Freud, “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” (1914) (II)
In the last entry, we reviewed Freud’s description of the psychoanalytic “standpoint,” which includes two criteria:
“[T]he theory of psycho-analysis is an attempt to account for two striking and unexpected facts of observation which emerge whenever an attempt is made to trace the symptoms of a neurotic back to their sources in his past life: the facts of transference and of resistance. Any line of investigation which [a] recognizes these two facts and [b] takes them as the starting-point of its work has a right to call itself psycho-analysis, even though it arrives at results other than my own” (16, bracketed letters mine)
To qualify as psychoanalytic, that is, a theory must recognize the facts of repression and transference; but it must also take them as its starting-point. And for Freud, Adler and Jung no longer adhere to psychoanalysis so construed.
But the meaning of the second criterion is itself hardly obvious. What does it mean, really, to take resistance and transference as one’s “starting point”? Here again, several interpretations — a weaker and a stronger — seem possible:
I have taken repression and transference as my "starting point” if, before taking up other psychological problems, I have provided some “explanation” of these phenomena. To be psychoanalytic, a theory must recognize and explain these “facts.”
I have taken repression and transference as my "starting point” if my theory is entirely dedicated to explaining them. To be psychoanalytic, a theory must recognize and explain these facts, and nothing else.
The “weak” interpretation seems the more sensible — both as a reading of Freud’s intentions and as a psychoanalytic desideratum. The “strong” interpretation, by contrast, seems inconsistent, not only with the greater psychoanalytic discourse, but Freud’s own corpus. (Can we reconstruct every text of Freud’s as an effort to explain resistance and transference? Did the author of Totem and Taboo and Future of an Illusion have this alone in mind when he wrote them?)
And yet, ultimately, Freud does incline towards the stronger — towards the claim that, as I will now amend his words, “the theory of psycho-analysis is [solely] an attempt to account for two striking and unexpected facts of observation.”
Freud’s definition of psychoanalysis, of course, has more than academic interest. As we have anticipated, it is in the name of some determinate idea of the entity called “psychoanalysis” that Freud excommunicates two heretics. A more-or-less capacious definition means including a greater-or-lesser number of theorists in his “movement.”
I will confess that Freud’s language of “secessions” strikes me as disingenuous. Had Adler and Jung announced their willing secessions, Freud would have no need to do it for them in this essay. Indeed, at least in Jung’s case, it is evident from Freud’s very descriptions that he had no wish to repudiate the title:
“Jung’s modification [of psychoanalysis]…is put forward in a peculiarly vacillating manner, one moment as ‘quite a mild deviation, which does not justify the outcry that has been raised about it’ (Jung), and the next moment as a new message of salvation which is to begin a new epoch for psycho-analysis, and, indeed, a new Weltanschauung for everyone” (60)
On the other hand, to say, ‘So-and-so has “seceded” from our group,’ is a self-exculpating euphemism available to every excommunicator. Such an authority can always claim: ‘This heretic has implicitly ‘seceded’ by failing to observe the norms and beliefs of out tribe; by excommunicating him or her, we are merely formalizing a ‘secession’ that has already taken place.’ By codifying the “essence” of psychoanalysis in this essay, Freud plainly is in a position to choose one that embraces or excludes the writings of Adler and Jung.
In any event, we will notice a peculiar feature of Freud’a account precisely when he turns to criticizing in detail Adler and Jung’s deviations from analytic orthodoxy (48-66) — the proximate motive for writing this history and committing himself to an inflexible definition of his science. The peculiar feature is that in his criticisms of Adler and Jung, which ostensibly demonstrate their self-disqualifications from the movement, Freud says almost nothing of the “criteria” he has only just established. And this remains the case, whether we construe these criteria in more or less exacting terms.