Authors: Frank Tallis
In his unremitting defence of the unconscious, Freud then revisits a point originally raised by Augustine; namely, that an individual’s totality must necessarily exceed the contents of his or her own awareness:
We can go further and argue, in support of there being an unconscious psychical state, that at any given moment consciousness includes only a small content, so that the greater part of what we call conscious knowledge must in any case be for very considerable periods of time in a state of latency, that is to say, of being psychically unconscious. When all our latent memories are taken into consideration it becomes totally incomprehensible how the existence of the unconscious can be denied.
This is an important and very persuasive argument. Nevertheless, it is an argument that was considered by some to have a fundamental weakness: What if latent memories are not psychological but physical in nature? As Freud explains, latent memories might ‘correspond to residues of somatic processes from which what is psychical can once more arise’. As such, if one adopts this position, there is no need to posit a psychology of the unconscious – a living, breathing world in which dynamic energies animate the dead record of memory. There is merely a neurochemical storage facility. A biological lending library, the volumes of which only become psychologically real when issued to consciousness.
Freud suggests that this approach offers few prospects for advancement. Indeed, it is something of an intellectual cul-de-sac. He argues that the physical characteristics of memory are totally inaccessible; for example, you can’t see the memory of a sunny day or moonlit night by examining a slice of brain tissue under a microscope. Therefore, this form of criticism doesn’t lead anywhere. It presents an alternative to a psychological unconscious, but then immediately runs up against the limits of scientific enquiry. If, on the other hand, one accepts the existence of a psychological unconscious, research into the mind and its working can continue in a meaningful way. In essence, psychoanalysis is a more practicable theory. Freud was not against biological accounts of memory. It was simply that thinking about latent memories as existing in a psychological unconscious (rather than as physical ‘residues’) offered richer theoretical possibilities.
Finally, Freud concludes his defence of the unconscious by reminding the reader that, prior to the advent of psychoanalysis, evidence for the unconscious had already been gathered by studies using post-hypnotic suggestion.
The subsequent sections of ‘The unconscious’ are highly technical. One senses that Freud is really trying to come to terms with the machinery of the unconscious. He is trying to dismantle it – metaphorically plunging his hands into the darkness and loosening nuts and bolts; feeling for parts; probing the gears; warming his palms on the dynamo.
Freud reiterates his early tripartite topography of mind – consisting of conscious, unconscious, and preconscious domains – and then seeks to define the special characteristics of the unconscious.
Freud states that the unconscious is exempt from mutual contradiction. It is a place where love and hate can comfortably exist, side by side. Like a machine designed by Escher, its impossible gears are not thwarted by logical inconsistencies. They smoothly work around stark juxtapositions and polarities.
The unconscious is timeless. Events are not ordered chronologically in the unconscious, nor are they altered by the passage of time. The recollections of early childhood are as potent as the recollections of the previous day.
Finally, the unconscious is a ‘place’ – a location where external reality has been replaced by what Freud called ‘psychical reality’. It is a kind of psychoanalytic cyberspace. An inner landscape where virtually anything can happen. It has its own enigmatic truths. The psychological truths of fantasy and the dream world.
The end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth century, were important times in the world of archaeology. The German millionaire Heinrich Schliemann, guided by a careful study of Homer, had excavated Troy and discovered King Priam’s Palace. He had excavated Golden Mycenae and found the tombs of Agamemnon, Cassandra, and Eurymedon. In 1900 Sir Arthur Evans excavated Knossos – site of the fabled labyrinth wherein Theseus slew the Minotaur. And, shortly after, the Golden Age of Egyptian archaeology began, culminating with Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen in 1922.
Freud had a passion for archaeology. Indeed, he claimed to have read more archaeology than psychology and followed the fortunes of contemporary excavations with great interest. Moreover, his consulting room was crowded with ancient artefacts. His patients commented that the ambience he created had more in common with a museum or an archaeologist’s study than a doctor’s consulting room. Everywhere were ranks of statuettes and figures, fragments of eroded stone, glass cabinets displaying antiquarian treasures, and on his walls hung images of temples, sphinxes and pyramids; a young woman, stepping silently through the streets of doomed Pompeii. And among it all the famous couch, covered in piliows and an ornate Persian rug.
The analogy that can be drawn between psychoanalysis and excavation is obvious, and it is indeed interesting how the major discoveries of one discipline coincided with the other. Although the analogy between psychoanalysis and archaeology is a crude one, it was an analogy that Freud enjoyed. He believed it to be particularly apposite. While he was treating a famous case known as the ‘rat man’ (published in 1909 as ‘Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis’), Freud used the relics in his consulting room to make a point concerning the preservation of unconscious memories:
I then made some short observations upon the psychological differences between the conscious and the unconscious, and upon the fact that everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing-away, while what was unconscious was relatively unchangeable; and I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antiques standing about in my room. They were, in fact, 1 said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation; the destruction of Pompeii was only beginning now that it had been dug up.
Freud saw himself as the mind’s archaeologist; he had taken a spade and plunged it into the topsoil of the limen. Like Schliemann, Evans, or Carter, he was in the business of opening secret chambers, recovering relics, and translating hieroglyphs (although in his case these corresponded with the unconscious, repressed memories, and dream interpretation). It was inevitable, therefore, that Freud would eventually speculate on the existence of genuine ancient treasure, buried deep in the unconscious. Unable to participate in a ‘real’ archaeological dig, he began to contemplate the possibility of undertaking the nearest psychological equivalent.
Intimations of Freud’s intention can be found in early letters to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess. In 1897 Freud was using terms such as ‘endopsychic myth’ and ‘psychomythology’. And in a letter dated 4 July 1901 he wrote:
Have you read that the English have excavated an old palace in Crete (Knossos) which they declare is the authentic labyrinth of Minos? Zeus seems originally to have been a Bull. It seems, too, that our own old God, before the sublimation instigated by the Persians took place, was also worshipped as a bull. That provides food for all sorts of thoughts which it is not yet time to set down on paper.
In this passage, one has a strong sense of Freud teetering on the edge of insight, daring to entertain ‘all sorts of thoughts’ which he was reluctant to share. But what were these thoughts? One can only speculate, but given the eventual direction of Freud’s writing and his reference to Knossos and the labyrinth, it is relatively easy to hazard a guess. If the labyrinth was real, then perhaps myths were vestigial memories. In the same way that personal memories are preserved in the unconscious, might not cultural memories also be preserved in the unconscious – but at a much lower level?
These considerations eventually resulted in the publication of
Totem and Taboo
(1912-13), which is very probably Freud’s most fanciful work. In it, he suggested that correspondences might exist between the Oedipus complex, the emergence of Oedipal themes in art and drama, and an actual prehistoric event in which the dominant male (or father) was murdered by the younger male members of a primal horde (or tribe) in order to gain access to females who had hitherto been jealously guarded. This was an extraordinary suggestion. Moreover, it carried with it the strong implication that ancient memories (and their associated emotions) could be passed down through subsequent generations. In theory the memories buried at the deepest levels of the unconscious were far, far more ancient than anything that might surface in Troy, Knossos, or Pompeii,
Freud’s writing is curiously seductive. The reader is reassured by Freud’s frank and frequent admissions that his understanding of the human mind is limited. He openly declares that he is perplexed when confronted by phenomena which psychoanalysis has so far failed to explain. Moreover, he often pre-empts the reader’s scepticism with his own. He, too, finds some of his discoveries hard to believe, but has been forced to accept them because of the sheer quantity of evidence. The weight of Freud’s hand exerts a ghostly pressure on the shoulder – paternal and consoling – coaxing us to face up to the strange and awesome implications of his work. We are left with the impression of a humble man who, having stumbled upon some difficult truths about the human condition, has reluctantly accepted the burden of taking these truths out into a hostile and unreceptive world. We are urged to pity him and admire him for his courage. Nowhere in his writings is this more apparent than in Lecture 18 of his
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(1916-17). In the concluding paragraph of this work Freud claims that, by emphasising the importance of the unconscious in mental life, he had delivered ‘the third blow’ – after Copernicus and Darwin – to human narcissism.
In the course of centuries the naive self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a fragment of a cosmic-system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master of its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind. We psychoanalysts were not the first and not the only ones to utter this call to introspection; but it seems to be our fate to give it its most forcible expression and to support it with empirical material which affects every individual.
Even among those with a taste for hyperbole, Freud’s claim here is arresting in its magnitude. Freud’s third blow is not merely the third in a regular sequence, but the third and ‘most wounding blow’. According to Freud, the role of the unconscious in mental life was of
greater
significance to humanity than both the heliocentric universe and the theory of evolution.
Many have suggested that Freud’s third-blow lecture is definitive proof of his fundamental arrogance and over-inflated sense of self-importance. His modest provisos, cautionary remarks, and sceptical attitude become horribly transparent – nothing more than a weak ploy. Suddenly, they stop concealing the monstrous ego that would lay claim to scientific discoveries of greater significance than Copernicus and Darwin.
This has certainly been the received and most widely endorsed view among members of the scientific establishment.
But what if Freud was right?
I
n 1902, a Viennese physician called Wilhelm Stekei made a suggestion to Sigmund Freud. He suggested that Freud might convene an informal gathering of local doctors interested in psychoanalysis. Stekel himself was extremely interested in the subject, having only recently been treated by Freud for impotence; however, Stekel was not typical among his medical peers. The Viennese medical establishment were iargely indifferent to Freud, and Stekel was one of a very small group of enthusiasts eager to learn more about Freud’s methods.
The problem of promoting psychoanalysis had occupied Freud’s mind for some time. He had already attempted to raise the profile of psychoanalysis by publishing
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(1901) – a book written for the general public which describes how the unconscious can influence trivial errors (such as tongue-slips), accidents, and mistakes. This was, however, a slight work, and over half of the first print run of Freud’s magnum opus,
The Interpretation of Dreams,
had yet to be sold. Thus, psychoanalysis was still very much a minority interest.
Freud warmed to Stekel’s suggestion, and subsequently sent invitations out to Stekel and three other doctors: Max Kahane, Rudolf Reitler, and Alfred Adler. So it was that on a Wednesday night in the autumn of 1902 four guests arrived at Professor Freud’s house – Bergasse 19. The topic they chose to discuss was ‘smoking’ (an activity which Freud found inordinately pleasurable, and had already decided was a substitute for masturbation). The evening was a great success, and the group decided to carry on meeting regularly. They always convened on Wednesday nights, and in due course their informal gathering became known as the Wednesday Psychological Society.
The Wednesday Psychological Society became something of a local institution. Interested parties were free to come along, some of whom became regulars while others lost interest and dropped out. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, attendance grew. The original members had no real understanding of what they had started. In the fullness of time, the Wednesday Psychological Society would become an international movement and exert a powerful influence on the cultural climate of the twentieth century. What began as five doctors discussing the psychological significance of smoking eventually became something very close to a new religion.