The Works of Sigmund Freud: A Marxist Critique

[p020] The Works of Sigmund Freud: A Marxist Critique THE SIGNIFICANCE of Sigmund Freud in contemporary Western culture extends far beyond the field of psychia- try. His influence on the visual arts, for good or ill, has been profound; the literature of today would have a very different shape and content had he never lived. Even those who know neither his work nor his name use his ideas and technical terms as common intellectual coinage. Socialists should be especially concerned with his ideas and influence, as these contribute in a profound way to the irrational and anti-scientific tendencies and ideologies within our society. Freudism largely takes the place of the anti-humanist and anti-rational trends in nineteenth century Christianity, which were the main ideological defence against improving the lot of the working class and establishing a socialist society. There is no doubt that Freud was one of the most voluminous writers on psychological topics which the John McLeish history of this subject has had to contend with. Except for that relatively insignificant part of his output which expounds his system for the general reader, most of his writings were intended as original contributions to psychopathology, to the history of civilization, to art criticism, to religious history, or to one of his other numerous interests. Much of what he wrote is rather remote from normal human interests, and both couched in a language and argued in a type of logic foreign to the ordinary man. Any attempt to summarize or analyse this vast material must of necessity be inadequate. In this article certain of Freud’s most significant works will be examined in order to illustrate his characteristic modes of thought and the changes which took place in his views and system as time went by. A detailed or systematic examination of all his writings is not en- visaged. Freud’s Early Opinions . In his initial contributions to neurology and psycho- pathology Freud adopted a rigidly scientific approach. His methods were those of the anatomist and physio- logist. His aim was to establish laws of mental function- ing on the basis of brain physiology. Owing to the in- fluence of the Helmholtzian school in which Freud was trained, it was commonly assumed that physiological processes, including the activity of the nervous system {and consequently, it was argued, psychological pro- cesses) were subject to the same laws as those of chemistry and physics. Freud for a time shared this somewhat one-sided view of mental function. It was 2 protest against the idea, based on religious conceptions, that biological and psychical phenomena in the case of the human organism were, in principle, inaccessible to investigation, because of the special nature of man, which was taken to consist in a unique combination of body and soul. The Helmholtzian protest was a neces- sary one; but it was one-sided because it attempted to reduce the laws operating at the highest reaches of nerv- Ous activity, namely the human brain, to those of the lower levels of mechanism and chemistry. The early development of his thinking is shown clearly from a remarkable manuscript which was published recently (1950). This was no less than a Project for a Scientific Psychology which he composed in 1895, but which he made no attempt to recover from his friend, Fliess, to whom he had sent it, abandoning both the manuscript and the scientific monistic basis of his activi- ties simultaneously.! The manuscript is remarkable for its attempt to base psychology and psychopathology on the anatomy and physiology of the central nervous 1His friendship with Brener also came to an end at the same time; by 1897 he had altered the whole pattern of his scientific work. 176 system. It was not, of course, unique: Sechenov had made a similar programmatic attempt as early as 1863: Exner as well as Fleischl-Marxow, two of Freud’s col. leagues, had written along similar lines only a year or two before Freud’s attempt. The Project is highly specul- ative, depending ou the deductive method rather thar working from empirical observation. Where it is based on actual observations these are from the field of clinical psychopathology: Freud uses this material in crder to deduce the nature of the nervous System in general, instead of working from the objectively deter- mined data of neurology and using these as interpreta- tive concepts with which to explain the subjective data derived from his patients. In spite of this fundamental defect of method, the Project presents us with a most ingenious model of the mind as a neurological machine. But it was a model which the techniques used by neuro- logists of that period, and even those in use today, could neither demonstrate to be true nor prove to be false. Un- fortunately the details are too technical to discuss here: in any case: the Project is mainly of biographical interest. It marks the end of a phase in Freud’s thinking; after writing this monograph Freud turned away altogether from neurology as a basis for a scientific psychology and instead sought for this foundation in the data of his clinical experience. In 1897 Freud broke away from the narrow Helmholtz-Brucke conception of mental functioning. Unfortunately, at the same time he abandoned the attempt to interpret mental processes (or better, be- haviour) in terms of brain functioning, taking instead mental concepts as autonomous categories to be interpreted entirely in their own terms. He abandoned the monistic conception for a frankly dualistic view of the human psyche.

[p021] Psycho-Analysis: Basis and Method This turning away by psycho-analysis from the phy- siology of the central nervous system is perhaps its most characteristic feature, even at the present day. It means that the psycho-analyst works only with thought material for which he is completely dependent on his patient. This is shown very clearly by the fact that Freud derives most of his basic schemata from the patients themselves: psycho-analysis in fact represents an attempt to reduce to a consistent system the delusions .and ex- planations of the neurotic and the insane. Freud's criterion of truth is consistency: objective reference is of secondary value. Thus the system as a whole bears all the marks of a paranoiac construction: it attempts to give a universal explanation of all the phenomena of human history and behaviour; it is marked by internal consistency of such a high order that it transgresses the limits of common sense, of human decency—even of ‘logic itself—in the service of a higher logic of its own devising. . It is not a scientific body of knowledge so much as a way of life and a total attitude to reality. Its adherents believe that they are specially marked out from the rest of erring humanity by their superior in- sights and their radical conversion from those human weaknesses which theologically minded people might describe as ‘sinfulness’. They believe that their peculiar tenets and methods, if universally accepted and applied to human life, would save humanity from crime, poverty, disease and war, by the method of inner ‘conversion’, without the necessity for any radical changes in the environment. Like Kepler, Freud discovered, or publi- cized effectively, certain important empirical facts; but he was unable to explain these except in a semi- magical framework, in terms of psycho-analytic myths. This is shown in those papers which were repub- lished in 1904 as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In this work Freud assimilates the normal person to the neurotic by attempting to show that the same mechanisms or unconscious mental processes operate in the former as in the latter. This demonstration is accomplished by taking certain incidents such as par- ticular slips of the tongue and pen, certain cases of forgetting and complicated, apparently meaningless acts, and showing that in each case these apparently accidental happenings can be plausibly interpreted as having a certain underlying motivation and meaning- fulness, of which their authors are unaware. The underlying assumption—psychic determinism— is one of the guiding principles of all Freud’s work. It holds that all mental phenomena have a cause and a meaning which can be elucidated by making use of the principles of association of ideas. Freud admits that this concept of psychic determinism was ‘lifted’ directly from his paranoiac patients. He says in the course of a discussion of determinism: . It is a striking and generally recognized feature of the behaviour of paranoiacs that they attach the greatest signi- ficance to the trivial details in the behaviour of others .. . [The paranoiac] sees clearer than one of normal intellectual capacity .. . Many things obtrude themselves in the cons- ciousness of the paranoiac which in normal and neurotic 177 persons can only be demonstrated as existing in their un- conscious by means of psycho-analysis.2 The material which Freud presents in this book is singularly unconvincing. This is especially true of the analyses of numbers thought of at random, material which he considers to be most cogent in demonstrating the existence and operation of highly organized think- ing processes of which consciousness has no knowledge. These analyses are too long for quotation in full, but the method can be illustrated from the case of 426,718, a number thought of ‘at random’ by one of Freud’s patients. This was interpreted as a criticism of doctors (4267: ‘If your catarrh is treated by a doctor it lasts 42 days, if not treated it lasts 6 weeks’); as a death wish directed at the brother and sister of the patient (they came 3rd and Sth in the family, and 3 and 5 are missing from this number); as a desire for a younger brother or sister, etc. etc. This example, which is probably the best of those quoted by Freud since it requires the least arbitrary manipulation of the material, certainly proves the exis- tence of a complex (to use.Jung’s term) or of an apper- ception mass (to go back to Herbart) in the case of this particular patient. A number of ideas, connected with his early family situation, become strongly associated together and have a strong feeling-tone associated with them. Freud has not demonstrated that the number was caused by the existence of this complex, but has merely shown that a particular combination of figures has the power of eliciting this particular complex of ideas. To make the position clear, the following experi- ment gives an analogue to the case quoted by Freud. If a person is deprived of food for two or three days and is then shown a series of meaningless drawings or ink- blots and asked to say what he sees in them, a large proportion of his answers will be concerned with food in one form or another. If we now take the ‘non-food’ responses and ask him for his associations to these, we can readily demonstrate that his whole thinking is coloured by the subject of food. I dare say if we pre- sented him with the number 426,718 (or asked him to write down a series of numbers at random, and then asked him for his associations to these numbers) we could demonstrate that these form part of a complex of ideas associated with the subject of food. Like Freud’s analyses, these facts show merely that the mind is organized in a certain fashion on the prin- ciple of association; that the recall of certain ideas is easier than that of others, but that ultimately all ex- perience and all organized systems of ideas can be elicited by the method of association. They also show the influence of the condition of the inner organs on the direction of conscious thought. In the case of the normal individual, the examples which Freud quotes indicate that it is possible in the long run to associate any two ideas, provided one is allowed to make arbit- rary alterations by negating or breaking off portions of the material. “Freud, “Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ (Pelican ed., 1942) p. .

[p022] Freud and Causality It is Freud’s merit that he recognizes the principle of causality in mental events, and thus attempts to bring these under the sway of scientific method. But he per- ceives causality only in a fantastic form. For Freud, a mere sequence of ideas is ipso facto .a causal sequence: _ thoughts are generated internally and have an autonom- ous character and existence, being derived only from internal motives; their character as a reflection of external reality, their objective social-historical content and context, are ignored. As against such philosophers as Petzoldt, Freud’s assertion of determinism in the psychic sphere is of value, but by pushing the source of this determinism into the unconscious, and by eras- ing the border-line between the normal and the abnormal psyche, Freud obscured the objective, real source of the determinism of our concepts. The principle of causality in our mental processes derives from the fact that we are part of nature and society. Thoughts reflect reality, therefore the recognition of necessity in nature and society presupposes the recognition of necessity in our thinking processes. By suggesting that there are only differences of quantity between the neurotic and the normal psyche and refusing to recog- nize qualitative differences Freud eliminates a necessary and legitimate boundary and obscures the source and origin of our ideas in external reality. This elimination of legitimate boundaries is quite characteristic of the Freudian approach in general; it is what makes his doctrines so pleasing to his disciples. He seems to supply the key which opens to their under- standing new realms of integrated phenomena. Had he been content to assert that many of the dividing lines, such as that between a correct evaluation of reality and a distorted or false evaluation, between the normal and the neurotic, were not as absolute as people imagined them to be, it is doubtful if he would have given rise to a school. Neurotic and normal are alike in so far as their thoughts reflect reality: the neurotic reflects reality in a distorted, sometimes even fantastic, fashion. Thus our thinking processes have only a relative autonomy. The Theory of Sex In his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, pub- lished in 1905, Freud eliminates another necessary boundary line and assimilates the child to the sexual pervert. This treatise on sexuality is perhaps one of the two most important books Freud wrote, the other being his Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Until one has mastered these books one cannot claim to have under- stood the Freudian system. The first contribution on the theory of sex deals with adult sexual aberrations or perversions. In it is established the erroneous character of the theory that sexual inversion (homosexuality) is due to congenital degeneration, and of the view that it is necessarily based on some anatomical peculiarity, the generally accepted view of perversions in 1905. The result of these demonstrations is to suggest an environ- mental determination of inversion: but Freud goes fur- ther in suggesting that the sexual constitution is extremely labile in everyone and that all men are capable of a homosexual object selection—indeed that everyone in fact makes such a selection in the un- conscious. Other types of sexual perversion are con- sidered in order to demonstrate the truth of the general- ization that everyone, to some degree, great or small, is perverse in his sexual choice and sexual behaviour. Freud concludes this contribution by asserting that that there is something congenital at the basis of per- versions but it is something which is congenital in all persons, and that the assumed constitution which shows the roots of all perversions will be demonstrable only in the child. This paves the way for the second contribution, in which it is alleged that the child is a ‘polymorphous pervert’, that is, an individual manifesting at different Stages of development all the different possible kinds of overt, perverse sexual behaviour. ‘The new-born child has the germs of sexual feeling’, writes Freud. Of course, it must be made clear that Freud does not mean that the child is identical with the adult sexual pervert. The three characteristics of infantile sexuality which dis- tinguish it from adult perverse behaviour are: (1) That it is anaclitic, meaning that it leans on other instincts such as feeding, elimination, etc., for its manifestation; (2) That it is auto-erotic; that is, the child chooses itself as love object and manifests its sexuality by 178 thumb-sucking, retention of faeces or urine, masturba- tion etc.; and (3) That it is non-genital; that is, the sexuality of the child does not subserve the functions of reproduc- tion. The sexuality of the child normally passes through several developmental stages, from birth to about five years of age. Then a period of latency occurs during which all sexual interests and manifestations are with- drawn until the second great flourishing period of puberty. In the latter period all other sources of sexual feeling are subordinated to the genital zone. The third contribution is devoted to adult sexuality. These Contributions, and the later developments of the ideas first adumbrated in them, show more clearly than does any other of Freud’s writings the characteris- tic tendencies of Freudian psychology: the biologism of Freud’s total approach, and his suppression of legitim- ate boundaries. In 1908 he wrote an article Character and Anal-Erotism in which he announced his discovery that persons whose pleasure lay in anal sensations (produced by the retention of faeces in infancy) de- veloped in later life three character traits: orderliness, economy amounting to miserliness and obstinacy. It was already implicit in his 1905 articles that character traits in adult life were determined by fixations of the infantile libido at one or other stage of sexuality. When Freud abandoned the Helmholtz-Brucke reduction of psychological processes to physics and chemistry, he

[p023] moved only to the next higher level, that of biology. Individual destiny, the liability or non-liability to neurosis, personality traits and behavioural manifesta- tions, all result from the transformations undergone by the sexual instinct. This is one aspect of biologism. The other lies in his belief, expressed in the Three Contribu- tions to the Theory of Sex, that moral taboos, and presumably other cultural achievements of humanity, are fixed in the race through organic heredity. The Lamarckian Element in Freudism The belief that psychic constructions of a very com- plex character are hereditary is a necessary assumption of the Freudian system; it is through a Lamarckian mechanism that he attempts to explain the alleged universality of the Oedipus complex.? In addition to the Oedipus complex, other mental constructions which he believed to arise independently of the experience of the individual and to be found universally in the human species (because of Lamarckian heredity) were: sexual fantasies of spying on parental coitus; the fantasy of seduction in childhood by beloved persons (including the parent of the opposite sex); and the belief that the male parent had continually uttered threats of castra- tion against the male child. In his book Totem and Taboo, it can easily be demonstrated that Freud was forced, to fall back on prehistory in an attempt to save his theory of the Oedipus complex, and to make up what can only be described as a myth to explain the alleged universality of this complex. In 1905 he calls in a fantastic Lamarckism in an attempt to save his theories of the origin of hysteria as the result of passive sexual experiences in childhood. The point is that he had discovered in 1897 that the supposed experiences which accounted for these disorders had never hap- pened, but had been invented by his patients. This was admitted in a paper in 1913, The Predisposition to Obsessional Neurosis; in the interim period he retained the sexual aetiology but suggested that the fantasies of The Social Environment and But the main criticism of Freud’s biologism stems from the fact that human personality is the result of centuries of social-historical evolution. We inherit a social environment which operates through conditioning, formal education, social institutions such as the family, the school, the nation, to reproduce in each new genera- tion many of the characteristics of the old. Freud continually ignores social factors of this kind: he assumes that the characteristics of the rather peculiar people he studied are universally distributed, and then he falls back on Lamarckism and certain manufactured psycho-analytic myths to explain this alleged univers- ality. According to the Freudian theory personality and neurosis are never formed in the present, through activity, but are always historical constructions, deriving from some infinitely far-off period in the history of the race, or in the corresponding period in the development of the individual. He falls back on the Oedipus myth, the 3The French scientist Jean Lamarck (1744-1829), in his ‘Philo- sophie zoologique’ (1809) suggested that evolution in animal species took place through the transmission of individual modifications (inheritance of acquired characteristics). 179 seduction, which the hysteric and the obsessional had manufactured, acted on the neurotic temperament as though they were real. In trying to account for these fantasies Freud was obliged to postulate that at one period in the early history of humanity these had actually occurred as historical events, and that they had subsequently been passed down in the form of an organic inheritance to all members of the human species in the form of some kind of racial memory. There has been a long and inconclusive controversy about Lamarckism. A great variety of experiments and observations has been made to try to establish whether or not characters acquired by the individual in the course of his life-experience are inheritable or not. Most biologists conclude that the case for Lamarck has not been made out, although there remains an element of doubt in relation to certain experiments and observa- tions. What is certain is that one cannot light-heartedly assume that complex psychic experiences such as are postulated in the Freudian theory are ‘remembered’ in some way. The biological experiments have at least demonstrated the extreme unlikelihood of anything in the nature of a ‘racial memory’. Ordinary observation shows that each generation has laboriously to learn what the preceding generation has laboriously been taught: if this were not the case all schools and edu- cational establishments would long ago have become superfluous. the Evolution of Freudism castration myth, the various sexual fantasies and ‘racial memory’ to explain the individual’s educational and cultural development and the historical changes of his social environment. It is remarkable that the present-day disciples of Freud continue to produce similar fantasies as explanations of character. For example, they teach that the determin- ants of national character are to be found in the nursery: some nations tie their children’s limbs in swaddling- clothes; some breast-feed their infants whereas others quickly wean them to other kinds of food; some are strict in their bowel-training, others are lax. Depending on these cultural differences in the nursery we get the English or the French or the German or the Russian national character, with their typical social and political institutions. These infantile speculations are presented as serious contributions to the psychology of national differences, and various recipes are concocted on this nursery level to convert ‘disliked’ national characteristics into those ‘favoured’ by the English or American writer discussing them. Although these speculations effectively reduce the Freudian theories of character formation to

[p024] an absurdity, nothing is more certain than that Freud would accept them as legitimate extensions of his views and would welcome them as contributions to know- ledge, since they are already implicit in his 1905 Contributions and are made explicit in his 1913 paper on obsessional neurosis. No new principle is involved. From 1902 onward Freud had been surrounded by a group of young medical men, artists, writers and others. Freud himself was not very happy with this group who, according to his later account, spent most of their time squabbling about who had thought of some particularly good idea first. Jung, who made the acquaintance of the group in 1907, described them as ‘a medley of artists, decadents and mediocrities’. However, the situation of psycho-analysis changed almost overnight when the im- portant Burgholzli (Swiss) group of psychiatrists, includ- ing Bleuler and Jung, declared for Freud. From 1907 onwards the psycho-analytic movement began to spread, first to America, which Freud and Jung visited in 1909 at the invitation of Stanley Hall, then to various coun- tries in Europe, especially Hungary and Germany. As it spread geographically it also crossed other frontiers, annexing prehistoric anthropology, mythology, art, literature, aesthetics, religion and education as its pecu- liar province. It became not merely an eccentric move- ment in psychiatry but also a cultural phenomenon. In spite of various break-away movements, or perhaps be- cause of them—Adler broke away in 1910-11, to be followed by Stekel, Jung, Ferenczi and others at inter- vals—the psycho-analytic movement spread very rapidly, especially after the first world war, in the mood of mysticism, romanticism and reality-avoidance which followed on this catastrophe. Freud wrote a History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement in 1914, to explain the significance of the schismatic trends and to outline his characteristic doctrines. From the Pleasure Principle ... to Political lt essimism In 1920 Freud made an important alteration to his instinct theory. To understand this it is necessary to refer back to his Two Principles in Mental Functioning pub- lished in 1911. This was an attempt to trace the develop- ment and differentiation of consciousness and the growth of human attitudes. According to Freud the unconscious mental processes came first in time, and these were dominated by the ‘pleasure-pain principle’. At this period in prehistory, according to Freud, the organism seeks only the gratification of immediate instinct, in a totally unreflecting way. However, this is unsatisfactory since it often leads to the death of the organism, and in other cases the shortest path to the pleasure goal may in fact result in frustration, the negation of pleasure. The ‘reality principle’ therefore comes into operation: this means that, in addition to its urge for gratification, the organism also takes account of what is happening in the outside world. A new faculty is developed, the faculty of attention, and then in succession arise memory, judgment, action and thought. The ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘reality principle’ developed historic- ally, and arise again in the life-history of each individual, following the same basic sequence. The reality principle does not dethrone the pleasure principle, on the contrary it is a device which postpones or sug- gests other routes to gratification in the interest of elminating any painful consequences and of heightening the pleasure arising from gratification. In this paper, which is one of the fundamental state- ments of Freud’s doctrine, we have a repetition of the false methodology which was discussed in relation to his Project for a Scientific Psychology. The method used is to work from clinical observation (conceived in the Freudian mythological framework) and to postulate historical events on the basis of these observations and hypotheses. It is obvious that the historical sequence of uncons- cious cerebration, pleasure principle, reality principle, attention, memory, judgment, action, thought, is quite arbitrary, and an unhistorical construction. It is not possible to argue from the neurotic or the normal psyche _ back to what happened in history. Obviously this is a 180 historical question. It has two aspects: the development of the race and the development of the individual. The former is the proper subject matter of palaeontology and comparative psychology, and the latter is a question for detailed historico-scientific investigation. Freud’s attempts to short-cut these difficult, empirical studies by means of the arbitrary schemes derived from his inner consciousness have as much scientific value as the un- historical accounts and sequences of the book of Genesis or the mystical propositions of the Hegelian system, to which they bear a very strong resemblance. An important revision of this view resulted from the experience of war neuroses and of general conditions during the first world war. In 1920 Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This is a book in which Freud reveals the fundamental pessimism of psycho- analysis, and argues in a perverse fashion comparable only to Schopenhauer (whose views obviously inspired Freud in an unreflecting way throughout his life and nowhere more obviously than in this book). Freud argues here that instincts are actually an expression of the conservative nature of the organism, being directed to the reinstatement of something earlier. They seem to strive after change and progress, whereas in fact they are merely trying to reach an old goal by ways both old and new. The goal of life is the ancient starting-point death. We must therefore recognize two groups of instincts which are in continual conflict with each other. There is the group of self-preservative instincts which are perversely called ‘death instincts’ since in fact, according to Freud’s interpretation, they are merely part- instincts which are designed to secure the path to death peculiar to the organism. These instincts are the power instinct and the self-assertive instinct. The other, oppos- ing group of instincts are the sexual instincts, or ‘life instincts’. The conflict between these two groups brings about an oscillatory rhythm in the life of the organism: one group pressing forward to reach the final goal of death as quickly as possible, the other group making detours and retracing its steps only to traverse the same stretch once more from a given spot. Eternal Eros (the ‘life instinct’) and eternal Thanatos (the ‘death instinct’),

[p025] immortal adversaries, take their place with the other mythological Freudian mind-deities. As Caudwell puts it: ‘Freud’s picture of a struggle between eternal Eros and eternal Thanatos, between the life and death instincts, be- tween the reality principle and the pleasure principle, is only the eternal dualism of reflective barbarians, carried over by Christianity from Zoroastrianism, and now projected by Freud into the human mind. It represents a real struggle but in terms of a Western bourgeois myth.4 In the same book Freud denies that there is any im- pulse towards perfection and in fact disclaims implicitly any belief in progress. In a letter to a Dutch psychiatrist he made clear the basic pessimism about humanity on which the psycho-analytic view is based. He wrote: Psycho-analysis has concluded from a study of the dreams and mental slips of normal people, as well as from the symptoms of neurotics, that the primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual .. . It has furthermore taught us that our intellect is a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our impulses and emotions; that all of us are forced to behave cleverly or stupidly according as our attitudes and inner resistances ordain.5 In The Ego and the Id, written in 1923, he comes back to the same theme, writing the Magna Carta of fatalism and quietism in the words: “The conduct through life of the Ego is essentially passive; we are lived by unknown and uncontrollable forces.’ Freud and Bourgeois Society The denial of the role of reason in history and in the life of the individual is one of the most characteristic assumptions of Freudism, and accounts largely for its significance as a social and cultural movement in con- temporary Europe and America. In his latest period, initiated by Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and continu- ing until his death in 1939, Freud found his doctrines becoming respectable intellectual coinage. The reason for this is not far to seek: it has nothing to do with his clinical studies, which are largely unknown to the intel- lectuals who have adopted Freudian principles as part of their anti-rational, anti-progressive and anti-scientific Weltanschauung. Freud’s popularity is to be traced directly to his providing the particular emphases and myths necessary to serve as a deterrent to those who wish to bring about radical changes in the social system. Pessimism about man, who ‘after all’ is only an animal; denigration of the drive for change as a ‘mere’ conse- quence of frustrated instincts; denial of the human reason as an active force in history; the mythologizing of human history and development and the denial of pro- gress; the wilful blindness to the social and economic facts of life and their effects on human happiness and suffering; the placing of the whole load of human suffer- ing, human history, social organization and human creativity on mysterious self-generated entities in the human psyche—these are the aspects of Freudism em- phasized in the West today. They explain why Freud has been built up into a superman, as the greatest psy- chologist since Aristotle first gave the study a name. Freud has become one of the Sacred Cows of contem- porary Western culture. Conclusion The main defects of the Freudian method and theory have now been exemplified from the source material. Much of this has been left unexamined, because of the limitation of space. However, nothing in the remaining corpus of Freudian writings contradicts what has been said: this material shows the same anti-scientific ten- dencies as that analysed. These tendencies are: the lack of any physiological basis for the psycho-analytic ex- planations of neuroses and of the structure of the human psyche (this is due to the basic dualism of psycho- analysis, which takes the mental life as an autonomous category); the total neglect of the social basis of neurosis and of human behaviour in favour of a determinism based on self-determined entities in the human psyche; the idealistic mode of thought which disrupts the rela- tion between thought and reality, between theory and practice, and isolates abstract, hypothetical entities, treating them as real causal forces; the failure to recog- nize levels of functioning, to recognize that quantitative changes eventuate in qualitative changes; lastly, the reduction of the human personality to simple biological categories (this is a special case of ignoring levels of functioning). 4Caudwell, C., ‘Studies in a Dying Culture’ (1948) p. 159. 181 If we wished to redress the balance a little in favour of Freudism (as it may be thought that a total con- demnation of his work is misplaced), we would single out: the fact that his theories were always couched in terms of dynamic opposition of forces, which is in con- formity with the dialectical approach to reality; his emphasis on determinism as the appropriate category in a scientific study of the human personality; the way in which he fearlessly exposed some of the shams of the ‘polite society’ of his day; and his charming literary style, including the way in which he depreciated his own numerous flights of fancy. Dogmatism was alien to the expression of his theories; he attempted rather to gain the conviction of his readers by ingratiatingly suggesting that he shared some of the reader’s misgivings. One cannot do better in concluding an analysis of the psycho- analytic theory than to quote one of these numerous disclaimers: this is Freud’s own estimate of his writings: ‘One might ask me whether and how far I am convinced of the correctness of the assumptions here developed. My answer would read that I am neither myself convinced nor do I ask that others shall believe them; or, better stated, I don’t know how far I believe them.’ “Jones, E., ‘Sigmund Freud, Life and Work’ (1957), vol. 2, p.

[p026] Communications Fryer’s Inflammatory Tone MAY I protest against the inflammatory tone of Peter Fryer’s attack on Edward Thompson? Dogmatism and _ intolerance produce an evil offspring, as Fryer saw for himself in Hung- ary. Yet here again the true Leninist polemical style is reproduced, in all its bitterness. Thompson is virtually depicted as an enemy agent poison- ing the wells of Marxist purity. If, as Fryer states, ‘the slightest concession to idealism . .. has its own fatal and compelling logic’ then King Street is right about Hungary and Fryer is wrong. That I refuse to believe, but it is the logic of his own position. ‘Under the cloak . . . an all-out assault’, ‘class duty’, ‘a disservice to the working-class move- ment’, ‘[bringing] grist to the mill of [our] opponents’—all our old friends are back. The alleged deviationist is once more ‘objectively’ a fascist. Such crude and cruel ‘logic-——or anything resembling it— is absolutely unacceptable to the British working class. As a miner and an active trade unionist I belong to, and have the closest contact with, the working class. In so far as they have made a choice at all, they have rejected this ‘tool’. And those who sought to thrust it into their hands were found to have a poorer grip of reality than the people they presumed to ‘teach’. . Since they discovered that devastating fact, various efforts have been made to determine what went wrong. In my opinion, no one has grappled as successfully with the problem as Thompson has done in his essay on Socialist Humanism. He has gone to the roots, and this has naturally displeased our British Fundamentalists as much as it would Khrushchev. One idol is down but touch not the other three! And so we are left with ‘wicked Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy’ in place of the rich and profound analysis which Thompson has begun. When Fryer eulogizes the teachings of Lenin as uncritically as he once did those of Stalin he must forgive us if we have our doubts. Certainly we cannot accept that it needs an acquaintance with Lenin’s ‘Philosophical Notebooks’ to under- stand what he regards as flaws in Stalin’s ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’. That the Notebooks have not yet appeared in English, and only recently in French, is no excuse for the eulogies of Stalin as thinker, in which Fryer previously indulged. David Guest’s book (1939) certainly did not ignore the identity of opposites, or the negation of the negation. But Fryer claims (rightly) that Stalin’s work—published in the same year—did ignore these dialectical laws. This fact must have been known to Fryer for many years—yet the only criticism he made of Stalin’s Collected Works was about the absence of an index. I hope this is not a case of an excuse being preferred to a confession. It may be true that without the categories of dialectical logic ‘we cannot think properly’. But not a few pre-nineteenth century thinkers didn’t do so badly; while many present day ‘thinkers’, armed to the teeth with ‘dialectics’, completely failed to ‘grapple with changing reality’. One of them—a Scottish comrade of mine—was asked after the Khrushchev speech what conclusions he had drawn. He replied: ‘For twenty years I’ve been thinking dialectically— but from now on I’m just going to think!’ I am far from disparaging the positive achievements of Marx and his followers. And I consider myself to be a com- munist in a far better sense of the word than the ‘Marxists’ of King Street. But fresh and bold thinking—unbounded by preconceived ‘categories’—is the need of the hour. This, Vit seems, is what Edward Thompson is doing. He will, no doubt, answer for himself should he care to follow Fryer along this particular trail. At this stage I merely wish to appeal to a comrade for whom I have a deep respect not to besmirch his fine new record with bigotry and intolerance. Ballingry (Fife)