Psychoanalysis and Moral Values
Roazen, Paul
MY GUESS is that a discussion of the relation between moral values and psychoanalysis would have made Sigmund Freud extremely uneasy. Freud never doubted that his ideas were revolutionary...
...New threats to human freedom are always arising, and psychoanalysis has to adapt to these if it is not to become one more component in the social hierarchy at odds with the growth of humane individualism...
...It was characteristic of him to have relegated a problem like freedom, for example, to a mere footnote...
...One might be healthy and still good-for-nothing...
...Even though people of fancy and imagination could hold a special place in NOTEBOOK his heart, Freud steadfastly admired the conscientious and the upright...
...Suggestion is still very much an element in treatment, even in the hands of well-trained psychoanalysts, and hidden ethical advice is all the more likely in those who think of themselves as morally aloof and neutral...
...Perhaps this was so, and perhaps the hippie was also schizophrenic, but such pat ways of dismissing behavior that deviates from middle-class norms does seem humanly offensive and scientifically questionable...
...Freud thereupon recommended that she undergo an analysis...
...In his earlier years he had been far more outgoing and interventionist than later on, especially after he had contracted his cancer...
...one might also be quite sick and yet, in Freud's mind, quite valuable as a human being...
...One wonders whether most candidates in training today would get off so easily were this the upshot of a supervised analysis...
...Freud thought this new relationship represented a solid step forward for his patient...
...In one case, the psychiatrist said, the young man in love had "shaky ego boundaries," which justified psychiatric intervention—as if any impending marriage were not an appropriate time for such an upheaval...
...Freud took for granted, at least in the early period of his practice, a well-functioning personality capable of integrating the insights he could offer...
...Standards of belief and value were more multiple and less uniform than a modern mass society tends to produce...
...In another case he actively intervened in behalf of a specific marriage choice, one that today might seem rather bizarre...
...Let me cite a few examples from my own limited experience...
...Once Freud was apprised of the girl's inner world, he dropped the idea of the match...
...The girl's analyst was told by Freud that there was a secret in the case, and that when the analyst discovered it she should report it to Freud...
...As the psychiatrist explained his handling of the case, "I didn't exactly criticize the affair, but I tried to make him see that a white woman who has an affair with a black man must have a devaluated sense of herself...
...The patient eventually "chose as his wife a respectable girl outside his family circle...
...For all his genius, Freud was not exempt from many of the social prejudices of his day...
...Freud assumed in his patients the role of a well-integrated, even if overly severe, superego, which may in part explain his relative lateness in coming to discuss this concept...
...but he did not know that the girl had the fantasy that she herself was the child of the illicit union between her uncle and her mother, which fully explained her hesitancy to get involved with him sexually...
...Unless one can acknowledge how different Freud was from what would be acceptable in a therapist today, it is impossible to see just how great were the forces of social prejudice, both in the world at large and in his own soul, with which he had to contend...
...Be better next time...
...In his later years he wrote about the roots of religion, the future of civilization, and pondered other age-old quandaries...
...As much as Freud had not wanted psychoanalysis to become a mere "handmaid," as he liked to put it, to psychiatry, in America at any rate it would be hard to overestimate the impact of his ideas on psychiatric theory and practice...
...Bold as he was as a practicing clinician, Freud remained shy about discussing the aims of analytic therapy...
...Psychoanalysis has had its successes, and analysts are now hardly in the position of being an underpaid revolutionary band at odds with conventional wisdom...
...and as his illness restricted his activities, he drew back somewhat from therapy...
...Within a week or so the analyst returned with the news that not only was the secret uncovered, but there was a secret to the case that Freud himself did not know...
...I remember seeing the case of a young Jewish girl presented at a psychiatric hospital...
...And yet how little attention is paid to what we could possibly mean by normality...
...For some time now psychoanalytic theory has been separated by a rather wide gulf from psychoanalytic practice...
...But Freud surprised his disciple by concluding that it was quite an appropriate point at which to terminate the analysis...
...Spock's child-raising manuals would be intellectually inconceivable without the backdrop of Freud's work...
...It can never be enough, though, to call upon a heritage that values individual freedom of choice and labors against deceit and coercion...
...From many such instances one acquires the feeling that almost any prejudice can be defended by means of modern psychology...
...In one area of contemporary psychology the role of values has crept in rather notably, although quite surreptitiously, and that is in developmental models of personality growth...
...To what extent are these models (such as those of Erik Erikson) descriptions of how things do happen, and to what extent are they accounts of what we would like and approve...
...was the way one of Freud's patients once summarized Freud's approach...
...This patient had had a longstanding sexual relationship with his brother's wife...
...She came from the proverbial good middle-class family, but had run away, across the country, for the sake of adventure and "sleeping around...
...Seeing Freud in proper historical perspective can also illuminate some characteristic clinical shortcomings of our own day...
...As he aged, his devotion to science grew increasingly pronounced...
...These are questions which on logical grounds alone psychoanalysis must try to answer...
...They could even afford to evade certain intellectual issues, thanks to the social position they found themselves in...
...What were Freud's practices as a clinician...
...A depressed black man was having an affair with a white woman...
...For those of a bookish cast of mind, it is disquieting that theoretical understanding is of so little help in orienting oneself in psychoanalysis...
...Far too little is known here, though more is preserved in the oral tradition of psychoanalysis than has ever made its way into print...
...By our current standards Freud the therapist was decidedly moralistic...
...The patients Freud worked best with were those with already well-constituted egos...
...At times Freud could even thunder like a modern prophet, challenging the values and practices of Western Christendom...
...in those last years of his life he was a good deal more disillusioned about the prospects of therapeutic success, and altogether more preoccupied with the future of his findings as a scientific body...
...To the degree that today's analysts have become members of the establishment, however, Freud's ideas need to be clarified lest they be pressed willy-nilly into service in behalf of the status quo...
...No one of course can choose goals for other people...
...The healthy was not just the same as the worthy—on that point Freud was insistent...
...The Central Europe of his time was far more cosmopolitan and less narrowly bourgeois than, for example, some contemporary practitioners of Freud's art...
...Freud hoped and expected that in each patient the analyst could anticipate finding an ally, the struggling self that had been weighted down by mistakes in upbringing and misconception of goals...
...What is impermissible, however, is for someone to assume his values and beliefs in such a way that rather striking moral positions are taken via clinical categories without an awareness that the same categories might justify very different moral alternatives...
...Yet almost nowhere did Freud seek to define the concept of psychic health...
...As long as Freud and his followers were themselves on the outside they could scarcely be accused of advocating conformism...
...The patient's children had grown up, her sexual affair was discreet, and her husband was now interested in her mainly for social pur NOTEBOOK poses...
...As a result of an analysis with Freud, the man was freed from his incestuous bond, only to fall in love with his niece, the daughter of his former mistress...
...He regarded NOTEBOOK it as axiomatic that college-educated white Americans who wanted to marry "barefoot girls with only a third-grade education" must be suffering from mental disturbance...
...The analyst was not supposed to burden a patient with extraneous problems, either analyst's or society's...
...FREUD COULD SCARCELY HAVE FORESEEN the uses his concepts would be put to in the thirty or so years since his death...
...In one case a middle-aged woman came to Freud because of her guilt over homosexual urges...
...Analysts have direct as well as indirect influence not only on psychiatric departments but on schools, law courts, universities, professional training centers, business corporations, and so on...
...Problems such as that of moral values need especially to be re-examined, in the very different historical conditions under which we now live...
...But even as Freud kept insisting more and more on the status of psychoanalysis as a science, he found himself giving freer reign to his own speculative impulses...
...Freud never doubted that his ideas were revolutionary and therefore bound to have effects far beyond the understanding and treatment of the neuroses...
...About two-thirds through the discussion the senior psychiatrist, an analyst, reacted with volcanic fury...
...She seemed to me a not especially intelligent young lady, and her rather standard manner of complying with the way some young people dress nowadays did not make her look any the more interesting...
...His hope was that some of his students would perceive the moral implications of psychoanalytic principles, and that workers in other fields would be able to revolutionize their disciplines as he had altered the shape of modern psychology...
...as a result of a year of treatment the patient was free of her guilt feelings but actively homosexual...
...Since psychoanalytic concepts aim at being scientific, they should be capable of being used for very different political and social purposes, from the most conservative to the most radical...
...By the end of the meeting the "diagnosis" of a hippie—or perhaps a diagnosis of a pseudo-hippie— had been agreed upon...
...but the widespread influence of psychoanalysis today as well as the background and training of those who now become therapists can lead to legitimate concern over the role certain types of values have come to play in clinical practice...
...Yet Freud always feared that his empirical discoveries might get swallowed up in mankind's search for ethical direction...
...Hypocrisy arises precisely when, under the guise of certain glittering ideals, rather objectionable conformist practices are permitted to flourish...
...Groping for justification, the resident finally had to admit that he did not like the way the girl dressed and wore her hair...
...When writing up this case for publication, Freud tried to suppress, no doubt out of discretion, the familial connection between the partners in this proposed union...
...It is simply not possible to exclude from psychoanalytic thought the problem of moral values...
...On theoretical grounds one may find little cause for worry that psychoanalytic ideas will be used to promote conformism or mere adjustment...
...FREUD COULD BE remarkably emancipated from some middle-class values...
...The writings of his last 16 years, as he gradually withdrew from the world, contain some of the most sustained abstract restatements of his findings that can be found anywhere in his work...
...Freud took for granted what nowadays seems so rare in patients, a self that knows what it wants...
...MY GUESS is that a discussion of the relation between moral values and psychoanalysis would have made Sigmund Freud extremely uneasy...
...The more psychoanalytic theory pays attention to problems of ethics and values, the harder it is going to be to make moral choices in undercover ways...
...Addicts, psychotics, delinquents, male perverts—those cases for whom the scope of psychoanalysis has been expanded since Freud's death—would have seemed more or less repugnant to him...
...From my participation in case conferences, two other illustrations of the role moral values can play in clinical practice come to mind...
...Freud's distance from the values of con ventional society played a role in his individualistic conception of treatment...
...At the very end of Freud's account of this case, there was a return of the suppressed...
...This case fits the archetype of the legendary Viennese love tangle...
...At another meeting, a peace corps psychiatrist described his work as largely focused on preventing young men from "going native" and marrying young girls in the field...
...It is a commonplace by now that the psychoanalytic revolution has contributed to the liberalizing trends in our time...
...At his best Freud stood for the ideal of autonomy...
...For if Freud was more intolerant as a therapist than would now be considered usual, he was also much more boldly individualistic than many of the followers who pay him homage...
...Though he wanted to understand as much of human behavior as possible, he could not help being a man of his time...
...Have we in fact examined anything like all the possible human potentialities that it might be possible to try to foster...
...He did not want to have to give advice or preach to patients, for that would be to duplicate the techniques of hypnotic treatment and suggestion, as well as some of the mistaken tasks of traditional religions...
...The young girl did indeed know about the long-standing liaison between her suitor and her mother, as Freud had wanted to find out...
...Her parents had finally retrieved her and put her in the hospital...
...With some trepidation, the analyst reported to Freud the outcome of the analysis...
...As Freud remarked to a patient at the end of a three-months' analysis in 1908, "What I liked best about working with you was that as soon as I gave you something you were able to make use of it...
...Freud recommended her to a Viennese pupil for an analysis...
...The girl, however, was recalcitrant and resisted the advances of her uncle...
...After contracting cancer in 1923, Freud never again wrote a case history...
...To attempt to do so is only to encourage the uncritical acceptance of the prevailing standards of morality...
...Until this point in the narrative Freud had not hinted that any of the patient's former loves had been within the "family circle...
...After all, to say that an act is immature or neurotic is to imply a standard of maturity or health...
...he demanded to know what was the evidence for schizophrenia in the girl...
...Ideally, the aim of an analysis was to help the patient, enriched from his inner resources, to become his own best self...
...The fact that Freud would countenance, even try to promote, such a match should demonstrate what a world away from today's middle-class values was his own private therapeutic practice...
...the task of good theory should be merely to make it as hard as possible for psychoanalysis to be used unthinkingly for a given political or social end...
...To the clean-cut, hard-working resident who was treating her, however, she was schizophrenic, and with psychoanalytic theory in hand everyone in the room tried to examine the roots of her troubles...
Vol. 18 • February 1971 • No. 1
