Lecture 1 – The Nature of Psychoanalysis

Transcript

Hello, my name is David Bell and I am a psychoanalyst and the former president of the British Psychoanalytic Society. I also work as a consultant psychiatrist at The Tavistock Clinic where I run a specialist unit for people [who] have long term very difficult psychological disorders, in which we provide them with psychotherapy for a number of years. Really I first came across psychoanalysis properly for the first time, I had read a bit, but for the first time when I was a young psychiatrist and that was when a consultant who I was working for interviewed a psychotic young woman and during the interview she became sane but extremely angry. And, I realised at that moment that that was the kind of thing that I was interested in. I wasn’t really interested in writing down mental states and schedules of treatment. I was interested in trying to understand what was going on and that event had a huge influence upon the rest of my life, because I was exposed to two areas of which I developed interest in the psychoanalytic understanding of serious psychological problems and then that led me into psychoanalysis. …I feel very much as Hanna Segal once described it, she once said that psychoanalysis was a god sent to her because it could combine so many of her interests in one. For her it was interest in literature, in the imagination and also being able to do something that was helpful to people. I’ve spent a very good part of my psychoanalytic career being involved in the relation between psychoanalysis and other disciplines, particularly literature, philosophy and political and social theory and culture in general. So I’ve been using applications of  psychoanalysis to racism, to literary texts, particularly Shakespeare, which I’ve been quite involved with and various other things. So for me too, psychoanalysis was a god sent in that sense that so much of my interests could be combined and you’ll see in what I have to say in this lecture that I define psychoanalysis itself is in a way…Freud once defined the ego as a borderline creature but I think psychoanalysis itself is a borderline creature because it exists on the borders of so many different disciplines. So, with that introduction, I’ll make a start. And given that this is a way of introducing you to psychoanalysis I thought we’d start right at the beginning.

What I was thinking of was, I’d like you to imagine that you are at a dinner party and you just started attending a course on psychoanalysis and someone asked you what it was, someone who never heard of it, what would one answer? I think the various answers one could think of, many people immediately say, it’s a form of treatment for psychological disorder. But also one needs to think of the ways in which Freud defined it which still remain a good example of the breadth and depth of this subject. For it is a body of knowledge of mind, a research method and a way of treating psychological problems. But if I had to choose one of those as the pre-eminent one, it would be a body of knowledge of mind and the reason that I say that is because there is always a kind of pull towards seeing psychoanalysis as a form of treatment pre-eminently. And that to me has the effect of greatly reducing its social, cultural and philosophical import. This is because, for example, if you reduce it to only being a treatment then you start comparing it to other treatments: such as medication or various other forms of psychological treatment and although it can be compared in certain ways it’s so radically different that the comparison is, to say the least, problematic.

I mentioned that psychoanalysis is also a research method because one could say that Freud discovered the unconscious in a particular way which I will come to, because that in itself it is not true that he quite discovered it, he certainly discovered it in a particular way. But that’s a discovery, whereas the, when we say psychoanalysis is also a research tool one is referring here to, not to something that Freud discovered but to something that Freud invented and that is he invented the psychoanalytic setting and the psychoanalytic setting is a setting which provides access to an understanding of levels of human experience which are not normally available when the human being is, so to speak, in a natural habitat. Maybe somewhat like a laboratory technician arranges and makes special context and environment somewhat artificial in order to be able to observe aspects of a plant or an animal that you can’t see easily in the natural habitat, so psychoanalysis invented this particular setting so that things become available which aren’t normally available in this way.

When I stated that psychoanalysis is a treatment and a body of knowledge, of course it is a very critical relationship between the body of knowledge as it’s grown up since Freud’s day and the treatment psychoanalytically of individuals, Freud once wrote – and I think this remains true – that an analyst cannot treat an individual patient or analysand without learning something new but also once you’ve learnt something new you immediately see its importance and relevance to your work in general. But that’s a very kind of specific micro learning but a lot of the main discoveries in psychoanalysis were discovered through the treatment of patients; not, I would say, the unconscious itself, treating patients was one of the areas of discovery but there are others which I will come to. But certainly later things such as the discovery of the importance of transference and later of counter-transference, that’s the feelings elicited in the psychoanalyst during the treatment of a patient, these were all discovered through obstacles at first, that got in the way of the development of psychoanalytic treatment and then the obstacles would seem to be the source of important new discoveries.

So when I say psychoanalysis is a body of knowledge of mind, maybe another way of sharing the importance of its difference to other forms of psychological treatment is, for example, we wouldn’t really expect someone doing CBT (Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy) necessarily to have a view, for example, of the meaning of a play such as Hamlet but one would expect a psychoanalyst to have a psychoanalytic viewpoint amongst, of course, many other viewpoints, a psychoanalytic viewpoint of a play such as Hamlet or any other literary or artistic productions. Freud took the view that treatment, psychoanalytic treatment, is an application of psychoanalysis. That is, for him the most important discovery was the discovery of the unconscious itself and its relevance to the way we live our lives and the culture in general and then treating a patient, for him, was an application of that knowledge. Sometimes people use expressions “pure and applied”, this should be likened; and the science is misunderstood but pure analysis is five times a week analysis, I can tell you that’s an entirely false expression. When Freud used the term pure and applied it was being likened to mathematics, so pure mathematics is the theory itself, whereas applied mathematics might be applying it for example to engineering. So when we use the term pure and applied psychoanalysis, pure psychoanalysis is the theory itself and the applied is the applications to anything else including treating patients and also to various other activities which I’ve mentioned. So as a body of knowledge then it’s important to say that because it is a body of knowledge it doesn’t belong to anyone because knowledge can’t belong to anyone. It doesn’t belong for example to The International Psychoanalytic Association or any Institute of Psychoanalysis. However, we have a critical relation in these institutes to the development of the knowledge and also, of course, within the practise of the discipline, protection of  standards, which is a different thing.

I now like to show you a cartoon. This cartoon I came across a very very long time ago and it’s by the cartoonist Jules Feiffer who also made a number of very psychologically deep films, one of which was called Carnal Knowledge. But this cartoon, it starts with a mask figure saying: “I am a critic, I am not a book, art, theatre, film, music or dance critic, I am a Bernard critic” and then we see him, resident, inside the head of Bernard and the resident critic inside the head, working inside the head of a Bernard: “He wakes up I tell him: You’re late, at the office, I tell him: You’re behind, at dinner parties I tell him: You’re boring” poor Bernard, eh? “When he falls in love I tell him: You’re not good enough. On occasion he” that’s Bernard “can’t take any more of my reviews and so he orders me out of his head so I rip off my mask and say: Is that the way to talk to your mother?” Now, when people look at that cartoon, they laugh. They laugh with a laughter of understanding and indeed, all forms of cartoons or pictures of this type express something of human psychology. But some, like this one, go much further. Not only express human psychology, they comment on the content of that psychology and we all laugh at it because we recognise it, we recognise what it’s like to have a critical voice inside our heads telling us that we are failing or giving constant negative reviews of whatever we are doing. Now if someone didn’t understand the cartoon, as long as they had some understanding of the cartoon convention but they said: “Who is that figure inside? What is going on?” we would feel that there was something wrong with them, that they didn’t understand this ordinary aspect of human subjectivity; he doesn’t participate in that world in which we all naturally laugh. But of course this kind of cartoon, which evinces so much of what we are like or a particular aspect, I should say, of what we are like in our own private worlds has a natural link to a psychoanalytic form of understanding and this serves, maybe, to make a point that I’ll make now.

It’s that it is sometimes easy to think of psychoanalytic understanding as something that’s cut off, that’s a very esoteric discipline of its own, with special forms of understanding. That’s not completely untrue, because we have a special language and our theories and so on. But it’s essential to understand that psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic theory, however remote it might seem at times, has a natural link to ordinary ways that people think about themselves. The philosophers call this “folk psychology”, they don’t mean it is folksy. Or sometimes they call it “common sense psychology”, which they do not mean it’s common sense. But what they mean is that this model of understanding of human conflict is on a par with our ordinary ways of thinking about ourselves, although it expands them enormously, particularly in terms of the depth of the conflict and the fact that a lot of it takes place unconsciously. But we all know what it’s like to have conflicts. We all attribute motives to people, even motives which they themselves may not be aware of, may be unconscious of, that’s part of what it is to be a human being.

So we return now to our cartoon, we see this internal figure and of course psychoanalysis would fill out quite a lot of its own particular understanding of what’s going on. The internal figure we would call “an object” and when we use the word object we don’t mean a thing, we mean an object that is the object of an impulse, or a desire, or an instinct. So an object here is an internal object and in this particular cartoon is an archaic of what we call primary object, in other words, usually, a mother. But we also understand it as a kind of super ego, that’s overseeing, overlooking and commenting on what we are doing and we also understand that it has an unremitting, an archaic (that means that has its origins very early in life) quality. We can add a little more, we can wonder about what Bernard’s relationship is like to this object: Does he purely submit to it in despair? Is he trapped in some way? Is he masochistically submitting? That is, is there some excitement in being involved in this terrible torment? And then we might ask, which we could reasonably ask, what would it be like, for Bernard, to come into analysis? And we can make some intelligent guesses. For example, we might imagine that Bernard came into analysis he would imagine everything that the analyst said was a criticism, so if he said something, the analyst said: “Oh, I think you might be talking about this”, what Bernard would hear is: “Why would you talk about this? Why were you talking about that?”. Or if he is late for a session and the analyst is interested, maybe, something upset him or some reason for him being late, what he’ll hear is: “Why are you late? You should be on time!”. But we can go even a little further than that, it is likely that someone like Bernard will hear his analyst in a very critical way, but something else can happen, that is, that Bernard may become identified with this critical object, he’ll become the critic and then the analyst can expect a lot of very critical reviews of his work.

I’d now like to show you another cartoon which illustrates a related theme. This cartoon…well, before I show you the cartoon I should say first of all the context . The context is from 9/11, the newspapers immediately after the catastrophe of The World Trade Centre. In The Sun newspaper, on the 14th of that September, so three days later, there was a cartoon which I’d like to have brought you but unfortunately I wasn’t able to. Now in that cartoon, if you can imagine it, we’ve got the sort of bombed out World Trade Centre and rising from the bombed out site, you’ve got a bird flying into the air, which seem to be both a combination of a phoenix – rising from the ashes – and an eagle – the American emblem. And the bird has something in its mouth and its claws and they’re cruise missiles. Underneath the cartoon there is the title of another article, that clearly is referring to the cartoon and it says: “We are all American, now”. Now I’d like to show you a different cartoon which appeared, I think, a couple of days later in The Guardian. In this cartoon you see some of the themes mentioned but in a completely different way: you see uncle Sam in a terrible state, crying with a huge tumour on his neck called “The Middle East” tumour and his teeth are shattered, I think his teeth are meant to be the bombed out World Trade Centre in New York and he’s doing something, he’s taking pills from a bottle called “Fast action pain relief” and the pills are cruise missiles. It also says on the bottle, if you look carefully, it says, “may have unforeseen side effects”. So, here, the cartoonist Martin Rowson, has addressed the same issue but he hasn’t just expressed the psychology, he’s commented on the psychology. That is, he is saying that violence is a defence against depression (the cruise missiles) and it may have catastrophic consequences. So what I am saying by showing you these cartoons that these kinds of cartoons are in the same kind of world that we, as psychoanalysts, function.

Now I’d like to turn now to thinking a little more specifically about Freud and what he discovered. But before that I’ll just read you a quotation from an excellent book on Freud by the philosopher Richard Wollheim “Operating from a private medical practice” this is on the preface to his book “operating from a private medical practice in Vienna, which he maintained from Easter 1886 until he was forced into exile in ‘38, Freud, by the power of his writings and by the breadth and audacity of his speculations revolutionised the thought, the lives and the imagination of an age. He contradicted, and in some cases reversed prevailing opinions of the learned as well as of common people on many of the issues on human existence and culture.  He led people to think about the appetites, the intellectual powers, about self-knowledge and self-deceit, about the end of life and about man’s profoundest passions and about his most intimate and trivial failings in ways that would have seemed to earlier generations at once scandalous and silly. It’ll be hard indeed to find in the history of ideas, even in the history of religion” Wollheim writes “someone whose influence was so immediate, so broad and so deep”. So, what did Freud discover? Well, you’ll hear a lot of the things that Freud discovered in these lectures but the first thing we have to turn ourselves to is Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Now, it’s often said that Freud discovered the unconscious and that’s not really quite true in a very important way because the knowledge of the unconscious existed long before Freud. Some even believed that the knowledge of the unconscious, namely the part of our mind that determine our nature that we are not aware of, were available to the Greeks and when they, for example, The Delphic oracle wasn’t only thought to be an oracle of the spirits but also a way of giving representation to awareness of forces that drive us that are beyond ordinary awareness, which we find peculiarly irresistible. Freud, never tired of saying over and over again that many of his discoveries were pre-dated by the poets and the philosophers and. By the poets, he meant particularly the Greek poets, he meant his beloved Shakespeare and his beloved Goethe. So if we just turn to some of those examples, to give you a slight flavour of it, we have for example, Jocasta and Oedipus Rex who advises Oedipus, this is near the end of the play, where Jocasta turns to Oedipus and in fact what she says to him is not to worry, not to be too disturbed because what they are discussing is the possibility of a man sleeping with his mother and Jocasta says: “All common mortals dream of such things”. So when Jocasta says even people have dreamt of such things, this shows the idea of the existence within Greek literature of an unconscious that determines certain very powerful desires. If we turn now to Shakespeare, of a famous example, Shakespeare was very loved by Freud, particularly he loved the way sometimes he uses slips in order to betray a character’s secret meaning. But in Henry IV, part II, we have a scene where the king is on his deathbed and his son, the prince, prince Harry is beside him and we see the son move away from the room, the young prince, and go to another room and in most performances he takes the crown with him, he takes the crown from the pillow, he takes it with him and tries it on. Having tried it on his father enters the room and the prince turns to his father and says: “I never thought to hear you speak again” to which the king replies: “Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought”. What a compact interpretation, one which I think many psychoanalysis would be very proud of, because here the king says many things in a short statement. He has said that Harry has a wish, a wish that his father dies and he takes the crown from him, what we will call an Oedipal desire. Secondly, that Harry doesn’t know that he has that wish and thirdly that he misrepresents reality as if it conforms to the wish because when he tries on the crown he is, so to speak, murdering his father. So, the wish, gives thought the strength of belief, this is something well-known to Shakespeare. Or, my last example is from the French philosopher Diderot, from the XVIII century who wrote the first encyclopaedia and he is quoted by Freud. I think it’s on the Three Essays on Sexuality and Diderot asks: what would happen if the baby so to speak, the child, so to speak were to grow into a man but maintain his childish mind, what would happen? He writes: “If the little savage were left to himself, preserving all the foolishness and adding to this the passions of a man of thirty he would strangle his father and lie with his mother”. These ideas were already around in the world so we come to consideration of what is it that Freud added? Freud didn’t add the idea of the aspects of mental life beyond awareness but he did add something that has turned out to be fundamental. First of all, what Freud discovered was not the unconscious as such but what he termed the dynamic unconscious, that is, isn’t just unconscious because as psychologists and philosophers had tended to say things were unconscious because they were weaker ideas, no. They are unconscious because they are strong ideas but they are held back by powerful forces in the mind which cannot allow them to have admittance to consciousness. So, we now have not just facts like a part of the mind that’s unconscious but we have an idea, a model of the mind of something emotional, something dynamic and certain ideas being held back. So Freud recovers not just the unconscious but what we call the repressed unconscious, that is, it can’t just become conscious by an act of will. Secondly, Freud discovered the unconscious for science. Now, what do I mean by that? I always tend to say when I say that that I mean science with a small s, that is I don’t mean science in terms of the physical sciences, I mean sciences with a very broad remit, so that would include the scientific aspects for example of sociology, archaeology, anthropology and so on. Now, when I use the word science in this sense, I mean the creation of a body of knowledge that has a recognisable theoretical structure and a relation between that structure and observation, that’s what I mean by science. And one can see how that it’s true for psychoanalysis but we wouldn’t expect a literary theorist who had a good understanding, an ordinary understanding of the unconscious to have a theoretical model of the unconscious, no. That’s what Freud managed to develop in ways that continued to develop throughout his life and has continued since, but the main aspects of it have remained, that is the idea of a dynamic unconscious with a content which is the other of Freud’s discovery so I said that it’s a dynamic unconscious that’s held back and repressed. Then, the second thing that Freud discovers is its bizarre content: it’s archaic, originally, fundamentally sexual and later other than sexual, particularly aggressively and very violent urges that are regarded, that are felt to be absolutely intolerable to consciousness. Thirdly he discovered the enormous consequences of the unconscious mind for our ordinary existence, that is that there is not just, that there isn’t unconscious but it has very powerful determining factors on the way we live our lives and we often deceive ourselves into thinking that we know why we are doing x or why we are doing y, when we’re actually being driven to do them for quite other reasons; something all of us discover to some extent in life, but of course, particularly discover in a more explicit way within analysis.

I’d now like to entertain a kind of wishful fantasy of mine because it’s rather revealing of what psychoanalysis is and here’s the fantasy: that is that, imagine that a university committee is convened, and the university committee meets with the vice chancellor and the vice chancellor says: “I’ve got a…the reason I’m meeting with you is that I’ve just had a cheque for a million pounds by someone who’s died from his state and there is only one rider on this cheque and that is, it is only to be used for the benefit of psychoanalysis so I met with you all to find, because of the university rules we could only put it in one faculty… so we need to put out which faculty”. So, what happens? Well, of course, it’s a very unusual psychiatric part of the medical school, they happen to be very interested in psychoanalysis so they put the hand out and say: “Thank you very much for the cheque, psychoanalysis is a form of treatment, we carry out psychotherapeutic treatment so we’ll take the cheque”. But just at that moment someone from psychology stands up and he says: “No actually, we have a very very active psychoanalytic aspect partoire psychology curriculum so I think psychology is really a much wider discipline than psychiatry”. But just as they sit down sociology gets up, say that they are from East London where Michael Rustin was working and they say: “The sociology department is internationally famous for psychoanalytic engagement” and then the history department, then the literature department and say that’s a department where Eagleton with a huge psychoanalytic interest and the anthropology, film studies, feminist studies and so on. So you can see the point that I’m making: there’s no natural place to put psychoanalysis, because it belongs, at the same time in so many places and the only other subject that I can think of that one can think of in a similar way and it must be for interesting reasons in the history of ideas is Marxism because you could do exactly the same experiment with someone saying: “This is only to be used for the research and scholarship and work on Marxist thought” and one could have the economists would say he was an economist, the historians would say he was a historian, the philosophers would say he was a philosopher but then we could have Marx’s film studies, Marx’s feminist theory, cultural theory, say the work of people like Stuart Hall and so on. So again you could see that for reasons which are perhaps to do with a pick up origin of a particular German form of thought going back to thinkers such as probably Hegel and Kant that these thinkers are influences, and Feuerbach, influenced by these thinkers have a very broad reach in terms of their thinking.

I’d now like to turn to something slightly different, having introduced the subject in this way, that is, introduced a bit about what psychoanalysis is and then discussed the relation of psychoanalysis to the pre-existing knowledge of the unconscious and then what it is that psychoanalysis develops in relation to that knowledge, the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious. Now, Freud was very keen when he introduced somebody to psychoanalysis, to try and make it link up to ordinary people lived lives and the best way of doing that was to talk about what Freud called “the psychopathology of everyday life”. That is the errors and slips that we make that give evidence of the existence of the unconscious.

The Unconscious

He published part of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, very near The Interpretation of Dreams and one of the things I’ve meant to say earlier was that we tend to think that Freud discovered the unconscious from work with patients but that’s not strictly true. To some extent he discovered it from work with patients and particularly with the early people suffering from hysteria but also the first patient, in an important sense, was himself, his own self explorations. But also just by looking around him and observing things in the world in literature, in art and in ordinary everyday life, he was able to find lots of evidence to the existence of the unconscious, which is why The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life really go so well together. I’ll strengthen the main argument with one or two familiar errors: You have an appointment and you forget it. One person says quite openly: “I didn’t want to go and I expect that’s why I forgot, although this was not deliberate in any ordinary conscious meaning of the term”. Another may not think this consciously putting his laps down to simple overside but on being questioned may agree that it was an appointment he didn’t want to keep. He hadn’t checked his diary that day for reasons he cannot account for, though he dimly remembers intending to look at his diary and somehow feeling drawn from doing so. Something in this imaginary example that was most unusual for him to do. He now accepts on balance that the best explanation is that a part of him beyond ordinary awareness prevented him from keeping the appointment. But now we come to the third case, which is the one that at the same time the most problematic and the most interesting. The man forgets the appointment and on it being suggested that maybe he didn’t want to keep it or at least felt in conflict about it, he violently repudiates this, claiming: “it was just an accident and that’s that”. He is particularly critical of any suggestion that there’s any part of him beyond ordinary awareness that might have facilitated the accident. Our hypothetical man must strike us as very unreasonable and he doesn’t even seem the slightest bit interested in the possibility we are suggesting, he shows, as Freud put it “a strong personal interest in demonstrating that his parapraxis (his error) that it does not have a sense”. Now central to this view of these kinds of errors is a notion that all human action and thought has a sense and it’s a communication. Let’s look briefly at the counter-arguments. Firstly the idea of ‘pure’ accident, a random event, in other words, something that could happen, as well as not happen in the purely random way and that’s it. This argument, often strongly maintained, if examined closely, is a really strange argument. It claims that “there are certain occurrences”, to quote Freud, “however small which drop out to the universal concatenation of events, occurrences which might as well not happen, as happen. If anyone makes a breach”, Freud suggest, “in the determinism of natural events” that is things that link one another “at any single point, it means it’s thrown overboard the whole Weltanschauung world outlook of science. Now, simple observation shows how difficult it is for anything in mental life to be random”. The former bit I quoted was a quote from Freud, now speaking for myself. It is for example impossible to think of a name at random, any name you think of would turn out, immediately to have obvious significance. It’s also impossible to conjure up a nonsensical sentence. Secondly, that’s most importantly, why put forward a view that can lead nowhere in furthering understanding? Surrendering to chance is really like surrendering to the gods, is it not more fruitful, as in all scientific enquiry, to start off not by assuming blind chance but by instead by assuming that a given phenomenon by careful study might just become more explicable. Insistence on chance does suggest a vested interest. The next argument is this: Mistakes and errors are to be explained by disturbances outside mental life, so just physiological disturbances that interfere with the tension. We might say that Mr A forgot his appointment because he was tired. There is no need to evoke inner opposing intention beyond awareness. Slips do occur, with more frequency when we are tense or tired but is that really an adequate explanation? We can leave aside the obvious counter-instances of these slips occurring or mistakes occurring in the absence of fatigue or when they are repetitive, or when the mistake occurs in the context not of a lapse of attention but of attention assiduously and carefully applied. Some tasks we know are executed easily with almost a complete lack of conscious attention. But apart from all this there is something wrong with the argument itself as Freud demonstrated, for it is certainly true that physiological disturbances such as fatigue will increase the frequency of errors and slips of the tongue but this argument has no specificity, so it cannot be a sufficient explanation and it explains the increase of frequency but not why one particular mistake or slip occurs. Freud illustrates the weakness of the argument in the following way: “Suppose one dark night” he writes “I went to a lonely spot and I was attacked by a rough who took away my watch and purse. Since I didn’t see the robber’s face clearly, I laid my complaint to the nearest police station with the words loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables. Now the police officer might say to me: “In what you say, you seem to be unjustifiably adopting a rather extreme mechanistic point of view, it would be better to represent surely the facts in the following way: under the shield of darkness and favoured by loneliness, an unknown thief has robbed me of my valuables. In your case, the essential task seems to be that we find the thief. In other words, a physiological disturbance such as fatigue cannot be the culprit, only the shield of darkness, which provides the conditions under which the unconscious intention can do its work”.

Let us now return to our example of the man who vigorously repudiates any suggestion that his accidental parapraxis, slip – that is his missing his appointment – has any meaning, as we need to anticipate an argument that would run as follows: Some science, this science of yours that accommodates any fact with theory, one man agrees his forgetting is easily explained by his not wanting to go to his appointment. The other finds his explanation satisfactory after some introspection and taking other evidence into consideration. These you take as supporting the thesis that the error resulted from the action of forces which had a sense and were not consciously available to the man at the time, which acted against his conscious intentions. But in the third case the man actively repudiates everything you say and finds no trace in himself of such intention and you take this as further evidence to support your theory, why?! it’s not better to say when your patient brings material that confirms your theory and when he doesn’t you’re equally satisfied.

Now there is a point here of course that anything we say about this man who repudiates the claim must remain speculative, unless, of course, he happens to be our patient, in which case the matter could be more carefully studied. But more important than that is the general context, what evidence could be brought to bear from a phenomenology of the man and his circumstances? Whilst in the third case the thesis cannot be taken as proven, there is really no ground to exclude it out of hand. Often those close to us are more able to see our own intentions in our actions than we ourselves are. Also, however, as already stated earlier, to assert that any aspect of psychic life is without meaning or determination is to make an extraordinary strong claim on very weak evidence and so ditch enquiry before it has even started.

But so far, we’ve only examined the simplest phenomena, those that might appear at least to an initial inspection to be understandable within the context of a surface psychology, without the need for suggesting hidden deeper intentions, or clearly I don’t think they can be. However there’s another whole class of phenomena which cannot be even approached from such a superficial perspective. I’m referring here to that class of errors which are repetitive and it’s here that some of the strongest evidence for underlying motives is found. Some people, for example habitually lose things, some repetitions can be called characterological errors, namely those types of mistakes which are repeated and have a particular symbolic meaning concerning deep preoccupations, these are part of character. Though, are those who habitually make mistakes concerning appointments, which on a conscious level have actually been looking forward to and have seriously taken every precaution to keep and yet still repetitively miss. For example I had a patient who absolutely loved classical music, particularly opera and he always felt that there was something magical about that moment when the overture started and he always loved to be well in his seat for that moment and never was, something always stopped him getting there, which he could not control. So explanations in terms of what is consciously desired flounder immediately.

I’ll now give an example of such a kind of error: Mr K, habitually lost documents and the ones he lost always [were the] ones of great importance to him. When he lost such a document, he became desperate, persecuted himself as he searched wildly for it, feeling himself to be guilty of some terrible crime, worthless and deserving to be punished. However, as result of some insight – gained in his analysis – he became more able to attend to what went on in his mind during these episodes and also to observe the context in which they occurred. He discovered the following: First he often lost documents that were of particular importance to progress in his career. Second, he felt intensely guilty about success, as he put it: “I manage to snatch failure from the jaws of success” this was related to deep feelings of guilt concerning his wish  to triumph over his dead father and to be more successful that he had been. Third, he noticed that whenever he found the missing document this was not accompanied, as one might have thought, by a sense of relief and pleasure but by disappointment. This latter was made up of at least two components: His wild searching exactly relieved the state of agitated searching he experienced after the death of his father, desperate to find him in the external world. So the finding, of the document, was accompanied by the disappointment of not finding what he had unconsciously been looking for, that is, his father. Also, that aspect of him, largely unconscious, would reveal frequently in dreams which persecuted him if he was successful and made him feel worthless, that aspect of him was placated by failure, he was safer if he failed. It was as if he was saying: “Look, my father, I have failed, so you’ve no need to punish me for the triumph over you”. Finding the documents meant success and therefore fear of further persecution. It was only when he became able to accept his death which is, again, his father, as well as his more conscious wishes for his father to live and to bear the guilt of those feelings that he was freed from the persecution and became more able to pursue his career without seeking out situations in his life in which he could be further punished. So with these kinds of examples we enter into a new territory, it serves to illustrate the complexity of even ordinary errors, their relation to the inner world and the far reaching influences of this inner world, on what we call our lived lives and what he call character.

So I hope in what I’ve described so far I’ve given you a feeling of what psychoanalysis is and maybe to some extent made some of you feel that you already knew what it was because it’s so much part of your lived life anyway. But I’ve also hope I’ve also been able to show you what it was Freud, (show you the beginning of) what it was Freud achieved and that has had such a permanent effect upon the way we think of mind in general.

I’d now like to end by just very briefly, situating Freud a little bit in the history of ideas. I’ve already hinted at this in the long history of the knowledge of the unconscious. But I’d now like to focus down a little bit to the period of history when Freud was working and also the things in culture that would have been influencing long before, [that] take their existence long before then, but have a very important and continuing influence on ways of thought. So I’m thinking particularly, for example, of the Enlightenment. Now, it’s very hard to say when to situate the Enlightenment but many people say around the XVII century, possibly a bit earlier, but what we mean by Enlightenment, generally speaking, is the idea that knowledge can be understood through work, psychic work, through discovery, investigation, as opposed to knowledge being revealed for example by religion. So, not that necessarily Enlightenment is non-religious, because many of the great Enlightenment thinkers were of course religious but they felt that God was guiding them towards and investigation of the world. And Freud certainly can be thought of in that sense as an Enlightenment thinker in that he saw himself as making available to us aspects of mental functioning that we hadn’t previously understood but also [he] believed [that] through beginning to understand them we would have, we’d be able to bring more of our natures under control and we need to put some immediate scare quotes there, because Freud did not think that it would ever be possible to bring everything under control, in fact, if we think about such a thing, an individual with everything under their control would no longer be ordinarily human in the way that we mean it. And Freud is very aware of the great limitation of what we could come to understand and what we could to some extent bring under control. Control here means control in terms of understanding, the kind of control that understanding brings, it doesn’t mean forcing something to stop. So he was never over-optimistic about the amount that we could learn, given what we are up against but he did think even the small amounts that we do learn can turn out to be of great importance. And he likened himself to what he referred to as “the great dissenters”. These are people, particularly from the Enlightenment onwards but also before who dissented humankind from their, if you like, feeling that they belonged in this vain narcissistic place as the centre of the whole created world. [Of] course the great first dissenter was Copernicus but actually Copernicus was preceded by other great astronomers, but Copernicus is normally given the place of having finally shown that the sun did not revolve around the earth but the earth was merely one of the planets. In other words we were taken away from our central position in the universe and rendered to be just one of the other heavenly bodies circulating, orbiting in the universe. Then, of course, for Freud there was Darwin, often referred to as “The Great Darwin”, who dissented humankind from their central place in biology, namely biological development, being, the humankind being the centre and ultimate landing point of human development. Instead, as we know, Darwin saw humankind as having developed from earlier forms of life and being in itself part of a trajectory to other forms of life. So again, we are part of history, we are not the determiners of history. And then Freud saw himself in a way as being a dissenter, that is he showed us that not even in our own minds do we have anywhere near as much authority and ruling and control as we thought we had, that we are rendered at the mercy of many forces that we do not understand and that are beyond our control, yet another, as Freud put it, terrible narcissistic blow of humankind.

So that’s one way of seeing Freud. In fact he likened starting to understand the unconscious with the engineering miracle of the Dutch who drained the Zuiderzee, that is, they drained the sea in order to reclaim some of the land and he felt he was able to reclaim at least some of the unconscious so that we could at least begin to understand it.

However, that’s the Enlightenment Freud but then we have a different Freud and that is the modernist Freud. Because Freud doesn’t come from nowhere, his place of work was  a very particular place and a very particular time, and that’s Vienna in the XIX century, at the closing of the XIX century, where so much seemed to be happening. In fact, some people curiously thought this was something to do with the end of the century and that we’d see the same at the end of the XX century. Of course, we didn’t, because it had nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with culture. And something was happening, which has been…, many accounts have been trying to explain why it should be happening in the middle of Europe at this time. But what was happening? Well, different kind of dissentering was happening, that is, literature was changing, for example, we have the move from, if you like, the more realist form of novel, not that it was superseded, not that we have realist novels. Of course not, but other forms of novel started to come into existence. You can thinking of it a little bit like the psychological novel of Tolstoy, the psychological novel of Tolstoy maybe, and the psychological novel of Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky is a very very new form where a lot of the scene of the novel takes place inside someone’s mind. Or later you have Joyce or you have Kafka and all the writers writing in this form, introducing a new way of writing and thinking about the human being. Similarly in art we have the breaking. So what I’m saying is with literature you have the breaking with classical form. In art you have a similar breaking with the move, particularly to the cubist movement, away from ordinary realistic representation where you take different aspects of an object seen from different angles and put them together. This is a totally new way, a revolution in art that took place over a very short period of time. Similarly, in music there was a break with the classical form, to the atonal system of Schoenberg and so on and though I am not familiar with it enough myself, formerly I’ve discussed this with colleagues and have been told me that exactly the same happened in dance theory, with a break from classical form and a new form of dance notation. So something was going on in Vienna at this time and it’s that world that psychoanalysis, which you could say, it’s the world of the dissent as subject is brought into existence and from that point of view, psychoanalysis has a strange tension within it between both these huge movements in thought, for, to some extent, psychoanalysis remains committed to an Enlightenment point of view in the sense that there is a belief that understanding can bring some degree of emancipation, not total, but some, that’s worth having. Whilst at the same time introducing us to the world of the fact of the subject shows us how much we are divided from ourselves and how critical we have to be of any truth that we’ve discovered for sure might well been soon be overthrown to reveal different kinds of truths that we haven’t even dreamt of. So some, the person that has written very beautifully about this is literary theorist called Steven Marcus, who discusses Freud as embracing within him the move from the Enlightenment to modernism within the course of his own life and retaining the tension within himself. He never, I think, comes down on one side and it’s very characteristic of Freud throughout his work, which you will see when you come to read him that there are these tensions within his thought all the time, and they don’t get resolved one way or the other and to me that’s very much part of his greatness. One can think of the tension for example between a more literary form, a more scientific form. These forms, you’ll read one essay, which reads out as the most brilliant literary essay and it’s not surprise that Freud won the Goethe prize for literature. You read another essay and it reads as if you’re reading the most difficult neuroscience. And Freud retains the tensions between modes of thought throughout his work and I wish you well in your reading of him.