lives. Of course, it is possible that they were peculiarly unsettled people in the first place, which explains why they were drawn to psychoanalysis; but the very least that can be said is that contact with psychoanalysis did not seem to have effected much improvement. Nor does psychoanalysis seem to have conferred wisdom or insight into wider matters: Freud was claiming as late as 1938 that his real enemy, the enemy he was really afraid of, was not the Nazis but the Catholic Church.
As for analysands, you meet some who claim that their lives were much improved by their analysis, but this is as little evidence of the truth or value of psychoanalysis as is the recent convert to Islam’s opinion of the Koran as proof of the prophethood of Mohammed. A little bit of what you fancy may do you good, but it doesn’t make it true.
In my experience, at least, analysis has at least as many harmful as good effects (I put it mildly). It turns people permanently inward and guts their language of individuality, replacing particularity by a kind of impersonal jargon. They often appear to have undergone a strange type of brainwashing. The philosopher Karl Popper accused Wittgenstein of always polishing his glasses but never looking through them; the same might be said of people who have undergone psychoanalysis. And Freud hit upon a brilliant method of keeping analysands loyal (I don’t mean that he did this deliberately): if you make a treatment long and expensive enough, people will always find that it did them at least some good, for otherwise they would have wasted their time and money, and would look foolish – even to themselves.
Recently I was sent for review a book by a woman who had been in analysis for twenty years, with four or five sessions a week, in all about four thousand. Four thousand hours of talking about oneself! Full marks for endurance, if not for choice of subject matter. Whether it did her any good is, of course, a question that cannot be answered definitively. What she would have been like without it must be a matter of fruitless speculation. The author, Barbara Taylor, is a historian who suffered no serious traumas in her life except that of her own personality and the consequences thereof. In the book she recorded some of the interchanges she had with her analyst, who seems to have been a lot more communicative if not necessarily more profound in his utterances than most orthodox analysts. I presume she must have written them down immediately after they took place:
SHE: Why [do I keep coming to the analyst]? Is it just to torture myself?
HE: Sometimes.
SHE: Why else? Why else would I keep coming here? I’m just making myself suffer more! Why else would I keep coming here?
HE: You have different reasons at different times.
SHE: What reasons?
HE: Well . . . to get revenge on your parents. To get revenge on me, their current representative.
SHE: Ah. Yes. [I have heard this so many times, it doesn’t mean anything.]
HE: And because you’re waiting for a miracle.
SHE: A miracle? [This is more interesting. Is he offering? Maybe there’s something he can do for me that he hasn’t done yet.]
HE: Yes, the miracle that will make you the baby your mother really wanted, the sort of baby she could really love, so that she would look after you properly.
SHE: Oh. That miracle. [Why is there never anything new?]
HE: And sometimes it’s because you want to know the truth.
SHE: The truth? What truth?
HE: About what happened to you.
SHE: I know what happened to me.
HE Do you?
SHE: [Do I?]
This, I presume, must have been one of the highlights of twenty years of analysis, or it would not have been selected for inclusion in the book. Behind the self-obsession of the analysand and the portentous banality of the analyst’s interjections lies the idea, self-exculpatory, that we are victims of our past, about which we can do nothing (unless, that is, we pay an analyst for four thousand sessions). Indeed, a British psychoanalyst called Adam Phillips wrote in a recent book, Becoming Freud, that childhood is inherently catastrophic and the past is, in his typically inelegant phrase, “unrecoverable from.” (Psychoanalysis, it seems, does wonders for a man’s prose style: it renders it labyrinthine without subtlety.) There is no place, then, for human agency, except the kind that leads you to talk about yourself in the presence of another for twenty years. Shallowness can go no deeper.
Though for several decades Freudianism ruled the psychological roost, and won the allegiance of those – always a large number – who seek to escape from the terrible burden, though also the glory, of being human (that is to say, of having to choose at all times how to act and respond to circumstances, and therefore of being at least partially responsible for their fate), it was never quite without opponents, enemies, or resistance. (I do not here mean resistance in the psychoanalytic sense, the refusal by an analysand to accept an interpretation by his analyst, a refusal taken by the latter as confirmation of its truth: not a manner of proceeding conducive to self-criticism among analysts, to put it mildly.)
No, resistance to psychoanalysis as a doctrine and a method arose because of its intellectual inadequacies, which were, or should have been, evident from the first. It provided no criterion of truth to distinguish between a true and a false interpretation, or even between a plausible and an implausible one, itself a deficiency so serious that it vitiated the repeated claims of psychoanalysis to be a science. Interpretations were based upon the theory and the theory (allegedly) upon interpretations, a circularity from which there was no escape: for despite Malinowski’s expedition to the Trobriand Islands to find the Oedipus complex among their Stone Age inhabitants, there never was and never could be any independent evidence of the intellectual constructs of psychoanalysis. It was a closed system in which one had a priori to believe as a kind of act of faith.
In reaction to the intellectual indiscipline and clinical impotence of psychoanalysis, a mindless psychology – a psychology that excluded mind – became quite popular, eventually developing into an orthodoxy, at least among psychologists, with a little church of its own. The data of consciousness, pronounced the popes of behaviorism, were not susceptible to scientific verification; therefore they should be excluded from scientific enquiry. Instead, psychology should study only verifiable and measurable inputs and outputs, stimuli and responses, for whatever happened between input and output, stimuli and responses, was inaccessible to verification and measurement. It was worse than the black box of Flight MH370: it was not merely unfound, it was inherently unfindable.
What started as methodology became ontology. It is an old adage of medical diagnosis that absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence, but the behaviorists ignored this sage call to modesty. Instead, they began to believe that stimulus and response were all there was to human life, that everything human could be explained by it. Again, this should have been laughable, but it was taken by many with the utmost seriousness. An intellectual could almost be defined as a person who follows an argument to an absurd conclusion, and believes the conclusion.
Behaviorism was not without its successes, however, and not just the institutional ones that psychoanalysis undoubtedly enjoyed. Its theory was used, for example, to teach pigeons to play table tennis. Who would have thought you could teach pigeons to play table tennis? Actually, I am not sure that you can teach it: for a game of table tennis involves more than merely
