Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) (II)
We closed our last discussion with Freud’s suggestion that mourning and melancholia represent two ways of absorbing loss, or “working through” it. So Freud contrasts “the work which mourning performs” (244) with “melancholia[’s]…similar internal work” (245).
To begin, then: how does Freud grasp the “work of mourning?” This work consists in reconciling the results of sober “reality testing” — the perception “that the loved object no longer exists” (244) — with the mind’s stubborn refusal to “willingly abandon [its] libidinal position” (244), so that at some level “the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged” (245). Mourning is completed only when “respect for reality gains the day” (244), and reality-testing has overpowered this refusal to acknowledge its results.
Freud’s subsequent “structural” model of the mind would, I imagine, assign the actors in this internal conflict to the agencies of “ego,” whose major function is precisely reality-testing, and “id,” where the mind’s most powerful and reality-impervious wishes are stored. Even where the ego’s reality-testing leaves the mourner in no conscious doubt regarding the irrevocability of a loss, the id — the unconscious level at which “libidinal positions” are entrenched — will withhold “acknowledgement” with all the forces at its disposal to ensure that “the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged.” Successful mourning invariably takes time, then; the required libido-withdrawal is only gradually achieved. Freud’s description is worth considering at greater length:
“Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it…[W]hen the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.” (244-45)
If this description of mourning is correct, though, we might quibble slightly with Freud’s previous suggestion that in “mourning…there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious” (245). To be sure, the mourner is in some respect conscious of the loss — in a way, moreover, that the melancholic is emphatically not. (The mourner knows his dejection is the consequence of whichever loss he has indeed suffered.) But in another respect, the mourner remains “unconscious” for the duration of the mourning, inasmuch as at some level this mourner continues to believe, falsely and in the teeth of the evidence, in the enduring existence of the lost-object.
Freud now contrasts this “work of mourning” with the “similar internal work” (245) of melancholia, whose “unknown loss” — just because it is unknown — must be absorbed in some other way. To see how this is, Freud returns to the “picture” of melancholia, and to a characteristic symptom it does not share with mourning. The additional feature of melancholia, purportedly absent in mourning (at least in its purified form), is the “lowering of the self-regarding feelings” (244). While temporarily sharing the melancholic’s dejection, insensibility, and general withdrawal of interest from the world, the prototypical “mourner” is not identifiable by her self-mortification. (In fact, we will find that this distinction holds only when mourning is uncontaminated by ambivalence. But in that case, the conceptual separation of mourning and melancholia breaks down, anyhow.)
Though these self-reproaches may appear excessive or entirely unfounded to observers, Freud insists straightaway that the melancholic “must surely be right in some way and be describing something that is as it seems to him to be” (246), or that “he is giving a correct description of his psychological situation” (247). While introduced axiomatically, both the meaning and warrant of these assertions are far from evident; they are arguably more conclusions that follow from the subsequent analysis than uncontroversial premises of that analysis. In other words, we will find that the self-reproaches are “right in some way” or “correct description[s]” only when we see how they are apt. (To anticipate: these reproaches apply precisely to the lost object that the melancholic has ex hypothesi internalized.)
Here Freud interpolates a brief theoretical reflection on “the view which the melancholic’s disorder affords of the constitution of the human ego” (247) — the ingredients of which prefigure the “structural” model of the mind officially introduced in 1923’s The Ego and the Id. (In Love and its Place in Nature, Jonathan Lear notes (158) that it was precisely Freud’s attempt to explain melancholia that compelled him to innovate the structural model.) Rather strikingly, melancholia provides the sight of a mind at odds with itself: “one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object” (247). This “critical agency,” Freud hypothesizes, enjoys a certain “independence in other circumstances” (247); it is not restricted to melancholic persons but is a universal constituent of mind, “commonly called conscience” (247). In melancholia and perhaps in other conditions, this agency, “among the major institutions of the ego” (247), precisely “can become diseased on its own account” (247).
As I understand the post-history of this trope, Freud will ultimately use a single term, superego, to embrace both this critical agency, “conscience,” and that which until this point he named the “ego ideal.” It seems somehow illuminating that, at least in the context of the “Mourning” essay, it has not yet occurred to Freud even to associate to the “ego ideal,” much less conjoin it to the “critical agency” that for the time being appears sui generis.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) (I)
Freud begins this well-known essay with a double-analogy — that is, an analogy between analogies. Just as (a) dreams supply a “prototype” drawn from healthy life that illuminates neurosis, similarly, (b) the non-neurotic and universal experience of “mourning” may help us to grasp “melancholia” — a condition which in many respects resembles it (243). The analogy implies an idea evident in much of Freud’s writings, namely, the essential continuity between pathological and non-pathological mental phenomena. The “healthy" person’s dreams and grief throw light on the “illnesses” of “narcissistic mental disorders” and depression, respectively, precisely because the same forces and principles obtain both in the norm and the deviation from it.
In what, then, does the connection between mourning and melancholia consist? Beyond their outward resemblances, or the similar “general pictures of the two conditions” (243), Freud’s clinical observations have led him to suppose that the “exciting causes due to environmental influences are…the same for both conditions” (243). The two are linked, in other words, both by their presenting “symptoms” and their (probable) “etiologies.”
First, the symptoms — what are these, exactly? When we compare the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of persons in these two states, and abstracting from the paths that lead to them, we discover a basic identity that is nonetheless complicated by one, significant discrepancy: `
“The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment…The disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same.” (244)
This significant discrepancy — the “disturbance of self-regard” observed in melancholy but not, generally speaking, in mourning — represents a puzzle which, in moment, Freud will attempt to address.
But before turning to this puzzle, let us ask: what type of “exciting causes” does Freud have in mind? (By “exciting cause,” I imagine Freud is referring to the catalyst of a condition, which may or may not coincide with its underlying explanation.) These are, as a rule, more unmistakable in the “non-pathological” process of mourning — the investigative appeal, again, of the analogy that begins the essay.
“Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one‘s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition.” (243)
We can anticipate that, while the “exciting cause” of melancholia may be perfectly obvious both to the melancholic and the observer, the underlying reason need not be conscious. Indeed, in some instances, as Freud will put it, “even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia,” this might be “only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (245). And in fact, one distinguishing feature of melancholia on Freud’s account is precisely its unconscious dimensions.
While Freud does not express his position in just this way, it seems that the “causes” of these conditions — at root the same problem of loss — may nevertheless be distinguished in two, related ways.
In cases of mourning, the immediate provocation or “exciting cause” is at the same time a sufficient explanation for the reaction. The death of a loved one, say, is not merely a trigger for mourning; it is also its entire object, hence a compelling reason for it. By contrast, the exciting causes of melancholia include such seemingly innocuous events as an unintentional snub or minor setback, which may not fully account for that reaction — in other words, there is some other reason.
Following from this first distinction, whereas the underlying basis of mourning is essentially known — the mourner is in no way perplexed about either the occasion or the essence of the mourning — the same cannot be said of the melancholic. While the latter may, indeed, be perfectly aware of, and pained by, the exciting cause of his dejection, both its underlying basis and the “mechanics” of its “work” remain mysterious, that is to say, unconscious. So Freud writes:
“This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.” (245)
Of course, the very premise of Freud’s article suggests these differences: while mourning is a familiar and relatively un-mysterious state to those who experience and observe it, melancholy is frequently puzzling, arising as it does in persons who are not obviously stricken by “loss.”
(To be sure, Freud expresses surprise that mourning is not more puzzling to both laypersons and psychologists, who accept the pain involved “as a matter of course” (245). But in this case, the ostensible puzzle relates, not to the cause or basic mechanism of mourning — to the popular notions of which Freud gives a psychoanalytic twist — but rather to the high degree of pain it exacts.)
At this point, Freud refers both to “the work which mourning performs” (244) and to “melancholia[’s]…similar internal work” (245), so suggesting that, as rule, the experience of “loss” introduces some destabilizing difficulty or problem to which one must respond. How the mind goes about resolving or “making good” the loss will determine which of the two conditions emerges. Or, more accurately: mourning and melancholia designate two strategies of absorbing loss and “working through” it — one mainly conscious, the other mainly unconscious. I will consider this distinction in greater detail in the next entry.
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.
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.
Freud, “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” (1914) (I)
Freud’s 1914 account of his “movement” contains pointed expositions of psychoanalytic method and theory. And it is here, too, that Freud infamously describes — or perhaps compels — the “secessions” of Alfred Adler and Carl Jung from that movement. We are asked not to call the activities of these apostates “psychoanalysis” any longer, since they have forfeited their title to it. These two aims — exposition and polemic — are naturally connected: the intelligibility of these secessions presupposes some such account of psychoanalysis. From what, after all, have Adler and Jung seceded? In the opening paragraph, Freud arrogates to himself a unique authority to adjudicate this question:
“Although it is a long time now since I was the only psycho-analyst, I consider myself justified in maintaining that even today no one can know better than I do what psychoanalysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind, and precisely what should be called psychoanalysis and what would better be described by some other name” (7)
What then is essential to psychoanalysis? — what are its necessary and sufficient “identity conditions,” such that particular “ways of investigating the life of the mind” could qualify, or fail to qualify, as specimens of this type?
In a condensed passage that announces Freud’s considered answer to this question, several possibilities emerge. The passage begins with a statement that appears to represent the “definitive” criterion:
“The theory of repression is the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests. It is the most essential part of it” (16)
Were we to stop reading here, we might suppose that only those who accept Freud’s full “theory of repression” are entitled to call their standpoint “psychoanalytic.” But the balance of the passage qualifies this initial impression. For Freud continues that it is not the endorsement of any “theory” per se — his or others' — that distinguishes analytic from non-analytic standpoints. Rather, what marks out psychoanalysis is in the first instance the acknowledgement in clinical contexts of certain “facts” — an acknowledgement that precedes and grounds all theorization. Freud puts his judgment this way:
“[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 recognizes these two facts and 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. But anyone who takes up other sides of the problem while avoiding these two hypotheses will hardly escape a charge of misappropriation of property by attempted impersonation, if he persists in calling himself a psycho-analyst” (16)
Later in the article, Freud subtly amends his formulation, adding a third observable “fact” — amnesia — to the original pair without, however, insisting on its special acknowledgement:
“The first task confronting psycho-analysis was to explain the neuroses; it used the two facts of resistance and transference as starting-points, and, taking into consideration the third fact of amnesia, accounted for them with its theories of repression, of the sexual motive forces in neurosis and of the unconscious” (50)
Thus the reader immediately confronts several dilemmas. The first dilemma is that, though we are initially told that the theory of repression is the “corner-stone” and “most essential part” of the psychoanalytic edifice, it now seems that — strictly speaking, and prior to all theoretical constructions — two types of empirical observation alone provide our psychoanalytic differentia.
But this constitutes a rather less exacting criterion. At least in principle, after all, we may imagine a theorist who in clinical work both observes and prioritizes a patient’s “transference” and “resistance,” but nonetheless proceeds to explain these phenomena on some theoretical basis other than Freud’s “theory of repression” — say, a different theory of mind, or of development, or of motivation. In the quoted passage, in fact, Freud appears, if not to welcome such theories, at least to recognize their potential legitimacy. Such a hypothetical theory, to repeat, “has a right to call itself psycho-analysis, even though it arrives at results other than my own.”
Yet there is a second dilemma. For even putting to one side the theoretical “explanation” of these observable “facts,” we may ask ourselves: what exactly is Freud demanding of any psychoanalyst vis-à-vis these facts? Is it sufficient for a theory to recognize “resistance” and “transference” in patients — to accept their existence — to qualify as psychoanalysis?
A cursory reading of the quoted passages appears to license such a broad interpretation. But this cannot be right. The mere recognition of resistance and transference will not be enough for Freud’s purposes since, as we will see, he disqualifies Adler and Jung despite their recognition of these facts. On closer inspection, Freud’s definition includes at least two criteria:
“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” (bracketed letters mine)
That is to say: not only does a psychoanalytic theory recognize the facts of repression and transference; in addition it necessarily “takes them as the starting-point of its work.” If Adler and Jung no longer qualify, then, it is presumably because they have failed the second, rather than the first, requirement. In the next entry, I will take up the meaning Freud assigns to this “failure.”