I find that one of the greatest bonds between us is our feeling for science and for what science really means. I hardly think that Freud always had a completely clear grasp of that.
Ernest Jones to Marie Bonaparte, 2 July 19541
Why do the current controversies revolve around the history of psychoanalysis and the manner in which it has been written? Why such vehemence on both sides, why a ‘war’? After all, the philosoph- ical, epistemological and political critiques of psychoanalysis never aroused such passion. Psychoanalysis was reproached by Karl Jaspers for mixing up hermeneutic understanding (Verstehen) and the explanation (Erklären) of the natural sciences, by Jean-Paul Sartre for confounding repression and ‘bad faith’, by Ludwig Wittgenstein for confusing causes and reasons, by Karl Popper for avoiding all scientific falsification, by Adolf Grünbaum for proposing an episte- mically inconsistent clinical validation and by Michel Foucault for producing sexuality under the cover of unmasking it. None of this affected psychoanalysts. Even the provocations and magnificent rhetor- ical violence of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus did not lead them to lose their composure. On the contrary, it is as if advocates of psychoanalysis were not perturbed by these debates because they
legitimate their discipline, letting the adherents invariably escape unharmed, entrenched in the private sphere of the psychoanalytic clinic. The more Freud is debated, it is often said, the more it confirms his significance.
Why then such sudden susceptibility concerning historical details, some of which on first sight appear to be quite trivial? Why is it so important for psychoanalysts to maintain the version of events given by Freud and his authorised biographers? Is it simply a question of a dispute between experts, a controversy between historians such as we often see? Not in this case, because the dispute here is not simply one between factions of historians, or of ways of interpreting the historical record. More deeply, it pits historians against a radically dehistori- cised version of psychoanalysis, disguised as a ‘history of psychoanaly- sis’. From this perspective, similarities abound between the ‘Freud wars’ and the ‘science wars’, which rage elsewhere between historians, sociologists and anthropologists of science on the one side and sci- entistic ideologues on the other. In both cases, what is at stake is the historicisation, and correspondingly the relativisation, of ‘facts’, ‘discoveries’ and ‘truths’ ordinarily presented as atemporal and uni- versal and shielded from the variations and contingencies of history (it is of little importance here whether psychoanalysis styles itself as a science or not, as it still nevertheless presents itself as a universal theory, a general ontology valid for all). These debates are not external to the science or the theory, because they bear on this demarcation itself: can one or should one separate the science or the theory from its history? To take up the famous Mertonian distinction, can one separate what is ‘internal’ from what is ‘ex- ternal’?2 Can one, as Reichenbach would have it, trace a limit
between the context of discovery (the anecdotal account of the emergence of concepts) and the context of justification (the prop- erly scientific work of proof)? It is the refusal of these demarcations by the new historians of science and of psychoanalysis which has generated such scandal, because it puts into question the
pretensions of this or that discipline to scientificity and to theoret- ical hegemony.
However, the comparison between the ‘Freud wars’ and the ‘science wars’ stops right here. Even if some scientists feel attacked in their most intimate convictions by the historicisation of science practised by ‘science studies’, those who are really threatened by this are rare. On the contrary, many scientists don’t mind opening their notebooks and laboratories to historians and anthropologists when asked, and some do not hesitate to recognise how they are portrayed, even if they draw different conclusions from those of their observers.3 This is a sign that they feel themselves sufficiently strong to bear the test of historical and anthropological inquiry. The same is not the case for psychoanalysis, where intrusions of historians into the Freudian ‘laboratory’ are generally perceived as unacceptable trans- gressions which should be denounced. For a discipline concerned with the past, psychoanalysis is strangely allergic to its own history, and for good reason: for it is precisely here that it is vulnerable.
Isabelle Stengers: [Psychoanalytic circles] have tried – with great success up to now – to occupy the domain of the present indefinitely and stop historians from having access to documents and archives. Everything takes place as if what happened to Freud one hundred years ago is still so confidential and private that it justifies sequestering archives, censoring correspondences and obstructing the pursuits of historians doing their work. It is to be believed that the secrets of psychoanalysis are weightier than those of diplomacy or international history. One knows today that Churchill decided to let Coventry be bombed rather than reveal to the Germans that the British had deciphered their code. But one can still not have access to this or that correspondence with Freud which could inform us about this or that detail of his private life! It seems that there is something there that is too explosive for one to dream of divulging. This is perfectly absurd. In terms of what concerns me, I see here the sign that psychoanalysis has failed to adopt the normal regime of scientific production. In contrast to the sciences, psychoanalysis is vulnerable to its past.4
‘Psychoanalysis is my creation’
The exact sense of this vulnerability remains to be understood. Is it simply a question of ‘all too human’ secrets of the founder’s biography, which would simply be factors external to the theory? Freud, as his biographers invariably note, did not like biographers and did every- thing to make their task more difficult.5At least on two instances, in
1885and in 1907, he destroyed most of his notes, intimate diaries and personal papers, veritable holocausts in which correspondences as precious for the comprehension of the origins of psychoanalysis as those with Bernheim, Breuer, Fliess, August Forel, Havelock Ellis and Leopold Löwenfeld probably perished. The same thing happened in 19386 and again in 1939,7 and one knows that he would have
destroyed his letters to Wilhelm Fliess were it not for the refusal of Marie Bonaparte, who had acquired this correspondence on the express condition that he could not regain possession of them.
Freud to Marie Bonaparte, 3 January 1937: The matter of the correspondence with Fliess has affected me deeply . . . Our cor- respondence was the most intimate you can imagine. It would have been highly embarrassing to have it fall into the hands of strangers . . . I do not want any of them to become known to the so-called posterity.8
Diary of Marie Bonaparte, entry of 24 November 1937: But when later, at the end of February or the beginning of March 1937, I saw [Freud] in Vienna and he told me he wanted the letters to be burned, I refused. . . One day he told me: ‘I hope to convince you to destroy them.’9
Freud to Martha Bernays, 28 April 1885: One intention as a matter of fact I have almost finished carrying out, an intention which a number of as yet unborn and unfortunate people will one day resent. Since you won’t guess what kind of people I am referring to, I will tell you at once: they are my biographers. I have destroyed all my notes of the past fourteen years, as well as letters, scientific excerpts, and the manuscripts of my papers. . . As for the biographers, let them worry, we
have no desire to make it too easy for them. Each of them will be right in his opinion of ‘The Development of the Hero’, and I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray.10
Freud to his ‘unsolicited biographer’11 Fritz Wittels, 18 December
1923: Needless to say, I would never have desired or promoted such a book [Wittels (1924)]. It seems to me that the world has no claim on my person and that it will learn nothing from me so long as my case (for manifold reasons) cannot be made fully transparent.12
Fair enough, one could say. No one likes anyone rummaging around in their private life. Who would criticise Freud for wanting to resist the indiscrete curiosity of biographers and historians? With Freud, however, this reserve (this censure) was combined with a very active and highly public autobiographical writing, which, moreover, he merged with the presentation of the psychoanalytic theory itself. From this perspective, one cannot reduce Freud’s manipulation of his biography to a simple private affair, without consequence for psycho- analysis. The presentation of the theory was intimately bound to the the founder’s self-presentation, and what affects one inevitably affects the other.
Freud: History. – The best way of understanding psycho-analysis is still by tracing its origin and development.13
It was very early, from his first synoptic presentation of psychoanal- ysis, the ‘Five lectures on psychoanalysis’ presented at the Clark conference in 1909, that Freud started to present his doctrine in the form of an autobiographical narrative. Even if the first sentence attributed the paternity of psychoanalysis to Josef Breuer, the rest of the text retraced Freud’s own evolution, from the abandonment of cathartic hypnosis up to the application of psychoanalysis to the problem of artistic creation, passing by the successive discoveries of repression, the meaning of dreams and infantile sexuality. This mode of autobiographical exposition was only accentuated in his ‘History of the psychoanalytic movement’ and the ‘Short account of
psychoanalysis’, and culminated in his ‘Autobiographical study’, which had been requested by L. R. Grote for the fourth volume of his Die Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen [Contemporary Medicine in Autobiography].
Freud: I have already more than once published papers upon the same line as the present one, papers which, from the nature of the subject, have dealt more with personal considerations than is usual or than would otherwise have been necessary. . . Since I must not contradict myself and since I have no wish to repeat myself exactly, I must endeavour to construct a narrative in which subjective and objective attitudes, bio- graphical and historical interests, are combined in a new proportion.14 But why, we may ask, does ‘the nature of the subject’ require such an emphasis on ‘personal considerations’? We have become so used to this autobiographical presentation of psychoanalysis that we no lon- ger notice the oddness of this statement. After all, why should there be any intrinsic link between psychoanalysis and Freud’s person?
It is not so much the autobiographical form as such which is a problem, for Freud was not the first pioneer of psychology and of psychotherapy to have adopted it – one thinks of the memoirs of Wundt, Stanley Hall, August Forel, Emil Kraepelin, Albert Moll, Havelock Ellis and later Jung.15 There was also, from the 1930s, a systematic collection of autobiographical accounts from the principal figures in psychology, such as Pierre Janet, William McDougall, James Mark Baldwin, J. B. Watson, William Stern, Edouard Claparède, Jean Piaget and Kurt Goldstein. One need only peruse the volumes of this monumental History of Psychology in Autobiography,16 initially pub- lished under the editorship of Carl Murchison, to see that a number of the autobiographies of Freud’s contemporaries were no less ‘subjec- tive’, tendentious and lacunary than his.17That of Watson in partic-
ular cedes nothing to Freud in terms of aggressive invective.
John Broadus Watson: The War played havoc with my work. . . I returned to Washington and was transferred to the Aviation Medical
Corps to work under Colonel Crabtree on oxygen deprivation. Did some work of an unsatisfactory nature, got into trouble because my own Corps asked me to write them, directly and not through military channels, what I thought of the famous ‘Rotation Test.’ I was nearly court-martialed for doing so. I was returned by Colonel Crabtree to Aviation with the notation ‘that he be not allowed to serve his country in his scientific capacity, but he be sent to the line’; in other words, the wish was implied that I be killed speedily. . . The whole army experi- ence was a nightmare to me. Never have I seen such incompetence, such extravagance, such a group of overbearing, inferior men. Talk of putting a Negro in uniform!18
However, none of Freud’s contemporaries appear to have linked their theories to their own person, and for a good reason: that would have meant putting into doubt the objectivity of the theory, in making it an expression of the theorist’s subjectivity.19By contrast, Freud never
ceased to affirm the objective and subjective, universal and local character of psychoanalytic theory.
Freud: No one need be surprised at the subjective character of the contribution I propose to make here to the history of the psycho- analytic movement, nor need anyone wonder at the part I play in it. For psycho-analysis is my creation . . . I consider myself justified in maintaining that even to-day no one can know better than I do what psycho-analysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind, and precisely what should be called psycho-analysis and what would better be described by some other name.20
Freud, regarding Jung and the Zurich school: They are unwilling to give up their connection with psycho-analysis, as whose representa- tives they became known to the world, and prefer to give it out that psycho-analysis has changed. At the Munich Congress I found it necessary to clear up this confusion, and I did so by declaring that I did not recognize the innovations of the Swiss as legitimate continu- ations and further developments of the psycho-analysis that originated with me.21
Here, Freud inscribes psychoanalysis within a patrilineal descent: what is not of his lineage, what does not descend directly from him,
the father of psychoanalysis, should not bear the name of psycho- analysis. But if psychoanalysis is Freudian, this should by no means be understood in the manner in which one speaks of ‘Newtonian’ physics or ‘Pasteurian’ medicine. Whatever the historical role of Newton or Pasteur in the theories which bear their name, their subjectivity and personality do not play a role in the theories them- selves or the debates and controversies to which they gave rise. That it was Sir Isaac Newton or another who formulated the laws set forth in Principia is not important to the physicist who proposes to test, extend or contest them. The movement of the modern sciences, in as much as they have put forward theories or general ontologies capable of creating a universal consensus, is linked to what Merton called scientific ‘communism’, i.e., the rejection of the idea of private property in matters of knowledge. The critique of the argument from authority, understood either in the rationalist perspective of Descartes or in the empiricist perspective of Boyle, amounts to the same thing: in each instance it is a matter of appealing to a ‘clear and distinct idea’ or to a ‘matter of fact’ whose evidence is binding on everyone and can be repeated by anyone, independently of the personage of the scholar. For moderns, knowledge is only legitimate when it is impersonal enough for everyone to agree about it, in other words: when it belongs to no one in particular. As Steven Shapin has noted, extending the works of Niklas Luhmann and Anthony Giddens,22one of the most critical features of the ‘scientific revolu- tion’ under way in the seventeenth century was the progressive abandonment of the trust placed in the individual testimony of persons judged to be of integrity and virtue in favour of neutral and anonymous institutions, founded on mechanisms of transindividual verification and self-regulation.
Steven Shapin: Modernity guarantees knowledge not by reference to virtue but to expertise. When we give our trust to – ‘have faith in’ – modern systems of technology and knowledge, our faith is now widely said not to be in the moral character of the individuals concerned but
in the genuine expertise attributed to the institutions. The expertise of individuals is itself considered to be vouched for by the institutions from which they speak and which are the ultimate sources of that expertise.23
By contrast, Freud seems to return to a premodern position when he insists on the moral qualities which enabled him alone to reveal that which had remained hidden until then to all other mortals. Indeed, if the psychoanalytic ‘nature of the subject’ and Freud are so insepa- rable, then it is because it wasn’t sufficient to stumble on the uncon- scious to ‘discover’ it. Courage and a staunch heart were necessary to be able to confront the somber truth of sexuality and the innumerable resistances which it aroused. Only a man without fear and above reproach could face such a daunting task, namely Freud.
Freud to Marie Bonaparte, 16 December 1927: If you had known Breuer, he was a great mind, a mind quite superior to me. I had only one thing: courage to stand up against the majority, faith in myself.24
Freud: I treated my discoveries as ordinary contributions to science and hoped they would be received in the same spirit. But. . . I under- stood that from now onwards I was one of those who have ‘disturbed the sleep of the world,’ as Hebbel says, and that I could not reckon upon objectivity and tolerance. Since, however, my conviction of the general accuracy of my observations and conclusions grew even stron- ger, and since neither my confidence in my own judgment nor my moral courage were precisely small, the outcome of the situation could not be in doubt.25
But this isn’t all. Freud still had to surmount the internal resistances to the truth, otherwise he would never have been able to confront the external obstacles which he met with along the way. This is a central element in the story that Freud tells us, which explains why it was he alone who ‘discovered’ the unconscious. No one was capable of confronting the truth of unconscious without the aid of analysis. Consequently, the primal analyst had to have been a self-analyst. Freud, we are told, was the first in the history of humanity who
analysed himself and it was thus that he could lift the repressions which prevented his predecessors and contemporaries, indeed all of humanity, from seeing the truth. In his ‘History of the psychoanalytic movement’, Freud claimed that it was thanks to the analysis of the dreams of his patients and his own that he found the courage to