As we now take up the subject of Freud's intellectual stance and
person-
ality as they are revealed in his theory, in his attitude toward his
col-
leagues, his opponents, and the world at large, we shall see that each
af
these symptoms of paranoia, with the possible exception of delusion, is
abundantly evident. It may seem surprising, to begin with, that the
founder of psychoanalysis should be thought guilty of the cardinal sin
of
projection, for
did he not extend suspicion even to his own thoughts and
motives? Partisans of psychoanalysis will tell us that this was his
greatest
achievement. But is it not rather the case that this suspicion, and the
pro-
found hostility that underlies it, was the very substance of Freud's
great
projection? The fact that Freudian suspicion respects no limit, the
fact
that it is total, betrays ... that it is a product of compulsive
rhetoric and
personal imperative rather than observation.... For the psychoanalytic
mind, nothing is what it seems. Every human act must be reduced within
the code of suspicion.
Employing the theory of narcissism, with its properly "uncanny"
power, Freud keeps in play the freedom of the mind to master the world
around it while acknowledging nothing beyond its own reflection.
Whereas the narcissistic consciousness of religion or metaphysics sees
itself positively reflected in the world that it "projects," the
Freudian rec-
ognizes the reflection of his wishes with mistrust. For both,
nevertheless,
the play of such wishes is coextensive with the psychological domain
itself, which means that the psychoanalyst can master this domain
without having to surrender attention to anything that is foreign to
his
own sense of order and desire. All he has to do is to reverse the
signifi-
cance of each symptom of mental life, unmasking each pretense of ide-
alism and bringing to light its subterranean connections with Eros and
aggression. The interpretive force of suspicion cannot be resisted.. .
. It
never fails to discover in the behavior of others the charm of
self-delusion,
the mistaking of desire for reality, and the temptation to credit the
honesty
of conscious motive....
The totalizing power of suspicion is a formidable weapon in the hands
of a
rhetorician like Freud who has the skill to evoke in his readers
an immediate sense of self-recognition. He asks that we reinterpret our
actions in an ironic and suspicious light, but in return we experience
a thrill
of comprehension. We derive a sense of mastery even in recognizing the
nature of our unfreedom. It is no slight to Freud's rhetorical gifts,
furthermore,
to recognize that suspicion is the most contagious of all attitudes
next
to simple fear, and that paranoia is the one communicable mental
disease...
Psychoanalytic practitioners themselves undergo therapy before taking
up
the work of analysis, so that their first confirming experiences of the
treatment
have to do with their own symptoms, anxieties, and problems. For these
reasons,
it is by no means evident that the people who make this form of therapy
a daily
pursuit are more likely to evaluate the theory in an objective light
than the general
public.
The fact that Freudian suspicion has the simplifying appeal of a projec-
tion helps to illuminate one of the central psychoanalytie myths-
the myth that an intellectual commitment to psychoanalysis demands a
libidinal sacrifice. One of Freud's assumptions is that the
psychoanalyst
differs from the paranoid in being able to rechannel his narcissistic
libido
into scientific investigation, or to achieve simple renunciations,
whereas
the paranoid, unable to cope with his repressed desire, regresses to a
primi-
tive, narcissistic state. Paranoids "love their delusions as they love
them-
selves. That is the secret," Freud once wrote, the implication being
that,
for such natures, self-love comes before the attachment to reality.
This is
where the scientist is superior, in his renunciation: thus Freud's
strange
boast to Sándor Ferenczi, "I have succeeded where the paranoiac
fails." . . .
But history has not borne out Freud's view that embracing psycho-
analysis requires psychoerotic, or "narcissistic," renunciation. Even
though psychoanalytic doctrine exacts a drastic form of intellectual
repression, it nevertheless seems to make some kind of satisfying
psycho-
logical return. For, contrary to psychoanalytic dogma, the movement has
commanded an attraction for the popular mind, a depth of commitment
among its adherents, and a level of acceptance among intellectuals all
of
which exceed what is justified by the scientific validation of the
theory.
Taken in broad strokes it seems to be, for many people, a compelling,
almost irresistible body of doctrin. Those who believe it vastly out-
number those who understand it. It is the allure, the charisma of
psychoanalysis that needs to be explained, not the imaginary resistance
it evokes. And there seems no better way to explain this allure than to
reconize its profound appeal to the mind's sense of what should be.
Freud's theory offers, then, after all of his disclaimers, the same
plea-
sure and attraction he imputed to the religious and philosophical
systems
be mocked; psychoanalysis and metaphysics cannot be distinguished
upon psychological grounds. But it would be negligent of the character
of
psychoanalysis to portray its sole appeal as that of philosophical
gener-
ality.
Psychoanalysis can legitimately claim to have brought its gaze to to
level of everyday life. And here we see the full, paranoid development
of
the interpretive system of suspicion..
. . In the most trivial signs it finds
the deepest significance. Nothing can be too small, or too large, for
its
attention: dreams, jokes, works of art, neuroses and psychoses,
totemism
and religion, group psychology, civilization itself - Freud
reinterpreted
the entire range of human experience. Inheriting a culture that had
stripped the world of significance, he discovered a new kind of signifi-
cance in every aspect of life that had ever once had a meaning. This is
what gives psychoanalysis what Ernest Gellner called its "world-filling
exhaustiveness." . . .
In a rare moment when Freud was attempting to restrain his tendency,
toward mistrust, he confessed that "the psychoanalytic habit of drawing
important conclusions from small signs is [ ... ] difficult to
overcome." To
comprehend the depth of Freud's habit-forming science of suspicion, and
with it the microscopic focus of its scrutiny, it is enough simply to
recall
the subjects treated in the first ten chapters of The Psychopathology
of
Everyday Life: The Forgetting of Proper Names, The Forgetting of
Foreign
Words, The Forgetting of Names and Sets of Words, Childhood Memo-
ries and Screen Memories, Slips of the Tongue, Misreadings and Slips of
the Pen, The Forgetting of Impressions and Intentions, Bungled Actions,
Symptomatic and Chance Actions, and Errors. Freud taught us in these
chapters to discover the aggressive, self-serving motives that were so
boldly and conspicuously displayed in the heroic origins of human cul-
ture, now still at work in every stray and covert motion of the
intellect.
Inadvertency, ignorance, failure in this view are never insignificant
but,
rather, signs for the adept. It is a strip tease of the unconscious:
"Every
change in the clothing usually worn, every small sign of carelessness-
such as an unfastened button - every trace of exposure, is intended to
express something which the wearer of the clothes does not want to
say straight out and and for which he is for the most part unaware."
Paranoia hardly seems an aberation in this context, and Freud, as
usual,
does not deny the resemblance between between his own operations
and those of the paranoid. Rather, he gives generous credit to paranoid
insight:
"A striking and generally observed feature of the behaviour of
paranoics Isic] is that they attach the greatest significance to the
minor details of other people's behaviour which wc ordinarily
neglect, interpret them and make them the basis of far-reaching
conclusions. [... ] The category of what is accidental and
requires no motivation, in which the normal person includes a
part of his own psychical performances and parapraxes, is thus
rejected by the paranoic as far as the psychical manifestations
of other people are concerned. Everything be observes in other
people is full of significance, everything can be interpreted.. . ."
The paranoid applies to others the suspicion that be, in his grandiose
delusion, so thoroughly deserves. And Freud knows that all of us
actually
deserve this suspicion, for none of us are truly different from the
para-
noid. And once Freud has given us this insight-possessed in a worthless
form by the paranoid, in scientific form by himself-we are ready to rec-
ognize the common egocentrism of humanity and to share the paranoid's
suspicion in all of its exquisitely detailed and systematic
elaboration.. . .
With such an attitude toward individual human beings, how threat-
ening must humankind appear to Freud in the mass. In his ingenious case
histories, like the analysis of "Dora" or of the "Wolf Man," be
exercised
the interpretive instruments of psychoanalysis to decode complexes of
symbols and motives that could never have been uncovered, or imagined,
by the patients themselves. These narratives compel by strangeness and
complexity. The unconscious imitates the movements of a tragic fate,
turning every evasion of the will to its own use, with results both
pitiful
and fearful.
But when it moves from the oedipal genre, the analysis of
individual minds and fates, to the life of social institutions and the
emo-
tional sources upon which they depend, the Freudian narrative becomes a
simple morality play. Here the paranoid's hostility toward the workings of
society is fully
developed. Every appearance of good must be exposed as
unconscious hypocrisy, every commitment to public interests
and to social institutions must be recognized for what it is - a
disguise for
narcissistic gratification or a painful instinctual concession.
Here is Freud, for instance, on the psychological origins of social
justice:
"What appears later on in society in the shape of Gemeingeist,
esprit de corps, "group spirit," etc., does not belie its derivation
from what was originally envy. No one must want to put him-
self forward, every one must be the same and have the same.
Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so
that others may have to do without them as well, or, what is
the same thing, may not be able to ask for them. This demand
for equality is the root of social conscience and the sense of
duty. It reveals itself unexpectedly in the syphilitic's dread of
infecting other people, which psycho-analysis has taught us to
understand. The dread exhibited by these poor wretches corre-
sponds to their violent struggles against the unconscious wish
to spread their infection on to other people; for why should
they alone be infected and cut off from so much? why not
other people as well? And the same germ is to be found in the
apt story of the judgement of Solomon. If one woman's child is
dead, the other shall not have a live one either. The bereaved
woman is recognized by this wish.
Thus social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was
first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of
an identification."
It is in passages like this that Freud's programmatic intentions become
clear. Only on the level of the individual can the true motives of
human
behavior be understood. Adherence to the social is a disguise: the good
for human beings lies in private satisfaction alone. Social commitments
depend upon paradoxical transformations of selfishness into harmony,
greed into generosity, society being held together by illusions of
justice
and solidarity that benefit the strong and gratify the resentment of
the
weak. The portrait of the syphilitic tormented by an unconscious spite
that can make its way into consciousness only as a painful form of
altruism, this is suspicion taken to a level of daring that must be
considered
marvelous....
There is only one fact that keeps psychoanalytic suspicion from
reaching the elevation of paranoid psychosis - the fact that the
psychoanalyst, unlike the fullblown paranoid, does not entfrely exempt
himself
from the domain of suspicion. His suspicion does not rest on private
grounds: it ascends to the level of the universal. The psychoanalyst is
thus, in a sense, even more suspicious than the paranoid, less
restricted in
the form of his projection, so that it returns upon himself. He
recognizes
his own narcissistic character, his own false idealism and ambitious
motives, as well as those of others. He sees himself as being dominated
and driven by an other, an unconscious, which he recognizes as his true
self, making the polite, idealistic character of his social persona
admit-
tedly a disguise.
Yet, by the peculiar logic of suspicion, the analyst turns these
recognitions
into an advantage for his theory and another source of its grandiose
appeal.
He portrays human consciousness as an ironized form of heroism, or
narcissism, yet the very acceptance of the irony implicit in the
Freudian
concept of narcissism is itself a test of strength.. . .
Here we must enter the consideration of Freud's own personaliry. Long
before he brought psychoanalysis into existence, Freud struggled with
his
need for heroic admiration. From the period of his engagement to Martha
Bernays, he was looking forward to the attention of his biographers,
who
would write the story of "The Development of the Hero." The young
Freud found it difficult to cope with the recognition that be might not
be
a genius, and could be heartened to have his friend Breuer recognize
his
inner resolve: "He told me he had discovered that hidden under the sur-
face of timidity there lay in me an extremely daring and fearless human
being. I had always thought so, but never dared tell anyone." Arriving
at
his theory of the unconscious, Freud was jubilant to pronounce himself
tbc "conquistador." Through all of the struggles with his errant
followers,
his need to prove his heroic nature only increased; thus be wrote to
Fer-
enczi toward the end of the World War, "I am still the giant." As much
as
any paranoid, Freud identified himself, in his nature and in his
intellec-
tual form of daring, with the most exalted figures of history: the
biblical
Joseph, Moses, Oedipus, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, William the
Conqueror, Columbus, Leonardo, Copernicus, Kepler, Cromwell, Danton,
Napoleon, Garibaldi, Darwin, Bismarck, and, inadvertently, even Zeus.
This was the company in which he habitually posed.
Yet beneath all of Freud's self-aggrandizement there was powerful and
gnawing sense of inferiority and thwarted ambition, a sense of being
resisted and disliked. During his studies with Charcot in Paris,
he
oscillated between grandeur and desperation. " I consider it a great
misfortune," he wrote to his fiancee, "that nature has not granted me
that indefinite something which attracts people. I believe it is this
lack
which has deprived me of a rosy existence. It has taken me so long m
win my
friends. I have bad to struggle so long for my precious girl, and every
time
I meet someone I realize that an impulse, which defies analysis, leads
that
person to underestimate me. This may be a question of expression or
tem-
perament, or some other secret of nature, but whatever it may be it
affects
one deeply." Freud repeated the sentiment twenty years later to Carl
Jung
"You are better fitted for propaganda," he wrote to his collaborator,
"for I
have always felt that there is something about my personality, my ideas
and manner of speaking, that people find strange and repellent, whereas
all hearts are open to you."
Freud's defensive stance had a powerful effect upon psychoanalysis as
an institution, giving rise to a peculiar, hermetic form of social
organiza-
tion. Its unusual exclusivity and cultishness reflected Freud's hostile
and
suspicious attitude toward the world at large.. . . The psychoanalytic
association was a throwback to the esoteric form of the ancient philo-
sophical academies. Almost from the beginning of psychoanalysis, its
founders had recourse to a canon of dogma with the primacy of the
libido
at its center. Adherence to this dogma separated initiates from the
opposing professional community.
The exceptionalist and schismatic character of the movement made it
susceptible to schisms within its own ranks and led to the
fortification of
an ever more rigid and defensive orthodoxy. In 1912, after the
defection
of Jung, Freud's "anointed [... ] successor and crown prince," had shat-
tered the morale of the movement, Freud's English disciple Frnest Jones
proposed a secret committee to be established around the person of the
master in order to ease the burdens of leadership. Freud was so much
taken with the scheme that he suspected it to be a forgotten idea of
his own.
"The Committee" was to be held together with bonds of special loyalty.
Each of its members promised to share research and responsibility with
the leader; each promised as well not to depart from the central
teachings
ol psychoanalysis without discussing his doubts with the others......
Like
the Paladins of Charlemagne, Jonas wrote Freud, its memebers would
"guard the kingdom and policy of their master." Freud celebrated the
first
meeting of The Committee by giving each of the members a Greek intaglio
from his collection, which they then had mounted on rings in
imitation
ot the itaglio of Jupiter, worn by their leader....Freuds immediate
concern
was that "First of all: This committee would have to be strictly secret in
its existence and in its actions."....The grandiosity of Freud, Jones
and the
others may seem comical and quixotic, but there is no evidence that
they
saw it in that way.
The founders of psychoanalysis made Freud's theory the basis of an
exclusive intellectual and professional commitment with special rituals
of
initiation; they also employed psychoanalytic theory to explain the
world's supposed reluctance to give psychoanalysis an immediate hero's
welcome. This reluctance was largely imaginary. In fact, Freud "pro-
jected," in the most uncomplicated sense of the term, his own hostility
onto the surrounding intellectual community, imagining that it was pecu-
liarly enraged by his findings. It is an obvious example of paranoid
cen-
trality.
In the mythology of psychoanalysis, the imaginary hostility of the
medical establishment was explained through the doctrine of resistance,
which held that the repression of libido in the majority of human
beings
made the theory of libido itself a source of anxiety and thus a cause
of
resentment.. . . The doctrine of resistance seemed to have been
designed
as much for polemical as for analytic purposes. Psychoanalysis came to
stand for the unconscious itself: the more its imperatives were
repressed,
the more powerful it seemed to become.. . . Freud had successfully
imported into science the style of the avant-garde, which feeds upon
the
appearance of rejection, outrage, and the breach of bourgeois manners.
His "movement" represents the most potent and long-lasting of all the
self-advertising cultural provocations of the early twentieth century.
. . .
It must be admitted, though, that whatever benefits the heroic myth of
the founder may have provided to the psychoanalytic movement, the
renunciations that he exacted even from his adherents proved to be exor-
bitantly great. For Freud's truly paranoid obsession with his autonomy
and originality as an investigator proved to be a constantly divisive
ele-
ment. All signs among his followers of reluctance to agree with Freud
had
to be explained by means of the suspicious logic of the unconscious,
revealing father complexes, narcissistic resistance, or oedipal
hostility,
depending upon the stage Freud's theory had reached. Of one of his
adherents, Freud remarked, "I cannot stand the parricidal look in his
eyes." Disagreement with Freud became a form of psychopatology and
members of the movement were adept at exposing the secret springs of
all
such transgressions. The practice of sell-interested diagnose
continues,
among analysts to this day.
No wonder, then, that so many of the most gifted early psychoanalysts
found themselves unable to continue under these humiliating terms,
Freud had to be the master. It was an imperative of his personality, as
he
was well aware, and he did not often choose to resist it. In The psy-
chopathology of Everyday Life, written before the earliest beginnings
af
organized psychoanalysis, he reveals that "there is scarcely any group
at
ideas to which I feel so antagonistic as that of being someone's
protegé
[... ] the role of the favourite child is one which is very little
suited indeed
to my character. I have always felt an unusually strong urge `to be the
strong man myself.' " ... He bad to be the primal father, yet he
wondered
why his disciples often could not accept his title. As he complained to
Abraham, "All my life I have been looking for friends who would not
exploit and then betray me."
Freud often derided his collaborators, but he did not want to meet his
like among them. In a letter of congratulation to the Viennese writer
Arthur Schnitzler, whose form of psychological intelligence had often
been
compared with his own, Freud speculated that the reason they had never
met, though living in the same city, was that Freud was afraid to
encounter
his Doppelgänger. It was a telling example in the genre of the
psychoana-
lytic compliment: Freud flattered Schnitzler in a self-congratulatory
way
by asserting the likeness between them, while assuming that this
likeness
would naturally produce a rivalry. The delusion of the double, it is
inter-
esting to note, is a concomitant of paranoia from which Freud on one
occasion actually suffered in hallucinatory form.
It is one of the greatest ironies of the psychoanalytic phenomenon that
Freud should have based his defense of the cultural value of science
upon
its ability to overcome the "over-estimation of thoughts," yet his most
egregious failing was his difficulty establishing the boundary between
thought and reality. His absurd exaggeration of hysteria as the cause
of
physical symptoms, and, indeed, his complete distrust of his patients'
understanding of their own experience continues to have clinical conse-
quences to this day. Yet the founder of psychoanalysis was himself by
no
means free of the tendency to let his obsessively charged preoccupations
alter his view of the world around him. He was the victim, for
instance, of
morbid superstitions and was particularly plagued by significant num-
bers. The scientist who believed that it was impossible to pick a number
at random without there being some subliminal motive for the choice
veretheless could not keep hmself from believing that the numbers that
appeared around him purtended some special significance related to his
fears of imminent death.
But it was not in numbers, those "persistent persecutors," that Freud
found the most threatening reflections of his own intellectual
activity; it
was in the developments from his theoretical vocabulary made by his own
colleagues, developments that frequently looked to the suspicious
master
like hostile urges in the direction of originaliry. The need to
maintain con-
trol over the body of thought known as psychoanalysis presented Freud
with the greatest difficulty. His entire career was beset with
controversies
about plagiarism and originality. There was a constant anxiety about
what
was his and what was not. And although Freud claimed that others' ideas
were of no use to him unless they came at a time when he was ready for
them, he proved enormously susceptible to their influence and even
noted his own tendency to "cryptamnesia," by which he "unconsciously"
contrived to forget his intellectual debts. He even came to believe
that
thoughts can be transferred from one mind to another not only uncon-
sciously but by telepathy! ...
It was in dealing with the heretics of psychoanalysis that Freud showed
the depths of his contempt for others' disagreements, often falling
back
upon his most self-vaunting rhetoric. In his History of the
Psycho-Analytic
Movement, written to excommunicate Adler and Jung, two arch-dissidents,
Freud mocks both of his former collaborators for having succumbed to
unconscious resistance, to fear of libido. Shrinking back from the
disci-
pline of psychoanalysis, they had lapsed into the false comforts of ide-
alism and system-building. Freud's grandiose and persecuted polemic
ends on the following note:
"Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea; they
become powerless when they oppose it. Psycho-analysis will
survive this loss and gain new adherents in place of these. In
conclusion, I can only express a wish that fortune may grant an
agreeable upward journey to all those who have found their
stay in the underworld of psycho-analysis too uncomfortable
for their taste. The rest of us, I hope, will be permitted whithout
hindrance to carry through to their conclusion our labors in the
depths."
Vast scholarly energy has been investecl in clarifying the relations
among the workers in the "underworld of psycho-analysis", with the
purpose of showing how the discoverers of the logic of the unconscious
failed to use their knowledge in such a way as to overcome the natural
human
propensities toward competition, selfishness, fear, and jealousy. Most
of
these studies have been written in a psychoanalytic spirit, using
Freuds
own concepts to analyze the causes of the divisions within his
movement.
In doing so, they merely repeat, sometimes in a more even-handed way
the hostile gestures of interpretation that were employed at the time.
They
demonstrate, therefore, the endless capacity of psychoanalysis to
generate
and then to capitalize upon suspicion. Even the master is fair game so
long as the suspicion is couched in psychoanalytic terms. What has not
been sufficiently appreciated, however, is the degree to which the theo-
retical vocabulary of psychoanalysis creates the perils of dissension
to
which the movement has been so remarkably vulnerable. In giving credit
solely to selfish motives in the event of intellectual dissent from
orthodox
teaching, it made every extension of the theory not initiated by Freud
himself a potential occasion for suspicion. No wonder psychoanalysis,
as Freud complained, brought out the worst in everyone.
One of the strangest and most absurd, indeed delusional, aspects of
Freud's behavior was his willingness to brand those who would not
submit to his authority as paranoids. Freud actually believed that the
break-up of his friendship with Wilhelm Fliess had had the power to
induce "a dreadful case of paranoia" in his former collaborator. The
diag-
nosis of paranoia helped Freud rationalize the hostility that arose
betwern
the two men when Fliess discovered that Freud had carelessly dissemi-
nated some of Fliess's ideas about human bisexuality, leading to their
publication. Fliess's paranoia was entirely in Freud's imagination! As
Frank Sulloway reasonably speculates, Freud's cavalier way of dissemi-
nating Fliess's intellectual property shows his own desire for revenge
against a man be felt had forsaken him.
In the midst of another break-up occurring some years after, Freud
wrote to Jones of Alfred Adler observing, "He is not very far from para-
noia, his distortions are gorgeous." A couple of months later he added,
"As to the internal dissension with Adler, it was likely to come and I
have
ripened the crisis. It is the revolt of an abnormal individual driven
mad by
ambition, his influence upon others depending on his strong terrorism
and sadismus." To James Jackson Putnam, and american supporter with
whom he was much less intimate, Freud was equally frank, denouncing
Adler as "a gifted thinker but a malicious paranoiac." His innovations
were "paranoivelties." The malice on Freud's part is apparent, but that
does not mean he did not believe what he was saying. He seems no less
sincere in making these charges than he was in making his claims that
psychoanalysis had encountered extraordinary cultural resistanee.. . .
Late in his career Freud even went so far as to disclaim that he had
the
temperament of a physician:
"After forty-one years of medical activity, my self-knowledge
tells me that I have never really been a doctor in the proper
sense. [... ] I have no knowledge of having had any craving in
my, childhood to help suffering humanity. My innate sadistic
disposition was not a very strong one, so that I had no need to
develop this one of its derivatives. In my youth I felt an over-
powering need to understand something of the riddles of the
world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute some-
thing to their solution".
This is a chilling admission from the most famous of therapists. We
might think to ascribe Freud's posture to modesty were it not supported
by a long record of comments in which he expresses distaste for his
patients and for human beings as a group: "In my experience most of
them are trash."
It is further to be noted that the "overpowering need" to solve "the
rid-
dles of the world" discovered by Freud at the core of his nature is
hardly a
point of modesty. Freud positions himself bravely as a descendant of
Oedipus. It is no part of his version of the myth that Oedipus
investigated
his origins in order to save his people; Freud's Oedipus is, like
himself,
entirely an intellectual hero. There is also something peculiar in the
terms
of Freud's disclaimer. It is because Freud has no strong "innate
sadistic
disposition" that he lacks the qualities of a physician. In other
words,
physicianly care can only be a disguise for a more fundamental sadism,
which must be hypocritically masked from conscious awareness in the
to be kind. Now we can see that Freuds lack of solicitude for humanity
is actually a virtue, part of his clear-sightedness, honesty,
narcissistic
independence, and freedom from animus. What it asserts, with a pecu-
liarly sinister form of self-congratulation, is a primal father's
notion of
virtue.
To illustrate Freud's performance in the role of primul father, I am
going to choose the most extreme example of the Freudian egotistical
sublime. It is the example of Freud's treatment of an adhcrent who
remained loyal to him even in the act of suicide, a fact that did not
make
up in Freud's view for his threatening endowment of talent. The story
of
Victor Tausk has been insightfully reconstructed by Paul Roazen.
Tausk
killed himself shortly after his return from service in the World War.
One'
of the circumstances surrounding Tausk's dejection, apparently, was
Freud's refusal to analyze him and his subsequent command that Tausk's
assigned analyst, Helene Deutsch, humiliatingly his junior in the move-
ment, be withdrawn so that Tausk could not interfere in her analysis
with
Freud. Freud disliked Tausk because Tausk had a way of developing
Freud's own ideas very much in the way Freud himself intended to
develop them. Freud came to view Tausk's analysis under the direction
of
his own analysand as an indirect way for Tausk to get at him. A primal
father cannot share his women, so Freud forced Helene Deutsch to
choose between himself and Tausk, with disastrous consequences.. . .
Freud reported the suicide to Tausk's former lover, his sycophantic
devotee, Lou-Andreas Salome: as a former friend of Nietzsche and lover
of
Rilke, her adherence to the psychoanalytic movement and attachment to
its founder were sources of considerable pride to Freud. The note of
tri-
umph over a former rival for Salome's regard is impossible to mistake:
"In his letter to me he swore undying loyalty to psycho-
analysis, thanked me etc. But what was behind it all we cannot
guess. After all he spent his days wrestling with the father
ghost. I confess that I do not really miss him: I had long real-
ized that he could be of no further service, indeed that he con-
stituted a threat to the future."
Roazen's account of this episode leaves little doubt that the "father
ghost" with whom Tausk was struggling was Freud himself. Tausk's
friends "in that tiny subculture" took it for granted that "if Freud
dropped
a man it could lead to his self-extinction." Tausk was not the only
example.
Freud's letter reveals a primal fathers's superiority, which is
responsible
to no one.....It is taken for granted that the future interests of the
movement
override any individual concern for Tausk's welfare; indeed, the
meaning
of his existence is altogether identified with
his contribution to that
future. Freud's sense of destiny justifies the
dictates of his
pride and fear with a flawless theoretical economy.. . .
During the battles of his later life Freud comported himself with an
Olympian superiority to human feeling, refusing to admit satisfaction
in
the world's homage, which he had so relentlessly pursued, refusing to
utter good wishes to his admirers -- this being an unacceptable
concession
to the "omnipotence of thoughts"-and declaring any altruism that might
have characterized his life to be something mysterious and not
necessarily
admirable:
"Why I -- and incidentally my six adult children as well -- have
to be thoroughly decent human beings is quite incomprehensible to me."
Only Freud had the strength -- and the entitlement -- to live out this
much
ol the wisdom of psychoanalysis. His paranoid suspicion toward the
\vorld grew up from a fundamental mistrust of his own nature, which be
learned to convert into a supreme intellectual advantage.
In the light of the facts presented here, let us now review Freud's
own account of his discovery of psychoanalysis: the naive modesty, with
which he set his findings forth, the hostile response -- imaginary --
with
which they were received, and the slow recognition of the immense
importance that this hostility betokened for his achievement. Now that
wc have become familiar with the suspicious manner in which Freud
habitually treats his own motives, his claim to the unselfish idealism
of
the discoverer rings distinctly false. Yet there is a strange
conviction here,
too, the conviction of a man whose sense of worth is powerfully
sustained
by an opposition that is the product of his imagination:
"I did not at first perceive the peculiar nature of what I had dis-
covered. I unhesitatingly sacrificed my growing popularity as a
doctor, and the increase in attendance during my consulting
hours, by making systematic enquiry into the sexual factors
involved in the causation of my patients' neuroses; and this
brought me a great many new facts which finally confirmed
my conviction of the practical importance of the sexual factor.
I innocently addressed a meeting of the Vienna Society for
Psychiatry and Neurology with Krafft-Ebing in the chair,
expecting that the material loss I had willingly undergone
would be made up lor by the interest and recognition of my
colleagues. I treated my discoverics as ordinary contributions
to science and hoped they would be received in the same
spirit. But the silence which my communications met with, the
void which formed itself about me, the hints that were con-
veyed to me, gradually made me realize that assertions on on the
part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses cannot
count upon meeting with the same kind of treatment as other
communications. I understood that from now onwards I was
one of those who bad "disturbed the sleep of the world," as
Hebbel says, and that I could not reckon upon objectivity and
tolerance. Since, however, my conviction of the general accu-
racy of my observations and conclusions grew even stronger,
and since neither my confidence in my own judgement nor my
moral courage were precisely small, the outcome ol the situa-
tion could not be in doubt. I made up my mind to believe that
it had been my fortune to discover some particularly important
facts and connections, and I was prepared to accept the fate
that sometimes accompanies such discoveries.
I pictured the future as follows: -- I should probably succeed
in maintaining myself by means of the therapeutic success of
the new procedure, but science would ignore me entirely
during my lifetime; some decades later, someone else would
infallibly come upon the same things -- for which the time was
not now ripe -- would achieve recognition for them and bring
me honour as a forerunner whose failure had been inevitable.
Meanwhile, like Robinson Crusoe, I settled down as comfort-
ably as possible on my desert island. When I look back to
those lonely years, away from the pressures and confusions of
to-day, it seems like a glorious heroic age. My "splendid isola-
tion" was not without its advantages and charms."
The reader who has assented to the foregoing analysis of freudian
psycjology will ahrdly need a commentary upon this passage. One
can only admire the rhetoric by which which Freud creates his
grandiose, magical, almost cosmic drama of unself-conscious
virtue that was met with, instead of applause, an unexpected and
meaningful silence, a "void" gathering round, full of disturbing "hints"
and then the sudden recognition that the "world's sleep" had been
inadvertently troubled, with ominous consequences that would forever
set the innocent inquirer beyond the pale of human consideration. So
what can he do but decide to believe in
himself, gather his moral
courage," which was not "precisely small," and await
in
splendid isolation" the verdict of the future? Hostility, suspicion,
strange
significance, heroic isolation, and embattled self-reliance -- all the
para-
noid vices and virtues are here.. . .
Let there be no mistake about the kind of explanation that I am
proposing in order to illuminate the form of psychoanalytic thought and
the source of its allure. I am not turning Freud's idea of paranoia
back
upon him. That would be merely to repeat his own self-reduction. What I
am drawing to attention is the fact that his self-conception, his
conception
of the human subject, is given in the image of the paranoid, and that
this
gesture is inherently self-fulfilling.
The power of psychoanalysis lies
in the ingenious manner in which
it permits reductive thinking to extend its authority by means of an
absolute psychological suspicion, leading to
the construction of a
most gratifyingly systematic paranoia. Freud the
theorist
displays every feature of paranoid thinking. Yet all of these features,
so
inseparable from Freud's personality, spring with unassailable logic
from
the premises of his science. In this paranoia we are not dealing merely
with a psychologically aberrant condition but, rather, with a
self-sustaining
intellectual dynamic. It is the prevalence of this intellectual dynamic
that
causes modern people to see themselves so movingly reflected in person-
alities like those of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Freud, allowing these
agi-
tated and frequently deluded intellectuals to assume a prominent place
in
history without embarrassment.
 
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