Ibid., pp. 618-619. 3 страница

122 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theo

ing by itself stems from the fact that independence is always e perienced at first as the loss of protective dependencies. Thin Dasein fears falling prey to and perishing in what it defends agains because the defended-against seems to have so much more powe than itself. Finally, because it is still encapsulated in the menta ities of others, Dasein fears becoming guilty, by admitting realm of beings which are regarded as sinful and dirty by these mentalities We will enter into a thorough discussion of the important problen of man's guilt later (see Chapter 19). Let us point out out hert that repression in Freud's sense does not exist at all. Instinctua derivatives, ideas, and affects, enclosed in a psyche which con­stitutes a prison from which they break out and to which they return every once in a while, have never been observed and nevei will be.

"Transference"

The concept of "transference" occupies a place in psychoanalytic theory as central as the notions of "repression" and "resistance." Yet the very term Freud coined for the phenomena which he sub­sumed under "transference" implies—indeed presupposes—that there are such things as "feelings" or "affects" existing as distinct psychic formations in themselves and for themselves, detachable from the mental object-representations to which they originally adhered. Only if we assume such thing-like, isolated, and inde­pendent feehngs is it possible to imagine, for instance, that hate for a father can be detached from the father, pent up inside, and trans­ferred to the analyst during the course of psychoanalysis. As shown in preceding chapters, however, such shiftable feehngs or affects are merely mental constructions and do not actually exist. As early as 1874, long before Analysis of Dasein, Brentano was able to prove their fictitious character, although he did so on a different basis. Such psychic entities, if non-existent, can hardly be transported, in the sense of Freud's "transference."

It is not surprising, therefore, that anyone who carefully studies Freud's writings on the subject of transference will notice that he does not actually succeed, in spite of extreme efforts, in producing any evidence for the existence of such shiftable affects. The so-called positive transference is a case in point. Freud is not able to

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 123

distinguish convincingly the nature of transference love from that of the genuine love of one partner for another in a normal love relationship. Eventually he is forced to admit that "one has no right to dispute the 'genuine' nature of the love which makes its appearance in the course of analytic treatment."⁸³ Furthermore, every analyst can observe that transference love for the analyst ap-:ars at those moments of the treatment "when the analyst has made his first insight-producing interpretations with their resulting emotional effects on the patient."⁸⁴ It seems evident that the phenomenon of love appears when being-together with a partner opens up an existence to hitherto unappropriated possibilities of relating to the world. Transference is not a mere deception based on a faulty linking of £ects and instincts to the "wrong" object, as Freud thought. Trans-icrence is always a genuine relationship between the analysand and the analyst. In each being-together, the partners disclose themselves to each other as human beings; that is to say, each as basically the same kind of being as the other. No secondary "object cathexes," -э "transfer of libido" from a "primarily narcissistic ego" to the ~Ъ\е object," no transfer of an affect from a former love object to - present-day partner, are necessary for such disclosure, because it ~ of the primary, nature of Dasein to disclose being, including.uman being. This means that no interpersonal relationship what­ever necessitates a "transfer of affect." Nor do we need the more Todem concept of "empathy" to understand the immediate dis-are of one person to another. This, in turn, frees us of the zation to explain yet another mysterious process, because the:.^ic nature of "empathy" has never been elucidated.

To understand the specific phenomenon of" so-called neurotic

ransference, we must realize that the primary openness of human

eing for the discovery of encountered fellow humans does not

necessarily result in perceptions which do full justice to the one who

_- encountered. We have already mentioned the fact that man's

с nature as world-openness fundamentally and necessarily in-

ies a closing-in. The limitations of a neurotic's openness (in the

;^iise of an understanding relationship with his world) are nothing

else but what psychology usually calls the neurotic distortions of

^B S. Freud, "Observations on Transference-Love," in CP, Vol. II, p. 388. **G. Bally, "Die Psychoanalyse Sigmund Freuds," in Handbuch der Neu~ -—Mil, Berlin, 1958, p. 150.

124 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and The '

his personality. He is—insofar as he is neurotic—limited to mod of disclosure and behavior similar to a child's. The great variety mature, full, and free manners of relating are not available to hii. (as, indeed, they are not available to the healthy child, but far different reasons). This limitation enables us to understand the phenomena of transference in the narrow sense of the term, nameb the so-called neurotic distortions of transference. The followiL; analogy may facilitate an understanding of what we mean.

A child plays with a burning candle. It closes its eyelids almos: completely and it sees a star-like arrangement of narrow rap instead of a full-sized flame. Suppose that the child were to bum his eyelids while playing with the candle and that they became per­manently sealed together. The child would then continue to per­ceive all candles in the same fashion for the rest of his life. But no­body would claim that his manner of perceiving the flame as an adult is due to a "transfer" of the experience he had as a child to a similar situation happenings in the present. The reason for the

_r distortion of perception is the same in both childhood and adult­hood: the closing of the eyelids. The situation of the adult neurotic is similar. His human condition is still so child-like and unde­veloped that—to select an instance—he is open to the perception only of ^he father-like aspects of all the adult men he encounters.

"- Thus, he behaves toward the analyst as if the latter were like bis father. Naturally, the limitation of possibilities for disclosing and relating persists in this neurotic, because of a father who inhibited the child's growth and was therefore partly disliked, even hated. Therefore, this neurotic will not even be open to all the possible father-son relationships. He will be able to exist only in a hate-ridden son-father relation. In the light of such reduced world-openness, he can perceive only the hateful father aspects of anv grown man he encounters, however spurious this aspect may actually be in a given person he meets.

Such patients as the neurotic in our example are often quite mature, insofar as their intellectual potentialities for relating are concerned. But this intellectual awareness does not as a rule have much influence in correcting the faulty relationship, precisely be­cause it is only a peripheral maturity and not an encompassing one. This explains why the patient's intellectual realization that the analyst is not like his father has little, if any, influence on the patient's reaction to him. Viewing the situation in this fashion it

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 125

seems superfluous to assume that an earlier affect is displaced from an earlier object to the one in the transference situation. At the same time, we no longer need consider transference love an illusory phenomenon. On the contrary, Daseinsanalysis regards every anal-ysand-analyst relationship as a genuine relationship sui generis. It is genuine despite the fact that the patient is carrying it out in a limited fashion owing to his mental distortions. It could not be otherwise. The analysand-analyst relationship, like any other, is grounded in the primary being-with of one man and another, which is part of Daseins primary world-disclosure. The patient's "trans­ference love" is not, therefore, "really" love of someone else—the father, for instance. It is love of the analyst himself, no matter how immature and distorted it may appear because of the limitations of perception imposed on the patient by his earlier relationship to his real father. It would seem that many psychoanalysts classify the love and confidence patients show them as "transference phe­nomena" because they think such feelings do not befit a scientific attitude toward mankind. Fearing that they might be thought un­scientific, they use this terminus technicus to assuage their un­easiness and to protect themselves against "real" love or hate.

"Projection" and "Introjection"

The concept of "psychic projection" occupies an important place in Freud's ideas concerning psychoses. He states:

The most striking characteristic of symptom-formation in paranoia is the process which deserves the name of projection. An internal perception is suppressed, and, instead, its content, after undergoing a certain degree of distortion, enters consciousness in the form of an external perception. In delusions of persecution the distortion consists in a transformation of affect; what should have been felt internally as love is perceived externally as hate.⁸⁵

Freud then extends the realm wherein projection operates beyond the confines of paranoia, with the statement that projection "has a regular share assigned to it in our attitude towards the external world."⁸⁶

Freud's explanation of a delusion of persecution by a process of

⁸⁵ S. Freud, "Psycho-Analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)," in CP, Vol. Ill, p. 452. ^M Loc. cit.

126 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

psychic projection clearly presupposes (i) the existence of two separate, thing-like "egos" or "psyches," and (z) the possibility of throwing some of the contents of one of these "psyches" over into the other.

As we have repeated, analysis of Dasein has been forced by its ob­servations to regard both these presuppositions as conceptual arti­facts which do not correspond at all to any actual human phe- ' nomenon. In consequence, analysis of Dasein cannot believe in the occurrence of so-called psychic projections either.

In Freud's own example of persecutory delusions, the phenom­enon as observed is neither a distortion of an internal affect of love nor a projection of this affect, internally transformed into hate, onto the outside world. If a paranoid wife feels persecuted by a husband who she thinks hates her, she feels this way because she is basically still a small child. The demands put on her as a wife seem so exces­sive that she cannot possibly help feeling that her very life is threatened. We can be equally certain that whenever paranoid patients feel threatened by "poison," this is the result of a dangerous strain put upon their fundamentally immature existence, no matter how highly developed their purely intellectual possibilities of deal­ing with the world. This being so, these patients are, in an existen­tial sense, fully justified in experiencing their life-situation as being real "poison" for them, crushing them, killing them.

It is natural that every threat to one's life elicits the strongest possible defense reactions. He who is threatened hates what threatens him. The existence of an immature, weak, dependent woman will always be threatened with death if her life-situation demands that she play the role'of a grown-up wife and mother, however benevolent her husband may be. This threat tunes her existence to hate and fear. Her hatefully and fearfully attuned existence is closed-in, necessarily, to perceiving or misunderstanding the partner as a correspondingly hateful person, who wants to treat her badly, even to kill her.

The relationship of a paranoid wife to her husband, however it may be tuned, is not, nor was it ever, something within that wife's "psyche." From the outset she was "out there," so to speak, in this relationship to her husband, carrying out her existence immediately in and as this relationship. Something, a so-called affect-formation of hate, for example, which has never been "inside" oneself, cannot possibly be "projected" or thrown out into the external world to be

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 127

perceived there. Again, some very complicated mental speculations of the psychoanalytic theory have become completely superfluous in the light of the Daseinsanalytic understanding of man and his world.

The concept of "introjection," as well as the notion of "identifica­tion" (the latter being closely related to the former), also presuppose a separate "psyche," capable of devouring another like a morsel of food. Furthermore, it is supposed that the act of devouring means the magical acquisition of characteristics belonging to that which is devoured. Hence, the devourer aims to emulate what he con­sumes, even as among certain ethnic groups, to drink the blood of an ox is to acquire that animal's strength. But in reality, the phe­nomena called "introjection" have nothing to do with in-corporation. In order to understand them more adequately we have only to bear in mind once more that man is "outside" himself before he comes to himself in an authentic way, i.e., before he has assembled all his possibilities of relating to a selfhood of his own. He will have reached this state of being authentically his own self only when he is able to choose freely in which of his relational possibilities he wants to engage himself and to occur as a human existence at any given moment of his life.

The phenomena which psychoanalytic theory calls "introjection" can now be understood if we think of a human being who has not yet extracted, so to speak, his existence out of the existence of some­body else. Wherever so-called introjection is observed, nothing has been taken in. On the contrary, a human existence has not yet taken itself out of and freed itself from the original being-together undividedly and undiscriminatingly with somebody else. This im­mature way of being-together, in its turn—like all the other different kinds of so-called interpersonal relationships—is only possible on the basis of man's primary being-together with his fellow human beings, which is one of the "existentialia," or fundamental features, of human Dasein.

Dream Images and Dbeam Symbols

One of Freud's greatest achievements was his discovery that dreams are meaningful psychological phenomena within the chain of occurrences of a human existence. However, he destroyed this

128 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

great contribution no sooner than it had been made. As a child of his technical age, he found it necessary to industrialize even man's behavior in his dreaming state and to force it into the theoretical straitjacket of the "dream factory." The energy of infantile wishes was thought to work upon latent dream thoughts, the raw material, to produce—under the guidance of a moral dream censor—the manifest dream pictures. This "dream-work" was supposed to be accomplished by the mechanisms of "condensation," "displacement," "inversion," "transformation of ideas into verbal images," and "secondary composition." Consequently, dream interpretation had to undo the disguising operations of dream-work by repeating them in reverse order, so that the assumed "motor" and "raw material" underlying the manifest dream might be laid bare. But an approach to dream interpretation which permits such intellectual manipula­tions of the immediately given content of the dream opens the door to every type of arbitrariness.

Today, more and more analysts are becoming aware of the arti­ficiality and arbitrariness of Freud's dream theory. As a result of this insight, they make less and less use of dream interpretation in their practice. But they are renouncing an exceedingly valuable therapeutic tool. For Freud's statement that dreams are the "royal road" to the very core of man's existence (the via regia to the unconscious) is true despite his secondary theoretical distortions.

The Daseinsanalytic approach seems able to restore the paramount importance of our dreaming state. It leads to a direct understanding of the meaning and content of our dreams and shows us how to make successful use of them therapeutically.

Daseinsanalysis regards Freud's mechanisms of "dream-work" as wholly superfluous conceptual constructs. First of all, however, Daseinsanalysis does not see any justification for the devaluation of dream phenomena by all the current psychological dream interpre­tations, which declare them beforehand to be mere "pictures" or "images" within a "psyche." This is judging the dreaming state by the standards of the waking state. Such a judgment from outside necessarily allows its specific nature to slip away from our under­standing for ever. If we take the immediately given phenomena of the dreams seriously, we must grant our dreaming state a character of "being-in-the-world" and of being open to the world which, though different from the waking state, is an equally autonomous and "real" way of existing—i.e., of an understanding, meaning-

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions 129

disclosing relating to what is encountered. We need not, however, enter into any more details here, since we can draw attention to a previous publication where we treated thoroughly the Daseins­analytic approach to dreams and dream interpretation.⁸⁷ There we ako undertook a detailed critique of the concept of symboUsm, a concept which plays a decisive part in psychoanalytic theory gen­erally and in the psychoanalytic theory of dreams especially. We were able to show that one can talk of the "symbolic" meaning of a thing only if one has previously mutilated the meaning-content of this thing and reduced it to its purely utilitarian aspects of an iso­lated object. Once this has been done, it becomes necessary, of course, to reintroduce—in the form of "symbolic interpretations"— all of the meaningful connotations which have been stripped from the object.

⁸⁷ M. Boss, The Analysis of Dreams, New York, 1958.

PART III

DASEINSANALYTIC

PSYCHOANALYTIC

NEUROSES

RE-EVALUATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE

В

I reud's establishment of general libido theory accomplished one of his aims: a reconnection of the three separate entities—psyche, body, and the realm of external objects—into which he had intellectually split the human being and his world. An equally ambitious aim of his was to show the specific kind of psychodynamics operant in different nosological entities. Here, too, he succeeded to an extent previously unheard of. His doctrine of the neuroses, which encompasses the melancholic and schizophrenic psychoses as well, exhibits an ad­mirable compactness. The question arises, though, whether the logical consistency of Freud's views was not achieved at the price of a tremendous reduction and mutilation of the reality of man and his world. The following discussion of the psychoanalytic doctrine of the neuroses will reveal, even more clearly than did our discussion of basic psychoanalytic therapy and theory, how great a discrepancy exists between Freud's immediate observations and his theoretical deductions.

131

"Conversion Hysteria" and "Organ Neurosis"

The Mystery of "Conversion"

It seems fitting to begin the discussion of Freud's doctrine of the neuroses with "hysterical conversion" because Freud's approach to conversion hysteria represented immense progress over the medical approaches current before his time. The mechanized thinking of somatic medicine before Freud had been completely helpless when confronted with the increasing number of hysterical disturbances. It was impossible to find lesions in any part of the body which could be proved to be causative, although the main dogma of medicine at that time held that there could be no illness without such physical - lesions. Some of Freud's medical contemporaries trusted in future and improved instruments and methods of treatment to bring to light the organic causes of hysteria. Others considered such ailments to be either imaginary or simulated. Still others hypothesized damage to the brain. Freud had a different explanation. He thought that in all hysterical cases certain ideas had been prevented from being "discharged" normally, i.e., into conscious actions. In such cases, the "affect" of these ideas, according to Freud, may be "strangulated" and undergo "a transformation into unusual somatic innervations and inhibitions."¹ For this assumed psychic process, Freud coined the term "hysterical conversion":

A certain portion of our mental excitation is normally directed along the paths of somatic innervation and produces what we know as an 'expression of the emotions.' Hysterical conversion exaggerates this portion of the discharge of an emotionally catnected mental process; it represents a far more intense ex­pression of the emotions, which has entered upon a new path.²

¹ S. Freud, "Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis," in SE, Vol. XI, pp. 13-14.

² hoc. cit.

133

134 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Doctrine of Neuroses

Freud's concept of hysterical conversion is of more than historical interest; it is the key concept supporting the giant theoretical struc­ture of today's "psychosomatic medicine," at least insofar as it pays tribute to psychoanalytic theory. Yet if we look closely, we notice that the concept of hysterical conversion provides a very weak and uncertain foundation for both the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis and psychosomatic medicine. Freud himself questioned the nature of the concept he coined. He realized that it is impossible to imagine a functional connection between two such utterly and essentially different objects as those implied by such terms as "body" and "psyche." With admirable candor, he confessed that the leap from the mental to the physical remains a mystery.³

The majority of physicians paid no attention to Freud's decisive confession. Thirsting for action, they began to experiment with the object "psyche," as they had done with other objects before. In thousands of different ways, human and animal nature were ques­tioned concerning possible effects of the psyche on the body. Nature responded willingly and gave remarkable answers to this rash questioning. Soon psychosomatic experimenters could penetrate deeply into the somatic realm of man and animals. By now there is seemingly such abundant experimental "proof" for the psyche's amazing capacity to cause somatic symptoms that not even the most rigidly "scientific" physician would argue the point.

The result of the thoughtless talk about psychic causes of physical symptoms was utter confusion. To find their way out of the laby­rinth, modern biologists, physicians, and psychologists use the most remarkable and naive conjuror's tricks. While the attention of the spectator is diverted by impressive psychosomatic experiments, the midbrain is pictured—parenthetically—as the seat or substrate of the affects. Volitional impulses, thoughts, and perceptions are equated with cortical functions. It is further stated that the processes in the gray cortex spark the automatisms of the vegetative nerve centers, this being the way by which the psyche is capable of effecting changes anywhere in the body. If we examine such state­ments, we find they represent a kind of conceptual legerdemain which does not further our understanding of the phenomena in­volved. No one who talks in this fashion has been able to state just how he pictures the "location of the affects" in the midbrain, or

⁸S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Garden City, N.Y., 1943, p. 229. Trans, by Joan Riviere.

"Conversion Hysteria" and "Organ Neurosis" 135

in what way thoughts are situated in their "substrate," the cortex.

A second large group of investigators tries to "connect" psyche and body by discovering ever more complex neuro-vegetative processes. They aim chemically to identify more hormonal sub­stances and to discover constantly more subtle differentiations. But it will never be possible thus to comprehend the origin of mental phenomena. The essential meaning of such phenomena can neither be explained nor derived from an understanding of metabolic products or of ever more complex neural connections. It is im­possible on principle that a physical substance or "energy," no matter how fine, can suddenly evaporate into a psychic phe­nomenon. Therefore, this approach is limited to the discovery of essentially peripheral, if practical, therapeutic techniques. It can contribute nothing to a real understanding of psychosomatic phenomena (see pp. 32 ff.).

A third group of investigators encapsulates itself into something that comes close to being a materialistic monism. While Freud wisely and modestly referred to hysterical conversion as a "mysti­fying" leap from the psychic into the somatic, Franz Alexander, a leader of this group, sees no great mystery. Mental phenomena, such as emotions, ideas, perceptions, are to Alexander merely the "subjective reflections of physiological processes."⁴ Nostalgic long­ings, for example, represent certain brain processes. Alexander admits that such longings can, at this time, be described meaning­fully only in psychological terms and cannot be identified by biochemical, electrical, or any other non-psychological techniques.⁵ The implication is that once these techniques have been perfected, they will yield results equally as meaningful as the psychological ones. "Fundamentally,... the object of psychological studies is no different from that of physiology; the two differ only in the manner of approach."⁶ Although his book bears the subtitle "Principles and Applications," Alexander scarcely illuminates the principles of psy­chosomatic problems. Instead, he succumbs to an easily discoverable pseudo-solution. When he talks of "subjective reflections of physio­logical processes" or states that "brain processes are subjectively perceived as emotions,"⁷ he smuggles into his conception a subject

* F. Alexander, Psychosomatic Medicine, New York, 1950, p. 37. *Ibid., p. 50. Italics added. ^e Ibid., p. 54. ⁷ Ibid., p. 50.

136 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Doctrine of Neuroses

who can perceive and reflect. However, neither the origin nor the essence of this contraband is ever explained in his psychosomatic theory.

Still another group of investigators adheres to a monism which might best be called "spiritual." These scientists think of the etiological aspect of the mind-body problem in terms of an "ex­pressive relationship." They hypothesize an X which underlies somatic and mental phenomena, which expresses itself in them, and which cannot be directly perceived. This X is referred to by various terms. Sometimes it is called a "unified organism" [Einheitsorgan-ismus] which exhibits both "aspects"—the physical and the psychic; at other times, there is talk about a "uniform life process" or "uniform life phenomena."⁸ Not infrequently, such writers employ the term "existence" to characterize their conception. Occasionally, they disregard X. They talk of "mutual expressive relationships" between physical and psychic things within a body-soul totality which remains unclarified.

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