Freud, Biologist of the Mind

236 TELOS necessary to do more than merely report that Croce's philosophy is now generally discarded, and that Gramsci's ideas are widely accepted. Nemeth's and Jacobitti's works are useful contributions. This usefulness is, however, rather limited since the leitmotif which Nemeth chooses to extract from Gramsci — phenomenological first philosophy — seems only marginal for the problem of intellectual and moral reform of popular culture. On the other hand, the leitmotif that Jacobitti emphasizes in Croce is the detached contemplativism of his avoidance of one-sidedness (pp. 142, 145). There is little question that this is a feature of Croce's approach (as well as a problematic one). But since Jacobitti does not suggest any more promising alternative, even if Croce's philosophy is a failure, that would not prevent it from being the best available one. Second, given that the motivating problem is that of intellectual and moral reform of popular culture, it is not clear that Croce's alleged detachment is inappropriate or ineffective. Here one should recall one of his slogans to which Jacobitti does not pay sufficient attention: theoretical activity prepares but does not determine action. Maurice A. Finocchiaro Frank Sulloway. Freud, Biologist of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1979. 612 pages. A Harvard-trained historian of science, Sulloway has written a new biographical study of Freud. It is an important book that explores the origins of Freud's thought in 19th-century evolutionary biology. Sulloway's work is based on a very wide reading of source material and its publication has occasioned considerable critical acclaim. The author claims to have produced "a comprehensive intellectual biography of Sigmund Freud" and "an entirely new historical interpretation." What he has actually produced is far less than he claims and far more than he would admit. Less, because he exhaustively catalogues one aspect of Freud's thought and tries to make it stand for the whole. But more, because he has produced a kind of empiricist propaganda attempting to justify the claims of sociology (and implicitly the medical model of psychiatry) at the expense of all other approaches. Sulloway's thesis is clear and straightforward: Freud was essentially a crypto-biologist who attempted to obscure the biological underpinnings of his theory in part by claiming that psychoanalysis was a "pure psychology" arising ineluctably from purely clinical data. Sulloway claims that subsequent Freud scholarship has promoted the myth that psychoanalysis arose out of the sheer creative genius of its founder. According to this myth, psychoanalysis was born not in the scientific tradition but ex nihilo partly as a result of Freud's famous self analysis. Sulloway claims to have uncovered no less than 26 similar myths and he attempts to present a systematic refutation of each. These myths have presumably annihilated the prehistory of psychoanalysis and legitimated its particular claims to originality. He claims that his work is the first to have explained psychoanalysis in terms of the sociology of knowledge. Sulloway sees himself as a revisionist historian representing a minority viewpoint. In his view, orthodox Freud scholarship, including the work of Ernest Jones and Ernst Kris, is intent on maintaining the Freud legend to establish its claims that psychoanalysis is a "pure psychology." Sulloway's Freud is, in contrast, a biologist of the mind, a scientist bent on extending Darwinian evolutionary theory to new areas. REVIEWS 237 In the first place, this is a false dichotomy since "pure psychology" is not a term that adequately describes Freud's understanding of his project, nor have his followers in the psychoanalytic tradition attempted to deny Freud's abiding interest in evolutionary biology. Sulloway's dichotomy is particularly puzzling since he himself quotes Ernest Jones as having said that "the creation of psychoanalysis signifies a contribution to biology comparable in importance only with Darwin's" (pp. 4-5). In fact, the insistence of Freud (and his loyal followers) on the importance of libido theory understood as a biologically immutable fact of human existence was the major source of disagreement within the psychoanalytic movement and led eventually to the rift between Freud and Jung, Adler, and, later, the so-called ego psychologists. It has been one of the most pervasive accusations brought against Freud by his critics, including Jung and Adler, that he was overly biological in his discussion of libidinal sexual and aggressive energy. Sulloway's effort to understand the rift solely in terms of differing biological assumptions is therefore patently ridiculous. Another problem is Sulloway's consistent refusal to recognize that there were at least two aspects to Freud's work: his concern to represent a fully elaborated theory of the mind and his effort to develop a technique of treating neurotic patients. It may well be that many of the early psychoanalytic practitioners tended to idealize Freud and to overestimate his originality but this phenomenon has been exhaustively — even obsessively — documented by Paul Roazen in Freud and his Followers (1971) and others. Indeed, Sulloway seems almost ignorant of psychoanalysis as a technique of treatment, and focuses exclusively instead on Freud's theory of mental functioning, which he insists on confining to evolutionary biology. As a result, several important and original aspects of Freud's thought are overlooked, including the existence of the unconscious and Freud's keen understanding of the limits of instrumental reason as a guide of human action. Yet, there is a point here. In his single-minded and often absurd reductionism, Sulloway does provide some sobering documentation of the family resemblances between Freud's work and that of contemporary biologists. In so doing he shows just how great was Freud's debt to biology and how seriously he worked to maintain that connection throughout his career. In this regard, Sulloway provides many persuasive examples of major misconceptions regarding the origins of Freud's work. A few examples will suffice. It is commonly believed that Joseph Breuer broke off his famous analysis of Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) and terminated his relationship with Freud because of his inability to accept the sexual etiology of hysteria. Not so, says Sulloway. Breuer was fully aware of the importance of sexuality and the real reason for Freud's break with him had to do with Freud's "fanatical" claim that sexuality was the cause of every hysteria and most other neuroses as well. Nor for that matter is it true, as Freud claimed in his autobiography, that his insistence on the existence of male hysteria was rudely rejected by his colleagues in Vienna and marked the beginning of his near complete isolation from the scientific establishment. It is commonly believed that Freud abandoned his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) shortly after it had been written because he realized the impossibility of constructing his new psychology on a purely scientific basis. What Freud abandoned, says Sulloway, was the idea of a purely neurophysiological psychology,but that he never abandoned the project and indeed resurrected it in a new form on the bedrock of evolutionary biology. Sulloway insists that Darwinian biology in general and the work of Ernst Haeckel in particular was a major influence, perhaps 238 TELOS the major influence on Freud's mature thought. While this may be an overstatement, Sulloway shows that Haeckel's ideas (particularly the notion that ontogeny capitulates philogeny; that the development of a single embryo from conception to maturity mirrors the entire evolutionary development of the species) were a unifying theme in Freud's thought — a theme he never abandoned. To take but one example, the Oedipus complex as an ontogenetic event was seen by Freud as having a philogenetic complement in real events in human prehistory. The wish to murder one's father, which every male child experiences symbolically, was an actual prehistoric event in which bands of brothers conspired to murder the patriarchal father. The pervasive influence of Haeckel's ideas on Freud's thought has never been as thoroughly documented as in Sulloway's work. Whether the concept that ontogeny capitulates philogeny had for Freud the status of a scientific law or was merely a central organizing metaphor is, however, another matter. Another famous piece of psychoanalytic lore concerns Freud's relationship to Wilhelm Fliess. According to the tradition, says Sulloway, Fliess was something of a numerological mystic whose contributions to science were marginal at best and whose chief importance to Freud was as a source of emotional support during the period of Freud's self-analysis. Sulloway buys none of this. In the first place, he claims Fliess was by no means the crackpot he has been made out to be. Indeed, Fliess had a fully developed theory of infantile sexuality including recognition of the sexually gratifying character of oral and anal zones. Secondly, Fliess had independently arrived at the theory that libido develops in periodic thrusts of sexuality interrupted by a latency period. In addition, Fliess had a sophisticated notion of bisexuality which included the idea that neurotics often suffer from unconscious homosexual impulses — an idea that Freud reformulated in the notion that neuroses are the opposite of perversions. In these and many other instances, Sulloway documents Freud's debt to Fliess and he claims that Freud eventually broke with his colleague precisely because of his great unacknowledged debt. It was because of Freud's "obsessional need for intellectual immortality" and neurotic concerns for scientific precedence and originality and not a rejection of Fliess' theory of periodicity which led to a break between the two. Nor was Freud's emphasis on sexuality particularly original or indeed all that shocking to 19th-century scientific circles. Indeed, says Sulloway, sexology had become a respectable area of scientific inquiry and had been the subject of comprehensive study by Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Albert Moll and many others. Fully 300 pages of the book are devoted to a meticulous study of scientific antecedents to Freud's theory and the result, in spite of its reductionism, is a book that demonstrates the full measure of Freud's debt to evolutionary biology. Recognizing the importance of biology in Freud's thought is a blow to those who, following Marcuse and others, have sought to interpret psychoanalysis as a critical theory of politics and society. If Freud is to be interpreted exclusively as a socio-biologist then the socially necessary repression which Freud discussed in his later work remains as immutable as evolution itself and therefore changes in the social order could be expected to occur over milennia and not, as Marcuse believed, within the course of a lifetime. In this respect, Sulloway's work is like a cold shower, dampening, if not extinguishing, the left's enthusiasm for Freud. While a cold shower may be useful for temporarily diminishing desires, we will argue that the interpretive impulse springs libidinally eternal. Sulloway's Freud is but one partial understanding of Freud and his intellectual heritage. There have been and will be others. David Bakan, for example, in Sigmund REVIEWS 239 Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958), has disclosed a surprising family resemblance between Freud's work and Jewish mysticism. One could explore Freud's debt to ancient Greek thought. While Freud's constant reference to Greek mythology and Platonic thought has been widely discussed, it has never been adequately explained. Nor has the resemblance between Freud's thought and 19th-century German philosophy been fully explored. This is particularly true with respect to Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. We might conclude that a "comprehensive" understanding of Freud or, for that matter, of any intellectual figure, is simply not possible and that what we have instead are particular interpretations always tied to concrete social and political interests. Recall Freud's own thoughts on the subject: "Anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it couldn't be used" (Letters, 1960, p. 430). In this sense, then, there is and can be no such thing as a comprehensive biography; only interpretation, and any act of interpretation can never be separated from concrete personal, social and political interest. What is finally at issue in the perennial struggle for the definitive interpretation of Freud is the familiar competing interests represented by empiricist and dialectic modes of understanding. While Sulloway clearly represents empiricist interests, his work presents a useful and necessary criticism of the work of Marcuse and others. Clearly Freud took science in general and evolutionary biology in particular very seriously. Perhaps Marcuse erred in not taking seriously enough the complexity and revolutionary importance of Freud's early discoveries and may have focused his analysis too heavily on Freud's later speculative essays. It can be argued that Freud's originality lay not in his discovery of the unconscious, nor in his formulation of the antagonism between civilization and individual desire, but in his discovery that the unconscious speaks and that it has a structure. Among other things, Freud, with Hegel, recognized that the understanding subject participates in the creation of its own object, that there is no simple separation between the thinking subject and its object, as the empiricists would have it. In fact, Freud's originality lies in his discovery of an entirely new mode of reflexivity, which Jacques Lacan likens to the Copernican revolution. Just as Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth is not the center of the universe, so Freud demonstrated that the individual ego is not master in its own house. From this viewpoint, the central issue in interpreting Freud's thought is not the opposition between psychoanalysis and science but between an empiricist and a dialectic conception of science. The social and political implications of this dichotomy are clear enough. The empiricist tradition that Sulloway represents is a repressive one whose function, as Foucault shows in Madness and Civilization, is to isolate the experience of madness from human discourse in the triumph of instrumental reason and capital accumulation. A dialectic conception of science, on the other hand, proceeds historically through the explication of contradiction and, in so doing, offers the possibility of a dialogue with madness. Which of these two positions most clearly resembles Freud's own is, of course, a matter of interpretation. It is important to recall, however, that Freud's model of the mind, his theory of mental illness, and his method of treatment are all based on a conception of conflict in which the warring parties are always dialectically related. Secondly, Freud's account of mental illness as well as his model of the mind are 240 TELOS historical conceptions unfolding through the ontogenetic development of the individual and the philogenetic development of the species. The distinction between dialectic and empiricist interpretations of Freud is a distinction from which concrete political and social conclusions inextricably follow. In therapy, for example, an empiricist sees a symptom to be categorized with nosological precision. As a result, therapist and patient are forever isolated from each other, and psychoactive drugs become necessarily the treatment of choice. A dialectic understanding, on the other hand, poses the possibility of dialogue between therapist and patient and offers for the patient the liberating possibility of freely choosing to give up the symptom. One method is necessarily repressive, the other at least potentially liberating. From the viewpoint of critical theory, it is relatively easy to understand the necessarily repressive nature of a sociobiological reading of Freud. But, as Marcuse's work demonstrates, a dialectic analysis is no panacea either. If nothing else, Sulloway's book helps us to understand that Marcuse's optimistic and often extravagant claims concerning the malleability of human nature were in part based on his overemphasis on Freud's later speculative essays. Thus if psychoanalysis is to be interpreted as both a clinical theory of treatment and a critical theory of politics and society, Freud's early work and particularly his relation to 19th-century biology must be taken seriously. Freud's later essays applying psychoanalysis to social questions should therefore be understood as frankly speculative, profoundly suggestive, but not necessarily definitive. Therefore, to understand the critical content of Freud's work it is necessary to begin with what is essential; the theory of the unconscious and the technique of treatment, and to elaborate that theory. As for Sulloway, his work in itself would hardly merit serious consideration if it did not represent the voice of authority and an officially acceptable definition of the limitations of the possible. There is, however, something particularly galling about an orthodoxy that presents itself in the guise of radical revisionism. As a contribution to the sociology of knowledge Sulloway's work fails by virtue of its claim to scientific disinterestedness when in fact it is very much interested in the maintenance of the status quo and the medical and behavioral models of mental illness. Its positive value is that it helps us recognize that the romantic view which regarded Freud's self-analysis as an inaugural event in world history was more correct than even Freud's most orthodox followers understood. Larry Fuchser International Journal of Politics A Quarterly Journal of Translations T e 1„9 7 t ESS3 individuals: $37 Editor: Arnold C. Tovell, M. E. Sharpe, Inc. Provides translations of material that has appeared in scholarly journals, books, and legal documents throughout the world. cTW-E-Sharpe inc. 80 Business Park Drive. ArmonK. New York 10504