Journal of Critical Realism

ISSN: 1476-7430 (Print) 1572-5138 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yjcr20

Critical realism, psychology and the legacies of

psychoanalysis

David Pilgrim

To cite this article: David Pilgrim (2017): Critical realism, psychology and the legacies of
psychoanalysis, Journal of Critical Realism, DOI: 10.1080/14767430.2017.1372668

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2017.1372668

Published online: 25 Sep 2017.

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 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2017.1372668

Critical realism, psychology and the legacies of psychoanalysis

David Pilgrim
Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The discipline of psychology has been poorly represented in critical Psychology; psychoanalysis;
realist texts to date. This is despite Bhaskar’s use of psychoanalytical Freud; seduction theory;
transference
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concepts to underpin his concept of the dialectic. By comparison,

other aspects of social science, such as sociology and economics,
have a well-established body of critical realist texts. The original
approach to psychoanalysis was analogous to the critical realist
ontological-axiological chain. It moved from an ontological
problem (what is) to an axiological solution (talking cure). Freud’s
eagerness to reframe psychoanalysis within a scientistic, objective
framework was perhaps due in part to the difficulties that he
faced as European Jew in the fin-de-siècle. The application of the
critical realist explanatory critique can contribute to our
understanding of how and why the fragmentation of Freud’s
legacies emerged. Critical realists should avoid the assumption
that psychoanalysis is a unitary body of knowledge; as such, they
should consider its various legacies separately.

Introduction
Compared to other aspects of social science, psychology is under-represented in a large
section of seminal critical realist texts, although there are some exceptions (e.g. Collier
1977, 1980, 1991; O’Mahoney 2011). For instance, in his clear introduction to critical
realism for students of social science, the sociologist Sayer (2000) makes extensive allu-
sions to sociology, political theory, cultural theory and philosophy. However, although
he briefly discusses the Frankfurt School, Jurgen Habermas makes a single allusion to
Claus Offe, he does not mention Freud, or any other psychoanalysts or psychologists,
such as Pavlov, Skinner, Rogers or Maslow. Neither ‘psychoanalysis’ nor ‘psychology’
appear in Sayer’s index. Although Archer (2000) focuses on the mental (reflexive) pro-
cesses around human behavioural choices, she gives psychology a surprisingly low
profile. Again, she does not refer to the work of most recognized psychologists and
their extensively studied theories. She mentions Donald Winnicott, a British psychoanalyst,
but only in a single footnote. Furthermore, like Sayer, neither ‘psychology’ nor ‘psychoana-
lysis’ appear in Archer’s index, although she briefly mentions the Frankfurt school. Archer
does allude to Freud as part of a critique of the work of Richard Rorty (with the latter offer-
ing us a ‘serious misreading’ of the former according to Archer). Her only reference to any
other form of psychology is in passing, when she uses the work of the critical social

CONTACT David Pilgrim david.pilgrim@liv.ac.uk

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2 D. PILGRIM

psychologist John Shotter to critique Rom Harré – who has worked at the interface of phil-
osophy and psychology. Archer’s tendency to over-value conscious reflexivity (to provide
the self with dignity and a sense of continuity) and downplay its unconscious aspects has
been noted by her critics (Akram 2012; Elder-Vass 2007; Fleetwood 2008).1
Furthermore, when psychological matters are considered in the seminal critical realist
texts, they are usually discussed in terms of psychoanalysis and aspects of the Freudian
legacies rather than in terms of orthodoxies in mainstream academic psychology.
Turning to Roy Bhaskar himself, in his early text A Realist Theory of Science, he admittedly
draws attention to the challenge of psychological investigations and the futility of experi-
mentalism. This was a fair and accurate commentary on the impossibility of dealing with
human thought and action in a closed system context. However, his starting point for that
reflection does not come from psychoanalysis or any other form of psychology but from
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linguistics (the work of Noam Chomsky). By the time Bhaskar comes to write his more
extensive later text on dialectical critical realism (DCR) we hear a more from psychology
but only from Freud (Bhaskar 2008). No other psychologist is mentioned, although Frank-
furt School writers are utilized briefly (Adorno and Habermas). Bhaskar spends some time
examining the nature of the self and ‘personality stratification’ within a DCR framework.
However, during this exploration he does not refer to personality theory; a sub-discipline
of psychology, with its own dedicated journals and extensive orthodox and critical tropes.
Bhaskar’s work does however engage extensively with the Freudian notion of defence
mechanisms; and he uses ‘compromise formation’2 as a way of understanding TINA3 for-
mations in our lives. In one paper during the DCR phase, Bhaskar lays out the case for
examining ideas and inner reality (Bhaskar 1997). Thus, Freud’s work is certainly
adopted as an important building block of critical realist understanding. Bhaskar (2016,
210) has also stated that a weakness of critical realism is ‘its lack of engagement with
developmental psychology and the role of world views and analogous Gestalts in the for-
mation of belief and action’.
Therefore, my point here is that, despite the clear role given to psychological issues
suggested by Bhaskar’s engagement with it, psychology and psychoanalysis are underu-
tilized in certain critical realist literature where its usefulness might seem obvious,
especially compared to other social science disciplines, such as sociology. Turning to
specific contributions from other critical realists outside of the above more general
texts, Graham Clarke has offered us a ‘personal relationships theory’ (Clarke 2008). This
incorporates a revised form of object-relations theory (Fairbairn 1952), Christian humanism
(MacMurray 1957) and a psychodynamic viewpoint emphasizing the innate human need
for companionship and the expression and receipt of altruistic love (Suttie 1988). Price
(2007) has utilized psychoanalytical insights from Freud and Jung – as well as the existen-
tial psychology interpreted by May (1967) and Maddi (1986) – to explain the mismatch
between environmental rhetoric and action. Kran (2010) has examined the alignment
between critical realist and psychoanalytical ways of understanding causality. The topic
of wish fulfilment introduced by the early Freud has also been examined as a legitimate
way of understanding motivation from a critical realist perspective (Pataki 2014).
With this brief review of critical realist engagement with psychoanalysis and psychology
in mind, I now turn to that tradition and its concerns to see if we can identify what might
be of potential interest to critical realists. Specifically, this article takes stock of the legacies
of a key figure in human science, Sigmund Freud.
 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM 3

The legacies of Freud

The term ‘legacies’ is used pointedly in the knowledge that psychoanalysis is a variegated
tradition. Psychoanalysis is not a unitary body of knowledge; a characterization that would
be conceded by its adherents and detractors alike. This is an ontological statement about
an epistemological field. A range of views from and about psychoanalysis emerged before
the codification of critical realism after the 1970s.
During the twentieth century psychoanalysis was not alone in exploring inner reality
and postulating generative mechanisms to account for human thought and action.
However, if historical studies of psychology are anything to go by, a ‘Freud-centric’
picture emerged in the academy. This does not accurately reflect either his presence or
his legitimacy in the orthodox academic discipline we now call ‘psychology’. As Borch-
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Jacobsen and Shamdasani (2008) point out, more has been written by historians of
human science about Freud and his followers than any other topic. This large body of his-
torical knowledge includes contributions that are internalist and celebratory (e.g. Jones
1957; Roudinesco 2016), internalist and critical (e.g. Masson 1985), externalist and celebra-
tory (e.g. Gay 1988; Roazen 1975) and externalist and critical (e.g. Gellner 1985; Webster
2005). Freud as hero or villain and psychoanalysis as revolutionary science or contemptible
pseudo-science jostle for position in this mixture of historical appraisals. Critical realism
potentially offers a way of understanding the different perspectives.

The dominant concerns of psychoanalysts

For Freud, at least in his later work, the aim of therapy was to render the unconscious con-
scious. Freud expressed an ontological certainty about the successful outcome of psycho-
analytical treatment: ‘where id is, there shall ego be’ (Freud 1932). The ego’s functioning
was distorted constantly by external threats from the outer world and internal ones
from the inner one. To survive without anxiety the ego, to various degrees and in
varying ways, uses ‘defence mechanisms’ to neutralize those inner and outer threats.
The role of the analyst was to use a conversational method to provide insights about
these processes and outcomes back to the patient. After a brief period when Freud was
committed to the cathartic method of emotional release (see below); he and his followers
eventually settled on the method of interpretation.
This summary of the basic psychoanalytical starting point then entailed two assump-
tions. The first was an ontological assumption about the human mind and its functioning.
For instance, it was assumed that the conscious and the unconscious existed. Similarly,
the internal and external threats, and the defence mechanisms in response, constituted
real generative mechanisms to account for why the patient acted and reported what they
did (Collier 1998). But in addition to these ontological concerns, psychoanalysts then devel-
oped codifications for their work. Interpretation was ipso facto a hermeneutic and conversa-
tional form of clinical intervention. In other words, these psychoanalysts were committed to
an ontological–axiological chain not unlike that suggested by Bhaskar – they moved from
ontological assumptions of what ‘is’, which included real generative mechanisms (e.g.
defence mechanisms), to axiological assumptions of what must then be done (talking
therapy). That psychoanalytical work assumed that linguistic interventions could result in
healing is an indication of its critical realist-style ontology, in which (linguistic) reasons
 4 D. PILGRIM

can be causes. However, as one would expect of any scientific theory, Freud and his fol-
lowers changed their theory as more evidence became available – sometimes they
changed it dramatically. Furthermore, and also as we would expect from a critical realist
reading of scientific progress, other analysts often arrived at alternative theories, that com-
peted with Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, to explain the evidence. Similarly, there were
attempts to correct Freud’s initial theory. Unfortunately, some (though not all) of these cor-
rections may have been retrogressive, as I argue later. They may have been more to do with
Freud trying to make his theory more ‘scientific’ (i.e. more empiricist and thus less critical
realist) – as a way of increasing its respectability in mainstream scientific circles. The
result is that psychoanalytical theory has not only developed over time, but has also
become fragmented, to such a degree that only family resemblances remain; and with
family members in vehement disagreement and often cool disengagement. This is where
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a critical realist approach could be helpful, especially in terms of its concept of ‘judgemental
rationality’, which could help to adjudicate on the proliferation of competing theories.
When considering these theoretical revisions, a risk is that epistemological critiques
against psychoanalysis can become confused with critiques of the claims of the theory
itself. Positivists and empiricists in different guises directed a strong epistemological objec-
tion that was not actually about psychoanalytical claims per se but against subjectivism in
general. The objection emerged from empiricist psychologists on the one hand and posi-
tivist philosophers on the other. In the first camp, we find Russian and American learning
theory (‘methodological behaviourism’) (e.g. Eysenck 1985) and in the second the emer-
gence of radical behaviourism, predicated upon logical positivism, as a philosophy of
science (e.g. Skinner 1953).
The point about objections to subjectivism in psychology (i.e. not to that of psychoana-
lysis alone) is significant because, prior to the development of behaviourist hegemony in
psychology in the middle of the twentieth century, many non-psychoanalytical psycholo-
gists used introspective methods and asserted them as a basis for scientific psychology. I
am here referring to both: the ‘associationists’, who were the progenitors of modern cog-
nitive science; and the ‘experimentalists’, who were interested in memory and thinking.
Both took inner reality seriously – considering it to be ontologically real – and positioned
it as the core business of psychology as an emerging discipline.
Whereas empiricism in the twentieth century was to become entwined with hostility to
subjectivism of any sort, this was not true of the work at the interface of British empiricist
philosophy in the nineteenth century at all. Indeed, that philosophy soon enlarged to
include ‘the workings of the mind’ in response to sense data. That morphing of British
empiricism into a psychological examination of inner events was evident inter alia in Alex-
ander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect and The Emotions and the Will which emerged in the
wake of Thomas Brown’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind in 1820 and in 1829 James Mill’s
Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. These appeared 50 years before Bain’s work,
which is credited with being the start of academic psychology in Britain (Hearnshaw 1964).
The main disciplinary point being made here is that mind was for a long while the core
business of philosophers; psychology had not yet been established by the mid-nineteenth
century. A similar pattern was discernible in the U.S.A. with the work of the philosopher-
cum-psychologist, William James. As with his British counterparts, James’ empiricist phil-
osophy could be readily extended methodologically to examine both thinking and the
emotions. This development was quite separate from psychoanalysis, which was
 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM 5

derived mainly from French psychopathology and was not an incipient empirical psychol-
ogy. However, one theoretical bridge at the time – that influenced Freud positively – was
provided by Franz Brentano, who championed phenomenology.
Given this liberal acceptance of inner events alongside empiricism in the nineteenth
century, we might deduce that the behaviourist hostility to psychoanalysis in the twenti-
eth century was about the politics of the insecure discipline of psychology, not merely
abstract epistemological arguments. The discipline was trying to establish its credentials
as a natural science. It aspired to be an empirical science that was distinguishing itself
from mere philosophical speculation (Pilgrim and Treacher 1991). All forms of subjecti-
vism, including psychoanalysis, were problematized, driven to the margins or expelled
completely. However, by the mid-twentieth century, inner reality could not be expunged
by mainstream academic psychology; it was after all part of reality requiring investigation.
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‘Black box’ psychology created a form of positivistic smugness but it had to suppress an aspect
of reality; our interior worlds with their transient feelings, intuitions, fantasies and rational and
non-rational cognitions. With the obduracy of the reality of our subjective worlds it was phe-
nomenology (notably not psychoanalysis) that was permitted back into the fold of academic
respectability but always in competition with positivist behaviourism (Wann 1964). The anti-
psychoanalytical campaigns were not only present in the behaviourist and naïve realist
camps of academic psychology. They could also be found in the psychiatric profession
which was offended by Freud’s unwelcomed attention to (or obsession with) sexual desire
and childhood sexuality. (Turner 1996)

The lessons of revisionism

Freud developed his ideas about unconscious life and its potential for offering a total
psychological account of humanity on the back of work in French psychopathology at
the end of the nineteenth century. His debt to Charcot, Janet and Ribot was explicit,
though French medical colleagues disapproved of the direction he took that legacy
after 1888 (Makari 2010). During that period just before 1900, Freud was working out
his position individually. This is important because at first his claims were not connected
primarily to leading a movement – eventually known as ‘psychoanalysis’ – which was an
amalgam of therapeutic interventions and theory-building. What Freud’s first and sub-
sequent phases had in common was his reliance upon (arguably limited) empirical data
to prompt, and for a while to sustain, a preferred theoretical position. I contend that,
once the subsequent phases emerged, and he was now the leader of a movement,
then intellectual considerations about being data-driven became entangled with his
need to justify his stance within his group and to protect it from attack from without.
The three phases below span a period from Freud being a marginal struggling figure
within European medicine at the fin-de-siècle, through a period when he became a
famous, and for some infamous, psychological innovator, to his gradual withdrawal
from intellectual disputes, after the First World War, with the emergence of both his
struggle with cancer and Nazi persecution.

Phase 1: actual sexual behaviour as the source of psychopathology

In the 1890s Freud argued that mental distress arose from excessive masturbation and
struggles with its guilty suppression. In particular, Freud maintained that masturbation,
 6 D. PILGRIM

and the struggle to suppress it, led to anxiety neurosis (Freud 1895). However, this con-
clusion had already replaced his more dramatic focus: sexual abuse in childhood at the
hands of fathers and brothers. The focus on masturbation was a stepping stone for aban-
doning his aetiological assumptions about actual sexual activity completely, to be
replaced instead with the patient’s fantasy life and its repressions (phase 2 described
below).
Before 1900 Freud was a young doctor picking his occupational way through the con-
tested terrain of medical psychology. By the turn of the twentieth century this struggle for
individual survival was to be replaced by a different scenario of innovation that was to
appeal increasingly to his sympathetic medical colleagues and curious non-medical
fellow travellers alike. This variegated multi-disciplinary avant-garde movement, was pre-
occupied with exploring the role of the non-rational in life generally, even if the empirical
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rationale for that broad interest was derived overwhelmingly from clinical encounters
alone.
Between 1900 and 1920 Freud was no longer just another doctor trying to make a living
but was entering a world of international celebrity. His ideas were being explored and
embraced or challenged in the key emergent psychoanalytical societies of Zurich,
Vienna, Berlin and Budapest. Given this change of fortune for Freud, what was at stake
was not only his restless intellectual curiosity but also his insistent version of psychic deter-
minism, with sex still at its centre, but now largely re-construed.

Phase 2: from actual trauma to mental distortions created by the libido

After 1900 Freud opted to move from the actual trauma theory towards one based upon
the notion of fantasy. Now he considered that the Oedipal drama, under the pressure ‘from
behind’ of the libidinal drive of the child, could explain mental distortions. The latter even-
tually became elaborated into a long list of what came to be known as ‘defence mechan-
isms’ (Freud 1935). The most important of these were fantasy, repression, projection and
displacement. Specific displacements onto the therapist, Freud came to call ‘transference’
(Freud 1912). Some but not all transference might be erotic. But erotic or not, according to
Freud the aetiology of psychopathology rested within the mind of the child, and stayed on
as the person matured into adulthood. And those mental processes were deemed by
Freud to be ubiquitous and distorting of reality.
This is important because it set a trend in European thought in the twentieth century of
considering that normal unanalysed consciousness was constantly out of touch with
reality (both internally and externally). The focus shifted from patients as victims of the
crimes of others (in Phase 1) to victims of their own (unconscious) self-deception (in
Phase 2). Some have claimed that Freud therefore assumed that patients did not suffer
crimes (Masson 1985); and in practice this change in focus, away from reality, no doubt
protected perpetrators from punishment. However, significantly for this discussion, the
result was that people were assumed to be continuously ‘in the wrong’ about reality. Fur-
thermore, it was assumed that submission to the corrective of medical psychoanalysis –
‘the talking cure’ – was the best, perhaps only, way to avoid this self-deceit. This second
phase of theorizations (up to 1920) was the core of what we now think of as Freudian
orthodoxy. Its axiom was that psychosexual processes drive psychopathology in us all.
However, although overwhelmingly reliant upon ‘psychic determinism’, it took for
 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM 7

granted phylogenetic inheritance. Drive theory within Freudian orthodoxy meant that
psychic determinism still presupposed a universally shared biological state and its attend-
ant processes from birth onwards.
As Sulloway (1979) put it, Freud was par excellence a ‘biologist of the mind’. He might
have emphasized the psychic determinism of psychopathology, but the mind was mana-
ging (or was constituted by) the outcome of the dynamic conflicts emerging from the tur-
bulent flow of inborn libidinal energy through the mouth, the anus and the genitals.
Indeed Freud, the research neurologist, always considered that eventually the mind
would be explicable in somatic and especially neural terms; what Wolman (1981) called
a position of ‘hoped-for-reductionism’. For Freud psychoanalysis and its hermeneutic the-
ories were a stop gap until the triumph of neuroscience eventually arrived. For critical rea-
lists, respectability does not depend on such reductionism, due to their acknowledgement
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of the emergent nature of mind from body, which makes the mind unilaterally dependent
upon – but not reducible to – the material, empirical body (Bhaskar 2008, 51).

Phase 3: not only Eros but also Thanatos

The period between 1900 and 1920 consolidated Freudian orthodoxy both for Freud
himself and his loyal followers. However, the impact of the First World War on Freud
and many of his contemporaries was considerable. In particular, he began to reconsider
his libidinal theory. The unrelenting slaughter that he witnessed in Europe, in the final
spasm of competing imperialist powers, led him to an additional conclusion about the
instincts: aggression, not just sex, was an important determinant of our actions. Accord-
ingly, he issued what is sometimes described as his ‘revised theory’ (implying this was
the first time that he had altered his view, when in fact there were differences already
evident within and between phases 1 and 2 noted above).
In Beyond The Pleasure Principle, he shifted from his structural model of the Id, the Ego
and Superego being the dynamic product of our psychosexual development alone, to
introduce us to both Eros and Thanatos within that dynamic. They, not libidinal energy,
alone now were put forward both as constituting our instinctual apparatus (the Id) and
of inflecting the activity of the Superego. Freud had already noted that the latter structure
of the mind was part conscious and part unconscious and it could be understood as con-
taining two sub-structures: the conscience and the ego-ideal. The first of these was
reflected in our experiences of guilt, shame and anxiety (an affective aspect of our
psychic lives) and the second our espoused moral views and values (a cognitive aspect).

Contemporary challenges to Freud

Several of Freud’s early contemporaries disagreed with him over the primacy of Eros, and
anticipated the idea of Thanatos. For example, Alfred Adler had argued that aggression, not
sex, was the main source of our problems in living. This and other differences between the
Freud and Adler to them part company (Adler 1912). Sabina Spielrein, even more clearly
than Adler, argued that destructiveness and creativity were entwined in our instincts
(Spielrein 1912). Moreover, in anticipation of later object-relations theory, she noted
that becoming a mother sacrificed the secure prior identity of the individual woman for
the continuation of the species. A third figure advocating the role of aggression, not
 8 D. PILGRIM

just sex, was Wilhelm Stekel. He, like Adler, left Freud’s inner circle because of this disagree-
ment (Stekel 1908). These three acolytes nevertheless anticipated the content of Freud’s
book Beyond The Pleasure Principle, in which he revised his theory to include Thanatos.
Freud’s ‘revised theory’ was profoundly disorientating to his loyal followers. Which
Sigmund Freud were they now expected to follow? The Freud who insisted that psycho-
sexual determinism explained all, or the one who focused on the interplay of life and death
instincts? If an emergent leitmotif of psychoanalysis was that of human ambivalence, then
Freud was surely now a very a public role model for it.
I end this section with the note that Freudian psychoanalysis was taken in a different
direction by Carl Jung. This direction might be of interest to critical realists who follow
Roy Bhaskar’s ‘spiritual turn’. In short, Jung suggested that our human driving force is
not life and death instinct, but rather spirituality, or self-reflexive individuation; which is
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expressed as a particular form of mystical universalism and includes the ontological collec-
tive unconscious (Dunne 2002, 3).4

Post-Freudian revisions
After Freud and his daughter escaped to London in 1938, a triple schism emerged in the
British Psychoanalytical Society, the result of a conflict between Anna Freud and Melanie
Klein. Specifically, Klein emphasized inherited aggression and very early (pre-Oedipal)
infancy, which set her against the Freudian orthodoxies of his three phases. Anna Freud
defended her father’s canon against the Kleinian deviation, although Klein always con-
sidered herself to be a Freudian loyalist as well. The schism could be described as: ortho-
dox Freudianism (post-1920); Kleinian psychoanalysis; and a ‘middle group’ who did not
take sides in the Freud–Klein hostilities. This lack of resolution between the positions of
the two women highlights a challenge to be picked up below about accepting forms of
epistemological variation within a very broad movement called ‘psychoanalysis’.
After the Second World War developments of ‘ego psychology’ in the U.S.A., which were
aligned, according to its critics with American individualism and adaptation to capitalist
alienation, began to dominate clinical psychoanalysis there (Hartmann 1939; cf. Fromm
1970). Psychoanalysis, to use the judgement of the latter author, was now in an ailing
and critical political state. It was theoretically fragmented and could give seeming
comfort to political conservatives, Marxists and all stops in between. There was no
longer a simple answer to the question ‘what is psychoanalysis?’; neither was there any
consensus on its actual or preferred role in modern developed societies. Its lengthy fee-
paying norms made it elitist and individualistic; but its potential disruption of bourgeois
ideology still appealed to the radical left.
The uneven hybrid of psychoanalysis and Marxism, developed either side of the Second
World War, was to have a major impact on discussions of the authoritarian personality, the
rise of fascism, capitalist alienation and cultural production. This gave rise to the Frankfurt
School and its brand of critical and socially sensitive hermeneutics, which is acknowledged
favourably in the critical realist texts noted earlier. Given the political roots of critical
realism and the shared concern with inner reality, outer reality and the relationship
between them, this common interest is not surprising. The ‘Red émigrés’ who left
Germany for the U.S.A. with the Frankfurt School were a counter to socially conservative
clinical psychoanalytical norms in their receiving host country. More conservative ‘White
 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM 9

émigrés’ moved to Britain and rejuvenated its empiricist traditions (Anderson 1968). By a
quirk of historical forces Sigmund and Anna Freud and Melanie Klein came together in
North London. And so, in that most empiricist of all places, Great Britain, international
debates were to be played out about one legacy of Continental idealism: psychoanalysis.
It was noted in the first part of the paper that there has been some engagement with
psychoanalysis from critical realism but this has not been extensive. It was also noted that
psychology more generally seems to have been of less interest to leading critical realists
than the discipline of sociology. In the other direction, maybe sociologists have been more
prone than psychologists to find use in critical realist philosophy. This might be because
sociology has tolerated non-positivist orientations, whereas psychology has been more
narrowly interested in defending itself as an empiricist project, loosening itself from the
historical ties of philosophical reflection. Whatever the reasons for this uneven disciplinary
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engagement, inner realities continue to exist and so warrant a continued interest from
critical realists.
The purpose of this paper has not been to offer a comprehensive critical realist apprai-
sal of psychoanalysis but instead to draw out an agenda for consideration in that deep and
wide task. The three main items on the agenda are as follows, with some initial comments
to begin a discussion for critical realists.

Psychoanalysis is not a unitary body of knowledge

Freud adopted the prompts of Spinoza and Nietzsche in his orientation towards inner
reality, determinism and the survival of willing subjects. However, hovering alongside –
as alternative options to underpin psychoanalysis – were phenomenology as a method
and existentialism as a philosophy, and these eventually came to dominate the method-
ology of psychoanalysis. However, this confusing mix of possibilities inevitably failed to
lead to a single form of legitimate systematic subjectivism.
To complicate matters further, some students of human action were primarily inter-
ested in forms of social determinism and the shaping of consciousness. Weber, Durkheim
and Marx (who by the way are in the indexes of the critical realist canon noted in the early
part of the paper) had their own ways of considering inner reality, which were sociological
not psychological. In particular, given the possible overlapping agenda between critical
hermeneutics and critical realism, we might want to attend to the emergence of the Frank-
furt School, with its attempt to merge the work of Freud and Marx to create a synergy with
new insights. Consciousness is a product of contingent social forces but consciousness is
also a springboard for social transformation. This is a dynamic interaction with a range of
contingent possibilities in open systems. The logic of the Frankfurt School has clear and
obvious resonances with the premises of critical realism.
The main point here is not to make an a priori claim that critical realism should endorse
or favour any of the hares set running by non-positivist attempts to deal with inner reality
but to note simply that they are not a unitary field. Moreover, even within the family resem-
blance of depth psychology, after Freud, there was not a unity. It is not logically or empiri-
cally tenable to approach the field of psychoanalysis as if it has a singular character.
Not only did Freud offer us three versions of his theory, these were picked up and
shaped quite differently by instinctualists like Klein and environmentalists like Winnicott
and Bowlby. Object-relations theory, developed by the British ‘independent’ group had
 10 D. PILGRIM

even veered heavily towards existentialism, with the work of psychoanalysts, such as
Ronald Laing and Peter Lomas, under the influence of Sartre (Laing 1960; Lomas 1994;
Sartre 1998). It was this British trend that captured the attention of Andrew Collier
noted earlier. Thus, if critical realism is to under-labour for psychoanalysis, then which
version precisely will it be working ‘for’? No matter how we might address that question,
the next matter will also need to come into play.

Epistemic and ontic fallacies explain certain controversies in

psychoanalysis
Critical realists are well-positioned to re-visit the important controversies in Freudian psy-
choanalysis. The first controversy – the abandonment of the ‘seduction theory’ (from
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phase 1 to phase 2 above) – was considered by some analysts to be a betrayal of actual

victims of child sexual abuse (Masson 1985; Miller 1984). For these writers, Freud’s original
viewpoint was not a misplaced trust in patient subjectivity, but a legitimate knowledge
claim.
The second controversy – the centrality of transference interpretations in clinical work –
once again assumed in advance that the testimonies of subjects were self-deceiving, that is,
they were defence mechanisms that distorted the reality testing by the Ego. This meant that
an authoritative hermeneutic leap was required on the part of the analyst. As noted, when
there was a conflict of opinion between the doctor and the patient, this standoff was:
… not resolved by examination of the merits of the two views but rather the physician’s auto-
cratic judgment: his view is correct and is considered ‘reality’; the patient’s view is incorrect,
and is considered ‘transference’. (Szasz 1963: 432)

It seems plausible, as Szasz (1963) argues, that transference became popular at least in part
because it helped therapists to deal with uncomfortable interpersonal scenarios. That is,
now analysts could say to themselves that the patient does not ‘really’ have these
feeling for me; it is ‘really’ about others in their past.
However, these two controversies – of the seduction theory and of transference – can
be explained in terms of the epistemic and ontic fallacies. They both face the dilemma of
how the practitioner is to work out the truth of a situation, when the only evidence avail-
able is the recollections of the patient, which may or may not be truthful. In the case of the
first controversy – seduction theory – the problem was the tendency towards the episte-
mic fallacy. Here, it was initially assumed, in terms of hermeneutics, that the method of
obtaining knowledge about the patient’s world is simply to ask the patient for (or
perhaps, in Freud’s case, elicit through suggestion) an account of their childhood experi-
ence. The seduction theory had a tendency to conflate the results of epistemology (truth is
obtained by asking patients about their world) with ontology (their actual world).
However, Freud considered the prevalence of child sexual abuse reported unlikely and
so he moved towards the alternative, and abandoned what we now would describe as
an epistemic fallacy. However, by moving from the latter he then created instead an
ontic fallacy. The latter is ‘the compulsive determination of knowledge by being - for
instance, in the guise of reified facts or hypostatized ideas’ (Bhaskar 2008, 4). The ontic
fallacy allowed psychoanalysts to appear to be scientific or objective, that is, to hide
their transitive role in the development of knowledge. In the reified version of infantile
 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM 11

sexuality, the patient’s accounts of sexual abuse could now be interpreted as made up in
the mind of the child itself. That is, patients’ accounts of sexual abuse could be ‘objectively’
assumed to be (most likely) fictions reflecting infantile sexuality (hypostasis), and thus the
role of the therapist – of interpreting the accounts as being infantile sexuality – was
hidden. In other words, the being (presence of ontological accounts of abuse5) compul-
sively determined knowledge (epistemological knowledge of the presence of infantile
sexuality). This resulted in the potential to deny the ontology of the abuse itself
(Masson 1985).
Similarly, the ontic fallacy was present in the second controversy, that of transference.
Here, being (the existence of love/hatred towards the therapist) was assumed to be knowl-
edge of being (knowledge that transference was present). Thus, the ontic fallacy reduced
all conceptualizations of messy and immediate emotions, arising between people, to a
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single concept and one applied authoritatively and unaccountably, moment to

moment, by the analyst. Transference thereby seemingly exhausted all conceptualizations
of this rich complexity between people by reducing it to one concept, imposed by Freud
and then adopted gratefully by subsequent analysts. If a carpenter only has a hammer,
then everything becomes a nail. Whereas ontic fallacies typically reflect a wider cultural
doxa, in this case Freud created a sub-cultural version of doxa understood only by a
knowing few: psychoanalysts. Critical realism solves this problem because it assumes
that one cannot read off truth of deeper reality from the empirical (whether measure-
ments or patient’s accounts). Therefore, although patient’s accounts must be the starting
point, they may or may not be truthful. Only a broad explanation, that considers as much
evidence as possible, and that encompasses more of the evidence than rival accounts, can
arrive at a (potentially fallible) version of the true situation.

The prospect of an explanatory critique of psychoanalytical legacies

There are a number of intersecting factors that are likely to account for the emergence of
psychoanalysis in its revised forms during Freud’s career and its subsequent fragmenta-
tion. There was the culture of debate at the turn of the twentieth century about the
relationship between those schooled in the Naturwissenschaften (broadly natural
science) and the Geisteswissenschaften (broadly, arts and humanities). Freud’s early meet-
ings in Vienna included both groups. Within that wider discussion, he and his medical col-
leagues sought to justify psychoanalysis as a form of respectable medical practice; note
that Freud himself took a permissive view of lay analysis (Freud 1926; cf. Jones 1927).
The pressure for medical respectability was strong and could perhaps, amongst other
things, explain Freud’s move over time from a hermeneutical epistemology (epistemic
fallacy) towards a more scientistic, objective epistemology (ontic fallacy). Until the
1920s, psychoanalysis was looked upon with suspicion by most physicians and analysts
were mindful of their precarious professional legitimacy. For example, in one famous inci-
dent in 1911, at a meeting of the Neurology Section of the British Medical Association, the
whole audience stood up and walked out in protest when an advocate of psychoanalysis,
David Eder, presented his defence (Hobman 1945). The war in Europe though was soon to
provide a vehicle of legitimacy for experiments with talking therapy. Freudian ideas
(amongst others) were an important rationale on hand for the ‘shellshock doctors’ (Shep-
hard 2000; Stone 1985).
 12 D. PILGRIM

Another consideration was anti-Semitism, which shaped a Freudian culture that was
both liberal and dogmatic in turn. The lived reality of anti-Semitism and fears of its
impact in the future encouraged Freud to carefully defend both his ideas and his followers,
most of whom were Jewish. Freud’s need to establish an authoritative version of medical
psychology was in part about Jewish acceptance within medicine. Gentile doctors often
suspected that Jews were prone to forms of mental degeneracy; a view held by one of
Freud’s early influences in the 1880s, Jean-Martin Charcot.
By the 1930s over 80% of the International Psychoanalytical Association’s membership
was Jewish. Accordingly, with the rise of a form of fascism with anti-Semitism at its core,
most analysts were either expelled or left swiftly from the Continental societies. Some
remained and were victims of the Shoa. Only the gentiles Ernest Jones and Carl Jung,
from Freud’s early circle, were to retain legitimacy in central Europe during the Nazi period.
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Freud’s books were burned by the Nazis and he survived just a year, after escaping to
London in 1938. Anna Freud submitted herself for interrogation on behalf of her father
and she carried poison with her, given to her by him, in case she was tortured by the
Gestapo. And maybe as a poignant confirmation of the ubiquity of the instinctual
human destructiveness she had claimed in 1912, thirty years later Sabina Spielrein and
her two daughters were murdered by an SS death squad.
A final factor to consider in an explanatory critique of the character of Freudianism in
the early twentieth century was that of gendered practice. We should not be surprised that
psychoanalysis, in its initial form, was patriarchal in its theory and practice, given its time
and place. Feminist concerns were only just emerging and they focused mainly on econ-
omic and political demands, rather than the interpersonal political emphases of the
second wave to come in the 1970s (‘the personal is political’). The early Freudian circle
had several notable women but their contribution has not been well-acknowledged. For
example, Makari (2010) notes that the idea of Thanatos was first suggested by a British
analyst Barbara Low, who proposed a Nirvana Principle (Low 1920). Sabina Spielrein, as
already mentioned, was the first to propose the idea of a Death Wish (Launer 2014; Spiel-
rein [1912] 1994). Although Freud acknowledged the contribution of both women in
Beyond The Pleasure Principle (Freud 1920), it is his notion of Thanatos that we now remem-
ber, not their innovative claims.6

Conclusion
This paper began by noting the relative absence of key critical realist texts with psychology
(especially when compared to sociology). It moved to examining psychoanalysis and its rel-
evance for critical realist work to date. The core of the article focused on what we understand
by ‘revisionism’ in relation to psychoanalysis, and attempted to overcome an absence in the
critical realist corpus, of the acknowledgment of the complex, fragmented, controversy-
ridden nature of Freudian scholarship. Relatedly, I pointed out that critical realists must
be cautious in the use of Freud and his contemporaries because certain legacies of the
times in which they lived are evident in their work, such as sexism. It is important, when
making use of their work, for critical realists to distance themselves from these legacies. I
then briefly explored how critical realism, with its concept of epistemic/ontic fallacies and
explanatory critique, could help to make sense of some of the controversies in psychoana-
lysis. Thus, I explained how critical realism can under-labour for psychoanalysis itself,
 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM 13

potentially freeing it from its empiricist underpinnings. I also argued that some Freudian-
inspired work seems particularly relevant to critical realists. This includes the work of the
Frankfurt School, particularly Eric Fromm (for critical realists interested in human emancipa-
tion at the level of social structures) and the work of Carl Jung (for critical realists interested
in human emancipation at the level of the psyche and in terms of psycho-spirituality).

Notes
1. Archer’s reconciliation of Catholic theology and critical realist philosophy might account for
her eschewing a full engagement with Freud’s atheistic theory and his cynicism about religion.
Freud (1932) noted that: ‘Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it
falls in with our instinctual desires.’
2. For Freud (1895) a compromise formation reflected a partial satisfaction of an inner drive and
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the requirements of reality. It fully satisfied neither instinctual expression nor a full acceptance
of reality. He and other analysts variously described it as a defence, a symptom or even a tran-
sient waking aspect of consciousness (such as a day dream or comforting fantasy).
3. i.e. ‘There Is No Alternative’; Bhaskar thus adopts ‘compromise formation’ as one vehicle to
understand ideology, which has both conscious and unconscious aspects to it.
4. A caution here, though, is that Jung has been accused of racial prejudice against Jewish
people, although there is some contention over this claim, since it is also acknowledged
that Jung demonstrated many acts of kindness towards Jews (Fromm 2005; Maidenbaum
2012; Noll 1997).
5. In critical realism, both the abuse itself, and accounts of abuse, have ontological status.
6. See Launer (2014): Spielrein went on to work with Piaget and then in Russia both Luria and
Vygotsky. Her intellectual brilliance was largely suppressed by the early psychoanalytical patri-
archs. Today in popular accounts she is remembered as the mistress of Carl Jung. Such a view
is offered in the film A Dangerous Method directed by David Cronenberg in 2011, with Keira
Knightley playing Spielrein reduced to an alluring neurotic sex object.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
David Pilgrim is Honorary Professor of Health and Social Policy at the University of Liverpool and
Visiting Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Southampton. His recent books include Under-
standing Mental Health: A Critical Realist Exploration (Routledge, 2015) and Child Sexual Abuse: Moral
Panic or State of Denial? (Routledge: 2017). He is currently Chair of the History and Philosophy Section
of the British Psychological Society.

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