Freud, “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” (1914) (III)

In the last couple entries I discussed the psychoanalytic “criteria” codified by Freud, and in the name of which he ostensibly expels Alfred Adler and Carl Jung from the fold: a certain recognition of the clinical “facts” of resistance and transference. I reproduce the relevant passage:

“[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)

But how does Freud actually go about the expulsion of Adler and Jung? He certainly reproaches both thinkers along a number of lines. Their demotion of the “drives,” generally, and “libido,” specifically, as significant ingredients in human thought and behavior, appears to vex Freud the most. But in fact, in neither case is his criticism that they have failed to acknowledge the existence of “transference” or of “resistance” in their clinical work, or even that they refuse to credit these “facts” as important. As far as I can see, Freud provides no evidence that Adler and Jung would deny either of these phenomena. On the contrary, Freud provides evidence of precisely the opposite: that Adler and Jung recognize both facts. Freud begins with Adler:

“In regard to resistance Adler informs us that it serves the purpose of putting into effect the patient's opposition to the physician. This is certainly true; it is as much as to say that it serves the purpose of resistance. Where it comes from, however, or how it happens that its phenomena are at the disposal of the patient is not further enquired into, as being of no interest to the ego” (57)

As we began to anticipate earlier, this passage helps elucidate the meaning of Freud’s criteria for psychoanalysis. It is in fact insufficient for a theorist simply to acknowledge the “facts” of resistance and transference. Nor, indeed, is it sufficient that a would-be analytic theorist is prepared to account for these facts, when pressed. (If Adler innovated an explanation for resistance, would Freud then accept his theories as “psychoanalytic?”) Beyond containing these ingredients — necessary but insufficient conditions of psychoanalysis — the “theories” in question must also arise exclusively out of attempts to account for these facts. In other words, Freud does not simply demand of psychoanalysis that it inter alia account for the “facts” of transference and resistance; he demands that psychoanalysis do nothing except account for these facts. That is why finally, Freud considers Adler one of those thinkers “who takes up other sides of the problem while avoiding these two hypotheses” and so cannot "escape a charge of misappropriation of property by attempted impersonation.”

In fact, “Adlerian" theory contains for Freud three basic trends, only one of which he finds really objectionable, and on account of which Adler ought to be ousted from the movement.

“[I]t consists of three sorts of elements of quite dissimilar value: useful contributions to the psychology of the ego, superfluous but admissible translations of the analytic facts into the new ‘jargon’, and distortions and perversions of these facts when they do not comply with the requirements of the ego” (52)

The offending “distortions and perversions”  — those that supposedly disqualify Adler from the movement — derive from his attempt to reinterpret psychoanalytic observations “purely from the standpoint of the ego, reduced to the categories with which the ego is familiar, translated, twisted and…misunderstood” (52). One might imagine that Freud is here impugning Adler for altogether rejecting the importance of unconscious forces in human thought and behavior. But that interpretation cannot be correct, as Freud then attributes to Adler a precisely mistaken grasp of these forces. (“I perceived how little gift Adler had precisely for judging unconscious material” (50), just as “Adler has never from the first shown any understanding of repression” (56).)

Freud’s stated disagreements with Jung, whatever their merits, similarly revolve around issues barely connected with the “facts” of resistance and transference. As though to underline the criterial non sequitur, his opening salvo turns on the mutual recognition resistance:

“In 1912 Jung boasted, in a letter from America, that his modifications of psycho-analysis had overcome the resistances of many people who had hitherto refused to have anything to do with it. I replied that that was nothing to boast of, and that the more he sacrificed of the hard-won truths of psycho-analysis the more would he see resistances vanishing. This modification which the Swiss were so proud of introducing was again nothing else but a pushing into the background of the sexual factor in psycho-analytic theory” (58)

The thrust of this critical exchange is not Jung’s denial or even neglect of “resistance” in patients, but the ostensible naïveté and confusion in his manner of explaining and managing that resistance. Plainly what disturbs Freud is the disregard, not of resistance, but of that specific theoretical item — “the sexual factor” — which the Swiss have erroneously diminished in their “psychoanalysis.”

Freud might well reply that “repression” of the “sexual factor” is an ironclad inference from resistance — indeed, a sort of tautological reformulation of it — so that one either recognizes the entire, indissoluble constellation or one recognizes nothing. Hence Adler and Jung, in rejecting the constellation, have effectively denied there are such things as resistance (and transference), according to their only acceptable meanings. And at several places Freud verges on just such an equivalence:

“The theory of repression…is nothing but a theoretical formulation of a phenomenon which may be observed as often as one pleases if one undertakes an analysis of a neurotic without resorting to hypnosis. In such cases one comes across a resistance which opposes the work of analysis and in order to frustrate it pleads a failure of memory” (16)

That is, if “repression” is really “nothing but a theoretical formulation of…resistance,” it becomes unclear whether Freud could recognize any other explanation for resistance apart from his own. But then, finally, Freud withdraws with one hand the very theoretical “lassitude” he extends with the other.

Most of what I’ve said so far has concerned the first fact, “resistance.” But the reason for this disproportionate emphasis is that “transference” does not appear by name in connection with Adler even once, so that it’s difficult to see how its non-recognition might be made responsible for Freud’s rejection of him. To be sure, the concept does appear briefly in Freud’s descriptions of the inadequacies of the Jungian clinical approach — he quotes a disgruntled former patient’s complaint that “not a trace of attention was given to the past or to the transference” (63). But then, immediately afterward, Freud credits his opponent with the very recognition he has just implied is lacking: “The patient, it is true, reported that he had heard that analysis of the past and of the transference must be gone through first; but he had been told that he had already had enough of it” (63). In other words, Freud’s criticism here cannot possibly be that Jungians deny the existence of transference. His objection is rather some combination of the judgments that they have misunderstood and undervalued this “fact.” But these “errors,” again, seem insufficiently damning for the purpose of ejecting their exponents from the psychoanalytic movement — at least by the measure of those standards, generously conceived, Freud himself has given us in the essay.