Art and Science. Infantile Sexuality and the Oedipus Complex. A Discussion of Rebecca Coleman Curtis's article, “Psychoanalysis: Science or Art? Science and Art.”

In previous publications Rebecca Coleman Curtis has elaborated on empirical evidence for the efficacy of psychoanalysis and dynamically oriented therapies across the currently diverse universe of psychoanalytic orientations (2014). She has been a champion for the importance of “new experiences” as a source of healing and for creative flexibility in theory and technique as the optimal setting for such healing (2012). A most recent publication stands in elegant service of encouraging analyst and analysand alike to confront “the infiniteness and limitations of knowing” in the psychoanalytic process (2019). In the present contribution, all of these themes recur either explicitly or between the lines in the course of her answer to the polemic at hand. Spelled out most succinctly in the second half of her article's title (…Science and Art) she concludes that psychoanalysis is—indeed, must be—a creative enterprise (especially in its therapeutic aspect) and that “some of psychoanalytic ideas [form] a part of the growing science of psychology” (my italics). At least in the present article, Coleman Curtis does appear to stop short, however, of saying outright that “psychoanalysis is a science”—be it one of the natural, human, hermeneutic or any other kind.

In the present contribution, Coleman Curtis offers a sometimes densely packed exploration, which, given its stated objective, succeeds as an incisive reminder of both the continuing limitations and the moments of scientific solidity achieved in the psychoanalytic enterprise, now almost a century and a quarter old. The major thrust of her discussion unfolds as a brief survey or sampling of scientific evidence for a circumscribed set of central psychoanalytic concerns: unconscious processes, psychological defenses, transferential processes, the question of efficacy, and

the relation of aggression to frustration. Interestingly, the subject of defenses is expanded into four separate sections (“Defense”; “Defense in Perception and Memory”; “Defense in Social Psychology”; “Defense in Development”) and forms the largest part of her survey. (It would be interesting to know to what extent this corresponds to the relative proportion of the various psychoanalytic concepts researched to date.)

We are reminded here that an ever-growing body of evidence exists to support scientific credibility for each of the five (or eight) conceptual categories. Beyond the essential corpus of psychoanalytic case studies, the survey draws from research conducted in cognitive psychology, experimental social, developmental, perceptual, comparative psychologies, and the neurosciences. (I will add cultural anthropology to this list of disciplines.) We are also wisely reminded of the fact that no longer is there any good reason for psychoanalysis to depend solely upon data derived from the psychoanalytic encounter itself to argue its case.

To do justice to Coleman Curtis's scholarship, I shall do my level best to devote the majority of my comments to those that might supply the greatest grist for the dialectics of difference. As such, I shall focus as much on what is absent from Coleman Curtis's article as on what is present.

Art, Science, Infantile sexuality and the Oedipus Complex

Coleman Curtis devotes minimal attention to exploration of the exact nature of art or the philosophy of science and epistemology, per se, although the latter is referenced in passing in introductory references to the modern debates stimulated by Grunbaum 1984, Popper , , Shakow and Rapaport 1964. (We will return to this and to Freud's own thoughts on it below.) Coleman Curtis is also intentional in choosing to exclude the subjects of development and gender from her main survey of evidence, although development is discussed briefly in relation to Bowlby's attachment theory, as we will see.

Unfortunately, the omission of development and gender from Coleman Curtis's main survey of evidence mirrors a more general disappearance from contemporary psychoanalytic literature of the two specific causes of arguably the greatest controversy over the last century: infantile sexuality and the universality of the Oedipus complex.

I am among those who believe that the steady neglect and uncoupling of these theoretical issues in the contemporary literature remains a significant problem for psychoanalysis. As I have underscored elsewhere (2018a), what Loewald (1979) called a “waning” four decades ago in his now classic paper on the Oedipus complex, has gradually become a complete “effacing” (Adler 2010) in some corners of psychoanalysis. This is certainly the case within psychoanalytic intersubjectivity theory, according to Adler's recent appraisal given at a conference for contemporary perspectives on the Oedipus complex. In his paper “The Effacing of the Oedipus Complex,” Adler lamented that his own intersubjectivist text (1998) included no indexed reference to the Oedipus complex. He expressed special concern about one particular aspect of this effacing, the elimination of the role of infantile sexuality in child development:

That these [inter-subjectivist] perspectives ignore, or outright reject the role of infantile sexuality in development, further tends to dilute and obscure the place of the Oedipus complex in our contemporary discourse. … [I]t is frequently uncoupled from the psychosexual dynamism that gives it its crucial significance as a developmental event that organizes gender identity and superego structure. (2010, p. 545)

Other authors (e.g., ) have drawn attention to this shift away from childhood sexuality and this decoupling of psychosexual dynamism from oedipal theory. Of course, this trend is as old as the original opposition to Freud's views on infantile sexuality. It was the object of Freud's objections in 1914 to the “view of life reflected in the Adlerian system [which] is founded exclusively on the aggressive instinct” (1914, p. 58). It was present in Jung's “pushing into the background of the sexual factor in psychoanalytic theory” (1914, p. 58).

Ironically, just as Freud's coupling of infantile sexuality (i.e., its multiflorous ‘components,’ beyond mere genitality) with the triangular intra- and inter-psychic conflicts of childhood (i.e., the ‘dynamism” of the infantile neurosis) has been increasingly effaced within psychoanalysis it has been steadily rediscovered (e.g., Powell, 1957, Fox, 1967, 1980, Spiro, 1982, Paul 1976, 2010) within anthropology—the very discipline from which the most influential 20th century critique of Freud's oedipal theory arose: Malinowski's Sex and Repression in Savage Society. (1927;

see Wallace 1983, a brilliant account of Freud's anthropological formulations and still my favorite narrative of the debates between psychoanalysis and anthropology stimulated by them.) I have argued (2018a, 2018b) that contemporary psychoanalysis minimizes the concept of a universal Oedipus complex at the expense of its own legitimacy and at the expense of its clinical effectiveness; Freud's formulations on infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex were most solidly grounded in his neurological and evolutionary biological thinking; it is precisely in these areas that some of the most relevant developments for psychoanalysis are now occurring, advances which Freud anticipated but were nonetheless unavailable to him in his time.

It is also noteworthy that Coleman Curtis does not explicitly address the more extreme manifestations of postmodern critical theory as these have emerged in the hermeneutic turn within psychoanalysis, particularly in Intersubjectivity and Relational Psychoanalysis. Wallerstein referred to this “”new challenge” to our accustomed willing conception of our discipline as properly a science” (p. 419). Blass referred to this “perspective which puts in question the very existence of an internal reality such as the unconscious” (p. 91). However much these trends may have served as a useful corrective to procrustean dogmatisms (perhaps most often directed toward institutionalized elements within American Ego Psychology) they have likely also represented a significant obstacle to the scientific standing of psychoanalysis. At moments in her language (though not in her actual documentation of research) Coleman Curtis appears indeed at pains to spread out the credit for scientific credibility far across the broad panoply of divergences from classical or Freudian approaches; at moments I could not help but wonder whether she runs the risk of glossing over the fact that some of those latter directions have been avowedly anti-scientific in the broadest sense and would not even want psychoanalysis to be identified with science at all, let alone scientism. Given the nature of her repeated reminders to the reader that her evidentiary net is cast well beyond the Freudian or classical waters, I began to wonder if Coleman Curtis was arguing that, excepting the few lucky cases, the scientific gains of psychoanalysis have been achieved in spite of its foundation in Freud's theorizing over the course of half a century, rather than because of it.

Some cases in point:

“As psychoanalysts began to focus more on interpersonal interactions and relationships rather than only on internal workings of the mind, their ideas became compatible with and overlapping with data not only from cognitive psychology but also from experimental social, developmental, perceptual, comparative psychologies, and neuroscience.”

One might argue—in fact, as we have just seen, some have—that with the relational and intersubjectivist turn in psychoanalysis it became, at least in some respects, less compatible with the more rigorous methods in the sciences—some of which are now providing support for a number of Freud's basic concepts and even his metapsychology. For example, from within the new discipline of Neuropsychoanalysis, Solms (2018) defined what he considers to be the three major scientific premises of Freudian psychoanalysis that can now be demonstrated conclusively to have definite neurobiological underpinnings: 1) contra the “blank slate” theory, human infants enter the world with innate, biologically-determined needs; 2) mental development unfolds epigenetically in the service of meeting these needs—thus, mental illness reflects a failure to achieve this task; and 3) perhaps most interestingly and most definitively Freudian—“most of our methods of meeting our emotional needs are executed unconsciously, which requires us to return them to consciousness in order to change them.” (p. 2) These psychoanalytic claims are robustly scientific in the sense of being testable and falsifiable and all three represent classically articulated Freudian concepts. Granting that substantial developments have indeed resulted from the relational turn in contemporary psychoanalysis, it would nevertheless be a stretch to claim that any of the aforementioned core premises arose from its focus on the “interpersonal interactions and relationships rather than only on internal workings of the mind”

Coleman Curtis repeats her point: “I am not equating psychoanalysis with Freudian theory. Psychoanalysis has evolved considerably since Freud's formulations, often affected by data especially from psychology and neuroscience.” And yet again “…this is not a review of the support for Freudian theory, as psychoanalysis has advanced far since Freud proposed his theories and since his death many years ago.” This occurs again in a reference to Bowlby and attachment theory, the brief but by

no means insignificant moment when Coleman Curtis does discuss the subject of development:

“In regard to development, I shall say that the ideas of psychoanalyst John Bowlby (; ; ) regarding attachment theory have received so much support from the scientific community that they are hardly a source of controversy. This is not to say that Freudian ideas have nothing worthwhile to say about development.” (my italics)

Whereas it is certainly true that Bowlby encountered opposition from within the British Freudian community on theoretical matters, it is also likely that much of what has been demonstrated definitively by rigorous scientific methods in Bowlby's formulations is Freudian in nature, certainly this is especially the case with regard to the most general reference “to a baby becoming securely attached” made by Coleman Curtis. Ironically, it was the Kleinian dogmatic technical divergences from the more Freudian (ala Anna Freud) attention to the vulnerability of the ego in early development, the immediacy of the role of the actual parental objects in the child's life (and by necessity, her treatment), and the technical necessity of educational and developmentally supportive interventions as opposed to early and deep interpretations in child analysis, that Bowlby rejected. Despite the substantive theoretical differences that eventually emerged between Bowlby and the Freudians, it's certainly arguable that the central concepts upon which his attachment theory is based could not have been more specifically and classically Freudian. As such, the italicized portion of the above quote struck me as something of a non-sequitur.

Coleman Curtis continues by reporting that “Bowlby's ideas and the research supporting them, however, are accepted as the major theory of development in contemporary relational psychoanalysis.” However true this statement is, in so far as it goes, some elaboration would be helpful to determine to what extent the specific ideas of Bowlby that Coleman Curtis has in mind here, and which have empirical “research supporting them”, are not themselves specifically Freudian. Absent this, one might expect some acknowledgement that there are certainly many ideas shared alike by most contemporary relational psychoanalysts - just as there are among Freudians—that, in and of themselves, remain to be determined in the strictly scientific sense.

Of course, undoubtedly with Coleman Curtis one would be preaching to the choir to say that broad acceptance, per se, should not itself be the criterion on the basis of which something acquires scientific credibility. Consensus in science is associated with experimental replicability, regardless of the varying methods determined by the unique subject matter of each discipline. Nothing could be farther from the idea of science than “acceptance”, however broad, without this. Popular opinion is a phenomenon that science is uniquely designed to critique by means of testing and validating or disconfirming hypotheses, and the power of this process to produce further useful hypotheses. Coleman Curtis's own observation about William James and the shunning of research on unconscious processes is an excellent example of this problem. Within Anthropology, Malinowski's Sex and Repression in Savage Society had the same impact on generations of anthropology students regarding the idea that a “matrilineal nuclear complex” in the Trobriand Islands had been discovered and constituted proof that Freud was wrong about the universality of the Oedipus complex. It remains one of the most fascinating anomalies of 20th century social science that Malinowski's matrilineal thesis could have been accepted within anthropology “with almost no skepticism or critical inquiry for fifty years.” (Spiro, 1982, p. 175)

Putting the dialectical method aside, I am struck by the power of Coleman Curtis's contributions here and elsewhere toward a fresh reunion of creativity and rigor, clinician and researcher, Art and Science. In fact, I am reminded by her advocacy of this integration in our psychoanalytic work of Freud's (1933) own beautiful description of the scientist/artist:

“Moreover, there is a good deal of exaggeration in this criticism of science. It is not true that it staggers blindly from one experiment to another, that it replaces one error by another. It works as a rule like a sculptor at his clay model, who tirelessly alters his rough sketch, adds to it and takes away from it, till he has arrived at what he feels is a satisfactory degree of resemblance to the object he sees or imagines.” (p. 174).