Unorthodox Freud: The View From the Couch (review)

In this volume, the authors have taken up an enormously interesting and important task. They list three aims: to offer a clearer understanding of how Freud actually worked; to contrast his behavior with the recommendations he made in his published works; and to review the value of his legacy. A historical study such as this is long overdue. As Lohser and Newton point out, there have been few studies of Freud’s actual methods, and these have been limited by inadequate data and doctrinal biases. Freud’s publications contain little direct or specific information on his actual methods.

Freud’s actual clinical methods—the ways in which he conducted his relationships with his analysands—are especially significant for several reasons. Freud did not engage in direct observation of the work of other psychoanalysts; his own practice provided his principal opportunities for testing techniques and making observations. In short, his psychoanalyses were both clinical treatments and research projects. His consulting room was also his laboratory. If his actual methods were to be found to have conformed to his technical recommendations, the value of his contributions would be enhanced in two ways: first, his recommendations would be shown to have been derived from experience; and second, his theoretical proposals would be shown to have been developed in a setting of systematic observation.

Lohser and Newton approach their task by reviewing the published memoirs of five analysands: Abram Kardiner, Hilda Doolittle, Joseph Wortis, John Dorsey, and Smiley Blanton. (In the case of Hilda Doolittle, they add some material from her unpublished correspondence.) They assert that this sample is “sufficiently extensive to permit [them] to identify the organizational principles that appear to have underlain Freud’s behavior” (p. 6). On the basis of their review, they conclude that Freud’s actual practices showed “order, stability and reliable patterning” (p. 5)—but also that these practices differed from his technical recommendations (or, at least, from the usual interpretation of these recommendations). In particular, they found that Freud did not maintain neutrality or anonymity, and did not engage in extensive interpretation of the transference; on the contrary, they found that in practice he concentrated on a primary task of making the unconscious conscious. His departures from neutrality were seen by these authors as enabling him to be spontaneous in the psychoanalytic setting, in the service of that endeavor.

The conclusions reached in this book are clearly stated and logically coherent, but there are very serious deficiencies of scholarship that limit their validity. Any well-informed reader hoping to encounter unfamiliar historical information will be totally disappointed—the most recent of the books used as sources was published twenty years ago! An astonishing number of published and unpublished sources have been ignored here, most crucial among them being Freud’s letters to Ferenczi and Jones, which contain Freud’s own descriptions of his psychoanalytic activities in a number of cases. Some of his analysands (Sergei Pankejeff, Helene Deutsch, John Rickman, Anna Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, Maryse Choisy, Marie Bonaparte, Emma Eckstein, Joan Riviere, Roy Grinker, Sr.) are mentioned briefly without any real consideration of his behavior toward them. Two cases are discussed without reference to crucial sources: Horace Frink ¹ and the “Wolf Man,” ² with very misleading results. Completely ignored are numerous autobiographical reports (from analysands such as Albert Hirst, Raymond de Saussure, Clarence Oberndorf, Ernst Blum, Medard Boss, Eva Rosenfeld, and Theodor Reik), and copious sources in other cases (Dorothy Burlingham, Heinz Hartman, Edith Jackson, Rene Spitz, Otto Rank, Mark Brunswick, David Brunswick, Kata Levy, Loe Kann, Elma Palos, Irmarita Putnam).

With their limited sample, these authors find no reason to address such important issues as Freud’s handling of confidentiality, or his participation in extra-analytic relations with analysands. Their book barely begins to meet the challenge of the task they have taken up.