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  • The Status of an Analogy: Psychoanalysis and Physics
  • Alan Bass

In his often cited Inward Bound, Abraham Pais (1986) views the years 1895–1905 as the most critical for understanding the great revolution in physics. During that decade discoveries were made that produced the quantum theory and relativity, and thus the end of the unquestioned conceptions of energy and matter, space and time, derived from classical physics. At the conclusion of his overview of the decade Pais surprisingly cites one of Freud’s letters to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess. Freud confides to Fliess that he is “not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer . . .” (cited in Pais 1986, 139). Pais comments that these “lines are especially fitting [my emphasis] since they were written in 1900 in the middle of the decade” (139) which produced the results, if not yet the theory, that would explode the presumed laws of nature. My entire topic is contained in Pais’ word “fitting.” For reasons he does not explain, it is “fitting,” it accords well with his general understanding of how the revolution in physics came about, that the theory of mind, psychopathology, and treatment, finally formalized with the 1900 publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, should be viewed by Freud less as a “science” than as “adventure.” Freud too was “inward bound.” Why the analogy? If this private statement of Freud’s is more than a coincidence, as Pais clearly seems to think, what makes it important? What does it give us to understand about the processes that simultaneously made possible psychoanalysis and the most important scientific revolution of the twentieth century?

If Pais is comparing Freud to any physicist in particular, I think it is to Max Planck, the father of the quantum theory. Pais says that if he had to choose “just one single discovery in [End Page 235] twentieth century physics as revolutionary,” he would “unhesitatingly nominate” Planck’s 1900 discovery of a constant, h, that accounted for anomalies in what physicists call “blackbody radiation.” Blackbody radiation refers to the discharge patterns of a body that re-emits any energy that enters it. Long before there were means to make measurements that would explain why blackbody radiation patterns were so strangely discontinuous, Planck was able to make an astonishingly accurate guess about an extremely small constant that resolved the enigma. Not content with his guess, and still a great believer in the laws of classical physics, Planck attempted to justify his results based on those laws. Very quickly, he came up with the quantum hypothesis of discrete, rather than continuous, values for blackbody radiation spectra. This hypothesis worked quite well to explain his constant, which itself was receiving experimental verification. However, Planck realized that he had come up against an unexpected dilemma: the quantum hypothesis violated the laws from which he had started. Pais cites Planck’s own account: “‘I tried immediately to weld the elementary quantum of action h somehow into the framework of classical theory. But in the face of all such attempts, this constant showed itself to be obdurate. . . . My futile attempts to fit the elementary quantum of action into the classical theory continued for a number of years, and they cost me a great deal of effort’” (1986, 133). Similarly, says Pais, based on Planck’s work, Einstein was able within the same decade to postulate the light quantum (i.e. the particle functioning of what had been assumed to be a wave). Einstein also did so by the methods of classical physics, which of course the photon also went far to undermine. Pais portrays Planck and Einstein as “reluctant revolutionaries” whose aim was to use as rigorously as possible the principles and methods that heretofore had functioned as indisputable laws of nature. Once they realized that their first principles had to be changed, they were compelled to adventure into uncharted territory. Pais’ point about Freud’s 1900 description of himself is that at just about the same time, Freud knew that he had the same dilemma: he had wanted to elaborate a psychology that would explain neurosis from...

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