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17 Freud’s Philosophically Split Personality
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315 As we have seen from the previous chapters on the existential phenomenologists , each individual thinker had much to say in response to Freud’s metapsychology. We are now in a position to crystallize those critiques of Freudian psychoanalysis and to identify the general, fundamental, philosophical presuppositions that underlie Freudian psychoanalysis from an existential phenomenological perspective. Given this perspective’s philosophical presuppositions, certain inconsistencies become apparent within Freud’s metapsychology—inconsistencies upon which the existential phenomenologists all tended to agree. In response to the apparent inconsistencies in Freudian psychoanalysis, in fact, Medard Boss asserted that there were two distinct Freuds: Freud the scientist, and Freud the humanist . As a psychoanalyst who highly valued Freudian therapy, Boss proposed that we reject Freud’s metapsychology while retaining Freud’s valuable therapeutic advice. He believed that Freudian therapy could be salvaged from the remains of Freud’s metapsychology precisely because the two were inconsistent. We shall consider Boss’s proposal and demonstrate that—contrary to any “philosophical split”—Freudian psychoanalysis was intrinsically unified, as Freud had insisted. Borrowing from Freud’s historicalphilosophical background discussed in the first part of this book, we shall show that it was Freud’s philosophical heritage—via Schopenhauer’s influence above all—that provides Freud with additional philosophical resources to reassert his unified psychoanalysis. Freud’s Philosophically Split Personality: The Existential Phenomenological Perspective 17 Presuppositions of Freud’s Metapsychological Theory In general, the existential phenomenologists saw Freud as holding a Cartesian thing-ontology and mechanistic framework, which offered a scientific explanation of human behavior and precluded the genuine possibility of human freedom. What were the specific philosophical presuppositions that underlie this critique and is there textual evidence within the corpus of Freud’s works to substantiate it? 1. Only objective “beings” or “things” exist. Throughout Freud’s account of the universe, everything that is, is a thing—including human beings. Examples from Freud include: “Analysts are at bottom incorrigible mechanists and materialists”;1 and, “the intellect and the mind are objects for scientific research in exactly the same way as any non-human objects.”2 2. Two forms of objective reality exist—the psychical and the material. Freud himself asserted that he was indeed a “dualist”: “If [I] had to choose among the views of the philosophers, [I] could characterize [myself] as a dualist. No monism succeeds in doing away with the distinction between ideas and the objects they represent.”3 3. The subject–object dichotomy is intrinsic to our mental operations. Freud ostensibly uncritically adopted the Cartesian subject–object dichotomy. He asserted, for instance: “This anti-thesis ego—non-ego (external), i.e., subject–object . . . remains, above all, sovereign in our intellectual activity and creates for research the basic situation which no efforts can alter.”4 4. “Material reality” is the independently existing external world of things.5 5. “Psychical reality”—that is, the mind—as an object, consists of internal mechanistic processes. For example, Freud wrote: “The psychical processes [are] qualitatively determined states of specifiable material particles.”6 Freud, then, transcended his Cartesian roots by hypothesizing: 6. Psychical reality includes unconsciousness.7 7. Psychical reality is powered by an energy analogous to, and reciprocally transformable with, material–physical energy; psychical (instinctual) energy exists.8 In order for the psychical instrument to operate, Freud thought it must be powered. Here he was seen as borrowing from his nineteenth-century sci316 A P P R E H E N D I N G T H E I N A C C E S S I B L E [54.242.75.224] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:44 GMT) entific heritage: “We assume as other sciences have led us to expect, that in mental life some kind of energy is at work.”9 Freud assumed that, though energy occurs in various forms (electrical, mechanical, chemical, and so on), the energy that powers the organism essentially is the same as the energy that powers the universe. Following the lead of the physics of his time, Freud simply defined psychical (instinctual) energy in terms of the work it performed.10 Since thinking, perceiving, remembering, and so on, as psychological activities are forms of work, Freud simply inferred that they must involve a psychic form of energy. Freud also subscribed to the principle of the conservation of energy: though energy may be transformed from one form to another, it can never be lost from the total system .11 Thus, Freud assumed that physiological energy could be transformed into psychical energy...