Zum sehen geboren,Zum schauen bestellt.I was born to see,To look is my calling.
Psychoanalysis is now inseparable from Western culture. Today a psychoanalytic sensibility has a central place in the humanities, theater, film, literature, art, and the media. A typical 19th century two-volume Life and Times…biography, as John Morley wrote of William E. Gladstone (1903), that never mentions he was a flagellant, or Dumas Malone's Thomas Jefferson (6 vols., 1948-1981), with no reference to the body, sexuality, dreams, or articulated private fantasies, is unacceptable and virtually unthinkable today. The reading public justifiably expects what the 21st century has to offer in grappling with the conflicts and multi-determination of motivation, and this includes the richness and complexity developed by psychoanalysis. The existence of unconscious thought and fantasies, the “Freudian” slip, the unrecognized, conflicted, ambivalent, and unacknowledged motive, the psychosexual phases of development, are a part of the everyday discourse of the media and of ordinary people. This is the triumph and generalization of psychoanalysis in our culture. Freud is indeed, as W.H. Auden said, “a whole climate of opinion.”1 Psychoanalysis has become a hermeneutic science, a quest for meanings in the thoughts, fantasies, and aspirations of individuals and cultures.
Psychoanalysis is a discipline of a new kind, a 21st century discipline, combining both self-reflection and science, but basing itself on a unique and different process of inquiry than either the natural or the cultural sciences.
Psychoanalysis is a discipline of a new kind, a 21st century discipline, combining both self-reflection and science, but basing itself on a unique and different process of inquiry than either the natural or the cultural sciences. “The psycho-analytic mode of thought,” said Freud, “acts like a new instrument of research.”2 In psychoanalysis two people together create a secure emotional field for the exploration of the latent and least understood meanings of fantasies, dreams, interactions (including their dialogic encounter), the body, behaviors, and life itself. Freud patterned the interpretation of dreams after the hermeneutic model: “‘Interpreting’ a dream implies assigning a ‘meaning’ to it.”3
Psychoanalysis is history, and the professional and cultural goals of the historian and the psychoanalyst are the same: to liberate us from the burden of the conscious and unconscious past by helping us to understand that past and its role in the present. Cultural historians, as do psychoanalysts, unfold Gestalten of the art, literature, theater, films, architecture, and other artifacts with which they reconstitute a past. They are particularly interested in temporal transformations, or what analysts call adaptations and adjustments to the traumata of war, defeat, revolution, famine, disease, exile, and death, as well as long-term political, social, and cultural patterns of development (la longue durée). Historians use their subjective empathic functions to understand the past. Our way of reading documents necessarily derives primarily from who we are, our psychodynamic past, our present countertransferences to the material, and our current emotional and theoretical surround. As in so much else, including our clinical work, psychoanalysts exist in a space of tension and ambiguity between our subjectivity and what we choose to define as outside “reality.”
Freud was a skeptic about both the potential of humankind and of our culture. His conservative pessimism regarding changing the single individual and the therapeutic efficacy of analysis was a constant from Studies in Hysteria in 1895, when he modestly postulated the aim of settling for “common unhappiness” (gemeines Unglück),4 to late in his life, when in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” in 1937, he cautioned “in the end the difference between a person who has not been analyzed and the behaviour of a person after he has been analyzed is not so thourough-going as we aim at making it and as we expect and maintain it to be.”5
Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) and his Basel colleague, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), were, with Freud, isolated dissenters from the 19th century ideology of progress—the idea implicit in linear time as progression, that the human condition and our civilization are getting ever better. Burckhardt. was one of Freud's favorite authors. He had six of Burckhardt's books in his personal library, and he often refers to the pleasure they gave him. Significantly, during the most lonely and depressed period of his self-analysis, when his sole transference object and mirroring comfort was the Berlin ear, nose, and throat specialist Wilhelm Fliess, Freud was reading Burckhardt: “For relaxation I am reading Burckhardt's History of Greek Civilization which is providing me with unexpected parallels. My predilection for the prehistoric in all its human forms has remained the same.”6 A week later he writes Fliess, “I am deep in Burckhardt's History of Greek Civilization.”7
The cultural pessimism expressed in Burckhardt's letters, lectures, and essays is one of the reasons for the resonance Freud found in Burckhardt as an historian of culture. A patrician citizen of Basel, a small Swiss republican cantonal democracy at the juncture of France and Germany, Burckhardt was a skeptic regarding the “progressive” virtues of nationalism, the state, and modern industrialism.
Peter J. Loewenberg, Ph.D., is co-dean of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. A professor of history and political psychology at UCLA, he will assume the Sir Peter Ustinov Visiting Chair for the Study of Prejudice in Vienna this June.
Burckhardt expressed his pessimism about the Enlightenment fantasy of a perfectible human nature: “The great harm was begun in the last century, mainly through Rousseau, with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature.”8
For a time, the “present” was literally synonymous with progress, and the result was the most ridiculous vanity, as if the world were marching toward a perfection of mind or even morality…. as to “moral progress”…there is none to be found…it is relevant to the life of the individual and not to whole epochs. If, even in bygone times, men gave their lives for each other, we have not progressed since.9
In Burckhardt's correspondence with his Prussian friend von Preen, he displayed an uncanny foresight into the terrorist dictators and their drab totalitarian police states of the 20th century. He envisioned:
high purposefulness of the military machine worked out to the last details…. The latter is bound to become the model of existence. It will be most interesting for you, my dear Sir, to observe how the machinery of State and administration is transformed and militarized; for me—how schools and education are put through the cure…. I have a suspicion that, for the time being, sounds completely mad, and yet I cannot rid myself of it: that the military state will have to turn “industrialist.” The accumulations of beings, the mounds of men in the yards and factories, cannot be left for all eternity in their need and thirst for riches; a planned and controlled degree of poverty, with promotion and uniforms, starting and ending daily to the roll of drums….10 The picture I have formed of the terribles simplificateurs who are going to descend upon poor old Europe is not an agreeable one; and here and there in imagination I can already see the fellows visibly before me.”11
I believe my esteemed friend Jonathan Lear has Freud's view of history wrong when he attributes to Freud the idea that “history is presumed to be progressive…a triumphal story of human progress….”12 Freud was an extreme skeptic about human moral progress. In fact, he did not think we were better than the Greeks. He did not subscribe to ideas of human moral progress or development, neither in individuals nor in epochs. He always admired antiquity, indeed he considered the ancient Greeks as our cultural betters. Freud made an explicit comparison of our society to ancient Hellas with reference to the toleration and educational function of homosexuality: “We surely ought not to forget that the perversion which is most repellent to us, the sensual love of a man for a man, was not only tolerated by a people so far our superiors in civilization as were the Greeks [einem uns so sehr kulturüberlegenen Volke wie den Griechen], but was actually entrusted by them with important social functions.”13 Can any of us who have witnessed the wars and atrocities, Holocausts and genocides of the 20th century doubt that Burckhardt and Freud were right about the lack of moral progress in ourselves and our civilization?
There is a striking congruence between Freud and the methods of the cultural historian. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) espoused the idea that the historian is himself the primary instrument of research, that he uses himself as the perceptor and interpreter of data. Dilthey understood that the historian relives the past in his own mind. What makes Dilthey so strikingly modern to us is the stress he laid on historical knowledge as an inner experience of the historian. Dilthey argued that the historian's understanding [Verständnis] is based on his inner relationship [innere Verhältnis] to his subject of research, and this relationship is possible through re-creation [Nacherzeugen] and identification [Nacherleben]. Historians face the practical task “of the inner reliving of the development of individuation” [innerlich…diesen Aufgang zur Individuation zu durchleben]. He called on historians to place themselves mentally in the historical situation [Sichhineinversetzen]. “On the basis of this placing of oneself in the situation, this transposition, the highest form in which the totality of mental life can be effective in understanding, arises—imitation or identification.” Dilthey was the earliest conceptualizer of the use of sympathy [Mitfühlens] and empathy [Einfühlung] as tools of cognition in historical research.14
R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) was Dilthey's prophet in the Anglo-Saxon world. His work and method is particularly congenial to the psychoanalytic mode of experience because it highlights the tools of emotional empathy and identification which lead to intellectual insight of “how it really was” (Ranke). Collingwood wrote:
All history is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind…. It is not a passive surrender…it is a labour of active and therefore critical thinking. The historian not only re-enacts past thought, he re-enacts it in the context of his own knowledge and therefore, in re-enacting it criticizes it, forms his own judgment of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it.15
Collingwood was aware of Freud and saluted him as “the greatest psychologist of our age.”16
To theorize elegantly about history is one thing. To apply a theory intelligently so that it yields solid results is quite another. With Collingwood we may see, not only a philosopher of history conceptualize an historical theory of epistemology, but we may observe a working historian doing his research and making discoveries. It is instructive to see how Collingwood operationalized his empathic theory of historical research. He tried to reason as the Roman strategists did, then reconstruct the past in his own mind and test his fantasy by empirical research. His research was on the purpose and function of Hadrian's Wall, a 73-mile-long structure built across the narrowest part of England on a line from the River Tyne on the North Sea to the Solway Firth on the Irish Sea, maintained by the Romans between 122 and 383 A.D. Collingwood reversed the previous scholarship by first creating a problem where there was previously only accepted dictum—that this wall, as other Limes at the extremities of the Roman Empire, was a military fortification designed to keep out barbarian invaders. Collingwood asserted that he could not imagine this. His subjective fantasies and feelings led him to his problem:
When disturbance ripened into war, when large forces from the north advanced upon the Wall and attempted (as no doubt they did, not always unsuccessfully) to penetrate it, we cannot imagine that the Roman cohorts actually lined up on the rampart-walk to repel them, still less that Hadrian's engineers ever contemplated such a proceeding [italics mine].17
Collingwood tells us that he is employing his empathy in making a reconstruction. He explicitly says that his tool of cognition is his power of imagination, his ability to get into the mind of Hadrian's engineers and, if a given pattern of thought is “unthinkable” for them in his mind, this fantasied implausibility is for him an important historical datum. Collingwood is using his educated and disciplined fantasy as a primary dimension of historical research.
He placed himself in the mental and intellectual position of the Roman generals and engineers who designed and built the wall. He immersed himself in their situation, seeking the “inward experience” of making the past alive in him. He maintained that the historian makes discoveries by rethinking the thoughts of his subjects in his own mind:
The historian of politics or warfare, presented with an account of certain actions done by Julius Caesar, tries to understand these actions, that is, to discover what thoughts in Caesar's mind determined him to do them. This implies envisaging for himself the situation in which Caesar stood, and thinking for himself what Caesar thought about the situation and the possible ways of dealing with it. The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.18
To theorize elegantly about history is one thing. To apply a theory intelligently so that it yields solid results is quite another.
In Collingwood's research and interpretation on the problem of the Wall, extending over two decades, we see the historian's procedure of reconstruction of the past by inferring the thoughts and feelings of particular men in the past from historical evidence in the present. It is a process of immersion in their problems and identification with their solutions, a practice analogous to puzzle solving, which in turn gives rise to new questions. Collingwood sought confrmatory evidence from residues in the present, much as an analyst would.
His archeological research established that there was no trench in front of the Wall. Indeed, the Wall top was only 15 feet from the ground.19 How do we know that Collingwood was right? Of course, we do not know for a certainty. Indeed we may be certain that in due course his view will be revised. But our conviction is based on the fact that for now the pieces fit. Puzzle solving, incidentally, is a methodological simile used by Freud:
If one succeeds in arranging the confused heap of fragments, each of which bears upon it an unintelligible piece of drawing, so that the picture acquires a meaning, so that there is no gap anywhere in the design and so that the whole fits into the frame—if all these conditions are fulfilled, then one knows that one has solved the puzzle and that there is no alternative solution.20
Historians use the present as an entry to the past, as do psychoanalysts who begin with the presenting complaint. This is consistent with the historical method of the great medievalist, Marc Bloch (1886-1944), who pursued a “prudently retrogressive method of research,” by moving backward from the present to origins. He taught: “The knowledge of the present bears…immediately upon the understanding of the past…. For the natural progression of all research is from the best (or least badly) understood to the most obscure.”21 Bloch critiqued the medievalist Fustel de Coulanges, who said the open field system of England did not exist in France, for not looking at the present fields of France and noting “the characteristic pattern of the plowlands visible all over northern and eastern France which so irresistibly call to mind the open fields of England,” and for ignoring “the debates on grazing on the arable which were engaging both Chambers at the very moment” Fustel expressed his judgement.22 Bloch's injunction to historians is that the key to the past is “to understand the living,” engage with the here and now, and “keep in constant touch with the present day.”23 For Bloch “historical facts are, in essence, psychological facts…. they find their antecedents in other psychological facts.”
The purpose of both psychoanalysis and cultural history is the expansion of one's self narrative and that of our analysands, as in the narratives of our collective historical past.
We benefit from cultural history—from empathic accounts of the creative struggles of persons and groups in our past. By recognizing ourselves in the cultural symbols of struggles, triumphs, and defeats of the past, as well as the history of creative efforts, we may derive, as did Freud, inspiration for ourselves and our psychoanalytic institutions in the present and future. Cultural history and psychoanalysis are both quests for personal and cultural identifications with the experiences of the past, including the non-rational aspects of human life, as we pursue personal and group creativity.
“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939), Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 215-18. The quotation is on p. 217.
“The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest” (1913), Standard Edition [Hereafter SE], XIII, 185.
Freud to Fliess, January 30, 1899 in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. 1887-1904. trans. and ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 342. , Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, Hrg. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1986), S. 374.
Freud to Fliess, February 6, 1899 in Freud-Fliess Letters, p. 344; , , S. .
Burckhardt to von Preen, July 2, 1871, in Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, , ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1955), p. 147.
, “On Fortune and Misfortune in History” (1871) in , ed., Reflections on History (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1979), pp. 323-24.
Burckhardt to von Preen, April 26, 1872, in The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, pp. 151-52.
Burckhardt to von Preen, July 24, 1889, in Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, p. 220.
, Freud (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 211.
, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” SE, VII, 50; Bruchstuck einer Hysterie Analyse, Bruchstuck einer Hysterie Analyse, Studienausgabe ( S. Fischer Verlag, 1969), VI, 124. [Hereafter Stud.].
, “Das Verstehen anderer Personen und ihrer Lebensäusserungen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ( Stuttgart B. G. Teubner 1958), vol. 7, pp. 213-15, passim.
, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press: 1943), p. 215.
, The Principles of Art (London: Oxford University Press: 1938), p. 64.
, “The Purpose of the Roman Wall,” Vasculum, 8, (October 1921), p. 9.
, Idea of History, p. 215.
, “Purpose of the Roman Wall” p. 5.
, “Remarks on the Theory and Practice of Dream Interpretation,” SE, XIX, 116.
, The Historian's Craft, trans. (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. 45-46, passim.
, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics, trans. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. xxvii.
, , pp. .
, Historian's Craft, p. 194.