Psychoanalysis

A few summers ago, my little sister was turning into a total bitch.  Like, for real.

She had just turned 16, and was using her newfound confidence and sense of individuality to strike out at people, to cut them down, to attack their insecurities and their weaknesses.  Her family members responded with anger or puzzlement, feeling increasingly alienated from the girl they used to love and trust.

One day, after bearing the brunt of one of her attacks, I turned to her and said: “Hey, sis, do you know what they say about people who cut others down all the time?  They’re only doing it because they’re insecure themselves, because they need to lash out at others to hide their own self-hatred.”

I repeated this hypothesis to her on subsequent occasions, and she grew increasingly frustrated with me: “stop saying that!” she’d snap.  “I don’t like it when you say that!”  Clearly, the hypothesis was affecting her.  By the end of that summer, she was noticeably less abrasive, and has since grown into a wonderful young woman.

Jonathan Lear has written this about psychoanalysis: “the truth-conditions for its hypotheses are practical, not theoretical” (Freud, 2005)   That is to say, while an analyst is interested in uncovering the truth about a patient’s psyche, this truth is ultimately only instrumentally valuable, and can even get in the way of the final end of psychoanalysis.  The final end is the successful restructuring of a patient’s attitude towards themselves and towards reality, a restructuring that is accomplished by both the patient and the analyst working in tandem.  The analyst’s job is to know when to ask the right questions and say the right things.  Even if (s)he has no conclusive theoretical grounds for believing in a particular hypothesis, it might be practically wise to propose it anyway, just to initiate the right kind of reflection in the patient.

Furthermore, the articulation of theoretical truths might even impede progress.  Lear writes:

Freud might tell his patient, ‘You want to kill your father and marry your mother’ – but even if Freud is right, and even if his patient believes him because Freud is the expert, the words cannot make the right kind of difference… Indeed, this phrase can now be used to keep real self-understanding at bay. It can be used as an empty intellectualization which falsely persuades one that one already has self-knowledge. (Freud, 52)

Now, I don’t know if my sister was experiencing self-hatred or insecurity that summer a few years ago.  It was a safe bet, given her age, but I can’t say that I had particularly strong grounds for believing it.  Yet, my hypothesis seemed to hit home and have the right effect: she began to see her subjective life as layered and complex, as something she could ask questions about.  In particular, she could ask what deeper, hidden motives were influencing her, and whether or not she ultimately approved of this subterfuge.

What I love most in Freud and Nietzsche is their insistence that no human life can be good without this kind of difficult self-criticism.  However Freud represents a humanist-optimist alternative to Nietzsche’s pessimism.  Maybe isolated individuals are too weak and stupid to begin this kind of deep psychological work.  But Freud thought that huge possibilities lay in our shared ability to work together, to provoke the kind of conversational honesty that can help us to live better lives.

Nowadays it is indeed fashionable to sneer at psychoanalysts.  We prefer Experimental Philosophers, neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists. We think that a Rutgers undergraduate's response to the trolley problem on a questionnaire is a reliable indicator of their actual moral psychology. We think that identifying the neural correlates of depression and wiping that brain activity out via pharmaceutical intervention counts as “curing” depression.  We think that a phrase like "humans are naturally altruistic" means something.

I cannot help but think that in effecting this change of focus from the complex and deep to the speculative and superficial, we are losing our grip on something of extraordinary and enduring value.