Psychoapologetics

Frank Cioffi

Philosophical Essays on Freud edited by Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins

Cambridge, 314 pp, 25.00, November 1982, ISBN 0 521 24076 X
The Legend of Freud by Samuel Weber
Minnesota, 179 pp, $25.00, December 1982, ISBN 0 8166 1128 9

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Wittgenstein, whose conversations with Rush Rhees lead off these Philosophical Essays on Freud, once
wrote to a friend: I, too, was greatly impressed when I first read Freud. Hes extraordinary of course he
is full of fishy thinking and his charm and the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled
... so hang on to your brains. This is not a piece of advice that all the contributors to this volume have been
willing to follow. And though this is compensated for by the distinction of many of the papers it is
unfortunately true of those contributions which deal with that question which has the most general claim to
interest: how has it come about that little more than a decade short of its centenary the most fundamental
and distinctive claims of psychoanalysis should still be the subject of radical scepticism.
That we are entering the shabby world of psychoanalytic apologetic becomes apparent from James
Hopkinss introduction, where the argument from resistance rears its fatuous head. Hopkins thinks we find
it difficult to judge the claims of psychoanalysis on their merits because psychoanalysis is concerned with
the representation in imagination and thought of activities involving biologically significant organs by
which we pass things in and out of our bodies and exchange them with those of others ... and many people
find the contemplation of such things either fascinating or repulsive or both. Or neither. Nobody ever
fidgeted and swallowed his saliva while listening to this sort of stuff. Real reminders of our secret lives
make us squirm. And whats this about organs by which we pass things in and out of our bodies and
exchange them with those of others? Is Hopkins equipped for delights denied the rest of us? Or has an
inability to inhibit his word flow betrayed him into losing his grasp of what he is talking about?
Accurate assessment of the explanatory scope and power of a theory can be made only by those who know
how to use it ... a capacity to interpret in psychoanalytic terms in a serious way must be acquired through
fairly extensive work and thought, and is therefore relatively rare. Hopkins is rather coy as to whether he
numbers himself among these rare birds: if not, he ought to have made it clear that his confidence is
confidence in somebody elses confidence. The material to which the theory has its central application,
moreover, is mainly outside the public domain. Is psychoanalysis no longer a theory of psychopathology
and of infantile development then? And may anyone have a private domain, or have they all been parcelled
out on a first come, first served basis? What is this esoteric wisdom from which some of us have foolishly
cut ourselves off? Hopkins illustrates (from the Rat Man case): Later associations had Freuds son eating
excrement and Freud himself eating his mothers excrement. Those familiar with psychoanalytic theory
will recognise connections with the patients attitude towards the lady ... and to his mother who was
condemned because of her money. No doubt it makes Hopkins feel quite grownup to go on in this way, but
what is its point? Just what does the money-excrement equation explain? Ernest Jones thought it explained
why Britain went on the Gold Standard. In fact he claimed to have predicted it (he also thought that the
Irish problem owed its intractability to an Irishmans unconscious equation of Ireland with a virgin and thus

of the six counties with an English penis). Why should we suppose that Jones was any less idiotic when he
left the public domain?
Hopkins deplores criticism like Poppers which uses invented examples, and asks us to consider such real
and testing examples of behaviour as are provided by the Rat Man. Let us do so. What Freud describes as
the Rat Mans great obsessive fear was that a torture, in which ravenous rats are introduced into the
victims anus, would be inflicted on his loved ones. Freud sets about explaining this apparently bizarre
thought by introducing the Rat Mans infantile misconception as to the nature of birth (that it is via the
anus), which through the mechanism of reversal changes babies emerging from the anus into rats
burrowing into it. But the gratuitousness of this farrago is evident when we recall that the great obsessive
fear was an exact reproduction of the torture which the Rat Man had had described to him the day before
by the very man whose request to repay some money was the occasion of its first occurrence. Yet this is
Hopkinss idea of a real and testing example.
Much psychoanalytic apologetic is based on a misconception as to what suspicion of Freuds cogency is
based on. Hopkins refers to the standards appropriate to physical science, i.e. law-supported explanation,
as if there could be no other source of misgiving, and invokes interpretative coherence as an equally valid
criterion. And so it is. But does Freud meet it? The argument that psychoanalytic explanation can
legitimately dispense with laws was most persuasively advanced by Fritz Schmidl in the International
Journal of Psychoanalysis over twenty-five years ago. Schmidl took the case of the tablecloth lady of
Introductory Lecture 17 as a paradigm of the nature of psychoanalytic argumentation. The case for
believing that there is a connection between her disastrous wedding night and a ritual in which she felt
compelled to engage is not the production of a law linking her trauma to her symptomatology but an
intuitively assessed gestalt fit between them. Her husband failed to consummate at the first attempt and
kept running from his room to hers at intervals during the night to have another go. In the morning he
complained that the lack of visible evidence of defloration would disgrace him in the eyes of the bedmaker
and so took a bottle of red ink, conveniently at hand, and poured some on the sheets, though in an
inappropriate place. Her compulsive ritual consists in running from her room to a room with a stained
tablecloth, ringing for the maid on some pretext or other and taking care that when she comes her view of
the table is unobstructed. Schmidl argues that the striking similarities between her behaviour and her
husbands justify the conclusion that the compulsion refers to the wedding night. The merits of Schmidls
argument are, fortunately, independent of the credibility of his particular example.