This isn’t particularly viable because the things we hide come back to haunt us in indirect ways. We eventually suffer from the secrets we harbor, the same secrets that alert us to the things we fear about reality. These secrets contain a truth, not because they necessarily reveal the nature of reality, but because the things we conceal seem too real to accept.
Psychoanalysis is concerned with revealing the truth about a reality we’re predisposed against. The analytic cure, as Freud conceived it, is based on the premise that it’s better to know where we stand than to avoid reality, however painful that reality is. Freud didn’t talk about truths, per se, but he talked at length about the nature of secrecy, hidden wishes, repressed desires, unconscious motives, displaced libido, and avoided realities. He was a philosopher of truth who never included this term as an integral part of his theory. If we want to determine the place truth enjoyed in Freud’s conception of psychoanalysis, we will have to extract it from the context in which he alluded to it. Ultimately, we will find it contained in his many references to our inherent difficulty with reality, and the significance he believed that reality assumes in our lives.
Freud discussed his conception of reality in at least five contexts: (a) inner (psychical) reality versus outer (external) reality; (b) realistic versus neurotic anxiety; (c) realistic (secondary thought process) versus wishful (primary thought process) thinking; (d) the neurotic versus psychotic experience of reality; and (e) real love versus transference-love. I would like to examine each of these contexts in turn to show how Freud tried to formulate a program of psychoanalytic enquiry based on a search for truth—essentially, a philosophical endeavor—while his objective was to get to the “facts” of observable behavior. However scientific his argument appeared, there’s no doubt Freud was searching for the truth—whatever he thought about the facts he discovered.
1 Psychical and External Reality
Freud rather reluctandy reached the conclusion that neurosis could neither be explained by nor limited to traumatic events. It wasn’t until his “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” published in 1914, that he confessed his despair over the discovery that his seduction theory (that hysteria was the consequence of having been seduced by one’s parent) could not explain, in every case, the genesis of hysterical neurosis:
The firm ground of reality was gone. . . . If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in phantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. (1957b, 17–18)
In a recent study of psychoanalysis, Marshall Edelson suggests that “Freud’s discovery of psychic reality is described reluctandy in relatively few passages throughout his writings; yet, it is the foundation of all his major achievements. Rarely has any discovery been made so contrary to the intentions and predilections of its discoverer” (1988, 3). Freud arrived at the concept of psychical or “thought” reality as early as 1895 in his “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” when he was seeking a foundation for psychology in empirical terms. He believed even then that “indications of discharge through speech are also in a sense indications of reality—but of thought-reality not of external reality” (1966b, 373). Freud was shaken by this discovery and only reluctandy abandoned his seduction theory because of it. Edelson believes that “Freud’s despair and even antipathy were not simply a rejection of the sexual context of psychical reality. . . . His anguish is that of the utilitarian rationalist who, wishing the cause of psychopathology to be ‘out there,’ is confronted by the obdurately nonrational and subjective” (4). Later, in his Introductory Lectures, Freud lamented the problems this discovery presented in terms reminiscent of a man who has learned that his wife was unfaithful, as though his patients had been “lying” to him. Edelson observes that, in Freud’s Lectures, “the psychoanalyst is perplexed by the ‘low valuation of reality, the neglect of the distinction between it and phantasy,’ and is ‘tempted to feel offended at the patient’s having taken up . . . time with invented stories’” (5).
Freud’s foreboding at the implications of this discovery is understandable. In fact, he never abandoned the search for confirmation of his theories in empirical, scientific terms. Even when his discoveries were taking him further and further away from such confirmation—indeed, these discoveries comprise psychoanalysis—Freud continued to couch his discoveries in “scientific” garb. He was afraid that his patients would refuse to accept his interpretations of their phantasy and imaginative life unless they were told their experiences were real:
It will be a long time before he can take in our proposal that we should equate phantasy and reality and not bother to begin with whether the childhood experiences under examination are the one or the other. . . . It remains a fact that the patient has created these phantasies for himself and this fact is of scarcely less importance than if he had really experienced what the phantasies contain. (1963, 367–68; emphasis added)
Freud assumed that his patients would feel insulted if he told them what they thought was real was only phantasy. They, Freud believed, wanted—like Freud himself—the truth. All human beings, including neurotics, want to be taken seriously and resent being told their experiences and recollections are merely products of their imagination. They feel—and want—these phantasies to be true. Freud knew these phantasies seemed real to the person having them. He even says they are real—in a way. But how could these phantasies be real if they aren’t, unless they’re experienced as such by the person who has them? In T:otem and Taboo, Freud added that
what lie behind the sense of guilt of neurotics are always psychical realities and never factual ones. What characterizes neurotics is that they prefer psychical to factual reality and react just as seriously to thoughts as normal people do to realities. (1958i, 159; emphasis in original)
Freud’s depiction of psychical reality isn’t the sort of factual reality or material reality that is supported by empirical science. Freud even defines this so-called reality in terms of phantasy and hallucination. In what sense can one describe these phantasies as realities when they aren’t actually real? Freud sometimes uses the term reality metaphorically. He thought that phantasies might be real in the same way that reality may be—but often isn’t—“real.” In other words, Freud recognized that phantasies, though not literally correct depictions of the past, convey meaning. And this meaning tells us more about our patients’ histories than might otherwise be learned. By interpreting phantasies and their symptoms, Freud was able to obtain what was truly meant by them. His use of the term psychical reality, which was opposed to external reality, actually juxtaposed a truthful (psychical) reality with a literal (external) one. This isn’t to say that literal—or external—reality is false, but it was Freud’s genius to see that the truth about one’s history—and, by extension, one’s existence—can be obtained linguistically by interpreting phantasies and symptoms as disguised messages. The recognition that these phantasies were also messages suggested there was something truthful about them that the patient couldn’t simply say. Freud’s insight that these phantasies were in some way real was a truth he discovered about the nature of phantasy.
Herbert Marcuse, in a famous study of Freud from a philosophical perspective, discussed the link between Freud’s conception of phantasy and the latent truths—if correctly understood—they potentially disclose:
As a fundamental, independent mental process, phantasy has a truth value of its own—namely, the surmounting of the antagonistic human reality. Imagination envisions the reconciliation of the individual with the whole, of desire with realization, of happiness with reason. While this harmony has been removed into Utopia by the established reality principle, phantasy insists that it must and can become real, that behind the illusion lies knowledge. (1955, 220)
In other words, phantasy serves a purpose: It reveals the intentional
