A few mailings ago I cited some passages from a psychoanalytical profile of modern liberalism. The fact that I did so does not necessarily mean that I am a believer in psychoanalysis—it is just that in making an argument one tends to pick up the evidence wherever one can; and in this case it more or less coincided with my own observations down the years.
But then this—this suggested lack of belief in psychoanalysis—should surprise nobody who read my posting of the twentieth of November—the one to do with the Eiger. The underlying substance of that posting was that I am a convinced Doubting Thomas insofar as any possibility of a complete human knowledge of existence or any facet of existence is concerned. Whether it be Freud or Einstein or Pavlov or whoever—and no matter how they may view it themselves—there is no complete and unchallengeable theory of anything existing in the world. And even if there was, we have no way of knowing it.
Now, in terms of what I spoke of in my original mailing as the possibility of lesser ‘local’ or ‘contingent’ truths, the question is to what extent does Freudian psychoanalysis fit even this particular bill?
The first thing that needs to be said is that the overall Freudian structure is one of the great intellectual achievements of mankind—but then so also is Don Quixote. A great intellectual achievement need not encompass truth (with a small t) in any literal sense of the term. With such in mind—to what extent is Freud’s theory to be regarded as true?
Any exhaustive answer on this would require almost a lifetime’s study. The collected works of Freud run to some twenty-four volumes, not including the thousands of subsequent articles and books written by supporters, critics and rivals. A lifetime would be too long to devote to the study of something that in the end can come down only to a choice between three possible single-word conclusions: yes (it is true); no (it’s not true); and maybe (it is true; and, again, maybe it’s not).
Now it is undeniable that Freud here and there seems to touch on things that resound in us with a sense of deeper meaning. But the question is to what extent these insights arise from his theory—or to what extent they are more representative of the phenomenon of the village clock that although stopped still manages to be right twice in the day. In line with the suggestion that if you give sufficient monkeys sufficient typewriters for a sufficient length of time, then inevitably one of them will produce the works of Shakespeare, it follows that anybody of ability who dedicates his or her life to investigating a certain field of knowledge—in Freud’s case the underlying structure and operation of the human mind and its expression in bodily actions—must, even if only at random, hit upon ideas that are true in their own right.
On a more practical level, there has been over the years increasing debate over the efficacy of psychoanalysis, even as practiced directly by Freud, in the treatment of neurosis. The fundamental idea would seem to be that psychoanalysis, for all the brilliance of Freud as a theorist and writer, is really a delusionary system, a self-delusionary system, that has more to do with the deeper needs of Freud’s ego than with scientific fact.
Idries Shah, a well-known writer on Sufism, speaking on the hunger for attention that can exist in some (indeed, many; if not most) individuals:
‘. . . [they] might even turn up at the house and ask for attention. It’s very easy to illustrate this attention desire if one does not feel flattered by the attentions of the other person. I’ve very often spoken to people who’ve come to the house, for half an hour or forty-five minutes, absolute nonsense, just to make them happy, just to show them (although they don’t always see it) that what they wanted was attention; they did not really want metaphysical truths or interpretations or advice. And, as a matter of fact, there are so many jokes about that in the Middle East that one is almost surprised that it is so unknown here, relatively unknown’ (The Diffusion of Sufi Ideas in the West: Idries Shah, Keystone Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1972).
The relevance of this to psychoanalytical practice is too obvious to need underlining.
Simone Weil, writing from a diametrically different direction, yet about the same phenomenon of attention, says:
‘The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection,or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.
‘This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.
‘Only he who is capable of attention can do this’ (Waiting on God: Simone Weil, Fontana, 1959).
As I say, the two approaches are diametrically opposed. Shah’s might be described as the more cynical, Weil’s, perhaps, as the more naïve (although this is a characterization demanding of a much closer discussion).
But the fact is that although both identify in their different ways the importance of attention, it seems to me, nonetheless, that they both miss the point—Weil somewhat more so than Shah.
There is a widespread hunger abroad for attention in these modern times. Some of the people who came to Shah might have gone away momentarily satisfied with the attention they received—but it was liable to be a very short-lived satisfaction. For the fact is that in many, if not in most cases, it is a hunger that is unassuageable.
The fact is that so many people are black holes for attention—they can never get enough. The roots of this deficiency, I think, lie in childhood and some deprivation of necessary attention or love or whatever. It is a deficit that, not being satisfied at the appropriate time, can never be satisfied, no matter how strenuously the victim may in later years try to compensate for it. One can shovel attention and consideration on such a person all the waking day long, only for them to rise next morning, and every subsequent morning—like some brain-damaged patient, the blackboard of whose short-term memory has overnight been erased—just as hungrily empty and imploring as the day before.
And there is no direct cure for it. No way of restoring what has been lost or never found. At best, one may come to a realization of the futility of one’s actions, and an acceptance of the long-term and irremediable nature of the loss which underlay them. It amounts to the establishment of a sort of laid-waste ground zero, the destruction of all you believed in and clung to up until now, with no promise of anything beyond it other than a blank a hospital corridor leading straight to death.
The difference for the secularist, Freud, was that the establishment of self-knowledge didn’t just threaten with the possibility of the bleakness of existence, it guaranteed it. At most, Freud promised to ‘change [unconscious] neurotic suffering into everyday misery’; the root of neurosis being something he [Freud] could not cure, it was up to the patient to consciously endure it.
Freud’s statement is both a chilling and a magnificent statement of the existential secularist position—especially when counterposed to the laughable naivety of the recent spate of slogans financed by atheists on London buses: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life.’
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