SAMPLE CHAPTER #2 from Controversies in Analytical Psychology (Withers, ed., Routledge, 2003)
Uneasy Ghosts: Theories of the Child and, The Crisis in Psychoanalysis
Christopher Hauke (Second draft)
‘it is only possible to come to a right understanding and appreciation of a contemporary psychological problem when we can reach a point outside our own time from which to observe it’. (C.G.Jung, 1945)
No one can doubt that analysis and analytical psychotherapy are in crisis at the present time: referrals are down and there is fresh internecine strife stemming from the BCP/UKCP split. There is growing and widespread competition from rival theoretical approaches, and short term help from counsellors of all sorts is often preferred - and not only for financial reasons. There is a steady flow of applicants to “trainings” which range from one year part-time counselling courses to the four or five year “full” analytic training. But it is by no means certain that the public will then be rushing into treatment with these newly qualified people. On the one hand there are more and more people being referred to counsellors - in GP practices, colleges, work-places and so on - presumably suffering a degree of emotional stress, disappointment in relationships, unhappiness with their state of mind - in general, the sort a maladies that analytic psychotherapy says it can treat. On the other hand, folk are less and less likely to seek treatment that is broadly based on the theories of Freudian psychoanalysis. Gone are the days of the 1940s when the British Institute of Psycho-analysis had around four hundred would-be patients on their waiting list while they hurried to get analysts qualified. Given the way that Jungians in the UK have pursued their own legitimation crisis by absorbing many of the psychoanalytic ideas from which Jung distanced himself, Jungian therapists also suffer from this discrimination. How has this arisen? After all, did not the whole business of one to one therapy based around talking to a trained practitioner which is now widespread, start - for the twentieth century at least - from precisely the same psychoanalytic roots that are now being marginalised and often dismissed? In such an age of ‘psychological man’ or ‘therapeutic man’ how come psychoanalysis is so unpopular?
This paper intends to unravel part of the answer. The title is inspired by two sources and gives a clue to my approach. In the book A Most Dangerous Method (1994), John Kerr likens the history of psychoanalysis to a ‘gruesome ghost story, where the ghost who finally devours all the people in the end is not a being but a theory - and a way of listening’ (Kerr, 1994: 15). So part of what I will be looking into today is the devouring theory - or theories - underpinning psychoanalytical thinking. The word ‘uneasy’ conveys how, over recent years, some psychoanalytic theories have been experienced with a sense of discomfort by many. This includes not only analysts themselves but also several thinkers and writers on science and culture. The word comes from the title of one of Freud’s famous texts: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur - The Uneasiness Inherent in Culture. You probably know this book better by its badly translated English title Civilisation and its Discontents. There is clearly an uneasiness in contemporary life as we live it in the industrialised West - that the practice of psychotherapy speaks to and where it is badly needed. But in addition - and sometimes countering the help that psychoanalytic practice might offer for such ‘uneasiness’ - there is another, separate uneasiness in the culture of psychoanalysis itself - where many of its premises and theoretical assumptions are regarded as invalid, unproven, easy to criticise, and, above all, pretty useless in practice.
I first wrote a paper dealing with the way psychoanalysis and Jungian analysis regards images of the child and infant, and how they are theorised and used in practice, which I delivered at a Jung Studies Day at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Kent, in November 1994. I called it The Child: Development, Archetype and Analytic Practice. After failing to get it published in the UK, it was accepted by the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal and published there in 1996. There are some off-prints available. When I submitted it to a British journal, one of the British readers said that she found the ideas in it ‘challenging’. We all know what that euphemism means.
I mention this by way of introducing this present paper which I regard as a continuation of some of the ideas in the first one, and a recapitulation of other ideas it contained. I also want to provide a couple of new angles for thinking about how, on the one hand, psychoanalytic discourse is embedded in contemporary culture while, on the other hand, psychoanalytic practice is sometimes way off the mark.
I begin by discussing the way that Freud’s theorising about the aetiology of neurosis, the unconscious, infant experience and development, and the part it plays in adult pathology - ideas which are embedded intact in so many contemporary psychoanalytical assumptions - stem from the evolutionary biology which was popular in late nineteenth century German thought. I find it astonishing that no matter how often we acknowledge the cliché that Freud’s vision was a singular product of late Victorian bourgeois society, such a view remains restricted to comments about the repressed sexuality of his time rather than constituting a far broader position from which to launch a radical critique of the bedrock of psychoanalytic theory. My view is that psychoanalysis requires - in its present crisis more than ever before - an historical examination of what underpins its theories in an effort to mine the ‘pure gold’ of contemporary practice - not, indeed, as Freud would have seen it, but more in an effort to discover what makes the contemporary treatments psychoanalysis inspired still so relevant for many today. I am indebted to Frank Sulloway’s research published in Freud: Biologist of the Mind. Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979) but, unlike him, I am a practitioner as well as a researcher, and so I want to think not only about the dubious hypotheses from which psychoanalytic theories sprang, but also about what is valid and what works in analytic psychotherapy today despite its peculiar origins.
I follow this with a brief examination of a text by Michael Fordham. Fordham is responsible for keeping Jungian analysis on the map in the UK by developing a way of theorising about the psychoanalytic concepts of infant libidinal and ego-development, which brings these concepts alongside Jung’s theories of archetypes, ego and self, and individuation. In examining Fordham’s text I will be pointing out assumptions imported from classical psychoanalysis and the way these both reveal and disguise their origins in evolutionary biology.
Finally, I intend to tackle the gap between psychoanalytic discourse and analytic practice by looking at the way certain theoretical positions within psychoanalysis are in fact embedded in various discourses elsewhere in our culture. By discourses I mean the way people talk and think - and arrange their thinking - according to frames and perspectives that are in themselves invisible. For this I will refer briefly to historical research on the discourses of child-care previous to the nineteenth century. I make no claims about the direction of influence between psychoanalytic assumptions and their appearance in cultural discourses outside analytic practice itself, but I do wish to make this point: Psychoanalytic theorising - and especially that portion of it that concerns the “child” - is now, and has always been, historically embedded in Western culture. Therefore, our focus at this critical time in its history should be the untangling of what we have inherited so we can examine more clearly the effectiveness of analytical psychotherapy in the present day, without the burden of being forced to include and account for ideas that, frankly, are well past their sell-by date. One the one hand, this may be seen as an extension of the same analytic spirit that seeks to heal through both discriminating and linking past and present; on the other hand, perhaps what is required is an “exorcism” of certain theories that, like ghosts, are haunting contemporary practice.
Freud the sociobiologist
What are those psychoanalytic ideas we should consider abandoning? To answer this we need to become familiar with the intellectual atmosphere within which Freud gave first breath to his ideas, and then to note which of these ideas still comprise our basic working assumptions today. By knowing the source of these ideas - and I am thinking here of sexual libido, libidinal stages of development, the Oedipus, fixation, regression, and the aetiological significance of early development to name a few - we will be in a better position to assess which of them describe the focus and the work of psychotherapy as we find it today and which are, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, positively misleading.
Most now agree that psychoanalysis arose at a time in Western European history at the peak of the Enlightenment’s aim to comprehend the processes of nature through Western scientific rationality alone. The self-examination of civilised Europe, or the study of “Man” as it was then called, began in the second half of the nineteenth century by relying, for the main part, on the established biological science of its day. This epistemology was enhanced and accelerated by the radical new theories of evolution introduced by Charles Darwin. Thus, anticipating psychoanalysis and psychology by some fifty years, the study of Man was initiated under the paradigm of evolutionary biology - and the laws of biogenetics.
There are a number of general ways in which the Darwinian legacy was a direct influence upon Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas. The ‘fundamental biogenetic law’ advanced by Ernst Haeckel as early as 1866 states that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ - in other words, the development of the human from fetus to adulthood (ontogeny) provides a brief recapitulation of the evolutionary development of the entire history of the race (phylogeny). As Sulloway notes, this has been the least emphasised ‘a priori biological influence in all of psychoanalytic theory’ (Sulloway, 1979/1992: 259). By the end of the century, the popularity of the idea was so widespread that the American psychologist and evolutionary theorist James Baldwin could conclude at the end of his book Mental Development in the Child and the Race(1895), ‘the embryology of society is open to study in the nursery’ (ibid.: 156). In Freud’s own library is a book by a colleague of Darwin’s - George Romanes’ Mental Evolution In Man (1888) - which is annotated throughout in Freud’s own hand (Sulloway, 1992: 247fn) but strangely, Freud makes no reference to this book in any of his published writings.
A second influence stemming from Darwin’s theory of evolution is the emphasis on how competition for the survival of species entailed conflict and a struggle for existence. Struggle and conflict as a mental paradigm was established early on in psychoanalytic theorising to the extent that ‘Freud never relinquished his belief that the ultimate causes of neurosis lie in the conflict between instincts as a whole and the demands and restrictions that human civilisation has placed upon them’ (ibid.: 257). A third general influence is the idea of historical truth: the past as a key to the present. Both Darwin and Freud found meaning in the seemingly trivial: for Darwin the significance of redundant physiological parts such as the appendix in adults and the gill slits and tail in early embryological development, and for Freud the significance of dream symbols, symptom formations and slips of the tongue all of which were subjected to an historical approach. As Freud wrote in Studies in Hysteria (1895): ‘All these [neurotic] sensations and innervations belong to the field of “The Expression of the Emotions”, which, as Darwin [1872] has taught us, consist of actions which originally had a meaning and served a purpose’ (SE, 2: 181). Both linguistic usage and hysterical symptoms - like the redundant bits of anatomy for Darwin - were viewed as arising from a common phylogenetic root.
Fourthly, common to both Freud and Darwin is their shared emphasis on the irrational in Man. This theme - which may be seen as a reaction against the long prevailing Enlightenment emphasis on human rationality - goes back to the previous century and Schopenhauer who not only influenced Darwin, but also Hartmann upon whose conception of the unconscious Freud was to base his own theories. The irrational aspects of Man that were to predominate in Darwin’s and Freud’s thinking were the instincts and especially sexuality.
Lastly, three of Freud’s fundamental mechanisms of pathological development - fixation, regression, and the significance of early experience - have their sources elsewhere in materialist, i.e. non-psychological, bio-evolutionary theories. These are of particular significance to the way in which the “child” in particular is conceived within analytic theory even today. Anatomical fixations, known as “arrests in development” were well established in mid-nineteenth century medical pathology and embryology. Writing about instinctual fixations, Darwin ‘paid close attention ….to the way in which instincts, inhibited or otherwise altered by new habits, might help to account for evolutionary change’ (Sulloway,1992: 265). In turn this led to firmer theories of instinctual fixation such as “imprinting” evidenced by the “following” behaviour of very young ducklings towards their initial carer even if it is a human. Familiar with the anatomical-evolutionary notions of fixations, Freud extended the idea to psychoanalysis asserting that ‘in the case of every particular sexual trend….some portions of it have stayed behind at earlier stages of its development, even though other portions may have reached their final goal…..we propose to describe the lagging behind of a part trend at an earlier stage as a fixation - a fixation, that is, of the instinct.’ (Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1916, SE 16:340).
The concept of regression owes much to the English neurologist Hughlings Jackson who conceived the human mind in terms of a hierarchical series of functional levels, the lower ones having been superseded in course of human evolution (1884). Senility, neurological disease and insanity were viewed as a general reversal of this evolutionary process and Jackson referred to these as “dissolutions” in mental functioning. Acknowledging Jackson’s contribution, Freud took up the idea of “dissolutions” and later applied it to his conceptions of the neuroses when he wrote to Abraham in 1907 of ‘the general pathological view that illness implies a regression in development’.
What this brief survey of the biogenetic sources of Freud’s psychoanalytic formulations reveals is twofold: namely, that his concepts about psychological development and the pathology of neuroses originated neither from the clinical treatment of adults nor the general observation of infants and children, but subsequent material from these sources were later used to justify his a priori bio-evolutionary hypotheses. I will offer a concise example which still remains critical to the psychoanalytic perspective today - the Freud/Abraham oral, anal, and genital “stages” of libidinal and ego-development.
Freud's emphasis is clear in 1916 when he says of the courses of ego and libidinal development: 'both of them are at bottom heritages, abbreviated recapitulations, of the development which all mankind has passed through from its primeval days over long periods of time' (Freud, Introductory Lectures, 1916-1917, SE, 16:354). Freud's initial groundbreaking model of the child's pregenital psychosexual development had from the beginning clearly less to do with observed phenomena in real human infants, than with placing instinctual development within an established phylogenetic frame. This overarching project becomes even clearer when we discover that the oral, anal, genital sequence itself derives from Haeckel's notion of the primeval gastraea. This gastraea (from the Greek gaster, “stomach”) is a simple marine sponge and is viewed as a critical point in the evolution of animal life - a basic form from which higher animals are descended. Haeckel had noted that in the earliest stages of embryological development, multicellular animal organisms follow a common pattern. As Sulloway says in Freud, Biologist of the Mind, 'Specifically (Haeckel) maintained that the fertilised zygote invaginates to create a primitive stomach, a mouth, and, later, an anal orifice', (Sulloway, 1980,:261). Wilhelm Bölsche, with his particular interest in the evolution of sexuality, seized upon Haeckel's idea to depict sexual sensitivity as having been 'gradually dispersed from the original "skin" of the preinvaginated gastraea to the later-evolved....organs of sexuality' (ibid.: 262), thus completing the phylogenetic sequence: oral dominance, followed by anal, and the later development of the genital. True sexual reproduction was originally 'a sort of higher eating' in Bölsche's characterisation. This view perhaps influenced Freud's observation of the suckling infant enough to make him equate the baby's facial expression during feeding to the look of sexual enjoyment and satiation in the adult (in Freud, Three Essays, 1905, SE, 7:182).
In constructing a theory of ego and libidinal development which claimed that adult psychopathology arose from the clash between instinctual urges and repressive social norms, Freud was employing materialist biological ideas to grasp the unobservable psyche. For example, the gill-slits observed on the embryos of a range of animals including humans, are a physical and observable phylogenetic recapitulation. Freud postulated a parallel in the theoretical “oral phase” which is an unobservable phenomenon, only indirectly inferable from the behaviour of infants, but one which fits however with theories of phylogenetic recapitulation. It was out of this theoretical exigency that the child was originally prioritised in the psychoanalytic canon. This view of the child as the carrier of development differs from the child-in-relationship-with-its-environment that is the emphasis today, but the contemporary twist should not obscure the phylogenetic, evolutionist origins of the theory. For instance, current depth psychological theory prioritises "oral" behaviour when in the development of the real infant a range of skills and "priorities" are proceeding simultaneously, such as grasping, recognition, memory, imitation, stimulation and quiescence and so on. Daniel Stern's The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York, Basic Books, 1985) provides important evidence and discussion of this issue.
It was Freud's excessive emphasis on the instinctual, and particularly the sexual, that led C.G. Jung to break away and develop his own theories. Later, Abraham developed Freud's instinct theory with what became the classical notion of oral, anal and genital stages as potential fixation points identifiable through the adult pathology encountered in the consulting room. Later still, this model came to be viewed by psychoanalysts as too mechanistic, and by the 1930s Melanie Klein, who had been analysed by Abraham, was developing ideas that would eventually form one basis for object relations theory. In reviewing the cultural roots of the dominance of the child motif in depth psychology, we have perhaps come upon the point in the development of psychoanalysis when these hypothetical stages of ego development became more firmly established by being linked to flesh and blood infants, mothers and breasts, and eventually to the specific historical mother and the infant the adult once was.
I want to follow this survey of the genealogy of psychoanalytic concepts with an up-to-date textual illustration from Michael Fordham, the Jungian analyst who is regarded as having made a significant contribution to Jungian psychoanalysis by the way in which he combined Freudian theoretical assumptions with some of Jung’s concepts and then establishing these, or so many believe, through the “scientific” observation of actual infants and their mothers.
Having heard what I have said so far, it seems fair to ask, So what if psychoanalysis derives its theories from nineteenth century evolutionary biology? Does this necessarily mean that contemporary thinking is wrong? And, besides, are we really still holding by these particular theories?
To take the first question, perhaps it is not so much that contemporary psychoanalytic thinking is wrong but that it constitutes a discourse that no longer fits our times. Biogenetic theories formed the discourse of a certain era when ideas of progress, breeding and the survival of the fittest constituted the paradigm for what was thought to govern not only the animal kingdom, but also individual human beings and society in general. As Erich Fromm (1979) has pointed out, Freud’s blind spot was the way he mistook bourgeois society for civilised society in general, thus making universalist assumptions from his bio-evolutionary perspective. To a certain extent, Darwinian evolutionary ideas still permeate beliefs around contemporary individual and civic life where the term “market forces”, for example, is redolent of an economic Darwinism which is used to express the success and failure of businesses, individuals and, indeed, whole nations who are viewed as engaged in a pseudo-evolutionary struggle for limited niches in world trade and profits. When it comes to the extension of Darwinism into human economic activity, there are quite contrasting theories now such as Chaos theory and Complexity theory which offer alternative perspectives backed up by mathematical evidence (Gleick, 1987)
The persistence of Darwinian views no longer stands as the only, or the dominant way of understanding the activity and motivation of individuals and society in general. Despite this, in British politics between 1979 and 1990, the Thatcherite urge to return to Victorian values spoke of attempts to revive the Darwinian discourse of a previous era. But the desperately anachronistic nature of this political move has to be seen in the context of what had been happening to Darwinian evolutionary theory itself since the 1950s. Not only has there been widespread criticism arising from gaps in the fossil record - of which Darwin was aware but hoped, wrongly as it turned out, that future investigation would close - but also criticism of particular cases such as, for example, that of the mammalian eye. Indeed, it has been so difficult to explain the existence of the eye in evolutionary terms that, in 1860, Darwin himself wrote, “To this day the eye makes me shudder” (Hitching, 1982: 67). Without going into detail, there is a big question mark over how the eye could have “evolved” gradually through natural selection as, without its complete function of vision, it is hard to see how earlier mutations or “part eyes” could offer any survival advantage to the species who developed them (ibid.).
Thus, when it comes to psychoanalytic theories of human psychology that derive from bio-evolutionary premises, I would argue for a questioning of the theory and the discourse from which it arises rather than the tendency we find in psychoanalysis persist in amassing of confirming “evidence” in clinical material and family dynamics, or, worse still, blunder ahead as if the issue was of little consequence. When questioned about the popularity of psychoanalytic explanations despite the lack of valid evidence, philosophers of science tell us that, as with all scientific theories, invalidity alone is not enough to negate the persistence of a theory - it may only be abandoned when a better theory comes along to take its place (Eyesenck, ).
I, for one, have little use for concepts of orality, anality and genitality either as stages in development or as points of fixation or regression. Equally, along with many other child developmental psychologists, I see no evidence for an Oedipal stage or the Oedipal dynamics as Freud described them. In this I seem to be in agreement with C.G.Jung who also thought of libidinal stages and the Oedipal crisis as superfluous concepts in analytic psychotherapy. This brings me to the second question: Are we still really holding on to such theories? Well, clearly we are in a general sense, but it is also interesting to notice how the same bio-evolutionary premises lie disguised within contemporary theorising in psychoanalysis and analytical psychology.
Michael Fordham and the uneasy theorising of the child
In a chapter of his book Jungian Psychotherapy called The Analysis of Childhood and Its Limits (Fordham, 1978/1986: 124-137), the Jungian analyst Michael Fordham demonstrates the persistence of bio-evolutionary assumptions when he discusses the work of reconstruction in the analysis of an adult male patient. Freud originally conceived analysis as a process of restoring the repressed memories of past trauma to consciousness, thereby removing the neurotic or hysterical symptoms purely through insight. The crudity of this idea has long been abandoned in contemporary analysis and instead we find emphasis being placed on recalling apparent infantile memories in general. As Fordham puts it, ‘It is often useful and important to go on until the infantile situations are clear….and…to keep a track on the age at which they took place, bearing in mind what is probable at any particular age. Thus, by relating the present to the past the patient’s ego is strengthened.’ (ibid.:125. Italics added). Fordham’s ‘bearing in mind what is probable at any particular age’ already indicates an a priori schema arranged according to stages of development. Furthermore, if memories are not available Fordham recommends, ‘the additional method of reconstruction to fill in the gaps’ (ibid.: 125-126. Italics added). Here, the hidden discourse involves a geological metaphor: like Darwin’s fossil record which formed the basis for evolutionary theory, there are gaps that need filling intellectually with hypotheses that will close them.
Fordham offers the clinical example of a fifty year old man who, in analysis, seemed remarkably undiscriminating about the interpretations Fordham offered him and, for whom, as Fordham puts it, ‘any intervention seemed to be “swallowed” under compulsion’ (ibid.: 126). The reconstruction commences with: ‘On the basis of this observation and his use of food to allay anxiety I suggested that his feeding in infancy might have been important to him and that his way of swallowing interpretations might be an indication of how he was fed as an infant.’ (ibid.) Fordham’s apparently neutral ‘bearing in mind what is probable’ has imposed and prioritised an oral stage on the reconstructed grid of the past. A theoretical assumption also evident in Fordham’s reconstruction is Abraham’s oral-sadistic sub-stage which involves aggressive feeding impulses. Fordham writes, ‘I also suggested that perhaps his mother had used breast feeding to keep him quiet….[This] reconstruction…. also made his predominant lack of verbal aggression more understandable….If he had been fed not so much when he was hungry as when he made a noise or used other methods of expressing his aggression, then the development of his aggression would have been inhibited and bound up inside him, as appeared to be the case in the transference.’ (ibid.)
Then, still referring to his patient’s verbal style in the analytic sessions, Fordham goes on to hypothesise how this also has its source in the “anal stage” of the man’s infancy. Fordham writes, ‘there was another aspect: in response to my interpretations he would produce a mass of associations as if he were under compulsion to do so. I reconstructed this in terms of his mother’s demand that he produce excreta during toilet training.’ (ibid.: 127). Fordham is then clearly delighted to report that the ‘incredulous’ patient promptly wrote to his mother who ‘replied in a letter which confirmed in detail the main points of my reconstruction: he had been given daily doses of castor oil and suppositories from time to time so as to help the regular functioning of his bowels.’ (ibid.). Fordham claims that by making such links with the past using memories and reconstructions he helps the patient to understand what is happening in the transference relationship.
There might well be other ways of understanding the patient’s way of relating verbally. For instance, when writing this I made the slip of typing “following” instead of “swallowing”. This leads me to reflect that, instead of the feeding metaphor that becomes concretised in Fordham’s example, another image which is still rooted in biology - that of imprinting - could equally be used to “explain” the patient’s behaviour. The image is one of the patient following Fordham’s interpretations like the duckling trailing behind its all-important carer. I do not prefer such an “explanation” and have no urge to extend it at all, but merely offer it as an example of the plasticity of such theorising.
Concluding his discussion, Fordham claims to have offered, ‘an example of developing a theory out of the patient’s material and not imposing one.’(ibid.). His reasoning - which stems from Fordham’s holding flexible views about which regimes of breast-feeding are preferable for emotional development - goes thus: ‘If I had thought that demand feeding, in the sense of not feeding by the clock, was always desirable, and then proceeded with that theory, the development of the analysis would have been jeopardised. It must have been, however, that his mother was not able to distinguish a hungry cry from the energetic crying of a baby needing to be aggressive….”Demand feeding” would then have been misused….to keep him quiet and so smothered his aggression.’(ibid.). This is the reason Fordham gives for claiming he has not imposed a theory but has “developed” one out of the patient’s material.
I would challenge this claim for theoretical neutrality on a number of levels. For a start, the text assumes that infants’ experiences of their mothers’ care persists into adulthood in such a way that aspects of the way they relate to an analyst as an adult can be attributed to the mother’s care in a cause-and-effect manner. This is a metaphorical version of the old ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny discourse, or style of thinking. In this case, the adult patient’s behaviour -“ontogeny”- repeats the experiences of infancy - “phylogeny” - where the evidence cited comes not from the phylogenetic, fossil record as it did for nineteenth century biogenetics, but from the more recent historical “past” as reconstructed or reported by the mother herself. (Incidentally, Freud gave strict warnings about seeking such corroboration as such “evidence” can so easily go against the hypothesis that is being claimed. [Reference]).
Secondly, what is also being imposed on the material in this reconstruction is a high degree of selectivity and prioritising of the wide range of actions that go between an infant and its mother. Although psychoanalytic reconstructions often involve a wider selection, in this case the focus places entire importance on the experiences of feeding and defecation. Other frequent and relevant aspects of infant-mother interaction such as styles of play, holding, gaze, and stimulation are not prioritised (cf. Stern, 1985, 1990). Lastly, then, such granting of importance to oral and anal experiences reveals how this style of reconstruction is not neutral at all, but is in fact embedded in the earliest assumptions of psychoanalytic thinking - the theoretical point of view that derives from bio-evolutionary discourse of the last century.
This is not to say that Fordham’s reconstruction was not helpful in the case he discusses. I am sure it was, and that this style is useful in a number of cases. But I also know that such techniques can alienate a patient and be unhelpful - especially when an analyst has little sense of the background to such methods. What I object to most is the way that it is claimed there is no theory being imposed when, in fact, there is a considerable weight of theoretical assumptions pressing down on the material. Those who are critical of psychoanalytic theory and methods are right to point out the danger in analysts not taking responsibility for the views they inherit from the Freudian past. Whether this arises through an insufficiently critical attitude that renders such inherited views invisible, or whether, as is often the case, psychoanalysis persists in justifying its theories using “evidence” derived from more and more novel sources rather than frankly questioning the theories themselves - either way analysis needs to get its house in order. There are too many ghosts disturbing contemporary analytic practice.
Historical discourse and alternatives to “the child”.
Where Michael Fordham is quite correct when he asserts that a degree of healing may be achieved for the patient by linking the past to the present. Nowadays this point of view has been formulated along the lines of creating a narrative, a life-story or the patient’s personal myth as ways of describing a main feature of analytic psychotherapy. (cf. Hillman, 1983; Covington, 19 ; Hewison, 19 ). Far from abandoning the need to link the present to the past, I think we should be honouring this aspect of Freud’s genius by paying greater attention to what we select as significant in this instead of being driven by what earlier psychoanalytic formulations deemed relevant. As I pointed out in my previous paper (Hauke, 1996), over the years, the frontiers of what constitutes the relevant past for psychoanalysis have been pushed back beyond early infancy to babyhood and even the womb. This has not only been due to the influence of individual theorists like Klein, Bowlby, Winnicott, Piontelli and Fordham, but also due to changing social and political influences. For instance, after the Second World War, the critical function of women as carers of their own offspring was emphasised not only in terms of individual child health but, indeed, as vital for the survival of the Western world itself. The International Labour Review of 1954 carried an article by Baers entitled "Women workers and their responsibilities" in which he claimed the child's normal development is dependent on the mother's full-time role in child-rearing, and that: "anything that hinders women in the fulfilment of this mission must be regarded as contrary to human progress" (in Clarke and Clarke, 1976: 23). We need hardly look further for confirmation of Beatrice Gottlieb’s statement in her book The Family in the Western World: From the Black Death to the Industrial Age (1993) where she writes: ‘ideas about the treatment of children always seem to be exaggerated versions of fundamental beliefs. Children play a special role in our view of our destiny and are a distillation of what we believe most deeply about ourselves.’ (Gottlieb, ibid.: 169).
Gottlieb’s historical survey of children and the family takes her up to the dawn of the industrial age in 1800, and so contains views and attitudes towards infancy that contrast with the middle and end of that century in which evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis emerged. It is interesting, therefore, to ponder about the discourse of infancy in the pre-psychoanalytic era as a way of assessing ideas around the child in contemporary practice. The point being made is that infancy, childcare, and the family are socially constructed and not the “natural” phenomena that psychoanalysis so often assumes.
In the pre-industrial period of Western society, swaddling of babies was common practice and Gottlieb suggests a sub-text to the practice of swaddling is the sense of the baby as alien and not fully human. Swaddling therefore served to keep the baby in an upright position as he or she would be when grown, and it also discouraged and avoided a crawling stage which, for the times, was equally viewed as too animalistic. I would add that, despite contemporary parents’ expectations and need for greater wage-earning and leisure time, swaddling is not common practice these days not because it is not convenient - it would be! - but because most of us have abandoned the idea of the infant as an animal that needs humanising. At least this belief no longer forms a dominant part of the contemporary discourse of the “infant”.
When it came beliefs around the feeding of babies, actual nutrition was not the only thing taken in through female milk; long before the psychoanalytic era and formulations like those of Michael Fordham’s, it was the belief that character was transmitted through breast milk. This was such an important issue that the widespread employment of wet nurses to suckle infants was brought under bureaucratic control in Paris as early as 1350 and had long been part of the French bureaucracy by 1800. This move was not only to ensure that the women had a good supply of healthy milk, but, just as importantly, to confirm that they also had good moral character and a stable disposition - not so they would be a good caretaker, but because the milk was believed to transmit personality (Gottlieb, 1993: 145-146). Vasari reports how Michelangelo joked that his calling as a sculptor lay in the fact that he had been nursed by a stone-cutter’s wife, from whose milk ‘I sucked in the hammer and chisels I use for my statues’. (ibid.: 146).
The barely hidden patriarchal assumption here brings in a further element of the discourse of infancy and feeding. There was a fear connected with nursing and one which probably threatened men more than women. Nursing was viewed as a process in which the animal-like infant drained the nurse/mother of vital forces; breast milk was regarded as a ‘form of blood’ - specifically menstrual blood - which had first fed the child in the womb and then fed it after birth. Nursing was a lowly job and thus breast-feeding suited a lower-class, more animal-like creature for the eighteenth century, urban, bourgeois family. (Elsewhere in the countryside mothers had far less choice).
Due to high infant mortality, the wet-nurse system, and the fact that men - who tended to dominate the written word - were seldom involved with young children, infancy is poorly recorded up to the start of the nineteenth century. It is fascinating how this changes with the more prosperous conditions of Victorian times and the improvement in infant survival. Without such social and economic shifts we would not have seen Darwin producing a detailed diary over three years of the mental and behavioural development of his first son, William. In response to the growing interest of child studies in the nineteenth century, Darwin published this in 1877 in the new journal Mind as “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant”.
But it was Darwin’s observations on infant emotions that were to especially influence Freud. Darwin’s idea that the fears of childhood did not derive from the child’s experience but were the result of ‘the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient times’ was to influence Freud’s idea of ‘instinctive knowledge’ - ‘knowledge that shapes much that is fundamental in the overall pattern of Freudian psychosexual development’ (Sulloway, 1992: 245-247). The roots of Fordham’s ideas about the influence of archetypes in infant development may be seen in Freud writing in 1914 where he calls archetypes “hereditary schema”: ‘Whenever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary schema, they become remodelled in the imagination -….It is precisely such cases that are calculated to convince us of the existence of the schema. We are often able to see the schema triumphing over the experience of the individual’ (1918 [1914], SE., 17: 119).
However, as we have seen above, Fordham differs from Jung in that he does not regard the baby as being mainly in touch with the collective unconscious - where lie the archetypes or Freud’s schema - but as mainly ‘engaged in a dynamic interaction with another person’ (Astor, 1998: 12). Fordham’s type of psychoanalytic theorising about the child, then, contains elements of more than one discourse stemming from different historical era. Not only is there a nineteenth century evolutionary aspect, but there is also a psychoanalytic version of the even earlier idea that character and personality are transmitted through the mother’s or nurses’ milk.
Conclusion: foreclosing other discourses.
To summarise, what I have offered is an illustration of the way that earlier discourses of Western culture are embedded in psychoanalytic theorising and especially in the theories around early life and infancy. What I am suggesting is that not only are these theories the most obvious targets for criticism of the psychoanalytic method, but, for us as practising psychotherapists, they are perhaps the theories which are least necessary. To substantiate this I will conclude with a brief description of what I think constitutes a more helpful frame for psychoanalytic theory and one which is more responsive as a discourse for, and within, contemporary Western culture. You must forgive me for not having worked this out fully yet! I think I know what we should abandon, and I think I know what we should keep, but I do not know what we need to add or develop. So, thus far, I employ Occam’s razor.
Forgive me for stating the obvious but, from the patients I see, and those I hear about, and from my observations in general about all sorts of “helping professions”, it strikes me that psychotherapy is concerned with how we all relate to each other. It is about how we get on with each other, and, of course, how we get on with ourselves, in our daily lives. It is therefore very much a social as well as a psychological understanding and change that is attended to and fostered in the work of therapy. This then includes much of what is talked about in therapy - our relationships with friends, spouses and parents, the relationships we experienced as children ourselves, and also our relationships with aspects of the world, its politics, values and mores with which we agree and disagree but which all affect us deeply and as invisibly -and unconsciously - as the social air we breathe.
Contemporary culture for many in the West differs vastly from earlier times due to the great improvement in material security we now experience. Although there are exceptions - and for the poor and homeless psychoanalysis is quite irrelevant as a priority - our food supply and shelter are secure enough to have allowed us the luxury of turning our concerns elsewhere. Some thinkers explain the rise in popularity of psychoanalytic thinking precisely upon this change in social circumstances. More specifically, it is said, now the hostility of nature and the risk of survival have been mainly overcome, the focus in the industrialised West has turned upon ourselves and each other: what remains for humanity is the puzzle of nature that is our relationship with each other and with our inner fantasies. ‘L’enfer c’est les autres’. It is other people and our relationships with them that is the stuff of therapy today. It is our inner and outer, social and psychological, intercourse and discourse, that seems to be the true concern of psychotherapy.
Therefore, this is not just a “culture of narcissism” as it has been accused. It is more a sort of “culture of socialism” if you like! But a “culture of relationship” carries less baggage. It therefore needs to include far more attention to, and eventually new theorising about, our social relationships according to a discourse that resonates with contemporary life. This would require far more of a focus on our experience of each other in the here and now and far less of an emphasis on explanations of such experiences.
In psychotherapy, as in the wider culture, people are invariably comforted by explanations. But the way in which these pseudo-explanations are delivered within a culture of the “expert” - the one who “knows” - runs the risk of producing an iatrogenic effect upon the quality of human relationships in general. Removing the division between those who claim expert knowledge and those who seek information about their own lives is a major task for the end of the twentieth century. Let us keep the spirit of story-telling and narrative-making in psychotherapy by all means, but let us seriously question discourses derived from previous eras which, in the hands of a few, attempt to impose a way of thinking instead of opening up new avenues.
To do otherwise - if I may generate a final metaphor of the “child” - would be like raising a child in the 1990s according to the strict, narrow mores of over a century earlier. Once grown, we should not be surprised to find before us an adult who is not only poorly equipped for the pace and flexibility of contemporary social relationships, but one who also burns with resentment that the vision of the world delivered through such an upbringing has robbed them of all relationship with the culture they experience all around them. And, above all, that this clinging to the past and extreme lack of foresight has also deprived contemporary culture of what such an individual might have to offer.
Perhaps psychoanalysis suffers from such a deprivation and disadvantage today.
References (to follow, completed, shortly)
Astor, J.,
Fordham, M.,
Sulloway, Frank J., Freud, Biologist of the Mind
Gottlieb, B.,
Hitching, F.,
Fromm, E.,
Kerr, J.,
Gleick,
|
