Henryplease Do Not Cite Or Circulate

HenryPlease Do Not Cite or Circulate

– Chapter 3 –

Fashioning a New Psychoanalysis: Exceptional States and the Crisis of Authority in Analytic Practice, 1919-1925

The seminal text of the postwar revision of Freudian metapsychology, Beyond the Pleasure Principle(1920), had at its heart a simple, if unsettling, question – namely, why was the mind compelled to revisit and relive experiences of an unpleasurable kind. The questionwasan especially difficult one for a theory that had previously identified the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of unpleasure (Unlust, the consequence of an unrelieved build-up of tension in the psyche) as the governing principle of mental functioning. While most sources of unpleasure posed no substantive challenge to the so-called pleasure principle, “the investigation of the mental reaction to external danger” raised new problems forthe Freudian conception of the psychical apparatus. In particular, in the “traumatic neuroses” produced by the “terrible war that has just ended” Freud saw himself confronted with a category of neurotics whose fixation to traumatic experiences appeared to defy both this basic principleand the more specific theoryof the neuroses it informed.[1] In attempting to make sense of these afflictions, Freud was led to consider what lay beyond, and indeed before, the pleasure principle, namely the attempts of the primitive psychical apparatus to bind the invasive quantities of stimuli that threatened to overwhelm it.

Tounderstand the compulsion of neurotic soldiers to return to the precipitating cause of their afflictionand repeat thisexperience in their dreams, Freud felt it necessary to“leave the dark and dismalsubjectof thetraumatic neurosesand to pass onto examine” the operations of the mental apparatus in one of its “earliest normalactivities” – that of children’s play.[2] In turning from adult war neurotics to infants in his discussion,Freud was recapitulating a move that Sándor Ferenczi had made in his contribution to the discussion of the war neuroses at the 1918 Budapest congress. At the close of his address, Ferenczi speculated that the symptoms exhibited by war neurotics represented regressions to “modes of adaptation” that had played a prominent role in the biological evolution of the species but none at all in the individual’s development. In a postscript to his address, Ferenczi attempted to clarify this obscure contention with recourse to a study by the Heidelberg pediatrician Professor E. Morros on the responses of infants to experiences of shock, responses Ferenczi classified as forms of artificially created “fright (or traumatic) neurosis.” Pointing to the parallel between the gestures of the frightened infants and the tendency of baby primates to cling to their mothers, he concluded that the “natural clasping reflex” activated in the infants at moments of sudden shock reflectedan “atavistic reversion of the mode of reaction in sudden terror.”[3]

The turn to the child in Ferenczi’s postscript and Freud’s essay reflected the emergence of a new understanding of neurotic suffering in psychoanalytic thought, one anticipated by Ernst Simmel’s two 1918 contributions to the psychoanalytic theory of the war neuroses (chapter two). In each case, it was the vulnerability of an ego exposed to overwhelming violence from without and unmanageable affects from within that dominated the clinical picture all but displacing the conflict between sexual desire and repression at the heart of the classical psychoanalytic etiology of the neuroses.[4] Yet far more was in play – for both Freud and Ferenczi, the new emphasis on the vulnerability of the subject and the analogy to the child it suggested resonated with fears of a potentially irrevocable collapse of civilization into infantilism and barbarity.[5] In tracing an arc that led from adult neurotics to children and, in fact, beyond – in Ferenczi’s case to frightened infant primates and in Freud’s to the most rudimentary form of organic life(“an undifferentiated vesicle of substance…susceptible to stimulation”)[6] –psychoanalytic thought appeared to open onto the possibility of an almost limitless capacity for regression. As soldiers became infants recapitulating adaptive behaviors from evolutionary prehistory, it seemed that the war had revealed a retrogressive tendency to organic life in which highly organized forms were in constant danger of sliding back into a pre-individual, pre-linguistic,creatural (kreatürlich), existence.[7] The manifestations of the traumatic neuroses may have figured as defensive formations (eingeschaltete Sicherungen) against the threat of psychosis, as they did for Simmel, or even as attempts to restore a disturbed psychical equilibrium through a piecemeal discharge of the overwhelming fright as Ferenczi (following a “hint” from Freud) suggested, but the danger of a more fundamental (and perhaps irremediable) collapse seemed already inscribed in the symptomatic behaviors and compulsive reenactments of the traumatized soldiers.[8]

The attempts of Freudiansto grapple with the psychical consequences of the warled to a partial displacement within psychoanalytic thought of the mature, autonomous, cultivated individualthat classical analytic therapy had taken as its legitimate object.[9] If in 1909 Freud could write that psychoanalysis requires a “state of normality for its application” and that it paradoxically meets the “optimum of favorable conditions where its practice is not needed” (i.e. among the healthy),[10] the collapse of liberal bourgeois society in the crucible of the war directed analysts’ attention to subjects who lay beyond the classical norm at the same time as it lent extraordinary urgency to the task of developing a mass psychotherapeutic response to the war’s devastation. The subjects Freud addressed in his 1918 address to the Budapest congress (chapter two) – “men who would otherwise give way to drink,”women in danger of succumbing to “the burdens of their privations,” and “childrenfor whom there is no choice but between running wild or neurosis” – appeared to require the exercise of a novel form of authority within analytic treatment, one that was “active,” pedagogical, and thus, disciplinary in its exercise. In the new context, as the previous chapter argued, education (Erziehung) thus took on a new valence within psychoanalytic thought: whereas prior to the conflict, it had figured primarily as a source of neurotic suffering, in the disordered environment created by four years of total war, Erziehungand the egoic resistances it inculcated came to appear essential to recovery of individual autonomy and social stability.

The program Freud articulated in 1918 for a mass application of analytic therapy(administered as a basic right but premised on a disciplinary reinscription into the social order)was a fundamentally Social Democratic vision.[11] Pedagogical authority was likewise central to the ambitious programs for recovery that Social Democrats articulated over these years – as the educator Otto Glöckel wrote in 1916, “the new times have created new educational needs.”[12] Viewing the collapse of the family unit amid the social upheavals of the war, Glöckel argued that the disruption of the educational function of the family placed new responsibilities on society. The massive welfarist intervention that Social Democrats like Glöckel and Julius Tandler envisioned in the last years of the war was formed around the figure of the vulnerable and immature subject in need of care and education.[13] Overcoming the dilapidated state of the social, however, required not only the construction of an all-encompassing welfare apparatus on behalf of the child, but also the education of the masses of adults who lacked an adequate consciousness of their responsibilities in the enormous tasks of reconstruction.[14]

Beyond the ranks of the Social Democrats, however, the ruination of the Volkskörper through the combination of mass slaughter, collective starvation, and the spread of epidemics generated an overriding concern among many observers with the health of the coming generations.[15] If the physical effects of the war on the population placed the upbringing and education of the younger generation at the center of programs for recovery, the social and political upheavals of the war and the ensuing revolution likewise trained the attention of many observers on the essential role of education in restoring social stability and securing the democratic achievements of the revolutions.[16]While many programs for reconstruction envisioned the mobilization of the total measures of the war and the subordination of individual concerns to collective problems, the unprecedented triumph of liberal, democratic values in the war’s aftermath posed an ideological challenge to these far-reaching (and often anti-liberal) ambitions. If Erziehung loomed so large in the thought of many reformers at this conjuncture, its prominence reflected, in part, its ability to reconcile the exercise of disciplinary authority with the democratic aspirations enshrined in the constitutions of the young Austrian and German republics. Through a new education the divergent needs of the moment could be aligned in a single program that encompassed biological recovery, social reconstruction, and democratic renovation.

In the psychological theory and therapeutic technique of Alfred Adler, Social Democratic reformers found an invaluable resource for their program of pedagogical social reconstruction. Adlerian Individual Psychology was fundamentally an “erzieherisch psychotherapy,”[17]one whose guiding aim in the aftermath of the war was the pedagogical task of cultivating feelings of community (Gemeinschaftsgefühle) against the individual egotism that Adler and many Social Democrats believed was destroying the collective good.[18] For Freudians, however, the adoption of a disciplinary, pedagogical procedure in the service of social reconstruction represented a transgression of its classical liberal principles (its politics of autonomy) and raised the unsettling specter of a loss of its unique identity. By clinging to its liberal principles and its individualist orientation in the midst of social deterioration and political upheaval, however, psychoanalysts, Freud recognized, would significantly delimit their ability to contribute constructively to the broader tasks of reconstruction and renovation.

Psychoanalysts were thus confronted with a fundamental problem following the Great War: while the collapse of bourgeois society demanded an ambitious therapeutic intervention, the mass application of analytic therapy appeared to necessitate the adoption of a mode of therapeutic authority that violated the liberal principles at the heart of analytic practice. For Freud in 1918, this contradiction demanded a cautious mediation between competing alternatives, a defensive recasting of the politics of bourgeois psychoanalysis in the interest both of preserving its identity and expanding its social efficacy. In the thought of two of his more radical followers – Ferenczi and Wilhelm Reich – by contrast, the displacement of the classical bourgeois norm and the prominence of new types of neurotic suffering demanded a fundamental rethinking of the means and ends of analytic therapy. Their work over the following years would come to rethink the practice of analytic therapy around the figure of the vulnerable, immature, and dependent – in a word, childlike – constituent of the masses. Like Freud, they thought of their transgressions of orthodox principles – at least initially – as a means of restoring the conditions of possibility for the flourishing of a kind of liberal (i.e. autonomous, self-regulating) subjectivity.[19] Yet unlike Freud,they simultaneously viewed the destruction of liberal society and the undermining of its ideal of subjectivity as opening up a horizon of possibility for the exercise of therapeutic and pedagogical authority that exploded the limits of classical analysis. Increasingly, their work would draw psychoanalysis away from its liberal bourgeois roots into a bracing confrontation with the mass, democratic spirit of the times.

State(s) of Exception

In April of 1919 Freud wrote Ferenczi in a cautionary tone. Urging “restraint” at a time when, as Ferenczi had reported, psychoanalysis was “being courted on all sides,” Freud insisted, “we are not suited to any kind of official existence, we need our independence on all sides…There is also an aftermath, in which we must again find a place. We are and remain nonpartisan except for one thing: to investigate and to help.”[20] Over the months following the military collapse, psychoanalysis appeared to be in danger of becoming the plaything of political forces in Ferenczi’s Budapest. After having been embraced and championed by the radical youth during the revolution and an object of official patronage under the short-lived communist regime that followed the war, psychoanalysis became the target of conservative backlash amid the virulently anti-Semitic reaction that ousted the revolutionary soviet government and established the nationalist authoritarian regime that would rule Hungary for the remainder of the interwar period.[21] While it had appeared to both Freud and Ferenczi over the preceding months that Budapest was destined to become the capital of the psychoanalytic movement, the political reversals that dashed their hopes to see psychoanalysis established at the university and the death early the following year of a major Hungarian-Jewish benefactor (the same businessman who financed the 1918 congress), put an end to this hope and relegated Budapest to the status of a mere provincial center in the psychoanalytic movement.[22] If Ferenczi had written at the end of the war, amid the destruction of “Globus Hungaricus,” that “it is a good thing that along with the Hungarian, one has a Jewish and a psychoanalytic ego, which remain untouched by these events,”[23] the upheavals that followed the war seemed once again to convince him of the truth of Freud’s gloomy assessment that “our kingdom is not of this world.”[24] Resigning himself to the new order established by the reactionary-clerical regime, Ferenczi wrote, “It is naturally the best thing for [psychoanalysis] to continue working in complete withdrawal and without noise.”[25]

Far from signaling the denouement of the tumult that runs through Ferenczi’s postwar letters, however, the disabusing political reversals of 1919 marked rather its transposition to a new plane, that of psychoanalytic theory. The same dramatic fluctuation between caution and enthusiasm that distinguishes Ferenczi’s commentary from Freud’s more consistently dour and circumspect prognoses would be similarly evident in Ferenczi’s writings on therapeutic technique over the 1920s. Where in the aftermath of the war, the future chances for psychoanalysis appeared to hinge primarily on external circumstances beyond their control, within a few years, Ferenczi was convinced that the opportunities for the expansion of psychoanalysis lay well within its grasp. These possibilities arose from the exceptional circumstances produced in the crucible of war and revolution: by internalizing the lessons of the past years and modifying analytic therapy accordingly, psychoanalysis would be able to emerge from its isolation and expand well beyond the limits imposed by orthodox practice. While the political situation would stabilize over the coming years, the upheaval of the postwar moment thus left a deep imprint on Ferenczi’s thought – far more than he cared to admit, the psychoanalytic ego he cast as inviolable and imperturbable was both shaken and altered by the tumult of the past years. Through detailed reconstruction of his contributions to the theory of psychoanalytic technique, which built directly off of Freud’s address to the Budapest congress, one can begin to discern the extent to which, what Ferenczi described as, “the great and powerful shocks of this volcanic epoch” shifted the foundations of psychoanalytic thought.[26]

In the wake of the 1918 congress, it was Ferenczi who took the lead in attempting to work out the technical implications of Freud’s address, and in particular, his consideration of the need for a more “active” therapeutic technique. A basic uncertainty, in fact, surrounds the concept’s provenance within psychoanalytic thought, for while Ferenczi would claim in his second paper on the subject to have been following a verbal suggestion from Freud in adopting a more “active” technique,[27] Freud himself credited Ferenczi with introducing the concept into the psychoanalytic lexicon.[28] Whatever its origins, however, Ferenczi’s contributions over the immediate postwar years would soon give him a proprietary interest in the concept of analytic “activity.” If, as the previous chapter argued, Freud’s circumspection inclined him to place limits on his own innovations, in particular on the application of methods designed to abridge analytic treatment and to extend its therapeutic reach to the masses, Ferenczi’s more impulsive intellectual temperament, which fluctuated dramatically between the extremes of intransigent orthodoxy and breathtaking heterodoxy, would increasingly threaten the limits Freud sought to uphold.[29]

Ferenczi’s first brief contributions to the question of active technique, “Technische Schwierigkeiten einer Hysterieanalyse” and “Zur Frage der Beeinflussung des Patienten in der Psychoanalyse,” both from 1919, posed no such challenges to the defining limits of Freudian thought. The latter paper in particular reads essentially as a gloss of Freud’s address, one intended to draw out and clarify the theoretical stakes at play that may have escaped less sensitive listeners. Like Freud, Ferenczi aimed to uphold the purity of psychoanalytic therapy while contemplating its modification, a process that similarly involved the definition of psychoanalysis against the rival techniques and methodological criticisms of outsiders. Recalling how in 1913 at the Munich congress of the IPA, he had defended the austere conception of analytic therapy against the suggestions of the Swedish psychiatrist Poul Bjerre that “pure psychoanalytic therapy be combined with the medical and ethical education of the patient,” Ferenczi now felt compelled to revisit the question he had resolved so decisively six years earlier. If in 1913 Ferenczi had insisted that psychoanalytic therapy exhausts itself in the “methodical enlightenment” of the patient and “the overcoming of the internal resistances,” the most recent issue of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse contained, he noted, two contradictory statements on the subject: “‘The psychoanalyst never advises a patient, least of all to take up sexual relations,’” Jones had asserted categorically, only to have his contention belied by Isidor Sadger’s candid admission that a patient of his had copulated for the first time “‘as a consequence of [his] advice.’”[30]