Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Abstract

In Chapter 3, stress was laid on Freud’s therapeutic ‘pessimism’, his belief that the goal of psychoanalysis could not be to bring about a major transformation of the quality of human existence, only to change ‘hysterical misery’ into ‘common unhappiness’. In general, as described in Chapter 1, Freud seems to have been far less interested in psychoanalysis as a therapeutic system than as an instrument of knowledge, of the archaeology both of the individual and of society Freud’s project was to understand, to develop a system of ideas that could make sense of people, in their individual psychology and in the structures that they create for themselves. Psychotherapy was a secondary project, undertaken ‘to make a living’, a nuisance to the extent that it called for the watering down of analytic severities in the face of the pragmatics of everyday life. ‘Therapeutic zeal’ was to be avoided because it interferes with the proper conduct of an analysis, the primary goal of which is knowledge and not cure (Segal, 1981, p. 69). The most enthusiastic supporters of Freudian pessimism, such as Marcuse (1955) and Jacoby (1975), have taken up precisely this point, that theory and therapy are not necessarily integrated concerns, and have given it a peculiarly political twist, arguing that it is in its theory that the major contribution of psychoanalysis resides. In so doing, they have attempted to defend the radical tradition within psychoanalysis against the adaptationist compromises that always threaten to engulf it and make it a poor relation in the pantheon of medical treatments, a relatively ineffective item in the structures of diagnosis-treatment-cure.