Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (III)

While Freud does not define “resistance” in this piece, his use of the term is congruent with the descriptions offered in other places. In “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915), for instance, Freud remarks that “anything that interferes with the continuation of the treatment may be an expression of resistance” (162). Repetition constitutes “resistance,” then, inasmuch as it replaces — and thus effectively preempts — the “work” proper to analysis. This work consists in the struggle to disarm repressions and liberate, or consciously access, that which has been repressed: impulses, affects, thoughts, fantasies, and, of course, memories.

Consider, too, Freud’s abstract on the aim of analysis, as it is found in the “Constructions” (1937) essay written towards the end of his life:

“[T]he work of analysis aims at inducing the patient to give up the repressions…belonging to his early development and to replace them by reactions of a sort that would correspond to a psychically mature condition. With this purpose in view he must be brought to recollect certain experiences and the affective impulses called up by them which he has for the time being forgotten. We know that his present symptoms and inhibitions are the consequences of repressions of this kind: thus that they are a substitute for these things that he has forgotten.” (257-258)

Thus releasing repressions and repairing memory are conceived as corollaries. If, Freud now seems to be saying, this repressed content, including memories, can be “discharged” in behaviors that schematically replicate the original experience, there will be no felt need to “liberate” that content as a conscious memory. In this way, the patient unburdens himself of the content in a way that favors resistance. So long as a repressed content, pressing for discharge, can be disposed of via action, there is little appeal in handling it by the comparatively painful approach of recollection. Indeed, the patient has considerable incentive to avoid the second alternative, if at all possible, since — negative consequences of “acting out” notwithstanding — repetition comes rather easily.

Under conditions of resistance — particularly, a transference that is “hostile or unduly intense” (151) — the analyst can expect a “sequence” of repetitions from the patient that are best regarded as potent “weapons”:

“From then onwards the resistances determine the sequence of the material which is to be repeated. The patient brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself against the progress of the treatment — weapons which we must wrest from him one by one.” (151)

Thus, in the case of the psychoanalytic “criteria” mentioned in the last entry — transference and resistance — repetition approaches a relation of pure identity. Repetition is a type of transference (and vice versa); just as it is a type of resistance. And these relations of identity, while threatening to collapse the distinctions between separate concepts, are nonetheless unsurprising. In most places, after all, Freud is plainly interested in transference itself almost entirely as a form of resistance, while resistance hardly threatens treatment until it blossoms into its most acute form — namely, transference. Once repetition is turned into a near-synonym for transference, in other words, it seems likewise inevitable that it would interest Freud exclusively under its aspect of “resistance.”

How exactly, though, does repetition constitute resistance? — how, that is, does it interfere with the course of treatment? Freud reiterates that “the patient repeats instead of remembering, and repeats under the conditions of resistance” (151). In short, the patient does not do what he ought — he does not remember directly. And he does do what he ought not — he succumbs to a repetition compulsion that both precludes directly recollection and, in the bargain, disrupts the analysis in other ways.

To this provisional summary, and in light of our foregoing reflections, I feel tempted to append a couple qualifications. First, as I have insisted, the patient not only repeats instead of remembering; he also repeats as a way of remembering — the only way as yet available to him. Second, while the neurotic’s repetition compulsion is, according to Freud’s account, plainly inflamed “under the conditions of resistance,” this compulsion has surely antedated the analysis-proper.

To be sure, “acting out” as a surrogate for direct recollection may well belong — strictly speaking — to the clinical context. But it would be an overstatement, it seems, to infer that repetitious phenomena originate there. Nor would Freud dispute this: for what is neurosis, from the isolated symptom to the all-pervasive character pathology, if not just such a repetition? Here one might respond that these repetitions, while antedating the analysis, are even then redolent of “resistance” — resistant, that is, to consciously approaching the repressed materials for which they substitute.  And this seems correct, provided we broaden the category the resistance beyond its “narrow” application to behaviors that interfere with analysis, and paradigmatically to whatever checks or diverts the flow of free associations.

In fact, I take the next sentences in Freud’s piece as strong evidence that he, too, is expanding the meaning of both “repeating” and “resistance” beyond the treatment, to wherever repressions much be secured against illumination.

“We may now ask what it is that he in fact repeats or acts out. The answer is that he repeats everything that has already made its way from the sources of the repressed into his manifest personality — his inhibitions and unserviceable attitudes and his pathological character-traits. He also repeats all his symptoms in the course of the treatment.” (151)

For what, indeed, could it mean for the patient to “repeat” — in treatment — his “inhibitions and unserviceable attitudes,” his “pathological character-traits,” as well as “all his symptoms” (151)? After all: on Freud’s own view, isn’t each of these items already and in essence a “repetition” of some unconscious memory? — something, in Freud’s phrase, that “has already made its way from the sources of the repressed into his manifest personality”? In other words, can’t we simply say that the patient’s “acting out” is the repetition — in therapy — of a repetition — those pieces of the manifest personality that already do double-duty for a repressed memory? Freud continues:

“[T]he patient's state of being ill cannot cease with the beginning of his analysis, and…we must treat his illness, not as an event of the past, but as a present-day force. This state of illness is brought, piece by piece, within the field and range of operation of the treatment, and while the patient experiences it as something real and contemporary, we have to do our therapeutic work on it, which consists in a large measure in tracing it back to the past.” (151-152)

The formulations enclosing this passage are, again, paradoxical. Freud begins the quote with an exhortation to “treat his [the patient’s] illness…as a present-day force,” and not as something over and done, “an event of the past.” Yet the very next sentence seems to contain a roughly antithetical idea: that, while the “patient experiences it [the illness] as something real and contemporary,” nonetheless, in “our therapeutic work” we should not be misled by this putative contemporaneity. On the contrary, we must insist on “tracing it back to the past.” If, then, Freud invites the analyst to construe the illness “as a present-day force,” it is because for the patient that is exactly how it appears — “real and contemporary.” The illness persists as a “reality,” then; but this reality is a function of the patient’s (unconscious) illusion. The patient’s “illusion of reality” becomes, for Freud, the “reality of an illusion.”

Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (II)

After Freud’s introductory overview of the three “phases” in the development of analytic technique — each of which, of course, implies some attitude to the superordinate aim of “remembering” — Freud “interpolate[s] a few remarks” (148), extending over several pages, on the meanings of “forgetting” and “remembering” in different contexts. The possible objects of “forgetfulness,” in particular, run a spectrum:

1. Experiences that, while they haven’t been “thought about” for some time, have nevertheless been “always known” (148) in some way

2. “Things” the patient “has never thought of since they happened” (148)

3. Events that are properly shrouded by “childhood amnesia,” that is, are repressed, but which are simultaneously “preserved” in distorted form as “screen memories” (148)

4. A “group of physical processes,” including “purely internal acts” (149) such as “phantasies” and “emotional impulses” (148), in relation to which the term “forgetting” is something of a misnomer — if only because, in these instances, something is “remembered” by a patient “which could never have been ‘forgotten’” as “it was never at any time noticed — was never conscious” (149)

5. The type of “forgetting” associated with the concepts of Nachträglichkeit or après-coup, which Freud now canvasses in this way:

“There is one special class of experiences of the utmost importance for which no memory can as a rule be recovered. These are experiences which occurred in very early childhood and were not understood at the time but which were subsequently understood and interpreted. One gains a knowledge of them through dreams and one is obliged to believe in them on the most compelling evidence provided by the fabric of the neurosis” (149)

Unlike (d), the “purely internal acts” which were not in the first instance “conscious” at all, (e) these items were proper experiences that had, Freud hypothesizes, been originally “conscious,” but which — owing to their retroactively-conferred “traumatic” significance at some subsequent point — were profoundly repressed beyond the point of any direct recall. These scenes are rather “posited” in analysis, or inferred from “evidence” preeminently including "the fabric of the neurosis” (149). (Here the editors direct us to Freud’s “Wolf Man” account. But we ought also to compare this argument with the “Constructions” piece written rather late in Freud’s life.)

At this place, Freud’s overview of developments in analytic technique becomes especially pertinent. For, notwithstanding their purported limitations, the original “hypnotic treatments” could still be credited with an appealing simplicity vis-à-vis “the process of remembering” (148) — a process that reliably generated a “delightfully smooth course of events” (149). By contrast, an analyst practicing the latest iteration of technique can by no means take this “smooth course” for granted. As a rule, it appears, the form taken by “remembering” in analysis is rather unlike the direct, literal sort induced under hypnosis. Instead, as Freud now puts it,

“we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (150)

In accordance with the tripartite title of the piece, then — “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” — the middle section (150-154) develops the causes, meanings, and implications of “repetition,” especially in the clinical context.

Freud claims that the patient’s conduct during analysis — embracing patterns of thinking and feeling, as well as “action” per se — regularly echoes some childhood prototype that is not itself remembered. To consider Freud’s examples: the adult patient may be “defiant and critical”; or ensnared in a “helpless and hopeless deadlock”; or “intensely ashamed.” In each of these instances, the patient unknowingly recapitulates some early dynamic concerning — we are told — his or her attitude toward parents; or frustrated reaction to “infantile sexual researches”; or shame and anxiety around “certain sexual activities” (150).

(Transference, it soon appears, is one type of these repetitious phenomena, in which what is “old” and consciously forgotten nevertheless persists in putatively “new” contexts. I say “putative,” of course, since, from the standpoint of the neurotic patient’s unconscious, the present is not “new” at all, but a simple prolongation of the original situation, the “old”; and, further, in accordance with this unconscious conviction, the patient practically “shapes” the new context — say, the analytic relationship — after the old model.)

There is a wonderful ambiguity in Freud’s use of this concept — “repetition” — and the article capitalizes on it. Sometimes it appears that repetition is an alternative to memory: that which we cannot or will not “remember” — say, the old defiance of childhood — is “repeated” instead. At other times, though, it appears that this repetition is, not an alternative to remembering, but precisely a type or “mode" of remembering, albeit a “primitive” and frequently unfortunate one. This ambiguity is hardly surprising. Freud had characterized the “symptoms” of conversion-hysteria in a roughly similar way. From nearly the beginning of Freud’s intellectual development, in other words, he’d tended to view the manifestations of neurosis — the paralyzed leg, the vomiting — as symbolic “repetitions” of some original, conflict-ridden state of affairs, and — for just that reason — ways of unconsciously preserving or remembering that experience.

This oscillation between “repeating or remembering,” on the one hand, and “repeating as remembering,” on the other, lasts the entire article. The piece’s rhetorical impact requires both uses: repetition must be acknowledged both as something distinct from remembering and as the unconscious effort to accomplish precisely that. So, for instance, at one moment, speaking of the repressed experience, Freud writes that the patient “reproduces it not as a memory but as an action” (150); and, at another moment, that “this compulsion to repeat…is his way of remembering” (150). Hence we might say that, in its narrow sense, remembering is counterposed to repetition. In its broad sense, though, remembering encompasses repetition, which represents one form memory may assume.

Now Freud continues: “What interests us most of all is naturally the relation of this compulsion to repeat to the transference and to resistance” (151). This “naturally” might strike the reader as perplexing and unmotivated — why the focus on the connections to these concepts rather than any others? We ought to remind ourselves, then, that in the “History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” published the same year, Freud isolated “transference” and “resistance” as the criterial differentia of legitimate psychoanalysis.

In a verbally playful phrase, Freud indicates that, from one perspective, transference is merely one kind of “repetition”; but from another, equally defensible perspective, repetition is a kind of “transference”:

“We soon perceive that the transference is itself only a piece of repetition, and that the repetition is a transference of the forgotten past not only on to the doctor but also on to all the other aspects of the current situation” (151)

Indeed, the consequences of repetition are not restricted to the “treatment” itself. “[T]he compulsion to repeat…now replaces the impulsion to remember” (151) both within the transference and beyond it, spilling over into all sectors of the patient’s life. In Freud’s words, the repetition is observable “not only in his personal attitude to his doctor but also in every other activity and relationship which may occupy his life at the time” (151).

On the other hand, as regards the second differentia of psychoanalysis:

“The part played by resistance, too, is easily recognized. The greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering. For the ideal remembering of what has been forgotten which occurs in hypnosis corresponds to a state in which resistance has been put completely on one side.” (151)

In other words, the presence of repetition in the treatment — its prevalence, frequency, and intensity — is a measure of resistance. The direct and transparent remembering evinced under hypnosis, it seems, obviates any need to “act out.” It is only because this direct path is obstructed by resistance — whose job it is precisely to protect the mental status quo, to shore up the repressions — that some indirect, unconscious substitute is required.

At this point we might pause to naively ask: why must a person strive to remember the repressed experience at all — if not directly (under hypnosis, for instance), then in the roundabout guise of “symptoms” or “repetitions”? How do we explain this purported conatus of the human being towards remembering? According to Freud’s dynamic conception of the psychical system, it seems, repressed material inevitably presses for “discharge,” a “return" into awareness, as a kind of counter-thrust to that repression. But if we no longer accept this “energic” account as anything but a metaphor — and a limited one — then it seems we will need some other way of explaining things.

In any case, the economics of the analytic situation appear zero-sum: the neurotic in analysis will remember, in one way or another. So, we may imagine the analytic situation in the following, mildly absurd, “quantified" way. Let us say that the patient has 10 “units” of neurotic — i.e. repressed and pathogenic — “memories” that must ultimately be recovered in a successful analysis. Freud’s argument indicates that, if 3 of these units are recollected directly (as they might be under hypnosis, or even spontaneously with the application of the latest “method”), we can expect the remaining 7 to be repeated, “acted out,” and the like. The desirability of the ratio in a given case, it follows, is finally an inverse function of the resistance involved. Where there is little or no resistance, the unconscious memories will presumably surface directly as “remembering,” at a ratio of 9:1; where resistance is entrenched, the ratio is turned around to 1:9, and nearly all memories are “recovered” — at least initially — only as repetitions.

Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (I)

Freud begins this 1914 piece by “reminding students of the far-reaching changes which psycho-analytic technique has undergone since its first beginnings” (147). More concretely, he rehearses in overview three “phases” of psychoanalysis, each of which — while sharing essentially the same “end” — takes rather distinct “means” to achieving it. Let us consider these phases in turn.

Phase 1

“In its first phase — that of Breuer's catharsis — it consisted in bringing directly into focus the moment at which the symptom was formed, and in persistently endeavouring to reproduce the mental processes involved in that situation, in order to direct their discharge along the path of conscious activity. Remembering and abreacting, with the help of the hypnotic state, were what was at that time aimed at” (147)

Hence this first method — the so-called “cathartic discharge” model — involved several ingredients:

1. It takes as its sole object the “moment” of symptom-formation.  The patient must be brought, especially via hypnosis, to recall the “situation” in which the illness began — paradigmatically conversion-hysteria. So, to take one of the best-known cases: Anna O, unable to drink water, must recollect the peculiar circumstances under which the aversion began — as it happens, she recalled seeing her nanny’s dog drink from her glass of water and feeling compelled to suppress her spontaneous reaction of disgust.

2. The scene must be recollected, however, not only as an intellectual exercise, but also as an affect-laden experience — one that “reproduce[s] the mental processes involved in that situation.” In this way, the originally-strangulated emotion is discharged or “abreacted.”

Phase 2

Freud describes the second “phase” as follows:

“Next, when hypnosis had been given up, the task became one of discovering from the patient's free associations what he failed to remember. The resistance was to be circumvented by the work of interpretation and by making its results known to the patient. The situations which had given rise to the formation of the symptom and the other situations which lay behind the moment at which the illness broke out retained their place as the focus of interest; but the element of abreaction receded into the background and seemed to be replaced by the expenditure of work which the patient had to make in being obliged to overcome his criticism of his free associations, in accordance with the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis” (147)

Here again, we are able to identify a number of aspects to the second “method” which, moreover, help distinguish it from its predecessor form:

1. In place of hypnosis — whose limitations, to be sure, are not recounted here — Freud invites the patient’s free associations.

2. The analyst must receive these associations, not directly and passively — as hypnotically-inducted recollections presumable were — but through an active “work of interpretation,” only afterwards “making its results known to the patient.”

3. In this way, rather than through hypnosis, analysis discovers “what he [the patient] failed to remember.”

4. Alongside the original scene or scenes of symptom-formation, Freud suggests that “other situations which lay behind the moment at which the illness broke out” were increasingly underscored. (In “Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), Freud was already arguing that the “root” cause of a neurosis must ultimately be sought, not in the proximate circumstances of its eruption, but in earlier traumatic scenes, also hidden from memory.)

5. These technical innovations have developed in response to the recognition of “resistance” — something which was neither perceived nor, for that reason, addressed in hypnosis.

6. The patient’s "expenditure of work” in overcoming “his criticism of his free associations” now accomplished the function — so Freud tells us — formerly assigned to cathartic emotional discharge, or “abreaction.”

7. In fact, Freud’s language is ambiguous here: “the element of abreaction…seemed [scheinen] to be replaced by the expenditure of work [Arbeitsaufwand] which the patient had to make…to overcome his criticism of his free associations” (my italics). Was “abreaction” really replaced during this phase by “work,” then, or was the substitution only “seeming”? Perhaps abreaction retained a place alongside this new “effort” — even if it came to eclipse the former in importance. We might suppose, indeed, that the distinction between the “cures” of abreaction and effort coincide roughly with that between patients who (1) enter therapy with discrete symptoms, and those who (2) possess “structural” character neuroses. This way of parsing things is imperfect, of course, since for Freud symptom-remission, too, involves circumventing “resistances,” while the arduous path to alterations of character surely runs through profound emotional upheavals. Nonetheless, as a first approximation, the classification may hold.

Phase 3

The third and last phase of analytic technique — at least in 1914, when the piece was published — appears in this way:

“Finally, there was evolved the consistent technique used today, in which the analyst gives up the attempt to bring a particular moment or problem into focus. He contents himself with studying whatever is present for the time being on the surface of the patient's mind, and he employs the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of recognizing the resistances which appear there, and making them conscious to the patient. From this there results a new sort of division of labour: the doctor uncovers the resistances which are unknown to the patient; when these have been got the better of, the patient often relates the forgotten situations and connections without any difficulty” (147)

What, then, are the specific aspects of this third iteration of analytic technique, and how do these aspects differentiate it from the first and second paradigms?

1. The analyst is no longer immediately interested in the “situations” of symptom-formation — as events either to be deliberately “reproduced”  by the patients under hypnosis, or to be inferred by the analyst interpretively, on the basis of the patient’s associations. On the contrary, “memories” relevant to the treatment can be trusted to “take care of themselves,” eventually, if the new technique is consistently applied — without special attention to any particular “scene,” per se.

2. The analyst turns from these scene to “whatever is present…on the surface of the patient’s mind” — a “surface” still accessible, presumably, in the guise of the patient’s free associations (which, again, are no longer tethered to particular “scenes.”)

3. The analyst’s interpretation is no longer directed at “circumventing” resistances. (This was the substance of the second phase: to get round resistance to the — unconsciously preserved — scenes, awareness of which the patient repels.) Instead, the analyst addresses the resistances themselves. Thus interpretively “recognizing the resistances” in the patient’s associative activity, and “making them conscious to the patient” — rather than identifying the repressed memories concealed behind these resistances — became the priority.

4. In this way, analysis arrives at the same “result” at which the first and second phases aimed: the recover of repressed memories. It does this not, indeed, by immediately (via hypnosis) or even mediately (via interpretive reconstruction) seizing these memories, but simply by “working through,” i.e. defeating, the “resistances” which obstruct the path to these repressed materials. When the resistances holding the repressions in place are dissolved, these materials seem to surface spontaneously, since nothing dynamically prevents it any long.

For this last reason, finally, Freud is able to conclude:

“The aim of these different techniques has, of course, remained the same. Descriptively speaking, it is to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression” (147-8).

I will say more about this in the next entries.

Fromm, “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” (1935) (V)

In the remainder (159-164) of “Social Determinants,” Fromm relates the contributions of two “representatives” of the “oppositional attitude” — opposed, that is, both to “Freud and his closest circle” and, by extension, to the dominant norms of liberal-bourgeois society. Georg Groddeck and, to a much greater degreee, Sándor Ferenczi, introduced innovations into analytic technique which rectify just the difficulties identified in the the last entry.

Fromm devotes relatively space to Groddeck, who “despised science” and so “scarcely expressed himself in systematic theoretical form” (159) — a fact which purportedly compromises the value of his “half scientific, half novelistic books” (159) for the program of articulating and defending an alternative standpoint. Even there, though, and especially in the “importance of his personality” to those who knew him, one is struck by a “totally different attitude towards sexual morality and towards all the other taboos of bourgeois society” (159), someone who “lacks the hidden prudery so typical of Freud” (159), and whose well-documented “attitude towards the patient” was “full of humanity and genuine friendliness” (159). Finally, though, Groddeck’s main significance to psychoanalysis consisted for Fromm in his influence on “the scientific development of Ferenczi” (159).

Fromm now examines this development in some depth. He begins by suggesting that, tragically, Ferenczi “lived under the influence of Freud and Groddeck, and lacked the strength to choose between them” (159). This paralysis was based partly in Ferenczi’s “kind but…soft and anxious” temperament, but also in an understandable fear of Freud’s intellectual intolerance of deviations from orthodoxy. (The latter notoriously expelled “oppositional” thinkers from the psychoanalytic ranks.) For these reasons, Ferenczi would only cautiously and cryptically express his “productive imagination,” his recognition of the “inadequacies of the Freudian technique,” as well as his own theoretical and practical innovations. Ferenczi’s “fear of openly opposing Freud,” writes Fromm, “made him hide the antagonism among assurances of his loyalty” (159).

Yet the crux of Ferencz’s’s deviation, the “requirement of showing the patient a certain amount of love,” which to Fromm’s ears, and perhaps to ours, “sounds almost self-evident” (159) — this innovation, despite his caution and equivocations, eventually did antagonize Freud and the psychoanalytic mainstream. Just this “theme,” however, expressed by Ferenczi in countless variations, promises to remedy the insufficiencies of an analytic situation defined by “tolerance” — a fraught value, we have seen, which undermines the very “ends” at which analysis officially aims. Thus Ferenczi, in a number of these variations, emphasizes the following analytic desiderata:

1. “how decisively important it is for the patient that he feels absolutely certain of the unconditional sympathy of the analyst” (160)

2. that a successful analysis demands that “the patient has lost his fear of the analyst” (160)

3. that — in the words of Ferenczi’s essay on the “Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique” — “only real empathy helps “ (160), a “more than christian humility” (160)

4. that the “fate of the ‘super-ego’ in analysis” is, optimally, its “complete dissolution” (160)

5. that the analyst must exchange the “schoolmasterly” attitude of cool detachment — “didactic and pedantic” (161) — for one with “humble-minded” and egalitarian qualities

6. that we accordingly achieve distance from, and skepticism about, certain classical “techniques,” if and when they fail to advance this program, or even obstruct it, for instance, “compel[ling] the patient to lie down while the analyst sat behind him out of sight” (161), refusing to treat patients who cannot pay, and adhering strictly to the length of sessions

7. Even going so far as to depose — or at least qualify — the analytic “principle of frustration” (161) with the “principle of indulgence” (161)

Again, in each of these ways, Fromm subtly implies, Ferenczi simply drew the logical implications from an “almost self-evident” premise, namely, that in order to most effectively assist the patient in reaching the traditional goals of therapy — overcoming resistance, relaxing repression, making the unconscious conscious — the analyst must meet “the requirement of showing the patient a certain amount of love” (159). There is in all of this an inescapable analogy, I think, between Ferenczi’s circumscription of Freudian orthodoxy’s authority, on the one hand, and the supersession of Judaism’s “Old Law” of Justice by Christianity’s “New Law” of Love.

I would like to conclude these reflections by asking: what are we to make of Fromm’s own position on these matters? Is he arguing — as he sometimes seems to be arguing — that analysis should embody “tolerance” exclusively in its objective, neutral, value-free, and “naturalistic” sense — refraining from any moral judgment whatsoever, in order simply to understand the patient’s mind as a natural process? — hence that the analyst should extinguish the other pole, the condescending “mildness of judgment,” which continues to harbor unexamined taboos that should merely be exacted as painlessly as possible?

This interpretation would, I think, seriously distort Fromm’s position — his recommendations vis-à-vis the analytic attitude — which undoubtedly contains a specific morality of its own. Nor, I imagine, would Fromm deny having some morality in store. The aim he proposes for analysis is not to extinguish the “mildness” pole of tolerance in favor of a purified neutrality. Indeed, he appears rather to believe that such a purified neutrality is neither possible nor desirable, and that, historically, it has been an ideological smoke-screen invariably concealing some morality or another.

Fromm, “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” (1935) (IV)

In the middle section of the essay (154-158), Fromm identifies a moralistic “core” to Freud’s standpoint. This moralism, which Fromm reconstructs from Freud’s writings, reflects the ambiguities of “tolerance” canvassed in our last entry. Alongside his critical, naturalistic disenchantment of mental life, and to some degree obscured by it, Freud also persistently betrays a perfectly conventional, liberal-bourgeois endorsement of sexual, political, economic, and more broadly social norms.

This is particularly conspicuous, Fromm argues, in Freud’s conception of the antagonism between sexual gratification and culture. For Freud, this antagonism is, not merely unsurpassable, but also desirable inasmuch as, via sublimation, it is responsible for all human progress at individual and collective levels. Accordingly, where sublimation is practicable it ought to be pursued, whereas neurotics who are less “capable” of the renunciation involved are to be pitied, and “tolerantly” allowed their perversions.

Freud’s conventionality does not end with sexuality, though. It is also detectable in his unreflective acceptance of certain criteria of mental health — “a capacity for work and enjoyment” — which promote the aims of “the successful, professionally active citizen” (157), and “the capitalist character in its most developed form” (157). It is evident, too, in a prejudice that any political radicalism is de facto a symptom of infantilism, an unresolved Oedipal Complex, and the like — “for Freud, anything running counter to the bourgeois norm is a priori “neurotic” (157). And indeed, the whole conceptual structure of psychoanalysis had by the time of Fromm’s article acquired a moralistic tinge:

“Freud and some of his disciples use psychological terms, where other members of the same social class make plain judgments. In this language, “neurotic,” “infantile,” “unanalyzed” means bad and inferior. ”Resistance” means hard-boiled obstinacy, the ”will to get well” means repentance and the wish to reform” (157-158)

Finally, Fromm’s critiques an important dimension of Freud’s thinking as follows:

“Bourgeois society is characterized by its patriarchal or patricentric character. According to the patricentric view, the meaning of life lies not in man’s happiness or well-being, but in the fulfillment of duty and subordination to authority. There is no unconditional right to love and happiness; it depends on the degree of fulfillment of duty and subordination, and has to be justified, even in the small amount permitted, by achievement and success. Freud is a classical representative of the patricentric character type” (158)

Having sketched the historical conditions of the value “tolerance” — its emergence and development — and identified a conformist, “patricentric” streak in Freud’s writings — their radicalism notwithstanding — Fromm now returns to the theme that began his reflections. He is interested, after all, in how analytic practice may best serve analytic ends. If the patient’s repressions and their resulting neuroses are ultimately rooted in anxiety; if, indeed, anxiety stubbornly persists behind the “resistance” holding these repressions in place; then an analyst who hopes to liberate the patient from suffering must somehow address this central obstacle: anxiety.

Yet precisely the “patricentric character” (158) embodied by Freud, idealized in his writings, and eventually assimilated by his disciples — precisely this unconscious moralism precludes the effort to address the patient’s anxiety. It was, Fromm reminds us, the patient’s negative experience and subsequent fear of critical judgment regarding his impulses that occasioned the original repression. For the developing child, the “possession” of these unacceptable impulses comes to coincide with the loss of love from family and later peers — a possibility fraught with such anxiety that it is preferable not to acknowledge the existence of these impulses at all.

If the analyst now unconsciously communicates to the patient an identical “patricentric” judgment that these repressed impulses are basically unacceptable, that generally speaking the patient enjoys no “unconditional right to happiness”  — beneath a hypocritical veneer of “tolerance” and despite his conscious intentions — then these impulses will remain anxiety-ridden and therefore repressed. And, of course, the path to approaching these materials will remain obstructed by “resistance” — the patient correctly suspecting, at some level, that the situation is not sufficiently hospitable or “safe” for exhuming the offending impulses.

Fromm describes the impossible situation engendered by traditional psychoanalysis in a long paragraph, well worth quoting in its entirety, since it brings together a number of threads which have until now been kept separate. These threads include anxiety, happiness, repression, “patronizing” tolerance, the patricentric ethos, and the official liberal-bourgeois order grounded in that ethos:

“The problem of the analyst’s patricentric character is of decisive importance for analytical therapy. Perhaps the patient’s most important need necessary for his recovery is for an unconditional acknowledgment of his claims to happiness and well-being. He has to feel, during treatment, that the analyst acknowledges the human claim to happiness and well-being as unquestioned and unconditional. It is precisely the lack of such unconditional affirmation in the average bourgeois family, the cruelty with which “enemies” or “failure” are equated, and with which both are viewed as just punishment of even one single misstep, that are among the most important conditions of neurotic illness. If a human being who has become ill in such an atmosphere is to be helped to clear up the unconscious parts of his instinctual life, he needs an environment in which he is certain of the unconditional and unshakable affirmation of his claims to happiness and well-being—indeed, since the neurotic mostly does not dare to make these demands, he needs an attitude on the part of the analyst that encourages him to do so. The patricentric attitude does not permit this atmosphere to develop. It rather entails an analytic situation whose unspoken or partly unconscious essence one might in caricature express somewhat as follows: “Here you come, patient, with all your sins. You have been bad, and that is why you suffer. But one can excuse you. The most important reasons for your misdeeds lie in the events of your childhood for which you cannot be made responsible. Furthermore, you want to reform, and you show this in coming into analysis and in giving yourself up to my directions. If, however, you do not comply, do not see that I am right in what I demand or what I say of you, then you cannot be helped, and the last way out of your suffering is closed to you.” It is undeniable that a patient’s lack of subordination towards an analyst of the patricentric character type not seldom calls forth hostility in the latter—albeit frequently unconscious—towards the patient. Such hostility not only makes all therapeutic success impossible but also represents a serious danger to the patient’s psychic health. The patricentric, authoritarian attitude of the analyst just outlined is unconscious, also in Freud, and is masked by the typical liberalistic tendency to permit every one to find salvation according to his own fashion…What is important, however, for the effect the analyst’s attitude has on the patient, is not his conscious stance, but the unconscious authoritarian, patricentric attitude usually hidden behind ‘tolerance’” (158-159)

In the next entry, I will conclude my commentary on Fromm's piece.