Given the defensive nature of the ego, even the primary processes pose a threat because after all, it is the primary processes that are thrusting one’s ego into the world.
Another paradox posed by Freud’s efforts to distinguish between primary and secondary thought process concerns the nature of the so-called irrational and nonsensical thoughts verbalized in the analytic session. If they’re so irrational, how can they be comprehended in terms of egoistic, rational, and scientific ways of thinking? If Freud’s conception of the rational was rooted in causal, scientific explanation, then why did he insist on seeking the unconscious meaning of the neurotic’s dreams and symptoms, rather than their “causes”? By relying on interpretation as his epistemological framework, Freud abandoned science for semantics. This has been noted by others, including Rycroft. If, in fact, we are creatures of semantics and it is language that manifests our symptoms and desires, psychoanalysis no longer relies on scientific rationality to justify its aims—at least not in the way Freud understood science. Rycroft believes that Freud’s insistence on couching psychoanalysis in scientific terms resulted in
the tendency of classical analytical theory to conceptualize primary process mentation, phantasy, and often even emotion, in terms which suggest that they have an intrinsic tendency to be experienced as alien and intrusive to the self, to describe the primary processes as primitive, archaic, unrealistic, etc., and to treat artistic and religious phenomena as analogues of neurosis. . . . [The ego] has been cast in the mould of the scientist at work, and the normal man implied by theory has been modeled on the rationalist ideal. (1968, 106)
Perhaps nowhere is the presumed split between desires on the one hand and the capacity to act on them on the other more evocatively described than in Freud’s analogy of the rider on a horse:
The horse provides the locomotive energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go. (1964c, 77)
Freud’s depiction of the normal state of affairs would seem to characterize, instead, the sort of splitting we might ordinarily characterize as pathological, even paranoid. Instead of assigning to the individual a necessary and inevitable fear of the external world that reduces one’s relationships to a capacity for adaptation, why not envision the human infant, as Rycroft suggests, as a creature who starts life in a state of primary integration, by which the infant’s expectations, phantasies, and capacity to perceive are epitomized by something akin to Hartmann’s notion of an “average expectable environment” and Winnicott’s “ordinary devoted mother”? Insofar as the child’s “expectations are fulfilled, primary integration continues . . . and he feels at home in the world” (Rycroft 1968, 111–12). On the other hand, when expectations are thwarted and the child experiences disappointment, the child’s capacities for wishful thinking and adjusting to the environment split off into different realms, or “types,” of thinking. This doesn’t mean, however, that the one type of thinking doesn’t “know” what the other is doing, or that ignorance, however pleasing, reigns supreme.
The nature of subjectivity has always puzzled philosophers and psychologists alike. Freud’s depiction of an “unconscious” agency whose purpose requires interpretation was his singular contribution to our age. But his theories could never explain what his intuition could actually see. Freud hypothesized some sort of self, or agency, prior to the formation of the ego. This was supported by his theory of primary thought processes and, in another context, by his conception of a primary form of narcissism (see chapter 5). We know that the id is capable of thought because, after all, it “decided” to form an extension of itself—the ego—to insulate itself against the anxiety of being in the world.
In practical terms, the division between the id and the ego is a false one. As Freud himself emphasized, the ego is merely an “outer layer” of the id—it was never conceived as a separate entity. If we want to be consistent with the ego’s origins, then that ego—following Freud’s reasoning—is nothing more than a “reservoir” of anxiety; in fact, the experience of anxiety itself. That is why “realistic” thinking, however else we conceive it, could never be divorced from one’s intentions, however unconscious they seem.
4 The Neurotic and the Psychotic Experience of Reality
Perhaps nowhere did Freud demonstrate more persuasively his conception of reality than when he sought to distinguish between the neurotic and psychotic experience of it. After having introduced the structural model in 1923 in The Ego and the Id (1961d), Freud wrote two papers in 1924 on the nature of neurosis and psychosis from this new perspective. The first paper, simply tided, “Neurosis and Psychosis” (1961g), contained a formula for “the most important genetic difference between a neurosis and a psychosis: neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relations between the ego and the external world (149; emphasis in original). Freud depicts the nature of neurosis, now described in accordance with the structural model, accordingly:
Our analyses go to show that the transference neuroses originate from the ego’s refusing to accept a powerful instinctual impulse in the id . . . or from the ego’s forbidding that impulse the object at which it is aiming. In such a case the ego defends itself against the instinctual impulse by the mechanism of repression. The repressed material struggles against this fate. It creates for itself, along paths over which the ego has no power, a substitutive representation . . . the symptom. The ego . . . threatened and impaired by this intruder, continues to struggle against the symptom, just as it fended off the original instinctual impulse. All this produces the picture of a neurosis. (1961g, 149–50)
Typically, the ego obeys and even follows the commands of its superego—its “conscience”—which, in turn, “originates from influences in the external world” (150). In its effort to accommodate reality the ego may feel compelled to “take sides” with it. When this happens, “the ego has come into conflict with the id in the service of the super-ego and of reality; and this is the state of affairs in every transference neurosis” (150). On the other hand, when it becomes psychotic “the ego creates, autocratically, a new external and internal world; and there can be no doubt of two facts—that this new world is constructed in accordance with the id’s wishful impulses, and that the motive for this dissociation from the external world is some very serious frustration by reality of a wish—a frustration which seems intolerable” (151).
Freud suggests, however, that despite these differences, neurosis and psychosis share the same aetiological factors. “The aetiology common to the onset of a psychoneurosis and of a psychosis always remain the same. It consists in a frustration, a non-fulfillment, of one of those childhood wishes which are forever undefeated and which are so deeply rooted in our phylogenetically determined organization. This frustration is in the last resort always an external one” (151; emphasis added). What, then, accounts for the divergence between a neurosis and a psychosis? According to Freud, whether “the ego remains true to its dependence on the external world and attempts to silence the id, or whether it lets itself be overcome by the id and thus torn away from reality” (151; emphasis added).
In other words, the ego’s relationship with reality governs, (a) the onset of a neurosis and a psychosis and, (b) whether we eventually succumb to a neurosis or a psychosis. Neurosis, generally speaking, is a result of complying with an unacceptable reality, whereas psychosis is a consequence of rebelling against reality by denying it. Because of the ego’s incessant “conflicts with its various ruling agencies,” it is always striving for a fragile “reconciliation between its various dependent relationships” (152).
Soon after the publication of “Neurosis and Psychosis,” Freud published another paper focusing specifically
