time—which would have explained how his patients were able to convey in disguised and indirect ways truths they “knew” but couldn’t bring themselves to admit. In other words, his neurotic patients unconsciously intended their symptoms and phantasies, they weren’t simply “caused” by their unconscious. Freud apparently suspected the existence of an unconscious form of subjectivity that was capable of intending symptoms when he invoked the term counter-will, early in his development. In a philosophical study of psychoanalysis, Stanley Leavy notes Freud’s difficulty in grappling with the notion of an “unconscious subject”:
One of Freud’s earliest ways of presenting the idea of unconscious motivation was as “counter-will” (Gegenwille), a word that is worth keeping in mind whenever we say “the unconscious.” Will, so rich in philosophical overtones, has been played down by psychoanalysis. Being a verb as well as a noun, the word will always implies a subject. When I do something that I claim I didn’t want to do . . . it does no good to plead that blind, impersonal, unconscious forces “did” the act: they are me. (1988, 8)
Leavy’s use of the term will does not, of course, refer to the conventional usage of conscious will, any more than Freud’s expression counterwill. Will refers to an “intentional act” and alludes to prereflective, or unconscious, sources of motivation and behavior. Freud first used the term counter-will in 1892 in his “Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism” (Freud: 1966a). He used it to depict an idea that the patient was unaware of while awake, but became manifest under hypnosis. He continued to use the term here and there in a variety of contexts for some twenty more years. Quoting from Leavy:
This concept helped Freud to come to an understanding of hysterical attacks. In “The Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena” [1962] (Standard Edition, vol. 3, 32), he said that a patient’s “fear that she might make a noise turned into actually making one—an instance of ‘hysterical counter-will.’” Freud turned to counter-will in his 1901 [1960] Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Standard Edition, vol. 6, 158n) to explain the mistakes and delays that often occur in making payments; elsewhere in the same work, Freud attributes many kinds of errors and omissions to the same origin. (12n.)
And later, in a paper on love and sexual impotence, Freud turned to the concept of counter-will again. “He [the patient] now becomes aware that it is some feature of the sexual object which gives rise to the inhibition of his male potency, and sometimes he reports that he has a feeling of an obstacle inside him, the sensation of a counter-will which successfully interferes with his conscious intention” (1957d, 179).
Leavy adds that the term seems to disappear thereafter. “Probably the generalization fell apart into concepts like resistance, repression, unconscious conflict, and ultimately, drive. But the gain in specificity was accompanied by the loss of the implication of a personal ‘will’” (1988, 12n.). In other words, as Freud pursued his aim of establishing the empirical “causes” of symptoms, the notion of the unconscious as a subtle agent, anonymous ego, or counter-will, receded into the background. This tendency to depersonalize the unconscious into impersonal drives, forces, and instincts has not met with universal acceptance, even within psychoanalytic circles. The term instinct, or drive, was scarcely used before 1905, though the concept was there under other guises. Yet, expressions like affective ideas and wishful impulses clearly convey more subjective nuances than do instinct, drive or excitations. With all the current debate over Strachey’s translation of Freud into English, especially regarding the translation of trieb into drive or instinct, neither trieb nor drive manage to alter Freud’s use of the concept itself. Strachey himself went to some lengths to explain the ambiguous way in which Freud used the term trieb, but it basically refers to a nonsubjective, impersonal edition of “unconscious will.” Whichever term one prefers, drive or instinct, psychoanalysts, with few exceptions, find it agreeable to use a term—any term—in which the impersonal aspect of the unconscious prevails.
One of those exceptions—in addition to Leavy—is Hans Loewald, who takes pains to explain how his use of instinct conveys a human quality. “When I speak of instinctual forces and of instincts or instinctual drives, I define them as motivational, i.e., both motivated and motivating. . . . Instincts remain relational phenomena, rather than being considered energies within a closed system” (1980, 152–53; emphasis added).
Terms such as motive and relational convey a clearly personal use of the term instinct, and even the word phenomena sounds more personal than forces, for example. Freud’s shift from counter-will to instinct lent credence to his claim that psychoanalysis—at least in appearance—deserved the status of a science, but a science more similar to that of academic psychologists who “study” rats or physicists who “measure” energies. However much some analysts may strive to measure the psychoanalytic investigation of truth in specifically scientific terms, the legitimacy of phantasy can only be grasped metaphorically, in essentially personal terms.
2 Realistic and Neurotic Anxiety
In a paper read before the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society in 1949, Hans Loewald addressed a central aspect of Freud’s conception of reality, focusing on Freud’s insistence that “external” reality—that is, the world—is essentially hostile and antagonistic.
In psychoanalytic theory we are accustomed to think of the relationship between ego and reality as one of adjustment or adaptation. The so-called mature ego has renounced the pleasure principle and has substituted for it the reality principle. It does not follow the direct path of instinctual gratification, without regard to consequences, to the demands of reality, does not indulge in hallucinatory wish fulfillment, but tests external reality . . . adapting its thoughts and actions to the demands of reality. This conception of the relationship between ego and reality presupposes a fundamental antagonism that has to be bridged or overcome in order to make life in this reality possible. (1980, 3)
Two years after he delivered “Ego and Reality,” Loewald returned to this theme again in “The Problem of Defense and the Neurotic Interpretation of Reality.”
The relationship between organism and environment, between individual and reality, in general has been understood in psychoanalytic theory as basically antagonistic. It is Freud’s “biological assumption” that a stimulus is something hostile to the organism and to the nervous system. Ultimately, instinct itself is understood as a need or compulsion to abolish stimuli. Any stimulus, as stimulus, represents a threat, a disturbance. On the psychological level, Freud comes to the conclusion that at the stage of the original reality ego, “at the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical.” (1980, 28)
Yet, what is this “reality” that poses such a threat to us? Is this a reality of our own making, as Freud hypothesized so enigmatically as “psychical reality”, or is it a reality completely independent of ourselves, impervious to our whims and indifferent to our needs—unheeding, barren, cold? Even Marshall Edelson, no friend of philosophical or hermeneutical interpretations of psychoanalysis, had to admit Freud’s problems with this concept.
We have seen that Freud had trouble with “psychic reality.” But judging from the variety of adjectives preceding “reality”—external, factual, material, practical—we may conclude that the conceptual status of “external reality” offered as much difficulty. Freud avoided philosophical questions as much as possible in his work in the interest of creating an empirical science, but here an ontological specter seems impossible to evade. (1988, 7)
Freud was too subtle and complex a thinker to be accused of adopting a superficial attitude toward the nature of reality, especially because it plays such an important role in his theories of psychopathology and psychoanalysis. Edelson points out that Freud “thought about such questions. That
