The Political Implications of Psychoanalysis

Introduction

“I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, nor an experimenter, nor a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador – an adventurer, if you want it translated – with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.” (Sigmund Freud, 1900). [1]

Questions on Psychoanalysis posed to the Internationalist Communist Left

The Internationalist Communist Left published very little on psychoanalysis, or, for that matter, on psychology in general. Yet, the impact of psychoanalysis on society has been enormous: it can even be characterised as one of the main ideologies of the Twentieth Century. It has directly affected the private lives of hundreds of millions of families in the period around the Second World War; it has influenced business policies and the world of marketing and publicity – it even inspired art and literature. It added a whole new vocabulary to commonly used language.

Through the intermediary of “mass-psychology” it also largely contributed to a redefinition of how to manage recalcitrant populations and make them behave like enthusiast and responsible citizens subordinate to the national state. War propaganda became more efficient in recruiting cannon fodder by more persuasive techniques: manipulation of the “unconscious” and playing on “instincts”.

Ample use of it has been made by Fascists, Stalinists as well as Democrats. It was in the period in which the working class was most defeated and mobilised behind the imperialist flags that this ideology could live its moments of glory while it tended to break apart after the 1960’s.

For decades psychoanalysts not only had to compete with positivist, experimental, scientific psychologists; [2] they also provided for a widely appreciated complement. Experimental psychologists, in their turn, rendered their own services to state policies, isolating the individual from its social context, pretending to represent the “science of human nature”. [3] It is arguable that psychoanalysis has been an obstacle to the development of modern psychology. But it is just as arguable that experimental psychologists, more in particular behaviourists, neuro-biologists and geneticists, will always need some form of psychoanalyses as a complement to make up for their own reductionism.

Biological and individual explanations add very little to our already very limited knowledge about the “human psyche” which is social by nature. Understanding a minimum, however, is all the more urgent as the present economic, social and political crisis, in first instance, risks to produce “collective psychoses” rather than class consciousness.

Today, in the much respected “international scientific community”, Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis have not vanished. In the Freud-Year 2006, celebrating the 150th birthday of this legendary “discoverer of the unconscious”, there was even a revival: an international orchestrated campaign, coming most of all from naturalist materialist neuro-biologists was waged in all kinds of periodicals; general, scientific and most of all popular-scientific, with cover-stories like: “Neurological research confirms the theories of Freud”, and “The come-back of Freud”. [4] Those who disagreed were disapprovingly branded as “Freud Bashers”; no attempts were made to reply to the critics. More serious scientists, whatever their school of thinking or background, tend to look at the theories of Sigmund Freud with the same wary disdain as at those of Rudolf Steiner. [5]

Psychoanalysis is most of all alive in countries like Argentine and France, in the form of Lacanism, and there it is also very present in bookshops with an impressive literature, which, however, doesn’t even exist in languages other than French and Spanish. [6] Lacanian psychoanalysis certainly constitutes a caricature of the undoubtedly very profound [7] and foremost speculative [8] thinking of Sigmund Freud. But as it was presented as a “return to Freud” when most psycho-therapists tended to move away from the theory itself – the sexual phantasms of the Old Master became too embarrassing, particularly women started to revolt against it – it can hardly be presented as a regression in relation to a “real” Freudian psychoanalysis. What did he say, the great Jacques Lacan, at the end of his life?

“Our practice is a swindle, bluffing, making people blink, blinding them with boasting words, it is after all what we use to call much ado about nothing. [...] From an ethical point of view our profession is indefensible, and anyway that is why I am sick of it, because I have a higher conscience just like everybody.” “It is about knowing whether or not Freud was an historical event. I believe he missed his chance. Like me, shortly, no one will give a damn for psychoanalysis any more.” [9]

The Origins of Psychoanalysis

The specific form of Sigmund Freud’s “unconscious”, filled with hard to define “sexual instincts”, [10] was plagiarised from vitalists [11] like Arthur Schopenhauer, [12] Eduard Hartmann and Friedrich Nietzsche. It stood in contrast to Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s concept of “alienation” with its social roots as further developed by Karl Marx.

In the 19th Century masses of “alienated” had started to populate ever more new build poor houses, prisons and asylums for the “insane”. From just a few thousand in the beginning of the 19th Century, hundreds of thousands were locked away in institutions by the end of the century. They were deprived, “alienated” of their means of subsistence and thus also of their own being with which they lost just as much contact as with reality. They had lost their pride, dignity and honour. At the end of the 18th Century Philippe Pinel – who did have an eye for the social background of the problem – called it “mental alienation”. All this was seen by naturalist materialists and vitalists as the inevitable result of “instincts” getting out of control; as an inevitable and irreversible physical and moral inheritable “degeneration” of “the lowest layers of society”. [13] In this context the idea of “unconscious drives” was born.

After the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris’ Commune, attention evermore moved away from social contradictions to the mysteries of the individual mind; it gave rise to a whole “psychic” movement of “free-thinkers”. [14] Vienna became one of its main centres; not only psychoanalysis, but also Theosophy was born there. Psychoanalysts were organised in the Psychoanalytical Association, far away from the scientific community, just like Theosophists were organised separately in their Theosophical Society. There, naturalist materialism could easily be combined with “spiritualism”. There, too, conflicts could be dealt with in a secret committee, watching over the loyalty of its members rather than trying to resolve them through public debate. [15]

The pretences of psychoanalysis

We also need to deal with the three great pretences of psychoanalysts:

1- Psychoanalysis would be a method to investigate the mind. Sigmund Freud’s scientific method consisted of “introspection” [16] and observation of his own children. He never applied the comparative method based on larger numbers or used any quantifiable and comparable data; the very few “case studies” he published – in the form of attractive detective stories – have turned out to be complete mystifications.

2- Psychoanalysis would constitute a systematised body of knowledge about human behaviour. But “neuroses” [17] do not even exist any longer as such in the classification of modern psychiatry. “Repressed memories” are a marginal subject and to be very cautious about as there are hardly any means to verify whether or not a memory relates to a real past event while “repressed memories” are also easily created by “therapy”. The rest consists of obnoxious ideas about very young children having “sexual impulses” and oddities like the “Oedipus-complex”, “castration anxiety” “penis envy” and “oral” and “anal” “fixations”. Typically vitalist are fluid entities like “the libido” and “Eros”. In The Ego and the Id (1923) Sigmund Freud also postulated some constant “psychic energy”, [18] without ever defining it or telling how it could be measured, where it came from or where it went to.

3- Finally, psychoanalysis would be a method of treatment of “psychological or emotional illness”, whatever that is. [19] The therapeutic success of psychoanalysis is not only questionable, but measured by comparing the subjective feeling of “well being” before and after treatment it certainly isn’t any better than a pilgrimage to Lourdes or the intervention of whatever faith healer. Also, disagreement with a psychoanalyst is difficult, as disagreement might constitute a “confirmation” of the analysis and proof of “unconscious resistance” against its acceptance.

Sigmund Freud’s integrity

Then there are a few questions that even put into doubt the integrity of Sigmund Freud and his followers:

– Questioned, he mechanically extended his individual psychology to anthropology and the history of mankind as a whole. He postulated a “primal horde” and created the myth of a gang of gorilla-like sons killing their father because they wanted to have sex with their mother. The main source of inspiration was the French racist Gustave Le Bon and it was covered by a misreading of Charles Darwin. [20]

– Psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung, Sándor Ferenczi, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, Melanie Klein, Erich Fromm, Karen Horny, Bruno Bettelheim and Jacques Lacan all formulated theories which contradicted each other. What they had in common was their resistance to verification. [21] Most of them even pretended that their therapeutic results would not be open to verification [22] as they would work on subjective feelings of “well being”. They were “curing” through “listening” and “giving some advise” – something that is also done by Catholic priests, Protestant pastors, Islamic imams and Hindu gurus, and, in contrast to expensive psychoanalysts, in general for free. [23]

– The official history of psychoanalysis, as laid down by Sigmund Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones, has turned out to be a complete mystification, aimed at covering up that Sigmund Freud was a pathological liar, a quack and a swindler, a firm believer in the para-normal and everything metaphysical, ending up with “meta-psychological”, that is: pseudo-scientific theories.

– Finally, we have to question Sigmund Freud’s relation to Marxism and the workers’ movement and the true nature of his “humanism”: not only he exclusively worked for the rich and famous, never showing any interest in all those excluded from society, imprisoned in the “mental institutions” of his days, but it is also difficult to maintain that he took any serious stance in the highly political questions he faced.

In its most innocent form, psychoanalysis can be no less fun than astrology or the Da Vinci Code. But it tends far more to take a nasty turn. It is even dangerous, precisely because it pretends to be scientific and as it can seriously affect the “psychology” of its victims.

Those who might think that there might still be “some truth” in psychoanalytical theories might also try to take into consideration that Sigmund Freud wrote so much, that it is statistically highly improbable that it is all wrong. The general rule is: when it is right, it is not exclusive to Freudian psychoanalysis; when it is proper to Freudian psychoanalysis, it is wrong.

Psychoanalysts cry out: “Don’t trust yourself, trust us”. As such it is an excellent means to manipulate those who believe in it and to abuse their confidence. Freudian psychoanalysts push their victims into narcissism, to turn themselves inward and to get imprisoned into their own private pasts; systematically asking them to distrust their own motives; [24] as immortalized in the Woody Allen movies. [25]

Psychoanalysis, the Workers’ Movement and the Bourgeois Left

The few real results of experimental, “positivist” psychology were not much of a problem to the materialist conception of history, [26] by contrast, their transformation into a new reductionist ideology posed serious problems. By contrast, psychoanalysis was completely opposed to it from the outset, and because of the silence on it, the workers’ movement could hardly have been expected to have remained exempt of its influence:

– The influence of the “psychic movement” at the turn of the century can already be felt in the later works of the co-founder of the theory of natural selection, the socialist Alfred Russel Wallace, and in the influence it had on the “Fabian” socialists George Bernard Shaw and Annie Besant, [27] with links to Mrs Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner in Vienna. Psychoanalysis was part of this “psychic” movement and it was influential in the circles of the Austro-Marxists before the First World War: famous first “neurotic” patients of Sigmund Freud were sisters of well-known Austro-Marxists. [28]

– The Bolshevik Adolph Joffe, troubled by nervous complaints when exiled in Vienna in 1908, was “psychoanalysed” by Alfred Adler; Leon Trotsky, arriving in Vienna shortly afterwards, was impressed by it and wanted to keep the question of the scientific basis of psychoanalysis open; [29] Lenin however denounced psychoanalysis as a “faddish mode” and it hardly took roots in the Soviet-Union. Yet Joseph Stalin’s son Vasili attended the psychoanalytical White Nursery in Moscow; the school was closed in 1925 and the Russian Psychoanalytical Society was officially repressed in 1930. [30]

– Psychoanalysis influenced several branches of anarchism.

– In Germany there was some early echo in the workers’ movement through the writings of Siegfried Bernfeld and Otto Fenichel, ending up in the short-lived Freudo-Stalinist adventure of Wilhelm Reich and his disciples in 1929-1930. [31]

– Otto Rühle and his wife Alice Rühle-Gerstel published in favour of Adlerian “individual psychology”, opposing the Freudian version. [32] Other “council communists”, like Paul Mattick and Anton Pannekoek, explicitly rejected Freudian psychoanalysis. [33] An exception is the later Henriette Roland Holst when she moved away from the workers’ movement towards moralising, spiritualism and psychology. Representatives of the Italian Left, like Amadeo Bordiga, never showed any signs of adhering to the principles of psychoanalysis, but they never seem to have bothered much about the subject neither.

– Within the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie Cornelius Castoriadis, when breaking with Marxism, adopted Lacanism in 1964; in 1969 he preferred to found his own school starting practising psychoanalysis himself from 1974 onwards.

There are little more echoes from the workers’ movement, but they need to be examined. [34] It is worth noting however that psychoanalysis was never applied to explain any historical facts; nor even to explain the behaviour of individuals. Leon Trotsky for instance, although he was very “psychological” in his approach to individuals, all too easily judging characters, never tried to clarify behaviour in psychoanalytical terms. Apparently, he didn’t need it; what he had to say came from his own empirical observations and life experience, not from any general theory.

By contrast, there is triple proof of the impact of psychoanalysis on the bourgeois left:

– Psychoanalytical thinking became popular through the so-called School of Frankfurt, with very different thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, or even, if they can be classified in this “school”, Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, both old adepts of Wilhelm Reich.

– The Freudo-Stalinism of Wilhelm Reich was revived in the 1970’s, particularly in Germany and the USA, as his later works seemed to be critical in relation to the “sexual politics” in the Stalinist Soviet-Union and as it coincided with the “Sexual Revolution” in the 1960’s.

– A hippie-cult book by Norman O. Brown, titled Life against Death, [35] once seemed an attractive complement to Marxism in the form of a sterile and all-explaining dichotomy, the mythical forces of life and death, very close to the dichotomies Yin and Yang and Zen-Buddhism.

Of course, new emerging groups, inspired by the Internationalist Communist Left in this period, lacking historical experience, were much influenced by the general ambiance in society. While at the same time really innovating to some extend the positions of the previous generations, they also tended to embrace everything which seemed to be “new” and “revolutionary”. “Couch psychology” could even be promoted as a “scientific alternative” to the “kitchen psychology” so dear to bourgeois intriguers.1

18 September 2009, Vico.