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RECASTING BOURGEOIS PSYCHOANALYSIS: EDUCATION, AUTHORITY, AND THE POLITICS OF ANALYTIC THERAPY IN THE FREUDIAN REVISION OF 1918

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2017

PHILLIP J. HENRY
PHILLIP J. HENRY*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Chicago E-mail: pjh@uchicago.edu
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Abstract

This article looks at Sigmund Freud's attempt to rethink psychoanalytic therapy at the close of the Great War. By profoundly undermining a liberal world order and dramatically eroding the material security and social prestige of the educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum) to which Freud belonged, the war unsettled the social politics of classical analytic therapy. Simultaneously, the treatment of the war neuroses by psychoanalysts appeared to invert the liberal principles around which the procedure of psychoanalysis was developed by placing the analyst in a fundamentally disciplinary relationship vis-à-vis the patient. In response to these threats to the identity of psychoanalysis, Freud undertook a far-reaching renegotiation of the politics of analytic therapy in his address, titled “The Paths of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” to the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress in the last months of the war. His attempt to mediate the contradictions exposed by the war gave rise to a vision of a postclassical psychoanalysis for a mass democratic age.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , August 2019 , pp. 471 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Modern Europe Workshop, the Central Europe Workshop, and the Medicine and Its Objects Workshop, all at the University of Chicago. I am grateful to the participants for their comments. Quite a few people have read iterations of this essay, and I thank Mitchell Ash, Linda Augustyn, Zachary Barr, John Boyer, Jeremy Cohen, Ryan Dahn, Michael Geyer, Jan Goldstein, Benjamin Fong, Tamara Kamatovich, Katya Motyl, Sarah Reynolds, Kaitlyn Tucker, and Tara Zahra for their feedback. Tyson Leuchter, Tracie Matysik, and the three anonymous readers provided by Modern Intellectual History deserve especial thanks for their editorial assistance over the last stages of composition. The title is a modest homage to Charles Maier's Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, 1975).

References

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2 Ferenczi to Freud, 7 Nov. 1918, in Briefwechsel, 2/2: 183.

3 Boyer, John W., Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago, 1995), 425Google Scholar. On the collapse of Viennese society see Healy's, Maureen Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

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5 See Fritzsche, Peter, “Did Weimar Fail?”, Journal of Modern History 68/3 (1996), 629–53, at 637, 653.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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19 Sándor Radó, “Psychoanalytic Movement,” Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Oral History Collection (1979), Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

20 Lerner, Hysterical Men, 178.

21 Perhaps the most forceful statement of this theory of the neuroses is provided in Freud's “Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie” (1905), in GW, 5: 29–145, at 64.

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25 Ernst Simmel, “Zweites Korreferat,” in Zur Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen, 42–60.

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27 On this subject see Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse, “Trauma or Drive—Drive and Trauma: A Reading of Freud's Phylogenetic Fantasy of 1915,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 43 (1988), 3–32CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

28 See Freud, Sigmund, “Vorlesungen zur Einführung in der Psychoanalyse” (1916–17), in GW, 11: 3–484Google Scholar, at 395–9. See also Freud's introduction to the congress reports when they were assembled into a single volume in early 1919. Freud, “Einleitung zu Zur Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen” (1919), in GW, 12: 321–4.

29 Freud to Abraham, 17 Feb. 1918, in Briefe, 255.

30 Simmel, “Zweites Korreferat,” 42–3.

31 Freud to Abraham, 17 Feb. 1918, in Briefe, 255.

32 Freud to Ferenczi, 17 Feb. 1918, in Sigmund Freud–Sándor Ferenczi: Briefwechsel, 133.

33 Ibid.

34 Ferenczi, “Die Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen,” 20.

35 Lerner, Hysterical Men, 70–71, 87.

36 Ibid., 87–8, 104–5, 114.

37 See Abraham, “Erstes Korreferat,” 40; and Lerner, Hysterical Men, 175.

38 Abraham, “Erstes Korreferat,” 40.

39 Simmel, Kriegsneurosen und “Psychisches Trauma”, 23.

40 Simmel, “Zweites Korreferat,” 47.

41 Simmel, Kriegsneurosen und “Psychisches Trauma”, 23.

42 Simmel, “Zweites Korreferat,” 49, 51.

43 Ibid., 42–3.

44 [D. J. H.] “Referat,” Internationale Zeitschrift für ärtzliche Psychoanalyse 5/2 (1919), 125–9, at 128.

45 Freud, “Vorlesungen,” 302.

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47 Freud, “Über Psychotherapie,” 25.

48 Freud to Fliess, 7 Aug. 1901, in Freud, Sigmund, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Moussaieff Masson, Jeffrey (Cambridge, 1985), 446Google Scholar. Freud's contention that analysis was forced to struggle “unceasingly against resistances,” together with the argument that this exonerated his science from the accusation of having merely “talked the patients into everything,” can be found in Freud, “Vorlesungen,” 470–71. See also Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel and Brick, Douglas, “Neurotica: Freud and the Seduction Theory,” October 76 (1996), 15–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Freud discusses the “capriciousness” of the method and the “impermanence of its results” in “Vorlesungen,” 467.

50 On this subject see Forrester, John, “Contracting the Disease of Love: Authority and Freedom in the Origins of Psychoanalysis,” in Bynum, W. F., Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, eds., The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, vol. 1 (London, 1985), 255–70.Google Scholar

51 Freud, “Vorlesungen,” 469.

52 Ibid., 453, 469, original emphasis.

53 Ibid., 466, 482. See also Freud, Sigmund, “Zur Dynamik der Übertragung” (1912), in GW, 8: 364–74, at 371–2Google Scholar.

54 Freud, “Vorlesungen,” 464, 469, original emphasis.

55 Ibid., 468, 471, 473.

56 Ibid., 450.

57 The quote continues, “but when this is so we are quite conscious of our responsibility and behave with the necessary caution.” Ibid., 450, added emphasis.

58 See Freud, Sigmund, “Ratschläge für den Arzt bei der psychoanalytischen Behandlung” (1912), in GW, 8: 376–87, at 385Google Scholar.

59 Freud, “Vorlesungen,” 452.

60 Freud, Sigmund, “Studien über Hysterie: Vorwort zur ersten Auflage” (1895), in GW, 1: 75–312Google Scholar, at 77.

61 Freud, “Über Psychotherapie,” 20–24, translations modified, added emphasis. See also Freud, Sigmund, “Die Sexualität in der Ätiologie der Neurosen” (1898), in GW, 1: 491–516, at 513–14Google Scholar.

62 Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 97–100.

63 Ibid., 99.

64 On Freud's hostility to the tyranny of suggestion see Freud, Sigmund, “Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse” (1921), in GW, 13: 73–161, at 96–7Google Scholar.

65 Freud, “Studien über Hysterie,” 282.

66 Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, 40–47.

67 Ibid., 46.

68 Freud, “Über Psychotherapie,” 25.

69 See Freud, Sigmund, “Die ‘kulturelle’ Sexualmoral und die moderne Nervösität” (1908), in GW, 7: 143–67Google Scholar; Freud, “Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie” (1896), in GW, 1: 429–59, at 443, 448; and Freud, “Vorlesungen,” 365–7.

70 Freud, “Wege,” 184–6.

71 Ibid., 185–9, original emphasis.

72 Ibid., 190, added emphasis.

73 Ibid., 191–92: “. . . der Kranke soll nicht zur Ähnlichkeit mit uns sondern zur Befreiung und Vollendung seines eigenen Wesens erzogen werden.”

74 Freud, “Wege,” 192–3, translation modified.

75 Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics (Ithaca, 2011), 27Google Scholar.

76 For this earlier use of Widerstandsfähigkeit see Freud, “Vorlesungen,” 389.

77 Freud, “Wege,” 191.

78 Ibid., 193–4.

79 Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalysis, 144–5.

80 Ibid., 144.

81 Freud, “Vorlesungen,” 480.

82 Freud to Abraham, 1 Dec. 1919, in Briefe, 278.

83 Freud, Sigmund, “Gutachten über die elektrische Behandlung der Kriegsneurotiker” (1920), in GW, 18: 704–10, at 708–9Google Scholar.

84 Freud, Sigmund, “Geleitwort zu Verwahrloste Jugend” (1925), in GW, 14: 565–7Google Scholar; and Freud, “Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse” (1937), in GW, 16: 59–99, at 94.

85 Notably an “enthusiasm for Erziehung,” in Dickinson's words, extended well beyond the ranks of psychoanalysts at this moment. Ross Dickinson, Edward, The Politics of German Child Welfare: From the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, 1996), 125Google Scholar.

86 Freud to Ferenczi, 17 Nov. 1918, in Sigmund Freud–Sándor Ferenczi: Briefwechsel, 186.

87 Fallend, Karl, Wilhelm Reich in Wien: Psychoanalyse und Politik (Vienna, 1988), 37Google Scholar.

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