Ibid., pp. 618-619. 1 страница

100 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

remains, as usual, completely unclarified, there is no proof what­soever in the dream phenomena themselves for the intellectual de­ductions Freud bases on them. These deductions were not made for the sake of the phenomenon of dreaming, but for the sake of the theory that dreams arise out of unconscious wishes. For this reason, this type of dream interpretation will never be able to defend itself against the accusation of utter arbitrariness. If, however, one does not accept the basis (admittedly unproved) for such deductions, the dagger and the scythe which the boy perceives can be under­stood (without assuming either a consciousness or an unconscious) as things which correspond to the pitch to which he was attuned, most probably that of anxiety. People in the mood of anxiety are, in the main, open only to the perception of those features of the world that are a threat to them. So it was with this child. We would have to know a great deal more about the dagger and scythe of the boy's dream—more than the references to mythology, which are Freud's and not the boy's—to be willing to label Freud's interpreta­tion (that they derive from unconscious rage and death wishes) anything other than fantasies of the interpreter. It would be im­possible to say, without precise knowledge of the mood and the meaningful content the peasant had for the boy, whether this old man was also called in by the patient's anxious mood, or whether he sprang, on the contrary, from the boy's natural longing for the security of a home. One thing remains certain. In order to meaning­fully understand this concluding example of The Interpretation of Dreams, we can dispense with a great deal of the preceding content of the book, but never with the very first sentence, a sentence which initiated a new epoch. To repeat:."Every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of his waking life."⁴⁸ This sentence reflects the elan of the joy of discovery, alive in a man who had just become aware of a new dimension—the thorough­going meaningfulness of all human phenomena—a man who had not, as yet, darkened this insight by theoretical regression into natural-scientific explanation.

Our necessary criticism of the assumption of an unconscious does not blind us to Freud's grasping of a realm fundamentally im­portant to the Daseinsanalytic understanding of man also. In his

*»lbid., p. i.

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 101

untiring search for the unconscious, Freud was on the way to the concealed, to concealment as such. Without concealment and dark-, ness, man would not be the world-disclosing being that he is. Light and darkness, concealment and disclosure, belong together in­separably; Freud must have sensed this. He said this, too, of the unconscious: that it contained the "indestructible" forces of the human mind, that it was the "true psychical reality."⁴⁹ As a child of his power-hungry time, he was unable to let concealment be the secret it is. He found it necessary to make subjectivistic, psy­chologists objects out of concealment in order to be able to drag it into the light and make it usable. As it has always done, and will always do, the secret withstood such characteristically modern impertinence.

"PSYCHODYNAMICS"

We have seen that Freud's topographical approach to mental life pictured mental phenomena in terms of a reflex apparatus within which psychic systems—called the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious respectively—were arranged behind each other, analogous to the lenses of a microscope. Freud soon recognized that the topographical approach could not adequately explain all mental phenomena. He felt this inadequacy all the more keenly as soon as he began to ponder the origin of conscious thought processes.

[Thought processes] represent displacements of mental energy which are effected somewhere in the interior of the apparatus as this energy proceeds on its way towards action. Do they advance towards the superficies, which then allows of the development of consciousness? Or does consciousness make its way towards them?... Both these possibilities are equally unimaginable.⁵⁰

The only conclusion to be drawn was that the topographical ap­proach was not enough. Not that one would ever want to give it up altogether, Freud speculated, but a dynamic view would probably come closer to actual conditions. Freud had been led "from the purely descriptive to a dynamic view" by the phenomena he had reserved in Bernheim's experiments in post-hypnotic suggestion and

** Ibid., pp. 613-614.

"S. Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 20.

102 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

in hysterical symptoms.⁶¹ He describes his transition from one point of view to the other as follows:

The term unconscious, which was used in the purely descriptive sense before, now comes to imply something more. It designates not only latent ideas in general, but especially ideas with a certain dynamic character, ideas keeping apart from consciousness in spite of their intensity and activity.⁵²

An even more vivid account of the change that took place in Freud's thinking is contained in the following passage:

We may speak of a preconscious thought being repressed or driven out and then taken over by the unconscious. These images, de­rived from a set of ideas relating to a struggle for a piece of ground, may tempt us to suppose that it is literally true that a mental grouping in one locality has been brought to an end and replaced by a fresh one in another locality. Let us replace these metaphors by something that seems to correspond better to the real state of affairs and let us say instead that some particular mental grouping has had a cathexis of energy attached to it or withdrawn from it, so that the structure in question has come under the sway of a particular agency or been withdrawn from it. What we are doing here is once again to replace a topographical way of representing things by a dynamic one. What we regard as mobile is not the psychical structure itself but its innervation.⁶³

In a different context Freud introduced a "dynamic factor" into his approach to hysteria (as well as to dreams) when he proposed "that a symptom arises through the damming up of an affect."⁵⁴ And in a third and last step he added an "economic" factor to the dynamic approach, with the postulate that each symptom is the "product of the transformation of an amount of energy which would otherwise have been employed in some other way."⁵⁵

This development of the psychoanalytic theory was inevitable. We need only recall once more Freud's fundamental statement about the main intention of his whole psychology:

We do not merely seek to describe and classify phenomena but to comprehend them as indications of a play of forces in the psyche, as expressions of goal-directed tendencies which work in unison or against one another. We are striving for a dynamic conception

^B1 S. Freud, "A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis," p. 24.

⁵² Ibid., p. 25.

⁵3 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 610-611.

⁸⁴ S. Freud, "An Autobiographical Study," in SE, Vol. XX, p. 22. ⁵⁵ hoc. cit. Italics added.

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 103

of psychic phenomena. Perceived phenomena must in our concep­tion recede behind the assumed, posited tendencies.⁶⁶

These posited, assumed "forces in the psyche" Freud called drives,
or instincts or impulses. For their assumed energy he coined the
term "Ubido." On this basis he was able to erect the elaborate edifice
of his "libido theory," with all its extremely complicated drive and
partial-drive mechanisms and its physical-chemical metaphors of
drive mixtures, drive decompositions, drive neutralizations, drive
transformations.⁶⁷ By this intellectual procedure, Freud aimed at
nothing less than to imitate the sciences which deal with inanimate
nature—that is, to make human phenomena quantifiable, calculable,
predictable, producible (if desired), or repairable (if regarded as
pathological). In the latter case, Freud thought that to make an
ailment disappear, one had simply to eliminate what was assumed
to be its first causal force.,

We need not be surprised that Freud's psychodynamic and economic theories have found widespread acceptance in contem­porary psychology and psychopathology, particularly in America. Basically, today's technique-oriented thinking—which has to a large extent subjugated the behavioral sciences as well—is at a loss to explain anything except on the basis of physicalistic and energetic principles such as are found in Freud's theory. More important still, since Descartes' time the natural scientists even have presumed dog­matically that only that can be called real which would yield itself completely and with certainty to an exact mathematical physicalistic explanation and calculation. Under the fascination of this dogma, psychology and psychiatry, in order to be recognized as sciences of real phenomena, have been most anxious to -ascertain their objects accordingly. Freud's libido theory seems to serve this purpose best if one is able to ignore completely its purely speculative, unascer-tainable character.

It is true that many psychoanalysts have long since discarded Freud's libido theory and that they consider many of his psychic mechanisms and chemisms as archaic ways of thinking. If, however,

** S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 60.

⁵⁷ See S. Ferenczi, "Das Problem der Unlustbejahung (Fortschritte in der Erkenntnis des Wirklichkeitssirmes)," Int. Zschft. f. Psychoanalyse, Vol. XII, 1926; H. Hartmann, "Notes on the Theory of Sublimation," in Ruth S. Eissler et al., eds., The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol. X, New York, International Univer­sities Press, 1955, pp. 9-29.

104 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

these psychoanalysts are asked what conceptions of their own have replaced Freud's "archaic" mental constructions, usually they are at a loss for an exact answer. Or they have merely exchanged the old Freudian term "psychic mechanisms" for the more modern ex­pression "psychodynamics." But what they actually mean by "psy-chodynamics" is not at all clear either. It seems as if this modern psychological catchword has a different meaning for every psycho­analyst who uses it. Most generally it is understood to distinguish the psychoanalytic approach from purely static descriptions, as be­ing concerned with the genesis, the development, the becoming of the psychic phenomena. But however manifold the connotations of the term "psychodynamics" may be, its very root always remains the dynamis, and the meaning of dynamis for some centuries now has been reduced to the idea of forces and energies. Thus all the psychodynamic theories cannot avoid being governed basically by the old Freudian conception. This is true even if some modern "psychodynamic" psychologists seek, by the use of the expression, to point to the development of psychic conflicts or of conflicting motivations. Even if "psychodynamics" are understood in this sense, it must not be forgotten that the very word "motivation" is derived from the Latin movere, to move. Every movement requires two elements: the mover and the moved. However, what or who is supposed to move whom or what in the sphere of human motivation? In modern thought, movement is imagined always as an event caused by some kind of forces. Therefore, psychology has imagined the movement of human motivation to be also effected by forces, i.e., by psychic drives. The drives within the psyche, it is main­tained, would then impel the ego. toward these or those wishes, volitions, or actions. The hunger instinct impels the ego to seize and eat an apple, for instance. The ego is the driven, the moved; the hunger drive sets the ego in motion, thus motivating the ego to eat the apple, in the sense of a cause of movement.

If I see a ragged beggar squatting at the edge of the road, the imagination of his misery which the sight of him has released in my "ego-consciousness" is assumed to be the motive moving me possibly to give alms. But now the situation is reversed. My ego, with the representation of the suffering beggar in its consciousness, is now assumed to be the mover; a specific imagination within the ego has become a motive which drives me to achieve an external aim—in this case, the alleviation of suffering. Nevertheless, this ideological

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 105

conception of human motivation is not to be separated from its causal aspect, for the representation of an object in the ego-consciousness can motivate a person to perform an act only insofar as it can waken the instincts and drives within his psyche and guide them in a specific direction. Both ways of looking at the matter, the causal and the teleological, remain within the same mechanistic frame of reference, in which ideas of driving forces prevail. Wherever drives are imagined, the ruling principles are pressure and thrust, as in machines.

Furthermore, the "psychodynamic" psychologists should not shut -.heir eyes to the fact that the notion of drives, while borrowed from the physicists, corresponds to their vis a tergo, i.e., forces mov­ing, pushing something from behind. In the field of psychology, however, our immediate experience does not at all show us any such moving or pushing from somewhere behind ourselves. Indeed the reverse is true. Something which has shown itself in the light of a human existence immediately as that which it is may become attractive to somebody. In other words, it may draw his whole being toward it and engage him in caring for it in this way or another.

Freud himself was not always sure about the reality of the psychic drives, notwithstanding the fact that he had made them the very foundation of his whole theory. Once even he admits frankly: "The theory of the instincts is, as it were, our mythology. The instincts are mythical beings, superb in their indefmiteness."⁵⁸

The rather careless use of physical metaphors by the "psycho-dvnamic" psychologists contrasts even with the thinking of some physicists. The latter, indeed, frankly admit nowadays that dynamic causal connections cannot explain a necessary and lawful emergence of one event from another, or prove the reality of a thing. On the contrary, the so-called neo-empiricists among contemporary physi­cists reduce the meaning of the concept of causality to the idea of 'if-then, always-up-to-now." They can no longer (nor do they wish to ^ claim that there has never been an unobserved event which con­tradicts dynamisms so defined. Nor do they claim to know of any rrovable reason why observed events will always in the future repeat the "if-then, always-up-to-now" without exception. That inductive logic in natural science counts on such steady repetition

** S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, New York, 1933, p. 131. Trans, by W. J. H. Sprott.

J 06 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

is regarded by modern empiricists as merely a highly probable hypothesis; a hypothesis, moreover, which is fundamentally devoid of any power to render intelligible the inner relation between the occurrences of this steadily repeated chain of events.⁵⁹

The problem of causality is compounded when the concept is applied to man in the form of psychodynamic hypotheses. Whether "psychodynamics" is used in the strict Freudian sense or in its present, unclear meaning, it remains unintelligible how "forces," instincts, or partial instincts could "cause" an observable human phenomenon, so long as "to cause" is used in the one sense to which the (originally four-fold) causality of Aristotle has become reduced in our days, namely, in the sense of causa efficiens. A causa efficiens is supposed, by definition, to be able to produce something out of something else by acting on it and by making it change into a different something, a new product or effect. This conception of "causing," however, would be meaningful only if we could spot that point in time when a cause actually turns into an effect: a something different from the cause, a something which was not inherent in the cause, either in form or in substance. But how could a psychic phenomenon ever "arise through the damming up of an affect," be produced through "innervation" of an assumed mental "structure," or be "the product of the transformation of an amount of energy which would otherwise have been employed in some other way"? How can all this happen if experienced mental phe­nomena are supposedly "in themselves without quality" and derive the energy which makes them experience-able from processes of excitation in some organ?⁶⁰ How can isolated thoughts have the character of wanting to stay away from something? Not the faintest corner of a human world can possibly be the effect or result of blind forces, drives, and impulses, for there is no human world whatso­ever without the understanding, meaning-disclosing relationships to what shows itself in the lucidity of a human existence. "Psycho-dynamic" conceptions cannot explain the emergence of such a world any better than can the concept of a psychic reflex apparatus con­ceived in topographic terms.

The abstract and comparatively meaningless character of modern talk about a psychodynamic understanding of the etiology of the

⁵⁹ See, for example, H. Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, Berkeley, 1951, Chapter 10. «OS. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in SE, Vol. VII, p. 168.

^

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 107

neuroses becomes even more obvious if one recalls what dynamis and aitia (the root of "etiology") originally meant. "Dynamics," today, refers to the doctrine of motion—in Greek, kinesis. In modern thinking every motion is the result of a force or of kinetic energies. The fundamental nature of forces and energies, though, remains completely in the dark. Kinesis to the ancient Greeks meant "the turning of something into the gestalt and form of something else." If a piece of wood is shaped into a table, Aristotle would have said that such a happening is kinesis. For the ancient Greeks it was not a supposed force which produced the table. For them the skill of the carpenter released a disposition toward its appearing which already was in the wood from the outset. Dynamis in its original sense is simply the possibility of giving rise to such a kinesis. This kinesis (or changing) has nothing whatsoever to do with the modern word "energy," a concept which, by the way, also has become completely alienated from its Greek root ergon. Ergon originally meant "a work which presents itself in its fullest richness and completion." The ancient dynamis, then, is badly misused when the notion of "dynamics" refers today only to forces, displacement of forces, or transformations of forces by which something is said to be produced out of something else in an enigmatic and magic way.

Aitia, on the other hand, originally meant "that which provides the opportunity for the emergence of something." Aitia, in other words, refers to something which, by its mere presence, occasions the coming forth and coming into its being of something else. This is a far cry from today's commonly accepted meaning of "etiology" as referring to the causal-genetic derivation of a thing or a phe­nomenon from another object.

Today's ideas concerning "psychodynamics" are too empty and abstract to be capable of furthering any genuine understanding of man and his world. At any rate, these ideas do not justify the psychodynamic thinker's feelings of superiority to those who are content with the "static" description of symptom complexes. Daseinsanalysis surmounts the "statism-dynamism" dichotomy al­together. It goes back to a point 'Ъегоге" both of these intellectual categories. It focuses "only" on what can be experienced immedi­ately, and it regards all phenomena as being of an equally genuine and authentic nature. At the same time, however, Daseinsanalysis is fully aware of the fact that every human phenomenon which

108 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

presents itself at this very moment is fundamentally inseparable from its whole past as well as from its future. In other words, Daseinsanalysis can never be accused of neglecting the patient's life history. It knows only too well that man's past as well as his future are going on in any given phenomenon of his immediate present, determining it and thus being "present" in it, each in its own specific way of actuality. Therefore, we can throw psychodynamics overboard as superfluous baggage. Abstractions of this sort are un­necessary in view of the insight of analysis of Dasein: that man's existing is of a primary disclosing, elucidating nature; that in the light of man's existence everything that has to be, including all so-called psychic phenomena of one's own self as well as those of one's fellow men, may appear—and thus come into being and unfold themselves in the course of a life history—each in an equally authentic manner. To attribute any anthropomorphous psychic or subjective forces and dynamisms to this ongoing emergence of ap­pearing phenomena (actually a pleonasm in itself) is sheer fantasy.

Thus the discussion of the concept of "psychodynamics"—a most typical offspring of natural-scientific thinking—is well suited to demonstrate once more the basic discrepancy between the natural-scientific approach and the Daseinsanalytic understanding of man. The concept of "psychodynamics" tries to derive every phenomenon from something else by assuming a causal energy, capable of trans­forming itself into an appearing thing. Analysis of Dasein, on the other hand, strictly abstains from such assumptions. It tries to stick to what is immediately experienced, i.e., to the phenomena which / show themselves in the light of our Dasein with all their inherent / meanings and references.

We fully realize that the believers in "psychodynamics" scorn­fully dispose of the Daseinsanalytic approach by calling it "naive" because its insights sound so simple. They may be warned, though, not to confuse the complicated intricacy of their intellectual con­structs with a higher degree of truth. The Daseinsanalyst, provided he stays strictly with the immediately shown meanings of observed phenomena, may achieve a more adequate and more exact under­standing of man's essential nature than the traditionalistic scientist whose "exactness" depends solely on intellectual deductions and reductions. In this sense Daseinsanalysis may yet turn out to be more "scientific" than the "psychodynamic" approach if "scientific"

Deseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 109

is taken in the genuine, literal meaning of its Latin roots, scire and facere (see p. 29).

"Affects" and "Emotions"

Affects, emotions, passions, and feelings are said to constitute the non-rational part of our psychic life. Within the science of psycho-pathology all these psychic conceptions were a half-century ago subsumed by Eugen Bleuler under the common heading of "affec-trvity." Since that time this notion has been increasingly important i- osychology and in psychiatry as a whole, both within and outside me psychoanalytic schools. Freud, for instance, has no scruples sV>ut declaring that the affects are "the only valid elements in the 1-е of the psyche" and all psychic forces are "only significant through their capacity to arouse emotions."⁶¹

However, the growing significance of "affectivity" is in striking..trast to the inadequacy and vagueness of what psychologists

I psychiatrists are able to say in detail about it. Even the philo-

Dhically trained psychiatrist Karl Jaspers has to put us off with иле following statement:

Ordinarily we designate as "emotions" everything psychic which can neither be attributed clearly to the phenomena of the objective consciousness nor to urges and acts of volition. All undeveloped, indistinct psychic formations, all those that cannot be comprehended and elude analysis, are called emotions; in other words emotions are everything that we should otherwise not know what to call.... It is still not known what an affective element is, what elements there are, how they are to be classified.⁶²

The psychoanalytic theory, of course, is not really interested in -"".■? description and the understanding of the affective phenomena

such. In typically scientific fashion it immediately inquires as to -_*е causal-genetic origin of the affects in general and as to what an iffect is in the dynamic sense.⁶³ Freud's reply to the first question is that the

affective states have become incorporated in the mind as pre­cipitates of primeval traumatic experiences, and when a similar situation occurs they are revived like mnemic symbols. I do not

^e S. Freud, "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva" in SE, Vol. IX, p. 49. ^e K. Jaspers, AUgemeine Psychopathohgie, Berlin, 1923, p. 77. •» S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, pp. 343-344.

110 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

think I have been wrong in likening them to the more recent and individually acquired hysterical attack and in regarding them as its normal prototypes.⁶⁴

As to the second question, Freud is of the opinion that in his previous discussions he had understood an "instinctual representa­tive" to be

only an idea or group of ideas which is cathected with a definite quota of psychical energy (libido or interest) coming from an instinct. Clinical observation now obliges us to divide up what we have hitherto regarded as a single entity; for it shows us that besides the idea, some other element representing the instinct has to be taken into account.... For this other element of the psychi­cal representative the term quota of affect has been generally adopted. It corresponds to the instinct in so far as the latter has become detached from the idea and finds expression, proportionate to its quantity, in processes which are sensed as affects.⁶⁵

In this way, however, affects—in contrast, let us say, to Jaspers' "unclear" and "undeveloped unanalyzable psychic formations"— have become things that seem to be comprehensible even quanti­tatively, namely, "drive conversion products." As such the affects are characterized by Freud, moreover, as "displaceable quanta," which may be cathected with the other type of drive representations, i.e., the "ideas," may "adhere" to them, but detach themselves from them again, be torn away from them, be "dislocated" and "transposed" and "vented" or "ab-reacted" in deeds or words. Freud's conceptions of the affects rather frequently assume such an intensely real shape that they are in his theory even "strangulated." Finally, Freud also emphasizes the marked participation of the body in all affects. This is thought to be so "obvious and tremendous" that many psy­chologists believed that "the reality of the affects consisted only in their bodily expressions." At any rate, Freud attaches to the "dis­placeable quanta," which he calls affects, such a decisive importance that he regards "their fate as crucial both for the onset of the illness and for the recovery."⁶⁶

Дата добавления: 2015-06-04