man whose rules are not etched in stone. His recommendations about the practice of analysis were uncommonly flexible by today’s standards. Many of his rules simply reflected his personality, and he told us why. We, in turn, are invited to do the same. But at the same time, we are admonished to use our heads. To whatever degree we do so, however successfully or not, we’re on our own. Ultimately, we’re the measure of what we are and who. At the end of each day, we answer to ourselves.
The very nature of analytic “rules” requires that they be flexible. We mold them to our personalities, as Freud molded them to his. Those who take rules too literally deny the spontaneous nature of analysis and its purpose: the freedom to be oneself and become oneself in the presence of another human being. In fact, it’s only in the presence of another that we can be ourselves and find ourselves when we’re lost. According to Freud, analysis seeks no other purpose than to allow two human beings to meet, in privacy and in truth. Yet, being honest isn’t so easy. That’s why Freud believed that the only rule that was indispensable—in fact, fundamental—was the one about candor: say what you must and don’t hide it.
Freud’s ideas about the rules for analysis and the way he treated them himself were profoundly personal. The relationship between the two participants is personal too. That’s why his conception of technique was essentially existential. The situation they encounter together is real. How could its technique be anything else? His rules were elastic. Their application with each of his patients were adapted accordingly. He was prudent. Those who wish to refine rules, who seek the “right” rule for every occasion—to be applied en masse—don’t understand this. They perceive Freud’s flexibility as his downfall and his humanity as a failure.
The Freud I want to talk about was concerned about the nature of truth and its accomplice—the secrets we endeavor to conceal. The truth about Freud’s technique is that it is essentially about truth. Freud was only peripherally concerned about mechanisms and psychology. He recognized the enormous ambiguity contained in the phenomenon of phantasy, its latent truths, and its potential for denying reality. Freud realized that our denial of reality inspires every form of psychopathology, that the only way of overcoming the suffering we conspire to evade is to know the reality we deny, and face it. This task is not as abstract—as “intellectual”—as we sometimes make it out to be. It is inherently practical, in the Socratic sense: Know your own mind and be your own person, and the truth will make you free.
We’re not that accustomed to thinking about psychoanalysis, in general, and Freud, in particular, in terms of truth, so I have decided to risk including a section in this book on Heidegger’s conception of truth and showing its facility for Freud’s thoughts about the nature of repression and the unconscious. It’s risky because the vast majority of people who are involved in psychoanalysis aren’t interested in philosophy. I don’t blame them. Most of what passes for philosophy today is so alienated it’s of practical use to no one. Freud felt the same way about philosophers in his day. Yet, there are philosophers who are the exception. Freud knew some and was influenced by them. Had Heidegger been older, perhaps their paths might have crossed. As it was, they didn’t. I think, however, that the risk is worth taking because Heidegger’s thinking is so compatible with Freud’s that I’m surprised this book wasn’t written much earlier, by someone else. You will have to judge for yourselves if I am right and whether including this section (Part Two) is helpful. If not, disregard it. The rest stands on its own.
I am primarily concerned with Freud’s work from the time he analyzed Dora (1900) to the completion of his technical papers on psychoanalysis (1915). A section is devoted to each of these events and a third explores Freud’s treatment of the Rat Man. My aim is to show how his analysis of these two patients—a hysteric and an obsessional—is entirely consistent with the recommendations he explicated in his technical papers, written subsequent to their respective analyses. I include another section—Part One—devoted to examining some of Freud’s references to the nature of reality throughout his writings, the principal thesis of this work. Freud’s views about truth and reality are intertwined, and sometimes only hazily distinguished. Yet, his thoughts on the matter pervade the technique he had crystallized, once and for all, when the technical papers were completed. Finally, I include in Part Six a discussion of Freud’s paper on termination, published in 1937, to show its fidelity—at this advanced age—to the papers he had written more than twenty years earlier.
I hope the final result is a Freud who, despite the enormous diversity of his output and the ambiguous nature of his conclusions, was consistent to the end. This is a Freud we have systematically rejected and are in danger of losing. Though some would claim that he is merely a historical figure, I believe that Freud’s contribution to analysis is more radical now than ever before. His ideas are no less controversial today than they were in 1900, and for the same reasons. If I have succeeded in encouraging anyone to take a second look at Freud before dismissing him, to really look at him for himself despite the bias against him, then my purpose in writing this book will have been achieved.
Over the last two years I have discussed portions of this book with a number of colleagues and friends. Although I cannot list them all, I would like to thank in particular my colleagues in London, Dr. John Heaton, Mr. Chris Oakley, and Dr. Steven Gans; and, in the United States, Dr. Robert Westfall, Dr. Murray Bilmes, Prof. Wilfried Ver Eecke, Dr. Julius Heuscher, Dr. Randall Weingarten, Prof. Walter Menrath, and Dr. Kirk Schneider. I especially want to thank Dr. Stanley Leavy, who contributed many invaluable suggestions; and Dr. Otto Allen Will, Jr., for whose encouragement and support I am eternally grateful. Both have had a profound impact on my thinking. Of course, none of the people who helped me are accountable for the ideas expressed here for which I, alone, am responsible.
THE TRUTH ABOUT FREUD’S TECHNIQUE
I THE TRUE AND THE REAL IN FREUD
Despite Freud’s insistence about his relationship with truth, confessed at an old age on reflection of his life, nowhere in his writings about psychoanalysis is the concept of truth discussed. It isn’t even a basic term in his theory. When Freud admitted his “single motive was the love of truth” and that during his whole life he only “endeavored to uncover truths,” was he talking about his personal relationship with truth, or his professional one? If the search for truth encompassed the entirety of his life, why is its nature neglected in his analytic theories? Why did Freud never talk about truth, as such? The nature of truth is a philosophical question. It isn’t now nor has it ever been a medical or psychological problem. Freud refused to couch psychoanalysis in specifically philosophical terms. Even ethics and epistemology, so central to psychoanalytic aims, were systematically avoided. He condemned philosophers, almost all of whom generally dismissed his work. Instead, Freud identified with science as it was then understood (and even now). Science, in and of itself, isn’t concerned with the question of truth, a speculative meditation concerning one’s experience. The nature of truth is far more encompassing than what we are able to “observe” about it. It is profoundly personal. Instead, science is concerned with—grant me this generalization—reality, a reality however, which, when defined by scientific method, is strictly measurable and observable. Yet, Freud rejected this definition of reality. The object of his explorations—the mind—isn’t measurable or observable. It can only be known according to a person’s capacity for thinking. The scientific method—in the social as well as the hard sciences—investigates behavior and the laws in nature that are presumed to govern it. Psychoanalysis is concerned with the mind. Though our minds aren’t specifically observable, it is possible to become aware of our thoughts through consciousness. Psychoanalysis also aspires to gain access to a so-called unconscious mind, a form of thought that is not only unobservable but is even inaccessible to consciousness.
Freud’s insistence on reporting his findings in scientific terms was one of history’s supreme juggling acts, one that has left everyone (scientists and psychoanalysts alike) dissatisfied, spawning endless arguments about whether or not psychoanalysis is a science and, if so, what kind of science
