In Our Time - Psychoanalysis and Democracy

Episode Date: July 11, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact of politics on psychoanalysis. The 20th century saw the birth and rise of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud led people to think about how the mind functioned and how our behaviour might be understood through the process of working with a psychoanalyst, either one-to-one or in a group. Freud thought a lot about this process and in 1922 he published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in which he pronounced that the group "wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters." He was writing at a time when ideas about rules and oppression were much discussed because the 20th century was also a century of fascism, totalitarianism and dictatorship. Freud died in 1939, just as a wave of despotism was sweeping across Europe. To what extent does psychoanalysis function by the rules of a dictatorship and to what extent does it function like a democracy? Is there a part of us that craves dictatorship and, if so, why? Is there a war going on in our own minds between ideas that we allow in to our consciousness and other ideas that we repress? With Adam Phillips, general editor of the new Penguin translations of Freud; Sally Alexander, Professor of History, Goldsmiths College, University of London; Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature and Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford.

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or wherever you get your pods. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, at the turn of the 19th century, we saw the birth and rise of psychoanalysis, championed by Sigmund Freud.

People began to think about how the mind functioned and how our behavior might be understood through the process of working with a psychoanalyst, either worn to one or in a group. Freud thought a lot about this process, and in 1920, he published group psychology and the analysis of the ego, in which he pronounced the group, quote, wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters, unquote. Freud was writing at a time when ideas about rules and oppression were much discussed because the 20th century was also a century of fascism, totalitarianism, and dictatorship.

Freud died in 1939, just as a wave of despotism was sweeping across Europe. Today we'll be discussing the relationship between politics and psychoanalysis, To what extent does psychoanalysis function by the rules of a dictatorship, and to what extent does it function like a democracy? Is there a part of us that craves dictatorship, and if so, why? And is there a war going on in our own minds between ideas that we allow into our consciousness and others that we repress? With me to discuss psychoanalysis and democracy are Adam Phillips,

psychotherapist and author of an excellent new book, Equals, and general editor of the new Penguin translations of Freud, Sally Alexander, Professor of Modern History at Goldsmith's College University of London and founding editor of the History Workshop Journal, and Malcolm Bowie, Marshall Foch, Professor of French Literature and Fellow of All Sales College, Oxford. Adam Phillips, Freud was writing in the early part of the 20th century. Can you sketch out the political and historical background that informed his ideas? In 1923, the young Adolf Hitler left Vienna in disgust,

describing it as a Babylon of races. And I think the most significant thing about Vienna in the period in which Freud lived in it was simply the either mobility of people. For example, in 1900 there were over one and a half million people living there. Over half of them hadn't been born in Vienna. It was one of the capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was a very strange and extraordinary country, if you like, because it was lots of countries.

So it was a sort of prototype for what we call, multiculturalism. The emperor, Franz Joseph, had ruled for 50 years. So you had the illusion of a stable empire, but actually the ethnic mix was extraordinary. There were Germans, Slovaks, Poles, Serbs, Italians, Hungarians, so an amazing mix of people. And there was, of course, with this, a strange, when people described living in Vienna in the time that Freud was there, I mean, between, Freud came to Vienna in 1860, aged four. Between 1660 and 1880, there were eight different constitutions in Vienna. So you have a sense of a great deal of

social, political, intellectual, turbulence. At the time, at that time, we have many ideas growing, and many political ideas, but let's take two, and if you can give us your opinion of the impact that this had on Freud. The general development of ideas of equality and the emancipation of women,

how did they affect him and affect his thinking? Well, I think Freud was living in this kind of, what is politely called, a melting pole. Freud was very aware of the sense in which there were, as it were, repressed voices in the culture, that certain people were as were allowed to speak and certain people weren't. Certain people could be heard and certain people were not given a voice.

Now, it seems to me of interest, although there's not a simple causal relation here, that Freud is writing about, if you like, the dissenting voices inside the individual. Freud is saying that we're made up of competing voices that can't always be reconciled. Malcolm Barrow, Frone wasn't explicit about politics in his work as I understand it. But political references did work their way into his metaphors and analogies. Can you give us some examples of this? He talks at a certain point about the ego struggling against superior agencies. And he reaches for a number of political metaphors in doing this.

One of them is that the super ego, let's to say the force of conscience, of repression, of correctness, of authority resembles a tyrant and the ego having created its own tyrant as it were then submits to its policies and it's often very cruel and vindictive

measures so there's an implicit micro-politics caught up in the structure of the mind in one of his central models of what he calls the psychical apparatus and of course the id is some sort of rabble

an array of anarchic forces needing to be controlled by the ego on the one hand and always running the risk of being over-controlled by the super ego on the other hand. So there's some sort of tripartite class system caught up in one of Freud's models of the mind. The super ego, the tyrant, the ego, the constitutional monarch and the unruly populace.

Constitutional monarch is the phrase he uses. All very neat. All very neat. How important was this to him? He was very good at putting down agendas for the future of psychoanalysis. He said at a certain point in the 20s, we need, in due course, we need a college of psychoanalysis, and an agenda item for this future college of psychoanalysis

was the interface and the interaction between the individual subject and the social and political order. And in group psychology and the analysis of the ego, as it's called in English, published in 1921, he sketches out a plan for the joint and interactive study of minds and social formations of one kind or another and says, psychoanalysis must attend to this. We can't at the moment get very far,

but in due course we will be able to talk to political scientists and even possibly to active service politicians about that extraordinary interference zone or grey area between individual minds in action and social activity, generally. Just to stick for another two or three questions to the time of Freud's time, at the time in which Freud lived, for instance, he was intrigued by censorship in Tsarist Russia, and this is an example, as I understand,

of the way that he took something that's happening on a political front and applied it to the mind. A strange propensity that the mind has is the propensity not to know about itself or not to know fully about various matters that one would have imagined it had complete access to. There's a mechanism somewhere in the human mind that wants not to know, as well as a mechanism that wants to know.

He talks very movingly about the desire to know, the vestib, so-called. But there's another desire which is to do with repression, not letting things up into consciousness, not willfully not understanding or not grasping or not remembering things that have been the case in the history of the individual. One of the ways he talks about that is that there's a mechanism which blanks things out, which takes mental materials,

rather as the censors at the border took incoming newspaper, the Russian border, and removes entire columns. And he thinks this is a particularly potent metaphor for various things that are going on endemically, innately in human minds. Sir Alexander, Freud and Einstein corresponded, and they corresponded also on the subject of war. What conclusions did Freud draw, about power relationships between groups and society.

It's an interesting exchange. He was pessimistic about the aggressive instinct ever being able to be eliminated in civilization. The aggressive instinct was innate and driven and powerful and could only be curbed by encouraging love, by encouraging Eros, by encouraging the ties between communities. He felt you could never, or he believed that you could never eliminate the aggressive. instinct. On the other hand, he concludes his exchange with Einstein with a very interesting and

rather enigmatic point where he argues that civilization is progressive, it is leading towards slowly and in very uneven ways, towards control of the instincts. This can be seen very clearly in the control of the sexual instincts. He was writing in the early 1930s when the birth rate was falling all over Europe and the Western world. He said, look at the sexual instincts. They're already being controlled. We're in danger of extinguishing ourselves by controlling the sexual instincts, the instincts of love.

So perhaps there's a hope that we might also be able to equally through the development of civilization, through the education, as it were, of our instincts, control aggression. Lansingly, and I don't have spent too much time on this, but it is of interest to me anyway. maybe it would not just you that he is talking so profoundly about the aggressive instinct in the 30s.

He doesn't seem to see Nazism coming along at all, even after Kristlnacht. Yes, it's extraordinary, and it's not uncommon at the time. I mean, this was a man who believed deeply in rational thought, in education, in the powers, the qualities of civilization to overcome the irrational.

I think perhaps at this time, he certainly saw the evidence of despotism around him and fascism and didn't flinch from its irrationalities, but he wouldn't have been alone in believing that the forces of civil life. He doesn't know if it's extraordinary that he is actually talking about this thing with such profundity that we're still talking about it now, and he didn't see smacking him in the face. There may be another point here which is that it may be that people develop an idea of an internal

world when external reality becomes intolerable. So there may be something quite paradoxical going on here because it's true. If you read Freud's correspondence, there are very few references to political reality. And we know if you read social histories, extraordinary things are going on in his world. And yet he's talking about what's going on inside people. And it may be that there's a paradoxical sense in which he works out this intolerable external reality by translating it inside and dealing with it in a very, very small group of people. Can I come to, let's, can we talk about equality in superior?

Adam, which you, one of the things you discuss in the book which I enjoyed so much. Freud says, what about this idea of Freud's idea, the group, wants, quote, wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters? Quite a powerful statement. Would you address that, please? I think what Freud is very mindful of is how frightened people are of themselves. Freud is producing a picture of people which makes them feel that there's a fear around, and it's obviously reflected in external political reality

that no one is in charge. It's as though people are feeling that they're being abandoned with all these instinctual desires, with all these internal competing claims, no one knows how to organise it. And I think, obviously this is part of a larger social reality, but Freud is beginning to feel that there is a craving to have a parent-like figure to submit to.

It's a bit like the idea that, you know, if God's dead, what that means is there's nobody left who knows who we are. So Freud is saying there's a craving among people whose societies are beginning to fall apart to have somebody who is in charge, who knows what's going on, and who is able to actually tell them which parts of themselves they should value, which part of themselves they should repress. So it's a longing to be subservient, it's a longing to be subjugated.

Do you find, I mean, do you think that's true? Would you think that's true, Malcolm? He makes a very interesting distinction in the group psychology book between led groups and leaderless groups. but the really dangerous thing in his analysis is the leader-led group because the ego latches on in his account to certain figures with dangerous intensity, subjugates its own demands to the claims of figures that are, to a very large extent,

phantasmal creations of the ego itself. And one can see this working very well in the 1930s of the rise of Nazism. So the analysis is really quite profound of that within individuals which seeks masochistically to be under the thumb of, under the rod of powerful leader figures, which have themselves been produced by a needy and insecure human individuality. So there's a potentially very powerful explanatory device for the discussion of various forms of political allegiance. and various forms of acquiescence in tyranny and brutality and so forth. San Alexander, do you think it's wishful thinking to think of a society without hierarchy? I think there were at the same time that Freud was living and thinking and working about developing and all these analysts

were kind of building up their international movement. The emergence of the women's movement which was organised democratically, the Labour movement which was organised democratically, that there's plenty of evidence from the historical periods, then in the early 20th century and right through the 20th century to see that there is a very powerful craving in people for equality, for democracy, for non-hierarchical forms of government, of self-control, of organizing ideals and fantasy lives and so on.

But how do you see the balance, Adam? You argue in the book it equals that, quote, without superiority existing in a person's orbit, they dash, we, dash, are destitute, Again, that's very powerful. You're emphasizing the craving for superiority, and equality at this stage and the argument doesn't seem to have the same cylinders. There's a quasi-froidian story that Sartre tells about a young married couple.

Every morning the couple come down together. They have breakfast. The young wife kisses her husband goodbye. He goes off to work and she sits by the window crying all day. and when he comes back, when the husband comes back, the young wife perks up. Sarch says the obvious interpretation of this story is that the woman is suffering from a terrible separation anxiety.

But actually Sartch says what's going on is that when her husband leaves work, she can do anything she wants. So she's suffering from a fear of freedom. She's got a whole day in which she could do anything she wants. Now if we just slightly fraudulianise this story, we'd have to say that she is destitute in that day because she'd rather be destitute than deal with her own freedom. This is what Sartre would say.

And her own freedom in fraudulent terms would simply be her desires. What she actually wants to do with her day? No. Absolutely. Go on. No, no. I was just, this is my listening face. I was just sort of, really listening.

I wasn't saying stop. Well, I'll continue then. Please do. Now, I think it's an interesting parable, this, because it's one version of why some, at an individual sort of microcosmic level, what's going on when somebody recruits somebody to, in inverted commas, look after them or govern them,

or consents to their own oppression? So what's going on at the same time as Freud is developing a very deterministic theory about how we are really driven, there could be no freedom, there are also people like Sart who are using bits of Freud to develop an existential theory, which is actually about the fear of not being governed. But not only not being governed externally,

us are not being governed internally, so that there's nothing we can have recourse to inside ourselves that will tell us what we should do. All we can do is make choices and see what the consequences are. Sir Alexander, were there specific events in the 20th century that provoked the idea that if we don't have leadership or superiority, or superiority, there will be anarchy? Were there specific outside political events that show, look, that is the anarchy that will happen to us and to the mind if we don't fall into line, really, have a hierarchy? The Russian Revolution was not just vivid in people's minds, but a very real immediate, just across the sea and the threat of revolution appeared vividly in the minds of the governing classes in Britain as in other European nations. Very high levels of unemployment immediately after the First World War,

the incompetence with which demobilization was organised also led to fears of real fears that there would be industrial, unrest, which might lead to revolution. The general strike, interestingly, was rather reassuring because working people revealed their extraordinary self-discipline and capacity for democratic organisation in the general strike. And so, apart from setting the tremendous amount of anxiety among the TUC leadership and so on, in fact, the general strike was rather reassuring in its effects. It was, again, economic depression in the 30s. and the unrest of the unemployed,

and the demonstrations of the unemployed, which led some members of the governing classes to fear that there would be revolution. I want to come to the Elmative Democracy, which I found the most gripping in this new book of yours. One of the key points is that, Adam, in your essay, is that society and individuals should learn to accept the conflicts, that occur between different ideas.

They shouldn't try to suppress, as I understand it, one in favour of the other. Are you saying that psychoanalysis should therefore offer no, A, are you saying psychon analysis should offer no answers to conflict, although most people think I go to a psychoanalyst to get out of conflict, and B, are you saying if it doesn't do this, then it is actually a very important way to look at democracy? Yes.

So there's two questions. Yes, I mean, the answer to that is certainly. I think that the aim of the psychoanalyst that I value is to enable people to be able to bear and sustain the conflicts without having to resolve them. Ernest Jones, who's one of the earliest psychoanalyst, said a very interesting thing, which is that we don't want to kill the person we hate most.

We want to kill the person who evokes in us the most unbearable conflict. So, for example, we might want to kill certain kinds of terrorists, not because we hate them, or the contrary people might think this, but because they evoke a conflict and it's that we cannot bear and sustain. Now, I think this is a very important idea, and I think what Freud is saying, and I think this is the democratic bit, is that we depend upon conflict. It's our lifeline. We think consciously, we must resolve them. We really need to solve our problems. I think there's another voice in Freud that says, actually, we need to be able to sustain them, because our conflicts are the bulletins from ourselves and from our cultures about the things that matter to us. But they're going to be competing claims. And it's very difficult to conciliate rival claims politically in the external world and internally. the internal world. But the aim is to make that bearable, not simply to abolish the enemy, you know, to trade with the enemy. Can you give us one or two, can you be rather specific just to give listeners an example or two of what you're talking about just so we can get hold of this?

Yeah. Let's imagine that I, as an adolescent, believe that I have to solve the problem or whether I am heterosexual or homosexual. Now, you could think that a good psychoanalysis or a good upbringing will resolve this problem for you. You will become one or the other. Actually, we both have a parent of each sex. So it's very curious in a way that we don't grow up, as it were at least potentially or latently, bisexual.

Now, all the pressure in the culture thus far has been for this to be resolved. And the kind of psychonautics I'd be talking about, it would be taken for granted that we are homosexual and heterosexual. Everybody's had a father and a mother, even if the father's been absent or indeed the mother's been absent.

nevertheless everybody biologically and often emotionally has a mother and father. So the aim of development would not be to become one or the other. It would be to be able to bear the fact that one is in fact both. And then to evolve a world, I think some people are trying to do now, in which such lives become practicable, in which you actually, for example, can bring up children and be bisexual. Malcolm, is it would a sort of rather common, but criticism of this would be to say,

look, this is just saying anything goes. And basically what we wish to do in our mind is to resolve things. And that Adam's idea can be said as, look, it's lazy, if I leave it all alone, it'll all kind of sort of self out in the end. I am reducing it appallingly. But what is your reaction to that? on the psychoanalytic couch, if one is fortunate enough to find oneself there and can afford to be there, sure enough, the treatment does allow one to explore things that otherwise is very difficult to explore.

So it allows, as it were, hidden sexualities to emerge. It allows experimental journeys back into one's own past and into the formative influences from one's own childhood to be undertaken. And it's all very fine and dandy. and I wish it were more commonly available. I wish that psychoanalysis had found, had invented ways of allowing that sort of, its sort of introspection, adieu, two-people introspection, to go on in a way that opens up a range of possibilities for the individual. But what we're faced with is a system, an approach,

a set of texts and a set of procedures within psychanalysis that are in practical terms available to very few people. and we could talk about the reasons for that. Now, in the absence of the lessons of psychoanalysis available on a broad front, one can't help but ask oneself who is being served, to whom is good being done by psychoanalysis as some sort of closed-off protection racket

for a certain fee-paying section of the middle class. Yeah, that isn't quite what I was getting at. I mean, thanks to... So, Sally, can I ask the question I asked Malcolm to you, which is do you think that Adam's right about this conflict idea, or do you think what it means is that if I have feelings of hatred, violence, vengeance, as well as feelings of affection and tenderness, what I should do is learn to live with the lot,

not try to get rid of the bad bits. I think there are two things about in what Adam's saying. One is that there is the possibility of looking closely at conflict inside the self, if you like. The other is the difficulty that there is of actually being able to in the psychoanalytic encounter or anywhere else of actually allowing that conflict to be spoken at all

to even the resistance to that knowledge. I don't think it's laissez-faire anything goes. I think the essay does point to the difficulty of knowing what it is we want to look at and resolve and deal with

of being able to speak the conflicts at all. And do you think it does give us some sort of model for democracy to bring it into the political inner again? Yes, I think if you think of the, I mean, I'm sorry to jump from the, you know, sublime to the whatever, but if you think of the difficulty and pain of the process of peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, for example, just getting people around the table to listen to each other or even to speak a sentence, then I think that the psychoanalytic encounter does have something to teach us, that it's very, very difficult and hard,

as well as if we can allow it to happen, it's important to be able to tolerate all these different voices and this conflict inside of us and between the analysts. To bring, Adam, to bring what Markham said back into the loop in a way, in a sense he's saying, look, this democratic notion between two people and so, which Sally has developed,

is all over a world, but it's happening to so very few people in such limited ways that, paradoxically, it's general, and in democracy is extremely limited. So what do you make of that? Well, I think Malcolm's right. I think that psychoanalysis, I mean,

psychoanalysis should be very, very cheap. Anybody who charges people loads of money shouldn't be doing it. Originally, there was child psychotherapy available on the health service, any taxpayer could get it. That was one of the great things about child psychotherapy. In private practice, people are charging people too much. So I think that for it to be genuinely democratic,

it has to be made really available. and there may have to be, at least in the first stage, a Robin Hood principle that wealthier people pay more to subsidise people who can't afford it. And it has to be known. Now, one of my wishes with this Penguin Freud is that people might become curious, and the people who become curious might be actually very pissed off that they can only have psychoanalysis if they've got £200 a week

or £100 a week to spend in it. I think that's absurd. And I think people should then protest about this and people should go into the profession who were more interested in doing the work than in making money. If they want to make money, they should do something else. Malcolm, can you come back to something you,

which you said very near the beginning of the programme? Freud expected more interchange between psych-analysts and practical politics, as I understand it. Why hasn't that happened? Getting politicians and practical folk sufficiently relaxed and sufficiently removed from the fray to think about their own underlying psychological processes, to think what has made them into the political creatures they are,

it almost requires a utopian revision of our present ways of doing things before we can even begin to step in that direction. But how wonderful it would be if there were weekend seminars, weekend retreats for politicians and analysts, to begin talking about these things jointly. One did see analysts from time to time, barricades in 1968 and Paris and on Ban the Bomb Marches and during the heyday of CND and so forth.

There is a kind of potential political militancy in the analytic community, but still very largely unrealised. Can I just end with this, another quotation from you, Adam, too much consensus is the enemy of democracy. What do you mean by that? Well, that in a way it seems to be democracy thrives as the individual thrives on there being not too much agreement. There has to be competing claims.

So one might be worried on a political or group level. If too many people begin to feel too like-minded, one would have to wonder then what is being suppressed or what's being left out because there's such a drive to avoid conflict that people might actually be setting aside things that matter to them in order to form the consensus and be part of the group. And that I think is the problem one's dealing with. Do you find that, Markham, would you agree with that?

An excessive consensus seems to me to be one of those a sort of superior level of problem, if you like. When we've got a work-a-day consensus that allows to, allows us to rub along with each other, then let's worry about the excess of consensus. That would be my view. Do you agree with that, hon? I agree that there should be conflict

and there should be argument and that it should be encouraged and so on. Yes, I do. And I think it's very interesting that, you know, if you think of the headlines in the posh papers about, you know, the conflict between Blair and Brown, for example, I think, well, terrific if these two guys don't agree with each other and they argue all the time and the cabinet argues.

I mean, this is exactly as it should be. Yeah, what it should be bad. Completely right. Why on earth do we want everybody to, you know, Blair and Brown to agree with each other all the time? It's nonsense. Well, there's been a depressing consensus at certain parts of this conversation.

On the other hand, you've managed to disagree quite enough. Oh, that's it. We've run out of time. Thank you very much, Malcolm, Adam, Sally. Thank you for listening. Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of...

of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio four.