Freud and the Freedom of the Sane

Freud seems to have been torn between a literary and a scientific model for his enterprises. On the one hand he stresses the scientific nature of his researches to an extent which makes the suspicious reader wonder whether he protests too much. On the other hand it is well known that he regarded many writers, though predominantly Shakespeare, as anticipating his findings on the unconscious. In one famous passage in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis he places his discovery of the unconscious on a par with the discoveries of Darwin and Copernicus in their effect upon man's picture of himself. He is justified, of course, and if we add Marx to this triumvirate we add a figure even closer to Freud in claiming a scientific status for his work, a scientific status which is, to the uncommitted, dubious. Theodore Mischel argues that Freud increasingly construes neurotic behaviour upon the model of ordinary intentional behaviour and, though he continued to show interest in the view that the unconscious impulses which are repressed are physiological in nature, this ideal of a reduction of the psychological to the physiological became a less active ingredient in his published work as his collaboration with Fliess receded into the past. So although he may have paid lip service to some form of psycho-physical identity, believing that mental phenomena are ultimately no more or less than physical happenings in the neurones of the brain, in mature Freud this seems to have been an idly spinning wheel. Roy Schafer has recently pointed out that many of Freud's followers use the concepts of natural science (force, energy and discharge, etc.), whilst simultaneously retaining traces of anthropomorphism in their metapsychology. For instance Heinz Hartmann emphasizes the concept of a ‘higher organizing function’ which resists formulation in the mechanistic metapsychology he favours. Similar difficulties obtrude in the work of Waelder and Kohut. The significance of these conflicts leads Schafer to frame basic Freudian insights in terms of the theory of action, stressing the manner in which an action may be described in differing ways and thus allowing us to present the fact that a patient's behaviour may both tell and not tell us of his deepest anxieties. Yet curiously Schafer denies that freedom plays any part in his account whereas we would have expected a concept so central to agency to have an equally central role in any recasting of psycho-analysis in terms of the theory of action.