BOWMAN, M. The Concept of Science As A Defense Against Psychoanalysis PDF

THE LAST RESISTANCE
SUNY series, Alternatives in Psychology

Michael A. Wallach, editor
THE LAST RESISTANCE
The Concept of Science as a

Defense against Psychoanalysis
MARCUS BOWMAN
State University of New York Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bowman, Marcus R.
The last resistance : the concept of science as a defense against
psychoanalysis / Marcus Bowman.
p. cm.—(SUNY series, alternatives in psychology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-5451-7 (acid-free)—ISBN 0-7914-5452-5 (pbk. :
acid-free)
1. Psychoanalysis—Philosophy. 2. Freud, Sigmund,
1856–1939. I. Title. II. Series.
BF173 .B717 2002

150.19'5—dc21 2002022761
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
CHAPTER ONE.
INTRODUCTION: DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF SCIENCE
Science and the Corrosion of Tradition 1
Science and the Self 8
The Metaphors of Science 13
Science and Consensus 19
The Distortion of Defense 28
CHAPTER TWO.
PLACING PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A SCIENCE 37
The Cartesian Separation of Mind from Science 37
Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics 43
Freud’s Own Remarks on the Classification of
Psychoanalysis 54
CHAPTER THREE.
NIETZSCHE AND THE CRITIQUE OF INTENTION 61
The Challenge to Dualism from Pragmatism 61
Nietzsche’s Critique of Intention 68
Applications to Psychopathology 77
CHAPTER FOUR.
ISSUES FROM STUDIES ON HYSTERIA 85
Individuation and Neurosis 85
Breuer’s Case of Anna O. 92
The Case of Elisabeth von R. 97
Catharsis and Psychoanalysis 106
v
vi The Last Resistance
CHAPTER FIVE.
DEFENSE AND THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY 117
Defense and the Conflict between Hunger
and Overabundance 117
Exception and Rule in Freudian Metapsychology 128
General Summary and Conclusion 132
NOTES 139
BIBLIOGRAPHY 171
INDEX 179
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Jane Bunker and Marilyn Semerad at State

University of New York Press for their help in the completion of this
work. I am indebted also to Margaret Copeley for copyediting the
text. Some material in this book, particularly in chapter two, ap-
peared in an earlier form in my article “On the Idea of Natural Sci-
ence as a Resistance to Psychoanalysis” in Psychoanalysis and
Contemporary Thought, Vol. 19 (1996): 371–402. I am grateful to the
editors of that journal for permission to review here some of the
points that were made there.
vii
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Chapter One
INTRODUCTION: DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY

AND THE PROBLEM OF SCIENCE
SCIENCE AND THE CORROSION OF TRADITION
The problem of the relation between psychoanalysis and

science is rooted in the way science has changed our un-
derstanding of our relation with the rest of nature. It can
be understood only when viewed in the context of this
change. In the past, human beings believed they stood
apart in some fundamental way from nature. Modern sci-
ence has undermined this dualist belief. The most impor-
tant consequence of the decline of dualism has been the
decline of faith in tradition and received wisdom and a
corresponding increase in a critical attitude towards these
things. In psychoanalysis and depth psychology this is re-
flected in the questioning of personal assumptions, preju-
dices, and convictions. The aim of this is to achieve a
deepened level of personal emotional autonomy. Emo-
tional autonomy is characterized by the capacity to live
fruitfully by conditional values, that is, by values and
aims that are always open to reexamination, rather than
being dependent upon the idea of unconditional impera-
tives that are assumed to be inherently beyond question.
The questioning of the scientific credentials of psycho-
analysis in recent times has been motivated, in large part,
by an unconscious wish to return to a more unconditional
world and thereby to lessen the demands of autonomy. Its
underlying aim is to argue that a scientific culture does
not in fact impose this ethic of autonomy on us.
Until at least relatively recent times, most human beings be-

lieved there was an essential difference between what went on in
1
2 The Last Resistance
their own minds and what went on in the rest of nature. In particu-
lar, they thought themselves to be motivated in some way clearly
distinct from other animals. If they were asked to clarify that dis-
tinction, they would have been likely to say that human beings had
the capacity to reason and the capacity to make moral judgements of
right and wrong whereas other creatures lacked these capacities.
Human beings had a reasoning soul, linking them to something di-
vine, to something, that is, above and beyond the principles govern-
ing the rest of nature. Other creatures did not have such a soul.
There is no doubt how prevalent this view once was. All the most
influential shapers of European moral thought endorsed it. From Plato
and Aristotle in the ancient world, through to Descartes and Kant in
more modern times, this view of the human animal has been the gov-
erning one, the official view, as it were. When Descartes claims that
reason is “the only thing which makes us men and distinguishes us
from the animals,” he is speaking for this predominant tradition.1
In the last two hundred years or so, as we all know, this ancient
consensus has broken down. The dualism that drew a clear distinc-
tion between human beings and the rest of nature has lost its gov-
erning role in Western thought. It has been displaced, of course, by
the rise of modern science.
Whatever else it may be besides, modern science is the story of
human beings pulling things apart to study more closely how they
work. Driven by this impulse of curiosity, the sciences have taught
us more and more about the role of necessity in events. More pre-
cisely, they have taught us how to describe ever more accurately the
conditions behind events.2 That is to say, they have taught us to de-
scribe events ever more carefully within the context of other events,
rather than having to regard things as disconnected and therefore
mysterious. Drawing ever wider and more intricate connections be-
tween things, the sciences have inevitably changed our sense of our
own relation with nature. As we have learned ever more accurately
to describe the conditions behind our experiences, we have seen our-
selves drawn ever more deeply into nature. The idea that there is
some fundamental disjunction between ourselves and nature has
seemed ever more implausible.
Certain episodes in the history of the sciences have become fa-
miliar symbols of this deepening understanding of the conditions of
nature, and of the deepening implication of human beings within na-
ture. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Copernicus and his
successors showed there is nothing privileged about our physical
home. It is only one of probably countless similar dependent stellar
Introduction 3
systems. In the nineteenth century Darwin made plain there is noth-

ing privileged about our organic nature either. We are just another
branch on the tree of life. We fight for a place in the sun along with
the other creatures. We have been made what we are by the long his-
tory of that fight, and in sickness and in health we are shaped still by
the demands of organic competition. Seventeenth-century cosmol-
ogy and nineteenth-century evolutionary theory are universally re-
garded as the two unequivocal success stories of science.
The conditional narratives of science like these have, however,
been achieved at a particular price. It is not just that they have un-
dermined the idea that human beings have a “free,” that is, a de-
tached, unconditioned will guiding their thoughts and actions. When
all is said and done this is a highly abstract idea and the general de-
cline of belief in it has probably changed the behavior and experience
of human beings little, if at all. The real, tangible price exacted by the
sciences is to be found elsewhere. It is to be found in their relent-
lessly corrosive effect on the power of received wisdom. What the
narratives of science have so greatly weakened, in other words, is the
power of custom and tradition. This is the most important practical
consequence of the fading of dualism, of the fading of the idea that
there is some fundamental separation between human beings and the
rest of nature.
It is not just this or that particular custom or tradition that has
been undermined by science. Faith in tradition as such has been un-
dermined.3 Five hundred years ago, almost any idea that had the au-
thority of long tradition on its side became by virtue of that fact
more acceptable. Even a hundred years ago tradition could confer au-
thority on an idea. What has changed is that now no idea—certainly
no idea that aspires to scientific credibility—can successfully defend
itself against criticism by resorting to the authority of tradition.
From a historical perspective this amounts to a fundamental shift in
human attitudes. For the first time in history, perhaps, we now feel
under a positive obligation to question what is traditional, old and
sacred. Science, in other words, has generated a new kind of ethical
imperative: we must not be governed by tradition; instead, we must
govern ourselves.
The divisions within ourselves created by this new obligation
are deeper than we generally realize. In one way or another, we are
all now at war with what we have inherited. And this is true not just
of the larger historical traditions but also of the private customs and
habits we have each personally inherited from family and home. Be-
cause this internal war of the spirit causes us so many stresses and
strains, older, more dualist ways of thinking about the world retain
a continuing, though unconscious, appeal for us. To go back to a
world where the critical spirit of science was excluded from our
most personal valuations and experiences would be to go back to a
world of significantly greater certainty, greater trust in precedent,
and hence less intense inner conflict. The appeal of such a prospect
is reflected in the widespread attempts in modern intellectual life to
draw limits and boundaries for science. The arguments we have seen
in recent times questioning the scientific status of psychoanalysis
are one important part of this. One way or another, all these argu-
ments about psychoanalysis and science have attempted to with-
draw science from the personal life and confine it to the areas it
occupied before Freud put pen to paper.
The debates in contemporary life about just where the legiti-
mate boundaries of science are to be drawn are symptomatic of the
fact that we are torn in our attitude towards science. We want the
power that science promises. But in an inarticulate way we are anx-
ious about losing what little remains of our traditions. We fear to
lose these remains because it is from our traditions and customs that
we take our sense of identity, our sense of who we are. Tradition
gives us a sense of belonging in some particular place and, more im-
portant, to some particular community. This sense of belonging ap-
pears to be a vital part of human self-esteem and self-assurance.
Perhaps this is because it is by adhering to traditions and customs
that we have always preserved ourselves from the potential chaos of
divergent inclinations within us, and prevented it from leading to
paralysis. The less tradition there is to adhere to, the more we have
to organize this potential chaos in a conscious and deliberate way
ourselves. This organizing of potential chaos is the characteristic
burden of modern life.
What we do not know is how far we can carry this process of
sloughing off tradition. Historically, human beings have never been
able to live in a creative way without traditions and it is not clear to
what extent they can dispense with them without losing the power
to be creative. The pressure which everyone is conscious of in mod-
ern life to make decisions for the shorter term only, at the expense of
longer term objectives, is a reflection of the disappearance of larger,
overarching traditions. This raises the possibility that as a culture,
because of science, we may already face an erosion in our deeper cre-
ative capacity. If we do go on replacing what remains of our unexam-
ined customs with scientific truth we cannot be sure what will
become of our creative humanity, of our sense of self-worth, of our
Introduction 5
sense of duty towards ourselves and towards others.4 As we leave ever

further behind a culture in which we were sure we were something
special, we don’t know how much of our sense of what it means to be
human may yet have to be sacrificed.
It is questions like these and the fears that go with them that an-
imate contemporary arguments about what science is and what its
legitimate boundaries are. And they also animate the controversies
over psychoanalysis. Freud carries the scientific spirit of inquiry into
the realm of our most personal customs and traditions. In general,
these are the customs we acquire as we interact with our immediate
family as we grow up. Freud found a way of asking questions about
these customs, and the conditions behind them, that is unmatched in
its penetration. Some of the answers he made to his own questions
are mistaken. Some of the answers later psychoanalysts and others
have made to his questions have also been mistaken. But the ques-
tions themselves have proven so illuminating that we cannot now
avoid asking them. Their very power, however, provokes the uncon-
scious anxiety that they may rob us of what is left of our customs and
the sense of identity we get from these customs. Fundamentally, it is
this underlying anxiety that has made the controversies over psycho-
analysis so intense, and often so unforgiving.5
The focal point for these controversies has been the question of
the precise relationship between psychoanalysis and the rest of sci-
ence. This should not surprise us. After all, if it could be shown that
psychoanalysis was at variance with the tenets of science, this
would invalidate, or at least seriously undermine, the challenge it
poses to our personal customs. Most significant of all, it would mean
that the spirit of science actually did not impose an obligation to
question how our characters are shaped by personal experiences and
early identifications. A deep, unconscious wish would thereby be
satisfied: the wish that we can have a culture based on science, with-
out the final threat to our sense of who we are.
The controversies we have seen over the scientific status of psy-
choanalysis are, therefore, ultimately about science itself, rather
than psychoanalysis as such. They are about our hopes and fears
from science and the divisions within us between the wish to push
science to its limits and the wish to confine science for fear it un-
dermines us. Properly understood, the arguments in recent times
about the scientific status of psychoanalysis are only the most re-
cent and overt manifestation of a conflict that has been brewing for
a number of centuries. From at least the time of Copernicus, science
has generated a conflict between a sense of obligation to truth and a
sense of obligation to tradition. To understand the modern argu-

ments about psychoanalysis we have to bear in mind this wider his-
torical context.
The conflict provoked with tradition by the rise of modern sci-
ence is revealed most clearly in the attempts by philosophers after
Copernicus to define science and trace its limits. Some of the most
influential of modern philosophers, like Descartes and Kant for in-
stance, sought to reconcile science with tradition by doing this.
They tried to show that actually there is not a conflict between
them. This is the psychological key to understanding their work and
it is the key to understanding their influence: they tried to defuse a
gathering crisis no one knew how to confront.
For Descartes in the seventeenth century the way to reconcile
science and tradition was to make as unequivocal as possible the an-
cient distinction between mind and matter. Descartes conceives sci-
ence as the mind’s knowledge of matter, its knowledge of what it
sees looking out through the windows of the soul onto the world.
Presenting the problem as one of how we can know this world with
certainty, he then argues that this knowledge actually depends upon
the traditional certainties of faith in God. Without this faith, he in-
sists, we could never trust our knowledge.6 The unspoken argument
in all this is that if science depends upon the traditions of faith, it
obviously cannot be a threat to them.
For Kant, working a century and a half after Descartes, the way
to address the conflict between tradition and knowledge was to
argue that science is founded upon a series of highly intricate intel-
lectual categories. These, he argued, are sealed off from the cate-
gories upon which rest morality and faith. According to this view,
science is not a threat to faith, because science and faith inhabit en-
tirely different intellectual worlds.7
Descartes and Kant did help to allay the unarticulated anxieties
generated by the rise of modern science, for a time. But what they
did not do was to help the development of a serious science of the
human psyche. On the contrary, they argued, in effect, that such a
science would be a contradiction in terms. According to their way of
looking at the world, natural science simply cannot tell us anything
essential about human volition and the traditions and customs that
condition it. This viewpoint, implicit in Descartes, becomes explicit
in Kant.8
A science of human volition finally did emerge, however, at the
end of the nineteenth century, with Nietzsche and with Freud. In-
evitably, it proceeds from presuppositions that are radically divergent
Introduction 7
from those of the two great dualist philosophers. This is precisely

why it is the ideas of Descartes and Kant that are still used, in a re-
ceived form, to try to invalidate that science. We shall consider this a
little more closely in the pages ahead.
Of course, there have been philosophers of a different intellec-
tual temperament, philosophers like Hume, for instance, in the
eighteenth century, or like Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, in the
nineteenth. Writers like these accept that the development of sci-
ence does indeed entail the loss of ancient and fundamental as-
sumptions about the nature of human beings and the human mind.
In the view of thinkers such as these, we have to accept that human
reason is not in fact “complete and entire,” as Descartes maintains
that it is.9 “Nature will always maintain her rights, and prevail in
the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever,” as Hume puts it in
a powerful assertion of the monist position.10 The implication is that
the human soul is not immune from critical scientific scrutiny. On
the contrary, just like everything else in nature, the processes of
human thought and feeling are conditioned, and therefore must in
principle be amenable to scientific exploration.
Such a realization, for a man of Schopenhauer’s temperament,
seems to offer only the despair of a world driven by a godless “will.”
If we are just the plaything of our natural passions, he concludes, the
best thing is to live with as few passions as possible.11 For others,
like Kierkegaard, the only way to save a sense of what is sacred in
man from being swept into the contingencies of nature is to uncou-
ple the concept of the soul from rational argument altogether. For
such a thinker, the soul can be saved now only at the price of a sev-
erance of the dialogue with science.12 This is the position of existen-
tialism which, of course, in one form or another has had a major
impact on the thought of the last hundred years.
Hume, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard are very diverse thinkers.
Even in their diversity, however, they are each closer to the spirit of
modern depth psychology than are Descartes and Kant. They are so,
because none of them pretends that there is not a profound conflict
between science and the traditions of faith and morality. They square
up to this conflict, while the dualists try to talk around it.
Nevertheless, perhaps their somewhat pessimistic reactions to
the development of science are premature. Certainly, science is in
the process of a major assault on all our received notions of what it
means to be human, just as it has already revised all our received no-
tions about material and organic nature. We know that science is in
that sense clearing the ground. What we do not yet know is whether
we are going to be able to build something genuinely robust and

fruitful on that cleared ground. Just possibly, however, out of this
painful collision between knowledge and faith, there might yet
emerge a new, healthier understanding of what it means to be
human. Perhaps the soul can after all survive in a scientific world,
perhaps even find new kinds of strength in it.
SCIENCE AND THE SELF
Before Freud the sciences were esoteric, in that each sci-

ence studied experiences that were accessible only to men
who became specialists in that science. Freud changed
this by making everyday, personal experiences which
everyone shares for the first time the subject of science.
He thus drew into science the problems of the self, of
identity, of the soul. This has drawn the criticism of those
who believe that the soul is a valid notion but one that
has no place in science. It has drawn also the criticism of
those who believe that the notion of the soul is a relic of a
prescientific age and is in the process of being abolished
by science. However, whichever of these two positions
they adopt, the modern critics of depth psychology all re-
vert to conceptions of science that reached maturity be-
fore the twentieth century. That is to say, they take their
models of science from a time when the problems of the
soul and the problems of science were still clearly sepa-
rated out one from another. They deny, in other words,
that the form of science itself may undergo evolution so as
to include the soul.
Science has been slowly changing our perspective on ourselves

for many centuries. Until the nineteenth century, however, it was
doing so in a way that was rather remote from the everyday concerns
of most people. Freud changed this. He brought science home. Before
him, the sciences were all more or less esoteric. They studied con-
ditions behind experiences that were familiar only to very restricted
groups of men who were practiced in those experiences. For in-
stance, in the early seventeenth century Kepler wrestled to work out
the mathematical formulas that describe the periods of the planets.
As he did so, only a handful of men were familiar with the dimen-
sions of the problem to be solved. To this day, the great majority of
Introduction 9
us can only take on trust that it has been solved. In the nineteenth
century, Darwin spent years trying to satisfy himself that competi-
tion really could account for divergent evolution. Again, only a rela-
tively small group of people have ever been sufficiently familiar with
the data to judge how well his theory actually works.
Freud developed a science that is not at all like this. He consid-
ered experiences that are familiar to everyone, experiences that do
not require special skill or special instruments; they require only
that one be human. He made science personal in a way it had not
been before. Copernicus and Kepler, and Newton, and Darwin all
made human beings reexamine the way they think about the world.
Freud made them reexamine the way they feel about themselves.
This is the most important reason psychoanalysis seems so anom-
alous among the sciences. Generally, it is the methods of psycho-
analysis that are criticized as unscientific. Whole libraries have been
written on how these methods fail to live up to the standards of sci-
ence. But, ultimately, this is not the thing that makes it anomalous.
The thing is that it studies experiences that are familiar to everyone,
and not just to a community of specialists. The apparatus of the
physical sciences and their esoteric reasoning are necessary to make
possible remote and unusual regions of experience. In psychoanaly-
sis these things are simply absent. Many of the familiar connota-
tions we have come to associate with science—like the laboratory,
the technical instrumentation, the sophisticated mathematics—
never make an appearance in psychoanalysis.
A further problem that people encounter when they are asked to
think of psychoanalysis as a science is that although the experiences
psychoanalysis explains are familiar to everyone, the account it offers
of the conditions behind those experiences is in many ways esoteric
and difficult. Freud writes with great clarity, but his ideas are not as
accessible as they can seem at first sight. The key ideas of psycholog-
ical defense and displacement, for instance, are intricate, they have
many ramifications, and they are not easy to understand properly.
They require a significant degree of thought and learning. Freud thus
explains intimate and familiar experiences with unfamiliar and de-
manding ideas. It is not comfortable to have one’s most personal ex-
periences treated in this way and this is a further reason why there is
always a receptive audience for the claim that to proceed in this way
is not scientific.13
Of all the sciences, psychoanalysis is the one that explores that
region of experience that is most familiar of all—it is so familiar it
does not even have an agreed name. We can refer to it as the “I,” as
Freud often does. We can call it “the soul,” as Freud also does.14 More
simply, we can call it the region of the self. There is no perfect word
to cover this region of the most intimate and familiar of everyday
human experiences, which everyone shares.15
Studying the dynamics of this self, depth psychology views
human beings wholly within nature, but wishes at the same time to
do proper justice to the essential strangeness of human beings. This
is a difficult intellectual position to maintain because it tends to
draw the accusation either that one is hanging on to outmoded dual-
ist notions—something that the soul, because of its long religious as-
sociations, can readily be portrayed as being—or, that one is naively
applying science in an inappropriate way to human complexities.
These, in fact, are just the two directions from which Freud’s
claims to science have always been criticized. They are criticized,
first, by those who believe that the principles of science we have
learned from the study of nature in the past are paramount. Critics
who take this view maintain that these scientific principles must
not be compromised by what they see as Freud’s misguided and pre-
mature efforts to accommodate the peculiarities of human beings
within the sphere of science. They are criticized, second, by those
who believe that faithfulness to the peculiarities of the human con-
dition is the essential thing. These critics maintain that Freud is
guilty essentially of a contradiction in terms in trying to describe
those peculiarities within a framework that calls itself natural sci-
ence. The first criticism can be regarded as positivist, the second as
existentialist. Positivism maintains, in effect, that the soul is a fic-
tion; it is something that will be replaced eventually by more scien-
tific notions. Existentialism maintains, in contrast, that the soul has
its own inalienable rights with which science simply has nothing to
do. Both viewpoints, however, lead in practice to much the same re-
sult: the complex pathways of internal human conflict are effec-
tively excluded from rational inquiry and investigation.
Psychoanalysis is precisely an inquiry into the conditions of in-
ternal human conflict. Specifically, it is an inquiry into what, for want
of a better metaphor, is often called the “child” within the self. In psy-
choanalytic work, we are exploring the implications of Nietzsche’s
dictum that within nature, man is the child as such.16 This is the way
we give expression to the exceptional place of the human animal in
nature, while emphasizing that it is not exempt from nature.
It is important to underline at the outset one thing that the
child within the self is not. It is not the historical or biological child
of human infancy. The child within the self is, therefore, not to be
Introduction 11
found in the memories of infancy. This mistake is the single most

prevalent error in the critical literature on psychoanalysis, where re-
peatedly we find the unconscious misconstrued as forgotten child-
hood memory.17
The child within the self is a metaphorical expression for the in-
herently divided or fissured nature of human intention. Even into
adulthood we are like children because we are torn perpetually be-
tween the need to find security and the need to grow. When we
speak of the child within the self we speak of this perpetual suspen-
sion between the need for the security of custom, and the need to
explore the limits of custom and to make something new. The child
within is an expression of the intrinsically ambivalent nature of all
our wishes along their entire length. Our wishes are always divided,
always fissured, always equivocal.
In psychoanalytic science we consider human action and expe-
rience insofar as it is conditioned by this inherent fissuring in our in-
tentions. We seek to make the self less afraid of its own ambiguities,
and more able to take responsibility for governing them. The aim is
to make the self stronger, more creative, less resentful, less depen-
dent on fictitious certainties, and less addicted to the experience of
suffering.
We are all nevertheless a little afraid, and some of us are signifi-
cantly afraid, that we do not have the strength to bear responsibility
for our own internal divisions and ambiguities. This is the underly-
ing anxiety that science in general provokes in us. And it is the un-
derlying anxiety that psychoanalysis in particular provokes in us.
There are, therefore, powerful forces in each one of us at the personal
level, and also in our culture as a whole, working against the scien-
tific uncovering of our divisions and ambiguities.
As we have noted, the predominant intellectual tradition in
Western thought has emphasized the separation of mind and nature,
and has argued against the possibility of understanding our most per-
sonal experiences through the careful study of our intentions. In
contemporary thought, this dualist tradition in philosophy contin-
ues to act in this way—that is, it functions as a defense against the
anxiety of science. The long legacy of dualism continues even at this
late stage to make respectable the wish to keep the searching, criti-
cal spirit of scientific inquiry away from ourselves. It serves to make
respectable the wish to keep hidden the divisions within the self and
thus avoid the difficult responsibility of being self-governing.
It does so through the old assumptions it helps to maintain about
the relation between science and human life. These assumptions
were shaped originally by the philosophers after the Copernican rev-

olution who tried to make sense of the emergence of modern science
against the backdrop of traditional faith. The most influential of
these philosophers, like Descartes and Kant, regarded it as axiomatic
that science could not encompass human wishing and acting, at least
not the essence of these things. To such thinkers it appeared to be
self-evident that human volition belonged to the region of faith and
morals, not to scientific investigation. Unconsciously, therefore, they
conceived science in such a way that it fitted into this dualist frame-
work. They portrayed science as something that can tell us about the
world, but will not ask questions about our values and morality.
These old assumptions about science are still quietly prevalent in
many areas of modern thought and feeling. And it is precisely these
old assumptions about science that have been drawn on by contem-
porary critics to question the scientific credentials of psychoanalysis
and depth psychology.18
All those who question the scientific status of psychoanalysis
point in support of their argument to versions of science that reached
maturity before the twentieth century—above all, physics and evolu-
tionary theory. The significance of these sciences in the context of
the argument about psychoanalysis is that they do not tell us any-
thing about our own wishing and acting and our everyday decisions
and problems. In other words, they do not infringe the dualist princi-
ple of separating the study of what is human from the study of na-
ture. Those who question the scientific status of depth psychology
say, in effect, that these forms of science offer us authoritative mod-
els that we can use to judge anything else that claims scientific sta-
tus. Obviously, if the criteria for science are drawn up in this way,
depth psychology must fail the test. What we see here is how dualist
assumptions condition contemporary intellectual debate, not in an
explicit way, where they are open to criticism, but in an unconscious,
covert way, where they evade criticism.
The important critical literature on psychoanalysis over the
past thirty years or so can be understood only in this light. I have
in mind here in particular the critiques of analysis such as those of
Karl Popper in Conjectures & Refutations (1972), Frank Sulloway
in Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1979), Adolf Grünbaum in The
Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984) and Validation in the Clini-
cal Theory of Psychoanalysis (1993), and Richard Webster in Why
Freud Was Wrong (1995). This literature draws on one or other vari-
ant of the old dualist perspective to try to invalidate the rational ex-
ploration of our fissured intentions. All of these writers profess to
Introduction 13
know how a scientific psychology is to be defined, and all define it

in such a way that the ambiguities in human intention are immu-
nized from its exploration. Each of these writers defines scientific
psychology in such a way that the problem addressed by psycho-
analysis disappears from view. Each examines psychoanalysis as if
the problem of psychic conflict and human ambivalence, the prob-
lem that defines it, did not enter into it. In place of an examination
of this problem, we are given arguments about how science must
not deviate from its past forms. For Popper and Grünbaum, this
means psychoanalysis must be an application of the principles of
physics. For Sulloway and Webster, it means it must be an applica-
tion of the principles of evolutionary biology.
By undermining the certainties maintained by tradition and
custom, science as a whole has increased the demands on each one
of us to find our own equilibrium and balance. The weaker tradition
and custom are, the less we can fall back upon them to organize life.
These critical writers speak to our hunger for an escape from these
demands imposed by a scientific culture. Their work expresses a
nostalgic wish to return to a world before we stumbled into the
labyrinth of the self, a world where more certainties were permit-
ted.19 Their work reflects a fundamental lack of faith in the human
self. They are saying, not overtly but by implication, that if we do
proceed with science and explore ourselves as we have explored
other parts of nature, then we will cease to function creatively. We
do not have, they say, the resources to live by self-governance. So we
must hold on to those external imperatives that still remain to us
from custom and tradition. This is the fear which, unconsciously,
they express.
THE METAPHORS OF SCIENCE
The human sciences have always looked to the success-

ful physical sciences for guidance as to how to proceed.
Positivists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
looked to Newton and later to Darwin as sources of
precedent for human science. Modern-day positivist crit-
ics of psychoanalysis differ from their predecessors in
that they use the arguments of old sciences not to see
how it is possible to achieve new knowledge, but to try to
invalidate knowledge we have already acquired. We
might call this attitude “scientific monotheism.” It is
characterized by the elevation of a single template for

science as the only legitimate form that may be adopted.
In contrast to these positivist critics, Freud never allows
any single scientific analogy to dominate his thinking.
He never allows himself to become the prisoner of any
single scientific metaphor.
The sciences of human motivation, like depth psychology, his-

tory, economics, social science, and so on, study the choices human
beings make in life and, no less important, the feelings they have
about those choices and the evaluations they put upon them. This
distinguishes them from the physical sciences and from physical
medicine. For these sciences of human motivation there has always
been the difficulty of deciding what is the best way to describe the
conditions behind human choices, because it is not self-evident just
what that best way is.
There has always been a tendency for those who have faced
this difficulty to look to the earlier physical sciences for guidance,
since these sciences have been so successful. Instinctively, every-
one feels that the older sciences of nature must contain the proper
precedents for a successful science of the human.
In certain quarters, for instance, there has long been the hope that
some way can be found of translating the form of Newtonian science
into a basis for a successful human science. There have been perennial
attempts to make human science “exact” science, especially for in-
stance in economics, where there is scope for a lot of quantification.
But this approach has never yielded anything like a unifying, “New-
tonian” theory of human behavior. This failure exasperated, notably,
J. S. Mill. He described the human sciences of his own day as “aban-
doned to the uncertainties of vague and popular discussion,” and as
representing a “blot on the face of science.”20 If we can account so suc-
cessfully for the motion of the sun and the stars, he felt, surely we can
find a way to account for ourselves just as precisely.
The hope of a human science modeled on physical science is
still with us. One only has to look at the criticisms of psychoanaly-
sis made by philosophers like Popper and Grünbaum. Positivists like
these want to see the conditions of human experience described not
in the way Freud describes them but in the way physicists describe
the conditions of matter.
The Darwinian revolution provoked analogous hopes to those
raised by the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century. If Dar-
winian theory can explain something as difficult as evolution, the ar-
Introduction 15
gument goes, then surely some elaboration of it must be capable of

explaining human experience and action. This was the hope of the
Social Darwinists of the nineteenth century. It is still the ostensible
hope of critics of psychoanalysis like Sulloway and Webster. The sub-
stance of their criticism is the same as that of Popper and Grünbaum:
The form of the narrative that psychoanalysis develops is the wrong
form. For Popper and Grünbaum, Freud fails because his propositions
are not like those of Newton and Einstein. For Sulloway and Webster,
he fails because his propositions are not like those of Darwin.
Ostensibly, all these critics want to draw psychoanalysis in a di-
rection that is more like older sciences. The real point of their criti-
cisms, however, although they are careful to deny this, is that
psychoanalysis fails because it cannot be drawn in this direction.
Whatever they may claim to the contrary about wishing to improve
psychoanalysis, or rescue it, their real aim is to invalidate it as it
stands in Freud’s work, and in that of his successors.
The arguments of these critics have received a lot of attention in
recent times. This is not because they stand up to serious examina-
tion, or because they lead anywhere new, but because they manage
to criticize Freud while at the same time appearing to be respectable
from a scientific point of view. Newton, Einstein, and Darwin were
all great scientists, and are universally revered. So, the argument
runs, how could psychoanalysis fail to become more scientific by
following them more closely?
The rhetoric here is powerful, but the reasoning is flawed. The
flaw is that science does not develop by repeating its history. New-
ton, Einstein, and Darwin were all great scientists. One indication of
that greatness is that each changed the form of science in his own
field. No one would suggest that Darwin or Einstein would have
been better scientists had they produced results more like those of
Newton. This, however, is the obvious corollary of the suggestion
that psychoanalysis itself should be modeled on the work of one of
these earlier scientists.
The fact is that none of these other scientists is a particularly
useful guide in the science of the human unconscious because, as it
happens, they were not interested in the human unconscious. This
point is so obvious one would think it hardly worth making. But the
perennial calls for “Einsteinian” and “Darwinian” improvements to
psychoanalysis show the truth is otherwise.
Essentially, and again unconsciously, the idea of improving psy-
choanalysis by making it conform to older sciences appeals precisely
because it is impossible to fulfill. By imposing an impossible demand
on psychoanalysis, a demand that apparently has the authority of sci-

ence behind it, the prospect is raised of an escape from psychoanaly-
sis altogether. More precisely, the prospect is raised of an escape from
the quintessentially modern burden of emotional self-governance.
The unconscious appeal of the positivist critics of psychoanalysis is
that of an appeal for a return to a time when our frame of reference
for the self was not yet a conditional one, as in the time of Newton,
and in the time of Darwin. The implication of their work is that sci-
ence does not after all impose an ethic of autonomy on us.
The traditional weakness of positivism was that it always ex-
pected the sciences of the future to look too much like the sciences
of the past. We simply do not know what forms science may yet
manifest in the future. If we did, we would possess knowledge and
not still be in search of it. Nevertheless, the argument of positivism
that we should look to older models of science to develop newer
ones like psychology should not in itself be dismissed. Setting up
older sciences as authorities by which newer sciences are to be
judged is a mistake, but using older sciences as guides and prece-
dents to help us to work creatively in newer sciences is not. When
we try to describe human beings in a scientific way it is often help-
ful to look to the precedents offered by other sciences. Everything
hinges, however, on doing this in an appropriate manner.
We use the other sciences as a source of ideas for human science
not because we expect the latter eventually to mimic the former, but
for an altogether different reason. We have reached now the point in
history where we have begun to understand that our investigations
into nature have always been, unconsciously, an exploration of our-
selves, strange as this may sound. Originally, we thought the sci-
ences gave us objective statements about the world, that is to say,
statements about the world as it would be independent of any
human agent acting upon it. Now, we know that what the sciences
actually give us is statements about our own relation with the
world, and about our own capacities in the world. The sciences tell
us how the world looks to the human eye and how it feels to the
human hand. No matter how sophisticated they become that is all
they tell us. “Know yourself is the whole of science,” notes Niet-
zsche. “Only at the end of knowledge of all things will man have
come to know himself. Because things are only the limits of man.”21
The history of science is the history of man’s search for the limits of
his own capacities. It is the history of his discovery of what he can
do with the world and what the world can mean to an animal con-
stituted with his particular purposes. The important thing is that
Introduction 17
natural science is actually a human story, even though we usually

forget to think of it in these terms.
What we also too readily forget is that all the sciences began by
projecting familiar experience onto more remote and esoteric expe-
riences. Science develops by assuming that the unfamiliar is like the
familiar, and then seeing how far this assumption has to be modi-
fied. The sciences of the physical world developed by progressively
refining analogies originally taken from more everyday events. The
sophistication of modern science conceals this origin but the essen-
tially metaphorical and anthropomorphic nature of all scientific
knowledge has to be remembered.22 It is because of this anthropo-
morphic quality of our knowledge of the natural world that, in de-
veloping human science, we are quite justified in borrowing back
analogies from the physical sciences, provided that we do not forget
that they are analogies. This is the way in which the natural sci-
ences do indeed offer us precedents for the human sciences.
The most important anticipation of the way Freud borrows
back scientific analogies can be found in the work of Goethe.
Goethe points out that the terms we use in the physical sciences
reflect a fundamental, though concealed, anthropomorphism. As
he remarks, “Man never grasps how anthropomorphic he is.”23
This insight was not unique to Goethe but he was ahead of his con-
temporaries in perceiving the possibility of reappropriating the
terms of the physical sciences as metaphors for human behavior.
His most significant experiment here is his novel Elective Affini-
ties, dating from 1809. Elective Affinities tells how the relations
between a husband and wife are altered by the arrival in their
household of two acquaintances. Erotic and destructive energies
between the couple are released and recombine together in new
forms as they form attachments with the new arrivals. Near the
beginning of the book the characters compare what is happening
between them to the dissolution and recombination of chemical
compounds—hence the title Elective Affinities. The details of the
novel do not matter here. What is important is the insight under-
lying it. Goethe himself makes explicit what this is: “In the doc-
trines of nature we very often use ethical similes in order to bring
closer something that is far distant from the circle of human
knowledge. Therefore, in a moral case, I wanted to return a chem-
ical simile to its spiritual origin. All the more so, since there is as-
suredly only one nature everywhere. And through even the realms
of cheerful free reason the tracks of a more somber, passionate ne-
cessity ineluctably run.”24
Goethe is not suggesting here that the study of human activity

can be made into a branch of physical science. He is saying some-
thing more subtle: that the development of knowledge everywhere
depends upon the use of analogies and metaphors, and that the
physical sciences now offer us a new source of analogies for de-
scribing what happens between human beings, a rival source to that
traditionally offered by religious teaching and the morality that
goes with it.
And it is just in accordance with this insight that Freud pro-
ceeds. No one has more effectively employed the other sciences as
sources of metaphors for psychology than did he. It does not follow,
however, as our clumsy modern positivists imagine, that he aspired
to be a Newton or a Darwin of the mind, in any literal sense.
Freud is highly eclectic in his use of analogies from the sciences.
He takes one up and then he drops it again, depending on how useful
he finds it for illustrating any particular point.25 There are, of course,
Darwinian analogies throughout his work. For instance, he views
the mind as an organic entity, and as an entity that is shaped by its
evolution. If one searches hard, there are even a few Newtonian (or
rather, Galilean) analogies. In chapter seven of The Interpretation of
Dreams, he draws an analogy between mental mechanisms and the
structure of a telescope, the suggestion being that wishes are bent
and distorted through the levels of the unconscious just as light
beams are refracted by a series of lenses.26 It must be remembered,
however, that some of his most significant analogies—for instance,
the censor of dreams or, for himself, the archaeologist—do not come
from the realms of physics or biology.
There are few pages in Freud’s writing where he does not go to
pains to show us what he is thinking of by an apt image which is
easy to visualize in the imagination. Often, these images have phys-
iological connotations. But his ability to describe clearly what are
frequently very difficult abstract ideas should not be confused with
an adherence to any simplistic conception of science. Freud was de-
scribing new truths about the psyche. To do that, he had no choice
but to create new metaphors.27
What sets Freud apart from the positivist critics of the scientific
form of psychoanalysis is that he does not become the prisoner of any
particular scientific metaphor. It is he who uses the metaphor, not the
metaphor which uses him. For Popper, for Grünbaum, for Sulloway,
for Webster, in contrast, it is the metaphor which rules. For them, the
objection to psychoanalysis is that it does not make the science of the
self obedient to any single scientific metaphor.
Introduction 19
In the science of the mind, however, as in every science, there

is a point at which every analogy breaks down. As a source of anal-
ogy, no scientific precedent ever lasts us quite as long as we would
like. If Freud had a genius for anything, it was for knowing the
point at which every analogy and metaphor must be replaced by
another. He notes, “In psychology we can describe things only
with the help of analogies. There is nothing unusual in this, it is
the same elsewhere. But we have to keep changing these analogies,
because none lasts us long enough.”28 The positivist critics of the
scientific form of psychoanalysis do not understand this. They
want to make us dependent upon a single source of analogy,
whether physics or Darwinism.
When we try to describe the intricate problems of the human
self in a rational way, excessive dependence on one analogy, or on
one restricted group of analogies, leaves us only with an unnecessary
handicap. Of course, it may allow us to purchase the look of scien-
tific rigor and respectability. This is not, however, what we need.
What we need is to retain intellectual freedom of movement so as to
overcome the ever new ways we contrive of concealing our conflicts
and anxieties from ourselves. Investing the expressions of old sci-
ences with an ideal status and saying that our investigations must
follow their form only, and no other, is one way that helps to ratio-
nalize such concealment. It gives us the appearance of endorsing sci-
ence while at the same time allowing us to sidestep the creative
responsibility science imposes on us to examine the way we live.
SCIENCE AND CONSENSUS
Science depends upon the exercise of the individual

conscience in the face of received wisdom and consen-
sually endorsed assumptions. This is exemplified in
psychoanalysis itself when it is properly practiced. The
positivist critics of psychoanalysis misrepresent scien-
tific truth as being decided by consensus. At the same
time, they misrepresent psychoanalysis as a process
closed from external checks in which the analyst is free
to impose an interpretation of history onto his patient.
These distortions are motivated by the wish to deny
that the ethic of autonomy, which is the ethic of psy-
choanalysis, is intimately connected with the rise of a
scientific culture.
Science is the most respected and feared of modern ideas. Indeed,

it is the only universally respected and feared of modern ideas. We re-
spect it because we want the power science promises. We fear it be-
cause we fear its corrosive effect on our customs and sense of identity.
The philosophers of science like Popper and Grünbaum, who have
criticized the scientific form of psychoanalysis, tap into and exagger-
ate these rather ambivalent feelings we all have in some measure
about science.29 These positivist critics endow science with an au-
thority greater than it should be given, while at the same time making
every effort to confine science to the regions it has occupied in the
past. This exaggeration of the authority of science, together with the
anxious wish to confine it, reflects a discomfort with the ethical im-
perative that goes with science, which is that of being able to take a
critical attitude towards authority while at the same time taking a
critical attitude towards one’s own motives.
In a scientific culture, to be fully human we have continually to
be willing to question our customs and habits so as to understand
more clearly what may be destructive and inhibiting in them. We
each have to try to master the customs we have inherited and try to
develop them in as fruitful a way as we can. We have to find a fruit-
ful way of maintaining the often very difficult balance between crit-
icism of custom and preservation of it. More frequently than we
would like, this balance breaks down and it degenerates into anxious
enslavement to fruitless habits, along with despairing, self-punitive
attempts to escape from them. As a therapy, the task of psycho-
analysis is to help to restore this balance where it has been lost. It
does this by strengthening within the individual the sense of unique-
ness of the self and the duty to be true to this uniqueness.
In a scientific culture, those who are not comfortable with this
personal ethos have a vested interest in denying its intimate con-
nection with science. The wish to deny the scientific element in the
talking cure comes from the wish to deny that this difficult ethic of
autonomy, which is the heart of the talking cure, goes hand in hand
with science. The positivist critics of analysis obscure this link by
presenting a distorted picture both of science in general and of psy-
choanalysis in particular.
These critics distort science in general by exaggerating the part
played in it by consensus and agreement. At the same time, they
underplay the extent to which an essential condition of truth, in any
field of science, is the readiness continually to question consensus.
Consistent with this view of science, they portray the main concern
of the analyst as being that of achieving the patient’s agreement with
Introduction 21
the analyst’s own hypotheses. They are entirely unaware of the ex-
tent to which the analytic process depends upon and cultivates a di-
vergence of viewpoint between patient and analyst. They further
distort the real nature of psychoanalysis by exaggerating the extent
to which the analytic relation is closed from the influence of exter-
nal checks and balances. The proper scientist is portrayed by these
writers as someone whose ideas are constantly subject to verifica-
tion by others. The psychoanalyst, in contrast, is portrayed as being
free from the constraints of consensual testing and therefore as being
free arbitrarily to impose interpretations on the material his patient
brings him.
Clearly, the principle that scientific knowledge must be regu-
lated by agreement among a community of qualified researchers is an
important one. For any idea to be regarded as true, it must prove fruit-
ful in a variety of contexts beyond the one in which it originates. The
skilful transference of insight acquired in one investigative setting to
another is one of the essential bases of all science. A new idea or pro-
cedure that cannot successfully be transferred into other contexts and
settings by skilled researchers will, in any event, die out.
In the context of psychoanalysis, however, this principle has
been invoked in a tendentious manner. Too often the critics of psy-
choanalysis have vulgarized it into the implied suggestion that sci-
ence in general relies on procedures that are accessible to and
understood by a widely participating audience. A contrast is then
drawn with psychoanalysis, which is portrayed as being closed off
from external assessment.
It was this simplistic idea of the consensual nature of scientific
truth that gave appeal, for instance, to Popper’s influential notion of
“falsifiability.” To those who found the notion persuasive, falsifia-
bility seemed to pinpoint what distinguishes a genuinely open and
testable science, like physics, from a closed pseudoscience, like psy-
choanalysis, which supposedly evades putting its ideas to test in the
public arena.
In reality, Popper’s arguments about falsifiability were much
more involved, and ultimately much more evasive, than this simple
distinction between science and pseudoscience suggests. His real
claim was that falsifiability was a quality inherent in scientific state-
ments. He maintained that this quality made them amenable to re-
producible testing, and thereby distinguished them from every other
type of statement, such as those of religion, metaphysics, or pseudo-
science.30 In practice, however, he was never able to define falsifiabil-
ity in a way that stood up to close examination. Modern physics, for
instance, because of its reliance upon statements of probability,

turned out not to be falsifiable in the sense he had hoped.31 He never
examined the life sciences at all, apart from the theory of evolution,
which he concluded was not properly scientific because it was not
falsifiable in the sense he meant either.32 And in order to be made a
plausible notion for the economic and social sciences, falsifiability
had to be defined in an entirely different manner from the way he had
attempted to apply it in the context of physics.33 In short, falsifiabil-
ity, as Popper conceived it, could not be applied to any of the exist-
ing sciences. There turned out to be no universal scientific criterion
of this nature. In trying to find an essence common to all scientific
statements, what Popper unwittingly demonstrated was just how di-
verse the different sciences actually are.34
Because the real argument Popper was proposing led him into
such intricate details of logic, and because he was compelled contin-
ually to redefine what falsifiability might actually mean, the idea it-
self became increasingly vague. Ironically, however, its very
vagueness only increased its impact because the more imprecise it
became, the more it appeared to be simply a technical statement of
the popular idea that science is dependent upon consensual, public,
repeatable tests. This appeared to be what Popper was talking about.
Many people who had never worked through Popper’s often highly
technical arguments missed the fact that he was actually talking
about properties of statements. Mistakenly, they assumed he must
have extracted from physics a rule about method, a rule about the
public testing of hypotheses, and that this could be applied as a test
to all the other sciences.35 In turn, this misconception had a signifi-
cant impact on the debate about psychoanalysis because the private
and highly individual nature of analytic work seems to set it so
clearly apart from other sciences. It is widely assumed now that the
scientific credentials of psychoanalysis are flawed. Probably nothing
has contributed as much to this climate of opinion as the confusions
to which Popper’s falsifiability gave rise.
Popper’s falsifiability argument was also the starting point for
Grünbaum’s more detailed criticisms of psychoanalysis. Sharing the
mistaken view that Popper was making a point about scientific
method, Grünbaum aimed to refute him by insisting that psychoan-
alytic hypotheses are testable in a public way; they can, as he puts it,
be tested “extraclinically.”36
Grünbaum’s suggestions for extraclinical tests are, however,
every bit as confused as Popper’s ideas about falsifiability. They are
confused because, like the falsifiability argument, they reflect the
Introduction 23
mistaken view of psychoanalysis as a closed procedure which at-

tempts to verify propositions while remaining immunized from ex-
ternal checks. Like falsifiability, the proposal of extraclinical tests
leads us in circles because it is a solution to a problem that does not
actually exist. To the extent that Grünbaum is pointing out that psy-
choanalytic ideas do have applications outside the clinical relation-
ship between patient and therapist, he is not telling us anything
new. Plainly, psychoanalytic ideas have had a huge impact in the so-
cial and cultural sciences and in the writing of history and biogra-
phy. Grünbaum’s real claim, however, is that Popper was wrong to
make so much of the contrast between Einstein and Freud and that
extraclinical tests for psychoanalysis can indeed turn it into a sci-
ence rather like physics. Whereas Popper argued (or gave the impres-
sion of arguing) that psychoanalysis simply fails as a science because
it is too private, Grünbaum holds out the prospect of redeeming the
private nature of psychoanalysis by turning it into something like
physical science. In fundamentals, however, Grünbaum’s writings
on psychoanalysis are only a more detailed repeat of Popper’s argu-
ments because he endorses Popper’s misleading contrast between
psychoanalysis as something that tries to shelter its ideas from pub-
lic refutation and the rest of science, which does not.
For Grünbaum, as for Popper, the significance of physics is that
it is an open science; it exemplifies a science that does its work in
public. At its best, they maintain, science gives us truth that can be
checked by consensus and agreement among a large number of peo-
ple. And physics is science at its best. According to their portrayal of
it, every hypothesis put forward in physics can be checked and cross-
checked by any number of researchers. Faulty hypotheses are imme-
diately eradicated because the process of survival of the fittest is so
ruthless and efficient. The message is clear. Psychoanalysis must ei-
ther turn itself into a branch of physics or it must forgo the status of
serious science. Without this transformation, Grünbaum insists, the
causal hypotheses of psychoanalysis are worth nothing because
there is no brake on the analyst’s powers of “suggestion” over his pa-
tient. Even if the patient feels better this proves nothing about the
correctness of the analyst’s ideas because suggestion may always be
at work. Revealingly, it never occurs to Grünbaum that the therapist
might take the greatest satisfaction in his work precisely when his
patient shows the greatest independence of mind from himself.
This obsession with science as a process leading to consensus
and confirmation, in contrast with psychoanalysis as a process
supposedly geared to producing suggestions, animates also Ernest
Gellner’s well-known polemical attack on psychoanalysis in The

Psychoanalytic Movement. This is written, as he himself empha-
sizes, in close sympathy with the position adopted by Popper and
Grünbaum.37 The virtue of Gellner’s criticisms is that, unlike
those of the two philosophers of science, they do not get lost in ab-
struse epistemological technicalities. Gellner strips the arguments
of the philosophers down to essentials and spells out more clearly
than either of them what their philosophy of science really means
for psychoanalysis: “Cure,” he writes, “must firmly, unambigu-
ously be a concept applicable and applied in the public domain. In
other words, its meaning and application must be governed by cri-
teria which can be applied impartially by any reasonably intelli-
gent and well-informed person.”38 In short, if psychoanalytic cure
were unambiguously defined and clearly visible “in the public do-
main,” Grünbaum’s concern that the analyst will suggest false
causes to his patient would be taken care of. It would be taken care
of because we would define cure in such a way that it always ex-
cluded cases where the patient felt better merely because he had
become persuaded by the constructions put upon his life by his an-
alyst. Popper’s concerns about the falsifiability of psychoanalytic
hypotheses would also be resolved because if we had a publicly ac-
cepted notion of what cure is, then either psychoanalysis would be
seen to produce such cures, or else it would be falsified. The ever
elusive goal of “confirming” and “validating” psychoanalysis or, as
so many hope, disconfirming and invalidating it, would at last be
achieved.
Following Popper and Grünbaum, critics like Gellner like to
play up the popular stereotype of science progressing by means of
the endlessly repeatable test before a widely comprehending public
because, superficially, this seems so unlike what happens in psycho-
analysis. In reality, of course, scientific progress is a much more es-
oteric, prejudiced, and irrational business than this stereotype
suggests. In all the sciences, the number of people qualified to inter-
pret or repeat any given test or procedure is always limited to those
with specialist knowledge and experience. If anything, the other sci-
ences are more closed in this respect than psychoanalysis. Contrary
to what Gellner implies, the truth of science never turns upon
proofs accessible to the general public, not even to “reasonably in-
telligent and well-informed” members of the general public. In that
sense, science is not, and has never been, “in the public domain.”
Just as Gellner paints a misleadingly open picture of science in
general, so he complements this with a misleadingly closed picture of
Introduction 25
psychoanalysis. He speaks of the need for psychoanalytic cure to be

governed by criteria “which can be applied impartially by any rea-
sonably intelligent and well-informed person.” In fact, psychoana-
lytic cure generally is governed by such criteria. Every good therapist
knows quite well which patients he has helped and which he has
failed to help. Patients, too, do not mistake where they have been
helped by therapy and where not. Provided one genuinely is well in-
formed on the unique characteristics of any given case history, and
provided one has skill and practice at making such judgements, it is
not difficult to tell how successful any given therapy has been. The
idea of psychotherapy as an unusually closed procedure where results
are peculiarly inaccessible to external assessment is simply a myth.
What is true, however, is that psychotherapy is an investigation
into and a cultivation of the individual conscience. This is what crit-
ics like Gellner and Grünbaum, and so many others, do not like
about it. This is why these critics want a publicly preestablished de-
finition of cure, so that cure may become no longer a matter for the
individual conscience but rather, as Gellner puts it, “firmly, unam-
biguously a concept applicable and applied in the public domain.” If
cure were a public concept, the analyst and his patient would be de-
nied the freedom to determine what the aims and criteria of success
in the treatment are to be. It is here that the positivists’ obsession
with falsification and extraclinical testing, which looks so reason-
able at first glance, betrays its essentially dogmatic inclinations. The
whole purpose of these proposals is to challenge the exercise of the
individual conscience in the conduct of life and in the achievement
of health. The myth of science as an open, public process turns out
to be a mask for the wish to subject the conduct of private life to ma-
jority vote. And this wish, in turn, is a reflection of a fundamental
inability to govern oneself, or of an anxiety that one will be unable
to govern oneself.39
The work of psychoanalysis is to explore the truth about the
human self. For each one of us, the most difficult part of this work is
coming to accept the unique nature of our history and the unique
nature of the needs that that history has cultivated in us. It is not
easy to accept that there must always exist a degree of divergence be-
tween our own most fundamental needs and the expectations of oth-
ers, especially those others who are closest to us. There is an
inescapably conflictual, and to that extent tragic, aspect to our con-
dition. A central part of psychoanalysis involves understanding this
and working to come to terms with it. The important point here is
that the achievement of greater depths of truth about the human
condition does not have any necessary connection with greater con-
sensus and agreement. This disconnection between truth and con-
sensus, between science and consensus, is one of the things we find
hardest to accept. To some extent it frightens all of us because it
means that to put order and health into our lives there are times we
shall have to act without the sanction and approval of those who are
most important to us and to our definition of ourselves. Those who
insist that truth can invariably be decided by recourse to consensus
are trying to deny this difficult aspect of the human state.
All neurosis is rooted in the unconscious feeling that it is bet-
ter to be barren but accepted than it is to be creative and indepen-
dent. All proper psychoanalysis involves a questioning of that
feeling. In psychotherapy, we cannot speak of cure unless the patient
has achieved greater emotional strength to be true to himself, which
means being more independent of consensus than he was at the out-
set. The patient should be less afraid to break with consensus when
his own conscience requires this and he should be able to do this
without taking flight into self-punitive patterns of behavior. It goes
without saying, or rather it should go without saying, that this also
must include intellectual and emotional independence from the
therapist.
This imposes significant limits on the possibility of any widely
agreed definition of cure in psychotherapy, as opposed to the detailed
understanding of cure that each patient and therapist can achieve
privately between them. Whenever we attempt a wide, public defin-
ition of cure, it is impossible legitimately to go beyond rather ano-
dyne criteria such as maturation, fruitfulness, acceptance, creativity,
and so on. All these notions are important. Above all, their absence
gives us a good test for the absence of cure. But in each case history
these terms will mean something unique. On their own, they tell us
little about how we may judge when cure has been achieved in any
particular case. To do that, we have to have detailed knowledge of
the history involved. This is why the people who are usually best
placed to judge the success of the treatment are the two people most
closely involved with it: the patient and the therapist.
The problems that come to psychoanalysis are the problems of
the human conscience brought about by living in a scientific cul-
ture. In such a culture, custom and tradition are routinely under crit-
ical review. Often, however, for whatever reasons of personal
history, the individual is unable to resolve his relationship with the
personal customs and traditions that govern him in particular. He
finds that he cannot live with these customs and yet has not the
Introduction 27
strength to break free of them or modify them so that they can be-
come part of a fruitful life.
In the days of greater moral certainty and stronger traditional
faith, before science had established its imperative of criticism and
skepticism over our cultural life as a whole, personal conflicts of this
nature were resolved either by recourse to some generally accepted
moral principle, or by recourse to religious teaching itself, or by re-
course to those who claimed to be able to interpret religious teaching.
The individual could look outside himself to these sources of author-
ity in the expectation that they would provide answers to the dilem-
mas of life. Whether he chose to go along with those answers, of
course, was up to him, but the important thing is that answers were
provided. In contemporary life, in contrast, answers are no longer pro-
vided. What falls to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy generally are
precisely those dilemmas of conscience that arise in personal life be-
cause, in contemporary culture, there no longer exists a moral con-
sensus for resolving them. These are the dilemmas for which, when
traditional moral expectations were stronger, there may once have
been solutions in the public domain, but which are no longer to be
found there. Science has thrown back on to each one of us the ques-
tion of how a human being becomes healthy. We must each now find
our own answer to this question. Some can find the answer through
their own resources. But for some, it leads to debilitating conflict, or
at least to periods of debilitating conflict. To assume that such indi-
viduals are necessarily weaker than the average would be a mistake.
In a world where values have become uncertain, it is often the most
intricate, most original, and most conscientious individuals who find
the task of being true to themselves most difficult.
The less that problems of conscience can be resolved by recourse
to tradition and consensus, the more the individual is called on to gov-
ern himself. When the old unspoken codes of morality lose their
power it is not that the burden on the individual conscience becomes
any less. In some respects it becomes greater. It may be that our fear of
losing the support and sanction of others actually increases as con-
sensus over the correct conduct of life becomes more uncertain, be-
cause it is less clear what is expected from us. And the more that we
feel unsure of the support of others, the more we turn unconsciously
to self-punitive patterns of behavior in an irrational attempt to secure
that support. Perhaps nothing characterizes the present era more than
the combination of an unprecedented lack of consensus over values
and an unprecedented degree of unconsciously self-punitive behavior
on the part of the confused individual conscience. Those who want to
return to a consensus definition of cure are reflecting this stress, but

their solution to it is premature and untenable.
Critics like Popper, Grünbaum, and Gellner who would apply
the criterion of consensual testing to psychoanalysis do not under-
stand its place in modern culture and its relationship with science.
To the extent their arguments have been popular, it is because they
appeal to those fears, which in some measure we all share, of break-
ing with consensus and being true to what is unique within us. At
one level, we would all like to be reassured that science, the great
engine of modern culture, does not necessitate the cultivation of a
private conscience that requires us to be independent of others. The
questioning of the scientific status of psychoanalysis has become so
acceptable because it carries this reassuring message concealed
within it.
THE DISTORTION OF DEFENSE
To learn about ourselves and to cure ourselves we have

to question the identifications that define us and we
have to reform them within our own emotional econ-
omy. We seek to evade this work out of fear of alienation
from those we are close to emotionally. This is psycho-
logical defense. This problem is at the center of psycho-
analysis. In the critical literature on psychoanalysis
there is, however, a consistent misrepresentation of de-
fense as a problem about memory. This distorts the real
nature of psychoanalytic work. Once the nature of the
problem is distorted in this way, it is easier to rational-
ize the argument that the principles of psychoanalysis
are in some fundamental way illegitimate and that it
should therefore be subordinated to the principles of
some other science.
There exists always a divergence between our own most funda-

mental needs and the expectations of others, even those others who,
through our identification with them, play an essential part in shap-
ing our sense of who we are. When this proposition is laid out before
us we have no conscious problem in assenting to it. Unconsciously,
however, at a deeper level where our most personal identifications
hold sway, it is anxiety over this divergence that always makes it dif-
ficult to be true to ourselves and therefore to live as well as we might.
Introduction 29
The problem for the person who has become emotionally ill is
that he is entangled in identifications that inhibit him from living in
accord with his own best nature. The neurotic has purchased his
identity, as it were, at the price of habits and self-evaluations that are
destructive to him. His primary identifications, generally those with
his family, are conflictual, in that he has a powerful sense of the need
to retain them, and an equally powerful sense that retaining them is
undermining him. This conflictual attitude is carried over into his re-
lations with the rest of the world. The neurotic has invariably an
acute sense of needing to belong, of not belonging, and of being pun-
ished because of his failure to belong. The task of psychotherapy is to
meliorate the anger and the guilt in this dependent stance towards
the world and to help the patient to achieve trust in himself.
For any one of us to achieve a greater degree of emotional auton-
omy we have to be able to depart in some measure from the identifi-
cations that have defined us. This kind of departure brings with it the
deep-rooted anxiety that we may lose the recognition of those from
whom we originally took our identity. There is a part of us that rec-
ognizes as legitimate only those wishes that have been accepted by
the customs and identifications of the past. For the neurotic, the
recognition and development of new, more innovative and creative
wishes within the self is prevented by the fear that this will be met
by incomprehension by others, and thus by condemnation and rejec-
tion. Attempts at renewal are smothered through the fear of isolation.
This is the problem of psychological defense. We defend our-
selves against something that does not yet exist and cannot yet be de-
fined: the healthier version of ourselves. This problem of defense is
the kernel of psychoanalytic theory and psychotherapeutic practice.
However, because defense is a difficult issue emotionally, it is
also an inherently difficult issue to handle conceptually. In the crit-
ical literature it has been widely misrepresented. Repeatedly, the
problem of defense has been misrepresented as a problem about
memory. The roots of this misconception go back to Freud’s early
work, especially Studies On Hysteria in 1895 where, in part, he too
thinks of defense in these mistaken terms. In 1896, in his famous
paper “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” he momentarily abandons the
theory of defense altogether in favor of a theory of forgotten memo-
ries. In this guise, however, the problem ceases to be about how the
self defends itself against itself, and becomes instead the problem of
how the self defends itself against what happened to it in the past.
All the celebrated critics of psychoanalysis in recent times have re-
sorted to this distortion of defense.
The most widely noted instance of this in recent times has been
that provided by Jeffrey Masson in The Assault on Truth (1984). In
fairness to Masson, he is not distorting the problem of defense so
much as saying that we should ignore it altogether. His claim is that
Freud was right in 1896 and that in the rest of his work he dodges
the real problem in neurosis by maintaining it is something other
than a problem about memory. According to Masson, Freud simply
misdiagnosed what was wrong with his patients because they were
actually the victims of sexual abuse in childhood. According to this
theory, the problem of neurosis is not the conflicts experienced by
the metaphorical child that lives within the adult with its divided
intentions between loyalty to others and loyalty to itself. The prob-
lem is, rather, what the historical child experienced at the hands of
adults. Those who subscribe to this theory believe that to get at the
source of emotional suffering what we need to do is to reconstruct
the memories of that historical child and that this, therefore, should
be the object of psychotherapy.
The problem with this theory is simply that it is untrue. Some
people who suffer emotional problems were sexually abused as chil-
dren but the majority were not. This hypothesis, therefore, does not
provide us with a general theory of or procedure for psychopathol-
ogy. The theory of defense, in contrast, does provide us with such a
theory and such a procedure.
In psychoanalysis properly conceived we do not regard memories
as the conditioning factors in neurotic suffering. We treat memories,
rather, as the complex and ambiguous symbols of the conditioning
factors we are interested in, namely the conflicts between our
presently existing wishes and inclinations. This distinction between
memories and the presently existing conflicts that may use memories
to express themselves is fatally easy to blur, but it is essential. From a
psychoanalytic point of view, all memories, whether they relate to
events yesterday or to those of fifty years ago, are treated as the sym-
bols of the conflicts within the self that exist today.
Nevertheless, the mistaken argument that memories are the
causal factor in emotional suffering enjoys perennial appeal. It does
so because it allows one to sidestep the problem of confronting one-
self. It is the classic form of defense. It says, I cannot become who I
am because of what happened in the past. I cannot become who I am
because I am a victim of the past, or because I am guilty of what I did
in the past. Implicitly or explicitly, this argument is used always as
a way of avoiding the task of psychoanalysis, which is to strengthen
Introduction 31
the self so that it is able to use what has happened in the past to cre-
ate something better in the future.
The most banal way this strategy is used to avoid confronta-
tion with the self is the attempt to turn psychotherapy into a
search for supposedly forgotten memories of childhood abuse.40 At
a more interesting level, however, this argument about memory is
used to justify the attempt to subsume psychoanalysis under other
sciences—thus rationalizing the wish to apply some extraneous set
of rules to it. Critics like Sulloway, Grünbaum, and Webster all
wish to assimilate psychoanalysis to some other science. To do
this, they all have to take out of psychoanalysis the problem that
uniquely characterizes it, the problem of conflict within the self.
To take this problem out, they all reconstruct the problem of de-
fense as a problem in the restoration of memory.
Frank Sulloway, for instance, giving inordinate importance to
Freud’s unpublished “Project for a Scientific Psychology” of 1895
(which he believes holds the key to the problem of repression and
defense), writes of Freud’s supposed preoccupation with “the dif-
ference between normal, everyday psychical defense against un-
pleasant or intolerable ideas and the clinically more elusive
phenomenon of repression followed by complete amnesia concern-
ing what has been repressed.” Freud, Sulloway maintains, thought
in “purely psychological terms” about the former, but “the latter
and highly pathological forms of repression” he wanted to account
for in “physiological terms.”41
Sulloway’s suggestion that Freud was preoccupied with two kinds
of defense, one “purely psychological” and the other “pathological,”
“physiological,” and leading to “complete amnesia,” is without foun-
dation.42 The point Freud makes about neurosis is just the reverse of
this supposed distinction: even clinically significant forms of defense
have a psychological, and not simply a physiological, aspect. What
Freud is saying is that we achieve a much deeper understanding of the
symptoms of hysteria, of obsessional neurosis, of anxiety and depres-
sion, when we look at them not just as physiological events, but also
in the context of emotional conflicts within the self.
Freud had no special interest in cases of “complete amnesia,” and
certainly not in contradistinction to “purely psychological” forms of
repression. The point of Sulloway’s distinction here is only that it
serves his own strange thesis that Freud was secretly more concerned
with biology than he let on. According to Sulloway, he pretended he
was inventing a new psychology, as a form of self-glorification, when
in fact he was a “crypto-biologist;” he was only doing what was, in

essence, an old, Darwinian biology. Sulloway’s point is that we should
go back to the old biology and forget the new psychology.
However, to make way for the assimilation of psychoanalytic
questions by Darwinism, Sulloway has to dispose of the issue of de-
fense because Darwin does not deal with this issue. Therefore, the
problem of defense is portrayed as a problem of “complete amnesia,”
which for Sulloway is a problem in pure biology. Clearly, if the prob-
lem of defense is not after all about the investigation of the self, then
we do not need psychoanalysis.
An analogous thing happens with Adolf Grünbaum. For Sul-
loway, psychoanalysis is a branch of evolutionary biology and should
not claim to be a science in its own right with its own problems and
procedures. For Grünbaum, psychoanalysis is not to be granted even
this degree of autonomy: it should be considered as a form of physics
because all natural science is a form of physics.43 To maintain this
fiction, like Sulloway he has to get rid of the problem that makes
psychoanalysis unique, the problem of how the self takes flight from
itself. To accomplish this, again as with Sulloway, the issue of de-
fense is turned into one of memory. “The central causal and ex-
planatory significance enjoyed by unconscious ideation in the entire
clinical theory,” he writes, “rests . . . on . . . inductive inferences
drawn by Breuer and Freud. . . . It had turned out that, for each dis-
tinct symptom S afflicting . . . a neurotic, the victim had repressed
the memory of a trauma.”44
Grünbaum identifies the theory of psychoanalysis with Breuer’s
cathartic cure because catharsis does in fact treat memories as the
causal factor in hysteria. The theory of catharsis, however, predates
Freud’s theory of defense, which is the beginning of psychoanalysis.
We shall look at the complicated theoretical relations between
Breuer and Freud when we come to consider Studies On Hysteria.
For Grünbaum, however, it is essential to pretend that Freud simply
followed Breuer, since this enables him to argue that psychoanalysis
is about something other than conflict within the self.
Richard Webster, like Sulloway, urges us “to pass beyond psy-
choanalysis in order to construct a theory of human nature which is
consonant with Darwinian biology.”45 Again, he removes from it the
question of the self and portrays the problem of defense as one of
memory. Like Grünbaum, he finds the easiest way to do this is to
pretend that Freud’s thinking is the same as Breuer’s: “Whereas the
claim that repressed emotions could engender psychological distress
would have been traditional and in some cases perhaps true, the
Introduction 33
claim made by Freud and Breuer was of a quite different order. For
what they believed they had discovered was an etiological theory
which could explain the origins of a particular disease and cure this
disease by uncovering repressed memories.”46
As for Sulloway and Grünbaum, it is essential to Webster to argue
that Freud was deeply rooted in physical science in contradistinction
to the science of the soul. Precisely because Webster tries to fit Freud
into this mistaken dualist framework, he resorts to the inaccuracy of
treating Breuer and Freud as sharing a common theoretical view. The
theory that repressed memories cause emotional illness is indeed im-
plicit in Breuer’s cathartic cure. Because it does not consider emotions
and motives as the causal factors in the illness, the cathartic theory
implicitly leaves intact the distinction between medicine and the sci-
ence of the soul. Freud’s innovation, however, was to replace this with
the theory of defense against shameful or dangerous emotions, rather
than memories as such, thereby drawing the problems of the soul into
medicine and natural science. In Freud’s theory, neurotic illness is at-
tributed to a current emotional conflict. The memories of the past
which are significant to the patient are just one part of a range of sym-
bols, of which the physical symptoms are another, through which that
current conflict expresses itself.
Through his development of the theory of defensive conflict,
Freud shows that the self of everyday experiences and emotions can
be made the object of a conditional scientific inquiry. This new field
of science coheres with the older sciences, especially the biological
sciences, and it applies many of the lessons implicit in them. How-
ever, it does not submerge itself in the other sciences. It is tackling
problems that are unique to it, for which there are no exact prece-
dents in the other sciences.
Sulloway, Masson, Grünbaum, and Webster all portray Freud as
doing something other than this. They all criticize him for failing at
something other than what he was actually trying to do. Masson, the
least theoretically pretentious of the Freud critics and in a way the
most honest, criticizes him for failing to blame adults for the mis-
fortunes of children. Sulloway and Webster criticize him for not
being sufficiently faithful to Darwin. For Grünbaum, his failing is
that he is not sufficiently true to physics, or to what Grünbaum con-
ceives to be physics.
What animates these critics is the unacknowledged wish to deny
that the self can in fact be made amenable to conditional inquiry. For
all of them, the self is made to disappear as a possible subject of
knowledge. To achieve this, the central problem of psychological
defense is portrayed as a problem about lost memories. This miscon-

strual is then combined with elaborate, contradictory argumentation
about the need to get psychoanalysis to obey the principles of some
other science, that is, some science whose field is something other
than that of the human self.
Freud’s significance in modern thought is that he brings into the
open the challenge that has been gathering in science over the last
few centuries: the need to study in a rational way the dynamics of
the human conscience and the need to create, and constantly to
recreate, autonomy within the self. Each of these writers seeks to
evade this challenge. They each represent a position of intellectual
regression back to a point in the history of science where the self is
not yet experienced as a part of nature and, therefore, not yet a sub-
ject for rational inquiry. They are nostalgic for a world where nature
and mind are still disjoined, and where the complex, intricate prob-
lems of the adult self are not yet opened up to conditional reflection.
Psychoanalysis is not an exercise in recovering forgotten mem-
ory; it is an exercise in finding out how to use whatever painful
legacy the past has left us with to make a better future. Its first task
is to explore the ambiguity of memories, their open nature, the
complexity of motives they express, the hidden richness of the past.
Then, its task is to make this ambiguity more fruitful, by finding
the possible futures that reside within it. Only when we have un-
derstood something of this symbolic nature of our memories do we
take possession of the past, rather than being possessed by it. Only
then do we start to overcome our defenses against ourselves. To
mistake memories for the causal factors in emotional suffering is to
deny their symbolic nature and thus to deny our own creative ca-
pacity for restoration.
In psychoanalysis we are seeking the not-yet-defined, the not-
yet-classified, that which can speak only to the “third” ear. The
third ear listens for what has not been said before, what has never
been heard in the public domain and is still looking for an acceptable
form of expression. A successful psychoanalysis is one which finds
this and cultivates it.
Modern science is the most significant creation of the rebellious
child within man. In one sense, it is a great self-inflicted injury,
since it is an assault on the traditions that have kept us alive for cen-
turies. Freud draws out some of the consequences for the individual
of this assault on tradition. In the process, he raises certain funda-
mental questions for which we do not as yet have answers: Are
human beings in general able to hold in a conditional and tentative
Introduction 35
manner to the traditions that have shaped them? Are they in general
able to retain a creative sense of identity within themselves if they
abandon the idea that their traditions can be a source of unques-
tioned convictions? In sum, are human beings strong enough to re-
tain their creative humanity in spite of their loss of belief in the
existence of unconditioned truths and imperatives? We do not yet
have the answer to psychoanalysis, but there are no good grounds
now for us to be distracted by misleading arguments about science
from understanding the question.
Chapter Two
PLACING PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A SCIENCE
THE CARTESIAN SEPARATION OF MIND FROM SCIENCE
There is a long tradition in European philosophy of regard-

ing the world as being divided between the principles of
matter and the principles of mind. This tradition is exem-
plified in the philosophy of Descartes. It is the outcome of
the psychological crisis brought about by the Copernican
revolution and it aims, unconsciously, to immunize the
mind from the skeptical inquiry of science. In due course
Kant made Descartes’s distinction between matter and
mind the basis of his own influential system of philosophy.
He goes to great lengths to define nature as the realm of
Newtonian science. This draws the strongest possible con-
trast with the realm of the mind. Kant’s division of the sci-
ences forms the basis of the modern debate between
positivism and hermeneutics. In turn, it is this debate that
has conditioned the contemporary arguments about the
scientific status of psychoanalysis.
We have noted briefly some of the modern criticisms of psycho-

analysis as a science. All of these, ultimately, rely upon older and nar-
rower definitions of science than the one Freud works with. This
narrowing of the field of science, this wish to prescribe limits for sci-
entific inquiry, has a history that long predates psychoanalysis. The
modern criticisms of psychoanalysis draw on this established history.
This is why their claim that psychoanalysis is flawed as a science has
been quite widely accepted, even though their reporting of the history
and theory of psychoanalysis is often manifestly inaccurate.
There is, in particular, a long tradition in philosophy of regard-
ing mechanics or physics as some kind of ideal natural science. This
view of mechanics is implicit in Descartes’s conception of the world
37
in which things are divided quite cleanly between matter and mind.
Kant makes this distinction more explicit, and much more elabo-
rate, by dividing the world into a sphere governed by Newtonian
physics, on the one hand, and a sphere of freedom and morality, on
the other.
Many years ago Gilbert Ryle pointed out that since Descartes
philosophers have too often looked on the laws of physics as the ul-
timate laws of nature. The laws of physics have been presented as an
ideal type towards which all other scientific accounts should tend:
“Newtonian physics was proclaimed as the all-embracing science of
what exists in space. The Cartesian picture left no place for Mendel
or Darwin.” Nor did it leave a place for Freud, described by Ryle as
“psychology’s one man of genius.”1
This feeling about the special place of physics among the sci-
ences is still with us. One only has to look at writers like Popper and
Grünbaum. Generally, among writers who take this view the special
place of physics is not explicitly asserted. It tends rather to be
treated as self-evidently true. A critic like Grünbaum, for instance,
clearly sees no need to justify treating physics as the model for
everything else that claims the status of natural science. It is quite
true that such an extreme positivist position is probably not held
now by the majority of philosophers of science.2 Nevertheless, the
intriguing question remains of how this strange attenuation of the
idea of nature came to be so readily acceptable in the first place.
In part, of course, the special status accorded physics is simply a
reflection of history. The scientific revolt against traditional author-
ity enjoyed its first indubitable success at the hands of Copernicus,
Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. These men were all physicists; they
were not biologists, nor political scientists, nor psychologists. In-
deed the fact that their field of inquiry was so esoteric and so far re-
moved from the everyday concerns of life only made their success
seem all the more impressive. It must have felt a little as if they had
challenged God at his own game, and won.
The scientific revolution of Copernicus and his successors nev-
ertheless produced a psychological crisis, at least for educated peo-
ple. Science was displacing man. In the most obvious sense it was
physically displacing him, by relocating his home from the center of
the universe to the periphery. But in a more significant sense it was
bringing about a spiritual and emotional displacement. The sciences
were showing that key beliefs held by long custom, for example
Aristotle’s cosmology, were not necessarily reliable. The message
was that custom and tradition were not after all to be trusted.
Placing Psychoanalysis as a Science 39
At every point, of course, European civilization relied upon

custom and tradition. Without them there was no culture and no
morality. Thus, in the pursuit of scientific truth, a whole civiliza-
tion had embarked on a questioning of its own foundations. Ini-
tially, no doubt, only the most thoughtful people had a sense of this
crisis. Now, however, we all live with it. We are all torn now be-
tween adhering to tradition and custom, and breaking with them.
Descartes’s philosophy can be understood as a response to this
looming crisis. The central dilemma with which his philosophy
deals is how to reconcile the need for certainty and faith with the
need to question customary opinions.
Descartes is in no doubt how much science depends upon the
criticism of opinion. He is positively obsessive in his wish to ques-
tion opinion. He remarks, “I shall apply myself seriously and freely
to the general destruction of all my former opinions. . . . Reason per-
suades me that I must avoid believing things which are not entirely
certain and indubitable no less carefully than those things which
seem manifestly false.”3
Nevertheless, in spite of this enthusiastic skepticism Descartes
is not prepared to accept that he might end up having to regard all
his ideas as hypothetical. In his view, knowledge must be certain. It
must be built upon indubitable foundations. To get round this prob-
lem he persuades himself that if we strip away from our judgements
everything based merely on custom we will eventually be left with
a core of ideas that present themselves so clearly and so distinctly to
our minds that we can no longer place them in doubt.4 Everything
must be questioned, yet at the end of our questioning, somehow, we
must arrive at certainty.5
At the safety of this distance in time, Descartes’s approach to
the problem of knowledge looks premature. It is a little easier for us
to accept than it was for him that we cannot rid ourselves entirely of
customary beliefs. And we find it a little easier to accept than did he
that we cannot have certainty either. Four hundred years on, we see
that science does not actually need certainty after all. For Descartes,
this was not so easy to see. The age of faith was not that far away. It
had been an age that encouraged a belief in the certainty of received
wisdom. It must have seemed logical that if one got rid of one kind
of certainty, one had to replace it with another.
At the time Descartes was writing, therefore, both for intellectual
and for emotional reasons there really was no solution to the dilemma
created by science. Science was beginning to create the new ethic of
accepting uncertainty but people had not yet learned how to live with
this. Therefore, the conflict between the skeptical spirit of science and
the certainty of faith in God, who was the guarantor of custom, had to
be hidden. Descartes’s way of doing this was to portray the danger to
faith, from science, as a danger to science, from skepticism. Science
was displaced into the position of God, and it was now science, not
God, that was in danger from skepticism. So far from being in conflict
with God, science actually needed God, as a guarantor of certainty.6
The modern positivist critics of psychoanalysis would of course hotly
deny that they have perpetuated Descartes’ displacement of God with
science, but in significant measure this is what has happened. They
have presented science as an authority with certain fixed rules that
must not be infringed by new kinds of knowledge.
What, however, was to become the most important legacy of the
way Descartes wrestled with his dilemma was the distinction he
drew between a world of matter and science, on the one hand, and a
world of mind and intuition, on the other. The world of matter and
science, according to Descartes, progresses by questioning custom.
The world of mind and intuition, by contrast, is free of custom. This
establishes a fateful distinction between the material world as some-
thing we learn about progressively, and the world of the mind as
something we can know with immediacy. We learn about the mate-
rial world by criticizing customary beliefs, those, for instance, of
Aristotle. But the mind we know immediately because, by virtue of
its immediate contact with God, it is free of custom. This concep-
tual division is obviously very inhibiting of the possibility of a sci-
ence of the mind.
Conceivably, Descartes’s attempt to reconcile science and faith
might have been of little more than historical interest by now had
it not been for Kant’s influential renewal of it at the end of the eigh-
teenth century.7 Kant develops Cartesian dualism of mind and mat-
ter into an extraordinary philosophic system whose purpose is “to
deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”8
It is said sometimes that Kant’s problem is how to justify
moral rules in a world apparently governed by Newtonian laws. On
the surface, this is the problem to be solved. But the more funda-
mental psychological problem for Kant is to persuade us, or to per-
suade himself, that the world actually is governed by Newtonian
laws. In the first instance, he has to show that a properly scientific
view of the world can be only a Newtonian view. Only once this
has been achieved do we have a conception of natural science that
leaves it as remote as possible from the dilemmas of human life,
and thus from morality. Only this very particular, very narrow con-
ception of natural science “makes room for faith” in Kant’s sense.

Faith in Kant’s sense means faith in unconditioned moral rules,
faith in the “categorical imperative.”
To this end, Kant has to put the scientific status of any science
that is not Newtonian in doubt. This means, most importantly, the
status of the biological sciences, since these sciences provide an ob-
vious intellectual link between human beings and the rest of nature.
Kant accomplishes this by defining the science of nature as the sci-
ence of inert physical matter, that is to say, matter in so far as it does
not display any purpose or function. In Kant’s philosophy, the rela-
tion of cause and effect in the strict scientific sense is always one of
inorganic, timeless laws. Scientific causation is only fully valid for
him if it is described in these terms.9
Explanations that resort to aims and needs are squeezed to the
margin of science by Kant. The concept of purpose—any teleological
concept—is excluded from nature by him. Unlike the idea of New-
tonian universal law, the idea of purpose, in Kant’s view, belongs
properly only to our judgements of human life. Certainly, he con-
cedes, the idea of purpose is essential for understanding living things.
Nevertheless, he insists, when we use the idea in this way we are re-
ally only borrowing it from its proper sphere of application, which is
human life. “The concept of a natural purpose,” he writes, “. . .
would introduce a new causality into natural science which we only
borrow from ourselves and attribute to other beings, without wishing
to assume that they are constituted in a similar way to us.”10
In this framework, biological science is reduced to a compromise
status. It borrows some of its concepts from natural science in the
proper Newtonian sense. The rest it borrows from the study of
human beings. In consequence, it is a natural science without proper
autonomy. And the connection between man and nature comes to
appear as tenuous as possible.
Nevertheless, Kant’s argument for excluding man from nature is
circular. Purpose, he says, is not a concept belonging to natural sci-
ence because it is a human concept. We need the concept of purpose
to explain human behavior and experience. Therefore, man is not an
object of natural science. This solution to the classification of life
science is not satisfactory. The biological sciences are, indeed, not
Newtonian. Since, however, they clearly are natural sciences, the
idea of purpose is clearly a natural concept as well as being a human
concept. When, in turn, we explore the behavior of human beings in
terms of the purposes that drive them, we are studying them in a
way that is much closer to natural science than Kant suggests.
Since the late eighteenth century, when Kant was writing, there
have been fundamental developments in the sciences, not least the
theory of evolution. For all that, the suggestion that there are some
fixed set of principles that define natural science has remained per-
haps the most tenacious of all Kant’s propositions. Where it has been
accepted, it has resulted in an inevitable division of opinion about
the prospects for the sciences of the psychic and cultural life of man.
On the one hand, there has been the view that if scientific knowl-
edge of man is to be possible at all, then it must come in the same es-
sential form as the knowledge we have of other things in nature. For
uncompromising positivists this means it must give us the kind of
nonhistorical, nonteleological propositions we find in physics. This is
the approach to human science exemplified by J. S. Mill in the nine-
teenth century and in the twentieth by Popper.11 For the more compro-
mising positivists it means that human science must come in the form
of one or another area of life science, Darwinian theory, for example, or
animal ethology.12 Positivists have differed, therefore, over what pre-
cisely should be the criterion of a natural science of man. But they are
agreed in the opinion that if we can pin down exactly what it is that de-
termines our particular ideal of natural science, then we shall know
what can be legitimately demanded of a natural science of man.
On the other hand, nominally opposed to positivism, there is
the view that the form of the knowledge we can have of man is fun-
damentally different from our knowledge of nature. This position is
exemplified in the work of the neo-Kantian philosophers at the end
of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert.13
These writers argued that the human sciences are sciences of the
spirit, Geisteswissenschaften, and that this fact clearly distinguishes
them from natural science. Dilthey argued that understanding
human action is more like interpreting a text than understanding a
natural law. He was the first to use the term “hermeneutics” to dis-
tinguish human science from natural science, an innovation that has
since been hugely influential.
In its origins, the hermeneutic school arose in opposition to the
kind of uncompromising positivism represented by J. S. Mill. Its ad-
herents stressed that knowledge of human processes involves a
study of certain things that appear to play no role in physics, in par-
ticular historical change, values, and language. As positivism has
evolved to advocate later forms of natural science like evolutionary
theory, which involves historical processes, and animal ethology,
which involves an interpretation of purposes and intentions, the
hermeneutic tradition has shifted its ground to stress above all the
place of language in human processes because language is the one

thing we seem to find nowhere in nature outside the human sphere.
The hermeneutic tradition has always been regarded as opposed
to positivism. However, both traditions spring ultimately from Kant’s
philosophy and they both leave unquestioned his key assumption that
natural science may not evolve to encompass human beings. Essen-
tially, this is why the argument between them is never resolved.
Ultimately, these two philosophical traditions of positivism and
hermeneutics are both animated still by Descartes’s aim of finding
something of certainty behind the shifting, uncertain world opened up
by science. They both reflect an attempt to arrive at final statements
about the form that legitimate knowledge can take. To that extent, it
must be said, they are animated less by the wish to extend and de-
velop science than by the wish to legislate for it.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HERMENEUTICS
Those who would assign psychoanalysis to some field out-

side science like hermeneutics share with the positivists
the assumption that we can know in advance what the
limits of science are going to be and that the soul falls out-
side those limits. The differences between hermeneutics
and positivism are, therefore, considerably more superficial
than they seem and than their respective adherents believe.
Ricoeur’s attempts to define a hermeneutic field for psy-
choanalysis lead him only into contradictions and indeci-
sion. Lacan, determined to get purpose and meaning out of
psychoanalysis because they are too scientific, ends by
defining the unconscious as a meaningless chain of signi-
fiers. Like Ricoeur, he seeks an essentially religious solution
for the soul, outside the realm of scientific reflection.
Hermeneutic and linguistic readings of psychoanalysis are,
essentially, overintellectualized resistances to the work of
thinking critically about our own motives.
The debate between positivism and hermeneutics in the human

sciences is reflected in the perennially unresolved debate about how
we are supposed to classify psychoanalysis. Ostensibly, the point of
this long-running argument is that a correct classification of psy-
choanalysis will somehow enable us better to assess its claims. The
problem, however, is that this debate starts from Kant’s assumption
that we can know a priori what the characteristics and limits of nat-
ural science are going to be. It overlooks the fact that psychoanalysis
involves an extension and development in our understanding of
what science is.
We have already considered how positivist critics like Popper and
Grünbaum distort essential elements in psychoanalysis to fit it into
their scheme of things. But this is no less true of those writers, like
Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Lacan for instance, who would divorce psy-
choanalysis from natural science and place it in an opposing realm of
hermeneutics or linguistics.
Ricoeur’s massive Freud and Philosophy (1970) is a heroic at-
tempt to show that psychoanalysis belongs with hermeneutics rather
than natural science. Logically, he stays within the traditional dualist
framework, retaining Kant’s distinction between lawlike causation,
which he associates with natural science, and explanation that resorts
to purpose or intention, which he associates with hermeneutics.14
Ricoeur’s attempts to fit psychoanalysis into this scheme of
things leads him also into a Kantian multiplication of categories. First
he segregates natural science from what he calls the “hermeneutic
field.” Then he divides the hermeneutic field into, first, a hermeneu-
tics of “unmasking, demystification, or reduction of illusions,” which
he associates with Freud, and second, a hermeneutics as “restoration
of meaning,” which he associates with religious faith and a sense of
the sacred.15 There is clearly an attempt here to concede that Freud did
in fact achieve something like a natural science of the spirit while at
the same time insisting that there is something in the spirit beyond
the reach of that science.
There is, Ricoeur maintains, an unresolved contradiction in
Freud’s work between a hermeneutic theory of meaning and what he
calls “energetics,” a causal, natural scientific theory. He writes, “As
I see it, the whole problem of the Freudian epistemology may be cen-
tralized in a single question: How can the economic explanation be
involved in an interpretation dealing with meanings; and conversely,
how can interpretation be an aspect of the economic explanation? It
is easier to fall back on a disjunction: either an explanation in terms
of energy, or an understanding in terms of phenomenology. It must
be recognized, however, that Freudianism exists only on the basis of
its refusal of that disjunction.”16
Ricoeur never makes it quite clear whether he regards Freud’s
refusal of this disjunction as a strength or a weakness. He is reluc-
tant to attribute to Freud any simple mistake in attempting a natu-
ralistic perspective on the psyche. For example, he regards as quite
inadequate “a mere linguistic transcription of analysis.” He evi-

dently means by this Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis, in which the
natural science aspect of psychoanalysis disappears almost entirely.
Against this, Ricoeur insists that “the analytic method is unfeasible
unless one adopts the naturalistic point of view imposed by the eco-
nomic model.”17 This sounds a fairly uncompromising endorsement
of a naturalistic perspective.
At the same time, however, Ricoeur maintains that “we must
first understand the difference between psychoanalysis and scien-
tific psychology,” and he claims that “psychoanalysis is not a sci-
ence; it is an interpretation, more comparable to history than to
psychology.”18 “Psychoanalysis,” he goes on, “speaks not of causes
but of motives.”19
But Ricoeur cannot make up his mind on this. Only two pages
later this view is retracted, when he writes that psychoanalysis is “a
mixed discourse that falls outside the motive-cause alternative.”20
It is thus never clear whether Ricoeur believes Freud’s naturalistic
approach to the psyche is tenable or untenable. He manifestly wants
to assign psychoanalysis to some hermeneutic sphere outside nat-
ural science yet ultimately he finds himself unable to do so.
Ricoeur does not see, or at least does not see clearly, that Freud’s
economic perspective, his “energetics,” although naturalistic, is cer-
tainly not “Newtonian.” Ricoeur’s adherence to Kant misleads him
here. The Freudian notion of drive is that of purpose or function. It
is by recourse to the idea of purpose or function that Freud develops
his interpretations. If you like, he deconstructs the idea of purpose
into that of drive, and then uses drives to reconstruct unconscious
meaning. This is why “energetics” and interpretation go together in
his work; they are inseparable. However, because Freud does not ac-
cept the Kantian categorization of purpose as a nonnatural one, he
has no difficulty in regarding his interpretive theory as a develop-
ment within, rather than without, natural science.
In psychoanalysis, to interpret human life, to study its mean-
ings, we consider the purposes of human life. In a discipline like
this, the concepts purpose, meaning, and determination are largely
coincident. Freud stresses, as he says, “the complete meaningfulness
and determination of even the most apparently obscure and arbitrary
phenomena of the mind.”21 He writes, “Let us agree again as to what
is to be understood by the ‘meaning’ of a psychical process. Nothing
other than the purpose it serves, and its position in a psychical se-
quence. For most of our investigations in place of ‘meaning’ we can
also use ‘purpose,’ ‘inclination.’”22
However, unlike Descartes and Kant, Freud makes no assump-

tion that human purposes are known immediately. On the contrary,
most of our purposes are hidden in our habits and customs. Pur-
poses, in short, are unconscious. By explaining human behavior and
experiences in terms of hidden, unconscious purposes, we meet at
one and the same time the demands of a causal theory, integrating
with the conventions of biological science, and of an interpretative
theory, integrating with history, biography and the study of human
cultural life.23 A science of unconscious purpose is a science of
meaning and it is also a science of nature.24
In general, however, we interpret the human unconscious not
by identifying some purpose that has not been recognized before, but
rather by showing how much of experience is an unacknowledged,
and unsatisfactory, compromise between various purposes. Our pur-
poses are more mixed up than we realize. Purposes which we readily
associate with one part of life, or one phase of life, spread over into
other parts where they are less acceptable and undergo disguise. Be-
cause of this interference between purposes, life is full of hidden un-
conscious contexts.
This idea of unconscious context (Zusammenhang) is one that
Freud uses frequently. One of the weaknesses of the standard En-
glish translations of Freud is their failure to convey how this term
becomes in a quiet way something of a leitmotiv in his writing.25 He
uses it particularly when considering the essential rationale of psy-
choanalysis. In 1912, for example, he remarked that psychoanalysis
“wants nothing other than to uncover contexts, by tracing what is
manifest back to what is hidden.”26
Freud associates the idea of context with that of a complex web
or genealogy of intentions, lying behind experience. It gives expres-
sion to the essential complexity of causal factors in psychic life. He
stresses this complexity in his psychological writing from the out-
set, that is, from Studies On Hysteria, in 1895. There, he refers to
the “principle feature in the etiology of neuroses,” namely, “that
their origin is as a rule overdetermined, that several factors must
come together to give this effect.”27
What distinguishes the human from the nonhuman is not pur-
pose, as the Kantians assert. Rather, human processes are distin-
guished from other organic processes by their relative richness of
purpose, by the overlayering of meanings and by their consequent
ambiguity.
Returning to Ricoeur, it should not be forgotten that his perspec-
tive on Freud is that of a religious writer. He believes we should not
lose the sense of something beyond the “hermeneutics of demystifi-

cation and suspicion” represented by psychoanalysis: “The contrary of
suspicion, I will say bluntly, is faith. . . . One reduces by explaining
through causes (psychological, social, etc.). . . . One describes by dis-
engaging the . . . intention and its . . . correlate—the something in-
tended, the implicit object in ritual myth, and belief.”28
Ricoeur speaks also of “the conflict—within myself and
within contemporary culture—between a hermeneutics that de-
mystifies religion and a hermeneutics that tries to grasp a possible
call or kerygma.”29
Ricoeur here alludes to the question that Freud should make us
focus on. If we place our habits under suspicion by looking for the
concealed purposes within them, will we be strong enough cre-
atively to reform our habits by attenuating those purposes that are
destructive and cultivating those that make us fruitful? This is the
most fundamental question that psychoanalysis leaves us with. If
we feel we do not have that strength then we must make recourse to
some form of traditional religious faith or moral code. If, however,
we feel we do have that strength, then by that very fact we are cre-
ating a new kind of faith, in ourselves.
A writer who does nothing at all to encourage this new kind of
faith and who has made even more elaborate efforts than Ricoeur to
impose a regressive dualism onto Freud is Lacan. Lacan is interest-
ing as an illustration of what can happen to psychoanalysis when the
attempt is made to find a place for it clearly outside the realm of sci-
ence. It is not a coincidence that he has become widely studied at a
time when the scientific credentials of psychoanalysis have come
under intensive questioning. Lacan’s psychoanalysis is significantly
closer in spirit to the positivist critiques of analysis like those of
Grünbaum or Webster than it seems on the surface. Like them, it
proceeds from a rejection of Freud’s attempts to think about the am-
biguities and multilayering of human intention in rational and sci-
entific terms. The difference is that whereas the positivists proceed
as if science is duty bound to pretend these ambiguities do not exist
at all, Lacan claims that they are too primary for science ever to get
a handle on them. The result, however, is the same in both cases: a
retreat from the rational exploration of the dilemmas of life, a mis-
understanding of the unconscious as being revealed in memories and
free associations, and, in human terms, a loss of a sense of propor-
tion and balance.
Lacan understands clearly the relation between purpose and
meaning in Freud’s work in a way that Ricoeur does not. But he too
wants to reach some sphere beyond the analysis of purpose and

meaning. Lacan takes his stand at what may perhaps prove to be the
final displacement of the hermeneutic defense against science. For
him, the line dividing nature and spirit is not that between mechan-
ics and purpose—as it is implicitly for Ricoeur and as it was for the
neo-Kantians at the turn of the century—but rather that between
purpose and language. By dividing purpose from language, however,
this turns out actually to be a line between the rational and the irra-
tional. Like Kierkegaard, Lacan believes the soul can be saved only
by withdrawing it from rational dialogue.
Lacan’s claim is that the unconscious is “structured like a lan-
guage.”30 He means by this that the unconscious is structured like a
language rather than like a biological system. This supposed opposi-
tion between language and biology is the centerpiece of his thought.
Freud stresses the interaction of language and biology; he empha-
sizes how biological need is filtered through language. Lacan argues,
in contrast, that language suspends the rule of biological need. Lan-
guage for Lacan is, in effect, a power beyond life and nature.31
Freud weaves nature and spirit together. Lacan separates them
out again. He does so, in particular, under the guise of a distinction
between what he calls “meaning” and the “symbolic.” Meaning, for
Lacan, is what we see when we view a human being from a biologi-
cal point of view. The meaning of an act is the biological need or
function it fulfils. The symbolic is what we see when we view a
human being as a language-using creature.
Lacan argues that because we are a creature dependent on lan-
guage, we cannot properly achieve knowledge of ourselves. His
point is not just that knowledge of ourselves is forever unfinished
and imperfect; with that we would all surely agree. His claim is,
rather, that knowledge of ourselves is a complete illusion; it is, as
he puts it, “imaginary.” This idea of the imaginary he associates
with what he calls the “mirror stage” of the mind.32 Contrary to
what the term may at first suggest, the mirror stage is not intended
as a particular historical phase in the development of the infant.
Lacan in any event rejects the perspective of developmental stages
in psychoanalytic theory.33 The “mirror stage,” rather, refers to the
knowledge we have of ourselves in a mirror, knowledge, that is,
that is not mediated by language.34
Lacan equates this imaginary mirror stage not just with our peren-
nial attempts to oversimplify to ourselves our own motives, but with
all knowledge of meanings and intentions, however sophisticated and
self-disciplined the route by which it is acquired. This equation is, of
course, quite untenable. Our knowledge of meanings and intentions is

mediated by language, just like all our other knowledge; there is noth-
ing imaginary about it. Lacan’s only purpose in drawing up this false
equation is that it allows him to disvalue knowledge of meanings and
intentions. Such knowledge, he insists, is not knowledge of what is es-
sentially human. It shows us only the “animal” in man.35
The only way we can escape the imaginary mirror stage, Lacan
argues, is by recognizing the primacy of language, the primacy of
what he calls the “symbolic order” or the “order of the signifier.”
This symbolic order, he emphasizes, is something we are born into;
it is not, he insists, anything we have significant power to fashion to
our own needs. Language is “something which goes infinitely be-
yond every intention that we might put into it.”36 Recognizing the
symbolic order means for Lacan recognizing our radical dependence
on language.
Freud attributes to human beings the capacity to balance in a
fruitful way potentially conflicting inclinations. This capacity is
what he means when he speaks, from the 1920s onwards, of the ego,
or the I, constantly having to strike a balance between the demands
of conscience—the superego, or over-I—and new impulses—the Id,
or the It. The stronger the I, the more highly developed is this ca-
pacity. For Lacan, in contrast, the belief in such a capacity is simply
another reflection of the imaginary mirror stage. He writes, “The
fundamental fact which analysis reveals to us and which I am in the
process of teaching you, is that the ego is an imaginary function.”37
Lacan’s message is that the “signifier,” that is, language, con-
stantly blocks our attempts to get at the “signified,” that is, at our-
selves. “We are forced,” he writes, “to accept the notion of an
incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier.” Each time we
try to grasp this elusive signified we find instead we have been di-
verted to yet another signifier. Instead of confronting ourselves, we
are confronted with an endlessly unfolding “chain of signifiers.”38 It
is the signifier, not the I, which is autonomous. Lacan’s theory of the
signifier is thus a further expression of his belief in our inherent in-
ability to use language in order better to know ourselves, and of our
inability to employ language so as to achieve a more creative fulfill-
ment of our own purposes.
At the same time, by equating the unconscious with the signi-
fier, he draws it into an ethereal, purposeless field, taking it un-
equivocally back towards the old transcendent God.39 In an attempt
to escape the analysis of meaning, Lacan argues that our chains of
signifiers can be resolved only through recourse to what he calls the
“absolute Other.”40 He employs this term with the ambiguity that is

his hallmark, but his rejection of the ego and of the ideal of psycho-
logical autonomy makes it impossible to interpret this notion other
than in a traditionally religious sense. There is, he says, an essential
“absence” or “lack” within human nature, an absence that can be
filled only by recognition of this “absolute Other.”41 This, for Lacan,
is the purpose of psychoanalysis.
In setting up a great division between the realm of the signifier
and the absolute Other, on the one hand, and the realm of the signi-
fied, of meaning, of the imaginary and the mirror stage, on the other,
Lacan institutes a full-scale regression from Freud’s achievement of
unification, while claiming all the while that he is simply bringing
us back to the essence of Freud.42
Throughout the 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth cen-
tury Freud worked to get behind the chains of signifiers produced by
free association. He succeeded in doing so by tracing their connec-
tions to the conflicts in human intention underlying them. Through
his attempts to disconnect associations from their meaning, Lacan
aims to reverse this immensely important step. He takes us back to
the cathartic model of the unconscious in which we get no further
than disconnected chains of associations and memories.
Again, notwithstanding the quasi-theological tone in which
Lacan expresses his ideas, we should note how close this view of the
unconscious is to that of the positivist critics of psychoanalysis like
Grünbaum and Webster. This closeness should not surprise us be-
cause they too are either unable or unwilling to grasp how Freud
draws the conflicts and ambiguities of the soul into the perspective
of nature. Writers like Grünbaum and Webster are what we might
call naive dualists, in that they believe simply there is no need of a
science that takes the ambiguities in human intention into account.
Lacan is a much more knowing dualist in that he is intent on getting
the ambiguities in human intention out of science.
Let us consider again what a chain of signifiers actually is.
Lacan himself is extremely poor at giving illustrations, so we will go
to Freud, who is so rich in this respect. The aliquis example from
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is a useful illustration here
because, on the surface, it appears to be simply an involved play on
words. What we learn from it, however, is that word games like this
cannot be comprehended if we do not relate them to human inten-
tion and, specifically, to the way in which human intention is di-
vided in itself. In other words, we cannot make sense of the
signifiers unless we have a grasp of the signified.
The aliquis example shows how free association works.

Notwithstanding what Lacan claims, and many others believe, free
association is not in itself a means of uncovering the unconscious.
One could free associate forever and still learn nothing about the un-
conscious because, as such, free associations do not show us the con-
flicting intentions that give them meaning. Free association is
nothing more than a trick for momentarily suspending the conven-
tional rules of dialogue. In this way, it facilitates contradictions and
anomalies in expression, thus giving us more clues to work with.
That is its only purpose. It is only when we suspend the game of free
association and ask why this or that particular association occurred
that we begin to uncover the conflicts of intention that are the stuff
of the unconscious.
The aliquis slip is a complicated symptomatic event. To under-
stand it, we have to consider the whole context of the dialogue in
which it occurs. It is only when we take this context as a whole that
we can get some idea of the themes that are struggling for expres-
sion. In the aliquis case, furthermore, a psychoanalytic dialogue has
to all intents and purposes been initiated, and the special character-
istics of this kind of dialogue must therefore be included among the
conditioning factors in the chain of signifiers produced. The associa-
tions are produced by a man who has a positive wish to discuss his
problems with Freud and they are produced with this end in view.
A young Jewish man falls into conversation with Freud while
on a journey. Freud makes clear that the man is not a stranger to
him and that he is familiar with his psychoanalytic writing. There
is no doubt, therefore, that Freud’s presence is a key factor in pro-
voking the slip at the outset; there is something that the man
wishes to say to Freud. At some point in the conversation he comes
round to expressing his frustration at the social obstacles that have
to be overcome by members of his race. To illustrate his feelings, he
quotes a line from The Aeneid in which Dido calls on her descen-
dants to revenge her on Aeneas: “Exoriar(e) aliquis nostris ex ossi-
bus ultor.” (Let someone [aliquis] arise from my bones as an
avenger).43 The man omits the word aliquis. He realizes something
is missing, but has to turn to Freud to supply the missing word.
After Freud has done so, the man challenges him to make a psycho-
analytic interpretation of his forgetting. Freud accepts the chal-
lenge, getting the man to give him the associations that spring to
mind on thinking about aliquis.
Liquis reminds him of two things. First, Reliquien—relics, in
the sense of religious relics; second, liquefying, or liquefaction and
thus the idea of fluidity. Relics in turn are associated by him with
the theme of Christian saints, in particular Saint Simon, who was
sacrificed as a child. The idea of saints leads to a remembered arti-
cle on Saint Augustine’s views on women, and then to Saint Januar-
ius—like Augustine, a saint associated with the calendar. Saint
Januarius is associated with a miracle involving the periodic liquifi-
cation of blood and this legend recalls once again the themes of
relics and liquefaction.
It is this last association that leads the young man to admit that
he is preoccupied by the fear that his mistress may prove to be preg-
nant. At the same time, however, as Freud points out, the choice of
that particular line from Virgil is also an expression of his wish for a
child. This is the conflict, or rather the first part of the conflict, that
is at work in the young man’s mind.44 He wants a child and he does
not want a child. This is the first conflict in his intentions.
Undoubtedly, there is much more behind this conversation than
we learn about in Freud’s report. Freud does not explore, for instance,
the fact that the particular context of the chosen line from Virgil is
that of the anger of a scorned mistress, seeking revenge on the lover
who has abandoned her. Was the young man tempted to abandon his
mistress? Probably. Had he been trapped by her? Perhaps he felt so.
Were his difficult relations with the woman a reflection of other
problems of identity? Very likely, for every young man has a problem
with his identity. What was the young man’s emotional relationship
with Freud himself? We have no idea. For a proper understanding of
the aliquis slip we would have to know how all these themes, and
many more, related to the young man’s preoccupations about becom-
ing a father. Without such an exploration, we have only a very tenu-
ous idea indeed of the conditions behind the slip.
The little game of free association and the chain of signifiers it
yields tell us nothing about these conditions. Free association is
nothing more than an artificial relaxation of the conventional rules
of human communication, so that thoughts and feelings that are at
odds with our conventional presentation of ourselves to the world
may come closer to finding expression. It is a momentary suspen-
sion of the logical, ethical, and aesthetic rules that normally apply to
human intercourse because these rules encourage us constantly to
make our intentions seem more coherent and more consistent than
they actually are.
Sebastian Timpanaro offers a lengthy criticism of the aliquis ex-
ample that has become famous.45 His examination makes plain just
how easily the primacy of conflictual processes is lost if we look only
at the wordplay they produce. He shows that he is able to make free

associations to any word of the chosen line from the Aeneid that lead
to the theme of unwanted pregnancy. He believes this invalidates
Freud’s method of interpretation since it shows Freud has not ex-
plained why aliquis, and not some other word in the line, is forgotten.
This is to misunderstand what Freud is showing. Freud is not ex-
plaining why aliquis rather than some other word is forgotten. All
that he does show is how an uncomfortable conflict between the
wish to reveal a compromising truth about one’s own intentions and
the wish to keep it secret can result in a bungled, distorted expres-
sion. The point of the aliquis example, like the other examples in
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, is that an apparent break-
down in meaning—for instance, the momentary forgetting of a
word—often reflects a conflict between meanings, that is, a conflict
between intentions. If, however, we follow Timpanaro, or Grün-
baum, or Lacan, and take meaning out of our examination of such
problems, this insight is lost.
We do not play games with free associations as an end in itself.
A chain of associations is not a chain of unconscious causal factors;
as such, they demonstrate nothing. Associations only become of in-
terest to us when we place them in the context of conflicting inten-
tions. To do this we look at them, first of all, in the context of a local
or short-term conflict, as in the aliquis example. Then, as we learn
more about the case history involved, we slowly trace the deeper
lines of conflict involved in the individual’s striving to be a self-gov-
erning human being. Under every chain of signifiers produced by
free association there is a conflict of intentions and it is that conflict
alone that makes it meaningful.
Lacan’s claim that we can go no deeper than the chain of signi-
fiers and that we are in some way barred from an understanding of
our intentions is wrong and it is obscurantist. The work of under-
standing our intentions is always intricate and demanding. But no
one who has acquired an insight into intention will ever be satisfied
again with meaningless chains of signifiers.
It should be noted that Lacan’s determination to separate the ex-
pressions of the soul from their underlying meanings is matched
also by an orthodox, hermeneutic view of the place of psychoanaly-
sis as a science.46 His emphasis on a narrow conception of language
(that is, verbal language), his aversion to metaphors that suggest bi-
ology or the physical sciences, and the relative absence of clinical
data (and the consequent neglect of the comparative method) all
place him firmly in the hermeneutic camp, whatever he may say to
the contrary.47 His view on science is entirely within the dualist

framework, though of course he expresses this in his own terminol-
ogy. “What I am calling natural,” he remarks, “is the field of science
in which there is no one who uses the signifier to signify.”48 In other
words, natural science is part of the imaginary realm of meanings; it
is suitable for discovering the animal in man, but not the human.
Lacan warns us against propelling “psychoanalysis down the path of
the prejudices of science, which lets the entire essence of human re-
ality escape.”49
Lacan proposes the term “conjectural sciences” for the human
sciences, which he opposes to the “exact” sciences.50 But this termi-
nological distinction, which he bases on Kant’s argument that “the
very idea of determinism is that law is without intention,”51 adds
nothing new to the traditional dualist view of natural science. It is, in
short, impossible not to interpret Lacan’s view of science, and indeed
his entire theory of the signifier, in a neo-Kantian sense.
At first sight it might seem that Lacan’s dualism is at odds with
his attitude towards Descartes, of whom he is indeed consistently crit-
ical. His aim, he says, is “to oppose any philosophy directly issuing
from the Cogito.”52 But it is not Descartes’s dualism of matter and
mind that concerns him. It is the antitheological strain in Descartes
that he objects to: Descartes’s love of clarity, his faith that experience
is a more trustworthy guide than ancient authorities, and his belief in
transparent, reasoned argument. Lacan’s response to Descartes is pro-
foundly irrationalist: “I think where I am not,” he says, “therefore I
am where I do not think.”53 Most important, however, his criticisms
of any Cartesian transparency in the mind are a reflection of his rejec-
tion of the autonomy of the self. Autonomy, the will to take responsi-
bility for oneself, is, according to Lacan, “imaginary;” it is merely
another word for adaptation to conventional standards of behavior.
The profound irrationalism that marks Lacan’s thought, his re-
sistance to all forms of consistent or logical argument, should be a
sufficient indication to us that the hermeneutic project for psycho-
analysis, the attempt to divorce it from dialogue with science, is fun-
damentally misconceived.
FREUD’S OWN REMARKS ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Freud regards psychoanalysis as natural science. But he

has a flexible idea of what this means. Psychoanalysis
studies meanings and intentions, and Freud expressly
contrasts this with “mechanistic” and with “exact” sci-

ence. Freud also uses the term “Geisteswissenschaft” fre-
quently but he does not use it in the neo-Kantian sense.
He uses the term for the human disciplines generally. He
hopes that these disciplines can be integrated more
closely with natural science by means of psychoanalysis.
In practice, he regards psychoanalysis as a development
out of natural science by means of which our under-
standing of human experience can be integrated more
closely with our understanding of the rest of nature.
Throughout his writing Freud frequently and unequivocally does

describe psychoanalysis as natural science, Naturwissenschaft. His
claims in this respect were in no way softened with time. For exam-
ple, in 1938, when he was eighty-two, he insisted, “Whereas the psy-
chology of consciousness never went beyond the broken sequences
which were obviously dependent on something else, the other view,
which holds that the psychical is in itself unconscious, enables psy-
chology to become a natural science like any other.”54
The claim that psychoanalysis is a natural science “like any
other” cannot be sustained. Apart from any other consideration, if it
were a science like any other it would not have engendered such a
debate about its status. This uncompromising claim, however, is not
a reflection of Freud’s considered view. Four significant passages in
his writing in particular make plain that his view of psychoanalysis
as a science was much more nuanced than this rhetorical remark
suggests when taken in isolation.
First, in “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis” (1925), he de-
scribes psychoanalysis as occupying a “middle position between
medicine and philosophy,” and this has made it difficult to place.
Doctors are inclined to suspect that it is a speculative system and
not truly part of medicine and science. Philosophers, on the other
hand, too readily equate the mind with consciousness and with rea-
son, and do not see what light a psychoanalytic perspective might
shed on their concerns.55
Second, in the following year, in The Question of Lay Analysis
(1926), he describes analysis as something, “sui generis, something
new and singular that can only be understood with the help of new
insights—or, if you will, new assumptions.”56 Clearly, this contra-
dicts the view that analysis is a science “like any other.”
Third, again in The Question of Lay Analysis, he remarks, “One
could describe the function which the analyst, whether doctor or
layman, has to fulfil in relation to the public as that of “a secular

minister of souls (ein weltlicher Seelsorger).”57 The religious conno-
tations of this phrase were intended by Freud. The Question of Lay
Analysis, he wrote to his friend the pastor Oscar Pfister, was in-
tended “to protect analysis from the doctors,” just as The Future of
an Illusion, written the following year (1927), in which he attacks
traditional religion, was intended to protect analysis from the
priests.58 Again, in this idea of a secular minister of souls we see the
suggestion of a “middle position,” delicately balanced between med-
icine and philosophy, or between science and theology, taking inspi-
ration from the traditions of both, perhaps modifying both, but
governed by neither.
Fourth, in his late paper of 1937, “Analysis Terminable and In-
terminable,” Freud suggests, in what has become a famous phrase,
that psychoanalysis is an “impossible profession,” one in which
“one can be sure at the outset of achieving an unsatisfactory out-
come.”59 It is important to recall, of course, what the “two other,
much longer known” impossible professions are that he compares
it with: education and government. The implication here is that
psychoanalysis is concerned with ethical issues in the broadest
sense, that is, with the perennial question of how human beings
should live. This is a question on which, in stark contrast to those
raised by the physical sciences, almost everyone feels themselves to
be entitled to a view, and upon which there has never been agree-
ment for any great length of time.
Considered together, these four remarks show that taking any
particular comment of Freud’s on psychoanalysis in isolation from
others will give us an overly simple picture of his thinking. That a
psychoanalyst should be a secular minister of souls and a practi-
tioner of a natural science at one and the same time certainly re-
quires “new insights—or, if you will, new assumptions.”
One never has to read far in Freud to encounter material that
flatly contradicts a positivist interpretation of psychoanalysis. For in-
stance, he expressly contrasts psychoanalytic theory with a “mecha-
nistic” approach to psychology. In 1925, he looked back on the
inability of the most favored medical approaches to account for the so-
matic phenomena of hysteria, at a time when men such as Charcot
and Breuer were exploring this field from a psychic point of view: “In
this materialist or, better, mechanistic period medicine made tremen-
dous advances, but it also misunderstood in a short-sighted way the
chief and most difficult among the problems of life.”60
Prior to this, Freud had given an even more explicit repudiation of

positivist ideals in the fifth chapter of the Introductory Lectures: “Can
you imagine what exact science would say if it learnt we want to
make the experiment of finding the meaning of dreams? Perhaps it
has already said it. But we won’t let ourselves be frightened off. If slips
can have a meaning so can the dream, and in very many instances
slips do have a meaning, which has escaped exact investigation. So let
us acknowledge the prejudice of the ancients and of the people and fol-
low in the footsteps of the dream-interpreters of antiquity.”61
We are told often that Freud painfully tried to conform to the con-
ventional wisdoms of a now outdated nineteenth-century view of sci-
ence. On the contrary, it is evident that, far from being at pains to
make his interpretations conform to existing scientific criteria, he
positively relished the problems that such a line of investigation cre-
ated for conventional ideas of science.
Freud, then, can certainly not be enlisted as a positivist. But nei-
ther can he be claimed for a neo-Kantian hermeneutics.62 He has al-
ready anticipated the arguments of this school and moved beyond
them. Consider, for instance, how carefully he uses the term Geis-
teswissenschaft. Since the work of Dilthey and Rickert at the turn
of the century, Geisteswissenschaft has come to be widely associ-
ated with the view that the science of the human spirit must not be
confused with natural science. Freud uses the word with just the op-
posite implication. He believes that the human spirit is a part of na-
ture, and that the sciences devoted to it should be sensibly
integrated with the sciences that explore other aspects of nature.
The word Geisteswissenschaft is not given special emphasis
by him but he uses it in an interestingly consistent way. Invari-
ably, he uses it when referring to connections between psycho-
analysis and the human disciplines in general. A typical example
of the way he uses it is the following sentence taken from the
tenth of the Introductory Lectures: “In psychoanalytic work rela-
tions develop to so many other Geisteswissenschaften the investi-
gation of which promises the most valuable results, to the study of
myths and philology, to folklore, to the psychology of peoples and
the theory of religion.”63
Whenever he uses this term it is invariably in this relaxed way
as a shorthand for the sciences of human cultural life in general,
viewed as potential material for considering from a psychoanalytic
perspective. Here is another example: “From The Interpretation of
Dreams onwards psychoanalysis had a twofold significance. It was
not only a new therapy for neuroses but it was also a new psychol-
ogy; it made a claim on the attentions not only of nerve specialists
but of all those engaged in a Geisteswissenschaft.”64
The view that the Geisteswissenschaften should be kept clearly
distinct from natural science is not shared by Freud. He takes as
much enjoyment in challenging it as he does in challenging the
scope of “exact” science. A scientific view of things, he insists, need
not overlook “the claims of the human spirit and the needs of the
human soul. . . . Spirit and soul (Geist und Seele) are objects for sci-
entific research like any non-human things. . . . The contribution [of
psychoanalysis] consists precisely in the extension of research to the
area of the soul.”65
This well-known passage from Freud’s 1933 New Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis, “On a Weltanschauung,” has some-
times been misinterpreted. Grünbaum, for instance, cites it to
counter Bettelheim’s argument that the standard English transla-
tions of Freud make him appear more committed to natural science
than he really is. “In that lecture,” Grünbaum writes, “Freud de-
clared that “psychoanalysis has a special right to speak for the sci-
entific Weltanschauung,” . . . the word scientific being intended in
the sense of the natural sciences.”66 However, Freud understood in a
way that Grünbaum does not that the sense of the natural sciences
is unfolding and changing all the time. Freud is not a positivist.
There is no intention on his part of abolishing the Geisteswis-
senschaften. His hope, rather, is that psychoanalytic insights and
methods can be used to integrate the human disciplines with an ex-
tended conception of natural science.
The Geisteswissenschaften are the cultural, historical sciences
of the human animal. They take as their field of study the way in
which human beings make choices and the conditions that govern
those choices. The insight of psychoanalysis is that the human ani-
mal remains in certain important respects like an infant, even into
adulthood. Like an infant, the human animal has constantly to rec-
oncile its creative impulses with its fear of departing from the au-
thority of the traditions that have nurtured it. Freud’s hope is that
the human cultural sciences can make use of this psychoanalytic in-
sight and apply it as an additional perspective on their problems. In
this way, he believes, the study of human culture can be drawn
closer to the study of man as a natural being.
The traditional disjunction between Naturwissenschaft and
Geisteswissenschaft is superseded by Freud. He draws Geist and
Natur together and thereby makes redundant the arguments both of
positivism, which expects the science of human beings to be a repeat

of the sciences of nature, and of hermeneutics, which searches for
some realm immune from science. We have to revise our under-
standing of the relation between the sciences devoted to nature and
to man. The history of the human spirit has become a department of
natural history, just as natural history has become an expression of
that spirit.
Chapter Three
NIETZSCHE AND THE CRITIQUE OF INTENTION
THE CHALLENGE TO DUALISM FROM PRAGMATISM
Pragmatism is a style of thought that diverges from dual-

ism. The aim of dualism is to identify the limits of knowl-
edge so as to make room for faith and ensure that the
conduct of life is put on a footing of certainty immune
from the skeptical examination of science. Pragmatism,
in contrast, asks, How can we use the essentially uncer-
tain, open-ended nature of knowledge to shape our con-
duct in life and thereby maximize our fruitfulness? The
pragmatist attitude to truth is the one that now predomi-
nates in contemporary intellectual life. However, the cur-
rent debates about the scientific status of psychoanalysis
make plain that, at an unconscious level, dualist habits of
mind still exercise a considerable influence on us.
The credentials of psychoanalysis as a science have been as-

sailed by modern adherents of dualist ways of thinking. These crit-
ics are dualist because, one way or another, they all divorce the soul
from nature, even though this is often achieved only at the price of
pretending that the dilemmas and complexities of the soul simply
do not exist. This seems to be a mode of thought very out of tune
with contemporary intellectual attitudes. And indeed it is. The in-
triguing thing is that these criticisms should be so widely accepted
even though they proceed from assumptions about the nature of sci-
ence and its relation to human beings that, when spelled out, most
educated people would now reject. The only conclusion one can
draw from this is that the criticisms of psychoanalysis as a science
have come to represent a generally accepted form of intellectual re-
volt, or regression, from what is in fact the now predominant
monist view of man and nature, and from the pragmatist view that
61
accompanies it of scientific truth as an instrument man has fash-

ioned for dealing with the world.
Pragmatism leads to very different conclusions about the nature
of science and its relation with human life than does dualism. It has
been cultivated and brought to predominance in modern intellectual
life by men of a significantly different intellectual temperament
from those who promulgated the great dualist perspectives of the
past. These are men who as a general rule are more inclined to look
on old sciences and systems as a potential source of building materi-
als for new creativity rather than to worry whether such use of old
ideas infringes the principles they originally made manifest. They
feel they can organize things in a creative way according to their
own lights and that the past is to be used as a resource for creating
the future without an anxious sense of dependence on inherited cus-
toms. They are, therefore, happy to think critically about how their
own motives have been shaped by the past and about how they can
reshape their own motives to make themselves more creative. They
are happy in other words to see themselves as a piece of nature, be-
cause their faith is that nature is fundamentally self-reforming and
self-repairing.
Pragmatism of course is a broad style of thought as much as it is
a particular school of philosophy. It encompasses the three impor-
tant American philosophers—Charles S. Peirce, William James, and
John Dewey. But certain key aspects of the spirit of pragmatism in
its contemporary manifestation can be traced back before them, for
instance, to the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with its emphasis
on man within nature, and before this to Goethe. And although Ni-
etzsche and Freud are not usually labeled as pragmatists, their atti-
tude towards truth is in essentials pragmatist.
The “categorical imperative” of pragmatism is fruitfulness. It is
stated by Goethe: “Was fruchtbar ist, allein ist wahr.” Only what is
fruitful is true.1 Goethe’s work is characterized by pantheism, a
sense that what is divine in life is to be found within Nature and her
laws rather than in the suspension of these laws; by empiricism, a
sense of the importance of reaching truth through our own first-
hand experience of life and of things; and by historicism, a sense that
to make the present as fruitful as we can we must be aware of how
our possibilities are shaped by the past. These three key attitudes are
to be found both in the pragmatism of the American philosophers
and in the depth psychology of Nietzsche and Freud. Goethe’s influ-
ence on the American pragmatists is mediated by Hegel and by
Emerson but on Nietzsche and Freud it is direct.
Nietzsche and the Critique of Intention 63
Pragmatism stresses the importance of science for life as it is ac-

tually lived. The trap existentialism falls into is that of trying to di-
vorce life from science out of an anxiety that our faith in life is
threatened by science. The trap that positivism falls into is that of
denying that the essential form of science can evolve, so it never en-
compasses what is vital to us. The pragmatist attitude avoids both
these traps through its insistence that science can and must be de-
veloped so as to develop a new kind of faith in life.
The ethical imperative of pragmatism is that a man must have
the strength to question the rules of conduct that have governed him,
and turn that questioning into deeper creativity. The ideal of pragma-
tism is that we should strive for self-possession and self-mastery in
the face of the shifting values and perspectives which the pursuit of
knowledge must entail. The essayist and poet of pragmatism is Emer-
son. He writes, “Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a
man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put
him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth
to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from
whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations
to society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded
and decease.”2
For men of a dualist temperament the primary problem has
been to preserve the rules governing the conduct of life from critical
scientific scrutiny. Such men say, by implication, that we do not
have the strength to become systematically self-reforming creatures
so we must preserve our rules for organizing life free from the re-
forming impact of scientific inquiry. For the dualist tradition, there-
fore, science may be of any form, provided only it does not threaten
those underlying imperatives that govern our conduct. For the prag-
matist tradition, in contrast, science may be of any form, provided
only that it does indeed lead to a more fruitful conduct of life. This
is the fundamental difference between them.
Dualist philosophers tackle their problem by trying to deter-
mine in some final way which new meanings may legitimately be
found in our intellectual categories, and which may not. This is ex-
emplified, for instance, in Kant’s proposition that one may not find
the notion of purpose in the categories of nature. This divorces
knowledge from human purpose as far as possible. But this dualist
concern with establishing the limits of categories is also unmistak-
able in those contemporary critics of psychoanalysis who set out to
define what science is, in the knowledge that the questions posed by
depth psychology will fail to fit into such a definition. Above all, for
a thinker of dualist temperament, one must not find judgements

about human conduct in the propositions of science. Facts and val-
ues must be kept immune from each other. We must never allow our
knowledge of the way things are to influence our judgements on the
rules of conduct we employ for organizing our purposes.
In contrast, the pragmatist attitude towards definitions is that we
can never be sure exactly what may turn up in our categories. For in-
stance, it often is meaningful to regard nature as including purposes.
And the codes and habits governing our purposes generally do benefit
from a critical examination in the light of new knowledge. But, the
pragmatist insists, we should not fear this uncertainty, because it is a
promise of fruitfulness. Our best hope lies not in exhausting ourselves
anxiously trying to define our classifications so that they are evermore
immune from review. Rather, we should let our classifications evolve
in an orderly way in response to the teachings of experience. And we
should let our principles of conduct be guided and reformed in the
light of our growing knowledge.
The pioneering logician of pragmatism is Charles Sanders
Peirce.3 Peirce develops his own position in opposition to that of
Descartes. As we have noted, in Descartes’s philosophy everything
revolves around the issue of how to reconcile the doubt engendered
by science with the certainty required by traditional faith. If custom
and habit are questionable, as science shows them to be, there is the
danger that doubt will invade everything. The problem is, therefore,
to find an island of knowledge untouched by custom and therefore
immune to doubt. From that island of knowledge, we can start
working outwards again, so that everything is placed on what is ul-
timately a footing of certainty.
Peirce insists that this way of reasoning is a source only of self-
deception. It is simply not possible to doubt in the way Descartes be-
lieves and, equally, we have no grounds for claiming that our
knowledge is certain. We cannot set the mind free from custom and
habit. We cannot achieve a state of mind that is not conditioned by
the past. Peirce remarks,
Philosophers of very diverse stripes propose that philosophy

shall take its start from one or another state of mind in which no
man . . . actually is. One proposes that you shall begin by doubt-
ing everything, and says that there is only one thing that you
cannot doubt, as if doubting were “as easy as lying.” Another
proposes that we should begin by observing “the first impres-
sions of sense,” forgetting that our very percepts are the results
of cognitive elaboration. But in truth, there is but one state of

mind from which you can “set out,” namely, the very state of
mind in which you actually find yourself at the time you do “set
out”—a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of
cognition already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if
you would. . . . Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece
of paper that you doubt?4
Peirce stresses that we cannot have any unhistorical knowledge of

anything. The shape of science is always conditioned by past custom
and habit. Science undergoes metamorphosis as our experience de-
velops, but we cannot uproot it from the past. Furthermore, we only
know what our scientific knowledge amounts to when we place it in
the context of life and see what rules for action proceed from it. “A
conception,” Peirce notes, “that is, the rational purport of a word or
other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the
conduct of life.”5 Therefore, “the rational meaning of every proposi-
tion lies in the future.”6 Until we see what purposes are implicit in
our scientific propositions we do not know what they mean. Scien-
tific concepts, therefore, never convey truth in an immediate way.
They are, rather, signs, never wholly transparent signs, for the con-
duct of life.7 Every field of science is really a matrix of implicit rules
for human action.
Everything we call truth has been derived ultimately in answer
to an unconscious question: By which rules for action should we
live? The pragmatist attitude to the problem of knowledge is to
make this unconscious question overt by asking, Which rules for ac-
tion follow from our judgements of truth?8 To judge the merits of
any science, therefore, instead of measuring it against some ahistor-
ical definition of science, as dualists do, we should study rather what
its implicit rules for action are. The crucial question is, do these im-
plicit rules increase our fruitfulness, or do they diminish it?
Of the three American pragmatists it is William James who does
the most to stress the human implications of pragmatism and who
drives home the fact that truth is a human construct: “Truth inde-
pendent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to
human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed
superabundantly—or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded
thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and
its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology . . . and
may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men’s
regard by sheer antiquity.”9
In other words, truth that we find merely does not exist at all.
We do not find truth, we make it. Where we seem to find it, this is
only where we have forgotten how our ancestors made it, or where
we for some reason hide from our own making. Even the most ap-
parently objective truth is steeped in human purposes and customs.
Scientific truth is part of a human narrative. “Objects of natural
science,” writes Dewey, “are not metaphysical rivals of historical
events; they are means of directing the latter.”10 Our judgements
about nature are conditioned always by human needs. There is no
“real” connection between experiences, no “natural” connection be-
tween them, that is not determined by what human beings have his-
torically found useful to connect in experience.11 The limits and
properties of each region of experience are determined by the mean-
ings we have habitually found profitable to associate with that re-
gion. Thus, for instance, whether we treat the human animal as
wholly a part of nature or as the boundary of nature depends entirely
upon the properties we feel it is profitable to attribute to this animal.
The problem, therefore, of the classification of a discipline like psy-
choanalysis cannot properly be answered unless we ask, Which pur-
poses are served by which classification of it? Those who feel there
is an advantage to be gained by inquiring quite rigorously into their
own motives will be happy to emphasize its connections with other
disciplines of science. Those who do not feel there is such an advan-
tage will be inclined to divorce it from science in an effort either to
discredit it entirely, or to make it subordinate to some other kind of
religious or moral program.
James speaks provocatively of the “practical cash-value” of our
beliefs.12 The cash-value of a new idea is its value for our existing
habits of thought and action. We test the value of a possible belief not
against a neutral reality, but in terms of its consequences for existing
habits of mind and action that we do not want to give up. As James
notes, “The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest
of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-
preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them.”13
There are thus two general conditions required before we will accept
a new idea as true. First, we must be able to integrate it with habits we
already trust. Second, we must feel that the idea promises us in some
way a new pathway for those old habits to develop. We will judge an
idea to be a false if we cannot integrate it with older habits, or if we
cannot use it to make those older habits develop.
The whole skill in the discovery of truth is, therefore, to be
able to distinguish between a new idea that opens richer pathways
for old habits to develop from one that merely perpetuates them in
a sterile way. And in rejecting new ideas, the crucial thing is to dis-
tinguish rejection of a new idea because it perpetuates existing
habits without allowing them to develop, from resistance to an idea
that may be unfamiliar and strange but which is actually poten-
tially fruitful. The pragmatist perspective on science leads us in-
evitably to a psychological perspective on science in which we ask,
Does acceptance or rejection of an idea arise from creative strength,
or from creative weakness?
It is said sometimes that we are all pragmatists now. In our
heads, perhaps, we are. The illusory nature of the timeless, disinter-
ested truth espoused by Descartes and Kant is now acknowledged al-
most universally. And although it still has its dissenters, the view of
scientific truth as an instrument serving human purposes is now the
predominant one in modern intellectual life. However, our intellec-
tual assent to this idea still outstrips the state of our unconscious in-
tellectual habits. There is more to doubting than writing down on a
piece of paper that we doubt. Perhaps the insight that our judge-
ments on truth are dependent on our creative strength is not always
congenial. Intellectually, we adhere to the interested and tentative
nature of truth, but the tendency to look for ways of getting round
this is still strong in us. And precisely because it has ceased to be in-
tellectually respectable, this tendency adopts all kinds of convolu-
tions and disguises. The positivist critiques of psychoanalysis that
claim so insistently to speak for science while carefully defining sci-
ence so that it excludes psychological questions provide one kind of
example of this. Hermeneutic versions of psychoanalysis with their
inflated religious theories of language provide another. These popu-
lar intellectual trends ignore the lessons of pragmatism. They are
saying, in effect, let us restrict scientific knowledge and let us not
take the risk of intellectual adulthood by questioning our funda-
mental habits of mind in a rigorous and honest way.
The Cartesian separation of mind and nature results only in an
attenuated notion of scientific knowledge that ignores what is truly
human, and a correspondingly inflated notion of the human that ig-
nores the disciplines of science. For James, this was the great failing
of philosophy at the start of the twentieth century. He noted, “You
find empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a
rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but
that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and
sorrows.”14 A century on, for all our talk of living in a “post-mod-
ern” world, the picture is in surprising ways unchanged. Intellectual
fashion is currently dominated, on the one hand, by an empiricism

that would draw the science of the mind back to Darwin, or even to
Einstein, and, on the other, by a hermeneutic poststructuralism that
keeps in view the ambiguities of the mind but loses sight of the con-
crete needs of human beings to organize these ambiguities in a ra-
tional way.
NIETZSCHE’S CRITIQUE OF INTENTION
Nietzsche draws out the consequences of the pragmatist

way of thinking about truth. He shows that the ancient
problem of what truth is has become the problem of
which purposes are healthy for human beings. The prob-
lem of truth thus gives way in the modern world to a new
intellectual discipline: depth psychology. To begin this
new discipline Nietzsche undertakes a new critique of
the concept of human purpose. He stresses that all
human purposes are inherently ambiguous because there
are always two aspects to our intentionality. These two
aspects are so radical that they defy precise statement in
language. We therefore have to keep revising and improv-
ing our terms to try to capture their essence. One way of
thinking about the division within us is that of over-
abundance of life versus hunger for life. We are driven
both by an inexhaustible generative something within
us, but also by a dependent need for something powerful
outside ourselves. Another metaphor for the division
within us is that of the rule and the exception. We are
torn always between our need to recognize that which is
precedented, and our need to be true to that within us
which is always unprecedented. A further metaphor is
that of the noble and the slave—that within us which
acts, and that which reacts.
The writer who has done the most to examine the implications
of the breakdown of traditional religious faith under the pressure of
science is Friedrich Nietzsche. No one has explored as profoundly as
has he what the ending of the dualist separation of man from nature
means for us.15 Most important, he explores how our judgements of
truth are conditioned by creative strength or weakness. This per-
spective becomes in turn the heart of psychoanalytic interpretation
because here our primary focus is on distinguishing those construc-

tions of the world that proceed from anxiety and weakness, from
those that proceed from strength and potential creativity.
In the dualist tradition, truth was thought of as something fixed,
timeless, certain. It was thought to be something which, once found,
we could unconditionally rely upon. The pragmatist theory of truth,
in contrast, developed out of the insight that truth is actually a
means to the fulfillment of human purposes. Truth is not to be
found in some sphere beyond the historical stream of our own
wishes and needs. It is created by us to fulfil those wishes and needs.
Nietzsche shares this pragmatist view of truth.16 As he empha-
sizes, we had been brought up to think of truth as something that
was to be found somewhere beyond the play of our own self-inter-
ested drives. Truth was something better than these drives, even
something standing in opposition to them. Now, we realize that
what we think of as the possession of truth is not a state beyond the
play of our drives at all. It is, rather, only a particular manifestation
of our drives.17
A pragmatist like James would agree with this. Where Niet-
zsche goes beyond the pragmatists is in his emphasis on just how
difficult it is to identify the drives that truth satisfies. These drives
go in disguise, sometimes heavy disguise. Of course, Nietzsche
would say to the pragmatists, the only test we have of truth is fruit-
fulness. But, he would point out, unless it is very carefully qualified,
fruitfulness is a vague notion. We can easily be misled by it. For in-
stance, judgements that make us fruitful in the shorter term may
lead to stagnation in the longer term. Equally, judgements that lead
to the flourishing of our noisier, more readily recognized drives, may
lead to the suffocation of rarer, more sensitive, but ultimately more
innovative drives. Therefore, if we think of truth as those judge-
ments that “work” for human purposes, the question we have to
confront is, work for which purposes? This is the central question
Nietzsche poses in his philosophy.
We are far yet from understanding all the many implications of
this new perspective. Nietzsche’s importance, however, is that he is
the first to point out that the ancient problem of truth has changed
its form in this way. The problem of truth is no longer a grand, meta-
physical enterprise searching for certainties about things beyond the
human. It has turned into something much more empirical, much
more tentative and, fundamentally, much more difficult: it has
turned into the question of which purposes, or which ordering and
arrangement of purposes, are healthy for the human animal?
The evolution of the problem of truth, therefore, compels us

now to try a new kind of science, a psychological science of the
health of the soul. “The way is open,” writes Nietzsche, “for new
versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such concep-
tions as mortal soul, soul as subjective multiplicity, and soul as so-
cial structure of the drives and affects, want now to be accorded
citizens’ rights in science.”18 This cannot be anything less than a
science of our drives and values in all their complexity and contra-
dictions. At every point, we shall be concerned with the intricate
and difficult question of which configurations of drives are
healthy, and which are not.
To lay the foundation for this new science, Nietzsche’s first step
is to reverse Kant’s strategy of excluding the concept of purpose from
science. It is by excluding purpose from science that Kant bars the
way for a proper psychology. If intentionality is not properly a scien-
tific problem, then obviously there cannot be a serious science of
human motives. What we need for our new science, Nietzsche points
out, is not only the inclusion of purpose, but a whole new critique of
the concept of purpose.19 We have to think more carefully than we
have done in the past about what human intentionality actually in-
volves. When we do this, what we find is that our intentions are in-
herently ambiguous and conflictual. Because of this, there is an
inherent “sickness” in our condition that we do not find in other an-
imals.20 The ancient problem of truth, therefore, resolves itself in
modern intellectual life into the new science of this human emo-
tional sickness.
When we reduce human intentionality to its simplest elements,
Nietzsche suggests, we find two fundamental dimensions in it. He
comments, “This seems to me to be one of my most essential steps
and advances: I learnt to distinguish the cause of acting from the
cause of acting in such-and-such a way, in-this-direction, acting-to-
wards-this-goal. The first kind of cause is a quantum of accumulated
strength, which waits to be used, in some way, or in some place; the
second kind in contrast is something that, measured against this
strength, is completely insignificant, a small occurrence at most, in
accord with which the quantum now ‘releases’ itself.”21
The distinction between these two kinds of cause is a funda-
mental one. Just because it is such a radical distinction, however, it
defies precise statement in words. It goes deeper than our use of lan-
guage allows us to capture as exactly as we would like. It can be de-
scribed only with analogies. And no analogy ever captures it
perfectly. We have therefore to keep refining the analogies we use for
it. More than any other science, depth psychology is the science of
analogy and metaphor. Exactness, in this field, does not mean leav-
ing metaphor behind; it means striving always to improve our
metaphors so that they are the clearest we can make them.
One rough-and-ready analogy for this division of causes within
us is familiar to us from everyday use. It is the distinction between
“nature” and “nurture.” We are driven by the fundamental purposes
of nature within us. And we are governed also by the particular his-
torical circumstances that have nurtured us. Nietzsche offers his
own variation on this familiar analogy by suggesting that the dis-
tinction is like the one between the driving force of a ship, the
“steam” in its engine, and the directing force, the “helmsman” at
the wheel who guides the ship along its course.22 It is not, however,
this distinction between force and guidance in itself that Nietzsche
wishes to draw our attention to. Rather, what he wishes to underline
for us is the imperfection in this analogy, as in every such attempt to
describe the distinction we are interested in.
The analogy is imperfect because we never see the power of the
steam that drives us, except indirectly, through what the helmsman
does with it. In other words, we can only describe the purposes of na-
ture that drive us in the forms given to us by the directing nurture we
have received, that is, in the terms and conventions of expression we
have inherited from custom. We depend upon nurture, we depend
upon conventionally sanctioned language and other forms of expres-
sion, to grasp our nature, to express our purposes, to describe them
and to fulfil them. Therefore, the two underlying aspects of our in-
tentions constantly interfere with each other; we never encounter
them in their pure, unalloyed forms separated out from each other.
Ortega once famously remarked that “man has no nature but, in-
stead, a history.”23 Nietzsche’s point is just the opposite of this: in
every aspect of his life and experience man has a nature and a history,
and if we are going to be scientific about ourselves then we must find
a way to deal with both these dimensions at one and the same time.
As individuals, to fulfill any of our purposes in life we have to
share the conventional expressions and forms of life that others rec-
ognize and sanction. The human animal cannot fulfill even its most
basic organic needs except by becoming, in the broadest sense of the
term, a historical animal, that is, an animal that uses the language
and symbolism sanctioned by the conventions into which it is born.
If we break too completely with convention, we become incompre-
hensible to others. If we become incomprehensible to others, we be-
come isolated. The danger of isolation is not just that we will perish
physically. The danger is that we will perish emotionally, that we

will be cut off from the larger stream of life that is human history.24
To belong to that stream, we have to use the language and symbol-
ism accepted by others. To use that language, we have to accept
many of the values and purposes already implicit within the mean-
ings sanctioned by it.
In this sense, none of us can express ourselves directly. Most of
the time, we use the expressions that we feel will present us in the
most advantageous way to those with whom we identify, or those
whose support we feel we need. But even when we are trying to be
most honest about ourselves, the best any of us can do is to use the
conventional language and symbols that seem least to deviate from
our inner nature. Anyone who has tried seriously to convey his inner
state of mind to another, as one does in the process of psychotherapy
for instance, knows just how difficult this task is. And the perennial
question of the psychotherapeutic patient, “Are these feelings nor-
mal?” reflects the anxiety we all feel in the face of the irreducible
uniqueness of the self. It feels safer to hold to the purposes that are
recognized by the rest of the world. Too often, however, good and
creative things within the self are distorted by this need to find ac-
ceptance from others.
It is because of this inherent imperfection in the match be-
tween human nature and the forms on which it depends for its ex-
pression that the science of human nature is such a complex and
difficult science. The puzzle of understanding human purposes pre-
sents us with what, Nietzsche remarks, is the “most difficult and
intricate” of all inferences, the one “in which the most mistakes
are made.” This is the inference, as he says, “from the work to the
originator, from the act to the perpetrator, from the ideal to him
who has need of it, from every manner of thinking and valuing to
the commanding need behind it.”25
Faced with this most difficult of interpretations, we cannot sim-
ply transfer the idea of purpose over from other life forms and apply it
directly to ourselves. This is the mistake of the Darwinian positivists
and the sociobiologists, for instance. On the contrary, we have to keep
in mind always the two elusive, underlying dimensions of human in-
tention: the underground force, and the shifting historical forms in
which alone that force can express itself.
What is the most elemental way we can formulate these two di-
mensions of intentionality? We need some form of words that is as
free as possible of specific cultural or historical connotations. Well,
one formula is to ask, “Is it hunger or overabundance that has here
become creative?”26 Again, like every other analogy for the two di-
mensions of human purpose, this opposition is imperfect. Neverthe-
less, we can use it as a starting point from which to amplify our ideas.
We can think of overabundance as the generative, squandering,
exuberant, experimenting energy of life which delights in the indi-
vidual, the ineffable. It is the unnamable force that sustains us, that
carries us through life in spite of all whys and wherefores. It is that
within us which never doubts its capacity for self-renewal, never en-
tertains regrets, dreads no future, and is not inhibited by any con-
sciousness of history. This is the overabundance of life of which
every living thing in nature partakes.
We can think of our hunger, on the other hand, as reflected in our
dependent human need for some power external to us to guide us, our
need for something to tell us how to express and how to fulfil our
needs. It is reflected also in our tendency often to deny the evidence of
our own experience in favor of what we believe others expect us to ex-
perience. It is a reflection of this hunger that we have developed those
things that are unique to us as a species: language, a highly articulated
memory, a sense of history, a deep reliance upon habit and tradition,
the sense of belonging to a past, the sense of owing debts, of being
bound by past promises, of needing to suffer with others, of needing to
punish ourselves if we betray their expectations of us.
The very fact that we depend on words to describe ourselves and
to try to understand ourselves is a reflection of this hunger. So is our
reliance upon all the other symbolic forms of expression that we take
from history and convention. We cannot express our nature without
these conventional forms. And yet we find them outside ourselves, in
the history we inherit. Language therefore can never give us more
than an imperfect map of our nature; it can never finally do justice
to the overabundance of life within us that utilizes it. To define our-
selves we must try one analogy and then we must try another. Our
hunger for another, better expression is never satisfied.
To the extent that we feel ourselves to be different from the rest
of nature, it is because of this hunger. It is this hunger that compels
us to ask why we live, and why we suffer. It is this hunger that dri-
ves us to tell a story with our lives and thus to find a meaning for
what we experience and suffer. It is this hunger that sustains the
codes and habits that organize our drives and that help to reduce
their inherent strangeness. And it is this insatiable need to belong to
something beyond ourselves that creates the conflict of imperatives
that lies at the heart of emotional suffering. It creates our sense of
guilt, it inclines us to interpret misfortune as punishment for the
infringement of some law, and it creates the intricate webs of self-

punishment that are the neurotic’s reassurance that in spite of all his
rebelliousness he still belongs.
Our innate overabundance tells us in broad terms what to do
with life: we must build, consume, exercise, reproduce, extend our
territory, and so on. But we depend upon history and convention to
tell us exactly in what way to do these things. And the intricacies of
history and convention often confuse us. They can lead us to mis-
judge our needs, they can cause us to become unsure of the best way
of fulfilling them, they can cause us to indulge certain needs to ex-
cess, leaving others to atrophy, and they can leave us trapped in im-
possible conflicts between needs. Because of the richness of our
conventions and our various forms of expression we are more cre-
ative and innovative than are other animals in the way we fulfill our
basic needs, but because of these things we are also more prone to
error and confusion. From the point of view of the other animals, we
are a disturbed and comical creature.
As a metaphor for the division within human intentions this op-
position between hunger and overabundance is stark, but it is also
imperfect. Nietzsche therefore goes on to reformulate the division,
trying to bring out other qualities in it. In Beyond Good and Evil, for
instance, he suggests that if we practice a little psychological vivi-
section upon ourselves what we shall find is the unconscious war
between the rule and the exception.27 This is the war between that
which is obedient only to its own inherent law of generation and
growth, the principle of the exception, and that which strives to ex-
press itself in the forms of life that others will sanction, the princi-
ple of the rule. This war generates a tension within every human act
and experience.
More often than not, we must assume, this war results in the
silent destruction within ourselves of any exceptional impulse that
cannot find expression in recognized forms. But even when excep-
tional impulses are strong enough to resist extinction, always they
survive only at the price of an accommodation with the rule. This
accommodation forces what is exceptional in us into indirect forms
of expression.
What preserves the rule, Nietzsche remarks, is “the uncon-
scious craftiness with which all good, fat, solid, mediocre spirits
react to higher spirits and their tasks.”28 These mediocre spirits
within us are the forces of hunger and anxiety. They are the
guardians of precedence, of going on as before, for fear of finding
something worse. They are the source of what Freud calls resis-
tance.29 They resist what is new, untried, experimental, bold.
In unhappy circumstances, the forces of the rule become so
strong that they distort what is fresh and courageous within the self
into contorted and pathological expressions. This is the condition of
neurosis. The individuating powers of the self are not properly de-
ployed. The fear of breaking with the rule has become too strong.
The exceptional powers of the individual are distorted into symp-
toms. They become banal, repetitive, sterile, angry, safe.
In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche proposes yet another
way of thinking about the underlying war within us. The distinction
here is between a noble manner of valuing and acting, and a slave
manner of valuing and acting.30 The noble manner of valuing is a de-
velopment of the metaphor of the exception, and of the overabun-
dance of life. The noble is that in a human being which trusts
instinctively in the force of life within itself. It acts, commands, or-
ganizes, chooses, perceives differences, solely with a view to what is
good for the organism itself. It is not inhibited by any received, his-
torical sense of good and evil. The world is divided into good things
and bad things solely on the basis of the needs of the organism itself.
On its own, however, the noble element in us lacks calculation
and it lacks intelligence. The noble manner of experiencing the
world is solipsistic. It is incapable of taking account of the needs of
any organism whose constitution differs from its own. It has no
sense of empathy. It has no sense of history in the human sense,
which is after all an awareness of natures different from oneself. It
has no sense of the rules and precedents which are essential to life
and which can be acquired only from history.
The noble, exceptional way of experiencing is exemplified in the
famous metaphor of the “blond beast.”31 The blond beast is a thought
experiment, a mythic creature, conceived as being without con-
science and without history. The blond beast is the essence of what
the “barbarian” has meant, in every age. It is something which, left
to its own devices, creates a “disgusting procession of murder, arson,
rape and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul.”32 The blond
beast is a symbol of vibrant life, but of mindless life.33
The second principle of human experience is that of the slave.
The slave is the being whose choices do not spring from its own in-
tegral imperatives and needs. On the contrary, they revolve around
those of other, more powerful beings. The slave values things not on
the basis of what experience has taught him directly is good, or bad,
for his own constitution, but rather on the basis of what some exter-
nal power has decreed is good, or evil. The essence of the slave prin-
ciple in human beings is that it is reactive to the needs of others, of
others, that is, who are perceived to be more powerful than oneself
and whose constitution differs from one’s own. In its purest and
most destructive form the slave principle is that within us which is
governed solely by the need to negate what has been compelled by
some external will.
The principle of the slave is, of course, a development of the
metaphor of our inherent hunger. It should be understood, however,
as a destructive consequence of this hunger, not a simple restate-
ment of it, just as the blond beast is a destructive consequence of
overabundance. Only when noble and slave interact together, in a
human being, do they become creative. Human beings cannot live
without external guidance to tell them how they should wish and
what they should wish for. Their dependence upon language, and
upon every kind of traditional expression, convention, history and
rule, is a reflection of this. What is slavish, however, is not this hun-
gry need of history as such. The cheerful obedience to an honorable
ideal handed down from history is not slave morality. What is slav-
ish is the inability to take creative possession of the forms history
passes down to us. What is slavish is to be condemned to a continu-
ous negating of the forms of one’s history, even as one compulsively
repeats them—because one compulsively repeats them. The slave
principle is of its essence a reactive, resentful, destructive stance to-
wards the world, and therefore towards the self.34
The principle of the slave in man has informed some of the
most compelling figures in literature; for instance, Shakespeare’s
Iago and Edmund, and both Milton’s and Goethe’s versions of
Mephistopheles. In an important sense, each of these characters is a
dead end, because each can only negate what already exists; none
can create anything new.35 But the perennial fascination of the en-
ergy and intelligence of these characters speaks of something essen-
tial in each one of us. At the same time, of course, none of these
figures is a pure type of the slave. We never come across pure types.
In every human event, the noble principle or the principle of the
slave is more predominant, but always both strands are interwo-
ven.36 One never exists wholly without the other. The distinction
between noble and slave, like that between overabundance and
hunger, and that between exception and rule, is an idealized meta-
phor. It does not pin down exactly the distinction we wish to de-
scribe but allows us merely to view it from a new point of view.
APPLICATIONS TO PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
Human beings are driven both by a hunger for precedent

and acceptance, and by an ever flowing overabundant
need to create something new and to break with the past.
In unhappy circumstances, where the interaction of these
two tendencies is not a fruitful one, conflict between
them leads to a chronic resentment against the world
and against history. In psychoanalytic terms, this is de-
fense. This resentment against the world is also the basis
of the lingering appeal of the dualist philosophies, with
their essentially reactive stance towards the forward
movement of new knowledge and science. In happier cir-
cumstances, the interaction of hunger and abundance
leads to an attitude of gratitude, towards oneself and
one’s history. This is the meaning of Nietzsche’s ideal of
the “Übermensch.”
As an illustration of this new problem of intentionality, Niet-

zsche uses some personal events that were pivotal for his own de-
velopment. At the age of twenty-four, to his surprise, he had been
appointed a professor at Basel University. This period of early aca-
demic acceptance coincided also with his close friendship with
Wagner. As it happened, Wagner was of a similar age to the father
Nietzsche had lost in early infancy. Gradually, however, Nietzsche
realized that through these early achievements and enthusiasms
he had lost touch with something essential in his own nature. He
comments,
I felt a complete aberration of my instincts. Particular mis-

takes, whether called Wagner, or the professorship at Basel,
were mere signs of this. I was overcome by an impatience
with myself. I realized that it was high time to recall and re-
flect on myself. All at once it became clear to me in a fright-
ful way how much time I had already wasted. . . . Ten years
lay behind me in which the nourishment of my spirit had re-
ally come to a stop. . . .
It was then, too, that I first guessed how an activity chosen
in defiance of one’s instincts, a so-called “vocation” for which
one does not have the least vocation, is related to the need for
deadening the feeling of desolation and hunger by means of a
narcotic art—for example, Wagnerian art. Looking about me
cautiously, I have discovered that a large number of young men

experience the same distress: one antinatural step virtually
compels the second. . . .
Anything seemed preferable to that unseemly “selflessness”
into which I had got myself originally in ignorance and youth,
and in which I had got stuck later on from inertia and so-called
“sense of duty.” . . .
Sickness detached me slowly. . . . My eyes alone put an end
to all bookwormishness. . . . For years I did not read a thing—the
greatest benefit I ever conferred on myself. That nethermost self
which had, as it were, been buried and grown silent under the
continual pressure of having to listen to other selves (and that is
after all what reading means) awakened slowly, shyly, dubi-
ously—but eventually it spoke again.37
What Nietzsche describes here is what we now call the neurotic

condition. Nietzsche’s dilemma was caused by a conflict between
two fundamental kinds of obligation, that is, two kinds of need. The
first was his need as a young man to master and assimilate the work
of others—in his case, as a scholar and as an artist. The second was
his need to be himself, to be true to his own creative individuality.
At first, the conflict between these two obligations was hidden. It
expressed itself only indirectly, in the need for narcosis. For Nietzsche,
narcosis came in the form of the excessive flights of Wagnerian drama,
with its emphasis on effect and sensation as an end in itself. Gradu-
ally, however, the conflict became more intolerable. It emerged in a
sense that the whole course of his life had become mistaken. It
emerged also in physical symptoms, in particular, severe migraines
and the increasing problems he had with his sight.
What is important is Nietzsche’s emphasis upon the ambiguity of
this kind of conflictual condition. It manifests itself as sickness. And
yet, it is mistaken to regard it simply as sickness. In an obvious sense,
it reflects weakness. At the same time, however, it reflects the asser-
tion of strength over weakness. “Sickness detached me slowly,” he
comments. In the various expressions of emotional illness, in the so-
matic symptoms, in the compulsive thoughts, in the depressed
moods, and so on, what one potentially is, speaks indirectly. This is
Nietzsche’s point about the difficulties he had with his eyes. Because
of these, he was compelled not to read, not to attend to others, not to
listen to anyone other than himself. These symptoms led to his re-
tirement from the university, and to the beginning of his most impor-
tant work.
A less creative individual would simply have enjoyed the kind

of early success and acceptance that Nietzsche achieved, but would
never have made anything new out of it. The paradox is that such
an individual would have been too weak to be made sick by it.
Emotional illness is not only an indication of an inability to live in
the world as it is; it is also an indication of the capacity to reform
the world so that it corresponds more closely to the optimum con-
ditions for one’s own nature. It is a sign not only of the need, so
strong especially in the ignorance of infancy and youth, to be “self-
less,” to belong, to be recognized, to do good, to do one’s duty. It is
a sign also of the imperative to be one’s own self, and not any other.
It is this duty to oneself, and the conflict it creates with one’s sense
of duty towards others, that creates the sickness we now call neu-
rosis. The more generative the individual, the more he has to learn,
like a snake, to shed his skin from time to time. Neurotic illness
occurs when something interferes with this shedding. Illness of this
kind reflects a conflict between a too early adaptation to circum-
stances, and the needs of a more vital, more original self, struggling
to create its own circumstances.
Neurotic illnesses are, therefore, also symptoms of health. Tol-
erance of conflict is itself an indication of strength. It is a reflection
of the capacity to reject what has been in the past, and to create
something that has not existed before. The suffering this entails is
the suffering of the war between the past and the future which is try-
ing to break out of the past.
Generally, we become emotionally ill when the constructions
and interpretations of the world and of ourselves that we initially
seize upon to find acceptance by others turn out to be damaging to
our own nature. To paraphrase James, the greatest enemy of our
most important truth may be the rest of our truths. It might be a
professional vocation mistakenly embarked upon, for instance, as it
was for Nietzsche. It might be a mistaken marriage or partnership.
But, generally, the roots of emotional illness go deeper than this.
Generally, if such mistakes have a lasting emotional impact it is be-
cause they reflect earlier, unsatisfactory attempts by the individual
to express his nature in the forms of life recognized as valid by his
first environment, that is, the environment of the family. The fam-
ily is the first social system everyone has to adjust to, with its own
particular language, traditions, and values. The child is always in
some measure in conflict with this system because the child is al-
ways a new experiment on the part of nature. Inevitably, the princi-
ples by which it flourishes best will not find perfect expression in
the forms of life already sanctioned by the family. It has, therefore,

to try to create its own expressions of life. Some degree of conflict
over this is inescapable. Sometimes, however, the degree of conflict
is such that the child becomes chronically divorced from its own
truth. It then carries this division within itself through into the later
stages of life.
Unlike Freud, Nietzsche has rather little to say explicitly about
childhood. But the connection between this double aspect of human
intentionality and the prolonged childhood of man is important. The
fear that others will abandon us if our evaluations diverge from
theirs is at its strongest in childhood. In addition, our way of judging
and evaluating those others from whom we will later adopt values in
life tends to be settled in childhood. Nietzsche remarks, “We are for
the most part our life long the fools of judgements we got used to as
children, in the way in which we judge our neighbors (their spirit,
rank, morality, whether they are exemplary or reprehensible) and
find it necessary to pay homage to their evaluations.”38
At the same time, however, precisely because in a certain sense
our childhood lasts throughout life, we never lose the capacity to
make something new out of the judgements we acquire from our his-
tory. Our long childhood therefore cuts both ways. It enlarges both
our hungry dependence upon history and our overabundant capacity
to synthesize new things out of it.
The child within us has constantly to reconcile creative impulse
with adherence to precedent. In the form of reconciliation it arrives
at there may be a predominance of either hunger or overabundance,
in Nietzsche’s sense. If anxious hunger predominates, the child
within becomes governed by the psychology of the “slave.” That is to
say, it makes the family history into which it is born punitive and de-
structive; it has not the strength to transform it into something fruit-
ful, so it goes to war resentfully against it. Potentially creative
impulses become distorted and displaced along fruitless and destruc-
tive paths. This, of course, is the condition of the neurotic. In happier
circumstances, the child within represents the “noble” principle, the
principle of the creator, the innovator; it becomes the promise of a
new cycle.39 In these circumstances, the child knows how to mine
the customs it inherits from the family for the elements out of which
it can make up a better self.
When a human being is in a state of health, the element of over-
abundance in him is strong enough to utilize in a creative way the his-
torical stream he is attached to. When life is abundant within him, he
experiences the stream of history as an abundant source of possibili-
ties, and therefore as something profoundly good. His predominant at-

titude towards his own history and experience is one of gratitude.40
More often than we would wish, however, our hunger is too
strong for us. It overwhelms the expression of our natural energy,
like a vine choking the tree on which it lives. Things turn sour. The
stream of historical circumstance distorts our attempts at creative
individuation. The creative impulse turns into a curse. It creates an
overdependence upon history. The predominant attitude towards
history and experience becomes a chronic negating of it. This is the
condition of some of the great figures of tragedy, such as Medea,
Hamlet, and Hedda Gabler. The native hue of abundant resolution is
sicklied over with the pale cast of injured thought. The proper
course of life, which is the perfection of the self, is perverted instead
into a bitter resentment of the world as such.
When hunger predominates over life, it is reflected in a pes-
simism about life and about the self. Life is lived, but with a sense of
bitterness towards its contingencies. The man of resentment blames
his history, his circumstances, his times, whatever they happen to be,
for his inability to live well. But it is not his history that creates his
bitterness, it is his inability to master his history and to utilize it in a
fruitful way. He is chronically dependent on his history, he cannot
define himself without it, and yet he is profoundly antagonistic to-
wards it. He carries his history around with him, recreating it wher-
ever he can, and yet recreating it in such a way that he is able to
condemn it at the same time. The past becomes a source of fixations,
that is, forms of life that recur in a compulsive way, and which be-
come vehicles of indeterminate negation, of anger and resentment.41
The central psychoanalytic notion of defense should be under-
stood in these terms. Defense is the smothering and distortion of an
exceptional tendency, a noble tendency, in Nietzsche’s sense, by the
rule of those good, fat, mediocre spirits within us. Something cre-
ative, adventurous, or risky is smothered by something that may in-
deed have many good things potentially in it but that has become too
cowardly, too dependent, too moralistic. Instead of being destroyed
completely, however, that creative something becomes revengeful;
it becomes corrupted into a force of resentment. It is unable to over-
throw the rule, but lives in such a way as continuously to negate it.
That which is not strong enough to reform can only condemn.
Defense, therefore, has nothing to do with forgetting the past. It
is, on the contrary, an inability to overcome the past and let it go.
And overcoming defense in psychotherapy has nothing to do with
restoring memories of the past. Overcoming defense means shifting
the balance of forces within the self so that more creative, more
noble forces take on new strength. The child within has the capacity
to leave behind destructive ways of feeling in which it condemns
both its history and, therefore, itself. It can change the meaning of
its history so that it reflects its own exceptional nature. The thera-
peutic task is to assist and support this.
Emotional illness is a characteristically human way of being ill.
It tells us things about human nature that purely physical illnesses
do not. In its ambiguity it reflects the essentially conflictual nature
of all human intention.
In treating physiological illness, our primary aim is to remove or
alleviate the symptoms. In handling emotional illness, in contrast, our
primary aim is to understand the capacities the symptoms indirectly
point to. Until these capacities achieve recognition and, in some mea-
sure, fulfillment, the symptoms which express them will persist, or
they will transform themselves into others equally debilitating.
Of course, there are powerful forces all the time at work against
this maturing and healing process. There are many who do not feel
they are strong enough to reform the meaning of their history in a
creative way. The lingering appeal of the old dualist perspectives on
science is that they provide intellectual rationalizations for this
weakness. They help to make respectable the inability to think crit-
ically about how we unconsciously manipulate our history. They do
this by holding up a false notion of what science does—for instance,
it follows the principles of Einstein or Darwin, even in the study of
things in which these men had no interest—and by holding up a
false notion of what psychoanalysis does—for instance, it is an in-
vestigation into forgotten memories, working to get the patient’s as-
sent to the analyst’s interpretations of those memories. Intellectual
arguments that tell us our problems are caused by past injuries,
rather than by what we have made of those injuries, will always find
a ready audience. The modern criticisms of psychoanalysis have
pleased many people because they do this while claiming to have the
imprimatur of science itself.
However, the more abundant in creative life a man is, the less
he will be afraid of considering his weaknesses and his hunger, be-
cause he will sense that he has the capacity to govern these things.
Of course, learning how to govern ourselves is a task without end,
even for the strongest—perhaps especially for them. Every day we
have to slough off the prejudices that we allow to adhere to us be-
cause of our anxious hunger, our need to make sure our own incli-
nations do not diverge too far from those with whom we identify.
We have constantly to rediscover ourselves beneath the debris of

this anxious need to be accepted. Goethe remarks, “Looked at pre-
cisely, we have to reform ourselves every day, and protest against
others. . . . We face the daily renewed task . . . of making the words
we use as immediately coincident as possible with what we feel,
see, think, experience, imagine, reason. Let everyone test himself
and he will find that this is much harder than one would think. Be-
cause, unfortunately, for the human being words are usually surro-
gates. For the most part, one thinks and knows better than one
expresses oneself.”42
The symptoms of emotional illness are the expressions of this
submerged self, struggling to be heard, but condemned to speak in
destructive, angry terms. If we work successfully, we assist in a re-
configuration of the self, one in which the child within is less dom-
inated by the evil status it has unconsciously adopted, and is more
free to experience itself and its own needs as something good, some-
thing no longer shameful and angry, but as something self-assured in
its own powers of regeneration.
This is what Nietzsche’s ideal of the Übermensch means. It is
an ideal in which the reactive, resentful forces in a human being
have been dimmed down to their lowest conceivable extent. We
should, Nietzsche says, understand “the word Übermensch as
naming a type of the most extreme turning-out-well.”43 He contin-
ues, “And in what basically does one recognize having turned-out-
well? That a man . . . has a taste only for that which is beneficial
for him; his pleasure, his desire stops where the measure of what is
beneficial for him is overstepped. . . . What does not destroy him
makes him stronger. . . . He is a selecting principle, he lets much
go past. . . . He knows how to forget.”44
In short, the Übermensch is the ideal of a man who, because
he has acquired knowledge and mastery of himself, has no need
any more to reject necessity as it is and existence as it is. He is not
all the time anxiously looking for an escape from the rule of neces-
sity in life, because he has no inclination within himself towards
things that are not healthy for him. He is not afraid, in a word, of
science. The man who cannot master himself, in contrast, will al-
ways try to keep science at a distance from his motives because he
has not the strength to use science to understand and reshape his
purposes so that they make him more fruitful. For such a tempera-
ment the best hope is in keeping things as they are, staying with
old habits and customs. And this also means, of course, staying
with old conceptions of science.
This psychological ideal of the “higher” human being is a re-

flection of our new understanding of what scientific truth is. It is the
logical outcome of the pragmatist insight that truth is something we
make, for our own purposes, to be as healthy as we can. It replaces
the old notion of an unchanging, unconditioned truth coming to us
from somewhere beyond ourselves. Depth psychology is our first,
tentative experiment in this new understanding of what truth is.
Chapter Four
ISSUES FROM STUDIES ON HYSTERIA
INDIVIDUATION AND NEUROSIS
The rise of science has meant that traditions of every kind

have become weaker. This in turn has meant that the
problem of identity has come to the forefront in modern
culture because the individual now has a problematic re-
lation with the traditions that define him or her. The im-
portance of Studies On Hysteria is that it considers
symptoms of illness as a reflection of problems in identity.
This is obscured, however, by the fact that the work as a
whole is undecided between the theory of catharsis and
the theory of defense. The theory of defense is a theory of
identity because it considers conflicts between intentions.
This becomes the basis of psychoanalysis. The cathartic
perspective, in contrast, does not go beyond thinking of the
unconscious as a storehouse of memories and free associ-
ations. Much of the recent literature on psychoanalysis has
blurred the distinction between these two perspectives. It
has thus attributed to psychoanalysis the shortcomings of
the cathartic perspective and has failed to see that the ker-
nel of psychoanalytic theory is the problem of human
identity.
Generally speaking, the stronger are the traditional expecta-

tions that are preserved in a culture, the fewer are the emotional
dilemmas that the individuals within it are left to resolve on their
own without external guidance. In other words, the stronger is the
moral system as a whole, the better are individuals shielded from
the full ambivalence of their own intentions. This, of course, is the
source of the perennial appeal of cultural systems that impose
strong moral codes.
85
On the other hand, the fewer and the weaker are the tradi-
tional imperatives in a culture as a whole, the more each individ-
ual is thrown back upon his own emotional resources in dealing
with life’s dilemmas. With the general weakening of the power of
traditional expectations, as we now have as a result of science, the
individual finds he has less guidance in how to achieve a fruitful
balance between his conflicting needs as he develops. The problem
of individuation has come to the forefront in modern culture be-
cause, in trying to resolve it, the individual no longer has the sup-
port of strong traditions from the past. The fewer the imperatives,
the more urgent and difficult becomes the problem of individua-
tion, the problem of answering the question, Who am I?1
Many of the personal choices that earlier generations were able
to decide by falling back on tradition are now left open and uncer-
tain. The fading of tradition provides us with many more opportu-
nities to experiment with life but it is also a source of increased
inner anxiety and sense of alienation. This leads to an unfocused
sense of self-dislike and, in turn, towards rather insidious self-puni-
tive patterns of personal behavior. Perhaps these modern habits of
self-punitive behavior we see all around us are also rooted in an un-
conscious attempt in some way to restore the sense of security that
goes with a stronger authority.
The fading of tradition also has the effect of leaving the individ-
ual more emotionally fixated upon the first authority encountered,
which is that of the family. Because the cultural structures that
planted the family in a wider system of imperatives and expecta-
tions have become attenuated, the family has become more impor-
tant, rather than less, as a source of personal identity. Many people
would now regard their families as the only remaining social struc-
ture having a serious claim on their allegiance. At the same time,
however, the spirit of science has made the family itself an object of
skeptical scrutiny to a degree it never was in times of greater cer-
tainty. As a result, most contemporary human beings are probably
more ambivalent in their feelings about familial authority than were
those in an age of faith.
This modern crisis of individuation is the one Descartes and
Kant attempted unconsciously to forestall. They both tried to estab-
lish certainties that could compensate for the decline of the author-
ity of tradition. Descartes tried to establish certainties about the
connection between the self and God that could override the fading of
tradition. Kant looked for moral certainties that would be immune
from scientific skepticism. In the longer term, these attempts to save
Issues from Studies On Hysteria 87
the self from the encroachment of science were without effect. Even-
tually, the spirit of skepticism, which had grown so strong in the
realm of the physical sciences, invaded the realm of the psyche also.
Now that this has happened, the problem of individual auton-
omy cannot any more be divorced from the question of science. The
spirit of scientific skepticism, through its corrosion of tradition, has
created the problem of the individual in its modern form. This is
why the attempts to divorce psychoanalysis from science miss the
point. If we are not to take flight into irrationality we have no choice
now but to try to confront our own motives as unsentimentally as
we have learned to confront the motive forces in the rest of nature.
In 1895, in Studies On Hysteria, psychoanalysis emerges as a
new development in medical science and in psychology.2 It reflects
the extension of scientific inquiry from the physical world to the
sphere of the emotional and ethical life, that is, the life of the soul. It
takes seriously those diseases that are not primarily conditioned by
physiological factors but rather by the inherently conflictual nature
of human intentions. With Studies On Hysteria, Freud embarks on a
new kind of science, one which Nietzsche had adumbrated through-
out the 1880s.3 Here, for the first time, illness is examined implicitly
as a problem in the end of unconditional morality. In every family, all
the rules are a little more ambiguous than they were for earlier gen-
erations. The perennial underlying human struggle between hunger
and overabundance, between the rule and the exception, is less per-
fectly contained than it was. Over the following years, Freud devel-
ops what is in effect a new metaphor for this inherent conflict
identified by Nietzsche. It is that of the struggle between the family
and the I. These competing forces, instead of being organized for the
individual, as they are to a greater extent in times of faith and moral
certainty, now increasingly have to be organized by the individual.
Properly understood, neurotic diseases are really episodes in the
struggle of the patient to individuate in a world of moral uncertainty.
For the neurotic, his illness is an essential part of his attempt to
develop his identity. This is why he cannot give it up. He wishes to
be cured, but he wishes also not to be cured—and he is right in both.
In neurotic illness what the patient wants, fundamentally, is to
know the meaning of all that he suffers. What hunger within has led
him to the dependence that imprisons him? What overabundance
has provoked the rebellious illness that makes the imprisonment in-
tolerable? And what keys to escape are secreted within the illness it-
self that make it at once so intolerable and yet so valuable? The
neurotic can be cured only by the achievement of an identity that is
more fruitful than the illness, but which at the same time allows the
recognition of the forces that created the illness.
In Studies On Hysteria, however, all this is still only emerging
in a fragmented and partial form. Much is confusing about the sig-
nificance of the book for the later development of psychoanalysis.
The most important source of confusion is that there are two differ-
ent theories of hysteria competing within it. This is stated quite
clearly by Freud himself. Nevertheless, throughout the work, but es-
pecially in the parts written by Freud, the distinction between these
two theories is frequently blurred.
First, there is the theory of catharsis and “hypnoid” states, il-
lustrated principally by Breuer’s case of Anna O. The cathartic the-
ory is that hysterical symptoms are caused by the inability to
remember traumatic events that involve emotions that are too
painful to confront directly. Restore the memory, so this theory sug-
gests, and confront the emotions involved, and the severity of the
symptoms will diminish.
Second, there is the theory of defensive conflict.4 The theory of
defensive conflict is that hysterical symptoms are symbols, that is,
displaced and distorted expressions, of emotional dilemmas and con-
flicts of intention that the patient cannot resolve. According to this
theory, the symptoms are really roundabout ways for the patient to ex-
press her failing struggle to achieve an autonomous identity. Precisely
because she is failing in this struggle, she is unable to articulate it di-
rectly. Among the Studies On Hysteria, this theory of defensive con-
flict and distortion begins to appear in its first clear outline in the last
case in the book, Freud’s case of Elisabeth von R., but even here it is
obscured by the theory of catharsis. Nevertheless, the theory of
catharsis and the theory of defense are two quite different ways of
thinking about the unconscious.5
In Studies On Hysteria we see the old dualist view of the world,
in which natural science and medicine still keep back from the ethi-
cal and moral conflicts of life, competing side by side with a new
monist perspective on the soul as a natural entity, amenable to a new
kind of science. The theory of catharsis is dualist, in that it treats the
symptoms of hysteria, by implication, as being rooted in physiological
factors, rather than in the conflicting intentions of the patient. It is du-
alist, that is, because it does not concern itself with the ethical life of
the patient, the question of the conflict of values she must resolve in
order to create herself. The theory of defense, in contrast, treats the
symptoms of hysteria as being rooted in the conflicts of intention, the
conflicts of identity, experienced by the patient. The theory of defense
is monist because it treats the problems of the soul as a part of nature,

requiring their own field of science. This theory of defense becomes
the basis of psychoanalytic theory, but only after a number of years’
struggle in Freud’s own mind. That struggle includes most impor-
tantly his diversion in 1896 through the seduction theory. This is ac-
tually a regression to the cathartic theory of the unconscious because
it looks for the cause of neurosis in traumatic memories rather than in
conflict between intentions.
In recent years in the critical literature on psychoanalysis the
important distinction between the theory of catharsis and the theory
of defense has become somewhat obscured. In much of this litera-
ture Breuer and Freud are treated as if they are presenting a single
theory, that theory being the cathartic one. The shortcomings of the
cathartic perspective are then attributed to psychoanalytic theory as
such. This view is shared by Sulloway (1979), Grünbaum (1985 and
1993), and Webster (1996).
The mistaken idea that Breuer and Freud are presenting a “joint
theory” of hysteria, as Sulloway calls it,6 was perhaps first given re-
spectability in recent times by Henri Ellenberger’s massive study The
Discovery of the Unconscious, published in 1970. The principal aim
of Ellenberger’s work was to argue that Pierre Janet’s importance had
been unfairly neglected in the history of dynamic psychiatry. Ellen-
berger’s study leaves the strong impression that Freud was more in-
debted to Janet, certainly during the 1890s, than he admitted. To this
end, he presents Freud’s thinking at this period as essentially coinci-
dent with Breuer’s, underlining his argument that both men were in
Janet’s debt. On Freud’s psychotherapy at the time of Studies On Hys-
teria Ellenberger writes, “At this stage it was an adaptation of Breuer’s
cathartic treatment, and almost identical to Janet’s procedure.”7 This
claim obscures more than it clarifies. Freud, Breuer, and Janet were all
experimenting with various techniques of psychotherapy around this
time. But Breuer never used suggestion therapy, which was to become
such a part of Janet’s technique, with Bertha Pappenheim. And Freud’s
notion of defense against morally or aesthetically upsetting feelings
was a crucial departure from both of them. Ellenberger never gives
anything like sufficient emphasis to how far Freud’s theory of defense
is essentially independent of the role played by traumatic memories,
the thing that all of Freud’s important contemporaries in psychother-
apy, like Janet and Breuer, were focused on.8 Ellenberger was a far
more informed critic of psychoanalysis than Sulloway, Grünbaum, or
Webster but his blurring of the essential differences between Breuer
and Freud did establish a precedent for their later distortions.
All of Grünbaum’s criticisms of psychoanalysis, for example, are

based on the assumption that Breuer and Freud held the same view of
hysteria. He writes: “The central causal and explanatory significance
enjoyed by unconscious ideation in the entire clinical theory [of psy-
choanalysis] rests . . . on inductive inferences drawn by Breuer and
Freud.” This inference, according to Grünbaum, is that “for each dis-
tinct symptom S afflicting . . . a neurotic, the victim had repressed the
memory of a trauma.”9 “All Freudians,” he continues, “champion this
causal inference: Let a causal chain of the analysand’s free associations
be initiated by his neurotic symptoms and issue in the emergence of
previously repressed memories; then, we are told, this emergence
qualifies as good evidence that the prior ongoing repression of these
memories was actually the pathogen of the given neurosis.”10 This is
a good description of the theory of catharsis but it tells us nothing of
the theory of defense.
The analysis of defense focuses on the fissures within the self
created by conflicting intentions and loyalties. With time, Freud
discovered that one of the most effective ways to understand defen-
sive processes is to consider the feelings of the patient towards the
therapist himself, because the therapy becomes yet another arena in
which the conflicting intentions in the patient play themselves out.
Referring to this development, Grünbaum quotes Freud’s remark
that “the personal emotional relation between doctor and patient
was after all stronger than the whole cathartic process.”11 Grün-
baum interprets this to mean that “the repression etiology was thus
bereft of therapeutic support,” and that “the very cornerstone of
psychoanalysis was completely undermined.”12
What this overlooks is that the theory of repression, that is, the
theory of defense, only begins where the theory of catharsis ends. To
put it in a different way, it begins where the ancient separation be-
tween science and morals breaks down. It begins, that is, with the
recognition that conflicts in our moral feelings can make us ill, and
that this is worthy of systematic scientific reflection. The theory of
catharsis is on the borderline of this historical transition, but it has
not yet crossed over because it is still not thinking in terms of the
inherent conflicts in human intentionality.
Richard Webster’s account of Why Freud Was Wrong suffers from
the same failure to distinguish defense from catharsis. He writes,
“Whereas the claim that repressed emotions could engender psycho-
logical distress would have been traditional and in some cases perhaps
true, the claim made by Freud and Breuer was of a quite different
order. For what they believed they had discovered was an etiological
theory which could explain the origins of a particular disease and cure
this disease by uncovering repressed memories.”13
This crude misreading of history is, of course, intended to dis-
credit Freud and it reflects a superficial reading of the development
of psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, it has been possible for writers like
Webster to get away with distortions like this because throughout
Studies On Hysteria Freud does try to diminish the distance that ac-
tually lies between his own thinking and that of Breuer. This is not
particularly surprising. In the 1890s he was keen to secure Breuer’s
collaboration on Studies On Hysteria because Breuer had indeed
made a major breakthrough with his cathartic treatment.14 Natu-
rally, Freud wanted the support of an established physician who was
thinking in terms not dissimilar from himself.15 The result, how-
ever, is that Studies On Hysteria consistently tones down the dis-
tance that actually lies between its two authors, and it obscures
Freud’s originality.
The confusion begins in the opening chapter, the original “Pre-
liminary Communication” dating from 1893, which Breuer and
Freud wrote together. In it they attribute hysteria to the existence
of “hypnoid” states: states of consciousness which have become
somehow dissociated from each other as a result of traumatic expe-
riences.16 Because of this hypnoid condition, what is experienced in
one state is barred from conscious association with a later state. Ac-
cording to this theory, helping the hysterical patient means getting
her to overcome this disjunction in her experiences. She should then
be able to “abreact” the emotions which have been hitherto locked
up, as it were, in the repressed memory.17
It is from this opening chapter also that we have the best known
remark in the book, that “the hysteric suffers mainly from reminis-
cences.”18 Whoever coined it, this remark has been responsible for
more misconception than illumination. As an aphoristic summary, it
fits reasonably well with the idea of therapy that emerges from
Breuer’s report on Anna O. It fits well, that is, with the idea of a
cathartic cure, in which contained emotions of sympathy and anxiety,
relating to the remembered suffering of a loved parent, are acknowl-
edged and released. It therefore fits well with the notion that repres-
sion is a dissociating or a forgetting of traumatic memories. However,
the theory of defense, which is what makes Studies On Hysteria such
an important work, is not in fact a theory about memory at all. The
theory of defense is a theory of conflicting intentions; it is about the
way intentions distort and interfere with each other. Of course, this
often incidentally involves a tendentious distortion of memory also.
But distortion is not the same as dissociation or forgetting. The idea

that defensive conflict results, as a regular occurrence, in the forget-
ting of major traumatic experiences is simply incorrect. To the extent
that Freud himself also took this view, he was mistaken.
Freud’s advance over Breuer was to shift the focus onto the inter-
play of wishes that causes the discomfort the patient has with memo-
ries, thus going beyond a mere recounting of free associations. The
theory of defense looks at the patient’s symptoms not as a reflection of
repressed memories and “unabreacted” emotions, but, on the con-
trary, as indicative in an indirect way of ethical conflicts within the
patient—conflicts, that is, of loyalty and identity.
BREUER’S CASE OF ANNA O.
The case of Anna O. is not an illustration of psychoana-

lytic therapy because it does not explore the issue of de-
fensive conflict. What we learn from Anna O. is that
symptoms can be associated in a close and illuminating
way with significant traumatic events in the life story of
the patient. This is a great deal. For all that, however, we
learn nothing from Anna O. about the conflict of inten-
tions within the patient and the way in which her symp-
toms are a reflection of this conflict.
The first case study that has any real claim to be called psycho-
analytic in the true sense is Freud’s case of Elisabeth von R. Before we
consider it, however, we need to review Breuer’s case of Anna O.19 It
used to be common knowledge among students of psychoanalysis
that Anna O. is not a case of psychoanalysis. But in the critical liter-
ature over the last quarter century, especially that questioning the
scientific credentials of psychoanalysis, there has been a concerted
attempt to identify Anna O. as the first case of psychoanalysis.
Anna O., whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim, was treated
by Breuer from the closing months of 1880 to the summer of 1882.20
This was over ten years before Studies On Hysteria came to be writ-
ten. Breuer was fourteen years older than Freud. In 1880, when he
has treating Bertha, Breuer was thirty-eight, while Freud was only
twenty-four, not much older than Bertha herself, who was twenty-
one.21 Freud had known Breuer in some capacity at least from 1877.22
But Breuer evidently first discussed Bertha Pappenheim with Freud
only after he had ceased to treat her in 1882.23 Freud did collaborate
with Breuer on the treatment of some cases in the later 1880s, after
his period with Charcot in Paris between 1885 and 1886.24 But of the
Studies On Hysteria only the opening chapter of the book, originally
published in 1893, is jointly written.25 What needs to be underlined
is that the book is not the work of two men of a single mind. There
are two very different intelligences at work in it, distinguished by
age, temperament, experience, and theoretical outlook.
Bertha Pappenheim became unwell in the summer of 1880 at
the time her father became seriously ill, probably with tuberculo-
sis.26 Bertha was his only surviving daughter.27 However, because of
her own illness, she in fact spent little time caring for her father up
to the time of his death a year later in April 1881.28 Bertha Pappen-
heim suffered from a complex variety of symptoms. At different
times these included a paralysis of her right arm and leg, distur-
bances of vision, a nervous cough, anorexia, inability to drink, peri-
odic inability to understand her own language, German, and various
vaguely defined “absences” and “deliriums.”29
At least at the outset, Bertha Pappenheim took much of the ini-
tiative in the treatment she underwent with Breuer. The states of
“hypnosis” she went into were initially self-induced, and were used
as an occasion for her to recount her fantasies.30 In the final months
of the treatment Breuer induced hypnosis in his patient and the
focus moved from a recounting of fantasies to a deliberate explo-
ration of her memories.31 It was Bertha herself who dubbed this
process, in English, “the talking cure.”
Bertha’s emotional symptoms began one night shortly after her
father had fallen ill. Breuer, in his original report written in 1882,
describes this as follows:
In the summer of 1880 her father, whom she adored, fell ill with
peripleuritis and very high fever. Some time later a surgeon was
called from Vienna; he was expected during the night of 17–18
July. On this night the patient had waited up for a few hours
alone, for her mother was exhausted and had retired. She was
alone with her somnolent father and her own anxiety, which
seems already to have been pathological. She sat on the bed, her
right arm over the back of the chair, and gradually fell into a
state of absence. In the course of the absence she hallucinated
black snakes crawling out of the walls, and one which crawled
up to her father to kill him. Her right arm had become anaes-
thetized owing to its position, and her fingers were transformed
into small snakes with death’s heads (nails). She probably tried to
drive the snakes off with her immobilized right arm. When the
hallucinations passed she had an anxious desire to pray, but
speech failed her; she was not able to utter a word until, finally
stumbling upon an English expression, she was able to think
again and to pray only in this language.32
Thereafter, Bertha became ever more subject to absent states in

which she experienced frightening hallucinations, and dissociative
states in which she seemed unable to communicate in her native
language.33 Breuer believed there was a connection between this loss
of the use of language and Bertha’s relation with her father. He com-
ments, for instance, “As the condition developed she lost the use of
words almost completely, gathering them laboriously from 5 or 6
different languages, so that she was scarcely any longer intelligible.
. . . Her inhibition was at its most severe on one occasion when, after
having been offended by her father, she decided not to ask after him
any more. She then suffered complete aphasia for about 2 weeks.”34
As long as her father was still living, Breuer’s treatment of
Bertha Pappenheim revolved around listening to the fantasies she
would recount in an apparently trancelike state in the evenings.
This alleviated her condition. Things became much worse, how-
ever, after her father died, in April 1881. In due course, this resulted
in a change of procedure. Now, Bertha would use her evening meet-
ings with Breuer to discuss the history of her own illness.
According to Breuer, he and Bertha began to use her trances as a
way of exploring the memories associated with each of her symp-
toms. They tried to get to the memory of the first occurrence of each
symptom. This was the idea of the cathartic cure: repair the disjoined
“hypnoid” states of consciousness and “abreact” the emotions asso-
ciated with the trapped memories.35
In Studies On Hysteria Breuer reports the events that initiated
this procedure. Talking one hot afternoon with him, she found she
was unable to drink a glass of water to refresh herself. “As it
touched her lips,” he writes, “she pushed it away like a hydropho-
bic.”36 This aversion to water lasted for a number of weeks, during
which she consumed only fruit to quench her thirst. Then, one
day, in one of the hypnotic states that she would fall into, she
began to speak of an English companion to whom she had taken a
dislike. With an expression of disgust, she related how once she
had come into this woman’s room to find her allowing her little
dog to drink water from a glass. At the time, Bertha made no re-
mark. But after she had recounted this story to Breuer she took
some water herself and emerged from her trance. Her aversion to
water seemed to have been overcome. This story of Bertha’s hy-
drophobia has become one of the most famous accounts in the lit-
erature of psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, many important things
about it remain obscure. We do not learn what its relation was
with the anxiety over her father’s illness, who the English com-
panion was, or whether there is any connection between this Eng-
lishwoman and the fact that during her trances Bertha mainly
spoke only English.
In his original report of 1882 Breuer relates another sympto-
matic habit of Bertha’s that, along with the episode of the hydropho-
bia, shifted the emphasis of the treatment from a recounting of
fantasies to an exploration of memories. When she went to bed in
the evenings she often could not bear to have her stockings taken
off. Sometimes she would waken in the early hours of the morning
and then remove them. This pattern was related by her to a time in
the past when she would get out of bed to eavesdrop on her father at
night, leaving her stockings on for this purpose. She recalled that on
one occasion she had been caught by her brother listening outside
her father’s door. Once Bertha had related this memory, “she began
to cry out softly, demanding why she was in bed with her stockings
on.”37 And from this point the symptomatic pattern disappeared.
Presumably Breuer chose to publish the story of the hydrophobia
rather than the symptom with the stockings at least in part because
the former involved a fairly clearly “unabreacted” emotion—that of
disgust—while the latter did not.
The memories associated with the onset of the symptoms were
often not easy to recollect precisely. However, they seemed usually to
involve some moment of emotional stress associated with her father’s
illness. “Regularly,” Breuer writes, “the first occasion [of the symp-
tom] was an alarm of some kind which she had experienced while car-
ing for her father, an oversight on her part, or something similar.”38
The important thing was that the initiating occasion seemed
generally to be one where the expression of an emotion was inhib-
ited. Her disturbances of vision, for instance, “were traced back as a
whole to single, more or less clearly determined occasions, for ex-
ample, in the manner that the patient, with tears in her eyes, sitting
at the sickbed was suddenly asked by her father what the time was
and, not seeing clearly but having to strain, brought the watch near
to her face so that the numbers appeared enlarged, thus accounting
for her macropsia and convergent squint; or, making efforts to sup-
press her tears, so that her father would not see them.”39
As for Bertha’s chronic cough, this, Breuer writes, “emerged for

the first time when, while she was keeping watch over her patient,
she heard dance music coming from a neighboring house. Feeling a
sudden wish to be there, she was overcome with self-reproaches.
Since then, she had reacted throughout the period of her illness to
that strong rhythmical music with a tussis nervosa.”40
Finally, they traced back the paralysis and the aphasia to the
night Bertha had sat by her father waiting for the surgeon at the be-
ginning of her father’s illness.
In a final development of this phase of the treatment, about six
months after her father’s death Bertha began to recollect each day
what she had been doing on that day on the year previously. Breuer
maintains these recollections were shown to be accurate, based on
the fact that her mother had kept a secret journal detailing the
course of her daughter’s illness.41 One might wonder, nevertheless,
just how much of Bertha’s behavior at this phase of her illness was a
reflection of the fact that her mother had apparently made her such
a close subject of scrutiny. There is a clear sense here of unconscious
connivance between mother and daughter in the daughter’s illness.
Evidently, Bertha Pappenheim’s illness was a serious and com-
plex one. Its precise causes are obscure.42 What is clear, however, both
from Breuer’s report in Studies On Hysteria and even more from his
original case notes of 1882, is that Bertha Pappenheim’s symptoms
were a cryptic commentary on her father’s illness and on the troubled
relations within the family as a whole. Breuer writes, “Her illness
was caused by the death of her father, and reverence for his memory
is the prime influence on her normal and pathological mental
states.”43 This is what is important about the Anna O. case: it gives
early insight into how to make sense of emotional suffering. Patients
are worth listening to carefully, because what they suffer is the re-
flection of a larger story.
In the longer term, Breuer did some damage to this discovery by
claiming too much for it. Talking about her memories added a new
understanding to Bertha Pappenheim’s symptoms and it clearly had
an effect on the way they behaved, but it did not leave her free of
symptoms. Breuer comments, “In this way her paralytic contrac-
tures and anesthesias, her various disorders of vision and hearing,
neuralgias, coughs, tremors, and so on, and finally also her distur-
bances of speech, were ‘talked away.’”44 As every student of psycho-
analysis knows, many of Bertha Pappenheim’s symptoms were not
talked away. “The poor patient,” as Jones puts it, “did not fare so
well as one might gather from Breuer’s published account.”45 Al-
though Bertha Pappenheim did go on eventually to lead a very active

life, she remained ill for a number of years after her treatment with
Breuer.46 The cathartic cure was an important development in the
understanding of emotional illness but it was not a shortcut to the
curing of emotional illness.
Manifestly, the attempt implicit within the cathartic cure to un-
derstand the extended context of what the patient suffers was a major
step forward in the treatment of emotional illness. There is, of course,
no effective psychotherapy without an examination of the emotional
implications of past experiences. Nevertheless, the Anna O. case is
not yet depth psychology. Bertha Pappenheim was starting the process
of piecing together her memories. But she and Breuer could not go any
further than this. They came to a halt because they lacked any insight
into how far her various symptoms were distorted reflections of con-
flicts within her—conflicts, for instance, among her feelings towards
her father. They lacked the insight that her symptoms were not just
linked to her memories, but were, in addition, integral to her struggle
to achieve an autonomous identity in which her conflicts would be
governed in a balanced and fruitful way.
Because, however, the principles involved in the Anna O. case
are relatively easy to understand and, not least, because the patient
did not fare as well as Breuer stated, most of the major critics of the
last quarter century, from Sulloway through to Grünbaum and Web-
ster, make much of the case. Among these critics, Anna O. is held
up now as the paradigm of psychoanalysis.47 This, however, it is not.
Anna O. is not psychoanalysis for the simple reason that there is in
the case no analysis of a conflict of intention; there is no analysis of
the inherent ambivalence of human intention that is at the root of
the problem of human identity.
THE CASE OF ELISABETH VON R.
The case of Elisabeth von R. shows Freud for the first

time exploring illness as symbolic of a conflict of iden-
tity. However, this is obscured by his attempts to make
the case look as close to the cathartic cure of Anna O. as
possible. In the case of Elisabeth von R. there is a very
uneasy compromise between portraying the aim of ther-
apy as that of getting the patient simply to recall memo-
ries and abreact the emotions associated with them, and,
on the other hand, the much more sophisticated task of
helping the patient to make more mature acts of judge-

ment about the conflicting values within herself.
In the years around 1890 Freud tried to use hypnotism in his

treatment of neurotic patients, partly as an attempt at direct sugges-
tion, to get them to give up their symptoms, and partly in a cathartic
way, to explore the history of their symptoms and the emotions asso-
ciated with them.48 However, by the early 1890s he was gradually
abandoning hypnosis, which in later years he described as “senseless
and worthless.”49 By 1893, the year of the “Preliminary Communica-
tion,” he seems largely to have given up suggestion therapy.50 More
and more during the early 1890s, he got his patients to trace, in a con-
scious state, whatever associations led from their symptoms.
The importance of free association to psychoanalysis has often
been exaggerated. Jones, for instance, writes, “The devising of this
method was one of the two great deeds of Freud’s scientific life, the
other being his self-analysis.”51 In fact, Freud’s development of the
method of free association was nowhere near as important a scien-
tific achievement as the development of the theory of defensive con-
flict. This theoretical insight did not depend upon free association
for its development and, without it, free association is itself of no
value. Nevertheless, many writers have taken the mistaken view ei-
ther that free association has the power to reveal the unconscious, a
position that Lacan, for instance, is perilously close to, or that Freud
claims that free association reveals the unconscious, a position
taken by notable critics like Timpanaro and Grünbaum.
The method of free association clearly originates not with Freud
but with Breuer and Bertha Pappenheim. And the Anna O. case
shows plainly how little is revealed by free association if it is not in
addition informed by the theory of defensive conflict. The explo-
ration of memory through free association does not uncover the
causes of neurotic illness. All that free association does is to increase
the number of clues we have to work with by providing memories,
fantasies, and current thoughts and reflections. It works like a mag-
nifying glass by enlarging our view of the problem and giving us
greater scope for reflecting on significant connections.
One learns nothing from free association until the data pro-
duced by it are placed in their proper context of the underlying con-
flict of intentions. Freud’s abandonment of hypnotism in favor of
free association in a waking state was of importance principally be-
cause it indicated that his perspective was shifting from thinking of
the unconscious mind as a chamber of memories, to the deeper in-

sight that it actually comprises the whole complex of attachments
that define the patient’s identity and how these attachments conflict
one with another. Furthermore, while the study of defensive conflict
remains the centerpiece of contemporary psychodynamic therapy,
free association, in its classical, slightly theatrical form of discon-
nected chains of words, plays a vanishing role. If the patient is free to
talk in a relaxed way about whatever he or she wishes then free as-
sociation becomes redundant.
Freud’s first reported cases in which he dispenses with hypno-
tism altogether date from 1892, including Elisabeth von R.52 It is not
a coincidence that as hypnosis becomes less interesting to Freud, he
speaks increasingly of memories and symptoms as symbols.53 This
means that memories and symptoms are indirect, displaced ways of
talking about conflicting intentions. In other words, they are
metaphors. This is a fundamental advance over the way of thinking
about memories and symptoms that we find in the cathartic treat-
ment in Anna O., which implies a much less sophisticated, almost
mechanical relation between symptoms, on the one hand, and locked
up memories and emotions on the other.
Elisabeth von R. is the last and much the most complete of the
Studies On Hysteria.54 It is the first of Freud’s case studies in which
he explores an emotional conflict between erotic wishes and family
attachments. It is, in other words, the first of Freud’s cases in which
there is an extended study of the ambivalence of human intention. It
is also the first to outline in some detail the links between the de-
fensive displacement of an ethical conflict and the symbolism this
generates. This study of defense is obscured, however, because the
case is overlayered with the trappings of the cathartic cure. Freud
dresses up the case of Elisabeth von R. to make it look more like
“hypnoid” hysteria than he really believes it to be.
The woman Freud calls Elisabeth was the youngest of a family of
three daughters. Her problems began when her father fell ill with a
heart condition. Of all his daughters, she had always been the one
most attached to him. In important respects, she had been for him the
son he never had.55 After he fell ill, for one and a half years, until his
death, she bore the main burden of his care.
The death of their father posed many difficulties for the four
surviving women of the family. Elisabeth’s mother, who had a his-
tory of nervous complaints, became more ill, and needed operations
to preserve her impaired sight. Elisabeth took on the role of caregiver
for her, as she had for her father. Her two sisters meanwhile were
looking beyond the family and about a year after their father’s death
both had found husbands.
Elisabeth first became seriously ill herself two years after the
death of her father. The family and the new brothers-in-law were
spending a summer holiday together at a resort. Towards the end of
the holiday, after her sisters had left with their husbands, Elisabeth
was overcome with an affliction of her legs that made walking
painful and difficult.56 Not long after this holiday, the younger of
Elisabeth’s sisters fell ill due to a second pregnancy. Together with
her mother, Elisabeth had to make a rushed journey to be with her,
only to find she had died shortly before they could reach her bedside.
Following this tragedy, her dead sister’s husband, who was the only
remaining male support Elisabeth and her mother had, withdrew
from the circle of her family, taking his surviving child with him.57
These were the precipitating events that brought Elisabeth at the age
of twenty-four into treatment with Freud.
He describes her as bearing her illness with the “cheerful coun-
tenance, with the belle indifférence of the hysteric.”58 She had diffi-
culty describing her affliction clearly. Even its precise location was
vague—now on the right leg, now on the left.59 When one touches a
painful area on the body of someone suffering from a purely organic
ailment, Freud remarks, the patient usually shows in her expression
an unmixed feeling of discomfort and tries to draw back. In contrast,
when one touched the afflicted area on Elisabeth’s leg, “Her face
took on a peculiar expression, rather one of pleasure than of pain.
She cried out—but I had to think, rather as if she were experiencing
a sensual tickling—her face flushed, she threw her head back, closed
her eyes, her torso bent backwards. None of this was very exagger-
ated but it was clearly pronounced. . . . Her expression did not fit the
pain supposedly aroused by the squeezing of the muscles and skin.
Probably it was better attuned to the content of the thoughts which
were hidden behind this pain and which one awoke in the patient by
stimulating the parts of the body associated with them.”60
Perhaps Freud is overstating how manifest was the sexual con-
notation of the illness. Or perhaps not. The important thing is that
hysterical illness, in contrast to purely organic illness, is never un-
equivocal in its meaning. For all the suffering it entails, it speaks al-
ways also of unfulfilled creative drives.
During her treatment with Freud, Elisabeth’s pains underwent
degrees of variation from day to day, as various free associations
linked to them were explored. On one occasion, she had heard of an
illness in her circle of acquaintances which reminded her of a detail

of her father’s illness; on another, the child of her dead sister had
been on a visit and its resemblance to its mother reawoke the pain
over her lost sister; on another occasion again it was a letter from
the eldest sister who had moved away, which seemed to show the
influence of her inconsiderate husband.61 And so on.
It became apparent that Elisabeth had first experienced pain in
her legs during the period she was caring for her father, though it had
not become serious at that time. In this connection she mentioned a
friendship she had had with a young man. The memory of it was still
painful for her. She felt she had much in common with the young
man. Indeed, she came to feel that he loved her, and that a marriage
with him would not require the sacrifices that generally she dreaded
from marriage.62 But the demands of caring for her father meant that
the opportunities to meet with him were infrequent, and the friend-
ship came to nothing. The pattern of Elisabeth’s illness appears to
have been established by this first conflict between her attachment
to this young man and her loyalties to her father.
Elisabeth’s various associations brought her to recall that during
her father’s illness it had been her task to bind his swollen leg, each
morning. Thus her own affliction was an identification with him.
Furthermore, it seemed that during this daily procedure her father’s
leg had normally rested on the part of her own leg that was now
causing her pain. She had dressed her father’s leg in this way “hun-
dreds of times.” This was the single most important reason why in
Elisabeth’s case it was her legs, generally an “atypical hysterogenic
zone,” that had become the focus for her illness.63 The pain itself
was probably initially just a rheumatic one. But it was as a symbol of
emotional conflict between her loyalty to her father and her inter-
est in the young man that it became significant. Freud writes, “The
contrast between the blissful happiness that she had allowed herself
to feel on that occasion [with the young man], and the worsening
condition of her father that she found at home, created a conflict, an
instance of incompatibility. The result of the conflict was that the
erotic idea was repressed from association and the affect attaching to
that idea was used to intensify or to revive a physical pain that was
present simultaneously or shortly before. It was thus the mechanism
of a conversion with the aim of defense.”64
At a superficial level, Freud seems here to be adhering to
Breuer’s theory that hysteria is caused by dissociated experiences.
“The erotic idea was repressed from association,” he says, and “the
affect attaching to it” was used to intensify the pain. But the cause
of Elisabeth’s illness was not a dissociation of memories; it was a

conflict of values in her heart. Elisabeth “repressed from associa-
tion” her feelings for the young man because she needed to preserve
her sense of herself as being faithful to her father. Furthermore, the
essence of her problem was not any repressive nineteenth-century
morality that compelled her to act as the dutiful daughter and deny
her sexuality. It was simply that her relation with her father was a
key part of her identity. Her father’s interests were her interests; his
outlook was her outlook. To abandon him was to abandon herself.
Elisabeth was in a trap. Life had presented her with a dilemma to
which there was no right answer. After her father’s death her sense
of loss only increased as her sisters married and moved away from
the family, and it was being together with them once again on holi-
day that made her grief intolerable and brought her illness to a head.
This is the real story Freud is telling with the case of Elisabeth
von R. But this presents him with a significant problem. Nominally,
Elisabeth von R. is supposed further to illustrate the theory that he
and Breuer have announced in the opening chapter of the book, the
theory that “the hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences.” The
Anna O. case history has interpreted this somewhat vague formula-
tion to mean the hysteric suffers from dissociated, inaccessible
memories. Yet here, in much the most detailed case history in the
book, it is clear that inaccessible memories play no part at all.
Freud tries to get round this problem by turning the scene at the
deathbed of Elisabeth’s sister into a key traumatic event of her illness.
He presents this as a pathologically dissociated experience in Elisa-
beth’s mind. To do this, however, he has to exaggerate Elisabeth’s at-
tachment to her sister’s husband so that her death becomes charged
with an erotic significance for Elisabeth which she has to banish from
her conscious thoughts. After the journey with her mother to be at her
sister’s bedside, he maintains, “They stood before the bed, looking at
her sister as she lay there dead. At that moment of dreadful certainty
that her beloved sister had died without saying goodbye to them,
without having had her care during her last days—in the same mo-
ment another thought had shot through Elisabeth’s brain which now
once again forced itself irresistibly on her, the thought that illumi-
nated the dark like a harsh lightning flash: Now he is free again and I
can be his wife.”65 The memory of this event, Freud argues, was dis-
sociated in Elisabeth’s mind because the emotions associated with it
were in conflict with her “whole moral being.”66
Freud returns to this dramatic deathbed episode on a number of
occasions in his report. However, he offers no corroborating testi-
mony on Elisabeth’s part that this thought ever did run through her
mind. Evidently, Elisabeth did feel a fondness for her brother-in-law

and this fondness was reciprocated.67 But it is doubtful whether the
relationship between them was anything like the powerful subter-
ranean passion that Freud suggests. Many years later, in 1953, the
youngest of Elisabeth’s own three daughters reported her mother as
having said that Freud tried “to persuade me that I was in love with
my brother-in-law, but that was not really so.”68
Elisabeth wanted marriage, but she also had an aversion to mar-
riage.69 Perhaps her parents’ marriage had not been a happy one. Per-
haps this was why she became her father’s companion in place of her
mother. Or perhaps her intelligence made her wary of the constraints
that would be imposed by marriage to a less able husband. Whatever
the reason, her distaste for marriage must qualify our understanding of
her attachment to her sister’s husband. If she was drawn to him this
may also have been because, with him, marriage was out of the ques-
tion. If so, his nominal eligibility as a husband on the death of her sis-
ter would have diminished, not increased, his appeal for her.
Elisabeth’s interest in her brother-in-law, such as it was, was re-
ally a reflection of something more fundamental. To the extent that
she formed an attachment to him, she did so with a man who pro-
voked anew the conflict within her between her father and the
young man she had been attached to while caring for her father. In
other words, her attachment to her brother-in-law was a further
symbolic statement of this conflict. She was saying, in effect, “I can
only form attachments with men I cannot have; and I cannot have
them because my father (or my family) needs my loyalty.”
The deathbed scene to which Freud gives so much emphasis is
suitable as an illustration of the cathartic theory of hysteria. But it
only obscures the advance which the Elisabeth von R. case repre-
sents over this theory. Hysterical symptoms reflect conflicts of loy-
alty and intention, not dissociated, repressed memories. Freud’s real
insight was to see that the illness of Elisabeth’s father blocked the
development of her erotic life outside the family.70 She experienced
her father’s need of her as a prohibition on her own creative poten-
tial. She obeyed this prohibition, but her rebellion against it eventu-
ally emerged, first in her physical symptoms, and then, possibly, in a
barren attachment to her sister’s husband. Elisabeth’s problem was
an erotic and ethical conflict. What she needed to come to terms
with was the possibility that she was driven by emotions of which
her father might not have approved.
In the case of Elisabeth von R. there is a very uneasy compro-
mise between regarding therapy as the need to get the patient to re-
call memories and to abreact the emotions associated with them,
and, on the other hand, the need to get the patient to make an act of
judgement about the complex pattern of displaced feelings of which
her physical symptoms are but one set of expressions. In describing
the objective of therapy in his concluding chapter of Studies On
Hysteria, Freud wavers uncomfortably between the cathartic notion
and a more complete psychoanalytic notion. At one point, for exam-
ple, he remarks, “The patient is only freed from the hysterical symp-
tom by reproducing the pathogenic impressions that cause it and by
expressing them with affect. Thus the therapeutic task consists
solely in inducing him to do so, and once this task is accomplished
there is nothing that remains for the doctor to correct or to annul.”71
This remarkably categorical assertion underlines Freud’s soli-
darity with Breuer. But again, it obscures the most important thing
he has discovered about hysteria: that it is rooted in ethical conflict,
and that, therefore, the crucial thing in treating it is not abreaction
of affect but getting the patient to recognize what others in her life
signify to her. Half a dozen pages after the above remark he gives this
rather different description of treatment: “Therapy does not consist
in extirpating something—for the present psychotherapy cannot do
that—but rather in causing the resistance to melt and thus in re-
turning circulation to an area that has been hitherto cut off.”72
This is not a description of catharsis or abreaction. But it does at
least prefigure what Freud was later to clarify as the goal of psycho-
analysis: making disguised conflicts accessible to more autonomous
judgement.
One thing we should learn from the case of Elisabeth von R. is
that a chain of free associations does not reveal the causes of the
neurosis. The causes of the neurosis are the conflicts within the self.
In each of the memories and fantasies produced by free association
the conflict underlying the illness reappears, but it is illustrated
from a slightly different angle. Each is but a nodal point, expressive
of the displaced inclinations engaged in the underlying conflict.
At this early stage in the 1890s Freud has in mind a simple anal-
ogy for this conflict within the self. He sees it as the conflict between
potentially perverse or incestuous sexual impulses—for instance,
Elisabeth’s attraction to her sister’s husband—and orthodox moral-
ity—for instance, Elisabeth’s sense of herself as the dutiful daughter
of the family.73 As a step forward in clarifying what actually underlies
hysterical illness, this is a major advance, just as Breuer’s discovery of
the importance of looking at memory is a major advance. But it is
still an oversimplification of the intricate conflicts involved. It leads
Freud to the mistaken view that Elisabeth can be cured of her illness
by overriding her moral side and proceeding to a relationship with her

brother-in-law. It was doubtless because he tried to press this solu-
tion on her that his relation with Elisabeth came to an unsatisfactory
conclusion and she abandoned the treatment.74
Conflict between sex and morality, or sex and the family, is only
another approximation to the elusive conflict Nietzsche delineates
within all human intention between overabundance and hunger, or
between exception and rule. Freud’s analogy adds something new
and vital to our understanding of this conflict, but it remains, like
the others, imperfect. The lines of emotional conflict underlying
hysteria are more messy and confused than Freud allows at this early
stage in the 1890s. Elisabeth’s sexuality is not only a force for inno-
vation and individuation, as Freud implies. It is also a force holding
her within the family, keeping her attached to it, and causing her to
perpetuate its illness. Equally, her moral sense of duty to her family
is not simply a brake upon her subversive desires and a source of
self-punishment that she needs to overcome. It is also a vital source
of her identity that she must not give up. Her sexuality and her
morality are thus both ambivalent. Freud sees this but he does not
yet have a theoretical structure that will allow him to do it justice.
Elisabeth’s symptoms, ultimately, were an unconscious attempt
to bring the history of her family as a whole under examination. As
a healthy child grows, she articulates her own personality by draw-
ing on the pool of habits and customs provided by the family and by
transforming these so that they become expressions of her own in-
dividuality. But if the family has a history of emotional and physi-
cal illness, as was the case here, then instead of containing the
child’s development and providing it with the security to individu-
ate, its history becomes an object to the child of perpetual uncon-
scious questioning. Instead of utilizing the family customs for her
own development, the child repeats them. She repeats the expres-
sions of its illness in her own symptoms, partly drawing profit from
them (as if they were indeed expressions of reliable health), partly
condemning them (because they do not provide her with health), and
partly trying to heal them (in the hope that they may become reli-
able expressions of health). This pattern is ubiquitous in the histo-
ries of children who become neurotic.
With the case of Elisabeth von R., psychoanalysis is just begin-
ning to emerge as what it properly is: a method for analyzing uncon-
scious ethical conflicts, in particular, conflicts between the wish for
individuation and independence, and the wish for attachment to the
family. With this development, the catharsis of painful memories
becomes radically reduced in importance, but at the time of Studies

On Hysteria Freud does not yet see this clearly. Indeed, to the end of
his career he was always to overestimate the extent to which the un-
conscious can be equated with things that have been forgotten. There
is in fact no point at which Freud ever entirely abandons the general
cathartic stress on traumatic memories and “unabreacted” emotions
in favor of the defense viewpoint. The cathartic way of looking at the
mind gradually becomes less important to Freud over the years but it
never disappears entirely. Right to the end of his life there is a part of
Freud’s mind that remains attached to the idea that repression in-
volves “forgetting” something (for instance, in 1918, the case of the
“Wolf Man’s” supposedly repressed memory of parental inter-
course75) and that undoing repression is a question of abreacting de-
nied impulses (which is implicit, for instance, in the view expressed
in 1930 in Civilization and its Discontents that civilization involves
ever greater quantities of repressed drives and impulses76). For all this,
however, the cathartic viewpoint is not Freud’s important contribu-
tion to our understanding of the mind. His important contribution is
his development of the study of ambivalence and defensive conflict.
It is because of his exploration of ambivalence that Freud, like Niet-
zsche, is still of interest to us in a contemporary way, whereas figures
like Charcot, Janet, and Breuer, who did not grasp the significance of
ambivalence, are of interest to us now only in a historical way. The
focus on ambivalence in human intention is the crucial thing that
brings modern depth psychology into being, rather than the emphasis
on the unconscious mind as such.
CATHARSIS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
In his later work Freud makes a clear distinction between

Breuer’s theory of catharsis and his own theory of defense
with which psychoanalysis properly begins. Nevertheless,
there were always some unresolved issues over this in his
own mind. Right to the end Freud was too prone to think
of the unconscious as containing things that had at one
time been conscious and had then somehow been forgot-
ten. He never entirely succeeded in separating out the
issue of defensive conflict from the hypnotherapeutic and
cathartic approaches to psychopathology he inherited from
nineteenth-century psychiatry. Also, Freud often thought
that what really set him apart from his medical contem-
poraries was his willingness to be uncompromising about

sex and that therefore this was central to defense. It was
partly this that led him to adopt the seduction theory in
1896 and it also contributed to the overemphasis on sex in
the Dora case a few years later.
It is not until twenty years after Studies On Hysteria, when

Freud is much more assured about his own views, that he states
clearly the differences that lay between him and Breuer. In 1914, in
“The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” he writes,
The first difference between me and Breuer emerged on a ques-

tion concerning the finer psychic mechanism of hysteria. He
preferred a theory that one might still call physiological, and
wanted to explain the mental splitting in hysterical patients by
the absence of communication between different mental states
(“states of consciousness” as we said at the time). He thereby
constructed the theory of “hypnoid states,” the products of
which were supposed to penetrate into “waking consciousness”
like unassimilated foreign bodies. I had looked at the thing in a
less scientific way; I sensed everywhere tendencies and inclina-
tions analogous to those of daily life. I conceived the psychic
splitting itself as the result of a process of repelling, which at
the time I called “defense,” and later, “repression.” . . . Soon it
was his hypnoid theory versus my doctrine of defense.77
In his Autobiographical Study of 1925 Freud comments again

on the relation between his own work and that of Breuer: “Breuer
named our procedure cathartic. The therapeutic aim of this was to
lead the quota of affect which was being used to maintain the symp-
tom, which was on the wrong path and as it were strangulated there,
back to normal paths, along which it could find release (abreac-
tion).”78 But, where “Breuer preferred what one might call a physio-
logical theory,” he himself, in contrast, “suspected rather a play of
forces, the effect of purposes and tendencies, as these can be ob-
served in normal life.”79
Because it had no theory of emotional conflict, the cathartic
cure could go no further than associating symptoms with memories
and generally reviewing the contents of memories. In this process of
associating and reviewing there was no theoretical attention given
to the ethical life of the patient, the life of her soul. This is what
Freud means when he says, with intentional irony, that he was “less
scientific” than Breuer. He means that he was not prepared to rec-

ognize the old limits of science, which were, of course, precisely
those established by the ethical life of the patient, the patient’s at-
tachments, loyalties, values, identity. With the theory of defense, in
contrast, Freud was in a position to extend natural science into the
field of the ethical life. The theory of catharsis stands on this ancient
borderline but the theory of defense, or repression, crosses over it.
Only with this crossing over does depth psychology properly begin.80
On the transition from catharsis to repression, Freud writes in
1925, “The theory of repression became the foundation stone of the
understanding of the neuroses. The therapeutic task had now to be
understood in different terms. Its goal was no longer that of ‘abre-
acting’ affects which had become diverted along incorrect paths, but
rather the uncovering of repressions, and their dissolution by acts of
judgement, which could result either in the acceptance, or the rejec-
tion, of what had been repudiated. In recognition of the new situa-
tion I named the procedure of investigation and treatment no longer
catharsis, but psychoanalysis.”81
Rather than talking about forces in the mind being repressed it
is perhaps better to talk of them as being subject to defensive dis-
placement because this emphasizes that the forces involved in con-
flict are never really pushed out of sight but do in fact always find
roundabout ways of expressing themselves.82 The term repression
also suffers from the fact that when Freud used it he was prone sig-
nificantly to overestimate the degree to which emotionally impor-
tant experiences can be, in any conventional sense of the word,
forgotten, and then made subject to recall again through psycho-
analysis. Freud never entirely freed himself from the idea that what
was repressed had at some earlier time been in consciousness and
then pushed out of it. This suggested that the aim of therapy was to
undo what had been done at that earlier time. It is, generally, one of
the more important weaknesses in Freud’s work that he tends to
think of the process of curing as that of reversing a process that has
previously occurred. Nature never goes in reverse, and particularly
not in the case of the human psyche. Injuries and errors can be over-
come only by renewed development, leading to the reintegration of
damaged structures and patterns so that they function in a more
fruitful way. What we defend ourselves against is not what we have
been, but what we have yet to become.
Psychopathological symptoms are a displaced, distorted expres-
sion of an unresolved conflict between forces, some of which are
leading towards new development, and some of which are anxiously
attached to the habits of the past. The problem with a lot of Freud’s
writing on the idea of repression, especially up to the end of the First
World War, is that it suggests that symptoms are some kind of alter-
native formation in consciousness to the underlying conflict, and
that they are somehow going to disappear once the conflict itself is
brought into consciousness. The persistence of this attitude in
Freud’s work shows the extent to which he never wholly succeeded
in throwing off the legacy of hypnotherapy and the cathartic view of
the mind. Furthermore, when this attitude joined forces in Freud’s
mind with his own image of himself as being more honest about sex
than other doctors, it resulted in his habit of pressing the patient for
some kind of supposedly reluctant confession about her sexual life,
with the assumption that this would lead to a cure.
It is quite true that patients are often not clearly conscious of
the dimensions of the conflicts they suffer, especially at the outset of
treatment, but they can achieve a lot of conscious insight into their
conflicts and still suffer badly from their symptoms. Symptoms are
resolved not when the underlying conflict becomes conscious, but
only as the forces that have generated the conflict undergo new de-
velopment—that is to say, once the defensively displaced expres-
sions of the forces at work are replaced, or supplemented, by newer,
more creative displacements. The notion of overcoming defense is a
very useful one, but it should be understood in terms of overcoming
obstacles to emotional development and the evolution of more fruit-
ful habits of life, not in terms of restoring forgotten conflicts to con-
sciousness. Equally, we should think of the curing of symptoms not
in terms of their removal, but rather in terms of their integration
into more satisfactory and fruitful habits of life.83
In the years following Studies On Hysteria the distinction be-
tween the cathartic treatment of Bertha Pappenheim and psycho-
analysis becomes increasingly significant in Freud’s work. Freud
himself, however, is not always the best guide to the distinction be-
tween them because many of his views on the development of psy-
choanalysis express his personal feelings about contemporaries, like
Breuer, rather than stating objectively the key issues at stake. In par-
ticular, Freud sometimes writes as if the capacity to see beyond the
theory of catharsis to the theory of defense hinges on a readiness to be
honest about sex. Although there is a drop of truth in this, Freud too
often conflates the problem of recognizing defense with that of rec-
ognizing sex. In 1914, for instance, in “The History of the Psychoan-
alytic Movement” he remarks, “Whoever rereads anew Breuer’s case
study in the light of the experience we have gained in the last twenty
years will not mistake the symbolism of the snakes, of the stiffening,
the paralysis of the arms. . . . His judgement on the role of sexuality
in the mental life of that girl will go much further than that of her
doctor.”84 True, but the snakes, the stiffening, the paralysis, and so
on, were symbols not of sex as such, but rather of conflicts in which
sex played some unknown part. Breuer’s problem was not that he was
intimidated by sex. His problem was that he did not have a theory of
emotional conflict. Freud’s advantage over him, and over Charcot,
Bernheim, Janet, and all his other predecessors in psychotherapy, was
that he did have such a theory. A willingness to be honest about sex
was certainly a part of this advantage, because it helped him to see
just how prevalent conflict actually is, but it was not its kernel.
There was a part of Freud that always felt that what really set
him apart from his contemporaries was his tough-minded approach
to sexual matters.85 Living up to this image of himself more than
once led him astray. His advocacy of the seduction theory is an ex-
ample of this.86 There is no doubt that an important part of the ap-
peal of this hypothesis for Freud was that it was such a direct threat
to anyone inclined to deny the role of sexuality in emotional illness.
Without that appeal, the simple improbability of the hypothesis that
all neurotic people had been sexually abused would have weighed as
heavily with him as it did with his colleagues. For all that, however,
the essential issue at stake in the seduction theory is now often
overlooked. The question it raises is not how prevalent is the sexual
abuse of children, but rather, What is the correct way to conceive the
nature of the unconscious mind? In fact, Freud’s advocacy of the se-
duction theory in 1896 represents a momentary theoretical regres-
sion on his part back to the cathartic view that the causal factor in
neurosis is the memory of traumatic events, rather than presently
existing conflicts in intention. The key to understanding the regres-
sion of the seduction theory is that Freud is in search of the deepest
source of trauma in psychic life; he is, as he puts it, looking for the
“source of the Nile” in psychopathology.87 Momentarily, he believes
this must be the earliest trauma in a historical sense, which at the
time he thinks must be the introduction of sex into childhood expe-
rience. In fact, the ultimate source of trauma in psychic life is deeper
than history because it is inherent in the very fissuring of human in-
tention itself. Freud’s eventual rejection of the seduction hypothesis
was not a rejection of the importance of the abuse of children but,
rather, stemmed from a growing recognition that the key to the un-
conscious is the study of this fissuring in intention and not the at-
tempt to recreate the past through memory.88
In his Autobiographical Study he describes his theoretical posi-

tion after giving up this theory. “When I recovered myself,” he says,
“I drew from my experience the right conclusions, namely that neu-
rotic symptoms are not directly attached to real experiences, but
rather to wishful fantasies, and that for neurosis, psychic reality has
more significance than material reality.” 89 The distinction Freud
draws here between “real experiences” and “wishful fantasies” is
not helpful. It leads to the misguided argument as to whether neuro-
sis is caused by the memory of traumatic events or by fantasies of
traumatic events. This is the wrong way of looking at it. The point
of the transition from catharsis to psychoanalysis is the realization
that symptoms are maintained by conflicting wishes and intentions,
irrespective of whether those wishes and intentions pertain to actual
memories or to fantasies. The causal factors at work in emotional
suffering, and the only curative forces at our disposal, are the wishes
and intentions of the patient.
It is this transition from the implicit physiological assumptions
of the hypnoid theory, with its search for causal factors in historical
events, to an exploration of the ethical self, the identity and con-
science of the self, that constitutes the transition to psychoanalysis.
The aim of psychoanalysis is not the reconstruction of memories;
nor is it the gathering of free associations; it is the development of
emotional judgement and intelligence through a deeper understand-
ing of the forces shaping one’s identity.
Apart from the seduction theory, the other important example
where Freud’s need to seem uncompromising on sex led him astray
on the nature of defense is the case of Dora, around 1900.90 Themati-
cally speaking, Dora is the last of the Studies On Hysteria and it is
also well-known as Freud’s most tantalizing “failure.” It “fails” in
that there is a great disparity between what he sees is happening to
his patient and what he allows himself to acknowledge is happening
to her. Throughout, he treats her defenses as if they were operating
exclusively against one particular sexual inclination towards one par-
ticular individual—the husband of her father’s mistress.91 Through-
out the Dora case, Freud is striving unsuccessfully to do justice to the
intangible nature of the conflict at the root of all human identity, the
perennial struggle between hunger and overabundance, between our
need of others and our need to be independent of them. In Dora,
Freud conceives this conflict in oversimplified terms as one between
sexual desire and conventional morality, and suggests that only what
he calls Dora’s “pride” prevents her from acknowledging her sexual-
ity.92 He also carries to extremes the cathartic notion that something
unpalatable about her sexuality must be shifted into consciousness

for the cure to be effective. What he does not see is that her sexuality
is in many ways working in a self-punitive and destructive way and
that she has good reasons to be at war with it. He also fails to see that
as a young woman striving for individuation and independence her
angry rejection of the husband of her father’s mistress as a sexual ob-
ject is entirely justified.
Through the confusions into which Freud falls in the Dora case
it is evident that he is trying to settle the account he feels is still out-
standing with Breuer over Studies On Hysteria. The real nature of this
account is that he had partly hidden his own theory of defense behind
the theory of catharsis in exchange for Breuer’s support. But Freud
does not think clearly about this; it seems to him that the whole med-
ical world is hypocritical about sex and he persuades himself that it
was really this issue that he compromised over in Studies On Hyste-
ria. In the Dora case, consequently, there is no escape from sex. “The
symptoms of illness,” he insists, “are, stated precisely, the sexual ac-
tivity of the patient.”93 It is this misguided proposition that he tries to
justify throughout Dora. To that end, he is committed to demonstrat-
ing that Dora, so long as she is hysteric, is not capable of a healthy sex-
ual response.94 This in turn means that he has to deny she could have
any healthy justification for rejecting Herr K., the only sexual object in
her life outside her family.
The woman to whom Freud gave the name of Dora was in treat-
ment with him in the final months of 1900, when she was eighteen.95
Illness had been part of Dora’s family all her life.96 When she was still
a young child her father developed tuberculosis, as a result of which
the whole family moved from Vienna to Merano, which was a popular
resort at the time for the treatment of tuberculosis.97 Some years after
this he developed problems with his sight, which caused major anxi-
eties for the whole family.98 Some years later again, her father was
brought by his close friend Herr K. for a consultation with Freud be-
cause he had developed symptoms of syphilis.99 The course of treat-
ment instituted by Freud led to an improvement in his condition, but
by this stage he had already infected his wife with gonorrhea.100 In
short, throughout her entire growing up, Dora’s family life had been
one of continuous illness.
The general misery of the family was compounded by her fa-
ther’s long-standing affair with Frau K., an arrangement in which her
husband acquiesced. Whenever exactly Dora’s father and Frau K.
began their affair, there had evidently developed a tacit agreement
between the two men to treat Dora as an exchange in this arrange-
ment.101 Dora’s main relation, however, was with Frau K., not with
her husband. Frau K. had become a trusted confidante of Dora’s and
Dora often looked after the K.’s children.
When Dora’s father brought her to see Freud she was afflicted
with a variety of minor symptoms. She had occasional breathless-
ness, and she suffered from a nervous cough.102 She also suffered (or
believed she did) from leucorrhoea, a mucous discharge from the
vagina. This condition was reminiscent of the symptoms associated
with her mother’s gonorrhea. Dora’s main problem, however, was
simply that she was moody and depressed over the state of her fam-
ily. For quite a number of years, she had been pressing her father in
vain to give up his association with the K.s, and in particular to
cease his affair with K.’s wife.
With his wife involved with Dora’s father, K. had been making
ineffectual attempts to seduce Dora for many years. In one memo-
rable incident when she was about fourteen, for instance, he had
contrived to be alone with her in his office, had seized her and tried
to kiss her. Dora resisted this advance, which she told Freud left her
only with a sense of nausea. Despite K.’s deceit in this matter,
Freud’s response to this story is that a “healthy girl” would not have
failed to be physically aroused by such an episode.103 In spite of
Dora’s denials, Freud insists that she is really “full of longing” for K.
and for “the little signs of his affection.”104 Her failure to acknowl-
edge this can only be an expression of her illness.
Of course, it is quite possible that Dora may have been attracted
to K. in some measure, but it is Freud’s attempts to argue that she
has no healthy reasons for rejecting his advances that makes his
reading of her situation as a whole so incongruous. Clearly, Freud
was in some way beguiled by the manifest “immorality” of the
whole family setup. He evidently welcomed the opportunity to en-
dorse an arrangement so much at odds with orthodox morality, just
as he had done in advocating Elisabeth von R.’s relationship with her
sister’s husband. Caught up in this preoccupation, Freud oversimpli-
fies the problem of defense as a straightforward conflict between
sexual impulse and conventional propriety.
In fact, Dora’s conflict was much more intricate than Freud al-
lows. She was torn between her identification with her father, and
therefore with his attachment to the K.s, and her anger with him for
his indifference to the family, the injury done to her mother, and his
disregard for her own interests through his involvement with the
K.s. This was a conflict over identity, over who she was and whose
example in life she should follow; it was not the straightforward
conflict between sex and conventional morality that Freud insists

on. Like Elisabeth von R., Dora was a young woman trying to
achieve individuation and independence and in this process her sex-
uality and her morality were both ambiguous, both partly aiding this
process and both partly inhibiting it. In terms of Nietzsche’s meta-
phor, Dora’s hunger was for the restoration of the health and secu-
rity of her family as a whole. Her overabundance was striving for
independence from the family. But because the family had become
so disintegrated, both aspects of her volition had come to grief. She
had become trapped in an attitude of negation towards herself and
the world in general. In moments when Freud forgets his irritation
with Dora, he states this clearly himself: “The cough . . . was an im-
itation of her father . . . and could serve as an expression of her sym-
pathy and concern for him. But besides this, it proclaimed aloud, as
it were, something of which she may then have been still uncon-
scious: ‘I am my father’s daughter. I have a catarrh, just as he has. He
has made me ill just as he has made mother ill. From him I have re-
ceived the evil passions that are punished by sickness.’”105
This self-hatred became also the basis of Dora’s relation with
Freud. She said to Freud, in effect, “I am evil; treat me as evil.” And
he, by his own admission, “failing to master the transference in good
time,”106 did just that. Freud did not recognize that within her emo-
tional life he had become yet another gratifying source of punish-
ment. Caught up in her difficult behavior, and too concerned to prove
untenable theoretical points, he lost sight of what he meant to her.
In Studies On Hysteria the sexual theme is all the more persua-
sive for being understated. In Dora it gets out of control. Freud’s em-
phasis on his patient’s fantasies of fellatio between her father and his
mistress, on her nervous dyspnea as an imitation of her father during
intercourse, and so on, quickly becomes absurd.107 It does so because
even as Freud ever more overtly speaks the language of sexual fan-
tasy in an ostensibly uninhibited manner, his tone becomes ever
more censorious and prurient. Nowhere in his writing does he more
insistently proclaim the values of the liberated Id, and nowhere is he
actually more captive of the prim superego. It was not Dora’s sexu-
ality that Freud was made captive by; it was her punitive morality.
He condemned her just as she condemned herself.
To be fully human, we have to do justice to both our hungry de-
pendence on others and our overabundant need for independence
from them. The purpose of psychotherapy is not to assist one side of
our nature at the expense of the other, but rather to assist the estab-
lishment of a more fruitful relation between them. The error to
which the theory of defense can easily give rise in psychotherapy,

and to which it does in Dora, is the notion that something unequiv-
ocally good in the patient is being resisted by something unequivo-
cally bad. What can be forgotten by the psychotherapist in the heat
of the therapeutic battle is that the dilemma the patient is caught in
is a completely real one—in the sense that the parties to the conflict
all have some legitimate claim. Furthermore, in every neurotic con-
flict the moral tendencies within the patient are subject to disguise
and distortion in generally far more subtle ways than the immoral
elements, which usually make themselves heard quite clearly. To
deny this moral side of our nature, our need to see others restored to
health and to find reconciliation with them, is, of course, as mis-
taken as to deny our often rather superficial immorality, our vaunted
need for self-assertion and self-gratification.
If he does not keep his own thinking sufficiently flexible, the
therapist can find that instead of encompassing the patient’s con-
flicts, he becomes inducted into them, as happens to Freud in the
Dora case. The patient will start unconsciously to manipulate the
therapist in the service of his own defenses. Faced with this state of
affairs, the therapist will usually attempt to deal with his own sense
of defeat by trying to persuade himself that some particular, clearly
visible inclination is what the patient is really defending himself
against. Focusing on one particular, readily identifiable tendency in
the patient can be seductive for the therapist by giving the feel of de-
fenses being confronted in an uncompromising way, and of difficult
work being done. It may be seductive also for the patient, if he or she
has a strong need for the therapy to be punitive. A failing therapy
can continue for perhaps an extended period of time on the basis of
such an unconscious contract between therapist and patient.
At the time of Dora in 1900 a great deal was, of course, still to
be learned about the capacity of the patient to manipulate the ther-
apist into becoming a punitive extension of her own illness. But
what we should also learn from the Dora case is that the therapist
too always has self-punitive tendencies. In Dora, Freud becomes en-
snared by these, as he had also been with the seduction theory a few
years earlier. In Dora he becomes a parody of himself. Conventional
morality, he implies, is distorting of sexual life; therefore what is
contrary to conventional morality must be healthy. It is here, not in
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, that we find Freud’s greatest
“slip.” For a moment, his customary subtlety deserts him and he be-
comes what he feels his enemies perceive him to be: someone who
reduces everything to sex.
Chapter Five
DEFENSE AND THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY
DEFENSE AND THE CONFLICT BETWEEN HUNGER

AND OVERABUNDANCE
The problem of psychological defense should be seen al-

ways in the context of human identity, of the problem of
“Who am I?,” and at the root of this there is always the
perennial human struggle between hunger and abun-
dance. This problem can be clearly shown even behind
Freud’s more ornate descriptions of unconscious processes
like those invoked to explain the Signorelli slip, or dreams
like that of Irma’s Injection, or the intricate patterns of
obsessional displacement in the Man of Rats case.
The beginning and end of all mature psychoanalytic interpreta-

tion is the study of the individual striving to achieve an autonomous,
fruitful identity. The more emotionally autonomous an individual is,
the more his attitude towards his history is one of affirmation and
gratitude because such an individual has acquired the strength to use
his history in a creative way. The less emotional autonomy an indi-
vidual has achieved, the more his life is characterized by a negating
and angry attitude towards his history. This negating attitude
emerges in the symptoms of psychopathology—in moods of depres-
sion and resentment, in chronic physical ailments, in self-punitive
styles of life, in destructive, unhappy relations with others, and so on.
Traditionally, we use the term defense to describe this un-
healthy state of negation. Like every term in depth psychology, de-
fense is an imperfect metaphor. Nevertheless, it is valuable for
denoting the states of defeat all human beings experience from time
to time in the course of their development. Also, it does convey well
the force of emotions we come up against when we try to reform the
mind and help it to live in a less unhappy way.
117
What we defend ourselves against essentially is the underlying

necessity of nature that fissures our intentions, destroys our security
and pushes us on to new creativity. Our more minor, day-to-day con-
flicts are only a local reflection of this larger process compelling us
to be who we are. At the root of defensive conflict there is always
the tension between the creative and self-assertive inclinations of
life, and those other very human inclinations that are hungry for the
sanction of others and are fearful of their disapproval.
In his case studies of other people Freud can sometimes be too
quick to simplify matters and to treat defense as working against
some particular, somewhat narrowly defined inclination, rather than
being a reflection of a large, imprecise conflict over identity. In con-
trast, it is in his descriptions of his own psychopathology that he does
most justice to just how complex and ambiguous the process of de-
fense actually is. Freud’s readings of his own symptoms and dreams
are remarkable for the richness of detail and the irony with which he
observes himself. His own defensive patterns are very persuasively
described by him, precisely because they are not oversimplified; they
describe episodes in one man’s struggle to become who he is. Con-
sider the famous example of Signorelli, which dates from 1898.
Freud classifies Signorelli as an instance of the forgetting of
words.1 This again reflects the hypnoid or cathartic idea that the un-
conscious is to be found in dissociated memories. Ostensibly what
happens in the Signorelli example is that Freud cannot recall a par-
ticular name; the name has unhappy associations and is therefore re-
pressed. What actually happens is that the name is momentarily, but
very visibly, displaced, and in the search for it a miniature commen-
tary on all his attempts to create himself at this point in his life is
developed. In addition, Signorelli is a slip created unconsciously
with a view to being interpreted in a psychoanalytic manner, and
thus with a view to showing us how Freud thinks the unconscious
works. This is an essential part of the self-assertion at its core.
Freud’s forgetting occurs in the course of a conversation with a
stranger met on a train journey through Bosnia-Herzegovina. Freud
is reminded of the stories he once heard from a medical colleague
who practiced among the inhabitants who live in the region. The
stories are about death and the fatalism shown by the Turks in the
face of death. Once, when a patient had died, his relatives had not
reproached the doctor for his failure but rather had tried to comfort
him. One of them had remarked, “Sir, what is there to be said? We
know if he could have been saved you would have saved him.” Freud
shares this remark with his travelling companion. What he does not
Defense and the Problem of Identity 119
mention, however, is that it reminds him of another one reflecting

the attitude of these local people towards sexual pleasure. Sex is the
only thing, they believe, that compensates for life’s suffering. “You
know, Sir,” one of them had said, “if that is no longer possible, life
no longer has any value.”
In fact, these gloomy reflections have really been provoked in
Freud’s mind by recent events much closer to himself. At an earlier
stop on the journey, a town called Trafoi, news has reached him that
a patient of his own has killed himself, a patient he was treating for
a sexual disorder. Freud experiences the death as a painful reproach
aimed at himself. He should have been able to save the man. By
killing himself, furthermore, the man was also making a statement
about life as such: without the possibility of sexual fulfillment, life
is not worth living.
In an effort to dispel these somber thoughts, Freud engages his
travelling companion in a conversation about art. But somehow, the
conversation is still infected with the theme of death. His thoughts
wander to the frescoes at Orvieto of the end of the world and the
Last Judgement. He is convinced they are the greatest he has ever
seen on this theme.2 He urges his companion to go and see them.
“Who are they painted by?” asks his companion. For the life of him,
Freud cannot recall the name. Is it Botticelli? No. Isn’t there a
painter called Boltraffio? There is, but it is not him either. The self-
portrait the artist has put in the corner of the frescoes is vivid in
Freud’s mind, with his detached, serious air and his folded hands.
But the name will not come. It is only once the journey is over that
Freud is able to do the necessary research and discover that the artist
is, of course, the name he knew all along: Luca Signorelli.
The explanation that Freud offers of this famous episode of for-
getting is highly detailed but its logic is rather contrived. Essentially,
his argument is that the themes of death and sexuality associated with
his own patient were repressed by him because of their painful nature.
It was then the influence of these repressed thoughts that drew “Sig-
norelli” itself into forgetfulness. Freud sketches an intricate set of as-
sociations to show how Signorelli is linked with these underlying
thoughts. These associations hinge on the fact that Signor is the Ital-
ian for the German Herr, of “Herr, was ist zu sagen?” (Sir, what is
there to be said?). Freud argues that these remarks, which were partly
revealed by him in the conversation and partly concealed, acted as a
bridge over which Signorelli was pulled into “repression.”3 The two
names that were substituted for Signorelli in his memory, Botticelli
and Boltraffio, can also be associated with the repressed thoughts. He
comments, “The Bo in both substitute names is explained by the

memory responsible for the repression; it concerned something that
happened in Bosnia . . .”—that is, the news of the patient who had
killed himself. He adds, “The word Traffio [in “Boltraffio”] is no doubt
an echo of Trafoi.”4
This is just the bare framework of the elaborate wordplay Freud
invokes to account for forgetting the name of Signorelli. However, his
associations in this example are in many ways more confusing as to
what is actually happening than they are illuminating. The problem
is that running through all of Freud’s account in the Signorelli case is
still his undecided view about the nature of repression. Is repression
the forgetting of thoughts that were at one time conscious, as the
case of Anna O. seems to suggest, and as the seduction theory sug-
gests? If it is, then undoing repression is simply a question of working
through the chains of association until the lost thoughts are restored.
The Signorelli example shows powerfully still the influence of this
hypnoid model of the unconscious.
The reality, nevertheless, is that Signorelli is an illustration not
of hypnoid dissociation of thoughts, but of defensive distortion of
conflicting inclinations. Freud is divided between revealing certain
personal thoughts, and concealing them. It is only in a superficial
sense that Signorelli is a case of the forgetting of a word. In a more
important sense it is a case of the highlighting of a word. By disap-
pearing for a short period, “Signorelli” draws an attention to itself,
and therefore to all the thoughts associated with it, which it would
never otherwise have received. This highlighting of the name, and
the elaborate wordplay it provokes, is a way of opening up to exam-
ination all the themes of death and sexuality as they relate to Freud’s
uncertainty about his own place in life.
The Signorelli slip, in short, is a veiled commentary on Freud’s
attempts to create himself. It occurred at a turbulent time in his
life. He was still coming to terms with the loss of his father, who
had died a couple of years before in 1896, and with the compulsive
self-analysis this provoked in him. He was still wrestling with the
mess of the seduction theory and with the questions it raised about
his father’s role in his own emotional life, and about his own pro-
fessional direction.5 He was also greatly preoccupied at this time
with his own physical health and with the sense that he was near
to death.6 Hence all the ambiguous allusions to death and sexual-
ity in the associations.
But perhaps most important in the context of Signorelli, and
not mentioned by Freud, are his doubts at this period in his life
about his own vocation as a doctor. The theme of the Signorelli

slip is the failure of doctors to be able to cure, and Freud’s own fail-
ings in particular. The underlying question here, as in so much of
Freud’s own psychopathology, is, Am I a doctor or am I not? Do I
really care about curing people, as a doctor should, or is what really
animates me the pursuit of knowledge? Freud’s momentary confu-
sion over Signorelli reflects this much broader conflict of identity.
It is just the tip of an iceberg of conflicting feelings and emotions.
Like every symptomatic event, it should be viewed not as a forget-
ting of thoughts but as a distorted expression of conflicting incli-
nations. Like Elisabeth’s paralyzed legs and Dora’s chronic cough it
is symptomatic of an underlying unresolved conflict of identity:
Who am I? and What should be my relationship with the world?
This underlying problem of identity is at the heart also of
Freud’s interpretation of dreams. Throughout life, our task always
is to find ways of satisfying our own unique purposes in ways that
others are prepared to acknowledge as legitimate. To be autonomous
we have to develop our own life so that the habits of feeling and
thought we inherit from the various traditions that define us, such
as those of family and of profession, are preserved in some measure
through our own life and yet at the same time are given new mean-
ing. Unconsciously, therefore, we are continuously reliving the ex-
perience of the infant which must express itself in the forms of life
sanctioned by its parents. We never completely outgrow the experi-
ence of the child of having to find a balance between accepting the
authority of parental habits, and trying to make out of those habits
something that more closely corresponds to the most fruitful condi-
tions for its own unprecedented nature.7
In our sleeping dreams we get a heightened portrayal of this un-
derlying conflict in our lives between the rule of the established
adult world and the exceptional nature of the child that finds itself
thrown into it. In sleep, we are disengaged from the world. The need
therefore to maintain a careful balance between the demands of the
adult and the demands of the child all but disappears. This allows
the elements at the root of our conflictual nature to appear in a more
uncompromising way than they can in waking life.8
Most dreams can be connected with little difficulty to the biog-
raphy of the dreamer. They can, that is, be related to the developing
interaction of his overabundant tendency to self-assertion and his
hungry need for acceptance from others. This, in effect, is what
Freud does when he argues that dreams speak of unresolved infantile
conflicts, but conflicts that are dressed in the terms of contemporary
dilemmas and concerns.9 Many powerful dreams make overt or

hardly veiled references to childhood and the dilemmas of child-
hood. A larger number, certainly the great majority of dreams, reflect
in general terms the tension between the wish for the security of sta-
bility, order, and precedent, and, working against this, the equally
strong wish to take creative risk, to make something new and un-
precedented out of what has been inherited in life.
It is true also that a primeval sense of horror and disgust at the
world comes out more often in our dreams than in any other every-
day experience. Dreams, in other words, express the negating quality
of feeling which we all have towards existence but which we cover
up more assiduously in waking life. In dreams we experience acutely
the absurd nature of the world we have inherited and with which, in
waking life, we have somehow to make do. It is as if, devoid of cre-
ative power by the condition of sleep, we can only distort and
negate, in a futile gesture of self-assertion. In dreaming, we often ap-
proach the condition of Hamlet—the world revolts and dismays us,
but there is no effective action we can take to remedy it: “The time
is out of joint. Cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.”10
Freud’s first and best known dream interpretation, the dream of
Irma’s Injection, shows these feelings clearly at work.11 The center-
piece of the dream is a scene where Freud reproaches his patient
Irma for “not accepting his solution.” If you suffer pains, he says to
her, it is your own fault. Then, alarmed at her appearance and fear-
ing he has overlooked an organic ailment, he takes her to the win-
dow and looks into her mouth, in which he sees pathological
patches. Dr. M. is called over to look and confirms that it is an in-
fection. It is clear where the source of this infection lies: Dr. Otto
has recently given her an injection of Trimethylamin.
Freud interprets this dream as an attempt at “self-justification.”
The day before the dream he had felt himself to be indirectly attacked
by Dr. Otto, who reported that a patient of Freud’s was not yet en-
tirely well. Freud responded that evening by writing a report on the
case, in “self-justification,” to be sent to Dr. M.12 The dream itself,
Freud suggests, represents a number of mutually incompatible self-
justifications. The most significant of these may be mentioned
briefly. First, Irma has not recovered because, although Freud has cor-
rectly communicated to her the hidden meaning of her symptoms,
she refuses to accept his solution. Second, Irma displays the symp-
toms of a physical infection, therefore Freud, treating her only for
psychic disturbance, is absolved of responsibility for her suffering.
Third, Irma’s position by the window, her diseased mouth and other
features of her behavior, are attributes of one of Dr. M.’s patients:

thus Irma is not Freud’s patient at all. Fourth, Irma’s illness is really
the result of an injection administered by Dr. Otto, not by Freud.
Freud insists that the theory of defense is “the kernel” of his
principle of dream interpretation.13 But what exactly is he defending
himself against in a dream like this? Freud is rather oblique about
this. Around this time, in the late 1890s, he was very preoccupied
with the question of defense against sexual experiences and wishes.
But there is actually very little reference to sex in The Interpretation
of Dreams. What then does Freud defend himself against in a dream
like that of Irma’s Injection?
What he never states explicitly is that all his attempts at self-
justification in the Irma dream are answers in the face of self-re-
proaches for failing to live up to the expectations of a healing doctor.
What he is defending himself against is the unhappy conflict be-
tween the wish for the security of professional recognition, for the
ability to cure, for the ability to support his growing family, and so
on, and the equally powerful wish that he were not bound by all
these tiresome conventional demands, because they are all a brake
on his own very peculiar talents. The conflicting feelings behind this
dream, and so many others he reports in The Interpretation of
Dreams, are his own difficulties with the authority and conventions
of medicine, conventions which constrain him and which he is to
spend the rest of his life at odds with.
In writing books on hysteria and dreams, and in stressing the
connections between the two, Freud is pushing the conventions ac-
cepted by his medical colleagues to the limit. He is doing so because
he is being driven to create that unusual animal we have since come
to call Sigmund Freud. Freud wishes to be a doctor, but at the same
time he does not wish to be a doctor, in the conventional sense. Self-
justification in the teeth of conventional expectations is the theme of
psychoanalysis. It is announced in this, the first dream of psycho-
analysis, and it is elaborated from one perspective after another in all
the other dreams Freud recounts. The theme is the conflict within
every human being between the rule and the exception, between the
hunger for the security of conventional acceptance and the over-
abundant need to create something that transcends the conventional.
Finally, returning again to Freud’s case studies, let us consider
the relation between defense and identity in obsessional neurosis.
The case of the Man of Rats, which dates from 1909, is Freud’s
richest and most theoretically innovative case study after Studies
On Hysteria and Dora.14 It shows how defensive conflict can turn
into a chronic negating of even the most minor self-assertive im-

pulses within the self.
The young man Freud called the Man of Rats was the son of a
man who had been habitually violent with his children. Nevertheless,
he himself had only been beaten once by his father, as a punishment,
apparently, for having bitten someone.15 He reacted to this assault
with an outburst of rage so violent it had inhibited his father from ever
attacking him again. But he developed a fear of any kind of physical vi-
olence and crept away in horror and indignation whenever one of his
siblings was attacked.16 From his childhood onward he had been
plagued by fears of harm coming to those he loved most. To try to deal
with these anxieties, his life had become bound round with all kinds
of prohibitions on his own impulses.17 Although his father had died
about eight years before the painful crisis that brought him to Freud,
at first this was not clear to Freud because so many of his patient’s
anxieties revolved around possible harm coming to his father.18
The tyrannical side of his father’s nature had continued to be a
major force in his son’s life even after his death. In the years leading
up to his treatment with Freud, his mother had been renewing the
pressure originally put on him by his father to give up the woman he
was involved with.19 This woman was not from a wealthy back-
ground and shortly before his death his father had advised his son
against her, saying he would only regret it if he married her. After
the death of his father, his mother made it clear that one of her rela-
tives would give him his daughter in marriage after he had com-
pleted his studies and that he could be sure of getting a position in
the family firm if he did so. This provoked profound conflict in the
son’s mind because it was just such a calculated arrangement that
lay behind his parents’ own marriage. His father had married his
mother for her wealthy business connections and he had abandoned
a girl of more modest means to do so. In short, the son was now
under pressure to repeat the father’s decision to base his life on cal-
culation, rather than genuine affection. His father’s decision had cre-
ated a family culture in which violence was an intrinsic part. Why
should the outcome in his own case be any happier?
This is the dilemma at the heart of the case of the Man of Rats.
As with all psychopathology rooted in emotional conflict, it is a
dilemma over identity. Always, the question the patient is wrestling
with is, How can I be sufficiently loyal to the customs that have
nurtured and defined me so that I retain that sense of belonging that
is vital to me, while at the same time modifying what I have inher-
ited so that it is fruitful for my own nature?
It was, however, a specific crisis that brought the Man of Rats to

Freud. Serving in the army reserve, one day he had fallen into con-
versation with some fellow officers. One of them was known for his
taste for tales of cruelty. This man started to relate details of a tor-
ture practiced in the Orient. A pot containing rats was fastened to
the buttocks of the victim and the rats were then forced to bore their
way into his anus.20 This vivid image of torture seized hold of his lis-
tener’s imagination. Try as he would, he could not dispel it from his
mind. In particular, he could not banish the fantasy either of his fa-
ther or of the woman he was involved with being made the victims
of the torture.
A little later on that same day, tormented still by these unhappy
images, the young man was approached again by the same sadistic
officer. He had no more disturbing stories to tell, but he handed him
a packet that had arrived at the post office. As he did so, the sadistic
officer remarked casually that the postage cost had been paid at the
post office by another officer and that this other officer was, there-
fore, owed this sum. However, as he took the packet the young man
knew that the instruction to pay this little debt was an error. Earlier
in the day, he had already heard that the packet had arrived at the
post office. The girl in the office, who knew him, had been looking
for someone to convey it to him without asking for the postage fee.
She knew she could rely on him to pay her the outstanding fee in
due course.21 It was, therefore, only to her that the money was owed
and not to anyone else.
In spite of knowing how things actually stood over the debt to
be paid, he said nothing. But there arose in his mind already tor-
mented by the images of torture two conflicting imperatives. The
first one was the sense that he must obey the instruction to repay
the postage, in accordance with the sadistic officer’s command. The
second one was the sense that he must not pay the money back be-
cause, if he did, the rat punishment would be perpetrated upon his
father. Over the next few days, this conflict flowered into a delirium
of imperatives and counterimperatives over the payment of the debt
that entirely paralyzed his ability to think and act coherently.
Once with Freud, the young man was, of course, readily able to
generate intricate strings of free associations and memories to the
rat story, and to the theme of the unpaid debt.22 But, as with the as-
sociations in slips like the cases of Signorelli or aliquis, or in hyster-
ical symptoms, or in dream interpretations, it is important not to
allow the richness of these associations to distract us from the un-
derlying conflict of motives that is the real engine of events.23
The invocation to pay the debt and the story of the rat punish-
ment were significant for the young man because they both lent
themselves readily as displaced expressions of the conflict at the
heart of his own identity. The theme of debt paying was a signifi-
cant one in the family history. Once, while himself serving as an
army officer, his father had lost a sum of money playing a game of
cards. The money was not his own, but a sum with which he had
been officially entrusted. A comrade had helped him out by lend-
ing him the required amount. Years later, he had sought out this
man to repay him, but it seemed he never succeeded in doing so.
This story had become part of the family lore. Evidently, this story
of the unpaid debt encapsulated in his son’s mind the character of
his father. To his son, he was a mean-spirited man, lacking in self-
control, who did not pay his debts. He was as unjust to the com-
rade who had generously helped him out after he stupidly gambled
money that was not his own as he was to the woman he had aban-
doned to acquire a wealthier wife, and as he was to his own chil-
dren. The story of the unpaid debt thus symbolized the fault line in
his father’s calculated marriage and the violent family he had
erected on that marriage. Thereby, it also symbolized his own im-
possible dilemma over the question of whether to marry the
woman he genuinely cared for or to follow his father’s precedent of
sacrificing this for financial advantage.
The fantasy of the rats was of course fixating because of its sheer
savagery. But, in addition to this, it had significance for the young
man because it brought together the themes of violence towards the
buttocks and anus with that of biting, the themes that had coincided
on the day his attitude towards his father had been crystallized when
he was physically attacked by him.24 It took hold of his imagination
already exhausted by the unresolved decision over marriage which
was rooted in his father’s authoritarian attitude.
In many ways the most revealing of the patient’s associations to
the rat fantasy is that it recalls to him Ibsen’s play Little Eyolf. This
is a drama full of symbolism that revolves around a child who has
been crippled in an accident which happens while his parents are
having intercourse. Early in the play, there appears the village rat-
catcher, a fearful old woman or “rat wife.” Her task is to destroy “all
the little creatures men hate and persecute” by drawing the rats to
swim out onto the deep waters of the lake where they drown.25 In the
end, this is the fate that also befalls Eyolf himself. The playwright
uses rats here as a symbol of everything that has been displaced and
twisted within the family, above all the child himself. The rats repre-
sent the rage and the guilt that have become all the more virulent
within the family for never having been honestly addressed.
Similarly, for Freud’s patient the rats are an overdetermined
symbol for himself. They are a symbol of self-assertive and poten-
tially creative energies of life that have become trapped by anxiety.
The rat fantasy tells of conflict between the weak and persecuted,
and the strong and sadistic. But the rat stands for both the perse-
cuted and the persecutor. He torments and destroys the helpless
victim, but he is himself at the same time the victim of the tor-
turer. The rat here is the expression of what Nietzsche describes,
with other connotations, as the “slave.” It is that within the self
which is so deprived of autonomous volition that it can only act
destructively. The rat is the symbol of life that is devoid of all cre-
ative activity. Torn as he was between his sense of obligation to his
father and his family and, on the other hand, his sense that this
obligation was only destructive of his best inclinations, the patient
found in the imprisoned rat the perfect symbol of his own emo-
tional state.
As with his case studies of hysteria, in this case of obsessional
neurosis Freud emphasizes how the illness inhibits the development
of an erotic relation outside the family. Of course, the inability of
the Man of Rats to establish a stable sexual relation is important in
itself. Ultimately, however, it is just one further expression of his
failing attempts to establish an autonomous identity. Here, as al-
ways in emotional illness, the underlying theme is the smothering
of the abundance of human nature by its anxious hunger. The con-
flict is one between the need to follow precedent and the need to ex-
periment and cut free from the past. The conflict between sexual
impulse and sexual inhibition is only a local skirmish behind which
this larger war is being played out.26
Hysterical illness reflects an unconscious fear of challenging the
family through an act of autonomy, in case this damages even fur-
ther an already injured family. For the hysterical patient, her family
remains the indispensable source of her identity and self-definition,
and therefore she feels she must not do anything that may under-
mine it further. The hysterical neurotic, instead of overtly express-
ing her anger at the dependence of her family on her, expresses it
indirectly through her own ailments, which often mimic those of
other people in the family. Obsessional neurosis, in contrast, reflects
an unconscious fear of challenging the family for fear of a reciprocal
attack in retaliation. The obsessional, instead of confronting the
threatening father directly, turns his sadism upon himself. Like the
hysterical patient, he preserves his identification with his family,

but, at the same time, covertly condemns this identification.
But in all these cases of defensive conflict, the underlying prob-
lem is that the emotional price of individuation is experienced as
being too high. For the hysterical neurotic, the price of attempting
individuation is perceived to be the destruction of the family by the
individual. For the obsessional neurotic, it is perceived to be de-
struction of the individual by the family. But, of course, in both
types of case there is a loss of meaning, an alienation, and an under-
lying pattern of self-punishment.27
EXCEPTION AND RULE IN FREUDIAN METAPSYCHOLOGY
Freud’s metapsychology is an attempt to describe in the

most fundamental and abstract way the nature of psy-
chic defense. In his early metapsychology he suggests de-
fense arises essentially because of a conflict between the
pursuit of pleasure and the recognition of reality. This
perspective proves largely redundant in clinical work
and, for this reason, many have argued that Freud’s at-
tempts to develop a theory of the mind compatible with
natural science was unnecessary and a mistake. In his
later work, however, Freud abandons this perspective
and thinks instead of defense as being mobilized against
what he calls “internal dangers.” An internal danger is
an inclination within ourselves that is in conflict with
some rule or convention we feel is essential to our sense
of identity. The threat from internal dangers is that they
will lead to castration, alienation, or loss of love and
recognition from others. Unlike the pleasure principle
framework, this is a sophisticated metapsychological
theory that does justice to the underlying division within
all human action and experience. Unless we are to per-
sist in the view that we are somehow not a piece of na-
ture, there are no good grounds for denying this theory a
place in natural science.
The child’s conflict with the family is one metaphor for the fun-
damental division within human intentionality between abundance
and dependence, between exception and rule. We have considered
how this metaphor is reflected in some of Freud’s case histories. But
how does it appear in his more abstract theories of the mind, his so-
called metapsychology?
In the early years of his work, Freud thought that the funda-
mental root of mental conflict might be that between the pursuit of
pleasure and the need for a recognition of reality. His hypothesis
was that human purposes originated in some internal region of the
mind where they were sheltered from reality and where they were
governed solely by the pursuit of pleasure. He conceived them then
as in some way moving out towards the external world, where they
had to adjust to the demands of reality and necessity. In broad
terms, this theory is consonant with the cathartic way of looking at
things, where the aim of psychotherapy is taken to be allowing
trapped emotional energy to get in touch with reality. Most impor-
tant, it is, like the cathartic theory, an attempt to think of mental
dynamics other than in terms of conflict between identifications
and loyalties to others, in terms, that is, of ethical conflict.
The high-water mark of this framework is probably the theoret-
ical chapter 7 of the 1900 Interpretation of Dreams. This chapter is
intriguing for the light it sheds on Freud’s own intellectual develop-
ment and for its relation to the unpublished 1895 “Project for a Sci-
entific Psychology.” However, it adds essentially nothing to our
understanding of the practical problems of interpreting dreams. It is
also not integrated with the theory in the rest of the book, which
turns on the distortion of wishes that threaten the dreamer’s identi-
fication with important others.
In fact, the theory that mental conflict is fundamentally a con-
flict between pleasure and reality has never played any significant
part in the practical work of understanding the neuroses and psy-
chopathological life generally. This is widely recognized, of course.
There is, however, some confusion as to why it is that we do not
make recourse to this theory in clinical work. For many therapists
and critics of psychoanalysis alike the problem with this theory, and
with Freud’s metapsychology in general, is that it tries to be a piece
of natural science. That this theory is redundant, so the argument
runs, only goes to show that natural science is simply an inappropri-
ate aspiration for psychoanalysis.
This judgement is premature. The problem with the pleasure
principle framework is not that it aspires to be scientific. The prob-
lem is that it does not get to grips with the peculiar nature of human
intentionality. It tells us nothing of the tension between hunger and
abundance; it tells us nothing of the perennial psychological war be-
tween the rule and the exception. It tells us nothing of the negating
attitude to the world of those who have not been able to achieve sat-
isfaction with themselves because they have not been able to resolve
this tension in a creative way. This is the reason it proves redundant
in clinical work, not because it aspires to be scientific.
Throughout the 1920s, beginning with Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, Freud works to replace the pleasure principle theory with
something more satisfactory. It is true that some of the ideas that
first emerged with the pleasure principle perspective never disap-
pear from his theoretical work. For instance, in the The Ego and the
Id of 1923, the ego is conceived partly as an ideal consciousness me-
diating between the unconscious, on the one hand, and the external
world, on the other, and this is a relic of the pleasure principle
framework. Nevertheless, by this stage in the 1920s the pleasure
principle perspective has become heavily overlayered with more so-
phisticated ideas. Defense, Freud now believes, is not illuminated
by the need to control pain, but rather by the need to control the
danger of alienation from others, or “castration.” We repress and
distort our wishes not because they threaten us with pain as such,
but rather because they threaten to undermine our relations with
those with whom we identify and upon whom we rely for recogni-
tion. This perspective on defense does indeed reflect the conflict we
are interested in, the conflict between abundance and hunger or be-
tween exception and rule. This perspective on psychological con-
flict does justice to the case histories and to everyday
psychopathology, and to the interpretation of dreams, in a way that
the pleasure principle does not.
It is this perspective on the mind as a system working always
to balance what is unique within itself against its identifications
with others, rather than working to balance pleasure against real-
ity, that informs the most important parts of The Ego and the Id.
Here, the ego, the I, is, in essence, a term for the capacity to find a
balance between impulse and custom, between the It (that which
as yet has no name because it is not recognized by custom) and the
superego, or over-I (the habits of life powerful others require from
us in return for recognition). The essential psychological task is to
find a balance between the subversive, but also creative and inno-
vative impulses within ourselves, and the need to meet the expec-
tations of others from whom we have to achieve recognition if we
are to retain our sense of identity. In this perspective, neurosis is
understood as the result of a failure to achieve a fruitful balance be-
tween these two vital tendencies. The task of therapy is seen as
that of teasing out the conflicts arising between these two tenden-
cies, helping the patient to see these more clearly, to be less afraid
of them, and to resolve them in more creative ways.
The It (das Es) is a shorthand for our childlike overabundance of
desires. As it develops, the child has to sacrifice certain of its over-
abundant wishes to the customs established by the relation between
its parents so as to retain the potential for fruitful interaction with
them, and thus with other human beings.28 The child, in other
words, renounces many of its primitive wishes in return for being
recognized as an identity in its own right. Things go wrong, how-
ever, if the child loses faith in its ability to maintain an appropriate
degree of self-sacrifice in exchange for recognition of its own right to
identity and autonomy. This can happen for any number of reasons;
for instance, illness on the part of a parent making the parent depen-
dent upon the child, as with Elisabeth von R.; a fundamental break-
down in the parental relationship itself, as with Dora; or the threat
of violence or abuse from a parent, as with the Man of Rats. When
the child loses faith in its ability to maintain this balance, for what-
ever reason, its more primitive overabundant impulses reassert
themselves in a distorted, destructive manner. The child turns on its
surroundings, and it turns on itself. The unconscious sense of alien-
ation, the sense of not being able to organize something vital within
itself in such a way as to ensure recognition from others, becomes
acute, as does the anxious sense that all further attempts at self-as-
sertion will merely be punished by further alienation.
In 1926, in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud argues
that all defensive symptoms can be understood as attempts to mini-
mize anxiety associated with this sense of alienation and castration.29
They are all responses to this danger from one’s own impulses: “The
process of defense is analogous to the flight by means of which the I
escapes a danger that threatens from outside. . . . And yet the case is
not the same. The wolf would probably attack us irrespective of how
we behave towards him. But the beloved person would not withdraw
his love, would not threaten us with castration, if we did not harbor
particular feelings and aims within ourselves.”30
What Freud calls in this important late work “internal dangers”
are those that are feared because they threaten to undermine a rule,
that is, a custom or habit of life upon which the individual depends
for some vital part of his identity. An internal danger, in other
words, is the danger of failing to conform to a custom or convention
with which one is expected to be familiar. The danger is that one
will be cut off from acknowledgement by the other individuals who
share the rule as a punishment for being an exception to the rule.31
We can each only realize ourselves by modifying the customs

and rules of life we inherit so that they accommodate our unique na-
ture, but still retain the sanction of others. Therefore, we have con-
tinuously to resolve conflict between adhering to custom and
challenging it. In every resolution of conflicting desires we find the
interweaving of hunger and abundance, the interweaving of the need
to adhere to the rule and the need to assert ourselves as an exception
to the rule. In every resolution of conflicting desires, therefore, some
internal danger must be negotiated. The more hunger predominates
over abundance, however, the more we are bound around by fear of
internal dangers, and the greater is the fear and the sense of alien-
ation from others. When this happens, life develops an infantile as-
pect, in the worst sense: it becomes defensive, fearful, unproductive,
and self-punitive.
GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
The problem of emotional health is the oldest human problem.

Every civilization has had to solve it in its own way and, increas-
ingly, each new generation is having to find its own solution to it.
This problem of emotional health is not solved in the way we
solve those of physical health. Unlike physical illness, emotional ill-
ness does not yield to progressive technological insight that develops
from one year to the next. We are not conquering emotional illness
in the sense we are doing this with physical illness. In that sense of
the word, it is misleading to think in terms of the possibility of sci-
entific “solutions” to the question of emotional health and it is
wrong to try to assess the merits and failings of psychotherapy as if
such solutions are somewhere going to be available to us. For all
that, however, modern science has changed fundamentally the con-
text within which we think about the problem of emotional illness.
Only in a scientific culture have we begun to look at emotional ill-
ness clearly. Ultimately, it is only the advent of a scientific culture
that has allowed us to be honest for the first time about just how in-
tractable, and indeed endemic to the human condition, emotional
illness actually is. It is, therefore, equally misleading to try now to
divorce the understanding of emotional illness and its treatment
from a scientific view of the world.
Emotional illness is rooted in the inherently ambivalent, di-
vided nature of human intention. This conflicting condition means
that human beings often simply do not know how to organize their
own intentions so that life is lived in a coherent, fruitful manner.

Human life is full of dilemmas and conflicts of value, some of them
terrible. Before the development of science, the fundamental pur-
pose of traditional religion and morality was to provide answers to
deal with these dilemmas and with the intolerable lack of knowl-
edge underlying them. They helped human beings to minimize the
self-injury that results from the incomplete, conflicting nature of
their own intentions. At the height of the Christian era, this meant
providing what purported to be an essentially complete account of
the place of human beings in the world. According to this religious
account, human beings were related in a unique way to a power out-
side the world. The health of the emotional life, it seemed therefore,
depended upon principles that were independent of the principles
governing the world. The legacy of this vision was that, until rela-
tively recently, the problem of the health of the soul was seen as sep-
arate from the problem of understanding how nature works.
Particularly after the Copernican revolution, the latter was regarded
as the sphere of natural science, while the former was regarded as
the sphere of religious teaching and moral doctrine.
As long as the questions of the soul were conceived as being dis-
tinct from the questions of natural science, the emotional suffering
of human beings was interpreted as reflecting a falling away from
this power external to nature. When human beings suffered emo-
tionally, this was taken to indicate that they were breaking tran-
scendent rules of some kind; in other words, they were sinful. The
sinful animal was thought to suffer because it had become divorced
from a power beyond itself, and it was restored to a sense of health
by making contact again with that power beyond itself. Such a way
of thinking about emotional health was perfectly rational as long as
there was a general belief in the existence of such a power, and it
meant that spiritual healing was, inevitably, a part of religious faith
and the institutions of faith. The decline of faith in such a power,
brought about by the rise of a scientific attitude of mind, has gradu-
ally closed this avenue for thinking about the problem. When we as-
sess now the emotional health of an individual we do not ask
questions about transcendent rules and unconditional principles. We
do not ask, how closely does this individual conform to timeless
moral standards? On the contrary, we ask, what are the conditions
that have created, and are sustaining, the habits of life that govern
this individual? And we ask also, what are the conditions under
which the form of life manifested in this individual will best thrive?
It is the emergence of science that has caused us to look at the
health of human beings in this conditional way. The essential thing

is that the suffering of the human animal is seen now to reflect the
fact that it misunderstands powers working within itself, powers
that are elusive, diverse and often contradictory. It can address that
suffering only by understanding these internal powers better and by
confronting the anxieties that have been generated by the conflicts
between these powers. It is this shift in context from thinking in
terms of an external power that must be obeyed, to internal powers
that need to be understood, that has given rise to depth psychology,
to psychoanalysis, and to psychotherapy generally.
However, in a culture that is now so dependent upon the intel-
lectual imperatives of science, we are more anxious about these im-
peratives, and more torn by uneasy guilt over them, than we like to
admit to ourselves. As we have seen, thinkers like Descartes and
Kant are important to reflect upon in this context because before
most of their contemporaries they sensed within themselves the
coming emotional crisis of science. They sought to save the task of
individuation, the task of being an autonomous individual with a
self-governing conscience, from the deep upset coming to it from
science. In their different ways, they tried to preserve the con-
science from the pressures of science by arguing that our knowledge
of the self is certain, that it is safe from uncertainties and skepti-
cisms, and that the human task of individuation is therefore not af-
fected by science.
Nietzsche and Freud saw that this is simply not the case. Sci-
ence, with its conditional forms of inquiry and its systematic skep-
ticism towards custom, has fundamentally altered the emotional
work of individuation we each confront. Nietzsche and Freud saw
that the problem of the health of the human soul now has to be ap-
proached in a scientific context, with a new kind of scientific disci-
pline. And yet, this remains a widely questioned position. Freud’s
most important offence, in the judgement of contemporary culture,
was not that he explored the unconscious. It was, rather, that he em-
phasized that it is science itself that now impels us to this explo-
ration of the unconscious. This has turned out to be the most
unacceptable part of his thought, much more so than anything he
had to say about sex.
Psychoanalysis addresses the consequences of the emotional
crisis created by science. In a religious culture there are socially
sanctioned rituals and conventions for dealing with our inherently
ambivalent attitude towards tradition and towards all the parental
icons tradition contains. The destruction of these religious rituals
and conventions through the critical action of science has deprived

us of an important means for containing the psychological cost of
our inevitable conflicts with tradition: the cost of guilt, of self-dis-
like, of the need for self-punishment. These psychological costs of a
scientific culture are what we treat in psychoanalysis.
The new culture of conditional values has been born, but it is
still far from mature. The old culture of moral absolutes no longer
rules, but its elements live on still in a fragmented form within each
one of us. Just as the intellectual abandonment of the idea of sin has
by no means abolished feelings of guilt, shame, self-dislike and the
need for self-punishment, so the intellectual transition to a condi-
tional view of the emotional life has by no means abolished the un-
conscious wish for unconditional imperatives.
There are a number of perspectives from which we can view
this continuing unconscious seeking of unconditional imperatives.
Partly, no doubt, it arises because as children we all looked for re-
ceived rules as a way of making sense of the world and dealing with
its anxiety, so this habit is second nature to us and is likely to re-
main with us in some measure no matter how far science advances.
Partly, of course, it arises simply from a wish to escape the demand-
ing work of understanding our own nature. And partly, it is because,
historically, unconditional moral rules gave us some protection
against our own divisions by specifying a clearer distinction between
good actions and bad actions than we now have at our disposal. Sci-
ence has robbed us of this kind of emotional protection and without
it we frequently become destructive and punitive towards others and
towards ourselves. The experience of the twentieth century leaves
us in no doubt of this.
Fundamentally, the argument about the scientific status of psy-
choanalysis is an argument not about psychoanalysis but about sci-
ence itself. At an important level, we would like to believe that
science is not compelling us to this difficult confrontation with our
own divisions and ambiguities. We are afraid of the scientific imper-
ative to think about our emotional life in conditional terms because
we are afraid that we may lack the strength to organize our lives in a
self-governing way, without the support of categorical imperatives.
We are afraid we may lack the strength to take responsibility for
mastering our own divisions. The effect of science, nevertheless, is
to compel us to find that strength in ourselves, where previously we
had found it in God. This is a psychological transition unlike any-
thing human beings have had to go through before. We need to try to
confront in an honest way just how difficult it is.
The development of science in general and its application to our

own motives in particular have generated both conceptual and emo-
tional complexities that are more difficult to deal with than we have
yet been able fully to acknowledge. At the conceptual level, one im-
portant complication is that we have to employ old terms in new
and altered ways. In depth psychology, we use terms like “soul” and
“science” in unfamiliar ways; unfamiliar, because the conceptual re-
lations between notions like these have undergone changes. In the
past, “soul” was an expression for our relation with a transcendent
God, and therefore an indication of the point at which scientific in-
quiry stopped. Now, it has changed its meaning to become an ex-
pression of our divided nature, and of our need to find coherence in
spite of that divided nature. This new concept of the soul can be con-
sidered in a scientific way, provided that our concept of science itself
evolves in order to encompass it.
Those who by temperament feel nostalgic for a purer scientific
frame of reference frequently exploit the old religious connotations
of the word “soul,” ignoring the way it has developed. They say that
it is high time we abandoned this old religiosity and got down to se-
rious scientific work where the emphasis is on prediction, experi-
ment, validation, and so on. This attitude is exemplified by the
positivist critics of psychoanalysis like Popper, Sulloway, Grün-
baum, and Webster. On the other hand, those who feel nostalgic for
a simpler religious frame for their experiences exploit the old posi-
tivist connotations of the word “science,” ignoring the way this con-
cept too has developed. They maintain that it is unrealistic to try to
capture the complex ambiguities of human beings in a scientific way
and that we should therefore withdraw from the dialogue with sci-
ence. A figure like Lacan exemplifies this attitude, as does a writer
like Ricoeur who would assimilate psychoanalysis to hermeneutics.
The appeal of all these writers is that, in various ways, they
seem to hold out an escape from the essentially modern task of hav-
ing to organize our ambiguities in a creative and fruitful way. They
appeal to those who do not experience the ambivalent nature of their
own intentions as a potential for deepening their creativity, but who,
rather, fear this ambivalence as something beyond their power to
master. The old morality of unconditional imperatives speaks
through all these writers in a displaced way, through their emphasis
on the old sciences and their limits, that is, the sciences that for-
merly existed side by side with the old morality.
In the context of the debate about psychoanalysis, the appeal of
sciences like physics and Darwinian theory is that it is possible to
employ them in this displaced manner. They are both fields of sci-
ence that happened to mature before the final decay of the old moral
certainties (in the case of Darwinism just before). In the context of
the debate about psychoanalysis, the appeal to these sciences reflects
a nostalgia for a time when the conflicts within the self could more
readily be resolved by recourse to unconditional rules and codes.
They reflect a nostalgia for a time when we were less unequivocally
exposed to the full ambivalence of our nature. Sciences like physics
and Darwinism do not tell us anything about the ethical dilemmas
that any serious science of human motivation must address. Setting
them up, therefore, as self-evidently adequate models of science per-
mits the pretence that the field of human impulse, the field of human
dilemma, the field of narrative, the field of tragedy and comedy, in
short, the field of the human soul, can legitimately be kept immune
from rational, conditional exploration.
Those who advocate these older sciences as models for psychol-
ogy are attempting to repeat old expressions of the scientific spirit,
rather than creatively developing those expressions, which is how
science always proceeds. To that extent, their work reflects, in an in-
tellectual form, the habits of the neurotic, who tries to repeat the
past because he lacks the self-governing strength to develop it in
new, more fruitful ways. Nevertheless, we cannot go back to physics
as our model for psychology and we cannot go back to Darwin ei-
ther. We have to move forward, because this is what science always
does. It does not repeat its own history.
What we need most urgently to develop is a proper, serious
psychology of the unconscious emotions that are involved in our
most important abstract concepts, especially that of science. We
are not comfortable thinking about the more deeply concealed
emotions involved in science and we are still very unpracticed at
exploring them.
Ultimately, whether we classify psychoanalysis as a science or
not is not the crucial thing. Any therapeutic method for body or
mind, when practiced effectively, is always more, and less, than a
science. The important thing to understand is that psychoanalysis
is a consequence of science; it is a profoundly important attempt to
address the ethical crisis created by science. The aim of psycho-
analysis is to help the individual to meliorate the worst excesses of
the conflicts created by living in a scientific culture. It aims at the
questioning and weakening of unconscious fears that keep the cre-
ative, synthesizing part of the self from developing its strengths.
This is in many ways a modest aim, but in human terms it can
mean the difference between a life that is imprisoned by anxieties

and one that is free and fulfilling.
The more seriously we confront the divided, elusive nature of
our intentions, the more we have constantly to reexamine afresh
what it is we actually do intend. We have continually to restore the
balance between the need within us to adhere to the purposes we
each inherit through tradition and history, and the need to give ex-
pression to the new, the unprecedented, the untried. To be healthy,
we have to summon the strength to recognize what in the past is
healthy for us and learn to reject what is not. This constant redis-
covery of one’s own intentions and of what is right is what it means
to govern oneself. This is an intricate, demanding, always unfinished
task. Each of us has to resolve it in a unique manner. The challenge
for the psychotherapist is to do justice to the uniqueness of the so-
lution we each must find to our own lives.
We no longer live now in a world where there is a clear and sim-
ple opposition handed down from one generation to the next be-
tween true and false, or between good and evil. These oppositions
that supported the generations before us in their intellectual and
emotional lives are now gone. Nevertheless, beyond these old out-
lived oppositions there is still a great deal to be discovered that is
true, and much to be done that is good.
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1. Descartes, Discourse on Method, part 1, 27. On what was at stake

in the Copernican revolution Lovejoy notes, “It was not the position of our
planet in space, but the fact that it alone was supposed to have an indige-
nous population of rational beings whose final destiny was not yet settled,
that gave it its unique status in the world and a unique share in the atten-
tion of Heaven” (The Great Chain of Being, 102–103).
2. Hobbes writes, “And for the knowledge of consequence, which I
have said before is called science, it is not absolute, but conditional. No man
can know by discourse, that this, or that, is, has been, or will be; which is
to know absolutely: but only, that if this be, that is; if this has been, that has
been; if this shall be, that shall be: which is to know conditionally”
(Leviathan, part 1, 131).
3. Of course, the preeminent symptom of this decline of faith in tra-
dition is the decline of faith in a transcendent God. In traditional religious
faith, just as God was felt to exempt human beings in a vital measure from
the contingencies of nature, so was he also the guarantor, as it were, of the
authority of tradition. Before we began writing our modern narratives of sci-
ence our relation with God seemed to hold us back from complete immer-
sion in the vortex of nature. There appeared to be all kinds of decisions to be
made for which tradition, and not nature, was the authority. Now, by virtue
of our own scientific curiosity, we find ourselves swept into that vortex of
nature. For better, or for worse, we have given up faith in any power outside
nature. This is what Nietzsche means, of course, when he speaks of us hav-
ing killed God (The Gay Science, section 125). The religious sense now looks
within nature, not outside it. This is exemplified, for instance, in Goethe’s
later poetry, where he places great emphasis on the coincidence of God and
nature. When later in the nineteenth century Emerson speaks of “Cause and
Effect, the chancellors of God” (in the 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” conclud-
ing paragraph) he too means a God who works within nature, and whom we
discover through our understanding of nature.
139
140 Notes
4. Ultimately, since the idea of truth itself derives from traditions

much older than science, we face the question of what science may yet do to
our commitment to truth. This is one of the central questions posed by Ni-
etzsche.
5. Those therapists who would turn psychoanalysis into a set of dog-
mas are, of course, trying to evade its critical scientific spirit every bit as
much as are its unreasoning critics. On the anxieties of psychoanalysts and
how these lead to various kinds of self-deception, especially in the institu-
tions of analysis, see Jeffrey B. Rubin, A Psychoanalysis for Our Time: Ex-
ploring the Blindness of the Seeing I. Rubin comments, “The dramatic
replication of censorship in the institutional structure of psychoanalysis is
a troubling phenomenon. Whether secret politics and censorship of differ-
ence and alternative theories—rather than an open, impartial search for
truth—persist in contemporary psychoanalysis is a question that is, or at
least ought to be, open to further examination. The fact that so few people
are pursuing this sort of inquiry embodies the collective blindness of the
seeing I and offers a testament to the way the field is still held captive by
ambivalence about knowing” (48).
6. Descartes, Discourse on Method.
7. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.
8. It becomes explicit in Kant because, unlike Descartes, he had to
contend with writers like Hume who had come close to suggesting that a
science of human volition was indeed quite possible.
9. Descartes, Discourse on Method, part 1, 27.
10. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 41.
11. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea.
12. For example, Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
13. To an extent, this problem is common to all fields of human sci-
ence. The physical sciences of nature work in a way that makes things that
are less familiar more familiar. They integrate remote regions of experience
with things we know already, through unifying theories. This is a reassuring
intellectual process. It goes some way to counteract the anxiety of giving up
older views of the world. By contrast, the sciences of man are always in the
anomalous position of making the more familiar less familiar. They start
from experiences everyone shares, and they then integrate these with
springs and forces which are hidden and difficult to describe properly. The
benefit to be gained from adopting such disorienting theories over more tra-
ditional and familiar accounts of human nature is often not immediately
clear. Small wonder that the scientific status of all the human sciences, and
not just psychoanalysis, has always been problematic.
Notes to Introduction 141
14. Respectively, das Ich and die Seele in German.

15. In depth psychology there is no perfect word for anything. We
have to strive for clarity continuously. We have to reformulate our ideas as
best we can all the time.
16. Nietzsche, Human, All-too-Human, volume 1, section 124.
17. It must also be said that there are too many therapists who mis-
construe their work as being that of recovering childhood memories.
18. See also Jonathan Lear’s comments on psychoanalysis and science
in his Love and Its Place in Nature, especially 216–222. As he remarks, “One
cannot just start with the category of science and ask whether psychoanaly-
sis fits into it; the very category of science must be reevaluated” (217–218).
19. On this nostalgia for a simpler and more certain world see Paul
Robinson’s excellent study, Freud and His Critics.
20. J. S. Mill, The Logic of The Moral Sciences, 833–834.
21. Nietzsche, Daybreak, section 48.
22. Perhaps the most overt example of natural science borrowing from
human science is Darwin’s theory to explain divergent evolution. This un-
doubtedly owed a great deal to the enthusiasm of nineteenth-century econ-
omists for the idea of competition, and Darwin himself acknowledged the
influence of Malthus.
23. Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, number 203. This point was
recognized also by both Hume and Kant, among others.
24. Goethe, Die Wahlverwandschaften, 260. My translation.
25. Freud in Studies On Hysteria: “I am making use here of a series of
similes, all of which have only a very limited resemblance to my theme and
which are also mutually incompatible. I know this, and I am not in danger
of overestimating their value, but I am led by the objective of illustrating
from different sides an extremely complicated topic which has never yet
been represented” (SE2, 291. All quotations from Freud refer to the Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, edited and translated by
James Strachey, which is cited by volume number: SE1, SE2, and so forth,
followed by the page number. However, all translations of Freud in the pre-
sent work are based on the original German text and occasionally deviate
from the Strachey version.) Goethe puts it as follows: “An analogous case
does not wish to impose itself, or to prove anything, it stands against an-
other, without uniting with it. Several analogous cases do not combine into
closed series, they are like good company, which always incites more than
it gives” (Maxims and Reflections, number 1247). For a richly thought-
provoking study of the role of analogy and metaphor in human creativity,
see Santoro-Brienza, The Tortoise and the Lyre.
142 Notes
26. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE5, 536f.

27. The psychoanalyst Ella Freeman Sharpe suggested that the lan-
guage we use for the emotions and the intellect always consists of what are,
ultimately, metaphors of physical experience. See “Psycho-Physical Prob-
lems Revealed in Language: An Examination of Metaphor,” in Collected Pa-
pers on Psychoanalysis, 155–169. This idea of mind as a metaphor of nature,
and nature as a metaphor of mind, has a long and distinguished pedigree.
Apart from Goethe’s exploration of the theme see also, for instance, Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s 1836 Nature. On the need for clear and vivid metaphors in
philosophy and psychology Nietzsche remarks that “the more abstract the
truth that you wish to teach, the more you must seduce the senses to it”
(Beyond Good and Evil, section 128).
28. Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, SE20, 195.
29. I have argued elsewhere that the notion of science has come to
play in modern cultural life a similarly ambivalent role to the one Freud as-
cribes to the totem in less developed cultures. See “On the Idea of Natural
Science as a Resistance to Psychoanalysis,” in Psychoanalysis and Con-
temporary Thought, 3 (1996): 371–402.
30. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 39. Originally, Popper’s
ideas developed out of those of the Logical Positivists, who had argued that
science consists of inherently “verifiable” statements.
31. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
32. Popper, Unended Quest, 167ff.
33. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism.
34. The flaw in the falsifiability argument was Popper’s assumption
that it could be used to identify inherently scientific statements. No state-
ment is inherently scientific. A statement becomes scientific only if it is in-
tegrated into a set of intellectual habits that treats it as part of a
hypothetical, scientific system. A statement is not scientific, for instance, if
it is treated as part of a set of self-evident truths, or as part of an aestheti-
cally satisfying whole. This is the case no matter what other properties the
statement may possess. For this reason, statements taken from any science
can be used as part of a dogmatic system, or a system whose justification is
purely aesthetic, if they are treated in the appropriate manner. One of the
conditions of scientific method is, of course, treating one’s propositions as
hypothetical and open to falsification. But the different sciences work with
different criteria of falsification because they study different areas of expe-
rience. To judge, therefore, whether any intellectual discipline is scientific
we have to look at the whole complex of procedures and ideas that charac-
terize it. What makes a science is the quality of mind of the people who
Notes to Introduction 143
practice it, not as such the quality of the statements they employ. Psycho-
analysts who employ their ideas dogmatically are, of course, not scientists.
35. This is why, for instance, Paul Feyerabend, who was very critical
of Popper, called his major work Against Method. Feyerabend offers a salu-
tary reminder of just how chaotic and irrational successful scientific meth-
ods actually are. But, in fact, Popper was never laying down rules for
scientific method. He just seemed to be doing this.
36. “Popper,” Grünbaum writes, “is quite right that contamination by
suggestion does undermine the probative value of clinical data” (The Foun-
dations of Psychoanalysis, 285). “Proposed clinical vindications of this eti-
ology without reliance on the presumed dynamics of the therapy are
epistemically quite hopeless” (185). “In view of my account of the epistemic
defects inherent in the psychoanalytic method, it would seem that the vali-
dation of Freud’s cardinal hypotheses has to come, if at all, mainly from
well-designed extraclinical studies” (278; emphases in original). However,
as Donald Levy rightly remarks in his Freud Among the Philosophers,
“When, as Grünbaum proposes, the testing of psychoanalytic hypotheses is
detached from its clinical setting in which resistance and transference phe-
nomena in free association provide the coordinating definitions on the basis
of which unconscious ideas and wishes are ascribed, the results are flawed.
For then, not only do the hypotheses cease to be genuinely psychoanalytic
ones, but, in addition, the hypotheses, in effect, cease to be testable, since
the key terms used in formulating those hypotheses are then without mean-
ing” (164–165).
37. Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement, xi.
38. Ibid., 187.
39. Lear comments, “Psychoanalysis encourages a person to work
through the particular meanings by which he lives his life; nothing is to be
taken for granted or accepted merely on authority. In this sense, psycho-
analysis commits a crime, and one should expect it to meet with the hostil-
ity that a mass displays toward any force for individuation” (Love and Its
Place in Nature, 206).
40. We do not need here to go into all the confusion caused in recent
years over recovered memory syndrome. On this issue and on the fashion in
recent times for reducing the concept of the soul to a problem about memory,
see Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and The Sciences
of Memory. Hacking’s survey of these issues is interesting but his views on
Freud are unresolved. For instance, he describes Masson’s criticisms of Freud
as a “well-aimed assault,” and believes Freud “denied the truth that child sex-
ual abuse was rampant in bourgeois Vienna (and everywhere else)” (194). This
categorical assertion is remarkably at odds with Hacking’s very sensible ef-
forts to argue just how problematic the whole concept of sexual abuse really
144 Notes
is and how such a wide variety of activities can be subsumed under this one
emotive heading. It is also rather difficult to reconcile with Hacking’s implied
claim that Freud himself is one of those responsible for reducing the soul to a
problem about memory. Hacking also compares Freud unfavorably with Janet,
who was, he insists, “a far more honorable man” than Freud. Hacking justifies
this judgement on the strange grounds that Janet tried to persuade his patients
that traumatic events in the past had never happened, whereas Freud tried to
get them to confront the truth about the past (197). In my view, arguments
like this are not helpful. The fact is that we remain much more in Freud’s debt
than we do in Janet’s. It is this uncomfortable sense of indebtedness that has
brought about the rather irritable attempts in contemporary culture to find
something dishonorable in Freud. However, if we are unable to outgrow
Freud’s influence the fault lies not with him but with ourselves.
41. Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind, 113.
42. Note also the dualist tendency in Sulloway’s distinction.
43. According to Grünbaum, “The logical situation in psychoanalysis
is commonplace in any and all sophisticated theories that purport to have
observable import” (The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, 36). The truth is
that the logical and procedural situations in the various sciences are related
one to another by family resemblance, not strict identity. It is a fundamen-
tal weakness in Grünbaum’s writing on psychoanalysis that he fails to ac-
knowledge this. Popper was wrong to try to discredit psychoanalysis on the
grounds that it relies on reasons and methods that differ from physics; he
was nevertheless quite correct that it does rely on reasons and methods that
differ from physics. Grünbaum simply ignores this problem.
44. Grünbaum, Validation in The Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis,
20–21.
45. Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong, 509.
46. Ibid., 109; emphases in original.
CHAPTER TWO: PLACING PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A SCIENCE
1. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 305; cf. 74. Along with Ryle, other
philosophers who have stressed how radically Freud departs from the Carte-
sian division between matter and mind, or nature and morality, include Iris
Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good, Walter Kaufmann in Discovering the
Mind, and Richard Rorty in “Freud and Moral Reflection.” As Hannah
Decker succinctly remarks, “The essence of psychoanalysis was its depar-
ture from the Cartesian dualisms” (Freud in Germany, 328).
Notes to Chapter Two 145
2. Indeed, Grünbaum’s views on the nature of science are so extreme

that they often read like a deliberate caricature of old-style positivism.
3. Descartes, First Meditation, 95.
4. Descartes, Discourse on Method, part 2.
5. Descartes’s emphasis on the need for certainty sprang from per-
sonal conviction, but also, no doubt, from a more pragmatic need not to of-
fend the spiritual and scholastic authorities of the day.
6. On our knowledge of the physical world Descartes writes, “I do
not see how [God] could be excused of deception if in truth these ideas came
from or were produced by causes other than corporeal things. And accord-
ingly one must confess that corporeal things exist. … From the fact alone
that God is not a deceiver, and that consequently he has permitted no falsity
in my opinions which he has not also given me some faculty capable of cor-
recting, I believe I may conclude with assurance that I have within me the
means of knowing these things with certainty” (Sixth Meditation, 158).
7. Hume’s skepticism in particular is a major step on the road to-
wards a modern psychology in which reason and the passions are seen as in-
teracting. Hume goes a long way toward overcoming dualism and in this
sense is much more scientific than Kant, who represents a regression back
to earlier habits of thought.
8. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, preface to the 2nd ed., trans.
Norman Kemp Smith, 29.
9. This particular conception of natural science—and, by implica-
tion, of nature itself—was given a formidable authority by being woven by
Kant into the forbidding texture of his first critique, The Critique of Pure
Reason. This critique purports to be an account of the bases of scientific
knowledge as such, yet in fact confines itself to physics.
10. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, section 61, that is, the first
section of Critique of Teleological Judgement; my translation. In The
Problem of Knowledge, Ernst Cassirer suggests that “The Critique of
Judgement marked a decisive break when it asserted the autonomy and
the methodological independence of biology without giving up its connec-
tion with mathematical physics” (118). My view is rather the opposite of
this, namely that Kant undermined the autonomy of biology by suggesting
that it depends on ideas borrowed from mathematical physics on the one
hand, and the science of man on the other. Kant might have argued that
the need for the idea of purpose in biology makes nature a more compli-
cated concept than Newtonian physics alone would suggest. Instead, he
argued by implication that biology is not really a part of natural science
in the full sense at all.
146 Notes
11. J. S. Mill, On The Logic of the Moral Sciences; Karl Popper, The
Poverty of Historicism.
12. For instance, O. E. Wilson’s Sociobiology.
13. Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften; Die
Enstehung der Hermeneutik; Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den
Geisteswissenschaften; Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwis-
senschaftlichen Begriffsbildung.
14. “In the area of physics,” he writes, “Kant has taught us to com-
bine an empirical realism with a transcendental idealism . . . Kant achieved
this combination for the sciences of nature; our task is to accomplish it for
psychoanalysis” (Freud and Philosophy, 432–433).
15. Ibid., 8–9.
16. Ibid., 66.
17. Ibid., 434.
18. Ibid., 344–345.
19. Ibid., 360.
20. Ibid., 363.
21. Freud, “A Short Account of Psychoanalysis,” SE19, 197.
22. Freud, Introductory Lectures, SE15, 40. Elsewhere in the same
work he remarks, “By ‘meaning’ we understand significance, purpose, incli-
nation and position in a sequence of psychical contexts,” (SE15, 61). He also
comments, “As the ‘meaning’ of a symptom we combined two things, its
whence and its whither or whereto, that is, the impressions and experiences
from which it arises, and the purposes it serves” (SE16, 284).
23. Ernest Jones suggests that Freud’s teacher in physiology, Ernst
Brücke, would have been shocked that his pupil was to make so much of the
idea of purpose in psychology. See Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund
Freud, vol. 1, 50.
24. The theory of drives outlined, for example, in Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality or in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” is of course a
theory of unconscious purpose. A drive as such cannot be an object of con-
sciousness, but only “the idea that represents it” (“The Unconscious,”
SE14, 177). This idea, or representation, is that constituted by the object and
the aim of the drive, either in their displaced or undisguised forms.
25. On some of the problems with the English translations of Freud,
see Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul. Bettelheim, however, does not
refer to Freud’s use of Zusammenhang. Although used in a looser sense than
by Freud, the term is also employed, for example, by Schopenhauer and
Dilthey (unlike Nietzsche, who does not use it). Max Weber spoke of a
Sinnzusammenhang, by which he meant a context of conscious intentions

to which social action can be referred to make it meaningful. This is cen-
tral to his interpretative approach to explanation in social science. This is
close to Freud—closer for example than Dilthey, who is never very precise
in his use of the term. But Weber never made the divorce between meaning
and conscious intention that is so central to Freud’s achievement. See Max
Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre.
26. Freud, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere
of Love,” SE11, 187. In 1915, in the first section of “The Unconscious,”
“The Justification of the Unconscious,” he writes, “All these conscious acts
remain without context and incomprehensible if we persist with the claim
that all mental acts that take place in us must be experienced through con-
sciousness; but they arrange themselves in a demonstrable context once we
interpolate the inferred unconscious acts. Gain in meaning and context is
furthermore a completely justified motive for going beyond immediate ex-
perience” (SE14, 167). And again, in one of the Introductory Lectures, com-
menting on the analysis of a particular symptomatic action, he stresses “the
assertion that [the symptomatic action] is not something chance, but on the
contrary has a motive, a meaning and a purpose, that it belongs in an ex-
plicable mental context and that, as a small indication, it informs us of a
more significant mental process” (SE16, 248).
27. Freud, Studies On Hysteria, SE2, 263. Elucidating this idea of
overdetermination, he writes, “The logical connection [Zusammenhang—
that is, between symptoms and causes] corresponds not only to a zigzag,
twisted line, but rather to a branching system of lines, and most particularly
to one that converges. It has nodal points at which two or more threads meet
and from there on proceed as one; and as a rule several threads which run in-
dependently, or which are connected at various points by side-paths, debouch
into the nucleus. To put this in other words, it is very remarkable how often
a symptom is determined in several ways, is overdetermined” (SE2, 290). In
a paper of the following year he developed this idea of a context formed from
branching etiological factors: “The chain of association always consists of
more than two branches. The traumatic scenes do not form a simple series,
like beads on a string, but rather branching, genealogical contexts, in which
two or more memories come to act as causes for each new experience. The
chains of association for isolated symptoms then begin to relate one to an-
other; the genealogical trees become interwoven. From a particular experi-
ence on the chain of association running from the symptom of vomiting, for
example, quite apart from the other strands of this chain, a memory is
awoken from another chain which forms the basis of another symptom, that
of headaches, perhaps. That experience belongs therefore to both series, it
represents thus a nodal point. . . . Nodal points of a different type are to be
found still further back. There the separate chains of association converge;
there are experiences from which two or more symptoms have arisen. To the
one detail of the scene is linked one chain, to some other detail is linked the
148 Notes
second” (“The Aetiology of Hysteria,” SE3, 196–199; emphasis in original). A

few other instances of this term Zusammenhang are worth noting. This one
points to the distinction between somatic and psychic causes: “Even the psy-
chiatrists, to whose attention the most unusual and strange mental phe-
nomena were being forced, showed no inclination to attend to their details
and trace their contexts. They were content to classify the variety of symp-
toms and, wherever possible, to trace them to somatic, anatomical or chem-
ical causes” (“The Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” SE19, 215–216; cf. The
Interpretation of Dreams, SE5, 534). The following passage stresses that one
of the characteristics of an interpretation or explanation in psychology is the
drawing together of what had previously appeared as unconnected experi-
ences: “I have told you that psychoanalysis began as a therapy, it is not how-
ever as a therapy that I want to commend it to your interest, but rather
because of the truth it contains, because of the information it gives us about
that which concerns men most closely, their own nature, and because of the
connections that it uncovers between the most varied of their activities”
(New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE22, 156–157).
28. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 28–29.
29. Ibid., 343.
30. For example, he writes, “The unconscious is fundamentally struc-
tured, woven, chained, meshed, by language” (The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book 3, 119). See also, for instance, The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis, 149 and 203.
31. Lacan is often, as Bowie remarks, “dangerously close to the lan-
guage of fundamentalism and to an acquiescence before supra-human au-
thority that sounds out of place both in Freudian scholarship and in the
practice of psychoanalysis” (Lacan, 85).
32. On the “mirror stage” see “The mirror stage as formative of the
function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience” in Écrits: A Se-
lection, 1–7. On the “imaginary” see, for example, The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book 1, 73–88.
33. He regards this as the “shakiest aspect” of Freud’s work (The Sem-
inar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2, 211).
34. It is not mediated, that is, by verbal language. It is a fundamental
weakness in Lacan’s thought that he consistently equates language with
words. This overlooks how much of our knowledge is acquired through non-
verbal signs, and how highly polysemous these can be. Lacan is incorrect in
his implied claim that the verbal is always ambiguous while the nonverbal
is always unequivocal.
35. He writes, “There is no doubt that meaning is by nature imagi-
nary. . . . You would know that hunger and love are the same thing, you
would be like any animal, truly motivated” (The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book 3, 54; cf. 177). See also, for example, The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book 1, 137.
36. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1, 54. Cf. Écrits: A Selection,
68; and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 246.
37. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1, 193; cf. Écrits: A Selection,
70–71. See also for instance The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2, 52.
38. Écrits: A Selection, 153–154. Elsewhere he writes, “The trap, the
hole one must not fall into, is the belief that the signified are objects, things.
The signified is something quite different. . . . It always refers to meaning,
that is, to another meaning. The system of language, at whatever point you
take hold of it, never results in an index finger directly indicating a point of
reality; it is the whole of reality that is covered by the entire network of lan-
guage. . . . A meaning always refers to another meaning. . . . The meaning of
these words cannot be exhausted by reference to another meaning” (The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3, 32–33).
39. He reports Lévi-Strauss, in “private conversations,” as expressing
reservations to him about this exaltation of the symbolic order: “He is afraid
that the autonomy of the symbolic register will give rise to a masked tran-
scendentalism once again, for which . . . he feels only fear and aversion. . . .
He is afraid that after we have shown God out of one door, we will bring him
back in by the other” (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2, 35).
40. “It must be posited that, produced as it is by an animal at the mercy
of language, man’s desire is the desire of the Other” (Écrits: A Selection, 264).
This phrase “desire of the Other” is deliberately ambiguous. It means both the
desire to possess, and to be possessed by, the other (initially, being recognized
by the other) and, by reflection, desire, by identification, for that which the
other desires (ibid., 58). Lacan’s notion of desire is drawn in substantial mea-
sure from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. He speaks for instance of “the
fundamental Hegelian theme—man’s desire is the desire of the other” (The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1, 146). There is of course much of value and
interest in these Hegelian themes. The problem is that Lacan consistently
subordinates them to his own theological program. In Lacan’s view, only by
exploring the complexities of our relation with the “absolute Other,” the
other beyond the realm of the imaginary, can we begin to understand what our
needs really are: “The other with a small o is the imaginary other, the other-
ness in a mirror image, which makes us dependent upon the form of our coun-
terpart. The . . . absolute Other is the one we address ourselves to beyond this
counterpart, the one we are forced to admit beyond the relation of mirage”
(The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3, 252). For a critical examination of
Lacan’s indebtedness to Hegel, see Santoro-Brienza, The Dialectics of Desire.
41. “Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being
properly speaking. It is not lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the
being exists” (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2, 223).
150 Notes
42. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud speculates on the possibil-

ity of a “death drive” at the root of human action. Lacan is keen to identify
in the hypothesis of the death drive an attempt by Freud to express what he,
Lacan, has more successfully achieved with the idea of the symbolic order.
Lacan sees in the death drive an attempt on Freud’s part to escape from what
Lacan calls “a confused, unitary, naturalistic conception of man.” The death
drive, Lacan maintains, “is only the mask of the symbolic order” (The Sem-
inar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2, 326). Freud, he says, “wanted to save some
kind of dualism at all costs, just when this dualism was crumbling in his
hands, and when the ego, the libido, etc., all of that was tending to produce
a kind of vast whole, returning us to a philosophy of nature. This dualism
is none other than what I am getting at when I emphasize the autonomy of
the symbolic. . . . At a given point in time Freud wanted to defend some sort
of dualism at all costs” (ibid., 37–39). This of course is more illuminating as
a commentary on Lacan than it is on Freud.
43. Virgil, Aeneid 4, 625. See Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life, SE6, 9.
44. The man’s choice of aliquis as the particular word to be forgotten
is also analogous to a pun. Unconsciously, he quotes a line calling for
“someone” to be his descendant, yet quotes it in such a way that “some-
one” is suppressed, misplaced, lost, forgotten.
45. Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criti-
cism, 41–61.
46. See Lacan’s early paper of 1936, “Beyond the Reality Principle,”
where he comments, “Truth in its specific value remains a stranger to the
scientific order: science can honor itself by an alliance with truth; . . . but it
cannot by any means identify it as its own end” (translation by Benvenuto
and Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan, 68).
47. For example, Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, 153. Ostensibly, he rejects the distinction on which hermeneuti-
cally oriented approaches to the human sciences have traditionally been
based: “You know the would-be opposition between Erklären and Verste-
hen. Here we must maintain that the only scientific structure is where there
is Erklären. Verstehen opens onto all kinds of confusion. Erklären does not
at all imply mechanical meaning or anything else of that order. The nature
of Erklären lies in the recourse to the signifier as the sole foundation of all
conceivable scientific structuration” (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
3, 191; cf. 143). Of course, the notion of Erklären has never been defined in
terms resembling what Lacan means by the “signifier”. He is misleading
also when he asserts, “The chain of signifiers has a fundamental explanatory
value, and the very notion of causality is nothing else” (ibid., 179). Only five
pages later (seminars separated by three weeks) he remarks, “We situate our-
selves in a field that is distinct from the natural sciences. . . . Where are we
Notes to Chapter Three 151
to draw the dividing line? . . . It is in these definitions of the signifier and of

structure that the appropriate boundary can be drawn. . . . It has become a
fundamental law for us, one required of every utterance within the order of
the natural sciences, that there is nobody who uses the signifier” (ibid., 184).
48. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3, 187. See also The Seminar
of Jacques Lacan, Book 2, 73, where he specifically endorses a Cartesian
dualism.
49. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3, 296.
50. Ibid., 295–297.
51. Ibid., 295.
52. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 1.
53. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 166.
54. Freud, Outline of Psychoanalysis, SE23, 158.
55. Freud, “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” SE19, 217.
56. Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, SE20, 189–190.
57. Ibid., 255.
58. Freud to Pfister, November 25, 1928, quoted by Gay, 525.
59. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” SE23, 248.
60. Freud, “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” SE19, 216.
61. Freud, Introductory Lectures, SE15, 87; emphasis in original.
62. “Hermeneutics” is a term, incidentally, that Freud never uses.
63. Freud, Introductory Lectures, SE15, 167.
64. Freud, “A Short Account of Psychoanalysis,” SE19, 200.
65. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE22, 159.
66. Grünbaum, Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis, 4.
CHAPTER THREE: NIETZSCHE AND THE CRITIQUE OF INTENTION
1. Goethe, Vermächtnis, 1829. See also Maxims and Reflections, no.

689, from the same year, “It is not enough to know, one must also apply; it
is not enough to wish, one must also act.”
2. Emerson, “Circles,” paragraph 15.
3. 1839–1914.
152 Notes
4. “What Pragmatism Is,” reprinted in Charles S. Peirce: Selected

Writings, 188.
5. Ibid., 183.
6. Ibid., 194.
7. Peirce comments, “All thought is in signs” (“Questions Concern-
ing Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” ibid., 34). A large part of Peirce’s
philosophy is devoted to the development of a theory of signs.
8. Umberto Eco, one of the modern heirs of pragmatism, puts it as
follows: “Everybody who wants to know something wants to know it in
order to do something. If he claims that he wants to know it in order ‘to
know’ and not in order ‘to do’ it means that he wants to know it in order to
do nothing, which is in fact a surreptitious way of doing something, i.e.
leaving the world just as it is (or as his approach assumes that it ought to
be)” (A Theory of Semiotics, 29). As Freud wrote, in the spirit of pragma-
tism, “Our aim is not to prove something but to change something” (Analy-
sis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy: “Little Hans,” SE10, 104).
9. James, Pragmatism, 33.
10. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 148.
11. On the theory of convention as the basis of experience, see Eco, A
Theory of Semiotics.
12. James, Pragmatism, 28.
13. Ibid., 38.
14. Ibid., 13. We have noted already Freud’s view on the failings of the
medical psychology of the nineteenth century: “In this materialist or, bet-
ter, mechanistic period medicine made tremendous advances, but it also
misunderstood in a shortsighted way the chief and most difficult among the
problems of life” (“The Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” SE19, 216).
15. There is a small but growing literature on Nietzsche’s psychology.
The first work devoted to this topic was Ludwig Klages’ Die Psychologische
Errungenschaften Nietzsches, published in 1926. Klages draws attention to
many important passages in Nietzsche, but his book as a whole lacks orga-
nization and does not refer to psychoanalysis and probably for these reasons
was not influential. Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psycholo-
gist, Antichrist, originally published in 1950, was the first comprehensive
study of Nietzsche to stress the central place of psychology in his thought.
Not all Nietzsche scholars have understood that his core concern is the psy-
chology behind philosophical ideas. In many of his later books Kaufmann
makes this problem his own. Particularly important in this respect is his
posthumous three-volume work of 1980, Discovering the Mind, dealing
with, notably, the psychology of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Freud, and Jung.
Notes to Chapter Three 153
More recent works of importance on Nietzsche’s psychology are Jacob

Golomb’s Nietzsche’s Enticing Psychology of Power; Graham Parkes’ Com-
posing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology; and Nietzsche and
Depth Psychology, edited by Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald
Lehrer, which is a collection of readings on different aspects of Nietzsche’s
psychology.
16. Truth, he remarks at one point, “gives a name to a process, or
rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end. . . . It is a word for ‘the
will to power’” (The Will to Power, section 552; a note dating from 1887).
17. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 333.
18. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 12.
20. Nietzsche: “Man is sicker, more uncertain, more changeable,
more unstable than any other animal, of that there is no doubt—he is the
sick animal” (On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, section 13; cf. ibid.,
section 28).
22. Ibid.
23. Jose Ortega y Gasset, Historical Reason, 223.
24. History makes it plain that human beings are very willing to sac-
rifice physical life if this is necessary to avoid spiritual, emotional, and in-
tellectual isolation from others.
26. Ibid.
27. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 218. An earlier men-
tion of the opposition between rule and exception is in Human, All-too-
Human, volume 1, section 225, dating from 1878. Here, Nietzsche equates
the idea of the exception with that of the “free spirit.” See also the follow-
ing sections through to 230.
28. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 218.
29. “A truly physio-psychology must fight with unconscious resis-
tances in the heart of the investigator” (Beyond Good and Evil, section 23).
30. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay. The meta-
phor of “noble” morality versus “slave” morality is first suggested in Be-
yond Good and Evil, section 260.
31. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, section 11.
32. Ibid.
154 Notes
33. Interestingly, another exemplary symbol of the noble in life is

Jesus, at one point described by Nietzsche as “the noblest man” (Human,
All-too-Human, volume 1, section 475). In Nietzsche’s view, Jesus’ nobil-
ity is reflected in his lack of awareness of his own strangeness. According
to Nietzsche’s reading of him, he has little sense of the difference between
his own constitution and that of others. He is animated by a profound
sense of God within himself. But he perceives no reason why others can-
not also be governed by this sense of the kingdom of God within. See The
Antichrist, for example section 32: “To negate is the very thing that is im-
possible for him.”
34. “While all noble morality arises out of a triumphant Yes-saying to
oneself, from the outset slave morality says No to an ‘outside,’ to an ‘other,’
to a ‘not-self’: and this No is its creative act. . . . Slave morality requires, in
order to arise, always first of all an opposition and external world, it re-
quires, speaking physiologically, external stimuli in order to act at all—its
action is from the ground up reaction” (On the Genealogy of Morals, First
Essay, section 10).
35. Goethe’s Mephistopheles describes himself as “the spirit who al-
ways negates” (“Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint!” Faust, line 1340).
36. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 260, and On the
Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, section 16.
37. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo,“Human, All-too-Human,” sections 3
and 4.
38. Nietzsche, Daybreak, section 104.
39. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part one, “Of the Three
Metamorphoses.”
40. This attitude of affirmation is exemplified by a remark of Emer-
son’s, much loved by Nietzsche and originally chosen by him as the epi-
graph for The Gay Science, “To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all
things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men di-
vine” (“History,” paragraph 13).
41. This is what Freud means when he speaks of the “compulsion to
repeat” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE18, 18ff.).
42. Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, numbers 673–675.
43. “Das Wort ‘Übermensch’ zur Bezeichnung eines Typus höchster
Wohlgeratenheit” (Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” section 1).
44. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” section 2.
Notes to Chapter Four 155
CHAPTER FOUR: ISSUES FROM STUDIES ON HYSTERIA
1. We live now, as Nietzsche puts it, in a period of “moral interreg-

num” (Daybreak, section 453). The old imperatives of traditional religious
faith no longer have the power to govern us but as yet we have not devel-
oped anything to take the place of these old imperatives.
2. Webster’s confused claim in Why Freud Was Wrong (108) that
Studies On Hysteria was intended as a contribution to medicine but
“never” to psychotherapy reflects again an inability to grasp Freud’s monist
perspective, that is, his drawing of medicine and psychotherapy together.
3. The indispensable source for what Freud probably knew of Niet-
zsche is Ronald Lehrer’s Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought:
On The Origins of a Psychology of Dynamic Unconscious Mental Func-
tioning. Nietzsche’s ideas were familiar in the intellectual circles in which
Freud moved at the turn of the century. As early as the mid 1870s Freud had
friendships with men who were deeply interested in Nietzsche, including
Joseph Paneth, who was later acquainted with him personally. Nevertheless,
there is good evidence from Freud’s own texts that he was never himself a
close student of Nietzsche’s later writing. The single most important part of
Nietzsche’s psychology is his stress on the inherent ambivalence of all
human intention. In fact, Freud is rather slow to come round to a clear un-
derstanding of the importance of this in emotional illness, and indeed he
struggles with this issue all through the 1890s, often losing his way in an
overemphasis on memories, on sex, and so on. He only really achieves a fo-
cused emphasis on the importance of ambivalence with The Interpretation
of Dreams in 1900, which is thirteen years after, for instance, Nietzsche’s
On the Genealogy of Morals. Furthermore, when Freud does cite Nietzsche
directly he can be rather inaccurate. For instance, his identification of the
important idea of the Übermensch (in Group Psychology and the Analysis
of the Ego, SE18, 123) with the leader of a prehistorical primal horde does
not suggest a close study of the original or an appreciation of its psycholog-
ical significance in Nietzsche’s thought. Freud is also incorrect in attribut-
ing to Nietzsche the term “the Id,” das Es. Nietzsche, he says, “habitually
used this grammatical term for whatever in our nature is impersonal and, so
to speak, subject to natural law” (The Ego and the Id, SE19, 23). As a matter
of fact, Nietzsche does not use the term das Es habitually in any special psy-
chological sense. The conclusion is inescapable that Freud absorbed certain
ideas of Nietzsche at second hand from his intellectual circle, and probably
divined important things about those ideas that some of his contemporaries
missed, but for all that was not himself a close reader of Nietzsche.
4. Freud comments, “Remarkably, in my own experience I have en-
countered no genuine case of hypnoid hysteria, whatever I tackled turned
out to be defense hysteria” (SE2, 286).
156 Notes
5. The most tangible expression of this difference was the vogue for
recovered memory therapy following Masson’s The Assault on Truth, in
1984, which was overtly hostile to psychoanalysis. The point of Masson’s
book is that the substance of the unconscious is in memories, not in conflict
of intentions. Recovered memory therapy thus represents a return to the
cathartic theory and a revolt against the defense theory of the unconscious.
6. Sulloway, 61.
7. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, 518.
8. By the time of writing Studies On Hysteria Breuer and Freud were
both closely familiar with the whole tradition of hypnotherapy in France, in-
cluding the work of Janet. Janet’s method of psychotherapy differed from
catharsis in that he employed hypnosis to recover traumatic memories, with
the aim then of using suggestion to alter the underlying traumatic idea. See
Hirschmüller, The Life and Work of Josef Breuer, 178. Breuer and Freud were
at one with Janet in stressing the dissociation of ideas in hysteria. They di-
verged from him however in rejecting congenital debility as a cause of hyste-
ria. For Freud’s comments on Janet’s view of hysteria see Studies On Hysteria,
SE2, 105, and for Breuer’s, SE2, 230–233. See also Hirschmüller, 167. On the
French schools of psychotherapy and their influence on Freud and Breuer, see
Hirschmüller, 148f. and 177f.; see also Hacking, 159–197, et passim.
9. Grünbaum, Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis,
20–21.
10. Ibid., 26.
11. Freud, An Autobiographical Study, SE20, 27.
12. Grünbaum, Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis,
27.
13. Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong, 108–109; emphases in original.
14. After apparently several years during which Freud tried to per-
suade him, Breuer finally agreed to collaborate on Studies On Hysteria only
in 1892. See Freud’s letter to Fliess, June 28, 1892, in Masson, The Complete
Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 31. See also Jones, 276, and
Hirschmüller, 151.
15. See Hirschmüller, 152.
16. Freud and Breuer, SE2, 12. The theory of hypnoid states derives
from Breuer. See Hirschmüller, 166–168. Freud finally rejects the idea of
hypnoid states in 1896, in “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” SE3, 195. However,
this is the paper in which he suggests that infantile sexual seduction is the
root of all hysteria. This, he argues, is always the underlying trauma, and he
expressly links this with Breuer’s emphasis on the memory of traumatic
events (ibid.). With the seduction theory, therefore, although Freud is nom-
inally distancing himself from the hypnoid perspective, he is also moving

away from his own emphasis on the displaced expression of moral and eth-
ical conflict, such as we see in the case of Elisabeth von R., back towards a
preoccupation with dissociated and forgotten memories. (On hypnoid states
see also his remarks in 1905 in the Dora case in SE7, 27.)
17. The first use of “repressed” with this sense occurs in the “Prelim-
inary Communication:” “It was a question of things which the patient
wished to forget, and therefore intentionally repressed from his conscious
thought and inhibited and suppressed [verdrängte, hemmte und unter-
drückte]” (SE2, 10).
18. SE2, 7.
19. Apart from Studies On Hysteria itself, the essential source for the
Anna O. case is Albrecht Hirschmüller, The Life and Work of Josef Breuer,
especially 95ff. The book is a model of careful scholarship. Hirschmüller re-
produces Breuer’s original report on Bertha Pappenheim, written when she
was admitted to Kreuzlingen Sanatorium in June, 1882 (276–292). This orig-
inal report was first uncovered by Ellenberger, who provided the first major
review of the case in his paper of 1972, “The Story of Anna O.: A Critical
Review with New Data,” which is reprinted in Beyond the Unconscious:
Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger in the History of Psychiatry, edited by Mark
S. Micale, 254–272.
20. Hirschmüller, 102 and 106.
21. Freud was born in 1856, Bertha Pappenheim in 1859. See
Hirschmüller, 98.
22. Hirschmüller, 133.
23. That is, after Freud had joined the General Hospital in Vienna as
a young physician. Freud graduated in medicine in March 1881 but spent a
further year in Brücke’s Physiological Institute. See Jones, 65ff. and 248; see
also Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, 430–434; and
Hirschmüller, 133 and 135.
24. Studies On Hysteria contains only two of these cases: Freud’s case
of Emmy v. N. (SE2, 48–105) and the periodically mentioned case of Cäcilie
M. (SE2, 69–70 and 176–181). See Hirschmüller, 143.
25. This first chapter was originally published in 1893 as “On the Psy-
chical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication.”
26. Hirschmüller, 101; cf. 368, note 102.
27. Bertha had two elder sisters who died in childhood, and a younger
brother who survived. Hirschmüller, 99–107.
158 Notes
28. Breuer writes, “During her illness she had seen him only very
rarely for short periods” (SE2, 25–26).
29. Studies On Hysteria, SE2, 23–24. See also Freud, “Five Lectures
On Psychoanalysis,” SE11, 10. Apart from the symptoms that were clearly
initiated and aggravated by her father’s illness, Bertha also suffered, from the
spring of 1880, that is, before her father’s illness, from trigeminal neuralgia
and facial spasms. This eventually became so serious she had to be treated
with morphine, to which she became addicted. Hirschmüller points out that
Breuer always regarded this symptom as something separate from her emo-
tional illness; he never treated it as a hysterical symptom. See Hirschmüller,
101 and 106.
30. Breuer comments in his original report on the case in 1882, “The
sexual element is astonishingly undeveloped; I have never once found it rep-
resented even amongst her numerous hallucinations” (Hirschmüller, 277).
This is reiterated at the outset of the published account in SE2, 21.
31. See Hirschmüller, 106. On the possible influences on Breuer’s use
of hypnotism with Bertha Pappenheim, see Hirschmüller, 91–95. Interest in
hypnosis had waxed and waned throughout the nineteenth century. Tradi-
tionally, it always enjoyed its widest interest in France and it was Charcot,
in the early 1880s, who made it medically respectable again after a period of
about twenty years in which it had been widely regarded with suspicion.
Breuer’s treatment of Bertha Pappenheim therefore coincided with a general
revival in the fortunes of hypnosis.
32. Hirschmüller, 278; see also Breuer, Studies On Hysteria, SE2,
38–39.
34. Ibid., 282.
35. The idea of catharsis and its possible medical implications were
widely discussed in the 1880s in Vienna as a result of the interest provoked
by Jacob Bernays’ discussion in his Zwei Abhandlungen über die Aris-
totelische Theorie des Dramas. This had been first published in 1857, but
reappeared in a new edition in 1880. See Hirschmüller, 155–159. The rele-
vant section in Aristotle is the Poetics 6,1449.b28. It is incidentally inter-
esting that Nietzsche believed Aristotle to be entirely mistaken in the view
he appears to hold that tragedy calms the emotions it arouses: “Are sympa-
thy and fear really diminished through tragedy, as Aristotle says, so that the
spectator goes home more calm and more cold? Do ghost stories make us
less fearful and superstitious?” (Human, All-too-Human, volume 1, section
212). For a contemporary discussion of what Aristotle may actually have
meant by “catharsis” see Jonathan Lear, Open Minded, 191–218.
36. Breuer, Studies On Hysteria, SE2, 34.
37. Hirschmüller, 288. In the published account this is not mentioned

but there is a fleeting reference to Bertha getting into conflict with her
brother when he catches her at night listening at the door of her father’s
sickroom. Breuer, Studies On Hysteria, SE2, 36.
38. Studies on Hysteria, 37.
39. Ibid., 39–40.
40. Ibid., 40.
41. Ibid., 33.
42. For a survey of suggested physical diagnoses of Bertha Pappenheim
see Webster, 114ff. But it must be remembered, of course, that Webster is
keen to deny any explanation of Bertha’s illness that is psychogenic rather
than “Darwinian.”
43. Letter to Robert Binswanger, November 4, 1881, reproduced by
Hirschmüller, 293. Bertha’s ambivalence towards her father is manifest but it
comes through much more clearly in Breuer’s original report of 1882 than it
does in the published account in 1895. In 1882 he comments, “She has never
been in love to the extent that this has replaced her relationship to her father;
it has itself, rather, been replaced by that relationship” (Hirschmüller, 278).
We have already seen that her first hallucination was of snakes attacking her
father, snakes which emerged from her own arm. This led to the paralysis in
the arm. We have seen also that Breuer himself connected her mutism with
her anger towards her father. The most important effect of Bertha’s illness
was, of course, that it prevented her from taking care of her father. Breuer
notes, in 1882, “The illness prevented the patient from satisfying her most
passionate and genuine desire to see her gravely sick father; and I am con-
vinced that she would have made any sacrifice, renounced any merely capri-
cious behavior, to achieve that end” (Hirschmüller, 283). It is evident from
Breuer’s 1882 account that after her father died, Bertha blamed her mother,
rather than her own illness, for the fact that she had, as Breuer puts it, been
“‘cheated’ out of a glance and a final word from him. . . . She would have noth-
ing more to do with her family. This was the origin of her disturbed relation-
ship with her mother” (Hirschmüller, 284). It is likely, of course, that Bertha’s
disturbed relation with her mother went back much earlier than this.
44. Breuer, Studies On Hysteria, SE2, 35. Overall, Freud and Breuer
are rather inconsistent in the claims they make for the efficacy of their ther-
apy in Studies On Hysteria. In the “Preliminary Communication” (that is,
the first chapter) they say that when the cathartic cure is applied properly
and successfully, it can cause symptoms to disappear “immediately and
without recurrence” (SE2, 6). This is quoted again by Breuer in his theoreti-
cal chapter (SE2, 221). At the conclusion of the “Preliminary Communica-
tion,” however, they say that “insofar as it is a disposition, we achieve
nothing against the recurrence of hypnoid states” (SE2, 17). Freud himself
160 Notes
is quite open about the limitations of his therapeutic success. Of the four
complete case histories he contributes to Studies On Hysteria, all end in
studied ambiguity. He leaves little doubt that he has not in any complete
sense cured Emmy v N. (SE2, 84–85), or Lucy R. (SE2, 119), or Katharina
(SE2, 133), and he makes it plain that Elisabeth’s eventual recovery was due
to factors beyond his own interventions (SE2, 159–160; see also his com-
ments at SE2, 262). The very ambiguity of Freud’s cases, however, makes
them more convincing portrayals of the mechanisms of hysteria and of the
interrelations between therapist and patient than Anna O.
45. Jones, 247.
46. Bertha Pappenheim remained seriously ill until at least the late
1880s. For a detailed account of what we know of her life after 1882 see
Hirschmüller, 112–126.
47. Another typical example is that of Malcom Macmillan’s Freud
Evaluated: The Completed Arc. The first chapter of this work is entitled
“Anna O. and the Origins of Freud’s Personality Theory.”
48. The prime example of a case combining hypnosis and suggestion
is Emmy v. N. (SE2, 48–106) which dates from 1888 to 1890. See
Hirschmüller, 178. Freud returned to Vienna in 1886 from studying Char-
cot’s experiments in hypnosis in Paris. Charcot, however, had never re-
garded hypnosis as a possible instrument of therapy. The more important
influence on Freud in this respect was Bernheim, two of whose books on
hypnosis as a basis for suggestion therapy Freud translated, and whom he
visited in Nancy in 1889 with a patient (actually Cäcilie M., see Gay, 69–70)
in the hope of improving his technique. Bernheim pointed out to Freud that
with many patients he himself could not achieve deep hypnosis, that in his
view there was never complete amnesia between the hypnotic and the nor-
mal state, and that he had succeeded in recovering memories simply by the
expedient of placing his hand on the patient’s forehead with the assurance
that the memory would come. Freud himself adopted this method in due
course (SE2, 108; see also Hirschmüller, 180, and Jones, 261–262).
49. A remark from 1918, quoted by Gay, 71. Freud may have gone on
using hypnotism occasionally until about 1897. See Hirschmüller, 180.
51. Jones, 265.
52. Freud, SE2, 135–181. The other cases here from Studies On Hys-
teria are Lucy R. and Katharina. See Hirschmüller, 179.
53. In the “Preliminary Communication,” written jointly by Breuer
and Freud, symptoms are described as standing sometimes in a “so to speak
symbolic relation” with the underlying traumatic cause (SE2, 5). In his own
contributions to Studies On Hysteria, Freud repeatedly describes symptoms
expressly as symbols or as memory symbols (SE2, 175–181, et passim). Breuer

briefly mentions symbolism in his theoretical chapter (SE2, 209, 216) but re-
gards it as confined to “dream-like states” and does not give it anything like
the emphasis it receives from Freud.
54. Freud treated the young woman he called Elisabeth in the fall of
1892. See Gay, 71–72.
55. Freud, Studies On Hysteria, SE2, 140.
56. Ibid., 142.
57. Ibid., 142–143.
58. Ibid., 135.
59. Ibid., 149.
60. Ibid., 137.
61. Ibid., 149.
62. Ibid., 146.
63. Ibid., 148.
64. Ibid., 146–147.
65. Ibid., 156.
66. Ibid., 157.
67. Ibid., 158.
68. See Gay, 72, 665.
69. As we have seen, Freud remarks on the “sacrifices that she
dreaded from marriage” (SE2, 146). He also reports (and presumably he can
only have heard this from Elisabeth herself) that her father often expressed
the doubt that she, his favorite daughter, would ever find a husband. She
was too ambitious, too proud and outspoken and “in fact greatly discon-
tented with being a girl” (SE2, 140). This was Elisabeth’s vision of herself, no
doubt shaped by her father’s vision of her.
70. “The circle of ideas relating to her duties towards her sick father
came into conflict with the content at that time of her erotic longing. Under
the pressure of lively self-reproaches she decided in favor of the former and
thereby created her hysterical pain” (SE2, 164).
71. SE2, 283; emphasis in original.
72. SE2, 291.
73. Freud writes, for instance, of “the contradiction between this in-
clination [that is, towards her brother-in-law] and her moral ideas” (SE2, 165).
162 Notes
74. “The approach of summer,” he writes, “made it urgent for us to

bring the analysis to an end” (SE2, 159). At this point he was still concerned
to see “what chance there was that the girl’s wish [that is, her supposed
wish to marry her sister’s husband], of which she was now conscious, would
come true” (ibid.). Freud raised the issue with Elisabeth’s mother: “Her
mother told me that she had long ago guessed her fondness for the young
man, though she had not known that the feeling had already been there dur-
ing her sister’s lifetime” (ibid.). The outcome of this breach of confidence
was predictable: “Some weeks after we had separated I received a despair-
ing letter from her mother. At her first attempt, she told me, to discuss her
daughter’s affairs of the heart with her, the girl had rebelled violently and
had since then suffered from severe pains once more. She was indignant
with me for having betrayed her secret” (SE2, 160). He then reports that Elis-
abeth in due course seems to have recovered from her pains and he con-
cludes with the remark that Elisabeth “by her own inclination, has married
someone unknown to me” (ibid.).
75. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” SE17, 29ff.
76. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, SE21, 97, et passim.
77. Freud, “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” SE14,
11.
78. Freud, An Autobiographical Study, SE20, 22; emphasis in original.
79. Ibid., 23.
80. In his Autobiographical Study Freud writes of these develop-
ments: “I was free of hypnosis, but with the change in technique the
cathartic work also changed its aspect. . . . How had it come about that the
patients had forgotten so much of the facts of external and internal expe-
rience? . . . Everything that had been forgotten was somehow unpleasant,
either frightening or painful or shameful for the claims of the personality.
. . . Precisely because of this it had been forgotten. . . . I called this process
repression. . . . It was clearly a primary mechanism of defense. . . . The re-
pressed impulse, which was now unconscious, found means of discharge
and substitute gratification by circuitous routes, which brought the aim of
the repression to nothing. In the case of conversion hysteria, this cir-
cuitous route led to somatic innervation, the repressed impulse broke
through at some point or other and created the symptoms, which were
therefore compromise results; substitute gratifications indeed, but dis-
torted, and turned from their objective by the resistance of the I” (SE20,
29–30; emphases in original).
81. Ibid., 30; emphasis in original. The term “psychoanalysis” itself
dates from 1896. See Freud, “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of
Defense,” SE3, 162, and Jones, 269.
82. It should be noted that in Freud’s original German the respective

terms for “repression” and “displacement” are closer than they are in En-
glish: Verdrängung and Verschiebung. They both convey the sense of a
pushing or a forcing of something aside, or from its proper path, so that it
emerges in the wrong place, in an unexpected guise. These terms are also
reminiscent of the terms Freud uses for everyday slips and mistakes that re-
veal unconscious conflicts, terms such as versprechen, to misspeak, ver-
schreiben, to miswrite, and vergreifen, to bungle a physical action.
“Repression” in the sense of holding something locked down, unter-
drücken, is used extremely rarely by Freud. Unfortunately, this is the sense
conveyed by the English term. In 1926, in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anx-
iety, Freud suggests that “defense” rather than “repression” should be re-
garded as the more general term, covering all cases where the ego defends
itself against unacceptable emotions, and that repression should be thought
of as occurring only in those particular forms of defense that also involve
distortion of memory (SE20, 163–164). “Defense” is the generic term for
every kind of unsatisfactory conflict of emotions and intentions. It always
involves some distorting play with memory. But this is to say very little; all
memory, after all, is creative reconstruction of past experiences since it can
never be reproduction of past events. Much more important than any ma-
nipulation of memory are the other specific features of emotional defense,
for instance, a general mood of depression, the entrapment in habits of life
that have a self-punitive character, psychosomatic symptoms, immuniza-
tion rituals of obsessional neurosis, projection of one’s own motives onto
others, and so on.
83. As Jonathan Lear comments, the aim of psychotherapy is to help
complete a process of development, “to supply the concepts toward which a
process of mental and emotional growth is striving and thereby to give the
meaning of that very process.” As he says, this is a better way of under-
standing therapy than “the classical conception of psychoanalytic theory [in
which] an analytic interpretation uncovers an unconscious wish” (Love and
Its Place in Nature, 113, 114).
84. Freud, “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” SE14,
11–12. In 1925 he remarks, “One would not easily guess from Studies On
Hysteria what an importance sexuality has for the etiology of the neuroses”
(An Autobiographical Study, SE20, 22). Jones (247) maintains that Breuer
was frightened off when he discovered the sexual aspects of Bertha Pappen-
heim’s attachment to him and that this was why he stopped treating her. On
the improbability of this account, and Breuer’s own stress on the importance
of sexuality in hysteria, see Hirschmüller, 126–131, 172–173.
85. See for instance his remarks in his Autobiographical Study of
1925 on the resistance to sex among his medical colleagues, including
Breuer (SE20, 26).
164 Notes
86. Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria.”

87. Ibid., SE3, 203.
88. Freud first acknowledges the mistake of the seduction theory, to
Fliess, in a letter of September 21, 1897; cf. Masson, 1985, 264. As Paul
Robinson points out in Freud and His Critics (158ff.), Freud’s views on the
role of seduction in childhood were never simple, either in the 1890s or
later. Recent debate about the sexual abuse of children, especially since
Masson’s The Assault on Truth in 1984, has often attributed to Freud much
more simplistic views on this than he actually held.
89. Freud, An Autobiographical Study, SE20, 34.
90. Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” For a very
perceptive survey of the Dora case, and of the social and historical circum-
stances in which it was set, see Hannah S. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna
1900. For other valuable commentaries on the case see Janet Malcolm, Psy-
choanalysis: The Impossible Profession, 93ff.; Steven Marcus, “Freud and
Dora: Story, History, Case History,” in Freud: A Collection of Critical Es-
says, ed. Perry Meisel, 183–210; and Patrick J. Mahony, Freud’s Dora.
91. Because of his excessive emphasis on the sexual impulses of his
patient, Freud ignores his own dictum that hysteria is always overdeter-
mined, though he repeats this proposition often enough in the case: “In re-
ality, which I am trying to portray here, the rule is complication of motive,
the accumulation and convergence of mental impulses, in short, overdeter-
mination,” (SE7, 60).
92. SE7, 58.
93. SE7, 115.
94. The “incapacity for meeting a real erotic demand,” he writes, “is
one of the most essential characteristics of neurosis” (SE7, 110). In the same
year in which he published the Dora case, however, in 1905, he also pub-
lished the Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality. There he states, in con-
trast to everything he says in Dora, that the sexual life of the neurotic is
“expressed either exclusively, or predominantly, or only in part, in these
symptoms” (SE7, 163).
95. SE7, 3. The case of Dora appears to have been largely completed by
early 1901 but was only published almost five years later (ibid.). It thus be-
longs to the period of Freud’s thought shortly after the completion of The In-
terpretation of Dreams. Apart from Studies On Hysteria, it is the earliest
of his case studies. It is also the most detailed.
96. See Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900, 50.
97. Ibid., 44. Merano is identified by Freud only as town “B.”
Notes to Chapter Five 165
98. Ibid., 45.

99. SE7, 19.
100. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900, 51–52. Dora’s mother suf-
fered from acute obsessional neurosis, though Freud refers to this as “house-
wife’s psychosis” (SE7, 20). Her obsession with cleanliness disrupted the
whole life of the household. Decker comments, “Käthe’s compulsive acts
clearly satisfied some deep impulse within her. . . . Incessant housekeeping
was one outlet for Käthe’s wrath, aroused by her forced move to Merano, her
gonorrhea, her chronic pain, her husband’s infidelity, and her daughter’s
contempt. Käthe’s cleaning was a hostile action, making the house virtually
unlivable for her family, and Dora and Philipp [Dora’s father] clearly per-
ceived it as such” (55).
101. SE7, 34. Frau K. had apparently met Dora’s father at Merano. Frau
K. had “been obliged to spend months in a sanatorium for nervous disorders
because she had been unable to walk” (SE7, 33).
102. Dora’s difficulty with breathing had arisen by the age of eight, ap-
parently first provoked by a mountain climb (SE7, 21). This was before she
had encountered the K.s and therefore before her symptoms could have ac-
quired a psychic meaning connected with them. Freud notes, “Every hys-
terical symptom requires a contribution from both sides [that is, psychic
and somatic]. It cannot come about without a certain somatic compliance”
(SE7, 40; emphasis in original). Later he remarks, “I suspect that it is a case
here of unconscious trains of thought which are drawn over pre-formed or-
ganic connections rather like festoons of flowers over threads of wire” (SE7,
84–85).
103. SE7, 28–29.
104. Ibid., 58.
105. Ibid., 82.
106. Ibid., 118.
107. Ibid., 47–48, 79–80.
CHAPTER FIVE: DEFENSE AND THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY
1. The Signorelli slip appears in The Psychopathology of Everyday

Life of 1901 in a section entitled “The Forgetting of Proper Names” (SE6,
1–7). It was first reported by Freud in more detail in 1898, the same year in
which it occurred, as an instance of “The Psychical Mechanism of Forget-
fulness” (SE3, 289–297).
166 Notes
2. See Freud’s letter to Fliess of September 22, 1898, in Masson, The

Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 326–327.
3. SE3, 292–293. See also Anthony Wilden’s comments in “Freud,
Signorelli and Lacan: The Repression of the Signifier.”
4. Freud to Fliess, September 22, 1898. At the end of his account to
Fliess, Freud remarks, “How can I make this credible to anyone?” (Masson,
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 327).
5. For his speculations that the emotional problems of his brother
and sisters, and by implication his own, could be traced to abuse by his fa-
ther see his letter to Fliess of February 8, 1897, in Masson, The Complete
Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 230–231.
6. He was concerned especially with the condition of his heart (das
Herz). “The heart itself, as an ailing organ, played a role in the thoughts I
have described as repressed” (SE3, 296). Thoughts connected with Herze-
govina open another train of thought leading to preoccupations about his
own life and death.
7. Hence, within nature, man is the child as such.
8. This is not of course to deny that nighttime dreams are produced
under very particular physiological conditions and that much of their pecu-
liar characteristics must be attributed to these conditions. No doubt, Freud
attributes too much of the peculiar nature of dreams to the need to defend
against subversive wishes and too little to physiological conditions.
9. Freud, Introductory Lectures, SE15, 210.
10. Hamlet, act 1, conclusion.
11. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE4, 106f.
12. “Dr. M.” was actually Breuer. For a detailed analysis of the bio-
graphical references in the Irma dream see Max Schur, “Some Additional
Day Residues of The Specimen Dream of Psychoanalysis.” Dr. M., of course,
also symbolizes medical authority as such, just as Dr. Otto symbolizes all
Freud’s mediocre colleagues. The “Irma” of the dream is also a condensation
but one reference seems to be to Emma Eckstein, whom Freud referred to
Fliess for surgery and who almost died as a result.
13. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE4, 308. See also “On The
History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” where he describes the attribu-
tion of distortion in dreams to an “inner dishonesty” as “the most charac-
teristic and important part of my theory of dreams” (SE14, 20). By the time
of The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1900, Freud has finally overcome the
hypnoid theory of the unconscious as a storehouse of dissociated memories.
This is why throughout the book he places such a great emphasis on the role
of wishes in the unconscious. Because he kept losing sight of this through-
out the 1890s, more than anything else this is a memorandum to himself.
The unconscious is the region of distorted wishes, not distorted memories.
14. Freud, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis.” Hysteria
had long been a widely recognized medical condition. Indeed its recognition
dates back to Hippocrates (ca. 500 B.C.). Obsessional neurosis (Zwangsneu-
rose), however, was first identified as a separate condition from hysteria by
Freud in 1894 to 1895. See the entries on “Hysteria” (194f.) and “Obses-
sional Neurosis” (281f.) in J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of
Psychoanalysis.
15. Freud, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” SE10, 206.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 158.
18. Ibid., 162.
19. Ibid., 198, 201.
20. Ibid., 166.
21. Ibid., 172.
22. Freud reports that the Man of Rats was struck by similarities be-
tween his own obsessional thoughts and the word associations described in
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (SE10, 159). His conflict of course de-
veloped into something more serious than the confusion over Signorelli.
However, like it, it was provoked by someone who was essentially inciden-
tal to his emotional life, but who momentarily came to symbolize conven-
tional obligations and expectations. For Freud, it was the stranger in the
railway carriage; for the Man of Rats, it was the sadistic officer. By becom-
ing momentarily the focus for a transference of more significant conflicts,
this third person became the catalyst for an emotional confusion that grew
out of all proportion to the significance of the precipitating event.
23. In his commentary on this case, Grünbaum looks for causal con-
nections between the associations themselves, ignoring the conflicts in in-
tention that alone make the associations meaningful. In doing so, again, he
is adhering to the hypnoid, or cathartic, model of the unconscious. See
Grünbaum, Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis, 121ff.
24. The rat story also suggested anal eroticism, not only at the mani-
fest level of the penetrating rats, but also via an ambiguity in the German
word Ratte, which suggests money and thereby feces: “In his obsessional
deliria he had coined himself a regular rat currency” (SE10, 213). On Freud’s
views on the symbolic links made by the infant between feces, gifts and
money (and other things besides), see “On Transformations of Instinct as
Exemplified in Anal Erotism,” SE17, 125–133.
168 Notes
25. Ibsen, Little Eyolf, act 1. The play was first produced throughout
the major European capitals, including Vienna, in 1895 (ibid., 217).
26. In reading the case of the Man of Rats we are reminded inevitably
of Nietzsche’s rhetorical question, “What destroys more quickly than work-
ing, thinking, feeling, other than from an inner necessity?” (The Antichrist,
section 11).
27. Of course, both hysteria and obsessional neurosis are “ideal
types,” in Max Weber’s sense. In practice, one will not find any neurosis that
does not show traces of both types.
28. The child wishes for possession of his mother, and for the displace-
ment of his father as her object of desire; he wishes also to become the object
of desire for his father, displacing his mother (“The Dissolution of the Oedi-
pus Complex,” SE19, 173–179). Freud calls the defense against these wishes
“primary repression;” the child yields the wish to establish a sexual bond
with either parent, in order to avoid castration, loss of the penis. The danger
of castration arises, Freud suggests, either as punishment for intercourse with
the mother, or as a condition of intercourse with the father (SE19, 176).
29. Freud describes this sense of alienation as an unconscious fear of
castration. The argument presented in “The Dissolution of the Oedipus
Complex,” in 1924, relies on quite a literal reading of the threat of castration.
It assumes first that the child at some stage receives an overt threat of cas-
tration (for masturbation); second, that the child subsequently observes that
little girls do not have penises; and third, that the child reaches the conclu-
sion this is because they have been castrated. He describes the conflict as one
between a “narcissistic interest” on the part of the child and a “libidinal in-
vestment of the parental objects” (SE19, 176). Two years later in Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety he treats castration in a broader, more metaphorical
sense to mean alienation, loss of love and loss of capacity for fruitful and
meaningful intercourse with others. Here, he argues that the primary anxiety
for the child is that of being separated from the mother (the trauma of birth
being the paradigm for all later anxiety), and that this is what castration re-
ally signifies (SE20, 137f.). The penis represents to the child his ultimate
means of making contact again with the mother, or more strictly, with the
womb and the quintessential sense of security and satisfaction that the
womb represents: “The possession of this organ is the guarantee of a reunifi-
cation with the mother—that is, with a substitute for her—in the act of in-
tercourse” (ibid.). Of course, Freud always had difficulty in extending this
framework to the case of the female child, his understanding of which he de-
scribes as “much more obscure and incomplete” (SE19, 177). Indeed, to ex-
tend this perspective to the psychology of women of necessity requires
taking the idea of castration in a broad metaphorical sense. “Castration anx-
iety,” he says, “develops into anxiety of conscience, into social anxiety. It is
no longer so easy to say what the anxiety is about. The formula ‘separation,
expulsion from the horde’ applies only to that later part of the superego
which has developed around social models, not to the nucleus of the super-
ego which corresponds to the introjected parental agency” (SE20, 139).
30. Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, SE20, 145.
31. What Freud calls “external” dangers, in contrast, are feared because
there is no reliable rule or convention for dealing with them. An external
danger is one that is not as such a threat to a rule, simply because no known
rule is adequate to deal with it. For instance, if the wolf attacks us, it is be-
cause our rules for dealing with wolf behavior are not adequate to forestall it.
If we succumb to physical disease, it is because the conventions of medical
science—or our knowledge of them—are not developed enough to master it.
In sum, an external danger is a failing in a rule, while an internal danger is a
threat to a rule. There is, however, no danger that is either purely internal or
purely external. As Freud points out, every internal danger has an external
aspect (SE20, 168). But, of course, every external danger has some internal as-
pects too. His example of an external danger, attack by a wolf, for instance,
will also have internal aspects, however attenuated; it will always evoke
some sort of internal, that is, conventional, response on the part of the per-
son attacked, even if this is no more than a futile gesture of self-defense.
What is significant here, however, is that someone who is experienced in the
behavior of wolves will know from habit what steps are necessary to mini-
mize the chances of an attack. In other words, he will be familiar with a con-
vention of human behavior that regulates the behavior of wolves. In fact, it
appears that at some point in prehistory human beings domesticated wolves
and made them their companions; if so, then all contemporary breeds of dog
are descendants of these wolves. In this way an “external” danger has been
“internalized” by human beings, it has been integrated into their cultural
conventions. Indeed, in broad terms, this is precisely what the progress of sci-
ence amounts to: we progressively integrate experience of our environment
into human conventions. Of course, as we modify our conventions in this
way, our sense of what it means to be human undergoes change with it. All
new science is really new discovery about ourselves.
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INDEX
Aristotle, 2, 38, 40, 158 Darwin, Charles, 3, 9, 15–16, 18,

68, 82, 137, 141; Darwinian
Bernays, Jacob, 158 positivists, 72; Darwinian
Bernheim, Hippolyte, 110, 160 theory as model for
Bettelheim, Bruno, 58, 146 psychoanalysis, 136–137;
biological science. See Kant evolutionary theory, 12, 42;
Bowie, Malcolm, 148 Social Darwinists, 14–15; and
Breuer, Josef, 56; and case of Anna Sulloway’s views on
O., 88, 91–97, 102, 104, 106, psychoanalysis, 31–32
157–159, 163; and cathartic Decker, Hannah, 144, 165
theory of unconscious, 107–112; defense: and memory, 91–92; and
discovery of free association, 98; Nietzsche’s duality of intention,
Freud’s divergence from, 81–82, 117–128; and symbolism,
101–102, 156–157; his views 88. See also Freud
misrepresented by Freud’s defense theory of the unconscious,
critics, 32–33, 89–91 88–90, 103–104, 107–111,
Brücke, Ernst, 146 128–132
Descartes, René, 2, 6–7, 12;
Cassirer, Ernst, 145 contrasted with Freud, 46;
cathartic cure, 32–33, 94–97; contrasted with Peirce, 64–65;
compared with psychoanalysis, and modern critics of
106–115 individuation, 86, 134; and need
cathartic theory of unconscious, for certainty, 39–40, 145;
50, 88–90, 106–115 physics as ideal science, 37;
Charcot, Jean Martin, 56, 93, 106, source for positivism and
110, 158, 160 hermeneutics, 43, 67; viewed
child within the self, 10–11, 30 by Lacan, 54. See also dualism
childhood and neurosis, 79–80 Dewey, John, 62, 66
Copernicus, Nicolas, 2, 5, 6, 9, 38 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 42, 57
179
180 Index
dualism: and boundaries for free association, 98–99; The

science, 4, 11–12; Cartesian Future of an Illusion, 56;
dualism, 6, 37–40, 67; “Geisteswissenschaft,” 57–59;
contrasted with pragmatism, Group Psychology and the
63–65; as defense against Analysis of the Ego, 155; “The
psychoanalysis, 82–83 History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement,” 107, 109; hypnosis,
Eco, Umberto, 152 98–99; Inhibitions, Symptoms
Einstein, Albert, 15, 23, 68, 82 and Anxiety, 131, 163, 168–169;
Ellenberger, Henri, 89, 157 “Instincts and their
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 62–63, Vicissitudes,” 146; The
139, 142, 154 Interpretation of Dreams, 57,
existentialism, 7, 10; compared 121–123, 129, 148, 155, 166;
with positivism and interpreted by Lacan, 47–54;
pragmatism, 63 Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis, 57, 146, 147;
Feyerabend, Paul, 143 knowledge of Nietzsche, 155;
Freud, Sigmund, 4–6; “The the Man of Rats, 123–128, 131,
Aetiology of Hysteria,” 29, 167–168; metapsychology,
147–148, 156; aliquis example, 128–132; New Introductory
51–53, 125; use of analogies Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 58,
17–19; “Analysis of a Phobia in 148; obsessional neurosis,
a Five-Year-Old Boy: ‘Little 123–128; positivist criticisms of
Hans’,” 152; “Analysis psychoanalysis, 14–15; as
Terminable and Interminable,” pragmatist, 62; “Project for a
56; An Autobiographical Study, Scientific Psychology,” 31, 129;
107, 111, 162–163; Beyond the and psychological autonomy,
Pleasure Principle, 130, 150, 34; “psychology’s one man of
154; Civilization and Its genius,” 38; The
Discontents, 106; claims of cure Psychopathology of Everyday
for hysteria, 159–160; Life, 50–53, 115, 150; The
conception of drive and Question of Lay Analysis,
meaning, 45–46; use of 55–56; “The Resistances to
“context,” 46; contrasted with Psychoanalysis,” 55, 148, 152;
Breuer, 88–92; criticized by Ricoeur’s comments on, 44–47;
Grünbaum, 3, 32; criticized by and science of the self, 8–10;
Webster, 32–33; “The seduction theory, 110–111, 164;
Dissolution of the Oedipus sexual abuse of children, 30,
complex,” 168; Dora, 111–115, 143–144; significance of sex in
123, 131; dream of Irma’s the unconscious, 104–105,
injection, 122–123; The Ego and 109–115; Signorelli, 118–121,
the Id, 130; Elisabeth von R., 125; and the soul, 10, 33, 58, 87;
88, 92, 97–106, 131, 161–162; Studies On Hysteria, 29, 32, 46,
forgotten memories, 105–106; 87–115, 123, 141, 147, 155–163;
Index 181
symptoms as symbols, 99, 110, Hirschmüller, Albrecht, 156–160

160–161; theory of cure, Hobbes, Thomas, 139
108–109; theory of defense, Hume, David, 7, 140, 145
162–163; Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, 146, 164; Ibsen, Henrik: Little Eyolf,
“The Unconscious,” 146, 147; 126–127
“On the Universal Tendency to
Debasement in the Sphere of James, William, 62, 65–67, 69, 79
Love,” 147; views on the Janet, Pierre, 89, 106, 110, 144,
scientific classification of 156
psychoanalysis, 54–59; the Wolf Jones, Ernest, 96, 98, 146
Man, 106
Kant, Immanuel: on biological
Galileo, 38 science, 41, 145; the
Geisteswissenschaft. See Freud “categorical imperative,” 41;
Gellner, Ernest, 23–25, 28 concept of science, 40–42;
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, contrasted with Nietzsche, 70;
139, 141–142, 151; Faust, 154; and the decline of tradition, 86,
Mephistopheles, 76; and 134; as origin of criticisms of
metaphor, 17–18; origin for psychoanalysis, 63; as origin of
pragmatism, 62; “We have to hermeneutic readings of
reform ourselves every day,” 83 psychoanalysis, 43–46, 146;
Golomb, Jacob, 153 physics viewed as ideal science,
Grünbaum, Adolf, 12–15, 18, 167; 38; source of dualist
ambivalence towards science philosophies, 2, 6, 12, 67, 140
20, 28; ascription of positivist Kaufmann, Walter, 144, 152
views to Freud, 58; compared Kepler, Johann, 8–9, 38
with Lacan, 47, 50; compared Kierkegaard, Søren, 7, 48
with Popper, 23–24; Klages, Ludwig, 152
extraclinical tests for
psychoanalysis, 22–25, 143; Lacan, Jacques, 44, 47–54, 136,
influenced by Ellenberger, 148–151; the “absolute Other,”
89–90; mistaking of defense, 50; compared with Grünbaum
31–33, 44; misunderstanding of and Webster, 47, 50; the
Anna O. case, 97; physics as “imaginary” and the “mirror
ideal science, 38, 144–145; and stage,” 48–50; Ricoeur’s
the soul, 136; and Timpanaro, comments on, 45; the
53 “signifier,” 49–50; “symbolic”
versus “meaning,” 48–50;
Hacking, Ian, 143–144 theory of science, 53–54; “The
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, unconscious is structured like a
62, 149 language,” 48–49; his views
hermeneutics, 42–43, 57. See also compared with cathartic theory
Ricoeur of the unconscious, 50
182 Index
language: and analogy, 70–73; and 70; Übermensch, 83–84; The

human intentionality, 70. See Will to Power, 153
also Lacan
Lear, Jonathan, 141, 143, 158, 163 Ortega y Gasset, José, 71
Lehrer, Ronald, 155
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 149 Parkes, Graham, 153
Levy, Donald, 143 Peirce, Charles S., 62; theory of
Lovejoy, Arthur O., 139 knowledge, 64–65, 152
Pfister, Oskar, 56
Macmillan, Malcolm, 160 Plato, 2
Masson, Jeffrey, 30–31, 33, 143, Popper, Karl, 12–15, 18, 136;
156, 164 ambivalence towards science,
Mendel, Gregor, 38 20; compared with Grünbaum,
Mill, John Stuart, 14, 42 23–24, 28, 38, 44; falsifiability,
Milton, John, 76 21–22, 142–144; and Kantian
Murdoch, Iris, 144 positivism, 42
positivism, 16, 42–43; contrasted
neurosis: and double aspect of with hermeneutics, 58–59;
human intentionality, 77–84; positivist criticisms of
and individualism, 85–87 pragmatism, 61–68; compared
Newton, Isaac, 9, 15, 16, 18, 38 with positivism and
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 68–84, 87, existentialism, 63, 67; and
105–106, 127, 134, 152–155; The intellectual temperament, 62
Antichrist, 154, 168; on psychoanalysis, 10, 18, 19–28
Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, psychoanalysis: and ambivalence,
158; Beyond Good and Evil, 74, 13; compared with cathartic
153; Daybreak, 155; The Gay cure, 106–115; concept of cure,
Science, 139; On the Genealogy 24–28; criticisms of its
of Morals, 75, 153–155; Human, scientific status as form of
All-too-Human, 153–154, 158; regression, 61–62; and
human intentionality, 70–76; emotional crisis created by
“hunger” and “overabundance,” science, 134–135; and ethical
72–74, 117–128; on Jesus, 154; conflict, 105; forgotten
“Know yourself is the whole of memories, 29–33; free
science,” 16; “Man is the child association, 51–53;
as such,” 10; metaphor and fundamental question it poses,
analogy, 70–71, 142; “noble” 34–35, 47; and hermeneutics,
and “slave,” 75–76; problem of 43–54; and human sciences,
truth, 69–70, 140; relation to 57–58; overdetermination, 46;
dualism and psychoanalysis, practice of psychotherapy,
68–69; relation to Kant, 70; 114–115; psychological
relation to pragmatism, 62, 69; autonomy, 20; its relation with
the “rule” and the “exception,” science, 135, 137–138; and
74–75, 128–131; and the soul, scientific method, 9–10
Index 183
purpose: as basis for life science, and the self, 8–13. See also
41; concealed in scientific Kant
knowledge, 65–67; Freud’s Shakespeare, William, 76;
understanding of drive and Hamlet, 122
meaning, 45–46; and human Sharpe, Ella Freeman, 142
science, 42; and Nietzsche, 69 soul, 2, 7–8, 136. See also Freud
Sulloway, Frank, 12–13, 15, 18,
Rickert, Heinrich, 42, 57 33, 97, 136; Ellenberger’s
Ricoeur, Paul, 44–48, 136, 146 influence on, 89; Freud’s
Robinson, Paul, 141, 164 “Project for a Scientific
Rorty, Richard, 144 Psychology,” 31–32
Rubin, Jeffrey, 140 symbolism: and conventional
Ryle, Gilbert, 38, 144 expressions, 71–72; in “Man of
Rats” case, 127; and memories,
Santoro-Brienza, Liberato, 141, 149 30; and symptoms, 33–34
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 7
Schur, Max, 166 Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 52–53
science: ambivalence towards it,
4–8, 20, 135; and anxiety, 11, Virgil, 52; The Aeneid, 51–53
28; and autonomy, 3, 16, 20, 87;
and consensual testing, 19–28; Wagner, Richard, 77
as displacement for God, 40; its Weber, Max, 146–147
effect on tradition, 1–8, 13; Webster, Richard, 12–13, 15, 18,
limits of science and theory of 31, 97, 136, 155; compared with
defense, 107–108; and Lacan, 47, 50; Ellenberger’s
metaphor, 13–19; physics influence on, 89; mistaking of
viewed as ideal science, 37–41; defense, 32–33, 90–91

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THE LAST RESISTANCE

SUNY series, Alternatives in Psychology

The Concept of Science as a

State University of New York Press

© 2002 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

For information, address State University of New York Press,

Production by Marilyn P. Semerad

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

BF173 .B717 2002

I would like to thank Jane Bunker and Marilyn Semerad at State

INTRODUCTION: DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY

SCIENCE AND THE CORROSION OF TRADITION

The problem of the relation between psychoanalysis and

Until at least relatively recent times, most human beings be-

systems. In the nineteenth century Darwin made plain there is noth-

sense of duty towards ourselves and towards others.4 As we leave ever

sense of obligation to tradition. To understand the modern argu-

from those of the two great dualist philosophers. This is precisely

we are going to be able to build something genuinely robust and

SCIENCE AND THE SELF

Before Freud the sciences were esoteric, in that each sci-

Science has been slowly changing our perspective on ourselves

found in the memories of infancy. This mistake is the single most

were shaped originally by the philosophers after the Copernican rev-

know how a scientific psychology is to be defined, and all define it

THE METAPHORS OF SCIENCE

The human sciences have always looked to the success-

characterized by the elevation of a single template for

The sciences of human motivation, like depth psychology, his-

gument goes, then surely some elaboration of it must be capable of

on psychoanalysis, a demand that apparently has the authority of sci-

natural science is actually a human story, even though we usually

Goethe is not suggesting here that the study of human activity

In the science of the mind, however, as in every science, there

SCIENCE AND CONSENSUS

Science depends upon the exercise of the individual

Science is the most respected and feared of modern ideas. Indeed,

instance, because of its reliance upon statements of probability,

mistaken view of psychoanalysis as a closed procedure which at-

Gellner’s well-known polemical attack on psychoanalysis in The

psychoanalysis. He speaks of the need for psychoanalytic cure to be

return to a consensus definition of cure are reflecting this stress, but

THE DISTORTION OF DEFENSE

To learn about ourselves and to cure ourselves we have

There exists always a divergence between our own most funda-

in fact he was a “crypto-biologist;” he was only doing what was, in

defense is portrayed as a problem about lost memories. This miscon-

PLACING PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A SCIENCE

THE CARTESIAN SEPARATION OF MIND FROM SCIENCE

There is a long tradition in European philosophy of regard-

We have noted briefly some of the modern criticisms of psycho-

At every point, of course, European civilization relied upon

ception of natural science “makes room for faith” in Kant’s sense.

place of language in human processes because language is the one

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HERMENEUTICS

Those who would assign psychoanalysis to some field out-

The debate between positivism and hermeneutics in the human

inadequate “a mere linguistic transcription of analysis.” He evi-

However, unlike Descartes and Kant, Freud makes no assump-

lose the sense of something beyond the “hermeneutics of demystifi-