Freud and Modern Psychology: Volume 1: The Emotional Basis of Mental Illness

251 Pages·1981·26.709 MB·English

by  Helen Block Lewis (auth.)

FREUD
AND
MODERN
PSYCHOLOGY
VOLUME 1: THE EMOTIONAL BASIS
OF MENTAL ILLNESS
EMOTIONS, PERSONALITY, AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
Series Editors:
Carroll E. Izard, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware
and
Jerome L. Singer Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
HUMAN EMOTIONS
Carroll E. Izard
THE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF TIME
Bernard S. Gorman and Alden E. Wessman
THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Scientific Investigation into the
Flow of Human Experience
Kenneth S. Pope and Jerome L. Singer, eds.
THE POWER OF HUMAN IMAGINATION: New Methods
in Psychotherapy
Jerome L. Singer and Kenneth S. Pope, eds.
EMOTIONS IN PERSONALITY AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
Carroll E. Izard, ed.
FREUD AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY, Volume I: The Emotional
Basis of Mental Illness
Helen Block Lewis
FREUD AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY, Volume 2: The Emotional
Basis of Human Behavior
Helen Block Lewis
A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery
of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual ship·
ment. For further information please contact the publisher.
FREUD
AND
MODERN
PSYCHOLOGY
VOLUME 1: THE EMOTIONAL BASIS
OF MENTAL ILLNESS
HELEN BLOCK LEWIS
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
PLENUM PRESS· NEW YORK AND LONDON
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lewis, Helen B
The emotional basis of mental illness.
(Her Freud and modern psychology; v. 1)
(Emotions, personality, and psychotherapy)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Psychology, Pathological. 2. Emotions. 3. Interpersonal relations. 4. Freud, Sigmund,
1856-1939.5. Psychoanalysis. I. Title. II. Series.
RC454.L48 616.89'001'9 80-20937
ISBN-13: 978-1-4684-3814-7 e-1SBN-13: 978-1-4684-3812-3
001: 10.1007/978-1-4684-3812-3
© 1981 Plenum Press, New York
Sol'tcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1981
A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation
227 West 17th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanicaL photocopying, microfilming,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher
This book is dedicated to my grandchildren
EMMA LEWIS BERNDT
DAVID ASHER DANGERFIELD LEWIS
Preface
The tension between Freud's clinical discoveries about the power of human
emotions and the theoretical framework in which he embedded these
discoveries has been most eloquently detailed by Freud himself. His agoniz
ing reappraisal. in 1926, of the libido theory of anxiety is just one example.
But, as is usually the case, theoretical difficulties point to gaps in existing
knowledge. At the time when Freud made his fundamental discovery that
hysterical symptoms (and dreams) were understandable as reflections of for
bidden ("strangulated") affect, anthropology was essentially nonexistent as a
science. The cultural nature of human beings (our species' unique adaptation
to life) could only be adumbrated by Freud (for example, in the myth of
Totem and Taboo). As a consequence, the primacy of human attachment
emotions in the acculturation process could not be postulated as a theoretical
base. What Freud adopted as his base of theorizing was the most forward
looking materialist concept of his time: the Darwinian concept of individual
instincts as the driving force in life. Freud assumed that the vicissitudes of in
stincts determine the fate of "ideas" in consciousness. Freud's theoretical base
thus impelled him to speculate about the origin and fate of ideas instead of
about the origin and fate of human emotional connectedness.
This book is a small step along the road which should ultimately bring
Freud's discoveries into a modem theoretical framework in psychology. I ac
tually began this journey of revisiting Freud's works some years ago when I
first undertook a phenomenological study of shame and guilt (Lewis, 1971).
Shame and guilt are two "instinct" inhibitors that are also themselves "in
stinctive" and transcultural. My way into that study was much facilitated by
the research on field dependence in which I had participated for many years.
Field dependence is a cognitive style that catches the self not only in its
vii
viii
PREFACE
characteristic relationship to its surround but also to its own value system.
The self is another construct that was stimulated by Freud's work, although
Freud, unfortunately, did not make much use of it. While the role of the self
is different in shame and guilt, both states are universal modes of maintain
ing threatened affectional bonds. That the two sexes differ in their use of the
two affective-cognitive states was-the theme of my book, Psychic War in
Men and Women (Lewis, 1976).
A theoretical stance that sees emotional connectedness as the essential
ingredient of humanity is itself largely a product of Freud's influence. The
task of freeing his discoveries from the metapsychology he so painstakingly
erected around his observations has been implicit in the work of many revi
sionists since Freud, as well as in the work of such contemporary psychoana
lytic critics as Lacan (1968) and Schafer(1978). Many have felt, and I concur,
that accomplishing this task should improve techniques of psychoanalytic
psychotherapy insofar as these have been hampered by Freud's metapsychol
ogy. For example, conceptualizing symptoms as products of by-passed
shame creates a very different therapeutic task than conceptualizing them as
products of a "narcissistic" or "borderline" personality. As the reader will see,
my own view of the enterprise centers on the need for psychology to build a
theory of human emotions combining both the individual arousal and the
communicative aspects of emotional life which Freud so brilliantly de
scribed.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance of many people who have
helped in this work. The first outline of the work was developed in a course
of undergraduate lectures at Yale, and the questions and comments of my
students were an invaluable stimulus to my own thought. Dr. Zenia Fliegel
has read all and Drs. Joel Allison, Sandra Buechler, Stanley Rachman, and
Jerome L. Singer have read parts of the manuscript of Volume 1, and offered
useful advice. Professor Carroll Izard has been a most helpful and encourag
ing editor. My thanks are due to the Behavioral Science Publications Fund of
the Yale Department of Psychology for financial assistance in the prepara
tion of the manuscript. Most of all, my husband, Naphtali Lewis, has, as
always, been my most reliable support.
May, 1980
Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
Chapter 1. THE SECULARIZATION OF GUILT:
Reinterpreting Christoph Haizmann's Story 17
Chapter 2. HYSTERIA: The Problem of Forbidden Sexual
Longings 31
Chapter 3. PHOBIAS: The Problem of Anxiety 63
Chapter 4. OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS: The Problem
of Sadism 101
Chapter 5. PARANOIA: The Problem of Homosex~ality 135
Chapter 6. DEPRESSION: The Problem of Grief and
Mourning 167
Chapter 7. PSYCHOANALYSIS AS THERAPY TODAY:
The Problem of Abreacting Shame
and Guilt 201
BIBLIOGRAPHY 229
INDEX 241
ix
Introduction
This book asks the question: What has become of Freud's major discoveries
and hypotheses in the light of nearly a century of subsequent research7
Freud's impact on twentieth-century thinking is literally immeasurable. It
ranges from the flowering of the modern psychological novel to
anthropologists' hypotheses about child-rearing practices as predictors of the
severity of initiation rites. Why, then, a book that seeks to assess the im
measurable outcome of Freud's work7
The answer lies in a paradox. On the one hand, the influence of
psychoanalysis on present-day psychiatry is waning. Fifteen years ago, in
one leading medical school that I know, the majority of residents in
psychiatry were also in psychoanalytic training, or planning to get it. Today
scarcely five percent intend to become psychoanalysts. On the other hand,
some Freudian interpretations of behavior are so taken for granted in every
day life that they are no longer recognized as Freud's. When feminists, for ex
ample, criticize Freud for being a sexist, they are making use of a Freudian
concept. Sexism refers to an unconscious bias. In order to defend his male
ego, Freud believed certain fantasies about the inferiority of women. Or, to
take another example, when we say someone is "uptight" or "tightass" we are
using a slang expression for Freud's description of the anal character. This
paradox - that Freud's discoveries about mental illness and its treatment are
.f alling into disuse while his corollary discoveries about normal behavior
have become household wisdom - invites inquiry.
Freud's first discovery was that mental illness can result from guilt or
shame over sexual longings. What this discovery implied is that emotions
and, by implication, the social life of human beings are powerful enough to
banish reason. This latter notion had been a part of folk wisdom and has
1
2 INTRODUCTION
been expressed in literature since ancient times. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and
Shakespeare's Hamlet spring to mind as familiar examples. Freud, however,
was the first person to trace sequences from forbidden sexual longings to
their clearly recognizable translations as neurotic symptoms. Freud's scien
tific work thus joined folk wisdom to become part of the twentieth-century
Zeitgeist.
Although the power of emotional forces had always been respected by
folk wisdom, the scientific study of emotions was neglected in Freud's time
and continues to be neglected at the present. This neglect has resulted in a
hostile, not to say scornful. attitude toward the scientific validity of Freud's
ideas. The fate of his work has thus varied enormously: among lay people it
has had a revolutionary impact on cultural values; among experimental
psychologists and other "hard-headed" scientists Freud's work is often
dismissed as fanciful. Freud's own attitudes toward the emotions were partly
governed by his own scientific training and were consequently ambivalent
(to use a Freudian term). And to a certain extent Freud's defensive efforts to
keep his discoveries scientific, as he understood the canons of science,
actually hindered progress which could have been made in psychoanalysis as
a therapy.
Freud himself described his discoveries on two levels, a clinical level and
a theoretical level. On the clinical level. which means speaking in ordinary
descriptive language, he directly implicated the emotions - rage, terror,
shame, guilt, sexual longings - in the formation of neurotic symptoms.
Specifically, he uncovered a kind of "psychic alchemy" by which forbidden
sexual longings are transformed into such symptoms as a bodily pain, a terri
fying obsession, a phobia, or a profound depression. By studying his own
dreams, Freud came to realize that the same transformation system at work
in neurosis is at work in each of us in our nightly hallucinations. To this
transformation system he gave the name "primary process," meaning to im
ply that unfulfilled (sexual) longings begin to operate in earliest childhood
even before they can be expressed in language. "Primary process" is the
special. ancient language of emotional experience. It operates also in
sophisticated metaphors. From the study of the similarity between dreams
and neurotic symptoms he concluded that each of us has a ready potential
for the formation of neurotic symptoms; in other words, that the boundary
between normalcy and neuroticism is slim. Especially since he was able to
discern echoes of his own childhood experiences in his dreams, he deduced
that forbidden sexual longings occurred all during the course of development
from childhood on, and persisted in their childhood form. From this he con
cluded that emotions are "indestructible." All these discoveries clearly had
implications for the understanding both of mental illness and of normal
human behavior.