Psychoanalysis itself raised the question: is this a science? Freud certainly thought it was. But what has to be true for a certain body of scholarship to be a science, or to be, perhaps more loosely speaking, scientific?
The contrary term, for the Circle, was "metaphysics." The VC disdained metaphysics. Their manifesto said that the VC stood for "removing the theological and metaphysical debris of a millennia," and one is to imagine the adjective "metaphysical" pronounced with disdain as one reads that. Indeed, this is their major link with the philosophy of Auguste Comte, who invented the term "positivism" that soon came to be applied to the VC.
So: was Freud engaged in metaphysics? Perhaps, but this was not obvious. Indeed, as Edmonds observes, the unconscious was not an "unreachable" postulate. Certainly as Freud understood the term the unconscious was a tangible fact there on the couch, part of the human being asking to be examined and set right.
Some of the younger VC members worked to translate Freud's language into something more scientific, removing any taint of the metaphysical from it.
But both Wittgenstein and Popper, those two Top Shelf thinkers most closely associated with the circle, were disdainful of such efforts.
Wittgenstein wrote, "Suppose Taylor and I are walking along the river and Taylor stretches out his hand and pushes me in the river. When I ask why he did this he says 'I was pointing out something to you,' whereas the psychoanalyst says that Taylor subconsciously hated me ... when would we say that Taylor's explanation was correct?"
This was what bothered Wittgenstein. It was also a fair statement of what bothered Popper about Freud, Adler, and that whole set. How could their claims be tested and, where appropriate, discarded? Maybe there was a beautiful church spire in the vicinity, and Taylor's arm motion could plausibly have been an effort to point it out....
What some in the VC did take from Freud was the general idea that the repression of sexuality, and consequent sexual guilt, is a bad thing, and that some liberation of sexual energy is to be encouraged.
One last bit of Freudian defiance before we are done with him. In June 1938, soon after the German takeover of Austria, the founder of psychoanalysis was on his way out of the country, to live in London. As a condition of his departure, the Gestapo demanded that he gave a written statement that he had not been mistreated. He wrote, "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to everyone."
Edmonds writes, "Fortunately for him, this remark seems to have been taken at face value, irony being yet another victim of Nazi rule."
Christopher, you write, "Edmonds observes, the unconscious was not an 'unreachable' postulate. Certainly as Freud understood the term the unconscious was a tangible fact there on the couch...."
ReplyDeleteI don't know what "not ... unreachable" means -- that some evidence for it exists? that it can be shown to exist? I submit that, though we have unconscious desires and unconscious motivations, there is no evidence of "the unconscious." "Unconscious" should be used solely as an adjective and not a noun, until the day when neurologists find it in the brain. Freud deserves credit for popularizing (certainly not discovering) the notion that our actions are sometimes motivated by desires of which we are not conscious, but of which we can become conscious. In no way, however, was he a scientist, but I won't attempt to justify that statement now.
Henry, I thought you would enjoy my oh-so-subtle use of a photo of cigars as an illustration for thism post. I agree with you about the substance of your remark. Freud had a remarkable mind, and he might have made a great novelist. Or literary critic. But if we are the retain any demarcation for the idea "science" as a specific activity it will have to exclude him. I will discuss the demarcation question in some detail later in these posts.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I didn't pay attention to the cigars. Are their varying lengths significant? ☺
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