Freud, “Charcot” (1893)

Freud’s early tribute to Jean-Martin Charcot serves well as an introduction to Freud himself. The obituary conveys Freud’s “style”; his scientific and philosophical values; his self-understanding as an experimenter and innovator; his perceived challenges and opposition; and, more concretely, his program as a psychological researcher.

We may roughly distinguish between form and content in this — mainly laudatory — piece. By “form,” I mean those general attributes, capacities, and tendencies in Charcot that Freud plainly admires and will gradually attempt to embody himself. By “content,” I have in mind those particular ideas, theories, and positions at which Charcot, the scientist, arrives — and towards which Freud’s praise is comparatively equivocal.

In these reflections I will emphasize the “form.” This includes Charcot’s personal, “human” qualities: charisma, warmth, accessibility, and a fundamentally egalitarian ethos. (Freud cites his “kindly openness” and “life-long loyalty” towards pupils, but also the “magic that emanated from his looks and from his voice” (16.) It includes, too, Charcot’s values as a researcher: scientific probity and humility, dedication to empiricism, and skepticism of theory-building unmoored from observation — all combined with a a bold, experimental spirit. And Freud especially praises the “type” of Charcot’s achievements: imparting scientific legitimacy to formerly-maligned subjects (paradigmatically hysteria), overturning traditional dogma (even if succumbing, Freud indicates, to several of his own), and, where necessary, courageously incurring the opposition of the conservative establishment.

Foremost among the man's “special gifts” — and a perfect illustration of the “formal” side of Freud’s admiration — was an essentially non-theoretical, “intuitive” approach to the object of research. “He was not a reflective man, not a thinker: he had the nature of an artist — he was, as he himself said, a ‘visuel,’ a man who sees” (12). This quasi-aesthetic intuition, Freud writes, was based on an immersive empiricism.

Indeed, Freud dedicates a couple of colorful passages to underscoring, illustrating, and — it seems — justifying Charcot’s radical empiricism. In these passages, Freud draws the invidious comparison between the “reflective man” or “thinker” and Charcot, whose “method of working” consisted rather in “look[ing] again and agin at the things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by day, till suddenly an understanding dawned on him” (12). The “things” about which Charcot, after this prolonged exposure, came to sudden illumination, were the “great number of chronic nervous patients at his disposal” (12). Charcot’s first-hand contact with these patients was, Freud implies, to an unusual degree “pure” — that is, unclouded by theoretical prejudice. “Concept” followed “intuition,” the primacy and authority of the senses. Once the repetition of sense-experience reached a certain threshold, the immanent structure of Charcot’s object would present itself spontaneously to his intelligence:

“In his mind’s eye the apparent chaos presented by the continual repetition of the same symptoms then gave way to order: the new nosological pictures emerged, characterized by the constant combination of certain groups of symptoms” (12)

Again, this would occur without any specifically theoretical effort on Charcot’s part — say, in the form of reflection upon logical chains of inference and deduction. The conclusion — the “new nosological pictures” — appeared rather to spring fully formed from a pre-reflective level. Freud’s subsequent self-identifications as a man of science, his unyielding characterizations of psychoanalysis as a legitimate branch of science, as well as the care he took to distinguish his program from the empty cogitations of “philosophy” — all echo these early comments on Charcot’s principles and method.

In “this kind of intellectual work,” writes Freud, Charcot “had no equal,” and it yielded to him “the greatest satisfaction” he could conceive: namely, “to see something new,” or, more precisely, “to recognize it as new” (12). Implied in these descriptions, I suppose, is the idea that, wherever it is authentic, scientific discovery is conditioned by these quasi-aesthetic experiences and values. In fact, it is only by virtue of the type of intellectual intuition cultivated by Charcot that the scientist, and science generally, are able to “advance” at all, since they are otherwise encumbered by theoretical preconceptions that obstruct access to the object as it is. In this way, Charcot transcended the myopia of a “medicine [in which] people only see what they have already learned to see” (12).

Intellectual intuition becomes both the method and aim of science, so interpreted: an approach to the world that (as far as possible) brackets one’s ideas about it; and also the end result, the final disclosure of the “new” in the midst of the old. In this respect, Charcot’s scientific conduct purportedly evokes Adam, in Genesis, before whom “God brought the creatures…to be distinguished and named (13), thus providing him with precisely “that intellectual enjoyment which Charcot praised so highly” (13). The substance of this comparison is the undiluted experience of an object — the animals of creation, nervous disorders — as something utterly new. Mythically speaking, Adam is the first to perceive, name, classify, and grasp the world — and so he must invent the names, concepts, and categories with which to organize that experience. So Charcot, adhering in his way to intellectual intuition, approaches a similar convergence between discovery and creation — for he can capture the new object, formerly unseen or ignored, only by evolving a new framework that is equal to its features.

To reiterate the distinction I drew above: Freud directs most of his praise, not towards Charcot’s conclusions, the particular scientific views he held — here Freud’s praise is tempered — but towards the values, ideals, and principles that guided him in his vocation. Charcot embodied an unprejudiced receptivity to experience; took seriously a phenomenon, hysteria, previously scorned by scientists; expressed humility regarding his uncertainties, but also ambition, disregarding doxa and defending convictions, once reached, even when it inspired antagonism: “The construction of this great edifice was naturally not achieved without violent opposition…the sterile opposition of an old generation who did not want to have their views changed” (21). These qualities and patterns of Charcot’s life, after which Freud can unreservedly model himself — the “how” — appear more important than the “what,” the content itself, or the doctrine which, by the time of the obituary, scientific criticism had already substantially weakened and which, in the closing paragraphs, Freud predicts will continue its decline.

Intriguingly, the scientific “hypothesis” that Freud expounds in this text with the greatest care and apparent interest did not belong to the man he is ostensibly eulogizing. It is Freud’s. In particular, it is an early intimation of his eventual theory of unconscious mental life, which — on a questionable pretext — he manages to insert into the obituary. Whereas Charcot “treated hysteria as just another topic in neuropathology” (20) — an attitude belied, it seems, by his own famous experiments in hypnosis — for Freud the “picture” looks at least potentially much different. I want to quote this hypothetical picture at length, not only on account of its value as an early anticipation of a mature doctrine, but because it helps clarify the limits Freud perceives even in Charcot’s “greatest achievement” (22), his experiments with hysterics under hypnosis. Freud outlines his own explanation — “the theory of a splitting of consciousness as a solution to the riddle of hysteria” (20) — as follows:

“[T]he question could arise as to what method of approach would lead most quickly to a solution of the problem. A quite unbiassed observer might have arrived at this conclusion: if I find someone in a state which bears all the signs of a painful affect — weeping, screaming and raging — the conclusion seems probable that a mental process is going on in him of which those physical phenomena are the appropriate expression. A healthy person, if he were asked, would be in a position to say what impression it was that was tormenting him; but the hysteric would answer that he did not know. The problem would at once arise of how it is that a hysterical patient is overcome by an affect about whose cause he asserts that he knows nothing. If we keep to our conclusion that a corresponding psychical process must be present, and if nevertheless we believe the patient when he denies it; if we bring together the many indications that the patient is behaving as though he does know about it; and if we enter into the history of the patient’s life and find some occasion, some trauma, which would appropriately evoke precisely those expressions of feeling — then everything points to one solution: the patient is in a special state of mind in which all his impressions or his recollections of them are no longer held together by an associate chain, a state of mind in which it is possible for a recollection to express its affect by means of somatic phenomena without the group of the other mental processes, the ego, knowing about it or being able to intervene to prevent it…Charcot, however, did not follow this path towards an explanation of hysteria” (19-20)

Now, what “method of approach,” exactly, is reflected in Freud’s solution to the puzzle of hysteria? The quoted passage is bookended by statements of two, contrasting “methods.” One method belongs to Charcot, who “did not follow this path towards an explanation of hysteria” (20), but instead, Freud continues, “treated hysteria as just another topic in neuropathology” (20), with its tools of description, classification, and through these the identification of “uniformities” and “laws” — thus providing the eventual basis for diagnosis. But these last do not seem to be the methodological “tools” either of the “quite unbiassed observer” or of Freud (whose avatar, of course, this “observer” unquestionably is). What, then, is this observer’s “path toward an explanation of hysteria”?

As a first approximation, we might say that the approach indicated is “psychological” rather than “nosological.” Later, Freud himself will express one basic doctrinal disagreement with Charcot in these terms: “But the exclusively nosographical approach adopted at the School of the Salpêtrière was not suitable for a purely psychological subject” (22). In that case, however, we must inquire: what is the meaning of this distinction, at least in the context of the passage I’ve extensively quoted? Simply put: in what respect or respects does Freud’s unbiassed observer manifest a “psychological” approach to the object — the phenomenon of hysteria — either instead of, or in addition to, the “nosological”?

I will suggest two possible differentia to the psychological method — on the evidence, in any case, of the observer’s conduct in the passage. On the one hand, and most obviously, one’s attention is narrowed to a range of phenomena that are themselves psychological: in the first instance, to a person’s thoughts, beliefs, desires, and feelings, and then, beyond these, to the person’s outward behavior inasmuch as it expresses — or seems to express — those “inner” mental contents. Whereas Charcot’s nosology pertained broadly — notwithstanding his experiments in hypnosis — to the “outer,” especially the organic and anatomical, the example Freud considers is inseparable from the “inner” and its seeming manifestations. So the unbiassed observer who approaches the object “psychologically” does not attend to all outer phenomena indiscriminately (say, to physiological deterioration), but specifically to the sort that is redolent of the “mental” — in Freud’s illustration, to “signs of a painful affect — weeping, screaming and raging” that evince “a mental process…going on in him.”

On the other hand, and closely related to the puzzle of hysteria, the psychological method seems in the nature of things to involve a form of inferential, “depth” analysis that is both unnecessary and inappropriate in the application of nosology. Not only, that is, does the psychological method presuppose a specifically psychological object — thoughts, feelings, and the like. It also presupposes a form of analysis, interpretation, and reflection that are commensurable with that object. In comparison, Charcot’s nosology begins to resemble a “zoological” program: description and classification suffice, since there is no “inner” to which he need infer. The unbiassed observer’s approach to hysteria rests on the intuition of a distinctively psychological puzzle: the perceived discrepancy between (a) the hysteric’s behavior, and (b) the hysteric’s conscious mental state, which does not seem compatible with that behavior. Our registration of this discrepancy —  by definition unnoticed in nosology —forces an “inductive” movement: if otherwise intelligible behavior, such as weeping, does not express the hysteric’s conscious mental state, then it must express a mental state — “mental process,” “impression,” “psychical process,” “recollections” — that is unconscious, but nonetheless gives rise to the observed behavior.

Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) (Chapters VII-Conclusion)

Chapters VII and VIII unites Freud’s reflections with an additional pair of concepts drawn from psychology— identification and hypnosis — that promise to throw additional light on the main theme. As Freud conceives it, “identification” constitutes a second, virtually separate mechanism of “emotional tie” alongside “object-cathexis” (45). Thus immediate (i.e. sexual) and mediated (i.e. “love”) object-cathexes are, from the beginning of life, complemented by another type of bond. Indeed, Freud makes this “other” bond originary: “identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” (46).

What are the characteristics of identification? Freud expresses it this way: “Identification endeavors to mould a person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as a model” (48). The boy who wishes and attempts to resemble his father, to incorporate the latter’s admired capacities and traits, with a view to eventually replacing him (46), illustrates the still-narcissistic thrust of this tie. Identification conveys a wish to model oneself after the object, hence (in Freud’s words) to be that object, while the subsequent “cathexis” indicates the wish to have that object (47).

We will find shortly that, as the “earliest and original form of emotional tie” (48), identification constitutes an enduring basis of “regression." This appears to be the fate of all “original” things and situations in Freud’s thought: subsequent achievements are relatively precarious, threatened with regression to what is earlier and primary. Above all, the achievement of object-cathexis may at any time succumb to this regressive dynamic, in which the love-object is once again “converted” into material for introjection. (One might compare “Mourning and Melancholia’s” somewhat different account of “identification.”)

Chapter VIII compares the mental state of love — specifically, “being in love” or romantic infatuation — with the mental condition induced by hypnosis. Freud’s objective is to deepen our understanding of the well-established “hypnotic” action of groups upon their members, though an examination of its genesis. Here Freud introduces the notorious distinction between two types of “object cathexis.” The first is “directly sexual,” and for this reason admits of direct, complete satisfaction — it creates no enduring “tie” with the object, but exhausts itself in sexual consummation. The second type of cathexis is a later, “aim inhibited” precipitate of the first: incapable of full satisfaction, this cathexis does generate enduring ties, functions of the merely partial satisfaction they afford.

Romantic infatuation is precisely an “aim inhibited”cathexis in full blossom. In these instances, a “direct” wish to possess a parent — the aim-uninhibited cathexis — was renounced and repressed under threat from the other, “rival” parent. This cathexis now unconsciously underlies the adult’s romantic life. In successful cases, at puberty one is able to “synthesize” the two currents of objective-cathexis — the directly sexual, and its “aim inhibited” sequel. (The latter is by definition laden with the dynamics of repression. It is after all a disguised form of a drive whose prospects for satisfaction were “consciously” disclaimed.) But a powerful romantic infatuation is, Freud more than hints, a product of failure to achieve such a balanced synthesis. “The depth to which anyone is in love, as contrasted with his pure sensual desire, may be measured by the size of the share taken by the aim-inhibited instincts of affection” (55-56).

  In such a case, that is, the “ratio” of aim-uninhibited to aim-inhibited drives tips decisively in favor the latter, all but eliminating the primary factor in its genesis and, indeed, any possibility of even partial satisfaction: hence the “unhappiness” of infatuation. The object of this intense, aim-inhibited love is increasingly “etherealized”; desire is divested, at least consciously, of sensual “impurities,” and “the illusion is produced that the object has come to be sensually loved on account of its spiritual merits” (56). The whole attitude is typified by distortion, exaggeration, denial — above all, “overvaluation…the loved object enjoys a certain amount of freedom from criticism…all its characteristics are valued more highly than those of people who are not loved” (56).

In particular: “The tendency which falsified judgment in this respect is that of idealization” (56). The lover’s intense, unsatisfiable longing is carried by “narcissistic libido” (56) — in quintessential cases, we are struck by how patently “the object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal…We love it on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego” (56). The love choice becomes a “roundabout…means of satisfying our narcissism” (56). Paradoxically, however, at its highest, most aim-inhibited pitch, love becomes utterly self-abnegating:

“[T]he ego becomes more and more unassuming and modest, and the object more and more sublime and precious, until at last it gets possession of the entire self-love of the ego, whose self-sacrifice thus follows as a natural consequence. The object has, so to speak, consumed the ego.” (56-57)

Freud continues: “The object has been put in the place of the ego ideal” (57). The external love-object is now invested with the qualities and function of my internal “ego ideal,” including not only certain perfections I aspire to embody, but also the claims and criticisms of “conscience,” to which I have until now been subjected. (Later in his development, Freud will ascribe these last functions to the “superego.”) To just this degree, in other words, my intrapsychic ego ideal has been evacuated, projected into some piece of the external world.

At this point, Freud makes one of his abrupt, speculative leaps in argumentation, bridging the gap that had evidently opened up between the book’s main topic and these more restricted, psychoanalytically familiar reflections into which Freud has plunged the reader. All along, in fact, this chapter has established continuity between the action of love and hypnosis. The same self-abnegating delegation of one’s ego ideal to another occurs in both cases. In the one case, the ego ideal is projected onto the love-object; in the other, the hypnotist. In both cases, the ego is afterwards as submissive to the externalized embodiment of its ideal — the object’s wishes, demands, and critical judgments — as it was formerly to its internal ideal, its “conscience.” And now, finally, the chapter’s last sentence states the relevance of this mechanism for group psychology: “A primary group…is a number of individuals who have put one and same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego” (61).

This formula unites in one place the ideas we encountered in earlier chapters with his present concern. For it is now unmistakable that the “tie” between individual and leader is in the the nature of an (aim-inhibited) “object-cathexis,” while the tie between the individual and his “peers” is a secondary “identification.” And these two libidinal operations, together with their logical relation, finally account for the “hypnotic” manifestations of groups: the vulnerability of individuals to conformism; the relaxation of their moral scruples; and the corruption of their power of judgment to match the “group “mind’s.”

Chapter IX presents Freud’s considered view of the so-called “herd instinct,” en route to his revival of that “scientific myth” of the primal horde, elaborated in Chapter X. In a now recognizable pattern, Freud’s reception of the idea is equivocal. He accepts the credibility of the herd instinct as an empirical touchstone, as earlier he acknowledged the relative validity of group “suggestibility.” But he rejects the irreducible status that others have accorded to it. In fact, this gregariousness or sociability is a relatively late acquisition. The herd instinct is further reducible, since it is explicable as a reaction-formation to a more primary situation, first in time, characterized by envy, rivalry, and mutual mistrust — which, because of the threat it poses, must be repressed, denied, and guarded against.

This is one, prominent Nietzschean thread. The herd instinct, like the ideals of justice and equality that partially constitute it, is a sort of compromise resignedly struck by the weak in response to their failure to secure their original, ambitious aims. (66) The following chapter is perhaps best understood as a prolongation of this motif: Freud’s picture of the primal horde simply fills in some of the relevant details of human “prehistory” and the human being’s innate “constitution” — two qualities which are never, in any case, tidily distinguished for Freud.

Freud’s scientific myth — he amiably accepts the appellation “just-so story” (69) from one of his critics — alleges a “transformation of the paternal horde into a community of brothers” (69). There is a parallel here. The infantile constellation is preserved, in the timeless unconscious of the adult, very much intact, exerting undreamt influence on the course of life — a situation that may always be abruptly restored, at a touch, by the pull of regression, in response to internal or external strain. In the same way, the template of the primal horde that Freud divines in our archaic history endures through all later social developments as a permanent core — no matter how revolutionary or progressive these developments may appear to us. And, though frequently obscured, this core is always ready to explode into undisguised savagery. Freud is perfectly candid about this parallel:

“Just as primitive man survives potentially in every individual, so the primal horde may arise once more out of any random collection; in so far as men are habitually under the sway of group formation we recognize in it the survival of the primal horde. We must conclude that the psychology of groups is the oldest human psychology” (70)

Having begun, it seems, from a place of scientific agnosticism, Freud’s account of group mentality and behavior is now increasingly darkened by Hobbesian and Nietzschean shadows. Power and violence (or at least its threat); the wish for unrestricted mastery and supremacy over others, ostensibly native to every individual (one actually realized by the father of the ancient primal horde, owing to his natural, terrifying strength); the genealogical origin of moral ideals like justice and equality in the primary affect of envy (from which they sprout as “reaction formations”) — Freud’s examination of the evidence, with the assistance a psychoanalytic frame of reference, leads him unerringly in the direction of disenchantment: the reduction of the higher to the lower, the noble to the base and all-too-human.

Chapter XI, “A Differentiating Grade of the Ego,” is dedicated mainly to fresh conjectures about the “psychogenesis” of individual neurosis, especially depression and manic-depression, and how these illnesses may follow the vagaries of “ego” and “ego ideal,” in their greater and lesser distance from one another. A greater distance signifies a self-mortifying depression; yet when all distance has been overcome — when, that is, the ego ideal’s critical monitoring and negative judgment have been suspended entirely — then mania results: “[I]t cannot be doubted that in cases of mania the ego and the ego ideal have fused together”(82). The special value of this chapter for our reflections is its tantalizingly brief paragraph connecting the jubilant, carnivalesque atmosphere of certain social traditions with this problematic. Freud suggests that, in all likelihood, these traditions respond therapeutically to a psychic situation characterized by a great discrepancy between ego and ego ideal, one that borders on neurosis. “It is quite conceivable that the separation…cannot be borne for long…and has to be temporarily undone” (81). Such an institutionalized, “periodical infringement of the prohibition” (81), sanctioned within certain bounds, spared individuals from neurosis by — consistent with Freud’s dynamic model of psycho-energics — releasing damned up libidinal forces and restoring the ego to health, whereupon it “might…once again feel satisfied with itself” (81).

Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) (Chapters V-VI)

Here Freud begins to derive the “group mind” and its seemingly unique qualities from the psychoanalytic master-concept of libido. “We will try our fortune, then, with the supposition that love relationships…also constitute the essence of the group mind [Massenseele]” (31). Chapters V and VI carry forward the argument by, first, reviewing several group types — Church and Army — that illustrate Freud’s “bonding” hypothesis in a perspicuous way; and, second, addressing the uneasy relation of “love” to its inescapable shadow, “feelings of aversion and hostility” (42), which taint even the most loving relations with ambivalence. (Freud’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” contains an extensive description of this ambivalence.)

Freud’s reflections on the Church and Army center on the forms of bonding each displays. Notwithstanding their real differences, the elementary emotional bonds holding them in place are essentially identical. Both are examples of “highly organized, lasting, and artificial groups” (32). Groups that lack these qualities — that are disorganized and unstable, that arise and dissolve spontaneously — scarcely qualify as groups at all. A group presupposes the condition of being held together.

The most striking characteristic shared by Church and Army — what for Freud accounts for their basic “morphologies” — is the “parental” figuration. In either case, “the same illusion holds good of there being a head…who loves all the individuals in the group with an equal love. Everything depends upon this illusion” (33). By “everything,” Freud means the continuing existence of the group. Somehow, the “belief” of the group members that they are loved by their leader — paraphrased, provocatively and without elaboration, as an “illusion” — generates in turn their own feelings of attachment, first to the leader and then to one another. This belief represents a necessary, albeit insufficient condition for the perpetuation of these groups. (Here Freud flags the possibility of “leaderless” (40) groups, hinting that “leading ideas” may assume the functions of leaders per se.)

The leaders in whose vital “love” the group members believe are Christ and the Commander-in-Chief. Each is construed, consciously or unconsciously, as a “kind elder brother” or “substitute father” (33) who cares about and looks after the welfare of everyone in his charge. Only on the basis of this original, primary “bond” — between leader and led — can there arise the secondary bond among the group members themselves. These member become united with one another, that is, by virtue of the unity each has individually established with a common leader.

Thus Freud remarks: “Believers call themselves bothers in Christ, that is, brothers through the love which Christ has for them” (33). As perfunctory evidence for these claims, Freud cites incidents of social disintegration — for example, when the members of an Army panic, dissolve their commitments, and turn on one another. Inevitably, Freud argues, this development is catalyzed by the antecedent rupture of the bond between these members and their leader (or more metaphorical “leading idea”), either because that leader has died, or abandoned his charge, or has retracted his “love” (or the basis for trusting it). Under these conditions, in which the principal, “parental” bond is broken, the secondary, “sibling” bonds quickly expire (38).

In this way, Freud has begun to ground the perplexing manifestations of group-mentality in the psychoanalytic theory of libido. The manifestations cited in the literature as suis generis, that is, “suggestibility,” “emotional contagion,” and the like — these may be explained, Freud suggests, as the predictable result of a specific libidinal distribution. In particular, the susceptibility of the individual to radical “alteration" by the group — the reduction of his intellect, and intensification of his affect, until they match the spirit of the group — can be understood along these lines:

“It would appear as though we were on the right road towards an explanation of the principal phenomenon of group psychology — the individual's lack of freedom in a group. If each individual is bound in two directions by such an intense emotional tie, we shall find no difficulty in attributing to that circumstance the alteration and limitation which have been observed in his personality” (35)

Common to the diverse manifestations of group-mentality is, fundamentally, the “impairment” of individual agency and integrity. But it is precisely libido, Eros, that most plainly activates this impairment. In other words, just this impairment illustrates Freud’s central thesis: “The essence of a group lies in the libidinal ties existing in it” (35).

In fact, Freud continues, “love for oneself knows only one barrier — love for others, love for objects” (43). Love, that is, is “the civilizing factor” (44) that checks every individual’s inborn “narcissism.” But our capacity to suspend this narcissism or “self love” — a precondition both of intimate relations and generic group membership — is finally limited. The mixed success of groups in maintaining themselves is a function of this limitation.

Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) (Chapters I-IV)

The book’s first sentence evokes and challenges a common perception, namely, that the disciplines of “individual” and “social” psychology are sharply differentiated:

“The contrast between individual psychology and social or group [Masse] Psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely” (3)

In fact, Freud continues, all efforts to grasp the individual in isolation, to abstract from his or her “relations” with others, and to distinguish this individual from the subsequent “social” creature immersed in that ensemble of relations —these efforts are bound to fail:

“In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well” (3)

These words may surprise readers who regard Freud as the originator, and most uncompromising advocate, of so-called “intrapsychic” images of mind. For, given the occasion to directly address this controversy and articulate his considered view, Freud inclines toward the “interpersonal” or the “relational” — precisely the paradigms that in recent decades have been routinely counterposed to Freud’s thinking.

Not only does Freud question the distinction between individual and social psychology. He also rejects the distinction — drawn by Gustave Le Bon and others — between “interpersonal” reality (the individual restricted to intimate relations) and that of “society” or the “group.” He indicates straightaway, in fact, that the same psychoanalytic concepts will describe and explain both.

In this introductory sketch, then, Freud does little more than question several related distinctions. The separation of individual from social psychology is, he suggests, more conventional and pragmatic than scientific: strictly speaking, the human being is virtually unimaginable apart from his or her “relations,” at the very least to the family. Similarly, the manifestations of our “collective” lives are not as social thinkers before Freud regarded them — suis generis functions of the “group mind,” unprecedented by, and incommensurable with the thought, emotion, and behavior of independent individuals. On the contrary, Freud will argue in Group Psychology that these collective manifestations are continuous with antecedent forms.

In particular, the psychological “expressions” of a member in a numerically great group are not, as Le Bon believes, a qualitatively distinct datum. Hence they do not require novel explanatory concepts, unneeded at the level of “isolated” individuals or small ensembles such as the family. The same psychoanalytic concepts and mechanisms that illuminate the individual and family are, appropriately adapted, sufficient to the group psychologist’s needs.

To motivate these anticipatory gestures, Freud in Chapters II and III canvasses some well-known contemporaneous accounts of Massenpsychologie. He does this, not in order to invalidate or even amend their descriptions and typologies of collective life (Freud accepts these as uncontroversial), but rather to isolate a mystery unresolved in their writings — a mystery camouflaged by “magic words” such as “suggestion,” “influence,” “contagion,” and “imitation,” alongside more scientific-sounding phrases like “primitive induction of emotion.” In fact, these words and phrases are tautological, since they essentially re-describe the explanandum as explanans.

In an autobiographical aside, Freud recounts his mounting dissatisfaction with and even “resistance” to these explanatorily-idle incantations, “protesting against the view that suggestion, which explained everything, was itself to be exempt from explanation” (28). In other words, confronted with phenomena that appear uniquely characteristic of the group-mind and in no way derivable from ordinary human behavior (as individuals in isolation or in small cohorts), Le Bon, Sighele, and McDougal are compelled to postulate novel forces — suggestion, contagion, etc. — to account for the “alterations” conceived as radical. These observers have in mind such alterations as the steep decline of “intellectual functioning” of any individual once interpolated into a large group, as well as the dramatic “intensification of affect” in him or her. These changes, this literature continues, are so discrepant from the ordinary run of things that some novel mechanism, like mass hypnosis, is required to explain them. (Later on, in fact, Freud will turn precisely to clinical experience with patients under hypnosis to make his point. His interest in hypnosis evidently began around the time of his studies with Charcot.)

To be sure, this “alteration” may also take less objectionable directions. Stabler and more highly organized groups may well elevate the moral capabilities of its members, rather than merely disabling their intellectual functioning and relaxing their scruples. The action of group mind is not uniformly regressive; only the frenzied “crowd,” neither stable nor organized, reliably induces regression.

Until this point, Chapter IV, Freud’s text has been mainly expository. Now Freud’s voice becomes innovative and critical, and begins to introduce the psychoanalytic concepts that both demystify the outstanding mystery and, more generally, redeem the Introduction’s promissory note: that, fundamentally, human behavior — whether in isolation or in groups, and whether in groups small or large — is defined by continuity, even homogeneity. There is no stark distinction immanent to human behaviors, hence there is no demand to evolve an incommensurable stock of “forces” attributable to some levels of behavior, but not to others.

The fulcrum of Freud’s argument is the concept of libido — as close to a psychoanalytic master-concept as one could like, which at times appears to explain each and every piece of mental functioning. The group-manifestations that Le Bon and McDougal trace to extraordinary forces are for Freud more or less disguised expressions of love. There follows a brief “deduction” of libido, eros, love, and cognate terms from their narrowly sexual basis: “The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists…in sexual love with sexual union as its aim” (29). Freud does not expend himself deriving these connections, which depend upon psychoanalytic observation, but confines himself to stating the axiom and asking: how might libido, once credited as a universal element in human behavior, explain group-manifestations that initially appear exceptional? I will take up this question in the next entry.

An Introduction

I will use this blog to record reflections during my psychoanalytic training at the William Alanson White Institute — mainly, I expect, on the reading that I do. I began this training last year in the Institute’s Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program (IPPP), and I regret not having kept any consistent record of my impressions. Ideally, this blog will motivate me to clarify my reactions to this ongoing experience, both for my own reference and for the benefit of anyone kind enough to visit my site. I am not an expert here. My PhD is in the history of philosophy, and while I’ve long been curious about psychoanalysis, I am now reading much of the “canon” for the first time. Perhaps this is an advantage for readers approaching this same material from similar backgrounds or levels: likely they are struggling with similar difficulties, questions about the same texts, and may profit from the example of someone working out tentative solutions on his own. Readers who know more about psychoanalysis than I do, who have had greater experience in this “world” — both clinicians and scholars — are invited to correct my mistakes and fill in any gaps. With your help I won’t mislead myself or others too badly in my efforts to grasp a discourse with a reputation for difficulty.

The White Institute is the originator and contemporary home of interpersonal psychoanalysis, and so I expect that the better part of my reading diet will tilt in this direction, or at least won’t deviate too far from it. Certainly, most of the writing to which IPPP students are exposed falls squarely within these parameters, and I imagine the current track will reflect more continuity than discontinuity. Nonetheless, I will also post my reactions to works that do not connect in any obvious way, or connect only problematically, to the interpersonal tradition.

Finally, I want to append an intellectual-autobiographical note, by way of explanation for my enrollment at this particular institute. What, after all, has drawn me to interpersonal psychoanalysis and the White Institute, rather than the traditions represented at the various other institutes in NYC alone? As I make plain on other parts of this website, my main interests as an academic, my intellectual center of gravity, have been the great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and that collection of thinkers now usually glossed with the phrases “Frankfurt School” and “critical theory.” In fact, there are compelling connections between each of these interests and what is now called interpersonal psychoanalysis.

The first is a true elective affinity, rather than a matter of direct or indirect influence. For many of the themes, preoccupations, and claims most characteristic of this tradition received early, systematic attention from Hegel, who among philosophers is now appreciated as the quintessential thinker of “recognition,” “intersubjectivity,” and “sociality” more generally. The second connection — the path from critical theory to the White Institute — is more direct: one of the best known Frankfurt School thinkers, Erich Fromm, was a founder of this Institute. In light of this association, it is unsurprising to find interpersonal psychoanalysis echoing the Frankfurt School premise that an irrational or “sick” culture will undermine the psychological needs of its members.

I hope to post around once a week, usually on Sundays.