The Truth About Freud's Technique. Michael Guy Thompson
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drive or excitations. With all the current debate over Strachey’s translation of Freud into English, especially regarding the translation of trieb into drive or instinct, neither trieb nor drive manage to alter Freud’s use of the concept itself. Strachey himself went to some lengths to explain the ambiguous way in which Freud used the term trieb, but it basically refers to a nonsubjective, impersonal edition of “unconscious will.” Whichever term one prefers, drive or instinct, psychoanalysts, with few exceptions, find it agreeable to use a term—any term—in which the impersonal aspect of the unconscious prevails.
One of those exceptions—in addition to Leavy—is Hans Loewald, who takes pains to explain how his use of instinct conveys a human quality. “When I speak of instinctual forces and of instincts or instinctual drives, I define them as motivational, i.e., both motivated and motivating. . . . Instincts remain relational phenomena, rather than being considered energies within a closed system” (1980, 152–53; emphasis added).
Terms such as motive and relational convey a clearly personal use of the term instinct, and even the word phenomena sounds more personal than forces, for example. Freud’s shift from counter-will to instinct lent credence to his claim that psychoanalysis—at least in appearance—deserved the status of a science, but a science more similar to that of academic psychologists who “study” rats or physicists who “measure” energies. However much some analysts may strive to measure the psychoanalytic investigation of truth in specifically scientific terms, the legitimacy of phantasy can only be grasped metaphorically, in essentially personal terms.
2 Realistic and Neurotic Anxiety
In a paper read before the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society in 1949, Hans Loewald addressed a central aspect of Freud’s conception of reality, focusing on Freud’s insistence that “external” reality—that is, the world—is essentially hostile and antagonistic.
In psychoanalytic theory we are accustomed to think of the relationship between ego and reality as one of adjustment or adaptation. The so-called mature ego has renounced the pleasure principle and has substituted for it the reality principle. It does not follow the direct path of instinctual gratification, without regard to consequences, to the demands of reality, does not indulge in hallucinatory wish fulfillment, but tests external reality . . . adapting its thoughts and actions to the demands of reality. This conception of the relationship between ego and reality presupposes a fundamental antagonism that has to be bridged or overcome in order to make life in this reality possible. (1980, 3)
Two years after he delivered “Ego and Reality,” Loewald returned to this theme again in “The Problem of Defense and the Neurotic Interpretation of Reality.”
The relationship between organism and environment, between individual and reality, in general has been understood in psychoanalytic theory as basically antagonistic. It is Freud’s “biological assumption” that a stimulus is something hostile to the organism and to the nervous system. Ultimately, instinct itself is understood as a need or compulsion to abolish stimuli. Any stimulus, as stimulus, represents a threat, a disturbance. On the psychological level, Freud comes to the conclusion that at the stage of the original reality ego, “at the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical.” (1980, 28)
Yet, what is this “reality” that poses such a threat to us? Is this a reality of our own making, as Freud hypothesized so enigmatically as “psychical reality”, or is it a reality completely independent of ourselves, impervious to our whims and indifferent to our needs—unheeding, barren, cold? Even Marshall Edelson, no friend of philosophical or hermeneutical interpretations of psychoanalysis, had to admit Freud’s problems with this concept.
We have seen that Freud had trouble with “psychic reality.” But judging from the variety of adjectives preceding “reality”—external, factual, material, practical—we may conclude that the conceptual status of “external reality” offered as much difficulty. Freud avoided philosophical questions as much as possible in his work in the interest of creating an empirical science, but here an ontological specter seems impossible to evade. (1988, 7)
Freud was too subtle and complex a thinker to be accused of adopting a superficial attitude toward the nature of reality, especially because it plays such an important role in his theories of psychopathology and psychoanalysis. Edelson points out that Freud “thought about such questions. That he knew and admired the work of Kant and was aware that our knowledge of external reality was shaped by the character of our minds is evident from Jones’ biography” (7). Freud explicidy refers to Kant in his paper “The Unconscious”:
Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object. Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to be. We shall be glad to learn, however, that the correction of internal perception will turn out not to offer such great difficulties as the correction of external perception—that internal objects are less unknowable than the external world. (1957e, 171; emphasis added)
What an amazing thing to say. As difficult and imperfect as our knowledge of our own minds is—and Freud is alluding to unconscious mental processes when he refers to “internal perception”—he says that “external” reality is even more unknowable than that! What is the ego’s relationship with this unknowable and hostile reality like? How does that relationship generate anxiety and what, in turn, does that tell us about the nature of reality, as Freud conceived it?
It was due to anxiety, in Freud’s view, that the ego developed out of the id in the first place, what Freud once referred to as “a frontier creature”, whose purpose was to “mediate between the world and the id . . . and to make the world fall in with the wishes of the id” (196 Id, 56). As I argued in The Death of Desire (Thompson 1985, 1–23), Freud’s initial conception of the ego was that of a defensive, repressive agency. Even when he modified this view to include a synthetic function, the synthetic function itself continued to be perceived in terms of defense. Freud never abandoned his conception of Das Ich as basically defensive, partially because he never entirely abandoned his view of reality as predominandy hostile. Freud viewed the individual as essentially opposed to the world and culture. Culture and reality are repressive, thus they present a threat to every human being. But isn’t this how neurotics typically perceive reality, as essentially hostile, ungratifying, threatening? Isn’t the nature of “transference” such that the patient in psychoanalysis anticipates—and, indeed, experiences—the analytic relationship in such terms? Loewald proposes that
on three levels, then, the biological, psychological, and cultural, psychoanalysis has taken for granted the neurotically distorted experience of reality. It has taken for granted the concept of a reality as it is experienced in a predominantiy defensive integration of it. Stimulus, external world, and culture, all three, on different levels of scientific approach, representative of what is called, reality, have been understood unquestioningly as they are thought, felt, experienced within the framework of a hostile-defensive (that is, regressive-reactive) ego-reality integration. It is a concept of reality as it is most typically encountered in the obsessive character neurosis, a neurosis so common in our culture that it has been called the normal neurosis. (1980, 30)
Loewald concludes that “psychoanalytic theory has unwittingly taken over much of the obsessive neurotic’s experience and conception of reality and has taken it for granted as the ‘objective reality’” (30). Of course, Loewald is referring to Freud’s conception of reality, and that conception, generally accepted by contemporary analysts, is based on Freud’s understanding of anxiety and fear. Freud discussed anxiety throughout his lifetime and revised his thoughts about it periodically. He returned to the subject in 1933 in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in his lecture “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” (1964c, 81–111). Here Freud reviews his earlier paper on anxiety in the Introductory Lectures, while