Psychoanalysis, the science and therapy founded by Freud, is 100 years old. He has been denounced by many on the left as a bourgeois thinker who regarded human beings as irredeemably selfish and thus legitimated capitalism as the only possible society. He is therefore charged with condoning a system whose essence is alienationour estrangement from each other and from our own creative potential. He is also accused of sanctioning a retreat from the outside world to an introspective preoccupation with oneself. Moreover, because the treatment Freud developed is costly, it has remained largely the preserve of the middle class.
Freud has also been taken to task by some feminists who argued that he justified sexism by his notion of 'penis envy', his claim that female emotional development is conditioned by a sense of inferiority towards the male, as represented by her father.
So why is Freud of interest to socialists? Firstly, because psychoanalysis provides a powerful critique of a society that denies human beings the satisfaction of basic needs. Secondly, it throws considerable light on the nature of human alienation under capitalism, mainly through its investigations into the dynamics of the family. It deepens our understanding of the way subjective consciousness is formed, how external structures of exploitation and oppression are internalised into the mind of the individual and how this distorts our relationships. Finally, elements of Freud's thought, particularly his theory of the unconscious, do provide insights either into human nature as such or at least into the ways it has manifested itself so far in history.
Freud's challenge to the conventional ways of thinking about human life required phenomenal courage, since 19th century psychiatry was dominated by an organic approach to mental illness. To the men of the medical establishment, the idea that the mind can be the source not only of its own but also of the body's malfunction was heresy. And the idea that sexuality can be a prime motive for much of our behaviour was an affront to the bourgeoisie of Vienna, where Freud practiced.
His theory began as a theory of certain kinds of mental illness and ended as a radically new theory of the mind itself. He argued that human beings have a universal, unchanging mental structure and fixed psychic drives rooted in our biological make up. Early on he asserted that two types of instinct or drive were the motive force behind our psychic life: the drive for self preservation and the sexual drive (libido). The chief principle of psychic activity is therefore the 'pleasure principle', the urge to discharge instinctual tensions so as to maximise pleasure. But the 'pleasure principle' has to be modified by the 'reality principle': taking external reality into account leads us to renounce or postpone pleasure.
Freud believed that our drives, both 'normal' and neurotic, are mainly conditioned by our life experiences, especially those of early childhood. Four concepts are at the heart of his work: the unconscious, sexuality, the Oedipus Complex and neurosis.
Freud developed the notion that we all have unconscious ideas or drives, which are repressed and are prevented from emerging into consciousness by continuing pressure. It was through his study of dreams that Freud first developed this theory. In his most famous work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he argues that 'a dream is a disguised fulfilment of a...repressed wish.' In dreams we act out secret desires by symbolically representing events or figures, avoiding the shame or anxiety they would arouse if conceived consciously.
He argued that these drives were largely sexual as there was clinical evidence that sexuality begins early in life. Initially, Freud believed that all those who came to him with psychic traumas had suffered sexual abuse in childhood. He later modified this theory, although he never abandoned it completely. Some have claimed that he did so to suppress the truth about child abuse and avoid offending the Viennese establishment. He also put forward the notion of infantile sexuality, arguing that, as infants, his patients had desired the parent of the opposite sex but that shame and guilt had induced them to construct fantasies of seduction.
Central to Freud's account is the notion that childhood sexual development consists of each individual going through a series of phases: oral, anal and genital. Each stage of infantile development is characterised by the association of pleasurable sensations with a different part of the body (erotogenic zones).
The Oedipus Complex was named after the Greek tragic hero and consists of 'love towards one parent and jealous hostility towards the other.' The boy's original choice of sexual object is his mother, that of the girl her father, though Freud later argued that girls went down a more complex path of development.
Another basic tenet of Freud's is that we are all inherently bisexual. In any individual, one sexual character tends to predominate, but it never enjoys a monopoly. In the case of 'Dora', a young woman developed a phantom appendicitis which Freud analysed as a simulated pregnancy, a secret wish to make love to and become pregnant by a married friend of her father. But she also harboured a secret homosexual desire for the man's wife. Freud thus revealed our inner resistance to capitalism's attempts to impose fixed gender identities on us.
Freud argued that neurosis occurs as a result of the repression or prohibition of impulses which continue to be active in the individual's unconscious but are prevented from coming to consciousness and are transformed into symptoms, such as paralysis, anxiety, depression. He calls this process 'the return of the repressed'. A thin line divides the 'normal' from the neurotic. As Freud said 'Find me a normal man and I will cure him.' What distinguishes the two is that the 'normal' person has successfully adapted their drives to the concrete conditions of life, whereas the neurotic is stuck in a childhood, fantasy world.
Therapy consists in making conscious wishes or impulses that have been repressed. Important techniques are dream analysis and 'free association' in which the patient is encouraged to give free expression to whatever ideas or fantasies enter the mind. Psychoanalytical therapy has thus been described as the 'talking cure'.
The Freudian view of the human psyche is that it consists of three 'sectors'id, ego, and super-egowhich combine and interact with each other in varying ways. The id is that part of the mind that is the repository of thoughts and impulses which have been repressed but which continue to influence and distort the life of the individual. The ego is our rational side, that part of the id which has been modified by the influence of the external world. Its task is to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle. The ego must itself be seen to be divided into two parts, one of which is less closely connected to consciousness than the other. This is the 'super-ego', the repressive, critical agency, the individual's conscience that sits like a rider keeping in check the superior strength of the horse.
For Freud, the super-ego develops as a result of the internalisation of the child's parental authority figures, in particular the father. This process begins with the earliest sexual relations that the infant establishes with the outside world. The super-ego emerges with the crisis that besets the onset of the Oedipus Complex.
Freud was rooted in the tradition of 19th century biological determinism and pleasure seeking individualism. He ended up arguing that there is an inherent conflict between our search for instinctual gratification and the needs of society as expressed in morality. Civilisation doesn't come cheap. Social harmony requires us to make massive instinctual sacrifices.
He thus adheres to philosophical liberalism, the idea that society is a collection of competing individuals who agree to tone down their mutual conflict out of enlightened self interest. He believes that we are primarily isolated beings whose physical and emotional needs drive us into relationships with others. It follows that for Freud aggressiveness is a basic feature of human nature, revealing itself, he believes, in the nursery.
However, a common error is to see psychoanalysis as beginning and ending with Freud. Psychoanalysis has moved on and Freud's theories have been developed by, for example, Winnicott and others who seek to go beyond Freud's biological individualism. These 'post-Freudians' put forward a conception of libido as 'object seeking' rather than narrowly pleasure seeking, with a psyche that contains from the outset social elements. The essence of human nature is thus the drive to form relationships.
A familiar accusation is that psychoanalysis is unscientific because it is based on mystical notions such as unconscious motivation. But this claim derives from a narrow empiricist view of science that believes it operates principally through generalising from the observation of facts. In reality, of course, even 'hard' natural sciences like physics and chemistry employ speculation and intuition.
Now it is true that Freud started out with the belief that he could apply to psychology the same principles of causality that in the 19th century were considered valid in physics and chemistry. However, as he developed his theory and therapeutic practice, he came to explain human behaviour in terms of reasons or motives. He denied that it was possible to predict whether a person will develop a neurosis and of what kind. He merely claimed that in retrospect it is possible to explain a neurosis in terms of certain childhood events or situations.
But Freud also insisted that choices made by individuals, whether patients or 'normal' people, are not arbitrary. Freud's method is to
understand the meaning of a person's choice in terms
of the individual's life experience. It is therefore scientific in that it makes the explanation of human behaviour possible through generalisation. To deny psychoanalysis
scientific validity because it isn't based on physical notions of causality, precise prediction or experiment would be also to deny that Marxism is scientific.
Freud remains the founder of the last great bourgeois science and to dismiss psychoanalysis because he got certain things wrong is like rejecting modern physics because Newton didn't get everything right. Marxists have always tried to absorb the most radical aspects of bourgeois thought into a socialist perspective. We need to incorporate the valuable insights of psychoanalysis into a Marxist framework.
Freud's main errors were to identify alienated humanity as normal human nature and the patriarchal family as the only possible one. Nevertheless, his ideas greatly illuminate the modern experience of alienation. His work has therefore profoundly radical implications, later pursued by Marxist psychoanalysts such as Erich Fromm and the early Wilhelm Reich. In the end, both Freud and Marx are about the raising of consciousness in order to extend human freedom and rational control over the worldboth the external and our own internal world.