context for the development of science which I personally find is all too rare amongst those who are attempting to bring the influence of the various Indic traditions to bear on modern thought:
"....a society which was even initially spiritualized, would make the revealing and finding of the divine Self in man the whole first aim of all its activities, its education, its knowledge, its science, its ethics, its art, its economical and political structure.... It might easily develop a Science which would bring the powers of the physical world into a real and not only a contingent and mechanical subjection and open perhaps the doors of other worlds.... It might discover (Nature's) secret, yet undreamed-of mind-powers and life-powers and use them for a freer liberation of man from the limitations of his shackled bodily life. It might arrive at new psychic relations, a more sovereign power of the idea to realize itself in the act, inner means of overcoming obstacles of distance and division which would cast into insignificance even the last miraculous achievements of material Science.... There will be new unexpected departures of science or at least of research, - since to such a turn in its most fruitful seekings the orthodox still deny the name of science. Discoveries will be made that thin the walls between soul and matter; attempts there will be to extend exact knowledge into the psychological and psychic realms with a realization of the truth that these have laws of their own which are other than physical, but not the less laws because they escape the external senses and are infinitely plastic and subtle.(Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Evolution, pp. 317-323).
Indic Influences on Modern Psychology
This is only the beginning of an outline which I hope others on the YogaPsychology list will help to flesh out. I am basing the information here primarily on two sources: J.J,. Clarke's "Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought" and Eugene Taylor's introduction to "The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation: A Review of Contemporary Research with a Comprehensive Bibliography, 1931 - 1996. The outline begins with some distinctions between psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry. Then there is a quick and extremely brief overview of the basic historical trends in psychology. Finally, there is a list with brief descriptions of some of the major individuals who have brought Indic influences to bear on psychology. (If you are interested in a much more detailed history of psychology along with an investigation of the role of introspection in psychological research, I wrote an essay on these topics which can be found at http://www.jps.net/virtreal/introspect.html)
I. Psychology, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry "Psychology", as taught in universities throughout the world, refers to an academic discipline, and a science which was established in the late 19th century. Several times on the YogaPsychology list, there has been reference to "science" as if the only real science is that which deals with physics and the brain. However, the research methodology of psychology has been dealing with human experience for over 120 years, even if often or mostly in a reductionist fashion. Psychological science includes a wide variety of disciplines, including developmental psychology, personality psychology, social psychology, comparative or evolutionary psychology, and among the applied psychological disciplines, educational, sports and neuropsychology. Typically, at least in the United States, a psychologist has a Ph.D. (Doctorate)
"Psychiatry" is a subspecialty of the medical profession. A practicing psychiatrist usually has at least an M.D., though sometimes a Ph.D. as well. Psychiatrists are primarily focused on psychopathology, treating mental illness. Historically (until approximately 50 years ago) this meant serious mental illness - the psychoses, manic-depression, major depression, obsessive- compulsive disorder, etc. With the increasing monetarization of the profession, there has been an widening array of so-called disorders which have increased to the extent that virtually nobody may be said to be free of mental illness.
"Psychotherapy" refers to a healing practice whose beginnings are associated for the most part with the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, who was by training a neurologist, not a psychologist. For the first 50 years of the 20th century, most practitioners of psychotherapy were psychiatrists, which means their training was in the field of medicine. By the 1970s, psychoanalysis had begun to fall out of favor, and the biological approach (drugs, essentially, though electro-convulsive therapy has had a resurgence as well) has gradually come to predominate, not in a small way because of the influence of the pharmaceutical companies. Psychiatrists receive very little training in psychology. Psychologists make use of psychoanalytic ideas and practices, though there are uniquely psychological contributions to therapy such as behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy and humanistic therapy, to name the most widely used approaches.
II. Historical Overview The psychologist Cyril Burtt once summarized the modern history of psychological science in this way: "Psychology first lost its soul, then it lost its mind, until it was finally in danger of losing consciousness altogether". The official beginning of the science of psychology is 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. The first formal school of psychology was the introspectionist school. Previously, psychology had been the domain of the philosophers. In an attempt to separate philosophy and science, psychologists no longer referred to the "soul". The "introspection" of this early school of psychology was an extremely superficial and reductionist cataloguing of sensory experience. There was little progress made during the 30 or 40 years this school was in existence. (Though William James wrote his famous "Principles of Psychology" during this period, he failed to establish a separate school or approach to psychology).
The second psychological school represented a radical break from the Introspectionists, and was initiated in 1913 by John Watson, the first behaviorist. He called for the elimination of all references to internal experience (this is what Burtt was referring to as psychology "losing its mind"). B. F. Skinner, several decades later, took this a step further, referring to the brain as a "black box", and refusing acknowledgment of any sort of consciousness at all.
In the late 1950s, the cognitive "revolution" was initiated, often considered to be officially begun with George Miller's article, "The Magic Number 7, plus or minus 2" (this refers to the amount of "bits of information" which the average human being can carry in their memory - the reference to the ancient magic number "7" was made consciously, though the idea that mystical associations were to be taken seriously was strenuously avoided. You might say that psychological science was finally beginning to regain consciousness at this time!
Since the 1950s, there have no longer been separate competing "schools' of psychology, a problem which has plagued the field of psychotherapy, which has over 400 separate and non- integrated theories of how therapy works. The above-mentioned divisions of psychology - developmental, personality, social, etc - are considered specialty areas of one discipline, not competing schools of thought, much like nuclear physics and astrophysics, as opposed to the conflicting theories of cognitive therapy and psychoanalysis.
Generally speaking, university departments of psychology hold the purely scientific disciplines in much higher esteem than the applied disciplines of psychotherapy, educational psychology, etc. The names "Freud" and "Jung" are rarely even mentioned past the introductory courses of psychology. Many people who are familiar with popular versions of psychology have heard of the "four forces of psychology" (psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, humanistic therapy, transpersonal therapy). Technically, these are 4 divisions of psychotherapy, and have little connection with the world of scientific psychology. Even within the world of mainstream psychotherapy, the field of transpersonal psychotherapy is considered a fringe discipline . This should be kept in mind for the rest of this outline, as it is in the area of transpersonal theory that the Indic traditions have had the most direct influence. III. Indic Influences on Modern Psychology Gustav Fechner:
(I'm writing this partly from memory, and will try to find more in the future. I invite anyone who has more knowledge of Fechner's work to send corrections and additional information).
Fechnier was a physiologist with interests in mystical traditions. I believe his interests included Indian philosophy, but I'm not positive. Here is an interesting quotation which shows a surprisingly modern - or even post-modern - approach to science:
"That gravitation extends throughout the whole world is a matter of faith; that laws which are traceable in our limited realm extend limitlessly in space and time is a matter of faith; that there are atoms and lightwaves is a matter of faith; the beginning and the goal of history are matters of faith; even in geometry there are things we take upon faith, such as the number of the dimensions of space and the definition of parallel lines. Indeed, strictly speaking everything is a matter of faith which is not directly experienced... Ultimately the best faith is that which is least contradictory in itself and to all knowledge and to our practical interest.
Franz Brentano:
Brentano was a philosopher among whose students was Sigmund Freud. Brentano's student Carl Stumpf, was a psycholgoist who taught Brentano's ideas to the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl. (Again, I'm stating this from memory, so please if you are interested or know more about this, send me information.) I believe that Brentano was familiar with Indian philosophy, though I'm not positive. Certainly, he must have been familiar with the Romantic ideas of the "Unconscious", which according to J.J.Clarke were definitely inspired by readings of various Indian texts. It is extremely important, I believe, in revising our understanding of the history of psychotherapy, to recognize the extent to which the idea of the Unconscious, popularized by Freud, can be traced by to its Indic roots. Clarke notes that Carus and von Hartmann, two pre-Freudian popularizers of the notion of the Unconscious, were influenced by Vedanta.
Brentano was a phenomenologist, and believed that observation rather than experimentation should be the method of scientific psychology. "The proper subject of psychology is mental activity, for example, the mental act of seeing rather than the mental content (that which is seen)" (cited in Schultz' "History of Psychology", 1987, p. 102).
William James:
James was familiar with Vedanta and other branches of Indian philosophy. According to Clarke, he had something of a 'love/hate" relationship with Vedantic ideas, though he accorded them a partially sympathetic hearing in brief sections of his famous "Varieties of Religious Experience". Members of the forum with more knowledge of Indic influences on James are encouraged to send in this information.
Roberto Assagioli:
Assagioli, a psychiatrist an the founder of the psychotherapeutic technique known as "Psychosynthesis", made an assiduous study of the Upanisads, the Yoga Sutras, and various Buddhist texts. He openly acknowledges his debt to these writings. Although a contemporary of Freud and Jung, he did not attain widespread recognition until the 1960s. This recognition came primiarily from the fringes of the psychotherapy world, particularly among those already interested in Indian religion and philosophy.
In the 1920s, J.H.Schultz, a psychiatrist, developed his "Autogenic training", a fairly widely used system of visualization and relaxation. Although it is largely derived from Yogic practices, most contemporary practitioners are unaware of its Indic roots. This would be an especially fruitful area to bring out, as Autogenic training is an accepted practice among mainstream therapists.
1914: Caroline Rhys Davids: published Buddhist Psychology, declaring that "Buddhist thought is very largely an inquiry into mind and its activities" and has much to teach the West.
1918: Friedrich Heiler, an: orientalist said that Zen meditation should be seen as a mental health te hnique
Carl Jung:
There are many studies of Eastern influences on Jung, among the most notable are Coward's "Jung and Eastern Thought". Jung engaged in extensive studies of Taoism, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, as well as Vedanta and the Yoga-Sutras. His ambivalence toward these teachings is well-known. He emphatically denied the possibility of experiencing a "universal consciousness", or anything resembling what is known in Vedanta as "the Self". This was not from a sophisticated Buddhist position, but rather from the perspective of European philosophy.
D.T. Suzuki is an interesting example of influences from the other direction According to Clarke, he was influenced by William James' pragmatism, emphasis on experience and phenomenololgical analysis of mysticism
1930s - 1940s: Gordon Allport, a personality psychologist at Harvard, met regularly with Swami Akhilananda of the Vedanta Society of Boston to discuss the Upanishads, Yoga Sutras and other Indian texts.
1950s: Michael Murphy visits the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, is deeply inspired, and returns to California to start Esalen, where many of the ideas for the humanistic and transpersonal psychology movements were developed. It was also during the 1950s that D.T. Suzsuki came from Japan to California, which led to a dramatic increase in American interest in Zen Buddhism.
1951: Christman Humphreys, the leader of the Buddhist Society of England (I'm not sure that name is correct) said that "the West has more to learn from Buddhism on psychology than it yet knows".
1955: Hubert Benoit, a French psychiatrist, wrote on psychoanalysis and Zen.
The 1960s: Due in no small part to the influence of "mind-expanding" drugs, many individuals became interested in Asian spirituality. A significant number of them traveled East and later brought the fruits of their searches back to the United States. At the same time, a large number of Asian teachers were becoming popular in the West, including Swami Satchitananda, Kirpal Singh, Nahanaponika Thera, Swami Rama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Chogyam Trungpa, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Swami Muktananda, Pir Vilayat Kahn, the Karmapa, and many others. Of course, it was Richard Alpert, now known as Ram Das, who along with Timothy Leary was responsible for the widespread use of LSD. Alpert, a psychologist teaching at Harvard, studied with Neem Karoli Baba, a North Indian Guru, along with Jeffrey Miller, who is now known as Surya Das, a widely-respected teacher of the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Some of the other American individuals who are now recognized as qualified roshis, swamis and tulkus include Sivananda Radha, Jiyu Kennett Roshi, Jack Kornfield, Robert Frager, Richard Baker Roshi, and others.
1960: Erich Fromm writes on psychoanalysis and Zen
1965: Medard Boss, a psychiatrist interested in phenomenological and existential thought, visits India to study Yoga, is deeply impressed, and on his return to Europe writes on Yoga and psychotherapy
Karen Horney: a psychiatrist who was a leading psychoanalyst had with personal interest in Zen, and visited Japan near the end of her life to study with a teacher, but didn't incorporate it in her psychotherapy practice
Leaders of humanistic psychology in 1960s:
Carl Rogers, Rollo May and Abraham Maslow - All were indirectly influenced by Eastern thought and practices: According to Rollo May: "Eastern thought never suffered the radical split between subject and object that has characterized Western thought". Maslow referred often to Vedanta in his writings on "Being" vs doing. Rogers was influenced by Taoism in the development of his notion of a natural, "organism" process of self-actualization.
1969: The beginning of the transpersonal psychology movement
Although there had been Indic influences on psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy since the late 1800s, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a virtual explosion of interest in meditation and Eastern spirituality in general. This was true in the popular culture (sorry for being Americo-centric here, but it is the area I know best - if you have information regarding other countries, please send it in) but spread into the sciences as well. Many young people who went to India, Burma, Thailand and other Asian countries in the 1960s returned in the 1970s to receive first-rate scientific training in psychology. One of the major sources of scientific research was the Maharishi Mahesh International University (MIU) founded by individuals who had studied Transcendental Meditation (TM) with the Maharishi. Over 508 research studies have been conducted on Tm over 2 decades. Some of the more well-known researchers include David Orme Johnson, Richard Wallace, and Charles Alexander. They have done excellent work, and have received over $2,500,000 in research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
I should mention that there is a strong Buddhist influence in transpersonal psychology. Several years ago, I took a quick look at the major authors who have appeared in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and I would estimate that close to 65% are students of Buddhist meditation (some names include Jack Kornfield, Ken Wilber, Daniel Goleman, John Welwood, Claudio Naranjo, Jack Engler, Roger Walsh, Deane Shapiro, Mark Epstein, all students of Zen, Vipassana or Tibetan Buddhism).
Some of the other major figures in transpersonal psychology include:
Charles Tart, an academic psychologist, who published "Altered States of Consciousness" in 1969, which contained an attempt to bring together systems thinking and ideas from teachings on Hindu and Buddhist meditation.
Claudio Naranjo, a psychistrist, began writing in the late 1960s on: Gestalt therapy and Buddhist meditation.
Robert Ornstein, a psychologist, in 1971 published "The Psychology of Consciousness", which incorporates ideas from Sufism, Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism.
Allan Weinstock, a psychologist, (named "Swami Ajaya by the Indian Yoga teacher Swami Rama) wrote in 1976 "The Evolution of Consciousness and Psychotherapy". This book is particularl notable as it was published before Ken Wilber's first book, and includes the idea, derived independently from Wilber, of a spectrum of consciousness. However, the ideas in the book are much more closely drawn from Yoga and Vedanta, with the latter being fully acknowledged. Indian "psychology" is depicted as far more subtle and sophisticated than the work of Freud or Jung. Also, unusual in transpersonal writings, Indian psychology is taken to deal with virtually all of the areas which many modern writings feel are better handled by Freud and Jung.
Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and former chief editor of the periodical "Psychology Today", wrote "The Varieties of Meditative Experience" in 1977. Goleman is worth dwelling on for a bit. A friend of Richard Alpert, he went to India to study Hindu and Buddist meditation. He returned to study psychology at Harvard. He wrote his dissertation studying under Herbert Benson. I'm not absolutely sure of this, but if my memory is correct, it was Goleman who, in what I think was a spark of inspiration with decidedly mixed results, suggested that meditation could be presented in a palatable form to modern secularized individuals as a form of "stress management". He took ideas developed in the 1920s by the physiologist Walter Cannon and later refined by Hans Selye in the 1950s as the "stress cycle" (dealing with the continual arousal of the autonomic nervous system leading to nervous exhaustion). He then suggested that the technique of meditation primarily served to deactivate this stress cycle. At the time, I thought this was a brilliant way of bringing meditation into the mainstream. However, over the years, I've come to see that the result is that meditation has been reduced to something negligible compared to its original purpose. Goleman, for example, defines meditation in "Varieties" as "an attitude of attentional manipulation". Anyone with any meditative experience knows that bringing this sort of attitude to the practice of meditation is likely to lead to headaches and irritability rather than a transformation of consciousness! In any case, the whole development of stress management and the wider disciplines of health psychology, behavioral medicine and complementary medicine, needs a whole study. Each of these fields has been deeply impacted by Indian practices and ideas, and many of the new centers for alternative and complementary medicine are making big efforts to hide this connection.
One notable exception to this trend is Jon Kabat Zinn. He has been using Buddhist meditation to treat pain patients for over 20 years at the Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester Massachusetts. He has seen over 10,000 individuals, most of who were referred because conventional medical treatments had been ineffective. He has published several excellent research studies in top-rated journals.
Ken Wilber published his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, in 1977. An overview of his work can be found on the ECIT website (Infinityfoundation.com/ECIT).
In 1977, biofeedback pioneers Elmer and Alyce Green published "Beyond Biofeedback", in which they described their ground-breaking studies of Swami Rama's ability to control parts of his nervous system which physiologists had previously believed to be beyond the control of the mind. Though they considered themselves Christians, the Greens quite openly acknowledged their life-long interest in and debt-of-gratitude to Indian philosophy and meditative practices.
Kenneth Pelletier, who in 1983 published an excellent book entitled "Toward a Science of Consciousness". I don't know if the Tucson conferences took their name from this book, but it remains a good collection of ideas that have yet to be worked out regarding the integration of Indian ideas and modern science, including not just psychology, but neuroscience, quantum physics, and other disciplines.
Jeremy Hayward, now the president of the late Chogyam Trungpa's "Naropa Institute", published an 1983 an excellent book called "Perceiving Ordinary Magic". A brilliant scientist who trained as a nuclear physicsts and worked in molecular biology research with arch-materialist Francis Crick, he brings together ideas from Tibetan Buddhism, phenomenology and Whitehead's process philosophy to propose truly original and inspired solutions to dilemmas in the fields of physics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience and psychology, with some particularly interesting ideas for the psychology of perception.
In 1986, Guy Claxton, a British psychologist, publishes a book (sorry, i don't have the title available) on the impact of spiritual traditions of the East on psychology and psychotherapy. Claxton is one of the minority of writers on East/West psychology, along with Charles Tart, who incorporates ideas from cognitive science with meditation.
In 1990, Crook and Fontana published an excellent book on Buddhsit influences on modern psychology.
In 1991, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch publish "The Embodied Mind". Varela is a cognitive scientist, as well versed in neuroscience as in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and practice. Evan Thompson, the son of William Irwin Thompson, is a philosopher, and Eleanor Rosch is a cognitive scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. "The Embddied Mind", a highly original book, brings together phenomenological philosophy, cognitive science and Tibetan Buddhism.
1991: Robert Thurman, along with the Dalai Lama and scientists from several disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, biology, among others, convene the first of several "MindScience" conferences at Harvard.
I'd like to close with a few quotations that point out the limitations, and to some extent the dangers, of the current largely secularized approach to the integration of meditative practices and psychology. First, this lovely passage from the philosopher Jacob Needleman:
"What part of the mind then is being activated when one is thinking from these particular concepts? ["new paradigm concepts such as are found in quantum physics]... What would be the role of an idea, like a holographic idea, in actually activating a different way of life? When Buddha came with the idea, or Christ came with the Christian formulation of the idea that the personality or the ego is not ultimately real, it didn't seem that more than a few people were able to bring that idea into their own tissues, their own blood, their feelings, and their life. [underlining added; D.S.] The problem is not having the right idea...but how to incarnate that idea in my actual life so that I am transformed in the light of that idea...We have never lacked great theory. What we suffer from, as the traditions tell us, is that the good, that I would, that I do not; and that which I do, that I would not... Simply holding a new paradigm is far from being that which can help me. It sometimes is the most dangerous of all things because this is where the danger of the mind is approached. It's not that the mind is wrong; it's just that all the power of attention gets sucked into the mind. Then one is under the illusion that because something is understood with the mind, one can be what is understood." (J. Needleman, cited in Welwood, 1978, p. 101).
Here is an excerpt from a letter of Sri Aurobindo on the limitations of the attitude of modern science:
The more you go inward or upward, the more the view of things changes and the outer knowledge science organizes takes its real and very limited place. Science, like most mental and external knowledge, gives you only truth of process. I would add that it cannot give you even the whole truth of process; for you seize some of the ponderables, but miss the all-important imponderables; you get, hardly even the how, but the conditions under which things happen in Nature. After all the triumphs and marvels of Science, the explaining principle, the rationale, the significance of the whole is left as dark, as mysterious and even more mysterious than ever. The scheme it has built up of the evolution not only of this rich and vast variegated material world, but of life and consciousness and mind and their workings out of a brute mass of electrons, identical and varied only in arrangement and number is an irrational magic more baffling than any the most mystic imagination could conceive. Science in the end lands us in a paradox effectuated, an organized and rigidly determined accident, an impossibility that has somehow happened; it has shown us a new, a material Maya.... very clever at bringing about the impossible, a miracle that cannot logically be and yet somehow is there - actual, irresistibly organized, but still irrational and inexplicable. And this is evidently because science has missed something essential: it has seen and scrutinised what has happened and, in a way, how it has happened, but it has shut its eyes to something that made this impossible possible, something it is there to express. There is no fundamental significance in things if you miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a huge surface crust, of manageable and utilizable appearance. It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyze, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, significance of the Lila (Divine Play). I say "begin" because, as you suggest, the Divine Reality is not so simple that at the first touch you can know all of it or put it into a single formula; it is Infinite and opens before you an infinite knowledge to which all science put together is a bagatelle. But still you do touch the essential, the eternal behind things and in the light of That all begins to be profoundly luminous, intimately intelligible...
And finally, a positive note from Sri Aurobindo's "The Human Cycle" - This passage provides a spiritual context for the development of science which I personally find is all too rare amongst those who are attempting to bring the influence of the various Indic traditions to bear on modern thought:
"....a society which was even initially spiritualized, would make the revealing and finding of the divine Self in man the whole first aim of all its activities, its education, its knowledge, its science, its ethics, its art, its economical and political structure.... It might easily develop a Science which would bring the powers of the physical world into a real and not only a contingent and mechanical subjection and open perhaps the doors of other worlds.... It might discover (Nature's) secret, yet undreamed-of mind-powers and life-powers and use them for a freer liberation of man from the limitations of his shackled bodily life. It might arrive at new psychic relations, a more sovereign power of the idea to realize itself in the act, inner means of overcoming obstacles of distance and division which would cast into insignificance even the last miraculous achievements of material Science.... There will be new unexpected departures of science or at least of research, - since to such a turn in its most fruitful seekings the orthodox still deny the name of science. Discoveries will be made that thin the walls between soul and matter; attempts there will be to extend exact knowledge into the psychological and psychic realms with a realization of the truth that these have laws of their own which are other than physical, but not the less laws because they escape the external senses and are infinitely plastic and subtle.(Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Evolution, pp. 317-323).
On Truth and Clinical Psychoanalysis
On Truth and Clinical Psychoanalysis
Philosophers have enumerated three criteria of truth: coherence, correspondence and pragmatic. I shall define them and examine some of the relations among them. My overarching argument is that these three criteria of truth, when adequately defined, can be seen not to be at odds with each other but to work together in the search for truths in clinical psychoanalysis. I write “truths” not because I think that truth is relative but because I do not subscribe to any metaphysical theory of absolute truth as in Plato, Descartes or Hegel.
A secondary purpose is to sustain a distinction between two concepts of inter-subjectivity. The first concept is the one that we are familiar with in common sense, scholarship and science: an observation is intersubjective, if it can be made by any competent observer of the relevant domain of fact. What is intersubjective in observation is the opposite of what is subjective i.e. opposite to what, in an observation, belongs to the idiosyncrasies of the observer and not to what is being observed. The second very different notion of intersubjectivity is that it consists of the inextricable transference and counter-transference interactions that take place in the relation between analyst and analysand in psychoanalysis which result in the co-creation of the analysand whose nature and history are formed by the analytic relation. This definition of intersubjectivity legislates the historical being of the individual, a being that is independent of the analyst, out of existence. To Aristotle’s rhetorical question, “that nature exists who can doubt?” contemporary subjectivist analysts reply “psychoanalysts should doubt the independent existence of at least that part of nature that is psychic reality”. Subjectivism repudiates the epistemic independence of the patient in his or her relation to the analyst and, consistency would require, the same of the analyst in his or her relation to the patient. Of course, we analysts sometimes feel differently about different patients. The vignette below illustrates an exceptional anxiety in the analyst in response to a patient. But from these and like facts it cannot be inferred that analyst’s capacity to know is inevitably altered by his or her responses to each patient. After all an appropriate affective response will normally quicken rather than compromise the analyst’s observation and thought.
To be sure our work as clinicians reminds us of the manifold ways in which our own personalities, beliefs and affects can interfere with out clinical work. Our clinical observations and thinking are intrinsically fallible. But it does not follow that they are in principle subjective or that we are intrinsically snared in inter-subjectivity of the second kind or that we can never achieve intersubjectivity of the first kind. Thoma (2007) has pointed to “a deep paradox in Freud’s work” between the intersubjective and the scientific. This paradox is generated by elevating the remediable technical problems of subjectivity in the analytic situation into an inter-subjectivist epistemology yielding the second meaning of the term, in which the technical problems become irremediable in principle. The paradox ceases to exist if we preserve the common sense, scholarly and scientific meaning of the word “intersubjectivity”. One of the problems of intersubjectivity in postmodern psychoanalytic epistemology concerns the nature of truth.
The coherence criterion of truth states that a theory is true if and only if it provides a consistent explanation of the phenomena to be explained. A theory that has to rely on a hypothesis that is not consistent with the basic concepts and principles of the theory fails the test. A theory that cannot account for all of the phenomena to be explained also fails the test. Coherence requires logical consistency (non-contradiction) and explanatory completeness. The coherence theory of truth asserts that theories that meet these criteria are true.
In the history of ideas the coherence theory of truth is associated with the idealist philosophies of German Romanticism and, in particular, with Hegel and the neo-Hegelians (Lotze, 1888; Bradley, 1883; Bosanquet, 1888). Among contemporary English speaking philosophers, Putnam (1981) argues that because observations are always theory laden they constitute what is observed. Reality is not given in observation; it is constituted by observation. This is the basic position of post-modern subjectivist epistemology. Putnam (1981) rejects the correspondence theory of truth on the grounds that correspondence requires an idea of God, who in Cartesian fashion, must be pressed into service as the infallible third who can judge whether or not and if so to what extent a perception corresponds with the object perceived. Epistemology should not logically require theology. Putnam (1981) also points out the paradoxical consequence that once coherence is adopted as a sufficient account of the nature of truth there can be more than one true theory of any phenomenon.
A fundamental problem of the coherence theory is that it demands of logic more than logic can provide. Coherence requires that all the hypotheses of a given theory are mutually consistent one with the others. But just as arguments can be valid without being sound because the truth of the conclusions depends upon the truth of the premises, so a theory can be logically consistent without being true. Euclidean geometry is a paradigm of coherence. It is consistent, complete, and self-evidence. It even continues to be useful for measurements and calculations over distances, short enough not to be influenced by the curvature of the earth’s surface. It does not apply to the space of the solar system or any larger space. The coherence, completeness and self-evidence of Euclidean geometry do not make it true.
If coherence is our sole criterion of truth, psychoanalytic theorizing is permanently relativized, according to Putnam’s paradox, but in a way that renders it illogical as the examination of competing theories in psychoanalysis will show. Freud’s theory of the origins of the Oedipus complex in drive development coheres perfectly with other components of his theory e.g. drive theory and the structural model. Similarly, Kohut’s theory of its genesis in narcissistically inadequate parenting coheres well with other tenets of self-psychology e.g. the primacy of narcissistic libido and of object relations. But the two theories are contraries. Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex asserts that all instances of the Oedipus complex result from drive development; self-psychology asserts on the contrary that no instance of the Oedipus complex results from drive development. That is to say, they cannot both be true, although they both may be false. Consequently, contrary to Putnam (1981), their truth cannot simply rely on their coherence. Coherence is a necessary condition for the truth of any theory, but it is not a sufficient condition. What about the correspondence criterion?
The correspondence theory of truth states that a belief, hypothesis or idea is true to the extent that it corresponds with reality. The correspondence criterion of truth is a basic premise of common sense, as well as, of scientific and philosophical empiricism. Throughout his work Freud (1915; 1933) stated his adherence to correspondence for which the word “tally” in the tally argument (Freud, 1917) is a synonym. Kleinian psychoanalysts share Freud’s view of the primacy of correspondence in the evaluation of truth. It is taken for granted by science (Dawkins, 2003; Hawking, 1988; Weinberg, 1992; Sokal and Bricmont, 1998).
Coherence advocates criticize correspondence for being absolutistic, uncritically naïve, and authoritarian. These criticisms cohere well with Putnam’s (1981) argument that a correspondence criterion relies upon a divine omniscient third for the verification of the correspondence between an independently existing object with a nature of its own and its perceptual, imaginary and ideational human representations. But the estimation of correspondence does not require the assumption of a divine omniscience with an absolute standard of truth at its disposal. The charge of absolutism does, I think, apply to the idealizing realism of Plato, Descartes and Hegel, but it does not apply to empiricist, scientific or, as I have called it, critical realism (Hanly, 1999; 2000a; 2000b). Correspondence can be evaluated without omniscience, without absolute knowledge and without certainty as illustrated by the astronomical observations that showed that predictions of the deflection of light from a star, passing through the sun’s gravitational field, based on Einstein’s theory of gravitation corresponded closely to the actual deflection of light whereas the Newtonian predictions did not (Isaacson, 2007). Here, the third is the object in nature allowed to reveal itself, in part, by the internal third which is the capacity for self-doubt and self-criticism. Similarly, in psychoanalysis, clinical observations can show that Bowlby’s ethological theory of anxiety is not sufficient to explain the phenomena of phobia and neurotic anxiety generally. Contrary to Bowlby, his enumerated ethological factors require Freud’s developmental sexual and aggressive factors to adequately account for phobia and thus meet both the coherence and correspondence requirement of completeness (Hanly, 1978). The psychological source of a third perspective on our observations and our ideas about what we observe in psychoanalysis, and in science generally, is the super-ego with its ideal of veracity not only adding motivational heft to the reality principle but adding the capacity of self-awareness and self-criticism to the ego functions of perception, imagination and thought that serve the reality principle (Hanly, 2001a: Hanly and Nichols, 2001b). It is this capacity that allows us to question the reliability of what we see and what we think about what we see. It is from this psychological ground that questions about what is true arise (Hanly, 1990).
The intrinsic relativity of the coherence thesis can account for empirical certainties within ideologies and theories but it cannot account for empirical certainties that transcend ideologies and theories. Correspondence is not a question of absolute, automatic, intuitive certainty. It is a matter of accumulated evidence. Accumulated evidence gives us reason to think that the composition of heavenly bodies out of chemical matter, the circulation of the blood in mammals, the curvature of space in the vicinity of matter, the evolution of species by natural selection and the existence of unconscious psychic processes are empirical certainties. Whatever the future developments in knowledge may be, it is highly unlikely that these ideas will ever turn out to have been false all along.
Pragmatism is the third criterion of truth. Philosophical pragmatism was developed by Peirce, James and Dewey. James’ philosophical concept of pragmatism which could offer support to post-modern epistemological relativism has been subjected to devastating criticism by Russell (1946). Consequently, I prefer what I shall call scientific or critical pragmatism. An idea or theory is true, if, by means of a technology specified by it and coherent with it, the theory can be used to change the course of nature. It is this concept of pragmatism that we find at work in Freud’s development of psychoanalytic theory and technique. In psychoanalysis the change in the course of nature we look for is the amelioration of neurotic disorders. The technique is the interpretation of free association and transferences in the analytic set-up. The theories concern the causes of neuroses. Freud’s first aetiological theory, the seduction theory, provided for an abreactive technique. The technique was specified by the theory and was coherent with it as were the predictions about the conditions under which recovery and a maturation of sexual life would occur. However, the coherence of the theory, technique and predictions did not establish the truth of the seduction theory. The theory was pragmatically falsified and had to be substantially revised because the predicted amelioration of symptoms did not occur.
I shall conclude by exploring the clinical relevance of coherence, correspondence and pragmatic criteria of truth in psychoanalysis. As we have seen coherence is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of the truth of a theory, whereas, correspondence is a necessary and sufficient condition of truth. I propose to illustrate this relation in clinical psychoanalysis by considering a situation in which the analyst’s need to know was urgently intensified by an unusual circumstance. A borderline patient in his second year of analysis, a young professional man who had lost his first job on account of a pretentious insubordination out of envy, was now a student came to his session beside himself with rage and threatening to kill an external examiner who had failed him. I quickly became aware of how badly I needed to be able to estimate, by the end of the session, his capacity to contain the rage that drove his wish to revenge the insult to his grandiosity and how much I needed to help him with this task during the session. The patient had, during periods of severe depression, told me of wanting to let the world know “that he was somebody” by committing a mass murder; he owned a substantial arsenal of guns and ammunition. I was sorely aware of how much I needed to know whether or not he was likely to carry out his threats and how difficult it would be to know. There was nothing, immediate, absolutistic or naïve about my urgent search for understanding. I did not for a moment think that his enraged murderous threat was a co-creation of his analysis or that I had any interpretive access to it for that reason. And I was aware that I would not be able to know with the confidence I wanted to have how well my thinking about him corresponded with his reality and what confidence I could place in whatever interventions I could make before the end of the session. The crucial observation would concern what would happen to his murderous rage and for that observation I had no alternative but to wait for what would unfold in the session. I had no acceptable choice but to give myself up to the task.
I concluded from his account of the damaging interview with the professor, punctuated and disorganized as it was by outpourings of vengeful rage and death threats, that there was some possibility that he had been neither passed nor failed but would be required to resubmit his work after dealing with criticisms. I was confident enough of this construction, despite the fear that it might be the product of my own wishful thinking, that I communicated it to him as something he might want to explore further. I was concerned about the risk, if it should turn out not to be true. But at least, it might buy time for further analytic work. I offered this reality testing in the context of interpreting to him the intensity of his rage in words that implicitly pointed to but did not explicitly mention the work of a phantasy of having been castrated. I had learned to link interpretations with tentative alternatives to his view of the reality of situations in which he found himself because of his difficulties with reality testing. Instead of interpreting his grandiosity or his castration anxiety directly, I interpreted his hurt pride. These interpretations facilitated an encouraging sequence of associations toward the end of the session about his immigrant father, often the object of his derogating criticism, who he now acknowledged had had the “balls” to leave his homeland and try to make a go of it in a new country even though it didn’t work out very well for him. I hoped that he was letting me know that he too might have the balls to go back to his faculty, and find out what really confronted him instead of carrying out his death threats. By the end of the session I observed a diminution in the frequency of his outbursts of indignant rage and sensed some reduction in their intensity. But he was by no means either calm or appeased. I was left with the anxiety provoking question as to whether or not he could sustain this fragile improvement in self-mastery after the session.
I was confident enough of what I had seen and understood not to warn my colleague or inform the police because of my impression that my interpretations corresponded well enough to be heard and because they appeared to have had some, at least temporary, beneficial effect. I was not confident enough to sleep that night. Without more evidence that I could not have until the next few days, I was taking a risk. I believed that any other action on my part would very likely be ruinous to the analysis. He had previously gone through a period in which he believed that I was taping his sessions in order to inform the police. All of these perceptions, estimations, hopes, fears and judgements were fallibly based on the evidence that became available during the session.
I was relieved and grateful to the efficacy of psychoanalytic interpretation, when my patient arrived the next morning and kept subsequent appointments with only rumblings of his rage and humiliation audible in his complaints of unfairness in a mood that was by no means calm but was sufficiently reconciled to his situation to abandon his threats of revenge and to get on with the tasks at hand. I was lucky that, as I had surmised, he had not been failed; there were some inadequacies in his work that required improvement for the examination to qualify him for his degree. I could now be reasonably satisfied that the observations and the ideas that guided my actions corresponded well enough with the reality of my patient’s psychic life. They had survived a pragmatic test.
I conclude with some reflections on the place of truth in the analytic situation. Correspondence is at the heart of the matter. In my view, the analyst has no alternative during a session to seeking to be as receptive as possible to what is really going on in the motivational life of the analysand. Fortunately, the stakes are not usually as high as they were in the session I have describe, but unavoidably the issue of how well our interpretations tally with the inner-life, character and circumstances of the analysand is always present. We are able to test the ideas we form as the session unfolds by looking for changes in the associations, the affects and the transference. In this session, there were changes in the content of my patient’s associations and in his affects. I infer that a regressed positive transference, that had eclipsed his earlier paranoid transference causing him to fear that I was preparing to report to the police, enabled the patient to bring his destructive rage into the session in the hope for help – a hope compromised, but in the circumstances beneficially compromised, by an aggrandizing family romance projection of an omnipotence that I would exercise by intervening on his behalf with his examiners, without his having to make further effort on his own behalf. This transference was only implicitly interpreted by not being enacted in interpretations that left him with his own problem. If he needed this phantasy, I was not about to deprive him of it and force him back into raging helplessness. Besides, it might help him take confidence from my tentative holding out to him the possibility, which was the best that I could offer, that his plight was not quite as bad as he thought it was. The shifts in associative content, the memories of his father’s struggles with difficulties in his life to achieve a modest success, and the diminution of the intensity of his vengeful rage provided evidence that the interpretations were having a beneficial effect. Here we come upon the joint work of pragmatic and correspondence criteria. A beneficial change in the patient’s psychic functioning was occurring. The implied prediction that this would happen was shown to be probably correct. But notice that this use of the pragmatic criterion relies itself on the correspondence criterion. The two criteria work together. The observations that indicate functional improvement must themselves tally with what is actually going on in the patient. And it is the realization of fallibility that appropriately kept signal anxiety alive in me in the aftermath of the session. This anxiety underlines the potential for the subjectivity that can be caused by wishful thinking and other biases and the need to make further as yet unobtainable observations to gain a more satisfactory degree of probability. It was the rigorous demands of correspondence combined with the highly unusual circumstances that gave the analyst a sleepless night.
The pragmatic criteria at work in clinical psychoanalysis are not satisfied by subjective or personal utility or with experiential coherence according to James’s (1907) formulation of pragmatism. It is satisfied by seeing real beneficial change. Since the reliability and durability of a beneficial change cannot be evaluated by the limited evidence available from one session we are obliged to live with uncertainty. But clinical uncertainty is reducible on the basis of further evidence. Uncertainty need not be chronic. This observational evidence is not theory relative, as subjectivists claim. It is, in principle, available to any competent observer in the appropriate circumstances i.e. for analysts in the analytic set-up. Although we need ideas in order to observe; our observations can be epistemicly independent of our theories in the sense that the observations can either falsify or confirm the ideas. And it would surely be grandiose and magical to suppose that in some hidden way my subjectivity led my patient into the post-graduate course only to fail it and bring his vengeful rage into the session. Another analyst, may have responded similarly but in his or her own way or differently and with a different outcome, but the desperate struggle with rage caused by potentially disastrous, overwhelmingly painful feelings of helplessness and humiliation belonged to the patient’s life independently of who his analyst was. And his eventual success in overcoming these liabilities also belonged to him as his achievement whatever help I was able to offer.
Although subjectivists, to be consistent, have to repudiate the correspondence criterion in their advocacy of coherence, it would be an equal and opposite error to repudiate the usefulness of coherence in clinical thinking. In the opening phase of a session, we largely rely on coherence in making a choice of interpretation. In my case, the observation of my patient’s chaotic, violently angry state stimulated a pre-conscious recollection of similar rage reactions earlier in his analysis e.g. being dismissed for insubordination, having a car splash him with muddy water. A coherence criterion is at work selecting previous clinical events on the basis of similarity and the common affect that links them, in this case, the patient’s rage reactions to insult. These recollections bring past experience to bear on the choice of an interpretation. The recollections are coherent and an interpretation guided by them will be coherent with what the analyst has already learned about the patient’s anger but, in the end, it is left to correspondence and pragmatic criteria to decide the adequacy of the interpretation; otherwise changes in the patient can leave the analyst out of touch. Therefore, in my view, each of the three criteria of truth makes its specific contributions to sound clinical observing and thinking in psychoanalysis.
As I see it, the fundamental philosophical problem for postmodern inter-subjectivity in all of its variations (narratological, irreducible subjectivity, dialectical and relational thirds, relational unconscious, dyadic inter-subjective fields etc.) is that it is conceptually limited to coherence and philosophical pragmatism for its criteria of truth. Postmodern inter-subjectivity can find no place for correspondence and scientific pragmatic criteria. For this reason, in subjectivist epistemologies, truth is relative in principle. Theory independent facts cannot exist.
At the heart of the issue between subjectivism and critical realism there is a question of being. For psychoanalysis it is a question of the being of the patient. Is the patient the bearer of his or her own life, an individual life that is intelligible in its own right, knowable in itself and existing independently of our experiences of it and our ideas about it. It is not possible to doubt the importance of relations between persons. In the clinical excerpt above, I have reason to believe that a positive transference involving trust but also entwined with expectations of my grandiose beneficence and complicated by a regression to a pre-oedipal use of me as a surrogate ego usefully sustained a working relation in this moment of crisis even while demanding further work in the future. But neither is it possible to doubt the patient’s independent reality. As I see it, the autonomous independence of the patient’s life is evident in his turning inward, instead of persisting in his grandiose demands upon me, in his own search for the strength to do for himself what I could not do for him. He found the confidence, however precarious it was at the time, in revived memories of his father to abandon enough of both his grandiosity and his helplessness to tackle the real life problem before him.
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Philosophers have enumerated three criteria of truth: coherence, correspondence and pragmatic. I shall define them and examine some of the relations among them. My overarching argument is that these three criteria of truth, when adequately defined, can be seen not to be at odds with each other but to work together in the search for truths in clinical psychoanalysis. I write “truths” not because I think that truth is relative but because I do not subscribe to any metaphysical theory of absolute truth as in Plato, Descartes or Hegel.
A secondary purpose is to sustain a distinction between two concepts of inter-subjectivity. The first concept is the one that we are familiar with in common sense, scholarship and science: an observation is intersubjective, if it can be made by any competent observer of the relevant domain of fact. What is intersubjective in observation is the opposite of what is subjective i.e. opposite to what, in an observation, belongs to the idiosyncrasies of the observer and not to what is being observed. The second very different notion of intersubjectivity is that it consists of the inextricable transference and counter-transference interactions that take place in the relation between analyst and analysand in psychoanalysis which result in the co-creation of the analysand whose nature and history are formed by the analytic relation. This definition of intersubjectivity legislates the historical being of the individual, a being that is independent of the analyst, out of existence. To Aristotle’s rhetorical question, “that nature exists who can doubt?” contemporary subjectivist analysts reply “psychoanalysts should doubt the independent existence of at least that part of nature that is psychic reality”. Subjectivism repudiates the epistemic independence of the patient in his or her relation to the analyst and, consistency would require, the same of the analyst in his or her relation to the patient. Of course, we analysts sometimes feel differently about different patients. The vignette below illustrates an exceptional anxiety in the analyst in response to a patient. But from these and like facts it cannot be inferred that analyst’s capacity to know is inevitably altered by his or her responses to each patient. After all an appropriate affective response will normally quicken rather than compromise the analyst’s observation and thought.
To be sure our work as clinicians reminds us of the manifold ways in which our own personalities, beliefs and affects can interfere with out clinical work. Our clinical observations and thinking are intrinsically fallible. But it does not follow that they are in principle subjective or that we are intrinsically snared in inter-subjectivity of the second kind or that we can never achieve intersubjectivity of the first kind. Thoma (2007) has pointed to “a deep paradox in Freud’s work” between the intersubjective and the scientific. This paradox is generated by elevating the remediable technical problems of subjectivity in the analytic situation into an inter-subjectivist epistemology yielding the second meaning of the term, in which the technical problems become irremediable in principle. The paradox ceases to exist if we preserve the common sense, scholarly and scientific meaning of the word “intersubjectivity”. One of the problems of intersubjectivity in postmodern psychoanalytic epistemology concerns the nature of truth.
The coherence criterion of truth states that a theory is true if and only if it provides a consistent explanation of the phenomena to be explained. A theory that has to rely on a hypothesis that is not consistent with the basic concepts and principles of the theory fails the test. A theory that cannot account for all of the phenomena to be explained also fails the test. Coherence requires logical consistency (non-contradiction) and explanatory completeness. The coherence theory of truth asserts that theories that meet these criteria are true.
In the history of ideas the coherence theory of truth is associated with the idealist philosophies of German Romanticism and, in particular, with Hegel and the neo-Hegelians (Lotze, 1888; Bradley, 1883; Bosanquet, 1888). Among contemporary English speaking philosophers, Putnam (1981) argues that because observations are always theory laden they constitute what is observed. Reality is not given in observation; it is constituted by observation. This is the basic position of post-modern subjectivist epistemology. Putnam (1981) rejects the correspondence theory of truth on the grounds that correspondence requires an idea of God, who in Cartesian fashion, must be pressed into service as the infallible third who can judge whether or not and if so to what extent a perception corresponds with the object perceived. Epistemology should not logically require theology. Putnam (1981) also points out the paradoxical consequence that once coherence is adopted as a sufficient account of the nature of truth there can be more than one true theory of any phenomenon.
A fundamental problem of the coherence theory is that it demands of logic more than logic can provide. Coherence requires that all the hypotheses of a given theory are mutually consistent one with the others. But just as arguments can be valid without being sound because the truth of the conclusions depends upon the truth of the premises, so a theory can be logically consistent without being true. Euclidean geometry is a paradigm of coherence. It is consistent, complete, and self-evidence. It even continues to be useful for measurements and calculations over distances, short enough not to be influenced by the curvature of the earth’s surface. It does not apply to the space of the solar system or any larger space. The coherence, completeness and self-evidence of Euclidean geometry do not make it true.
If coherence is our sole criterion of truth, psychoanalytic theorizing is permanently relativized, according to Putnam’s paradox, but in a way that renders it illogical as the examination of competing theories in psychoanalysis will show. Freud’s theory of the origins of the Oedipus complex in drive development coheres perfectly with other components of his theory e.g. drive theory and the structural model. Similarly, Kohut’s theory of its genesis in narcissistically inadequate parenting coheres well with other tenets of self-psychology e.g. the primacy of narcissistic libido and of object relations. But the two theories are contraries. Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex asserts that all instances of the Oedipus complex result from drive development; self-psychology asserts on the contrary that no instance of the Oedipus complex results from drive development. That is to say, they cannot both be true, although they both may be false. Consequently, contrary to Putnam (1981), their truth cannot simply rely on their coherence. Coherence is a necessary condition for the truth of any theory, but it is not a sufficient condition. What about the correspondence criterion?
The correspondence theory of truth states that a belief, hypothesis or idea is true to the extent that it corresponds with reality. The correspondence criterion of truth is a basic premise of common sense, as well as, of scientific and philosophical empiricism. Throughout his work Freud (1915; 1933) stated his adherence to correspondence for which the word “tally” in the tally argument (Freud, 1917) is a synonym. Kleinian psychoanalysts share Freud’s view of the primacy of correspondence in the evaluation of truth. It is taken for granted by science (Dawkins, 2003; Hawking, 1988; Weinberg, 1992; Sokal and Bricmont, 1998).
Coherence advocates criticize correspondence for being absolutistic, uncritically naïve, and authoritarian. These criticisms cohere well with Putnam’s (1981) argument that a correspondence criterion relies upon a divine omniscient third for the verification of the correspondence between an independently existing object with a nature of its own and its perceptual, imaginary and ideational human representations. But the estimation of correspondence does not require the assumption of a divine omniscience with an absolute standard of truth at its disposal. The charge of absolutism does, I think, apply to the idealizing realism of Plato, Descartes and Hegel, but it does not apply to empiricist, scientific or, as I have called it, critical realism (Hanly, 1999; 2000a; 2000b). Correspondence can be evaluated without omniscience, without absolute knowledge and without certainty as illustrated by the astronomical observations that showed that predictions of the deflection of light from a star, passing through the sun’s gravitational field, based on Einstein’s theory of gravitation corresponded closely to the actual deflection of light whereas the Newtonian predictions did not (Isaacson, 2007). Here, the third is the object in nature allowed to reveal itself, in part, by the internal third which is the capacity for self-doubt and self-criticism. Similarly, in psychoanalysis, clinical observations can show that Bowlby’s ethological theory of anxiety is not sufficient to explain the phenomena of phobia and neurotic anxiety generally. Contrary to Bowlby, his enumerated ethological factors require Freud’s developmental sexual and aggressive factors to adequately account for phobia and thus meet both the coherence and correspondence requirement of completeness (Hanly, 1978). The psychological source of a third perspective on our observations and our ideas about what we observe in psychoanalysis, and in science generally, is the super-ego with its ideal of veracity not only adding motivational heft to the reality principle but adding the capacity of self-awareness and self-criticism to the ego functions of perception, imagination and thought that serve the reality principle (Hanly, 2001a: Hanly and Nichols, 2001b). It is this capacity that allows us to question the reliability of what we see and what we think about what we see. It is from this psychological ground that questions about what is true arise (Hanly, 1990).
The intrinsic relativity of the coherence thesis can account for empirical certainties within ideologies and theories but it cannot account for empirical certainties that transcend ideologies and theories. Correspondence is not a question of absolute, automatic, intuitive certainty. It is a matter of accumulated evidence. Accumulated evidence gives us reason to think that the composition of heavenly bodies out of chemical matter, the circulation of the blood in mammals, the curvature of space in the vicinity of matter, the evolution of species by natural selection and the existence of unconscious psychic processes are empirical certainties. Whatever the future developments in knowledge may be, it is highly unlikely that these ideas will ever turn out to have been false all along.
Pragmatism is the third criterion of truth. Philosophical pragmatism was developed by Peirce, James and Dewey. James’ philosophical concept of pragmatism which could offer support to post-modern epistemological relativism has been subjected to devastating criticism by Russell (1946). Consequently, I prefer what I shall call scientific or critical pragmatism. An idea or theory is true, if, by means of a technology specified by it and coherent with it, the theory can be used to change the course of nature. It is this concept of pragmatism that we find at work in Freud’s development of psychoanalytic theory and technique. In psychoanalysis the change in the course of nature we look for is the amelioration of neurotic disorders. The technique is the interpretation of free association and transferences in the analytic set-up. The theories concern the causes of neuroses. Freud’s first aetiological theory, the seduction theory, provided for an abreactive technique. The technique was specified by the theory and was coherent with it as were the predictions about the conditions under which recovery and a maturation of sexual life would occur. However, the coherence of the theory, technique and predictions did not establish the truth of the seduction theory. The theory was pragmatically falsified and had to be substantially revised because the predicted amelioration of symptoms did not occur.
I shall conclude by exploring the clinical relevance of coherence, correspondence and pragmatic criteria of truth in psychoanalysis. As we have seen coherence is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of the truth of a theory, whereas, correspondence is a necessary and sufficient condition of truth. I propose to illustrate this relation in clinical psychoanalysis by considering a situation in which the analyst’s need to know was urgently intensified by an unusual circumstance. A borderline patient in his second year of analysis, a young professional man who had lost his first job on account of a pretentious insubordination out of envy, was now a student came to his session beside himself with rage and threatening to kill an external examiner who had failed him. I quickly became aware of how badly I needed to be able to estimate, by the end of the session, his capacity to contain the rage that drove his wish to revenge the insult to his grandiosity and how much I needed to help him with this task during the session. The patient had, during periods of severe depression, told me of wanting to let the world know “that he was somebody” by committing a mass murder; he owned a substantial arsenal of guns and ammunition. I was sorely aware of how much I needed to know whether or not he was likely to carry out his threats and how difficult it would be to know. There was nothing, immediate, absolutistic or naïve about my urgent search for understanding. I did not for a moment think that his enraged murderous threat was a co-creation of his analysis or that I had any interpretive access to it for that reason. And I was aware that I would not be able to know with the confidence I wanted to have how well my thinking about him corresponded with his reality and what confidence I could place in whatever interventions I could make before the end of the session. The crucial observation would concern what would happen to his murderous rage and for that observation I had no alternative but to wait for what would unfold in the session. I had no acceptable choice but to give myself up to the task.
I concluded from his account of the damaging interview with the professor, punctuated and disorganized as it was by outpourings of vengeful rage and death threats, that there was some possibility that he had been neither passed nor failed but would be required to resubmit his work after dealing with criticisms. I was confident enough of this construction, despite the fear that it might be the product of my own wishful thinking, that I communicated it to him as something he might want to explore further. I was concerned about the risk, if it should turn out not to be true. But at least, it might buy time for further analytic work. I offered this reality testing in the context of interpreting to him the intensity of his rage in words that implicitly pointed to but did not explicitly mention the work of a phantasy of having been castrated. I had learned to link interpretations with tentative alternatives to his view of the reality of situations in which he found himself because of his difficulties with reality testing. Instead of interpreting his grandiosity or his castration anxiety directly, I interpreted his hurt pride. These interpretations facilitated an encouraging sequence of associations toward the end of the session about his immigrant father, often the object of his derogating criticism, who he now acknowledged had had the “balls” to leave his homeland and try to make a go of it in a new country even though it didn’t work out very well for him. I hoped that he was letting me know that he too might have the balls to go back to his faculty, and find out what really confronted him instead of carrying out his death threats. By the end of the session I observed a diminution in the frequency of his outbursts of indignant rage and sensed some reduction in their intensity. But he was by no means either calm or appeased. I was left with the anxiety provoking question as to whether or not he could sustain this fragile improvement in self-mastery after the session.
I was confident enough of what I had seen and understood not to warn my colleague or inform the police because of my impression that my interpretations corresponded well enough to be heard and because they appeared to have had some, at least temporary, beneficial effect. I was not confident enough to sleep that night. Without more evidence that I could not have until the next few days, I was taking a risk. I believed that any other action on my part would very likely be ruinous to the analysis. He had previously gone through a period in which he believed that I was taping his sessions in order to inform the police. All of these perceptions, estimations, hopes, fears and judgements were fallibly based on the evidence that became available during the session.
I was relieved and grateful to the efficacy of psychoanalytic interpretation, when my patient arrived the next morning and kept subsequent appointments with only rumblings of his rage and humiliation audible in his complaints of unfairness in a mood that was by no means calm but was sufficiently reconciled to his situation to abandon his threats of revenge and to get on with the tasks at hand. I was lucky that, as I had surmised, he had not been failed; there were some inadequacies in his work that required improvement for the examination to qualify him for his degree. I could now be reasonably satisfied that the observations and the ideas that guided my actions corresponded well enough with the reality of my patient’s psychic life. They had survived a pragmatic test.
I conclude with some reflections on the place of truth in the analytic situation. Correspondence is at the heart of the matter. In my view, the analyst has no alternative during a session to seeking to be as receptive as possible to what is really going on in the motivational life of the analysand. Fortunately, the stakes are not usually as high as they were in the session I have describe, but unavoidably the issue of how well our interpretations tally with the inner-life, character and circumstances of the analysand is always present. We are able to test the ideas we form as the session unfolds by looking for changes in the associations, the affects and the transference. In this session, there were changes in the content of my patient’s associations and in his affects. I infer that a regressed positive transference, that had eclipsed his earlier paranoid transference causing him to fear that I was preparing to report to the police, enabled the patient to bring his destructive rage into the session in the hope for help – a hope compromised, but in the circumstances beneficially compromised, by an aggrandizing family romance projection of an omnipotence that I would exercise by intervening on his behalf with his examiners, without his having to make further effort on his own behalf. This transference was only implicitly interpreted by not being enacted in interpretations that left him with his own problem. If he needed this phantasy, I was not about to deprive him of it and force him back into raging helplessness. Besides, it might help him take confidence from my tentative holding out to him the possibility, which was the best that I could offer, that his plight was not quite as bad as he thought it was. The shifts in associative content, the memories of his father’s struggles with difficulties in his life to achieve a modest success, and the diminution of the intensity of his vengeful rage provided evidence that the interpretations were having a beneficial effect. Here we come upon the joint work of pragmatic and correspondence criteria. A beneficial change in the patient’s psychic functioning was occurring. The implied prediction that this would happen was shown to be probably correct. But notice that this use of the pragmatic criterion relies itself on the correspondence criterion. The two criteria work together. The observations that indicate functional improvement must themselves tally with what is actually going on in the patient. And it is the realization of fallibility that appropriately kept signal anxiety alive in me in the aftermath of the session. This anxiety underlines the potential for the subjectivity that can be caused by wishful thinking and other biases and the need to make further as yet unobtainable observations to gain a more satisfactory degree of probability. It was the rigorous demands of correspondence combined with the highly unusual circumstances that gave the analyst a sleepless night.
The pragmatic criteria at work in clinical psychoanalysis are not satisfied by subjective or personal utility or with experiential coherence according to James’s (1907) formulation of pragmatism. It is satisfied by seeing real beneficial change. Since the reliability and durability of a beneficial change cannot be evaluated by the limited evidence available from one session we are obliged to live with uncertainty. But clinical uncertainty is reducible on the basis of further evidence. Uncertainty need not be chronic. This observational evidence is not theory relative, as subjectivists claim. It is, in principle, available to any competent observer in the appropriate circumstances i.e. for analysts in the analytic set-up. Although we need ideas in order to observe; our observations can be epistemicly independent of our theories in the sense that the observations can either falsify or confirm the ideas. And it would surely be grandiose and magical to suppose that in some hidden way my subjectivity led my patient into the post-graduate course only to fail it and bring his vengeful rage into the session. Another analyst, may have responded similarly but in his or her own way or differently and with a different outcome, but the desperate struggle with rage caused by potentially disastrous, overwhelmingly painful feelings of helplessness and humiliation belonged to the patient’s life independently of who his analyst was. And his eventual success in overcoming these liabilities also belonged to him as his achievement whatever help I was able to offer.
Although subjectivists, to be consistent, have to repudiate the correspondence criterion in their advocacy of coherence, it would be an equal and opposite error to repudiate the usefulness of coherence in clinical thinking. In the opening phase of a session, we largely rely on coherence in making a choice of interpretation. In my case, the observation of my patient’s chaotic, violently angry state stimulated a pre-conscious recollection of similar rage reactions earlier in his analysis e.g. being dismissed for insubordination, having a car splash him with muddy water. A coherence criterion is at work selecting previous clinical events on the basis of similarity and the common affect that links them, in this case, the patient’s rage reactions to insult. These recollections bring past experience to bear on the choice of an interpretation. The recollections are coherent and an interpretation guided by them will be coherent with what the analyst has already learned about the patient’s anger but, in the end, it is left to correspondence and pragmatic criteria to decide the adequacy of the interpretation; otherwise changes in the patient can leave the analyst out of touch. Therefore, in my view, each of the three criteria of truth makes its specific contributions to sound clinical observing and thinking in psychoanalysis.
As I see it, the fundamental philosophical problem for postmodern inter-subjectivity in all of its variations (narratological, irreducible subjectivity, dialectical and relational thirds, relational unconscious, dyadic inter-subjective fields etc.) is that it is conceptually limited to coherence and philosophical pragmatism for its criteria of truth. Postmodern inter-subjectivity can find no place for correspondence and scientific pragmatic criteria. For this reason, in subjectivist epistemologies, truth is relative in principle. Theory independent facts cannot exist.
At the heart of the issue between subjectivism and critical realism there is a question of being. For psychoanalysis it is a question of the being of the patient. Is the patient the bearer of his or her own life, an individual life that is intelligible in its own right, knowable in itself and existing independently of our experiences of it and our ideas about it. It is not possible to doubt the importance of relations between persons. In the clinical excerpt above, I have reason to believe that a positive transference involving trust but also entwined with expectations of my grandiose beneficence and complicated by a regression to a pre-oedipal use of me as a surrogate ego usefully sustained a working relation in this moment of crisis even while demanding further work in the future. But neither is it possible to doubt the patient’s independent reality. As I see it, the autonomous independence of the patient’s life is evident in his turning inward, instead of persisting in his grandiose demands upon me, in his own search for the strength to do for himself what I could not do for him. He found the confidence, however precarious it was at the time, in revived memories of his father to abandon enough of both his grandiosity and his helplessness to tackle the real life problem before him.
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