Category Archives: Freud

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 3.2

07 Tuesday Jul 2020

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Rieff explains the process in this manner.  The entire culture functions as a superego, replete with symbolic expression and procedures for bringing the individual into conformity with the community purpose.  The individual is thus brought to health by conforming the individual to the community superego. 

The person who brings the individual into conformity with the community superego was the earlier therapist. In this role, particularly if the earlier “therapist” utilized any sacral symbolism, functioned as a “priest.”

To bring the individual into conformity to the community superego brought about a “transformation” of the individual and formed a “positive community. 

Rieff also proposes an interesting role for the estatic or ascetic religionist. Such a person by means of an extreme religious action which disestablishes prior bonds and re-establishes the individual into a new positive community, a new set of symbols. 

In contrast to a positive community where the therapist brings about a “transformation” the analytic therapist, as developed by Freud creates no positive community and engages in no commitment therapy. 

Freud’s therapy was precisely for the purpose of removing the “analysand” from any positive community. The therapist had no end of bringing the individual into conformity to a communal superego: quite the opposite. The individual was taught to understand the superego. The therapist does not propose any new community, he rather acts to free the analysand. 

When the analysand comes to the therapist, he is “buried alive  … in the culture.” (64) The previous sacral system is no longer a means of healing, but “sickness.” Freud offers not salvation, merely I suppose – although the this word is not used by Rieff – reality:

To be thus freed from a tyrannical cultural super-ego is to be properly bedded in the present world.

This does not mean those who followed in Freud’s footsteps were content to leave the individual freed from all external superego. Such persons are considered by Rieff later in the book. 

At this point, Rieff merely posits that analysis is a means of psychologically detaching oneself from broken symbols which are symptoms of an earlier, no longer functioning community: “The analytic therapy developed precisely in response to the need of the Western individual … for a therapy that would not depend for its effect on a symbolic return to a positive community.” (61)

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 3.1 (Community and Therapy)

07 Tuesday Jul 2020

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The prior post on Triumph of the Therapeutic may be found here.

Community and Therapy, Chapter 3

In this chapter, Rieff begins with an understanding of mental health as provided by means of a symbolic system. By means of a symbolic system, the society creates a matrix in which the individual person can achieve a character ideal. To be a functioning person, the person must belong to a “positive community” which “offers some sort of salvation to the individual through participant membership.” (60)

In this scenario, the system works if the individual functions reasonably well. The system will need a sufficiently robust symbolic format and mechanism for involvement in that system. 

For the individual to function well, the individual not may but must participate in the communal life: it was only the life of the community that the life of any individual would be sufficiently well served.

Rieff then subsumes the history religion and culture into a concept of therapy:

Ultimately, it is the community that cures. The function of the classical therapist is to commit the patient to the symbol system of the community, as best he can and by whatever techniques are sanctioned. (57)

Rousseau provided a seeming break from this concept by introducing the idea that the individual must break free from the confinements of the community. But in the end, Rousseau ended up in the same place, because he merely posited the creation of a new community in the future.  

Marx took Rousseau a step further and argued that the community was utterly broken and that all that currently existed is cash interactions. But Marx was still looking for a community, just a new future community where the individual could finally be integrated into the communal whole.

From a slightly different perspective, De Tocqueville considered the possibility of a wholly democratic society where all communal bounds would be broken down and all life would be private.

But for all that, Rieff contends that prior to Freud, mental health was a matter sociology: it was obtained by means of integrating the individual to the society’s system to simultaneously define and give room for expression of the individual. 

At this point, Rieff places Freud as the one who provides a therapy to the individual when no positive community exists. 

Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 2.3 (Culture)

11 Thursday Jun 2020

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Rieff ends the chapter “The Impoverishment of Western Culture” with a movement from the individual aspects to the way which these individual attitudes playout across a culture:

“Every culture is an institutionalized system of moral demands, elaborating the conduct of personal relations, a cosset of compelling symbols.” ( 52)

The system which surrounds the individual consists of a cultural wide system of both (1) moral demands, which is expressed by means of “compelling symbols.” Freud provided a mechanism to understand and resist those symbols.

Moreover, Freud’s system made it impossible for anyone to again try and resurrect and impose the fading moral order:

No moral demand system could ever again compel at least the educated classes to that inner obedience which bound men to rules they themselves could not change except at the expense of spirit, far beyond the usefulness of such rules to the continuance of cultural achievement.

Freud believed he had put human beings – at least educated human beings – beyond the power of some system to impose upon human beings moral demands which they did not personally find necessary. 

Rieff saw material comforts “rising expectations” as sufficient to stave off the ascetic strain of morality.  We can simply use “analysis and art” as a substitute for religion.

We were now in a place where only a “yielding demand system” could possibly hold sway (53). 

We keep seeing ourselves at the end of history, where this will just be the conclusion.

Rieff’s conclusion that Freud had created a stable place of yielding seems to fail with a vengeance. The moral demands may have changed (one must believe that biological sex is a social construct, and so on) from prior morality. That may make it appear to be “liberating”. But we are seeing moral demands as strict as anything which has been witnessed in any religion. People are keeping lists. Public displays of piety are mandatory. 

It seems that Freud may have provided a tool to go after a morality of one sort of sexual limitation, but he did not free humanity from any sort of exclusively personal moral freedom. 

Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic 2.2 (Therapy as Re-Education)

12 Tuesday May 2020

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The previous post on Rieff may be found here. 

Therapy as Re-Education

Rieff has a useful understanding of therapy in contrast religion (which in the case of Freud would be Christianity of Judaism) which Rieff refers to as “older moral pedagogies.” (45) The prior moral system required one “concentrating on the life of trying to order the warring parts of the personality into a hierarchy.” (45).

This ordering of one’s competing demands and impulses is done in accord with the requires of a “positive community” which promised “a kind of salvation” for such accord. (43).

Freud and therapy provide a completely different manner of understanding one’s self. Rather looking at the various “impulses” as a matter of good or bad, higher or lower, one should consider demands as “a jostling democracy of contending predispositions”. (46-47)

Freud realized that this new means of understanding the various “impulses” would result in a subversions of the expectations of life. In particular, the position of the “father” would be particularly subverted, because the position of father takes the position of maintaining of “repressive command”. (47).

Now it may be thought that Freud encourages immorality. But the understanding of the impulses as there does not necessarily result in the encouragement of acting on such impulses.  What Freud did do was seek to exhaust a sense of guilt built upon these moralities.

At this point, Reiff makes a rather self-contradicting argument. Freud’s analysis:

Help[s] us distinguish between guilt on one hand and a sense of guilt on the other, between responsibility for an offense committed and fantasies about offenses intended or merely imagined, seems a moral as a well as a therapeutic aim.

This argument seems to be that the older moral orders merely imposed a “fantasy” of moral order in exchange for a promise of salvation as contrasted one making a conscious decision based upon “responsibility.”  Upon what moral basis could one determine concern for “responsibility”?

There is not any rational basis for responsibility. You could say I would like to avoid whatever I might see as a negative consequence (like avoiding imprisonment) was rational – but seeing a connection between the consequence and the result does not determine whether I should not engage in the conduct. The decision to avoid the behavior to avoid the consequence is a moral decision. Granted it is a very limited morality (I want to avoid negative consequence), but it is still a moral decision.

If the negative consequence is less than imprisonment or death, than what do we mean by “responsibility”? Does he that I could care about what my behavior would do to another? That would be a moral decision.

The only sort of amoral decision would be one where I see the consequence and have not concern for the consequence.

Perhaps the concept is that I can decide whether I wish to abide by the moral code I see raised by my “impulse”. But one still must made a decision to be moral; that decision may have a very habitual basis, but it is not a reflex in the sense of blinking an eye.

Indeed the decision to forgo an “older moral paradigm” is itself a moral decision.

Freud may make one explicitly conscious of the moral decision. Freud also grants a certain sort of sanction to forgo moral decisions (this is an evil desire, it is just a desire – evil is what I have been taught to call this desire; but the desire is not in itself evil). All Freud has done lay the basis for a new morality where personal desire is necessarily good.

Thus, therapy is a matter of “re-education” into a new basis for morality.

Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Chapter 2.1 (Discipleship and Therapy)

21 Tuesday Apr 2020

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Chapter Two

The Impoverishment of Western Culture

There is an implicit claim here that symbols function as a mechanism by which a culture gains ascent over the various individuals in the culture: the means by which the superego functions. A curious question which is left unanswered is “Why symbols?”

We could argue that symbols point to the transcendent, but a proposition of Freud must be that there is no real transcendent. Why then any sort of desire or inclination in that direction? That is left unanswered. We simply learn that Freud provides us a mechanism to strip out the symbols.

We then learn that essentially Western Culture developed by means of suppressing sexual desire. (40) The control over sexual desire was the high water mark of character.

Since there is no objective morality, only pragmatics, there is no particular need for such suppression except in and so far as it is functional for the culture.

On an aside, I have noticed that the treatment for “sexual addiction” is distinction amoral in this regard. The problem is not whatever inclination, but rather whether there are negative consequences for following such an inclination.

There is an unstated morality which is present in this: Desires are inherently good. That is a moral equation in the guise of amorality. But if it were truly amoral there would be nothing better about indulging or refraining. Moreover, personal happiness could not be relevant, because anyone else’s concern for your well-being is also irrelevant.  In short, the moral question is really not as absent as some pretend. It is always there; the difference is where does not draw a line?

But back to Freud: The “analytic attitude”, the aim of “therapy” is always at the distinct individual. There is no reason to “cure” any sort of desire; because what makes Mr. X happy is necessarily good.  “Well-being is a delicate personal achievement”. (41)

This is taken as an ethical demand upon “therapy”. We start with the idiosyncratic evaluation of the patient and seek to assist in achieving that end.

That is fundamentally antithetical to the Christian demand. In Matthew 28, Christ places a solitary command upon the Church: “make disciples”. The process of disciple making is “teach the to observe all that I have commanded.”

Now one can reject the proposition that Christ spoke or that Christ spoke these words. That is an honest position, and the position of Freud, for instance. But for one to claim to be a “Christian” and also take a position that Freud has a contribution on this issue is perplexing.

The position of the Scripture is not terribly confusing. Yes, there can be knotty issues, but those are not the main. The center of the road is abundantly clear.

What is confusing is when someone proposes that there is any sort of integration possible at this key point. No one is contesting the ability of anyone to make observations about the relative frequency of X behavior. But when it comes to this question of the fundamental presuppositions, What is a human being, What is the purpose of a human being, What is necessary for human beings to change: those issues are beyond compromise or “integration”. When we get to presuppositions, those are questions of grammar.

In the English and German language, the sound “gift” has a fundamentally different meaning. In English you get one at Christmas. In German, it is “poison”.

Discipleship and therapy are similar in that both involve words and directions and people who know something is wrong. “Gift” sounds the same in English and German. But O the difference!

As a final note, if you are at all curious about the matter of the importance of “presupposition”, I must direct you to my brothers at:

Domain for Truth: https://veritasdomain.wordpress.com

 

Philip Rieff: The Triumph of the Therapeutic.3 (Religion and Therapy)

14 Tuesday Apr 2020

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On page 27, Rieff interprets religion in terms of therapy. Religion creates mechanisms for “therapeutic” control and remission: it is a mechanism for responding to and dolling out “instinct.”  The distinctions between religions are largely uninteresting except in the efficacy of providing for a means of successful in providing for “continuity of mood.”

There really is no question concerning truth or falsity; there is no morally objective right: that is the analytic posture of Freud. What Freud has done is to strip out all of the accidents, the fungible elements and consider only the real effect of religion: what and how well it controls and expressions the instincts. Thus, “The analytic attitude is an alternative to all religious ones.” (29)

There is an interesting charting of the similarity and distinctive nature of therapy and religion:

Similarities: (1) the patient or adherent must be honest “in performance”. Gravity cares very little for my position; but for either religion or analysis to “work,” I must be honest in my presentation. As a corollary, I must be “receptive” for the process to work. In short, the process must be internalized to have effect.

The divergence in the ways in which the character can be transformed.

Rieff here makes an interesting observation: While Freud is often seen as revolutionary, he actually is not poised to create some new revolutionary culture. “Freud appears as a defender of high culture.” (29) In the remainder of the book, Rieff contrasts Freud which his disciples who set far more revolutionary goals.

Since Freud’s analysis works upon the character, the eventual effect is a work upon the culture. As such it is not set to remake the world at the level of official politics, but rather at the level of the “mind.”

Freud came about because the “inherited moral systems have failed us.” (30) Since the inherited systems no longer function at a cultural level, the world was ripe for Freud to provide some mechanisms to shore up the psyche and permit human beings to function.

“The religious question: How are we to be consoled for the misery of living?” (23) Christianity and Judaism did not seek to make us happy, but to console us in our misery (although not said, you will have heaven later). Freud did not promise happiness, either; rather, he simply sought “less misery”. (30)

As such, Freud birthed an as yet not fully developed “psychological man” who has a “durable sense of well-being”. (32) This man has the capacity to make some sense out of the chaos of his psyche and the world about him. Morality is “that which is conducive to increased activity.” (33)

Freud preserved “the very notion of tradition,” by preserving a mechanism for understanding what was taking place with humanity. The theologians will find Freud helpful, because they need – as Archbishop Temple said was needed, “a theology based on psychology.” (33)

Rieff proposes that Jung has provided that psychology upon which the theologians can begin to build.

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic.2 (You are “sick” should ask if life is meaningful.)

09 Thursday Apr 2020

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The prior post in this series may be found here. 

Rieff, pp. 23-27

There are two interrelated issues which run through this section of his discussion of Freud. The two issues are not unrelated, but they are also not coterminous. One issue concerns the function of culture vis-à-vis impulse (the inherent desires of the human being). These two, the Superego and Id, are in conflict with one-another.

In wildly simplified terms, the ego is the negotiation and expression of this conflict. Freud’s work was to make plain the nature of this conflict and allow the individual who had obtained “maturity” (Rieff’s term) was to become aware of this conflict and to set the relationship between the two oneself: “Maturity, according to Freud, lay in the trained capacity to keep the negotiations from breaking down.” (24)

There is a related issue concerning, culture, religion and the superego. The superego functions as the cultural representative. The requirements and limitations of the culture become effective in the individual. The tools developed by Freud permit the individual to keep these tools at a distance.

It is for this reason, the “modern intellectuals” (26) find Freud appealing. His tools provide one a way to read and thence to disarm the culture’s effect upon the individual. Although not discussed here, this explains why Freud was so valuable in the literature departments in cultural criticism because his critique – even if not considered scientifically valid as a psychology – was practically valuable as a means of putting cultural limits at bay.

Essentially, one could critique moral standards as merely archaic residue of an earlier commonly held superego.

Concept of culture is tightly related to the concept of religion in this thinking. Adherence to cultural understanding permitted one to have “meaning.” But Freudian analysis sidesteps this issue and simply does not permit the question of “meaning” to arise. Life is neither meaningful nor meaningless. This is the religious question.

Freud held that to ask the question concerning “the meaning and value of life he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence.” (27)

Philip Rieff, Trumph of the Therapeutic.1

07 Tuesday Apr 2020

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Introductory: Toward a Theory of Culture

If I am tracking Rieff correctly at the beginning, he speaks of the older forms of culture which fell apart in 19th Century; a culture which in particular utilized a religious form as the means of “controlling the infinite variety of panic and emptiness to which they are disposed.” (3) A culture is a mechanism which makes possible a communal understanding such that the people can live with one another and themselves.

A culture permits its members to “sublimate”, a process of renunciation and from that the creation of something greater.

But throughout the 19th century there was a “deconversion” form a “series of symbols” to a superior “system of symbols – Science”. (6) This system, which Rieff compares to a stiff collar is in process of being changed. Freud sought to “soften” the collar; others have sought to take it altogether off.

Freud saw as a necessary the elements of coercion and renunciation to the maintenance of a culture. This process of renunciation works itself out in sublimation, which the creation of cultural artifacts of value within the culture.

Here is where becomes interesting: There are those who seek not merely to soften the collar but rather to remove it altogether. They seek a culture with no aspect of renunciation. Rieff refers to this as a cultural suicide. It is a religion of self; thus, apparently something without any culture, because culture “is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.” (3)

This is an anti-culture of intellectuals Rieff describes as “the most elaborate act of suicide that Western intellectuals have ever staged.” (7)

He sees a force toward an atomization of the individual and the countervailing force toward structures which permit communal life. “Every culture must establish itself as a system of moralizing demands”. (8)

He then comes to the “unreligion of the age”, the “therapeutic” which has “nothing at stake beyond the manipulatable sense of well-being.” Prior culture had mechanisms to permit renunciation, provide for sublimation and provide a type of judgment, admonitions and reassurances. (11) There is a type of human aimed by such a mechanism. And when the culture changes the nature of human “perfection” changes. (8)

It should be noted that the mechanisms do not seek merely the complete extirpation of desires. In reference to Christian asceticism, the aim was “control and complete spiritualization” of sexual desire. (13).

Speaking of modern culture (at the time of his writing in the 1960’s) he noted that the movement of sexual desire was away from renunciation toward “release”. The previous “desire” has become a “need”. (13)

And so, since the previous religious (primarily) culture makers have failed to communicate their symbolic vision to others in an inherently compelling way, “We are probably witnessing the end of a cultural history dominated by book religious and word-makers.” (15)

We have moved to a therapeutic culture of individualized management of the self for a sense of well-being, “With the arts of psychiatric management enhanced and perfected, men will come to know one another in ways that could facilitate total socialization without a symbolic of communal purpose.” (17)

“Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” (19)

Thus, what may have been before considered immoral may be rejected if it is seen in a therapeutic light of “enhancing one’s sense of well-being.” (21)

What is not mentioned in this end of individualized well-being (particularly as to sexual desires) brought about without a cultural control which applies to others is the conflict of my desire and your counter-desire. The history after Rieff has witnessed a contrast of predators and then the pain or remorse or shame or ruin of their prey. But on what account can they be accounted wrong? We have to reach back to prior categories that do not quite make sense.

We have the question as to why “consent” carries sufficient moral weight to require imprisonment. I’m not saying by any stretch that non-consensual actions are morally good. But rather that consent is made to carry enormous moral weight.

Consent is a difficult matter, because it raises all sorts of questions of moral ability, freewill, influence, excessive influence and such. Moreover, those questions of human moral capacity do not fit easily into a naturalistic empiricism. The moral reasoning which underlies such matters borrows from other understandings of human value.

We are also seeing the emergence of a new sort of insistent moral reasoning respecting sexual desire which is every bit as demanding as any parody of previous Western moralities (influenced obviously by Christianity). Indeed, this new religiously insistent morality sees it perfectly fit to end the public life of those who violate the rules (whatever those rules may be).

Freud: Forgetting Names and Sequences of Words

23 Friday Mar 2018

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Sigmund Freud

This chapter in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life concerns the maddening event of forgetting a name or sequence of words (in one’s own language). The gist of his argument is some-things, some people are painful to us and so a ‘physic power deprives me of access” to information sought.

He “proves” this point by a number of case studies: examples where someone forgets a name or sequence of words (such as a line from a poem). When the breakdown happens he uses something such as free-association to draw down on the cause (“In many of these examples all the subtleties of psychoanalytic technique have been employed to explain why a name was forgotten.”)

Thus, a person forgets a particular name or phrase : the then runs associations (say) until he draws a connection between some unpleasant thing (the woman I want to marry will soon be grey; the man I forgot caused me embarrassment, et cetera)  the name (or phrase) forgotten.  The connection between the unpleasantness and the forgotten word may be either direct or “by what may seem a tortuous route”. [For example, it may not be that the person named is the source of pain but rather that “some similarity of sound suggests another name which we do have good reason to forget.”]

This mechanism is particularly effective if the pain is especially personal and sensitive.  “A wish to avoid arousing unpleasant feelings through the agency of memory is a very strong motive for such disturbances.”

This mechanism presumes “a constant stream of self-referentiality’ going through my mind. I am not usually aware of it, but it betrays itself when I forget names in this way.”

The theory makes some sense on its: Of course one would desire to forget painful things. We have the experience of shying away from things which remind of us particularly painful events: one might avoid a particular person or place because the sight (or sound or smell) provokes an unpleasant feeling.

Freud presents a number of “proofs” (there are 19 number examples in this chapter, not all of which are from Freud’s personal observation).

But is any of this true? Is there really a mechanism which censurers painful names and words by association? Do I really carrying a constant chain of references (X links to A links to Z links to Y, et cetera)? Wouldn’t painful things be more easily remembered, as being more sensitive? Would the suppression be “unconscious” (by some unobservable — except in effect — mechanism) – our wouldn’t be rather, I don’t want to talk about that?

The whole mechanism hinges upon two thesis: (1) a constant chain of reference; and (2) a self-censuring mechanism seeking to block this unconscious chain of reference from conscious observation.

Freud’s theory here is marvelous, because it cannot really be observed. The mechanism is all unconscious. It can only be inferred by this glitches (lost words) and dug-up psychoanalytic technique (such as free association). It can be asserted, but not really proved.

 

Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, “Forgetting Proper Names”

20 Tuesday Feb 2018

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(The painter whose name Freud could not remember):

800px-Signorelli,_Luca_-_selfportrait_alone

Freud argues that it is not merely forgetting but “substituting” which is interesting: I search for the name of X, I substitute the name Y — and that substitution “persists”.  This process of substituting one name for another “follows regular and predictable paths.”

To demonstrate this procedure, Freud gives an example of how this once happened with him. While having a conversation with a stranger about Turks in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Freud remembered something a friend had told him about those people involving sex and death. Nothing thinking it appropriate to make such a statement in a conversation with a stranger, Freud repressed the information.

Then he later tried to remember the name of a painter. He could not remember the name of the painter, but instead he “remembered” the name of two other painters. There was some association between the names of the “other” painters and the information he had repressed about Bosnia.

First, he represses information A.

Second, he cannot recall information B.

Third, he substitutes information C (which has some association to A) in place of B.

As for the association between C and A, there may be some “external” relationship there is also [often] “some connection of content.”

He is careful to admit that not every act of forgetting follows this pattern: sometimes there is a “simple” forgetting, “While proper names are sometimes forgotten for simple reasons, they are also sometimes forgotten for reasons motivated by repression.”

(One of the paintings Freud was viewing when he could not remember the name:)

1024px-Luca_Signorelli_001