Why Freud and Psychoanalysis Matter to Me: A New Appreciation Based on a Classic New Yorker Essay by Janet Malcolm
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Freud and the psychoanalytic form of therapy that he pioneered have taken a beating in recent decades. Critics have highlighted Freud's Victorian-era prejudices toward women and his dismissal of homosexuality as inherently deviant. Some of Freud's claims were culturally shocking and resistant to empirical validation, like the perennially controversial Oedipus complex, an allegedly unconscious drama in which little boys yearned to have sex with their mothers and then became so horrified about being castrated for harboring this desire that they developed an implicit but exacting sense of self-censorship. And the five-days-a-week and multi-year commitment that orthodox psychoanalytic therapy required was simply impractical and unaffordable for all but an elite few. Shorter and more evidence-based forms of therapy, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, have largely filled in the hole that the limitations and flaws in psychoanalysis left open.
But what shines through a classic essay on Freud and psychoanalysis by the legendary New Yorker journalist Janet Malcolm, an article I just came across, was a sense of Freud's genius, despite his blind spots, and the enduring value of key aspects of his clinical method. Entitled The Impossible Profession, Malcolm's 1980 article brought the reader into Freud's mind, and his world, as he constructed and reconstructed what would become the most revolutionary thinking in the history of psychotherapy. Malcolm also showed what the practice of psychoanalysis was like from the perspective of a well-established New York analyst, with whom she conducted in-depth interviews. (Malcolm wrote a second, companion essay in a subsequent issue of the New Yorker on the tense complexities of professional development and advancement within the NY Psychoanalytic Institute, but my interest in this post is in her first piece.) The Impossible Profession was beautifully written and remarkably stimulating.
Malcom's article was excellent as a work of journalism, but it also meant a lot to me on a personal level. Her writing moved me to remember my own experience growing up in a family that took Freudian ideas as givens. It also invited me to reflect on my experience with psychoanalytically rooted therapy as a young man. Further, Malcolm's work helped me to see a connection between Freud's legacy and yoga and meditation, life practices that have been central to me for almost 20 years but which I never thought had much in common with Freudian practice.
I wanted to write about the impact Malcolm's essay had on me in part to understand it better for myself. I knew the piece had struck a personal chord, but until I started to write this response, I wasn't quite sure what that chord was. I'm also hoping that some readers of my piece might consider reading The Impossible Profession to see where it might take them.
A Resonance with My Family Background
Immersing myself in Malcolm's long-form essay evoked for me a positive sense of family identity. I grew up in a household in which Freud and psychoanalysis held deep meaning. My parents married and had children, my brother Randy and me, in the years after World War II, the heyday of psychoanalysis in America. Both my mother and father were secular Jews who were raised in New York City, which may have endowed them with a sensibility conducive to Freudian thought. Psychoanalysis was often referred to as "the Jewish science," because, I suspect, not only were Freud and most psychoanalysts Jewish, but this form of therapy emphasized verbal inquiry and insight (the "talking cure"), which aligned with the kind of study, questioning, and philosophical discussion associated with the Jewish rabbinical tradition. Further, New York City was the intellectual and professional center of psychoanalysis in this country.
By the time I was in my early teens, I had picked up from my parents basic concepts in psychoanalytic thought, especially the notion that we all had an inner world that was largely hidden from our view that could push and pull us in directions we did not consciously want to go in. I also remember my mom speculating about the emotional basis for various physical problems, like when my father broke out in boils one year, and she wondered aloud what had been going on emotionally to prompt this eruption. The notion of an unruly and often wily unconscious and the possibility that physical dysfunction or illness might reflect knotted up and "repressed" emotions were pillars of Freudian thought and accepted as essential truths in my parents' belief system.
I have to this day on my bookshelf (the pre-Kindle, hard-copy shelf), The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (Modern Library, 1938), which I took from my family’s home. As I look through this text, I can see passages I underlined in my late teens (though at that time I read only selected passages because most of the writing was too technical for me).
More importantly, I learned from my father that psychoanalytically oriented therapy could be beneficial. In his late twenties and early thirties, Dad drove twice a week from our home in Huntington, Long Island, to Manhattan, a good hour drive, to see a psychiatrist. By his own account, his therapy, which was grounded in the psychoanalytic model, helped him to gain a bit more freedom from the obsessive thoughts that had so often hemmed him in. Though I faced very different issues from my father, as a young man I also saw a psychoanalytically oriented therapist, which helped me open possibilities in my thinking and my life choices. Freud and psychoanalysis meant a lot to me as a young man in part because it seemed to be a natural and beneficial part of my family's culture.
The Curse and Blessing of Transference
Malcolm wrote with particular eloquence and insight about the meaning of transference in psychoanalysis. I gained a better understanding of this process through her explanation. The article also was a catalyst for me to revisit my original therapeutic experience with transference and reflect on its continuing role in my everyday life.
I found the following paragraph on transference to be the most illuminating and haunting in Malcolm’s essay:
The phenomenon of transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery. The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and it has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. “Only connect,” E.M. Foster proposed. “Only we can’t,” the psychoanalyst knows.
Evidently, Freud came to his views on transference in a kind of hit-and-miss way. He had been experimenting with different treatment modalities, including the "cathartic method" most associated with another physician, Joseph Breuer, in which memories of events believed to have given rise to hysterical symptoms were evoked under hypnosis and thus presumably defused of their power over the patient. Freud also tried a literally hands-on approach of pressing the patient's forehead to facilitate their remembering of impactful events.
But whatever method Freud used, his female patients kept falling in love with him. As he observed this pattern, he could see that his patients' love had little to do with him as a person and much more to do with their childhood needs and fantasies. Patients were recreating him as a larger-than-life father, an all-knowing figure who could fulfill unacknowledged and infantile longings. His job was not to give in to countertransference, in which he would assume the role that the patient had conjured for him, but to foster with respectful questions and observations the patient's awakening awareness that what they were feeling for him was not real but a reflection of their earliest years.
Freud believed that romantic love in general, not merely the love displayed in the analyst's office, was inescapably bound up with the appetites, aggressions, and yearnings of early childhood. That's why love could be deceptive and treacherous. But it's also why transference in the therapist's office could be an essential teaching tool. If the patient could learn to see how they transferred onto present relationships patterns from the past, and if they could learn to touch into and tolerate the charged energy of transference without pushing it away, they could gain a measure of freedom from the hidden drivers of their behavior.
After reading Malcom's rich account of the evolution of transference as a therapeutic idea, I paused, closed my eyes, and revisited my own opening awareness of transference.
This took place during psychotherapy in my early twenties. One of the issues I struggled to bring to the surface was my resentment toward my father. While I spoke outwardly of him as a good man—a steady, reliable, and nice guy—not far from the surface was my deep disappointment and hurt that he was also emotionally distant and withholding. Through the "free association" method described later in this piece, it became clear that I harbored anger that Dad didn't pay all that much attention to me or engage with me in shared activities. Further, and perhaps more consequential, I tended to blame myself for his inattention, as if I were not interesting or good enough to warrant it.
I recall that about four months into therapy, I started to say things to my psychiatrist that revealed an analogous resentment toward him. I accused him of just sitting there, not really being present with me, and not showing that he cared about me more than a mere professional obligation required. I had previously referred to my father as appearing dead to me as a boy. And I told my psychiatrist that as a therapist he seemed dead in our sessions.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that I was transferring onto the therapist unresolved feelings toward my dad. But I didn't see this until the therapist asked me a question that went something like: "Do the words you are using to describe your frustration and disappointment with me remind you of words you used to describe your feelings toward anybody else?" This question really did prompt an awakening of awareness. I wanted my psychiatrist to be my ideal father, a man who would understand and validate me, help me grow up, and make me feel special.
This was not the same transference situation that Freud originally described with his female patients. But it had all the earmarks of transference. I was making up a story about my psychiatrist according to a blueprint formed in childhood.
Gradually, I learned to spot transference when it arose and to allow myself to stay with this difficult energy until its edges softened and I could gain perspective. This proved hard to do in certain intimate relationships I had with women. But over time, I got a little better at seeing my reactions for what they were. I grew slightly more skilled at letting in difficult feelings that welled up from the past and then letting them go.
A Connection Between Psychoanalysis and Meditation and Yoga
Until reading Malcolm's article, I hadn't thought much about the ways in which my experience with psychoanalytically oriented therapy related to my experience with yoga and meditation other than my awareness that both practices reflected a desire for personal growth and my lifelong interest in the inner life.
But when I read what Malcolm had to say about Freud's therapeutic method of "free association," a parallel with yoga and meditation came to mind. (I'm lumping yoga and meditation together for present purposes because, to me, a meditative awareness is a big part of doing yoga poses; as some wise person said, yoga is meditation in motion.)
As Malcolm explained, in free association the patient gives voice to whatever thoughts, feelings, images, and memories arise for them, however random or trivial they might seem, without having to pass this outpouring flow through the filter of reason. Freud likened free association to a poet's creative process, quoting the poet Schiller to help describe what was at play: "...where there is a creative mind, Reason...relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them.…" For Freud, free association was "the ore from which...the analyst extracts its content of precious metal." It was through free association that transference was revealed.
I knew what free association was before reading Malcolm’s article, but I had never explicitly made a connection between this process and meditation and yoga. In both psychoanalysis and yoga/meditation, the practitioner learns to let arise in consciousness without judgment or interpretation the sensations, emotions, and thoughts that appear in the present moment. In both psychoanalysis and the Eastern contemplative tradition, the veil of reason, it is believed, can hide what the body and inner being are experiencing, and so lifting the veil is crucial.
It struck me that I had long thought of meditation and yoga as being almost opposite in focus to Freudian thought. Eastern wisdom seemed to be about losing the individual self and opening to the universal, whereas psychoanalysis seemed to be all about the individual self and personal history without an intention to connect with the cosmos. Yet as I reflected on Malcolm's essay, what became clearer to me is a parallel between free association and mindfulness meditation and yoga. I felt a bond between these two traditions. Both, I began to sense, help us free ourselves from the traps our minds may lay as we enlist reason to control our environment and manage our lives in the world. Both traditions invite us to release our grip from the stories we so carefully construct of who we are and how we should be. Both aim to bring us into a greater wholeness.
One further parallel between Freudian practice and yoga and meditation came to me. It's that in both traditions, there is a risk of latching onto a method as an end in itself. With regard to Freud, it's tempting to reduce the complexity of his contribution to the idea of releasing repressed feelings, to pouring one's heart out and not letting reason and judgment get in the way. But surely the point of free association is not simply to remove the filters from one's self-expression. It's to face difficult truths and weave those truths into the fabric of one's life.
Something similar can be said about meditation and yoga. After all, mindfulness meditation was just one part of the Buddha's eightfold path, which included ethical precepts like "right speech," "right action," and "right livelihood." Similarly, in the tradition of yoga, meditation and physical postures were parts of a more comprehensive and holistic wisdom practice that, as in Buddhism, included ethical principles and a commitment to self-study and service. Meditation and yoga are important ingredients in a good life but not the whole meal.
I'm grateful for the experience of reading and reflecting on Janet Malcolm's classic essay. I learned more about Freud and psychoanalysis. Even more important, I learned about myself and the way in which Freud's legacy is alive in my own life.
Thank you Glen for doing the hard work of comparing the world of Buddhist meditation and the approaches to self-understanding that we grew up with through Western therapy, especially psychoanalytic therapy, all through the lens of your own experiences in both realms. Your writing is always meticulous, detailed, and clear.