From David Prynn and James D. Young

[p030] David Prynn James D. Young Freudian Blinkers JOHN McLEISH’S otherwise excellent article in your issue of Nov.-Dec. 1957 suffers, I think, from one main shortcoming. For a ‘Marxist’ critique it does not dwell at sufficient length upon Freud’s periodic excursions into the field of politics, nor does it bring to your readers’ attention a number of his more explicitly reactionary pronouncements. These have obvious roots in Freud’s system itself. May I here counterpose to Freud’s psycho-analysis of politics some comments upon the politics of psycho-analysis? Freudism bases itself on the assumption that man’s actions may be interpreted in terms of certain universal, primitive and unchanging instincts, constantly seeking gratification, This reservoir of instinctual energies Freud calls ‘the id’. Its driving forces are modified, according to Freud, by various mechan- isms, to make them conform to the requirements of the external world, to the norms of conduct prevailing in ‘civil- ized’ society, to what Freud calls ‘reality’! This is done by ‘the ego’, which is ‘that part (of the mind) which is concerned with the perception of outer reality and our adjustment to it’. The ideals or moral standards a man seeks to live up to con- stitute the ‘super-ego’. Freudian theory seeks to explain all human activity—and history itself—in terms of the conflict between instincts, ideals and ‘reality’, The ego, mysteriously personalized, is made the arbiter between the contending forces. Successfully sublimated (i-e., diverted) instinctual drives find expression in artistic and other forms of creative endeavour. Neurosis results when the ego proves unequal to the onerous task of arbitration imposed upon it. What solutions for suffering humanity did Freud derive from this schema? He was not averse to generalizing the problems of the individual, and Professor Fliigel, one of his disciples. tells us tnat he ‘ultimately came to realize that he had the whole of mankind for his patient’.* Starting from Freud’s own premises (the validity of which is questionable) it will be be seen that the Freudian system holds out three possible solutions to the problems confronting man in a modern society. It is extremely revealing (for the politically minded) to see which of these the psycho-analytic school came to advocate. On the one hand the individual could give free rein to the id, ignoring the social uses and customs of his time, when these in any way thwarted his self-expression. Freud rejected this ‘free-living’ solution completely. ‘The child,’ he tells us ‘has to learn to ‘control its instincts. To grant it complete freedom is impossible ... It would do serious damage to the children themselves’.* For; he claims elsewhere, ‘the stubborn conflict ... between sensual and ascetic tendencies ... is not resolved by helping one side to win a victory over the other .. ‘If we were to make victory possible for the sensual side . the disregarded forces repressing sexuality would have to indemnify themselves in symptoms’. Freud thus became the supreme advocate of compromise. For any other solution, you see, produces psychiatric symptoms. For the analyst, a clear case of heads I win, tails you lose. What of the other possible solutions? If the granting of a free rein to the instincts is not possible in contemporary society, perhaps society might be changed, made more rational, thus giving greater scope to the id and to man’s inherent potentialities? Freud would have none of this. Society must not be changed. ‘Psycho-analytic education will be assuming an unwarranted responsibility,’ he tells us ‘if it sets out to make its pupils into revolutionaries ... I should go so far as to say that revolutionary children are not desirable from any point of view’.* Now if an educational system does not consciously and deliberately reject the current values and institutions of a society, it must of necessity give them tacit support. Human thinking, like other phenomena, is subject to a certain inertia. Freud did not equivocate on this issue. “The function of edu- cation,’ he tells us, ‘is to inhibit, forbid and suppress and it has at all time carried out this function to admiration’... He was fully aware of the social implications of these opinions, for in another passage he tells us that ‘every education is partisan; it aims at making the child adapt itself to whatever social system is the established one, without consideration of how valuable or how stable that system might be’.® Was Freud perhaps more enlightened when it came to politics and the class struggle? He tells us that ‘it is not the business of the analyst to choose between parties’.’ This would be ‘parti- san’ (!). His mantle of neutrality wears, however, a little thin in places. Like so many ‘impartial’ experts Freud had very definite views on such questions as Marxism and Bolshevism. “Marxism,” he tells us, although it has ‘remorselessly swept away all idealistic systems and illusions, has nevertheless developed illusions itself, which are no less dubious and unverifiable than their predecessors. It hopes, in the course of a few genera- tions, so to alter men that they will be able to live together in the new order of society almost without friction, and that they will do their work voluntarily. In the meantime it moves else- where the instinctual barriers which are essential in any society, it directs outwards the aggressive tendencies’ which threaten every human community, and finds its support in the hostility of the poor against the rich, and of the hitherto powerless against the former holders of power. But such an alteration in human nature is very improbable’.® From this concept of ‘the intractable nature of man’ it is but a simple step to Freud’s contention that Bolshevism was a religion which was ‘obliged to compensate its believers for the sufferings and deprivations of the present life by promising them a better life hereafter, in which there will be no unsatisfied needs’.° It mattered little to Freud whether what was promised was ‘pie-in-the-sky’ or the earthly fruits of a rationally planned economy. Freud considered that in the USSR what he called ‘Bolshev- 1 J. S. Fligel, in Am Outline of Modern Knowledge (1931), p. 385. 2 Ibid. p. 356. 3 S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures (1933), p. 191. 4 Ibid. p. 194.5 Ibid. p.. 191. © Ibid. p. 193. 7 Ibid. p. 194. 8 Ibid. p. 230. ° Ibid. p. 231. 91

[p031] LABOUR REVIEW ism’ was failing from within. He saw the early stranglehold of the bureaucracy and the beginnings of the terror. The régime was punishing those who doubted the validity of the cfficial doctrine “as vindictively . . . as heresy [had once been punished] by the Catholic Church’. A little psycho-analytic sleight of hand, a little unscrupulous equating of Bolshevism and Stalinism and hey presto, the trick was done: man must invariably assert his anti-social tendencies and his needs for inspired belief, whatever the social frameworks he may devise. We see here how the ‘materialistic’ and ‘scientific’ Freud joins hands with the worst obscurantists of Roman Catholicism in echoing the oldest anti-socialist cry of them all: the immut- ability of human nature! . What then is the solution advocated by the Freudian school? ‘Education,’ Freud tells us ‘has to steer its way between the Scylla of giving the instincts free play and the Charybdis of frustrating them ... It is a matter of finding out how much one may forbid, at which times and by what methods!”” And the objective of psycho-analysis? It is quite simply to ‘strengthen the ego’, so that it can cope with the conflicting demands of the instinctual life, of the super-ego and of the environment. The latter, as has been shown, are none other than the dictates of the prevailing social order. The product of this psychiatric recipe would be a species of 10 Ibid. p. 192. Document