A Note on Bruno Bettelheim on Freud and Man's Soul

I was first introduced to Bruno Bettelheim in high-school by a wonderful English teacher who had first introduced us to Freud and Jung in order to read Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy. I read with great fascination Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, and in fact had great fun with a friend using that book to analyze various fairy tales we had both grown up hearing and reading.

It was many years later when I thought about Bettelheim again, and read Bettelheim: A Life And A Legacy by Nina Sutton. By then certain egregious details about Bettelheim, in both his Austrian and American periods, were notorious and his reputation nosedived. Sutton's book appeared not long after a lot of those revelations came to light, and attempted reasonably well to grapple with them and to judge him judiciously.

At some point, too, I read his Freud and Man's Soul. This remains a vitally important and likely overlooked book, though my circle of wonderful psychotherapists on Twitter have this week been ordering copies and discussing it, which compelled me to go back and read it again. 

When I first read it, I paid the most attention to Bettelheim's compelling and disturbing examples of the many and serious problems of translation, especially by the Strachey circle, of Freud. I am speculating--but I think on very firm ground in doing so--that these translation decisions were very largely motivated by the politics and early historiography of psychoanalysis (here my debt is chiefly to Paul Roazen's revealing books, including Freud and His Followers as well as others) as well as an overly anxious concern for its reception, and corruption, in American circles. Having seen how the Great War very nearly destroyed psychoanalysis in Mitteleuropa, and how by the 1920s analysts were already emigrating to anglophone countries, Freud (as I've briefly touched upon elsewhere) could already see that psychoanalysis was going to survive most widely in America, but that it would be captured by American physicians and to that extent domesticated and even, one might say, denuded of its more critical and far-reaching potential. 

It would also need--again to an American audience then in increasing thrall to a rising crescendo of American behaviorist psychology--to appear as "scientific" as possible, and to that end a new language had to be invented. This is captured perhaps most notably in what can only be described as the deliberate and ruthless efforts to render the German into abstract pseudo-scientific-sounding English purged of any and all references to the "soul," a point Bettelheim makes with more power than anyone else I have read. I will return to this point presently. 

The Tripartite Model:

The most immediate problems are with the invention of Id, Ego, and Superego (totally foreign to the German, as Bettelheim shows with such devastating cogency, but also to the French: le moi, le ça, le surmoi). If we keep close to Freud's often poetic German (for which, remember, he won the Goethe Prize), then his famous phrase is re-translated by Bettelheim as "Where it was, there should become I."

The problem with these English renderings, Bettelheim shows, is that the bleed out all the deeply personal and individual feelings of das Ich and das Es, introducing a level of estrangement precisely where Freud is attempting to maintain an intimate and personal understanding of the mind. 

Thus a good translation would look like this:

das Ich = the it 

das Es = the I

Über-Ich = the over-I. 

On this latter point Bettelheim says Freud's motive was to stress to us that "it is the person himself who created this controlling institution of the mind" (p.58), thus underscoring again Freud's metapsychological point that the human mind is estranged from itself. (All this is worked out prior to his last phase, the 'cultural phase,' as it were, when he writes of broader estrangement in, e.g., Civilization and its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism.)

The Oedipal Story:

I had forgotten about this part of Bettelheim's book, but on reading it anew saw what a powerful point this was. The translators took it for granted Freud's anglophone readers would understand the details of Oedipus and not need the story presented to them to grasp Freud's point about how little we understand our motives, how blind we often are both to our desires and their sometimes devastatingly destructive consequences (for ourselves and those we hold closest and love most dearly), and how those most blind are often rendered as such because of childhood traumata, all of which the original story of Oedipus make abundantly clear. Oedipus is a deeply wounded child rejected by his family of origin and cast into adoptive and abusive relationships--points we should all have great familiarity with today, making the story as timeless for us as Freud thought it was.

Instead, we get some farrago of nonsense attributed to him. As Bettelheim reminds us, that story is "boys lust after their mothers and want to kill their fathers to have her to themselves for perverse sexual ravishment." This tiresome and transparently tendentious rendering of Freud seems designed only to ensure he is ridiculed ab initio without having to read him any further.  

Freud the Libertine:

Bettelheim opens his book by taking aim directly at another wildly popular but misleading rendering of Freud: that he is some kind of libertine. (Roazen's book Meeting Freud's Family shows in charming detail what rubbish this is.) This has led--in my experience--many religious folks to scathing skepticism or outright dismissal of Freud as some kind of dangerous revolutionary. But this is to miss his point entirely! And that point is that "Know thyself" is not a blank cheque, and does not justify the total absence of (as we would say today) emotional regulation and self-restraint, especially when it comes to erotic desires and sexual practices. 

Freud the Dogmatic Interpretation Machine:

Bettelheim reminds us that problems with translation go back to Freud's most famous book, almost invariably called The Interpretation of Dreams. That title, of course, suggests, not least by using the definite article, that it has oracular powers to divine the meaning of all the productions of the unconscious mind we call dreams. But this is very wide of the mark, Bettelheim says: the German is far more tentative and far less ambitious. Better renderings supplied by Bettelheim would include:

A Search for the Meaning of Dreams (my preference)

or

An Inquiry into the Meaning of Dreams (which Bettelheim prefers).

This corresponds with my reading of Freud's works, and especially his correspondence. Though there are undoubtedly parts of him that occasionally appear as "dogmatic" (but of whom could that not be said at least some of the time? As Adam Phillips has shown, we are all prepared to become unbalanced fanatics about things we truly care about!), I am struck time and again by far more numerous and sincere examples of his hesitancy, his tentativeness, his self-aware putting forth of ideas about which he himself is not completely convinced. Let us recall here how many of his writings were not monographs but essays, and that verb's infinitive in French, of course, means to try.

To pick the most controversial example, the death drive, which appears in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (do read the Broadview translation!): I defy any reader to get through the introduction to that and not be struck repeatedly by how open Freud is to criticism. He seems to go out of his way to underscore his own hesitations, and with good reason. 

The Deletion of the Soul:

"Of all the mistranslations of Freud's phraseology, none has hampered our understanding of his humanistic views more than the elimination of his references to the soul (die Seele)" (p.70). I take this to be the most crucial point of Bettelheim's plaidoyer. On this I think him absolutely correct in ways nobody else has bothered to consider.

In my view (working as I am on a book about the reception of Freudian and psychoanalytic thought in Christian circles), this is the most unforgivable sin committed by virtually all the English translators. For it has fed into the rabid dismissal by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian believers of Freud as a "godless Jew" (to use his own, albeit wry and perhaps ironic, phrase) who, with Marx and Nietzsche (the three "masters of suspicion" famously so called by Ricoeur) is, we are endlessly told, out to "destroy Western civilization" (a phrase whose utterance automatically marks the speaker down as a fundamentally lazy and unimaginative reactionary).  

Bettelheim goes into wonderful detail about how many examples of the soul show up across Freud's writings. I would document some of these, but I have to get off to another meeting, and I want to write about this more in an essay of its own--and finally my long-suffering readers were promised "a note" on the book, not a 10,000 word treatise!

Finis (pro tem).

Some Thoughts on the Death Drive

 I was moderately heartened to see that as the centenary of the publication, in 1920, of Freud's most neglected and professionally disliked book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, approached, we saw a renewed interest in its most controversial idea: the death drive. The sputtering bewilderment proffered by psychoanalysts and others in the face of this theory finally seemed, after a century, to be giving way to some actual substantial engagement with Freud's text--albeit mostly by non-clinicians. The fact that anyone, clinician or otherwise, reacted so strongly to this theory has long been itself bewildering to me for evidence of a human propensity towards repetitive self-destruction (and the unconscious pleasure, or at least purpose served by such destruction) seems constantly on offer in consulting rooms around the world, and in so many other places.   

I do concede the point that part of the reaction may have been to Freud's suggestion that the death-drive might in fact be an actual "biological" drive. Unlike some, I think you can leave that out of Freud's theory without fatally (!) weakening its overall claims. 

The fact that discussions of Freud's notion of a death drive, which were few and far between even while Freud was alive, and were often politely ignored by much if not most of the psychoanalytic establishment for decades after his death, have taken off nearly 80 years after his death puts me in mind of Adam Phillips' argument from some time ago that the best time to re-examine Freud is precisely now, when nobody thinks much of him anymore and there are fewer and fewer professional establishments rushing to "protect" him from being critically scrutinized, or rushing to enforce some orthodox line or other:

This is certainly a good time for psychoanalysis: because it is so widely discredited, because there is no prestige, or glamour, or money in it, only those who are really interested will go into it. And now that Freud’s words are so casually dismissed, a better, more eloquent case needs to be made for the value of his writing ("After Strachey," London Review of Books vol. 29 no. 19, 4 October 2007, p.36) 

So scrutiny is returning to several parts of Freud's project, but noticeably his late-period "cultural works." Thus, earlier this year, as I discussed here in some detail, there was Benjamin Fong's fascinating new book Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism.

And before him, in 2013, in one of the most richly provocative books I've read in a long time, there was Todd McGowan's Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, which I discussed in detail in three parts when I was attempting to demonstrate that much psychoanalytic thinking should be welcomed by theologically minded Christians, especially Catholics. 

In addition to Fong and McGowan, nobody has written as much about the death drive as Todd Dufresne, whose works I have enjoyed and through whom I discovered the wonderful work of his Doktorvater, the late Paul Roazen.

Roazen's Meeting Freud's Family is a thoroughly charming book. His Freud and His Followers was a groundbreaking and controversial work which fills in very important gaps in the historiography. And I have found his Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis useful in surveying what religious and theological responses were made over the history of psychoanalysis to the 1990s.

Dufresne's work on the death drive is found first in his Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context and then, more recently and succinctly, in his introductory essay to the Broadview translation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is the Broadview translation that I require of my students when I assign this text in classes. 

To my enormous surprise and puzzlement, neither of these books shows up anywhere in one of the heftiest recent books devoted to the topic, Repetition, the Compulsion to Repeat, and the Death Drive: An Examination of Freud's Doctrines, co-authored by M.A. Holowchak (a philosopher) and Michael Lavin (a clinician) (Lexington Books, 2018, viii + 163pp.). It is a very useful, crisply written, and largely clearly argued work.

 There are several virtues to this book, including its relative brevity, and the arrangement of each chapter, which aids in reading. More broadly the book will be useful if it is received as the history it is, tracing out the trajectories of the concepts of repetition, compulsive behavior and thinking, and the death drive across the Freudian canon. As such it goes back to 1895 and Studies in Hysteria, co-authored by Freud and Breur, and then forward past Beyond the Pleasure Principle to works in the last period of Freud's life, often referred to as his "cultural" or "meta-psychological" period. Along the way it also notes such "watershed" publications as Freud's 1914 paper, "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through" as well as his essay on anxiety from 1932, by which point he seems to have moved from the very tentative and speculative writing of Beyond the Pleasure Principle 

Further virtues include the fact that this is neither an attack on Freud--though it advances important, serious, and considered criticisms of his theory--nor a glorification of him enforcing a certain "orthodox" line. It agrees with Freud in places, argues with him in others, and gives evidence in still others for where Freud may have been wrong, or subsequent research does not bear out his often highly tentative and speculative claims in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 

On the latter score, it notes problems with Freud's attempting to find phylogenetic evidence for a death drive and compulsive repetition. The question remains: can his theory be rescued if the evidence he claimed to find for it in the biological sciences does not exist, or can be explained by other theories? In answer to that question the authors diverge somewhat, and candidly acknowledge this in the conclusion. For my part, I see few problems in separating out and sustaining most of the theory from insufficient "natural" evidence, and again the authors seem--albeit somewhat uneasily--inclined to agree, especially in a clinical setting, noting that clinicians rarely take their theory pure and whole.

All that having been said, the drive to destroy, including the self, is often a repetitive one, and we are faced with the question of why that is when such a drive brings terrible anguish, suffering, and consequences to the self and to others. Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the drive for pleasure and the death drive are not always operating in mutual and exclusive opposition. As the authors admit flatly, "eros and the death drives do not function independently of each other" (85). In fact, one of Freud's key insights here and in other areas was the admixture of experiences and emotions. In this light, one can, as he himself wrote, find in destructive repetitions the "pleasure of mastery or revenge," including against childhood traumas, enemies, or frustrations.

Such an understanding also goes some way towards accounting for what is perhaps Freud's clearest clinical evidence for compulsive repetitions and self-destructive behaviors: the regularly observed fact that patients get bogged down in treatment, and come actively to undermine the very thing that may help them get better through attacks on the therapist and the therapeutic alliance. In this regard, as D.W. Winnicott put it, attacks on a therapeutic analysis may be understood to reflect the fact that for many of us, "health is much more difficult to deal with than disease." In our perverse ways, we like being sick, we like being punished, and though we do not always admit this to ourselves consciously, our unconscious repetitions-in-action bear this out.

By chapter 6, it seems the authors' patience is wearing a wee bit thin, as they sum up the "view in the secondary literature...that the death drive creates more problems than it solves" (98). I think this overstates the case and the authors themselves have not provided absolutely conclusive evidence to support this judgment. Moreover, they fear that Freud's insistence on the death drive runs the "risk of throwing his metapsychology into a state of chaos" (108).

Here is precisely the point where an engagement with Todd Dufresne, mentioned above, would have been crucial. Dufresne's argument is that BTPP is a deliberate act of sabotage on Freud's part, undermining his theories of sexuality and much else. As Dufresne puts it, "metapsychology subverts psychoanalysis," whether "playfully or otherwise," inflicting from a position within the movement a "trauma" on psychoanalysis. 

Dufresne does not elaborate much on why he thinks Freud may have done this, but I would speculate--following Adam Phillips--that this may have been done precisely to keep the analytic movement from becoming a closed, rigid ideology with enforced orthodoxies and a putative epistemological omniscience. Already there were clear signs of this (some of them demanded, or at least supplied, by Freud himself!) before the great man's death in England in 1939. Alas, they seem only to have gotten worse after his death. If psychoanalytic institutes today complain (as they have for years) of their declining fate, much of the responsibility for that is entirely their own for they have too long been hidebound places demanding loyalty to certain orthodoxies that Freud himself was more open to questioning. (One of the virtues of Roazen's scholarship is the documentation it supplies whereby Freud was often rather free-wheeling in his own clinical practice, but often much more strict in what he recommended in writing.) 

Freud was certainly aware of the dangers in this direction (and had himself on occasion contributed to it), especially if analysis remained in the hands of psychiatrists or other medical doctors alone. He was forced to address this problem in 1926 in The Question of Lay Analysis, a work I would also see (as, again, Adam Phillips has) as pushing back against analysis becoming a closed system with a closed caste of expert "professionals," especially if those medical professionals were Americans, of whom he thought very little and whom he regarded with enormous skepticism. Such a resistance reflects Freud's own compulsive concerns in some ways, for he was clearly desperate for respect and acceptance for most of his life, but late in life seems to have come to regard such desires with disdain and begun to resist them and call for others to do likewise.

In the end, Holowchak and Lavin conclude there is not a lot that can be salvaged from Freud's death drive, but they do themselves a great service by noting that many other prominent analysts, including Klein, Lacan and Laplanche, disagree with them. Laplanche, it seems to me, takes the most sensible route forward by arguing that if the theory is stripped of biological concepts, if it is seen as exclusively human, and if it is seen as operating not independently but bound up with other drives and desires, it can be rescued. This remains my own view (for whatever that's worth). I will say more about it in later reviews of some of the other books on the death drive that have been helpfully published in the last 3 or 4 years. 

Not Him Again! Biographies and Histories of Freud on his 165th Birthday

This blog began a year ago yesterday, on Freud's birthday. I had hoped to have this entry finished to post yesterday, but it has been an utterly exhausting academic year and in the press to finish grading this week and many other things, I was not able to finish this post.

But finally here--if anyone finds them useful--are some thoughts on Freud and psychoanalysis, and some book recommendations. I start with historical context, and then look at some of the biographies.

All this reading began thirty years ago when my outstanding gr. 12 English teacher gave us a crash course in Freud and Jung which, she said, we needed before reading that year's required novels from Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy. (Davies, we discovered, clutters up his novels with all kinds of especially Jungian references to archetypes and such things.) Thus began my introduction to psychodynamic thought, which I have ever after found invaluable not just in my intellectual work but also now in my clinical practice. 

I never hide my "bias" for psychoanalytic thought, but neither do I try to force it on others, either, for nobody likes a crusading busybody, least of all me. One of the best lessons it has given me is to beware of anyone who becomes a zealous convert to, and thus hidebound ideological proponent of, a particular tradition of thought and practice to the exclusion and denigration of others. 

The fact, as Paul Roazen and others have shown, that the history of psychoanalysis is not immune to such temptations in nowise undermines this gift which, at its best, it continues to offer. Roazen, in fact, is a good place to start for his books are not just very important and revealing in their own right, but also, taken together, form one of the first and, in my view, still the best broad consideration of the many historiographical issues posed by studying, e.g., Freud and his Followers, a great book I read alongside Meeting Freud's Family. Both books were able to talk, sometimes with unprecedented access and freedom, to surviving members of Freud's family, his inner circle, and some of his patients as well as analytic colleagues in that first generation around him. 

Roazen is also useful in his Freud: Political and Social Thought. Finally, in addition to the above-linked book on historiography, see also Roazen's fascinating Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis.

Historical Context:

Roazen's work can usefully be situated in a still-wider historical context, and two books do that extremely well. Both recognize that psychoanalysis did not develop in a vacuum, but instead in a particular context and moment which--as has been frequently noted--seems, in Freud's hands, to have been seen as a full-throated fin de siècle embrace of Enlightenment ideals about the triumph of "reason" over something called "religion" and other disordered human passions. 

Two very good books give this historical context and a very good critical analysis: the first is George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (Harper, 2008). He concentrates his focus on Vienna, but also moves outward as psychoanalysis expands into other centres such as Berlin and Budapest, and then London, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere.  

The second is Eli Zaretsky's Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. (Zaretsky's more recent Political Freud: A History should also be consulted.) Here as elsewhere Zaretsky is an important historian of the political left and of the depredations of capitalism. In both of his books, he is aware of and gives greater emphasis than Makari does to the socially radical consequences of psychoanalytic thought (well captured in Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 by Elizabeth Ann Danto) before it became captured by the North American medical establishment and bourgeoisie. 

More recently, we have Daniel José Gaztambide's exhilarating new book A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: from Freud to Liberation Psychology (Lexington, 2019). I interviewed him about this book at length here. I am happy to note that effective next week, his publisher is bringing out an affordable paperback edition of his book, so now you have no excuse not to order it!

Biography: 

It has become something of a commonplace that the first "authorized" biography of Freud, the three-volume effort by Ernest Jones (on whom see Brenda Maddox's fascinating and often amusing book Freud's Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis), traffics too much in hagiography. But when I found a used copy two summers ago and read it, I found that it was more critical in places than I was expecting. Jones was capable of taking more distance from his subject than many have suggested--even if, indubitably, he was also extremely anxious about and solicitous for the protection of Freud's family and reputation, which caused him to ignore or severely downplay some things. 

Peter Gay's biography, which I read as an undergraduate, has also been accused of being hagiographic. But it is still a well-researched and well-written biography by a first-rate historian (Gay held an endowed chair at Yale): Freud: A Life for Our Time. I would also recommend Gay's much shorter book Freud for Historians. 

I have read just about every book written by Adam Phillips and been deeply influenced by him. His mini-biography, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst is very good, but by design it only goes up to his fiftieth birthday in 1906.

For a full biography--and arguably the best one-volume treatment--I have referred people to Elisabeth Roudinesco Freud: In His Time and Ours. I would also recommend Roudinesco’s short but powerful book Why Psychoanalysis?

Daniel Burston on Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University

Several years ago I came across Daniel Burston at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. His biography of Karl Stern (A Forgotten Freudian) was fascinating, and since then I've profited greatly from several of Burston's books, including his study of R.D. Laing, and his work on Erich Fromm, about whom I have myself recently written a chapter for an international project based at Cambridge University in England.

Burston has a new book out, Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Postmodern University (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and having read it with great interest, it was my delight to be able to interview him about it by e-mail.

AD: Tell us about your background

DB: I  was born in Naharia, Israel in 1954, and raised and educated in Toronto, Canada. As a child, I attended Bialik Hebrew Day School, and as a teenager, went to Forest Hill High School. I dropped out of High School after 10th grade, and enrolled in a “free school” modeled loosely on A. S. Neill’s experimental school Summerhill, where I focused on English, history and philosophy. After one year, I left that anarchic environment and my parental home, making a meager living on the fringes of Toronto’s waning counterculture, offering Yoga and guitar lessons to raw beginners, working odd jobs in vegetarian restaurants, bakeries, gardening and landscaping companies, picking up new skills and new friends, including some gifted and creative people who introduced me to spiritual, political and psychotherapeutic ideas, practices, and groups of various kinds. My immersion in the counterculture lasted three years, during which time I studied psychology, philosophy, and political theory; sometimes on my own, but often in dialogue with friends who, like me, were intellectually curious but not keen on acquiring a university education.

However, at 21, I finally decided not to remain an auto-didact. I needed a more formal education. So after completing an undergraduate degree in political science at York University, I completed two Ph.D.s there; one in Social and Political Thought (1985) and another in Psychology (1989). My second doctoral thesis became the basis for my first book, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991). Shortly after the book appeared, I landed a job in the psychology department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and have taught there ever since.

AD: What led to the writing of Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University?

If I am honest, irritation and dismay--among other things, I guess. When I started my undergraduate career, the university was often described to me by my teachers as “a community of scholars” (Paul Goodman); a community in which the social sciences and humanities held a pivotal, if not a privileged place. Getting a proper education was valued as an end in itself, and not primarily as a means to other ends, i.e. launching a career, making money, etc. Yes, the old “Ivory Tower” was insular and elitist, and therefore in need of urgent reform, as Paul Goodman noted. 

But the neo-liberal version of the university, which is dominated by the STEM disciplines and corporate agendas of various kinds, is worse. The professoriate has been transformed, by and large, from a cadre of respected professionals into an army of service workers whose job is to stuff and stock students’ minds with a pre-packaged bundle of information and skills, enabling them to succeed--or at any rate, survive--on the job market. As a result, we have been debased to the status of service workers who increasingly fear the wrath or disapproval of their touchy customers, rather than the other way around, which was how things stood when I started university. 

Meanwhile, as the professoriate has been proletarianized, the Liberal Arts have declined steadily in power and prestige, and faculty have been profoundly disempowered by the rise of the administrative (managerial) caste. The ideal of shared governance, once highly prized, is often no more than a pretense.

So, at the end of the day, I have devoted my entire career to scholarship and to post-secondary education, and in the process, born witness to the emergence of many worrisome trends in contemporary university life. After reflecting on them, and how best to address them, for two decades or more, it finally dawned on me that a close look at certain trends in the history of psychoanalysis and critical theory might help illumine the state of contemporary university and intellectual life in useful and unexpected ways. Erich Fromm’s theory of authority – which has seldom received the attention it deserves – was particularly useful in this regard.

AD: I was glad to see your acknowledgement at the opening of your book of the work of the late Paul Roazen, whom I stumbled upon in 2018 and read with great profit. Tell us a bit about your own relationship to him, and why his work is important.

DB: When I was approaching 20 years of age, I stumbled across Paul Roazen's book Brother Animal. During the previous two years, I had struggled with a series of books by and about Freud, C.G.Jung, the Glover brothers, Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson, and the impressions I had gleaned of Freud’s personality from these disparate sources did not create a clear or consistent impression. Freud was doubtless one of the major thinkers of the 20th century. But Freud the man was a mystery to me, rendered all the more elusive by the dense controversies that swirled around him. 

So when I read Roazen’s gloss on the correspondence between Lou Salome and Sigmund Freud with respect to Tausk’s abortive analysis and subsequent suicide, I was completely “blown away”, as they say. Thirteen years later, while researching my 1991 book The Legacy of Erich Fromm, I discovered that Erich Fromm also greeted Roazen’s revelations with considerable shock, but in due course, praised Paul’s clarity and courage--unlike Kurt Eissler, whose odd, abrasive, and unpersuasive rebuttal, Victor Tausk’s Suicide set out to discredit Roazen entirely. Indeed, I soon discovered, Fromm recommended Brother Animal to all his students in Mexico and the United States, most of whom read the book with considerable appreciation.

Having read Brother Animal, I acquired a copy of Freud and his Followers, which was thoroughly engrossing.  And since Paul Roazen taught at York University in my own home town, I resolved to study with him. I spent my first year as an undergrad getting core requirements out of the way, but much of my second and third year centered around my course work with him. I was dazzled and occasionally confused by his richly stimulating (but poorly organized) lectures on Freud and his followers, which were leavened with lengthy reflections on Norman O. Brown and Phillip Rieff; philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Isaiah Berlin; eccentrics and free spirits like Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Thoreau, and T.E.Lawrence; poets like Rilke and Frost; and European and American political commentators like de Tocqueville, William Bullitt, Harold Lasswell, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Marcuse, among others. It was quite an education! When I started on my MA, I was fortunate enough to continue on as Paul’s teaching assistant for two years, during which time I got to know him and his work even better.

Paul’s work has been largely forgotten in the aftermath of the Freud wars, but his pioneering work exposed many of the problems and oversights of mainstream psychoanalytic historiography right into the 1990s. Like Erich Fromm, he believed that the history of psychoanalysis provided by orthodox Freudians was riddled with distortions and omissions of truly Stalinist proportions. But while he freely acknowledged Freud’s authoritarianism and personal blindspots, he never wavered in his admiration for Freud’s courage and originality as a thinker.

AD: Having gone back to him in my own work just this year, I was even gladder to see Erich Fromm getting renewed attention 40 years after his death in your first and fifth chapters. Tell us a bit about your own work on him both here and in your earlier biography of him.

DB: As it happens, I stumbled on Fromm’s work a few years before I read Roazen’s works. Indeed, I was drawn to Roazen in part because he confirmed many things that Fromm had said earlier about the biases inherent in orthodox Freudian historiography. 

I think the first book I read of Fromm’s was The Sane Society, which was published in 1955, in the early years of the Eisenhower era, but which I only read in 1969 or so. What struck me then-- and strikes me still--was Fromm’s contention that an entire society can be mad, and that “adjustment” to a deeply disordered society--one largely unaware of or indifferent to its own perversity--constitutes a “pathology of normalcy.” Of course, in this context, the term  “normalcy” denotes something more akin to a chronic, low-grade deficiency disease than it does to genuine health. Normalcy, or normality in this sense reduces internal suffering and ongoing tension or friction with one’s environment to a tolerable minimum, but only at the expense of one’s development as an honest, intact and responsive human being. 

As an alternative to this kind of socially patterned defect, Fromm advocated what Martin Luther King Jr. later called “creative maladjustment.” Another thing that attracted me to Fromm’s work was the fact that he cared deeply about spiritual values, and despite his radicalism, demonstrated a deep familiarity with and respect for various (Eastern and Western) religious and contemplative traditions.

As I studied Fromm’s work more closely, it started to dawn on me that he had been unjustly dismissed by many fashionable intellectuals in the late 60s, 70s and 80s as a lightweight, a popularizer or as little more than a self-help guru. Moreover, the secondary literature on Fromm – in psychology textbooks and histories of psychoanalysis – is riddled with errors, oversimplifications, and omissions. That being so, I felt it was time to rehabilitate him, and to situate his work in the history of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School.

AD: In your fifth chapter Fromm appears again along with Reich, Adorno and others on authoritarian personalities, one of whose hallmarks is that they “may become attached or become passionately attracted to others. But they cannot genuinely love other human beings” (p.97). The study of authoritarianism began, as you note, in Europe in the interwar period, but has acquired more recent relevance in the US, Israel, and elsewhere in the last few years. Tell us about the forms of authoritarianism you analyze today—both of the left-wing and right-wing types.

DB: The literature on “the authoritarian personality” is now so vast that I find it difficult to summarize my own thoughts and conclusions succinctly. Suffice it to say that, as a rule, the main difference between Right- and Left-Wing authoritarians resides in the ideologies they embrace or espouse, not in their modus operandi once they are installed in power. In their efforts to win the hearts and minds of the populace, Right-wing authoritarians typically extol law and order, and promise a return to the status quo ante, or the “good old days,” which are heavily idealized, and  exist only in the collective imaginary. Their propaganda taps into people’s fear of change and nostalgia for the past, and they preach the pursuit of racial or religious “purity.” 

By contrast, Left-wing authoritarians promise their followers liberation and equality, the removal of the status quo and its replacement with a new egalitarian social order, only to renege on those promises later on. Their propaganda doesn’t dwell on the past, or indulge in nostalgia. Instead, they typically tap into people’s anger about current conditions and their hopes for a brighter future. And in theory, at least, they tend to eschew religious or racial purity in favor of ideological purity or “political correctness”, although many Left-wing authoritarians in the West have an affinity – or at the very least, a high degree of tolerance for – Islamic fundamentalism, even though they mistrust and revile Christian fundamentalists.

What authoritarians of the left and right both share in common, despite their different ideologies and rhetorical styles, is an attraction towards authoritarian strongmen who place themselves above (or outside) the law and show contempt for weakness, a strong attraction to violence as a means to solve (real or imaginary) social problems, and an eagerness to resort to secrecy, lies and deception to achieve their political ends, which have to do, above all, with seizing and holding onto power. They also have a pronounced tendency to dichotomous, “black and white” thinking, an intolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and to projection, i.e. to seeing authoritarian tendencies on the other side of the political spectrum, but minimizing or disavowing the same tendencies on their own side. All of these traits are in keeping with what Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm first described as the “sadomasochistic” or “authoritarian” character.

AD: Your chapter on Jordan Peterson (whose book I reviewed here) opens by discussing some aspects of the decline of the liberal arts in the university today, noting where Peterson is not entirely incorrect in blaming “post-modernism”, but that such a critique overlooks “cultural and market forces” and “the rather obvious fact that at the end of the day, most people care very little about the pursuit of truth” (136). You sift the contents of Peterson’s claims, and their reactions, and the debates they engendered, with great care before concluding that “Peterson [is] an enabler for Trump’s authoritarian agenda” (p.154). Tell us a bit more what you mean by that.

JB: Look, Jordan Peterson is a complicated man. I vividly remember an online interview he did with a crusty, conservative columnist in Canada named Rex Murphy several years ago. In this interview, Peterson was remarkably honest and vulnerable, the exact opposite of the aloof, steely, hyper-masculine presence he usually adopts in public fora. I remember thinking then that despite our political differences and all the bad press he’s received to date, this guy really means well, that he wants to make the world a better place. In that moment, I wanted to extend him the benefit of the doubt, even though I disagree profoundly with his one-sided analysis of our social ills and with the solutions that he proposes to the current crisis in the Liberal Arts. It struck me then that his basic intentions are good, nonetheless.

Unfortunately, however, Peterson seldom extends the benefit of the doubt to his liberal and left wing critics, whom he swiftly converts from potential partners in dialogue into implacable and unreasoning adversaries because of his penchant for polarizing people. You either love Peterson, or you hate him, as a rule. There is no middle ground. Those like myself, who are prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, but dare to criticize his manner or ideas, are swiftly dismissed by his ardent supporters and his ferocious detractors.

That said, as a somewhat reluctant Canadian ex-pat, and as a (Jewish) resident of Pittsburgh for many years now, I was profoundly disappointed by Peterson’s public remarks about Trump after the Tree of Life massacre on Oct 27, 2017. Don’t get me wrong. Peterson is not an anti-Semite. 

However, his efforts to normalize the Trump Presidency, and to depict Trump as someone who is merely disagreeable and bombastic, rather than an authoritarian menace to democracy, seemed extremely blinkered, if not disingenuous, especially in light of all that has transpired since. Now that principled conservatives are slowly finding their backbones, and many are coming out publicly in favor of Joe Biden for president in November, 2020, one wonders why Peterson did not raise the alarm earlier, or say something strongly supportive of their efforts now. In dire situations, like the crisis facing America today, silence is complicity. What purpose does it serve, except to maintain a cozy relationship with Trump supporters?

AD: Your last chapter on anti-psychiatry was fascinating for several reasons, including the role played in it by R.D. Laing, on whom you published two earlier books. I always thought it was very much a fringe movement, but you open by noting that the “number of websites devoted to anti-psychiatry is utterly mind-boggling” (p.158). However, as you go on to show, the term is a bit of an omnium gatherum for diverse if not contradictory agendas. Tell us about how you understand anti-psychiatry and what may be valuable in parts of it today, including the critique of Big Pharma, and the still-relevant insights of Laing into alienation and estrangement.

DB: Like Erich Fromm, R.D. Laing was firmly convinced that psychological adjustment to an insane society was a symptom of alienation or self-estrangement; a form of pseudo-sanity, not the genuine article. Unlike Fromm, who leaned heavily on Marx, Freud, and classical sociology, Laing was schooled in existential psychiatry, and drew inspiration from a wide range of existential and phenomenological thinkers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and religious existentialists like Buber, Berdyaev, Marcel, Tillich, etc. 

Writing in the 1960s, Laing felt that the medical-model or classical psychiatric approach to schizophrenia is inadequate or misleading in many cases, and that the evidence on behalf of the medical model was weak and flawed at best. He believed that everyone, without exception, had the potential to go mad, regardless of their neurological integrity (or lack thereof), and invited his readers to consider madness as an existential crisis brought on by interpersonal defenses, dilemmas and stratagems that landed mental patients in a “check mate” position; one that the patient does not understand, cannot tolerate and yet is powerless to change.

However, despite his reputation to the contrary, Laing was not really an “anti-psychiatrist”, if by that we mean someone who called for the abolition of psychiatry as such. However, he did agree with the anti-psychiatric thesis that most psychiatric interventions into the lives of profoundly distressed and disoriented people entail a massive reification of the person, and an invalidation of their personal experience, and that psychiatric power is often wielded for the benefit of the powerful, not the powerless. And with rare exceptions, he was opposed to involuntary hospitalization and coercive medical treatments, i.e. involuntary drugging, electroshock, lobotomy, etc.

The anti-psychiatry movement took root in the mid-to-late 1960s, when involuntary commitment and old fashioned state-run mental hospitals were still prevalent. Places like these warehoused large numbers of people deemed to be deviant and/or dangerous to themselves and others, and deprived them of their basic civil rights. In those days, psychiatric power was exercised chiefly over in-patient populations like these, which were much larger than they are today. Moreover, the average length of stay in such places was much longer than it is now. All this changed with de-institutionalization, and the de-commissioning of state-run mental hospitals, which left many thousands of formerly hospitalized mental patients to fend for themselves on the streets. The resulting spike in homelessness, substance abuse and petty crime in the USA cost tax-payers at least as much as maintaining the old mental hospital system did. And Laing deplored this state of affairs, because it left former patients profoundly vulnerable, too.

However, the de-commissioning of state-run mental hospitals meant that the locus of psychiatric power shifted gradually from the steadily decreasing in-patient population to the burgeoning out-patient population. Why? Because, now people with diagnoses of severe mental disorders – schizophrenia, manic depression, refractory unipolar depression, etc. – were treated on an out-patient basis. If they were committed involuntarily, their stay in hospital would be curtailed to 2 weeks to 2 months, at most. This is when Big Pharma stepped in. As the number of people – including adolescents and children--diagnosed with severe mental disorders started to climb, so did the number of prescriptions they received. Even people who suffered symptoms of mild to moderate severity were now routinely medicated, and their access to long term, insight oriented psychotherapy curtailed by insurance companies. This was – and to this day, remains – a financial bonanza for Big Pharma, despite the fact that the drugs it produces seldom, if ever, cure the underlying disorder, and sometimes do not even control the patient’s symptoms effectively. Alternatively, their drugs may control the symptoms effectively for a time, but the so called “side effects” and neuro-toxicity that results from extended use are very injurious to people’s health in the medium to long term.

So, to summarize, the anti-psychiatry movement of yore emerged in response to conditions and institutions that no longer exist. Since their collapse, through its collusion with Big Pharma, psychiatry has extended its power immeasurably into the “out-patient” population since the de-institutionalization movement of the 1980s. And while the anti-psychiatrists of the 1960s faulted psychiatry for adhering rigidly to the medical model, and refusing to explore or acknowledge alternative ways of understanding madness, contemporary critics of psychiatry tend to focus on the utterly-mind boggling debasement of the medical model, when it is routinely subverted to serve corporate interests in defiance of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm”. Fortunately, integrative and holistic medicine have recently generated many useful alternative strategies to mitigate and sometimes cure serious psychiatric conditions which do not require psychiatric medication. Indeed, in many instances, the first step in these treatment protocols is to wean patients off of the psychiatric meds they’ve become accustomed (or addicted to), sometimes for decades.

I am not an anti-psychiatrist. But I do think that the psychiatric profession is urgently in need of reform, and that both the earlier and current critiques of psychiatry have considerable merit. While the former is obviously less applicable to contemporary conditions, it still has much to teach us.

AD: As we come to the end of your book, it seems to me every chapter is an attempt to examine the question with which you began: “What happens when people lose all trust in authority” (p.3)? In place of different modes of rational authority, you write, we often instead get identity politics, conspiracy theories, and “irrational doubt.” And nobody, if I understand your argument aright, is free from the temptation of irrational authority or even outright authoritarianism—including not just politicians but also Freud himself and his defenders, or later Lacan, Peterson, or others in the academy, psychiatry, and elsewhere. Is that a fair assessment of what you were trying to do in the book?

DB: Well, not quite. Granted, mistrust of authority – of all kinds, and in all domains of expertise--is extremely prevalent nowadays. And perhaps no one is completely immune from the blandishments of power and irrational authority. But some people genuinely prefer to function and conduct their daily lives in an open and democratic fashion, and become profoundly distressed when the foundations of democracy are eroding before their eyes. But even democracies cannot function without relying (to some extent) on authority in the secular, scientific and spiritual domains. To imagine that we could do this is merely utopian nonsense. That is why it is important to emphasize that the way in which authority is wielded in these different domains of competence has a profound impact on how much the general population is able to trust those we deem to be experts, or to whom we entrust decision making powers.

The mode of authority most conducive to maintaining democratic norms and institutions is rational authority, because it promotes competence and mutual respect, values transparency and honesty, and does not stifle the critical faculties or the conscience of those who are subject to it in the course of their growth and training. Moreover, it strives to promote equality in the fullness of time by bringing those subject to it up the level of the person in authority, rather than the populist approach of leveling things by embracing the lowest common denominator. That being so, we should strive, as much as possible, to identify and root out irrational (and anonymous) authority and to encourage and augment rational authority whenever and wherever we can. This will never restore trust in authority completely, because a healthy dose of skepticism is consistent with an intact critical faculty, and because people in power can mask the exercise of irrational authority behind the rhetoric of freedom and emancipation quite easily.

AD: Having finished Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University, what are you at work on now?

I am currently researching a book on the personal and cultural sources of anti-Semitism in the life and work of C.G. Jung and his inner circle, and their relevance to trends in contemporary Jungian (and post-Jungian) thought.

The Gift of Yalom (I)

My clinical supervisor very off-handedly mentioned "Yalom" in class one day last year and everyone seemed to know what/who that was. I had no clue. I half-figured it was one of those myriad acronyms for some gimmicky "technique" modern psychology loves, if only for purposes of trade-marking and marketing and thus money-making.  

I have been happily rectifying my ignorance since then by reading several of Irvin Yalom's books, starting with his landmark work, which I used for a project in a group therapy class: The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, which is fascinating and so much better written than any textbook I've read so far in the area. I expect this will be the kind of book I shall return to often in the coming years. 

Next up I ordered The Gift of Therapy. It, too, will reward re-reading over the years. It is, in some respects, almost a collection of aphorisms, though most chapters are a little longer than the typical aphorism, and in that regard the subtitle is apt: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients. 

The book's 85 chapters are thus seen as something longer than an aphorism but shorter than a really long letter: they are in fact short letters, some of them less than a page, and the longest of them just over six pages. Yalom writes with a light and often charming touch, so these are an easy read. 

That is not to say they are flippant in any way. Some of these letters strike me as such obvious counsel that they do not need saying (e.g., ch. 64, "Never be Sexual with Patients"), but clearly they do need saying as sexual abuse by clinicians is by no means unknown even today. One of the startling and disgusting experiences of my undergraduate days was finding out that a professor, whom I really liked, who had taught a class on personality theories, which was one of my favourite classes, was later tried by the College of Psychologists of Ontario and had his license stripped after on-going sexual relationships with several patients, to whom he was later ordered by the courts to pay extensive damages. 

Part of the motivation for writing this book, Yalom says in the introduction, is that "our field is in such crisis," in large part because (at least in America under its horrid and rapacious health insurance industry) of the pressure that all therapy be "brief, superficial, and insubstantial." Such pressures (ongoing in 2020, as this letter from Division 39 of the APA shows) mean that mental healthcare today is running the risk of being "deformed by economic pressures and impoverished by radically abbreviated training programs" (xv). It is for those who also want to resist these pressures, and learn how to offer a form of therapy that is deeper, longer, and open to exploring existential issues (about which Yalom has written elsewhere several times) that Yalom has written The Gift of Therapy. 

Part of what immediately endeared Yalom to me is that he makes it plain that his enemies are also mine: he is explicitly "against sectarianism" and in favour of "therapeutic pluralism in which effective interventions are drawn from several different therapy approaches" (xv). Some of his friends are also mine, and so I happily note his positive references to such existentialists as Paul Tillich and others, including Nietzsche. 

Even more delightful was to encounter a name I have not seen, nor read, since high-school: Rainer Maria Rilke, whose Letters to a Young Poet I read at a crucial time and have stayed with me all these years later as an example of what Christopher Bollas (in his first and, to my mind, still his best book, The Shadow of the Object) would recognize as a largely unconscious "transformational object." Rilke shows up again at the end of ch.3, where Yalom quotes his wise counsel: "Have patience with everything unresolved and try to love the questions themselves" to which Yalom himself adds "try to love the questioners as well."

Yalom's The Gift of Therapy exhibits an openness to the questions and insights from giants of the near-past without idolizing them: names like Karen Horney (who graces the first page of ch.1), Winnicott, Ferenczi, Fromm, Erikson, and of course Freud are cited here with critical appreciation. Given its nature ("this volume is in no way meant to be a systematic manual") it does not of course lend itself to a standard review, so instead I shall simply mosey around the book highlighting things that stand out. (This will be an on-going series of posts.)

Chapter 3 opens with an observation Yalom draws from the French novelist André Malraux about one of his characters: "there is no such thing as a grown-up person." That immediately put me in mind of Adam Phillips, the other person I have spent the last four years reading very closely, and who will feature on this blog regularly. He says in one of his many books that "we remain children for a very long time." In this light I am also minded to think of an observation I heard (perhaps in the Ken Burns' PBS series The Roosevelts?) someone make about Teddy Roosevelt to the effect that "you have to understand the president is, at heart, just a six-year-old boy." It's a pity too many of us would regard that as a fault or failing!

In ch.4 and elsewhere, Yalom offers a simple question I have started using with people and that is to ask them some version of this: As you are driving home today/leaving from here, what are you telling yourself about this conversation? What are you taking away? This, as he says later, is a useful window to help him see that he and the patient do not always "have the same experience during the hour." 

Ch. 5 offers one pithy bit of advice: "Don't be stingy" in offering positive feedback to patients. Too many today, Yalom fears, may in fact be stingy, and I would wonder if some of this does not go back to Freud's rule of "abstinence" in that the therapist was to leave the patient as undisturbed as possible by refusing to offer advice or feedback. But as Paul Roazen has demonstrated, Freud talking to fellow therapists comes across as strict and forbidding, but Freud's own clinical practice was often much more relaxed about the rules he laid down (and sometimes, as the correspondence with Ferenczi makes clear, this was not always to the good!). 

Ch. 7 deftly deals with statements from patients such as "you must be bored of me by now" by turning them around: "Is there a question in there for me? "

Ch.8 (without quoting her) sounds very similar to advice the great Nina Coltart (about whom I have a post coming) offers in allowing patients to matter to therapists, and not to be afraid to acknowledge that. This must be nicely judged, however, so that things do not get too awry and patients matter too much or the counter-transference gets out of hand. But to be totally unmoved, sitting in lofty and aloof silence, will help nobody.

Several times throughout the book Yalom says that therapists should just acknowledge a cock-up and deal with it openly: "I'm sorry I made a mistake" will help things get back on track more swiftly and successfully than pretending nothing happened.

Several times he also uses words like "spontaneous," "dynamic," and "ever-evolving" to describe how therapy should proceed, and in this way pushes back against the increasing tendency towards manualized, standardized "therapy."

Yalom's Ch.12, with which I shall end for now, contains what I regard as the central and most important insight and counsel in the entire book, captured by its title: "Engage in personal therapy." I am frankly amazed that plenty of people can enter the therapeutic vocation (as Coltart rightly calls it) without having undergone, and regularly undergoing, their own therapy. As I have argued elsewhere recently, a personal psychoanalysis has been the most transformational experience of my life and I remain profoundly grateful.