In Our Time - Psychoanalysis and its Legacy

Episode Date: February 4, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relevance of psychoanalysis at the end of the 20th century. It’s 100 years since Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, a term which he coined, published The Interpretation of Dreams. Sixty years after his death, Freud’s influence and the influence of that book, has been felt in the 20th century in everything from the arts, history and anthropology, to of course psychology and even science. Dreams have inspired political speeches, songs, and seduction, captivating and fascinating mankind since time immemorial. For Sigmund Freud, they were the key to unlocking the working of the unconscious. But at the end of the 20th century, has psychoanalysis become too fractured and too insistent on privileging the past over the present to go forward into the future? Has it failed to develop and adapt to an age increasingly dominated by science? With Dr Juliet Mitchell, psychoanalyst, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, Department of Political and Social Sciences; Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and author of The Beast in the Nursery.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. 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. It's 100 years since Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, a term which he coined, published The Interpretation of Dreams. Six years after his death, Freud's influence and the influence of that book

has been felt in the 20th century and everything, from the arts, history and anthropology, to, of course, psychology and even science. But at the end of the 20th century, has psychoanalysis become too fractured and too insistent on privileging the past over the present to go forward into the future? Joining me, a Dr. Juliet Mitchell, one of Britain's foremost feminist thinkers and theorists, a practicing psychoanalyst, she's a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and is in the Department of Political and Social Sciences there. How many works, psychoanalysis and feminism to Who's Afraid of Feminism, and renowned for their challenges to orthodoxy,

even the central tenets of orthodox feminism itself. Adam Phillips has been described as our leading proponent of the validity and vitality of the Freudian ideal. He's been described as an anti-Froidian Freudian psychoanalyst, who's fascinated by the literary and the ambiguous. His collection of essays on psychoanalysis, the latest being The Beast in the Nursery, published last year, have established his reputation

as the leading writer in his field. He said, psychoanalysis is only just beginning to get the kind of public scrutiny, the intelligent hostility it needs, and that will allow people to decide both the people who can afford it and the people who can't whether it's worth keeping. Adam, why do you think it needs intelligent hostility? I think one of the problems about evaluating psychoanalysis has been the inevitable privacy of it as a therapy.

That is to say that nobody can know other than the participants what goes on in the psychoanalysis, and even they have a limited sense of what's going on. So if you haven't actually undergone analysis or practiced it, it is as though from the position of the orthodoxy, you're not quite in a position to evaluate it, which means effectively it can be only evaluated by those who do it. That inevitably, I think, limits the field.

And I think psychoanalysis has gained a lot from being read by and interpreted by people who have all sorts of other kinds of interest in other things as well as psychoanalysis itself. Given the position that you put there, that it is between two people privately for an hour, and the condition is that this will not be spoken about in public in any way, even if this is recorded as a case history, the person is called X or Y. Isn't it always going to be like that? How could it be subject to any sort of scrutiny at all?

Well, it can be, the only scrutiny it's available for, I think, is people talking about their experience of analysis, people writing about their experience of analysis, both as practitioners and as so-called patients. But I don't see how this differs from so many other subjects. I mean, we can't test what a cell biologist does. I mean, we can't test what most scientists do, and I know you don't want to use the word science for psychoanalysis,

and I couldn't care less whether we do or don't in one sense. I think we can use it in a very general sense we can, and if we restrict it, we can't. But it seems to me just that's an inevitable factor that one cannot know a specialist's work, except by being involved in it. And I agree with you, that widening it out and people from other fields coming in and making use of it does contribute something.

I do still think, and I would argue for, the necessity of that private, very confidential relationship, which can only be known in one sense by the two people involved, but of course is replicated by other people who are doing the same, repeating the same sort of thing in their own private consulting rooms, and coming up with comparable information, which is then compared in the write-up. But this is actually the nub of Freudianism, isn't it really, whether it is or not a science, which is very important to him. Surely you can test what a cell biologist can do.

Another cell biologist can test it. You as a cell biologist can say, look, the cell behaves in this way, which gives us this result, which is very important. Adam, you try that. If you find the same thing, Malvin, you try that. If you find the same thing, we're on to something. You can't do that in analysis. You can say...

You can to a certain extent, actually, Melvin. And you can actually say, look, X number of people are showing this, this and this as responses, let's say to a typical response to trauma or something. You can say, now we have seen over many, many generations, this type of psychological response to this type of trauma. Just give you that as an example. You can then make a comparable assumption. From that comparability, you can make an assumption. It's not identical.

And I think that what we've got to do now has been much more wide in our application of the term science than Freud was at the time he was writing. And I think most scientists would agree now that there's a lot that's intuitive in science. That's a lot that is imaginative in science. and we have to broaden that field. Feminism itself very much went into the scientific field and said, look, this is a very masculine misconception of science, it's very limited testability or non-testability one, and we've got to take up many other factors into account.

If you take a broader view of science, which is being done now, then black analysis perfectly well fits in. Yes, I mean, and people as differing as Susan Greenfield and Oliver Sacks are both reclaiming Freudian analysis for science. Adam Phillips, is it the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis you're objecting to it? No, I don't object to it. I just think the problems of institutionalising it are part of the project of doing it.

That is to say, it's not that I think that psychoanalysts or people interested in shouldn't group together or share views or anything like that. I just think it's striking the fact that if you produce a description of something called the unconscious, which seems to be something that disrupts coherence, if you like,

it's very difficult to, in a sense, institutionalize the unconscious. So when Juliet says psychoanauts is a specialism, I think what's perplexing is what exactly that specialism is, as in what are psychoanalysts specialising in? The unconscious. How can you specialise in the unconscious? Well, of course you can. You can specialize in techniques

for enabling you to have some access to unconscious modes of thinking. It's not a thing, the unconscious, it's a way of thinking. It's not just that it disrupts what we call our secondary process, thinking, our rational discourse, as we're hopefully having it now, it's that it actually has other forms of discourse itself, such as dreams and symptoms, for example, that if you think of your dreams,

I mean, it's the ABC of it, but if you think of your dreams, they don't follow in logical sequences, as our speech hopefully does now. They form juxtapositions, condensations, displacements, whatever you write, say, symbolizations, etc. They work differently, and you can have access to that mode of unconscious thinking.

It's not the unconscious itself, which is just a whole. hypothesis. It's something that we see manifest in alternative ways of thoughts. But if there's a technique, are psychoanalyst effectively, in your view, technicians of unconscious thinking? That is to say, people who have a special sense of how to tap, get access to, redescribe unconscious the process? Well, I wouldn't put them as technicians. I think there is a technique, and therefore people who use it are, if you like, technicians of it, yes. Is this taking market little different from that used by certain artists?

It's markedly different from anything in one sense. And I think here, from what I know of Adam's work, he and I would disagree on this. I think that if you're really doing a psychoanalytic treatment and a psychonetic practice, what you're doing is not listening to a story or a conversation or anything like that. What you're doing is asking for the analysts and the patient to suspend anything that they can that's of conscious censorship on what they're saying and just say what comes into their head. When you can actually say something

that is what we call free association, then you really in some sense have suspended the censorship and something comes in which will produce contiguity with something else and from that you get a whole system of associations. Adam. I think the problem is in the phrase what we're really doing. When Judith says when we're really doing psychoanalysis, we're doing X,

that one of the interesting things about psychoanalysis is that there really is a diversity view about what it is to really do it. And that I think one of the things that psychoanalysis is interesting about is this question of authority, of how it comes about that people feel in a position to speak authoritatively or what in themselves feels authoritative. In other words, it seems to me as much about working out which voices inside oneself are privileged and why and the history of that process. And I think that it's inevitably, it defies conventional causality, that when you're talking about the unconscious,

you're talking about other ways of thinking, non-instrumental ways of thinking, in which consequences are not predictable. A free associate seems to me is to be able to see where your words happen to go. And the analyst then has to intervene. And the question then is, what does the analyst do with, At what point do they punctuate?

What's the nature of the intervention or what is the purpose of the intervention? In other words, what's the analyst persuading the patient of? Now, I think that, I think Juliet and I would disagree about this because for me, psychoanalysis is much more a form of moral education and a rhetoric of persuasion than it is a, as it were, release of something. We definitely disagree. I think it's absolutely, if it's that, then it's gone down,

I think, even quite a dangerous track in a sense if it's to be moral persuasion. I really do profoundly disagree with almost everything you've said there actually. But it does seem from what you're saying and from what has been said, I'm just slightly playing the devil's advocate, that this act of free association is releasing the unconscious, this is the holy grail. Once that this comes, then the whole human being can be described and set right. Absolutely not at all.

It's a very modest claim that you get at something. I think perhaps I'm emphasising it more because I think there's a lot of misunderstanding that people, there's such a fashion for the narrative and the story at the moment, that people think that psychanalysis is about getting a story. And perhaps I'm trying to say, look, it's not about getting a story. That's the mistake they're recovered memory therapists and people who are all making it.

It's getting back to a story of original abuse or original that or something. It's not. Once you start listening to the story in psychanalysis, you've stopped being a psychoanalyst. You said something very striking out in Philadelphia. You said that psychanalysis is paid conversations with people as to how they want to live. which I think will surprise many listeners.

They would think, gosh, it's much grander than that, it's much broader than that, it's much more resonant than that. And that sort of puts it in a... It's much more difficult than that, that's the point. It's just would be so easy. It's a painful, difficult process that not many people want to take on. Is it easy to have a conversation about how to live?

Well, it's easy to have a conversation, whether it's about how to live is another matter, but it's easy to have a conversation, relatively speaking. It's much more difficult to go through an... an analytic treat. And does the difficulty in itself make it of value? And what significance of the fact is difficult? Why does that matter?

Because one of the things that many people are doing when they're having symptoms is, I think, protecting themselves. The symptom is a protection against something that's too painful to take on, and it's too unbearable. And the difficulty is a mark of the degree of pain that people have necessarily and understandably

it had to avoid, but they're not anymore longer avoiding efficaciously, if you like. And so in that sense, the difficulty is commensurate with the pain that they have been avoiding. So, yes, it has to be difficult. Why is the paying so important, Adam? Paying conversations. Oh, paid. Paid conversations.

Well, I think that, I think it's an interesting question this, because one of the questions is, well, what does the so-called patient give the analyst? I think if you live in a certain culture, there are certain kinds of contract. And I think it's inevitable. I mean, in many ways, I would prefer to live in a world in which people, could, you know, if you were very good at making cakes or knitting, you would knit me a pullover and I as well give you to psychotherapy. But since we don't, I think that it's very important that people pay because there's a symbolic exchange, because it in a sense frees people. It also means that, in a sense, psychoanalysis is, as it were, contaminated by the criteria

of the culture, as it becomes part of the culture. People can ask questions like, am I getting my money's worth? Now, in a sense, from one point of view, this is nonsensical. I mean, are you getting your money's worth if you're cured, if you're happier, if you feel more authentic, it's not obvious. But it seems to be quite important that people can argue from some position about the value of what they're receiving. That seems to me to be important.

I don't mind about pay. No, I think there's a history of it being paid. What about people who can't pay? There's clinics where you can get means related. So this reduced the activity. If you have an unpaid conversation, is this less of a cycle? No. I don't think it's a conversation, and I don't think

I think the paying, we have a culture in which the history of psychoanalysis is that there was a choice to go into the health service after the war. And the choice was not to because of retaining independence from controls and questions like confidentiality. But actually, I was to, one has read often, sorry to cut a crime, I didn't mean to be rude, that the paying was an important part of the act. It depends what it means by important. I don't think it's integral to the process of doing it at all. And one of the wonderful things, for example, like child psychotherapy, was that. that it was in the health service, it was available.

And I don't think anybody has found that I've come across, that psychoanalysis is better or worse, paid for or not. I do think, though, that it's a factor in the treatment if you're paying. It can't help but have some significance. As this is a hundred-time anniversary of the interpretation in dreams, do you think that, Mitchell, do you think that what Freud said in there largely has still got central relevance to the way we should think about ourselves, I think it's extremely important about dreams and whether you think dreams are relevant to us is a matter of choice in a sense. I think dreams are very relevant.

Take people invalided out of war situations with severe symptoms which have no organic basis as they can find out like paralysis, etc. And they have terrible nightmares. One stage of recovery is often then you get an absence of dreaming and then we're in absence of dreaming and then we're in the absence of dreaming. and once people start to dream again, that they're actually on the way to recovery, something we do process something rather important in our dream life. That just could be time-lapsing there, couldn't it? Yes, but the dreaming itself is important. And what Freud did...

Can we prove that as much of interest? I think you can probably, I mean, that it actually does protect sleeping. Is it because there was a report I read just the other week and said it didn't at all the moment. I know, this is in debate at the moment, but nobody's actually proved it away. But can I just get to the Freud part about it?

What Freud did was to understand how dreams work, and I think that still does hold good. And so understanding them, you can say it's another language or whatever you like. I mean, using language in a very loose sense there. But there is a dream mechanism, a dream method, if you like, which is utterly other than our waking methods of thinking. It's an alternative system of thought. And I think Freud understood not definitively.

You can add many more things to it. You can criticise it in all sorts of ways. But he understood something absolutely crucial about the method of thinking. Or is it just an edited and highlighted way of ourselves? There might be another way of answering the question you see, I think, which is that William James once said the question to ask of any idea is, how would my life be better if I believed it? Now, I think it's more interesting to think along the lines of,

how is my life better if I believe dreams are meaningful? Now, obviously, that question will be answered in lots of ways. Now, Freud shows us ways in which, if you take dreams seriously in the way he wanted us to, certain kind of meanings emerge that are surprising or shocking to the person who's dreamt them. Now, that seems to me to be both of interest and practically, that is to say,

people, in my experience, are struck by how inventive they are in their dream life, how this is, as it were, another way of thinking about the things that preoccupy them, a very odd and unusual way of thinking about things, and that the eliciting of this material and the free associating around it feels compelling,

persuasive, intriguing, painful. All these experiences that in some sense provoke some kind of assent or conviction so that it seems to me that, at its most minimal, one's life is more interesting if one notices that one dreams. Can I turn to one crucial aspect of Freud's theories, which got him into a lot of trouble at the time, and have swept through this century,

and that is his views on the state of the child, and the child's sexuality of the child and what the child contained for the man or woman in future life and so. Do you think that his ideas are still as powerful and as relevant now as they were 100 years ago? Well, I'm very curious about this, because it does strike me as very extraordinary that we live in a Western culture

where we actually do think, more or less, that the first three years of life are really formative for the person and that if you have a first good three years, then, you know, you're basically okay. You're up and running, yes. And I mean, whether or not it's true for the moment, I find that a very extraordinary thought that, you know, this culture of ours actually maintains that.

I mean, you think back, you know, the 14th century or cross-culturally or something, you'll be pretty surprised at what we believe that. Now, on the other hand, if I look at other sorts of research, it increasingly seems to be likely that the first year, three years are rather important. There's research going on. the moment about increasing malnutrition and deaths from malnutrition among children in

third world in developing countries where there's increased resources, there's increased malnutrition. And one of the factors that's now being looked at is the changing relationship of care for those first three years of the child as more as men are unemployed and women are working in urban conditions. And the first three years of child, instead of being on mum's body picking in the field, as it were, is now deprived of that and is actually suffering from malnutrition and increasing wasting. Now that's an extraordinary statement. You know, as the world gets richer or as poor countries get richer,

there's more deaths from malnutrition in the 1 to 3 group. So you look at it from other perspectives. I think psychonysis has a lot then to say about that because there's actually, there is a lot of research within psychonosis on how crucial those first three years are, actually. So though I, on the one hand, it's extraordinary, we believe that. On the other hand, actually, more and more seems to suggest it is very important. I think there's an interesting follow-up to that in a way,

which is the relationship between the research about childhood and the knowledge we acquire from observing children and the adults' memories of childhood, that is to say, the way in which this is recovered or not recovered. It seems to me there's a very uneasy or difficult relationship between childhood memories in adulthood and, as it were, what we know about how people grow up. But Freud said they weren't memories.

They're never memories. They're only reconstructions. They're not actual memories of actual facts. Well, I think this is a mistake lots of people make. No, but hold on saying, I haven't made it yet. I know that Freud said the memories of reconstructions, but they are reconstructions not of a scientific order. They're not reconstructions based on research.

They are reconstructions based on desire. They're based on history. They're not based on child development theories. So they're not based on, as it were, factual information about childhood from other sources? Well, they're not the same as. They're different from that. Yes. Actually, I think in that area, what is interesting is how much coincidence there is

and how increasingly there seems to be more and more coincidence between child development research and the reconstructions of psychoanalysis of those three years. I mean, it seems to be an amazing mesh of different. The same side of the fact that in those three years the brain's still growing. What relevance does that have? Well, it must have relevance. It doesn't... I thought it had massive relevance, wouldn't you?

Well, I mean, no, it's not a three years that's a fixed time. It's a three years into which we come and go all the rest of our lives, in a sense. It's not a development that ends. It's... But you've been talking through us quite specifically. But you might see, there might be a way of addressing that, I think, which is there's a very interesting French icon. It's called La Planche.

has in a way a very simple idea, which is that the recent childhood is important is that because as an infant and a young child, one is extremely receptive to the influence of one's parents and yet very undeveloped, as in very unable to process whatever it is that parents and the adults are communicating to the child. In other words, the child is the recipient of very perplexing messages which he or she can't help but work on and work out. So that I think there's something very important about the child's relative immaturity and the fact that the parents

are grown-ups and there's a kind of as a were a mismatch that's an inevitable match between these two developmental stages but can I just ask you about the romantic notion of Freud which you seem to me to continue forward from words with child's father a man through Freud to yourself that everything is

growing up is a loss what it leaving childhood is an inevitable process of disillusion and entering the culture, learning even to talk elaborately, to tell narratives, is something that is a deprivation of certain things. Not a straightforward. It's, from my point of view, a process of illusion and disillusionment and reallusionment. This is an ongoing process. That there is an inevitable jarring between my wishes about the way I want and think I need the world to be and what I experience. And my life is the way which these are negotiated.

It's not that growing up is a process of disillusionment. You might say that growing up is a process of, as it were, increasingly satisfying illusionment or increasingly realistically satisfying illusionment or something like that. But I think the life story that suggests that basically life is a process of mourning seems to me to be rather misleading and to rather load the dice. And I think maybe one of the disagreements I have with Juliet is that I don't think of life as a process of pain management or the development as being a question of how one manages psychic pain.

I think the problem of managing pleasure is for many people as difficult. And I think that psychoanalysis, in some of its forms, has erred on the side of the veil of tears approach. Well, I, of course, don't think that that's just one aspect of it, I think. I want to just return in looking at the last question about this romantic view of childhood to what Adam was saying previously about La Planch's work. Well, of course, what Freud was emphasizing, we are in sense talking about a hundred years of Freud,

is the importance of what's called neotony, the premature birth of the human infant, in conjunction with the development of the mind and all the other sort of evolutionary developments that mankind has had. And it is that condition that being born prematurely makes us utterly dependent on our first keepers, our first carers, the person who,

people who first look after us, feed us, etc. We're utterly dependent. We would die without them. Because we're unfinished when we're born. We're unfinished when we're born, that's right. We're born absolutely unfinished. And therefore we have to have a rather intent relationship with somebody who will look after us for us to survive.

And that's what, in a sense, is the precondition that makes those first years so important. And in a sense, makes them an area for possible acquisition of human culture within a very short amount of time. I mean, it's remarkable if you think, how early a baby learns to speak and to understand. I mean, a baby understands things long before they even speak. And so, you know, it's a very amazing concentration. I just worried that they're speaking sometimes, learning to speak sometimes gets in the way of their better understanding. Well, it's complicated This, I just think that there's

Because it can only be spoken about in words this But I think it is extraordinary As Juliet says, that one goes from a state of not speaking But clearly feeling with a great intensity To speaking And what happens in that process Now, I'm mystified as mystifies anybody by this But it just is extraordinary

That one acquires something called language In which one then reconstructs What it is one might have been feeling As a baby or a child and that's fascinating that process. Do you think that psychoanalysis privileges the past over the future too much? Yes, in some senses I think it can do, and I think it's terrible if people get caught,

as I said in the sort of recovered memory thing, of just solve the past and the future will take care of itself. No, I think that's a terrible dimension of it. It can do and it shouldn't do. I think at its best it privileges the past to make the future possible, that in a way it's trying to enable people or to release people into their futures. Finally, is there a sense in which we've,

in the last particularly in 2030 years, there's been a sweeping forward of Darwinianism into every discipline that one can think of almost, and Freud has been seriously marginalised, although there are complex. But Darwin seems to be the bigger explanation, a stronger explanation, and psych analysis has been,

and especially in America, it's a fight for its respectable life in a way. Do you think that there is a sense in which it has served its time, had its time rather? No, actually, I think the American situation is particular in that it's had to undergo a major switch from being a very medicalised psychiatric profession to being a much more lay profession

with many different types of practitioners now involved and interested in it. I think it's going through a change. I think I'll make a bit of a prediction that Freud's going to come back, that Freud's going to come back, actually, that as we get more and more concerned with changing family structures, with violence and all these sorts of issues,

there are so many insights and explanations that you can gain from psychoanalytic research that I think there will be some sort of comeback, whether it's actually in the name of Freud or in something else, emanating from him, I'm not sure. Freud's insights and Freud's views about the society and those which you can extrapolate from his writings, I agree with you.

But, Adam, in the one-to-one, which we began this, in the one-to-on relationship between the person going into analysis and the analyst himself. Has that, very crude, but has that got a future? Oh, I think it's certainly got a future. I think that, I think you need Darwin and Freud.

I mean, Darwin says the aim is to survive and reproduce our genetic material. What Freud adds to this equation is the notion of happiness, of pleasure. Darwin doesn't have a theory of happiness. Once you put happiness into the Darwinian equation, you have a very interesting problem on your hands. and I think that we should have both

I think it would be a shame to lose the way in which because of Freud, apart from being a bit of a Lamarckian he was also a Darwinian. Well, I think that Freud's Lamarckianism which is famous, nevertheless, addresses a very real question which is how do we inherit

characteristics such as emotions and these sorts of things? It's an important question. Actually, Darwin's emotion and Freud's are going to come together because Darwin, of course, did write on emotion and I think Freud and Darwin will come together on that. I agree.

Sadly, we'll have to draw this to a close. Thanks very much to Julia Mitchell and Adam Phillips, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.