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).

A Note on Four Psychoanalytical Biographies

I have been a tireless reader of biographies at least as far back as the seventh grade. Since the summer began, I've had a chance to read four biographical studies, none exhaustive, and each in most cases covering terrain I was at least moderately familiar with. But they were enjoyable nonetheless, each in their own way, and each also filled in some gaps in a welcome way, so I thought I'd offer a few notes on each in case others might wonder about the wisdom of picking any of these up.

I begin with Joel Kanter, ed., Face to Face with Children: The Life and Work of Clare Winnicott. I should confess two biases at the outset: first, anything with the word "Winnicott" in the title is invariably going to attract my attention. Second, Joel Kanter is one of the conveners of an international study group on psychosis that it has been my very great privilege and delight to be part of.

That said, this book fills a huge lacuna. Clare Winnicott's husband Donald Woods is of course world renowned. But her own life as a clinical social worker and writer has been largely left in his shadow, which is completely unjustifiable given the scope of her contributions in their own right--to say nothing of the huge and countless ways she helped her husband achieve so much. 

Kanter has assembled a worthy cast of people to write about her works, and has reprinted several of them which were originally published decades ago in obscure places. But the crowning glory of this book is the 90-page biography he writes at the outset, which is superb. Buy and read the book if only for that reason. 

I have been very interested in reading more of Sandor Ferenczi for some time, and recently stumbled across Sandor Ferenczi: Reconsidering Active Intervention by Martin Stanton. It is a unique book: in fact I would call it a prolegomenon to a proper scholarly biography. That diminishes Stanton's labours not a whit, and in fact he himself more than once says he is merely trying to lay out the parameters of what a full biography of Ferenczi needs to wrestle with. 

There are at least two significant gifts offered by this book. First, Stanton has performed a very great task by merely assembling a chronology of the Hungarian analyst's life, farcing into each entry not just significant events in Ferenczi's own life, but also significant developments in the wider psychoanalytical movement in the opening decades of the last century. Thus we see when and where Freud and Ferenczi first meet, and Jung and Ferenczi, and so on.

Second, he has put together thematically named chapters that introduce the reader to some of the concepts and practices unique to Ferenczi, with liberal quotations of his writings as well as reactions, where known, to his writings from Freud and Jones, Jung and Klein, and others.

Next up is Gérard Bléandonu's Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works. It is an odd book in some ways, starting with the fact that a French psychiatrist wrote the first biography of an English psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, which was then translated from French. As someone who, many years ago, worked in scholarly translation of works between French and English (dealing, at the time, with Canadian governmental policy on HIV/AIDS), I know what a vastly time-consuming and painstaking process it is. I also learned that it's generally inadvisable to translate from translations. 

Nevertheless, in a way not entirely dissimilar to the Ferenczi study noted above, Gérard Bléandonu has written a life that spends most of its time discussing Bion's texts. I would have welcomed more integration of the theoretical chapters with Bion's life, which seems very much confined to the introduction to the book. By the end of the book one does not feel that one has penetrated very far at all beneath the surface of Bion's life, which is perhaps how he wanted it. 

So I would not consider this the definitive study of Bion by any means, and once again wonder: is anyone working on such a biography? If I had time and money I'd gladly fly to England (and anywhere else!) to luxuriate in archives and private collections of letters and whatever else I could lay my hands on in order to write about Bion. (For some unanalyzed reason, I have long wanted to write a biography. I thought at one time I might do the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, but a new study of his life has just been published--once more first in French!) 

Finally we come to Brett Kahr, The Legacy of Winnicott: Essays on Infant and Child Mental Health. I picked this up not only because I respect Kahr and have enjoyed previous works of his, but for two other reasons at least: the inclusion of an interview with Winnicott conducted by no less a figure than Paul Roazen; and then a really compelling essay by Susie Orbach, "The False Self and the False Body." 

If you do not know Roazen's work, then you should. He bids fair, more than a decade after his death, to retain (to my mind at least) the post of doyen of historiographers of psychoanalysis, at least in the anglophone world. Several of his books have been utterly fascinating, not least his Freud and His Followers as well as Meeting Freud's Family. 

It was Roazen, if I recall correctly, who back in the 1960s discovered and published the then hugely scandalous fact that Freud had analyzed his own daughter Anna, which by that point almost everyone was at pains to conceal, not least since she didn't die until 1982. On the topic of Anna, I've read two biographies: the one by Robert Coles (which is workmanlike but all of his biographies tend to feel just a shade too beige in some ways) and the more comprehensive one by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, in an updated second edition from 2008.

I have known of Orbach's work for a while, but not read much. Still her essay in this collection is extremely valuable for its steely eyed critique of Winnicott's ideas of the true and false self. Orbach argues that too much of the reception and use of these ideas by and after Winnicott posit some kind of chasm (bad!) between them, on the one hand, or some kind of magical integration on the other (good!). But, she argues convincingly, we cannot and must not allow them to be seen as thus divided because in reality aspects of the true and false selves are always mixed up with each other. The therapeutic task thus becomes not a perfectionistic one (how very unWinnicottian!) whereby we totally separate or totally integrate the two, but rather an asking of the question: how ought they to be together, and what can be realistically disentangled and perhaps changed, and what cannot? 

In sum, each of these books was interesting, though none, admittedly, was as moving and fascinating as the last major biography I read, Gail Hornstein's lovely study of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (about which a few brief comments here though I really should go back and write more about her). 

Next up: I will likely shift away from psychoanalytical biographies for a bit as I've just ordered Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. I was tempted to do so after this highly entertaining (can one say that?) interview with the author here.