In 1968, at a convention of Students for a Democratic Society, I spied the title of a pamphlet by Herbert Marcuse on the book table: The Obsolescence of the Freudian Conception of Man. I still remember my shock. It seemed to me inconceivable that a discovery like that of the unconscious could become obsolete. Born in 1940, I had grown up in an immigrant Jewish cultural environment in which Freud's stature was comparable not only to such modernist giants as Joyce, Kafka, and Proust but also to figures Freud had written about: Goethe, Dostoevsky, Leonardo.
As a leftist, I knew that while the analytic profession (mostly doctors then) might be conservative, Freud's thought was central to radical politics. After all, what defined the New Left, as I understood it, was the understanding that capitalism was not simply an economic system, organized through coercive but rationalistic techniques of exploitation, but also a deeply irrational psychical order, grounded in sexual desire, the family, and what I would now call personal life. At that point it did not seem conceivable to me that America could go back either on the great achievements of the modernist era or on radical politics.
This moment was brought to mind when I began to think about the question Michael Slevin had posed to me: “Has psychoanalysis ever truly produced a public intellectual?” On the one hand, his question made no sense to me. Freud was obviously one of the great public intellectuals of the 20th century, and his works were widely read outside the analytic community, increasingly so as he turned to cultural, historical, and what can only be termed political questions in the late ‘20s and ‘30s. Furthermore, what can one say about such figures as Melanie Klein, Wilhelm Reich, D.W. Winnicott, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Theodor Reik, Herbert Marcuse, Judith Butler, Juliet Mitchell, Marie Langer, Christopher Lasch, or Elisabeth Roudinesco? Every one of them was or is a psychoanalytic public intellectual. Winnicott was a BBC stalwart, Lasch and Fromm best-selling authors, Roudinesco a leading personality in French intellectual life, Mitchell and Horney founders of modern feminism.
From another point of view, however, the question can be restated: Given the fact that between World War I and the ‘60s or ‘70s psychoanalysis was central to public debate, how did it become so marginal today? To address this question we must first address three prior questions: 1) What do we mean by psychoanalysis? 2) What can psychoanalysis contribute to a democratic society above and beyond psychotherapy? 3) More generally, what if any relation does psychoanalysis have to politics? Let us take these up in turn.
Psychoanalysis as a profession is defined through education and licensing by those who practice analysis in consulting rooms. By contrast, I would define psychoanalysis more broadly to include those with a professional sensitivity to unconscious mental forces, and especially to resistance. In my view, practicing psychoanalysts have special expertise in those areas that revolve around treatment, but psychoanalysis also includes those who study the unconscious in film, literature, politics, symbols, rituals and anthropology, historical materials, biography, autobiography, philosophy, child development, and numerous other areas, including the natural sciences. An analogy might be architecture: Those who build houses have a special expertise and a special role to play, but the field of architecture includes theorists, critics, historians, public sculptors, city planners, acousticians, and others.
Historically, psychoanalysts distinguished the analytic profession from “applied analysis,” meaning education, social work, sex clinics, and the like. This no longer works, partly because the most important “application” of analysis is psychotherapy, and partly because those who practice therapy do not have a monopoly on analytic knowledge. To be sure, this approach raises a host of questions concerning how we gain knowledge of the unconscious, and how we are to understand resistance. However, these questions are difficult in any case and remain unresolved to this day.
However we define psychoanalysis, we can ask what it can contribute to public discussion in a democratic society. What uses might it have above and beyond its value as therapy? I suggest that the larger value of analysis has to do with the powerful role that non-rational or irrational forces play in our lives, both individual and collective. Psychoanalysis remains the most developed and comprehensive approach we have that allows us to understand and cope with these forces. Let me illustrate this with three examples: economics, the media, and fundamentalism.
The economic system, as it is presently understood, presumes the rational, self-maximizing individual as its unit, in other words, market economics. In recent years a new field of behavioral economics has opened up, based on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, which tweaks market economics at the margins but does not provide an alternative model. Keynes, however, writing in the wake of Freudianism, located very powerful emotional forces in economic life, such as fear, greed, the gambling mania, the
Eli Zaretsky, Ph.D., is professor of history at the New School for Social Research. He is author of Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, and Why America Needs a Left.
drive for security, “animal spirits,” and the like. He thereby sought to draw a line between macroeconomic (governmental) processes, which we could collectively manage, and market forces, whose driven character we had best respect. Keynes brought rationality and planning into economics by demonstrating their limits. In the long run, I do not think it is possible to have a serious discussion of the world's economic problems without including a similarly robust sense of depth psychology.
The conditions of human life have been transformed by the role of images. The philosopher Theodor Adorno called mass culture “psychoanalysis in reverse,” meaning that instead of interpreting our dreams we were living them out. Psychoanalysis has a useful concept that can help us understand this: narcissism. We live in a time marked by a great validation of narcissistic urges and drives, and we need a language that can help us evaluate what is positive and what is negative in this shift.
In earlier times this language came from religion and from political philosophy, but this is no longer enough due to the psychological revolution of the 20th century, which I have termed the rise of personal life. Since the '60s, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, brain physiology, artificial intelligence, the behavioral sciences and so forth have been put forth to fill this need, but there is a difference between the neurological unconscious and the unconscious mind. Because of that difference, we need a psychology that is our psychology, one that speaks to the modern individual's need for subjective self-expression and self-knowledge, and not just external, objective, natural sciences.
…we need a psychology that is our psychology, one that speaks to the modern individual's need for subjective self-expression and self-knowledge, and not just external, objective, natural sciences.
Fundamentalism offers a third example of a subject that would benefit from psychoanalytic understanding. One thing that made Freud compelling was that psychoanalysis spoke to the irrationality of fascism in a way that few other disciplines could. Today we see again the rise of great fundamentalist religions, in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, but also in such forms as market dogmatism, scientific reductionism, and political correctness.
While there are important non-analytic concepts, such as charisma and the sacred, to discuss these phenomena, psychoanalysis adds something extra: the analytic attitude, by which I mean the capacity to look at one's own experiences objectively, without moral judgment, at least in the first instance. The hope is that the encouragement that psychoanalysis gives to individuals to be reflective and non-defensive, may eventually translate into democratic public culture as well.
What relation does analytic attitude or an analytic culture have to politics? Certainly, there is good reason to protect the idea of the analyst's “neutrality,” when it comes to respecting the autonomy of the individual in analytic practice. But this is not to say that the field of psychotherapy is “apolitical,” as we have learned from the successes of bringing feminism, gay liberation, multiculturalism, awareness of poverty, internal democracy, and the like into psychoanalytic education and training, as well as into theoretical investigation.
There are also cases where analysts cannot avoid taking a political stand. In 1933 Freud exclaimed “Free me from [Wilhelm] Reich,” because Reich wanted to organize sex-clinics against the Nazis, and Freud feared this endangered the psychoanalytic institutes. I regard Reich as a hero for seeing the need to organize against the Nazis, and I see a tragic flaw in Freud for his deluded hope that psychoanalysis could survive in Nazi Germany, even after the expulsion of the Jewish analysts. This is, of course, an extreme case, but there are many other examples of the involvement of analysts with politics.
The sad truth, in fact, is that when one studies the matter historically, analysts have collaborated with fascist, authoritarian, and other repressive regimes far more than with insurgent and leftist movements. Yet the psychoanalytic engagement with the left has produced great classics, such as Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism , whereas the collaboration of psychoanalysts with McCarthyism or with the dictators in Latin America has produced only regrets.
This brings us to our final question: Given the role that psychoanalysis played in the 20th century public sphere, how did it come to be marginalized? This is a profound and complex problem, with roots in the ‘60s. To begin with, there was an underlying problem in psychoanalysis, namely that it often did not work as a method of treatment. In Freud's day this was a problem addressed within analysis itself, above all through the development of ego psychology. However, with the emigration to the United States, and with the general crisis of World War II, American analysts claimed to possess a “true” science, based on experiment and prediction, and created a defensive, ultra-authoritarian and sexist culture to protect it. As a result, psychoanalysis was already in decline when the attacks by the New Left and by feminists and advocates of gay liberation occurred in the early ‘70s.
We can understand the effect of those attacks under three rubrics: the sense in which they preserved psychoanalysis, the sense in which they negated psychoanalysis, and the sense in which they transcended psychoanalysis or, as I believe, failed to do so. As I think is widely recognized now, feminism, gay liberation, and the emancipatory culture of the '60s in general saved American psychoanalysis by encouraging a less authoritarian and more democratic culture, and by encouraging a more enlightened view of both gender and homosexuality, subjects at the center of psychoanalysis. One can only welcome the modesty and respect that contemporary analysts show their patients, when compared to the old-world authoritarianism of classical Freudianism.
At the same time, the attacks negated psychoanalysis insofar as they substituted a sociological and political account for the study of the unconscious. Whereas classical psychoanalysis understood bisexuality as ambivalence over sexual object choice, today's meaning has shifted to a choice to sleep with both sexes. Whereas homosexuality meant a sexual current common to both sexes, today it refers to an identity derived from the choice of an object. Likewise gender, a sociological concept based on power differential, has largely displaced the analytic focus on the psychology of sexual difference. More generally, the quality of “distance” that made classical psychoanalysis problematic also enabled the creation of a scientific discipline based on the study of the unconscious, distinct from its social and political surround.
The upheavals of the '60s and '70s, however, did not make possible the transcendence of the older analytic model, in the sense of creating a new model and a new culture that preserved what was strong while overcoming what was weak. The reason for this failure is that neither of the two main forces contending for psychoanalysis in the '70s actually grasped the value of the idea of the unconscious at the depth required to mount an effective defense. On the one hand, the feminists held that Freud was an arch-sexist, whereas they were emancipated on the sexual question, while on the other hand, the old-line analysts held that Freud had a pre-professional, personalistic attitude to psychoanalysis, which American medicine and scientific norms transcended.
Both groups were much more interested in explaining how far they had advanced beyond Freud than in explaining what they had taken from him. As a result, the defenders of the analytic tradition opened the path for today's redefinition of psychical problems as behavioral problems to be understood in terms of “results-oriented” research and, its kissing cousin, neoliberal cost accounting, as well as for the utterly benighted and tendentious view of Freud and of analysis, which remains predominant in the public sphere today, although it is so untenable that it is probably finally crumbling.
In the end, the place of psychoanalysis in the public sphere can only be discussed in the context of a broad sense of the overall historical situation. What made the Freudian moment so indelible was the widespread sense of crisis and decline that characterized the '20s and '30s, along with the powerful hopes for leftist reform and revolution. Similarly the reduction of psychoanalysis to neurobiology and pharmacology in the '70s was part of a larger neoliberal counterrevolution that included the return to neoclassical economics, the rational choice revolution in political science and sociology, and the postmodern attack on subjectivity. If, as seems likely today, history sees a revival of radical thought, it is also likely that an understanding of the unconscious, and of the power of resistance, will also return to public debate.
Editor's Note:
Eli Zaretsky's forthcoming work is tentatively entitled Political Freud.