Paul Roazen (1936 to 2005) was a political scientist who became a leading historian of psychoanalysis. I first read this history of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement back in the early 1990s when it was only 15 or so years old. Now it’s getting on for 50 years old and, as I set off to read it again, I wondered about its value and relevance. Hasn’t it been superseded by more recent accounts with more modern perspectives?

Interviews

But, as I read on I discovered that this book has one really unique and enduring selling point which keeps it relevant. In 1964 Roazen set out to interview as many people as possible who had had direct experience and knowledge of Sigmund Freud. He managed to interview over 70 people who knew Freud personally; 40 or so who had taken part in the early movement or had a professional interest in its history; 25 of Freud’s actual patients; Freud’s sister-in-law, two daughters-in-law and three of Freud’s children.

(Roazen gives a full list of all those interviewed in an appendix. He also gives an extensive account of his interviewing methodology in the opening chapter.)

So even though this book is almost 50 years old, and the project itself began almost 60 years ago, the number and range of people he interviewed makes the book itself a unique historical record. While he was doing his research a steady stream of the interviewees, many in their 70s or 80s, passed away, slowly converting the book into a unique source of opinions from people who were patients of, trained under, or were directly related to Freud.

Having established his methodology, Roazen goes on to compare himself with the leading Freud biography of his day. From 1953 to 1957 Freud’s most loyal English disciple, Ernest Jones, wrote his epic three-volume biography of Freud. In this, as in all his other assessments and judgements, Roazen gives the impression of being thorough and balanced and fair. His view is that Jones was immensely thorough but, at many points, erred on the side of caution and discretion, not least to please Freud’s daughter Anna who, as early as the 1920s, had emerged as Freud’s heir and keeper of the flame and was to live on, protecting her father’s archive and reputation, until 1982.

So Roazen’s aim was to go beyond Jones, not by doing more work in the Freud archives (although he did gain unique access to the archive, as well as to the papers Jones acquired in researching his biography); but by using the method outlined above, by undertaking the most comprehensive possible set of interviews with people who knew Freud.

Context

This means that the book has much more context than a straight biography, in at least three distinct ways.

1. The followers

The most obvious way is indicated in the title of the book, which declares that it will treat Freud’s followers as thoroughly as the master. Hence, after spending 200 pages retelling the story of Freud’s early life, family, student days, tentative steps as a medical researcher, then covering the breakthrough into the invention of psychoanalysis and his development of it up to about 1910 – Roazen then devotes the remainder of this long book to a series of lengthy, in-depth chapters about ‘the followers’. These are:

• Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel (pages 187 to 233)
• Jung (pages 235 to 300)
• the followers who remained ‘loyal’, being Victor Tausk, Lou-Andreas-Salomé, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, JJ Putnam, HW Frink, AA Brill (pages 304 to 386)
• another rebel, Otto Rank (pages 389 to 413)
• a chapter devoted to women followers: Ruth Mack Brunswick, Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein (pages 415 to 478)
• a short section about Erikson and Hartmann (pages 499 to 505)

All this before finally returning to the man himself in the final chapter to describe Freud’s decline, flight to England, and death. Well over half the book’s 520 or so pages of text are devoted to ‘the followers’.

2. Using the interview material

Early on, when dealing with Freud’s parents and birth and boyhood and so on, all the interview material Roazen goes to some trouble to explain right at the start of the book, isn’t used very much. Even when we get to the time Freud spent in Paris studying under Jean-Martin Charcot (October 1885 to January 1886), or his ten-year collaboration studying the origins of neuroses with Josef Breuer (1890 to 1900), or his intense correspondence with sounding board Wilhelm Fliess (1887 to 1904) – Roazen gives some quotes and opinions from his interview material but not enough to change the already established stories.

The benefit of the interview project really kicks in when Roazen starts to explain the theory and practice of psychoanalytical therapy itself, the famous talking cure. This is because he now quotes extensively from many of the actual patients Freud treated, and so you he starts to depart from all the official, stiff and often pompous descriptions which Freud and his followers gave in their writings, and depicts actual practice which is far more irregular, ad hoc, unpredictable than you would have imagined. Suddenly the narrative becomes really gripping, and really human. Roazen’s interviewees’ testimonies build up a vivid picture of a flawed and deeply complicated person.

This account feeds off in two directions. It links up with the idea of the ‘followers’ because many of the patients not only describe their therapy with Freud himself, but were farmed out to what, by the 1920s, had become a sizeable number of disciples in what was now an international Psychoanalytical Movement. My point being you don’t have to wait till the later chapters to hear about the followers, you begin to get a sense of which patients Freud assigned to which of his followers, and why, and how they fared, and sometimes the conversations which went on between, say Ferenczi or Deutsch, about a patient he’d given them.

There’s a fascinating section about how long an analysis should last, with a wild variation, from one or two months to 3 or 4 or 5 years, with some patients requiring top-ups for the rest of their lives (p.145). He even admitted, on a rare occasion, that analysis could in fact, last a lifetime (p.146).

It’s here, about page 140, that the book suddenly opens up and starts giving you all kinds of insights and information you don’t get from a standard biography.

If Freud allowed himself privileges which were not for younger and more inexperienced analysts, it was because he was above all an investigator and would try almost anything once. (p.139)

Suddenly, you start seeing Freud in the wider context of the broad Psychoanalytic Movement, at first regarding treatment of patients, then other issues, and this prepares you for what’s coming up, which is the major disagreements which caused the schisms.

3. The American context

Lastly, Roazen is an American academic living on the East Coast familiar with New York and New York psychoanalysts. So a thread running through the book (once it gets warmed up about page 140) is continual comparisons between Freud’s official writings and the (sometimes wild variation in his actual) therapeutic practice on the one hand – and the staid, dull, conformist practice of the American psychoanalysts Roazen appears to know or writes confidently about.

In a nutshell, the early psychoanalytic movement included quite a few madly inventive, not to say screwed-up, individuals who rang all possible changes on Freud’s original ideas, from modifying them, to introducing new concepts, to rejecting the entire thing and walking away to set up their own movements (Adler, Jung, Rank).

But when the founding fathers and mothers fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis and then the Second World War, they found themselves in a completely different culture, far less anarchic and individualistic, far more intensely capitalist and professionalised than the old world. And so the next generation of analysts, American-born, tended to be much more professional and regular and strict and boring.

Psychoanalysis grew so fast as a movement that it has sometimes oversold itself as therapy; Americans in particular have been guilty of this. (p.186)

This decline was part of the general disappointment which came to characterise the movement, and which Roazen mentions again and again:

Psychoanalysis began with the bold hope of freeing us from mental conflicts. Its history, however, records a series of retreats in its claims for therapeutic efficacy. Originally Freud proposed to apply depth psychology to all the human sciences. But by now psychoanalysts are largely content to restrict their profession to a medical specialty. Whereas Freud and his immediate followers were radical in their expectations and their promises, and considered themselves at odds with conventional society, success has now bred a very different group of psychoanalysts … Psychoanalysis as a field is now incapable of attracting people as original and, it should be said, as undisciplined as those who joined it half a century ago. (p.32)

Compare with the repeated criticism of contemporary (1975) New York analysts for being cold and distant (p.147). But the real criticism of American psychoanalysis is that it lost its theoretical energy, its radical charge, and became just one depth therapy among many others (p.388).

(Compare with Helene Deutsch’s disappointment, in later life, at the relative failure of analysis as a therapy, p.465.)

A lot later, Roazen summarises that the trend in American psychoanalysis has been towards emphasising the ego and the healthy-minded aspects of Freud’s work. It ‘hinges on Heinz Hartmann’s concept of the “autonomous” ego to resist regressions’ (p.473)

Recap

To recap, then, this is far superior to a standard biography because it a) quite quickly places Freud amid the burgeoning, squabbling world of his followers; b) Roazen’s unique interview material provides amazing insights into the actual practice of therapy in the 1920s and 30s, as well as the complex network of therapists and patients which surrounded the great man; and c) Roazen is viewing the whole thing from 30 or so years later, when the initial, explosive creativity of the movement has fizzled out (in America, anyway) into professional conformity. It went from being a radical revolution to a conservative profession. Freud unhappily anticipated this and tried to prevent it:

‘Because of the rarity of such a combination of qualities as are needed to form the true master of mental healing by the psychoanalytic method, psychoanalysis should always remain a vocation, a mission, and should never become (as unhappily it often does today) a mere occupation or business.’ (Freud quoted on page 143)

Topics

Rather than summarise the whole book, I’ll highlight interesting topics.

The roles of Charcot and Breuer

Charcot discovered that by implanting an idea into the unconscious mind, via hypnotism, he could trigger hysterical symptoms in a patient.

Breuer discovered that if you extracted a pathological idea from the unconscious by making it conscious, then a pathological symptom disappeared.

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish invention or profession?

Personally, I think it’s obvious that psychoanalysis was a Jewish invention, something to do with:

• close scrutiny of the self
• a Talmudic attention to texts and words for hidden meanings
• the outsiderness of Jews in antisemitic central Europe made it easier for them to take unorthodox risks
• a certain type of neurotic intensity which seems to be part of Jewish culture (this may be wrong, but my views are based on the novels of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and the movies of Woody Allen, all of which tend to ridicule goyim for being so much simpler, cruder and less obsessively reflective than Jews)

But because its founder and earliest adherents were all Jewish doesn’t make it a ‘Jewish science’. Obviously, its teachings have been taken up and developed by plenty of non-Jews and it works as a therapy for all kinds of people. In the same way that soul music is indisputably the invention of Black people, comes out of black social and musical culture, but can be enjoyed by anyone and has led plenty of white people to develop their own variations.

For what it’s worth, here are some of Roazen’s references to Jews and Jewishness in the book:

• Freud could be suspicious of non-Jews. (p.36)
• A Viennese Jewish analyst, Hanns Sachs, on moving to America and treating more gentile patients than he had in Europe, was worried how he could continue to analyse without Jewish stories. (p.42)
• Freud remained sensitive to antisemitism and wary of all gentiles. He believed that basically there was no-one who was not antisemitic. (p.49)
• To accomplish a great intellectual (rather than military) achievement was not only far more in accord with Jewish culture but was also in itself enough to establish the superiority of the Jewish spirit over the philistine Gentile world. (p.55)
• Freud founded a great movement by which, in a sense, he sought to undermine Gentile values. (p.55)
• As a Jew, Freud felt keenly the need for the help of the Gentile Jung. The Viennese psychoanalytic group was made up almost entirely of Jews, and Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be something more than a Jewish sect. (p.238)
• ‘It is really easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas, for in the first place you are completely independent, and then you are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship, while he as a Christian and a pastor’s son finds his way to me only against great inner resistances. His association with us is the more valuable for that. I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair.’ Freud writing to Abraham (quoted page 239)
• As a Jew trying to subvert and overcome Christian standards of morality, Freud had to break out of the constricting confines of Jewish circles in Vienna. (p.239)
• Others in the movement regarded Freud’s reliance on Jung as currying favour with the Gentile world. (p.259)
• Freud as a Jew sought Jung for the sake of breaking out of the constricting milieu of Viennese Jewry. (p.261)
• In Freud’s movement Ernest Jones stood out as one of the few notable Gentiles. (p.347)
• [Freud was] a master of Jewish anecdotes. (p.405)
• Like Jung, [Heinz] Hartmann represented the world of academic psychiatry and was the Gentile Freud could rely on to keep analysis from being a completely Jewish affair. (p.505)

Why did psychoanalysis take off so quickly in America?

Roazen lists possible reasons:

• core aspects of American culture – optimism and belief in individualism – chimed with a therapy which promised that the individual can cure themselves, through their own efforts
• a child-centred culture liked the idea that all problems can be traced to childhood traumas or, to put it another way, we can develop new types of education to prevent those traumas ever taking place
• a childish culture took to the idea of idealising child-like spontaneity over stifling ‘society’
• America contained many rich people, specially in New York where the fleeing analysts arrived; before they knew it, they were treating the neuroses of the very, very rich
• the rich like fashions and fads; psychoanalysis became steadily more and more fashionable in the 1920s and 30s
• America, as a young nation, had a young unformed, malleable culture which this ‘radical’ new therapy could penetrate more easily than in hidebound European societies
• America is a nation of immigrants who must carve out their own identities – psychoanalysis promises to help you do that, get in touch with your inner child, work through your problems, become successful etc
• America, unlike France, Germany, Britain, lacked a psychiatric tradition of their own, so they, in effect, imported one and adopted it

In 1921 Freud had nine patients in analysis: 6 were new, of which 5 were Americans (p.145). By 1928 the majority of Freud’s patients were Americans (p.137).

American analysts in particular tended to be more orthodox than Freud, since European analysts were likely to have more regular contact with him. (p.142)

Later, discussing the influence of Putnam, Frink and Brill in America, Roazen suggests the US has an odd schizophrenia because its public rhetoric is all about individualism and self expression and yet in many ways it’s a deeply conformist society (shaped, although he doesn’t say this, by the all-pervasive effect of consumer capitalism).

American psychoanalysis quickly became professionalised, and well paid, talking among themselves the rhetoric of rebellion and radicalism, but in practice helping the mentally ill fit better into their society’s needs.

Although Freud loathed America…

Freud visited America along with Jung in 1909. He was quietly appalled at the lack of manners and ceremony surrounding, for example, barbecues, the lack of culture, the frenetic pace of life. Throughout the 1910s and 20s Freud’s dislike of America steadily grew. He called America ‘a gigantic mistake’. He denied ‘hating’ America, merely ‘regretted’ it.

America offended Freud ‘by its deference to numerical superiority, its belief in statistics, and its worship of brash wealth’. He called Americans ‘savages (p.406).

Roazen shrewdly points out this was partly due to Freud’s aversion to feeling dependent and, by the later 1920s, most of his patients were American i.e. he had become financially dependent on the Yankee dollar (p.382 ff.) Well into the 1930s his American patients paid Freud $20 an hour (p.419).

Is psychoanalysis based around Freud’s own personality?

Yes and no. If you’re not expecting it, it comes as a surprise to read Freud and discover just how much he refers to his own experiences and dreams and intuitions on every page. His collected writings are more like literary works than scientific papers, and literary works which are, moreover, continually, insistently autobiographical. As he himself wrote in his Autobiographical Study:

Two themes run through these pages: the story of my life and the history of psychoanalysis. They are intimately interwoven. (quoted p.507)

Or as Roazen puts it:

It would be impossible to overestimate how much of himself Freud put into his work. (p.103)

His founding text, the Interpretation of Dreams, is one of the most autobiographical works ever written, the general principles he writes about being extrapolated from an apparently endless stream of Freud’s own dreams – many, many dreams from other sources, historical, from literature, from patients or friends; buy many of Freud’s own personal ones, too. And this feels like a fundamentally literary strategy:

As with other great writers, it required a rich self to enable him to recreate a version of human experience out of his autobiography. (p.44)

Freud was aware this was a very weak spot for his theory, and touchy about suggestions that the entire theory was a huge extrapolation of his personal neuroses (p.150), so there’s weight to the attack.

But you can’t dismiss psychoanalysis as being the extrapolation of one man’s personality for two obvious reasons: one, Freud developed and evolved his ideas, quite drastically, over the 40 years he wrote on the subject; sure, these were based on his own changing beliefs, but they also reflected changes in the evidence: some the result of long analyses over decades with scores or patients; some from the evidence of other analysts in the growing movement; but the biggest change coming as a result of the First World War and the epidemic of shell shock it created.

And the second rebuttal is the way psychoanalysis was taken up and developed and fine-tuned by plenty of other people, initially in the shadow of Freud (from which some rebelled), but then, in the next generation, among analysts who’d never met him and took his teachings in whole new directions.

Especially the women analysts. Yes, you can critique some aspects of the original teachings as reflecting his personality and obsession, for example, his persistent denigration of women:

• He thought that shame was a specifically feminine trait (p.49)
• Freud tended in an old-fashioned manner to idealise and yet also denigrate women…In Freud’s world women are treated as objects, rarely as subjects. (p.67)

And the way his entire model of the mind privileged the experience and development of boys and men, and placed the son’s alleged struggle with his father (the Oedipus complex, p.119) dead centre of his first model of the mind. Yes, his theory had far less to say about girls and women, and when it did, was of a consistently insulting nature:

Freud’s resistance to religious ideas as akin to his more general rejection of dependence and passivity, which he associated with femininity. (p.260)

But his followers a) included leading women figures, such as Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein  and b) they developed, rejected, improved and changed his teachings in all sorts of ways, especially regarding the role of mothers in the child’s development (see below).

Above all, psychoanalysis survived, as a theory and a practice, down to the present day, which it could never have done if it had just been an elaboration of just one man’s idiosyncrasies.

Psychoanalysis eventually became something quite different from Freud personally. As the movement expanded, changes were introduced into psychoanalytic thinking which would have been utterly alien to Freud himself. Working with the method he gave them, later investigators revised some of his most cherished positions. (p.46)

Prophet of doom

An interesting aspect which ties together the issues of Freud personality and success in America was his strong personal sense that civilisation was doomed (p.53). He was a pessimistic old so-and-so. He took a ‘characteristically harsh view of human nature’ (p.162).

Freud was inclined to think that not much could help improve mankind. (p.311)

Personally, I find his gloomy pessimism about human nature appealing about his work – as opposed to the happy, smiley, religiosity of Jung, which I find off-putting.

But there are two points: in his gloomy sense that civilisation was going down the tubes, Freud was very much of his time and place. Central European thinkers had been lamenting The End of Western Civilisation since the 1890s, a process crystallised in Oswald Spengler’s famous book, ‘The Decline of the West’ (1918). Freud’s own, late work, ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, published in 1930, took its place in this tradition of hand-wringing lament.

But it goes to show how little his personal opinions were stamped onto psychoanalysis that, in America, this gloomy old European defeatism was completely rejected in favour of the shiny can-do positivism mentioned above.

How important was the practice of psychotherapy to Freud?

The answer which emerges very clearly is ‘not very much’. Roazen’s account quotes sometimes shocking passages from Freud’s own letters to highlight two running themes:

1. Freud quite frequently refers to his patients as scum and riff-raff.

• ‘I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash…’ (quoted p.161)
• ‘In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.’ (quoted p.161)

2. Freud thought psychoanalysis could only really work with patients who were a) mature and b) well educated enough for the ego to be able to make sense of the revelations therapy throws up (p.152); he preferred patients from ‘the more educated classes’ (p.153). In fact he went so far as stating that the ‘optimum conditions for psychoanalysis exist where it is not needed – among the healthy’ (p.175). He hoped for far more than palliating the anxieties of the well-off.

• He had in mind something more cultured and more elevated than the treatment of psychotics; he wanted people to be higher and better. (p.158)
• He demanded that people grow up; he expected more of mankind. (p.178)

And anyway: ‘No one has ever been fully satisfied with therapeutic results, analytic or otherwise’ (p.363).

3. He increasingly thought the hard labour of spending years trying to help people with obstinate mental problems was for ‘the theoretical yield’. In other words, he thought treating patients was only really justified by the new theoretical insights it could give you.

Freud the wordsmith

It’s extremely obvious that Freud was one of the great writers of the 20th century, that he based his theory and practice on a very close attention to words (in free association, slips of the tongue, as they transmuted into images in dreams, the acting out of transference in the analytical situation) and spread his teachings very successfully through his charming and persuasive writings.

An interesting light is shed by the fact that he didn’t like music because there are no words for the rational mind to latch onto.

• Of all the arts music is perhaps closest to the id, and without a guide from the more rational part of his mind Freud felt uneasy. Unable to analyse the effects of music on himself, Freud could not enjoy it. (p.57)
• ‘Music did not interest him because he regarded it as an unintelligible language.’ (Edward Hitschmann, quoted p.270)
• ‘I feel no need for a higher moral synthesis in the same way that I have no ear for music.’ (Freud, quoted p.377)

The limits of psychoanalysis

Among the most interesting passages in the book is Roazen’s discussion of whether psychoanalysis can help mental illness beyond mild neurosis. Can it help with the more severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic-depression, multiple personality disorder? Short answer: No.

Tellingly, Roazen digresses from Freud to point out that psychiatry as a profession still (well, in 1975) had no hard and fast method of distinguishing between neurosis and psychosis, and only a poor understanding of the combined organic and psychological causes of severe mental illness; and a limited range of treatments, which often don’t really work.

That is the biggest context of all. Psychoanalysis evolved into a system of hermeneutics or interpretation – of signs, symbols, literature, art, film etc – in the essentially well. That’s where it has ended up having the longest life and biggest significance.

In the real world of psychology, it takes its place among a range of other talking therapies, strategies and medical treatment, of mild disorders such as neuroses and depression. It has turned out not to be the complete revolution in psychiatry which Freud and the early disciples hoped for.

Transference

The key criterion for deciding whether a patient was treatable was whether they could establish transference to the analyst. Yes, and the patient can project stifled feelings and act out smothered wishes onto the figure of the analyst and both can use these to dig down and unearth the roots of the neurosis. But if no transference can be established, no treatment is possible (p.165).

Darwin

Paul Robinson implies that describing Freud’s theory as an outcrop of Darwin’s theory of evolution was errant or scandalous, but that’s how I’ve always approached Freud. If there is no God, no plan, no teleology, if we have evolved by accident through a vast series of untold contingencies, if we are just another type of animal, but admittedly with this astonishing ability of reflection and thought – how would this ‘thought’ develop in the infant, how would its developmental stages linger in adult thinking; what is thinking? I like Freud because he situates us firmly in the animal kingdom where we belong, with no special dispensation.

It may be difficult for many of us to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I…cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. (p.261)

Its main legacy

Psychoanalysis has left a legacy too pervasive on twentieth century culture to be measured. But Roazen has a very simple paragraph which says that Freud’s greatest and indisputable discovery in psychology is the persistence of infantile remnants in the adult mind, to a greater extent and of a vastly more complex nature than anyone had ever realised before. (Mind you, he has Erik Erikson saying a sentence later that Freud’s ‘greatest contribution’ was the importance of psychosexuality, p.200).

Looked at another way, Freud’s main legacy is the widespread availability of depth psychological therapy in every country in the world. The basic idea that psychological problems and symptoms in any of us may have their roots in early infant experiences and that these can be recovered, remembered and resolved, may not be the universally recommended treatment of mental ailments, but is universally accepted as at least one of the main therapeutic strategies.

Titbits

Height

Freud was only just about five foot seven in height, whereas Jung, 19 years younger, was a strapping six foot two. If we adopt a heightist theory of history, trouble was inevitable.

The schism with Jung

After seven years of correspondence, during which Freud had adopted Jung as the Crown Prince of psychoanalysis, their relationship ended. On a lecture tour of America in 1912 Jung made his differences from Freud quite clear and throughout 1913 they argued, leading up to the Psychoanalytic Congress of September 1913 where battle lines were decisively drawn. Jung rejected the primacy of sexuality. He rejected the notion that children were in any sense sexual. He had the insight that the fact that so many patients in analysis brought up infantile sexual memories was in fact a screening device, a projection back into earliest memory, of problems the patient was facing in the present. That psychoanalysis presented many patients with the easy option of dwelling endlessly on the past rather than confront the difficult future. According to Roazen this insight is now generally accepted among contemporary psychoanalysts. In 1913 Jung delivered his paper announcing his concepts of introversion and extroversion, with Freudian psychoanalysis seen as merely a subset of the former.

He was, in short, developing an entirely different model of the psyche and Freud felt he had to make an absolute break in order to protect the integrity of his model and his movement.

Jung thought he was making common-sense adaptations to the evidence continually being thrown up by actual treatment of patient. But Freud thought the sexuality of children was the absolute bedrock of his theory and saw in Jung the same pattern he’d seen in Adler and, indeed, in most western medicine and psychiatry, which was inability to face the fact of childhood sexuality which was itself based on repression among the deniers. In a typically Freudian manoeuvre, he thought the more everyone around him denied the existence of childhood sexuality, the more true it must be.

Jung resigned his editorship of the movement’s magazine in late 1913 but hung on until April 1914 before resigning as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Freud had to see things in embattled oppositions, a dialectic; at first the conflict between conscious and unconscious, after the Great War the conflict between the Life Drive and the Death Drive. Above all Freud had a strict requirement to make everything rational and clear and understandable; anything which couldn’t be clearly explained was a neurosis which had to be brought into the light of explanation.

Jung had a different temperament: he saw unity in the human mind, which could incorporate these other elements. He thought the mystical and unexplained needed to be experienced and healing, wholing properties. Freud thought only the unhappy neurotic man has fantasies. Jung saw fantasy as an aspect of creativity, as a positive component in a healthy mind.

Freud was obsessed with the impact of the earliest infant and childhood experiences on the adult. Jung became increasingly interested in the problems of the elderly. Older people are less concerned about the vicissitudes of sexuality, but by a search for meaning in life.

Jung had much more clinical experience working with the seriously mentally ill. This opened him up to a far greater range of ideas of what therapy could consist of and what ‘well’ looked like. Freud had a far narrower view and thought therapy could only work with neuroses and obsessions, in other words with relatively minor mental illness. This was because Freud’s model relied on the patient’s ego or rational self being relatively intact. Once the repressed traumas of childhood sexuality were dragged into the light of day and accepted, the patient could be relied on to integrate these insights and get on with life.

Whereas Jung treated patients whose egos were splintered and needed help just getting out of bed or getting dressed. So his model of therapy was far more interventionist. Freud advocated an aloof detachment, giving rise to a tradition of cold and antiseptic therapists. Jung thought therapy should more like a collaboration and a journey.

• ‘The therapist is no longer the agent of treatment but a fellow participant in a process of individual development.’ (p.282)
• ‘The psychotherapist should be absolutely clear in his own mind that the psychological treatment of the sick is a relationship in which the doctor is involved quite as much as the patient.’ (p.283)

Mind you Jung was a bigot, too. He was notoriously intolerant of male homosexuality. And he thought university education had a disastrous impact on women’s personalities (p.278).

Science

It was very characteristic of Freud not to define ‘science’ in terms of methodology, hypotheses, experiments and data, but solely in terms of his own model of the mind. Thus:

To Freud, the essence of science was that it represented ‘the most complete renunciation of the pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable.’ (p.245)

But Roazen points out that this metaphor is immensely autobiographical. It simply described Freud’s personality – tight-lipped, stoical, immensely self-contained, aloof. An entirely subjective autobiographical model which every other analyst and therapist has been free to ignore, not least Jung with his emphasis on a more humane therapeutic engagement.

According to Roazen, it was in the 1920s that Freud moved away the often literary basis of his writings in a bid to emphasise the scientific nature of psychoanalysis.

Superstition

Superstition derives from suppressed hostile and cruel impulses. Superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble; and a person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without. (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901.)

Totem and Taboo

Roazen rubbishes Totem and Taboo as do all modern commentators. Freud projected his fairy tale ‘discovery’ of the Oedipus Complex back onto ‘primitive’ societies claiming that every society passed through the same developmental phase (just as he insisted all toddlers do), namely when the horde is dominated by a great Father who hogs all the nubile women, the young generation of men (all his sons) band together to kill and eat him, then are overcome with guilt and so institute a new religion around a great sacrificed god alongside complex taboos regarding incest and exogamy.

No anthropologist has ever found any evidence to support this story which amounts to a fairy tale, a projection by Freud of his pet developmental theory back into an invented prehistory. Totem and Taboo is Freud’s silliest book, though it has steep competition in the equally ludicrous Moses and Monotheism (Freud had the grace to describe Totem as a ‘novel’, though it is really the fantastical farrago of a very old man working out his obsessions in public) (p.301).

Famous analysands

‘Analysand’ means ‘someone undergoing psychoanalysis’. The most famous analysands would include composer Gustav Mahler, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and novelist Herman Broch.

Ego psychology

Freud’s emphasis was on decoding the repressed wishes of the unconscious via dreams, slips and free association. His focus was on the unconscious and repressed drives. From the 1930s the younger generation of analysts began to switch the focus to the conscious mind, the ego, specifically to understand the mechanisms of coping and defence which the ego deployed.

In 1936 Freud’s daughter, Anna, who had followed him into analysis, published ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, a study of the ‘ways and means by which the ego wards off depression, displeasure and anxiety’. It became a founding work of ego psychology. By the 1950s this focus on ego psychology had become the main stream of psychoanalysis.

Two paradoxes

Calvinism, Marxism and Psychoanalysis are all deterministic ideologies, propounding iron laws of causation, and yet all relied very heavily on the achievements of zealous and energetic individuals (p.350).

Marx loathed Russia, its backwardness and brutality, and yet it was in Russia, of all the European countries, that his followers seized power and he was set up as a god. Similarly, Freud came to deeply loathe America and all it stood for (fake egalitarianism, lack of culture, surplus money) and yet it was in the single nation he hated most that Freud’s invention became most successful and lucrative (p.384).

A fine figure

Ernest Jones, the only Gentile in Freud’s close circle, a feisty defender of the Master, and very energetic organiser, the man who wrote the magisterial three-volume biography of Freud – was also an excellent figure skater and actually wrote a book about figure skating. (p.353)

Freud’s followers

• Paul Federn (1871 to 1950)
• Edward Hitschmann (1871 to 1957)
• Victor Tausk (1879 to 1919) suicide after Freud told Helene Deutsch to stop analysing him
• Lou Andreas-Salome (1861 to 1937)
• Hanns Sachs (1881 to 1947)
• Theodor Reik (1888 to 1969)
• Herman Nunberg (1883 to 1970)
• Karl Abraham (1877 to 1925) solid, reliable
• Max Eitingon (1881 to 1943) Russian with enough private fortune to fund the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute; analysed by Freud on evening strolls
• Georg Groddeck (1866 to 1934) disorganised, Freud stole the word das Es for the unconscious, Groddeck believed organic illnesses were the product of thwarted desires, he specialised in applying psychoanalysis to organically sick patients
• Paul Schilder (1886 to 1940) as professor of psychiatry at University of Vienna did more than any other man to promote psychoanalysis
• Herbert Silberer (1882 to 1923) suicide
• Ernest Jones (1879 to 1958)
• Sandor Ferenczi (1873 to 1933) delightful, popular; Freud wrote more letters to Ferenczi than anyone else (2,500); diverged from Freud in later years by thinking patients needed the parenting and motherly love they often lacked in childhood
• James Jackson Putnam (1846 to 1918) a Gentile, professor at Harvard and early American adopter of psychoanalysis; disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on conflict and the dark side of the unconscious
• Horace W. Frink (1883 to 1935) a Gentile, had 2 analyses with Freud but then suffered a complete mental breakdown
• Abraham A. Brill (1884 to 1948) by end of the Great War the acknowledged head of psychoanalysis in America (p.380)
• Sandor Rado (1890 to 1972) brilliant pupil who was sent to direct training at the New York Institute but the faithful felt he had deviated in some of his books and led attacks which ended in him being expelled
• Franz Alexander (1891 to 1964)
• Erich Fromm (1900 to 1980) politically committed (Marxist) Fromm tried to integrate psychoanalysis with contemporary social thought. Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought which is outside the scope of Roazen’s book
• Erik Erikson (1902 to 1994) an intuitive child analyst with no medical or university training, Erikson was spotted and encouraged to become an analyst by Anna Freud. He found the atmosphere of the Vienna group stifling; after he fled the Nazis to America, Erikson worked on the formation of identity, postulating a sequence of identities which the developing must create in order to achieve ‘ego strength. Erikson coined the term ‘identity crisis’

Otto Rank

Otto Rank (1884 to 1939) from a very lowly background, was mentored and supported by Freud, became his indispensable secretary, expert on mythology, wrote The Myth of the Birth of the Hero which, in offering psychoanalytic interpretations of literature, was right up Freud’s street.

When the breach came it was about the role of the mother, and the aims of therapy. Up till the 1920s Freud’s theory focused almost entirely on the role of the father, specifically the boy child’s resentment and efforts to overthrow him, named the Oedipus complex. Mothers existed, but as the source of the succouring breasts or as objects of infantile sexual fantasy, rarely for themselves.

Rank greatly expanded the importance of the mother, the closeness of the mother-infant bond, and the importance of separation anxiety. Rank then sought the deep origin of that anxiety in the experience of the trauma of being born, a horrifying experience laid down in the unconscious and triggered by all kinds of later experiences. Therefore, he developed the idea that the patient relive the experience of being born; or at least act out the anxieties and terrors it gave rise to.

This was in flat contradiction to Freud’s notion that therapy be an entirely rational process whereby infantile issues were dragged into the light of day and calmly examined by the detached, clinical adult. Freud’s therapy was all about intellectual insight. Rank was suggesting emotional release. Insight was not enough; the patient needed active emotional support (something Jung had suggested before the war). All this was expressed in his 1924 book, The Trauma of Birth.

Wilhelm Reich (1897 to 1957)

Reich was one of the most extreme and radical analysts and Freud disliked him from the start. Where Freud thought therapy was predominantly about memory i.e. dredging up specific repressed memories which lay behind specific neurotic symptoms, Reich (like Jung and Adler) thought therapy should address the whole person.

He took a literalistic definition of sexuality as genital gratification, which Freud thought a massive step backwards to the traditional view of sex which his theory of libido was meant to expand and deepen. Reich thought mental illness was caused by sexual repression and therefore he promoted free expression of sexuality. In the 1960s this fed into the notion of ‘free love’ i.e. having sex whenever you wanted with whoever you fancied, leaving no sexual urge unexpressed.

Reich thought the family was the institution whereby each generation’s sexuality was defined, controlled, monitored and repressed and so he recommended abolishing the nuclear family, and having children raised by communities of adults (as later practiced in Israeli kibbutzim).

Finally, he was a Marxist, a rare political radical among the bourgeois analysts, who linked the overthrow of bourgeois society and taking ownership of the means of production, as cognate with overthrowing the nuclear family so that every individual could take ownership of their own sexuality.

In the late 1920s Reich went on a lecture tour of Bolshevik Russia where he claimed that without a full sexual revolution the Soviet state would degenerate into a repressive bureaucracy, the net effect of which was, amusingly, to prompt the Soviet authorities to shut down the until-then thriving Russian Psychoanalytic Society (p.493).

Reich was kicked out of the International Psychoanalytical Society in 1934. Reich moved to Norway where he carried out investigations into the nature of the orgasm (trying to measure electrical activity in the brain during sex). With the outbreak of war he fled to America.

Shortly after he arrived in New York in 1939 that Reich first said he had discovered a biological or cosmic energy, an extension of Freud’s idea of the libido. He called it ‘orgone energy’ or ‘orgone radiation’, and the study of it ‘orgonomy. (Wikipedia)

His increasingly wild experiments with orgone and erratic behaviour drew the attention of the authorities and, after a sequence of legal problems, he was sent to prison in Pennsylvania where he died of heart failure in 1957.

Women psychoanalysts

The penultimate chapter, chapter 9, (pages 415 to 478), is devoted to the key women in the movement, namely:

Ruth Mack Brunswick née Blumgart (1897 to 1946)

Brunswick worked closely with Freud to flesh out his theories, subtly bringing out the importance of the mother in the development of the child, and the importance of the pre-oedipal period, especially in women, which Freud admitted he had been unable to get at because his women patients always projected memories of their fathers onto him (p.424). Brilliant theorist but Roazen depicts her as working too closely with Freud, her extended analysis with him (1922 to 1938) turning into a psychological addiction. She became addicted to painkillers and died miserably.

Anna Freud (1895 to 1982)

Freud’s youngest child, an unwanted pregnancy, ended up becoming his primary carer after he was diagnosed with jaw cancer in 1923, and then jealous protector of the family archive, letters and so on. Nowhere near as intellectually brilliant or as good a writer as her father, she nonetheless developed into a leading figure in the next generation of the movement for her pioneering work with children. For five years before she thought about becoming an analyst, she worked as a schoolteacher with small children, and this experience fed into her therapeutic practice and then theoretical writing (p.433). She set up the Anna Freud Clinic which continues to this day.

Anna said that children couldn’t be directly analysed because their chief transference remained onto their parents. Therefore the analyst had to a) develop an educative relationship with the child i.e. stand in the relationship of teacher but also b) work through the parents. Often, changing the family situation was enough to cure a child’s symptoms (p.438).

But her key theoretical work was to pioneer the new focus from the 1930s onwards on ego psychology (see above). Her most famous book, ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, listed these mechanisms: regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, denial, identification with the aggressor – all strategies to help the ego cope, manage, survive.

With Dorothy Burlingham she set up a hostel for parentless children during the Second World War and noticed that if one of the women carers succeeded in forming a mothering bond with a child, the child’s halted development could resume. The importance of mothering. During the 1950s and 60s it became more obvious that relationships with the good or bad mother played as much or a greater role in child development as with the threatening father depicted in Freud’s version of analysis.

Helene Deutsch (1884 to 1982)

Pioneer of female psychology. Published The Psychology of Women (1945). Despite her emphasis on the importance of the mother in the child’s development, many of Deutsch’s views were, echoing Freud’s sexism, surprisingly conservative, and she has come in for criticism from feminists. For example, Deutsch’s belief that a woman only becomes fully a woman by transferring her agency onto a strong man to whom she willingly becomes a dependent. She must leave the initiative to the man; she must renounce her originality, etc. Roazen cites a critique by Germaine Greer. (Roazen gives a jaw-dropping compilation of Freud’s sexist assumptions, pages 462 to 465).

She was Freud’s golden girl in the early 1920s but they had a falling out and she never regained his trust, which hurt her for the rest of the life. She played a key role in setting up and running the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but spotted the looming threat of the Nazis and emigrated to America in 1935, where she continued practicing and was held in high esteem.

Melanie Klein (1882 to 1960)

Klein was one of the next generation of women who emphasised the importance of the Mother in a child’s development, in Freudian terms focusing on ‘pre-oedipal’ layers of child development.

Freud, in his rationalist patriarchal way, had emphasised the importance of words and reason: the repressed material has to be dragged into the light of day in the form of words. The female psychoanalysts highlighted the pre-verbal communication of the really young infant.

Klein caused a lot of controversy because she moved a lot of Freud’s developmental schema much earlier, into the life of the pre-verbal baby. She sees the baby as seething with the rage and jealousies which Freud had attributed to the Oedipus complex about age 5.

Klein was a zealot. She believed that children responded to the same therapeutic environment as adults. She thought the child playing with toys as the exact equivalent of the adult’s free association with words, and both as direct channels into the unconscious. She thought every child without exception should be given analytic therapy as a prophylactic against later neurosis. Roazen calls Klein’s approach ‘crusading’ and ‘utopian’ (p.478).

In this stern inflexibility she was the opposite of Anna Freud’s more nurturing, mothering supportiveness. The differences between the two women were made explicit when they both gave papers on child psychoanalysis at a psychoanalytical congress in 1927, and remained the source of sometimes bitter enmity. Freud was prepared to leave a patient with some neuroses if they helped him or her cope. Klein was ferocious to pursue every single neurosis in order to effect a complete ‘cure’.

Freud came to disapprove of Klein as the 1920s went on but was wanted to avoid an open break as he had with the big male schismatics: partly because the big three schisms were with men he had overloaded with oedipal significance and seen as his ‘son and heir’, Crown Prince etc, whereas he never gave any female analyst the same significance; partly because Klein’s theory came from a place doubly removed from his own experience, analysing children and deep consideration of the female psyche, neither of which Freud had a feel for.

When, in 1926, Ernest Jones offered Klein a job at the British Psychoanalytic Institute in London in a bid to beef up its intellectual level, she accepted the offer, moved to London and lived there for the rest of her life. Her fierce character and intense convictions strongly influenced British psychoanalysis and Roazen speculates that the British wing might, eventually have been forced to secede from the international movement if it hadn’t been for the Nazis.

The advent of the Second World War brought a wave of Viennese analysts to London along, of course, with the Master himself and her daughter. The newcomers thought Klein’s focus on pre-oedipal experiences was yet another denial of and resistance to the centrality of the Oedipus Complex – the same crux which had forced out Jung, Adler and Rank.

This town ain’t big enough for the both of us describes the daggers drawn atmosphere that developed between the well-established Kleinians and the newly arrived, orthodox Freudians.

Reading about the way Freudian psychoanalysis developed, evolved and splintered, creating divergent heretics and sects, gives exactly the same pleasure as reading about the first few hundred years of Christian history. There are multiple levels of pleasure. One is watching the way a fundamental idea can be reinterpreted, expanded, followed to its logical conclusions in ways its founders never dreamed of – like watching a game of chess unfold, like watching the plot of a good novel develop in ways you never expected but seem logical as soon as they’re explained.

And the other pleasure is a soap opera-level enjoyment of watching very clever people fight like ferrets in a sack. Roazen’s descriptions of Ernest Jones’s political manoeuvrings are entertaining, but not as funny as his account of the way Jones’s number two in London, Edward Glover, was conducting an analysis on Klein’s daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, and used material thrown up by this to attack Klein in the name of orthodoxy and Anna.

In a phrase, these very clever, very subtle people, who liked to imagine they held the key to solving all the psychological problems of mankind, turn out to be just as underhand, devious, manipulative and vicious as a cellarful of rats.

Thus Roazen speculates the way Melanie Klein’s writings emphasise the goodness of the mother but the child’s vicious, negative emotions, its possessiveness and anger, can plausibly be mapped onto the way her own daughter, Melitta, attacked her, in writing and in public forums.

The war of words really broke out at the end of the bigger world war, in 1944 and 45. A compromise was proposed whereby two groups would have separate facilities, the B group (Anna and followers) and the B group (everyone else). Some members joined the A group, some the B group, but at least half rejected the idea of a split, and wanted peace.

These became known as the Middle Group or Independents, and it’s from their number that the most influential British theorists emerged, namely John Bowlby, Michael Balint and Donald Winnicott.

Other notable women in the movement included:

• Dorothy Burlingham, American who left her disturbed husband to move to Vienna with her four children; worked closely with Anna
• Marianne Kris
• Jeanne Lampl-de Groot
• Eva Rosenfeld
• Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth
• Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882 to 1962)

Thoughts – the widest impact

Reading this book through to the bitter end (Roazen’s apparently never-ending list of Freud’s followers eventually becomes quite exhausting) makes you realise it’s getting on for pointless to try and assess ‘the legacy of Freud’ because his biggest legacy was that he created an entire new field of human enquiry and medical practice, which has spawned scores, maybe hundreds, of followers, acolytes and heretics who have themselves gone on to develop or invent whole new sub-domains and new channels of investigation.

Without Freud an Adler, Jung, Rank or Erikson and some of his umpteen other followers might have gone into psychiatry, but many wouldn’t have because they didn’t have the strict medical training required. So Roazen’s book teaches us that alongside a consideration of Freud’s achievement in terms of his writings and theory, must go the obvious fact that just as important was his creation of such a league of followers.

And that it is often through the followers that major ideas have emerged which have percolated into popular consciousness and popular culture. The concepts of the inferiority complex, identity crisis, separation anxiety, are all products of the intellectual framework Freud created.

*****

Great men

The most dated thing about the book is that Roazen comes from a time and place where he still believes in ‘Great Men’ and ‘Great Thinkers’. Although he critiques multiple aspects of Freud’s character and theory, nonetheless his basic instinct is to place Freud firmly in the pantheon of Great Men.

• ‘Freud’s genius’ (p.13)
• ‘a revolutionary in the world of ideas’ (p.29)
• ‘Freud deserves to be a hero of our time’ (p.40)
• Jones interpreted Freud’s credulity as part of the receptivity and open-mindedness that accompanies genius. (p.108)

He carries a 1940s/50s mental model of Great Men who Made the Modern World and are Heroes of Thought, Intellectual Giants etc. I don’t know exactly when this model died off – sometime in the 1980s? – giving way to a far more complex model which, for a start, includes lots more women, but more generally opened up the world of the mind to thousands more creative thinkers, across the full range of the arts and humanities and sciences, and also opened the doors to non-white people beyond the Anglosphere – till you arrive at the jostling, thronged, progressive and often dangerous, sometimes bewildering, multicultural intellectual world we live in today.

Americanisation

The second aspect I found odd was how conventional and conservative his view of psychoanalysis is. This might partly be because he’s American. Americans are (or were) notorious for their positive, upbeat, can-do attitude. Businesslike, have-nice-a-day consumer capitalism. It’s fairly well known that most of the first generation psychoanalysts, being Jewish, fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis and settled in America, especially in New York with its large Jewish population.

In America the questing, experimental, tentative, the Middle European and often quite bleak, pessimistic tone of Freud and his first followers, refugees from the land of Kafka and Musil, was converted into a positive, upbeat, we-can-fix-you procedure for the land of Walt Disney and Oprah Winfrey. You can achieve your dreams! You can be happy and healthy! You can have it all! Just sign up here for your starter course of psychotherapy at the very reasonable price of 25 bucks an hour and we’ll have you back on your feet and back in the office in no time.

So although Roazen pays lip service to Freud as discoverer of the unconscious blah blah, along with all the other stuff about libido, repression, transference and so on, it doesn’t really worry him. He doesn’t seem to take on board what is truly revolutionary about Freud which is that he destroyed the rationale of two and a half thousand years of philosophy, theology, legal and political theory which were all based on the notion that human beings have a capacity for objective reason.

No they don’t. We are terrified animals which, in the course of our infant development, develop a set of psychic defence mechanisms to mediate between the inner world of our raging drives/desires and the cold, brutal outside world which doesn’t give a damn about us. No wonder so many people are damaged and betray odd compulsions, obsessions and anxieties. It’s a very anxious position to be in!

But deeper and more subversive than that, Freud asserts that the rational mind isn’t a shining Greek god, isn’t a gleaming repository of reason and morality, but is made out of the same dark chaotic stuff as the unconscious. The so-called ego is just bits of the unconscious which are split off by the human organism, which can’t help itself developing strategies to try and cope with the ongoing frustration of nearly all its instinctual drives and fantasies.

This is a complete, radical and devastating break with the age-old tradition that all humans contain a fragment of the divine reason in their minds, are mostly capable of rational self-interest (as the economists ridiculously claim), of rational debate and political decisions (as political theorists absurdly claim). No. We are petrified animals subject to a bewildering variety of psychic mechanisms and strategies designed first and foremost to allow us to fulfil psychic wishes and desires, albeit often sublimated into socially acceptable forms.

Thus all the social labels and categories dished out by traditional psychology, ‘neurotic’, ‘obsessive’, ‘degenerate’ and so on, are all relative. We are all on the spectrums of weird behaviour. People don’t just have quirks and anomalies which are basically additions to a reliable core of common sense and reason. There is no common sense and reason. We are all made entirely out of quirks and weirdness. Freud hoped his therapy might, a little, ameliorate and lessen the quirks and weirdnesses which afflict all of us, which humans are, in fact, made of.

Credit

Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen was published by Alfred Knopf in the USA in 1975, and by Allen Lane in the UK in 1976. References are to the 1979 Peregrine paperback edition.

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