BOOKS
Self-Knowledge
BY D. W. HARDING THE centenary in 1956 of Freud's birth was not a favourable moment for assessing his achievement. His active work had not long been ended. His theories had for some time been under- going revision not only by psychotherapists like Homey, Fromm and Sullivan, but by some of his avowed followers. The effort of Freudians like Melanie Klein to see their new insights and altered emphases as developments of Freud's own views—to the concern of really Freudian Freud- ians like Edward Glover—makes it difficult at the moment to define Freud's own achievement. Freud and the Twentieth Century,* an American collection of essays, mostly stimulated by the centenary, has appeared about forty-two years too soon to have much chance of justifying its title. But it has features of contemporary interest.
Although referred to as a symposium it is only an anthology of separate papers (twelve reprinted and four written for this book), and divergent views are not brought, effectively together. Thus Mr. Alfred Kazin believes that the greatest part of the Freudian revolution, 'and 'one that really explains the overwhelming success of Freudianism in America, lies in the general insistence on individual fulfilment, satisfaction and happiness . . . the insistence on personal happiness repre- sents the most revolutionary force in modern times.'
But this view is left unrelated to Mr. Stanley Edgar Hyman's opinion that the therapeutic aim of 'true happiness' instead of Freud's 'modest relief from neurotic difficulties' is one of the deplorably sentimental deviations of Karen Hor- ney. Mr. Hyman's paper (Psycho-Analysis and the Climate of Tragedy') expresses, in a more emotionally wrought up way than the other essays, a dissatisfaction with Horney, Fromm, Sullivan and the other 'revisionists' that many of the American contributors share. In particular he is determined not to relinquish the pessimism that stems from the conviction that man's animal nature is evil and necessarily in conflict with social standards, and not to accept the revisionists' view of man 'as fundamentally good, innocent, and unfallen."Horney,' he writes, 'never doubts that when the patient has the courage to be himself it will be a good self. . . . Beneath everything there is some sort of ultimate, absolute "genuineness" in the personality, and it is this that giVes her her faith, against Freud's "disbelief in human good- ness and human growth," that "man has the capacity as well as the desires to develop his potentialities and become a decent human being." '
Mr. Hyman's attack on the neo-Freudians is based less on an argued case than on his personal conviction and his objection to trends in literature which he thinks their more optimistic views sanc- tion. 'If Freud produced a climate of opinion in which tragedy could again flourish . . . the neo- Freudians or "revisionists" have done their best to dispel it as quickly as possible.' And he relates this to what he sees as a lamentable tendency in many contemporary writers—he mentions Hem- ingway, Faulkner, Frost, Eliot, among others— to have 'followed their earlier tragic work with later mellowings.' The trouble with the revision- ists, he says, is that they pretend 'that we are well when we are in fact desperately ill, and they drive out art when it is almost the only honest doctor who will tell us the truth. If Freud showed us that human life was nasty, brutish, and short, and had always been, he was only holding the mirror up to our own faces, saying what the great philosophers and the great tragic writers have always said.'
This is an odd way to discuss a scientific theory and the criticisms brought against it—as though one's judgment of the literary trends to which a theory may perhaps be related could possibly be evidence of its validity. The editor of the book notes of his contributors' attitude to Freud, 'All, it happens, prefer him to . . . the American neo- Freudians,' and 'prefer' is the keynote of too many of the essays. Mr. Hyman in fact writes, 'Ulti- mately, the differences of Homey, Fromm, and Sullivan with Freud reduce themselves to a con- trasting view of human nature, to philosophic disagreement.' That, clearly, is to put the whole question beyond the range of science; and the con- tributors who argue the point seem not in the least perturbed. And yet Freud, in formulating his views, thought he was stating scientific facts.
The British Freudians who have issued the centenary lectures,t given for general audiences, pay no attention to the revisionists; they un- obtrusively revise. On the particular point that exercises Mr. Hyman, for instance, we find Dr. John Bowlby accepting the view 'that there is in human beings the germ of an innate morality which, if given the opportunity to grow, provides in the child's personality the emotional foundations of moral behaviour. It is a notion which puts beside the concept of original sin, of which psycho-analysis discovers much evidence in the human heart, the concept of original concern for others or original goodness which, if given favour- able circumstances, will gain the upper hand. It is a cautiously optimistic view of human nature, and one which I believe to be justified.' Dr. Bowlby's view has at least been squared with close clinical observation and is not the outcome merely of personal conviction or literary preference. Whether it is Freudian the outsider fortunately need not try to judge. It looks very much like one of the ideas put forward by Adler within the psycho-analytic circle in his early (and interest- ing) days, which led to his break with Freud. A recent and very skilful attemptt to rehabilitate Adler's reputation as a serious psychologist makes it look as if Freudian theory would have been
* FREUD AND THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Edited and selected by Benjamin Nelson. (Allen and Unwin, 28s.) t PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT.
Edited by John D. Sutherland. (Hogarth Press and Institute of. Psycho-Analysis, 25s.)
t THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ALERFD ADLER.
Edited and annotated by Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher. (Allen and Unwin, 30s.)
strengthened if Adler's theory of a natural impulse to affection as the origin of social feelings could have been assimilated in 1911 instead of being ejected.
Whatever disagreements there may be about Freud's theories, the method of psycho-analysis is fully accepted by all the very diverse contribu- tors to the American anthology, including Jacques Maritain and- Reinhold Niebuhr writing as Christian philosophers. The analytic method seems likely to stand as a permanent addition to human tools. It is a difficult tool to use. Not only that, but the ideal it implies—of regarding each person as unique and patiently exploring his mind without preconceptions—is not easily upheld in an age of generalisations based on averages. Gregory Zilboorg, the psychiatrist and historian of medical psychology, in one of the best of the essays, suggests that in psychiatry the last twenty- five years have seen a lapse from the ideals that psycho-analysis could have been made to serve. Mechanical methods have been preferred, and both psychology and psychopathology have tended towards the `disindividualisation' that modern States have found administratively con- venient. 'In our days we witness the emphasis on inventories, tests, and questionnaires to the detri- ment if not at the expense of the more direct study of the inner life of the person. And by inner life I do not mean the scientifically undefinable spiritual life of man, but the workings of the psychological apparatus within the living person in the latter's totality.'
Necessary though it is to distinguish psycho- analytic method, as Maritain does, from Freudian psychology and Freudian philosophy, the boun- dary is likely to blur if the analyst applying the method is also an adherent of the theory. Freudian theory in its various phases has implied rather rigid preconceptions of what would be found in each mind, although if the psycho-analytic method is followed scrupulously nothing prevents the revela- tion of totally unprecedented features of an individual personality, if they exist. The discipline of suspending all expectation and waiting for what the method brings to light is not likely to be main- tained With equal consistency and rigour by every analyst. But though that problem remains, it is nothing like as serious as it would be if Maritain's strangely archaic impressions of the nature of the psycho-analytic procedure were correct. He speaks as though free association to words suggested by the analyst were the essence of the method, he gives the recall of repressed traumatic experiences the sort of importance it was thought to have in the era of M. H. R. Rivers, and worst -of all he sees analysis as a 'single combat' between patient and practitioner. If things were like this there would be every justification for the doubts of intel- ligent and sensitive people who hesitate to 'submit themselves' to treatment by an analyst who is quite likely to be less intelligent, less educated and less subtle emotionally than they are themselves. But in such a case the safeguard lies—for practitioner as well as patient—in the scrupulous use of the analytic method, with the control it provides for them both. Freud originated a laborious and sternly disciplined method of extending self- knowledge far beyond the previous boundaries of honest self-examination; and this remains, what- ever may happen in the end to the theories. As Dr. Frederick J. Hacker writes of Freud, contrast- ing him with Marx and Kirkegaard, 'His pro- cedures are prosaic and unglamorous; they lack the ardent appeal of the sweeping solution. . . Applying Freudian theories to culture, religion, politics and one's own life may be no more than intellectual gesturing or adolescent display; finding out more about oneself through psycho-analysis is a strenuous step towards growing up.
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